Duke Political Review Vol.1 Issue1 Spring 2014

Spring 2014 | Volume 1 | iSSue 1

Terry Sanford and the Origins of the War on Poverty

How Mexico Overcame a Gridlocked Congress

Obamacare: Contraception,

Corporations, and Religion

DukePoliticalReview

By Mousa Alshanteer

By Connor Phillips

By Shobana Subramanian

By Will Giles

End of the Road for Campaign Buttons?

2 DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW SPRING 2014

from the editors’ desk

Dear Reader,

It all started as a party conversation between friends. We couldn’t help but notice that, although Duke students had no shortage of interest in politics, our campus had a distinct lack of political publications. We wanted to create not only an outlet for students to display their writing and opinions, but also a means for students to become more interested in politics. So, while this publi-cation had its start at a social event, its true origins are rooted far deeper – in a hope to foster meaningful political dialogue on campus, and in a desire to encourage students to read and write about issues that matter to them.

The Duke Political Review is an entirely student-run publication, present-

ing the work of undergraduates both in print and online. Our print magazine features longer, more in-depth pieces on contemporary issues. Meanwhile, our website, dukepoliticalreview.org, brings you a constant stream of politi-cal commentary and current events analysis in four key areas – United States politics, foreign affairs, North Carolina politics, and political philosophy. All of this is made possible by an incredible staff of the most talented and passionate writers and thinkers at Duke.

We would like to thank everyone who has helped us in creating the Duke

Political Review. Without your dedicated and insightful contributions, none of this would be possible. First and foremost, thanks go to our founding staff – Online Managing Editor Ryan Gaylord, Web Director Rajan Patel, and Art and Layout Director Natasia Leung. They have put in a great deal of hard work over the year to help make this idea a reality. Additionally, we would like to thank our faculty sponsor Professor Gunther Peck for his guidance and support, and Professor Daniel Magleby for his equally helpful advice. Thanks are also owed to Ben Wofford and the staff at Brown Political Review for their invaluable assistance in walking us through the process of founding a brand-new publication. We could not have found a better role model than your publi-cation, and we look forward to working with you in the future.

And, most importantly, thank you for reading DPR and being a part of

Duke’s newest undergraduate publication. Let the debates begin.

Best,

Editors-in-ChiEfJacob Zionce and Ray Li

onlinE Managing EditorRyan Gaylord

ChiEf-of-staffAbhi Sanka

WEb dirECtorRajan Patel

art dirECtorNatasia Leung

businEss dirECtorRussell Crock

assoCiatE businEss dirECtorsBrigitte Alanis, Momin Ghaffar, Katherine King, Megan Steinkirchner

unitEd statEs EditorTaylor Imperiale

World EditorOlivia Wasteneys

north Carolina EditorMousa Alshanteer

PolitiCal PhilosoPhy EditorLeke Badivuku

dEPuty unitEd statEs EditorEllie Schaack

dEPuty World EditorAnand Raghuraman

dEPuty PolitiCal PhilosoPhy EditorMousa Alshanteer

ChiEf layout EditorNatasia Leung

ChiEf CoPy EditorLia Cromwell

Editors-at-largELia Cromwell, Jeff Daye, Kimberly Farmer, James Ferencsik, Maxime Fischer-Zernin, Matt Pun, Jay Ruckelshaus, Lauren Silk, Chandni Sinha Das

staff WritErsTara Bansal, MC Bousquette, Steven Brenner, Amani Carson-Rose, Emily Feng, James Ferencsik, Jack Fines, Will Giles, Zach Gorwitz, Matt Hamilton, Gautam Hathi, Ryan Hoerger, Stefani Jones, Courtney Murray, Michael Pelle, Connor Phillips, Natalie Ritchie, David Robertson, Jay Ruckelshaus, Jay Sullivan, Shobana Subramanian, Jessica Sun

Front cover photo from the Duke University Archives.

Duke Political Review

Ray LiEditor-in-Chief

Jacob ZionceEditor-in-Chief

SPRING 2014 DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW 3

Contents

DiSpATCHeS

4 the danger of Political labelsBy Jay Ruckelshaus

5 Pick your Poison: a Preview of india’s ElectionBy Gautam Hathi

7 Ex-felon disen-franchisement: a Vestige of Jim CrowBy Michael Pelle

norTH CArolinA uniTeD STATeS WorlD

8 abandoning the battlefield: the north Carolina fund and the Enduring War on PovertyBy Mousa Alshanteer

36 beyond the gothic Wonderland: duke, durham and inequality in americaBy Matt Hamilton

14 hobby lobby and Corporate religion: the Constitutional Cost of obamacareBy Shobana Subramanian

24 ‘Canvas’-ing for the Vote: the lost art of Political buttonsBy Will Giles

29 the necessity of a resurgent democratic Party in the american southBy James Ferencsik

37 the Modern libertarian: is government the dark Knight?By Pi Praveen

40 Why the government owns your genesBy Tara Bansal

19 Mexico’s banner yearBy Connor Phillips

33 a territory in limboBy Ishan Thakore

8

UN Photo by Martine Perret.Photo from the Duke University Archives. 33

1924

Spring 2014 | Volume 1 | iSSue 1

disPAtChes


I recently had a conversation with an Australian student in which neither of us knew what the other was saying. We were

both speaking English, but it was prob-ably the most unproductive conversa-tion you can imagine.

We were ostensibly discussing the merits of the liberal commitment to supporting the welfare state. It was one of those moments I was looking forward to while signing up for the Duke in Oxford program; here was my chance, I thought, to attain enlighten-ment in an oak paneled room while discussing a subject whose pretension matched that of my environment. And with a foreigner!

But it was not to be. I became in-creasingly confused because he said there was no commitment at all – liber-als are only concerned with supporting the free market. I tried explaining that liberals generally favor expanding the welfare state and otherwise checking the unregulated market. After several minutes of fruitless efforts we decided to change the subject.

When I returned to my dorm that evening I was still puzzled. I did a bit of research and discovered that, in fact, we were both correct. It turns out that the Liberal party in Australia leans to the right and favors laissez-faire eco-nomics. This certainly differs from the American conception of what it means

to be liberal – that is, to generally en-dorse market regulation. It is no won-der we were confused; in our conversa-tion the term ”liberal” conferred two essentially opposite meanings.

This is problematic. Politics is a com-plicated enough show as it is. It’s hard to stage debates about substantive is-sues when we can’t even agree on how to classify them. Political labels, in trying to collect and unify the various components of a single political ideol-ogy, very often confuse them.

“Liberal” is an excellent example. The modern political label of liberal-ism (or is it Liberalism…) is a messy amalgam of countless distinct strains of political thought. The classical lib-eral movement, defined by its respect for individual liberty and equality, took root during the age of Enlightenment. Great thinkers of the liberal tradition like Locke, Mill, and Rawls have each interpreted the demands of liberty and equality differently, and so have each provided slightly different accounts of liberalism. Over time these accounts diverged so extensively that the con-temporary threads of “liberal” thought bear little resemblance to each other. Many might be surprised to learn, for example, that American libertarianism and American liberalism share a com-mon philosophical heritage. Given this astounding conceptual diversity – and the spatial and temporal inconsisten-

cies – the appropriate reaction when someone claims to be a liberal may be one of bewilderment rather than com-prehension.

Politicians, of course, get a lot of mile-age from this conceptual confusion. It’s easy to adopt a label when it’s conve-nient and quickly abandon it when it’s not. And the vast majority of us don’t even know when it happens.

One of the central projects of politi-cal philosophy is to cut through rhet-oric and expose the true meaning of political concepts and terms. Precise language and deliberate thinking are the tools of the trade. One way political theorists help is by drawing crucial dis-tinctions to prevent labels from claim-ing conflicting ideas. For example, we can distinguish between classical economic liberalism (free market and private property) and social liberalism (friendly to the welfare state).

There is another, more serious dan-ger inherent in the use of political la-bels – apart from the potential for ambiguity. It relates more to adopting the label of a specific party rather than a philosophy. When citizens adopt a party label – inevitably, in this country, Republican or Democrat – they often commit to following all of the party’s positions. In fact, many people do not consciously adopt a party label at all; the single greatest predictor of party af-filiation remains the party affiliation of

The Danger of Political LabelsBy Jay Ruckelshaus

DispatchesHighlights from dukepoliticalreview.org

disPAtChes


one’s parents. The problem is that the party label can become proactive and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The culture of political labeling thus encourages quick and mindless deci-sion-making. It attempts to substitute for critical thinking by giving people a slate of opinions they can dutifully adopt. But there is no substitute for critical thinking. Instead of forming our opinions around the agenda of our party label, it is crucial that we come to independent conclusions. This is clear-ly the less convenient way to conduct one’s public life, but given the burden that democracy places on every citizen – to gather evidence in order to ratio-nally frame and revise an opinion on public issues – it is necessary.

In some cases this may be an overre-action. It’s entirely possible that a voter does in fact subscribe to all of the opin-ions that a particular party endorses, in which case I see nothing wrong with adopting a label and wearing it proudly. But I’m willing to bet that the majority of citizens believe in a political canon whose shape does not always fit into a party’s outline.

When used properly, labels are mar-velous things – probably even essential. Labels help us to organize the infinite amount of collectible data about the world around us into neat stacks, giv-ing us a conceptual framework that we can use to think more efficiently – what psychologists refer to as schemas. The problem does not lie with labels them-

selves, just our imperfect applications of them. I realize it would be silly to disregard labels altogether; I’m cer-tainly not proposing people begin call-ing themselves Republicrats or some other unsavory concoction.

But still, the essential truth is this: Our political beliefs come in shades of such astounding subtlety that any de-finitive labeling system is destined to obscure meaning, at best, and prescribe opinions, at worst. We must be careful. The only label we may adopt without worry is that of a Skeptic.

Jay Ruckelshaus is a Trinity sopho-more. He is a staff writer and editor at large for DPR.

Pick Your Poison: A Preview of India’s ElectionBy Gautam Hathi

I ndia often likes to call itself the world’s largest democracy, and next year the country will once again hold a general elec-

tion, an event that is truly unparalleled in scope or scale across the world. For some context, The Election Commis-sion of India estimates that over 400 million people voted in the last Indian national election. That’s about three times the number of citizens who voted in the 2012 US Presidential Election. However, as new political players enter the area, this election is shaping up to be a massive source of controversy.

On September 13, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which currently controls the second largest block in parliament, put its pieces on the board: It announced Narendra Modi as its candidate for Prime Minister of India. Mr. Modi, the 63-year-old, unmarried, and crisply bearded chief minister from the state of Gujarat, is widely regarded as a powerfully charismatic orator. He

has ruled Gujarat, India’s 10th most populous state, with an iron fist for well over a decade, during which he presided over rapid economic growth. Gujarat’s GDP growth rate from 2010 to 2011 was more than 1.5 times the overall rate for India. Perhaps even more importantly, Modi has developed a reputation for absolute incorruptibil-ity in a country plagued by corruption. He is held up by his supporters as a shining example of what India’s slow-ing economy and horribly inefficient government desperately needs. After more than a decade of doing little more than causing trouble for the incumbent Congress Party, the BJP hopes that a campaign centered around one person will help them to regain control of the nation.

However, Modi has a distinct dark side. He is an avowed Hindu nationalist in a country that has been consistently haunted by deep sectarian divisions between Hindus and Muslims from

its very inception up until the pres-ent day. From a young age, Modi has been a member of the RSS, a militant Hindu nationalist organization with a violent past. During his tenure as Gu-jarat’s chief minister, he presided over some of the worst sectarian clashes in India’s recent history. In 2002, over 1000 people, a large majority of whom were Muslims, were killed in Gujarat during days of communal violence and large scale rioting. Modi was accused of doing little to quell the unrest. In fact, not-so-quiet whispers keep circulat-ing that Modi played an active part in whipping up communal hatred against Muslims, although he vigorously de-nies anything along those lines. Modi’s reputation has suffered so much that he was denied an entry visa to the United States in 2005 on the grounds that he had supported human rights violations during the 2002 riots.

Indeed, even though Modi has been engaged in a years-long effort to trans-

disPAtChes


form himself from religious partisan to practical job creator, many feel that he still does all he can to favor Hindus over Muslims. Development projects in Gujarat find themselves neatly situ-ated in Hindu areas. The dividing lines between clean and well-kept areas with proper infrastructure and dirt-poor slums in Gujarati cities often fall con-spicuously along religious boundaries. And some have pointed out that several Indian states have economic growth rates similar to or even higher than Gujarat’s, suggesting that Gujarat’s economic reputation is more a result of a few high profile industrial commit-ments to the state from companies such as Tata than real standout growth. As a result, Modi remains one of the most deeply divisive and polarizing politi-cians in India today; loved by Hindu supporters, distrusted by moderates, and loathed by Muslims. In a country where tensions between Hindus and Muslims are always on a hair trigger, such a record is not only troubling, but also extremely dangerous.

The BJP’s strategy of running a campaign centered on Modi would be extremely risky under normal cir-cumstances. But things are different in today’s India. The ruling Indian National Congress party, which traces its roots through the Gandhi-Nehru family back to India’s colonial era, has found itself in a deep rut as of late. After winning a second five year par-liamentary term in 2009 on promises of economic reforms and growth, the party has found its agenda stymied by stubborn coalition partners, ineffective administration, and a punishing eco-nomic slowdown that has robbed India of the growth upon which it depends.

Manmohan Singh, the aged, soft-spoken Sikh economist and current Prime Minister has developed a reputa-tion for meek ineffectiveness. Although widely believed to have no personal involvement with corrupt practices, he has seen a number of major corrup-tion scandals precipitate around him during his time in office. He was also forced to back down from several ef-forts to reform the retail sector before finally passing watered-down reforms, losing large amounts of political capital

and popular support in the process. To cap it all off, the rupee is just leveling out after a major dive. Despite Man-mohan Singh’s reputation as a brilliant economist, he hasn’t been able to stop this currency crisis, which has caused prices to soar. Currently, Mr. Singh’s government operates on razor thin parliamentary majorities with shift-ing coalitions that prevent almost any real governing. Such paralysis does not make for a particularly compelling re-election platform.

Then there is the Congress Party’s elephant in the room. As everyone in India knows, Manmohan Singh isn’t really the man who runs his party or his government. The real power lies with Congress’ old aristocracy, the Ne-hru-Gandhi family. Sonia Gandhi, the matriarch of the family, is the one who

gives all the orders within the ruling coalition. Mr. Singh may run the gov-ernment on a day-to-day basis, but all major decisions go through Ms. Gan-dhi. Furthermore, it is widely believed she is prepping her son Rahul Gandhi as both the new party leader and Prime Ministerial candidate. The problem is that Rahul hasn’t quite been fitting the “leader” mold. He has vacillated on ma-jor issues, refused to deal with specu-lation of his future political role, and failed to gain the type of popular re-spect enjoyed by other members of his family. The fact that everyone believes he will soon be taking over doesn’t ex-actly bolster the current government’s legitimacy either.

However, with Modi’s ascendancy and the increasingly gloomy prospects for Congress next year, Rahul may be forced to step up to the plate and do what’s required of him. In mid-Septem-ber he picked a fight with Manmohan Singh, publicly calling his cabinet’s de-cision to let convicted criminals remain MPs “complete nonsense.” Many see this move as a way for Rahul to distance himself from the deeply unpopular cur-

rent government and position himself as a leader. But it will take more than a passing swipe at current leadership for Rahul Gandhi to lead his party to vic-tory and cure it of its current ills.

So where does that leave India, the world’s largest democracy? In short, the country must choose between two seemingly bad options. On the one hand, there is the current government: corrupt, incompetent, leaderless, and overdue for a change after a decade in power. Rahul Gandhi is not in a posi-tion to take over at this point, and it is quite unclear whether he really wants to or whether he’s being pushed into the limelight by his overbearing moth-er. On the other hand, there is the Hin-du nationalism of the BJP and Naren-dra Modi. While Modi appears to have a better record than the incumbent government in a strictly administrative and economic sense, putting lighting rods in charge of countries is rarely a good idea. It is considered a virtual cer-tainty that Modi’s candidacy for India’s highest office will provoke riots at some point over the next few months. He is also unlikely to ever have the support or trust of India’s 176 million Muslims. And what sort of awkward conversa-tions are going to happen when Prime Minister Modi visits the United States, which has labeled him a violator of hu-man rights?

Either way, India has a difficult choice to make, and there’s certainly no guarantee that things will hold to-gether in either case. Right now, the country is just starting to come off the growth high that has sustained the complacency of its voting based for the past couple of decades. India needs its next government to do well, but at the moment there are very good reasons to be deeply skeptical of all the options on the table.

Gautam Hathi is a Trinity freshman. He is a staff writer for DPR.

“things are different in

today’s india”

disPAtChes


L ast November, over two million people voted in Vir-ginia’s gubernatorial elec-tion. No ballots, however,

were cast by the state’s 350,000 ex-felons.

Virginia, Florida, Iowa, and Kentucky permanently disenfranchise those with felony convictions, regardless of the crime’s nature. Ex-offenders can only restore their voting rights by directly applying to the governor’s office, a process that takes months or years de-pending on the state.

Fortunately, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell vowed in 2010 to limit the waiting period to sixty days, and newly elected Governor Terry McAu-liffe promised to implement automatic rights restoration following release for nonviolent offenders.

The situation in Florida is far bleaker. Nonviolent felons must wait five years after the end of their sentences to even apply for rights restoration, and violent offenders must wait seven years.

And like many unjust voter suppres-sion laws, ex-felon disenfranchisement disparately affects the black communi-ty. According to the Sentencing Project, 7.3% of the voting-age population is disenfranchised in Virginia, but 20.4% of all voting-age blacks are unable to cast ballots. In Florida and Kentucky, over 22% of blacks are barred from the polls due to felony conviction.

Similar to the literacy tests of the early and mid-1900s that relied upon a racially biased public school system, ex-felon disenfranchisement derives its impact from racial disparities in crimi-nal justice. During the 1990s, for exam-ple, black men were disenfranchised at a rate seven times the national average.

Not only do ex-felon disenfranchise-

ment laws disproportionally impact blacks today, but they also have a his-tory steeped in racial discrimination.

The laws first became prevalent in the Northeast during the early and mid 1800s. Universal white male suffrage laws swept the region, and ex-felon dis-enfranchisement quickly followed as a means of curbing the new expansion. The first American laws of the kind were not expressly connected to race, but their use as a tool for disenfranchis-ing social underclasses had been real-ized.

Following the Civil War, nine of elev-en Confederate states passed their first ex-felon disenfranchisement law. Many of these early laws specified crimes that lawmakers believed were more often committed by blacks. ‘Black crimes,’ such as larceny, resulted in perma-nent disenfranchisement, while ‘white crimes’ allowed offenders to automati-cally regain voting rights.

During Virginia’s 1901-1902 Consti-tutional Convention, Senator Carter Glass promoted new Jim Crow laws, which included ex-felon disenfran-chisement provisions: “This plan…will eliminate the darkey as a political fac-tor in this state in less than five years, so that in no single county…will there be the least concern felt for the su-premacy of the white race in the affairs of government.”

Modern defenders of these laws fail to take their racial impact and history into account, proposing rationales that are at best ignorant and at worst inten-tionally deceitful. Some assert ex-felon disenfranchisement statutes prevent crime, but the laws do little to deter mis-conduct in comparison to the threats of prison and fines. Others argue that we cannot trust ex-felons’ judgment. Such

opposition, however, constitutes a form of viewpoint discrimination previously deemed unconstitutional by the Su-preme Court.

Ex-felon disenfranchisement’s great-est constitutional defense ironically comes from the Fourteenth Amend-ment. Section Two, which immediately follows the famed Equal Protection Clause, prohibits the disenfranchise-ment of any male constituent except on the basis of “participation in rebellion, or other crime.”

But the framers of the Reconstruc-tion Amendments sought to impose greater racial equality upon the de-feated Confederate States. They could not have foreseen the use of Section Two’s language to subvert the equality that the Fourteenth Amendment guar-anteed. Upheld by the Supreme Court through Section Two, ex-felon disen-franchisement policies must now be nullified through policy changes rather than legal challenges.

The laws currently in place in Vir-ginia, Florida, Kentucky, and Iowa dis-enfranchise over 1.5 million individuals who have already paid their debts to society. Constituents in all four of these states must demand automatic rights restoration for felons upon completion of their sentences. Condoning this an-tiquated practice only perpetuates the racial logic of the Jim Crow Era.

Michael Pelle is a Trinity sophomore. He is a staff writer for DPR.

Ex-felon Disenfranchisement: A Vestige of Jim CrowBy Michael Pelle

North CAroLiNA


President Johnson and Governor Sanford visit the Marlow family in Rocky Mount, N.C. Photo by Billy E. Barnes.

North CAroLiNA


abanDoning the battlefielD:

By Mousa Alshanteer

the north carolina fund and the enduring War on poverty

North CAroLiNA


O n January 14, 1963, Ala-bama’s newly-inaugurated governor, George Wallace, declared before an impas-

sioned audience his rallying cry for those opposed to integration.

“I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny,” he began, “and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow [and] segrega-tion forever.”

Four days later, nearly 550 miles away, North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford made an entirely different promise—“to provide leadership for the kind of understanding America needs today,” “to quit unfair discrimination” and “to give all men and women their best chance in life.”

Sanford’s heeding the command of Isaiah—“to undo the heavy burdens” of what one contemporary referred to as the poverty-segregation complex “and to let the oppressed go free”—gave rise to a monumental initiative which would inspire Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

It was called the North Carolina Fund, and, unfortunately, its legacy and the lessons it inspired have been forgotten in the contemporary effort to rid the state of its poverty predicament.

“A Condition of deprivAtion”

T he rise of poverty in North Carolina differed from that of its neighboring states.

Since the plantation econ-omy characteristic of the pre-Recon-struction-era South was not rooted in North Carolina, the Civil War did not impact the state’s economy to the ex-tent it impacted those of its neighbors.

Accordingly, North Carolina, unlike the rest of the South, had the financial and natural resources necessary to ven-ture into new industries, particularly those of textiles, tobacco, and furniture.

Within these industries, the Univer-sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s James Leloudis argues that “public policies such as segregation, disfran-chisement, antiunionism, and miserly expenditures on public education ef-fectively maintained a racially divided and low-wage work force,” which, in

turn, manufactured inexpensive prod-ucts that were significantly marketable to the state’s neighbors.

“From 1900 to 1939, the state in-creased its value of manufactured products 1,397 percent,” writes former N.C. Insight editor Bill Finger, “far more than any other Southern state ex-cept Texas, a close second.”

Over time, the state’s manufacturers, such as American Tobacco Company and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, became leading employers in North Carolina.

It is no wonder, then, that the mecha-nization of the state’s key industries—largely a prolonged result of the Sec-

ond Industrial Revolution—resulted in significant unemployment and out-migration.

Industries no longer needed to hire low-wage workers when new machin-eries were able to assume their respon-sibilities.

As a result, the percentage of the state’s total workforce in the textile industry, for example, decreased from 19.1 percent in 1960 to 10.3 percent twenty years later.

The automation of the state’s in-dustries also led to the emigration of over 250,000 highly skilled, affluent citizens between 1940 and 1950—an event which left behind a population of unskilled workers who were unable to attain gainful employment and eventu-ally succumbed to living in poverty.

In “To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to

End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America,” Robert Korstad and James Leloudis write that, at the time, “37 percent of all North Carolinians lived on less than $3,000 per year in family income, a full $1,000 below the nation-al poverty threshold defined by multi-ple studies between 1959 and 1963 and later adapted by President Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisors.”

“An astonishing 73 percent of North Carolina families lived on $6,000 or less a year,” they continued—“a figure that, by national standards, defined a condition of deprivation.”

These circumstances influenced San-ford to establish the North Carolina Fund, a nongovernmental organiza-tion tasked with ridding the state of the poverty-segregation complex.

“In North Carolina, there remain tens of thousands whose family income is so low that daily subsistence is always in doubt”—“tens of thousands who go to bed hungry…whose dreams will die,” he acknowledged.

“These are the children of poverty who tomorrow will become the parents of poverty. We hope to break this cycle,” he continued.

“That is what the North Carolina Fund is all about.”

“UniqUe to eACh CommUnity’s needs”When Sanford first conceived of the Fund, he did so, as Leloudis notes, “from a position of relative weakness,” as those who objected to his fiscal pol-icy and moderate stance on civil rights had cornered him with their resound-ing popularity among North Carolin-ians.

It is for this reason that John Ehle, Sanford’s special assistant, advised the governor that any effective anti-poverty program would have to be funded pri-vately, independent from the bureau-cracy of state government, where his opponents carried more leverage.

Ehle’s advice appealed to Sanford, as one of his predecessors, Governor Charles Aycock, had in mind the same idea when he approached John Rock-efeller and Frederick Gates’ General and Southern Education Boards to fi-nance his celebrated school construc-

“these are the chilDren of poverty Who tomorroW Will become the parents of poverty. We hope to break this cycle”

North CAroLiNA


tion campaign. Accordingly, Sanford chartered the

North Carolina Fund as a temporary, private, nonprofit corporation that would draw the bulk of its support from philanthropies, such as the Ford Foun-dation, the Z. Smith Reynolds Founda-tion, and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation.

Federal agencies, such as the Office of Economic Opportunity and the De-partments of Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare and Housing and Urban Development, also became conduits of funding after the passage of Lyndon Johnson’s Economic Opportunity Act in 1964.

After having secured funding and organizing an interracial Board of Di-rectors and Executive Committee com-prised of the state’s foremost citizens, Sanford—and his executive director, George Esser—opened offices in urban and rural counties across the state.

“This decentralized structure,” ac-cording to the University of North Car-olina at Chapel Hill’s Aidan Smith, “was designed to permit each office to coor-dinate locally administered public and

social services and to assist the poor by developing an approach unique to each community’s needs.”

In November 1963, the Fund distrib-uted a pamphlet across the state which invited concerned citizens to propose community action programs to address local instances of poverty.

By February, the Fund had received 51 proposals from committees includ-ing directors of social welfare agencies, educators, government officials and of-ficers of various civic clubs and chari-ties.

Of those proposed, the Fund selected eleven projects spread amongst the western mountains—a region where over 50 percent of residents were im-poverished, the eastern counties— in which no fewer than 40 percent of residents were impoverished, and the Piedmont.

The first statewide antipoverty agen-cy of its kind, the Fund was tasked not only with demonstrating its effective-ness, but with inspiring the next gen-eration’s leaders to continue fighting the war Sanford started.

“Citizen soldiers”To assist the communities in carrying out their projects, the Fund quickly or-ganized the North Carolina Volunteers program, which, during the summers of 1964 and 1965, assigned students from every college and university in the state to racially integrated teams tasked with confronting the realities of the poverty-segregation complex.

The volunteers began their summers of service in early June, when they gathered for a brief orientation at Duke University, and were divided into teams and assigned to each of the Fund’s com-munity action programs.

As the volunteers settled into their respective communities, they engaged in a variety of tasks, including, but not limited to, conducting dietary surveys with local health clinics, renovating homes, installing sanitary pipelines, tu-toring children, counseling high school dropouts and serving as advocates for access to healthcare.

Unfortunately, the success of the vol-unteers was often modulated by the ra-cial tensions of the time.

In Harnett County, volunteers reno-vated a library that had been closed for years and, in the process, allowed for the intermixing of white and black children.

In the week after the library’s reopen-ing, influential members of the local committee that had invited the volun-teers hastily convened a public meeting and voted twenty to ten to discontinue the volunteers’ work.

The volunteers had no other choice but to leave.

After witnessing such happenings, the Fund’s Board of Directors became increasingly concerned about the vol-unteers’ safety and decided to disband the volunteer program.

It was time, they believed, to shift course.

“Blessed Are the poor”

S hortly after President John-son declared a War on Pov-erty, Sanford told a congres-sional committee that he had

come to believe that charity and relief [were] not the best answers to human suffering.”

Photo by Billy E. Barnes.

North CAroLiNA


Rather, he continued, “we ought to attempt to find ways to help them work out of their situations of poverty and become self-respecting and self-sup-porting.”

In order to help the impoverished be-come “self-respecting and self-support-ing,” the Fund began, in late 1965, to focus on how best to stimulate effective community organizing.

Community organization efforts led by the impoverished, they supposed, would lead to the reformation of the es-tablished leadership which propagated the poverty-segregation complex.

In Durham, for example, the Fund financed the United Organizations for Community Involvement, an as-sociation which organized civil rights marches and strikes, and in eastern North Carolina it financed the People’s Program on Poverty, an association of impoverished sharecroppers, domestic workers and farmers.

One of the United Organizations for Community Involvement’s first initia-tives was a protest of a decision by Dur-ham school officials to reject federal assistance for public education due to nondiscrimination requirements.

The Durham school board eventually gave in and reversed its vote on wheth-er to accept federal funding.

The People’s Program on Poverty found success in different ways.

At the dawn of the Vietnam War, its founders incorporated a company, Ber-tie Industries, which secured contracts to manufacture uniforms for the mili-tary.

The company’s workforce eventually increased to the extent that Bertie In-dustries became the sixth largest em-ployer in the county and, by the mid-1970s, began reporting annual profits over $100,000.

“From those exchanges and their own firsthand observations,” Korstad and Leloudis explain, “Fund staff drew one critically important lesson: winning the War on Poverty required that the poor be fully outfitted for battle.”

“Above all else, that meant providing the poor with the resources to support their own independent institutions, within which they would develop lead-ership skills, merge experiential knowl-

edge with broader understandings of policy, politics, and economics, and build their capacity to engage public life as citizens and constituents rather than as clients.”

“to sACrifiCe innovAtion”When the Fund had nearly spent all of its budget, the Ford Foundation com-mended it for all that it had done: helping “initiate and finance innova-tive, experimental projects…to better educate the young and give job skills to unemployed adults, to improve health and sanitation in backward commu-nities…to initiate farm coops, and to begin imaginative projects organizing domestic workers, establishing day care centers…training and developing indigenous leaders, and a host of other activities, indispensable to ending pov-erty.”

Though the Ford Foundation offered

to prolong its financing of the Fund, its leaders refused, for they had conceived the initiative as a temporary and exper-imental solution.

With no intent to allow for the bu-reaucratization of their experiment, the Fund’s founders allowed their finances to run dry.

They refused, as Leloudis explained, “to sacrifice innovation to the very forms of inertia that had for so long crippled the nation’s response to its most needy citizens.”

At the end of 1968 the Fund officially concluded its operations, triggering the emergence of independent nonprofit organizations modeled after its com-munity action programs—among them the Foundation for Community Devel-opment, which continued the Fund’s legacy of grassroots organizing among the impoverished, the Manpower De-velopment Corporation, which provid-ed resources for employment, and the

Photo by Billy E. Barnes.

North CAroLiNA


Low-Income Housing Development Corporation, which advocated for the expansion of inexpensive housing.

The Fund had clearly succeeded in its objectives.

“speeding pAst the Competition”

M ost economists, says the Raleigh News and Observer’s Rob Chris-tensen, contend that

the various social programs inspired by the North Carolina Fund—many a part of Johnson’s War on Poverty—effective-ly reversed poverty in North Carolina.

The state’s poverty rate decreased to 20.3 percent by 1969, 14.8 percent by 1979, 13 percent by 1989 and 12.3 per-cent by 1999, after which it returned to earlier levels, partly due to the same reasons that caused Sanford to put forth his initiative decades ago.

At one point in time, North Carolina

ranked first in the country in manufac-turing as a share of its employment.

A transition in the state’s economy from a primary focus on traditional manufacturing to a newborn focus on services, however, has caused the state to become among the leaders in the amount of manufacturing jobs lost.

The state’s poverty rate increased to 15.1 percent by 2005, 16.3 percent by 2009 and 17.9 percent by 2011.

While “the most recent recession…added about 1.8 percentage points to the poverty rate,” writes the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Pat-rick Conway, “over 2 percentage points of the increase in the poverty rate oc-curred [even though] the unemploy-ment rate was not rising.

“While poverty rates have risen throughout the U.S. in recent years,” he continues, “North Carolina’s rise is larger than that of all but four states,” likely due to the state’s transition to a service-based economy.

“A decade ago, we were 26th [high-est in the nation with respect to pov-erty rate]—a little better than average,” writes Gene Nichol, the Director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportu-nity.

“Now we’re 11th, speeding past the competition.”

“ABAndoning the BAttlefield”In their article, “Citizen Soldiers: The North Carolina Volunteers and the War on Poverty,” Korstad and Leloudis explain that, today, North Carolina “faces problems similar to those con-fronted by Governor Terry Sanford and his colleagues forty years ago: rapid technological change, growing income inequality, smoldering racial hostilities, and a workforce that is increasingly ill-equipped to meet the challenges of a global economy.”

Fannie Flono, a columnist for the Charlotte Observer, explains that a fo-cus similar to that of the North Caro-lina Fund is necessary to tackle the is-sues of today.

She describes the efforts of Mac Legerton, the co-founder and execu-tive director of the Center for Com-munity Action—a private, nonprofit,

community-based organization which advocates for sustainable development, poverty reduction, and social justice.

Legerton’s nonprofit, like the North Carolina Fund, connects public and private organizations in an effort to stimulate grassroots community orga-nization and, unsurprisingly, has lifted many North Carolinians out of poverty.

“Solving poverty is not as complex as some make it out to be,” he says.

“Most communities just don’t provide all the solutions needed to have a ma-jor impact on poverty. The community might have one or two successful model programs,” he continues, “but you need 15 to 20” programs which adequately address issues such as employment, education, health care, housing, and social equity through community orga-nization.

After all, that was what the North Carolina Fund was all about.

Either unaware or unappreciative of the importance of community orga-nizing, the leaders of this generation wrongly believe that there are merely two possible ways to effect change, writes Korstad: “as the providers of direct service to poor communities or as power brokers in the public policy arena.”

Rarely are there initiatives, such as the North Carolina Fund and today’s Center for Community Action, in which the providers of service and the power brokers work together with the impov-erished in efforts to address poverty.

There is a certain arrogance to it all, an unfortunate belief that the impov-erished have nothing to offer in this effort—that those who know nothing about poverty simultaneously know ev-erything about it.

That is the reason why we have yet to win the War—not because our infantry is weak, but rather because we have, in the words of Sanford, “abandoned the battlefield.”

Mousa Alshanteer is a Trinity sopho-more. He is the North Carolina Section Editor and the Deputy Political Philos-ophy Section Editor for DPR.

UNited stAtes


Hobby Lobby and Corporate

reLigion:

By Shobana Subramanian

The Constitutional Cost of Obamacare

UNited stAtes


President Obama greets Speaker John Boehner at his 2011 State of the Union Address, almost a year after the passage of the heavily contested Affordable Care Act. Photo by Pete Souza.

UNited stAtes


ployer-provided health insurance. This section allowed the Health and Human Services Department to issue the HHS Mandate, which requires employers to provide their employees with contra-ception and abortion services as part of their health insurance. Churches and religious organizations are ex-empt, but almost all for-profit corpora-tions employing more than fifty people must comply, regardless of religious affiliation. Business owners whose re-ligion is against certain methods of contraception must choose to pay the devastating fines imposed by the ACA to uphold their religious beliefs, or go against those beliefs to preserve their livelihood. The legal issue in question is whether the limits placed on Hobby Lobby by the government violate the company’s free exercise of religion, as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

To address this issue, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case Sebel-ius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc, in which Kathleen Sebelius, now the former

head of the Health and Human Services Department, challenges the injunction granted to Hobby Lobby by the Tenth Circuit Court. Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft stores, is the perfect example of a religious corporation. The private corporation is owned entirely by the Green family, which has demonstrated its commitment to aligning its business practices with its Christian principles. For example, all Hobby Lobby stores are closed on Sunday in observance of the Sabbath. Christian music is played in the stores, and all employees are of-fered free religious counseling and ac-cess to a chaplain. Company profit is used to purchase full-page evangelical ads in various newspapers, and mil-lions of dollars are given each year to Christian ministries. The family also owns Mardel, Inc., a chain of Christian bookstores.

The respondents wish to be exempted from four of the twenty contraceptives listed in the HHS Mandate, as they be-lieve that drugs preventing embryo im-

Kathleen Sebelius, formerly the Democratic Governor of Kansas, was appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services by President Obama. Photo by Pete Souza.

I t is hard to imagine a time when all religious conserva-tives had to fear was free will. Fighting their way out of the

nineteenth century’s state-enforced emphasis on social purity, twentieth century women demanded the right to decide when and if they would have children. The birth control campaign came to fruition in 1972, when Eisen-stadt v. Baird made contraception le-gal everywhere in the United States. A year later, Roe v. Wade did the same for abortion. Religious groups regretted the loss of power, but in the end, all was fair—after all, no one had usurped their right to make their own lifestyle choices but had merely granted the same right to others.

Now, half a century later, that is no longer true. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), more commonly known as “Obamacare,” has triggered a major backlash from religious conservatives over its section guaranteeing employ-ees “preventive services” under em-

UNited stAtes


plantation, such as Plan B, are equiv-alent to abortion. The respondents believe that providing their employees with any of the these four contracep-tives will make them participants in a practice that directly conflicts with their religious beliefs. They have filed suit under the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA), a law passed by Congress in 1993 that requires any government suppression of a person’s religious freedom to pass strict scru-tiny. Before the Court considers its case under the RFRA, Hobby Lobby must meet two conditions: First, it must qualify as a “person” in terms of the law; second, the Court must find that the HHS Mandate poses a significant burden on Hobby Lobby’s free exercise of religion. If these two conditions are met, then the government will have to show that the mandate meets the re-quirements of strict scrutiny—that is, that the law is narrowly tailored, serves a compelling state interest, and is the least restrictive means of furthering that interest. The respondents argue that the mandate fails to meet these standards.

Jurisprudence dictates that corpora-tions qualify as legal persons capable of exercising First Amendment rights. The Dictionary Act, Congress’s guide-book of definitions for commonly used legal terms, defines a “person” as in-cluding corporations. It is true that cor-porate personhood does not guarantee a corporation the same rights as a living person—for example, in United States v. Kordel (1970), the Court ruled that corporations do not have Fifth Amend-ment rights, such as the right against self-incrimination. First Amendment rights, however, have consistently been applied to corporations. In cases such as First National Bank of Boston v. Bellot-ti (1978) and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court ruled that corporations have the same freedom of speech rights as natural persons. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law … prohib-iting the free exercise [of religion]; or abridging the freedom of speech. …” Nothing in the amendment’s structure or language suggests that one right has a broader scope than the other, with

one limited to non-profit organizations while the other is open to all corpora-tions. Citizens United will make it diffi-cult for the Court to deny Hobby Lobby standing under the RFRA.

The RFRA’s second requirement for standing is that the mandate must pose a “significant burden” on Hobby Lobby’s free exercise of religion. The government has never questioned the sincerity of Hobby Lobby’s religious beliefs, and therefore the Court cannot either. Ultimately, any law that forces an individual to perform an action that

violates his religious beliefs poses a sig-nificant burden on that individual. The courts have never been in the business of determining whether a practice truly violates a religious belief; that is a job for theologians, not judges. If Hobby Lobby believes that offering those four contraceptive medications violates its religion, then the Court will take its word for it and assess the merits of its case under the RFRA.

The RFRA has had a significant im-pact on how the Free Exercise Clause is interpreted by the courts. Prior to the RFRA, Free Exercise Clause cases tended to follow a pattern: Laws ban-ning specific religious practices were often decided using the rational basis test, while laws forcing individuals to take part in practices that violated their beliefs fell under strict scrutiny. The ra-tional basis test, which places the bur-den of proof on the individual to show that the government has no relevant interest in the law in question, made it acceptable in most cases for the gov-ernment to ban various religious prac-tices. For example, in Davis v. Beason

(1890), the Court ruled that banning polygamy was an acceptable invasion of Mormons’ religious rights. Almost a century later, the government was granted permission in Lyng v. North-west Indian Cemetery Protective As-sociation (1987) to build a road across lands sacred to Native American tribes because, wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, doing so would not force the tribes to engage in any practices “con-trary to their belief.” In short, the Court believed that outlawing religious prac-tices did not burden individuals to the same degree as compelling them to act a certain way.

In 1993, however, the RFRA rejected that notion by requiring that any regu-lation of religion meet the standards of strict scrutiny. Three years earlier, the Court had ruled in Employment Divi-sion v. Smith that the state of Oregon could ban the use of peyote, a halluci-nogen commonly used in Native Amer-ican rituals. The case sparked public outrage, to which the Democratic ma-jorities of President Clinton’s new Con-gress quickly reacted by passing the RFRA. The RFRA had precisely the in-tended effect—as if in reaction to Smith itself, the Court ruled in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal (2006) that the federal gov-ernment could not ban hallucinogenic substances used in religious rituals. Under strict scrutiny, the government was unable to provide a compelling in-terest for not granting an exemption for religious purposes.

The RFRA has only strengthened the Court’s tendency to favor the individual in cases where the government requires them to perform actions that conflict with their beliefs. In Sherbert v. Verner (1963), Adell Sherbert, a member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, was fired when she refused to work on Sat-urdays, and was denied unemployment benefits. The Court ruled that Sherbert must be granted unemployment ben-efits because she had been placed in a position of choosing between her faith and her job. Hobby Lobby has been placed in a similar predicament. Un-der the HHS Mandate, the company must either forsake its religious beliefs or suffer paying $475 million more in

“Citizens United will make it

diffiCUlt for the CoUrt to deny

hobby lobby standing Under the

rfra”

UNited stAtes


annual taxes. Their only other op-tion is to pay $26 million more in annual taxes and eliminate their insurance plan altogether. The government cannot justify not granting an exemption to religious for-profit corporations, especially when they ask only to be excused from providing a fraction of the required contraceptives.

In order to meet the first two standards of strict scrutiny, the government must not only have a compelling interest in enacting the HHS Mandate, but it must also demonstrate that the law is narrowly tailored. However, the government’s interest in the “promotion of public health” and “[women’s] equal access to health-care services” is too broad, with no indication of why an exemption to Hobby Lobby and similar corpo-rations would significantly deter it. Under its current structure, the mandate does not even apply to a vast percentage of the workforce. Religious employers such as churches are exempt, as are non-profit religious organizations. In addition, the man-date does not apply to “grandfathered” plans—insurance plans that have not changed since the adoption of the ACA. Small businesses, defined as corpora-tions with fewer than fifty employees, are also exempt. As a result, it is esti-mated that the mandate only covers one half to two thirds of all Americans. Offering so many exemptions goes against the compelling state interest of all employees having access to contra-ception, and the mandate is therefore not narrowly tailored.

Strict scrutiny’s third prong requires the law to be the least restrictive means of furthering the state interest. The respondents in Hobby Lobby correct-ly point out that there are other ap-proaches the federal government could have taken to address public health and women’s reproductive rights. For ex-ample, the Health and Human Services Department oversees family planning efforts through Title X of the Public Health Service Act. Title X funds are appropriated to cover services such as Planned Parenthood, which have ex-

isted long before the ACA. Congress could have appropriated greater funds to Title X, rather than campaigning for a contraception mandate. The law does not accept political or financial dif-ficulty as excuses for sidestepping the Constitution. The difficulty in having a state interest as ambitious and unde-fined as universal access to contracep-tion is that even if it is possible, there

are many ways of achieving it, some of which strictly adhere to the Constitu-tion and some of which do not. Since there are ways of furthering the state interest that do not affect Hobby Lob-by, the HHS Mandate fails yet another requirement of the RFRA.

If the Supreme Court rules in fa-vor of Hobby Lobby, the case will join

the ranks of Citizens United as an infamous extension of corpo-rate rights. Corporate religion, like corporate speech before it, has become a divisive issue in the world of political commentary. At a time when corporate power has become a symbol of America’s economic troubles, it is too easy to see corporate religion as yet an-other legal loophole exploited by business owners to avoid provid-ing employees with the services to which they are entitled.

But that is an illusion. Anyone who cares about rights, whether he is an employer or an employee, should have an interest in Hobby Lobby’s Free Exercise rights. The real fight is not between corpora-tions and employees but between government and rights—in partic-ular, the right to religion. There is no Establishment Clause for busi-nesses; secularism as a policy can-not be imposed on private corpo-rations, no matter how desirable

it may be in government. Advocates for putting religion aside in the new era of government-sponsored healthcare should remember: eparation of church and state goes both ways.

Shobana Subramanian is a Trinity freshman. She is a staff writer for DPR.

“the law does not aCCept politiCal or finanCial diffiCUlty

as exCUses for sidestepping the

ConstitUtion”

A poll conducted by the Washington Post reveals just how unpopular Citizens United was.

WorLd


Banner YearDespite its transition to a free-market democracy in the 1990s,

Mexico has remained economically stagnant and politically gridlocked for years, the promise of its reforms unrealized. Last year, all that began to change, thanks to an agreement struck

by the most unlikely of allies.

By Connor Phillips

MEXICO’S

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has made reform his mission. Photograph from the Presidencia de México.

WorLd


B y any account, 2013 was not a good year for the United States government, with ideological polar-ization and tactical obstructionism combining to make the first session of the 113th Congress among

the least productive in US history. And with midterm elections looming, it seems likely that gridlock will only worsen over the next year.

South of the border, it’s a different story.Mexico—a country known to many US citizens only as home

to drug cartels and spring breakers—has spent the past year enacting monumental reforms to its economy and political system. And yet Mexico’s government, on the face of it, is even more divided than the US’s, with the legislature split among three major parties, none of which holds a majority in either chamber. How could three ideologically antagonistic parties unite at just the right time to pass a substantial program of legislation? And could the United States benefit from borrow-ing part of its political model?

A grAdUAl proCessAlthough today a democracy, Mexico spent much of the

twentieth century under the rule of the Institutional Revolu-tionary Party (PRI), which emerged out of the 1910 revolution that overthrew then-dictator Porfirio Diaz. The party fulfilled a pressing need: Mexico’s 1917 constitution forbade re-election of government officials (the means by which Diaz had main-tained power), so with considerable political turnover some entity was needed to impose order on the process by selecting candidates and aiding their election. The PRI supplied this organization, and its priorities accordingly determined gov-ernmental decision-making. Thus, the constitutional provi-sions designed to avoid a personal dictatorship brought about a corporate one.

Although the PRI built a broad political base consisting of interest groups from across Mexican society, divisions eventu-ally emerged. The first, in 1939, resulted in the formation of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), opposed to ex-cessive state involvement in education and the economy. The PAN struggled for its first several decades, as the semi-author-itarian PRI largely refused to relinquish power. By the 1980s, however, Mexico’s socialistic economic model had run into trouble, and the PRI leadership decided to pursue free-mar-ket reforms. This initiative had two consequences: first, the PRI’s discontented left wing split off to form the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and second, negotiations over a free-trade zone with the United States and Canada (which eventually became NAFTA) gave the US leverage to push for democratic reforms in Mexico. Although the PRI retained a primary role in Mexican politics, the other two parties began to make gains, until the PRI finally lost to the PAN in the 2000 presidential election.

While the gradual evolution of a democratic system was a major accomplishment, Mexico’s history of authoritarian rule had left it with a highly centralized government and economy. This engendered several problems. First, the PRI’s privatiza-tion program left many sectors of Mexico’s economy monop-olized and uncompetitive, controlled by personal or family

Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico al-most continuously from 1876 to 1911. Photo by Aurelio Escobar Castellanos.

Billionaire Carlos Slim controls much of Mexico’s telecommunications industry. Photo by José Cruz.

WorLd


syndicates such as America Movil, the telecoms company owned by billionaire Carlos Slim. Partly as a consequence, the distribution of wealth and power in Mexico is highly unequal, and it is estimated that just under half of the population (especially the indigenous population) is living in poverty. In part, the high poverty rate stems from a lack of educational attainment: only 36% of Mexican adults have a second-ary education, according to the Organi-zation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the powerful teach-ers’ unions have blocked reform of the corrupt education system.

The Mexican state itself is hampered by a variety of issues, from corrup-tion to inefficient tax collection. The state oil monopoly, Pemex, is notori-ously outmoded and inefficient, and if the state took less of its revenues, they could be re-invested in developing more of Mexico’s oil reserves, providing another source of economic growth. In addition, drug cartels, while not as pervasive a force as portrayed in the American media, have weakened and corrupted local law enforcement. Pres-ident Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) chose to rely on the military to battle the cartels, which hindered efforts to create functional civil institutions and created an explosion of violence. Clear-ly, Mexico’s efforts to establish a clean, effective state have not yet come to full fruition.

Finally, Mexico’s political model is proving unsuited for the demands of democracy. With all members of the legislature limited to one term, the body as a whole has very little legisla-tive experience or ability. A lack of re-election also meant a lack of account-ability for elected officials, and party interests rather than constituency in-terests predominate. Thus, after the last PRI president, Ernesto Zedillo, departed office in 2000, the legisla-ture essentially gridlocked, unable to address Mexico’s problems. Moreover, even after its largely voluntary depar-ture from power, the PRI still remains the dominant political actor in Mexico thanks to its organizational structure and support from many of the monop-olies it helped create. After two succes-

sive PAN presidents (Vincente Fox and Felipe Calderon) were frustrated by PRI obstructionism during their time in office, the PRI returned to power in the 2012 presidential election in the form of the young former governor of Mexico state, Enrique Pena Nieto.

An impACtfUl eleCtionPena Nieto entered office promising

to bring about a new era of change, pledging that the PRI had reformed itself, and both other parties proved re-ceptive to his overtures. First, the PRD split with its presidential candidate, the fiery populist Andres Manuel Lo-pez Obrador, shortly after the election, seeking to rebrand itself as a moderate, pragmatic party. Because Pena Nieto’s campaign rhetoric was closer to that of the PAN than that of the PRD, the PRD

leadership was fearful that an alliance between the two parties would mar-ginalize them, and reached out to Pena Nieto in the hopes of striking some sort of deal. The PRD leadership thus met with Pena Nieto’s transition team and suggested a sweeping pact of common legislative goals. Meanwhile, the PAN had finished a disappointing third. If it wanted to accomplish anything, it needed to align with one of the two oth-er parties. Encouraged by Pena Nieto’s campaign promises and his record of cooperation with PAN initiatives while governor, it too began meeting with the transition team.

Pena Nieto, who had only received 38% of the vote (Mexico’s election law decrees that whoever gains the most votes in the presidential election wins, whether or not those votes constitute a majority), was eager to follow through on his promise of effectiveness and re-alized that support from the other two parties could help pass his agenda, es-pecially because it would give him the

two-thirds majority necessary for con-stitutional change. He thus approved the meetings with the PRD and PAN.

After several months, leaders from all three parties began meeting to hammer out a common legislative program. After fifteen years of stasis, a broad consensus had developed on the types of reforms that needed to be passed. In addition, the small number of negotiators enabled personal rap-port to develop among them. By the night of Pena Nieto’s inauguration on December 1, 2012, the final piece of the program (energy reform) was ready to go, and the Pacto por Mexico (Pact for Mexico) had emerged: 95 goals for the government to accomplish before 2015 midterm elections. The most drastic reforms would require Congress and a majority of state governments to ap-

prove constitutional changes, to be fol-lowed by secondary implementation legislation.

Pena Nieto first moved to address Mexico’s education system. His aim was to take on the powerful teachers’ unions, which had developed con-siderable autonomy and clout during their days as a key PRI constituency. Seeking to end abuses like the selling and inheritance of teaching positions, Pena Nieto proposed an independent government body to evaluate teacher performance. Under the law, teach-ers would be hired based on merit testing and those who fail evaluations three times would be fired or assigned an administrative position. Although teachers’ unions staged staged a strike against the reforms, they went ahead, albeit with concessions designed to protect teachers’ privacy and enable them to challenge individual evalua-tion results.

Next up was a telecommunications reform aimed at ending monopoly

“Mexico’s history of authoritarian rule had left it with a highly centralized government and economy.”

WorLd


power in that sector, passed on June 11. The package of changes made access to telecommunication and information technology a constitutional right (ac-cording to the Wall Street Journal, only 32% of Mexican homes currently have computers, and only 26% have internet access). To expand the availability of these technologies, the reform aimed to increase competition by imposing “asymmetric regulation,” or expanded restrictions on the largest telecoms companies, and ending the cozy rela-tionship that hitherto existed among telecoms companies, regulators, and the courts.

the CrACks Begin to show

With these early successes, Pena Ni-eto was determined to implement the centerpiece of his agenda—fiscal and energy reform—by the end of Decem-ber. Different parties, however, had different ideas as to how these inter-connected reforms should be imple-

mented, and translating the optimistic generalities of the Pact into legislative language proved problematic.

The PRD focused more on taxes, as-serting that raising more revenue di-rectly would help fund social programs and give Pemex greater autonomy, al-lowing it to invest more in developing Mexico’s oil reserves and thus boost-ing economic growth. In opposition to this plan, the PAN argued that it was necessary to open up Pemex to foreign investment. Even today, the 1939 na-tionalization of Mexico’s oil is viewed as a fulfillment of the earlier Revolution’s promise to rid Mexico of foreign influ-ence. The PAN was thus pushing a rad-ical proposal. Pena Nieto tried to split the difference, offering to allow foreign companies to make only profit-sharing agreements with Pemex, but even his reform was controversial.

The impending fight over energy reform shaped the second half of the year’s legislation. Fiscal reform was something of a disaster: the PRD was

largely allowed to dictate the terms of the package, resulting in a less ambi-tious measure than originally intended that mainly increased taxes on upper income brackets. Alienated by the fis-cal reform, the PAN then predicated its support for the energy reform initiative on passage of another component of the pact: political reform. This mea-sure, backed by both the PAN and PRD and supported in principle by the PRI, would allow lawmakers, governors, and mayors to be re-elected for a limited number of terms and increase federal oversight of elections. Such reforms would hopefully limit the power and in-fluence of parties (especially the PRI), allow lawmakers to develop governing experience, and reduce corruption.

As energy negotiations continued, the distance between the PAN and PRD was proving unbridgeable. The bilateral talks between the PAN and PRI on political reform alienated the PRD, and it grew suspicious that both parties, which together possessed a

The fate of Pena Nieto’s presidency will be decided by the outcome of his reforms. Photo by Chatham House.

WorLd


two-thirds majority in Congress, would also strike a deal on Pemex. For the PRD, as for many Mexicans, protecting Pemex’s monopoly is not only a policy priority—it constitutes an integral part of national sovereignty. Seeing what it believed to be the writing on the wall, the PRD on November 28 thus took the fateful step of exiting the Pact for Mexico and calling for massive protests against the proposed energy reform.

As the protests raged outside Mexi-co’s Congress, the legislative pace with-in increased from brisk to frenetic. The promised political reform was hastily drafted and passed, albeit in a slapdash state that left many details yet to be de-termined. With the PRD gone, the en-actment of a reform based on the PAN’s vision was almost a foregone conclu-sion: the constitutional change passed both houses of Congress and was rati-fied by a majority of state legislatures (mostly controlled by the PRI) within a week. On December 20, 2013, al-most seventy-five years after President Lazaro Cardenas closed off Mexico’s oil to foreign investment in perpetu-ity, his successor Enrique Pena Nieto reopened it with a flourish of his pen.

Even enthusiasts were astonished by the sweep of the reform: private com-panies will be able to contract with Pe-mex to exploit Mexico’s hydrocarbon reserves, sharing both production and profits. Moreover, the Energy Depart-ment will be able to auction off drilling licenses to private companies that will pay taxes and royalties on the oil and gas they extract. The Pact for Mexico may be dead, but its most important fruit is very much alive.

whither mexiCo? Although these reforms may not be

perfect, Pena Nieto has accomplished more in his first year than many other Mexican presidents have done in their entire terms. Still, even greater chal-lenges loom ahead, including Mexico’s economy, which stagnated during the first year of his term, and the drug war, which rages on despite Pena Nieto’s promise to reduce violence. Further-more, most of his reforms still await secondary legislation to implement them, and all will need to be put into

practice, with most laws scheduled to take effect in 2014.

In all likelihood, there will be suc-cesses and there will be failures. Tax reform seems to have already been written off, while education reform will probably yield little progress in the short term: even after removing bad teachers, there still remains much to do to improve Mexico’s schools. The success of the economic reforms—tele-communications and energy—depend in large measure on implementation. Pena Nieto’s record of effectiveness as a governor augurs well for his ability to enact these measures in the spirit in which they were intended, but over-

coming institutional inertia in both ar-eas will not be easy. Political reform, finally, will depend on the extent to which Pena Nieto is willing and able to help his party move past its authoritar-ian background.

For precisely this reason, there was a profound irony buried at the heart of the Pact for Mexico: in attempting to break down the centralization of power within all parts of Mexico’s govern-ment and economy, it relied upon and was propelled by the mother of all cen-tralized institutions—the Institutional Revolutionary Party. It was the PRI that gave the reins of power to a cor-rupt elite, ultimately putting Mexico’s schools, government, economy, and re-sources in the sorry state they are in to-day, and refused to cooperate with the PAN for its twelve years in power while it struggled in vain to implement many of the same reforms Pena Nieto has put forward.

Moreover, the manner in which these crucial reforms were enacted was pro-

foundly disquieting. There is some-thing fundamentally anti-democratic about politicians in technocratic ne-gotiating sessions setting the course of the country while all the public can do in opposition is spill out into the streets in impotent fury. As much as some of us in America may yearn for an ideal world where high-minded poli-ticians freely join together to pass the initiatives that all recognize our nation truly needs, that is not how our sys-tem works, nor should it. Democracy is predicated on the clash of ideas, the opposition of perspectives, the thesis that the correct course should prevail not when the most powerful actors in a state throw their support behind it but when its proponents take their case to the people and triumph in the court of public opinion. Mexico’s misfortune lies not in the fact that its parties bat-tled for so long but instead in the fact that it has become such a top-down society that perhaps its only hope lay in top-down reform. Viewed in this light, the Pact for Mexico becomes not a model for functional democracy, but a fleeting opportunity to remake a soci-ety urgently in need of a course correc-tion, born of contingent circumstances and nothing more. Its breakdown was not a tragedy, but the natural course of events if Mexico is to become a full de-mocracy.

The biggest question mark hanging over Pena Nieto in 2014 will thus not be any challenge discussed above but the fundamental dilemma that faces him: is he prepared to honor the spirit of his reforms and truly return power to the people, knowing full well that suc-cess would dismantle the system that enabled him to gain and wield power, and may very well weaken his own of-fice for the remainder of his tenure? If he decides in the affirmative, he will be remembered as more than a great leader; he will be a transformational one. And 2013 will be remembered as the year when Mexico finally began to escape the shadow of the PRI and move toward a more hopeful future for all.

Connor Phillips is a Trinity freshman. He is a staff writer for DPR.

“The manner in which these crucial reforms were enacted was profoundly disquieting.”

UNited stAtes

24 DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW SPRING 2014Photo by Will Giles.

UNited stAtes


By Will Giles

Before social media, campaign supporters had only one option to show how much they ‘liked’

their preferred candidate: political buttons.

UNited stAtes


The first “modern” presidential cam-paign occurred in 1840, as William Henry Harrison faced Martin Van Bu-ren. Each campaign held hundreds of parades and rallies, wrote dozens of campaign songs, and produced nu-merous campaign slogans, including “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too.” Cam-paign tokens or medals became promi-nent items in a campaign supporter’s repertoire. Each was stamped with a portrait of the candidate, as well as a slogan or perhaps imagery from the candidate’s life, such as a log cabin and barrel of cider in Harrison’s case. Usu-

ally, a hole was punched in the top of the token in order for the supporter to wear it around his or her neck.

The election of 1860 saw the intro-duction of the ferrotype badge. Like the campaign token, it had a hole to al-low the badge to be worn around one’s neck. However, instead of being mint-ed like a token, the obverse and reverse of a ferrotype contain actual pictures of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates on glass, which was the style of photography at the time. Due to the portraits being on glass, the badges were difficult and expensive to produce and were very brittle.

The invention of the celluloid politi-cal button by the Whitehead & Hoag Company combined the best qualities of its predecessors: the cheap, mass-production capabilities of tokens with the striking beauty of candidates’ por-traits of ferrotypes. Yet, the innovation of celluloid buttons did much more than just syndicate the redeeming at-

T he information age has revolutionized the ways in which an individual can show support for her

preferred candidate. President Barack Obama has over 38 million likes on Facebook and 40.8 million followers on Twitter while Mitt Romney, despite a year removed from his electoral de-feat, still has over 11 million likes and 1.5 million followers. These numbers do not include the many likes and fol-lows of their respective party’s pages, unofficial candidate pages, or issues for the campaign. Showing support is now as simple as changing one’s Facebook profile or cover photo, and an individu-al can post status updates regarding the campaign to her friends and followers.

Similarly, the proliferation of cars also brought about the proliferation of bumper stickers. Inexpensive and eas-ily-removed, bumper stickers provided an easy way to support a candidate. Simply peel and stick to a bumper, and forget about it. It is not uncommon to see many stickers placed on one bum-per, creating a collage of political sup-port.

While the date is known only to the few of us who collect political items, July 21, 1894 marked the beginning of a transitory period in political sup-port that was just as important as the Internet or cars. On this date, the Whitehead and Hoag Company of New Jersey patented the celluloid political button (Celluloid, a hard type of plas-tic, is now used in the manufacture of billiard’s balls). To manufacture a but-ton, one simply pressed a circular piece of paper between the celluloid covering and a metal disk, to which a pin was at-tached. Thus, creativity was only con-strained by one’s paper-printing ability.

To understand how revolutionary this invention was, we must first look at the prior history of campaign mate-rials. The first American political items were manufactured for George Wash-ington’s Inauguration in 1789. These items were buttons in the truest sense, made of stamped metal and sewn into the lapel or jacket of the wearer. A perhaps apocryphal story states that Washington himself wore a set to his own Inauguration.

tributes of previous entities; it trans-formed political campaigns into “Get Out the Vote” (GOTV) machines and created a profitable business for button manufacturers like Whitehead & Hoag.

The election of 1896 proved to be the watershed moment for the use of cel-luloid buttons. The election pitted Re-publican candidate William McKinley and the Gold Standard against Demo-cratic candidate William Jennings Bryan and the Silver Standard. Most of the buttons featured a gold or silver theme; “gold bugs” supported McKin-ley by wearing buttons with sayings such as “In Gold, We Trust; In Bryan, We Bust!”, while “silver bugs” rallied around Bryan with buttons that pro-moted a “16 to 1” ratio of silver coinage to gold. It has been estimated many millions of political buttons were pro-duced for this campaign alone.

Thus, the ‘Golden Age’ of political buttons, an adage coined by us politi-cal items collectors, was inaugurated, lasting until 1916. The sheer number of buttons produced during this period can only be matched by the ingenuity of the designs. Buttons featured every color imaginable, as well as symbolisms and metaphors that cannot be gleaned today by liking a candidate’s Facebook page. I am constantly amazed about how so much beauty and historical sig-nificance could have been placed into such a small package; they are truly works of art.

After 1916, buttons became more mundane in their colors and schemes. One possible reason for this could be the introduction of the lithograph process. Machines could turn out thousands of these metal buttons per minute, removing the need of print-ing sheets of paper to be placed in the buttons. Another possible reason is the concentration on the outbreak of World War I in 1917. For whatever rea-son, there is a remarkable difference between buttons produced before and after 1916, as red, white, and blue be-came the predominant color design.

“ThE shEEr numbEr of

buTTons ProDuCED DurIng ThIs

PErIoD CAn onLY bE mATChED bY ThE IngEnuITY of ThE

DEsIgns.”

UNited stAtes


ColleCting politiCAl BUttons

T he possibilities for collect-ing political buttons are endless. Possible collecting interests include particular

candidates, parties, election years, lo-cals, states, causes, Women’s Suffrage, Temperance, and Prohibition, as well as any category in between. As an ex-ample, I collect Charles Evans Hughes, John Nance Garner, ‘Alfalfa Bill’ Mur-ray, Speakers of the House of Repre-sentatives, Supreme Court Justices, John Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, and Ronald Reagan. I know someone who collects only gold-colored buttons as well as someone who collects non-partisan ‘vote’ items. There are enough items and interests for every collector to find his or her own niche, no matter how eccentric their tastes.

99% of all political buttons are worth-less. Thus, one must educate himself or herself to discern a good button from a bad button. Generally, picture pins are

worth more than word pins, and ju-gates are worth more than single pic-ture pins. However, this is not always the case, as a number of clever word pins, such as “Landon-Knox Out Roo-sevelt” (Alf Landon and Frank Knox were the Republican Candidates in 1936), are highly desirable. Also, pins from 1896 to 1960 are worth more, on average, than newer pins; however, there are always exceptions to this rule. A rare pin, no matter what candidate or year, is going to demand a premium price. Condition means everything in the hobby, as damage greatly affects the worth of a button. A damaged button is usually only considered to be worth about 10% of a pristine example.

The rarest candidates to collect are James Cox (Democratic Candidate in 1920), John Davis (Democratic Candi-date in 1924), Charles Evans Hughes, and Harry Truman. Other than a few of the most common buttons for these candidates, most pins command a

price of at least $100. A Cox-Roosevelt jugate (Franklin Roosevelt was the Vice-Presidential nominee), so rare that most consider that only 50 pro-motional items were ever made, com-mands at least $30,000 and upwards of $100,000. The most popular candi-dates to collect are Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roos-evelt, John Kennedy and Harry Tru-man. The Lincoln campaign produced more items than any of the other three candidates in 1860 combined, but the demand of items of the Great Emanci-pator is exceptionally high.

A new collector must be very careful of reproductions. I, like many other collectors, was fooled early in collect-ing career by deceptive reproductions. The Hobby Protection Act of 1973 re-quires that all imitation numismatic and imitation political items sold in, or imported into, the United States be marked with the word “Copy” or the year of manufacture. Generally, this

word pinContains the names of the can-didates or perhaps the campaign slogan (“I Like Ike”)

piCtUre pinContains a picture of the candidate (usually presidential)

JUgAteContains pictures of both the presi-dential candidate and his running mate

trigAteContains the picture of the presi-dential candidate, the vice presi-dential candidate and a picture of a local candidate

CoAttAilContains a picture of the presiden-tial candidate and a candidate for a local office (senate, governor, etc.)

who hopes to “ride the coattails” of the candidates popularity

hopefUlA button for a candidate seeking nomination before a party’s nation-al convention

loCAlA button featuring a candidate for office that isn’t the presidency or vice presidency (mayor, Congress, etc.)

pre-presidentiAlA local button featuring a candi-date who later went on to run for president

tABA small metal badge with a pro-jection that folds over to place on one’s pocket

TYPEs of buTTonsJust as they are not monolithic in their design, political buttons, also known as campaign badges, pins, or pin-backs, also come in many different types. These are the major distinctions:

lApel stUdSame as a pinback, except has a metal protrusion that slides into a lapel hole

third pArtyAn item from a party that wasn’t from the two major parties at the time.

single dAy eventAn item from an appearance of a political figure at a fair, parade, event, etc.

flAsher Lenticular items that contain mul-tiple images (usually two) where the image changes when viewed from different angles. Also known as flickers or winkies.

UNited stAtes


is marked around the curl of button or placed upon the back. However, many reproductions are not marked, which can deter new collectors from enter-ing the hobby. The best tips to a new collector is to remember that celluloid buttons were not made until 1894 and metal buttons until 1916. Thus, a but-ton featuring a president or candidate that ran before 1896 is automatically a fake; a metal button that features a candidate who ran before 1916 is also a fake. The old adage, “If something is too good to be true, then it is,” remains pertinent.

The best decision a collector can make is to join the American Political Items Collectors (APIC). Founded in 1945, the APIC promotes the cultiva-tion and conservation of all historical artifacts and has over 2000 members across the United States. Political but-ton shows, where members set up ta-bles and sale political items, are held

in numerous locations throughout the country each year, and national con-ventions are held every two years (The next national convention is being held in Denver this August; mark your cal-endars!). You could visit thousands of antique stores and flea markets and not see half of the political items featured at these shows.

politiCAl BUttons todAy

P olitical buttons are becom-ing obsolete, relegated to the status of relic-items that are reminders of the past but

serve no current purpose. On the cam-paign trail in 2012, I saw more stickers on shirts than buttons. The buttons, if there were any, seemed to be adver-tising the candidates’ online presence rather than the candidates themselves. Unlike an online presence, which is a passive form of support, wearing a campaign button is very active, requir-

ing one to make a conscious effort to pin a button on clothing. The decreas-ing use of campaign buttons threatens political involvement and action in the country. As a collector, this is a trav-esty, as it likely means there will be fewer collectors to sell my collection in the future. Thus, for my heirs’ and de-mocracy’s sake, proudly wear a political button!

Will Giles is a Trinity junior. He is a staff writer for DPR.

Photo by Will Giles.

UNited stAtes


blueThe Necessity of a Resurgent Democratic Party in the American South

By James Ferencsik

President Jimmy Carter meets Governor of Arkansas and future President Bill Clinton. Photo from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

BaCK to

UNited stAtes


been the epicenter of Congressional polarization, those moderates are most needed and most logically to come from the South. For more Southern moderates to get elected to the House and Senate, Southern Democrats must become significantly more competitive. This will have a moderating effect on Republican candidates, in particular, to appeal to the middle. To understand how Democrats can break Republican’s stranglehold on the South, it is neces-sary to first discern why the South be-came such a dark shade of red.

more thAn ColorThe Civil Rights Act did ignite a shift

of Southern conservatives from the Democratic to Republican Party. In the 1964 Presidential election, the ma-

jority of the Deep South voted for the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwa-ter. Since then only Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both Southerners them-selves, have won in the Deep South as Democrats. However, as recently as ten years ago, many deeply conservative Southern states still commonly elected Democratic Governors and Senators such as Governor Ronnie Musgrove of Mississippi. Up until 2010, South-ern Blue Dog Democrats, known for their conservative stances, constituted a significant number of Democrats in Congress. This fact demonstrates that conservatives’ shift to the Republican Party took several decades to occur and is just now ossifying. Clearly, this shift had to do with more than one law forty years ago.

In addition to voting for Republican Presidential candidates, Southerners

began to elect majorities of Repub-licans in state legislatures across the South. Republicans used those ma-jorities to their advantage. After each census, state legislatures can redraw Congressional districts. Republican-controlled Southern legislatures cre-ated more ideologically lopsided dis-tricts, including minority-majority districts, in a process known as gerry-mandering. This political tactic creat-ed favorable districts for Republicans, creating Republican-heavy Congres-sional delegations. In North Carolina in 2012, for example, Republicans took fifty-four percent of the electorate and seventy percent of Congressional seats. Considering the House is a common stepping stone for the U.S. Senate and Governors Mansions, Republicans

have a much deeper bench of candidates to run statewide than Democrats.

Gerrymandering, additionally, shrunk Democrats’ bench by alienating Southern Democrats from the more conservative cul-tural and political identity of the South. With higher concentra-tions of liberal voters in “Dem-ocratic districts,” more liberal candidates were elected. Con-sequently, Southern Democratic Congressmen, since the 1970s, have increasingly voted with

their more liberal Northern counter-parts. Furthermore, minority-majority districts usually elected minority can-didates. In Southern states excluding North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, African-Americans hold half of South-ern Democrats’ seats in the House of Representatives.

Liberal and minority representatives, however, have been historically incapa-ble of winning statewide office. Nearly every elected statewide Democrat since 1964 has been considered a moderate and only one African-American official, Gov. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, has been elected to statewide office since Reconstruction. The only Latinos elected to statewide office have been Republican. It, however, is worth not-ing that minority representatives are often liberal. Wilder’s victory and Har-old Ford, Jr.’s near 2006 Senate victory

“Democrats have gotten caught in a vicious cycle that has hardened republicans’ grip on the south over time.”

I f you live in the south, you likely live in a single-party state. The once-dominant Democratic Party has be-

come electorally uncompetitive and irrelevant to the governing process. Democrats have a majority in only one chamber of one legislature in the en-tire region – the Kentucky State House, while Republicans hold supermajori-ties in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. A Democratic candidate for President has not won a state in the “Deep South,” or original seven Con-federate states, in twenty years. Of the thirty Senate races since 2006, Demo-crats have won eight, six of which were incumbents with sizeable fundraising advantages. The other two faced oppo-nents marred by controversy. The Re-publicanization of the South has not only harmed Democrats but also hurt the whole U.S.

The decline of Southern Dem-ocrats has mirrored the general increase in Congressional po-larization since 1964. Southern Democrats and, to a lesser ex-tent, Northeastern Republicans once served as the bridge be-tween Republican conserva-tives and Democratic liberals in Congress. They functioned as the pragmatists and dealmakers that enabled the legislative pro-cess to work. The loss of that bridge has turned routine legislative tasks, such as passing a budget, into gargan-tuan feats. This political gridlock has wreaked enormous, adverse conse-quences on the United States. While the 113th Congress has not ended, it has already set records as the most po-larized and least productive Congress thus far in U.S. history. Last year, the world watched in shock as partisan political differences nearly caused the wealthiest nation on earth to default on its debt. This nightmare of an epi-sode is indicative of a broader shift in American politics. Government shut-downs and fiscal fights have replaced compromise and pragmatism as norms of governance in Washington.

To rediscover some common ground in politics, Congress needs more mod-erates. Considering the South has

UNited stAtes


in Tennessee demonstrate that conser-vative African-American Democrats can be competitive at the state level and ideology can trump race. Nonetheless, the political reality of the South is that gerrymandering has created a much smaller pool of candidates for statewide races. Thus, it is not a coincidence that Southern Senate and Gubernatorial candidates are often related to a for-mer Senator or Governor. In Georgia, for example, Democrats are relying on Michelle Nunn, the daughter of a Sena-tor, and Jason Carter, the grandson of Jimmy Carter, to win statewide despite their general inexperience. While these candidates are generally strong, Demo-crats cannot consistently recruit these heirloom candidates, requiring a more comprehensive and sustainable strate-gy for Democrats to regain lost ground.

Electoral problems in the South dis-courage national Democratic strate-gists from dedicating the requisite money and resources to build a win-

ning political infrastructure in the re-gion. This affects down-ballot races by discouraging potentially strong lo-cal candidates from running for office – further shrinking Democrats’ back-bench. Ultimately, Democrats have gotten caught in a vicious cycle that has hardened Republicans’ grip on the South over time.

go soUth, win loCAlThe easy and direct solution to loos-

ening that grip is eliminating gerry-mandering. State legislatures could select non-partisan commissions to draw the districts. This would create more competitive districts and force candidates to compete for centrist vot-ers, moderating both Democratic and Republican elected officials. However, Republicans will not do this, because it directly hurts them politically. This means Democrats will have to use oth-er strategies to turn the tide. To win the South, Democrats need a compre-

hensive, long-term strategy that will address some of the more fundamental problems the Party faces.

The cornerstone of this strategy must be a renewed focus on winning state assembly, county, and municipal elec-tions. For Democrats to expand its pool of statewide candidates, it must recruit new, dynamic candidates at a local level and give them the political operation to be successful. These candidates must demonstrate they can govern effec-tively at the local level. This strategy is Southern Democrats’ best shot at sepa-rating themselves from Democrats on a national level and regaining political relevancy.

This effort is also essential to Dem-ocrats winning back the U.S. House. When Republicans captured state leg-islatures in 2010, they put Democrats at a distinct disadvantage in Congres-sional races for the next decade. If Democrats can turn the tide and build back majorities by 2020, then they not

Richard Nixon gives his trademark victory sign as he greets a crowd of voters during the 1968 Presidential election. Photo by Ollie Atkins.

UNited stAtes


and dubitable reproductive the-ory, “partly right.” Kingston has recently declared that poor chil-dren should sweep the cafeteria floor for their subsidized lunch. Nunn’s success and the success of other Democrats are directly related to how well they can paint themselves as the prag-matic antidotes to the Tea Party wave. It may not guarantee a victory, but it will, once again, make these candidates very competitive.

The story of Southern Demo-crats demonstrates that elec-tions not only have political con-sequences but broader national consequences as well. A vibrant republic is a large-scale compe-tition of ideas which improves the quality of public discourse and policy. America needs a more politically competitive South. It will breed more mod-erate officials from both parties and ameliorate the disease of virulent partisanship. This will mean a renewed Southern con-

servative wing of the Democratic Party, which will once again bridge both par-ties. Republicans from the South will focus less on Tea Party challengers and more on winning the middle and gov-erning effectively. To do this, Demo-crats need to build a stronger political infrastructure and backbench of candi-dates for statewide races. This requires more resources, more attention, and an overall Democratic push southward. So, no, the political future of America will not be determined in Ohio, Ne-vada, or Wisconsin, despite what pun-dits say. It will be determined in the South.

James Ferencsik is a Trinity freshman. He is a staff writer for DPR.

only will have an easier time winning the House but also building a corps of moderate Democratic Representatives to run for statewide office in the South. The good news for Democrats is that a few Demo-crats have already realized this.

Recently, Southern Demo-cratic strategists have founded the Southern Progress Fund and the South Forward PAC. Both groups are focused on preparing, funding, and elect-ing candidates in local races and “building a bench.” When announcing the creation of the Southern Progress Fund, the Fund’s Director and former Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove declared, “Every day we see voters in the South that are hungry for more options. The extreme far-right fringe of the Republican Party has a stranglehold on the South.” He believes a local first strat-egy will break that stranglehold and “make it okay to be a proud Democrat in the South again.” While the effectiveness of these particular groups has yet to be seen, they, over time, could seriously influence South-ern politics. The impact of more re-sources and a stronger bench, however, will be limited if Democrats cannot ef-fectively sell themselves as a viable al-ternative to Republicans.

Southern Democrats need to estab-lish a coherent and appealing iden-tity. With the intractable gridlock in Washington, Southerners, like the rest of the nation, thirst for pragmatic solu-tions to the nation’s problems and for politicians who get things done. No re-cent candidate has understood this like Michelle Nunn. Nunn is campaign-ing as a “problem solver” and kicked off her campaign with a statewide lis-tening tour titled “What Washington Can Learn from Georgia.” Nunn is on point. Nunn has focused her campaign on education reform, business com-petitiveness, and balancing the budget. She has distanced herself from Obam-acare and called on Democrats to help reform entitlements. This moderation

may not yield a majority of votes but it will make her a very competitive can-didate.

Democrats need to utilize this mes-sage across races in the South. If they make problem solving and effective governance their focus, they should be able to win seats on a local level. If they fulfill campaign promises and continue to hammer home their mes-sage, Democrats will develop an iden-tity as problem solvers. In as little as 8-10 years time, Democrats could have a strong backbench of pragmatic and proven policymakers who can compete and win statewide.

An influx of Tea Party Republican candidates this election cycle will also make Democrats’ jobs easier. Nunn, for example, will face the winner of the Tea Party troika of Representatives Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, and Jack Kingston. All three are known for in-flammatory remarks. Broun is famous for calling evolution, embryology, and the Big-Bang Theory “lies straight from the pit of Hell.” Gingrey called Todd Akin, the originator of “legitimate rape”

Georgia Senate candidate Michelle Nunn speaks at the White House about volunteerism. Photo by the Corporation of National and Community Service.

WorLd


Welcome to Africa’s last colony- the Western Sahara. An uneasy peace teeters here, held by a ceasefire and flickering hopes of a permanent answer. Even though shots are rare,

everyone wants to know who really owns the desert.

A TerriTory

By Ishan Thakore iNLiMBo

The Western Sahara is still contested by both Morocco and the Polisario Front. Photo by Ishan Thakore.

WorLd


T he Western sahara, wedged under Morocco and border-ing Algeria and Mauritania, is one of the least populated

regions in the world, and rainfall aver-ages less than 2 inches a year. Its desert is rockier and less picturesque than the endless dunes of other Saharan stretch-es, while its sandstorms and summer weather are known to be brutal. The Saharawis, its native inhabitants, used the area nomadically and thrived on caravan trading. European incursions eventually divided up Morocco between France and Spain, but the end of the French protectorate in 1956 led Madrid to cede part of its holdings to Morocco. By the 1960s, Spain began investing in its Saharan stretch, through phosphate extraction and fishing. As colonization faded from fashion, UN Resolution 2229 (1966), as well as the Resolution 2983 (1972) clearly stated the right to self-determination, or voting for inde-pendence, for residents in the Spanish Sahara. In 1971, activists founded the Polisario Front, or the Frente Popular para la Liberacion de Saguia el-Hamra y Rio de Oro, to lead the effort for a free Western Sahara. Polisario countered Spanish rule with military finesse and raided Spanish bases.

who owns the desert?Polisario’s vision did not mesh with

that of Moroccan King Hassan II, who harbored a vision a la Manifest-Des-tiny that would have Morocco stretch from the Mediterranean to Mauritania.

I t’s not hard to enter the Western Sahara (or Moroccan Sahara, depending on who you ask). Buses from Morocco run frequently to the larger towns like Laayoune, the territorial capital, and besides the frequent requests for your passport and identification, it would seem like these were normal customs and border control precautions. But these routines hide the fact

that the territory is Africa’s last colony, and home to its longest running colonial dispute. Each side is literally divided- a series of walls, known as berms, stretch nearly 1400 miles (about the distance from Long Island to Miami) to split the desert. It is surrounded by explosives and minefields, and according to some United Nations (UN) experts, the Western Sahara harbors more mines than anywhere else in the world. A permanent solution to this issue eludes policy makers after decades of accords and cease-fires. While there may be a semblance of normality for some residents, the Western Sahara is an abnormal case on the world stage.

WorLd


Both Morocco and Mauritania claimed some parts of the desert, and in 1974, upon Morocco’s request, the UN Gen-eral Assembly authorized the Interna-tional Court of Justice (ICJ) to deter-mine who the Western Sahara really belonged to. By October 1975, the ICJ found that no reasonable claim could be made by either Morocco or Maurita-nia to the Western Sahara. At the same time, a report by a UN visiting mission found Polisario to be the dominant po-litical force there, with most residents in favor of independence.

While the ICJ decision shut the door on any legal premise to inhabit the Western Sahara, it did not deter Has-san. By manipulating parts of the ICJ ruling, Hassan leveraged public support and Islam’s holy color to stage a “Green March” to rid Morocco of “colonial-ist infidels.” On November 6th, 1975, 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians walked past the Spanish-Moroccan border into a small demilitarized zone, pre-negotiated by Spain in anticipation of the event. Spain, already in disarray because of Dictator Francisco Franco’s impending death, ceded the territory less than two weeks later. The Madrid Agreement laid out a three party tran-sitional authority (Morocco, Maurita-nia, and Spain) to govern the Sahara until Spain could withdraw in February 1976. Spain also received fishing rights and a stake in phosphate production.

the ConfliCt Begins With Spanish withdrawal, Polisario

created an international political pres-ence to further its goals. It announced its own state, the Saharawi Arab Dem-ocratic Republic (SADR), to rule West-ern Sahara, which was eventually rec-ognized by the African Union in 1984.

As Morocco and Mauritania military forces consolidated their territories, Saharawi refugees flooded into Alge-ria- there were some 50,000 in there by the end of 1976, according diplomat Erik Jensen. That is nearly half of the Western Sahara’s original inhabitants, and many still live in these camps to-day. The same year, Morocco severed diplomatic ties with Algeria, which was now linked in the conflict as a fervent supporter of Polisario.

The Polisario guerilla campaign quickly proved too much for Mauri-tania, which capitulated in 1978. Mo-rocco took over and embarked on a long and expensive desert war to stamp out Polisario. By 1991, Morocco had deployed 250,000 troops to subdue the region, dropped napalm and phos-phorus to batter settlements, and built walls to section off its territory. With the dividers, 80% of the territory was under Moroccan control, which includ-ed the region’s lucrative phosphate and fishing reserves.

seArChing for A solUtionAs the conflict wore on, a renewed

diplomatic thaw between Morocco and Algeria in 1988 created some hope for a political answer. A 1991 UN-brokered cease-fire was the first step towards a

referendum based solution, but UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar could not achieve a consensus between Polisario and Morocco. MINURSO, or the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, began in April 1991 with a mandate to hold a vote, set for January 1992, but disagree-ments over who should vote hampered the effort from the beginning.

Polisario believed that the voter list should be tied to Spain’s 1974 territori-al census, which counted mostly Saha-rawis who would overwhelmingly sup-port independence. Morocco, alarmed by this possibility, wanted to add nearly 100,000 Moroccan squatters to the list to push the vote towards inclusion. UN

efforts to mediate the list dragged on for years.

To galvanize the mission, UN Sec-retary-General Kofi Annan appointed James Baker, former US Secretary of State, as his personal envoy to the Western Sahara. Baker’s efforts led to the 1997 Houston Agreement, which created a list of 86,000 eligible vot-ers. Morocco, again unhappy with the list, bogged down the process in ap-peals. Scrapping the Houston Accords, Baker proposed the Baker Plan, which would create a partially independent Western Sahara under Moroccan sov-ereignty. The plan was rejected by both sides and led to the second Baker plan, proposed in 2003, reviving the idea of a referendum to decide if the territory would be free, autonomous or integrat-ed with Morocco. Algeria and Polisario accepted the plan but Morocco rejected it, noting that any plan with indepen-dence was unacceptable. Baker re-signed shortly afterwards, and all UN referendum efforts ended there.

stAlemAteThe loss of Baker was a setback for the

Polisario, as was a lucrative 2006 fish-ing deal between the European Union and Morocco which included Western Sahara waters. It was a sign that the international community was having fewer reservations over Moroccan rule in the Western Sahara. Morocco sub-mitted its own autonomy plan in 2007, and while the US deemed it “serious and credible,” it did not offer any real freedom to the Saharawi people. Previ-ous examples of autonomous states do not provide a warm precedent- Serbia revoked Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, triggering a NATO military campaign. In 2008, Peter van Walsum, the new envoy to the Western Sahara, declared that “an independent Western Sahara is not a realistic proposition.”

The United Nations failure to broker peace stems from conflicting interests and hardened positions by each side. On the Security Council, The United States and France have a vested stake in appeasing Morocco- a regional and stable ally in Arab North Africa, known as the Magrehb, and a country with good Israeli relations. For the West,

“By 1991, Morocco had deployed 250,000 troops to subdue the region, dropped napalm and phosphorus to batter settlements, and built walls to section off its territory.”

WorLd


a new independent state would not be viewed as a Polisario victory, but rather as a source of instability and a haven for terrorists. In 2010, violent demonstrations occurred near refugee camps in Laayoune, the capital, while some reports indicate that Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) may be recruiting in Algerian camps. Wash-ington remains silent after most of its efforts failed, but it recognizes the im-portance of Morocco as a strategic ally. The U.S. is unlikely to endanger that relationship by supporting indepen-dence.

As a result, a zero-sum game has en-trenched both sides. Morocco will only accept autonomy or integration, while Polisario will only take independence and a referendum. Morocco stands to lose millions in economic development if the territory goes up to a vote, in-cluding the $42 million fishing port it opened in Dakhla. The abundant nat-ural fishing and phosphate resources provide much needed revenue to the Kingdom, while the chance of finding oil could be a boon for the energy-poor Morocco (it imports 95% of its petro-leum). But many Moroccans are also tied to the Western Sahara after decades of state media campaigns ingraining it in the national consciousness. It is now a matter of national identity, even if the territory never truly was “Moroccan.”

Polisario has a vested territorial and

ancestral stake in the conflict, and any-thing less than independence would be a loss and setback for decoloniza-tion efforts worldwide. It is, after all, legally entitled to a vote by the ICJ and the UN. The Saharawi people, many of whom have grown up in Algerian refugee camps, still lack a permanent home. Algeria would also lose some au-thority as a regional power if the terri-tory is secured by Morocco.

However, there is much to gain by a compromise. Regional Maghreb se-curity is already threatened as AQIM grows in influence, especially in Mali. A unified Maghreb can bring stabil-ity and form regional partnerships for economic development. In total, the conflict has cost 2 GDP points every year for the Maghreb, according to the French daily Le Monde. The New York Times reported Morocco spends $1 million a day on the conflict, money that could be spent to help alleviate its growing income gap. Morocco’s bor-der with Algeria is still closed, shut-ting the door on possible trade with Algeria’s goods-poor market. The Af-rican Maghreb Union (AMU), which could allow for thriving regional trade, is crippled by disagreements over the Western Sahara.

While the Polisario should remain wary of any solution with Morocco, it may have to reluctantly agree on au-tonomy. It can reasonably accept a

well-crafted autonomy proposal that respects its cultural differences, and one that is thoroughly decentralized to allow Saharawi control. Autonomy would allow for refugees to return home, and the territory might finally be resettled by Saharawis. It seems unrealistic that independence is still a viable option, especially as the West-ern Sahara continues to be developed. There is some hope that positions are softening: Morocco, which amended its Constitution in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, has redistributed some authority from the King to the Parlia-ment, which might be more responsive to deals. A growing sense of economic urgency and political discourse can bring both parties back to the table for a comprehensive settlement. But until this can be accomplished, Africa’s last colony will continue to atrophy as a ter-ritory in limbo.

Ishan Thakore is a Trinity junior.

MINURSO Team on Patrol in Western Sahara. UN Photo by Martine Perret.

UNited stAtes

SPRING 2014 DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW 37Photo by Ferran Moya.

ThE moDErnLIbErTArIAn

By Pi Praveen

W hen Senator Russ Fein-gold (D – Wisconsin) vot-ed against the Patriot Act in 2001, he was the only

senator to do so. Ninety-eight senators voted ‘Yea’ and one abstained as national outrage against the perpetrators of Sep-tember 11th grew stronger and stronger. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence had both been unable to pre-emptively intercept Al-Qaeda’s plans. Incensed, they wanted the tools necessary to apprehend the per-petrators. Feingold stood firmly against public opinion—which, like the Bush ad-ministration, called for swift, decisive ret-ribution.

Before the U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft brought forth the Patriot Act, the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act limited the scope of surveillance to the suspects themselves. With the Act, and the expansion of the surveillance man-date to persons at all linked to a suspect, unwitting and innocent Americans were brought into the sphere of the govern-ment’s drive towards a new and improved national security. President Bush lauded the Patriot Act’s expanded powers as “new tools to fight the present danger.”

Is Government the Dark Knight?

UNited stAtes


Fox calls it “beautiful…unethical…dan-gerous.” He says it is “too much power for one person.”

Increasingly, Americans are coming around to Mr. Fox’s view in their opin-ion of government’s expanded powers. Two separate streams – coming from traditionally opposing political ideolo-gies, as any promising third party fac-tion does – are coming together to as-sert that the U.S. Government’s efforts to protect its Gotham have gone too far.

The first group is led by elite anti-establishment Tea Party figureheads like Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. These senators come to Libertarian-ism from a principled stance, declaring smaller government the highest ideal. Their message, however, is distinct from the traditional Republican plea for small government in that it also rejects enlargement of military power that Republicans traditionally support. As favorability towards the wars reach-es an all-time low, Tea Partiers point to the costs of military expansion: the

dangers of big government in the sky above should drones be allowed into American airspace, the high budget deficits that are a consequence of ex-pensive foreign entanglements, the loss of freedom that results from increasing surveillance. For Paul and Cruz and the rest of the Tea Party/Libertarian co-hort, government is too big, too power-ful, too cumbersome. When the face of government is the TSA or the NSA, as it has often been in recent years, the case for such an argument is made easy.

A second group, a more motley cross-section of typically left-leaning American youth, has begun to mobilize around a different iteration of Liber-tarianism. This group came into being as a political force when the Stop On-line Piracy and Protect IP Acts were in-troduced on the floor of Congress, and it reached maturity when information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program was leaked. It differs from the Paul/Cruz rhetorical machine in that its revulsion towards

The public, still shell-shocked by the September 11th attacks, agreed with him in 2001. But, as the years passed, support has diminished with astonish-ing rapidity. To current voters, the dan-ger seems less present, and the expand-ed powers have begun to look less like tools—and more like weapons.

I n a lot of ways, the Nolan broth-ers’ “The Dark Knight” parallels the dynamic between the Fed-eral government and the Ameri-

can public over the years. There is pow-erful scene in which Mr. Fox and Bruce Wayne part ways after a long partner-ship. Mr. Fox has thus far been more than willing to dissemble and collabo-rate as he builds lethal capabilities for Wayne’s alter ego, Batman. He cannot, however, stomach Batman’s newest, secret capability: a sonar-enabled con-traption that uses cell-phone signals to create a virtual map of Gotham, while simultaneously monitoring each and every call made around the city. Lucius

Protester at Occupy Wall Street. Photo by Timothy Krause.

UNited stAtes


government overreach stems from the very real, sudden realization of lack of privacy in each citizen’s daily life rather than the consistent consideration of pure libertarianism’s lofty ideals. In this case, the political elite in DC does not drive the public’s concerns; the 4.5 million signatures on Google’s anti-SO-PA/anti-PIPA were garnered by capi-talizing upon grassroots indignation. This petition and others like it led eigh-teen Senators to change their position on the acts.

This youthful generation comes from a time in which paranoia guided Amer-ican politics. To us, a universe in which there is near-universal support for an enormously expanded surveillance state is nearly unfeasible. Without the pressing danger, the expanded powers of government are difficult to justify.

I n “The Dark Knight,” it is made clear that Gotham has wanted and needed Batman, especially in times of attack, strife, and

upheaval—just as the US support-ed expanded governmental security powers post-9/11. But then, Gotham backtracks, experiencing periods of middling societal introspection when confronted with the threatening mag-nitude of Batman’s power. Like Batman says, “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” This is what has happened to the United States’ policy-machine post-9/11.

The ideologues on soapboxes tell Go-tham and America that they must vilify Batman and the administration’s secu-rity strategy in totality. But then, what would happen when the next Joker or Bane arrives on the scene, or we suffer the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11?

Lucius Fox was disgusted with Bat-man’s new invention to monitor calls because it represented something far beyond Batman’s job description, as Gotham’s public understood it. There was no space to add it to Batman’s ar-senal, just like libertarians argue that there is no space for SOPA, PIPA, or the NSA’s tactics within the adminis-tration’s security apparatus because the public did not sign up for them. Yet with the Joker on the loose, Fox uses

the apparatus. Just this once, he prom-ises. Then, he resigns and destroys the device.

But movies end, and reality does not. In the real world, we must ask: what happens the next time lives are lost be-cause Fox didn’t trust the city’s protec-tors with increased power to protect?

Moreover, the U.S. government’s new powers simply cannot be destroyed at the push of a button like Batman’s ap-paratus can. New security technolo-gies cannot simply be removed from the equation. How can we, instead, optimize their usage? In the midst of their protests, it is evident that neither

Feingold nor Paul is offering up a well-thought out plan for integrating NSA and drone capabilities into the govern-ment’s arsenal so much as they are as-serting a rhetorical argument around the very ethics behind their existence. Meanwhile, we are largely removed from the dangers that the newfound security powers were developed to pro-tect against—9/11 and the following wars are too far away in time and dis-tance. Ideologically, both factions are united in that they simply don’t take the capacity for real and present danger into account.

Practically, though, there’s a security arms race. Because there is an inherent desire to expand power, those countries that do not continue to innovate with

new ways to expand security capabili-ties will inevitably fall behind. Liber-tarian rhetoric around security is often accused of being simplistic. In response to SOPA/PIPA indignation, the White House declared: “Rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do. Ask yourself what’s right.”

T he American public will al-ways embrace its civil liber-ties, but every now and then, a tragic event comes that re-

introduces a salient, motivating fear of the enemies of the American state. The central question, then, is how to achieve a security apparatus that is powerful enough to protect against threats yet not powerful enough to pose one itself.

How can we temper the dynamic be-tween the two? Recent calls for Ameri-ca to stand down, to essentially retreat into isolationism as a criticism of big military and governmental overreach, have been packaged increasingly at-tractively as a form of protection for those of us back home.

But Batman’s exile from Gotham is only attractive so long as Gotham is not in immediate danger and so long as Batman represents a danger in and of himself.

We cheer when Batman and his ter-rifying power disappear as their mo-tivating threat does at the end of the second movie. Similarly, having spent some blessed time apart from salient threats, factions are uniting in a push for the U.S. Government to follow Bat-man’s lead.

And maybe it should. But we should all be wary of forgetting that the series is a trilogy. Danger will come again, and when it does, we may need to call for the Dark Knight’s return.

Pi Praveen is a Trinity sophomore. She is a staff writer for DPR.

“The central question, then, is how to achieve a

security apparatus that is powerful

enough to protect against threats

yet not powerful enough to pose one

itself.”

UNited stAtes


Why the Government oWns your

GenesBy Tara Bansal

Artwork by Jessica Yu

UNited stAtes


“…today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to…cancer, and then take action.”

Last May, Angelina Jolie wrote a highly publicized editorial in the New York Times about her preventative double mastectomy after learning of her high genetic predisposition for breast cancer. After her mother died of ovarian cancer at age 56, Jolie under-went genetic testing that showed she had a mutated BRCA1 gene which, doc-tors estimated, gave her an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer. These types of genetic testing and preventa-tive surgery have become increasingly more affordable.

Genetic testing has not only be-come more common over the past de-

cade, but some researchers have also predicted a world in which it will be ubiquitous: it could become routine procedure at birth to sequence your

child’s full genome. Going to a genet-ic counselor could become as routine as going to the dentist. The market is already concentrated with research companies such as 23andMe and Path-way Genetics, which boast “accurate and affordable” tests for as low as $99 that can determine gene defects from DNA extracted from a saliva sample. These tests can ascertain an incredible amount of information from our DNA: our ancestry, relations to distant family, and most importantly, our likelihood of developing diseases such as Alzheim-er’s Disease, Type 2 Diabetes, or certain cancers. This information can help us alter our lifestyles or begin preventative medical measures.

Genetics are an integral part of our lives—both literally and figuratively.

Genetic research has advanced at a dramatic pace since James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Fast forward just five

decades and the scientific community saw the completion of the Human Ge-nome Project, an international con-sortium that cost over three billion dollars. It presented a fully sequenced genome of DNA so that scientists could determine which DNA sequences were responsible for specific human traits, creating an entirely new field of medi-cal diagnostics.

de-pAtenting gene pAtents

W e are now living in an age in which ge-netic testing is evolv-ing, growing simul-

taneously more refined and more common—as evidenced by the slew of personal genomic testing kits available. Due to the rapid nature of technological progress, the US government has spent the past year regulating the previously unfettered industry, often removing scientific autonomy to ensure patients’ safety. While geneticists and politicians have the same health goals—providing patients with the best medical diag-nosis and treatment— they have come into considerable amounts of conflict. As genetic testing becomes more ordi-nary, federal intervention is expected to as well.

Specifically, this past June the Su-

In the dawn of genetic testing, get ready to be told what you can and can’t do with your DNA. The race towards better understanding the genome is being slowed down by a world in which researchers cannot patent it, companies cannot analyze it, and you cannot understand it.

“GOinG tO a GEnEtiC COunsElOR COuld BECOME as ROutinE as GOinG tO tHE

dEntist.”

UNited stAtes


preme Court narrowed the scope of patentable genetic material in the case Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. Myriad Genetics, a federally funded research corporation, patented their finding of BRCA1 and BRCA2 “breast-cancer genes” in 1994 and 1995 respectively. By sequencing a patient’s genome, Myriad could look for mutations in these genes and deter-mine an individual’s likelihood of de-veloping breast and ovarian cancer.

Nonetheless, Myriad enforced their exclusivity of BRCA testing, going so far as to send cease and desist let-ters on the basis of patent infringe-ment to researchers, such as those at the Genetic Diagnostic Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, for test-ing samples for BRCA. This monopoly allowed Myriad to charge pre-mium fees—hinder-ing patients’ ability to be diagnosed or seek out a second opinion. Certainly a question of both the monopoly’s le-gality and morality had to be raised. Thus, the Association for Molecu-lar Pathology filed a lawsuit to remove Myriad’s access to this patent.

After AMP won the case on the Fed-eral circuit, the Supreme Court agreed to hear it as well. In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court struck down patents on human genes, and thus monopolies on genetic testing. In the affirmative opinion, Justice Thomas wrote, “…We hold that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.” While all objects are technically “products of nature” in their origin, the court ruled that patentable products must specifically be syntheti-cally altered for “utility, novelty, and non-obviousness”.

This decision has implications for the removal of over 3000 non-expired iso-lated DNA patents and countless other patents on genetic sequences of differ-ent organisms. By removing patents on the unaltered genome, the Supreme Court allowed for increased competi-

tion in genetic testing of all types.Even though we as a consumerist so-

ciety find benefit in our expanded abil-ity to inexpensively conduct these tests, it is important that we consider at least some autonomy of scientists over their intellectual property. Not only is the federal government limiting the exclu-sivity rights of companies like Myriad Genetics, but it is also enforcing pro-cedural transparency within these ge-netic firms. The US government has a long history of restricting marketing claims, and the scientific community is no exception.

the fdA’s Biggest feArs Come trUe

2 3andMe is the most promi-nent in a new line of startup companies that are market-ing your own genes to you.

This Google-backed company has se-quenced the genomes of over half a million people who voluntarily provide their samples and consent to its being incorporated into a larger database. While this practice is relatively clear in presentation and is sound from a legal standpoint, most consumers will not fully understand the implications of their consent: that 23andMe has the right to patent and profit from muta-tions discovered in their genes.

On November 22nd 2013, the FDA issued a warning cease and desist let-ter to 23andMe, claiming that the ge-netic tests were not medically proven to be entirely accurate and could result in patients pursuing inadequate or in-appropriate medical procedures. The company kept private its specific meth-ods for testing. The FDA has asked for

a comprehensive methodology to bet-ter understand how 23andMe is deter-mining genetic likelihood of diseases and for what the company is using the genetic information.

One of the main criticisms of firms like 23andMe is that these companies use consumers’ DNA to make discov-eries on genetic links and then to file patents. Another concern is that ge-netic mutations do not always result in the development of a particular illness. For example, in breast cancer screen-ings, the existence of BRCA1 mutations only leads to the development of breast cancer 55 to 65 percent of the time, and BRCA2 mutations only 45 percent of the time. The FDA fears that patients

who discover they have gene mutations will automatically undergo preventative surgeries that may not be neces-sary.

Even so, this injunc-tion came as a shock to the genetics com-munity, many of whom claimed that bureau-cracy and politics were restricting the potential and the promise of ge-

netic testing. While these studies can-not guarantee complete diagnosis, they can often provide valuable information to mitigate general medical risks and have already been successfully used by millions of patients. Some research-ers claimed that to fully eliminate the FDA’s voiced threat, the US govern-ment would have to entirely restrict in-terpretation of genetic variants.

However, the FDA’s cease and desist letter to 23andMe published on their website on November 22nd is most fas-cinating because it do not truly dispar-age the method of genetic testing itself so much as discuss the threat of how consumers might perceive the results.

…[Medical] risks are typically mitigated by International Normal-ized Ratio (INR) management under a physician’s care. The risk of serious injury or death is known to be high when patients are either non-compli-ant or not properly dosed; combined

“tHE Fda FEaRs tHat patiEnts wHO disCOvER tHEy HavE GEnE MutatiOns

will autOMatiCally undERGO pREvEntativE suRGERiEs tHat May

nOt BE nECEssaRy.”

UNited stAtes


with the risk that a direct-to-consum-er test result may be used by a patient to self-manage, serious concerns are raised if test results are not adequate-ly understood by patients or if incor-rect test results are reported.

The FDA seems most concerned with a patient’s assessment of his or her per-sonal health outside the confines of a medical office and the consequential actions. 23andMe responded on De-cember 5th saying it would continue providing consumers with the raw data but would no longer market health claims or interpretations of this data. Nonetheless, this may not satisfy the FDA as consumers themselves will still be allowed to run anal-yses of their testing re-sults using online tools.

23andMe repre-sents the general trend within the scientific community towards the democratization of genetic information. This conflict illustrates the contrast between political health estab-lishments such as the American Medical As-sociation, Food and Drug Administra-tion, or United States Department of Health and Human Services, and the “techno-populist” engineers that are creating new methods of assessing per-sonal health. Once again, the inherent consumerism of the western economy encourages us to expand our availabil-ity to inexpensive genetic tests but we must consider the federal governments intentions in restricting our access.

defining “siCk”

O ne of the remaining de-bates between the scien-tific community and the political sphere is the gov-

ernment’s role in enforcing insurance companies to cover the sometimes-costly genetic tests. Currently, insur-ance providers generally cover tests done for genetic disorders in fetuses and newborns. For those with family history of certain illnesses, insurance companies often subsidize most or all

of testing as well. To make genetic testing truly uni-

versal, many geneticists are pushing a platform in which insurance compa-nies should be mandated to provide ge-netic tests and the subsequent preven-tative surgeries to those who are at risk. But, determining “at risk” individuals can often be difficult: having one fam-ily member with breast cancer is not automatically indicative of increased risk, and doctors might approach the necessity of testing differently.

Moreover, some health insurers such as Cigna have claimed that genetic test-ing will only be covered for those that reap a direct “medical benefit,” in order to eliminate patients testing just for the

sake of testing. Basically, a patient with family history of an illness such as Al-zheimer’s disease who orders a test will still have to pay out of pocket since no known treatment for Alzheimer’s exists and accordingly the patient would not receive a direct medical benefit.

Currently, Medicare only covers test-ing for patients who have already been diagnosed with cancer, rending the preventative nature of genetic testing useless. The Affordable Care Act lists BRCA testing as the only preventa-tive care genetic testing and even then BRCA tests are only available for eli-gible patients—those with much high-er-than-average chances of breast or ovarian cancer based on a pre-existing family history. The scientific communi-ty is putting pressure on policymakers to further expand mandates on insur-ance companies to allow more patients, even those with lower risk, to safely de-termine their genetic susceptibility. Es-pecially considering the FDA’s restric-

tions on personal testing companies, patients must rely on a medical profes-sional to provide them with the more costly versions of these resources.

Genetic testing is by no means per-fect, but its rapid growth and immense potential are just some of many reasons why it is likely to become one of the most important medical diagnostic de-vices of this decade. Given this, as test-ing capabilities expand, the scientific community should expect its autonomy in the patenting and sale of their devic-es to become increasingly restricted by federal provisions.

So I pose to you, the reader, some questions: To what lengths should we be willing to go to universalize genetic

testing? Does it make financial sense to invest in diagnostic tools for illnesses such as cancer or research their treat-ments? Would genetic testing create a world in which scientists are barred from claiming ownership over their discoveries and anxious patients overinvest in preventative medicine or would an expansion

of this research create a more success-ful medical field? While it may be diffi-cult to perfectly gauge the implications of genetic testing, learning our A’s, C’s, T’s, and G’s could be more difficult than we may have anticipated.

Tara Bansal is a Trinity freshman. She is a staff writer for DPR.

“tHE sCiEntiFiC COMMunity sHOuld ExpECt its autOnOMy in tHE

patEntinG and salE OF tHEiR dEviCEs tO BECOME inCREasinGly REstRiCtEd

By FEdERal pROvisiOns.”

North CAroLiNA


BEyOnd thE GOthICWOndErlandDuke, Durham and Inequality in AmericaBy Matt Hamilton

Jordan High School. One of its teach-ers, Brian McDonald, called it “abys-mal” to teach in North Carolina. Photo by Matt Hamilton.

North CAroLiNA


T he achievement gap is often presented as the fundamental problem in American education. It is

a popular narrative and it is undoubt-edly compelling. Affluent schools dras-tically and consistently outperform poor schools. Income inequality – the buzzword of contemporary domestic politics – is reinforced and perpetuated by deep inequalities in education along socioeconomic divides.

It is an easy problem to understand. It is a far harder to conceptualize ef-fective solutions – largely because the problem is chicken and egg; a Catch 22. Poverty is a significant impediment to learning. But, education is the turnkey to social mobility and escaping pover-ty. Income inequality is an impetus for the growing achievement gap in American, and simultaneously the achievement gap reinforces income inequality in America. Do we have to target poverty to lessen the achieve-ment gap? Or, do we need to dimin-ish the achievement gap in order to alleviate poverty? Where do we start? Where do we focus? How do we stop a powerful feedback loop?

The juxtaposition between Duke and Durham provides a clear and acute microcosm of the systemic and deepening inequality in Ameri-can education. It is a starting point to facilitate critical thinking about ways to ameliorate the self-reinforcing prob-lems of educational and economic in-equities.

In thinking about this article, I spent some time in Durham Schools. If I was going to write about the achievement gap in Durham, it was vitally important to expose myself to the school system I was writing about.

Beyond the gothic wonderland, Dur-ham provides a far different vignette of education in America than Duke. Much has recently been made of the policy shift in North Carolina – and rightfully so. Teacher tenure will soon disappear, teacher pay has fallen to 46th in the na-tion, and average investment per pupil is considerably below the national av-erage. Brian McDonald, social studies teacher at Jordan High School, called it “abysmal to teach in this state.” While

the profession remains fulfilling, he -- like many of his colleagues -- is forced to work two part time jobs to support his family.

The adversity faced by Jordan’s Mc-Donald, does not only stem from state-wide political circumstances. More so, the challenges he faces in the classroom are tremendously profound: even in his Advanced Placement classes at Jordan, which is one of Durham’s flagship in-stitutions, he faces three consistent problems: “attendance, motivation and literacy.”

But, if Durham is spending more than average per student, why are the results lagging behind the rest of the state? Why is “literacy” still a funda-mental problem, even in an AP class-

room at one of Durham’s top schools? There was a theme stressed by Mc-

Donald that also emerged in each of my conversations with stakeholders in Durham schools: poverty places an enormous strain on students and emerges as a difficult barrier to over-come. The barrier of poverty is never intractable, but it is always substantial.

61.9% of Durham’s 32,384 public school children are eligible for free or reduced priced lunches. To qualify for free lunches, a student must come from a family that earns less than 130% of the federal poverty level; for reduced priced lunches, the family must earn under 185% of the poverty level.

One in every four Durham children lives in poverty. Sixteen percent of Dur-ham’s homeless – a population that has nearly doubled since 2001 – are chil-dren.

In each of these conversations, a

unique stress was placed on the role of the University in partnering to target the achievement gap. Principal Mat-thew Hunt of Northern High School said that, “we want to know that Duke is committed to Durham Schools.”

And, by every indication Duke is wholeheartedly committed. The East Durham Children’s Initiative is a new organization modeled after Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. It works in a 120-block area in one of East Durham’s poorest neighborhoods. The Initiative is creating a pipeline of services and community partnerships to work intimately with students from birth until college in order to supple-ment their education. Education does not just happen in the classroom. And,

especially amidst poverty, effective education requires immense sup-port services: summer program-ming, mental health services, parent aid such as home visiting nurses for newly born children, and healthy, nutritional food.

EDCI is engaging a community to assure it is wholeheartedly dedicated to student success and aware of its possibility given community-wide commitment. Simultaneously, it is equipping the community with the resources that are vital to achieve such success by working closely with

Durham Schools to coordinate its sup-port services. David Reese, the organi-zation’s President and CEO, said that the organization – now in its third year of full implementation – is seeing up-ward trends. It is “moving the needle” in the community. “Child abuse and ne-glect rates are already down,” said Re-ese, and the zone now has the “lowest crime rate in East Durham.” He called poverty the “one and true obstacle,” but students can have success, he said, “if we engage parents and build commu-nity.”

To this point, Duke has been instru-mental in EDCI’s progress: it is provid-ing vitally important levels of human capital as the Initiative takes root, ex-pands and evaluates its impact. It is equally instrumental in many of the initiatives of Durham Public Schools commented Durham Assistant Super-intendents Dr. Deborah Polen-Pitman

“OnE In EvEry fOur durhaM ChIldrEn lIvES In pOvErty.”

North CAroLiNA


and Dr. Terri Mozingo. It is, by all ac-counts, a vital and beneficent partner.

Investing in the community is a vi-tal step, but it isn’t an absolute solu-tion. It is naïve to think the problem of inequality is solely external and not institutional. Providing human capi-tal to the community will help address poverty and the achievement gap, but fostering human capital at the Univer-sity amongst traditionally more vul-nerable populations is necessary for a substantial long-term impact on social mobility – given the vital role of college education in fostering social mobility.

Duke University prides itself on its need blind admissions policy. It right-fully takes great satisfaction in admit-ting students who prove worthy and capable of attending the institution no matter what socioeconomic status they come from. Throughout the past years, the University’s commitment to

financial aid has grown – now spending $130 million annually on financial aid.

And yet, only fifty-seven percent of Duke students qualify for need based financial aid; forty-three percent of Duke’s students are deemed capable of paying nearly $60,000 a year to attend the institution. In spite of a need-blind admissions policy, access to Duke is skewed towards the affluent, in large part because they have access to more resources and better schools growing up. As much as Duke exalts its diver-sity, students attending the institution are disproportionately wealthy.

A recent report by Dr. John Jerrin analyzed the socio-economic statuses of students at “elite” universities. The lowest quartile of income distribution – so called “disadvantaged students” – comprises only five percent of the stu-dent body at elite universities, whereas the highest quartile of income distribu-

tion – so called “advantaged students” – represents sixty percent of the students at elite universities.

Jerrin also quantified the benefits of higher education in America for the individual and the state. Beyond the countless intangible benefits of higher education, receiving higher education causes an individual to make an average of $400,000 more in their lifetime and has an extra value of roughly $250,000 for the state. Higher education drasti-cally increases an individual’s wealth, but access to higher education dispro-portionately belongs to those who are already economically “advantaged.”

Duke is no exception to Jerrin’s find-ings. To an extent, this is an inevitable problem. But, it is also a problem the institution quietly, and passively accept in spite of its festering growth. It is en-demic, corrosive and self-reinforcing.

We speak in platitudes about how

The University of Colorado Boulder is piloting a new system to formally integrate socioeconomic status into admissions considerations. Photo by Inga Munsinger Cotton.

North CAroLiNA


education is the escape from poverty – the turnkey for social mobility and con-duit for the American dream – but we often ignore how socioeconomic status is the primary determinant of educa-tional opportunities. Duke can, to an extent, provide resources to Durham as a means of taking responsibility for deepening inequality. But, it can also empower students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds with an unpar-alleled opportunity for social mobility. It can help students overcome deficien-cies in educational opportunities they faced, and therefore provide an escape from poverty.

So long as Duke remains an institu-tion that – in drastic proportions -- dis-proportionately accepts and caters to the wealthiest Americans, it tacitly accepts, enshrines and perpetuates deep inequalities, in spite of all it does to fight such inequalities with its re-sources.

The question emerges as to how to facilitate greater diversity without sacrificing Duke’s emphasis of ad-mitting the most driven and talented students. How does the institution balance its social responsibility to ac-tively facilitate social mobility with its continued commitment to attracting students from the highest-achieving academic backgrounds? Recent stud-ies suggest that when measuring so-cioeconomic diversity is properly in-tegrated into the admissions process, the goals are not mutually exclusive. The choice does not have to be between merit and diversity.

Two metrics developed at University of Colorado Boulder – the disadvantage and overachievement indices – provide a means to tangibly quantify how stu-dents have preformed relative to their socioeconomic background. Using these nuanced metrics – which consid-er a student’s family, school and com-munity a school group up in – students are categorized by how their academic achievement measures in relation to their socioeconomic backgrounds. It is a means to explain how students overcome circumstances and barriers beyond their control – and it provides admissions officers with another data point in a holistic admissions process

to understand how a student has pre-formed in context with their socioeco-nomic backgrounds.

At University of Colorado, these in-dices have yielded higher rates of so-cioeconomic diversity, and indirectly, higher rates of racial diversity. To this point, students admitted with the em-ployment of these indices have pre-formed well in their college setting. Gaertner has found that “On average, class-based admits (kids who wouldn’t be accepted without the disadvantage & overachievement indices) perform slightly worse than typical undergradu-ates.” But, this is to be expected given their status as borderline candidates for admission. More importantly and sur-prisingly, though, students identified

specifically through the overachieve-ment index have preformed better than the average student with “higher GPAs, credit hours earned, and graduation rates.” The indices provide institutions with a sense of how students have pre-formed relative to their circumstances, and as such, they give a more rounded context to predict how students might be able to thrive in an elite academic setting with immense opportunities.

More so, Gaertner believes the indi-ces are capable of succeeding in a high-ly selective academic environment like Duke. Research, he points out, dem-onstrates that “highly selective schools give little or no admissions preference to socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants.” It is within this context that Duke can emerge as a unique and innovative leader. “Of course, Duke

serves a small proportion of America’s undergraduates and can’t solve the in-equality problem on its own. But Duke is also an engine of innovation and up-ward mobility, and given its prestige Duke is in a position to send a stronger message and set a more visible example than most other schools.”

Duke’s race based affirmative action policy is a good starting point to cre-ate a diverse campus and help students overcome societal inequalities. But, it alone does not foster social mobility: the average income of minority stu-dents, according to a 2010 Chronicle report, remains over twice the average of the mean national income. More so, at no point during the period of 1994-2008 did the percentage of Duke stu-

dents who came from families below the US median income exceed 15%.

Duke must vigorously seek to ex-pand its applicant pool to more disad-vantaged students and it must quan-tify a student’s performance relative to their background in order to ex-pand the number of competitive ap-plicants from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. If social mobility is the byproduct of higher education, Duke must intensify its commitment to fostering greater socioeconomic di-versity. The efforts, to this point, have fallen short. Until elite institutions take more robust strides to counter-act the current severe imbalance of

socioeconomic diversity, it will propa-gate serious inequalities, no matter how much it invests its human capital in addressing poverty and the achieve-ment gap. The commitment must be credible both internally and external-ly – to providing its human capital to disadvantaged communities while also investing in disadvantaged communi-ties by providing more opportunities to integrate their brightest into our insti-tution. This multifaceted approach is a vital step towards solving the feedback loop of economic and educational in-equality – and universities are at the center of it.

Matt Hamilton is a Trinity sophomore. He is a staff writer for DPR.

“thE ChOICE dOES nOt havE tO BE BEtWEEn MErIt and dIvErSIty.”

already read this cover to cover?

Read more at dukepoliticalreview.org

Duke Political Review Vol.1 Issue1 Spring 2014

Documents

Transcript of Duke Political Review Vol.1 Issue1 Spring 2014