• Blog
  • All Blogs
• Culture
  • Artist-in-Residence
  • Going Out Guide
  • Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down
• Features
  • Citizen Conversation with…
  • Diary of a Mad Ethics Professor
• News
  • HKS News
• Opinion
  • Dems v. Reps
  • Heresies
  • Letter to the Editor
• Print Edition
• Sports
• About
  • Masthead
  • Privacy
• Contact

Subscribe

Citizen Conversation With…Ernest James Istook, Jr.

Interview w/ IOP Fellow, Ernest James Istook, Jr. conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP/MTS’12.

You’ve titled your study group, “Propaganda in American Politics.” I’m wondering how you define “propaganda.”

The correct definition of propaganda is “information that is designed to influence and sway people’s thinking and actions.” The information that they use for this may be totally false. It may be totally true. It may be true but warped and distorted. The point is that it’s designed to sway people’s thinking in a political fashion.

So I try to make the point that just because something is labeled as propaganda, it doesn’t mean that it’s false information. But it is information that should be treated circumspectly and with an understanding of the purpose behind what is being told to people. I hope that all who participate in this study group will have a healthy skepticism of information that they receive, and will look beyond the surface to understand what agenda is driving a presentation, what are any biases, and that they look to multiple sources for their news and information.

A Pew study from September of 2009 measured Americans’ feelings toward major news outlets. All of the major media outlets – not just the cable news channels – had strikingly different approval ratings depending on the respondent’s partisan affiliation. Is this an accelerating trend? If so, should we worry about it?

In the very first session, I described and used a Power Point presentation to detail the news sources that are typically relied upon by members of Congress and other decision-makers in Washington, D.C. I wanted to convey to students an idea of how politicians intake information, how they process it, manipulate it and regurgitate it in different forms. At the highest levels of government people are constantly doing this intake and analysis and sending back into the media what the politicians believe people should know and think about the events of the day. It is a constant propaganda machine that’s in daily operation, making it important to understand where they get their data and then how they send it back out.

What were those news sources that you discussed?

I printed out a copy, thinking you might like this. Let me just go get it in my office.

[Mr. Istook returned a few minutes later with a printout of his study group presentation.]

…This material relates to the classic question that was posed to Sarah Palin about what newspapers she reads. The very asking of a question like that is outdated because most people who keep up with current events turn to aggregators of news rather than to a single news source. An aggregator will give you information that may come from The New York Times; it may come from The Washington Post; it may come from newspapers or broadcast outlets from Seattle or Miami or Omaha, or other places.
I like Real Clear Politics. I think it does a good job of highlighting important material. There are places like The Drudge Report on the right; there’s The Huffington Post on the left. There are publications such as Congress Daily, National Journal, the Daily Congressional News Briefing, The Note from ABC News, Frontrunner, Hotline – a whole series of these. Most function as aggregators rather than originators of news. It’s not healthy to depend upon one particular news outlet, but you need a way of tapping into multiple sources.

New media allows for the dissemination of information - including propaganda - in a variety of new ways. I’m wondering, though, whether propaganda tactics and techniques are changing as well. In other words, is propaganda today the same as it’s always been, but just delivered in a new format? Or are our public conversations facing new challenges unrelated to technology?

A few years ago, the term you heard used was “spin” and you would talk about “spin doctors,” who are trying to organize information and to channel people’s thinking into certain pathways. We’ve gotten well beyond spin. It is so strong that it needs a stronger term, which propaganda fits. Plus, with a government as complex as ours and a society as complex as ours, just giving straightforward data with no perspective and no context confuses many people more than it informs them. So some level of interpretation and analysis is necessary.

The question is whether media openly admit that they are doing this, or adopt a pretense of claiming that they are being objective when really they are not. In one of our study groups, John Fund [an online columnist for The Wall Street Journal] described it as saying, “You cannot expect media to be objective. You can only expect them to be fair.”

When you look at the political and media landscape, do you see news sources that our notably more propagandistic than others?

Typically, people will attribute conservative tendencies to Fox News and quite liberal tendencies to MSNBC. Now, in my observation, I think MSNBC has a more difficult time being fair. They not only give their perspective but also cast aspersions on the integrity or intelligence of anyone who holds a contrary view. That’s not universally true of MSNBC or of others. But I think in their programming, they go the farthest in that direction. That’s not to say that Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, or others, never disparage people of contrary opinions. It is a real challenge to present news and analysis in a way that both attracts an audience and achieves a fundamental level of fairness.

Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers Magazine, talked about this in great length in our study group: Media tend to identify an audience to which they wish to appeal; then they tailor their presentation to appeal to the tastes and biases of that audience, sometimes to the extent of treating contrary thought as having no legitimacy whatsoever.

I’m interested in your distinction between MSNBC and Fox in that respect.

They’re not alone. I thought I’d pick them as examples.

Sure. You described MSNBC as less fair than Fox. Is that an impressionistic view, or are you aware of any systematic analysis that could back up your view?

One of our guests, Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University – and a Harvard PhD – has undertaken to provide more statistical analysis of things such as that, which is the reason that we had him here.

I think about those characters that you mentioned – you know, Hannity, Beck, Olbermann, Maddow -
Maddow, Schultz. Yeah. I was on-air a lot of times with Schultz - we had a difficult encounter the last time I was on, so I don’t know if he’d want to have me on again.

Oh, how did that go?

It’s on YouTube. Give me an email, I’ll send you a link. [The link is http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jack-coleman/2010/03/29/heritages-ernest-istook-again-runs-circles-around-exasperated-ed-schul]

Sure. You know, it’s interesting that you mentioned those folks. To my mind, none of them are even trying to be fair. They might think of themselves as serious news figures, but by no stretch of the imagination do they exhibit the sort of fairness and competence we would expect from serious journalists. I’ve been troubled by the place that this group has come to occupy in the American media landscape. That isn’t to say that I had full faith or confidence in the previous generation of news anchors or anything like that. But it’s a bit of a sad prospect if this group is playing a more prominent role now, isn’t it?

The failures of the old media and traditional media to provide fairness and balance have led to the situation today. The criticisms of traditional newspapers and networks for being biased are very legitimate criticisms. Once they created the standard that says fairness is not a prerequisite of journalism, then they opened the door for people who don’t even have a pretense of fairness.
I’m not saying that the names I’ve mentioned lack a pretense of fairness, but I just name them as some who are best known for providing opinion or invective.

In the presentation handout you provided to me, I noticed that you included a picture of the cover of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent….

In one sense, I think his…thesis…is saying that there is an inherent bias created by the corporate ownership of the media, rather than by the attitudes of those who are reporters. I attend different events here where they bring in different reporters, through Shorenstein and such. But I find that most of them tend to reflect a consistent left-leaning viewpoint. Remember that it’s not always whether you make a slanted presentation of the news; it’s also the selection of what you choose to present and what you choose to exclude that can mischaracterize how things are.

When you think about fairness in journalism, do you think about it in terms of an equal balance of journalists who lean one way or the other politically? Do you think about it more in terms of fidelity to the truth? Or is it something else entirely?

My point is this: Fairness does not dictate that every individual who reports events must give equal weight to arguments of either side (or multiple sides) on a topic, but it means that institutions should make sure that they are presenting multiple perspectives. There’s a key difference there. It doesn’t mean every individual has to portray every viewpoint as though each had intellectual or moral parity. But when an institution presents itself as a new organization, people take note of whether their self-portrayal matches what they actually provide. Today with the multiplicity of media and resources that are available to people through the internet and other means, you cannot hide your slant from being detected. There are too many routes for providing contrary information; it comes bubbling forth.

In your view, are there particular political issues around which the media actually makes it more difficult for Americans to have a useful conversation? Where could we be squabbling less and talking more productively?

I think energy is one such area, and it’s not just the debate over global warming and man-caused climate change. It’s also a failure to include the costs of alternative energy as a legitimate factor in the discussion. Some people, because they are totally devoted to a belief in man-made global warming, will disregard the costs to society and to families of what they propose as alternatives.

It’s a little known fact that – let me see if I can remember this accurately…the use of wind power to generate electricity costs about two to three times more than generating electricity with fossil fuel; and solar power costs about five or six times more. If you convert to those sources, peoples’ home electric bills will reflect that enormous increase; manufacturing costs and distribution costs will also reflect that extra expense. The ability of society to make possible a fair standard of living and opportunity for all will be diminished because energy is central to everything and its costs have skyrocketed. [Mr. Istook later provided the following link via email: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/11/mike-pence/pence-claims-obama-said-energy-costs-will-skyrocke/ ]

People who try to squelch the conversation, either about cost or about the legitimacy of global warming, are doing a great disservice. Yet a one-sided perspective is abundant in so much of so-called mainstream media.

I agree that if that perspective is squelched out of hand, there’s something amiss. My sense, though, is that what you’re saying about comparative costs doesn’t reflect the true social cost of producing energy with fossil fuels. That social cost would include things like the externalities of pollution and global warming.

The challenge is that introducing a new measurement and labeling it “social costs” cannot be readily compared with other costs that are known through general accounting standards. You introduce a broad subjective term by saying, “Well, you haven’t accounted for the social costs.” What is that supposed to mean? It should not be treated as though you were playing a trump card–claiming that other discourse had to be abandoned and other viewpoints must yield when someone says “social cost.”

Remember, too, that if you remove the ability of someone to live where they wish to live and work where they wish to work and move freely between those points – if you remove that capability because you make energy so expensive, that is a severe social cost imposed on us all. How do you measure that? How do you offset it?

Well, I agree that it’s a hard task. I don’t know that it’s impossible. There are economists who try to do exactly that, to literally calculate the social costs that come with climate change.

Usually, they’re very vague and subjective variables.

It sounds like you’re skeptical about even trying to factor in these sorts of externalities.

I’m skeptical about the tendency to use that as a trump card as though it made everything else irrelevant.

I agree with you there. It needs to be considered carefully, just like every other part of the conversation.

Let’s return to Chomsky. You summarized his view quite well - that given the structure of media ownership, the journalistic outcomes that we see are fairly predictable. I’m wondering whether you agree with this view.

I think there are flaws in his basic thesis. Basically, people who adopt his view tend to say that since people with more wealth tend to have larger megaphones, therefore the answer is for government to step in and use taxpayer resources to give more megaphones to more people.

Part of the challenge today is that government is the source of so much propaganda. Rather than reflecting what people are saying, government resources are often used to try to change public opinion to match the desires of those who hold office. That’s part of the difficulty that we have today.

It sounds like you’re talking about public financing of elections.

Oh, that’s only one aspect. But if you look at a lot of the studies that are produced from Washington, D.C., many of them are predetermined in advance to further a particular cause or point of view. That’s not to say all, but there’s a significant number.

I would think that there’d be at least some instances in which it’s appropriate for the government to intervene in some way, to try to change the minds of the populace if they don’t have access to the information they need.

Who decides that?

Citizen Conversation With…Former Haitian Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis

Interview conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP’11

What kinds of contributions do you think that Kennedy School students and the Harvard community more generally can make to Haiti right now, both for the country’s recovery in the short term and for its development in the long term?

In the short term, I think it would be interesting to propose field studies to the students. We need skills, we need competence - that we don’t always have – and it would be important if students here, who are acquiring knowledge in different fields, can come, let’s say, during the summer or when they have a break and participate in some projects, whether it be in health, in education, in environment, in reconstruction – housing, or infrastructure. There are going to be a lot of opportunities and at the same time there is a lack of resources at home in all these different fields.

We, on our side in Haiti, have to work on the framework of the projects, so that when they come, they know that they are going to be of use…and there’s not going to be any waste.

In the long run, perhaps more structural projects can come along. Also what the university here could do that would be very interesting – because all the universities in Port-au-Prince, where there’s a concentration of higher ed buildings, have been destroyed – is to set up with universities in Haiti some kind of distance learning program, especially in the scientific fields where we have a large deficit.

Also, I know that it’s very difficult for US universities in general to raise funds for the reconstruction of physical buildings, but they can perhaps find grants that can help us to set up labs, computer labs, scientific labs, even if they are small. That can be extremely helpful to students in Haiti, whether in Port-au-Prince or in other parts of the country, because I also believe now is the time for decentralization.

And then, of course, the field studies – that can be helpful to us, but also to the university, for research or development of models that can eventually be applied in Haiti. The university will also be part of the reconstruction process.

Thank you. I’d like to return to that in a moment, but first, I’d like to step back a bit. As you know, the US and Haiti have a very complicated historical relationship. Do you feel like Americans have an accurate picture of that history? And if not, what would you like to share?

That’s a very good question, you know. While I’m here, I’m working on a keynote speech that I’m going to give at John Carter Brown Library at Brown University on May 7, and this is exactly what I’m working on. They wanted a more specific subject, so I chose the trade relationship between the US and Haiti which started even before independence – before the US independence and during Haiti’s colonial time.

I went back to my history books and I am learning a lot. It’s a fascinating history, really, because it started early in the 16^th century, and it’s so complex. But I don’t want to say too much now, and will come back to your question.

I think there are too many clichés about Haiti, too many stereotypes, and there’s a need, first and foremost for us, Haitians, to explain more the complexity of our country, the paradox that we live in, and to project a better image of Haiti. To me, the US – I’m talking about the government now – has an unchanged image of the country. It’s as if the Haiti of the time the US occupied Haiti from 1915-1939 has not really evolved. The policies that were applied then are barely reviewed and re-adapted, but they hardly take into consideration the complexity of today’s world.

There is a need for us to better explain our situation, and find relays like the US universities to convey the truth about the country. That will help to better explain the role the US can play in trying to help us come out of today’s catastrophic situation.

A lot of aid flowed into Haiti in the wake of the earthquake. Some observers are concerned what while lots of aid is focused on immediate humanitarian needs, not enough has been earmarked for long term or structural development and government capacity-building. Is the aid going to the right places? And if not, where should it be going?

When you look at a post-disaster situation, there is first the relief effort, the relief phase. You have to bring food, water, medicine to help the survivors. Today, it’s dramatic. We have one million people in the streets. They’ve lost everything they had. The relief effort is an important phase, but it is taking too long.

There are a lot of complaints on the part of the Haitian people. It’s not so much because there is not enough supply; it’s because the distribution is not coordinated, not properly coordinated. That’s also the responsibility of Haitians and that of the Haitian government. But the government seemed to have been in such a state of shock that it did not show any capacity to respond to the population’s needs at that particular time.

We had to take care of the dead; it’s true. We had to mourn our dead. We still have to go through the grieving process. But at the same time, we have to continue to save lives. And I think the lack of coordination is probably one factor that was most visible at the time.

Now, your question also had a very important aspect. Haiti will not develop with humanitarian aid. Haiti will develop with investment – investments that create jobs, jobs in the formal sector. And that’s not the type of jobs that are created now. Because there is so much to do after a disaster of such magnitude, the jobs being created are temporary – which is good in terms of giving people revenues right away so that they can get by – but at the same time they are not durable, sustainable in the long run. On the other hand, there has to be some coherence between what is being done for immediate relief and the long-term reconstruction process.

The long term has to do with investment – public and private investments, in infrastructure, in ports, in airports, housing, water, electricity, agribusiness etc. We have 1,800 kilometers of coast and we only have three ports. Look at what is happening now. The port of Port-au-Prince collapsed and there is only one international airport, with one runway, no taxi ways. That’s why the 82nd US Airborne came in and said, “Hey, there is going to be a disaster”. They took command. Within hours, we passed from having 10-12 flights a day to a hundred. And we were not at all ready to have that type of air traffic.

The German Public Policy Institute has argued that much of the perception that has shaped the international response has underestimated Haiti’s government capacity that was already in place - that there’s this oversimplified notion of Haiti as a failed state.

It is probably true, but we still have to reinforce the institutions. The government role is essential but we have to build local capacities. It can only be done through our acceptance of technical support, of technical assistance. It’s true for the justice system. It is true for the public works system, the education and health system.

So we should be open. That’s also one area where the Haitian-American students can be very helpful. They can have internships in the ministries and be helpful in different areas. We need to review some of our policies. It’s true. But sometimes, we have very good policies and have no way to implement them because we don’t have the administrators who are competent enough, that have the skills to implement those policies.

Women and girls remain deeply vulnerable in the wake of the earthquake. What can the government, NGOs, or other organizations do to ensure their safety, particularly against the threat of rape in tent cities and elsewhere?

There have been a lot of rapes in the camps and they’ve been recorded even by institutions like CARE. Four major women’s organizations have created a forum mostly for advocacy on violence against women. They have also created a clinic for women victims of rape, sexual harassment and other types of violence where they are given medical and psychological care. In that process, they also document the cases so that they can eventually bring the cases to court.

The forum’s advocacy campaign convinced the Haitian Parliament to adopt two new laws: one on adultery - because it was very discriminatory against women - so there’s more equity towards women; and then the law on rape, because rape was not a crime in Haiti. The women’s organizations have been working a lot since the earthquake, going to camps, registering the cases, and also helping with the psychologists they have working for them. These women’s groups are doing a very good job, and they try to work as closely as possible with the Ministry of Women’s Rights, so that the government is engaged also in that process.

Haiti’s a deeply religious country. Can you talk a little about the role that faith institutions and faith traditions have played in Haitians’ response to the earthquake?

I think the churches were really hit hard by the earthquake. Usually in a situation like this, the voice of the Catholic Church, the Methodist Church or the Episcopalian Church would have been heard right after, because they have a huge constituency in the country and have played, and continue to play such an important role in Haiti. Lots of people are wondering why they remained so silent.

The Catholic Church has paid a high price. The cathedral and practically all the churches in the capital have been destroyed. The archbishop died under the rubble. Lots of priests and an incredible number of nuns and parishioners died when the churches collapsed. So it’s a huge, huge disaster to the Catholic Church. Moreover, a lot of Catholic schools also collapsed and many students died in those schools.

I had at least three meetings with the Nuncio, the diplomatic representative of the Vatican, since the earthquake and the last one was with the Cardinal of Boston who was visiting Haiti a few weeks ago. The Catholic Church says that its priority is to rebuild the Catholic schools. But at the same time, they need to know what the government’s reconstruction plan is. Now, the Episcopalians also lost a lot. They had a beautiful cathedral with murals from the most prominent Haitian painters, as well as a school for the handicapped and a music school, all of which collapsed.

All this said, people are praying a lot, in the streets, in the public places, on the rubbles, you can hear the prayers, the chants, and the cries sometimes. They also go to the Vodou temples. Some [commentators] from some Protestant sects have tried to imply that Haiti and Haitians are paying for their wrongdoings. But of course, that has nothing to do with reality. In fact, a lot of us were upset with this kind of interpretation of a natural phenomenon and with this idea of blaming the victim.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you to you. I hope it was useful.

Citizen Conversation With…Tim McCarthy

Interview conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP’11

You recently discussed “the future of protest” at Harvard Thinks Big, and you exhorted Harvard students to take up the spirit of protesters past. Could you summarize your views?

The question I asked was, “Does protest have a future?”…I work on the history of social movements, particularly the history of radical movements in the United States, so I’m really interested in…what my colleague John Stauffer calls “passionate outsiders”…

What motivates the specific question about whether protest has a future? What’s special about this moment now?

Well, I think there are a couple of things that are special about it. But…I think that this question—does protest have a future?—should always be posed….[T]he society that we live in has been given to us by people who have had the courage to stand up…and to protest the things that are wrong….Every generation needs to figure out how they will rise to that challenge. And there are a lot of things that are really wrong in the world.

It’s important to remember that the world that we live in is not just shaped by people who are powerful….[I]t is also shaped by people who are powerless in lots of ways….But how do these folks come together to change society?…[P]articularly in democracies.

In this country…a couple of things [are] going on right now. One is the enormous energy that came out of the Obama campaign, which many people thought of as a kind of social movement of sorts (though I would argue that it wasn’t)….[W]hat do we do with that energy?

On the other hand…we also have a situation where we are as divided as a country politically—in institutions of power and way outside of these institutions of power—as we’ve ever been in my lifetime. The animus exists…whether you’re on the left or right. And their frustrations are directed toward those who are in power….But I would also say that these institutions of power…are not functioning properly, or not functioning at all, because of the larger divisiveness in the culture…How do you get out of that?

On the other hand…because of our globalized new media world, we’re connected to one another and aware of each other’s lives in ways that we haven’t been in the past. Look at the great empathy [toward] Haiti or Chile….Because of the global flow of information and images, I think the way we…connect to these kinds of things is probably different now than it was a generation ago.

…Then there’s the future….“What world are we going to give to our kids?” I think that every generation needs to wrestle with and reflect upon that—not just on “What am I going to get right now?”
As a teacher, I feel that urgently….I have the privilege…to teach and reflect with and think deeply with the next generation. I’ve been teaching now for fifteen years at three different institutions. I now see my former students who are out there making change in the world, some of them for the good and some of them not so good. Many of them are still struggling to figure out what kind of lives they are going to lead, what kind of change they are going to make.

…I like to call this the “pedagogy of the privileged.” I have the privilege of teaching some of the best and brightest minds in the world. But this cuts both ways. On the one hand, there’s great opportunity there to help people figure out what kind of positive impact they’re going to have in the world….
But there’s another side….If we don’t ask these deeper questions—how we will confront and change the things that are wrong? what kind of lives do we want to lead?—then we will be sending people out into the world…to exercise power and privilege who have never gone through the process of reflecting about the moral and ethical and political dimensions of how they’re going to use their power and privilege.

I think there are two types questions an institution like this should ask. One is, “What are we aiming for, and why? The other is, “How do we get there?” I worry that we spend too little time on the first question and too much on the second. To me, that first question is fundamental. Before we can decide how to deploy policies effectively, we need to ask hard questions about what we value. And we need a spirit that encourages intense grappling with that question.

I agree. But let me put it in a slightly different way….I’m constantly [trying to get] students…to wrestle with two questions: One is, “What do you believe?” And the second is “Why do you believe this?” I want people to articulate what they stand for—what they’re willing to throw down for, what they’re willing to get arrested for, what they’re willing to die for—but also why they believe the things they do.
But we don’t ask these questions as much as we should….When we think about some of the people who inspire us, we see these questions answered. Martin Luther King, Jr., could tell you what he would die for. Gandhi could tell you….Mandela could tell you….Mother Teresa could tell you.

…[W]e need to ask our students these questions more often. If someone said to me, “What would you die for? What would you be arrested for?” I could tell them.

What would you say?

…[A]t the outset, broadly speaking, I would say justice. Ultimately, I am driven by equality, which is one of the reasons why I have such a complicated relationship with the academy….I think that institutions like Harvard are places that privilege hierarchy, because that’s how they function. People have specific roles to play, and those roles are often either privileged or subordinated to one another.

….I find that to be intensely problematic, and I am very uncomfortable with this. I am much more…of an egalitarian, and if I see equality…thwarted in various ways, that’s something that troubles me deeply.
For instance, one of the exhortations I had in my talk was that [the undergraduates] should be less worried about the loss of hot breakfast – which they are totally preoccupied with, which is foolish – and more concerned about the loss of jobs for those people who made hot breakfast. At the end of the day, Harvard laid off hundreds of people last year when the students were complaining about eggs and pancakes and the faculty was complaining that they weren’t getting an annual salary increase.

…Let me be very clear: It’s not a human right to get an annual salary increase. It is, however, a human right to be able to have a job and be…fairly and justly compensated for that job. So when institutions are privileging one kind of complaint over another—whining over the loss of small perks and privileges rather than insisting on full and just employment—that’s something I feel compelled to speak on….

I’m also willing to go to jail for peace. I absolutely am willing to die for peace, which sounds weirdly ironic, right? But I’m a pacifist. I reject war, even so-called “just war.” I have gotten death threats because of the stance that I took in opposition to the Iraq war and…to the Bush administration’s war on terror, and I was “blacklisted” as “short of patriotism” by Lynne Cheney.…But I’m very proud of that. I’m much prouder of the stance I took in opposition to the Iraq war—standing up at that moment in history—than anything I’ve ever written or published. I sleep somewhat easier at night knowing that I was on the right side of history at a time when that stance was not only unpopular but also widely viewed as “unpatriotic.”

That said, I know that’s not going to get me tenure, it’s probably not going to get me a job promotion, and it’s probably not going to earn me the respect of most of my colleagues. But I don’t care. That’s where I feel like I have a complicated relationship with places like this. I hate the silences that institutions like Harvard sometimes require for advancement or survival or “success.”

That said, I also think it’s essential for us to articulate why we believe what we do, to explain and even justify our positions….I’m constantly trying to get my students…to wrestle with the question: “Why do you believe that?”…It’s not simply whether or not you support the death penalty, or whether or not you support welfare reform….These are policy positions that you can believe in passionately. But…why? For instance, if you are opposed to welfare—say, if you believe that poor folks need to get off the dole—I want to know why you believe that welfare creates laziness and dependency?…In other words, what about your experience…supports or undergirds the ideology that leads you to take this particular policy position?

We don’t often think enough about that. At the end of the day, these questions get into your personal experience, your political ideology, your worldview, which is directly shaped by your material and social experiences. I don’t mean to sound like too much of a Marxist – well, maybe I do – but at the end of the day, why you believe something goes to the heart of who you are and how you act in the world. Ideology is at the core of politics.

I was thinking about Jon Stewart recently. Sometimes his analysis is sophisticated; other times, it falls short. But what’s so valuable to me about what he does is that he actually asks questions – and suggests answers - about what’s motivating public figures to do what they do and say what they say.

Well, let me give you two examples of things I care very deeply about. One is welfare reform. I was a graduate student at the time [of Clinton’s reforms] and I was living in New York when Rudy Giuliani was mayor….There were all these moves to cut welfare services and [other] services….

The whole movement for welfare reform was rooted in a discourse that denigrated and stigmatized poor people. Almost nowhere in the debate over welfare reform—at least…among the powers that be in New York City or Washington—was there…any acknowledgement that poor people are complex and valuable human beings, just like all of us.

You never say that we need to get suburban parents off the dole and stop taking their kids to public parks on the weekends. But public parks are tax-supported public offerings that people of all kinds rely on….We never say that middle class people—or rich people, for that matter—are on welfare because we don’t have an underlying sense that these folks are lazy or dependent or corrupt (when, if fact, they can be all of these things). But we do have an underlying sense that poor people are that way, particularly poor people of color, which is often implied in debates over welfare and the like.

And this is amazing, given the other narratives at work in American political discourse. One is the Horatio/Alger bootstrap narrative, and another is the way that politicians regularly make paeans to the hardworking decency of the average American. Now, granted that they’re usually pitching themselves at middle-class Americans…

…Horatio Alger tales were stories, largely, of white European immigrants who came to the United States and divested themselves of all the things that might have dragged them down, imbuing themselves with the so-called “American spirit” of picking themselves up by their bootstraps and moving from poverty to riches.

One of the reasons why Booker T. Washington, the great African-American leader of the late nineteenth century, called his autobiography Up from Slavery is because he was trying to intervene in this highly racialized discourse of upward mobility that presumed that European immigrants could rise from rags to riches but black folks couldn’t.

In a school of public policy, we need to interrogate our positions on particular policies by asking: “Why is it that you believe this?” What kinds of assumptions are you making based on your experiences—or no experience….[M]any people who favor welfare reform, or abolition, have never met a person on welfare, or a poor person, or a person of color….For the last nine years, I have run this program in Dorchester, a college humanities program for low-income adults. Most of the students in my program….live at or below the poverty line.

There’s nothing in my experience with any of these folks…that would ever support a narrative of laziness to characterize them – not one. Resilience, courage, faith, love – all those things. Laziness? Not a person, in nine years, and hundreds of people have come through this program. So I would challenge anyone who would base support for welfare reform or abolition on the premise that poor people are lazy, dependent, and corrupt.

So that’s one thing. The other issue is same-sex marriage. I just got engaged to my partner, and we’re getting married next year.

Congratulations.

Thank you….I’m not as preoccupied with the gay marriage issue as some other queer people are. Still, I do worry that the debate over marriage has crowded out other important LGBT issues….[M]arriage equality should not be the only, or even top, priority for the movement, but that’s another conversation. That said, I should have the right to marry to my partner anywhere I damn well choose. I love him, I am committed to him, and I want to spend the rest of my life with him. Just like my parents and grandparents.

…There are people who are opposed to gay marriage. Okay, fine. My response to them: “Why? You and your wife have a relationship. I have no authority or right to intervene in it…other than to say, ‘Congratulations. I’m happy for you. You found someone that you love and want to be with the rest of your life and you want to make that commitment….’”

And that’s all we want: congratulate us on our loving commitment and step aside. But if you don’t think that we have the right to the same thing that you have—if you want to stand in the way of our human rights—then I want to know more about why you think that. I want to know what it is about my partner and me that makes you think you need or are entitled to a kind of “super citizenship.” Why do you think it’s your democratic or regulatory duty to intervene in our relationship in a way that denies us the joy and love and recognition that you have? That is arrogant and discriminatory, plain and simple….

In class, it’s unsettling to me when people say things like, “Well, I like XYZ strategy because I like market mechanisms.” It seems to me that if you’re going to seek to influence policy, you’ve got to do more than just ‘like’ one policy over another. You have to be able to say why.

And it’s deeply personal. That’s why my good friend Marshall Ganz’s work is so important. We all have stories, and those stories are what allow us to articulate and really put into words what we believe….
When it comes to markets, people take for granted that capitalism…exists and it always will. Very few people ever challenge the logic of capitalism any more….Adam Smith challenged the logic of capitalism more than most people do today….To paraphrase, he said, “The wealth of nations is determined not by the wealth of those at the top but the lack of wealth of those at the bottom.” He was talking about how capitalism produces economic inequality and how we need to recognize that as a way to critique capitalism from the inside. Nobody does that any more.

So [you hear that] the market [will fix] education, the market will fix social services, the market will fix health care and the media. Maybe that’s true, but there’s a lot of evidence – data, if you will – to suggest that it’s not true. Capitalism can be a very bad thing.

We learn early in API-101 that markets aren’t always particularly good at providing public goods.

…[I]n the health care debate, the thing that has driven me craziest is that the public option is seen as “socialism.” But the public option actually helps to make the free market more fair….[T]he public option is a government alternative within the free market of choices for health care. So it actually…increases competition by creating a public option among the range of options for health care that will help to drive down prices….

But the Democrats didn’t fight the socialism battle because they lack courage. Once the Right said, “It’s socialism,” or “liberal,” or whatever the bad word of the day is, [the Democrats] ran for the hills. They said, “Well, we have to figure out another way to do this.” Democrats love to run from a fight.

Right. And the response is so easy. It’s, “If you think that the public option constitutes socialism, then I assume you also oppose Medicare and public education.”

Or public parks—and schools and sidewalks and subways and snowplows.

Right. Yeah. That should be an easy argument to make.

…But again, it’s an argument that would require you to articulate a worldview about the role of government in our lives - particularly in the lives of people who are struggling - that the Democrats are unwilling to make, for the most part. I’m glad to see the President – who I like and admire very much, but am frustrated with at times – I’m glad to see that he is starting to talk about this. But the Democrats need to be able to say, “Look, there are millions of people who can’t afford health insurance. That is a reality that has been created largely because of the influence of capitalism on our health care system.” Let’s just say that—period—in public with people watching and recording it.

That is the reality. So we have to figure out how, as a government, which is supposed to be something that is collective and protective of the common good, we can pull together resources collectively to provide things for the most number of people who need them.

…But the Democrats are largely unwilling to say that….The Republican Party and conservatives are much, much more articulate about saying why they believe something. The Democrats have a harder time with this, because they are always running away from labels, from the battle. That’s why [the Republicans] win even when they are in the minority.

It can’t be a discussion in which we just throw ideologies at one another.

Because then it gives the Republican Party the ability, which they do now, to claim that they care about poor people. They’re claiming that they care about the uninsured. I mean, I’m sure there are Republicans who do care about the uninsured and poor people and people who are struggling, but many of them don’t. And the reality is that many Democrats in Congress don’t, either, which is another reason why they aren’t able to make the case as strongly as it needs to be made….

…I loved last week…when Nancy Pelosi…said, “Look, [Democrats] need to get behind this because this is the right thing to do, regardless of whether or not it hurts your reelection prospects.”

That’s it.

…[W]e should remember that people who have been most…radical and most courageous in taking a stance didn’t [always see their goals] come to fruition in their lifetime. For instance, there was not one person [at the first Women’s Rights Convention] at Seneca Falls in July of 1848 [who was] alive in 1920 to vote. We don’t always benefit in the short-term from being part of the long-term struggle.

Right. I can’t speak knowledgeably about the details of the current health care bill, but in general, it seems like this is the sort of issue that’s worth staking your career on. This is one of the big ones. I’m amazed that the Democrats haven’t been able to muster a stronger rhetorical case. The Republican solutions – cutting corruption, tort reform – still only address a small fraction of the problem, as I understand it. Why aren’t the Dems dominating the rhetorical landscape here?

Well, it’s a rhetorical strategy…to seize on the [minutiae]. Take “reconciliation”….Reconciliation is going to fix some small debates within the bill. Reconciliation is not how [the Democrats] are going to “railroad the bill through the Congress.”

Most people don’t know these things. Most people don’t understand why we have a Senate bill and a House bill, why one is bigger than the other, why one bill has a public option and the other one doesn’t, or even what “reconciliation” [is]. I mean…people are too busy working their jobs or trying to get a job and trying to figure out how they’re going to pay for health care or how they’re going to get it if they don’t have it.

[The Republican] rhetorical strategy [is] related to magnification—which is to take something that’s little—for instance, Japan, in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s declaration of war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That speech was all about taking Japan, an island nation, and turning it into an “empire,” a colossal threat to the United States. When we look at the language and the rhetorical strategies in that speech, it’s all about…magnifying [a] threat.

And that is what the Republicans are doing with health care – taking some of these small things and magnifying them, so that they’re so overwhelming we can’t possibly [address them]. They are making mountains out of molehills to ensure that everything will fall apart.

If that’s what Republicans are doing with regard to reconciliation, it seems like a really risky rhetorical strategy to me, particularly given their incessant threat of the filibuster. Again, the response could be, “Oh, you mean fifty-one votes shouldn’t be enough? You mean a majority isn’t adequate?” It was amazing to me how the Republicans at the health care summit simultaneously tried to argue that the American people are opposed to the health care bill AND that passing the bill would represent a tyranny of the majority. How can you have both?

Well, that’s the thing. Democrats need to turn [it around and say], “That’s [not] American. Tyranny of the minority, that’s the threat to our system.” But…they don’t have the courage to do that.

And there’s all this imprecision, these ad hoc standards invented on the go. Using reconciliation twenty-one times for legislation you like is apparently okay, but using it to restructure a large portion of the economy isn’t. No one articulates a principle as to why this case is different. They just say so. Well, why is this different? What principle distinguishes this case from last time?

Exactly….[T]hat’s why a deeper historical and ethical understanding of our politics is necessary, beyond just focusing on policies and messaging. I know these things are important. But at the end of the day, we need to have a deeper context for understanding our politics, to pierce through the surface and go to the root of things. That’s what “radical” means—to go to the root of things. And that’s why I am a huge advocate of…ask[ing] the question, “Why do you believe what you believe?” Ultimately, the future of protest—hell, the future of the world—will depend on how we answer this.

Citizen Conversation With…Marshall Ganz

Interview conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP’11

Last year, you and Peter Dreier wrote an essay for the Washington Post in which you attempted to diagnose why health care reform had stalled. You wrote that “The White House and its allies forgot that success requires more than proposing legislation, negotiating with Congress and polite lobbying. It demands movement-building of the kind that propelled Obama’s long-shot candidacy to an almost landslide victory. And it must be rooted in the moral energy that can transform people’s anger, frustrations and hopes into focused public action, creating a sense of urgency equal to the crises facing the country.”

For readers who didn’t catch the Post piece, can you elaborate a little on what you’re recommending here?

…The history of reform in this country, of social reform, and political reform, has been a history of the “two hands clapping.” It’s been a history of responsive political leadership and assertive social movement.

If you go back as far as you’d like to go back, there’s this dynamic where the political leader gets elected and then he has to do their thing, and runs into all sorts of pressures and opposition. So unless there’s somebody out here whose main mission is to achieve reform, then all the energy shifts in one direction, to those that oppose it.

So unless you can create the power to - it’s not so much holding the political leadership accountable as it is creating the demand, the urgency, the need for reform – then it goes away….
Anytime you’re trying to change the status quo, the status quo has the overwhelming preponderance of resources on its side, plus inertia, plus habit, plus apathy, so it’s tough. You don’t just change things because you want to.

The legislative process has been much more responsive to the creation of crises that legislation is needed to resolve than it has been to, “Gee, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we made things work better?” So, the job of those trying to create change is actually to create crises that require legislative solution.
Now, a crisis that is felt by the powerless isn’t a crisis, because the powers that be don’t experience it to be a crisis, and so the challenge the powerless or those whose needs are not being addressed face is how to create the urgency.

So when Saul Alinsky, the community organizer, said, “Organizers need to be willing to be schizoids, because you have to polarize to mobilize, and you have to de-polarize to settle.” In other words, you have to create the urgency and the need for action, which inherently involves a process of polarization. But then, to actually settle anything, you have to shift and be able to negotiate….

Now, what the Obama Administration seemed to try to do was to mobilize by depolarizing….[I]n other words, it seemed like an effort to compromise your way to deep reform. I’ve never seen that that has ever worked in the history of this country, and I doubt anywhere, because it’s a contradiction.
So, on the one hand, the administration was not being clear, aggressive…as it had been in the campaign…and more culpably, the leadership of the reform movements, the people who were fighting for health care, for labor law reform, for environmental reform, for immigration reform, all bought in to this strategy. They all bought into “let Obama do it. He knows what he’s doing.”

Well, that’s kind of convenient. Some people confused access with outcomes, or access with power. So you may now have the power so long you get to go to the White House; well, that’s kind of cool. And the White House is saying, “Don’t rock the boat. We’ll take care of it.” So, you’re saying, “Gee, I don’t know. It’s the White House, so I better not rock the boat.”

Now, I don’t know if you saw today’s Washington Post, there’s stuff that the unions are clearly pissed off, because for a year, they’ve been struggling along on this idea that they’re going to get labor law reform, and so they haven’t been doing a damn thing to get it.

But the same thing happened in health care, the same thing….It’s like a mirroring kind of thing [that] resulted in no mobilization.

In the essay, you talk about the Obama for America organizing effort, how it was quite effective at getting people out and asking them to do things that would move the entire movement along. When the Obama team got to the White House, do you think they wondered whether it was appropriate to deploy that organization now that their guy was the President, and not just an aspiring leader?

I think there’s a couple of things going on. I mean, there is a question about leadership style, and conflict aversion versus “getting into a fight when you need to.” As we’ve seen, the President has pursued a pathway that has been conciliatory in almost everything.

That’s not appropriate for everything, because the world is full of bad guys and people whose interests conflict. You have to be willing to take on these fights, so that there’s something to mediate later on.
That’s an issue. In the campaign, it was less of an issue because it was defined as an adversarial – you know, there was “us” and “them.” But then moving into the governance, all of a sudden, it shifted. So here, you have this whole organization. This movement’s been built on trying to bring about some real change in the country. If your strategy doesn’t continue to be proactive, then what do you do with this movement?

So deciding to put [Organizing for America] into the DNC was a critical choice, because it meant, one, that it couldn’t be a mechanism to put pressure on Democrats. And of course, as we’ve seen, one of the major sources of problem has been the Democrats. So right there, it sort of tied the hands of the operation.

Then, by keeping it tied directly to the President, then it was like if the President was pursuing a strategy of, “Let’s compromise with everybody, and I’m not going to define what I’m for and I’m not going to-” And you’re out here in the field trying to mobilize people around “we don’t know what, from who, under what circumstances,” you can’t mobilize that way. You can’t organize that way.
So they wound up being in a very weird position, where they really had no program, that there was nothing they were clearly fighting for….So there was no strategy. So they were reduced to getting people to make phone calls to legislators who already supported their position, and act as if that was mobilizing something.

You know, it almost makes it appear like what they wanted to do was keep the machine on for the next election.

Since your essay was published, have you noticed any change in…

Well, right after it…there was a lot of stir. I got a lot of feedback of different kinds. All my friends in OFA thought I was a jerk, and so we had to work that out, which, eventually, we sort of did.

I know within the immigration reform movement, there was a reassessment of like, “Wait a second, we can’t just keep waiting around. We’ve got to do something,” so some of us have been involved in that campaign since August to try to create a much more of a movement mobilization base demanding immigration reform. That then actually has turned into what’s going to be a mobilization in DC for March 22nd.

….I think our piece sort of struck a chord, but not enough of the chord, and I think helped strike a deeper chord of realization that unless people who want to see deep reform mobilize and fight for it, it’s not going to happen, and that what Obama offers is an opportunity to do that. But Obama is not the messiah, and is not going to do it. It’s like Alinsky once said, “The liberals need radicals.”…Unless you have that pressure out there, it’s not going to happen.

Is it too late to turn health care around?

I don’t know. It’s hard to see where the momentum is going to come from. You know, we got civil rights legislation because there was reality out in the world that demanded it. It wasn’t because of lobbying tactics. Now, Lyndon Johnson played an important role, but we got environmental legislation in the early 70s even from the Nixon administration, because the whole country was going nuts around Earth Day and a whole lot of stuff was happening.

It’s like everybody seemed to forget all that in the last year and think that somehow now, deep reform is going to happen through congressional horse-trading. But that’s how you maintain the status quo; it’s not how you change it.

It’s what I learned in the Farm Workers….Now, see, we were fighting to build a union in California, and so eventually, we needed legislation…For a long period of time, the opposition was advocating legislation, because they saw that as the way to control us.

The conditions under which legislation became useful, and actually turned into a very positive thing, were that we had had a strike involving 70,000 people in California, 3,000 arrests, 44 beatings, 2 murders – I mean, of our people. A boycott going on all over the country of, you know, grapes and lettuce produced in California; county governments being bankrupted because of having to pay for jury trials for every single person arrested in the strike and which we demanded, and having to pay overtime for sheriffs; supermarket industry that was really - that because the growers couldn’t settle their problem in California turned into boycotts, were picketing supermarkets all over the country – they sure didn’t want it.

So legislation came in a context in which the supermarkets wanted it. The growers needed it. The county governments needed it. That gave us the power to negotiate legislation that was beneficial for us. Now, if all that hadn’t been going on and we’re just being sort of politely trying to negotiate what would be in the best interest of farm workers, nothing would have happened.

So there’s a kind of ahistoricism about the whole thing that really just surprises me.

It’s amazing how despite the momentum that the Dems brought with them to Washington this time, watching the ‘sausage-making’ in Congress seems to have really put a lot of Americans off the entire process. And perhaps as a result, nothing’s getting through.

…Well, the people who created the basic institutions in American government were very concerned, they were very fearful that government would become a source of power, and so they didn’t want that. And of course then, there weren’t huge corporations; there weren’t all these private concentrations of power that [were] so enormous.

So, the whole instrument is very enfeebled, so it becomes much more effective as a way of checking change than enabling it. And we’ve just seen now, for a year, how that works, and it’s all just checks…nobody can get anything done.

It’s extraordinary to have an opportunity when you can actually make reform. Now, Reagan made that happen, and he didn’t even have a congressional majority. I mean, Reagan figured out how to use his moment of power to restructure the financing of government in such a way that we’d never have debates on that programs anymore. All we debate about is finance and taxes and revenues. That’s a brilliant, brilliant move by the conservative movement, as they call it “to starve the beast.” They accomplished that, and it redefined how we do our politics.

Now, they were very smart about using the movement, using the moment. We’ve just blown a year on the progressive side. Lining up all the dots in such a way that we can actually get Congress to - I don’t know. It’s not set up to make change. It’s set up to resist change. So to make change takes an extraordinary effort and an extraordinary kind of focus and opportunity.
But…I was looking yesterday [at] all the appointments that just haven’t been made because “This congressman, or this senator [had an issue].”…Well, that didn’t stop Bush….Bush used the recesses to make these appointments.

So it isn’t just the institution. It’s also…this government strategy that is curiously non-assertive.

Citizen Conversation With…Noam Chomsky

Interview conducted on December 15, 2009 at Chomsky’s MIT office by Matt Bieber, MPP ‘11

In Manufacturing Consent (1988), you use a “propaganda model” to describe the way elite media functions. Can you summarize the view? Do you think its central claims still hold? If so, how might the model help us to understand coverage of the war in Afghanistan?

Well, the Propaganda Model is very simple-minded. It’s pretty close to truism, I think. If you look at the structure of the media, what kind of institutions they are, there are some simple observations. Let’s keep to the United States; it’s slightly different than other countries.

The media in the United States are major corporations…usually part of mega-corporations. Like other businesses, they sell a product to a market. Now, the market is advertisers — that is, other businesses. There are other powerful institutions that they interact with, like state power, which is very closely linked to concentrated private power in numerous ways. As for the product that’s sold — that is, audiences — that depends on which media you’re talking about. Our work is mostly on the elite media. So that audience is educated people, you know, people who are in general managerial circles — political managers, economic managers, doctrinal managers, universities, and so on.

If you look at that array of properties, you draw some plausible conclusions about…what the output of the media would probably be like. You’d expect it to conform to the interests and the goals, the concerns of the sellers, the buyers, the state closely linked to them, and the audience. Then come specific conclusions about whether in fact there are filters or factors that do shape media content, and then come investigations of case studies to see if it’s true.

In that particular book we ran through a series of case studies and tried to pick what should be called “hard cases” where the media think that they did a fantastic job, and we tried to show that in fact, it’s seriously distorted by these factors….

I think the common sense expectations — basically, guided free-market expectations – tend to be quite accurate. You can investigate the detailed studies and draw your own conclusions. And it continues. Take for example the U.S. escalation of the war in Afghanistan, in reality our invasion of Afghanistan. There have been intense deliberations for the last couple of months and a lot of discussion about how seriously everyone’s taking it. Just ask - who participated in these deliberations? I mean, was there a voice of the general population? I mean, we know the popular attitudes towards it; the population’s mostly opposed to it. Do they have a voice on the table? No. What about the Afghans? Do they have anything to say about this? Well, no voice at the table, so they have nothing to say about it. The citizens of Pakistan, do they have anything to say? No.

We know something about what they think because there are polls and so on, but the point is they are not part of the decision-making because of our very deeply rooted imperial culture, which says that the victims have no voice. It’s the powerful — namely us — who have the voice. In fact, not even “us,” if that includes the general population.

Obama made a speech the other day, the Nobel Peace Prize speech, about how we’ve made mistakes, but basically, everything we do is dedicated to peace and justice and we have a very noble record. It was a very well-received speech.…Did anybody ask, for example, whether four million corpses in Indo-China would have given the answer that everything we do is just? Or hundreds of thousands in Central America?….We can go on. No, they’re just not part of the story. What we do is basically right; it can’t be wrong. It can be mistaken, but it can’t be wrong. Now, that’s just a principle.

So, for example, Obama’s considered a principled critic of the Iraq war, very much hailed for that position by liberal sectors. But what was his criticism in the Iraq war? He said it was a strategic blunder. In other words, he took the same position that you could have read in Pravda in 1985 about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan….In fact, it’s the position you could have heard from the Nazi general staff after Stalingrad - fighting a two-front war was a strategic blunder. Now, we don’t call these principled criticisms. In fact, we call them deeply immoral criticisms — criminal criticisms, in fact. But when we do it, it’s a noble, principled position.

[T]he Vietnam War is a very interesting case, because there’s a ton of literature and commentary about it….But you find one very interesting thing. It’s virtually impossible to find the phrase “American invasion of South Vietnam.” I mean, obviously, there was one. You know, Kennedy in 1962 sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam. He authorized chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock and ground cover. They started programs which drove millions of people into what amounted to concentration camps, in order to separate them from the guerillas, who the government knew very well they were supporting.

Well, if somebody else did that we’d call it aggression. But when we did it, the phrase can’t be pronounced. If you look, go to the end of the war and ask what the retrospective judgments are, about the most critical judgments you could find from the extreme critical end is perhaps Anthony Lewis of the New York Times — I don’t think you can get much beyond that. He said the war began with “blundering efforts to do good.” They were blundering because they didn’t work out too well. They were efforts to do good by definition, ‘cause we did them. You don’t need any argument for that. So it began with blundering efforts to do good, but by 1969, it was clear that it had become a disaster. It was too costly — he says too costly to ourselves, some others say too costly for others. And it was therefore a mistake. Well, try to find something more critical than that in the media, then go read, say, Pravda on the Afghan invasion. I haven’t done it, but I assume you would find pretty much the same….

And do you think that the criticism only ever goes that far because the participants in elite media want to give the benefit of the doubt to leaders who we’ve all been taught to believe were under the influence of a belief in the domino theory and perpetual Soviet aggression?

Well, first of all, the Russians weren’t anywhere in sight, so yes, you can believe in Russian aggression if you want, but…the Russians had a better case for believing in American aggression in Afghanistan or Chechnya — we don’t take it seriously. And in fact, if you look at the whole history of the Cold War — it had events after all — the events were very different from the ideology. The events were almost invariably wars by the United States against forces in its own domains, and violence by the Soviet Union against forces in its own domains. In all cases, justified by the fear of the other, but with very little justi — some yes, some shred of justification — propaganda exercises never totally lack them.

And what’s more interesting is that this is conceded at the end. So a very interesting moment to look at, if you want to understand the Cold War, is what happened exactly twenty years ago. We’ve just had a big commemoration of the Fall of Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Try to find in all of this discussion some attention to what happened next. Well, something happened next. Couple of weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, George Bush the first invaded Panama to capture a petty thug, who was kidnapped and brought to Florida and sentenced for crimes that he committed for the most part on the CIA payroll. We don’t know the casualties because we don’t do body counts, but Panamanian civil rights organizations estimated a couple of thousand people killed, mostly poor people. In fact, Panama has a day of mourning every year to commemorate it. But on our side, it was nothing. In fact, that’s correct; it’s just a footnote to history — we do it all the time.

There were two new things about it though. It was pointed out by Elliott Abrams, recently in the State Department, that this was the first time that the United States had been able to - he wouldn’t say “invade,” you know, liberate, or whatever - intervene in another country, without the concern that the Russians might react somewhere….But this time, we could disregard it. So we’re much more free to use force than before. That’s one effect of the end of the Cold War….

The other novelty was that the pretext was new. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union’s collapsing, couldn’t be that the Russians are coming. So they had to make up a new story. In this case, Hispanic narco-traffickers are trying to destroy us. And over the next couple of years, there were interesting developments in the intellectual community, not just the media, to try to concoct new stories to justify intervention. So humanitarian intervention, a responsibility to protect, one and after another story was concocted…

So the policies go on about as before, and more freely because there’s no deterrence and with new pretexts. Take a look at how the government reacted. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Bush administration came out with a national security strategy and defense budget. They make for interesting reading. Now, if you want to understand the Cold War, that would be the perfect thing to look at.

Okay, Cold War’s over, now what happens? Well, turns out they said that things will stay just as before. We still need a huge military force, not because of the Russians but because of what they called the “technological sophistication” of Third World powers. So therefore, we need this huge military force. And we have to maintain what they call the “defense industrial base.” That’s places like MIT. That’s a euphemism for high-tech industry, which is funded under the cover of defense, like computers, the internet, and so on.

So we have to maintain the defense industrial base. We have to maintain intervention forces, directed at the Middle East energy resources. Then comes an interesting phrase, where the substantial threats to our interests “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” So in other words, we’ve been lying to you for fifty years, but that’s over, and now the threats could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door, the cases that involved military force. That’s true, it could never have been laid at the Kremlin’s door. But that was not the story for fifty years, and so it continues.

…What happened last month is pretty striking. It’s not just about the media; it’s about the intellectual culture altogether. There were two major events to commemorate last November. One of them was the fall of the Berlin Wall — huge commemoration, a lot of discussion about its meaning, idealism triumphed, we learn the lesson that non-violence works, and so on and so forth. A lot of self-praise, that was the theme.

A week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 16, 1989, elite military forces in El Salvador — their elite battalion…fresh from training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina; they’d just come from three months of training, and then had a refresher course a couple of days earlier — went in and murdered six leading Latin-American intellectuals, their housekeeper, daughter. That capped a decade of monstrous crimes, traceable back to us, in Central America, which killed hundreds of thousands, three countries ruined…

And that’s just the end of something much more significant. It’s the end of a war, a war against the Catholic Church, that the U.S. initiated in the early 60s, after Vatican II. Vatican II, called by Pope John XXIII, was a revolutionary event in the history of the Catholic Church. It was a return to the Gospels. The Church in the 4th century had been taken over by the Roman Empire, Constantine, and he basically converted it, to quote a famous theologian, “from the Church of the persecuted to the church of the persecutors.”

And so it pretty much remained until Vatican II, which set off an effort to restore the Church to the Church of the Gospels, which is radical pacifism. And in that context, Latin American bishops undertook what they call the “preferential option for the poor.” They began to — priests, nuns, laypersons — they went to peasant communities, organized communities to read the Gospels, to think about ways in which they might take their lives into their own hands and overcome the misery and oppression they had suffered under U.S. domination. It was really an effort to revive the Church, to revive Christianity.
U.S. reacted immediately. The first major reaction was the military coup in Brazil, 1964, planned by the Kennedy administration — took place right after the assassination. It instituted the first Neo-Nazi style national security state, a violent torture state…[and] of course, suppressed liberation theology….
That was called “the greatest victory for freedom in the mid-20th century” by Lincoln Gordon, who was Kennedy-Johnson’s ambassador. Then the dominos started falling. Brazil’s a big country. One country after another fell under a brutal vicious dictatorship: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and so on. The plague spread to Central America in the 1980s, I just described that. It was essentially terminated on November 16, 1989. It was maybe the final blow; that’s a pretty important historical event, I would think. Did you see anybody discuss it? Actually, there was a meeting in Boston College about it, where the one survivor of the Jesuit massacres appeared, but I don’t think that was even reported. Well, okay, the comparison gives us an interesting insight into imperial mentality.

Do you think that self-justifying, self-praising intellectual climate in the U.S. is markedly different than it is in other…

That’s the way great powers behave, and if you look at the history of England or France or Germany or Japan, you’ll find pretty much the same thing.

What would it take for the sorts of things you are describing to change?

The country is a lot more civilized that it was in the 1960s. It’s because of activism and dissent. Now, I mean, you’re supposed to hate the 60s and call it the time of troubles and so on, but what the 60s actually were was a time of activism, mostly young people and some of it, you know, crazy, some of it off-the-wall, but that was a fringe. And just look at the impact. Out of it came the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, later the international solidarity movements, anti-nuclear movements. It’s just a much, very much more civilized country than it was.
I mean, the Kennedy School was an example. It didn’t look like that forty years ago.

What did it look like?

Probably looked like MIT did 40 years ago when I got here in the 1950s — white men, well-dressed, obedient, deferential, doing their job, working hard, not much interested in anything in the world. But take a walk down the halls now. It’s not what it looks like anymore….

About the possibility of dissent today, what’s your take on the emergence of figures like Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann? Do they strike you as a new development in American political culture, or are they incarnations of old phenomena?

Back in the 30s, you had Father Coughlin preaching anti-Semitic racism and so on. It’s new because we have new media — it’s different in many respects. Actually, I’ve never heard Glenn Beck, so I’m just judging by secondary comment. But I do listen to talk radio while I’m driving, because it’s interesting. I think it gives you an interesting insight into a significant part of the culture. I don’t exactly know what the scale of the audience is. But if you listen to, say, Rush Limbaugh for a while, you get a kind of a sense of the people who he’s talking to and who’re calling in.

And at least — I’ve never seen a study of it — but the sense that I get is that these are people with real grievances, valid grievances. They’ve been treated very badly for 30 years. They are hard-working — they think of themselves as hard-working Americans, white, Christian, God-fearing, do all the right things, but for thirty years, they’ve been cast aside. Their incomes and wages have stagnated; such benefits as there were have declined. Their jobs are being sent abroad, schools are no good. Two members of the family have to work to put food on the table. Families are falling apart. Bad things have happened to them. It’s not like El Salvador where we slaughtered them, but it’s not nice, and they don’t understand why. They want an answer and they deserve an answer. Well they’re not getting an answer that says it’s because of the bipartisan decision in the 1970s to shift the structure of the economy towards financialization and emptying out of industrial production and towards the neoliberal policies that enrich a tiny sector and disregard everyone else — no one is telling them that….

And they do get an answer from Rush Limbaugh – a crazy answer but it’s an answer. And you know, McLaughlin and Michael Savage and the rest of them, the answer is it’s the rich liberals who own everything, who run the corporations, run the government, run the media. They want to take everything away from you and give it to the illegal immigrants and the shiftless blacks and so on….So you’re ordinary Americans? I’m one of you and we’re getting back at these rich elitists, who don’t care about us. Okay, that’s an answer. It’s not the right answer, but it’s an answer.

If you kind of suspend disbelief, you forget what you know about the world, and just try to get into that system of thought, it’s a coherent answer. It’s internally coherent. It’s logical. It has historical resonances. It’s rather similar to late Weimar Germany. That’s the way the Nazis organized, to an aggrieved population, giving them answers that were coherent — crazy but coherent — and I don’t have to tell you what happened after that. So I think it’s very important.

Citizen Conversation With…Meghan O’Sullivan

Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, News Writer, MPP’11

Meghan O’Sullivan is Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs. Previously, she was at the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004-2007. She has cumulatively spent two years in Iraq, including working for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003-2004 and helping negotiate the bilateral security agreement between Iraq and the United States in the fall of 2008. She also worked in Policy Planning at the State Department, where she was the senior advisor to the special envoy to the Irish Peace Process and her portfolio included Iran, Libya, Syria, and relations with the Muslim world. She is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

In your view, can the decision to go to war in Iraq be justified using traditional just war theory, or did it represent an extension, augmentation, or violation of that theory?

The departure was in moving from preemptive war — which is broadly considered to be a legitimate and justifiable type of just war — to preventive war. That’s the controversial bit. Post–9/11, senior U.S. officials believed they had a new set of security threats. And we did, in many respects.

After 9/11, people in charge pulled back and said, “We have to re-look at all of our threats in a new light.” Low-level threats in a pre-9/11 world were no longer considered to be low-level. Risk that was acceptable pre-9/11 was no longer considered acceptable post-9/11. This change encouraged the administration to conflate the concepts of preventive war and preemptive war. They’re not the same thing. But the relevant question was now “Is there anything about this new international security environment that actually makes the urgency of a preventive war akin to that of a preemptive war?” I think that’s the debate, which will probably go on for a long period of time.

Do you have a personal view about that?

I understand where policy makers’ heads were at the time. They believed, based on intelligence that was later proved to be wrong, that they were facing a threat in Iraq with some urgency. One of the questions was how to evaluate the urgency in the new security environment where you no longer could expect to identify all your threats as clearly as armies amassing at a border. President Bush described this challenge to me personally in some detail because he wanted me to understand how he was looking at the world in light of his responsibilities. In this 9/11 world, where his primary responsibility continued to be one to protect the American people, he saw it as his responsibility to counter threats before they materialized.

So, in some fashion, you can understand the logic here when your threats are no longer discernable in the sense they used to be. But in practice, the concept is extremely unwieldy. If you extend the logic, it really becomes very expansive….Think about what it might mean for how the situation with Iran is addressed in the next year or eighteen months or whatever the window is. If the United States or some other country were to take military action, to what extent is a preventive action going to be considered to be a justified action?

My sense is that many of the people who voted for President Obama perceived their vote as, in part, an effort to roll back aspects of the Bush Administration. I’m wondering whether for policymakers in the White House, policies are likely to have more staying power than the public may understand. We’ve seen that borne out in some notable examples - Obama retaining Bush-era policies surrounding detention for suspects and so forth. With all this in mind, what do you think of as the policy precedents and ramifications of Bush’s decision to wage a preventive war?

The first part of your question is true: particularly in foreign policy, there is almost certainly likely to be more continuity in policy between administrations than some people outside of government understand. This is not specific to the Obama administration.

And that is because the reality is, once you get into the White House, whether you’re President Bush or President Obama, you’re mostly concerned with national challenges and you largely have the same national capabilities. You’re dealing with the same information, more or less. You may have slightly different sources or perspectives, but you’re getting similar information. And at the end of the day, the most important element of your job is the same – protecting the American people.

So, in a lot of ways, it wasn’t surprising to me to see in some cases once President Obama came into office and was confronted with certain situations, he made somewhat similar choices. The reality is that President Obama didn’t have many more options than President Bush had before him a day earlier. President Obama did have increased international credibility and good will, and the good feelings that came in with his election. This did create some new options. But in general, there are some realities having to do with the threats the United States faces. There are some realities about our capabilities which are distinct from individual presidents.

In terms of Iraq being a precedent used by others to wage a preventive war, it’s a great question and I really don’t know the right answer to it. My immediate reaction is the concept has been discredited by how things went in Iraq. Iraq discredited, to some extent, intervention. It has discredited, in some respect, the use of military force. It has certainly discredited the idea of a preventive war. So there are all kinds of – we could call them casualties – associated with the Iraq War and with the complications that unfolded as a result of it.

So, on the one hand, I think that subsequent administrations will be loath to use Iraq as any kind of precedent. But really, in answering your question, we need to consider what if another administration is faced with the same perceived situation…. Incidentally, there are many things that are reasonable to criticize the Bush administration for regarding Iraq, but one of them which is not valid, is this notion that the administration did not really believe that Saddam had WMD. Senior officials and most others did think Saddam had WMD. The debate at the time wasn’t really about questioning the intelligence and whether or not Saddam had WMD – the debate was about what was the right response to this threat.
So what if President Obama or some subsequent president found himself or herself in a situation where he had some degree of certainty that there was a threat that was perceived in similar fashion? I think when you make the question more specific, it’s harder to answer that no president will ever wage a preventive war again. You know, I wouldn’t put my money on that.

Let’s switch our area focus for a moment. There’s a famous Henry Kissinger quote that goes, “High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.” Can you describe the intellectual environment in the White House during your time there? Did you feel like there was space for reasonably paced intellectual discourse? Or were things too fast for that?

You don’t want to say, “There’s no time for intellectual discourse.” But the reality is that true intellectual discourse is rare in policymaking. It is not impossible, and I can give you examples of where it happened. But often, you are reacting to a crisis and you are not in a position to be reading books and contemplating theories. Occasionally, you are able to look out and say, “I’ve got a strategic vision,” or “This is something that’s coming down the road, and therefore, we need to mobilize people. We need to marshal resources that have other immediate applications for this issue down the road because the world is changing – threat, opportunity, whatever it is.” That can be a more intellectual endeavor in some respects.

It also depends where you are in government. I started government in a place called Policy Planning, which is basically like a think-tank for the secretary of state and the State Department. That was an environment in which my colleagues and I had much more scope to think intellectually, because in that environment, we, in general, were not operational, meaning that we didn’t have any responsibilities for executing policy. Our job in Policy Planning was to think of good ideas, to try to critique our own government’s policies, and to propose creative solutions to things. And it was a fabulous job and it was a great introduction to government. I came from Oxford, then I went to a think tank, and then I went to this part of government – it was a perfect slow immersion into the realities of government and policymaking.

That sort of work is very different than being in the field. I spent a total of two years in Baghdad, and no day in Baghdad went nearly the way I expected it to. In the field, especially in place like Baghdad, you’re trying to help build something that’s very long-term, but you’re buffeted by daily, hourly, and sometimes, by-the-minute forces. So it’s a constant challenge to balance the immediate and the strategic.

I actually am a huge subscriber to Kissinger’s sentiments. The longer you’re in government, especially depending on what kind of job you’re in, the harder you have to work to maintain your ability to look at ideas afresh when they come to you. People who have been in government a long time can have a tendency to quickly say, ”We’ve tried that. We’ve done that. This didn’t work.” I worked hard not to do this. Instead, I tried to keep an open mind to the idea that just because something didn’t work in 2005, doesn’t mean it’s not going to work in 2007. The context may have changed. You have to work hard to really be able to digest ideas over and over again to really appreciate the nuances and complexities of things.

How does it feel to come out of such an intense and highly bonded work environment? Does it make it difficult to get used to the notion that you’ve relinquished power and that it’s in someone else’s hands now?

No one is in a high government job forever, and you go into one of those jobs knowing that it is a privilege to serve in that job, and that there will come a time when you’re not in that job and that you should have respect for person who does that job subsequent to you.

It’s nice to hear that, particularly given the way the media covers Washington — you can easily get the impression that participants at that level think of the opposition party as the enemy and root for them to fail.

It is Washington and there is some of that. But in the executive branch, there is probably less of that on both sides than people think. We’re talking about people at a very senior level in the executive branch. Once you get one of those positions, you don’t wake up every morning saying, “I’m a Republican” or “I’m a Democrat.” If you’re somebody who’s working on the policy side and you’re working foreign policy, your morning thought is about the American interest. It’s not a partisan thought.
I know some people find it very hard to believe that in the Bush White House people weren’t sitting around and talking about how to hand a blow to the Democratic Party. I mean, maybe they were, but certainly not in my office on Iraq and Afghanistan. We were talking about how to shift the momentum, how to correct the flaws, how to garner more resources to help America, our coalition and Iraqi partners succeed in Iraq.

You mentioned 18-hour days. I read an excerpt of a study recently on high-level British officials; the study estimated that the pace at which senior government officials work is so damaging to the body that it can be the equivalent of working with a blood alcohol level of 0.1. Two questions: Did you have the strength and endurance to deal with the incredibly complicated and nuanced problems that were on your desks? And if that capacity was diminished by sleep deprivation or overwork, did you have strategies to deal with those challenges?

When I went into government, I saw a few colleagues who’d been in government a long time under very stressful conditions, and they had burned out but were still in their jobs. I remember saying to myself, “I’m going to leave before I burn out.” And every year, I checked in with myself and asked, “How close am I to that level?” It’s a part of the reason why I left in 2007 and not in 2009. I wanted to feel that I had done the best job that I good do on both my first day and my last day.

When one of my old bosses, Bob Blackwill, talks about things he looks for in a person he’s looking to hire, he always mentions physical stamina. It sounds like not really an important thing for a policy person, but really, the ability to work those hours for that length of time without being demoralized, disheartened, or losing your judgment is something that requires physical stamina. Perhaps even more importantly, it requires a certain psychological perspective and resilience. There are lots of tactical defeats in foreign policy. You can’t be demoralized every time something doesn’t go the right way.
During my first stint in Iraq – from early 2003 to mid-2004 – I, and all my colleagues, worked seven days a week, easily eighteen hours a day, sometimes twenty hours a day. I came back, I went directly to the White House – I had a few days off in between. Then I started to work a similar schedule again, but soon I realized this is not actually sustainable and I had to find pockets in the week, however small, to rejuvenate. For me it was a long Sunday afternoon run….I don’t think it requires having ten consecutive nights of twelve hours of sleep, but you need some point to recalibrate, and I think everybody finds it in a different way. The people who don’t find it, I think, cannot last nearly as long.

Citizen Conversation With…John Donahue

Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, News Writer, MPP’11

John D. Donahue is the Raymond Vernon Lecturer in Public Policy and faculty chair of the HKS Case Program and the SLATE teaching initiative.His teaching, writing, and research mostly deal with public sector reform and with the distribution of public responsibilities across levels of government and sectors of the economy, including extensive work with the HKS-HBS joint degree program. He has written or edited ten books, including Disunited States (1997), The Privatization Decision (1989, with four translations 1990-92) and most recently, The Warping of Government Work (2008). He served in the first Clinton Administration as an Assistant Secretary and then as Counselor to the Secretary of Labor. Donahue has consulted for business and governmental organizations, including the National Economic Council, the World Bank, and the RAND Corporation, and serves as a trustee or advisor to several nonprofits. A native of Indiana, he holds a BA from Indiana University and an MPP and PhD from Harvard.

You’ve spent an awful lot of time at the Kennedy School. You’re an MPP, a PhD, and you’ve spent the bulk of your career here. How do you think the school is doing? In particular, how has it changed since the time you were an MPP, and what challenges is it facing right now?

Harvard had really lousy luck in when it decided to launch the Kennedy School – or rather, when it decided to scale it up – in that it went from being a small program to an avowedly large-scale initiative meant to create a new profession in the late 70s. (1979 is when the current building was built.) That was just about the time the bottom fell out of public service in the United States. Right at the point when the relative economic rewards of public service collapsed, and right when trust in government and the status of public service declined. So we couldn’t have done worse.

I always think it’s important to think of that background in calibrating how we’ve done relative to the mission. Given how strongly the tide has been running against us, we’ve been doing pretty well. Had the Kennedy School been started in, let’s say, 1941 or 1946, or maybe right now, I think it might have been a smoother launch. So that affects how I set par in my mind.

If I could push a little further on that in particular, what do you see as the legacy of a stumbled launch thirty-odd years later?

Any institution, if it doesn’t have a strong external constituency to keep it on track with its intended mission, will follow a path of least internal resistance and find something else to do. One thing about the Kennedy School is that there’s a strong gravitational pull exerted by the faculty of Arts and Sciences. Most of us come from there. We all respect the elegance of what they do. Without some other strong force offsetting that gravitational pull we end up—instead of orbiting at an appropriate distance around the arts-and-sciences world—getting pulled completely into it.

The Law School, the Medical School, and the Business School all benefit from the discipline imposed on them by a pretty robust and well-defined labor market they’re feeding into. Because we don’t have that, we’ve got to work extra hard to become something distinct from just a branch of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Do you think the Kennedy School has a clear picture of what it wants its students to leave the Kennedy School having learned? Is there a clear vision of a successful student?

Some parts do. I admire the MPA/ID initiative because of the clarity of its mission. I think it’s kind of a niche mission, but they know what they’re doing. I think the intentionality of the MPP program ebbs and flows. There are times that we have a clear fix on what we’re trying to do and we build it into the curriculum, and there are times when we sort of drift away from that.

We always do come back. This is a conversation that we always have, over and over again. It would be easier, again, if we had a thousand public-service organizations around the world that know exactly what they want in an MPP to keep us honest if we start to depart from that. In the absence of that external discipline, we need a little bit more internal focus.

Which areas of the MPP curriculum and of the MPP profile are well defined right now and which ones could use some work?

I think the pieces are well defined, but the whole is not as much greater than the sum of the parts as it ought to be. To the extent that the MPP offers something distinctive, it’s the reliable capability to integrate and apply the different disciplines in real world practice. I wish we did a better job at that. You get some practice at it in Spring Exercise, you get some practice at it in your PAE. In my ideal conception of the Kennedy School, we’d devote more time to this kind of integrated policy analytic work throughout the core, but that’s hard to do.

We all have so much within our areas that we think it’s urgent for you to learn. I’ve got my stuff I want you to learn in management, and other people have their stuff they want you to learn in economics, statistics, ethics, and so on. It’s a collective action problem, making way for the common curriculum of integrated policy analysis.

I’ve been impressed in the moments when our syllabi are coordinated – so that we’re talking about topics that integrate material that we’re learning in multiple classes at once. But I can imagine that doing that thing on a large scale is really hard to arrange.

You bet. It pays off big-time. If I had my way, that would happen closer to 90% of the time, instead of 10% of the time. But again, it’s a lot of work to get that done.

I actually have an ambition – not this year and not next year but probably the year after that – to do some experimentation with a single cohort that does a little bit more consistent integration and see if we can demonstrate the value of that.

Is that tied into your efforts to improve professional pedagogy more generally? And can you provide some background on that effort for our readers?

The case program was broken and we had to close it or fix it. The dean asked if I would become the faculty chair to try to help fix it, and I said okay. Then about a month later, the dean said, “While you’re at it, can you do something about faculty training and assessment?” I said, “Not by myself, I can’t. But if you will help me line up some reinforcements, maybe collectively we can..”

So we recruited two fabulous colleagues – Dick Light and Dan Levy—who joined with me as the core faculty team. Anne Drazen had been the head of IT at the Kennedy School and was sort of bored with running a mature process and raised her hand to do be the staff head of the effort. And we recruited Lee Warren, an ace teaching coach, to be the director of professional pedagogy.

We have an advisory board, chaired by Derek Bok, who understandably turned down everything else Harvard wanted him to do after his second time as president, but said yes to us because he cares so much about this mission. The dean, the executive dean, the academic dean are all strongly behind it.
What does the content of the training look like in particular? What gaps are you seeking to fill?
Well, case teaching for one thing, but not just the case method strictly speaking. The term we use is problem-based learning, which includes cases, but also includes exercise and simulations, and all kinds of teaching methods that have the students actively engaged in the learning experience, rather than passively receiving lessons from the professor.

We just finished the first case teaching seminar for faculty who wanted to use the method but didn’t know how. This past August and September we just did our second round of new faculty orientation for people to introduce them to the idea that this is a professional school, and what that institutional distinction means for how they might approach teaching.

When the school was small, when I was an MPP student, there were only around 25 people on the faculty. The Tom Schellings and Dick Neustadts and Fred Mostellers of the world were able to informally impart the ethos of professional-school pedagogy to the new folks. Then the school got big and that model didn’t work anymore. It took us a while to figure out that we needed a more structured institution to replace it. To their credit, this leadership team recognized that, set out to fix it, and is putting tons of support into the effort. It’s going to take five or ten years to see if it’s going to make a big difference, but so far, things are going very well.

Citizen Conversation With…Stephen Walt

Photo courtesy of Taylor Chapman, MPP’11. Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, News Writer, MPP’11.

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Rene Belfer Professsor of International Relations. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and he also serves as Co-Editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press.

In an article and a subsequent book published a couple of years ago, you and John Mearsheimer argued that the Israel lobby exerts a power over U.S. foreign policy that can’t be explained in terms of American or Israeli interests, nor in terms of America’s moral obligations. So can you summarize your argument for our readers?
The basic argument of the book is that there is a powerful interest group—a coalition of different individuals and organizations—that seeks to maintain a “special relationship” between the United States and Israel. In particular, the special relationship means that the United States gives Israel extraordinary amounts of economic, military, and diplomatic support, and does so more-or-less unconditionally. No matter what Israel does, in short, it continues to receive economic, military, and diplomatic backing.
We argued that this special relationship was primarily due to domestic politics in the United States, and tried to explain exactly how that worked. We emphasize that the lobby’s activities were legitimate forms of political participation and far from unique– that there were lots of other interest groups that did similar things—though few groups were as influential.
We also maintained that the special relationship was not good for either the United States or Israel. It was undermining America’s interests in the Middle East and elsewhere, and encouraging Israeli policies that were not in Israel’s long-term interest. Accordingly, we argued that a more normal relationship would be better for both countries.
By writing the book, we hoped to get the subject more out in the open and get people talking about it, given that it had been something of a taboo subject for many years. Needless to say, the reaction of some of our critics confirmed that this is still a difficult subject to talk about in a calm and rational way, although I would argue that the discussion has become somewhat more open since our work was published.
Do you see Obama’s relationship with the Israel lobby as different than Bush’s was?
Maybe at the margin, but there has yet to be sharp break with past behavior. President Bush was as unconditionally supportive of Israel as any American president has ever been and yet he also did a number of things that were unintentionally quite harmful to Israel, and needless to say, to the United States as well. Not because he intended to, of course, but because the policies he pursued were not very smart.
President Obama has suggested on several occasions that he has a somewhat more nuanced view of this issue. For example, he has said that “Good friends ought to be able to disagree with one another, and that sometimes that’s the right thing to do,” which implies some recognition that US and Israeli interests aren’t identical. But I’ve yet to see him actually deliver on that sentiment. He has made some great speeches, but so far, the special relationship has not been affected one way or the other, and he has not been willing to use American leverage to try and advance the peace process in a significant way.
In your view, is there anything that American leadership can do to advance the peace process?
The United States has enormous potential leverage over most of the relevant parties. We have a lot of leverage on the Palestinians, who depend on us for economic aid and diplomatic backing because they’re almost powerless themselves. We’ve also played a constructive role in helping create a more reliable Palestinian security force. If we stopped doing that, that would be a real problem for the Palestinian National Authority.
So we have lots of leverage with them and we haven’t been shy about using it in the past. We’ve put pressure on the Palestinians for decades, both to recognize Israel’s right to exist before and then to make various concessions as part of the peace process.
We also have enormous potential leverage on Israel. Not only do we provide them with $3-4 billion in aid every year, but we’re also their principal diplomatic ally and protector. The problem is that no American president really has ever been willing to use leverage, mostly because they had been worried about the domestic political consequences of doing so. So you have this bizarre situation, where every president since Lyndon Johnson—including President Obama—says that Israel should stop building settlements. The Israeli government refuses and then all Obama says is, “Well, you know, that’s regrettable” and doesn’t do anything else.
If it wished, the United States could have actually ended this conflict a long time ago, but no American president had the political courage to do it. And that’s tragic. Dean Ellwood likes to talk about the need to “Act in Time,” and this is an obvious case where the United States has consistently failed to do so. The result is that the situation there has gotten steadily worse, and the two-state solution that Obama says he wants may no longer be possible.
Could an American president condition some portion of our support on Israel halting the construction of settlements and expect to survive the domestic backlash?
I think it would be difficult, but if an American president made it a priority and actively explained the situation to the American people—including Christian evangelicals and Jewish Americans who have been very supportive of Israel—many of them would support [the president]….Not all, but many of them would.
It would involve some use of the “bully pulpit” to explain why putting pressure on both sides was really necessary. You’d have to explain why doing so was in America’s interest but it was also in the Palestinians’ interest and in Israel’s interest. In particular, you need to point out that all of the alternatives to a two-state solution look substantially worse. If you do that, then I think an American president could succeed.
I would also argue that our current president is unusually well-equipped to do that. He’s very articulate, he’s very smart, and I think he understands the issues quite well. Unfortunately, he’s also got about nine million other things that he’s supposed to solve in the next three or four years, and they aren’t going to be easy either. So whether this issue will rank high enough on his list of priorities to get that kind of attention, I just don’t know. That’s why I’m not particularly optimistic about any real progress.
Can you describe what you think the world would look like if Iran did acquire a weapon? Are we overly concerned?
Yes, I think we are overly concerned. I don’t think an Iranian bomb would be a good thing, of course, and I would prefer Iran not acquire them. I can even make a case for why it’s not in Iran’s interest to go all the way across the threshold to a full nuclear capability. But if Iran did do that, it would not have particularly dramatic effects. They couldn’t use a weapon against anyone that we care about because we could retaliate. Or in the case of Israel, Israel could retaliate on its own.
And if you look at other countries that have acquired nuclear weapons, having a bomb didn’t suddenly give them extraordinary global influence. It didn’t let the Soviet Union blackmail anybody, and it didn’t let China blackmail anybody. It hasn’t made it possible for the United States [to] simply tell people what to do and get them to obey.
You occasionally hear this idea that if Iran got nuclear weapons, it would begin throwing its weight around and telling all these countries in the Middle East to do what it wanted….[B]ut no other nuclear power has been able to do that, so it’s fanciful to think Iran would be able to wield enormous influence just because it tested a nuclear device.
So again, an Iranian bomb would not be a good thing; I’d rather they didn’t [acquire one]. We ought to be looking for different ways to persuade them not to go all the way. But if they did, we would immediately find ways to live with it. In fact, we would start telling everyone that it didn’t matter very much.
I’d like to push back a bit in two ways. One, there are those who argue that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it would immediately inspire an arms race among Iran’s neighbors in the region. What do you make of this argument? And two, do we need to worry about the possibility that Iran could use a nuclear capability against Israel in a way that would make Israel incapable of responding? Elliott Abrams used the phrase “a one-bomb country” to describe Israel when he spoke in the Forum several weeks ago.
A regional arms race might happen, but that isn’t inevitable. If you look at when other countries have acquired nuclear weapons, it hasn’t immediately led to regional arms races, either. North Korea is now testing nuclear weapons, but South Korea is not building a bomb and Japan is not [pursuing] a bomb. The Philippines aren’t trying things like that. So you don’t see this sort of “proliferation chain” happening automatically.
By the way, the possibility of a regional arms race is one reason why Iran might actually be better off not going all the way to an active nuclear capability. They are the most populous country in the Persian Gulf. They have the most economic potential there. Over time, they are likely to be the dominant power in that part of the world, which means if it remains a nuclear-free area, they’re going to have more influence than they would have if countries like Saudi Arabia acquired nuclear deterrents of their own.
You could make the argument that Iran ought to have the capacity to go nuclear if it ever had to but it should refrain from exercising that capability - the condition of nuclear latency.
As for the one-bomb argument, Israel is not so small that you drop one bomb on it [and] it would destroy everything, though it would certainly be a horrific event. But more importantly, Iran is not going to attack Israel because the Israelis would undoubtedly have ways to retaliate. The Iranians could never be certain that a dozen, two-dozen Israeli bombs wouldn’t find their way back to Tehran, completely destroying their society.
There’s never been any evidence whatsoever to suggest that Iran’s leaders are suicidal, and you’d be committing suicide if you attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. And for what? If you dropped a bomb on Jerusalem, you destroy the third holiest site in all of Islam. If Iran is led by a bunch of people who take Islam seriously, as we are led to believe, it’s hard to imagine that this is what they would do if they were to acquire a nuclear capability. So I think this is another case where we’ve suffered from a certain degree of threat-mongering.
One final topic: Afghanistan. Do you oppose the notion of sending more American troops to Afghanistan?
Yes.
What’s the best course of action for President Obama at this point?
I think President Obama should be looking for ways to end America’s military involvement in Afghanistan as rapidly as possible, but that can’t be done instantaneously. It doesn’t mean that our presence there would go to zero, but that basically, we should not be trying to fight a counter-insurgency war against the Taliban. We should be letting Afghanistan settle its own problems.
Our major objective in Central Asia should be to focus on anti-American terrorists, and especially Al-Qaeda. We should not be trying to determine the political fate of 32 million Muslims in Afghanistan, along with the 180 million Muslims located in Pakistan. We don’t have the knowledge or the capacity to socially engineer either of these societies and we are as likely to make things worse as to make things better, and at considerable costs to ourselves.
It sounds like you think that despite America having intervened in Afghanistan, we don’t have any ongoing moral obligation to stay.
No. There can be circumstances where there’s some moral responsibility involved, but there are clearly limits as well. In particular, the moral obligation is limited when you don’t really have the ability to improve the situation. I tend to analyze this situation in very straightforward cost-benefit terms. [The] costs there are substantial and rising. [The] benefits, even if we succeed, are relatively minimal. For Americans, the primary benefit would be helping to lower the risk of Al-Qaeda-based terrorism, and I don’t believe victory in Afghanistan makes much difference one way or the other. Victory will not eliminate Al-Qaeda and defeat isn’t going to make Al-Qaeda substantially more powerful.
Finally, we have to ask, “What’s the likelihood of success?” You’re not morally obligated if there’s nothing you could do that would actually make things better. In my view, waging a large-scale counter-insurgency campaign there is ultimately going to fail, and it is not going to make things better in Afghanistan.
There are things we can and should do, along with other members of the international community. We can continue to do economic development projects in the areas that are relatively stable. We can continue a modest effort to train Afghan security forces, but our presence should be as small as possible. I’d be aiming to try and have us out of Afghanistan about as rapidly as we’re getting out of Iraq, and make it clear that Afghanistan’s fate will be determined by the Afghans, not by us.

Citizen Conversation With…Archon Fung

Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP’11

Archon Fung is Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship. His research examines the impacts of civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency upon public and private governance. Fung received two SBs and a PhD from MIT. [Biography courtesy of HKS]

Please tell me about the work you’ve done in the area of deliberative democracy.

I do work in public deliberation and deliberative democracy and citizen participation. [O]ne premise of that work…is that an appealing idea of democratic government is a government in which the laws and policies flow from deliberation and argument and reason among citizens.

People think of deliberative democracy as quite different from aggregative democracy, in which the laws and policies are products of just…“counting up heads”….The problem with aggregative conceptions of democracy is that they can oftentimes result in unjust policies or even unwise policies when [people’s] preferences…are either not well-informed, or maybe they’re unjust…

Recent experiments have actually put some of these notions of deliberate democracy into practice. Can you talk about some of those experiments?

[W]hen I began this work…I think it’s fair to say that in the academic world…a lot of people are already working on deliberation, but they were thinking about it as kind of an ideal of how societies ought to be. And one criticism is that these ideals and theories never quite touch the ground. And so what does deliberative practice look like, what does it look like when people actually deliberate, or policy-making is actually connected to deliberation…?

And in recent years, there have been some experiments, but not just experiments….[I]t’s become more and more common for some kinds of policy-making, especially at the state and local level, but also at larger levels, to incorporate elements of citizen or deliberation participation.

[Y]ou have some really old examples. The town meeting that everybody knows about, and even older [examples like] classical Greece…that’s one kind of face-to-face democracy. But now, you see examples and experiments springing up all over the place and all over the world.

…[A] famous example comes from Porto Alegre, Brazil, and that’s the participatory budget….[I]n…probably…the late 1980s, they changed how they formulate…the infrastructure portion of the city budget…to a system in which it’s not a planning department or a budgeting department or even a city council that decides how to allocate that money. But it’s allocated over a year through a structure of direct citizen participation, in which people from every neighborhood kind of show up and they say, “Well, for our neighborhood, the first priority is water,” or it’s electrification, or it’s schools, or it’s housing, or whatever it is. And then what they say gets added up across the city and that becomes the eventual budget for that year.

The problem that that structure solves is a problem of patronage and corruption…
What has happened since is that much, much more of the money has actually gone toward infrastructure spending, and there’s some evidence to show that the spending that results is much more closely aligned with what people want.

It’s such an interesting example because one of the first questions you hear in these sorts of conversations is about the extent to which the citizenry can be involved in complicated political decisions. You hear things like, “Well, the legislators are there full-time. They’re involved in these issues. They’re steeped in intricate insider knowledge. The average person is busy. He’s got a job or a family or both, and he just doesn’t have time to do that sort of thing.” And it sounds like the city of Porto Alegre put a pretty complicated question in front of these neighborhood groups, and the groups handled it with some aplomb.

Yeah, and they did. The advantage in Porto Alegre is that the issues that people are talking about are pretty palpable issues that affect their day-to-day life. You know, you can see whether or not the street needs paving….[P]eople know whether or not a community center or housing would be a good thing in their neighborhood…

…I think there is something to the argument that you offered, that professional legislators are – it’s their job to understand many complicated issues and to sort them out, and to sort out priorities. And unlike a lot of people who favor greater citizen participation, largely or exclusively for intrinsic reasons – that is, because they think more participation would just be a good thing in and of itself – I guess, I do think that, too. But I think that it’s most constructive to devote energy to creating direct citizen participation or popular deliberation in areas of governance and on issues where the representative machinery or the administrative machinery is broken…

Are there certain issues that strike you as so complicated that they will always require the attention of professional legislators? Or do you envision a culture in which notions of participatory democracy spread and average citizens become ever more willing and able to deal with complex public questions?

I don’t think it’s the difficulty of the question…. Although more complex issues require forms of participation that are much more demanding on people. They have to learn a lot more about it, become quasi-expert themselves.

Can you talk a bit more about the kind of commitments that citizens have to make in order to participate meaningfully in these sorts of experiments?

…[T]he success of the project…depends on a certain amount of good faith – that the citizens go in, embracing the objective of addressing that problem, that public problem, as their purpose and motivation for going, rather than with some different agenda. That’s important.

I think it’s important that – depending on the issue – that citizens, participants, be willing to learn and to invest energy in both thinking about the public issue and sometimes in acting to solve it. [S]ome of these initiatives and participation require not just…showing up for a couple of hours of your day but actually doing something afterwards, some kind of community action or civic action.

And then, I think the success of deliberating initiatives oftentimes requires respect for other participants with very different points of view, and patience and a willingness to listen and the openness to change one’s mind…in the face of new information or good reasons that one hasn’t considered before…
…[C]onversely, I think the responsibility is not just on the part of citizens but on the part of whoever convenes some public deliberation. I think the responsibility there, which is oftentimes not delivered, is that whoever convenes or organizes deliberation actually take what people say seriously and respond to it and act on it in some way….

Very broadly, do you have a sense of whether citizen participation and deliberative democracy initiatives tend to foster a culture of deliberative conversation better than, say, professional politics?

…[T]he quality of discussions varies a lot, depending on how they’re organized and the norms that people have when they enter a conversation….
So, I think, one mistake…when people think about citizen participation or public deliberation is they take some example…and think, “Oh, it’s always like that.” So you can look at the recent…healthcare town meetings…and say, “Oh, well, there – we shouldn’t do public participation or public discussion or public deliberation because look what happens, some people fight.”

[T]he quality, at least from a deliberative perspective or, I guess, from any perspective, just varies a lot, depending on how things are organized and who participates and what the issue is….And I think that a big job for us, as a society, and for political officials and…public leaders acting in any capacity, is to get better at constructing high-quality public deliberations.

I think that we, as a society, are not very good at that. Usually, we think of public participation, at least from the government perspective, as a box that you have to tick off, and it usually takes the form of a public meeting or a public hearing, which is one of the worst ways to organize a public conversation. It’s usually not a conversation at all.

And yet, there are many, many organizations and people who know, who have the expertise, the craft, to construct much better public deliberations. I think that…people [in] policy schools, people training to be politicians or training to work in government or training to work in NGOs that act in some sort of public capacity for the civic good ought to have a set of skills at convening and organizing and hosting deliberation, and that ought to be much more widespread. I think the quality of our democracy would improve if that were the case.

Do you think it’d be a good idea for HKS to mandate that students take some form of class work on developing these sort of skills?

Yeah, I think that would be a very good thing….

At Hillary Clinton’s first campaign event during the ’08 race, there was a huge banner that read, “Let the conversation begin.” Obama has talked and written about how he thinks of politics less as a contest of wills and more as a conversation in which we engage and learn from one another. I might be putting words in his mouth here, but it sounds like he thinks of politics as something that doesn’t really have a fixed endpoint, something that evolves with the changing circumstances in which we find ourselves. That’s refreshing, at least to me.

Yeah, it’s an appealing image, and certainly one that I endorse and hold to. The difficulty is, I think, constructing the institutions that enable that conversation to occur, that change some part of politics from a contest of wills to a conversation in which people are interacting with each other and open-minded about exchanging reasons and arguments and information. I think it does require the construction of institutions that displace some of the political dynamics that are primarily about a contest of wills and the ability to gain the most votes or marshal the most money, and there’s some fungibility between the two.

It requires the creation of spaces and the construction of institutions that really are deliberative. And along with that, the existence of people, of public leaders in the public sphere, who have the impulse to convene public deliberation and the skills to do it. And I think that’s rare….It involves sharing power and it involves…a certain humility….[Y]ou do find that, but it’s rare. And I dare say, more rare in the United States than in many other countries and societies in the world….

During the last couple of years, politicians seem to be asking for more citizen input, particularly in the technological sphere….To my mind, there’s a lot of promise there. But there’s also something a little disheartening about this picture. Rather than convening publicly and doing the hard work of talking through the issues face-to-face, we’re being encouraged to do so in a relatively detached and isolated way. Do you think that technological mediation can help us develop some of the more robust political impulses we may lack? Or will it enhance our social isolation and disinvestment in the public square?

[F]or people interested in this question, I suggest you read Beth Noveck’s book, Wiki Government. She…is working in the White House, trying to advance some of these ideas of participation through new technologies…[and other means].

I think that the question of technology in participation, you might think of in two separate branches. One, this is a public or political application, but Wikipedia and similar kinds of platforms have drawn a lot of attention, and people have said, “[W]hat are those dynamics and how can we apply them to the public sector?”…

…I think that’s a very good question, and I think it’s an unanswered question, either in theory or in practice….I think it’s kind of a mistake to draw or try to draw too many lessons from the wiki model, because there’s, I think, a fundamental difference between a wiki-collaborative production dynamics on one hand, and political deliberation dynamics on the other.

…[A] central difference, is that politics and deliberation often begin with a set of interests…or a set of participants…that disagree with one another on moral issues, on political issues, on practical questions. Whereas, the collaborative-production model, and collaborative governance, begins with a large region of agreement; people are trying to pursue the same thing. They’re trying to get the truth right about black holes or cats….

With political deliberation, it’s a little bit different. People disagree, and in order to have a constructive deliberation, you need some way for people to engage fairly deeply, to learn about issues…and oftentimes, to undergo a little bit of transformation of their views…or their commitments, or even themselves…in some way.

And so, I’m agnostic about whether…one could create some technology, some sort of media platform that enabled high-quality deliberation from many, many people around subjects like healthcare, the war, or immigration, or tax policy, or what have you….We’re at the very beginning stages of that and nobody’s figured it out, number one. And number two…it’s probably a mistake to look for too many answers on the wiki side…because the beginning situations are quite different.

Citizen Conversation With… Dan Okrent

Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP’11

Daniel Okrent is the Visiting Murrow Lecturer of the Practice of Press and Public Policy. Before his appointment as the first Public Editor of the New York Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, he was editor-at-large at Time Inc.; editor of new media for all Time Inc. publications; and managing editor of Life magazine. Okrent was the first Hearst Foundation Fellow in New Media at the Columbia University School of Journalism, and was a Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2006. His six books include Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history, and Public Editor #1, an annotated collection of his Times columns. His forthcoming Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition will be published in 2010. [Biography courtesy of the Shorenstein Center]

Do news organizations have on obligation to ignore? To not to let the crazy fringes – the birthers, say – hijack meaningful public conversations? To keep debate at some level of reason and accuracy? To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “You are entitled to your opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” I might add that you’re entitled to your opinion, but you aren’t entitled to news coverage.

You used the word ‘ignore,’ and I think there are relative levels of ‘ignore.’ To ignore it entirely would be to deny a reality, which is that that there are a lot of people who believe that Obama was not born here. Whether they are right or wrong is, to a degree, irrelevant. If people are choosing not to vote for him or not to support his policies or not support what his government is trying to do because they have this notion, news organizations have to report that this is indeed so. To give credence to their position is a different matter. To say, “There are some who believe he was not born here” without adding, “Although all the evidence indicates otherwise,” or “They are wrong,” or, “This is a false assertion,” that’s a different matter. But I think ignoring it is more dangerous than giving it credibility.

You wrote a column in 2004 entitled, “It’s Good to be Objective. It’s Better to be Right.” In it, you lament the way that a fear of being labeled impartial leads many journalists to shy away from contradicting their subjects’ or sources’ claims, even when those claims are patently deceptive or inaccurate. I notice a parallel phenomenon in the way much of the media focuses on controversy - the emphasis is often on the fact of a controversy rather than an inquiry into which – if any – of the parties are in the right. How do you think about these issues, about the moments in which journalists come into an obligation to correct for inaccuracies?

We have a perpetual obligation to correct inaccuracies. If there is one thing that we can ask of journalists, it’s, “Get the facts right.” And whether that means, “How do you spell my last name?” or “Was Obama born in the United States?” the assertion of fact that is contrary to the impression left by partisans on one side is a necessary part of doing your job. But I get back to the point that liars are news. The misinformed are news. Hitler said that the Jews were an inferior race - does that mean we don’t cover Hitler? Pretty dangerous.

A Pew Research Center study published this week indicated that Americans now rate the accuracy of media coverage lower than at any point in nearly 25 years. Do you think the proliferation of partisan cable news shows, blogging, and other new forms of media have altered Americans’ overall view of media? And - perhaps given these changes - are Americans right to be more skeptical of media accuracy today?

We have greater access to the public square because of technological change, and greater access to the public square means more divergent voices. We are way past the era when all of America listened to Walter Cronkite at 6:30 every night. This is an America with thousands of different voices and thousands of different views, so of course that’s going to undermine the authority of what once was the established view. So I’m not surprised that the Pew study had that finding, even if it dismays me. I don’t think there’s been a material decline in the quality of news coming from the major news media. But there’s also the matter of what news media were they asking about?

The questions covered the major news networks, Fox, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CNN….Respondents’ assessments of news outlets’ trustworthiness broke down pretty cleanly on partisan lines….From that same study: “…only about a quarter (26%) now say that news organizations are careful that their reporting is not politically biased, compared with 60% who say news organizations are politically biased. And the percentages saying that news organizations are independent of powerful people and organizations (20%) or are willing to admit their mistakes (21%) now also match all-time lows.” There’s a fairly stark partisan division in the way Americans see news outlets - roughly speaking, Fox News and the WSJ on one side, and the rest of the networks, the NYT, and NPR on the other.

What’s really interesting to me about The Wall Street Journal particularly is, I don’t think there’s been a material decline. I think their stories are getting shorter, but there hasn’t been a material change in the partisanship of their news coverage. But people have an impression of the Journal and trust or mistrust its news because they like or dislike its editorial page — which tells us a lot about how people are coming to their conclusions. Which is to say that the same facts may appear in the Journal and in the Times, but if you’re on the right, you’re going to trust them more in the Journal because you make this association with the editorial page. There’s no justification for that, but we have lined up in partisan camps. Rupert Murdoch did a brilliant thing with Fox - by setting up on the right, that suggests that everything to the left of that is… the left. There is no center. If you start where everything is in the presumed center, and then you create something on the right, then the center becomes the left.

Would you suggest that no news organizations on the left have tried to deliberately position themselves in opposition to -

Well, no. Clearly MSNBC has done so. MSNBC saw a market opportunity. It wasn’t, I don’t think, that the people at MSNBC had this passionate belief that Keith Olbermann was the voice of god. No, they saw the success of the ranting on the right, and decided to try some ranting on the left. Which has been good for CNN - to have somebody positioned to the left of CNN suggests that CNN might be toward the middle — even though Fox has been trying to maintain since they were created that CNN is the left. There are absolutes, and there are relatives, and readers and viewers have come to believe that everything in the news media has become ideologically relative: is it to the right or to the left?

If I remember correctly, CNN had the highest overall favorability rating among respondents. But on the same topic, it’s worrying to me - and I’m wondering if it’s also worrying to you - that we don’t seem to have a media outlet that’s trusted relatively equally across partisan lines.

I think this is a terrible, terrible thing. And I think that those media who are in a position to do so have not responded to this. This is an expression of my own personal issue, with my beloved New York Times. If you have an op-ed page and an editorial page that is so consistently mainstream Democratic left, then that affects the perception of the whole newspaper, just as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page affects the perception of The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times newsrooms - really, they’re not that different, but we have these perceptions because of something that is extrinsic to the news reporting, namely the editorial policy. And, in fact, in both places…the editorial pages, and the people who manage them, have nothing to do with the news coverage.

You wrote about that in some of your columns when you were public editor, about how there’s this perception that the editorial board dictates the tone of news coverage.

Right, there’s a real wall. Now it’s true, and some of the critics when I wrote about it pointed out that the same Arthur Sulzberger who runs the newspaper and appoints Andrew Rosenthal to be the editorial page editor also appoints Bill Keller to be in charge of the news operation. So to say that they are from different planets isn’t fair - they have the same genealogy. But, you know, cousins and siblings sometimes don’t think the same way, and there is nothing to suggest that because Andrew Rosenthal and his colleagues at the editorial page think a certain way that Bill Keller and his colleagues think a certain way. Now there is, as I wrote - quite controversially - there is a general worldview that journalists have, and particularly journalists in New York have, and that’s an inescapable reality, very hard to get around. But I think they make an effort, just as the reporters at the Journal make an effort, to do work that has nothing to do with the editorial views of ownership or of the people who edit the editorial page.

I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but I want to resist what you said just now a little bit. I can imagine that journalists from, say, the far right and from across the country would be more than happy to move to New York to take a job at the Times. In other words, it’s not as if there’s a shortage in -

Oh but there is a shortage of conservatives working in the news media — or, I should say, an imbalance between liberals and conservatives. The last survey I saw was on the ‘04 election - I don’t know what it was in ‘08 - but in ‘04 something like 75 percent of working journalists at daily newspapers voted for the Democrat. I mean, you can’t deny this. It’s a reality.

In recent years, the Times made what I took to be a pretty blatant effort to change the public perception about the paper, and about the editorial board in particular -

How?

By hiring, say, Bill Kristol a couple of years ago.

But Bill Safire had been there for 30 years. And so he leaves, and management thinks we have to hire somebody to replace Bill Safire. Now I’m not equating Safire with Kristol exactly, but in fact there’s long been a conservative spot on that page.

Almost like the Supreme Court.

Yeah, that there’s a view that the columnists can’t all be to the left . There are some who make an arguable case that they’re in the middle, but generally it’s a left-tilting page. There’s always been the presence of at least one, and sometimes two - depending on how Brooks feels that morning - conservatives on that page, as it is now. Kristol’s gone and now it’s Douthat. Now, why they picked Kristol specifically is a different issue altogether, but there was an acknowledgement, just as The Boston Globe chose Jacoby to hold down its right flank, they don’t want to be exclusively left on that page.

Do you think if there were fewer unsigned editorials by the editorial board - basically if the page were just a series of individual columns signed by individual authors - might the page seem more like a general marketplace of ideas rather than a place in which the paper speaks as a monolithic institution?

Well, it depends who the authors are. When I was at the Times - my term there ended four years ago - everybody on the editorial board was a Democrat. I asked Gail Collins, who was then the editorial page editor, “Why don’t you have a greater ideological variety and philosophical variety so you can have richer debate on the page?” And she said, “If I had a couple of conservatives on this page, they’d be unhappy all the time. They’d either have to write something that wasn’t their view, because we decide our view consensually, or they’d never get to write. So, what’s the point?” Now, Gail knows a lot better than I the dynamics of coming to an editorial position, but it would seem to me that, if for no other reason than to challenge the conventional thinking that may - and I stress the may - dominate the conversation on the editorial board, it’d be nice to have somebody else there who might say, “Well, here’s another point of view.” Now if your editorial page was like an op-ed and offered a wide range of opinion, that would be, to me, a much more satisfactory way to go. But it’s ingrained in the American tradition that there is an editorial voice that is the voice of ownership or the owner’s designee, that endorses candidates, that takes positions on legislation, that uses the one word which as a journalist just makes my skin crawl, which is ’should’: Congress should do this, the State Department should do this, Israelis and Palestinians should do this. It sounds like my mother telling me how to behave. I can’t argue that mine is a sensible position, but I’m a believer in facts and reporting and analysis that leads the reader to arrive at his or her own conclusions, rather than having the conclusions presented to them as if tablets from Mount Sinai.

A lot of ’should-ing’ goes on in individual op-eds as well; why is it meaningfully different in the case of a collectively produced, unsigned editorials?

Because if you have a wide variety and the individuals are saying ’should do this,’ ’should do that,’ then you’re going to have - I mean, I’m not crazy about their doing it either - but at least its gets a dialogue going. Editorials are not a conversation; editorials are pronouncements. Maybe that was really important in the era of a less informed public, but I think we’re pretty informed today. This is not to say that a lot of the analysis they do on editorial pages isn’t really fine analysis, but you know, keep it to the analysis, don’t tell me what to think. The one place where I do think the editorial pages of America do perform a function is in endorsements for down-ballot positions. How am I to know whom to vote for for civil court judge in Brooklyn? So, if I’m aware that The New York Times thinks the way I do [and] The New York Post does not, I’ll vote for the guy the Times tells me to vote for.

So back to the question about the fact that we don’t have a news outlet that’s relatively equally trusted across partisan lines. If we can’t agree on what the news is and what the facts are, it’s difficult to have a productive conversation about what to do in response. So what can we do about that problem?

I would turn to the people who run the news organizations of America and ask them to be absolutely assiduous about the way they present the news and avoid giving a logical opening to the inevitable criticism from the other side. If you have an editorial page and an op-ed page that seem to be working in behalf, or against, the Obama Administration, it’s going to color the way people view your news coverage. So I suppose one answer is, get rid of editorial pages, or have much more varied op-ed pages.

It sounds like you’re not committed to preserving op-ed pages at all.

Well, certainly not in the form they are now. If I owned the Times I would really have a balanced range of views in there. I would not have - you know, I listen to people say, “I love the Times, but that guy, that Douthat, he’s a conservative, and David Brooks is a right-winger - well, if you only want to read people who agree with you, read The Nation. If it’s to survive and flourish, the Times has to be an honest broker, and the perception left by that op-ed page and the adjoining editorial page is that it’s not.

But we’re not starting from a blank slate and creating wholly new perceptions. How to contest the fact that there’s already this deep-seated, widespread distrust?

You can only contest it with the work that you do. And so that means maybe changing the lineup of op-ed writers and also being really careful in the news pages….We see what we see because of the way we stand. If we’re facing east in the morning we see the sun rise, and if we’re not facing east the sun isn’t rising. So when you put together a news staff, you have to ask where do your people stand? Are you getting people who are, together, looking in all directions? Are we getting a really representative newsroom? When I was at the paper I criticized it pretty strongly for not having ideological diversity or religious diversity on the staff. The same reason we would want racial diversity , to provide different perspectives on the world, would suggest that we want the same thing religiously and ideologically and philosophically. And I was very roundly criticized by some people on the left about that, people who thought it was an outrage that I was suggesting that the Times hire more conservatives. Why is that an outrage? Why is it an outrage to get a more varied view of the world? We want a varied view if we’re going to be good citizens, if we’re going to have a functioning democracy. We must have a varied view.

Thank you.

Is that persuasive?

I think you and I probably disagree about the extent to which we’re capable of arriving at best answers and then describing them in a public forum. To my mind, at least with regard to some public questions, there are best answers, and in other cases there are best choices among unpalatable choices.

I don’t disagree with that.

Perhaps I misinterpreted, but it did sound a bit like you don’t want newspapers playing that role - of not only providing analysis but also coming to some recommendation about what to do as a result of their analysis.

I think if the analysis is good, then the recommendation is implicit, and you don’t need to come out and say ’should’. I disagree only…from a rhetorical point of view. I think that the language one uses to make one’s recommendation needn’t be prescriptive to make the same point. I think you’re more effective if you’re not prescriptive….Did you read the clean water series they did last week?

No.

Almost nobody did. [T]hat’s one of the problems with these big acts that go on for four pages. But it presented an inarguable description about how awful our water systems are and what needs to be done, but there wasn’t a ’should’ in it. If you just give the facts - obviously we all select our facts, and we can select one set or the other - you’re much more likely to be persuasive with those people who don’t trust you because you disagree with them on other issues. You tell me how you think on same-sex marriage and I’ll tell you how you think on many other issues — unless you’re Theodore Olson. This comes across in the way that people perceive our news media. ‘Well, I know they take this position and therefore, they’re over there and I’m over here. I don’t need to listen to them, I don’t trust them, I don’t trust their facts.’ They [the news media] undermine their own authority by declaring themselves.

I’m wondering whether - with the rise of what you called ‘the ranting right’ and ‘the ranting left’ - whether Americans turn to news organizations as much for facts as they do for opinions.

I worry about that. I think that has been one of the consequences of the fractionalization, and its particularly visible online and at the cable news networks. You know, my friends watch MSNBC to agree with Olbermann and Maddow. That’s not about facts.

It’s much more about partisan solidarity, finding a community of like-minded people.

I suppose here’s an argument you can make that, well, if I’m on the left and I read The Nation, my arguments will get stronger. And people on the right can probably say the same thing about National Review or about The Weekly Standard. But beyond that, it is affirmation and community that people are after when they’re watching cable news.

There’s something troubling and dangerous about the prevalence of media organizations that are now in business basically to make you feel more comfortable with your own opinions.

Yes — it’s terrible! One of the things that most upset me during the presidential campaign was that moment during the primaries when Fox was going to host a debate, and there was an outcry among Democrats, and the debate was cancelled. These Democrats might as well have said, “Let’s not try to persuade the people who disagree with us. Let’s only talk to our own people.” Here they had a chance to be watched by people who don’t vote Democratic - well, don’t you live for that opportunity, if you’re a politician? To change minds?

Next Page »

Latest Blogs

• “Singled Out @ HKS”
• Happy Chinese New Year and…Final Thoughts
• A Tale of Two Perspectives
• Last Night in Chengdu
• Community Organizing with Chinese Characteristics

• Recent Posts

  • Rethinking ANWR
  • An Interview with Former AFL-CIO President John Sweeney
  • Winning Entry: The Center for Public Leadership’s “Profiles in Leadership” Essay Contest
  • KSSG Passes Resolution to Increase International Student Aid
  • HKS Hosts Black Policy Conference

Copyright © 2007 The Citizen · Home · About · Contact · Letters · Privacy Policy