Why Washington Is Broken

Congressman Delaney has an Op-Ed in The Washington Post about our broken Congress and a bill to fix it. As he writes,

Representative democracy is in crisis in the United States. One of the three pillars of our system of government — the legislative branch — is failing. The current Congress has shut down the federal government, bickers constantly and increasingly does not speak broadly to the American people. Obvious problems, from a struggling middle class to a flawed tax code to crumbling roads and bridges, go unaddressed. The American people have certainly noticed; according to Gallup, 80 percent disapprove of Congress

We can’t let 535 people continue to limit the progress of a nation of more than 300 million.

After two decades spent gaining a data-driven perspective in the private sector, I believe that problems on this scale are usually caused by structural failures. Our electoral process has created perverse incentives that have warped our democracy and empowered special interests and a vocal minority. Congressional dysfunction is the logical result of closed primaries, too many gerrymandered one-party seats and low-turnout elections.

To address these problems, I filed the Open Our Democracy Act in July. If passed, the legislation would mandate open primaries for House elections, begin the process of national redistricting reform and make Election Day the equivalent of a federal holiday.

Addressing Delaney's solution to the problem of "broken government" starts with figuring out what's wrong. Delaney doesn't pay much attention to this issue, but I'm happy to do the work for him. Or at the very least, I'll quote some guys who will do the work for him. The key here is understanding the US is a presidential republic, and that this form of government is actually a pretty terrible form of democracy.

We often talk about the "greatness" of American democracy, but we're a huge outlier. There have been quite a few presidential democracies in Latin America. All of them have failed. Basically, the US is the only presidential democracy to have remained stable for a substantial period of time, and there's some very particular reasons for that. I'll get to that in a second. But first, what's so bad with our government? The great Yale Political Scientist Juan Linz identified four key problems back in 1994 in his classic book The Failure of Presidential Democracy. To quote Mainwaring and Shugart's review:

First, in presidential systems, the president and assembly have competing claims to legitimacy. Both powers are popularly elected, and the origin and survival of each is independent from the other. If a majority of legislators favor policies different from those the president pursues, a dramatic conflict between the assembly and the executive can erupt. “No democratic principle exists to resolve disputes between the executive and the legislature about which of the two actually represents the will of the people” (p. 63). Linz argues that parliamentarism obviates this problem because the executive is not independent of the assembly. If the majority of the assembly favors a change in policy direction, it can replace the government by exercising its no-confidence vote.

Second, the fixed term of the president’s office introduces a rigidity that is less favorable to democracy than the flexibility offered by parliamentary systems, where governments are not elected for a fixed term of office but rather depend on the ongoing confidence of the assembly. Because under presidentialism the chief executive cannot bolster his or her authority either through a vote of confidence or by dissolving the parliament to call new elections, presidential leadership can be weaker than that provided by some prime ministers. Presidential constitutions often manifest a contradiction “between the desire for a strong and stable executive and the latent suspicion of that same presidential power” (p. 55). Moreover, it is extremely difficult to remove a president from office, regardless of his/her level of competence and support among legislators and other relevant political actors. By virtue of their greater ability to promote changes in the cabinet and government, parliamentary systems afford greater opportunities for resolving disputes. Such a safety valve may enhance regime stability. 

Just as presidentialism makes it difficult to remove a democratically elected head of government who no longer has support, it usually makes it impossible to extend the term of popular presidents beyond constitutionally set limits. Although such provisions are not inherent in the regime type, most presidential constitutions bar presidents from serving successive terms. Presidents therefore have relatively little time to pursue their projects and, as a result, are often tempted to try to accomplish a great deal in a short term. “This exaggerated sense of urgency on the part of the president may lead to ill-conceived policy initiatives, overly hasty stabs at implementation, unwarranted anger at the lawful opposition, and a host of other evils” (p. 66). 

Third, Linz argues that presidentialism has a winner-takes-all logic that is unfavorable to democratic stability. In parliamentary systems, “Power-sharing and coalition-forming are fairly common, and incumbents are accordingly attentive to the demands and interests of even the smaller parties” (p. 56). In presidential systems, the direct popular election is likely to imbue the president with a feeling that he/she need not undertake the tedious process of constructing coalitions and making concessions to the opposition. Moreover, “The danger that zero-sum presidential elections pose is compounded by the rigidity of the president’s fixed term in office. Winners and losers are sharply defined for the entire period of the presidential mandate... The losers must wait at least four or five years without any access to executive power and patronage” (p. 56). 

Fourth, Linz argues that the “style of presidential politics” is less propitious for democracy than the style of parliamentary politics. In contrast to prime ministers, a president is called upon to be both the head of state and the head of government, and the exigencies of these two roles at times are in conflict. The president’s sense of being the representative of the entire nation may lead him/her to lamentable intolerance of the opposition. The absence in actual presidential systems of a monarch or a ‘president of the republic’ deprives them of an authority who can on occasion exercise restraining power (p. 62)."

In short, presidential democracies are primed for conflict, lack the intra-government mechanisms for solving conflict, lack the democratic mechanisms for resolving conflict and encourage a type of politics that favors greater conflict. With this unfortunate disposition towards political conflict, a couple things tend to happen. The first route is gridlock. It becomes politically favorable to sabotage the ruling party whenever possible. Long-term gridlock causes extra-legislative points of power to emerge. For the US, this means an overactive President and Supreme Court that essentially creates legislation. Once this process no longer becomes tenable, the government dissolves, usually in some form of military junta.

Needless to say, we're lucky to have avoided it. And the saving grace of American politics through the twentieth century was the strange heterogeneity of its political parties. Largely, this was due to Democrats' willingness to accept apartheid as a cost for loyalty in the South. But it led to strange situations where incredibly liberal politician like Nelson Rockefeller were Republicans and incredibly conservative politicians like Strom Thurmond were Democrats. It wasn't surprising for people to reach across the aisle or for voters to have candidates they preferred in both parties. Both liberal and conservative ideologies were widely represented.

The breakdown of this heterogeneity is often attributed to civil rights, but I believe that it was inevitable regardless. This comes from the problem of "first past the post" (FPP) voting. In a voting system where a candidate is elected by a majority of the vote, voters are most likely to get their interests represented if they engage in strategic voting. This usually means to vote for the candidate most similar to your beliefs but also most likely to win.

What do I mean? Imagine a scenario with 4 candidates: Green, Democrat, Republican, Tea. I hope the ideological spectrum becomes clear. Voters pick the candidates most ideologically similar to them, and it turns out that the Democrat wins. This isn't all that bad for the Greens. They got their second-favored choice. For the Teas and Republicans, though, this is a disaster. The Democrat was their third-preferred candidate. So, the next time around, they drop their candidate and vote Republican. This leads to a conservative victory, since the liberals split the vote between their two separate candidates. In the end, this leads the Greens to drop their candidate, leaving us with a fiercely competitive two-party system.

Admittedly, this doesn't always happen so smoothly, but given enough feedback and enough iterations, an FPP voting system finds a sense of equilibrium between two ideologically pure parties. This pattern is empirically confirmed, which is why most countries don't actually vote this way. Those that do tend to have active movements in favor of alternative voting systems. This is what was happening in the UK not too long ago. But it hasn't happened yet in the US, and that's a huge problem. So we all engage in strategic voting. While this is the easiest way for everyone to get their views represented in Washington, this is the worst-case scenario for the American government.

So that's the gist of the problem. We have a government that can't handle conflict. We have a voting system that creates tons of conflict. We're stuck.

How do we get out of this? I don't really know. The last time the US had this much political partisanship was before the Civil War. That ended well. Things ended pretty poorly for most Latin American presidential democracies too.

You have to judge Delaney's recommendations from this perspective. These are all programs that I support, in the name of better democracy, but they only go so far. Gerrymandering is a problem, no doubt, but there would be plenty of partisanship due to Americans' ideological sorting. It turns out that liberals prefer to live with liberals, and conservatives prefer to live with conservatives. This process is known as ideological sorting, and it occurs both between states, and within states. By that, I mean that people tend to move to the state they ideologically prefer, and they tend to live in a ideologically comfortable part of that state. Once you take ideological sorting into account, gerrymandering doesn't have that large of an effect on partisanship.

Open primaries are a nice concept, but research on Louisiana and Washington shows that they have almost no effect and on the partisan composition of governments. Parties remain powerful even without party-driven primaries. This was the chief conclusion of the only expert witness in California's recent drive to create open primaries.

Expanding voting roles is a partisan issue. Democrats believe that they win when more people vote, and Republicans tend to believe that they do better when less people vote. It's hard to see how any self-interested political party would support policies that they know would harm them. Plus, there is a strong ideological current within more conservative circles towards less voter rights. This comes up in the Tea Party push to abolish the direct election of Senators. Nonetheless, research on voting patterns tends to show that total turnout really doesn't matter all that much. Bigger aspects of voter preferences, including punishing incumbent parties, have a much stronger effect.

Again, I don't think that Delaney is proposing something bad. I think these are good ideas, just as I think reducing money in politics is a good thing. But I'm not sure if there's any simple legislative fix to the fundamental problems in the US government. There are fundamental flaws within our democracy, and it will take constitutional amendments to solve them. Considering the current level of partisanship, these aren't all that likely to happen.

I hope that it can continue to limp on for a long while, with small bursts of legislative activity occurring during "wave" years. Otherwise, we'd be best off getting used to a state of permanent dysfunction.

The Limits of Presidential Power

The recent events in Ukraine have helped put a variety of issues into perspective, many of which are only tangentially connected to crisis itself. One of the most interesting features of this discussion involves the limits of Presidential power. Many conservatives see  Obama as a weak leader, who could solve this crisis by simply showing a bit more "force." David Brooks' comments are typical.

Basically since Yalta we’ve had an assumption that borders are basically going to be borders and once that comes into question, if in Ukraine or in Crimea or anywhere else, then all over the world all bets are off. And let’s face it, Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a — I’ll say it crudely — but a manhood problem in the Middle East.

[...]

Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad or somebody like Putin? I think a lot of the rap is unfair, but certainly in the Middle East there is an assumption that he’s not tough enough.

The problem with Brooks' statement is twofold. First, it assumes that there is no risk of overreaction. Obviously, that's ludicrous, and it requires a willful distortion of recent history to reach this conclusion. More importantly, this criticism masks a terrible misunderstanding the actual power of the presidency, and it's important to set that right. 

 

Calls of tyranny aside, the power of the president is actually quite limited in the American system of government. There's very little that he can do without the support of Congress, and it's telling that the places where Obama's tyranny "rings loudest" are precisely the exact same places where Congress relinquished authority wholeheartedly. You don't have the ongoing NSA scandal, for example, without Congress passing the Patriot Act.

And in this instance, you don't get anything done with Russia without Congressional approval. Thankfully, Congress passed an aid and sanctions package back in April. Considering that these are the primary source of pressure on Putin's government, and they remain the forceful measure in place, we should be happy.

I think most of us know this. After all, we all went to school and were taught that Congress passes the laws. So why do we pretend otherwise. Why do we believe, as you write, that some very marginal changes to regulation are somehow the key to a national economic revival? How could we fool ourselves into thinking that a country with terrible tax policy, no government investment, a failing education system, no competition in major industries and a two-tier class system that guarantees no demand will somehow emerge as an economic giant if a little extra smog allowed? Why, because we all want to subscribe to the "Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency." As Ezra Klein recently explained,

The Founding Fathers were rebelling against an out-of-control monarch. So they constructed a political system with a powerful legislature and a relatively weak executive. The result is that the US President has little formal power to make Congress do anything. He can't force Congress to vote on a bill. He can't force Congress to pass a bill. And even if he vetoes a bill Congress can simply overturn his veto. So in direct confrontations with Congress — and that describes much of American politics these days — the president has few options.

Green Lantern theorists don't deny any of this. They just believe that there's some vague combination of public speeches and private wheedling that the president can employ to bend Congress to his will. Ron Fournier, a prominent Green Lantern theorist, offers a fairly typical prescription for presidential success:

He could talk to the media and the public more often with a more compelling and sustained message. He could build enduring relationships in Washington rather than being so blatantly transactional with his time. He could work harder, and with more empathy, on Capitol Hill to find "win-win" opportunities with Republicans.

The problem with this is that the Green Lantern Theory isn't just false. It's often backwards. The basic idea is that more aggressive and consistent applications of presidential power will break down opposition. But political science research shows the truth is often just the opposite.

When the president takes a position on an issue the opposing party becomes far more likely to take the opposite position. In a clever study, political scientist Frances Lee proved this by looking at noncontroversial issues, like whether NASA should try and send a man to Mars. She built a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and 2004. Typically, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time. But but when the President took a clear position the likelihood of a party-line vote rose to more than half. In other words, when the president pushed on an issue the opposition party became more likely to oppose him.

The reason is simple: elections are zero-sum affairs. The more the American people perceive the president as successful the less likely they are to vote for the opposition in the next election. "If you're cooperating then it suggests to the public that things are working just fine," explains Lee. "And it undercuts the whole logic of your campaign against the president or the president's party's continuation in office."

The Green Lantern Theory also infantilizes Congress. Take this Maureen Dowd column in which she argues that it's actually the president's job to force Congress to behave, as if the most powerful and democratic branch of the American government is just a bunch of petulant children waiting for discipline:

It is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It's called leadership.

This kind of thing both lets Congress off the hook and confuses Americans about where the power actually lies in American politics — and thus about who to hold accountable.

I'm trying my best to stop writing about Presidential politics, but I also was a long-time believer in the Green Lantern Theory. It's hard to give up. But that doesn't change the truth of the issue. Criticizing the President for the state of American public policy is stupid. There is almost nothing that the President can accomplish without an act of Congress already in place.

It's also a little frightening. For all the problems in government right now, the executive branch isn't nearly as corrupted as Congress. Nor is it as hated or as corrupted. Do you want a major new wave of economic policy that grows the middle class? Focus on how Congress will pass it. Wait, Congress doesn't pass anything these days? Tough, that's the only group of people who will get something done.

 

The same goes for nearly every foreign policy issue. Especially in matters of peace and war, the President rarely operates outside of the scope provided to him from Congress. Obviously, the President is free to direct his administration to conduct diplomacy, but any meaningful measure requires an action of Congress.

This should make you pretty pessimistic, which is appropriate. Thanks to growing partisanship, corruption and an increasing focus on political gamesmanship, our Congress is the least effective that it has ever been. Conservatives, when they speak about President power and "strength" are blinding themselves to the truly important issues facing this country.

 

As my Dad always says, "we have a bought and sold Congress." Getting over this problem involves one of two things: either one side gets control of the presidency and a filibuster-proof majority in both chambers, or we need aggressive citizen action to remake the way we conduct our elections. I don't know if I will see the former in my lifetime, but thankfully Lawrence Lessig is leading the charge to address the latter. I have high hopes for the Mayday PAC, but to reform our political system, we also need to focus in on the fundamental problems. Empty posturing about "manhood" won't get us anywhere.

What Comes Next in Ukraine? A Debate (2)

After the downing of flight MH17, it's worthwhile to take stock of our knowledge of the events on the ground. The tragedy can lead to two very disparate outcomes. On the one hand, the crash could encourage Europe to put the kind of pressure on Russia needed to finally end its meddling. On the other, both sides might see little reason to avoid escalation. In a previous post, I presented the case for the former outcome. I'll now discuss the latter.

While a case could be made that the events in Ukraine have finally reached a decisive point, there is no guarantee that pressure from Europe will force Russia to stop encouraging its proxy war. This is the argument presented by political scientist Paul D'Anieri in The Monkey Cage, which is hosted by The Washington Post. As he writes,

To see why a cease-fire works to Russia’s advantage, the Ukrainian leadership need only look to Ukraine’s western border, where a slice of its neighbor Moldova known as Transnistria has been occupied by pro-Russian forces since 1992. The conflict began when a group that did not want Moldova to secede from the Soviet Union took up arms, with extensive support from the Soviet/Russian military. A cease-fire was declared in July 1992, and the conflict has remained “frozen” ever since.

The Ukrainians can also look to Azerbaijan, where the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has been occupied by Armenia—with support from Russia—for nearly the same period, again after a conflict and cease-fire. Or it can look to Georgia, where a similar practice was followed, until Russia actually invaded, detaching Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008.

Indeed, what is happening in Eastern Ukraine seems not to be a one-off conflict, but rather the most recent in a series of moves by Russia to exploit local tensions and seize bordering territory. The downing of a civilian airliner was madness, but there is method in everything else that Russia has done in Eastern Ukraine.

Of course, the Ukrainians can also look at their own experience with Crimea, where the international community briefly registered outrage at its annexation before returning to business as usual. Russia has spent considerable time and resources building its influence in Europe and in Washington, and it understands how to wield it. While the Dutch and British governments have been vocal in their outrage over the incident, other European leaders have been quieter, preferring, it seems, to try to preserve a constructive working relationship with Russia. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has been particularly reticent, perhaps because of Germany’s long-standing coziness with Russia, and perhaps because of her outrage at the recent revelations of U.S. spying on Germany.

It is natural to ask what ‘the West’ can do to stop the conflict. Raising the cost for Russia may help to deter future aggression, but an enormous amount of empirical research on sanctions shows that their efficacy is extremely spotty. NATO governments have so far has been unwilling to incur major costs to punish Russia. Russia reads this level of commitment clearly: In response to the sanctions enacted over Crimea, Deputy Prime Ministry Dmitry Rogozin tweeted that “NATO people” should “send me your teeth ground in impotent rage.”

In sum, both the Russian and Ukrainian governments are much more realistic about how this will really play out than are international optimists. The Russians know that holding the territory is key, that they can deflect serious consequences, and the demanding a cease-fire helps them do both. The Ukrainians know that the only way they will get their territory back is to take it by force.

D'Aneri's argument fits nicely within the framework of a classic example of Game Theory - the prisoners' dilemma. Most people are aware of this decision-making model, but for those that aren't here's the gist. Under a prisoners' dilemma, two agents are forced to decide whether or not they cooperate. In the case of two prisoners, they can cooperate by both remaining silent. If they do, they have the chance of receiving a reduced sentence. On the other hand, if either testifies against the other, he could potentially avoid prison altogether while condemning his partner to a long sentence. If both agree to testify, both will suffer.

The available choices can be formally described in this kind of table that follows. Game theorists analyze these scenarios by precisely quantifying the potential losses each agent faces in the possible scenarios, but we don't need to go that far for this example.

The prisoners' dilemma, as described by National Affairs.

In the case of Russia and Ukraine, each country is presented with the following choices. They can choose to cooperate by seeking a diplomatic solution, or they can choose noncooperation through military escalation and increased violence. Cooperation would benefit both countries most in the end, by avoiding war, but the costs of backing down whole the other side pushes on are so high that the optimal solution for both sides is to fight on.

Ukraine cannot accept the invasion of Donetsk. It had to fight on, and it has to be prepared to invade Crimea if it is able to secure a position in the East. The current government has almost no legitimacy as it is. How could they claim a mandate to rule if they cannot ensure territorial integrity? Moreover, much of Ukraine's wealth is located in the east, which is home to a majority of its heavy industry. Ukraine is already facing an economic crisis. It's hard to imagine how the western half of the country would function if it did actually split.

Similarly, given the war fever gripping the country, Russia faces such huge domestic costs from backing down - national humiliation at the top of the list, that I'm not sure that we should rule out the chance of an invasion. After all, Russia is now using artillery on the boarder to assault the Ukrainian army advancing on Donetsk. The media have attached so much national value to this 'rescue' of Novorossiya that Putin's standing as a leader is now at stake.

Framing the issue this way, it's hard to see a good reason for Ukraine to stop bombing and Russia to stop shelling. The longer this continues, a diplomatic solution will only become less likely. Residents of Solvyansk and Donetsk are irate by the Ukrainian army's inability to distinguish between rebels and civilians. As I wrote in a previous article, a thousand of people have died and a hundred thousand have already fled. The bad blood won't suddenly dissipate if the Ukrainian and Russian governments magically decide to talk.

Even if this is the beginning of the event, we should definitely expect more violence along the way. Both sides benefit by applying as much force as possible during this critical moment. This makes me wonder if there is a point where the strategic calculus changes. Is there a way to make the price of escalation high enough so that neither side wants to push things further? If we wish to draw the line, where would we want that to be? Would we allow for a Russian invasion?

This is a very difficult question to answer. We have no meaningful alliances with Ukraine, and the threat of nuclear war with Russia lurks, even if it is still very unlikely. We couldn't accept that, which makes me believe that the US and Europe might eventually decide that a Russian invasion is tolerable. We allowed this in Hungary and Prague during the Cold War, and it's arguable that the stakes were much higher then.

Whither the Ivies?

The New Republic has done us all a favor by hosting a terrific debate on the public good of America's elite institutions. Now, there is no doubt that the Ivies and other major private American universities are the best in the world. The problem stems from their role in encouraging economic inequality and furthering the gap between the sliver  of the elite that attends these universities and everyone else.

William Deresiewicz does a brilliant job summarizing these issues, and it's worth reading the entire article. But to pull just one quote selectively,

This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. As of 2006, only about 15 percent of students at the most competitive schools came from the bottom half. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is apt to be. And public institutions are not much better than private ones. As of 2004, 40 percent of first-year students at the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of more than $100,000, up from 32 percent just five years earlier.

The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game. The more hurdles there are, the more expensive it is to catapult your kid across them. Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools. The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely. Today, fewer than half of high-scoring students from low-income families even enroll at four-year schools.

The problem isn’t that there aren’t more qualified lower-income kids from which to choose. Elite private colleges will never allow their students’ economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can’t afford to—they need a critical mass of full payers and they need to tend to their donor base—and it’s not even clear that they’d want to.

And so it is hardly a coincidence that income inequality is higher than it has been since before the Great Depression, or that social mobility is lower in the United States than in almost every other developed country. Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.

While it is easy to dismiss this problem as the jeremiads of a particular class and those that aspire to join this class, consider this: we offer these institutions massive subsidies through federal financial aid, the largesse of the national research budget and tax exempt status. My alma mater, Yale University, regularly hands out multimillion dollar salaries, has an endowment worth billions and would owe the city of New Haven as much as 100 million dollars a year of its property was actually taxed. Many aren't aware that New Haven is a poor city, and that money is badly needed to address distressed schools, crime and drug problems. Money not paid by Yale ends up being money drawn from the rest of the city. As Milton Friedman often stated, there is almost no justification in taxing the poor to give to the rich and upper middle class.

Of course, like many issues concerning the distribution of wealth and public benefits, a lot of your opinion about the Ivy League depends on your personal perspective.  This makes it very much a glass half full, glass half empty issue. Without a doubt, I am a pure product of this system. Yale transformed me in an uncountable number of ways, and my life is profoundly different than that of my peers in Wyoming. And for each of these differences, I am much better off.

This is the heart of J.D. Chapman's response to Deresiewicz. For those people who are able to take advantage of the system's benefits, almost nothing has the same transformative power as an Ivy League education.

One of Deresiewicz's central contentions, that students at elite institutions are particularly emotionally dislocated and wayward, is presented with two kinds of evidence. The first is anecdotal and personal with no counter-examples of peers from lower profile institutions, or from outside of higher education altogether. The second is a glancing mention of what I assume was the survey "The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010," which did not appear to disaggregate data by selectivity at all. ("A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history," Deresiewicz writes.) One wonders, does he know other 18-21 year olds? My own experience suggests that thoughtful, curious people in this age group are widely prone to confused self-loathing no matter where they are.

Most of my friends today are not Ivy League graduates. They are, like most middle class people in America not in the trades, graduates of lower-profile liberal arts colleges and state universities. The ones with whom I have discussed this article are unanimous on that last point: They all felt like they were wandering around with no clear direction at that age and object to the premise that that is a special property of the Ivy Leaguer. They are also unanimous on this point: they are proud of their educations, but do not conclude from that pride that an Ivy League education is “overrated” in comparison.

I agree with Deresiewicz that liberal arts colleges like Sarah Lawrence and Reed are uniquely positioned to nurture and challenge students, and I champion them when I can. I don’t believe the Ivies are for every bright kid, and I have occasionally counseled students capable of admission to them to favor other options. And I agree that class lines are hardening in dangerous ways; the Ivies have too much money and power; and meritocracy is a delusion. That does not mean that an Ivy League diploma isn’t valuable, especially for someone whose family has no history of access to elite careers like teaching at Yale or writing for The New Republic. It means that it is valuable. Whether it should be is another discussion altogether.

During a time of increasing class disparity, the Ivies are both institutions that cater to the elite and offer some bit of meritocracy. Those that criticize the Ivies believe that we should some much more of the latter function and a lot less of the former. They believe that the inequality gap is big enough already. We would hope that the criticism of Yale would make the admissions process much more fair in the end. In the same way, we hope that people can still get ahead despite the chasm between the elite and everyone else in America. Both of those things might not be possible anymore, but it's a credit to our innate values and aspirations that we dream for something else.

This gets to the heart of Americans' difficulty in addressing the overall problem of inequality, one that John Oliver did a brilliant job of addressing recently. Americans, without question, all believe that we all have a real shot of getting rich one day. It is part of the national fantasy, and it is one of our most endearing traits. This dream, by and large, is not true, but we can't help but cheer at the incredibly few people who actually make it.

No metaphor captures this better than the major lotteries, which are terrible fiscal policies that amount to little more than a tax on the poor that also justifies cutting services. It is hard to deny the harm, but Americans love the lottery! And there is always a big emotional buildup whenever the jackpots get especially large. We get so excited about winning even though we know, as a nearly irrefutable fact, that we won't win!

Looking at the real lottery or its educational counterpart, Harvard,  means addressing fundamental philosophical questions about ourselves and our nation. Do we justify the existence of a purely elitist institution because there's an incredibly slim chance that a few poor kids might sneak in? Do we stop ourselves from addressing the huge problems of income inequality because we can't help but dream about someday, somehow, ending up on the winning side of the divide? There aren't easy questions here, but we cannot fully grapple with the state of our nation in the 21st century without trying to tackle them.

What Comes Next Ukraine? A Debate (1)

The downing of flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine is the type of tragedy that has the potential to completely reshape the West's involvement in the ongoing crisis. The outrage in England and Amsterdam is palpable, and even normally reticent countries like Germany seem to have adopted a much more aggressive attitude towards Russia over the last week. 

These are the kind of singular moments that demand we once again take stock of our knowledge of the events on the ground. It's an excellent time to ask ourselves, what comes next? Does a tragedy of this scale lead to a resolution of the rebellion or is it only another step in a dangerous environment that is quickly escalating? 

Since forecasting is inevitably an exercise in speculation,  it is a disservice to any reader to present only one side of the argument. So, I'll offer both. This article will present my case for why I believe that this is the herald of the beginning of the end. I'll follow it with an argument for why the situation might only become more dangerous in the coming weeks.

I don't believe that these arguments are fully mutually exclusive. Hopefully, seeing a more nuanced presentation of this issue will give readers room to synthesize their own opinions about what might happen and why.

The Price We Pay

In light of my previous article on the imminent end to the conflict in Ukraine, I think it's worthwhile to take a moment, complicate that conclusion and and remind ourselves of everything that's brought the Ukrainian crisis to this point. I'll say that there's about a 60 percent, maybe 70 percent chance that this is the beginning of the end. I have no idea how Europe can continue to sit on the sidelines after the death of so many Western European civilians, and the case against the Russian military only grows stronger each day.

The Guardian Gives Us a Chance to Play With Relative Risks

A post in The Guardian about black imprisonment in Britain offers this shocking, headline-grabbing statistic. To quote,

Evidence of this damaged relationship can be found in the commission's report. On the streets, black people were subjected to what the report describes as an "excess" of 145,000 stop and searches in 2008. It notes that black people constitute less than 3% of the population, yet made up 15% of people stopped by police.

The commission found that five times more black people than white people per head of population in England and Wales are imprisoned. The ethnic minority prison population has doubled in a decade – from 11,332 in 1998 to 22,421 in 2008. Over a similar period, the overall number of prisoners rose by less than two thirds. The commission says that the total number of people behind bars accelerated in the last decade despite "a similar number of crimes being reported to the police as in the early 1990s … the volume of indictable offences has fallen over this time".

If you were willing to skip over the correction at the beginning of the article, this can lead someone to quickly conclude that "The United Kingdom incarcerates 75% more black people proportionally than the United States." What are we to make of that? What are we to make of The Guardian's retraction?

On MH17, Blowback and the Future of Ukraine

When faced with an IR problem that "scares me," what is the appropriate response? No doubt, we badly want to go out there and "fix things," "bring evil-doers to justice" and "make right with the world." And without question, I am both infuriated and dispirited after witnessing 300 civilians casually murdered. Dear reader, you're not alone, I want something done too.

Nonetheless, reacting aggressively to perceived threats is very dangerous. This is something similar to the "compulsion to act," a terrible logical fallacy that comes up when faced with uncertainty and danger. The world is a scary place, and we would prefer to believe the lie that there's always something that "Obama can do" to fix it. Once again, look at "bring back our girls." What an awful situation. Wouldn't be nice if we could just ride in and fix it? We can save some lives and shoot some evil terrorists along the way! It'll be just like Kony2012 or Rambo 5. I get those two mixed up sometimes.

Obviously, we can't actually go out and fix things, not in the emotionally satisfying way that gives the world's John McCain's a hard-on (i.e. vaporizing brown kids). Overreaction is a much greater threat than under-reaction. 9/11 has proven costly not just because of the people lost that day, but because of the insane series of decisions that led to invading two countries, wasting trillions of dollars, sacrificing thousands of Americans, destabilizing vast portions of the globe, poisoning key alliances and ultimately accomplishing nothing of any meaning (aside from one dead Osama. Hurray!).

The Obama administration has learned this the hard way, after a series of humiliating foreign policy failures in the Middle East and South Asia. Invading Libya couldn't have gone worse, nor has the "Afghan surge" proven to magically build a democracy in Kabul. We bungled a response to the Arab spring and are now forced to ally with the leader of mass executions and religious suppression in Egypt. Even when we respond at the right moment, it's become painfully obvious that our choices and our realistic chances of success are extremely limited. To make matters worse, the ability to enact change in dangerous places is only becoming more rare as the dangers of asymmetric power steadily increase.

All of this is quite weird when discussing Russia, since this seemed to be the case of one of the few major powers that "got it." Throughout all of the build-up to Syria and nuclear negotiations with Iran, Russia emphasized the importance of international stability over idealism, of recognizing our limitations and the dire consequences of failure. They seemed to have learned this the hard way after having to level the North Caucasus on multiple occasions, only to see more terrorists, more violence and an even greater need to go back every few years. And yet, despite all of this hard-earned wisdom, the relentless urge to "do something" has backfired disastrously. Instead of stamping out right-wing extremism in Ukraine after Maidan and restoring East-West balance in Ukraine, they're looking at a horror show of blowback:

1. They armed terrorists that killed 300 civilians (or alternatively Russian black ops mistakenly did it on their own. Even worse). On that plane were some of the leading AIDS researchers and activists. They've guaranteed that this regime will be permanently thought of in the same context as Qaddafi's. That ended well.
2. They will face serious unrest back home for laying bare the emptiness of political ethno-nationalism. That racist frenzy they whipped up won't suddenly vanish after losing its convenience, and the threat of violence within Russia grows. Instead of containing their own Maidan, they've probably only made it more likely. Look how quickly they fell apart in Ukraine. How long will they hold up to real domestic pressure?
3. Ukraine is irreversibly now on the path to the EU and NATO. Georgia too. While Russia was trying to expand their sphere of influence and solidify regional soft power, every one of their neighbors has learned the exact opposite lesson from this: you better be in NATO or nuclear armed if you want to avoid meddling. 

In almost every conceivable way, Russia has failed. Even worse, they had "victory" right after the annexation of Crimea, but the urge to act, hubris or some combination of the two found a way to crush them along the way. The message had become clear and decisive. Stir up anti-Russian hatred in some stupid exercise of "democracy"? We'll crack the whip, and you'll pay the consequences. Instead of coming off as brutal and forceful, Moscow is proving unable to contain the mess it put together. It's hard to see how this isn't going to get much worse for them before it gets better. How do you win Ukraine now? Invade?

As Americans, we should find it very distressing that the clinical case for overreaction is staring us in the face, yet we learning nothing from it. Everything about the last few weeks in Ukraine says "cool out" and "don't do anything stupid." But the voice of America, embodied so well by you cousin, is pleading for the exact opposite. Russia has failed! Let's fail even more spectacularly!

In the meantime, the intense urge to "roll the ball out" hides what has actually been accomplished. Little would most of us know, the Obama administration has led the most aggressive response to Russian fiddling in Ukraine. Sure, sanctions don't play well on Fox News (only McCain boners there), but it looks like they've worked pretty well. The US government is now targeting Russian banks and energy companies, and the EU pushed through tougher sanctions on the day before plane was shot out of the sky. You now have the unfathomable occurrence of a Dutch Prime Minister vowing revenge. You think things are going to end well for Russia?

It's time like these that lead me to a much more reflective mood, resembling the ideology of Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. Looking at the Earth on a global or, even better, a universal scale is deeply humbling. It's a reminder of how small we are, how short our lives are and how limited we can be in trying to force through change during emotional moments. It's a reminder of the slower changes and greater challenges we face as a species, those true existential threats that are entirely divorced from the day-to-day chatter of the news media.

This is an awful tragedy. Everyone should be shocked, horrified and saddened by what has just happened. There will likely be even greater ramifications from all of this. More blood will be spilled in Ukraine. But moments like these also indicate a turning of the tide. As Dr. King reiterated, "nights are always darkest before the dawn." Everything is finally pointing towards a concerted Western response to end this issue; one that doesn't require Obama becoming a "decider" or impossible fantasies of unity within our broken political system. Diplomacy will eventually work, and it will save us from the even greater dangerously of overreaction.

A Stunt, a Spoof, and a Lesson on Racism

Joe Scanlan is marginally known in the art world for his obviously racist stunts where he either performs under the guise of a black man or has black actors perform his art for him. Justin Wong decided to take this charade even further and satire the absurd exercise by "creating" Joe Scanlan as a version of himself. This is a satire, and it is a brilliantly incisive take on the politics of "dressing up." As he writes,

The idea for Joe Scanlan came a few years ago when I became interested in the presence of straight white men within the art world. In so many other realms straight white men are deprived of social and political ‘authenticity’: look at the white appropriation of black music from blues to hip hop, the white idolization of black athletes, or the apotheosis of white politics (Bill Clinton) resting in black folksiness. In the art world, however, the discourse around art produced by straight white men often casts them as singular and generative geniuses.

This struck me as a curiosity. I wondered what it would be like to create a figure that, through a practice of what I’d like to term “willful white male idiocy,” could not only point to, but also test the limits of and explode the boundaries of straight white male positionality within the art world. Could such a project, were it successful, help to undo some of the myth of the white male genius (and its corollary: the ghettoized queer, female, poor, colored “political” artist) we have inherited from European modernism?

The idea of "willful idiocy" is especially illuminating here, and it's not a concept I had a term for before reading this article. This is probably best encapsulated by occurrences where someone acts in a racist manor or brings up a racist comment while explicitly denying that their behavior is racist. By at least playing up this factor in Scanlan, Wong has hit at one of the most bizarre yet prevalent aspects of the current American conversation surrounding race.

For example, it's not uncommon to hear liberal people saying the problem with black America is "single mothers" or talking in panicked terms about the coming "white minority." Or trying to dredge up the old straw man of "black racism." They say on one hand that they want to see black people succeed (or oppose "racism") all while blaming something endemic to black people for dysfunction in their community (or pretending that "racism" has white and black victims). You see this thing happen all the time. Even Jonathan Chait kept repeating these lies during a recent debate on race.

As Ta Nehisi Coates always emphasizes, the problem is not poverty, or marriage, or even bigotry, the problem is white supremacy. Everything else is a distraction from that crucially important fact.

The importance of Joe Scanlan is multiple and tied fundamentally to a concept of erasure. White people are terrified of being accused of being a racist, because they equate racism with a certain uncultured bigotry that's no longer acceptable. Think Cliven Bundy. But this hysterical attitude towards "racism" actually serves racist ends. It makes the conversation about individuals' behavior instead of social hierarchy, even though the latter is the real problem.

Race and bigotry were invented to justify exploiting an entire class of Americans. That exploitation has not stopped, and little effort has been spent to solve it. In fact, by "erasing" bigotry, we've spent a lot of the capital needed to address hierarchy while making it nearly impossible to acknowledge how our attitudes and assumptions perpetuate the real problem. Like it or not, as white Americans, we are all racist.

So it's not just Justin Wong, Scanlan's "creator" and author of this article. We are all Joe Scanlan in the ways we (un)consciously reinforce American white supremacy. Solving this problem starts with acknowledging that fact and investigating our own history. We say and do racist things, we benefit from racial exploitation, and we owe it to ourselves to admit that. Only then can we see through the caricatures and fictions of racism in America and gain a true appreciation for what it means to be American.

The Scientific Process and the Global Warming Debate

An article on Bill Moyers's website recently featured a brilliant interview on how our limited understanding of the scientific process influences our debate about issues like Global Warming. To quote climate scientist Michael Mann, as told by Joshua Holland,

Too often we allow the forces of anti-science, the forces of denialism, or contrarianism, to somehow frame their position as one of skepticism. But denying mainstream, well-established science based on arguments that don’t stand up scrutiny, that’s not skepticism. That’s pseudo-skepticism.

Real scientists embrace skepticism because that’s what moves science forward. That’s the self-correcting machinery, to use the language of Carl Sagan, which keeps science on this inexorable course toward a better understanding of the way the world works. If your ideas are wrong, if your theories are wrong, if they don’t hold up, if the data don’t support them, if other studies don’t come to the same conclusion, then science moves on, and it searches for a better answer. Scientists are always trying to find holes in each other’s proposed ideas, or in their own proposed ideas.

To belabor the point a little bit, Climate-change deniers are not skeptics in the true sense. They instead enter the debate with a preset agenda and cling fiercely to a limited amount of information in order to make their case. That's ideology at work.

When someone says "I'm waiting for better science," they often imply that their point of view would have to disappear from the scientific literature before they agree with the consensus. But that's not how science works. Since scientists are skeptical and contrarian by nature, you will always find literature that attacks the accepted framework of climate. This is their job, and it is how they build a professional reputation.

No paper is definitive. Each new publication part of a large, slow-moving debate that has many facets. Picking out a single paper (or even a small number) is like listening to only one debater. That's never how you reach the truth.

Actually assessing the literature is hard, because it is the work of thousands of different people. This is why major scientific bodies only do big reviews once every few years. The arguments need time to develop. Research needs to be reproduced so it can be confirmed or denied.

This is why the statements of big reviews matter. And this is why scientific consensus is so important. When the UN panel says it has reached an overwhelming consensus on climate change, it means that this is the irrefutable conclusion after working through thousands of papers. It's basically impossible to read the extent of the literature and honestly believe something else. At that point, if you are still denying climate change, its source and its risk, you are denying reality. You have no justification other ideology. You are wrong and behaving very dangerously, because denying reality has dire consequences.

What Do We Make Of American Racism After Donald Sterling?

The Donald Sterling spectacle and his ultimate removal from the NBA has sparked a very disappointing by illustrative conservative backlash. The Washington Times trying to deflect by focusing on Larry Johnson is a typical response. In doing so, they bring out the hoary trope of "black racism," a lurking threat that has never actually materialized in the last 300 years. 

First things first, "black racism" is one of the most awful terms from the history of US race relations. White victim-hood, in particular, is a really challenging topic as it has often been used to justify some of the most horrendous acts of violence we've ever seen. Lynchings, for example, were justified because they protected the "purity of the white race" against miscegenation. In more recent debates, the concept gets trotted out to dismantle affirmative action or policies aimed towards reparations. The Atlantic has a very instructive history of the term in that context. To quote Stanley Fish,

What I want to say, following Bush's reasoning, is that a similar forgetting of history has in recent years allowed some people to argue, and argue persuasively, that affirmative action is reverse racism. The very phrase Reverse Racism contains the argument in exactly the form to which Bush objected: In this country whites once set themselves apart from blacks and claimed privileges for themselves while denying them to others. Now, on the basis of race, blacks are claiming special status and reserving for themselves privileges they deny to others. Isn't one as bad as the other? The answer is no. One can see why by imagining that it is not 1993 but 1955, and that we are in a town in the South with two more or less distinct communities, one white and one black. No doubt each community would have a ready store of dismissive epithets, ridiculing stories, self-serving folk myths, and expressions of plain hatred, all directed at the other community, and all based in racial hostility. Yet to regard their respective racisms--if that is the word--as equivalent would be bizarre, for the hostility of one group stems not from any wrong done to it but from its wish to protect its ability to deprive citizens of their voting rights, to limit access to educational institutions, to prevent entry into the economy except at the lowest and most menial levels, and to force members of the stigmatized group to ride in the back of the bus. The hostility of the other group is the result of these actions, and whereas hostility and racial anger are unhappy facts wherever they are found, a distinction must surely be made between the ideological hostility of the oppressors and the experience-based hostility of those who have been oppressed.

Not to make that distinction is, adapting George Bush's words, to twist history and forget the terrible plight of African-Americans in the more than 200 years of this country's existence. Moreover, to equate the efforts to remedy that plight with the actions that produced it is to twist history even further. Those efforts, designed to redress the imbalances caused by long-standing discrimination, are called affirmative action; to argue that affirmative action, which gives preferential treatment to disadvantaged minorities as part of a plan to achieve social equality, is no different from the policies that created the disadvantages in the first place is a travesty of reasoning. Reverse Racism is a cogent description of affirmative action only if one considers the cancer of racism to be morally and medically indistinguishable from the therapy we apply to it. A cancer is an invasion of the body's equilibrium, and so is chemotherapy; but we do not decline to fight the disease because the medicine we employ is also disruptive of normal functioning. Strong illness, strong remedy: the formula is as appropriate to the health of the body politic as it is to that of the body proper.

Even without the disgusting historical record, the image of a black racist is dangerous because it plays up a false equivalence. Racism is a lot more than just "mean things said by this guy." This is a mistake that many (Conservative) white people make. They believe that racism is what happens when people say mean things to you because of your race. You are "hated" for being white. It helps that most "racism" scandals in the US, like Donald Sterling's, are reduced to this definition. This definition is behind a lot of the crazy beliefs like "white people are greater victims of racism than black people." A majority of white Americans actually believe this.

I would say a better and more fundamental definition is this: Racism is things actually happening to you because of your race. 50 years ago, that means lynching, beatings, getting slowly but surely robbed by racist property owners, employers and financial institutions. Even if a lot of those things don't happen any more, there are continuing effects from this kind of racism.

For example, you can't explain the existence of ghettos without white violence. As black people migrated to Northern cities at the beginning of the 20th century, they were certain to have their property destroyed, if not be killed, if they didn't live in the poorest most crime ridden neighborhoods of the cities. When they didn't, riots happened. Up until the 50s, you could expect one every couple of years. The Cicero Riots, for example, were an international scandal. Today, they're hardly even remembered. But their effects still reverberate in segregated neighborhoods and racially-limited options for getting a mortgage.

Black poverty, urban crime, diminished educational expectations and terrible health outcomes all have some thread dating back to the Jim Crow South or Northern Apartheid. Despite all of our best intentions, those evils of the first half of the twentieth century are institutionalized and do not go away easily. I think it would be very strange to believe otherwise, especially looking at data of racial attainment, and witnessing the huge lag for African Americans in every social sphere.

Today, the racism that I'm talking about is mass incarceration. Black people are 30 percent of the population and 60 percent of the prisoners. Today, there is no doubt about widespread bias in treatment from recruiters, doctors, teachers and schools. Looking at CEO's, top managers, politicians and leaders in almost every sphere, it's hard to deny the huge professional achievement gap. And most obviously, you cannot talk about persistent income and wealth inequality in US without taking race into account too.

Both races experience the first kind of racism I described above. But whites do not experience the latter. That's why I think it's more appropriate to call the latter "real racism." If someone says a mean thing to you, tough shit. Or if they say they hate you because of your race, you won't experience material harm.

Either way, it's not nearly equivalent to being slammed up against the wall in New York because the explicit policy of the police department is to harass people of your race. Or having every basic civil right stripped from you by a racist drug war. Or struggling to get by when you are stuck in segregated schools and broken neighborhoods. There's a whole different scale here.

Going back to The Washington Times, you start to get a real picture of the problem when they try to cast Larry Johnson as a "black racist."

• Johnson is talking about black ownership in a country that has intentionally limited black wealth for almost all of its history.
• Sterling has a much broader history of harmful racist behavior, and this is more important than words.
• The concept of "black racism" tries to mix up the two kinds of racism I described. The Washington Times is trying to make people believe that the "real" racism of social discrimination and mass incarceration isn't nearly as terrible as it is in reality. This is part of a conservative political agenda.

A thought experiment might help here too. Ask yourself whose racism is worse: Mayor Bloomberg or Cliven Bundy.

Now, Cliven Bundy has some really abhorrent views of African Americans and has said some really terrible things about them. It's further evidence that any story starting with "Let me tell you something about the Negro" is bound to end badly. Mayor Bloomberg has never done anything like that. In fact, it would be hard to find any evidence of Bloomberg's " ignorant belief of ones superiority i.e..skin color, religion, sexual preferences," to use a common (white) definition of racism.

But Bundy, even though he said racist things and has seemingly racist beliefs, has never caused the harm to African Americans in any meaningful sense. On the other hand, Bloomberg is the chief advocate of Stop and Frisk, a program that has been devastating to the African American community in New York. We're talking about thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lives ruined by absurd drug sweeps and racist targeting. If you make someone a drug felon after busting them with a dime bag, their life is ruined. And it is revolting to think that someone would want this to happen over and over, but that's exactly the result that Bloomberg was looking for.

As Jamelle Bouie writes, only Bloomberg's racism really matters to the well-being of actual people. And that's what makes it so insidious. Not only it is less visible, it is far more damaging.

When it comes to open bigotry, everyone is an anti-racist. The same Republicans who question the Civil Rights Act and oppose race-conscious policy are on the front lines when it’s time to denounce the outlandish racism of the day. “I wholeheartedly disagree with him,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in response to Cliven Bundy’s digression on “the Negro.” Sean Hannity, the Fox News personality who championed Bundy’s cause of free grazing rights, blasted Bundy for his “ignorant, racist, repugnant, despicable” comments.

Indeed, the mere hint of racial insensitivity is enough to bring the hammer down, as we rush to refute and repudiate the transgressor. This can go too far—see the most recent controversy over Donald Rumsfeld—but it’s an understandable impulse, and on the whole, a good one.

At the same time, we all but ignore the other dimension of racism—the policies and procedures that sustain our system of racial inequality. The outrage that comes when a state representative says something stupid about professional basketball players is absent when we learn that black children are punished at dramatically higher rates than their white peers, even as preschoolers. Likewise, it’s absent when we learn that banks targeted minorities—regardless of income—for the worst possible mortgage loans, destroying their wealth in the process.

In turn, this blinds us to the racial implications of actions that seem colorblind. In a world where racism looks like cartoonish bigotry, it’s hard to build broad outrage for unfair voter identification laws or huge disparities in health care access.

Conservatives prefer to talk about individuals. It's politically convenient. Under their rubric, "racism" is going away because open bigots are now rare and can be found among all races. And while "racists" can be punished, doing anything about real racial injustice would be considered "government overreach." Obviously, the Washington Times doesn't want something like this, so they make cartoonish bigotry seem ubiquitous (or at least equally distributed), although real harm is exclusively concentrated among one group.

But therein lies the rub. Racism matters when it hurts people, as when a slumlord robs his tenants for decades because they're black and easily exploited. You have to fix it with laws. And that's hard. It's easy to condemn Cliven Bundy's or Larry Johnson's racist words. It's much more important to do something about Bloomberg's or Sterling's. That's why the latter is "real" and important, while the former is just a distraction. And in the end, understanding this tricky distinction is the heart of the debate for real reparations. 

What the Hell Is Happening In Ukraine?

I have some friends in Ukraine who might disagree with me on this, and I have other Eurasian expert friends who are better at this than me, but here's the gist of my impression of this:

1) The events in Ukraine are related to a very long political struggle about the future regional direction of the country. The struggle has been flaring up ever since the Orange Revolution 2004. But its roots stretch back hundreds of years, connecting to the fights between the Russian, Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires for control of the region.

Catholic Ukrainian speakers in the West feel closer to Poland, Lithuania and the rest of Europe. Orthodox Russian speakers in the East, along with people strongly affiliated with the USSR (like the Tatars in the South), obviously want strong ties to Russia.

There are lots of fun ways to visualize these challenges. WaPo shows some of these maps here, along with a good explanation of the situation.

While the challenges are not necessarily historically determined, there are obvious historical trends at play. Kiev is the ancient home of the Russian people, but the Ukraine has always been a battle ground between Turks, Slavs and Catholics. These historical tensions are reflected in the country's current political challenges.

2) Ukraine is a mess economically and the government is corrupt and ineffective. The latter isn't necessarily new to the region (KZ is no different), but the citizens of post-Soviet states are more tolerant of the BS and the bribes when everyone is seeing some sort of progress. In that way, they're no different than the citizens of Western countries, who's citizens tend to ignore government failings when times are good, but they get a little crazier during economic struggles (enter Tea Party).

Ukraine is essentially broke and owes a lot of money to all of the usual international institutions. The most important issue in Ukraine right now is finding some way to get economic growth. This frame needs to be placed on any other discussion of the crisis.

3) The EU started this mess. You don't need to mince words. Politics in Ukraine is about balancing the aspirations of both the East and West of the country. The EU threw a bad trade deal at Ukraine that would have been harmful economically in the short term (subjecting them to IMF austerity terms) while waving a giant middle finger at the East who still wants strong ties with Russia. It would have been crippling politically for Yanukovich and the interests he represents. He had to turn it down.

Worse, Ukraine was expected to get take on very harsh terms for what was barely better than nothing from the EU. They continue on their "way" to trade integration, but they got nothing in the line of things like immigration rights. The Spectator sums it up well.

In spite of stringing Kiev along with pretty words about a European future, the EU could offer only $800 million , via the IMF, and that came at the price of exceptionally painfully economic reforms. Ukraine would have been subjected to the same devastation of its agriculture, on which it depends, as Romania and Bulgaria were in their pre-accession period. Its industry would have collapsed as well. Russia, by contrast, has been able to offer nearly 20 times this sum in loans to prevent Ukraine from becoming insolvent, and it is the biggest market for Ukrainian exports – bigger than the whole of the EU put together.

Which deal would you choose? The EU probably recognized this too, which is why they played their trump card. By creating a crisis (calling off all EU integration talks in one fell swoop), they can hope to force Yanukovich out of power undemocratically, putting in the other, more favorable part of the elite. Not surprising, the EU is now forcing sanctions on Ukraine, furthering the crisis.

4) During calm moments, the people in the streets are largely average Western Ukrainians who hope that some sort of European integration will reduce the corruption, impotency and insanity of the Ukrainian political system. Honestly, it's a little naive, but their intentions (liberal, transparent, just) are good.

But the real power behind the protest is a bunch of extreme right neo-Nazi parties. The Russian press has covered this well, and these groups are quite prominent in Ukraine, going by names like Far Right Sector and Trident. Russia tends to throw around this term a little too liberally (since this is ultimately the conflict that defines modern Russia), but it is mostly apt here.

Svoboda (the right political party that is the most moderate of the groups involved and actually has ministers in Parliament) marched around new year celebrating a Ukrainian nationalist leader that fought along side the Nazis against the Soviets. This is pretty typical of the group; their former name is the “Social-National Party of Ukraine” (ring a bell?). You hear lots of nationalist chants in the squares, along with insults about how the current government consists of "Jews."

To be fair, racist thugs are being employed by the government to counter the protests too. (The Berkut has pep talks where it calls the protesters a bunch of Jews). But it's important to remember that either side would act appallingly regardless of who was in political power.

5) Yulia Tymoshenko was just released from jail, which should make the lead up to the snap elections really nuts. Like everyone else in Ukrainian politics, she's corrupt and her party was pretty terrible while in government. But she is an obvious unifying figurehead for the movement (more than Klitschko or any of the other politicians in "talks"), and she is certainly liked by the West. We'll get to watch her propped up on a pedestal for awhile even though she's incredibly unpopular back home. It's not a coincidence that essentially no one was actually protesting in favor of her release.

6) Most importantly, keep in mind that the West always has an axe to grind with Russia. Egypt, despite the deaths of hundreds and an actual military coup, is getting more than a billion dollars in military aid from the US. Ukraine, which more than anything just needs some money, is facing sanctions because less than 50 people have died in a political struggle. The hypocrisy and the extreme prejudice are appalling.

The West owes an incredible gratitude to Putin for his pivotal role in stabilizing several political crises over the last few years (Iran and Syria are largely Russian diplomacy efforts). There is a lot to dislike about his politics, but there's a lot to dislike about the politics of any country. We can call Russia corrupt and homophobic, but US politics aren't corrupt? The US isn't homophobic? People really need to stop fighting the Cold War and start looking at the world with a little sense of rationalism.

Similar things can be said about Yanukovich. He is legitimately and democratically elected. We can debate the effects of the centralization of powers under his control, but it is maddening that Western governments are forcing street diplomacy onto Ukraine because they do not like his politics. It is a huge disservice to Ukrainians, who deserve better than to be trapped in the middle of an East-West pissing contest.

7) One of the many paradoxes of the Maidan revolution is the status of Yanukovych. On the one hand, this man is a clown. He was always bad for Ukraine, and he made it worst during his presidency. He deserves almost everything that has happened to him over the last few months. The nearly universal hatred is well deserved.

While he talks about the fascists in the square, it's an unavoidable fact that he is primarily responsible for his ouster. A savvier politician wouldn't have passed the anti-protest laws that got everyone to the street; a better human being wouldn't have had snipers shoot civilians. And yet, despite all of this, Ukraine is worse off for the way that it got rid of him. The Maidan did serious damage to long-term democratic stability. Even if this crisis is resolved soon (and armed seizures of airports in Crimea show that this is only the beginning), this armed revolt have negative effects for many years.

8) Ultimately, recent events nail home a very under-appreciated aspect of Russia's foreign policy: the premium placed on stability. For very good reasons, Russians hate political and social upheaval. They can easily describe the huge human cost of various revolutions.

Most Americans, while perhaps possessing the more justifiable ideals than Putin's Russia, have no sense of proportion, restraint or humility in international affairs. We naively celebrate the fall of tyrants, and cheer on demonstrations for "democracy and freedom." When these situations become chaotic and people starting dying, we shrug our shoulders and foolishly blame "national character" or "lack of civilization" for the obvious effects of our own efforts at destabilization.

I hope for the best in Ukraine, but this is the second time in 10 years that the street has settled political problems. I can't see how this bodes well in the future. In Kyrgyzstan, another fractious Post-Soviet, each successive revolution has been more violent than the last. The negative effects of the instability linger, and you end up with pogroms against ethnic minorities.

I'm sure there are reasons to celebrate the fall of a thoroughly corrupt politician with authoritarian tendencies. But at the same time, I mourn for those people (half the country!) who supported and organized behind him. Russian-speakers should have little faith in the future of democratic Ukraine, as this is the second time that Westerners have overthrown a man that they worked to elect. Where do you go from here?