State of Disunion

Stanford politics magazine

LENA ZLOCK ON THE ALT-RIGHT, PAGE 04 VIVAN MALKANI ON CLIMATE CHANGE, PAGE 15 AND THE TOP 10 STUDENT POLITICOS, PAGE 34

STATE OF DISUNION

MAY 2017 | ISSUE 01 STANFORDPOLITICS.COM

STANFORD ABOUT US

Stanford Politics is an award-winning, non-partisan student news magazine.

In 2014, Jason Willick (’15) founded the Stanford Political Journal, or SPJ, after noting the absence of a non-partisan political magazine, such as those that exist at peer institutions like Berkeley, Yale, Duke or Brown, on Stanford's campus.

As the first Editor-in-Chief, Willick aimed to provide a forum for students to discuss, debate and learn about a wide range of political issues, from international affairs to campus politics.

Over the next two years, under the leadership of second Editor-in-Chief Truman Chen (’17), SPJ continued to produce thoughtful and insightful commentary, growing both its staff and its following in the process.

Now, in the spring of 2017, under third Editor-in-Chief Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna (’18), SPJ is in the process of rebranding as Stanford Politics.

While retaining the founding mission of SPJ, Stanford Politics will expand the scope of the organization in several ways. In addition to continuing to produce highquality political analysis and feature pieces, Stanford Politics will also provide news coverage for important political issues on campus and in the cities nearby.

Some of the beats we will cover are: student government, university administration, activism, local governments, housing and urban development and more!

POLITICS GET INVOLVED

Our content will be available on a newly redesigned website (coming soon) and in a weekly email newsletter (beginning in the fall of 2017). Further, beginning with this May 2017 issue, Stanford Politics Magazine will print bimonthly during the academic year (in November, January, March and May), and a new episode of Stanford Politics Podcast will be available every other week (also beginning fall 2017).

Stanford Politics is looking to grow its staff considerably. If you’re interested in joining a group of diverse and passionate policy junkies, aspiring journalists, tech wizzes, business buffs, artists and jokesters, all committed to bringing the Stanford community and beyond the most informative and engaging political journalism possible, email Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna at editor@stanfordpolitics.com.

We’re currently looking for reporters, feature writers, columnists, editors, photographers, interviewers, podcast producers, graphic designers, web developers and more!

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Stanford Politics is always looking for smart investigative or analysis pieces aimed at a general, though well-informed, reader. While we are exclusively a platform for political journalism, we do not limit ourselves to a narrow definition of what can be considered political. We welcome topics ranging from art and culture to technology or social justice. What we don't want are clichés, rants or random thoughts. Stanford Politics is not meant to be another version of the Stanford Daily opinions section, nor is it meant to be a platform for re-publishing class papers. That said, we welcome strong, provocative writing backed by insightful analysis, original reporting or personal experience, and pitches can, of course, be inspired by academic work you have done. We are a non-partisan publication, which does not mean that what we publish cannot be ideological, but rather means we welcome perspectives from anywhere on the political spectrum. Stanford Politics aspires to illuminate important issues that people may not be aware of, contribute new and unique ideas to existing discussions or debates and provide thought-provoking challenges to, or critiques of, conventional wisdom.

(It is important to note that all of our articles are exclusive, and we only publish writing by Stanford affiliates. If you are an undergrad or grad student, that's perfect! If you're an alum, a professor or a resident of the local community, that also works—we will just label your article as an op-ed.)

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CONTENTS

THE ALT-RIGHTEOUS MIND

04

LENA ZLOCK

COLOMBIA’S VOTE AGAINST PEACE WAS FAR FROM A FAILURE

10

DANIELA GONZALEZ

SUSTAINABLE OPTIMISM

15

Communicating Climate Change Effectively VIVAN MALKANI

“EVICTION IS A DRIVER–NOT JUST A CONDITION–OF POVERTY” A Conversation with Urban Sociologist Matthew Desmond

20

MICAELA SUMINSKI

COVER STORY: STATE OF DISUNION

26

LUCAS RODRIGUEZ & SPENCER SEGAL

2016-2017 POLITICOS

The Ten Most Influential Students in Campus Politics

34

EDITORIAL BOARD

A CLASS DIVIDED

39

ERICA SCOTT

LAW IN A CHANGING SOCIETY

A Conversation with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

44

JONATHAN FAUST

REN HANG’S POLITICAL AESTHETICS TRUMAN CHEN

2

48

EDITOR’S NOTE Nearly three years ago, at the founding of this publication, one of our first articles echoed a sentiment by the philosopher and journalist Günther Anders that demands to be echoed once more: “It is not enough to change the world; we do this anyway, and it mostly happens without our efforts, regardless. What we have to do is interpret these changes so that we in turn can change the changes, so that the world doesn’t go on changing without us— ultimately to become a world without us.” The point is to interpret, to think through the world at as many registers as possible such that the worst can be prevented. The historical moment we currently find ourselves consigned to might be remembered as one possessed by an apocalyptic anxiety over the countless threats peeking over the horizon. Yet we must equally remember that, for many, the end of the world takes place every day. The pangs of poverty and racism, the cruelties of eviction, the criminalization of gender and sexuality and the thoughtless terror of war continually deprive countless individuals of their equal right to exist and to live lives of their own making.

The kind of politics our publication seeks to embody is not the “politics as usual” responsible for this human crisis of ours. Truly political writing instead seeks to disrupt that through the thoughtful introduction of new narratives and languages to make sense of the world. It is an effort to think the unthought in order to ensure that certain experiences and ideas are not unduly eclipsed and forgotten at our own loss. I’m not speaking here of a familiar, cheap contrarianism that posits unsurprising oppositions for the sake of argument. Rather, it is about reconfiguring the very terms on which discourses are based, guided by the fundamental conviction that there is still “something that counts as getting it right.”

As I hope can be felt in these pages, Stanford Politics has been and will continue to be a concerted effort toward accomplishing just that. The state of disunion in which we currently find ourselves is, in the end, only the most severe symptom of the first problem of thinking politics within the narrow conceptual boundaries imposed by partisanship. Insofar as we consider our current political situation regrettable, mere dialogue between the left, right and center has proven insufficient in overcoming this problem. With rigor and clarity, the following articles aim to puncture through the limits of existing discourses and demonstrate an openness to the world and the endless ways in which it can and must be thought through for the sake of those who are subject to our times.

Truman Chen Editor-in-Chief, 2015-2017

MASTHEAD TRUMAN CHEN MICAELA SUMINSKI BRETT PARKER RUAIRÍ ARRIETA-KENNA ZOE SAVELLOS CONTRIBUTING EDITOR ANDREW GRANATO MAGAZINE DIRECTOR DANIELA GONZALEZ PUBLISHER JAKE DOW EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CHIEF OF STAFF MANAGING EDITOR SENIOR EDITORS

MAY 2017 ISSUE COPY EDITORS COVER ART

SARAH ORTLIP-SOMMERS SARAH WISHINGRAD KAYLA GUILLORY

ADDITIONAL GRAPHIC DESIGNERS CECILIA CAVALIER-RICCARDI NATALIE FERRANTE

3

THE ALTRIGHTEOUS MIND

LENA ZLOCK

alt-right

THE DISCOURSE OF DEMOCRACY IS TURNING INTO A DIALOGUE OF THE DEAF. EACH SIDE—LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES—CLAIMS MORAL HIGH GROUND, WHILE DISPARAGING THE OTHER AS NOTHING BETTER THAN MEDIEVAL BARBARIANS. BUT THE QUESTION BEFORE US IS NOT ONE OF GOOD VERSUS EVIL, RIGHT VERSUS WRONG. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST JONATHAN HAIDT WRITES IN HIS BESTSELLING 2012 BOOK “THE RIGHTEOUS MIND” THAT WE MUST CHALLENGE OURSELVES TO BE PUSHED BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF OUR OWN BELIEFS, TO UNDERSTAND THE OPPOSING SIDE. WE MUST LEARN TO SPEAK ACROSS A WIDENING CHASM OF BELIEF.

Walking a tightrope across, I ventured into a territory shunned by many on the left: the virtual community of the alt-right. Here are the outposts of the Internet’s Wild West, the places teachers warn students to avoid at all costs. Why subject myself to page after page of racist, anti-Semitic homophobic posts? Because we do not have a right to claim the superiority of our opinions unless we can fully understand competing sides. Because—in the Stanford community and in broader society—we cannot continue to deny the voices of our opponents. Constructing psychological barriers to insulate the like-minded only obscures wide swathes of American society who believe as firmly in their values as we do and who will continue to play a critical role in politics. There is little denying the alt-right has become a prominent feature of the civic sphere. Its rising national presence seemingly legitimizes, and will likely continue to legitimize, the actions of individuals who agree with its ideology. We would do ourselves and each other a disservice by writing off the movement as a scourge, for even diseases must be treated with care.

Before continuing, as the author of this article, I must say that I in no way condone the ideology or actions of the alt-right. Rather, as a woman and as a Jew—two identities not exactly embraced by the alt-right—I believe I have a responsibility to understand them.

In exploring seemingly hate-filled online message boards, I hoped to step beyond the confines of a liberal righteous mind and into the very heart of darkness.

Defining the Alt-Right What is the alt-right? You might say neo-Nazis, white nationalists, racists, or scum of the earth, and you would probably be accurate with any of those descriptors. In the wake of the its resur-

gence in the public eye, Ben Shreckinger of POLITICO Magazine describes the alt-right as a “dispersed movement that encompasses a range of right-wing figures who are...addicted to provocation” and as a “loose confederacy of meme-generating internet trolls, provocateurs and self-appointed custodians of Trumpism.” Surveying user comments on Donald Trump’s Facebook page, Atlantic writer Jonathon Morgan characterizes the alt-right as a “radicalized subculture” and a “hate group.” Morgan links the “racist or anti-Semitic” comments found on Trump’s page to established white supremacist rhetoric, leading him to conclude that this “ideology is becoming normalized in a large community of Trump supporters.” While some journalists and pundits worry about the advent of the alt-right under a Trump presidency, others continue to debate over the proper definition for this “radicalized subculture.” Kristine Phillips of the Washington Post described the alt-right as being “known for espousing racist, anti-Semitic and sexist points of view.”

Mincing no words in the debate over how to describe the group, Guardian columnist Lindy West writes, “it’s a bunch of straight-up neo-Nazis,” and urges her readers, “if you see a Nazi, say a Nazi.”

Each of these terms carries emotional and political baggage.

“Neo-Nazi” conjures up images of massive parades at the Hindenburg Gate in 1939 Berlin. “Radicalized subculture” sounds like disgruntled teens hunkered down in a darkened room spewing venom on the deep web. And the term “hate group” practically speaks for itself. While each of these terms carries a measure of truth, they all permit the audience to easily write off the alt-right as a simple nuisance or a great scourge. However, one might ask, why should we even entertain their ideology in our political discourse? Events of the very recent past are evidence enough.

For his chief strategist, President Donald Trump chose Steve Bannon, executive chair of the news media company Breitbart, an

5

alt-right outlet Bannon himself describes as “the platform for the alt-right.” Just ten days after the 2016 election, Richard Spencer, leader of a white nationalist group, convened a meeting of self-described alt-right members in Washington, D.C., less than a mile from the White House.

The meeting was dressed in the shadows of 1933 Berlin. Proudly making the Hitler salute, attendees pledged their allegiance to Trump, and cried out for the death of the lugenpresse, or “the lying press,” a term used by the Nazis to silence the media. Post-election analysis has linked the rise of the alt-right largely to Trump’s rhetoric during campaign season. BBC journalist James Cook writes, “populist rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has energised a disparate American movement that is accused of racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny.” Figures like former Breitbart editor and social media pundit Milo Yiannopoulos, before seemingly disappearing in disgrace, joined Richard Spencer in becoming political celebrities. To top it off, the advent of a prominent alt-right has coincided with a new wave of hate crimes in the United States. NBC/Reuters report a greater than 20 percent increase in hate crimes in major metropolitan cities last year. The Southern Poverty Law Center released statistics on 867 hate crimes reported in the ten days following the election, including incidents from every single state. Of those 867, striking figures included 187 incidents linked to anti-black sentiment, 280 anti-immigrant, and 100 anti-Semitic. While it is unjust to link every incident to the alt-right, the recent political climate has undoubtedly empowered a specific hateful sentiment in an unprecedented way.

ONLINE FRONTS When looking to explore what underlies this emergent ideology, I focused on two major alt-right web forums: 4chan’s /pol/ or “Politically Incorrect” board, and Stormfront, which touts itself as the “voice of the new, embattled white minority.” The core of the alt-right’s community was driven online after facing resistance from mainstream media. United by a desire for change and stigmatized by the outside world, online users began to form their own communities. Both Stormfront and 4chan outline rules of engagement, and urge new members to read and adhere. Newcomers to Stormfront are led to the 2004 New Orleans Protocol, a set of rules first proposed by David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. The protocol opens by reaffirming the commitment of the white nationalist body to “a pan-European outlook, recognizing national and ethnic allegiance, but stressing the value of all European peo-

6

ples.”

The /pol/ board has its own conception of “good public discourse.” An introductory post on the board warns, “Unless they are quality, well thought out, well written posts,” they will be deleted, and the user possibly removed from the site. The moderators stress, in a vein close to their Stormfront colleagues, “The variety of threads allowed here are very flexible and we believe in freedom of speech, but we expect a high level of discourse befitting of the board.” The rules of conduct created by the moderators of Stormfront and 4chan would academically be classified as de jure procedures, meaning they are treated as formal laws or regulations by which users must be abide. In addition to these de jure regulations, the alt-right community is also delineated by de facto elements, or those that are not formally defined but to which users closely adhere for practical reasons.

Because the alt-right was driven online through marginalization and stigma, members are acutely sensitive to newcomers in the online community. Members on both Stormfront and 4chan have effectively established a set of words and phrases that mark a user as “clued in” to the culture of the site.

What I cared most about was that these structures, both de facto and de jure, seemed to lay the groundwork for ideology creation. This ideology, born in the virtual sphere, provides the desire and the agenda for change in the physical community. At first glance, the ideology of the alt-right appears as a venomous clutter of anti-Semitism, homophobia, Holocaust denial, Islamophobia and every other prejudice known to man. While each of these tenets is indeed ingrained in the conscience of the alt-right, the group fundamentally understands itself through a certain, distorted historical consciousness.

Members of the alt-right see themselves as part of a vast historical tapestry, composed of interweaving threads of progress and degeneracy. They believe their mission is to tie up the ends and right what was wronged. But just what do they think went wrong?

ALT-HISTORY The answer is found in the most charged conversations on Stormfront and 4chan, centered not around current politics or spontaneous bursts of racism but around political theory, historical events, and scholarly texts. Reading through these posts reveals a process of historical interpretation, practiced and refined by the users themselves. One Italian member on /pol/ asks, rhetorically, “Why is Rome such a shithole?” Apparently, “Rome has always been a shithole.” He describes its

alt-right “Basically, any time there was a major crisis, citizenship was extended to foreigners in order to fix the politics, armies, and finances of the Roman world.

DOES THIS SOUND FUCKING FAMILIAR?”

“Every

month

is

White

decline, placing the blame on the actions of rulers like Caesar, who “oppose[d] the obsolete senate and start[ed] giving citizenship to anyone...Basically, any time there was a major crisis, citizenship was extended to foreigners in order to fix the politics, armies, and finances of the Roman world.” In case the parallel to modern Europe wasn’t clear enough, the user rages, “DOES THIS SOUND FUCKING FAMILIAR?” The historical pseudo-analysis is underscored by drawing parallels to contemporary problems across the world. Another conversation on /pol/ is based around the question, “Should the Holy Roman Empire be reestablished?” After explaining the foundations of the Holy Roman Empire in religious warfare, one user comments, “Daily reminder that we are in a Holy War as we speak.”

Members believe the white race has a long history of accomplishment but is slipping into degeneracy owing largely to minority groups and immigrants. On Stormfront, each page is headed by a banner showcasing the achievements of white people (whether or not these people were white nationalists). These include images of writer Edgar Allan Poe and physicist André-Marie Ampère, as well as historical locations such as the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England and the Parthenon in Rome. Each banner is coupled with the phrase “Every month is White history month,” composing a mosaic of the best the white race has to offer. The antidote to contemporary degeneracy is the long history of progress.

The who, what, where, when and why of this historical progress is worked out in dozens of conversations on the site. Users can choose from forums entitled “Ideology and Philosophy,” “Nature and Environment,” “History and Revisionism,” “Science and Technology” and even “The Women’s Forum,” to name just a few. Posts in a forum can range from around 3,000 to over one million.

Under these headers, one can find conversations such

history

month.”

as “The Enlightenment and the Jews,” which includes extensive citations from works by Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau; “Early History of Race/Racism;” “How the ancient Spartans learnt to hate money and wealth” and “PLE Theory on Georg W.F. Hegel & WW2.” Judging by alt-right coverage by The Atlantic, The Guardian or CNN, a vibrant discussion about the merits of Hegel is the last thing one might expect to find on an alt-right forum. And yet the presence of the posts is not unusual for the website described as the face of the white nationalist movement.

Users will even critique each other’s interpretations of a historical event and go so far as to call others out for using quotations out of context. One Stormfront user asks for more links on a particular topic, noting “I’d like more information on this before I comment.” Bemoaning his lack of knowledge, a 4chan member writes, “I am no expert of course just philosophizing.” A fellow user replies back, “I concur, wish we had some more people to discuss with, perhaps more knowledgeable.” During a conversation about the movie “Hidden Figures,” one Stormfront member writes to another, in a comment reminiscent of a stern college professor, “That’s a weak foundation [upon which] to make that conclusion.”

Stormfront members are especially concerned with current perceptions of National Socialism, and will write extensive essays on the site to explain national socialist philosophy, and combat what they consider to be popular misconceptions.

What really fascinated me was that these observations I made are all elements of historical interpretation, as practiced by students and scholars of history, albeit more revisionist. By making claims through historical interpretation, alt-right members cultivate a desire for change. And through the dialogues found on sites like Stormfront and 4chan, they are able to crowdsource an agenda for achieving that change. The historical tapes-

7

alt-right

try, spun from progress and degeneracy, does not end in a neatly embroidered border. Burning in the minds of many alt-right users is the vision of a final battle, between the powerful and the righteous. A Stormfront user writes, “it is a war, and this is a fight to the death.”

It is a war that has been waged since the earliest days of white civilization, reaching its zenith in the Crusades, and flying its triumphant colors in the accomplishments of white people. With the rise of liberal ideology—and its corresponding vices of diversity and political correctness—the alt-right believes it is preparing for the next stage of this war. Another Stormfront member implores white nationalists, “Please don’t dump on Christianity. It is the only ideology that united Europeans under one flag as Christendom, and they went out and fought...during the Crusades or against the Moors and the Turks...There is nothing historically better than the Christian flag...for uniting Europe.”

The alt-right’s virtual community is preoccupied foremost with creating an ideological template for their cause. Understanding history allows them to prepare for the future. And, to them, invoking history gives their mission legitimacy. The power of history, and the urgency of the conflict to-be, has also been reflected in the alt-right’s physical presence. Just a day after Trump’s inauguration, populist leaders from across Europe, including Marine Le Pen, met in Koblenz, Germany, a city of around 100,000 people. But this was no random choice of location: Koblenz has been a symbol of political countercurrents ever since aristocrats fearing for their heads

In Oct. 2015, Donald Trump tweeted a cartoon of alt-right symbol “Pepe the Frog” as himself. Pepe, as a meme, originated on 4chan around 2008 and in the years since has become the mascot of the alt-right. Versions of the frog wearing a Make America Great Again hat or as a Nazi proliferate online message boards.

8

fled here during the French Revolution. Le Pen and her fellow nationalists see themselves as inheriting the legacy of political countercurrents, not because they’re aristocrats, but because they’re resisting the dominant, liberal order.

The slogans, marches and speeches seen in the mainstream media—CNN, The New York Times and the like—are only the final products of a much longer process of ideology creation. This is hardly a spontaneous cry, or a transient moment of nationalist rhetoric. The virtual marketplace of ideas provides a template for the alt-right’s own understandings of perceived injustice committed towards an embattled white minority, how a history of progress turned into a narrative of decay and what steps need to be taken to restore the white race.

It is no longer enough to simply gripe or rail against minority groups, the government, immigrants or the mainstream media. A leading 4chan moderator rallies his supporters to action, writing, “Though we may rest now in our hour of peace we must stay vigilant for the enemy is always at large. Our enemy are [sic] large in number but they are weak [sic] structured and disorganized. Our strength in our arms and knowledge has shown to be triumphant regardless.”

In order to fully confront the realities of today’s political landscape, one must seek to comprehend the underpinnings of ideology. George Orwell’s 1984 reminds us that “He who controls the past controls the future.

He who controls the present controls the past.” The altright is more than alternative facts, fake news or wild conspiracy theories. It is a group who, like many others, seeks to establish a cohesive identity, project its version of historical truth and recover what it sees as unjustly taken away its members, the supposed progenitors of civilization. The alt-right seeks to control the past, present and future.

Engaging with the alt-right should not be dependent on whether one sympathizes with their philosophy or finds it abhorrent. It is an act of intellectual honesty to understand the philosophies with which you might not agree. And more importantly, understanding the altright reaffirms the need for unity. This unity does not mean accepting the ideology of the alt-right, but rejecting the division between “us” and “them,” the “right” and the “wrong.” Neo-Nazis, homophobes, Islamophobes, Holocaust deniers, and white supremacists are alive and well in 2017 America. The self-righteousness of the Left only emboldens these groups: we will not heal the divisions of this country by turning a blind eye. Let us attempt to understand where these people are coming from and what role they play in this civic sphere.

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COLOMBIA’S VOTE AGAINST PEACE W FROM DANIELA GONZALEZ he Colombian people are no strangers to conflict. In the early 1960s, extreme economic disparity and United States-backed, anti-communist repression led to the formation of a prominent, leftist guerrilla group known as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Since then, Colombia has been in a state of seemingly unending asymmetric civil war, causing many of its citizens to desire peace above almost all else. Recently, an opportunity presented itself: A peace accord between the country’s government and the FARC was finalized and signed in September 2016.

And yet, after over 50 years of warfare and four years of negotiations, the Colombian people voted to reject it.

T

COLOMBIA

WAS FAR M A FAILURE The 297-page peace accord was released to the public in August, and a plebiscite for its ratification took place on Oct. 2, 2016.

The question on the ballot was seemingly straightforward: “Do you support the final treaty for the termination of the conflict and the construction of a stable and lasting peace?” In response, voters could mark either “YES” or “NO.” But the country was fiercely divided over whether or not to approve the agreement. For some, the answer was simple: to vote “YES” was to vote for peace, and thus an obvious choice. For others, it was significantly more complicated: to vote in favor of the peace agreement was to forgive the guerrillas, to allow them to evade prison sentences regardless of crimes against humanity and to grant them political power, including seats in Congress.

Some favored the peace in full recognition of its shortcomings. For example, Colombian Stanford graduate student Daniel Hernandez saw the treaty as flawed but necessary.

“I wanted the ‘YES’ to win,” he said. “I knew the result of the negotiations maybe wasn’t the best, but it was the best [under the circumstances].”

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, a leading proponent of the peace agreement, shared a similar perspective. He has said that “perfect justice would not allow peace,” indicating that guerrilla leaders were unlikely to accept a treaty involving more severe forms of punishment.

Despite evident controversy, it seemed

most Colombians agreed with the President, as the “YES” was poised to win. And yet, on Oct. 2, (much like with Brexit and the US Presidential Election) the final results remarkably defied most polls. The “NO” vote triumphed, with a narrow majority of 50.2 percent of voters rejecting the treaty and 49.8 percent voting in favor.

To proponents of the “YES” vote — the peace accord’s supporters — this loss was not only concerning, but also a humiliating and disgraceful disaster. Outside Colombia’s borders, the international community was in a state of shock. How, many foreigners wondered, could a country’s people vote against their own peace? Against the end of war and turmoil? Martín Caparrós of The New York Times went so far as to label the incident “Colombia’s Proof That Democracy Doesn’t Work.” Both domestically and internationally, the plebiscite was perceived and portrayed as a failure.

But according to Guillermo Ruiz, a Colombian former visiting student researcher at Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies, “[The plebiscite] wasn’t failed at all. This is a triumph of institutionality in which we are not using arms to solve the conflict, but we are using a constitutional mechanism to deepen democracy.”

Ruiz also explained that, per the Colombian constitution, plebiscites are plainly means for political participation, unlike referendums, in which citizens decide on specific constitutional modifications. The result of a plebiscite is solely binding for

the executive branch and doesn’t restrict Colombia’s judicial or legislative branches of government. In other words, the plebiscite is primarily a way for the government to gauge public opinion on an important question, rather than a direct vote on a legally-binding decision.

“Now, the President is bound by the plebiscite to renegotiate the agreement,” Ruiz said.

And this was exactly the case. In light of the treaty’s rejection, the Colombian government and the FARC extended their ceasefire and put significant effort into renegotiating and revising with their opponents’ concerns in mind.

GROUNDS FOR OPPOSITION The reasons some Colombians opposed the initial treaty are manifold. Many simply felt they could not forgive the guerrilla, and believed the treaty was far too lenient in its punishment. Although the accord involved the FARC giving up its arms to the United Nations, the “transitional justice” offered by the Colombian government in return was concerning to some citizens. Under the agreement, guerrilla fighters who fully confessed their crimes would participate in “reparative and restorative” service work for five to eight years, but would not face prison sentences. A notable portion of “NO” voters were uncomfortable with this and called for harsher consequences for those guilty of crimes against humanity.

Surprisingly, those who were most directly affected by the conflict voted overwhelmingly in support of the treaty and were ultimately willing to forgive the FARC. Some argue this was because voters close to the conflict wanted a quick end to it, while those outside could afford to prolong the war for the sake of a marginally better agreement. According to political analyst Hernando Gómez Buendía, those in less-affected, urban areas were more concerned with specifics of the treaty impacting issues such as employment, transportation and inflation. Victims, on the other hand, saw the accord as an immediate, much-needed end to violence and suffering, regardless of

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COLOMBIA clemency and concessions for the perpetrators.

But, Ruiz emphasized, there were exceptions. “The most important counterexample is Bogotá, the capital. Bogotá experienced peace for many years and has forgotten what it is like to be at war. And in the plebiscite, the ‘YES’ won.”

Venezuelan Stanford sophomore Alex Trivella spoke with a number of Colombians living in his home country, most of whom were against the peace deal. Trivella said this was because of the precedent Venezuela set in regard to granting political power to radical leftist groups. Venezuela is currently in crisis, largely due to mistakes made by late socialist President Hugo Chávez, a long-time supporter of the FARC. Colombia’s peace deal allows the FARC recognition as a political party and grants them 10 seats in Congress.

The deal’s critics are concerned about the possible consequences of giving so much power to the former rebels. They draw parallels with an episode when, a decade after overthrowing a dictatorship, Venezuela allowed Marxist guerrilla groups to identify as fringe political parties. This led to ardent divisions and a fractured political system, ultimately making way for the detrimental rise of Chavez in 1999.

“For the people I’ve spoken to, the fear is that granting amnesty to these FARC leaders and giving them political power could lead to a similar situation [to Venezuela],” Trivella said.

Others still doubted the peace deal’s ability to generate lasting peace, given how the FARC is only one component — albeit a crucial one — of the Colombian conflict.

These voters felt the treaty should be improved before it was passed, and disagreed with the phrasing of the “YES” campaign

12

that made it seem as though people were voting for or against peace itself. Colombian Stanford sophomore Romeo Umaña first heard about the accord from his mother, who was also in opposition largely because she wasn’t confident in the treaty’s efficacy.

“Some people just don’t think that this peace deal will bring peace,” Umaña said.

“They think that people will just rise up with another group. A lot of people were worried that, even if FARC disappeared, there were still going to be other groups fighting.”

Although the FARC is arguably Colombia’s most prominent guerrilla group, another not included in the treaty is the ELN (National Liberation Army). The ELN announced in September that they are ready to commence peace talks with the government, having delayed negotiations since March. Nevertheless, while the accord would have certainly lessened the conflict, its promise of “stable and lasting peace” may have been a bit inaccurate due to the continued existence of other guerrilla groups.

UNIFIED DESIRE FOR PEACE What is crucial to recognize is that both “YES” and “NO” voters had the ultimate goal of a lasting peace. The difference between the two was whether the accord, as it was initially written, would be the best way to attain it. “NO” voters even adopted the slogan “Paz sí, pero NO así,” which translates to “Yes on peace, but not like this.”

In addition to the block of “NO” voters who wanted to see the peace accord rewritten, other voters were understandably overwhelmed by the vast amount of information in the treaty and felt they could not fully comprehend what they were being asked to approve. The length and complexity of the accord undoubtedly contributed to this confusion.

YES

DIDN’T VOTE

NO

BLANK/NULL

RESULTS & TURNOUT “The controversial nature of the peace accord revealed intense divisions throughout the country — with only 50.2 percent of voters in opposition, 49.8 percent in favor, and a meager 37 percent voter participation, the ‘NO’ vote only succeeded by an incredibly thin margin.”

“When you have 300 pages and a month later you have the plebiscite, some people go, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t understand anything. I’ll just vote NO,’” Ruiz said.

Colombian Stanford freshman Cecelia Cavalier thought the high rate of abstention may have been due to a similar issue.

“People weren’t educated about [the agreement] and didn’t know what they were voting for,” Cavalier said. “It’s kind of like you don’t know your own power in your ability to vote and what that impact means.”

But why did the treaty’s creators decide to ask for the people’s opinion in the first place? The plebiscite was technically unnecessary, given that the treaty could have gone into effect without a vote for its approval. Caparrós of The New York Times criticized President Santos’ decision, calling it “the biggest mistake by a politician who has made a mountain of errors.”

COLOMBIA

Demonstration against FARC Guerrilla (2008).

“President Juan Manuel Santos could have made the agreement official without the need of a plebiscite, but he yielded to the temptation of obtaining, through this peace accord, the support of his fugitive voters,” Caparrós said.

In Colombia, peace is a constitutional right, which is why many felt it was the President’s responsibility to protect it at all costs, regardless of the outcome of a vote. In some way, the plebiscite didn’t make much sense — after all, Santos was elected by the Colombian people to make these very decisions on behalf of his country. Nonetheless, it seemed he wanted to ensure his constituents supported his chosen course of action, both to establish his credibility and promote a smooth implementation of the peace process. But the people — much to Santos’ surprise — voted “NO.”

Lingering Divisions Regardless of whether or not the initial treaty was significantly flawed, it appears Colombia was not ready for its ratification.

The controversial nature of the peace ac-

cord revealed intense divisions throughout the country — with only 50.2 percent of voters in opposition, 49.8 percent in favor, and a meager 37 percent voter participation, the “NO” vote only succeeded by an incredibly thin margin. Moreover, despite peace itself being almost universally desired, the peace process became a highly partisan issue. This was emphasized by current, Liberal Party President Juan Manuel Santos’ persistent commitment to the treaty, while former President Álvaro Uribe of the conservative Centro Democratico led the campaign for its opposition.

The divisiveness the plebiscite both encouraged and illuminated remains highly problematic, as the changes brought about by the accord will likely affect the great majority of the Colombian population and necessitates their cooperation. Colombia is the 11th most unequal country in the world, and such intense inequality was a key factor in the initial rise of the FARC. In order to both abate poverty and grant concessions to the largely rural, impoverished guerrillas, the peace treaty ensured reforms such as the redistribution of land that are

meant to benefit Colombia’s poor. Because of this, most landowners and other members of Colombia’s wealthier classes were particularly opposed to the treaty.

Furthermore, Colombian business owners may be unwilling to hire ex-guerrillas, which would complicate their reintegration into society. The simple presence of former guerrilla soldiers, guilty of crimes as severe as murder and kidnapping, in day-to-day life is understandably enough to make many Colombians uncomfortable. Thus, it is questionable whether or not peace could have been successfully implemented with so much of the country either unsure or in opposition.

“What we have here is a peace process.

And a peace process is not something where the government and guerrillas just sign an agreement. It means a whole change in the political system, even for citizens,” Ruiz said.

The process is so far-reaching that some “YES” supporters even believe it may have been for the best that the treaty was not approved with a similarly narrow margin.

Hernandez said he felt this way on Oct. 2,

13

COLOMBIA when the vote counts grew frighteningly close.

“I started saying: hopefully, the ‘NO’ wins. Because if the ‘YES’ wins in these conditions, that might mean something very terrible,” Hernandez said.

Had the “NO” lost under comparable circumstances, an aggressive reaction from the treaty’s opponents and their leaders was not improbable. Uribe’s “NO” campaign against the treaty was so severe, it is likely that the opposition would have demanded recounts and actively attempted to thwart the peace process in protest of the accord’s alleged flaws. Such actions would have undermined the treaty’s objectives and hindered the feasibility of peacefully reinte-

grating the FARC into Colombian society.

In contrast, “YES” advocates have proven to be primarily hopeful and perseverant in the face of defeat. Responses have ranged from peaceful demonstrations in part of Colombian citizens to the official revision of the accord by its creators, working in tandem with its critics. The updated treaty was approved unanimously by the country’s House of Representatives on Nov. 30, 2016, one day after its approval in the Senate. Colombia is progressing toward unity and increased participation, and the goal is to achieve peace in such a way that will work for most — if not all — of the country’s citizens.

A STRONGER DEMOCRACY Evidently, the treaty’s rejection has sparked significant discussion throughout the country. The unexpected outcome of the plebiscite has forced many to better understand the controversial agreement and possible next steps. Political participation in terms of voting may have been low, but the discourse has greatly increased. Regardless of the result, such dialogue is beneficial for Colombia, because its citizens are — in some way — experiencing democracy more fully.

“From my experience, I can say that we have never lived a real democracy in my country,” Ruiz said. “And I think that, right now, we are experiencing that. All of the

people are talking about this, and there is no unified view of what is going on.”

Colombia was shaken by the rejection of the peace accord. Nonetheless, as Ruiz said, this is anything but a failure. A country riddled by seemingly interminable conflict has managed to sit down with its most prominent guerrilla group and negotiate terms for peace. The people are joining the discussion. They are listening to the treaty’s supporters and to the opposition. They are listening to each other. This may not have been the anticipated result, but Colombia has made unquestionable progress.

Ruiz, who voted in favor of the treaty’s approval and yearns for peace in his home country, remains highly optimistic in the aftermath of the plebiscite:

“For me, it is not a crisis that we are experiencing. We are just experiencing the change, the peace. It is a process that gets into your bones, into your veins. And I find that peace is the purpose of my life.”

14

This article was originally published online on Feb. 1, 2017.

SUSTAINABLE OPTIMISM

COMMUNICATING CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECTIVELY Vivan malkani

CLIMATE Caring about climate change can be emotionally exhausting, especially given the current political climate. Shortly after Nov. 8, Vox’s climate and energy writer David Roberts penned and published an article titled “Trump’s election marks the end of any serious hope of limiting climate change to 2 degrees: Widespread suffering and misery from climate change are now effectively inevitable.” The temptation to accept a fatalistic outlook is powerful, particularly when many, including the President of the United States, remain apathetic. However, one can retain a somber sense of realism while simultaneously maintaining the hope that climate action can be effective.

At Stanford, students are encouraged (both by peers and by initiatives such as those by Stanford Residential and Dining Enterprises or the Office of Sustainability) to conserve electricity and water, to reduce food waste, to recycle and even to

First, there is a need to acknowledge the deep “sadness” that accompanies truly caring about climate change, says Richard Nevle, the deputy director of the Earth Systems program at Stanford. He shares that the role humans have played in bringing the planet to the point of mass extinction and extreme loss of biodiversity is personally devastating to him; yet when I mention the cynicism or defeatism that this sense of devastation would seem to inspire, he gives a knowing chuckle. The climate and the environment are far too all-encompassing to view in a binary of optimism or pessimism, he warns. Blind optimism can lead to denial of the severity of the problems that lie in store and can beget a false sense of security. But overpowering negativity can prohibit the motivation necessary to make inroads where possible, and while there exist irreversible tipping points, there also remains a wide spectrum of potential outcomes, varying in degree of catastrophe, de-

CARING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE CAN BE EMOTIONALLY EXHAUSTING, ESPECIALLY GIVEN THE CURRENT POLITICAL CLIMATE. consume less meat. Student activists continue to push the university to divest endowment funds from fossil fuel companies. But sustaining optimism in the face of climate change can be a difficult task. The more we learn about the various forms and consequences of climate change, the more depressing our future seems. Why switch off the lights when you leave a room, choose to switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet, or call for Stanford’s fossil fuel divestment when these actions are the futile last shots of a war already lost?

Seemingly much more significant are President Trump’s promises to revive the coal industry and “cancel the Paris Agreement.” Against this rightfully gloomy backdrop, how does one fight off an almost inescapable wave of pessimism?

I spoke with climate change advocates, experts and educators at Stanford and beyond to try to better understand their personal frames of mind when thinking about the issue, as well as their perspectives on the political landscape.

16

pendent on our actions today. Noting that “as humans we have the rare ability to feel profound sadness,” Nevle observes that embracing the suffering and disappointment that comes with caring about climate change and its impacts is what can motivate us to seek opportunities to mitigate that suffering for others. We must revel in that capacity for compassion and balance it with the pull of hope.

Josh Lappen, a student leader of Fossil Free Stanford who remains as committed to this cause as ever, describes the solace he finds in the inherent incrementalism of climate action. He even suggests that, despite the occasional setbacks, technology and policy seem to be slowly but surely driving us towards a safer future. He gives the example that California is an exemplar in that aspect; state subsidies on solar power production drove improvements in efficiency whilst providing cleaner energy for the entire state.

Climate

In recent weeks, The New York Times’ new conservative columnist, Bret Stephens, has sparked a national debate about the notion of uncertainty in relation to climate change. Stephens’s controversial first column, titled “Climate of Complete Certainty,” encouraged skepticism of climate advocates by likening the faith Democrats placed in election polls and models that wrongly predicted a Clinton victory last November to the trust in scientific consensus that climate advocates use to support their efforts. Stephens was lambasted by climate scientists, environmental reporters even at his own newspaper and liberals around the world for what they decried as a false equivalency and denial of reality. But in speaking with Dr. Nevle— before the column was published—I found that the concept of “uncertainty” about the future is actually one of his greatest sources of hope.

As a climate scientist himself, Nevle knows more than most about the graveness of the situation we face, but he also acknowledges that some of the most apocalyptic projections that are colloquially spoken of may not be accurate and even the ones that are based on more solid scientific foundations are potentially avoidable. This uncertainty about the future, he suggests, can be powerful; it should, he says, inspire people to play a more deliberate role in shaping that future. Nevle draws upon a Martin Luther King Jr. quote to make his point: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

But the debate sparked by Stephens’ column highlights more than just the oft-over-

looked nuance of the concept of certainty regarding climate change; it calls attention to the role climate communication plays in shaping the attitudes of those who support or oppose climate action.

Because some use the lack of complete certainty—a mythical possibility—as justification for inaction, climate advocates must reckon with the fact that a more effective framework than relying on “science” is needed to spur change.

We are living in an era of “information fatigue,” says Emily Polk, a lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) who specializes in climate communication. Learning more can be difficult, she says, especially the more we learn about that which is lost and at great risk. She suggests that an alternate way to build and sustain optimism and motivation for action is to try to develop a sense of community. The key to making people care, she emphasizes, is to give them personal connections to the issue.

“Facts are not enough,” agrees Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She argues, “Social science studies indicate that arguing over facts often deepens the divides between us. Most objections [to climate action] are couched in “science-y” sounding language, but when you have a conversation, you soon realize that the real objection lies in in the fact that [objectors] are more threatened by or afraid of what they think are the proposed solutions to climate change than they are threatened by the impacts of climate change. Those who reject

the reality of climate science, the vast majority of the time, are the people who are opposed to big government solutions.”

This phenomenon that Hayhoe describes is academically known as solution-aversion and is applicable to more than just climate change. In November 2014, researchers at Duke University published a study on motivated disbelief. Noah Diffenbaugh, a renowned climate scientist and Stanford professor, shared it with his freshman introductory seminar (aptly titled “The Global Warming Paradox”) students. He analogized climate solution-aversion to Stanford students who routinely deny the risk involved in riding a bicycle without a helmet (because of a subconscious prioritization of their appearance) despite the vast amount of evidence available to the contrary.

Climate action opponents, Hayhoe says, “think that the government should have as little as possible involvement in their personal lives, and they see climate change as one of the biggest ways in which the government can invade their personal lives, telling them how to set their thermostat, what type of car they’re allowed to drive, how much water they’re allowed to use and ruin the economy at the same time.”

One thing that climate advocates can do to change this, she says, is to make the impacts relevant and tangible and to present solutions that climate action opponents agree with ideologically.

Rob Jackson, chair of the Stanford department of Earth Systems Science, describes this reframing of the climate change conversation in an interview with Stanford

“FACTS ARE NOT ENOUGH” - DR. KATHERINE HAYHOE

17

CLIMATE Report. Jackson hopes to bridge the political gap in climate advocacy by shifting focus from science to matters like jobs, security and health.

“We need to relate to people’s daily lives.

People care more about improving human health than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If I say coal use in the United States dropped by 20 percent in the last two years, slashing carbon dioxide emissions and future climate change, many people would yawn. If I say the same drop in coal use will save 3,000 American lives this year by reducing air pollution, people notice. Both things are true.”

Jackson and Hayhoe seem to agree that more information on the scientific consensus on climate change as a real and dangerous phenomenon will do little to change people’s underlying political ideologies.

What is needed, Hayhoe suggests, is “more information on what specific impacts are occurring in the places that we live that are affecting things that we already love and care for.” These types of arguments can be much more compelling to those who would otherwise remain apathetic about the environment.

Nevertheless, whereas Jackson and Hayhoe suggest highlighting climate change’s impact on every community, Nevle asserts that a key component of climate apathy in the United States can be attributed to what he describes as a “poverty of experience.”

Recognizing this fact is an important step to understanding opposition to climate action. Simply labeling climate action opponents as “selfish” is unproductive; attempting to cultivate a greater sense of empathy without contextualization is futile. Empathy at a distance is impossible without visibility and at least a limited understanding of the problems at hand. Having lived the majority of my life in India, I had the perverse privilege of being able to see the direct effects of climate change. I was surrounded by communities that face the direct impacts of rising sea levels and unbearable heatwaves. My visits to see family in New Delhi compel me to breathe in toxic pollution to which the vast majority of the city’s 19 mil-

18

lion inhabitants, many of whom will experience ruinous health effects, have become normalized. Closer to Mumbai, I interact with people whose economic well-being hinges upon sufficient and predictable rainfall; erratic monsoons and subsequent famine can be disastrous for these communities. These experiences made climate change painfully visible to me and to those suffering communities, but it is unrealistic to expect people who have, as Nevle says, “never had their hearts broken” to feel a true sense of empathy for the communities affected by climate change.

This underscores the need for visibility. The term “charismatic megafauna” describes large animal species that are widely popular and are therefore used by environmentalists to elicit sympathy and foster action (think polar bears stranded on shrinking icebergs), but to really inspire compassion the devastation of climate change needs to be shown to be a fundamentally human issue. The photograph, for example, of Omran Daqneesh, the Syrian boy pulled from the rubble of a destroyed building in Aleppo, sitting dazed in an ambulance sent waves across the world. Such horrible photos reportedly influenced President Trump decision to order air-strikes in Syria, a reversal of his prior stance of non-intervention.

Art, photography, literature and film all have the power to instill empathy, to show the ways in which suffering is caused and promote thinking of ideas for how it can be alleviated. It was probably with this mindset that Diffenbaugh, the faculty moderator of the Three Books program (the assigned readings for the entire incoming freshman class at Stanford), selected Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones.” While the book is ostensibly a fiction novel, it fits the theme of sustainability and equity, focusing on the suffering and resilience of a family facing Hurricane Katrina. The human effects of climate change desperately need more visibility, not to promote hopelessness, but to help spur change.

STANFORD POLITICS INTERVIEWS

“

When you come from a country where your relatives have been deported and you are a child of refugees, things like democracy mean a lot...liberalism, outside the United States, is not a left-wing concept. I say, “I’m a liberal.” That says nothing about whether I’m left or right, but I believe in free and fair elections, rule of law, respect for human rights...We’ve seen huge ups and downs in the economic fortunes of Europe and the United States since World War II, but no one ever [up till now] questioned the fundamentals of liberal democracy and the need for strong institutions defending it... Europe really needs to get its act together.

”

Toomas Hendrik Ilves

“

There’s a key takeaway from Egypt, which is why the scale of authoritarianism is unmatched. If you do not manage to guarantee and keep intact a media landscape which is vibrant and pluralist in terms of debating, it is an easy ride for authoritarianism. Without that, you will be surprised to see how quickly other institutions collapse.

They become submissive, eager to serve the one man playing his own show for his own interests.

”

Amr Hamzawy Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Former President of Estonia

SEE MORE AT STANFORDPOLITICS.COM

“EVICTION IS A DRIVER– NOT JUST A CONDITION –OF POVERTY.” A CONVERSATION WITH URBAN SOCIOLOGIST MATTHEW DESMOND MICAELA SUMINSKI

eviction

MATTHEW DESMOND

is an internationally renowned sociologist best known for his bestselling book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” (2016). A MacArthur “Genius” and Harvard professor who has been featured in The New Yorker and The New York Times, Desmond leverages sociology to highlight disturbing social inequalities in United States society today. Through his study of evictions and the housing market in poor areas, Desmond connects with families and individuals on a deeply personal level, lending a unique tone of compassion and urgency to the fields of sociology and policy.

He also calls attention to the fact that while “poor black men were locked up, poor black women were locked out,” casting a light on the connection between the systematic mass incarceration of poor black men and the systematic mass displacement of poor black women in the United States. More broadly, his work highlights the generational wealth divide today, alongside the frequency with which the little wealth poor people have (in the form of possessions) being stacked on the curb after they are kicked out of their homes.

Desmond joined the Stanford Program in Urban Studies as a visiting scholar this October, during which time I had the opportunity to sit down with him to talk about housing policy, sociology and social change.

AS A SOCIOLOGIST WHOSE WORK IS HEAVILY ORIENTED TOWARD SOCIAL JUSTICE, YOU’VE MENTIONED STICKING TO YOUR MISSION. WHAT EXACTLY IS YOUR MISSION — WHAT DOES STAYING “ON MISSION” MEAN TO YOU? I think that we’re in a moment right now where we’re having a real conversation about poverty and inequality in America, and there’s a moment where the interests in this issue in particular — the lack of affordable housing in our cities — is growing more acute and a lot more people are getting around the table.

I was in Pittsburg the other day doing a talk and I met with a lot of folks that are involved in affordable housing. There were the usual suspects, like affordable housing developers and tenant organizations, but surprisingly there were also public sector unions there.

When I asked what they were doing there, they told me their members can’t afford to live in Pittsburg anymore. I was also recently in inner-city Phoenix to meet with some teachers who told me that 40 percent of their students who start on the first day won’t be there on the last day of school. The teachers said they never knew why; it turns out that this research on evictions helps us understand why.

So when I think about how there are only 24 hours in a day, and when I think about how to focus this message, building a broad constituency of people who are actively engaged in these issues is important to me.

WHO ELSE AT THIS EVENT IN PITTSBURG BESIDES PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS SURPRISED YOU? Young people. One in five of all renters in America now spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. That’s going to hit young people in a big way, and it already is. Folks in Washington, too, on both sides of the aisle, are trying to work out big, bold strategies for this problem.

IF YOU WERE IN WASHINGTON, WHAT’S ONE THING THAT YOU’D WANT TO DO? I can tell you one thing we have done already, as a bit of encouragement. Doing this work, I noticed that women were getting evicted at much higher rates than men. When landlords told me to look into nuisance ordinances, I got two years worth from the police department in Milwaukee and found that evictions were having a huge effect on domestic violence victims. Every four days, a landlord gets a nuisance ordinance for domestic violence — and in roughly 80 percent of domestic violence nuisance ordinance cases, the landlords evict the tenant. continued on pg. 24

21

Housing In CRISIS STANFORD POLITICS HAS PURSUED AN EXTENDED REPORTING

PROJECT ON HOUSING, PARTICULARLY IN PALO ALTO AND THE WIDER BAY AREA, TO EXAMINE HOW HISTORY, POLITICS AND POLICY HAVE INFLUENCED THE DEVELOPMENT OF WHAT IS RAPIDLY BECOMING THE MOST EXPENSIVE PLACE TO LIVE IN AMERICA. march 2016

The Tragic Economics of Urban Housing

by Stanford Politics Contributing Editor Andrew Granato

“The greatest victims are the usual suspects: Low-income people are being gentrified out of urban areas and the middle class, if not already depleted, is next.”

AUGUST 2016

“I don’t think Stanford wants to be in a place that used to be the innovation capital of the world, but that’s kind of where we’re headed.”

- Kate Downing, former Palo Alto Housing and Transportation Commissioner, to Stanford Politics “ The cities [in the South Bay] have all kind of developed a gluttony for job growth, and they need to recognize that it’s not healthy in the long term for themselves and the region.”

- Patrick Burt, former Palo Alto mayor, to Stanford Politics SEPTEMBER 2016

“What’s worrying is when Palo Alto’s longtime mentors are being displaced from the city because of housing costs, or seniors are unable to move from their single-family homes to an accessible unit that is close to transit and services that they need, or young families don’t have the opportunity to make roots here.”

-Adrian Fine, member of Palo Alto City Council, to Stanford Politics

NOVEMBER 2016

“The current manner of federal intervention in the housing market seems to be just categorically unfair.”

-Mark Wolfe, land use attorney and lecturer in urban studies, to Stanford Politics

Percentage of housing supply need met, 2007-2014

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Rohnert Park* Novato Santa Rosa Vacaville Brentwood Dublin Vallejo Pleasanton Richmond Hayward San Leandro Pittsburg

Alameda Livermore Palo Alto Union City Cupertino San Ramon

Martinez San Mateo Daly City San Francisco Gilroy Redwood City

Concord Oakland Berkeley Antioch Emeryville Rio Vista

San Rafael South San Francisco Fairfield Napa Petaluma San Jose Fremont Walnut Creek Mountain View Santa Clara Sunnyvale Morgan Hill

*cities sharing the same color are listed in order of left to right on the chart

INFOGRAPHIC FROM

Apr. 13, 2015

Each Bay Area city is expected (but not legally obligated) to build enough housing to keep up with population projections made by the Association of Bay Area Governments.

How are local cities doing so far? Here are the number of housing permits issued in each city from 2007 to 2014, as a percentage of predicted housing need during that time.

san francisco business times

Note: Does not include Milpitas, which produced 254 percent of its housing need. Only includes Bay Area cities expected to permit at least 1,000 housing units.

“Did your city fail the Bay Area's housing supply test?

Probably.� By Cory Weingart

Eviction

continued from pg. 21 That puts women in these terrible situations. After Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) read the chapter about this in “Evicted,” she and people like Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Al Franken (D-MN) wrote a general letter to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) asking for guidance for these laws and suggesting that they could be in violation of the Fair Housing Act. HUD then issued broad guidance for cities. We’ve now changed the law in Pennsylvania and Arizona and other places around the country.

That’s a big step forward.

But it’s also important to know that we have policies that work.

The problem isn’t with the design; it’s with the dosage. Our biggest affordable housing program now is the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Voucher program. It allows families to take a voucher and live anywhere they want, as long as the housing isn’t too expensive or too run-down, and they pay about 30 percent of their income on housing while the voucher covers the rest. And this really works. It lifts about two million people above the poverty line. People use those vouchers to move to better neighborhoods. They’re more stable; their kids are healthier.

The problem is that it’s only for the lucky minority. So we could take this policy and expand it for everyone below the poverty line: that would be a game changer.

DO WE FLIP THE CONVERSATION TO WHAT PEOPLE ARE SPENDING THEIR INCOME ON, TO HIGHLIGHT TRENDS LIKE THE FACT THAT PEOPLE ARE SPENDING MORE THAN 50 PERCENT OF THEIR INCOME ON HOUSING? Talking about wages and decent jobs is crucial to addressing poverty in America — but we also need to think about ceilings, not just floors. A robust, anti-poverty platform has to be two-pronged: it has to focus on incomes and wages, but it also has to focus on expenditures, with housing being the biggest for most low-income Americans. If we don’t do that, any kind of initiative we have to address poverty is going to be watered down. I can give you one example: if you look at eviction rates by month, they always plummet in February. What happens in February? The Earned Income Tax Credit. This is a giant, bipartisan program designed to lift working families above the poverty line — which for some of those families has just become eviction prevention insurance, because the housing market is cut up. So if we don’t address housing along with wages, the programs will have to work a lot harder to make a difference.

IN TERMS OF THESE EVICTIONS, YOU TALK CAN YOU SEE THAT HAPPENING REALISTICALLY? ABOUT BLACK MEN BEING LOCKED UP AND Yes — why not? It’s well within our capacity. We as a nation have BLACK WOMEN BEING LOCKED OUT. WHAT to have a frank and honest conversation about the fact that housing ABOUT POPULATIONS THAT AREN’T BLACK OR is crushing the incomes of families of moderate means. We need to ask what we’re going to do about that. What are we going to do WHITE? HOW WILL EVICTIONS AFFECT POPUabout a city like Palo Alto, where the folks who are waiting tables LATIONS LIKE THE HISPANIC POPULATION, THE are living two hours away? When I was growing up, we used to talk ASIAN AMERICAN POPULATION, LATINX POPUabout “the other side of the tracks” as a demarcation between communities; your generation is probably going to talk about the other LATION, MUSLIM AMERICANS, REFUGEES, AND county or the other town. So we need to ask questions like, “What MORE OVER THE NEXT DECADE OR SO? is that doing to families?” “Are people able to see their families?”

“Are commute times fundamentally changing the lives of working Americans?” We need to start there: with a national, informed conversation about depth and extent of the problem.

SOMETHING I’VE NOTICED IS THAT WE’RE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT WAGE, RATHER THAN WHAT WE’RE SPENDING OUR INCOME ON. HOW 24

The jury is still out on that one. We need a lot more research and data to answer that question in a rigorous way. I’m working with the Gates Foundation to build the nation’s first eviction database. We’re collecting eviction records from all over the country, and we’re merging those with other data sets that will allow us to answer this question in a way that’s empirically sound. Right now, the data infrastructure doesn’t exist.

eviction

“NO MATTER WHAT YOU’RE INTERESTED IN, WHETHER IT’S COMPUTER SCIENCE OR URBAN STUDIES, YOU HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO PLAY A ROLE IN THIS ISSUE.” What I can tell you at least about Milwaukee is that the Hispanic community among renters was hit really hard by the foreclosure crisis. We know that nationwide, the average Hispanic family lost about 41 percent of its wealth during the 2010 foreclosure crisis, the average Black family lost about 33 percent and the average White family lost about 11 percent. And so that crisis had an acute effect on Hispanic families in America, and if you add up landlord foreclosures with evictions in the city, Latino families are evicted at very high rates. If you take those foreclosures out of the equation, African American families are evicted at higher rates. So I think there’s a story there about the foreclosure there that’s really important.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE TOP LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE FORECLOSURE CRISIS? The foreclosure crisis was an incredibly important moment in American history and in the whole world. I think it’s important for your readers to know that today — in 2016 — a family in your town has been evicted. Their things have been piled on the sidewalk. If you look at evictions throughout the crisis, they were stable. They were high before the crisis, they were high through it and they were high after. And so I think that if we care about family stability and community stability, we need to think about addressing the eviction crisis, which hasn’t gotten as much attention as the foreclosure crisis did.

SO IN TERMS OF ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM, DO YOU ADVOCATE FOR PEOPLE TO READ YOUR BOOK AND YOUR PUBLISHED WORK? HOW DO YOU GET YOUR WORK IN FRONT OF PEOPLE? DO YOU JUST HOPE THAT PEOPLE WILL SEE IT? You have to get ready for the long game with something like this.

Changing the public conversation about something like this is going to take a while. I’m thrilled that we’re having this conversation.

I’m thrilled that readers who are really interested in this issue are coming around to this book. I’m thrilled that people who have been working on this issue for years and years now have a bit more light shed upon their work. I’m glad the word is getting out and I’ll do whatever is in my power to try and help that, but I also do just love to research.

WHAT ROLE DO YOU SEE SOCIOLOGY PLAYING IN BROADER POLITICAL CHANGE? I think that for this issue, we need a lot more sociology. Housing has been kind of neglected by sociologists, especially housing at it articulates to poverty. We need a sociology of housing; we need a sociology of displacement that focuses on the causes and consequences of eviction. We have a unique role in shining light on and bearing witness to the wreckage that’s being caused by this problem and the persistence of deep poverty in this wealthy nation.

SO IF EVICTIONS WERE STABLE, IS THAT REALLY BAD NEWS ABOUT EVICTIONS OR IS THAT BETTER NEWS ABOUT HOW THE FINANCIAL IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT POLITICRISIS DIDN’T AFFECT EVICTIONS? CAL JOURNAL READERS TO KNOW? Right, so the financial crisis affected evictions in the form of landlords losing property. So if eviction is just broadly understood as “a tenant having to move,” it certainly had a big effect. I think what you see in that kind of trend data is that this isn’t a story just about 2008 — this is a longer story about the gradual erasure of affordable housing from our cities, and climbing rent, and rising housing costs in the 2000s, and stagnant wages and the lack of aid to address that problem.

I think that this is an issue that’s going to impact young people more and more. No matter what you’re interested in, whether it’s computer science or urban studies, you have an opportunity to play a role in this issue. You have a responsibility: It’s a personal responsibility and a civic responsibility. So I think that we just need you guys on this one.

This interview was originally published online on Oct. 24, 2016.

To learn more about eviction and to get involved at the local or national level, visit Desmond’s project: http://justshelter.org/

25

THE STATE OF

DISUNION LUCAS RODRIGUEZ & SPENCER SEGAL

IN 2004, a budding state senator from Illinois delivered a moving speech at the Democratic National Convention.

The speech jump-started his career and sprung him onto the national political scene. At a time when Republicans and Democrats were becoming more and more polarized (here and throughout the article, the term “polarization” refers to polarization of the political elites. Political elites are those citizens that are most engaged in our politics, e.g., party extremists, people who donate to campaigns, etc.), the young senator spoke of compromise and bipartisanship, saying:

“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America… The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.”

His rhetoric captivated the minds of many of the conventions attendees and television audiences, and four years later Barack Obama found himself at the Democratic convention again, this time as the party’s presidential nominee.

Obama would go on to win the presidency, in part by running a campaign largely focused on the promises that he could bring bipartisanship back to Washington and prevent American politics from slipping further down the dangerous slope it was heading. In his resulting victory speech, he would again stress the importance of cooperation and friendship between Republicans and Democrats.

Obama urged Americans to “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.” He reminded the Democrats in the room that although they had claimed victory that night, he wanted them to do so “with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.” It was with this hopeful mindset that Obama began his presidency.

While Obama’s legacy is undoubtedly filled with many liberal policy accomplishments, he himself will be the first to admit that he failed in one of the areas that mattered most: halting political polarization.

In his final State of the Union address delivered earlier this year, Obama humbly noted, “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”

This disappointing observation contrasted sharply with the optimistic rhetoric voters heard in 2004 and 2008. Despite having a seemingly genuine intention to bridge the gap between the two parties, as president, he could only helplessly watch as Republicans and Democrats became more polarized than ever. After eight years of serving in the highest electable office in the United States, it appears as if President Obama has come to terms with the harsh reality of modern American politics: the country is spiraling into unprecedented levels of polarization with serious consequences, and there is little elected representatives can do to stop it.

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POLARIZATION BY THE NUMBERS Pundits and political scientists alike have been studying polarization in American politics for some time now, and while there are many reports out there on the subject, few are as comprehensive and as revealing as the Pew Research Center’s 2014 study “Political Polarization in the American Public: How Increasing Ideological Uniformity and Partisan Antipathy Affect Politics, Compromise and Everyday Life”. Pew surveyed 10,000 randomly selected, nationally representative Americans across a three-month span. The results are truly remarkable, charting increasing trends of polarization and political antipathy in all parts of American life and proving that polarization has most definitely worsened during Obama’s time in office.

There are two trends the study outlines that are particularly noteworthy. The first is perhaps the most talked about, that constituents of the two parties are simply moving farther apart ideologically. Today, 92 percent of Republicans are more conservative than the median Democrat and 94 percent of Democrats are more liberal than the median Republican. In 1994, only 64 percent of Democrats were to the left of the median Republican and 70 percent of Republicans were to the right of the median Democrat. Put differently this means that in ’94, 30 percent of Republicans were more liberal than the average Democrat and 36 percent of Democrats were more conservative than the average Republican. Today, those numbers are just eight percent and six percent respectively. This means there is much less ideological overlap between the two parties, making compromise much more difficult.

The second, somewhat related trend is that more and more Democrats and Republicans are becoming consistently liberal and consistently conservative respectively. This is a relatively new phenomenon in American politics. Being a Democrat did not used to mean that one was liberal on all issues, nor did being Republican require constant conservatism. Although the majority of Americans still claim to have a mix of conservative and liberal interests, those with consistent interests are on the rise. The percentage of Democrats who are consistently liberal has quadrupled over the past twenty years, going from five percent in ’94 to 23 percent in 2014. For Republicans, the increase is more recent; in 2004, just six percent of Republicans were consistently conservative, but today 20 percent claim to be consistent in their views. This type of party sorting has largely driven the ideological separation identified in the first trend.

What’s particularly concerning about the increase in ideological consistency is how strongly it correlates to these individuals’ increase in political participation.

Engaged citizens (those who regularly vote and follow the goings-on of government and politics) are found to be much more uniform in their views. 70 percent of both engaged Democrats and engaged Republicans

2004

2011

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DEMOCRATS & REPUBLICANS MORE IDEOLOGICALLY DIVIDED THAN IN THE PAST The blue area in these charts represents the ideological distribution (based on a survey of questions on political values) of Democrats and the red area represents the ideological distribution of Republicans. Notice how the overlap of the distributions (shaded purple) is shrinking, while the distance between the median Democrat and median Republican increases.

Pew Research Center, Political Polarization in the American Public (June 12, 2014)

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state that they take positions that are mostly or consistently in line with their party’s ideology. Similarly, 58 percent of consistent liberals say they always vote, with 78 percent of consistent conservatives saying the same. Ideologues of this type are also far more likely to donate to political campaigns, with 31 percent of consistent liberals and 26 percent of consistent conservatives stating they’ve donated to a campaign in the past two years. Conversely, only 39 percent of those with both conservative and liberal preferences always vote, and only eight percent donate to campaigns. Representatives are more responsive to those who always vote and contribute to their campaigns, and thus the hard line liberals and conservatives are having a disproportionate effect on the political process.

These same ideologues tend to have a deep dislike of the opposing party, according to the survey. Republicans and Democrats have certainly always disliked each other to a degree; however, those negative views have significantly spiked in the last 20 years.

In 1994, only about 17 percent of Republicans and 16 percent of Democrats claimed to have a “very unfavorable” view of the opposing party. Today, those numbers have practically doubled, going to 43 percent and 37 percent respectively. Of these people who view the other party very unfavorably, 36 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats claim that the other party’s policies are “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well being.” That there are individuals sincerely believing that the other party is harming the nation reveals a level of partisan antipathy that is itself “a threat to the nation’s well being.”

How it Happened Any discussion of political polarization must go beyond a survey of its effects. A deeper question to ask about these shifts in the American political landscape is why they occurred in the first place. How did a country that was being governed by a moderate Democratic President and a tough but compromising Republican Congress only 20 years ago become a gridlocked political battleground, a chaotic mass of opposing factions and interests? While political scientists are divided on some of the particulars of America’s polarization problem, it is clear that the divide in American politics has been a long time coming and is the result of a deep erosion of American political culture.

One source of this erosion has been the infectious spread of political distrust. For much of the 20th century, the two major parties

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were able to effectively govern, despite often-divided government, due to their willingness to compromise. However, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal dashed the political trust that the American people had in their government. Since 1958, the American National Election Studies, a research-based organization that conducts surveys on a variety of political and electoral questions, has been asking Americans the question: “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right — just about always, most of the time or only some of the time?” The numbers don’t lie; the period between 1964 and 1980 saw the most drastic decrease in the percent of Americans saying they trust the federal government “most of the time” or “just about always,” with that percentage going from almost 80 percent to an abysmal 25 percent.

This period marked the beginning of a patent shift in American political culture; as Americans began to distrust their government, their antipathy toward government increased. The emotional distance this has created between the government and its citizens has had mixed effects, fueling both political movements, such as the rise of the conservative right, and political apathy. Political distrust has led to the emergence of an increasingly significant minority with strong ideological views on either side, and has simultaneously contributed to the relative apathy of the political middle, thereby creating incentives for polarized behavior.

After the rise of distrust in American politics, many citizens did not believe in their government’s capacity to help them, and so they became less inclined to be politically involved. Today, this trend has continued, as evidenced by the record low primary turnout rates of recent Congressional elections in both parties. Strength of preference and ideological extremity tend to go hand in hand. Those with more ideological views are more willing to mobilize for their political causes, because they are more passionate about their beliefs than their more moderate compatriots, as evidenced by the results from the Pew report.

Voting is a form of self-selection, and therefore it naturally amplifies the preferences of those with intense views, since a citizen with a less intense preference is less likely to make the effort to get out to the polls. Political distrust has exacerbated this effect by emotionally distancing most citizens from their government, which has led to a significant drop-off in political participation. However, since those with intense preferences are more likely to mobilize and vote, the depressant effect that political distrust has on voting has

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served to further magnify the political power of the ideologically extreme, as there are fewer competing votes from moderates. This is especially true in primaries, where candidates in both parties are strongly incentivized to run campaigns geared toward their highly ideological bases because of the lack of moderate votes. In all, the political distrust that is ubiquitous in modern American politics has empowered and normalized the views of the extremes on either side of the political spectrum, while simultaneously diminishing the profile of moderates in political life.

Political distrust is not the only factor that has led to our current polarization, however. The proliferation of choice has also contributed heavily to the current stratification of our political discourse.

One perfect example of this phenomenon is in the media. As the form and distribution of media has evolved, citizens’ ability to choose what media they wish to consume has evolved along with it. Today, between the rapid growth of cable news and the explosion

of online media sources, consumers are freer than ever before to choose a media source — and it is this ability to choose that has led to the demise of more nonpartisan mass media. Statistically speaking, the vast majority of conservatives and liberals obtain their news from sources that espouse opinions in line with their own. A full 47 percent of consistent conservatives get their news from Fox News, according to Pew, while a full 48 percent of strong liberals get their news from MSNBC, a more liberal source.

This self-sorting does not end with media consumption — 44 percent of consistent liberals admit to having de-friended conservative friends on social media due to their political beliefs, and 66 percent of consistent conservatives state that most of their close friends share their political views almost exactly. Even more alarming, 50 percent of consistent conservatives and 35 percent of consistent liberals have a desire to live in a place with people that share their political views. From media to friendships to even the places

Trust in the Federal Government 1958-2012

Note the large decrease in the percent of respondents saying they trust the federal government “most of the time” or “just about always” between 1964 and 1980.

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people decide to live, political partisanship has slowly crept into every aspect of personal life, separating our country into two disparate fragments, one red and another blue. These isolated colonies of political thought have become echo chambers of ideological fervor, without dissent and without deviance.

This vast chasm of separation has become an increasingly great obstacle to political compromise. Historically, Congressional politicking has been inherently contingent on compromise. A lot like an efficient offense in football, everyone, both Republican and Democratic, would work together to ensure that they would all walk away with something they wanted: a three-yard run one day, a five-yard pass the next, gradual gains on a long drive to a policy goal. Rarely did either party get the touchdown legislation they would have preferred, but they were content to be moving in the right direction. Whether it was the formation of Johnson’s Great Society or the welfare reform passed under Clinton, major policy shifts were almost universally bipartisan events, representing a convergence of diverse interests and viewpoints.

Recently, however, this pragmatic approach has become less tenable. As regular voters, and consequently their representatives, have moved further apart ideologically, the temptation to demand purity has mounted. Neither party’s politicians or constituents are content with simply gaining a few yards anymore — they want a Hail Mary touchdown, and they want it now. Whether it was Obama’s Democratic Congress passing the Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote or the Republican Freedom Caucus shutting down the government in 2013 in an effort to defund the ACA, both parties have exhibited a blatant preference for purity over pragmatism. Both parties cannot achieve every one of their policy goals at the same time — in a system without compromise, one party must always lose, and this sense of increased competition has only intensified the vitriol between them.

THE WORST IS YET TO COME If we fail to repair our fragmented politics, unforeseen but increasingly dangerous consequences will come as a result of the increased partisanship. Congress, for one, will be continuously faced with the impossibility of a win-win situation, i.e., neither party will be able to succeed without the other losing. In recent years, the country has either had a majoritarian system in which both chambers of Congress and the Presidency are all controlled by the same

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party or gridlock due to divided government. With the latter, it’s easy to see how neither party can accomplish many of their respective policy goals because nothing will get done.

Historically, even in the former situation, where there’s united government, parties would still need some sort of bipartisan support to get legislation passed. There used to be conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, and a party could not always expect to receive votes from every one of its members. Instead, leaders would have to appeal to conservative members or liberal members from the other side of the aisle, and thus both interests would have a better chance at being represented in the final bill. But even so, there was no practice of using tools like the filibuster to obstruct majority policies. There was a certain respect the two parties had for each other. However, the increase in both ideological consistency and partisan animosity has led to a situation where either the majority completely steamrolls the minority as the Democrats did with the Affordable Care Act in 2010, or the minority prevents the majority from doing anything with a filibuster.

Unfortunately, everyday Americans are needlessly suffering amidst all this inaction. Two years ago, both parties watched as interest rates on federal student loans doubled, going up from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. This rate hike made it far more difficult for 7.4 million American students at the time to pay off their student loans. Although both parties expressed genuine interest in preventing the rate hike from ever occurring, partisan stubbornness on both sides of the aisle prevented any bill from ever coming close to passing. Similarly, just a couple of months ago when the Zika virus broke out in the state of Florida, Congress was unable to pass a bill to provide funding to the state to help address the health crisis before they went on a month long recess. Consequently, a largely underfunded Florida was left to deal with the breakout by itself. As was the case with the student loans, Republicans and Democrats alike wanted to get the legislation passed but were somehow unable to.

In both these instances, inaction was driven by the fact that each party was willing to test the other’s resolve to the point where nothing got done. With the student loans, Republicans had legislation on the table that would’ve prevented the rate hike; however, it did so in a manner that was unacceptable to Democrats. So, congressional Democrats decided to sit back and do nothing, thinking Republicans would cave and simply pass a bill that would freeze the rates at 3.4 percent. Unfortunately, Republicans had the same strategy in mind. Accordingly, neither party was willing to admit

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defeat, meaning no bill was passed. The same mindsets were employed in the Zika case, this time with respect to an amendment in the funding bill having to do with Planned Parenthood. These sort of strategies make it very easy for each party to blame inaction on the other one, and while they all engage in these finger-pointing games, voters are left helpless.

When both parties consistently fail to produce results for their voters, the voters get upset. Grievances within the party lead to intra party conflicts and rifts, as is currently occurring with both Democrats and Republicans. Such a lack of productivity in Congress also diminishes faith in government and discourages even more people from participating in politics. Again, lack of participation from would-be moderates allows the party extremists to command political discourse across the nation.

Furthermore, Congress’ unproductiveness has detrimental effects on the Supreme Court, the one branch of government that is supposed to remain insulated from the political rancor that can sometimes consume the nation. Plaintiffs have taken more and more issues to the courts in an attempt to resolve them, seeing as how Congress is incapable of doing much of anything. This tendency has forced the Supreme Court to take up politically divisive cases that can expose their partisan divide. Those cases, of course, create their own set of consequences for both the rule of law and the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

Similarly, the Executive branch also suffers at the hands of the inactive Congress. Executive orders and actions, the President’s way of furthering his/her policy goals without going through Congress, have greatly expanded in scope as partisanship has increased. Most recently, Obama’s two largest actions on climate change and immigration have both come under fire in the Supreme Court. In February of this year, SCOTUS temporarily blocked the administration’s plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions of power plants. Then, in June, the Court effectively blocked the implementation of Obama’s executive actions regarding immigration by coming out deadlocked on the case that challenged the immigration plan. Clearly, the executive branch is beginning to step over its legal boundaries in a desperate attempt to enact some sort of policy change, since polarization has made it too difficult to work with Congress on efforts such as these. Continued litigation over executive orders and actions reflects very poorly on the President, further diminishing trust in government.

MOVING FORWARD As one representative once told me, Congress is perhaps the only group that is actually less than the sum of its parts. Our congressmen and women are, for the most part, pragmatic individuals with a fair grip on both the most pressing issues facing the nation and, in some cases, the best policy solutions to those issues. Unfortunately, some of their constituents, particularly those that vote in primaries, are not as pragmatic. Ideologues on both sides of the aisle are hijacking our political process and discourse. The Constitution was not designed to account for such strictly ideologically sorted parties; in fact, it wasn’t really designed to account for political parties at all.

The founders intended the act of creating new laws and amending old ones to be difficult but not impossible. Consequently, such bitter divisions among our politicians cause our system of government to come to a legislative halt. While government’s standstill has led to some calls for an abandonment of our Constitution, there are far less radical measures each and every one of us can take in order to truly bring bipartisanship back to the United States.

It’s easy to blame the current state of disunion on Congress or the Constitution. But what’s necessary but difficult to do is to recognize that everyone is partially at fault. Much like implicit racism or sexism, there exists a certain blind-spot bias with regards to political polarization. Educating voters on the existence of this divide and the detrimental consequences it brings could help remove the blind-spot bias. Refraining ourselves from posting that one inflammatory status on social media or from implicitly judging a stranger because of his/her political partisanship are little things each of us can do to help re-instill some sense of respect and civility into our politics. It’s not necessarily inherently bad to be one of these “ideologues,” but those with strong opinions need to understand the consequences of their unwillingness to compromise. Similarly, moderates need to shed their apathy and vote.

More than anything else, polarization in America is a collective action problem. If we can agree to put aside petty personal differences in order to have substantive and civil policy debates, our representatives will do the same. But until that day, the United States Congress will remain committed to the most vocal and engaged citizens: the stubborn ideologues.

This article was originally published online on Nov. 2, 2016.

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Politicos

THE TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL STUDENTS IN CAMPUS POLITICS At the end of each year, Stanford Politics highlights 10 undergraduates of impact, the Politicos. In the past, these Politicos have hailed from campus media organizations, activist groups, student government and more. This year, we interviewed a shortlist of over 30 students (selected from an even greater number of nominations by the student body) before our editorial board decided on the ones featured below.

As a non-partisan publication, Stanford Politics does not endorse any particular agenda held by any of the Politicos.

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LILY ZHENG SENIOR, PSYCHOLOGY

While selecting this year’s top 10 Politicos was extremely difficult, deciding who would get the top spot was not. Lily Zheng made the listing two years ago when she, as a sophomore, brought attention to issues of social justice and radical activism, queer and trans identity, sex positivity and sexual violence, and other such topics through her provocative-yet-compelling Stanford Daily column, as well as her role leading Kardinal Kink. However, in the past year, Lily describes her activism as having shifted from only making noise to making institutional change. In an interview with Stanford Politics, she laments that much of the work of her fellow activists so often “makes a bang and then fizzles out,” referencing, as an example, the Stanford 68 bridge protest on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2015. She says her own burnout helped her realize that activist efforts on campus can’t be completely student-run and driven.

Whereas previously, Lily seemed to serve as

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a “bridge” between student activists and the greater Stanford community, this year she sought to become a “bridge” between student activists and the university administration, and, in many ways, she succeeded.

The efforts she’s made, which she describes as “translation work,” have mostly involved engaging and communicating with administrators, faculty and staff. After reading a campus climate report Lily wrote in December 2016 for the incoming university provost, Persis Drell reached out to Lily, and they have since developed a working relationship that seemingly culminated in a day-long workshop event that brought together students, alumni, staff and administrators to shed light on university organization and governance, as well as to promote collaboration. Also this year, in keeping with her focus on leaving a mark, as a student staff member for the Weiland Health Initiative, a joint project to support the health of all Stanford students of all

gender and sexual identities, Lily took the initiative to create four informational brochures (“Coming Out,” “Best Practices for Trans-Inclusivity for Staff and Faculty,” “Intimate Partner Violence & Sexual Assault” and “The 2017 Unofficial Guide to Trans Resources at Stanford”) that have become mandatory reading for all 8,000+ staff and faculty members as part of their bi-annual training. In the last month alone, Lily has been recognized as a 2017 Woman of Impact by Stanford Women in Business and has received a Stanford Award of Excellence, an Outstanding Achievement Award and the James W. Lyons Award for Service.

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HOPE G. YI JUNIOR, COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE AND ETHNICITY

Though Hope G. Yi knew their story would be in the inbox of every student at Stanford because the ASSU president and vice president would push it out through a mass email, they also convinced The Stanford Daily to publish it as an op-ed, despite the piece being over three times the word limit for op-eds. Also published in Psychology Today, the Jan. 25 op-ed details Hope’s harrowing personal experience with how Stanford handles student mental health crises. It was that experience that motivated Hope, upon returning to Stanford after a two-year hiatus, to become a tireless advocate for mental health reform. Through formal positions, such as at the Bridge Peer

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Counseling Center, on the ASSU executive cabinet, as a facilitator for the Peer Support Group for Survivors, on the Mental Health and Wellness Coalition, on the Mental Health and Well-Being Advisory Board and on the CAPS Student Advisory Committee, as well as through informal roles such as at Terra, where they are a non-mandated-reporter, Hope has worked with administrators, staff and fellow students to reform the way mental health is perceived and dealt with on campus. Hope has also been a champion, in particular, for queer people of color and other multiply marginalized identities. Some ways through which their imprint will soon be visible include

the launch of a revamped Stanford Wellness website as well as the Bridge’s use of a new curriculum for crisis and sexual assault protocol, which Hope is developing. Their continued efforts have certainly gained the attention of decision-makers, including Provost Persis Drell, who recently met with Hope and other student leaders to discuss the intersections of sexual assault and mental health.

RACHEL SAMUELS SENIOR, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The work those in student government do can often be thankless. If not for this profile, the work Rachel Samuels has done behind-the-scenes in an unelected role would probably go unacknowledged, though certainly not unfelt. Though she was selected for her impact as ASSU executive chief-of-staff this past year, Rachel’s personal influence has built up over the last four years as she accumulated institutional knowledge as an intern for the ASSU Senate Advocacy Committee turned ASSU undergraduate senator turned chief-of-staff turned campaign manager turned chiefof-staff again, working with the last three ASSU executives in various capacities and, in recent weeks, working with the newly-elected ASSU executives, Justice Tention and Vicki Niu, to assist with their transition.

Recent ASSU executives Jackson Beard and Amanda Edelman (who were each also nominated for this year’s top Politicos) describe Rachel to Stanford Politics as the “third exec.” She has had a hand in virtually everything they have worked on this year, using her relationships with student leaders in the ASSU and across campus, as well as with university administrators and staff, to facilitate meetings and ensure that issue advocates have the tools they need to accomplish their goals. While most of her impact is seen in the success of others with whom she works, including several on this list, she has also seen tangible results in personal projects of her own, such as getting an emergency contraception vending machine at Tresidder, something she’s been working on since her sophomore year. Her

approach to working with university officials, which has been described by peers as “aggressive without being confrontational,” has allowed her to effectively advocate for ASSU goals. Rachel tells Stanford Politics that, at Stanford, she’s done her best to learn from those before her, build on the progress that’s been made and leave those who come after something to work with. “If we keep starting over,” she says, “we’ll never get anywhere.”

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04

SYDNEY OSIFESO SENIOR, PSYCHOLOGY

Sydney Osifeso stands out as a clear leader in the First Generation and/or Low Income (FLI) community at Stanford, notably serving as co-president of FLIP. This year, Sydney made food insecurity a key priority of the organization and worked with university administrators and ASSU senators to raise funds for and awareness of this issue many might not think about—what students do over break when they can’t go home, the dining halls are closed and eating out in Palo Alto is simply not affordable. Sydney, who also works in the DGen office, helped establish the “What I Wish

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tems after Stanford’s. With 18 percent of the incoming freshmen identifying as first-generation and an unpublished number from low-income backgrounds, the work Sydney and the about 30 other students (including frosh interns) involved with FLIP undoubtedly impacts the lives of current and future students across campus.

Shanta Katipamula SOPHOMORE, ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

A year ago, Shanta Katipamula, a newly-elected ASSU undergraduate senator, threw her hat in the ring for senate chair, challenging a re-elected member of the previous senate. In what the Stanford Review described as a “coup,” Shanta narrowly defeated her competitor with the vote almost exactly split between her fellow newly-elected freshmen senators and the returning ones. But despite the divisive start, a year later, Shanta’s chairship has been widely lauded by her peers. She’s followed through on promises to increase both student government and university

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My Professor Knew” campaign to educate faculty about the particular challenges— academically, socially or otherwise—FLI students face at Stanford, which has culminated this year in a video that will be used in faculty training about FLI inclusion and awareness. Sydney also is the only undergraduate on the search committee for the next Vice Provost for Student Affairs. Notably, Sydney has taken her advocacy for the FLI community nationwide, speaking at conferences across the country on behalf of Stanford’s FLIP and DGen office to help other institutions model their support sys-

administration transparency and outreach by working with Greg Boardman to implement “open office hours” programs, and she’s worked to develop more cohesiveness between the ASSU undergraduate senate and graduate student council (GSC), such as by standardizing the two groups’ funding practices and by creating a joint committee on sexual violence. Sexual violence has actually been Shanta’s main focus area since even before she was elected to the senate. Probably her biggest achievement is having successfully pushed, in partnership with ASSU executive efforts, Stanford

to undertake a three-year pilot of Callisto, a tool for documenting and reporting sexual violence. Further, besides Callisto, Shanta has also advocated for students to have sexual violence prevention trainings during all four years of the undergraduate experience, instead of just during the first. The goal is that this year’s freshmen will have four years of trainings by the time they graduate.

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CARSON SMITH SOPHOMORE, POLITICAL SCIENCE

Carson Smith is a pillar both in the Native American community at Stanford and in student government. As a co-leader of the Native American Cultural Center (NACC) social justice team, she has aimed to start conversations and advocate for issues that impact Native communities on campus, nationally and internationally.

During the fall, in an effort to give people a productive way to support the NoDAPL campaign, the team worked directly with organizers at Standing Rock to put together a rally here on campus to raise money and awareness. Carson tells Stanford Politics that she didn’t want the rally to be just an expression of frustration, so she made sure it also included an educational panel with Delphine Red Shirt, Buzz Thompson and Tiarra Little. As an ASSU undergraduate

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senator, Carson has focused her attention on mental health and well-being advocacy, working with a coalition of student groups to directly engage the student body and the administration on CAPS reform, counselors in community centers and other mental health initiatives. Even though her senate term is now over, Carson continues to work with the coalition and well-being curriculum for resident assistants next year.

In her capacities as a leader in the campus Native community and as a senator, Carson has been a visible and vocal advocate for renaming buildings named after Junípero Serra, telling Stanford Politics that the reason she actually decided to run for the senate last year was because she knew Leo Bird, who was named a 2015-2016 Politico for his advocacy on the issue of Serra renaming,

was not going to run for re-election, and she didn’t want the efforts he began to be swept away. As a senator this year, Carson requested that she be placed on the university committee (of mostly faculty and staff) that is currently finalizing the principles for renaming a building. Now, she hopes that when those principles are established, they will be quickly applied to Serra. Carson says she wants administrators to understand how this issue of inappropriate memorialization is inherently tied to mental health and wellness.

JOSH LAPPEN & ALEX RAMSEY SENIOR, CLASSICS & SENIOR, AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

When one typically thinks of Stanford Politicos, the Stanford Band might not be the first thing to come to mind. However, this year, in responding to the band’s suspension, seven members really stood out for their influence in channeling public outrage, cooperating with the administration and, eventually, getting the ban overturned.

This past fall, on the Friday night before finals week, members of the band found in their inboxes an email notice of the band’s immediate suspension. It was what appeared to be the culmination of a two-year war between the band and the university administration, and the band seemingly lost. Josh Lappen texted Alex Ramsey right away. Because the band transitions its formal leadership on the calendar year, with just a few weeks left in 2016, it was unclear who was in charge of dealing with this, both tell Stanford Politics. While it was an emo-

tional and chaotic night for many members of the band, Josh and Alex figured that something had to be done, so they took it upon themselves to organize a response.

The very next day, several hundred people showed up to their hastily planned rally.

This outpouring of support that necessarily included so many non-members of the band, Alex tells Stanford Politics, really made clear to him how big of a deal this was to the broad campus community. At this point, Josh and Alex joined forces with their friends and fellow band members Allegra Cohen and Peter Adelson for what Peter describes to Stanford Politics as the point in their response when they decided to shift from being reactive to proactive.

This working group of four, operating as a distinct entity from the formal leadership of the banned band, hatched a plan for a letter-writing campaign and public

relations operation, including an official statement that reached over 100,000 people on Facebook. Over the winter break, they began to tackle the formal appeal process, working with the band’s incoming 2017 management—Cassidy Forler, Anna Whittell and Julia Howell (who were all already supportive of this effort)—and four became seven. Over the first few weeks of January, all seven of the working group (Josh, Alex, Allegra, Peter, Cassidy, Anna and Julia) met three times with outgoing Provost John Etchemendy, not to mention the additional numerous meetings between individuals in the working group and individual university administrators. Though Cassidy was nominally the leader of the band, she tells

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politicos Stanford Politics that, throughout these efforts, all seven in the working group were equals. After several iterations of writing and rewriting their formal appeal and executing an effective PR strategy that included denouncing the FoHo’s calls for people to

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dealing with the administration were replaced with a simple, four-person board that will handle any issues with the band going forward. Just six months after they were totally shut down, the band is back and, arguably, better than ever.

EVA BORGWARDT SOPHOMORE, UNDECLARED

Eva Borgwardt is a champion of open-mindedness, collaboration and communication between different political identities. As a co-chair of Stanford J Street U, she promotes productive discourse on campus about the Israel/Palestine conflict.

At this time last year, Eva (along with other J Street U leaders) was a key figure in unanimously passing the undergraduate senate anti-Semitism bill, which included an original definition of anti-Semitism that met the needs of Jewish students while not silencing the free speech of pro-Palestinian advocates. This past fall, Eva led an action as part of a national campaign against the demolition of Susya, a Palestinian village in the West Bank. Part of that campaign in-

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submit FERPA requests as a form of protest, Etchemendy delivered a verdict even better than the band had expected: All preexisting investigations were ended, the suspension was lifted and the bureaucratic hoops the band used to have to jump through when

cluded the construction in White Plaza of a sukkah, in which J Street held a teach-in and sleep-in to raise awareness of the impending demolition, which has since been put on hold. Further, Eva was influential in changing the dynamic of how Israeli Independence Day was celebrated on campus this year. Last year, seemingly irreconcilable narratives confronted each other when pro-Israel supporters publicly reveled in White Plaza while pro-Palestine activists held a “die-in.” This year, Eva and J Street U helped move the pro-Israel party to Hillel and focused on facilitating public conversations, instead. In addition to her work on campus, Eva spoke at J Street’s national conference in Washington D.C. There,

she advocated that American Jews should stand up for Palestinians the way they stand up for American Muslims, suggesting that the immigrant and refugee narrative with which Jews in America resonate is politically salient not just in Trump’s America, but also across the world. As just a sophomore, Eva has already proven to be a mainstay in both the Jewish and activism communities on campus, and she tells Stanford Politics that she has no plans to stop now.

Di’Vennci “DV” Kerón Lucas SENIOR, AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Di’Vennci “DV” Lucas has been an influential figure at Stanford ever since getting involved with the Black Lives Matter campaign in 2014. While being involved in direct actions both on and off campus, he came face-to-face with police, while also engaging community and family members in conversation surrounding the police brutality, criminality and systemic bias riddled throughout the justice system.

But during his junior year when campus climate seemed to have quieted, DV tells Stanford Politics, he reflected on his activism, the effectiveness of his communication and its complex impact on both himself and his surroundings. Ultimately, he decided that he would depart from thinking of direct action as a primary vehicle towards

social change. Instead, for him, direct action would stand as a tool to be used strategically and pragmatically. “I believe now that while direct action has symbolic and therapeutic significance for its participants, without effective communication of salient messages, it can be detrimental not only to those receiving the message, but also to its participants,” he explains. Nevertheless, while DV may not be readily found on the front lines of protests and marches today, as the outgoing chapter president of the Stanford NAACP, an at-large member of the Black Student Union, an undergraduate fellow for the Program in African & African American Studies, and an ethnic theme associate in Ujamaa, he can be found in almost every other corner of Stanford’s

black community. As a passionate leader and trusted mentor in these spaces, DV aims to make an impact by providing his comrades in civil rights advocacy with the contacts, connections and knowledge he has acquired through his wide network and range of experiences. He pushes those around him to not only think of making an impact, but also to consider how and when they will engage others. A particular challenge he has posed to both self-identifying continued on pg. 52

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A CLASS

DIVIDED ERICA SCOTT

I

n 2016, the American political zodiac fell on the sign of the Rust Belt. Almost overnight, the news cycle filled with stories about laborers left jobless by globalization, opioid addiction ravaging rural communities and a population feeling existentially threatened by immigration and the apathy of the “coastal elite.”

The people typically featured in these stories were angry, and they wanted immediate change. Their moniker became the political buzzword of the year: the “white working class.”

CLASS DIVIDED This segment of the American underclass, hailing from the hamlets of Appalachia to the crumbling factory towns of the Midwest, took the front seat of American politics in 2016 as the bloc that many would say was primarily responsible for the election of Donald Trump. The day after the election, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Why Trump Won: Working-Class Whites,” and the Washington Post ran “How Trump won: The revenge of working-class whites.” Hillary Clinton’s loss was blamed, at least in part, on the Democratic Party’s failure to appeal to this seemingly-decisive demographic group, which turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers. The Democrats’ inability to garner enough support from the white working class is often framed as a “failure” because the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of working people; the party’s official website even declares that Democrats have historically led the fight for “civil rights, health care, Social Security, workers’ rights, and women’s rights.” So if the Democrats truly do fight to help working-class Americans, then why did so many lower-income white voters defect from the party that claims to represent their interests?

Part of the answer to this problem is coded into the very language we use. The Democratic Party can’t be an effective “working-class” party because there is no unified American working class. There never has been. The word “class” implies a kind of collective consciousness, a group identity born out of shared economic interests. No such thing exists among America’s poor. Instead, the most economically disadvantaged Americans are fractured along racial lines, divided so deeply that they cannot form any kind of class consciousness. That’s why we talk about the white working class and the black urban poor as two distinct entities, despite the fact that one might think these people would have similar economic interests by virtue of their shared poverty.

However, while political identification is certainly influenced by one’s concrete economic and social interests, it also rests on a psychological perception of the nature of society and one’s place in it. America looks different to different groups of people, and

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these often mutually incompatible perspectives bear heavily on their political affiliation.

The magnitude of the divide in the American working class is highlighted by the perspectives of two authors who have emerged on opposite sides of the rift: Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.D. Vance. Coates— an African-American author, educator and journalist who currently works as a national correspondent for The Atlantic—published his most recent book, “Between the World and Me,” in 2015. The novel, written as a letter to his son, pays homage to James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” reflecting on Coates’s experiences as a black “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. man in America.

On the other hand, Vance—a self-described “hillbilly” who community.

However, the two books are strikingly grew up in a Rust Belt city in Ohio and an similar in their descriptions of their auAppalachian town in Kentucky, attended Yale Law School and worked as a venture thors’ upbringings. Both Coates and Vance capitalist in San Francisco—published his were raised in neighborhoods plagued by debut novel, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a poverty and addiction. Coates grew up in Family and Culture in Crisis,” in 2016. One urban Baltimore in the 1980s. “To be black reviewer describes Vance’s book as having in the Baltimore of my youth,” he writes, done “for poor white people what Ta-Nehi- “was to be naked before the elements of si Coates’s book did for poor black people: the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, give them voice and presence in the public crack, rape, and disease.” Vance spent part of his youth in Middletown, Ohio, a comsquare.”

When it comes to their central messag- munity that, like many other Rust Belt es, these two memoirs appear unrelated. towns, thrived during the manufacturing Coates’s book is a fiery indictment of rac- era but had begun to fall into physical and ism and an American Dream built upon economic disrepair by the time of Vance’s “the plunder of black bodies.” Vance’s childhood. “From low social mobility to memoir avoids race almost entirely and in- poverty to divorce and drug addiction,” stead focuses on the weaknesses of family Vance writes, “my home is a hub of misand religious institutions in the “hillbilly” ery.” While he grew up in Middletown,

CLASS DIVIDED

“Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance.

Vance notes that he only later realized one neighborhood “was actually two neighborhoods—one inhabited by Middletown’s working-class black population, the other by its poorest white population.”

Both men were forced to learn the law of the streets at an early age. Coates describes the streets of Baltimore as an “array of lethal puzzles and strange perils” in which a single slip-up could result in “a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy.” The message was clear: One had to learn to be tough to survive. Vance writes of similar lessons learned in his experience: “In the southwest Ohio of my youth, we learned to value loyalty, honor, and toughness. I earned my first bloody nose at five and my first black eye at six.”

Moreover, Vance and Coates both describe feeling unfit for the public school

system, and they each struggled with the impact that domestic and neighborhood violence had on their academic lives.

Both men suggest they may not have “made it out” of their communities had an external force not exposed them to the possibility of a different life—in Coates’s case, attending Howard University, and in Vance’s case, joining the Army.

But perhaps most tellingly, even as each writer tells of when he “made it out”—once Ta-Nehisi Coates became an acclaimed journalist and Vance entered Yale Law School— they still portray themselves as vastly unequipped to assimilate into the alien world of the “coastal elite.” Coates recalls moving to New York City and being astounded by the breezy fearlessness of the white urban elite as they strolled along Manhattan streets: “the galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.” Similarly, Vance writes of discovering at Yale Law School that “successful people are playing an entirely different game…there is enormous value in what economists call social capital.”

The parallels between Coates’s and Vance’s experiences illustrate a truth that should need no explanation: poverty is indiscriminate. Violence, addiction, and unemployment are not necessarily race-specific problems; they’re symptoms of the larger evil of poverty. As Monica Potts writes in Democracy Journal:

“There are two economies, and the country’s least educated and poorest are in the worse one. They’re disproportionately African-American and Latino, but in raw numbers they include plenty of whites, too. These people aren’t just missing out because they have less education and training.

They’re also missing out because they live in the wrong places.”

Coates’s and Vance’s narratives demonstrate how poor people in America—black and white—face a similar set of core economic and social problems. Theoretically, an American “working class” should exist, because, theoretically, those belonging to America’s “worse economy” would coalesce politically, at least over the basic issue of improving their own economic situation.

But theory breaks down when race is introduced into the equation.

In this country, race matters. It fundamentally shapes the lens through which each and every one of us views the world, whether we are conscious of it or not. While wealth and poverty belong to the concrete realm of economics, race influences the psychological side of politics; it underlies our variable perceptions of America and our belief in that elusive and vaguely fictitious promise we call the American Dream.

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, the American Dream is a flat-out lie, a dangerous fantasy spun by people who find solace in the false construction of their “whiteness.”

“The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts,” Coates muses. “The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake…I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”

He urges his fellow African-Americans to remain conscious of the false and insidious nature of “the Dream.” In Coates’s eyes and in the eyes of many black people, America is a hostile country. From slavery to Jim Crow to redlining to mass incarceration to police brutality, African-Americans have been actively oppressed by their own country for reasons that have nothing to do with economics. The meritocratic ideal of social mobility inherent in the American Dream

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CLASS DIVIDED does not apply to people of color.

On the other hand, Vance very much believes in the American Dream, even if “his people” do not. To Vance, this Dream is difficult for poor kids to access, but not unattainable. While race features front and center in “Between the World and Me,” it is notably missing from “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Rather, Vance seems only to mention race to justify its absence: “I do hope that readers of this book will be able to take from it an appreciation of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism.” He does not appear to consider the role race plays in the social mobility of the poor. Instead, when describing the plight of his white community, Vance adopts a version of the “pull yourself

on because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was ‘payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!’”

Despite being major beneficiaries of welfare programs, the white working class sees government assistance as a contributor to their own decline. According to Vance, they attempt to “draw bright lines between the working and nonworking poor,” blaming their own lack of motivation on the idea that the government lets undeserving non-workers live just as well as they, poor workers, live. He recalls his Mamaw’s judgement of a woman who moved into the house next door to theirs using government

THE INCLINATION TO TRY TO DRAW CLEAN POLITICAL LINES BETWEEN SINGLE IDENTITY CATEGORIES IGNORES THE WAYS THOSE IDENTITIES CAN BE FURTHER DIVIDED BETWEEN OTHER IDENTITIES. up by your bootstraps” rhetoric so integral to America’s traditional glorification of the Protestant work ethic. He laments the white working class’s tendency to “blame problems on society or the government” instead of being “tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children.” Vance argues that the white working class’s economic woes are due to intra-community failures, such as declining church attendance and a cultural stigma against hard work and academic success. But in doing so, he highlights the fundamental paradox of the racial divide in working class politics: “As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nix-

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vouchers: “She’s a lazy whore, but she wouldn’t be if she was forced to get a job...I hate those fuckers for giving these people the money to move into our neighborhood...I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.”

Vance suggests that poor whites resent government assistance and offers that what is actually needed is less policy change and more mentality change. Coates, on the other hand, offers (at least in his landmark June 2014 cover story for The Atlantic titled “The Case for Reparations”) that the government can play a valuable role in alleviating the plight of poor African Americans.

Unlike Vance, Coates adamantly refuses to blame the problems of the black poor on intra-community failures. “To yell ‘blackon-black crime,’” he writes, “is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.” He instead points to societal failures, describing America as a country in which racism “has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting.” Without active government intervention to prevent America from reverting to this “default” of oppression, the black working class will not be able to access anything close to the social mobility promised by the American Dream.

Any kind of political unity in the working class would require ideological cohesion in regard to the role people envision government playing in their own lives and therefore what they look for in a political party. But as the memoirs of Vance and Coates demonstrate, members of the white working class have a certain faith in the attainability of social mobility that members of the black working class do not.

The former group simply sees government interventions as unjust prohibitors to the American Dream, whereas the latter sees the lack of government interventions to right the wrongs of the past as an unjust prohibitor to that Dream. Perhaps this is why white residents of the Rust Belt saw a promise in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric that rang false for most of black America.

It can be easy to blame the Democratic Party’s electoral losses during the 2016 election on failing to appeal to the white working class. However, when the worldview of the white working class is so often incompatible with that of African Americans and other minority groups that have grown to compose the Democratic base, this task becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible. The inclination to try to draw clean political lines between single identity categories—in this case, class—ignores the ways those identities can be further divided between other identities—in this case, race.

The Democratic Party cannot broadly appeal to America’s working class when that demographic is so deeply factionalized.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Jonathan Faust.

LAW IN A CHANGING SOCIETY A Conversation with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

JONATHAN FAUST

RBG

JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG has served on the Supreme Court since 1993. Before becoming the second female Supreme Court Justice in history, Justice Ginsburg was a law professor, a general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1980 to 1993. She sat down with Stanford Politics to discuss the evolving nature of law and laws that have evolved, the importance of judicial independence and “Scalia/Ginsburg,” her legendary friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia and the opera that it inspired. This transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Special thanks to Professor Pamela Karlan for her input.

What do you feel has been the most consequential decision during your time on the Supreme Court? And beyond your time on the Supreme Court, what opinion, written by someone else during any time in history, do you wish you could have written, and why?

One of the most important decisions, I think as important, if not more important than Brown v. Board of Education, was Loving v. Virginia. I hope you’ve seen the film, because it’s excellent. Loving v. Virginia was decided in 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Board, and it was the decision that held anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Despite Brown, several states still banned interracial marriage. So Loving, which was a unanimous decision of the Warren Court, is the one that, more than anything else, was meant to end apartheid in America. I don’t think I would have done better writing it; it was a very short decision.

And during your time on the Supreme Court?

One decision that would not have been possible without Loving v. Virginia is the Obergefell decision, the same-sex marriage decision. Two things were important precedents for that decision: one, as I mentioned, was Loving v. Virginia; the other was a decision from 1981 or 1982, in a case called Kirchberg v. Feenstra. That was a challenge to Louisiana’s then head and master rule. In both the common law and the civil law, a marriage included a dominant male and a subordinate female. So, in the common law, husband and wife were one, but husband was the one. In the civil law, husband was head and master of the communities. In theory, there was a sharing of assets between husband and wife, but because husband had the sole control, it didn’t mean much to the wife. In 1981 or ’82, the Supreme Court declared the head and master rule unconstitutional. That meant marriage was a union of equals, not a dominant male and a subordinate female. So, I mean, if you had a same-sex union, who would be the dominant partner, who would be the subservient partner? Those two precedents, Loving v. Virginia and Kirchberg v. Feenstra made Obergefell possible.

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RBG Justice Scalia famously gave an interview to the California Lawyer Magazine, in which he stated that the Equal Protection clause does not provide heightened protection against sex discrimination because, in 1868, no one thought it would. You’ve obviously taken a very different approach to the Fourteenth Amendment. How would you respond to an originalist about how to interpret the Constitution?

ident George H.W. Bush announced Justice Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the President privately told him that he would not criticize any decision that Justice Thomas might make on the bench. If we consider that statement today, is it proper for one branch of government to criticize another branch, and how do you think we can ensure judicial independence and the separation of powers in today’s climate?

There was a great constitutional law scholar named Paul Freund who said “[t]he Court should never be influenced by the weather of the day, but inevitably, it will be influenced by the climate of the era.” That is, this is a constitution, not a law meant to last a certain period of time; it was meant to govern through the ages. And of course, to govern through the ages it has to be kept in tune with the people that are governed. It can do that because it has broad themes that were meant to grow with an evolving society. So, if you take the free speech clause, it wasn’t a big thing until the protests [against] World War I. There was no equality provision in the Constitution until 1868, and it certainly wasn’t meant to do anything about the situation of women because, in 1868, when we got the Fourteenth Amendment, in many states, married women were still under certain disabilities. [These] disabilities meant that they could not contract in their own name, they could not sue or be sued in their own name [and] they could not hold property in their own name. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not mean that that was going to change overnight, but I think they wrote these broad principles into the Constitution expecting that it would govern society as it evolved.

I mean who would want to be governed by a dead constitution? The Constitution can’t be dead. If it is dead, it won’t serve the society. If you think of the equality principle, it’s not only women who were left out.

In the beginning, who were “we the people?” White property-owning men. Who are “we the people” today? In the beginning, it did not even include Native Americans, and it left out half the population until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment, at last, gave women the right to vote. So, I celebrate the Constitution as it has evolved over the centuries and not so much with what was written in 1787.

Constructive criticism [is appropriate]. Criticism just for the sake of criticism is of no use. Suppose the Court is trying to interpret a dense statute passed by Congress. By pointing out the obscurities, the ambiguities, the Court is trying to encourage Congress to write clearer laws. The Court is saying “we’re doing our best to interpret this, but it would really help us out, Congress, if you expressed yourself clearly.” So, that kind of criticism is constructive.

Judges’ opinions are not to be taken as the gospel. Judicial opinions are often criticized. If it is constructive, not destructive, it is helpful.

I think that what President Bush told Justice Thomas was just right.

And I think that the President who appointed me, President Bill Clinton, would have said the same thing. Judges are not part of the political branches of government.

One great check on a judge’s authority, at least that of an appellate judge, is that you cannot just vote yes or no, as you can in Congress.

We must always give reasons for what we decide. In the process of writing out the reasons, sometimes you find out that your initial judgment was not correct, and then you start over. I think that the discipline of having to say how you came to a certain judgment is very important for judges. I think that the founding fathers were wise in giving the judges two great supports for their independence. One is that we are the only office holders in the government who hold our offices for life. The Constitution [states that we hold office] during good behavior. So, if the President, Congress, or what I call the home crowd, does not like a decision, they cannot demand that the judge step down. That is one great protection.

The other protection that they wrote into the Constitution was that our pay could not be diminished while we held office. Congress cannot retaliate against a decision that it doesn’t like by passing a law to cut a judge’s salary. Those are two great safeguards of judicial independence, and they are in the Constitution. Now, you probably know that in most states of the United States, the state court judges, at least at some levels, are elected, not appointed. I

In an interview with 60 Minutes a few years ago, Justice Thomas said that before Pres-

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RBG think that a judge who is elected does not have the same security, the same sense of independence. If a judge must stand for election, the judge may worry. Suppose there’s a rival candidate who says that he’s tough on crime, and [that you are] not tough enough. I think that appointment is a much better way to select judges than elections are.

I understand that you were close friends with the late Justice Scalia, and that’s despite your dramatically different worldviews. So, I’m wondering, in this time of incredible political polarization, do you have any recommendations for how we can attempt to bridge the divisions that exist in the United States today?

We have differences yes. There’s an opera called “Scalia/Ginsburg.”

If you come to Cooperstown, New York this summer, you will see it performed on Aug 13. Near the end of the opera, there’s a duet that we sing, “We Are Different, We Are One.” We are different in the way that we interpret legal texts, but one in our collegiality, our genuine fondness for each other; one in our reverence for the Constitution; one in our reverence for the Court we serve and our strong desire to leave it in at least as good shape as we found it.

Another thing we have in common is that we both care about good writing and try to write opinions that even non-lawyers can understand. We spend a lot of time trying to write an opinion that not only gets the judgment right, but that tells it in a way that people of ordinary intelligence can grasp. We shared a great love of music. We were [supernumeraries] together at the Washington National Opera a few times. We traveled together on judicial exchanges, most notably to India, where there was a picture of the two of us on the back of an elegant elephant. We understand (although we disagree with) each other’s approach, but we understand it. I suppose more than anything else, Justice Scalia had an infectious sense of humor. He could make even the most sober judge laugh.

So I loved him for that.

This interview was originally published online on Feb. 8, 2016.

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Ren hang’s political aesthetics Truman Chen

REN HANG

On Feb. 24, the Chinese photographer and poet Ren Hang (任航) tragically committed suicide at the age of 29. In his brief, six-year career, which began in an attempt to overcome his collegiate Beijing ennui, Ren had already exhibited in over 20 solo and 70 group art shows in cities ranging from Tokyo and Beijing to New York and Vienna. His photography primarily displayed his close friends in the nude, often enframed within scenes of smoggy urban desolation or embedded and entangled within natural flora. His creative disregard for normative constraints on imagistic representations of gender and sexuality, especially in the context of Chinese social conservatism, earned him praise from the LGBT community both at home and abroad. Chinese queer activist and filmmaker Fan Popo paid tribute to Ren: “You probably never know [sic] how many people you saved with your photos…Our golden era in Beijing had gone.” And before his sudden exit from the stage, Ren had only just begun to emerge in the American mainstream consciousness with a feature in Frank Ocean’s Boys Don’t Cry magazine.

But in our grief over the loss of Ren and his visionary aesthetic, we have failed to fully register his art’s deeper political significance.

Aside from a couple of brief notifications of his passing from the likes of TIME and BBC and a flurry of short remembrances from sympathetic friends and communities, there has been an uncomfortable silence — and a notable absence of reflective retrospectives and studies of the implications of Ren’s work. This leaves the broader public dangling in a confusing limbo: Ren’s work is posed as self-evidently important, but it’s not immediately clear why.

This silence, in a sense, feels like it’s resulted from a collective wondering: What is there to really say? Wasn’t Ren simply just another controversial artist who had been unjustly censored? The difficulty of understanding Ren’s art as something more meaningful is, in part, due to the restrictive ways in which Chinese art is received and interpreted in America.

On the one hand, we have high-profile artists like Ai Weiwei — who himself championed

Ren and co-curated an exhibit with him in 2013 — who has regrettably been reduced to little more than an affirmation of American liberal values and a testament to the strength of American soft power subverting a totalitarian Chinese regime. We also have filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who, though not directly related to American projections of liberalism in China, has abandoned the radicalism of his early films in favor of depoliticized directions of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics and blockbuster blunders like “The Great Wall,” thereby feeding into and confirming American orientalist images of what “China” is. And, on the other hand, we have critically acclaimed artists like the filmmaker Jia Zhangke, who has found little audience beyond art house circles in spite of the nearly unmatched historical power of his cinema in registering the marginalized experiences of post-socialist China.

Ren fell somewhere in between these two American paradigms of Chinese art, as either confirmations of American political machinations or largely neglected altogether. This straddling of Ren’s work might explain the confusion over how to think through its meaning — not to mention the matter of fact that the sexual taboos against which Ren rebelled firmly remain taboos in the American mind, as well. That is to say, the difficulty of speaking on Ren’s work comes as a result of the American habit of only recognizing a single mode of Chinese politics: that which can be appropriated into the language of rights, the rule of law and multi-party democratic governance, or essentially nothing at all. Ren’s work holds a certain allure for Western audiences, in part because of how it has been censored, but Ren escapes liberal frameworks by never speaking of his art’s suppression in the language of rights or democracy. As a result, there has been little serious consideration of the political significance in how his works open up an experiential, affective world of gender fluidity and open sexuality that deconstructs typical characterizations of Chinese cultural politics.

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REN HANG

“My pictures’ politics have nothing to do with China. It’s Chinese politics that wants to interfere with my art.”

- Ren Hang

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That Ren’s radicalism has been passed over with little more than a concerned whisper is, at least in part, due to a fatal misreading of Ren’s own elusive remarks on his work. When asked how his work should be interpreted politically, Ren cleverly responded: “My pictures’ politics have nothing to do with China. It’s Chinese politics that wants to interfere with my art.”

But it would be absurd to take this as a cue to abstract Ren from his immediate context, for Ren’s photography carves a space for the erotic out from a larger world beyond the frames.

Though his remark on the surface might appear to be a dismissal of politics, it is instead a configuration of his art’s politics as one that reveals and captures an active suppression that is otherwise concealed. He reveals that there is an interference in the first place, as opposed to a simple absence of Chinese sexuality.

Though this suppression is by no means limited to the censorship by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — social conservatism in China propagates a slew of phobias that suppress with their own force — the Chinese government’s policy toward the LGBT community is perhaps the most telling. The CCP is concerned as much with concealment as it is with containment. According to Stijn Deklerck, a Belgian grassroots LGBT activist in Beijing, the official policy is known as “san bu zhengce (‘three no’s’ policy): bu zhichi, bu fandui, bu tichang (no approval, no disapproval, no promotion). The idiom gives a fairly accurate picture of the current situation: It stresses the fact that the official position toward LGBT people in China is a “nonposition.”

For Ren to have put forth his photographic disclosure of a concealed eroticism is therefore radically political in problematizing the duplicitous nature of the CCP’s tactic of rendering invisible the very existence of entire subsets of its population. In Ren’s own words, “Sex is a taboo in China. It’s not something that’s openly talked about. Why can’t we talk about sex in public? Are nude bodies shameful? We ought to be proud of our own bodies. Or at least cherish them. Our existence is worth valuing.”

To bring out the significance of Ren’s politics of rendering visible a suppression in Chinese society, one would do well to refer to the political aesthetics of the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Consistent

REN HANG throughout Rancière’s writings is an impulse to denaturalize falsely naturalized hierarchies in an aesthetic structuring of the world. He has called this structuring a “partition of the sensible,” in which the sensible encompasses the totality of one’s experiential world. This approach therefore makes our ways of sensing the world, through images, categories and essentialized positions in society, intrinsically political. These hierarchical orderings, and the principles, norms and values that reinforce and naturalize them, structure how we perceive ourselves, one another and our world, thereby altering and shaping our perception of things in order to reinforce social hierarchies. As has been the case historically, the partition of the sensible determines what is and is not perceived or considered, or what is considered rational speech and what is disregarded as irrational noise. In these terms, both historical and ongoing struggles toward social justice in our world by slaves, workers, women, LGBT people, etc., have been struggles to attain public recognition of equality — to be counted just like everyone else.

True politics, according to Rancière, is therefore a disruption of a normalized partition of the sensible, and a matter of creating new subjects to be seen in a new way “through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, [but] whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience.” Ren’s photography is, in this sense, fundamentally political through its enunciation of the existence of Chinese sexuality and queerness, thereby disclosing a society “in its difference to itself ” by falsifying what Deklerck aptly termed nonpositions; Ren pointed out that there is “a part that has no part,” an “excluded remainder” suspiciously hidden away, and declared its equal right to be seen.

In Ren’s own crude formulation, with his playful boyish personality, “I don’t want others having the impression that Chinese people are robots with no cocks or pussies.

Or they do have sexual genitals but always keep them as some secret treasures. I want to say that our cocks and pussies are not embarrassing at all.” Ren’s art is therefore as simple as it is subversive: It beckons you

to not forget Chinese sexuality behind all those ideological renderings of reality that would indeed rather have you forget it entirely. As one of Ren’s models, who goes by the name Lemon, phrased it, “[Ren’s] works expose phenomena and images that aren’t visible in daily life. They feel like they’re from a different world.”

But Ren’s world was not a different world. It’s our world, and Ren’s art made clear that it only feels so estranged because these private existences have had to be so firmly tucked away out of sight. The naked truth of these naked bodies, entangled with a nature as natural as their own skins and desires, was the unadulterated subject of Ren’s photography. When asked why he remained in China, Ren answered, “I shoot here because I love China. It’s my country.

I was born here. The censorship makes me want to stay even more. Not being able to do what you want in your own country is such a tragic way to live. I just want to lead a quiet life.” Ren Hang didn’t fully live out this quiet life he hoped for, but in the process, he revealed just how political this hope can be.

This article was originally published online on Mar. 2, 2017.

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continued from pg. 38

and non-identifying activists on campus is to think about the ways they can ensure that every demonstration has a purpose—a tangible goal beyond visibility—while also understanding the real psychological impact demonstrations inevitably have. In the wake of Trump’s election, for example, DV sent an email to the Diaspora email list (the self-described “virtual soul of the Black

10

Community at Stanford”) asking that people focus their reaction on sending emails and making phone calls to elected officials not in opposition to protest, but to enhance the message and purpose of protest. In addition to his political, behind-the-scenes activism, DV has emphasized community service both in his own life and in the efforts of the broader activist community at

Stanford. He has pushed the NAACP to center more programming on service in the coming year and, personally, has worked and succeeded in bringing CEO of My Life, an Atlanta-based organization that empowers future entrepreneurs, to Stanford’s campus for a summer pilot in partnership with the d.school.

Matthew Cohen & Gabe Rosen JUNIOR, POLITICAL SCIENCE & EARTH SYSTEMS & SOPHOMORE, PUBLIC POLICY

Matthew Cohen has run for and been elected to the ASSU undergraduate senate three years in a row, the last two years running with coalitions of candidates that both included Gabe Rosen. Matthew recently resigned his seat for the current senate term (which began a few weeks ago and runs through next April), making Gabe the only returning senator. Both Matthew and Gabe have established reputations among their student government colleagues as dedicated public servants with a knack for efficiency and efficacy. Matthew tells Stanford Politics that he feels the senate is a body that too often gets caught up trying to tackle really big issues. He says he prefers to focus his attention on the actionable areas that af-

Skye Lovett

fect students, even if those might not be as sexy. One area in which Matthew has been particularly influential upon returning to campus after spending the fall at Stanford in Washington and interning at the White House is the management of Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE), the business and financial branch of the ASSU. As a member of SSE’s board of directors, Matthew pushed for a resolution to the legal discrepancies over fiduciary responsibility in SSE’s and the ASSU’s governing documents. As a candidate for chair of SSE’s board, Matthew hopes to keep the board apolitical, especially on issues of divestment. Also with keen financial savvy, Gabe worked on the senate appropriations committee this past

year and was elected to serve as the chair of that important committee for this new session. Gabe’s personal achievements in the senate this past year include authoring, passing and implementing the “Full House” bill, which provides need-based financial assistance for student group membership, as well as writing and passing several bylaw amendments relevant to senate appropriations rules.

★ ★ ★ HONORABLE MENTIONS ★ ★ ★

JUNIOR, COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE AND ETHNICITY It may come as a surprise to many that Terra is only the de facto LGBTQ+ house on campus and is not officially considered a theme house. Skye Lovett, a prominent activist for an array of issues, has been working, along with many others, to change that. This year, Skye—hosting programming on topics ranging from asexuality to family—has nominally served as the residence’s RCC, but effectively as the Queer Theme Associate, a position that will only be formally recognized next year (as the Weiland Health Associate) thanks to partnership with the Weiland Health Initiative.

Elizabeth Davis

SENIOR, COMPUTER SCIENCE Elizabeth Davis has served as both a role model and mentor to black entrepreneurs at Stanford. Elizabeth co-founded Greo, a video-based social media app being used at Stanford in its beta phase, with the intent of providing a platform for people of color to engage with each other on topics of social justice and politics. Also a resident assistant at Ujamaa and a founding member of Black in CS, Elizabeth encourages and advises her freshmen and others at Stanford to think about how they can use technology to make social impact.

Emma Hartung & Solveij Praxis

SENIOR, AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES & SENIOR, ANTHROPOLOGY Despite respectively asking not to be considered for the top-10 ranking and declining to be interviewed, Emma Hartung and Solveij Praxis merit recognition for their influential roles in campus activism, particularly with SALA (Student and Labor Alliance) and SSN (Stanford Sanctuary Now).

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Image credits: Flickr: 13- Camilo Rueda López; 15- 0Four; 23- BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN; 48, 49, 50, 51- Ren Hang. Noun Project: 10- parkjsun; 17, 18- Simon Mettler; 22- Numero Uno. Twitter: 8- @realDonaldTrump. Wikimedia Commons: 1- King of Hearts; 23- Rene Riisalu; 26, 27- The White House; 39- Gage Skidmore. Other: 4- Harry Cole; 20- Matthew Desmond; 31, 32- ObsidianDawn; 34-38, 52- Photos courtesy of subjects; 40- Spiegel & Grau; 41-Harper Press; 44- Chris Delgado/The Stanford Daily.

All in-text references are cited online at stanfordpolitics.com Stanford Politics is a student publication at Stanford University. All views expressed in the magazine are those of the authors and interviewees only and do not represent the views of Stanford University. Copyright © 2017 by Stanford Political Journal. All rights reserved. No original article or portion herein is to be reproduced or adapted to other works without the expressed written consent of the editor of Stanford Politics.

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