Summer 2020: America's Youth Speak

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

HOPE IN A TIME OF FEAR

BIG PHARMA

PRISONS TO POLLS

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AMERICA’S

SPEAK

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AMERICA’S YOUTH SPEAK This issue’s cover topic was edited by Joseph Winters, Swathi Kella, Chloe E.W. Levine.

3 Discrepancies in Professions of Patriotism Chloe E.W. Levine with Oliver York

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12 Youth Want Equal, Not Just Socialist, Institutions Christine Mui

14 American Identity?

Jelena Dragicevic and Brammy Rajakumar

Confusion, Alienation, Invigoration Swathi Kella

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Struggle and Unity Abigail Romero and Jing-Jing Shen

CAMPUS

23 Politics of Protectionism Jay Garg

UNITED STATES 23

Politics of Protectionism Jay Garg

26 Big Pharma Donovan Keene 29 Prisons to Polls Maya Bharara 34 The Political Economy of Australia’s Wildfires Jack Taylor

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In New York, A Blow to Democracy Connor Chung

WORLD 34

Hope in a Time of Fear Rebecca Araten and Jing-Jing Shen

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Obstacles to Macron’s “True European Army” Maxwell Zhu

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How the UN Failed Haiti: Inadequate Response to the Cholera Outbreak Andre Ferreira

16 Remaking Ethnic Studies Swathi Kella 21 Lessons From a UC Meeting Ajay Sarma

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CULTURE 42

How Blue is Bluegrass?

Chloe E.W. Levine

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Monopoly, But Make it Socialism Winona Guo

INTERVIEWS 46

The Struggle for Global Justice: Interview with Geoffrey Robertson Jack Taylor

The Political Economy of Australia’s Wildfires Jack Taylor

42 How Blue is Bluegrass?

Chloe E.W. Levine Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image Credits: The Noun Project: Cover- Made by Made; Cover- Chris Kerr; 26,28- Three Six Five; 26,28-Orin zuu; 29parkjisun; 39,41- Alex Muravev, RU; 39- Ted Grajeda, US; Unsplash: Cover- Devin Avery; Cover- Priscilla Du Preez; Cover- Alexis Brown; Cover- Anna Vander Stel; Cover- Josh Barwick; 1- Campaign Creators; 3- Ali Morshedlou; 6,7- Louis Valazquez; 8- Wylly Suhendra; 10,11- Leon Contreras; 10-Raychan; 12- Hello I’m Nik; 14,15- ben sweet; 16,17- Brandon Mowinkel; 17- Forest Simon; 21- AbsolutVision; 21- Hugo Rocha; 23- Sharon McCutcheon; 32,33Mike C. Valdivia; 32- Element5 Digital; 34- Ricardo Gomez Angel; 35- Martin Adams; 35,36- Toa Heftiba; 36- Chirag Nayak; 37- ev; 45- Brian Miller; Wikimedia Commons: 14,15- jacobolus; 46- Elizabeth Allnutt.

Design by: Winona Guo, Swathi Kella, Tosca Langbert, Trina Lilja, Kendall Rideout, and Madison Shirazi.

SUMMER 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

FROM THE PRESIDENT

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

The Politics of Protest

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. LI, No. 1

EDITORIAL BOARD

PRESIDENT: Alexis Mealey PUBLISHER: Wyatt Hurt MANAGING EDITOR: Marian Bothner ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Ilana Cohen ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Clay Oxford STAFF DIRECTOR: Cate Brock SENIOR COVERS EDITOR: Kendrick Foster ASSOCIATE COVERS EDITOR: Kate Gundersen SENIOR U.S. EDITOR: Joseph Winters ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Swathi Kella ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Chloe Levine SENIOR WORLD EDITOR: Kelsey Chen ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Ruhi Nayak ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Ajay Sarma SENIOR CULTURE EDITOR: Jacob Blair ASSOCIATE CULTURE EDITOR: Christine Mui SENIOR CAMPUS EDITOR: Winona Guo ASSOCIATE CAMPUS EDITOR: Jaden Deal INTERVIEWS EDITOR: George Dalianis BUSINESS MANAGER: Duncan Glew ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER: Victoriah Verna SENIOR DESIGN EDITOR: Trina Lilja ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Tosca Langbert ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Kendall Rideout SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Jacob Heberle ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Nicolas Medrano ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Annelisa Kingsbury Lee SENIOR TECH DIRECTOR: Kodi Obika ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: Yaodong Yu ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: David Hacker COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DIRECTOR: Alexandra Diggs

STAFF

Alex Tam, Alienor Manteau, Alisha Ukani, Alison Chen, Allison Piper, Amy Danoff, Amy Wang, Annelisa Kingsbury Lee, Audrey Sheehy, Ava Salzman, Ben Roberts, Benjamin Firester, Brammy Rajakumar, Bridger Gordon, Byron Hurlbut, Campbell Erickson, Caroline Yun, Carter Nakamoto, Charles Xu, Chloe Lemmel-Hay, Chris Sun, Christian Browder, Clara Bates, Clara Nevins, Colton Carpenter, Connor Brown, Connor Schoen, Daniel Friedman, David Hacker, DJ Kranchalk, Eleonore Evans, Eli Berlin, Emily Malpass, Emily Moss, Emmet Halm, Enrique Sanchez, Esha Chaudhuri, Ethan Schultz, Fatima Taj, Gabrielle Landry, Garrett O’Brien, Graham Walter, Hadley DeBello, Hafsa Muse, Hope Kudo, Isabel Cole, Isabel Isselbacher, Jacob Kern, Jake McIntyre, Jamal Nimer, James Blanchfield, James Coleman, Jamie Bikales, Jamie Weisenberg, Jay Gopalan, Jerrica Li, Jerry Huang, Johannes Lang, John Ball, Jon Riege, Jordan Barton, Jose Larios, Joseph Minatel, Josh Berry, Katharine Heintz, Katherine Ho, Katie Miao, Kevin Bi, Lainey Newman, Lauren Baehr, Lauren Fadiman, Leila Wass, Libby Palanza, Lindsey Bouldin, Lu Shao, Manuel Abecasis, Marcus Trenfield, Matthew Hatfield, Matthew Shaw, Max Snyder, Maya Bharara, Meena Venkataramanan, Melissa Kwan, Mfundo Radebe, Michael Montella, Michael Wornow, Mikael Tessema, Mimi Alphonsus, Miyu Imai, Mustafa Ansari, Natalie Dabkowski, Nicholas Sleeper, Nick Danby, Nidal Morrison, Nikole Naloy, Noah Knopf, Noah Redlich, Otto Barenberg, Pawel Rybacki, Peyton Dunham, Roger Cawdette, Rumi Khan, Ryan Chung, Ryan Golemme, Sam Meyerson, Samantha FrenkelPopell, Sandy Koenig, Sanika Mahajan, Sarah Deonarain, Sarah Tisdall, Satish Wasti, Sophie Dicara, Tamara Shamir, Tom Slack, Vanessa Ruales, Will Finigan, Will Polster, William Boggs, Yash Kumbhat, Yashaar Hafizka, Yuri-Grace Ohashi, Zachary Buttenwieser, Zehan Zhou SENIOR WRITERS: Akshaya Annapragada, Alicia Zhang, Amir Siraj, Andrew Zucker, Anirudh Suresh, Beverly Brown, Chad Borgman, Corbin Duncan, Darwin Peng, Drew Pendergrass, Eve Driver, Gordan Kamer, Hank Sparks, Jessica Boutchie, Katie Weiner, Keshav Rastogi, Lauren Anderson, Matthew Rossi , May Wang, Nicolas Yan, Perry Arrasmith, Russell Reed, Sarah Shamoon, Savitri Fouda, Waseem Nabulsi, Will Imbrie-Moore.

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke E.J. Dionne, Jr. Ron Fournier

Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

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As I write this letter, I am, for once, at a loss for words. When I wrote the last President’s Note in January, the world looked radically different from that which we see today. We looked forward with hope for a new decade, only to be faced immediately with immense hardship. Societies across the world have been turned upside down, and we have all struggled to adapt. Even as we emerge from this crisis, we weather the storm in solidarity with the many whose lives have been lost and the countless others whose lives will never be the same.

Yet in the wake of this pandemic, one fact remains apparent: life moves forward. We struggle onwards, negotiating our global grief within the simultaneously harsh and hopeful reality that life must continue. We find new ways to connect, new ways to laugh, and new ways to exist.

This issue of the Harvard Political Review is no exception. For the first time in HPR history, we have built a magazine around articles written in collaboration with the Harvard Public Opinion Project (HPOP), a biannual poll which results in the most comprehensive dataset of political opinions and trends among young Americans. Our writers worked with HPOP data specialists to bring you the heavy-hitting, data-driven political analysis you will find in this issue.

First, Chloe E. W. Levine and Oliver York explore the implications of patriotism for candidates seeking the youth vote in “What’s in a Name?: Discrepancies in Professions of Patriotism.” Next, Swathi Kella breaks down young Republicans’ complicated feelings on President Donald Trump in “Confusion, Alienation, Invigoration: The American Youth on Three Years of the Trump Presidency,” examining a trend of ideological confusion among young conservatives as they come into power. Abigail Romero and Jing-Jing Shen then analyze the large number of youth who identify themselves as “struggling,” tying the data to trends in young voters unifying behind change in “Struggle and Unity: Young People Demand Change.” Shen and Rebecca Araten continue to analyze struggling youth in “A

Young Person’s Recipe for Hope in a Time of Fear,” noting that young voters remain optimistic for the future. In “Youth Want Equal, Not Just Socialist, Institutions,” writer Christine Mui breaks down how this hope has manifested itself as a desire for equality. Finally, Jelena Dragicevic and Brammy Rajakumar dig into young American identity in “What does it mean to be American?”

Each of these pieces is filled with top-notch analysis from some of our most talented staff, but to our publication, this magazine represents something greater.

These articles were written as we were evacuated from campus with just five days to pack our belongings, say goodbye to friends, and return to homes that many of us no longer recognized in all corners of the world. This magazine is not just a collection of articles. It is evidence of our grit, our resilience and our commitment to good journalism and to one another.

Over the past three months, we have lived at home, finished classes and dealt with the uncertainty of this pandemic.

Nevertheless, we at the HPR have still hit milestones we never dreamed could be possible, breaking all-time viewership records on our website and publishing almost dailt. In all of this uncertainty, the HPR has served as a point of light and solace in my life and in the lives of so many of our staff. We have you, our readers, to thank for allowing us to continue to share our thoughts and stories with you, and we will be forever grateful. We hope that you enjoy this magazine that, to us at the HPR, represents so much more.

Alexis Mealey President

THE POLITICS OF PROTEST

Discrepancies in Professions of Patriotism Chloe E.W. Levine

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AMERICA’S YOUTH SPEAK

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spousing — no, exuding — patriotism has been a tacit requirement for U.S. presidential campaigns since the dawn of the nation, even as debates about the true meaning of patriotism have embroiled candidates. Who could forget the 2008 scandal in which then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., decided to forgo a flag pin and sparked a national battle over the very definition of patriotism? Unlike in 2008, however, in 2020, winning the right to call oneself a patriot may not mean winning the election.

In fine-tuning their formulas for success, candidates that hope to win the youth vote must tread cautiously around the topic of patriotism. Amidst plummeting levels of national pride, invoking patriotism may still prove viable, but only if handled with care. Young Americans’ responses to questions about their patriotism vary based on the specific words used to ask them.

Understanding these discrepancies could provide valuable insight into the dimensions of young voters’ love for their country, helping campaigns calculate how best to harness that love in the name of victory.

WORDS MATTER For many young people, patriotism holds some appeal, but self-identification as a patriot would be a bridge too far. A recent poll of 18- through 29-year-old Americans by the Harvard Public Opinion Project finds that they have drastically different reactions to the words “patriot,” “patriotic,” and “patriotism.” When asked which from a list of ideological monikers (patriot, socialist, capitalist, democratic socialist) they identified as, if any, 33% of the HPOP poll’s respondents claimed the label of “patriot.”

Respondents were much more likely to consider themselves “patriotic,” with a total of 62% describing themselves “very” or “somewhat” so. The popularity of patriotism as a concept falls between those two rates: Presented with the same list in noun form and asked which schools of thought, if any, they supported, 52% of respondents expressed support for patriotism. Significant contingents of young people polled, then, would call themselves patriotic despite a lack of support for patriotism or a refusal to self-identify as a patriot, revealing prevalent ambivalence about these words and the ideologies for which they stand.

These trends in respondents’ relative reactions to different word forms characterize the HPOP data across party lines.

Political parties undoubtedly grapple with patriotism in different ways: Republicans are, on balance, more enthusiastic about their national pride, while Democrats emphasize constructively criticizing the nation in order to improve it. Nevertheless, members of both parties seem to associate their preferred politicians with the term “patriotic,” implying that they view the adjective positively. For example, 35% of Democrats said Republican President Donald Trump was patriotic, compared to 87% of Republicans, and 39% of Republicans said former Vice President and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was patriotic, compared to 69% of Democrats. Indeed, for both Democrats and Republicans, respondents were most likely to identify as patriotic and least likely to identify as a patriot, with 33 percentage points separating the two figures. A parallel trend held for respondents not affiliated with either major party.

These findings suggest that candidates of all party affiliations should pay attention to the nuances inherent to potential voters’ understanding of patriotism.

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NATIONALISM AND PATRIOTISM The connotations of right-wing nationalism carried by some iterations of patriotic language today help to elucidate the HPOP results. President Trump frames his political movement as a defense of American pride, expressing affection toward patriotic symbols and using the slogan “Make America Great Again” to encourage nostalgia for American history — although that history is inextricably linked to oppression. He unabashedly ties his version of patriotism to a controversial brand of nationalism which puts “America First” in a militaristic foreign policy agenda and often rejects the value of international cooperation. In just one example, the disastrous outcome of the Trump administration’s individualistic response to the coronavirus has demonstrated that “America First” is a clearly fallible strategy for ensuring the wellbeing of Americans. Still, by his definition, globalists and patriots are opposites. Due to this widespread conflation of patriotism and nationalism, even academics struggle to articulate the contemporary difference between the two in the United States. Consequently, many Americans perceive a connection between the application of patriotic ideology and violence, discrimination, and division.

Labeling oneself as a patriot is therefore ambiguous: Do self-identified patriots view themselves as Trump-era nationalists or idealistic critics? Is their love of country unqualified or aspirational? Adopting such a label without an explanation may feel risky, since psychological studies have found that labeling a person unleashes an arsenal of associated assumptions upon them. Coupled with the diminishing importance of patriotism in the daily lives of young Americans, professing personal patriotism distinct from nationalism may not seem worth the potential misunderstanding. This effect could explain respondents’ reluctance to call themselves patriots in spite of their support for depersonalized patriotism and claim of the adjective “patriotic,” which from a linguistic perspective partially modifies their identity rather than definitively characterizing it.

THE NEED FOR NUANCE Attesting to a belief in patriotism is made more difficult by the ideology’s wide-ranging definitions, imprecision which could make even Trump voters feel uneasy about an admission of support. The McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s June 2019 Mood of the Nation Poll reveals significant variance among respondents about patriotism’s defining characteristics. The component most commonly agreed upon was “showing respect, loyalty and love for one’s country,” but there are multitudinous possibilities for the real-life manifestations of that quality. An almost contemporaneous Economist-YouGov poll found similar disagreement. In one particularly stark difference, Democrats were 37 percentage points more likely than Republicans to allow that an American could be patriotic despite “refusing to serve in a war that they oppose.” Democrats were also more likely to accept a similar allowance for Americans who “disobey a law they think is immoral,” though with 56% of them in support as compared to 41% of Republicans, both groups were divided. The relationship between patriotism and morality is thus unclear; some see the two as inextricable, while others believe patriotism can require immorality. All these discrepancies suggest HPOP respondents unwilling to brand themselves as patriots/patriotic

AMERICA’S YOUTH SPEAK

or support patriotism might have been deterred by uncertainty about the literal terms of the question.

It follows that when given the option to place themselves along a spectrum of patriotism, respondents were more willing to identify as at least somewhat patriotic than they were when given a binary choice between support and disavowal of the ideology. According to the HPOP data, the highest rates of patriotism were derived from the net affirmative responses to a question which asked young Americans how patriotic they considered themselves to be (very, somewhat, not very, or not at all).

Respondents nervous about the implications of an unconditional affirmative answer could, in the adjectival form of the question, answer with reservation. This result indicates that politicians would be electorally ill served by presenting a monolithic, all-ornothing patriotic vision.

For 2020 candidates, then, the solution to this ostensibly conflicting data could be simply broadening campaigns’ definitions of patriotism. Young Americans disagree about the parameters of patriotism, and their responses suggest apprehension about the ideology’s associations, but a clear majority express some measure of interest in patriotic thought. Appealing to that interest thematically — without getting bogged down in the hackneyed

language and cliched iconography with which discordant ideas about patriotism are so often wrapped up — might just earn candidates the votes they need. 

“Patriot”

Percentage of Respondents Per Party Who Identified With:

“Patriotic” “Patriotism”

75%

50%

25%

0% DEMOCRATIC

INDEPENDENT/UNAFFILIATED

REPUBLICAN SUMMER 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 5

THE POLITICS OF PROTEST

CONFUSION, ALIENATION, INVIGORATION:

The American Youth on Three Years of the Trump Presidency

Swathi Kella

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s the 2020 elections draw near, the future presents two possible paths: the continuation of a presidency that has become emblematic of a global shift rightward, or a return to the liberal moderation that defined the term prior.

This choice takes the form of the presidential contest between incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and it has been heavy on the minds of young people across the nation. The past three years of the Trump administration have significantly impacted youth engagement with politics by confusing the young Republican base, alienating swing voters, and invigorating those on the left.

Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy and election sent shockwaves not only through the establishment Republican party but also through the youth Republican base, which presents very confused attitudes about his current tenure. In a poll conducted by the Harvard Public Opinion Project among 18through 29-year-old Americans, an overwhelming 83% of young Republicans said they approve of Trump. Despite this apparent certainty, only one in three conservative respondents reported that Trump has made their lives better. Instead, 40% of young conservatives even said Trump’s presidency has had no impact on their lives.

This finding presents a large gap in reasoning that may be reconciled by considering the dual position that young people occupy in society — at once still very influenced by their parents but also developing an increasingly independent consciousness.

On one hand, as Boise State University political science professor Jeffrey Lyons discovered in a 2017 study, a young person’s political position at the age of 18 is strongly influenced by their parents’ beliefs. On a seven-point scale, ranging from strongly Democrat to strongly Republican, a child whose father was strongly Republican was an average of 2.5 points more conservative than a child whose father was strongly Democratic. Lyons elaborated that this was the effect of environmental conditioning on both sides of the ideological spectrum, saying, “Kids are these empty cups you can pour beliefs into, and they’re more

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likely to stick.” Parents’ beliefs, then, may be a strong predictor of the attitudes that young people profess towards the president.

While young Republicans are likely to avow the political views of their parents through approval ratings, responses to deeper questions suggest that their internal feelings are more conflicted than that. This pattern may be the result of a shift within the ideology of the conservative youth: A 2016 study conducted by Gary C. Jacobson in the midst of the prior election cycle found that Republicans were extremely splintered by generation, with youth party affiliates identifying as much less conservative than their elders. Similarly, Wired contributor Issie Lapowsky found that young conservatives view both the president and his ideology as “relics of the past,” representing older Republicans more so than the youth. This trend would explain young Republicans’ professed support for the presidential incumbent, despite harboring more conflicting personal feelings regarding Trump’s direct impact on their lives.

This generational divide also sheds light on a major dissonance between the sentiments of Republican youth across the country and the actions of Republicans in Congress, who have largely fallen into rank with party leadership. A FiveThirtyEight Congressional tracker that compares how often members of Congress vote with or against the president indicates that all but seven Republican senators — out of a total of 63 — have voted in line with Trump’s position more frequently than predicted based on his 2016 margin within their home districts or states.

Taken together, this voting tracker and the HPOP data suggest that the Republicanism espoused within the highest legislative chambers — one that frequently follows executive direction — is not representative of the opinions of Republican youth.

Conflicted youth attitudes towards the current presidency, and the larger generational difference within which it is seated, can be ascribed to the way Trump has handled a number of key issues. For instance, take Trump’s antagonistic record towards climate — in three years, the Trump administration has reversed 58 environmental regulations, with 37 more rollbacks in the pro-

THE POLITICS OF PROTEST

cess. Given interest in climate change among younger generations who will invariably have to deal with the detrimental effects of current environmental practices, it comes as no surprise that most young people do not take a favorable view to Trump’s presidency. A study from the Pew Research Center even found that only three in ten members of Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2005) approve of Trump’s job performance.

Another contributing factor to young Republicans’ hesitation is the changing social landscape of America. There appears to be a growing racial consciousness among youth on both sides of the aisle that is increasingly distancing itself from Donald Trump’s platform and demeanor. According to Pew, Generation Z Republicans are more likely than any other Republican age cohort to say that blacks are not being treated fairly, with 43% agreeing compared to the 20% of Republican Boomers, the generation that dominates Congress today. Climate change and social issues are just two of the issues that have fueled the disconnect between the youth and the current administration.

This uncertainty and ambivalence among Trump’s own youth voter base will translate into real political consequences this fall.

While 83% of young Republicans reported approving of Trump earlier, only 53% are sure that they will vote for him in the upcoming election cycle. Among those who identify more broadly as conservatives, rather than just Republican, only 41% are sure they will vote for Trump. This result leaves Trump’s own base divided in half over whether they will vote for him, further highlighting confusion among young conservatives.

In addition to its conflicting impact on Republican youth, the Trump administration has alienated young centrists. Roughly 40% percent of young moderates and those who identify as independents say that they have a worse view of the Republican party because of Trump, while only 7-11% of the same demographic report having a better view. Young people who identify as independents also have a worse view of Trump on the issues, considering that 77% of this demographic disapprove of his handling of climate change, 70% disapprove of his handling of

health care, 57% disapprove of his handling of the economy, and 63% disapprove of his handling of coronavirus.

These views encapsulate the genuine alienation among swing voters who might otherwise be drawn to the Republican party during the 2020 elections. One in four moderates reported that they would be more likely to identify with the Republican party if Trump were not associated with it. And even moderates leaning right on the political spectrum are wary of Trump — 75% of them are uncertain whether they’ll vote for him in the general election. This doubt leaves a large portion of the moderate voting base open for either candidate or an independent.

This fact is especially significant when taking into account that among young likely voters, there are as many moderates as liberals. Liberals in particular may be especially vocal about the upcoming election, with 48% of liberals reporting that they are more politically active because of Trump, compared to 24% of moderates and 27% of conservatives. Together, moderates and liberals make up 77% of all young likely voters, most of whom feel alienated in some way by the current president. Trump has lost out on a major portion of the youth vote, leaving these ballots up for grabs by Biden or an independent candidate, if they can figure out how to tap into this electoral cache.

While Trump’s approval ratings among young Republicans initially appear high, a closer look at the data shows that views among the youth towards the current presidency are far from monolithic. Instead, there is far more ambivalence and alienation among young people, both within the Republican party and among independents and Democrats. The race for the youth vote, then, will largely be determined by whether Trump can convince disillusioned young Americans that he can represent their generational perspective or whether Biden can successfully channel their disillusionment and confusion with the previous three years. 

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AMERICA’S YOUTH SPEAK

Struggle and Unity Abigail Romero and Jing-Jing Shen

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nce bustling public spaces, now visited only by the occasional mask-wielding passerby. Funerals with no attendees. Blue tents dotting long-winded streets. These images bore into the minds of so many Americans amidst the coronavirus pandemic.

Though the pandemic is not the genesis of our society’s problems, it has heightened the fears many young Americans already feel on a daily basis. An inadequate health care system, debt, and housing costs, among many other concerns, persist in our already fragile state. Hospital workers who fear contracting the virus confront shortages of personal protective equipment and a mental health crisis. An overall uncertainty surrounding the end of the pandemic remains, highlighting the global community’s lack of preparedness for major disasters. Financial insecurity from missing stimulus checks alongside asymmetrical access to COVID-19 tests have unveiled the disproportionate impacts of emergencies on poorer communities. As the death toll rises, the struggles that preceded the coronavirus have also grown, raising the question: Will the months after quarantine be any less anxiety-ridden?

Half (50.4%) of Americans ages 18 to 29 identify themselves as struggling, according to the most recent youth poll from the Harvard Public Opinion Project. Growing up in the wake of 9/11, experiencing continued fall-out from the Great Recession, and now confronting a global pandemic have contributed to young people’s sense of struggle and made them apprehensive about

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the present and future.

Beyond the coronavirus, each day young people endure struggles with individually unique effects. Yet across educational disparities, party divides, and racial differences, youth are facing these difficulties together. While the suffering is uneven and each challenge distinct, the struggle is collective — young people are not persisting through these times alone.

STRUGGLES ON MANY FRONTS Despite the multitude of issues in the world, from climate change to income inequality to gender inequity, many youths have rallied behind a few priorities, including debt, housing, and health care. This selectivity in and solidarity behind issues can then concentrate focus on organizing.

As an example, most young people agree the government should take action to address debt. With U.S. personal debt growing 19% since 2009 and reaching its highest-ever levels last year, it comes as no surprise that debt is an issue that many people will face. Over half of young Americans find themselves in debt. Further, one in five youth say they have debt that significantly affects life decisions. When turning to policy, young Americans are split on how the government should manage student loan debt, with 33.1% of HPOP respondents saying the government should cancel student loan debt for everyone, 16.7% saying it should only do so for those in need, and 34.9% saying

AMERICA’S YOUTH

it should help with repayment instead. Still, only 13.4% wanted no change in loan policy. In essence, an overwhelming majority of youth are unified in seeking further governmental action on debt.

Many of the nation’s young people are also worried about their health and ability to obtain care. The HPOP poll found that 44.8% of survey-takers agreed with the statement “I am concerned about accessing health care if and when I need it,” and an equal percentage felt the same about mental health care. With the prevalence of mental health issues among youth reaching an all-time high, and millennials accounting for 20% of patients hospitalized with the coronavirus, healthcare access is becoming even more salient. Most respondents (62.9%) attested to a belief that basic health insurance is a right for all people and the government should provide it for those unable to afford it.

Much like with debt, most youth agree that the government must change its policies to fundamentally attend to these daily challenges.

Concerns about accessibility extend into housing, especially given the recent appreciation in housing costs. More than threefifths of young Americans express concern about housing costs.

This worry is not confined by region, as 68.2% of young urban residents and 64.4% of young suburban residents express feeling the impact of rising housing prices. Likewise, a similar percentage (59.1%) of small-town and rural residents echo this point.

From city to country, affordable housing has become harder to obtain for residents of all different communities.

Even without readily apparent solutions to rising housing costs, recognizing that a majority are suffering lays the foundation for continued action in this realm. More than half of respondents (59.9%) felt that “Basic necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that the government should provide to those unable to afford them,” suggesting that young people have compassion for others who are struggling. This concern offers promise for political solidarity and empathy.

Young people have vocalized concerns surrounding debt, health care, and housing, either through majority opinion on the impact of these difficulties or insight into preferred policies.

The prioritization of such issues can streamline a path towards change in the political sphere.

as compared to federal ones, it may be beneficial to pursue solutions through institutions at a regionalized scale.

Institutions can reduce policy lags to help spark the change for which the populace calls, but first, these institutions need to build trust with an already burdened generation. In the meantime, many young people are already enacting this regionalized approach themselves on a small scale. More than three in four (77.3%) respondents agreed with the statement “Community service is an honorable thing to do,” up from 70% in spring 2019, underscoring how young people increasingly value helping others. In fact, according to a 2019 Deloitte survey, people are more likely to aspire to help their communities than to dream of starting businesses or families. Around the world, they are taking matters into their own hands when authority figures fail.

Although the coronavirus pandemic is a devastating global catastrophe, it highlights these community-oriented tendencies.

Despite mandated physical separation through social distancing and quarantines, many communities have become more socially connected. And young people are on the frontlines of providing coronavirus-related aid — teenagers are delivering groceries for senior citizens, college students are offering free K-12 tutoring, and medical students are joining understaffed health care teams.

Especially with the coronavirus pandemic exacerbating the problems they grapple with, young Americans seek impactful remedies. The struggles encountered by young people have fostered their unification behind policies on everything from debt to health care. These struggles are real, and the youth are unified in desiring substantive action, in demanding real change. 

INSTITUTIONAL VS. COMMUNITY CHANGE Governmental institutions may have the capacity to carry out transformative policies in these areas, but young people are skeptical of them. Two-thirds of young Democrats (66.2%) and close to half of young Republicans (46.4%) feel that “the government does not represent the America I love,” showcasing a lack of trust in institutions that can compound the struggles they already feel. To whom can young people look to address their needs?

After all, young people harbor distrust for national leaders. Under one-third of respondents said they trust the federal government (32.5%), fewer trust the President (31.4%), and even fewer trust Congress (28.8%) all or most of the time. However, local institutions retain more trust. The HPOP poll found that 42.5% of respondents said they trusted their state government, and 43.2% trusted their local government. These figures may point to greater confidence in authority located closer to home.

Given young people’s proclivity for trusting regional institutions

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AMERICA’S YOUTH SPEAK

Hope in a Time of Fear Rebecca Araten and Jing-Jing Shen

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ight now, the lives of young people are fraught: worries surrounding healthcare, debt, and the cost of housing weigh heavily on young consciences. A majority of America’s youth — 50.4% — describe themselves as suffering in some way or another. They worry about what the political realm has in store for them, expressing dissatisfaction with policies, politicians, and even politics overall. Yet young people still harbor hope.

The latest poll of Americans ages 18 to 29 conducted by the Harvard Public Opinion Project found that over half (57.9%) of respondents said they felt fearful about the future. The sources of these fears are plentiful. The most commonly cited concern was the novel coronavirus (19.4% of responses), followed by issues related to health care (14.8%), the environment (7.9%), and the economy (6.4%). Levels of concern over the economy and the environment remain close to the corresponding figures from the Fall 2019 HPOP survey while healthcare worries have risen twofold. Close to a majority of youth (43.4%) voiced concerns about accessing health care, and a similar number (44.8%) expressed

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worries about accessing mental health care. Around two-thirds of survey responses came in right as the COVID-19 pandemic began to cause massive national closures, and four in 10 (43.0%) respondents said they believe someone they know will die from the disease. Beyond health worries, a majority (57.2%) of youth have debt, an even greater number (63.4%) are concerned about the cost of housing, and a staggering 64.8% of college students believe it will be difficult to find a job upon graduation. As overwhelming as these figures may be to process in close succession, they are even more overwhelming to live through on a daily basis. Troubles abound and only seem to be growing.

Among the problems that young people face is a disappointment in how the political realm, which theoretically should offer solutions, functions. Young people feel a disconnect with their political leaders, with only 10.3% of survey respondents feeling that elected officials share their priorities. A majority of young people (55.8%) agreed that politics has become too partisan. These findings line up with growing party divides and dissatisfaction with polarization. A March 2020 Pew Research

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Center study found that a striking 91% of survey respondents believed that conflicts between Democrats and Republicans are either strong or very strong, up from 86% in 2017. The growing hostility across political differences is just another problem that young people face. Nonetheless, it is not one that prevents young people from seeking the political changes they want to see.

Despite the laundry list of anxieties, hope springs eternal.

While young Americans worry about both the present and the future, many believe that change is not only necessary but possible. This hope manifests in numerous ways. For some respondents, it displayed itself as a relativization of their own struggles and a conviction that, on the whole, America is a better place to live than most other countries. Of all respondents, 60.7% preferred to live in the United States rather than anywhere else.

And over half of young Americans agree with the statement “I can succeed in America by working hard.” Despite minor variations among different races (65.6% for White respondents, 59.2% for Black respondents, and 64.8% for Hispanic respondents), a majority of youth retain faith in this American Dream.

The poll results also imply that politics may serve as a source of hope since most respondents believe political processes can have a real impact. Three in five (60.6%) young people think the outcome of the 2020 presidential election will make a difference in their lives, and 63.7% of survey respondents disagreed with the statement “It doesn’t really matter to me who the President is.” Daily worries that young people must wrestle with are real, but there is potential personal relevance from politics and policy.

The struggle is ongoing, but a belief in the potential efficacy of politics to address the challenges confronted by youth persists.

Additionally, politically engaged youth have more hope about the future. Among self-identified politically engaged respondents, the percentage of people who said they were more hopeful than fearful about the future rose to 45.6%, versus 40.5% for all respondents. Young people who are more hopeful are not only slightly more politically engaged (35.4%) but also say they are more likely to vote in the 2020 presidential election (70.4%) compared to those who are not hopeful (31.5% and 67.9%, respectively). This correlation between political participation and hope suggests that those who imagine a bright future are actively striving to make that vision a reality.

In one example, although the environment is a huge source of anxiety for young people, young folks have harnessed their fears to fight for a better environmental future. This model of fear catalyzing activism is one that could extend to other troubling issues. The environment has not been a source of positivity for young people, a 2019 Washington Post survey showed, with 69% of surveyed teens saying that they do not feel optimistic about climate change. HPOP survey data corroborated this in finding that young people are still plagued with environmental concerns, with 7.9% of respondents overall, and 10.2% of fearful individuals, listing the environment as a top source of alarm.

Consequently, teenagers have been responding to their anxieties with activism and action. One in four of the Washington Post’s surveyed teens had participated in a walkout, demonstrating how ready younger Americans are to take active steps toward change.

Young people are not only driven to work towards change that benefits them specifically; they also have compassion for others. The HPOP poll found that 87.6% of respondents supported some form of government involvement in debt cancellation,

as opposed to inaction, as a remedy for the rising levels of debt confronted by many young people (57.2% of those surveyed).

The poll results demonstrated this widespread support for public policy to address the crisis, although well over a majority (67.5%) of young people rated their own personal financial situations as “good.” Among financially stable individuals, 66.3% favored replacing current political institutions, and 71.6% supported institutional reform. While individuals might not be facing financial difficulties themselves, they still would opt for change, suggesting that people may be interested in systemic improvements beyond improvements to their own personal wellbeing. Veneration of selflessness was a common thread throughout responses, with 77.3% of surveyed youth agreeing that community service is honorable. This altruism may push young people to bring about change, with impacts that extend beyond themselves.

Young Americans are worried about the future. Yet their belief in the possibility of change, potentially as a result of the upcoming election and/or future governmental action, prevails.

On the heels of hope follows engagement. Youth who are more hopeful are more likely to follow the news closely and respond that they will likely turn out for the upcoming general election.

Even as many issues keep young Americans up at night, there remains hope that they will awake to a better tomorrow. 

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AMERICA’S YOUTH SPEAK

Christine Mui, Kevin Wang, and Yao Yin

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rior to the 2016 presidential election cycle, the Democratic Party’s slogans centered around the uplifting message of “yes, we can.” These days, one may be more likely to associate the party with the so-called “political revolution” characterized by policy measures like Medicare for All. Youth in particular have led this ideological shift, often rallying around ideas that can be traced back to progressive figures like Bernie Sanders.

In 2016, Sanders’ presidential campaign was largely viewed as a quixotic far-left challenge. His message, however, proved resonant, and his policy agenda, including Medicare for All, has been surprisingly durable. During the 2020 Democratic primary, 11 candidates supported some version of universal healthcare.

Even after dropping out of the race, it is clear that Sanders’ ideas have not gone with him — his team is already negotiating with Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, on policy positions. The Democratic Party may continue shifting further left on health care and other key issues.

These electoral developments reflect a burgeoning desire for institutional change among young Americans, and specifically

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young Democrats. According to the Harvard Public Opinion Project’s national youth poll, only 8% of Americans ages 18 to 29 think our government is working as it should be. Despite significant differences within parties and ideologies, there seems to be mutual agreement in the desire for institutional changes that ultimately circles back to the themes of identity and equality.

This finding explains Sanders’ strong support among young voters — his followers are drawn not simply to his socialist rhetoric, but rather to his desire to create institutions focused on personal liberty and equality. That goal is here to stay.

YOUTH ON REVOLUTION VS. REFORM Though young Democrats show unity in their belief that the government is not functioning as it should, they offer diverging views on how to fix it. HPOP data further reveals that about half of young Democrats believe that to solve our government’s problems, we need to create new institutions to replace our old ones. By contrast, only 38% of independents believe in such fundamental change, and that number falls even lower to 19%

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for Republicans. Since the alternative to fundamental change is slower, more incremental reform, this data suggests a split between revolutionary thinking and more moderate ideology among young Democrats, even if both schools of thought seem to support broadly socialist policies.

As youth support for socialism has become widespread, media outlets have raised concern that socialism’s millennial and Generation Z supporters do not know what it means. Indeed, young people seem to view socialism as more of an abstract concept than its traditional definition, “governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” Sanders’ self-classification as a democratic socialist, rather than simply as a socialist, diverges from this definition — at a 2015 speech on the topic of democratic socialism at Georgetown University, Sanders drew inspiration from Franklin D. Roosevelt, calling for an economic bill of rights made up of the rights to quality health care, affordable housing, secure retirement, complete education, racial equality, a clean environment, and a living wage.

These rights are what appeal so strongly to today’s youth.

Young Americans want greater equality in our institutions, and they see government intervention as the way to achieve it. Forty percent of youth surveyed by HPOP say they prioritize equality over the economy, in contrast to the 29% who chose the economy over equality-seeking measures. Those who choose equality are split when it comes to the level of institutional change they want to see, with 47% supporting replacing existing institutions, which aligns more with traditional socialism, and 48% supporting reforming existing institutions, aligning more with democratic socialism. Nonetheless, youth appear to prioritize equality over economic freedoms, and that prioritization provides a lens for understanding their support of Sanders’ policies.

placement of institutions. Fifty-five percent of respondents who strongly agree that they are concerned about accessing health care want to replace institutions, compared to 39% overall. Compared to issues like housing (49%) and debt (42%), concerns about mental health care (57%) and health care (55%) were more strongly correlated with support for replacement over reform. Equality within health care has long been a high priority for young Americans — it was a key issue espoused in virtually every stump speech of Sanders’ presidential bid. Now, the coronavirus pandemic has only highlighted the healthcare system’s inequalities and fostered young people’s desire for change.

DO YOUTH KNOW WHAT SOCIALISM IS? It seems as though young people have been drawn more to calls for greater institutional equality than to the socialist label of Sanders’ politics. One reason may be that Generation Z is set to be the most unequal generation yet, with the greatest income equality, most student debt, and the largest wealth gap. Having reached working age during and after the financial crisis and the Great Recession, millennials are the first generation to fall behind their parents’ standards of living, earning far less than earlier generations. In Sanders’ address at Georgetown, he referenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” A large number of youth have gotten behind these words. 

WHY EQUALITY MATTERS The youth’s prioritization of equality can be contextualized by their perspective about the United States’ history of injustices. HPOP data shows that young black people are significantly less likely than their White counterparts to believe that the founders of America shared their values and built an America that is for them. Fifty-nine percent of White respondents agree that America was built for people like them, while 41% of black respondents disagreed. Although race is the main dividing factor for agreement, only 52% of all young people believe the founders of America shared their values, indicating a much broader disillusionment with American values. This sentiment may be the result of a combination of factors, of which race is only one.

Despite uncertainties raised by the coronavirus pandemic, the future of America remains secure and full of hope for the 69% of young Americans who believe the founders shared their values and that America was built for people like them. Seventythree percent of these youth remain more hopeful than fearful about the future of the country. Furthermore, there is a direct correlation between having optimism in America’s future and believing the nation’s institutions align with one’s values. While most youth think America is not headed in the right direction, the 21% minority who do overwhelmingly believe that America was built for people like them.

During these uncertain times, there is a correlation between being concerned about access to healthcare and wanting the re-

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american identity?

Jelena Dragicevic and Brammy Rajakumar

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n his farewell address to the American people, President George Washington proclaimed in 1796, “Citizens by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.” Although Washington was trying to instill the idea of nationhood into a still-forming nation of thirteen disparate colonies, his words set a precedent for contested notions of “Americanism” and “patriotism.” As data from the Harvard Public Opinion Project shows, young people across the nation approach these two terms with varying definitions and levels of support. This variation, informed by a long history of racism and xenophobia, reveals that there is a major disconnect in whether or not members do feel as equal “citizens … of a common country.”

Support for patriotism has declined broadly over young Americans across the past two decades. According to the HPOP poll, the proportion of young Americans ages 18-29 identifying themselves as patriotic has decreased by nearly 30 percentage points, falling from 89% in 2002 to 61% in the present day. In fact, more young people have even expressed outright aversion to the label — the number of young Americans who identified as “not at all patriotic” spiked up 10 points from nearly zero at the start of the millennium to 12% in 2020. These trends reflect the shifting views of younger Americans compared to their peers from past decades and speak to a decline in their identification as “patriotic.”

However, even among the young generation studied, selfassessed levels of patriotism vary across political parties. Young Republicans are significantly more likely to identify as patriotic

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than young Democrats, with 86% of young Republicans identifying as patriotic compared to 56% of young Democrats. Of the young Republican respondents, 41% call themselves “very patriotic,” compared to only 11% among young Democrats. This data suggests that the Republican and Democratic parties differ in both the quantity and potency of patriotism among their supporters.

Underlying these partisan differences is a historical shift that has made the Democratic Party increasingly left-wing and the Republican Party right-wing over the course of the past century. Prior to the 1930s, Democrats who were predominantly concentrated in the South and southeast U.S. held hardline beliefs against Black Americans and fiercely defended states’ rights with limited centralized authority. Gradually, northern Democrats steered away from Southern Democrats’ alienation of Black Americans, initiating the realignment of Black voters in the 1920s (especially as the Republican Party continued to dismiss civil rights).

The Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tenure during the 1930s provided the impetus for the Republican and Democratic parties to switch, with the Democratic Party’s New Deal offering social welfare policies that sought to address the failing economy that disproportionately affected Black Americans, as well as other ethnic and racial minorities.

While FDR remained reserved about his opinions on civil rights, his administration set the tone for minority groups to primarily identify with the Democratic Party. Accordingly, only 8% of all Blacks, 28% of all Hispanics, and 12% of Asians in the U.S. identify as Republicans, compared to 84% of all Blacks, 63% of all Hispanics, and 65% of all Asians identifying as Democrats today.

Coupling the status quo with the low support for “patrio-

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tism” among young Democrat respondents aligns with the anti-minority connotation that the term itself is often wrapped up in. As the scholars Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto explain, “American patriotism has always been racialized.” Sidanius and Pratto continue that “nationality and ethnicity are complementary because their power has enabled Whites to successfully define the prototypical American in their own image.” Further corroborating this notion that “American” equals “White” and thereby “White” equals “patriotic” is the work of researchers Thierry Devos of San Diego State University and Mahzarin R. Banaji of Harvard University, who found these connections to be implicit and rooted within our unconscious mind. Therefore, while “patriotism” intuitively means “loyalty to one’s country,” it is White Americans who have been propagated as being inherently “patriotic.”

President Trump’s own rhetoric harkens back to this definition of patriotism. The phrase “America First,” which he mentioned in his inaugural address, builds on a history of xenophobia, immigration issues, and ultimately, racism. In 2019, President Trump also criticized four minority congresswomen, three of whom were born in the United States, by telling them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” instead of advocating for reform in America’s political system. Even in 2020, Trump continues to make race a key part of his strategy, which some have labeled an exclusive “White identity politics” that alienates people of color.

Despite this exclusivity, in his inaugural speech, Trump did note that “whether we are black or brown or White, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots,” implying a definition of patriotism that transcends race differences, although young people of color might not have cause to feel this way.

This paradoxical construct of “patriotism” — both universal and exclusive — has largely been informed by clashing perspectives of different racial and ethnic groups, shaped by their complex and often competing histories. If one dissents against institutionalized, discriminatory, prejudiced practices, as did San Francisco’s 49ers former quarterback Colin Kaepernick by kneeling during the national anthem, it is perceived as “unpatriotic” by non-minorities who are convinced that such behavior stands in opposition to America’s democratic values. To minorities, the act is not symbolic of disdain for democracy, rather a commitment to improving democracy. Essentially, minority groups believe in the democratic cornerstone of equal protections for all, and they are willing to exercise their freedom of expression to communicate when these ideals of democracy are jeopardized. Non-minorities perceive minority dissent as a defiance against democracy and thereby “unpatriotic” because they lack the same oppressed history as minorities do to attach minority-dissent to a broader social and historical context.

Data from HPOP, alongside other national data and research, gives credence to the overall schism in the definition of “patriotism” among young Republicans and Democrats, which is primarily a result of the Democrat’s more diverse constituency compared to Republicans. Despite young Democrats identifying themselves as “patriotic” less frequently than young Republicans, this statistic is not per se a depiction of young Democrats’ lack of “loyalty” and unwillingness to prioritize the best interests of the United States. Consequently, HPOP provides a glimpse of contested versions of “patriotism,” revealing divided attitudes towards what it means to be “American.” 

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REMAKING ETHNIC STUDIES Swathi Kella

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cross the nation, students are making it clear to their universities that the curriculum they are learning every day is insufficient for the 21st century. Recognizing a rift between the words written on a chalkboard and the society that lies outside the classroom door, these students are increasingly pushing for a course of study that allows them to learn about traditionally underrepresented figures and reckon with concepts of oppression and justice. For this, they look to ethnic studies.

Ethnic studies is an interdisciplinary field devoted to the examination of race and culture in U.S. history and contemporary society. It came to the fore with the growing racial consciousness that defined the 1960s. In 1968, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire published a groundbreaking body of work called the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” charging traditional educational institutions with indoctrinating hierarchies of power within the classroom setting. That same year, one hemisphere over, a wave of youth and faculty at San Francisco State University initiated the Third World Liberation Front movement — it is historically unclear whether they had read Freire’s work, though they share the same thread of ideas — to advance the cause for ethnic studies. Soon, waves of students would be storming the campus of not only SFSU, but also the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota, among others. These schools succeeded in developing a lasting pedagogical architecture for

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ethnic studies, paving the way for universities to do the same.

In the 21st century, the legacy of this effort has continued on in pockets of the United States, though ethnic studies programs vary greatly from university to university. In no two places has the discipline emerged in the same way — some schools have established separate departments and research facilities for ethnic studies, while others remain without a major. Harvard College is one of the latter. As we examine our own efforts to establish an ethnic studies department at Harvard, looking at the work other schools have already done to achieve the same goal can help.

This comparison not only shows that Harvard is behind many of the other universities in the United States, but also offers pathways for Harvard ethnic studies advocates to follow.

ON THE HOME FRONT At Harvard, students advocate for ethnic studies as a more complete representation of this nation’s history, which they have found to be lacking in traditional university curricula. “I grew up hearing Border Patrol helicopters overhead, and that was just a fact of life. Reading these texts made me feel seen,” Raquel Rivera ‘23 told the HPR, speaking to the curricular texts of Spanish 126: Performing Latinidad. Rivera is one of the organizers for the Harvard Ethnic Studies Coalition, a collective

of current Harvard students and alumni pushing for the creation of an ethnic studies department. But for Rivera, the significance of ethnic studies was far more than personal. “Beyond that and more importantly, ethnic studies … is a way to improve our understanding and critique our understanding of race, ethnicity, and other power structures.”

The first call for a track of study dedicated to a particular racial group at Harvard came in the 1960s, setting off decades of resistance that continues today. In 1969, the college established the African and African American Studies Department, then called the Afro-American Studies Department, in response to increasing student unrest catalyzed by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Four years later came the first proposal for an ethnic studies program from then-Harvard history professor John Womack. Eleven more proposals would come as the years went on, but action remained slow. Faculty and student opposition argued that the discipline would garner little interest, that it was a form of self-segregation, and that it was a political rather than academic undertaking. Administrators also pointed to a lack of sufficient funding in the arts and humanities to support the creation of the program.

Finally, in 2009, Harvard established the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights, an achievement that former Undergraduate Council President Andrea R. Flores described as “10 [or] 20 years in the making.” The committee offers two different secondaries, one entitled Ethnicity, Migration, Rights and another entitled Latina/o Studies that focuses specifically on studying the Latinx population within the United States. The secondaries remain popular among Harvard students, with 78 currently declared across the two fields during the 2019-2020 school year, according to the committee’s Administrative Director Eleanor Craig.

Nevertheless, a committee is insufficient. Rivera cited the importance of having a department that would also offer undergraduate concentrations and graduate-level degrees, grant professors independent hiring power, and provide greater transparency in the tenure selection process. “The most important thing is that the discussion happens, and right now I don’t think we have that sort of discursive space that has been given value,” said Ajay Singh ‘21, who is also an organizer for the HESC, in an interview with the HPR. While the creation of a department is a primary goal, student activists also wish to see the university invest in an analogous research facility to explore ethnic and racial formation. As of now, Rivera said, “Harvard might be producing groundbreaking work in ethnic studies, but it’s less Harvard and more so professors like professor Lorgia García Peña.” Singh added, “If a department or program has a research center, it means that there is funding that has been allocated for faculty ... to pursue cutting edge research, given value beyond their teaching.”

The movement for a full department has been active for at least four decades, cycling through waves of activism and reform. In the most recent wave of ethnic studies activism, the Task Force for Asian American Progressive Advocacy and Studies, formerly named the Task Force for Asian and Pacific American Studies, coordinated many of the early efforts and laid the framework for a cross-community coalition that would become the HESC. The HESC had largely escaped the attention of the student body until the denial of tenure to García Peña, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, in November 2019.

Soon after the denial, HESC emerged in the foreground of student activism efforts, drawing together a broad base of students, affinity organizations and political groups in support of García Peña. Harvard students and community members published a statement immediately after the incident, gaining 285 signatures and the support of 53 campus organizations. Some voiced their discontent through protests outside Widener, donning black caps demanding “Ethnic Studies Now!” and carrying posters reading, “Justice for García Peña.”

In addition to these student efforts, over 200 professors from all over the country responded by publishing a letter addressed to President Larry Bacow in which they cited Harvard’s failure to recognize García Peña’s significant contributions to the field as well as a lack of institutional support granted to faculty members of color more broadly, many of whom nevertheless conduct research on their own. As scholars from various fields of ethnic studies and gender studies, they wrote that the denial of tenure signified that “despite increasing demands from students, these areas of study are not intellectually significant in the tenure process.” Similar letters of support for García Peña continued to pour in from the American Studies Association, the African American Intellectual History Society, and various other individuals and organizations.

On campus, the HESC plans on furthering their advocacy despite the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Singh said that the movement was planning to pursue different avenues of activism by producing digital content, organizing video forums, and utilizing social media. “I’m excited,” Singh said.

“I’m a little wary but I’m nervously excited, I guess, because there’s a lot of creativity that we haven’t accessed yet in terms of digital media. There are a lot of possibilities.” As the campaign continues through the coronavirus pandemic, Singh reports that student activists remain optimistic about their efforts to create the discursive space that Singh and others would like to see. In the meantime, however, Harvard still has much progress to make — especially compared to other institutions across the nation.

A WEST COAST SUCCESS STORY On the West Coast, ethnic studies arrived more than fifty years earlier as an outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement.

While the infrastructure for the course of study continues to evolve, it nonetheless provides a strong example for colleges around the nation.

San Francisco State University was the first school in the nation to establish a College of Ethnic Studies in 1969, a product of insistent and dynamic student activism. SFSU is still the only university in the nation to dedicate to ethnic studies an entire “college,” an apparatus that houses multiple departments representing distinct pathways for the study of various racial and ethnic groups. The dean of SFSU’s College of Ethnic Studies, Amy Sueyoshi, told the HPR, “A number of people have posed the question, ‘Why did it happen at [SFSU]? Was it because the student organizing was particularly effective, or because the students were particularly radical?’ The strikers consistently say that it was pretty good coalition building across all the different constituents at the university.” Beginning in 1968, the TWLF campaign put together what would become the longest student-led strike in United States history, a five-month effort demanding a curriculum and faculty which represented more

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voices of color. The movement would spark many more across the nation, and according to SFSU, by the year 1978, 439 colleges in the country would collectively offer 8,805 courses in the field of ethnic studies.

The impetus that propelled such a broad change in pedagogy nationally still runs strong in the school today. Joyce D. Bantugan, a current senior at SFSU, remembers entering campus as a freshman in 2016 and witnessing hunger strikes that tried to draw attention to budget cuts within the College of Ethnic Studies. In an interview with the HPR, Bantugan said, “It really struck me because it really showed the power that students have in academics and curriculum, and it showed what community building can really do.”

Bantugan would soon come to realize what exactly the students were advocating for after her first ethnic studies experience in SFSU. Bantugan had not formally learned about her cultural background in any way before coming to the university.

“If I recall correctly the one time I remember reading about Filipinos was about Cortez and the spice trading,” she told the HPR. “That was the one time I remember ever hearing about Filipinos in any textbook, I kid you not.” Bantugan soon enrolled in the course “Asian Americans in History” in the spring of her freshman year. “I started to realize just how big of an impact Filipinos had in California, in the United States, and so forth. That fueled my hunger to learn more about my culture, about my history.”

This sense of recognition Bantugan had while studying her own culture is a central element of SFSU’s program, one that aims to teach students about both their own place in society and that of others.

The college prides itself on featuring a diverse array of voices and perspectives within its classes. Sueyoshi emphasizes the importance of making sure the educators themselves represent these voices, with 65% of the faculty being women of color — the national average sits at 11%. Meanwhile, at Harvard, underrepresented minority women constituted only 3% of tenured faculty members in 2019. At SFSU, this diversity is further reflected in the curriculum, with the college even offering a quantitative reasoning course that Sueyoshi jokingly refers to as “ethnic studies math.” While ethnic studies and math may seem an unlikely pair, Sueyoshi explains: “It’s a class that makes us delve into the data to look at the numbers more carefully and think about what they mean.” By studying how the tools of data and statistics can be leveraged to understand the position of communities of color in modern society, the course makes a case for subjectivity in the traditionally “objective” world of numbers. The course is seated within a larger tradition that takes a holistic approach to race and ethnicity, bringing identity out into the open in order to critically examine it. Finally, a necessary complement to SFSU’s holistic pedagogical approach to the field is Community Service Learning, which integrates classroom learning with experience in the field and enhances the relevance of an ethnic studies education for students.

All of these features of SFSU’s culturally-relevant education have had substantial impact. Majors within this college graduate at rates 25 percentage points greater than the average for nonethnic studies majors. In addition, even nonmajors who take at least one course within one of the five ethnic studies departments graduate at higher rates than those who do not. Bantugan affirmed this: the College of Ethnic Studies not only increased her participation in school but also increased her participation

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within the community. All this is accomplished without the significant monetary cost that critics of ethnic studies departments elsewhere often point to. Sueyoshi stated, “The irony is that [California State] … [is] a poor, poor university system. San Francisco State University also is super poor among all the other campuses. If San Francisco State University ... can find funds to offer ethnic studies courses, then almost any other school could do the same. I firmly believe that.”

SFSU’s success has been paralleled by other schools across the West Coast. In the year 2017, while schools in the four states of California, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington collectively awarded 200 degrees in ethnic studies, the remaining swath of states across the nation awarded only 121 degrees. Even at the high school level, Stanford researchers Emily Penner and Thomas Dee found that participation in an ethnic studies course reduced unexcused absences by 21 percentage points and increased students’ GPAs by 1.4 points. The results that came back surprised Penner herself, as she shared with the HPR: “We thought they couldn’t possibly be right. They were so large, we didn’t expect them.” When asked about why these programs have been able to hold in West Coast schools, Sueyoshi pointed to a heightened racial consciousness that has emerged from the unique history of the West. Though the West Coast has its own racial problems, cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have greater levels of racial integration than New York or Philadelphia, allowing for the creation of what Sueyoshi calls “a people of color consciousness.”

The relatively rapid rate of movement across the West Coast has drawn attention to the chasm of progress that schools like Harvard and Yale still have to cross. “It reveals the fundamental contradiction wherein if universities like Harvard and Yale invest in ethnic studies, they’re basically investing in their own destruction,” Yale senior Janis Jin said in an interview with the HPR. “I think that’s precisely why it’s so hard to get funding and support from schools like Harvard and Yale, and it’s much easier in public institutions.” Perhaps West Coast schools are less entrenched in a history of colonialism and slavery, and rely less on its legacy of endowments. After all, UC Berkeley was founded in 1868, SFSU in 1899, and the University of Oregon in 1876. Harvard was founded in 1636, when what would become the United States was enmeshed with colonialist enterprises; the university was explicitly sustained by the slave economy for the first 150 years. Then, for years after, it featured professors such as Louis Agassiz and Nathanial Shaler who promulgated “race science” that upheld White supremacy. A study of this history would invariably mean the uncovering of our own checkered past and present. “It’s honestly a bit shameful and hypocritical of Harvard,” said Rivera. “In this global stage we talk about how far we’re ahead of the pack, but in reality we are really far behind. We are not even a blip on the radar.”

THE REAL HARVARD-YALE In order to understand where Harvard stands, it might also be helpful to look toward New Haven. Harvard and Yale have been both peer and rival schools for centuries, always seeking to surpass one another — and when looking at ethnic studies, it seems that Yale has gotten much further than Harvard.

At Yale, while ethnic studies lacks a departmental presence with a central faculty and greater resources, it takes the form

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of a distinct program called Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. For most of its 20-year history, it existed solely as a major, until heightened demand in the last decade led the university to formalize the program with more faculty positions and the creation of a corresponding research facility called the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Jin sees this major as a way for students to understand and examine the world around them, something that has become more and more relevant against the backdrop of racial tensions within the United States. She told the HPR, “Racism is not really about microaggressions and cultural appropriation and those sorts of things as much as it is, in a very literal way, something that determines whether you live or die in a lot of instances. I think that raised the stakes of everything for me and at Yale.” In particular, Jin was drawn to the discipline in search of answers after a 2018 incident of racial profiling, when a police officer previously involved with Yale fired at an unarmed Black couple just outside of the university.

Much of the recent advocacy work on Yale’s campus was in response to what students saw as the unfair denial of tenure to ERM professor Albert Laguna. Six months before her own denial of tenure at Harvard, García Peña wrote an editorial in April of 2019 on the implications of Yale’s decision.

“White supremacy in these institutions bleeds through the photos of White men which hang in the halls of the university, in the syllabi that privilege White cannon and lack any type of representation for people of color, and in the university’s inability to hire or retain black and brown faculty, in the university’s disavowal of Ethnic Studies as a legitimate field of knowledge.”

Responding to Laguna’s denial of tenure and additional

institutional shortcomings such as the programs’s lack of hiring power or departmental corpus, 13 senior faculty members stepped down from ERM. Professor Daniel HoSang, one such dissident, said in an interview with the HPR, “We withdrew our labor from the program because we found the university’s model for supporting it unsustainable. No one essentially had a formal appointment in ERM, so we were splitting our time between the [things] we were appointed in and ERM, and it didn’t allow us to properly advise, support, and teach students, or conduct our research.” As it did in Harvard, this denial of tenure served as a catalyst to bring out much larger structural problems into the open.

In response to the immediate wave of protest, Yale came to a resolution that granted the program independent hiring authority and a greater role in the tenure promotion process. Singh commented that Yale professors were able to hold this leverage in a way that Harvard professors could not because of the presence of a formalized program. “There isn’t a central way for faculty [at Harvard] to express the kind of solidarity that the Yale faculty were able to express and leverage to get Yale to follow their demands.”

While Yale has acquiesced to certain student demands and strengthened the department, the ethnic studies discipline is far from where students imagine it could be. Students specifically point to a lack of faculty to support growing student demand for the field. Jin noticed this herself with respect to seminar classes, saying, “I’ve had to apply for almost every single ERM seminar. … You have to write an application saying, ‘I deserve to be in this class.’” She continued that this was an experience she has had only within the ERM department, whereas comparably popular

At Harvard, students advocate for ethnic studies as a more complete representation of this nation’s history.

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English courses seemed to have enough faculty to sustain multiple sections.

HoSang pointed to one possible reason for the often relatively slow action on this front: The administrative infrastructure of higher education, he said, is generally slow to respond to student activism because of the separation between the static administration and dynamic faculty and students. However, there is a notable exception. “The interesting thing is that universities are quite responsive in the STEM fields, where people understand that innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration inside and outside the university are critical.” Putting this next to what HoSang terms the “really lethargic response” to the formation of an ethnic studies department reveals discrepancies in the administrative treatment of different fields. Administrators, instead, should give the same thought to the creation of an ethnic studies department as it would to any other.

While there are certain features of Yale’s ERM major that students wish to see improved, Harvard has much to learn from the New Haven university: in particular, the importance of building a structure that supports and retains a strong faculty base within the field of study.

A LARGER DILEMMA In Lansing, the home of Michigan State University, a refugee center hosts a significant number of refugees hailing from Cuba.

Here, the vibrant migrant community has also underscored the need for ethnic studies. As professor Miguel Cabañas, who teaches Chicano/Latino studies at Michigan State University, said in an interview with the HPR, migrant workers of the 20th century would travel in a circle across the United States, from California to the midwest to Florida and Texas, in search of work. “It’s not an easy thing to teach, and it’s not an easy thing for people to learn, but knowing that history, people will understand why migrants are here.” In this way, ethnic studies provides a way for Cabañas and his students to reconcile the academic experience with the developments of our contemporary world.

One feature of Michigan State’s approach to ethnic studies that separates it from that of many other universities is the creation of distinct departments for each racial or ethnic group.

“We have nothing in common,” Cabañas said. “We’re not in the same area, we’re in different colleges.” While Chicano/Latino Studies is seated within the College of Social Sciences, African American & African Studies and Indigenous Studies fall under the College of Arts & Letters. This type of separation, says Cabañas, disjoints the fields of study that might otherwise find greater strength in unity: “By having all these in an umbrella, it could help us pull in the same direction and create programming that can be useful for the different ethnic programs.”

While Michigan State’s materialization of ethnic studies as a discipline has emphasized the importance of integrating ethnic studies across areas of study, the University of Minnesota has emphasized the importance of research. Ethnic studies at the University of Minnesota is not identified by that name; instead, it comprises various departments focusing on different identities that come together with the Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality Initiative. The RIGS Initiative focuses on building a strong research community that facilitates discourse on issues of power, inequality, and social change.

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In an interview with the HPR, professor Tade Okediji, chair of the Department of African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota, cited the importance of a research center as an “incubator to talk about issues and challenges from multiple dimensions, the issues and challenges at the intersection … of race, class, gender, sexuality studies.” Okediji adds that one of the central components of such a research center is inviting academics from diverse fields of study to enter a cohesive dialogue and pursue “coherent research agendas that are relevant to contemporary society.”

Apart from Michigan State and the University of Minnesota, numerous other universities across the nation have worked to instate some form of ethnic studies. The University of South Florida features an Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean, underscoring the importance of situating a course of study within the local context of the university. At Brown University, which grants the most degrees in the field outside of the West Coast, a concentration allows students to choose to focus on a particular aspect of the lived experience of communities of color — this encapsulates a broad range of themes such as health, diaspora, and inequality. The expansion of ethnic studies offerings is slowly becoming visible in the workforce as well; the number of people in the workforce with a degree in ethnic studies is currently at 166,893, but the number has been increasing by 3.67% in recent years. What Harvard has to learn is the importance, as Cabañas said, of not just touting “vague ideas of diversity” but making the institutional commitment to ensure that diverse voices and perspectives are represented in the academic experience.

Harvard, take the lessons that other universities are giving you: look to SFSU for community engagement, to Yale for structures of faculty support, to Michigan State for integrating various areas of study within ethnic studies, and to the University of Minnesota for the strength of a unified research center. Look to your own students, whose activism has been showing you what they need for more than 62 years now. There has been progress in implementing ethnic studies curricula across the nation, but, if it is to uphold the promise it has made to its students, Harvard still has a long way to go. 

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Lessons From A UC Meeting Ajay Sarma

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n a snowy December night, the Harvard Undergraduate Council hosted the inauguration of James Mathew ’21 and Ifeoma White-Thorpe ’21 — the president-elect and vice president-elect of the UC. The ceremony was the main event of the evening; speeches and swearing-ins marked a celebratory, symbolic transfer of power from the UC’s previous leadership to Mathew and White-Thorpe. However, it also underscored the unique challenges the duo will face over the next two semesters. The last UC election directly called the organization’s legitimacy into question, with calls for the body to be dissolved. Diversity within the UC and its ability to engage with students directly have, in the eyes of its leaders, contributed to negative perceptions of the Council. Even internally, challenges include the simple matter of attendance. Mathew and WhiteThorpe face a campus that is questioning whether it needs an Undergraduate Council at all.

ISSUES OF LEGITIMACY November’s UC Presidential Election saw two candidates, Aditya Dhar ’21 and Andrew Liang ’21, run on a platform centered around abolishing the UC. Dhar and Liang won the largest number of first-choice votes, but under the ranked-choice voting system employed by the UC Election Commission, they did not earn enough points to beat out Mathew and White-Thorpe.

Dhar and Liang earned 1,063 first-choice votes, while Mathew and White-Thorpe earned 1,025. However, the winning ticket secured 1938.0 points, edging out Dhar and Liang who received 1,865.8. Though they were unsuccessful, the possibility that Dhar

and Liang might have been successful and gained enough student support to abolish the UC seemed salient as the UC’s outgoing president and vice-president delivered speeches focused on attitudes towards the UC. In her farewell speech to Council, outgoing vice president Julia Huesa ‘20 described how her experience has shown her that the UC can be “an intimidating and sometimes even thankless organization to be a part of.” Outgoing president Sruthi Palaniappan ‘20 explicitly mentioned the need to further “legitimize the UC” and told the convened members that “for others to take the UC seriously, first we need to take the UC seriously.” Critical to this goal, she continued, would be to ensure that the student body is aware of the importance of the tasks that the UC handles, such as “funding organizations each week … saving shopping week, providing subsidized summer storage and putting forward a host of important initiatives.”

In a brief interview with the HPR, when asked about the issues of legitimacy facing the UC as it prepares for the upcoming semester, Palaniappan asserted that “students on and off the Council need to treat it seriously in order to get administrators to think of the UC as a legitimate organization.” She added that it might also have the added benefit of increasing the legitimacy of the organization in the eyes of students if it were treated as legitimate by Harvard’s administration. She reiterated the importance of communication in increasing the UC’s legitimacy, especially to demonstrate more clearly to students that the UC is actively working on the issues facing them and that its decisions have tangible impacts on their experiences at Harvard.

Palaniappan believes Dhar and Liang’s ticket was intended to

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be humorous, but recognizes that its substantial support reveals the general apathy or active distaste of the student body towards the UC. Despite this, Palaniappan does not seem to believe that their campaign poses a threat to the actual existence of the UC. She summarizes the position of students she interacted with who voted for the pair, as “the UC has been doing more than ever before but … wouldn’t it be funny if the joke ticket won?”

For Mathew, the relative success of Dhar and Liang’s campaign also represents a legitimacy concern that must be addressed. “The student body [will be] more engaged, more aware of what the UC is doing … when it’s not something that’s so distant from them,” Mathew said to the HPR. However, he shares Palaniappan’s view that the UC does not have to worry about a significant contingent of students actively supporting the abolition of the UC and that the students who voted for Dhar and Liang likely enjoyed the “humor of it” more than anything else.

He did acknowledge the possibility that a minority of voters for that ticket did legitimately vote for Dhar and Liang because they perceive the UC as ineffective, something that he believes needs to be rectified through communication.

THE UC HAS AN ATTENDANCE PROBLEM This past term, the UC actively attempted to improve the attendance of its members at meetings. In its Mid-Year Report, the Undergraduate Council acknowledged concerns about attendance. It claimed that “representatives that did not leave the council averaged 1.75 unexcused absences and 0.86 that were excused,” asserting that this was a 16% decrease in unexcused absences and a 41% decrease in overall absences compared to the previous semester, Spring 2019, which was an anomaly due to changes in UC policies regarding excused absences. In Spring 2019, only two members of the then 46-member UC attended every meeting, including general meetings like the one on December 2 and smaller committee meetings devoted to specific issues.

Despite having a more pronounced role within the UC than rank-and-file members, the attendance problem seems to have expanded to committee chairs, who are charged with leading their fellow student legislators in specific issue areas. At the beginning of the meeting, the chairs of each committee were asked to update the rest of the Council on their progress, but two of the six committee chairs were not in attendance. Attendance information obtained by Luke Albert ‘22 reveals that 11 members were absent without an excuse at the December 2 meeting. Additionally, some members of the Undergraduate Council missed as many as 9 meetings — general meetings and committee meetings — without presenting any valid excuse.

In an interview with the HPR, when asked about the UC’s problems with attendance, White-Thorpe spoke of a general problem within the Council of “maintaining membership,” especially at the end of each semester, something that she has noted with increasing concern over the past few years. As she and Mathew plan for the upcoming semester, they have set their sights on improving attendance at meetings and ensuring regular participation of those elected to the body. “We want to incentivize people to stay on the UC and to be changemakers,” White-Thorpe noted. She acknowledged that sometimes there is a benefit to members cycling out since it makes space for new people and the new ideas they bring with them. But, she was also aware of the value of institutional memory and how atten-

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dance issues that evolve into people leaving the UC pose a challenge to that. The key is, in White-Thorpe’s view, to work with the current Undergraduate Council to ensure that its members and the student body recognize “the UC as a necessary outlet for them to make change.”

RESTRUCTURING THE UC FOR DIVERSITY A critical component of the Mathew and White-Thorpe campaign, as well as many others, was renewing the UC’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Other campaigns strongly featured proposals for increasing support to first-generation students, establishing a multicultural center, and supporting undocumented students. Mathew and White-Thorpe, however, resolved to change the structure of the UC itself in order to make it more inclusive. In addition to those representatives elected by the student body, the president-elect and vice president-elect want to “create a representative body of student group leaders to incorporate into the UC caucus system.”

To both Mathew and White-Thorpe, the creation of a more diverse and representative governing body is quintessential to the UC’s legitimacy. White-Thorpe sees the goal of the caucus system as a way to empower students of all backgrounds and identities by bringing them “into the fold of the UC so that they can actually see what’s happening and to ensure that their voices are being heard.”

At present, the UC currently has a system of internal caucuses that seek to represent the concerns of marginalized groups on campus. The problem with this, according to White-Thorpe, is that these caucuses are “only composed of [existing] members of the UC.” Mathew and White-Thorpe would want to devolve power to community leaders within the student body by extending caucus membership to students that represent various groups at Harvard. For example, under their plan, a black students’ caucus might have representation from student groups that serve and provide spaces for black students on campus.

These students would “work hand-in-hand with elected members of the UC” to introduce legislation and craft statements, among other tasks, to ensure that the UC is truly representing a diverse group of interests.

As was clear from its meeting on December 2, the UC will have to work to serve a student body that, at best, does not seem to take it seriously or, at worst, is actively hostile towards the UC as an institution. Furthermore, the month of March saw Harvard undergraduates asked to return to their homes around the world in light of COVID-19. The UC’s leadership this term must contend with the additional concern of ensuring the UC’s own members and the student body continue to support it and believe in its efficacy. However, that will have to happen in spite of the physical distance that now stands between the UC and those it intends to represent. The task before Mathew and WhiteThorpe is no small one. However, they are uniquely positioned to address the issues posed by distance and diversity and, if they are effective in their plans to restructure the UC, they may end their term with more student support than what they started with. 

THE POLITICS OF PROTECTIONISM W

hile we as a nation confront the spread of a novel coronavirus within the United States, the easiest path is to blame others and turn our backs on the rest of the world. Fear often lends itself to isolationism. This is exactly the policy espoused by President Donald Trump, who, in a speech on March 24, took the opportunity to criticize America’s interdependence with other countries: “This crisis has underscored just how critical it is to have strong borders and a robust manufacturing sector. … Our goal for the future must be to have American medicine for American patients, American supplies for American hospitals, and American equipment for our great American heroes.” The speech incorporates the pathogen that threatens both our lives and our way of life into the typical refrain of the Trump administration. We are bringing back American companies and jobs. We will make others pay to trade with us, and we will guarantee that we are not being cheated. This isolationism, undergirded by economic arrogance, is called economic protectionism and forms the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s policy agenda.

President Trump’s inclusion of this remark, about manufacturing and economic independence, in a speech about the coronavirus speaks to the political weight of economic protectionism. Supporting protectionist policies and viewpoints is politically advantageous, yet all available evidence and an overwhelming majority of economists support the notion that

Jay Garg

economic protectionism is a mistake. It does not work, and it leaves Americans worse off economically than before. To better protect the American economy, more focus needs to be given to educating voters and helping the “losers” of free trade so that the country can begin turning its back on protectionist policy.

THE CONSUMER’S CONUNDRUM Economic protectionism constitutes a policy agenda of protecting American producers from foreign competition.

Through carefully targeted tariffs and taxes, the government can make it relatively more expensive for foreign companies to sell their goods within the United States. This prevents cheaper foreign goods — perhaps made in countries with lower wages or cheaper materials, or simply made more efficiently — from undercutting domestic prices.

From a domestic company’s perspective, this policy is fantastic. Mark Perry, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, explains in an interview with the HPR that “in an ideal world for the producers, they would like to be a monopoly, have no competition, and have the highest price possible.” Economic protectionism gets them significantly closer to that ideal world, pushing out competition and artificially inflating prices.

On the other hand, one could view these policies from the perspective of a consumer, in some sense the more common

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perspective of the two. While only a fraction of the population works for these large production companies, everybody living in this country is a consumer. Any changes to the experience of the consumer will have a far broader effect on people and on the economy as a whole.

SO HOW ARE CONSUMERS AFFECTED BY A PROTECTIONIST TRADE AGENDA? In a word, negatively. Through unrestricted trade, new ideas and innovations are able to flow freely between nations. Consumers get access to choices that were previously unavailable, new goods and services that might be better than or preferable to the standard. Perhaps most importantly, competition from foreign producers keeps domestic industry on its toes, decreasing the cost that consumers face and freeing up money for other expenditures. Whatever is not spent on groceries or clothing at the store can instead be spent going to restaurants or movies, creating new jobs in other areas. As former Chairman and President of the Export-Import Bank Fred Hochberg identifies in an interview with the HPR, these are the primary benefits of free trade: innovation, variety, and price reduction.

The economic value of these benefits is huge. As Hochberg points out, “the amount of money Americans spend on food and clothing has dropped to 20% [of their incomes] due to trade,” compared to 60% at the beginning of the 20th century. Protectionist policies, on the other hand, can be incredibly costly. Perry points to the cost of sugar as an example of protectionism hurting the consumer. Around the world, the price of sugar is about 14 cents per pound; in the United States, the price of sugar is double that at 28 cents per pound. Perry explains that “because we keep most of the foreign sugar out of the country, the cost of higher sugar prices is spread around two or three hundred million consumers. We all pay a little bit more, every day, for anything that has sugar in it.” In 2012, these protectionist policies on sugar alone cost Americans $3 billion. Now imagine how much money is lost due to protectionist policies on steel and corn, on washing machines and solar panels. President Trump’s recent trade war with China, for example, cost the economy 300,000 jobs and $46 billion in increased costs. It is clear that these protectionist policies hurt not only the consumer but the overall economy.

Enacting protectionist policies is equivalent to constructing a moat around the United States to keep foreign products, even those that would make us better off, out. “Last time I checked,” Hochberg quips, “moats went out of style around the 13th century.” Still, protectionism might be a fair trade after all if the jobs “saved” from outsourcing labor to other nations contribute more value to the economy than lower prices; however, that does not seem to be the case. If manufacturing jobs were truly moving en masse to China or Mexico, then domestic production would be declining. And yet, as Perry notes, manufacturing output is at an all-time high. Instead, a recent study indicates that 88% of manufacturing job losses are due to rising American productivity resulting from automation and technological advances — not due to free trade, outsourcing, or foreign competition. Overall, from their negative impact on consumers to their marginal effects on the labor market, protectionist policies harm the economy far more than they help.

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WHEN POLITICS AND ECONOMICS DISAGREE Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University, once proposed a rule he calls Murphy’s Law of economic policy: “Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.” That certainly seems correct with regards to trade. A poll conducted after the 2016 election found that 77% of Americans felt it was very or somewhat important to establish tariffs to discourage companies from relocating to other countries. And yet, on May 3, 2018, over 1,100 economists of all political ideologies signed an open letter to President Trump, warning against the imposition of trade tariffs. Though economists overwhelmingly believe that free trade is far superior to protectionism, protectionist policies remain a political win.

There are a number of reasons why the public is wary of free trade. On the surface, the words we use to describe trade may play a role in affecting the way it is perceived. Words like protectionism carry positive connotations, reassuring voters.

In contrast, the idea of a trade deficit sounds scary, clinical, and dangerous.

More significantly, trade is associated with foreigners. This, according to Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, is why a disparity exists between the views of the general public and those of economists. In an interview with the HPR, he explains that “when the public hears about foreigners, they picture bad stuff and … let their imaginations run wild.” This phenomenon biases people against the idea of free trade, creating a disconnect between what economists agree to be the ideal trade policy and the trade policy most favored by American voters. Caplan adds that “without [anti-foreign bias] it would be easier to get people to just think about the possibilities [of trade].” Instead, the bias creates a mindset where people are quick to leap to negative conclusions.

At the same time, the harms of trade are far more visible than are the benefits. People can look outside and point to factories that have closed down or companies that have moved overseas, but it is far more difficult to conceptualize the jobs that have been created due to lower input costs and the industries that exist only because of international trade. Like Perry mentioned, the benefits of trade are spread around an entire economy, decreasing their visibility. Voters likely find it easier to believe the anecdotal evidence that is right in front of them, even if the empirics might indicate that protectionism will do even more damage.

While anti-foreign bias and visibility explain how protectionism appeals to individual Americans, two additional factors must be taken into account to understand why the economic policy enjoys such prominence in government. The first is the relative organization of producers compared to consumers. Whether it be the American auto industry, local steel companies, or any other domestic industry, production tends to be dominated by two or three big companies. Consequently, Perry finds that there are massive stakes for those companies in getting protectionist policies passed. These companies are also few enough in number to band together, forming a powerful special interest group. The U.S. steel industry, for example, has spent more than $180 million on lobbying in the past decade, likely leading to the recent imposition of massive steel and aluminum tariffs. In con-

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trast, because the benefits of free trade are diffused over such a large consumer base, individuals find it challenging to rally against these special interest groups, or even identify where they are losing money. “Consumers don’t recognize if prices are down for groceries, clothing, and so on, that trade actually has anything to do with it,” Hochberg remarks. “They just think that they’re good shoppers.”

The second reason for the continued prominence of protectionism in U.S. policy is a geographic accident. In general, Hochberg indicates that the states that have been most detrimentally affected by the short-term repercussions of trade — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — also happen to be battleground states, states that wield disproportionate influence in the American electoral system. Consequently, policy tends to be drastically skewed by the interests of existing industries within those few states, leading to protectionist policy. Altogether, even though economists are almost unanimously opposed to protectionism and tariffs, it remains politically advantageous to support those ideas.

Solidarity and unity, it seems, are unintended byproducts of this disease. Doctors are leaving their home countries to help in those areas most stricken by the coronavirus. China, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, India, Honduras, and Mexico, all dealing with their own crises of varying magnitudes, are churning out personal protective equipment for use in the United States. Though we all hope that the virus is beaten and the crisis is ended as quickly as possible, perhaps it would be advantageous if this attitude of international solidarity, this acknowledgement that other nations have much to offer us and vice versa, lasts.

The implicit assumption in agendas of economic protectionism is that America would be better off if we operated alone.

That assumption is categorically untrue. “We don’t have a monopoly on every good idea,” Hochberg concludes. “That kind of thinking is not good for America and is not good for the world.”

DO POLITICIANS KNOWINGLY PROMOTE BAD ECONOMIC POLICY? In some ways, the most important question is whether or not politicians know about the downsides of economic protectionism. Are they simply uninformed, or are they deliberately deceiving the public in order to score political points? And, as Caplan askst in his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, “What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters — specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity.”

According to Perry, many current members of Congress already genuinely support free trade. However, when confronted by anecdotal evidence of factory closures, when offered political support to promote protectionist policies, when aware of popular antagonism towards free trade, it may seem easier to not question the downsides of protectionism. Instead, politicians find it easier to put aside broader, long term effects in favor of more visible and immediate concerns. In the case of the U.S.China trade war, for instance, former Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohn told President Trump about the damage it would do to our economy. Yet President Trump chose to ignore him.

Caplan describes the result of this discrepancy between good politics and good economics bluntly: “politicians are just not doing very careful intellectual hygiene.” To expect otherwise is, perhaps, asking too much.

In order to strengthen our approach to the economy, we must look past the politicians and toward the structural failures that have led to the increased popularity of detrimental protectionist policies. We must educate voters, show them the numbers and the facts that prove they are worse off under protectionist regimes than under free trade policies. We must focus on the losers of free trade, provide training programs and improve the social safety net. We must reduce the power of special interest groups and money from massive corporations in politics.

Perhaps then, the public — and by extension, politicians — will be willing to listen to the experts.

In the wake of the outbreak of COVID-19, it has been heartening to see Americans and others around the world not going along with President Trump’s attitude of blame and isolation.

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Pharma Donovan Keene

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n Friday evenings, I walk along Mount Auburn Street — the epicenter of social life for many Harvard students — amidst the pungent odor of marijuana, open bottles, and the cacophony of voices waiting outside parties for a less than memorable night. Several blocks away, I enter the basement of a church, complete with people chain-smoking cigarettes outside, uncomfortable chairs, and lackluster black coffee.

“My name is Donovan, and I am an addict.”

A common theme reverberating from many in the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous is the impact opioids have had on their lives and families. Unfortunately, addiction does not discriminate, preying on homeless persons, Harvard affiliates, and everyone in between. The room is filled with an arguably more diverse group than Harvard itself; business executives, attorneys, tattoo artists, former professional athletes, and single parents alike line the walls.

According to the National Safety Council, people are more likely to die from an opioid overdose than a motor vehicle accident for the first time in U.S. history. This sobering statistic demonstrates the growing threat posed by the opioid epidemic.

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Although myriad socioeconomic factors contribute to the prevalence of addiction, big pharma played a large role in facilitating this ongoing crisis through its unethical, aggressive marketing of opioids to physicians and consumers alike. While the opioid epidemic and sway of big pharma are most notable in the United States, this is an increasingly international phenomenon, with nations ranging from India to Australia feeling the effects.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE The pharmaceutical drug and biomedicine industry, colloquially known as “big pharma,” has a much greater influence than an average American would know. The Center for Responsive Politics — a non-partisan research group tracking money in politics — found that pharmaceutical companies spent over $900 million on lobbying between 1998 and 2005, which was significantly more than any other industry. During this same period, big pharma donated $89.9 million to political parties and federal candidates to push their agenda. This spending excludes the vast

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quantities spent on advertising, marketing, and incentives for both pharmaceutical sales representatives and physicians.

In the mid-’90s, vigorous lobbying by organizations such as the American Pain Society championed the importance of addressing pain as a public health priority in the United States.

These lobbying efforts were successful, resulting in pain being designated as the fifth vital sign. However, this posed a unique challenge; the first four vital signs — body temperature, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and heart rate — can be easily quantified, whereas pain is a subjective measure reported by patients.

It is no coincidence that after pain was made the fifth vital sign in 1996, Purdue Pharma began marketing its time-released oxycodone, OxyContin, the same year.

From 1996 to 2000, Purdue more than doubled its internal sales force as well as its physician call list. In 2001, the average Purdue sales representative’s salary was $55,000, but annual bonuses far exceeded representatives’ salaries, totaling $71,500 on average. In addition to implementing these lucrative commission bonuses, Purdue aggressively distributed branded promotional items to healthcare professionals, including OxyContin fishing hats, stuffed animals, and music CDs, a move unprecedented for a Schedule II opioid. Finally, Purdue severely misrepresented the risks of OxyContin, training its sales representatives to carry the message that the risk of addiction was less than 1%. While an affiliate of Purdue, alongside three company executives, pled guilty to criminal charges for misbranding OxyContin by claiming it was less subject to abuse and addiction than other opioids, it came only a decade after the drug’s release. As Piers Kaniuka, the Director of Spiritual Life at Granite Recovery Centers and author of Real People Real Recovery, told the HPR, “Oxy was marketed as having little or no potential for abuse … so the first wave of addicts in the opioid epidemic were not drug seekers.

They were merely being medically compliant.”

Purdue’s sophisticated marketing strategies contributed to the exponential growth in pain medication prescriptions and subsequent side effects. Big Pharma compiles prescriber profiles for individual physicians detailing their prescribing habits and patterns, which allows Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies to identify physicians and zip codes with the greatest number of patients experiencing chronic pain. This same database also identifies which physicians were the most frequent prescribers of opioids or the least discriminate prescribers. “This means that the origins of the current opioid epidemic lay with the reckless and unethical (but not illegal) marketing of pain medication to unwitting consumers,” Kaniuka said.

PAIN KILLER That “reckless and unethical” marketing has had immense consequences in precipitating the opioid epidemic. Purdue and the other giants in the pharmaceutical industry are notorious for stressing the benefits of medication while minimizing the side effects; this unethical practice has had immense consequences in precipitating the opioid epidemic. Between 1997 and 2002, there was a national increase of 226%, 73%, and 402% for fentanyl, morphine, and oxycodone prescribing, respectively. According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, during this same period, emergency department visits for fentanyl, morphine, and oxycodone rose by 641%, 113%, and 346%, respectively.

Unsurprisingly, drug overdose has risen to become the lead-

ing cause of accidental death in the United States. To put this into perspective, in 2016 alone, an estimated 64,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses — more than the combined death tolls for Americans in the Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars. From 2000 to 2010, the overdose rate quadrupled, and admissions to addiction treatment programs increased six-fold.

While the rising death toll and millions of individuals affected by addiction are enough of an imperative to effect policy change, there is seldom discussion of the broader societal and economic costs of opioid addiction. According to the Recovery Centers for America, drug and alcohol use costs the U.S. $1.45 trillion annually, including $578 billion in economic loss and $874 billion in societal harm through quality of life adjustment and premature loss of life. These economic losses’ meteoric rise coincides with the onset and progression of the opioid epidemic, with a large portion of cases derived from prescription and illegal opiate use.

OPIOIDS OVERSEAS Although the opioid epidemic and Big Pharma are primarily discussed in a U.S. context, opioid misuse, addiction, and overdose are sadly an increasingly global phenomenon. After facing scrutiny for aggressive marketing campaigns and unethical sales tactics in the U.S., many pharmaceutical companies have shifted gears towards other markets. Representative of this is the current crisis in Australia, where both opioid prescriptions and overdose deaths have doubled between 2006 and 2016.

A majority of overdoses have been attributed to prescription opioids rather than heroin, which is worrisome in and of itself.

Down under, more than 3 million Australians, over an eighth of the population, have at least one opioid prescription.

Meanwhile, Mundipharma, owned by the same Sackler family that owns Purdue Pharma, has been actively lobbying to expand its predatory opioid prescribing initiatives abroad. In Poland, Mundipharma’s efforts have facilitated new legislation allowing any physician, rather than specialty pain doctors, to prescribe opioids. Mundipharma has also partnered with pharmaceutical titans in populous developing countries, including India. From Delhi to Mumbai to Kolkata, for-profit pain clinics are proliferating, and addiction is rising significantly. This had led many small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies in India to push powerful opioids for all kinds of pain, oftentimes using legal loopholes to avoid regulation or engaging in illegal diversion. Similar tactics are being utilized in Brazil, where prescriptions for opioid painkillers have grown by 465% in merely six years.

Countries such as Mexico and China have also faced dire consequences from opioids and their misrepresentation, leading them to produce and export heroin and fentanyl to satiate demand. This is especially problematic because fentanyl, a synthetic opioid painkiller, is approximately 50 times stronger than heroin and has permeated many countries, including the United States. Worldwide, fentanyl overdoses have grown 540% in the past three years.

FINDING A FIX Admittedly, there is no simple solution to this complex problem. RAND Corporation public health policy expert Dr. Ryan

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McBain stresses the importance of a comprehensive approach.

“I think the treatment response needs to be multifaceted — community de-stigmatization efforts, provider education about appropriate opioid and non-opioid prescribing practices, and increased supply of medication-assisted treatment,” he told the HPR. Policy experts and addiction specialists echo those sentiments. Dr. Corrie Vilsaint, a principal investigator at the Recovery Research Institute and Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, also argued for a multilateral effort to improve outcomes amidst the opioid epidemic in an interview with the HPR. Vilsaint suggests we “continue the prescription monitoring program, medication disposal programs, and increase the availability of treatment and recovery support services.” She also champions expanding “implementation efforts for easy access to Narcan and medications for opioid use disorder while plugging holes in the continuum of care, like emergency departments that do not provide Suboxone (and thus overdose protection) to patients who are discharged after surviving a drug poisoning.”

Other countries have averted an opioid crisis altogether by implementing these safeguards and initiatives from the get-go.

In 2016, 10 times as many Americans died from opioid overdoses than their German counterparts, and Germans experienced opioid addiction at less than a third of the rate at which Americans do, even though only the U.S. outranks Germany in the total volume of opioid prescriptions. A chief reason for this is that German doctors must first try alternative treatment modalities, which are typically covered by the nation’s universal health care system. Similarly, doctors must get special permission before prescribing opioids and screen patients for their individual risk of addiction. Unlike the U.S., which has an extensive history of pursuing tough-on-crime policies and a war on drugs, Germany treats addiction as a medical and public health issue rather than a criminal issue or moral failure. By implementing harmreduction strategies, including safe injection sites, Germany has demonstrated a progressive, proactive model to avoid an opioid epidemic.

Albeit controversial, Portugal’s decriminalization of all drugs beginning in 2001 has proven successful in ameliorating the physical, emotional, and fiscal costs of addiction. Alongside this decision, the number of people voluntarily entering treatment has risen significantly, overdose deaths and the incidence of HIV among drug users has plummeted, and incarceration for drugrelated offenses has decreased. To put things into perspective, the lethal overdose rate in Portugal is now five times lower than the EU average and stands at one-fiftieth of the United States’ rate. Portugal’s human-centric approach and emphasis on harm reduction are archetypal of the types of reforms the U.S. should implement because, as Vilsaint notes, this “treatment has been demonstrated to establish physical stability, increase health and nutrition, decrease injection drug use, reduce criminality, increase employment, and stabilize lifestyles.”

Similarly, the Netherlands has taken a progressive approach to combating drug abuse. Rather than pursuing tough-on-crime policies and ramping up arrests, the Netherlands integrated perspectives from healthcare, law enforcement, social services, and the mental health fields. By implementing services such as needle exchange clinics and helping those at risk access treatment, the Netherlands enjoyed a considerable decrease in its

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heroin-using and homeless populations, improving outcomes for both those most vulnerable and society at large.

Thus, to reduce the influence of big pharma and the deleterious effects of the opioid epidemic, the world must follow the model of countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Portugal. However, Kaniuka remains unconvinced that the U.S. has the ability to do so. “Our system will not permit us to institute harm reduction as it is practiced in Holland or Portugal. We simply will not pay for the wrap-around services (housing, job placement, education) that are made available to addicts in those countries. Here, you can get a subsidized dose of Suboxone and still have to sleep on the street and eat in a soup kitchen.” That being said, the Recovery Centers of America calculate that if everyone in the U.S. that needed treatment for substance abuse received it, it would cost approximately $224 billion but save $368 billion, resulting in an economic gain of $144 billion and a happier, healthier population.

Given the return-on-investment and pervasive need to address the opioid epidemic, instituting these reforms and effecting policy change should be a bipartisan imperative. While decriminalizing all drugs in the U.S. would likely prove difficult given our past draconian drug policies, small steps like enhanced screening for both physicians and patients regarding opioid prescriptions and expanded accessibility to recovery resources including medication-assisted treatment could lead to important progress, especially if paired with innovative reforms such as safe injection sites. Only by doing so can we effectively combat the American opioid epidemic and serve as a model for other struggling nations. 

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Prisons to

Po s Maya Bharara

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niversal suffrage is an essential component of a successful democracy. And as the world’s oldest modern democracy, one might expect the United States to boast high voter turnout rates and accessible re-enfranchisement for the previously disenfranchised.

It doesn’t. In fact, the United States is the only democracy in the world that denies people the right to vote even after they are released from prison. As of 2016, a shocking 6.1 million Americans were barred from voting because of felony disenfranchisement or state-level laws that restrict voting rights for those convicted of felony-level crimes. In recent years, though, this has begun to change: although Maine and Vermont are still the only states that allow ex-felons to vote without any restrictions, the National Conference of State Legislatures reports that 39 states offer some type of restoration of voting rights to ex-felons.

Florida is new to this list. A recent amendment to the state constitution, Amendment 4, promises to re-enfranchise most exfelons who have completed all terms of their sentence. What was originally seen as a victory for voting rights advocates, however, has become more complicated with the passage of SB 7066, a

senate bill clarifying that completing “all terms of a sentence” includes fulfilling any and all financial obligations. As the debate about whether re-enfranchisement can be restricted based on wealth winds through the courts, the fate of over a million potential voters in one of the most important battleground states is on the line.

DASHED HOPES OF RE-ENFRANCHISEMENT Until 2018, Florida was one of only three states that banned former felons from voting for life, a relic of 19th century laws designed to prevent newly freed slaves from exercising their political voice. In 2018, however, this changed. Through a ballot initiative in the midterms, Florida voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment 4, which restores the right to vote to most people with felony convictions once they finish “all terms of their sentence” (it excludes those convicted of murder or felony-level sex offenses). Passing with a 65% majority and bipartisan support, Amendment 4 was a triumph for voting rights advocates.

It potentially restored the right to vote to 1.4 million Floridians,

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a quarter of all disenfranchised felons in the country, making it one of the largest single re-enfranchisement events in American history.

Only a few months later, though, this victory was dramatically curtailed: in May, the Florida legislature passed and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 7066, which clarified that completing “all terms of their sentence,” as Amendment 4 requires, includes paying all “financial obligations” associated with a sentence, including court-ordered fines, fees, victim’s restitution, and any other monetary obligations. According to SB 7066, until felons have paid everything they owe, they cannot legally be re-enfranchised.

The problem is that the vast majority of former felons in Florida simply cannot pay their outstanding fees. From 2014 to 2018, the Florida Clerks and Comptrollers labeled 83% of fines as having “minimal collections expectations,” meaning the courts are aware that defendants cannot afford these fines. Similarly, Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida, used data from 48 of the 67 counties in Florida to estimate that 82.4% of former felons in the state cannot be reenfranchised under the bill because of money owed.

SB 7066 was quickly labeled a “poll tax” that unjustly and possibly unconstitutionally targeted poor and minority felons, and was challenged in court. In October 2019, a federal court judge ruled that the payment requirement in SB 7066 is unconstitutional and issued a preliminary injunction. Three months later, in January 2020, the Florida Supreme Court disagreed and issued an advisory opinion that supported Gov. DeSantis and the bill. Then, in February, the 11th Circuit of Appeals upheld the preliminary injunction from October, arguing that the law unconstitutionally discriminates based on wealth. This ruling, however, applied only to the 17 plaintiffs in the case and did not determine the constitutionality of the law. This will be decided in another trial and the resulting decision will apply to all felons in Florida, not just the 17 plaintiffs. This trial is currently delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but whatever the eventual result, both sides expect the decision to be appealed and for the case to ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

UNCONSTITUTIONAL OR SIMPLY UNFAIR? Throughout the various trials that have already happened and those that remain, the central debate remains: is a bill that prevents some people from voting based only on wealth constitutional? Nancy Abudu, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is representing several of the plaintiffs, has argued that SB 7066 holds ex-felons’ right to vote hostage. “This is an unconstitutional poll tax or an unconstitutional form of wealth-based discrimination,” she told the News Service of Florida in January.

Racial disparities in wealth complicate the matter further.

African-American former felons are both more likely to owe money and more likely to be unable to pay. In Palm Beach and Sarasota counties, for instance, fewer than one in 10 black individuals who have completed all other terms of their sentence have fulfilled their financial obligations, while more than one in five White individuals have. These racial inequalities contribute to mass voter suppression of African Americans, and especially African American men, who are disproportionately disenfranchised due to former convictions and who then lose the ability to

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exercise their political voices.

So far, federal courts have agreed in theory that the law is unconstitutional, even though there has not yet been an overarching ruling on its constitutionality. The February federal appeals court ruling was especially significant. A unanimous decision by three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, the ruling states that it is unconstitutional to force exfelons in Florida to pay all financial obligations before registering to vote. Florida has a right to disenfranchise all felons, the court argued, but once voters passed Amendment 4, indicating a willingness to move toward re-enfranchisement, the state cannot constitutionally discriminate based on ability to pay. “Once a state provides an avenue to ending the punishment of disenfranchisement,” the ruling reads, as Florida voters clearly did by passing Amendment 4 with a nearly two-thirds majority, it must “do so consonant with the principles of equal protection.” Punishing certain ex-felons more harshly based only on their wealth, the ruling continues, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which promises equal treatment under the law. Under this argument, since SB 7066 explicitly applies the law differently based on ability to pay, it is unconstitutional.

The Florida Supreme Court disagreed, siding with Governor DeSantis’ lawyers and arguing that voters who approved Amendment 4 did not universally re-enfranchise ex-felons, thereby taking away Florida’s right to disenfranchisement of former felons. Instead, voters re-enfranchised only felons who have “paid their debt to society.” According to DeSantis, voters would not have so overwhelmingly voted for the Amendment had they known that exceptions to “all terms of their sentence” would be made for poor felons. Allowing former felons to vote regardless of whether they have paid, DeSantis went on, would do “irreparable harm” to Florida.

Federal judges found this argument flimsy, responding that it is impossible to claim that Florida voters would have voted differently had they known that the Amendment would apply to poor felons who simply cannot pay their fines as well as to wealthier individuals.

As the case currently stands, the federal appeals court ruling allowed former felons to vote in the Florida Democratic primary elections, which were held on March 17th. The status of SB 7066 is not, however, anything approaching stable. The case will now return to a Florida trial court, which will be tasked with deciding whether the law is a poll tax or possibly invalid under another provision of the Constitution. Whatever the ruling is, the case is likely to make its way to the Supreme Court, meaning it will be months or even years before Floridian ex-felons with outstanding payments receive a clear answer about their voting eligibility.

CONFUSION AND CONSTERNATION Meanwhile, confusion abounds in Florida as to who can vote without fear of being accused of voter fraud. Much of the confusion stems from the fact that many former felons don’t know how much they owe, and it can be incredibly complicated to find out the answer. This is because there is no statewide system to track how much former felons owe. Each of the state’s 67 counties has its own clerk and courts office, each with vastly different systems for tracking past cases. Some have digital data, some don’t. Some track cases and money that has been owed

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for decades, and others don’t. Some keep track of money that has been sent to other collections agencies, while others neglect these records entirely. Besides all this, some counties misplace necessary documents or don’t even keep them in the courts office — in Miami-Dade county, for instance, the most populous county in the state, many necessary documents are held by the police department, making them even harder to access.

As a result, most former felons do not know how to confirm that they’ve fulfilled their financial obligations, and there is little help available to them. This uncertainty leads many to decline to register to vote out of fear that they could be doing so illegally — writing on a registration form that your rights have been restored when they technically have not been is a felony. The risk is too great, said Toshia Brown, chief of Voter Registration Services at the Department of State’s office, in her deposition: If you don’t know, “I would not register to vote.”

For felons who do know that outstanding financial obligations will prevent them from voting, asking for a modification to their sentence is possible, but complicated. Former felons who genuinely cannot fulfill their financial obligations can petition the court to either waive these obligations or turn them into community service hours instead. This involves multiple steps: first, former felons must reach out to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), which will then contact the public defender’s office to investigate the file. If there are indeed outstanding payments that the individual is unable to make, the public defender’s office will enlist a pro bono attorney to file a court motion to modify the original sentence, at which point the court may or may not agree to do so. “This is not something where a non-lawyer can easily figure it out,” Miami-Dade public defender Carlos Martinez told ABC News.

to have low voter turnout.

As it is, we will have to wait and see how the case progresses from trial court to potentially higher courts in later months and years. Though federal courts so far have ruled that SB 7066 denies individuals their 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law, the current Supreme Court has a strong conservative majority that may disagree with those rulings. No matter the result, though, the Florida case is just one step is a long road for felon re-enfranchisement in the U.S. Hopefully in the coming months and years, we will see more states relaxing restrictions on voting rights for felons and working to fulfill our democracy’s promise of universal suffrage. 

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS Although it is indisputable that Florida is an important — if not the most important — battleground state in the 2020 election, it is not immediately clear how re-enfranchisement of Floridian ex-felons could impact the result of the race. It is true, however, that of over 21 million Floridians, only 13 million are registered voters. If all 1.4 million newly eligible former felons register to vote, they would constitute 10% of the voting population. In a state that decided the results of the 2000 presidential election by under 600 votes and that has voted for the eventual president in eleven of the past twelve elections, that is no small number.

It is unlikely, however, that the effect will be that dramatic.

According to Desmonde Meade, who led the Amendment 4 initiative in 2018 but has remained uninvolved in the lawsuits, at most 50,000 felons have registered since Amendment 4 took effect. Political science professors Michael McDonald and Dan Smith agree that it is doubtful that Amendment 4 will add 1.4 million ex-felons to the voter rolls.

In terms of the partisan skew of felon voters, voting rights is traditionally a Democratic cause, leading some to believe that ex-felons are more likely to vote for the eventual Democratic nominee. Additionally, ex-felons are disproportionately people of color, who are more likely to lean left. This skew, however, is by no means a guarantee. There are few concrete indications that most ex-felons register as Democrats, and felons are disproportionately poor, placing them in a group that historically tends

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IN NEW YORK, A BLOW TO DEMOCRACY Connor Chung

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n June 23rd, New Yorkers will — one way or another

— cast their votes in the state’s primary elections. One race, however, will be missing from the ballot. On Monday, two unelected officials moved to cancel the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, denying a voice to millions of New Yorkers at this critical moment in history.

The decision springs out of an obscure clause in the recent state budget — tucked away, in classic Albany style, in a 200,000 word bill passed in the final hours of budget season — giving the state Board of Elections the power to deem a candidate in a presidential primary “no longer eligible” and omit them from the ballot. Despite no candidate requesting Sen. Bernie Sanders’ removal, Sanders’ stated desire to remain on the ballot, and no legal mandate for the board to use that power, the Democratic

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commissioners decided Monday to invoke this provision for the first time.

“What the Sanders campaign wanted is essentially a beauty contest that, given the situation with the public health emergency, seems to be unnecessary and, indeed, frivolous,” said BOE co-chair Douglas Kellner in announcing his decision.

Kellner is, of course, right that election plans can and should be altered in response to the Coronavirus crisis. In states like Wisconsin, when candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden urged supporters to show up to polls in person, lives were put at risk.

But especially when a shift to a mail-in election was already in progress before Keller’s decision, the idea that the pandemic should justify scrapping a primary altogether

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is deeply problematic. The results of the New York primary would have been far from insignificant: Whether or not Sanders can meet the 15% threshold necessary to have representatives on the Democratic National Convention’s platform committee hinges on the percentage of outstanding delegates he wins.

With roughly half of the states yet to vote, deciding that there is no utility to further primaries erases the voices of countless Americans and limits the party’s ability to grapple with the essential questions of the day.

The decision would make more sense if New York had a record of making such alterations to the ballot equitably — if every time a candidate were no longer active, figures from the Democratic establishment had sought to change the law in order to remove them from the ballot. But when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat former Rep. Joe Crowley in his Democratic primary, and he remained on the ballot due to some quirks of election law, was there the same push to remove him from the general election ballot? Or, when former state Sen. Jeff Klein, a conservative Democrat who had allied with Republicans, lost his primary and ended his campaign, was there the same desire to omit him from the final ballot? Indeed, if the ability to exclude inactive candidates from the ballot is so necessary for the smooth functioning of elections, wouldn’t the budget bill have granted that power in races other than presidential primaries alone?

Monday’s decision is emblematic of a deeper contempt for democracy baked into New York’s political system. It is an ideology that manifested last primary cycle, when New York City purged 200,000 voters from rolls, and BOE members were accused of knowingly violating state laws to do so. It is an ideology that manifested a few months ago, when New York state did its best to wipe out the Working Families Party, a progressive

third party, due to what many observers saw as the governor’s personal vendetta against it. It is an ideology that manifested in the fact that, until reforms last year introduced basic improvements like early voting and no-excuse absentee balloting, New York state had the “worst-in-the-country voting system.” And it is an ideology that manifests in Monday’s decision.

The lack of a contested primary at the top of the ticket will no doubt depress turnout across the board at a time when local races are more important than ever. Across New York’s 27 congressional districts, all but seven will hold Democratic primaries. A similar story is true for Assembly and state Senate districts and for races at the local level. Especially in a state where primary elections often determine the winner of the general election (due to years of gerrymandering by both sides, toss-up districts are far from the norm), lower turnouts have grave consequences for the democratic process.

Trust in the democratic process is not something to be taken for granted, as part of some automatic civic ritual. It’s something that needs to be cultivated through rigorous and robust elections, and when citizens feel that their voices are ignored, that trust is violated.

Especially in New York, elections have long served as evidence of the state’s resilience. On the darkest day in the state’s history, as 9/11 struck New York City’s heart, the polls remained open. During one of the most horrible natural disasters that the state has faced, as Hurricane Sandy ravaged the land, the polls remained open. Even — especially — in moments of trial, elections have long symbolized democracy’s perseverance in the Empire State.

As the coronavirus shakes society to its core, we could have used that symbol once again. 

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The Political Economy of Australia’s Wildfires

Connor Chung

T

his past summer, Australia experienced one of the most devastating fire seasons on record. Over a period of 80 days, forty-six million acres of bushland were razed (an area larger than Portugal), an estimated one billion animals were lost, including endangered species, and 2,500 homes were destroyed. Tragically, thirty-four people died.

But the fires have done little to ignite climate action on the national political stage. Instead, the country is actually increasing the rate of fossil fuel extraction and combustion — the very things which exacerbated these extreme weather events in the first place.

So why is the Liberal Coalition continuing down this path?

And does its “highly mitigated” approach to climate change provide the answer for countries hoping to maintain strong economic growth while transitioning to renewables?

A COSTLY EVENT The wildfires did not just devastate the life and land directly in their paths. Smoke from the blazes drifted as far as New Zealand (1,200 miles away) and poor air quality affected an estimated 11.3 million Australians. In the capital city of Canberra, air quality deteriorated to 38 times the hazardous level – the worst in the world. The wildfires injected 434 Mt of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, which is almost equivalent to Australia’s yearly carbon output. Research published by BIS Oxford Economics estimates insurance costs at 1.65 billion Australian dollars, and the impact on the agriculture and the tourism sectors to be AU$4 billion and AU$4.5 billion respectively.

In an interview with the HPR, Dr Nicholas Biddle, a profes-

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sor at the Australian National University and co-author of the report “Exposure and the impact on attitudes of the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfires,” noted that “77.8% of the population reported some form of indirect exposure. In our review of the literature, we haven’t been able to identify a natural disaster which has had as diverse an indirect effect on the population.”

THE ROLE OF GLOBAL WARMING The science suggests global warming played a major role in exacerbating Australia’s recent wildfires. Global warming is enlarging Hadley’s cell — an atmospheric circulation pattern of hot air that travels from the equator to the poles. The expansion of Hadley’s cell and the spread of warmer temperatures towards the poles has increased temperatures in the subtropical ridge over Australia. The consequences of this warming process are drought and high temperatures, which have increased the length and intensity of Australia’s fire seasons — they used to begin in October but now commence as early as August.

In the years preceding the recent fires, the rates of rainfall in autumn and winter on the south-east coast, where Australia’s wildfires are most often concentrated, had decreased significantly. And across the continent, 2018 and 2019 were Australia’s driest years. Australia also measured its hottest day on record on 17 December 2019 with an average high temperature of 41.9 degrees Celsius (107.4 Fahrenheit) only one day after the previous record was broken. High temperatures and a low rate of rainfall led to drought and the accumulation of dry forest fuel, which intensified the fires this past summer.

In an interview with the HPR, Ken Thompson, former

Deputy Commissioner of NSW Fire and Rescue and cofounder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, noted that “Australia’s fires typically start in the south-eastern part of Queensland and progress over a period of a few months down through New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, and out through South Australia and Tasmania. They have a similar pattern on the west coast. This past season we had the entire area burning at the same time… It overwhelmed the fire and emergency services because, typically, they share resources.”

A number of politicians, including the former leader of the National Party Barnaby Joyce, suggested that Australia’s recent wildfires were intensified by a concerted reduction in the number of controlled burns conducted in national parks and bushlands as a result of environmental lobbying. Controlled burning involves setting planned fires to rid a forest of dead leaves, tree limbs and other natural debris that acts as fuel for fires in order to prevent a destructive wildfire in the future. These controlled burns can only be scheduled for a period when they will not pose a threat to the public.

Ken Thompson disagrees with Joyce. He says that in some wildfire-prone areas of Australia there is now a window of only a few months, weeks, or even days in which controlled burning can be done because fire seasons are becoming longer and conditions are now less conducive to being able to use the technique.

He also suggests that “When you reach a certain level of fire intensity, controlled burning has very little impact, if any. Any fire over 50/100 is severe and will overwhelm any hazard reduction or controlled burning that’s done. A catastrophic or code red fire is 100/100 and during the recent fires we had regions of over 200.”

THE POLITICS Australia’s climate policy in the past decade has consisted of an amalgam of rebranded initiatives with mostly similar functions. A serious attempt was made late in 2011, led by Julia Guillard and the Labor Government, to introduce a mixed carbon pricing scheme and cap-and-trade initiative as part of the Clean Air Act. The program led to the largest annual reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 24 years while, most noticeably, GDP continued to grow by 2.6% p.a., according to the Australian National University. But the foot was taken off the accelerator in June of 2014 when the Liberal Party regained power and repealed the Carbon-Pricing Scheme.

Since the abolition of the Scheme, Australian governments have made little headway on climate action. The current Liberal Government’s policy is focused on the AU$2 billion ClimateSolutions Fund launched by Prime Minister Scott Morrison in February of 2019. The Fund is a voluntary-corporate initiative spread over 15 years, which pays large companies when they introduce ecological programs that reduce GHG emissions. It is a rebranded version of the Emissions-Reductions Fund which ran out of capital after three years and was not refunded. Environmental-economics experts from the University of Melbourne have criticized both funds as initiatives that do not adequately address the core issue of GHG emissions. They say that the Fund does nothing to divert the fossil-fuel sector towards non-renewable sources which they believe is needed.

In November of 2019, Scott Morrison claimed that Australia’s emissions are too small to make a difference. The Liberal Coali-

tion points out that Australia’s domestic consumption of fossil fuel only contributes 1.3% p.a. to global carbon dioxide emissions. But if Australia’s total carbon footprint (including exports) is included, this figure jumps to 4.15% and Australia becomes the six-largest global contributor to climate change. Australia’s per capita GHG emissions are also the highest in the developed world.

In an interview with the HPR, Dr Peter Drysdale AO, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy, outlined that the current Government is “torn between a couple of main perspectives: one which is very strongly disrespectful of the science and one which is intelligently trying to come to terms with the science as well as manage the economic transition that is necessary in a way that it is politically positive.”

The Australian government has recently added that any transition to renewable energy will involve an intermediary reliance on gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG). In a speech to Australia’s National Press Club in January this year, Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated that “There is no credible energy transition plan for an economy like Australia that does not involve the greater use of gas.” And in the past year, the Liberal Government has moved to open new gas projects in every state and territory of Australia, except for Tasmania and the ACT, as well as to provide extra subsidies to gas developments on the east coast. In addition to being the world’s largest exporter of coal, in 2019, Australia overtook Qatar as the world largest exporter of LNG. Although the Australian government insists that gas is the preferable transition fuel, research from the American Association for the Advancement of Science suggests that gas tends can be more harmful to the environment than coal. Bruce Robertson from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis told the HPR that “There are great underestimations of the greenhouse effects of gas. You only need very minimal leakages in a supply chain, between 2% and 3%, and gas is worse than coal for GHG emissions over a 20-year period. LNG also uses vast amounts of electricity.” The Government needs other policies that do not involve an increasing reliance on gas in order to deliver the structural changes necessary for Australia to decarbonize.

Prime Minister Morrison recently stated that “Australia’s climate policy settings are to meet and beat the emissions reduction targets” of 26 to 28 percent of 2005 levels by 2030 under the Paris Agreement.” But the 2019 UN Emissions Gap Report found that Australia is not on track to fulfil its promise under the Paris Agreement. The Report stated that, “Australia has no major policy tool to encourage emission reductions from the electricity sector in the short to medium term…emission levels for 2030 are projected to be well above the target.” Since the abolition of the carbon tax in 2014, Australia’s GHG emissions have increased steadily every year and the 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranked Australia’s climate policy 56th out of the world’s 61 highest emitting countries.

More recently the Australian government has said that it will carry-over 370 million tonnes of emissions credits from Kyoto 1 and 2 towards its target of removing 695 million tonnes of emissions from the atmosphere by 2030 under the Paris Agreement.

But following Kyoto 2, international bodies attempted to restrict the accounting measure because it benefited countries, like Australia, that had much more attainable carbon reduction targets.

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The Investors Group on Climate Change found that if every country with these credits were to follow Australia’s lead and deduct them from their Paris targets, an extra 13 billion tonnes of carbon would be emitted into the atmosphere and the Paris Agreement would invariably fall through.

THE ECONOMICS To date, Australia’s energy needs have been largely met by abundant and low-cost coal resources. The current government argues that making a hasty transition to renewables and curtailing its reliance on fossil fuels might jeopardise the economy. But is this the case?

Dr. Drysdale explained that Australia’s economy is still substantially reliant on fossil fuels through domestic energy production and through exports. He noted that, “The main baseload power is still supplied by power stations — with the exception of the hydro capacity of the Snowy Mountains and Tasmania — and they are coming up to their use-by date. Australia is also the top global supplier of coal and gas internationally, particularly to Japan, Korea, and China.”

The mining and resource sectors currently account for over 50% of Australia’s total export earnings and for 8% of Australia’s GDP according to the Reserve Bank of Australia. Yet the sum of agriculture, tourism, and foreign-student revenues — industries that will be most heavily impacted by climate change — also cumulatively account for approximately 8% of Australia’s GDP and hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Government also provides AU$29 billion of taxpayer funds in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry every year or AU$1,198 per person according to the IMF. In addition, Australia’s per capita economic losses from climate change may be 12 to 24 times more than that of the global average. Dr. Drysdale stressed that “These findings are absent from the policy debate in Australia and they have to become more important in the discussion to ensure Australia is at the forefront of managing a climate change adjustment globally.”

Australian economist Dr. Ross Garnaut, a colleague of Dr. Drysdale, outlines in his book “Superpower: Australia’s Low Carbon Opportunity” that Australia could reach 100% renewable electricity by the 2030s while significantly boosting its economy. He notes that Australia has considerable opportunities for growth in renewable energy generation because the country has an abundance of solar and wind resources and because the cost of battery storage systems and installation has decreased significantly in the past decade. Under Dr. Garnaut’s vision, Australia could play an increasingly important role as a provider of renewable energy to its neighbours through direct electricity exports or by exporting energy to global markets as hydrogen.

A report published by the Institute for Sustainable Futures also supports Garnaut’s findings. It estimated that the transition to 100 percent renewable energy would cost Australia AU$800 billion between now and 2050. Despite the high price, Australia would save AU$90 billion more with this approach than if it continued down the path of fossil fuels. And the researchers estimated that in the long term fuel savings would cover 110% of the funds needed to transition the economy.

The Government argues that the economy cannot handle the burden of going green. But if Australia does not act more quickly, its third, fourth, and fifth largest industries of agriculture, tourism, and foreign students will bear the brunt of climate impact.

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And ultimately, the benefits of mitigating the impact of climate change for Australia outweigh the costs.

BEING BRAVE The research suggests that Australia has the capacity to decarbonise its economy but this will not happen without comprehensive policies and directed investment. Experts from the East Asia Forum suggest that the current Covid-19 crisis might inadvertently provide the setting Australia needs for investment in renewable energy. With Australian oil prices at a 20-yearlow, the Government could transfer portions of its oil industry subsidies to households and businesses in the move towards renewables without much of an affect on pricing. As part of future stimulus packages responding to the damage done to the economy by Covid-19, the Government could also earmark funds for Australia’s renewable sector, which would protect jobs and reduce Australia’s long-term carbon emissions.

As Dr. Drysdale suggests, “the political economy of managing a global commons problem like climate change is always tremendously complicated, not only for Australia. It will only be successful if it is married with a clear vision of where the economy can go in a lower fossil fuel energy environment overtime. That’s where Ross Garnaut’s vision of the renewable energy superpower comes in. I think that’s the bottom line.” 

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Obstacles to Macron’s “True European Army” Maxwell Zhu

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trained US-NATO relations and fears of further Russian expansion have motivated the European Union to aggressively increase defense and security cooperation in the last five years. However, there is little indication that French President Macron’s call for a “true European army” will be realized in the foreseeable future.

RAPIDLY INCREASING EUROPEAN DEFENSE CAPABILITIES American leadership and NATO have been the linchpin of European defense since the end of the Cold War, but the Trump administration’s actions have irrevocably damaged this relationship. President Trump has repeatedly and publicly called out European contributions to NATO, seriously considered withdrawing the United States from NATO, and has already withdrawn the US from both the Iran nuclear deal and the INF Treaty. In doing so, the administration has not only eroded the trust that underpins the trans-Atlantic security commitment, but has also

damaged the credibility of any future security agreements.

As a result, European leaders have started to ramp up their defense programs. For example, in 2017, the European Union established the European Defense Fund, which earmarks 5.5 billion per year for defense research, development and acquisition projects, and activated the Permanent Structured Cooperation defense projects. Additionally, the EU created the Military Planning and Conduct Capability, a centralized command for EU military missions. And with President Trump’s re-election potentially on the horizon as well as fears of continuing Russian aggression, pressure on the European community to increase their independent defense capabilities will only increase.

SOVEREIGNTY AND LEADERSHIP ISSUES HINDERING MILITARY INTEGRATION Despite these milestones, however, there still exists a significant gap between the current Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) and Macron’s stated goal of a “true European

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army”. First of all, any attempt to form a pan-European army will face opposition from member states unwilling to relinquish sovereignty over their armed forces. In 1952, for example, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries signed the Treaty of Paris establishing a European Defense Community (EDC). The EDC would have created a supranational army with a common budget and shared institutions, but the French parliament failed to ratify the treaty. Their unwillingness to cede sovereignty as well as fears of German re-armament resulted in NATO alone assuming the responsibility of European defense.

The intervening decades of Franco-German friendship have alleviated the specter of German rearmament, but France’s historical reluctance to cede military (and especially nuclear) sovereignty persists. Macron’s comments to the contrary, it is unlikely that the French would accept a Hungarian officer commanding French soldiers, and vice versa. Without national contingents answering to a unified, supranational chain of command, this army would simply be a military alliance, not a military.

Even if the EU could find a satisfactory command structure, how would 27 countries develop a unified military policy? The European Union is one of the great achievements of the postwar era, but its representative governance makes it difficult to agree upon a common defense policy, much less wield a common army.

The EU’s current Common Security and Defence Policy focuses largely on humanitarian and peacekeeping missions; a fundamental retooling would require the consent of all 27 countries.

The resulting lowest common denominator force would likely lack the hard military power of NATO. Instead, the EU could look to create a horizontally integrated force that incorporates cyber and economic warfare as well as internal security policy, focusing on broad spectrum power projection to complement, rather than replace, NATO. This structure would certainly be more amenable to unanimous acceptance, but nonetheless a far cry from a standing European army.

Alternatively, the European countries could pursue a standing army independent of both the EU and NATO. Europeans themselves increasingly support a pan-European army, and Franco-German political and military cooperation provide a plausible nucleus for such an organization. This way, there would be no need to bring in the entire continent.

However, a European army without all the EU countries could prove disastrous to European solidarity. Paris and Berlin were forced to confront this exact issue when the EU activated their Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) defense projects. Discussion centered around two competing approaches: a French vision promoting robust operational and commitment standards and a German vision emphasizing inclusiveness to avoid alienating other member states. While contentious, PESCOs are only limited defense integration projects. A European army created to be independent of the EU would dangerously magnify this divide, exacerbating intra-European tensions – especially with traditionally neutral EU countries such as Ireland, Austria and Sweden – and therefore weaken the EU itself.

Furthermore, leadership of this military organization is made difficult by the relative military and economic parity of the European countries. According to Usherwood and Pinder, NATO’s success was built upon US “hegemonial leadership” – because American GDP and NATO spending far outpaced its European allies, NATO was, first and foremost, an American military

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organization. As a result, the European allies largely followed America’s lead. In contrast, European militaries and economies are much more comparable and intergovernmental relations in Europe are fundamentally cooperative, in accordance with the democratic nature of the European Union. Although France and Germany are clearly the first among equals in Europe, it is difficult to imagine either (or both) maintaining the steady helm necessary for an integrated military alliance such as NATO, much less a permanent military force. Without decisive leadership, this military alliance would lack the singular direction needed to operate decisively. And so while an independent European army is an attractive idea, serious concerns exist.

Faced with an increasingly assertive America and fearful of an expansionist Russia, European countries will face increasing pressure to augment their independent security capabilities in the next decade. In response, Europe will likely focus on supranational efforts to spearhead military integration, with special emphasis on increased funding, research and development. It is doubtful, however, that a fully-fledged, supranational European army will form anytime soon. 

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How the U.N. Failed Haiti Inadequate Response to the Cholera Outbreak Andre Ferreira

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I

n 1945, much of Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa, lay in ruins. Countries faced severe economic strife in an attempt to rebuild what was lost. The war led to the deaths of over 80 million people, a staggering toll of military and civilian lives.

In the midst of all this suffering, the end of World War II would signify the beginning of an era towards maintaining international security and peace through international cooperation.

Thus, 51 nations gathered to sign a Charter that would become the founding document of the United Nations, a multinational organization intended to give humanitarian assistance and promote global development. The U.N. strives to build a better world “guided by the purposes and principles contained in its founding Charter” by promoting democracy and international law, and by protecting human rights.

However, despite the U.N.’s “devotion” to tackling the international concerns that countries face in the 21st century, from sustainable development to confronting humanitarian and health emergencies, its most recent history may tell us a different story.

CHOLERA’S EMERGENCE IN HAITI The year is 2010. In Haiti, the month of October of that year will go down in infamy.

In the small village of Meille, located in Haiti’s central plateau, a young man by the name of Rosemond Lorimé lived a simple life. His day consisted of helping the older folk raise pigs and turkeys, plant cassava, or swim in a nearby river. This simple life would all change, however, when a fatal disease swept through the nation.

Nine months after an earthquake struck the nation of Haiti, Rosemond found his life turned upside down when the first of his family fell ill: his father. It began with a pain that radiated in his stomach, followed by vomiting and diarrhea that left him severely dehydrated. That illness would soon spread to the rest of the family, leaving everyone in the household in quite critical conditions. His father’s sickness was the most intense, and he would eventually pass away from the disease. Rosemond not only lost a beloved member of the family but his father’s death also meant the loss of their breadwinner.

Rosemond’s is but one story depicting the infectious epidemic that lay waste to the country of Haiti and its people. It began with an intense pain in the stomach, radiating through the entire body, followed by vomiting and diarrhea. The sickness quickly took its toll until death by dehydration. This often fatal and infectious disease would affect thousands and become the disastrous epidemic that would change the course of the nation.

Its name: cholera.

Despite the country’s extreme poverty and the destructive earthquake that lay waste to Haiti in January of that same year, Haiti was free of a cholera epidemic for about a century prior to the arrival of the U.N. peacekeeping force. These circumstances beg the question: What exactly was the source of the outbreak?

NEGLIGENCE AND OVERSIGHT Recent scientific research has overwhelming evidence that the source of the cholera epidemic was a U.N. peacekeeping force that had arrived from Nepal that very month, in the same region where the cholera outbreak was first reported. Shortly

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before these troops left Nepal, there had been an outbreak of cholera. As a result of failing to appropriately screen peacekeepers of transmittable diseases, the U.N. failed to prevent the disaster that was to come. The U.N. compound also did not meet international regulations as the peacekeeping mission was given inadequate sanitation facilities in the town of Mirebalais.

This oversight proved deadly because cholera is spread through consuming the feces of another individual, and inadequate water treatment or poor sanitation make communities susceptible to the disease and allow it to spread quickly.

Consequently, cholera-infected waste leaked into Haiti’s largest river, the Artibonite, and because many Haitians are dependent on the river as a source of water, cholera spread like wildfire throughout the country and relentlessly killed thousands.

Despite the quick response from organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that were able to prevent thousands of deaths from cholera, cases continued to emerge throughout the country. To this day, people continue to be affected by the cholera transmission and the U.N. has yet to provide sufficient efforts to improve Haiti’s water and sanitation infrastructure in order to achieve “large health gains” and reduce the chances of cholera spreading further.

Today, there are over 9,000 dead and over 800,000 sickened due to the carelessness of the U.N., and as cholera continues to sicken people to this day, the U.N. still hides shamefully, claiming immunity and failing to even claim responsibility until six years after the epidemic began to spread. The U.N. failed to abide by its own mandate of redressing victims of human rights abuses and violated its own principles of international accountability, despite claiming that these values are what it seeks to promote.

This is not to say that the U.N. does not successfully help many individuals across the globe suffering from humanitarian crises, but it failed to fulfill its obligation of helping the people of Haiti when they were not held accountable for their role in the disease’s outbreak and provide the necessary reparations.

Until 2016, the U.N. denied responsibility for being the source of the spread, although their own reports in 2011 showed that the strains of cholera in Nepal and Haiti were identical. This led several human rights organizations, including the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a United States human rights advocacy group, and the Haitian Bureau des Avocats Internationaux to file “claims for compensation under the procedures the U.N. promised to create as part of its agreement for sending peacekeepers to Haiti.” This claim was ignored for over a year, and when the U.N. finally responded, they claimed legal immunity under the 1946 Convention on Privileges and Immunities.

Instead, a U.N. spokesperson deemed that the outbreak was a result of “a confluence of circumstances” and reveals Haiti’s inability to cope with natural disasters. Rather than helping the country and its peoples, the U.N. blamed the cholera epidemic on the nation’s vulnerability from the earthquake in January.

Despite this inappropriate response by the U.N., many were hopeful when the Secretary-General of the U.N. announced in August of 2016 that they were developing a new approach to help the people of Haiti that were affected and rebuild the foundation of the country. It would provide the people with the necessary reparations they required, but for various reasons, the feeble attempt to right their wrong proved ineffective, especially due to lack of funding to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and waste management.

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Susan Farbstein, co-director of the International Human Rights Clinic and a clinical professor of Harvard Law School, currently focuses her work on economic, social, and cultural rights. When asked about whether the cholera epidemic is still worth discussing today, Farbstein emphasized the fact that what happened in Haiti should be an ongoing discussion because the people of Haiti are still suffering and have not received the support they require to rebuild everything they lost. As one in six Haitian families had someone who was killed in the cholera epidemic, the event had a devastating long-term impact.

Apart from the fact that the people of Haiti were never given the material assistance and support they truly needed as a result of the United Nation’s mistake, the Secretary-General’s approach failed to even accept responsibility for their actions or apologize for all the organization had done.

Beatrice Lindstrom, clinical instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic and the supervising attorney of Advocates for Human Rights, provided the HPR with additional insight into the accountability of transnational actors and obligations of international organizations, especially as it relates to the access of remedies. When discussing the 2016 efforts to rebuild the country of Haiti, Lindstrom pointed out several aspects of the initiative that insufficiently met the goals the U.N. had set to achieve in Haiti. According to Lindstrom, “the new approach is only funded at 7% and there have not been any consolations for victims beyond those very small-scale community projects that victims have been largely sidelined in the process of developing.”

The promises made to the victims of cholera are going unfulfilled, and for those interested in maintaining human rights and international justice, this issue must be resolved and requires our attention.

In not acting accordingly to fulfill their responsibilities, the U.N.’s actions are not only immoral but illegal according to international law, which mandates that the organization provides a way for third-parties to file claims against these peacekeeping forces. If the U.N. simply claims legal immunity every time claims are filed against them, there is no process that affected innocent bystanders can take to obtain justice and seek reparations for the damage that the U.N. has done.

In a desperate attempt to save face, the U.N. failed to hold itself accountable for the actions of its peacekeepers, who harmed innocent parties through actions that were unnecessary to the mission.

their actions in leaking human waste (infected with cholera) into an important water source for the people of Haiti. The lack of transparency and utter lack of regard for the rights of Haitian people has proven that the U.N. is not fulfilling its purposes and is only delegitimizing the values it “seeks to promote”.

As the outbreak continues to affect Haitians today, it is vital that we shed light on the actions of the U.N. and pressure organizations to provide avenues to file claims against them for illegal actions and to obtain justice. Organizations such as the U.N. lose credibility when they fail to acknowledge their own mistakes and not attempt to provide solutions to problems they created.

Many Haitians today ask why the U.N. holds human rights abusers accountable for their actions when it does not hold itself to those same standards. To this day, cholera activists and members of the vast Haitian diaspora fight for an apology from the U.N. It is essential that we continue to discuss the events of 2010 because the U.N. has yet to compensate the families of the deceased. It is also critical to recognize that the U.N.’s systematic denial of accountability for the first six years has led to exacerbating conditions and a failure to prevent much of the damage they caused and save lives.

Farbstein tells the HPR that in order to truly help the people of Haiti, victims of cholera in Haiti should “get to participate in designing remedies… This is a basic human rights principle: that victims should be at the center of any kind of reparations or compensations process.” In not including Haitians in the conversation and not seeking to really understand their needs, the U.N. undermines the effectiveness and legitimacy of their organization.

Rather than accepting responsibility for their actions, the U.N.’s response to years of pressure, from lawsuits to protests and petitions, was to simply claim immunity in order to avoid being sued. For an organization that is ostensibly dedicated to the promotion of development and human rights, the cholera epidemic in Haiti was truly a blunder and a step in the wrong direction. Yet, what is perhaps more concerning is the U.N.’s failure to accept their wrongdoing and assist the hundreds of thousands of people affected. 

HOW THE U.N.’S ACTIONS CONTINUE TO AFFECT HAITIANS TODAY Due to many years of denial, it took an incredible effort from civil societies in Haiti and solidarity groups internationally to even have the U.N. admit its responsibility. From the moment the cholera epidemic began, the U.N. should have been held responsible for the compensation of those that they harmed during the course of their operations. Lindstrom told the HPR that this responsibility was “breached when the U.N. said that it would not receive any claims related to cholera” and would “not even allow this question to be put before any kind of independent body that could hear the evidence and decide the question of responsibility.”

The U.N. mission to help those in need is contradicted by

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E U L B

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Chloe Levine

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o the uninitiated, a banjo might not be a harbinger of progress. America’s mountain music evokes a largely bygone era of agricultural subsistence, local autonomy, and a supposedly simpler way of life. Yet bluegrass, the slick younger cousin of string band, old-time, and a myriad of other musical influences, emerged just eighty years ago, and its reach is ever-expanding.

As the genre’s audiences begin to approximate the diversity of the national identity to which it is so intimately tied, the political and cultural fractures that shape American life appear among its listeners. Loyal bluegrass fans are often older, White, Southern, and conservative. In contrast, new listeners responsible for the genre’s growth tend to be younger, more diverse, and farther to the left politically. These demographic divisions also correlate with musical preference: older listeners favor traditional bluegrass, while younger listeners prefer experimental styles.

Since the bluegrass scene’s financial viability relies upon a core group of devoted fans, there is a commercial imperative for musicians to find their listeners by picking a side. And due to the split’s dual nature, that choice goes beyond musical sensibilities, corresponding to a decision between social preservationism and

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social activism. These musicians thus also join the fray in the conflict over who can claim ownership of and membership in American identity, always hotly contested between progressives and conservatives. Audience pressures compel them to take part in an ideological proxy war — one that could prove more fruitful than today’s bipartisan political debates.

SETTING THE STAGE While bluegrass has connections to American cultural heritage as a whole, it originated with a single band, Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys. Monroe, a mandolinist displaced from Appalachia by the Great Depression, drew influences from diverse traditional canons to pioneer a new sound. His music was governed by nostalgia for a mountain home, despite the poverty and hardship he experienced there. Bluegrass found commercial success among rural transplants to cities, who related to Monroe’s longing. Over time, his voice became a stand-in for the voices of that entire cohort.

Though bluegrass was a product of individualistic innovation, strict guidelines rooted in Monroe’s stylistic preferences regulated its development. As Dr. Joti Rockwell, an associate

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professor of music at Pomona College, explains in his article “What is bluegrass anyway? Category formation, debate, and the framing of musical genre,” traditional bluegrass must abide by specific parameters for rhythm, register, and instrumentation.

Monroe is responsible for this inelasticity, the article details.

Once it became clear his band had unwittingly founded a new genre, he pushed musicologists and musicians to accept his aesthetic predilections as bluegrass’s inflexible definition. Because of Monroe, traditional bluegrass can sound like the product of a time capsule, mimicking music from almost a century ago.

Some self-proclaimed bluegrass musicians chafe at Monroe’s restrictions. In order to establish a new genre, they argue, Monroe himself pushed boundaries; challenging his stringent rules is in the spirit of the genre. That view resonates with Richard Emmett, program director at the Blue Ridge Music Center.

His venue has partially shifted its focus toward these so-called “progressive bluegrass” acts even as traditional bluegrass fans lambast their deviations from Monroe’s vision. “Mountain music is a living musical tradition,” Emmett told the HPR. “By presenting these artists, it’s not like we’re doing something that hasn’t been going on … since the birth of the music.”

The rise of these innovators coincided with the midcentury urban folk revival populated by political progressives, to which bluegrass soon became linked. The genre had leftist ingredients: Its themes of dispossession and class struggle played into antiinstitutional narratives. “It was a music of the working people,” Emmett underscored. At the same time, urban audiences loved bluegrass because its connection with rural Appalachia provided an escape from daily routine. However, according to Rockwell’s article, they escaped into a culture that bears the hallmarks of social conservatism. To this day, female and queer musicians struggle to find work in the scene. Still, without progressive support, bluegrass likely would have disappeared altogether, reabsorbed by country music.

These contradictions characterize the genre. Its creative sensibility is inherently forward-thinking, and yet by nature, it gestures toward the past. Perhaps the divisions in the bluegrass listening audience should thus be unsurprising.

HEARING THE DISCORD Many aspects of the bluegrass world undoubtedly reinforce a socially conservative world order. For example, the scene is overwhelmingly male-dominated behind the microphone and in the jam circle. Men playing tunes while wives sit on the sidelines is common at bluegrass festivals. Lyrics often fall victim to the madonna-whore complex, either idealizing maternal figures or recounting domestic violence against adulterous women through murder ballads. In a 2019 article for the Guardian, writer Emma John even claims the competitive culture between jam circle soloists, with “each instrument trying to one-up what came before,” is a form of machismo.

The demographics of bluegrass are also extremely White.

While African American music unquestionably influenced bluegrass, industry pressures historically separated black roots, dubbed “race music,” from White “hillbilly music,” keeping black bluegrass performers out of the genre’s commercial space.

Musician and activist Rhiannon Giddens’ efforts to correct this erasure are often cited, but even today, few other artists of color are elevated alongside her. The figures are stark: Accord-

ing to the most recent available data from the Bluegrass Radio Network, more than 95% of listeners were White, and all of the more than 50 musicians on Bluegrass Today’s Top 20 chart as of March 20 were White-presenting.

In 2018, White men were more than 50% more likely to vote for a GOP candidate than a Democrat. It follows, then, that the prevalence of conservative bluegrass listeners is widely accepted. “It’s not totally like that,” noted Phil Jamison, music director of the Traditional Music Program at Warren Wilson College, “but there’s probably some tendency in those directions.”

These trends are especially true for traditional bluegrass, which is most popular in the genre’s Appalachian home. “You’re going to find your demographics to be more in the South,” Mark Freeman, the president of traditional label Rebel Records, told the HPR, pointing to the region that accounts for 42% of bluegrass listeners: “Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina.” These areas are predominantly conservative, particularly among older voters; traditional bluegrass fans, who tend to be older, are representative of that correlation.

The subgenre, after all, represents a brand of nostalgia for a past American culture that can be traced to Monroe’s longing for the mountains and is perpetuated by adherence to his strict rules. As social critics have often noted in the era of “Make America Great Again,” access to such nostalgia is unequal. For most members of marginalized groups, the 1940s were a time of greater oppression. Admittedly, traditional artists typically avoid overt political messages. “Folks don’t want to hear about politics,” Freeman asserted. “They want to hear about … all the traditional values that they’ve grown up with.” Still, many on the left claim that language describing those “traditional values” codes for conservative ideologies.

However, bluegrass owes much of its contemporary popularity to the young urban left. Unlike traditional bluegrass listeners, these musically progressive listeners are often scattered around the country. Maya Rubin, a sophomore at Wellesley College and a self-described moderate liberal from New York City, is the lone bluegrass fan among her peers. “If you start playing someone like Béla Fleck … they’re just going to be like, ‘What? What the hell is this?’” she told the HPR. Yet music streaming platforms have enabled such isolated individuals to find bluegrass anywhere.

Most industry experts accept that this cohort favors progressive bluegrass and its offshoots over traditional styles. The undeniable link between mainstream roots-influenced acts like Mumford & Sons and bluegrass has brought more young, diverse listeners into the genre’s less conventional fold. Their aversion to traditional bluegrass may be explained by the correlation drawn between the subgenre and a stereotyped version of Southern conservatism in popular culture. In the words of Gabe Lepak, a bluegrass fan and first-year at St. Olaf College, “There’s this outside view … that it’s all, like, backwater hick towns.” Young liberals and leftists may be scared off by those connotations, leading them to seek progressive artists.

Challenges to Monroe’s regulations necessarily bring challenges to traditional bluegrass’s social nostalgia. The all-female band Lula Wiles, for example, conceptualizes their music as a call to political action, parodying the genre’s frequent idealization of the past with lyrics like, “It’s all history by now and we hold the pen anyhow.” In an interview with the HPR, John Smith, the associate director of their label Smithsonian Folkways, explained that Lula Wiles speaks to a “newer generation”

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of listeners. “They want to hear what’s happening today, what’s happening from different perspectives,” he declared. In other words, these listeners want forward-thinking music that speaks to current events.

The bluegrass audience’s ardent passion for music snaps its divisions into sharper focus. A special report from Bluegrass Today suggests that the genre’s listeners are 84% more likely to play an instrument than the general public, and that 77% claim listening to music as their favorite pastime. Daniel Boner, the director of Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies at East Tennessee State University, emphasized how much fans care about the music they love. “Bluegrass is serious,” he told the HPR in an emailed statement. “Its listeners … know its history and development like obsessive baseball fans geek out over what type of socks Babe Ruth wore.” Their divergent opinions about the genre, then, are more than preferences: They are principles.

CHANGING THEIR TUNE For bluegrass musicians, pleasing such a split audience is a tall order. Having it both ways is near impossible. A contingent of the old guard dismisses progressive bluegrass and bluegrassinfluenced rock/pop as opportunistic, while some devotees of the new subgenre reject traditional bluegrass as exclusionary.

Besides, not all scholars agree on how the divided audience breaks down. In an interview with the HPR, Rockwell commented, “Many politically left-leaning bluegrass enthusiasts are … the most attached to bluegrass music’s most classic sounds.”

Letting the disunity of listeners affect creative decisions might appear risky.

Still, ignoring audience pressures could prove far riskier. Unlike for jazz or classical music, bluegrass crowds are often devoid of wealthy potential benefactors. Without financial support, artists who annoy too many listeners in a genre sometimes off-putting to outsiders skate on thin ice. The general consensus maps musical conservatism and progressivism to their sociopolitical counterparts. Notwithstanding Rockwell’s disagreement, it may be worth it for musicians to gamble on using that paradigm to court a targeted subset of listeners.

Artists choosing to take a blatantly political stance sail through uncharted waters. For Phil Boyce, an amateur musician from Virginia, the absence of self-conscious politics is part of the canon’s pull. “We declare a temporary armistice in the culture wars,” Boyce explained to the HPR in an emailed statement. “I wish more Americans could do it.” Rockwell concurred, noting that unlike folk revival music, bluegrass has rarely been imbued with political function. However, given growing contemporary polarization, neutrality may be a thing of the past.

Especially on the left, some modern acts have taken up the challenge. Rockwell highlighted the last two decades as a period of increasing political activism in bluegrass. String band Che Apalache, for example, blends Latin and bluegrass music to craft topical songs like “The Wall,” which argues against President Trump’s border wall. On their most recent album, the bluegrassadjacent Avett Brothers sang about gun violence, racism, and misogyny. These new activist voices are a product of — and encourage further expansion of — the genre’s inclusion of artists with diverse perspectives.

The preservationist traditional scene lacks that same potential for growth, to negative commercial effect. “Venues that focus

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on strictly traditional music and aren’t able or willing to … think a little farther outside the box than that maybe have seen some audiences dwindle,” observed Emmett, linking larger crowds for paid concerts at the Blue Ridge Music Center to more progressive headliners. Freeman was blunter: “A lot of the folks who are into traditional bluegrass are older … and those folks are slowly dying off.”

Furthermore, the themes of progressive bluegrass seem more inclusive of new listeners. Like country music, the specific lyrical content of traditional bluegrass uses a shared vocabulary common to its close-knit community. Progressive bluegrass can sport pop-influenced lyrics, providing a lower barrier to entry for listeners with different backgrounds. In a statement emailed to the HPR, Rockwell mentioned that instrumental bluegrass is especially prevalent in the progressive musical movement; its complete absence of lyrics extends this trend. Traditional bluegrass, by comparison, has resisted lexical change, and may thus be more intimidating to outsiders.

While navigating these tensions, bluegrass musicians must understand that they cannot please everyone. Despite Emmett’s box office success, he noted that activist acts face criticism from traditional fans. Thomas Cassell, the mandolinist for the progressive band Circus No. 9, knows that criticism well. “It’s weird in this music,” he told the HPR. “People are much more likely to tell you what they don’t like than what they do.” Yet he added that “Cool It Son,” the band’s song about climate change, is a frequent favorite on bluegrass radio. For Cassell, creation comes first, and finding the right audience comes second. “We get the backlash,” he admitted, “but … those people aren’t the ones supporting us anyway.”

LOOKING AHEAD There are no easy answers to questions about the identity of bluegrass because there are no easy answers to related questions about national identity. Who should be the caretaker for a profoundly American cultural form: traditionalists, who look to its history for guidance, or progressives, who see more promise in an unknown future? Many in bluegrass hope to avoid the choice, prizing the peaceful coexistence within jam circles. When musician Chris Pandolfi used his 2011 keynote address at the genre’s business conference to proclaim, “We need to agree to disagree,” the crowd erupted into applause. But under the weight of polarization, the coalition is cracking.

Still, unlike in electoral politics, there need not be a loser if bluegrass splinters. “You have, like, the big tent and the small tent, and the small tent is where … traditional, kind of old-school bluegrass lives,” explained Cassell. “Because it’s a small tent, people think it’s dying. But it’s not, you know? And the big tent is bigger than it’s ever been.” In other words, though musicians cannot garner universal approval, there are enough listeners to go around. The metonymic political discourse within bluegrass, then, has greater potential to be constructive than battles for American identity within strictly political spheres. Without an imperative to defeat their opponents, impassioned bluegrass listeners can meet on the common ground of shared love for the genre. As Bill Monroe put it, “Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world.”

Perhaps bluegrass’s fissures can eventually be a source of unity. 

CULTURE

Monopoly, but Make it Socialism

Winona Guo

I

watched my younger siblings scamper off, closing their bedroom doors behind them, before returning my gaze to the rubble at my feet — pseudo-cash, old-timey red tokens, and black chips with blue roses scattered without order or care on the living room floor. We had been playing Monopoly Socialism.

I felt glum. An hour ago, I had been corralling the two of them to test out my Christmas gift, eager to resurface the childhood glee of plotting their bankruptcy in a round of classic Monopoly, “the world’s favorite family board game.” Monopoly Socialism’s alternate premise fascinated me: instead of acquiring private property, the task was to build projects together, drawing from a shared Community Fund, in pursuit of a “socialist utopia.” But the game itself made the task feel silly. “Everyone in the Community loves your new podcast, Crapitalist,” my sister read aloud, placing a chip on the board. “Seems kind of nasty.

Are they mocking the capitalist, or the socialist?” My brother drew the next card: “Your neighbor tells everyone they got food poisoning from your vegan meatloaf.” I wondered if vegan meatloaf had ever once crossed Marx’s mind. “All we’re doing is losing money,” my brother said, removing a chip and standing up to leave. “I’m bored.” Soon, I was left alone to fiddle with the abandoned game chips, to ask that silly cardboard how its politics had snuck its way into my leisure time.

Who the hell invented this game? I couldn’t sleep that night without an internet escapade. “It goes without saying that this game is entirely uninterested in trying to understand what socialism actually is and how it might function,” tweeted Rutgers University professor Nick Kapur. “A primer on socialism, by dipshits, for dipshits,” read another review. My questions about Monopoly Socialism turned to the politics of the Monopoly franchise. I found that while Monopoly’s parent company Hasbro credited the game’s genius to Charles Darrow, the man who sold them the rights in 1935, the idea could be traced farther back. A woman named Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie, whose familiar sketches on my screen even included the crucial “go to jail” corner square, had patented The Landlord’s Game in 1903.

Magie’s Monopoly came with a purpose: to demonstrate the evils of wealth accumulation. She invented The Landlord’s Game after observing the world as a land-grabbing competition — to her, “the game of life” — where oil, steel, and railroad monopolists like Carnegie and Rockefeller got rich while most players remained poor. Inspired throughout her life by the economist Henry George, who proposed an early progressive “single tax” on land, Magie also imagined an alternate political system. “Lizzie created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a

monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents,” wrote researcher Mary Pilon. “Her vision was an embrace of dualism and contained a contradiction within itself, a tension trying to be resolved between opposing philosophies.”

Only the monopolist set sustained. No reference to the other is made in Monopoly’s goals today: Collect the cash. Conquer the land. Construct the houses. Conspire for others’ bankruptcy.

For years my siblings and I have memorized them, internalized them, fought for our egos by their rules. During the game, if my sister got locked up? Excellent. If my brother suggested teamwork? Fool. Ethics? You kidding? Rich get richer, poor get poorer; it’s all part of the game. Anti-capitalist critique? Never heard of her. Magie died with little money or recognition; Darrow and Hasbro made millions. Hasbro’s spin-offs now extend far beyond Monopoly and Monopoly Socialism to include Monopoly Cash Grab, “Who can grab the most cash?”, Monopoly Cheater’s Edition, “What can you get away with?”, and Monopoly Plus, “Build your empire ... animated by funny sidekicks.”

Perhaps Hasbro — building squares of property toward its own monopoly of the board game market — also has an ego at stake.

Its capitalist game was never a game at all.

For those who would condemn teaching children greed at school, mascot Rich Uncle Pennybags already does the job at home: for more than 1 billion players worldwide. For perspective, some estimate that globally there are 1.48 billion primary and secondary students. Monopoly has been schooling us (pun intended). Finding us sprawled across the floor in our most relaxed familial moments, Monopoly teaches us a lesson in cash and conquest. With some practice, we could incantate these ambitions in our dreams. Unchecked, we begin to wish we could incantate the same for our realities. We believe we participate in entertainment, not education; unknowingly, we become young capitalists-in-training. We can no longer imagine the thousand alternate possibilities for the world depicted in the game, and even less so for the world we live in.

I was probably eight years old when I started playing Monopoly. Since then, I’ve always associated the game with some good apolitical fun. Monopoly Socialism showed me otherwise: that even my favorite board games were not immune to capitalist logic. Without my Christmas gift this year, I may never have known of the class struggle to be waged — not on Wall Street or Capitol Hill but right in my own living room, starting with the tidied-up Monopoly set sitting innocently back on the shelf, while my siblings and I sat alienated from one another in our own rooms. 

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INTERVIEWS

The Struggle for Global Justice with

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC G

eoffrey Robertson QC is a distinguished human rights barrister, academic, author, and broadcaster who holds dual Australian and British citizenship. Mr. Robertson has won landmark rulings in the highest courts in Britain, Europe, and the Commonwealth. Among his numerous other accomplishments is his highly-rated television program, “Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypotheticals.” He is the founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers, the U.K.’s largest human rights practice, a Master of the Middle Temple, and a visiting professor in human rights law at Queen Mary College in London. In 2018, he was awarded an Order of Australia medal for “his distinguished service to the law and the legal profession as an international human rights lawyer and advocate for global civil liberties.”

Harvard Political Review: Your career has taken you around the globe with cases involving Salman Rushdie, Julian Assange, Mike Tyson, and the Armenian government, among others. What inspired you, a boy born and raised in the suburbs of Sydney, to have a career in international law and human rights?

46 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW SUMMER 2020

with Jack Taylor

Geoffrey Robertson: Nobody thought much about human rights where I grew up — I can’t recall the concept having any traction in Australia in the 1950s. I did have a teenage desire to do something about injustice, induced by reading the works of Charles Dickens and by observing the contemptuous treatment

by Australia of its aboriginal people and its ban on any nonWhite immigrants. When studying law, I was influenced by the scholarship of my professor, Julius Stone, whose teaching raised the prospect of fighting injustice through international treaties and courts. I became involved in student politics and was spotted by the CIA as a potential prime minister — it made many mistakes in those days. It secretly funded a “scholarship” — a three-month trip to the U.S. for Asian student leaders — to try to convince us that America was the best place in the world. I got to meet Gerald Ford and Timothy Leary and was billeted with the young Pee-Wee Hermann. I made a bee-line for Harvard where I was interviewed by Dean Cavers for postgraduate studies. But this prospect was trumped by an offer of a Rhodes scholarship, which took me to Oxford and the English Bar. I became a regular advocate in the Privy Council, acting pro bono for men about to be hanged in various countries in the British Commonwealth,

INTERVIEWS

and trying to develop international standards to get them off death row. This was my trajectory to a career in international law, in practice rather than at a university, although I did publish a book, “Crimes Against Humanity – The Struggle for Global Justice,” in 1999. A fellow named John Bolton reviewed it in The Washington Times and called me a threat to America. I had urged the U.S. to sign up [for] the International Criminal Court, so I guess the CIA may have thought it did not get its money’s worth from my scholarship.

American death rows!

HPR: Over your career, you have worked as a prosecutor and a defense attorney in more than 200 cases. How do you choose who you prosecute and who you defend?

GR: Because, in this case, Turkey is “neuralgic” — the word that the British Foreign Office used to describe it in some secret memoranda I obtained under our Freedom of Information Act. The Foreign Office privately admitted that it was genocide, but they could not say so because Turkey would take diplomatic and economic reprisals. Turkey is a NATO member of great strategic importance, and for that reason, the U.S. government cannot admit the truth either. President Obama always said that he would call it a genocide, but he quailed when he became president and called it “Medz Yeghern” — an Armenian phrase which means a great catastrophe. Donald Trump, for all his bravado, dare not speak the truth either by calling it “genocide.” Turkey is too strategically important, and its neuralgia must not be stoked by honest description of its history.

GR: The answer to this question involves a notion of professionalism that does not apply to American lawyers. I don’t choose cases — they choose me. British barristers operate on the “cabrank” principle — like a taxi, we have a duty to take on anyone who flags us down, unless, of course, they can’t pay! This rule serves to ensure that even the most demonized of defendants can find a good barrister to stand up for them in court. It’s also meant to protect us from being confused with the views of our clients — although, of course, it doesn’t. I’ve had death threats for defending Julian Assange and for acting for Salman Rushdie when there was an attempt to prosecute him for writing “The Satanic Verses.” The Bar of England is a referral profession — we are sent instructions by solicitors who are presumed to know which of us can best speak for their clients. I am entitled to turn down cases in areas in which I am unfamiliar, but I would accept the side that came to me first in media or constitutional law.

In criminal law, I am usually briefed to defend, but I have been involved in prosecutions of international criminals like Augusto Pinochet and Hastings Banda.

HPR: You have been counsel in landmark cases in constitutional, criminal, media and international law. Is there a case you have been involved in that means the most to you, and if so, why?

GR: There are a few cases that stand out. At the Old Bailey [court] after the Iraq War, cross examination exposed the hypocrisy of the Thatcher government, which had secretly sent arms to Saddam Hussein. Thatcher’s trade minister confessed: “We were economical with the actualité” — a clever way of saying that the government had lied. Then there was an appeal case in Britain’s highest court, Wall Street Journal v. Jameel, which established a public interest defence for investigating journalists in English common law. The U.K. has no First Amendment, and London had become the libel capital of the world — “a town named Sue,” American writers called it. But I guess my favorite memory is the Privy Council decision in Pratt v. Attorney General of Jamaica, in which the Court held that a prolonged stay on death row amounts to torture and requires the death sentence to be commuted. It took six months to prepare for the hearing, but I am told that over 1,000 death sentences have been commuted as a result. It has not been followed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is almost as inward looking as the current U.S. president, although Justice Stephen Breyer mentions it occasionally. If [the Pratt ruling] was adopted as a precedent, it would empty a lot of

HPR: In your book, “An Inconvenient Genocide,” you establish the case outlining the Armenian Genocide where the Ottoman Empire systematically murdered up to 1.2 million Armenians during World War I. You suggest that proving that this was an act of genocide is “inconvenient” for the world. Why is that?

HPR: In your book “Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice,” you mention that you were born on the day of the Nuremberg Judgement — Sept. 30, 1946 — and you describe your life as “a precise temporal measure of the extent to which the international community has delivered on the momentous promise of that day.” What made the Nuremberg Judgement so significant? And to what extent have we delivered on the promise it evoked?

GR: Well, it was the creation of international criminal law.

Before Nuremberg, international law applied only to states and not to individual political or military leaders. The point of my passing reference to my birthday was to say that 73 years is the length of time that it has taken to get to a stage where we have still not yet fully delivered on the Nuremberg promise — that those who commit crimes against humanity will be punished.

We have come a certain distance — the ad hoc tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have morphed into the International Criminal Court, and there is the precedent of the U.N.’s Special Court for Sierra Leone, which put Charles Taylor in prison for life. I was the latter’s first president. But there is no justice for the Rohingya or for Jamal Khashoggi, murdered obviously on orders of the Crown Prince. Although America was never a member of the ICC, the Obama and Bush administrations were never as hostile to international justice as the Trump administration, with its childish threats to have ICC judges arrested if they dare to investigate war crime allegations against American soldiers in Afghanistan. So we have a long way to go before the Nuremberg legacy — which ironically, America helped to create — can be delivered.

HPR: You have worked in the fields of international law and human rights for nearly 50 years. Has the landscape of the field changed much in that time? Are countries more

SUMMER 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 47

INTERVIEWS

receptive to the jurisdiction of legal bodies like the ICC than they once were?

GR: The landscape has certainly changed and for the better.

Back in the early 70s, I recall writing begging letters to Pinochet and Idi Amin, asking them politely to stop torturing people.

By the turn of the century, I was appearing for Human Rights Watch in the case in Britain that ordered Pinochet to stand trial for breaches of the U.N.’s Convention against Torture. What has been achieved over that period and until 2012 is a legal structure and a jurisprudence for dealing with international criminality, but it raised too many expectations about its universal application. I remember those early demonstrations in Damascus with protestors raising banners saying “al-Assad to the Hague.” After a few thousand protestors were shot, I called it a crime against humanity, which would justify a Security Council reference to the ICC. But it took four more years and 400,000 deaths before the U.K. proposed it, and then ... it was vetoed by Russia and China. Now, we have an American government which displays contempt for the whole exercise. Why should smaller countries respect the ICC when great powers do not? I guess it still offers a form of justice for pariah states and brutal warlords, and I hope it gets hold of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, whose indictment for the genocide in Darfur was supported even by America.

But I am afraid that any perpetrator with friends among the “Big Five” on the Security Council will have effective immunity.

HPR: In November of last year, Gambia filed a suit on behalf of the Rohingya Muslims against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice for the crime of genocide.

The ICC has also authorized an investigation. What does this current case say about these institutions and our ability, today, to bring human rights abusers to justice?

GR: It says something, but not much more than I have already said: Myanmar lacks powerful friends, and although one human rights hypocrite, Aung San Suu Kyi, was internationally shamed, she was playing to her local audience. The ICC prosecutor should issue an arrest warrant for five of her generals, but I doubt they will appear in The Hague anytime soon. It will be the same story, I am afraid, with the perpetrators of the mass murder of Tamils in Sri Lanka in 2009 — some of [whom] have just got back into power. In recent years, I’ve been advocating for the use of Magnitsky laws — operating under national rather than international law as a means to at least sanction human rights violators. There is the Magnitsky Act passed by the U.S. Congress, which was copied and improved in some respects by Canada and Britain, and is being considered by Australia. The Act is a way of naming and shaming violators, preventing them from banking in or visiting Western democracies. I think the sanctions could and should be stronger, preventing wrongdoers from educating their children or sending their parents for medical treatment in the West. It provides at least some form of sanction based on national laws which work, rather than the “catch as catch can” quality of international criminal justice.

HPR: With the rise of multinationals after World War II has come the encroachment of big business into issues of

48 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW SUMMER 2020

human rights — both directly and indirectly. For example, in Myanmar, Facebook was used as a platform by some to incite hate speech and call for the genocide of the Rohingya minority. What responsibilities do you think multinational corporations have in regard to human rights, and how might we enforce this?

GR: This goes back to one failure at Nuremberg to develop criminal liability for corporations that assisted the Nazi atrocities. We no longer remember that Hugo Boss made the concentration camp uniforms! Now, we have the recent problem that multinational companies like Facebook unwittingly spread disinformation on the internet. This is becoming a real problem for democracy, as the Mueller report showed with Russian interference in the 2016 election, and now we have dangerously false information about COVID-19. The problem is how to combat fake news without laws that can be used against political opposition — something that is happening in Malaysia and even France.

There is an NGO called Avaaz, which is trialling the idea of using fact-checkers: when a post is found to be false, the internet provider is obliged to notify all who have downloaded it.

HPR: How do you view America’s record on human rights? And what drives the ebb and flow of the nation’s advocacy of human rights?

GR: In my autobiography, published in 2017, I wrote: “I have never faltered in my general acceptance of America’s leadership of the free world — a result, I suspect, of my knowledge about the alternatives.” It’s a line I would not write today — how can you follow a leader who cares nothing about the free world, but only about himself? The nation that has contributed so much to our thinking about human rights has nothing to offer — to climate change, the ICC, the Iran nuclear deal, the World Trade Organization, even most recently to the World Health Organization. It’s tragic, really, and the baton has now passed to Europe’s lawyers and philosophers, as we try to shore up rule-based treaties and institutions which the U.S. helped to initiate but now wants no part of. I am currently acting for a family whose young son was killed by an American wife of a CIA operative at an English airbase. She fled the country, and the U.K. asked for her extradition, but U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tore up the request and condemned it as “abusive.” The real abuse is an arrogant attitude of exceptionalism, which promotes the idea that the U.S. is above the rule of international law. It was epitomized by former U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, who wanted to bomb The Hague if the ICC ever got its hands on an American war criminal. Now, that attitude is back with a vengeance, and the pity of it is how it diminishes the contribution of American scholarship and enthusiasm to human rights. 

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