Few times have been worse than the present to say anything good about the European Union (EU). It has faced many crises over the years, but none have been as serious as the current problems in the eurozone. Since news first broke of the difficulties in Greece in late 2009, pundits and political leaders have been falling over themselves in their efforts to ratchet up the language of doom and gloom. Under the circumstance, euro-optimists might be well-advised to lay low, and certainly they seem hard to find at the moment.

And yet this is the very time to remind ourselves of the achievements of the EU, because if we are to make sensible choices about where we go from here, we will need to have a clear idea of both its successes and its failures. Whatever happens to the euro, the EU is obviously on the brink of some major changes, generated not just by its immediate problems but also by some broader political and philosophical questions about the meaning and purposes of the European project.

Critics have focused on numerous themes in their recent attacks on the EU, among which is the recurring question of just what it means to be European. The EU is regularly accused of lacking clear purpose, and conventional wisdom suggests that Europeans have too little in common to weather the crises. After decades of convergence, we are now often told that Europeans are moving apart, with a growing backlash against European integration and – more specifically – a right-wing reaction against immigration, and talk of the failure of multiculturalism.

In truth, however, Europeans have a great deal in common , but they are often the last to realize this because they are repeatedly told about their differences, and the EU is repeatedly castigated for its lack of leadership and its failure to make a mark as an actor in the international system. The result is that many can no longer see the wood for the trees. It is only when we compare the European experience with that of other parts of the world that the patterns begin to emerge.

One of the clearest examples of Europeanism (if we understand this term as meaning the distinctive set of values and preferences that drive choices and preferences in Europe) is its secularism. Where support for organized religion is growing in almost every other part of the world, in Europe it is declining, and this is impacting the way Europeans think about politics, science, social relations, and moral questions.

Another example is offered by the redefinition of the role of states. It was in Europe that the Westphalian state system was born, and yet Europeans since the end of the Second World War have been reviewing their association with states: more are thinking of themselves as Europeans, while identity with nations has been growing. Meanwhile, Europeans have been rejecting traditional notions of patriotism, which – thanks to its long association with nationalism – has a bad reputation in Europe.

On the international front, the Europeanist model is notable for its support of civilian over military means for dealing with threats to security, its support for multilateralism over unilateralism, and its preference for the use of soft power (incentives and encouragement) over hard power (threats and punishment). Europeans long ago tired of war and conflict, and while they are still prepared to engage militarily where necessary, they would rather use diplomacy.

The examples go on: support for welfarism, the cosmopolitan association with universal ideas and the belief that local and global concerns cannot be separated, communitarian ideas about achieving a balance between individual and community interests, a belief in the merits of sustainable development, a belief in working to live rather than living to work, and association with a host of more specific beliefs, such as opposition to capital punishment and support for action on climate change.

Much of the current pessimism about the direction and future of European integration is generated by a belief that Europeans do not have enough in common to sustain the efforts of the EU. The result is that critics focus on the structural weaknesses of EU institutions and policies, of which – to be sure – there are many. But if we look beyond those weaknesses, we quickly find that Europeans (thanks in large part to the encouragement of integration under the auspices of the EU) have enough in common – and enough that distinguishes them from others, such as Russians or Americans – to sustain the European project over the long-term, whatever its short-term problems.

John McCormick is Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Politics at the Indianapolis campus of Indiana University in the United States. A dual British and American citizen, he has long been interested in pinning down the meaning and identity of the EU, and finds it particularly instructive to compare and contrast the European and American experiences. His most recent book, Europeanism, was published by OUP in 2010. He has also written Europeanism and The European Superpower (2007) as well as several textbooks on EU and comparative politics.

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What did you find most surprising in your research and interaction with the Tea Party? On balance, how were you received by the people you interviewed?

When we would first reach out to local Tea Party groups, they were often quite suspicious of us, particularly because we come from Harvard University. Many we spoke to in the Tea Party believe that East Coast liberals are elitists who look down on “everyday Americans” like themselves. They also wondered, since our politics are not in line with theirs, whether we were truly interested in understanding their political activity, or whether we just wanted to attack them.

Meeting in person, however, people were extremely welcoming – which surprised us, at least at first, given how nervous people had been over email. Partly, it may be that getting to see us in person made us seem less intimidating or suspect. But also, these older, middle-class people, particularly those in the South, have very strong norms of hospitality. They frequently referred to us as their guests, and went out of their way to make us comfortable in their meeting places and homes. Only on one occasion was anyone less than polite to us at a Tea Party event – and numerous other members were clearly unhappy with the outburst, and several went out of their way to apologize privately afterwards.

How would you assess importance of the web in helping to spread and sustain the Tea Party’s messaging?

The web has played a crucial role in helping organize what would otherwise be a relatively dispersed group of older, extremely conservative people. In fact, we suspect that those in the Tea Party, particularly the older members, became more Internet-savvy as a result of their Tea Party activity! But the Internet has also allowed for the spread of ideas that are sometimes far outside the mainstream of political discourse. Some of the more conspiratorial concerns we heard (for instance, about the need to revive the gold standard, about the imminent threat of martial law, about the dangers of modernizing the electric grid) occasionally appeared on Fox News or conservative talk radio, but largely survive online.

Who the “leaders” of the Tea Party are continues to be a subject of debate. Do you expect the Tea Party ever to have a centralized organizational structure?

No. In our book, we discuss the Tea Party as the confluence of three long-standing strands of conservativism, which worked together in new ways in the first years of the Obama Administration. First, older, white, middle-class conservatives, many of whom had been previously involved in politics or local affairs, were demoralized after the electoral defeats of 2008, and looking for new leadership. Second, conservative media outlets, particularly Fox News and talk radio, helped mobilize and direct these grassroots conservatives. Third, long-standing extreme free-market advocacy groups, like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, took advantage of the new activism to build connections with grassroots conservatives and to push their agenda in Washington. These groups had similar goals in 2009 and 2010 – revitalizing conservatism, derailing the Obama Administration’s progressive agenda, and pushing the Republican Party to the right. But, as we discuss in the book, these groups do not always have the same policy goals, and in 2012, the Republican Party will have to appeal to moderates to win back the presidency. So it is unclear that the Tea Party label will continue to be a banner that these various conservative forces can rally behind.

Does the possibility exist for a split within the Republican Party?

Not because of the Tea Party. There are always factions within a party, and the Tea Party supporters make up a major component of the Republican base. To the extent they are frustrated with the Republican Party, it is because they see the party as inadequately conservative, not because the Tea Party voters are political independents.

What differences do you foresee in the role of the Tea Party in the 2012 elections versus the role they played in 2010?

First of all, Tea Party sympathizers will make up a far smaller portion of the electorate in 2012. Far fewer people vote in midterm elections, and those who do tend to be older, wealthier, and more conservative. In general elections, like 2012, we tend to see higher rates of turnout among the young and among minorities. So the influence of the Tea Party at the grassroots will be diluted. The elite aspects of the Tea Party, of course, will still be influence campaign contributors. And we are seeing the Tea Party play a role in the Republican primaries – a point we discuss in detail in our New York Times post.

Vanessa Williamson is a PhD candidate in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University and co-author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Previously, she served as the Policy Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

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By Edward Zelinsky

On a personal level, I enjoyed the news reports that Mitt Romney holds assets worth tens of millions of dollars in his individual retirement account (IRA). These reports confirm a central thesis of The Origins of the Ownership Society, namely, the extent to which defined contribution accounts, such as IRAs and 401(k) accounts, have become central features of American life.

I was also gratified as colleagues, friends and neighbors who are often skeptical of what I do for a living (“You actually teach about pensions?”) sought my opinion about Mitt Romney’s IRA. Since we don’t have all of the details, my answers entailed a certain amount of conjecture. For those too sheepish to ask, here are the questions most frequently posed to me and my answers:

Mitt Romney. Photo by Gage Skidmore. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Because he was a better investor than you. It appears that Mitt Romney’s IRA largely consists of investments he made while a partner at Bain Capital and of the proceeds from such Bain investments. Those investments were apparently made in Mitt Romney’s 401(k) account when the investments had relatively little value. When he left Bain, these investments were rolled over, i.e., transferred tax-free, to Mitt Romney’s IRA. While these investments were modest when initially made, they are now quite valuable. That is what successful private equity investors do.

When must Mitt Romney pay taxes on the assets in his IRA?

April 1, 2018. He could start paying taxes before then but what the Code calls his “required beginning date” is April 1, 2018. This date is set by a statutory formula which is quizzical even by the standards of the Internal Revenue Code: Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947. He will be 70 years old on March 12, 2017. Six months after this birthday is September 12, 2017. Therefore, Mitt Romney must start to draw down and pay tax on his IRA as of April 1, 2018.

How much tax will Mitt Romney have to pay then?

It will depend on the size of the IRA at that time and the tax rates then in effect. Because Mrs. Romney is only two years younger than her husband, the first distribution from Mitt Romney’s account on or before April 1, 2018 must be at least 3.65% of the account as it then exists. This percentage is based on the Romneys’ joint life expectancies as determined by Treasury actuarial tables. Thus, for example, if Mitt Romney’s IRA is worth $100,000,000 on December 31, 2017, his first distribution from this account on or before April 1, 2018 must be $3,650,000. Assuming that Mitt Romney made only tax deductible contributions to the account, all of this distribution will be taxed as ordinary income, at whatever tax rate then prevails.

What about subsequent years?

Each year, as the IRA holder ages, the required distribution (and thus taxable income) increases as a percentage of the current account balance. For example, when Mitt Romney is 75, his required IRA distribution will be 4.37% of the account as it then exists. When Mitt Romney is 80 years old, he will be required to receive and pay ordinary income taxes on 5.35% of the IRA balance as it then exists.

Wouldn’t Mitt Romney have been better off from a tax perspective keeping these investments as capital assets outside his IRA?

We don’t know. Had these investments been held directly by Mitt Romney as capital assets, they would have been more lightly taxed as capital gains. In contrast, Mitt Romney will pay tax at higher ordinary income rates when these investments are eventually distributed to him from his IRA. However, there are two potentially offsetting factors which Mitt Romney likely considered as part of his tax planning. First, some, perhaps many, of these investments may yield ongoing ordinary income. As to this annual income, it is typically considered desirable to engage in the kind of tax-deferral Mitt Romney has obtained by holding assets in his IRA.

Second, if assets are sold inside the IRA, those sales are tax-deferred. In contrast, if Mitt Romney had kept these assets in his own name and sold them, tax would have been due upfront on each sale. It appears that Mitt Romney concluded that these latter two considerations made it tax efficient to put these investments into his 401(k) account and, from there, into his IRA.

What is a “foreign blocker”?

The term “blocker” is today used to describe a corporation interposed between an investor and an investment. A foreign blocker is a blocker incorporated outside of the United States, typically in a low tax jurisdiction like the Cayman Islands.

Why did Mitt Romney use a foreign blocker for his IRA?

Probably to avoid the Internal Revenue Code’s unrelated business income tax (UBIT).

What is the UBIT?

Otherwise tax-exempt institutions, like pension trusts, university endowments and Mitt Romney’s IRA, trigger federal tax if, instead of investing to obtain dividends, interest and similar forms of passive investment income, they receive active earnings from business operations. The UBIT is the provision of the Code which levies this tax on the active business income received by tax-exempt entities. It is likely that many Bain assets are active businesses and thus would generate UBIT if owned directly by Mitt Romney’s IRA.

So how does the foreign blocker work?

Instead of the exempt institution itself holding active business assets, those assets are held by a foreign corporation which pays little or no corporate tax to its home jurisdiction. This foreign corporation then pays dividends to the exempt institution. These dividends are then tax-deferred to the exempt entity such as Mitt Romney’s IRA.

Without more detail, we don’t know if the foreign blocker corporation actually reduced Mitt Romney’s effective tax obligation. If the foreign blocker corporation owns U.S. business assets, the blocker will pay U.S. tax on its U.S. business income. This typically results in no net tax savings since the U.S. tax obligation is merely shifted from the tax-exempt institution to the blocker corporation.

If, however, the foreign blocker holds foreign business assets, it is possible for the blocker to spare the U.S. exempt institution from U.S. tax while paying little or no foreign tax. In that case, the foreign blocker is a real tax winner.

To evaluate this further, we need to know more about the portfolio of Mitt Romney’s IRA. It is, however, unlikely that a Bain Capital partner would have used a foreign blocker unless some tax savings resulted.

Is this unusual?

Hardly. The use of foreign blockers is quite common. You (here my previously indignant questioner typically becomes quite sheepish) may be covered by a pension plan which uses foreign blockers to defer UBIT on what otherwise would be currently taxed business income. You may also benefit from or contribute to a university endowment which uses foreign blockers.

Can I invest my IRA funds like Mitt Romney?

In theory, yes. In practice, no. There are mutual funds which invest in private equity deals of the sort Mitt Romney holds in his IRA. However, under the best of circumstances, these funds need to be scrutinized carefully as to their management fees and whether they really obtain the kinds of investment opportunities available to a Bain Capital partner. I’m skeptical.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears here.

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The Republican establishment is stepping up its attacks against Gingrich. It was coordinated today from a variety of quarters: Bob Dole, Peter Wehner, Tom Delay, William Buckley Jr., and Anne Coulter.

Photo by Gage Skidmore. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The fact that a coordinated strategy against Gingrich is happening within party ranks conveniently on the eve of the last debate before the Florida primary is particularly striking given that Gingrich doesn’t really have a fall back plan beyond Florida. Romney took a landslide victory in Nevada, the next state up in the primary calendar, back in 2008, so it is difficult to imagine that Gingrich would be able to pull an upset there, or in Arizona or Michigan on February 28.

But everything changes if Gingrich wins in Florida. Then the momentum will keep him going until Super Tuesday on March 6 when the South speaks and Gingrich will rise; and civil war will erupt in the Republican party. The Establishment will do everything to thwart him there, and that is why they are taking no chances and are already making headway. Mitt Romney’s superior debate performance tonight was also a reflection of a campaign in full knowledge that the Florida firewall must not fall.

A few days after the President’s State of the Union address, hardly anyone is talking about it because Obama’s fate in November will depend more on forces he cannot control than on anything he can do. Every single poll out there placing Gingrich and Obama in a head-to-head match gives the election to Obama — by a 12 point spread on average. If the Republican primary electorate delivers Gingrich to Obama, even Bob Dole and William Buckley think it’s going to be four more years.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.

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Photo by Gage Skidmore. Source: Wikipedia

Volatility, though, has been the hallmark of the nomination race this year, and there is no reason to think this will change. The higher quantity of debates has helped Gingrich build a momentum in the last week — as has his superPAC — and both are new developments from the last cycle. For the first time in modern history, the Republicans have picked a different winner for each of the first three states. For the first time ever, the Republicans are going to nominate either a Mormon (Romney) or a Catholic (Gingrich). This denominational diversity reveals a conservative electorate much more concerned about the economy than about social values, which was the major issue just eight years ago. Finally, the loyal supporters of Ron Paul are a wild card, because no one knows to whom they will turn when Paul finally bows out — and he intends to to hang around. All told, there are 1150 delegates to get to earn the nomination, so this race pushes on at least until the Spring.

Gingrich did not win in South Carolina because of “electability” as the SC exit polls misleadingly say; he won because of the rage that South Carolinians believe is necessary to take on Obama. Gingrich received the first standing ovation in the debates so far when he observed that more people had been put on food stamps under Obama than under any other president – a line he has been repeating in the last week. Obama will not and cannot receive credit for whatever he has done because his very presence in the White House is perceived by some conservatives as a criminalization of the the state in the service of socialism. This newly rediscovered “southern strategy” worked in South Carolina and it may well work beyond.

Gingrich is in a good position but not a front-leading one, however. He will not enjoy the native-son-of-the-South advantage in Florida as he did in South Carolina, so the next contest is going to be important for him to prove his viability. He would need a huge infusion of cash to be able to afford the television ads he or his superPAC will need to run in Florida. Gingrich won’t be able to sustain his momentum with just the free media, though the two debates last week will help. For now, Romney still enjoys a lead because Florida’s electorate is older and less evangelical than in South Carolina. Early voting has already started in Florida, and will continue until the 28th, so Romney’s initial lead there would help him.

It is also worth noting that Romney is the only candidate who has done well in all three states. He is still, therefore, the frontrunner. But he cannot afford any more mis-steps. The tax returns questions from the media was just poorly handled, and Romney has stuttered repeatedly on a question for which he should have been more than prepared (as Gingrich was about ABC’s interview with his ex-wife). Romney’s fundamental problem, paradoxically, is that he is a happy, privileged man. He has no axe to grind, no grievances — not even with the liberals and the feds. Worse still, he doesn’t even perform anger very well, and that is why he could not gain traction in South Carolina. Romney is going to have to go after Gingrich’s ethics violations, Fannie and Freddie Mac associations, and his multiple marriages; while Gingrich is going to go after Romney’s Bain history, his healthcare positions in Massachusetts, and his tax returns. Things will have to get much uglier before the results of the nomination contest become clearer. And so onward toward the Sunshine State we go.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.

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Has the Washington foreign policy establishment disavowed democracy in the Middle East? According to Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald the answer is a resounding yes. Greenwald, a lawyer by training and blogger/author by trade, has long been a trenchant critic of various “establishments.” In addition to “America’s national security priesthood,” he has often skewered the mainstream media for various transgressions such as giving the George W. Bush administration a pass on the invasion of Iraq and more recently for giving Luke Russert and Chelsea Clinton high-profile jobs. Greenwald’s work on post-9/11 domestic policies, especially the way the Bush administration and a complicit Congress compromised civil liberties through dubious laws like the USA Patriot Act is among the best there is out there. Yet on those occasions when he has wandered into foreign policy, Greenwald’s commentary is considerably less original.

In his January 2 column, Greenwald went after CSIS’s Jon Alterman for an oped he published in the December 31 New York Times. Alterman had been an election observer in Egypt during the second round of polls. In about 80 words he relayed what he saw, including large numbers of voters turning out for either the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party or the al-Nour Party, which is affiliated with one strand of the Egyptian Salafist movement. Alterman, who spent three years living in Egypt in the 1990s, suggests that the best outcome in terms of American interests would be “a balance” between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and Egypt’s new politicians. The implication being, I think, that the military would retain control over important foreign policy issues like the bilateral relationships with the United States and Israel while ceding executive authority in other areas to elected civilians.

Being well…I guess… part of the foreign policy establishment by dint of my employment, it is hard to understand how Greenwald extrapolates from Alterman’s oped that Washington foreign policy establishment has collectively decided that democracy in the Middle East is bad for the United States. A few observations before I move on: 1) people outside of Washington often make claims about Washington that they would never make about anywhere else. Greenwald is a smart guy. He surely knows that the so-called foreign policy elite is a diverse group. Indeed, there are many varieties of species in this zoo, 2) I don’t know whom Greenwald has been reading, but I count exactly two people who have warned that democratic development in the Middle East is bad for U.S. interests—Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and Greg Gause, professor of political science at the University of Vermont. Greenwald suggests his two primary bugaboos: Israelis and neocons. He is surely correct about the Israelis who prefer to make deals with regional authoritarians whom they hope can keep a lid on public sentiment, but he has got the neocons wrong. (By the way, in order to make his claim that “many neocons” oppose democracy in the Arab world, Greenwald cites a February 2, 2011 piece—nine days before Hosni Mubarak fell—in The Forward that only references David Wurmser and Malcolm Hoenlein , hardly a representative sampling.) Take the Egypt Working Group, a bipartisan group that which includes leading neocon personalities like my colleague, Elliott Abrams, and the Brookings Institutions’ Robert Kagan. Neither the Group nor Abrams nor Kagan have wavered in their support for democratic change in Egypt.

The jaundiced views of folks like Gelb and Gause does not make either of them democracy haters, though. It seems to me that they are onto something that few people took into consideration during the heady days of last winter, myself included. It has been an article of faith among many observers that more democratic countries in the Middle East will ultimately be better allies of the United States. Maybe. This is actually more of a hunch based on what people hope will happen in the long run than a reasoned analysis based on either historical precedent or the political dynamics of region. The emergence of a new kind of politics in the Arab world in which public opinion matters in new and important ways, revolutionary narratives about what has ailed countries the past and the best solutions for the future, as well as politicians seeking to establish their nationalist bona fides strongly suggests that in the short run (might I remind that the long run is made up of lots of short runs) Washington is going to have a tough time in the Middle East.

Greenwald seems to think that Washington has a special allergy to the accumulation of Islamist political power conveniently forgetting the Islamists who run Turkey or the Wahhabist worldview that undergirds Saudi Arabia or the fact that policymakers saw the writing on the wall relatively quickly after Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak fell and dropped official prohibitions on interaction with the Muslim Brotherhood. Still, the changes that are coming in the Middle East are not a function of Islamism per se, but rather politics. It would be rather un-pragmatic politically of the vaunted pragmatists of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to renounce its long-held position that the United States has played a malevolent role in Egypt and the Arab world more generally. The Brothers are not alone, however. Everyone in Egypt has sought to leverage the moment of national empowerment and dignity that the January 25th uprising represents to their political benefit and the strategic relationship between Mubarak’s Egypt and Washington is a juicy target.

Given U.S. interests—the free flow of oil from the Middle East, helping to ensure Israeli security, and preventing any other power from dominating the region—and the changes presently underway in the Arab world, foreign policy analysts would be remiss not to point out that there are potential downsides to democratic development in the region. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and others helped create a regional order that made it relatively easier and less expensive to pursue its interests in the Middle East. That era has come to an end and it is likely to be costly to the U.S. The good news for Greenwald and everyone else is that there is nothing Washington can do about it. There will be no Operation Egyptian Freedom. American foreign policy, in order to be successful, is going to have to take stock of the changes in the region and adjust. There is every indication that the national security priesthood actually understands this and is now groping to develop a new approach to the region, though much of U.S. policy will depend on political outcomes in the Middle East and not what is written in the oped pages or said at Washington, DC foreign policy roundtables.

This article appears courtesy of CFR.

Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A leading expert on Arab and Turkish politics, he is author of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.

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Interviewee: Steven A. Cook, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org

With the anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution [January 25] only a couple of weeks away, do Egyptians think they are better off now than they were when Mubarak was in charge? What about U.S. officials, are they happier or more worried?

For the most part, Egyptians are happy to see the end of the Mubarak era, which was not an era of prosperity. It was not an era in which they could participate. It was an era of corruption and authoritarian politics. There remain supporters of the old regime, although they are a relatively small minority. The big question is what does the so-called silent majority–that the Egyptian Armed Forces consistently looks to–want? It’s unclear without major nationwide polling, but you do get a sense that what these people want is change. They came out in large numbers to vote in the now-concluded parliamentary elections. They want change. They want prosperity. They do not want the authoritarianism of the previous regime, but beyond that, it’s entirely unclear what Egyptians want. And I think that that is the challenge going forward.

There is supposed to be a hundred-person constitutional assembly created to write a new Egyptian constitution, which is to be followed by a presidential election. Is that going to be easy?

The challenge in the constitution-writing period is divining a vision for Egypt that the vast majority of Egyptians agree upon. And I think that that’s been and remains a problem.

Is Washington content to watch this uncertainty unfold?

The challenge in the constitution-writing period is divining a vision for Egypt that the vast majority of Egyptians agree upon.

U.S. policymakers find themselves in an unknown environment. Egyptian politics have been quite scrambled. The party of the Muslim Brotherhood–the Freedom and Justice Party–is slated to win somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent of the seats in the new People’s Assembly, followed by the Salafist al-Nour Party, with some 25 percent. Neither of these groups has historically held worldviews that conform to American interests in the region. So there’s going to be a divergence between Egypt and the United States over time. And that’s due not only to Islamist politics. People associate Egypt’s strategic relationship with the United States with Hosni Mubarak, even though it began before him, and people don’t believe that it served Egypt very well. As a result, I think there are going to be changes, and I think that that is certainly cause for concern. American policy makers are aware of the changes in Egypt, and they’re struggling to find a policy that adjusts to this new era.

The parliament that’s now been elected, as you point out, is predominantly led by the Muslim Brotherhood and the more conservative Salafists, but there’s no single individual who stands out for president. The people who are running for the presidency are more or less people we knew from the Mubarak days. Does it alarm you at all that there is no clear leader?

It is evident that Egypt, which through the years has had very strong leaders [Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak], now seems to be lacking someone who can give the revolution some sort of leadership and coherence. People are vying for the leadership role, but the uncertainty at the top ultimately may be a good thing over the long run. Egypt has suffered from executives with too much power. I would bet that if this constitution is written in a relatively free and unfettered environment, that the tendency will be to reduce the powers of the executive.

There are some newcomers to the field of would-be presidential candidates, but the ones that are known more broadly are people that are not surprises. It remains to be seen how they will fare. Mohamed El Baradei [former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency] had a hard time gaining traction among the broader public. The supporters of Amr Moussa [former head of the Arab League] insist that he has the broad, public support that would be required to carry him to the presidency. Nobody really knows. Does Abdel Moneim Fotouh, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is a charismatic figure, tip the scales as the new leader? There are a number of other potential presidential candidates: Ahmed Shafiq–whom Mubarak appointed as prime minister during the uprising and remained for a short period afterwards, resigning in March–is seen as someone [who] might command significant numbers of Egyptian votes.

When will the presidential election take place, after the constitution is written?

That’s the way it’s supposed to happen, but we’re in a compressed timeline now because the military, as a result of public pressure, has indicated that it will hand power over at the end of June or beginning of July of this year, rather than in 2013 as originally planned. The constitution’s supposed to be written in six months. So the question is: Can the constitution be written, a presidential election held, and the military [hand over power by] June-July? That does not seem to be feasible. So there’s going to have to be a reshuffling of the timeline.

What about the constitutional assembly?

There’s already some dispute over where these hundred people will come from and who will choose them. There was some thought that it would come from the parliament, then it was argued it would come from a combination of people from the parliament and outside the parliament. It is uncertain whether the parliament will choose the outsiders, or [whether the] military [will] do so. Or will the parliament and military both do the choosing?

There’s the potential for a significant struggle between a newly elected parliament that can legitimately claim a popular mandate and a military that retains executive authority and would like to continue to be the ultimate authority and source of power in the political system. That is setting things up for what is likely to be a clash between the parliament and the military.

The Brotherhood and the military are not beyond making short-term tactical deals with each other to advance each other’s interests at particular moments, but ultimately they are competitors.

The military will continue to be watchful and want to oversee things, but it needs to make a deal with someone about its economic interests, about its post-transition role. If that deal is made, perhaps there won’t be a decisive showdown with the parliament.

What happened to the liberal young people, the people who were in Tahrir Square back in January 2011 who inspired the revolution? Have they been pushed to the sidelines with the rise of the Islamists and the Salafists?

Yes and no. There’s a difference between the revolutionary groups and the political parties. The revolutionary groups have had quite obviously a hard time gaining traction. In some ways, they’ve turned themselves into a permanent revolution against the military, which they see as an extension of the Mubarak era. But that kind of permanent protest seems to have had diminishing returns. They don’t have the kind of momentum that they had coming out of the uprising. That’s not to say that they haven’t been able to make their voices heard and their weight felt. You had big protests in late November; you had this terrible kind of battle between revolutionary groups and the military police in downtown Cairo in mid-December.

[Revolutionary groups] were not very interested in party politics and as a result didn’t organize in parties. In the elections, secular, liberal parties haven’t done very well. Many liberal, social democratic parties recently set up are redundant. They have very similar programs, but they’re divided along leadership and personalities. There’s one bloc of political parties–the Free Egyptians, the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, and the Tagammu party–that ended up in the 15 percent range. They’ll have a voice in the parliament along with a smattering of independents, but by and large the elections have favored the Brotherhood, which had an eighty-year head start, had the benefits of having for a long time a mechanism of political mobilization through the provision of social services–and has a vision of Egyptian society that resonates with people.

Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A leading expert on Arab and Turkish politics, he is author of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.

This article appears courtesy of CFR.

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Ron Paul has two problems. One is his and the larger conservative movement of which he is a part. The other is ours—by which I mean a left that is committed to both economic democracy and anti-imperialism.

Ron Paul’s problem is not merely the racist newsletters, the close ties with Lew Rockwell, his views on abortion, or even his stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act—though these automatically disqualify him from my support. His real problem is his fundamentalist commitment to federalism, which would make any notion of human progress in this country impossible.

Federalism has a long and problematic history in this country—it lies at the core of the maintenance of slavery and white supremacy; it was consistently invoked as the basis for opposition to the welfare state; it has been, contrary to many of its defenders, one of the cornerstones of some of the most repressive moments in our nation’s history[pdf]—and though liberals used to be clear about its regressive tendencies, they’ve grown soft on it in recent years. As the liberal Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar put it not so long ago:

Once again, populism and federalism—liberty and localism—work together; We the People conquer government power by dividing it between the two rival governments, state and federal.

As I’ve argued repeatedly on this blog and elsewhere, the path forward for the left lies in the alliance between active social movements on the ground and a strong national state. There is simply no other way, at least not that I am aware of, to break the back of the private autocracies that oppress us all.

Even people, no, especially people who focus on Paul’s position on the drug war should think about the perils of his federalism. There are 2 million people in prison in this country. At most 10 percent of them are in federal prisons; the rest are in state and local prisons. If Paul ended the drug war, maybe 1/2 of those in federal prison would be released. Definitely a step, but it has to be weighed against his radical embrace of whatever it is that states and local governments do.

Paul is a distinctively American type of libertarian: one that doesn’t have a critique of the state so much as a critique of the federal government. That’s a very different kettle of fish. I think libertarianism is problematic enough—in that it ignores the whole realm of social domination (or thinks that realm is entirely dependent upon or a function of the existence of the state or thinks that it can be remedied by the persuasive and individual actions of a few good souls)—but a states-rights-based libertarianism is a social disaster.

So that’s his problem.

Our problem—and again by “our” I mean a left that’s social democratic (or welfare state liberal or economically progressive or whatever the hell you want to call it) and anti-imperial—is that we don’t really have a vigorous national spokesperson for the issues of war and peace, an end to empire, a challenge to Israel, and so forth, that Paul has in fact been articulating. The source of Paul’s positions on these issues are not the same as ours (again more reason not to give him our support). But he is talking about these issues, often in surprisingly blunt and challenging terms. Would that we had someone on our side who could make the case against an American empire, or American supremacy, in such a pungent way.

This, it’s clear, is why people like Glenn Greenwald say that Paul’s voice needs to be heard. Not, Greenwald makes clear, because he supports Paul, but because it is a terrible comment—a shanda for the left—that we don’t have anyone on our side of comparable visibility launching an attack on American imperialism and warfare. (Recalling what I said in the context of the death of Christopher Hitchens, I suspect this has something to do with our normalization and acceptance of war as a way of life.) In other words, we need to listen to Paul, not because he’s worthy of our support, and certainly not because the reasons that underlie his positions on foreign policy are ours, but because he reveals what’s not being said, or not being said enough, on our side.

There is a long history in this country of the left not paying too much attention to the ways in which our leaders do things that set the stage for worse things to come. J. Edgar Hoover got a tremendous amount of traction under FDR and the New Deal because he was perceived to be a spit-and-polish, professional crime fighter. So trusted and hailed was he by liberals and progressives—when he worked for their leaders—that it was none other than Arthur Schlesinger, in The Vital Center (1949), who urged Americans to put their trust in Hoover rather than in the Red hunters of the far right:

All Americans must bear in mind J. Edgar Hoover’s warning that counter-espionage is no field for amateurs. We need the best professional counterespionage agency we can get to protect our national security.

In 1950, William Keller reports in his essential The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover, while Truman was still president, Hubert Humphrey took to the floor of the Senate to declare:

If the FBI does not have enough trained manpower to do this job, then, for goodness sake, let us give the FBI the necessary funds for recruiting the manpower it needs….This is a job that must be done by experts.

Yet, as Ellen Schrecker rightly argued in Many Are the Crimes, her definitive account of McCarthyism:

Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act opened the Bureau’s files, “McCarthyism” would probably be called “Hooverism.” For the FBI was the bureaucratic heart of the McCarthy era.

In the last week, liberals and progressives have been arguing about these issues; Digby has been especially cogent and worth listening to. The only thing I have to add to that debate is this: both sides are right. Not in a the-truth-lies-somewhere-in-between sort of way. Nor in a can’t-we-all-get-along sort of way. No, both sides are right in the sense that I laid out above: Ron Paul is unacceptable, and it’s unacceptable that we don’t have someone on the left who is raising the issues of imperialism, war and peace, and civil liberties in as visible and forceful a way.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He blogs at coreyrobin.com, where this post originally appeared.

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Newt Gingrich, class warrior and scourge of the capitalist elite! Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

Veteran Gingrich-watchers wouldn’t have predicted the latest Newt incarnation, either, but they probably weren’t too surprised. Over the course of his long political career – he first ran for Congress almost four decades ago – Gingrich has been consistently inconsistent and predictably unpredictable. Whatever the issue, he has been on all sides of it.

Obviously one can point to the chameleonic shifts that Gingrich’s GOP presidential rivals already have highlighted, including his former support for government-mandated health insurance and his now-regretted collaboration with Nancy Pelosi on the dangers of global warming. But take the subject of, for example, the Republican Party’s relations with African-Americans. Gingrich has lately been spanked by the New York Times editorial page for implying that black Americans prefer food stamps and government dependency to jobs, and indeed his efforts to stir white racial resentments seem likely to worsen the Republicans’ already dismal standing with black voters in the 2012 elections. But Gingrich has not always traded in this sort of George Wallace-style, minority-baiting populism. In 1989, after he won election as House Republican whip, Gingrich told an interviewer that his goal was to build the GOP as “a caring, humanitarian reform party.” He believed that “one of the greatest mistakes the Reagan administration made was its failure to lead aggressively in civil rights.” And despite his recent criticism of Mitt Romney as a despicable “Massachusetts moderate,” Gingrich in that same 1989 interview identified himself with “the classic moderate wing of the party, where, as a former Rockefeller chairman, I’ve spent most of my life.”

For all of his reversals, it’s hard to tag Gingrich as a flip-flopper, if only because he argues his positions with a vehemence matched only by the vehemence with which he later argues diametrically opposed positions. It’s not inconsistency so much as political schizophrenia, although the logic of his changing postures always seems transparently obvious to Gingrich if no one else.

It’s possible that the upcoming South Carolina primary will be Gingrich’s last, snarling stand, after which he at last will pass from the national political stage. Or perhaps he will emerge as the conservative alternative to Romney and take his improbable criticism of Bain Capital all the way to the Republican convention. Who knows? With Gingrich, all attempts at prediction seem futile.

But his presidential run suggests at least some of the ways in which American politics has changed since Gingrich led the “revolution” that resulted in the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress. The recent $5 million donation to a Gingrich-supporting Super PAC is evidence of the growing influence of money in politics, which Gingrich did much to advance as Speaker. Republicans’ apparent willingness to write off black voters points out that political polarization, as championed by Gingrich, now threatens to extend to social polarization, in which ethnic groups and social classes will be seen as homogenous and partisan voting blocs rather than as Americans whose needs must be addressed by both parties. The intensification of partisanship, in turn, makes it less likely that whoever wins the 2012 presidential election will be able to secure bipartisan agreement for any significant measures to combat the problems that confront us.

It’s possible, though, that Gingrich will be remembered by historians not so much for the things he did as for the breakthrough he might have achieved. One of the more eye-opening political histories of recent years was Steven M. Gillon’s The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation (Oxford University Press, 2008). Gillon revealed that in 1997, after the Republicans’ failed budget shutdown, Gingrich entered secret talks with Clinton to find common ground on reform of the Social Security and Medicare programs, the financial stability of which already was threatened by the aging of the baby boomers. The two leaders reached a tentative compromise in which Republicans would agree to use the budget surplus of the late ‘90s to strengthen the programs rather than spend it down as tax cuts, while Democrats would accept the incorporation of privately managed accounts into Social Security. As Gingrich told Gillon, “We were trying to think through the necessary reforms to modernize America to move into the twenty-first century.”

The budding agreement was derailed by the revelation of Clinton’s sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky. The result was Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, the election of George W. Bush, the dissipation of the budget surplus, and the arrival of record-setting deficits heralding the coming age of austerity. Gingrich is partly to blame for the political failures of the past decade, but he once had the potential to redeem them as well. It’s not a pitch he can make to South Carolina voters, but it’s one that Americans should keep in mind when evaluating this talented and maddening figure.

Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party and the National Book Award-nominated The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment. He has written for numerous national publications and has been an assistant professor of history at Yale University. He lives outside Washington, DC.

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The charismatic Elder Price of Broadway’s Book of Mormon musical famously and energetically sings “I Believe!” in a boisterous catechism of odd Mormon beliefs. But Elder Price is only one voice in a chorus broadcasting Mormonism’s strangest doctrines. While the Mormons portrayed in the musical are presented as basically good if generally deluded, many discussions of the Mormon tradition emphasize the utter absurdity of their beliefs. The average reader is left wondering how on earth Mormons could be so credulous. In context, though, these caricatured beliefs make a certain kind of sense.

There are two general points that need to be made before discussing any relevant context for specific beliefs, though. First, Mormon belief is as diverse as that of any other religious tradition. Mormons include dogmatic fundamentalists and believers not unlike mainline Protestants, while large numbers of practicing Mormons hold few-to-none of the beliefs circulating in the media. Second, Mormonism began at the tail end of the early modern era, and we now look back at its history across a cultural chasm. Early Mormons sounded like many of their peers and predecessors in early America. Several traditional Mormon beliefs are fossils of a lost worldview at the same time as Mormons participate in modern American society. Anecdotally, Mormons currently boast the top women’s historian in the nation, a successful financier running for president, and a conspiracy theorist with a chalkboard selling gold on cable television. All are true to their Mormon roots and they signal the diversity of Mormon belief.

With those two caveats in mind, let’s consider two of the more distinctive beliefs attributed to modern Mormonism.

Humans will have their own planets in the afterlife, and God lives on one such planet named Kolob.

In the phrase of the Book of Mormon musical, Mormons “believe that God has a plan for me, and that plan includes me getting my own planet,” and “God lives on a planet called Kolob.” These phrases roughly approximate the beliefs of some, though far from all, Mormons even now. The context for these beliefs requires understanding the role of family and the significance of ancient views of the universe in early Mormonism.

Mormon founder Joseph Smith believed that the work of the universe was the creation of relationships, connections he framed within a notion of the family that encompassed all of humanity, indeed the entire cosmos. Ancient ideas about parallels between the structure of the universe and human existence heavily influenced Smith’s views. Smith and his followers understood celestial bodies as participating in a kind of family relationship parallel to that of humans. Family relationships, especially those between parent and child, were central to the Mormon worldview, and Mormons saw the relationship between God and Jesus as parental (they strongly rejected the traditional Trinitarian view of God dominant within Christianity). Mormons therefore believed that the basic meaning of life was to parent. After Smith’s death, several of his closest followers tried to imagine what it would mean to (a) be like God and Christ, and (b) parent in heaven. They imagined that they would participate in creation the way God and Christ had. It seemed logical that their participation could potentially result in the creation of new planets.

In Smith’s cosmic family of celestial bodies, Kolob (probably a minor variant of kokab, the Hebrew word for star) was understood to be the star closest to the actual location of heaven. Though relatively few Americans would endorse an actual physical heaven now, it wasn’t so uncommon when Mormonism arose and reflects in part the concrete way early Mormons read the Bible. If God truly existed, they thought, wouldn’t it be possible to encounter him in a literal heaven somewhere in the heavens?

Mormons wear magic underwear

Smith told his followers that the way to establish the family relationships that could interconnect all humanity was through special rituals that took place in buildings called temples. The Mormon temple liturgy contains various rites that think through what it means to be human and to create. As part of the temple system, Mormons acquire sacred undergarments, essentially an undershirt and boxer shorts. Mormon “garments” draw on images and themes from the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, and Masonry, much as the temple liturgy does. These garments recall, respectively, the clothing of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Old Testament priestly robes, Jesus’ burial shroud, and the robes of angels. By wearing this clothing Mormons affirm their commitment to Mormonism, their connections to all humanity and their new life in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Academics also see this clothing as a marker of cultural difference–a way to remind Mormons that they are indeed Mormons, a tool to resist the influence of outsiders. Something as richly symbolic as this garment would almost certainly be seen by some as having special power; various Mormons over the years (including hotel magnate Willard Marriott on “60 Minutes” in 1996) have made impressively literal claims about the power of these garments. Such beliefs are not much different from folk Catholic beliefs about the power of holy water or saintly relics, or modern American beliefs about the power of pomegranate juice, antioxidants, or St. John’s wort.

In historical context, some of the early Mormon beliefs that have persisted into portions of modern Mormonism are primarily concerned with puzzling through the meaning of life, our integration into the universe, the persistence and scope of human relationships. Though at times these beliefs bear a more antique flavor than many contemporary observers would favor, the Mormon tradition vigorously attempts to make sense of the world. In some respects these Mormon beliefs recall, in idiosyncratic specificity, the visceral stirrings of awe that strike many of us at some point when we stare into the night sky and wonder how we could possibly fit into the universe.

Samuel Brown is Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Utah/Intermountain Medical Center and the author of In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death. He is also the translator of Aleksandr Men’s Son of Man.

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Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. There is at least one capital campaign to raise $25 million or more underway in virtually every major population center in North America. Smaller capital campaigns are even more numerous, with phone-a-thons, door-to-door drives, and mail solicitations increasing in popularity. Despite the ubiquity of fund-raising, we still have an imperfect understanding of the motivations for giving and the welfare implications for the giver. One may wonder: what moves all of these people to donate? Is such generosity necessarily welfare-enhancing for the giver?

We argue that there are two types of motivation for giving: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure from the solicitor. The two motivations have very different welfare implications. The altruism (or warm glow) model (Becker 1974; Andreoni 1989, 1990) posits that giving is mostly supply-driven, and that it is utility-maximizing for the giver to give. Under this model, donations unambiguously enhance the giver’s utility as well as societal welfare. The social pressure model (Akerlof and Kranton 2000) posits that giving is mostly demand-driven, and that giving may be utility-reducing for the giver.

We tested for these two types of motivations in the context of in-person, unsolicited donation requests. We designed a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. Building on a theoretical model, we designed a field experiment that allows us to test whether giving is welfare-enhancing or welfare-reducing for the giver.

THE EXPERIMENT

Our field experiment revolves around a door-to-door fundraising drive for two charities, a local children’s hospital, which has a reputation as a premier hospital for children, and an out-of-state charity, unfamiliar to most solicitees. Between April and October 2008, we approached 7, 668 households in the towns surrounding Chicago. The crucial aspect of the experimental design is to allow individuals to sort, that is, to either seek or avoid the solicitor. In our first treatment, a flyer on the doorknob notifies households one day in advance about the one-hour time interval in which a solicitor will arrive at their homes the next day. In the second treatment, Opt-out, the flyer also includes a box to be checked if the household does not want to be disturbed.

This design allows for a simple test of altruism versus social pressure in door-to-door giving. If altruism is the main driver of giving, the flyer should increase both the presence at home and giving. Because giving is utility-enhancing, givers should choose to stay at home. In addition, givers who would like to give in response to the flyer but who find it too costly to be at home should give to the charity via other means, such as mailing a check. Conversely, if social pressure is the main driver of giving, the flyer should lower both the frequency of opening the door and the frequency of giving.

THE FINDINGS

We report four main results, which are similar across the two charities. First, we find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Second, the simple flyer does not reduce giving. However, the flyer with an opt-out checkbox decreases giving significantly. Third, the decrease in giving in the opt-out treatment is driven by small donations up to $10; donations above $10, instead, increase slightly. Fourth, there is no effect on donations via mail or Internet.

Overall, the reduced-form estimates indicate that both altruism and social pressure are important determinants of giving in this setting, with stronger evidence for the role of social pressure. The lower frequency of households opening the door after receiving a flyer indicates that households are, on average, trying to avoid solicitors, consistent with social pressure. The social pressure interpretation is also consistent with the lack of donations via mail or Internet.

FIGURE IV
Frequency of (A) Answering the Door, (B) (Unconditional) Giving, and (C) Giving Conditional on Answering the Door Panel A presents the percent of households that answer the door under different treatment. The third set of bars (Opt-out treatment) also shows the percent opting out (shaded colors on top). Panel B displays the percent that give to the charity out of all the households in the treatment group (including those not answering the door). Panel C shows giving conditioned on answering the door, which equals the ratio of the estimated shares of unconditional giving (Figure IVB) and of households answering the door (Figure IVA). All estimates are obtained from regressions that control for randomization fixed effects.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

We find evidence that both altruism and social pressure affect door-to-door charitable giving. We estimate that about half of donors would prefer not to be contacted by the fund-raiser either because they would prefer not to donate, or because they would prefer to donate less. As a result, the estimated average welfare effect of the door-to-door campaigns in our sample is negative. Although this could be used as an argument to introduce a do-not-solicit or do-not-call list for charities, our findings suggest a simple alternative: to provide an opportunity to the households to sort or, even better, to opt out.

We conjecture that our results are likely to extend to other high-pressure approaches to raise money, such as phone-a-thons, charity banquets, auctions, lotteries, and so on, but likely have less explanatory power with lower-pressure approaches, such as mail solicitations. We hope that future research builds on this strategy to provide more evidence on behavioral phenomena.

To read the full article “Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving” by Stefano DellaVigna, John A. List, and Ulrike Malmendier in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, please visit: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/4446/1.

I’ve decided to feature a brief excerpt from The Reactionary Mind from chapter six, “Affirmative Action Baby,” which profiles the thought and theory of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Many think of Scalia as either a social conservative or fussy originalist. I argue that he’s neither. He’s something far stranger, more wild: one part Nietzschean, one part Social Darwinist, one part post-modernist, and two parts crazy.

Next to Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia is the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court. He also loves the television show 24. “Boy, those early seasons,” he tells his biographer, “I’d be up to two o’clock, because you’re at the end of one [episode], and you’d say, ‘No, I’ve got to see the next.’” Scalia is especially taken with Jack Bauer, the show’s fictional hero played by Kiefer Sutherland. Bauer is a government agent at a Los Angeles counterterrorism unit who foils mass-murder plots by torturing suspects, kidnapping innocents, and executing colleagues. Refusing to be bound by the law, he fights a two-front war against terrorism and the Constitution. And whenever he bends a rule or breaks a bone, Scalia swoons.

Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles . . . . He saved hundreds of thousands of lives . . . . Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? You have the right to a jury trial? Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so. So the question is whether we really believe in these absolutes. And ought we to believe in these absolutes?

Yet Scalia has spent the better part of his career as a lawyer, professor, and jurist telling us that the Constitution is an absolute, in which we must believe, even when—particularly when—it tells us something we do not want to hear. Scalia’s Constitution is not a warming statement of benevolent purpose, easily adapted to our changing needs. His Constitution is cold and dead, its prohibitions and injunctions frozen in time. Phrases like “cruel and unusual punishment” mean what they meant when they were written into the Constitution. If that produces objectionable results—say, the execution of children and the mentally retarded—too bad. “I do not think,” Scalia writes in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, that “the avoidance of unhappy consequences is adequate basis for interpreting a text.”

Scalia takes special pleasure in unhappy consequences. He relishes difficulty and dislikes anyone who would diminish or deny it. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a plurality of the Court took what Scalia thought was a squishy position on executive power during wartime. The Court ruled that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed by Congress after 9/11, empowered the president to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely as “illegal enemy combatants” without trying them in a court of law. It also ruled, however, that such citizens were entitled to due process and could challenge their detention before some kind of tribunal.

Scalia was livid. Writing against the plurality—as well as the Bush administration and fellow conservatives on the Court—he insisted that a government at war, even one as unconventional as the war on terror, had two, and only two, ways to hold a citizen: try him in a court of law, or have Congress suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Live by the rules of due process, in other words, or suspend them. Take a stand, make a choice.

But the Court weaseled out of that choice, making life easier for the government and itself. Congress and the president could act as if habeas corpus were suspended, without having to suspend it, and the Court could act as if the writ hadn’t been suspended thanks to a faux due process of military tribunals. More than coloring outside the lines of the Constitution, it was the Court’s “Mr. Fix-It Mentality,” in Scalia’s words, its “mission to Make Everything Come Out Right,” that enraged him.

Scalia’s mission, by contrast, is to make everything come out wrong. A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, is “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage.” Scalia may have once declared the rule of law the law of rules—leading some to mistake him for a stereotypical conservative—but rules and laws have a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Where others seek security, Scalia seeks sublimity. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. “Being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear,” he tells one reporter. “Duresse oblige.”

That, and not fidelity to the text or conservatism as it is conventionally understood, is the idée fixe of Scalia’s jurisprudence—and the source of his apparent man-crush on Jack Bauer. Bauer never makes things easy for himself; indeed, he goes out of his way to make things as hard as possible. He volunteers for a suicide mission when someone else would do (and probably do it better); he turns himself into a junkie as part of an impossibly baroque plan to stop an act of bioterrorism; he puts his wife and daughter at risk, not once but many times, and then beats himself up for doing so. He loathes what he does but does it anyway. That is his nobility—some might say masochism—and why he warms Scalia’s heart.

It means something, of course, that Scalia identifies the path of most resistance in fidelity to an ancient text, while Bauer finds it in betrayal of that text. But not as much as one might think: as we’ve come to learn from the marriages of our right-wing preachers and politicians, fidelity is often another word for betrayal.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He blogs at coreyrobin.com.

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Editorial Assistant

In Voltaire’s Candide, the title character wanders through a life of brutal executions and natural disasters and angry mobs, and yet believes that he lives in the best of all possible worlds. When I think of misguided optimism, I think of those who are disinclined to do anything to change the world or their lives because (a) they believe all things serve some greater good, or (b) they optimistically and passively wait for their god(s), or the people around them, to change their lives for the better. I thus approached Roger Scruton’s book The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope with interest. Perhaps, I hoped, he might skewer the blindly optimistic patriotism espoused by so many Americans, or the distasteful optimism of the Candides and Panglosses of the modern world who fail to acknowledge the horrors around them.

Scruton’s objections to optimism, though, run in a curiously different direction. The optimists he finds most dangerous aren’t those who sit and wait as they contemplate their half-full glasses, but those who believe in quick-fixes to society’s problems. He argues that optimism, unchecked, has led to many of civilization’s failures, and that a dose of pessimism is necessary to dash unfounded hope. The “credit crunch,” for example, he attributes to the “best case fallacy”–the same illusion that prompts gamblers to recklessly risk their money:

Many factors conspired to produce this crisis. But we do not need to look far to discover the best case fallacy at the heart of it. The first stirring can be perceived in the Community Reinvestment Act, signed into law by America’s President Carter in 1977. This requires banks and other lenders to offer mortgages in a way that addresses ‘the credit needs of the communities’ in which they work, and in particular the needs of low-income and minority households. In short, it requires them to set aside the normal reasoning of lenders concerning the security of a debt, and to offer credit as part of social policy and not as a business deal. The reasoning behind the act was an impeccable piece of optimism, beginning from the best case scenario, according to which otherwise disadvantaged groups would be lifted into the realm of home-ownership, so taking their first step towards the American dream. Everyone would benefit from this, and no one more than the banks who had helped their communities to flourish. In the event, of course, the banks who had been pressured into ignoring the demands of prudence, and who had been forbidden by law to consult the worst case scenario, ended with a steadily growing accumulation of bad debts, leading eventually to the ’subprime mortgage crisis’ of 2008.

Others, meanwhile, had begun to trade in these debts. After all, the best case scenario tells us that a mortgage, being secured on a home and therefore on the one thing in which every borrower has the greatest investment, cannot fail to pay interest. And a fixed rate mortgage can be sold at a profit, when interest rates fall below the rate agreed. The worst case scenario–so obvious that nobody bothered to check it out–tells us that, when interest rates fall, money loses its value, and fixed rates become harder to pay. The good debt becomes bad, however much was invested in the home that secures it.

According to Scruton at his most pessimistic, “the argument of [his] book is entirely futile” for the indefatigable optimists among us. I agree that pessimism is entirely necessary. But I think we would not be where we are today if some starry-eyed optimists had not acted on their visions of the future–and I’m talking about issues such as civil rights. Had we allowed things to change organically (glacially), had nobody spoken of their optimistic dreams of a better world, would our schools still be racially segregated by law? Would women have the right to vote? Would Europe still be governed by kings and queens? Changes that once seemed radical have now come to pass. What do you think?

Roger Scruton is Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Beauty and Death-Devoted Heart.

Once upon a time, Barack Obama understood the power of a good story. His campaign mantras — “Yes we can” and “Change we can believe in” — inspired voters, especially young people, blacks and Latinos, and propelled him into the White House. But once in office, Obama lost the thread of the plot. He abandoned his original message and embraced compromise and bipartisanship rather than pushing for dramatic change. That narrative hasn’t gotten far with a recalcitrant Congress, especially Republicans, who have their own high concept to pitch: Just say no to Obama.

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Obama will undoubtedly look to the Hollywood left for money and endorsements, but he would be equally well served to look to the Hollywood right—especially the legacy of Ronald Reagan—for lessons about how to tell his story and the importance of sticking to it and reinvigorating it when governing became problematic.

From Louis B. Mayer to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hollywood right has told a simple but compelling story of American triumphalism: The United States is the greatest nation in the world.

Mayer’s Hardy family films, the most successful series in MGM history, promised Depression-era audiences that anything was possible so long as they subscribed to what he viewed as the holy trinity of American life: family, God, and country. Several decades later, reporters attributed former actor George Murphy’s surprise election to the Senate in 1964 to his successful use of Mayer’s optimistic story line. Murphy, a Democrat turned Republican, “makes you feel good,” explained one journalist. “He has no doubts, and your own doubts can be resolved.”

Schwarzenegger employed his own heroic narrative in his gubernatorial campaign: He was a caring and compassionate populist who promised to tell Democratic and Republican politicians, “Do your job for the people and do it well, otherwise you are hasta la vista, baby.”

Few citizens, history shows, want to hear a Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, or Sean Penn point out what is wrong with the United States. They want to be reassured that in frightening times, their leaders can defeat all foes and deliver an essentially happy ending.

Reagan in particular understood this need and created a story line that was effective for campaigning and governing. During his gubernatorial bid in 1966, and his presidential run in 1980, he drew upon a simple narrative that he repeated over and over again—one aimed not only at the Republican faithful but at independent voters who could swing elections and provide the mandate needed for a conservative revolution in government. Reagan merged American triumphalism with messages of fear and reassurance: fear of communism and creeping federal socialism, and reassurance that he and determined conservatives could save the nation by defeating the Soviet Union and overturning the New Deal welfare state.

He campaigned for the presidency on a set of simple but powerful ideas: reduce taxes, return power to state and local government, and fight all enemies of America, foreign and domestic.

Once in office, Reagan ran into trouble when he abandoned his policy promises by raising taxes and increasing the size of the federal budget. Facing a tough reelection campaign, he revitalized his base by adding a new catchphrase that brilliantly restated his story line: “It’s Morning in America.” Reagan was victorious in 1984 in part because he shifted attention away from his broken promises and focused instead on the vision of a “happy ending” for America, a return to an imagined past of simpler, better days.

To be successful at winning and then governing during a second term, Obama needs to reconfigure his successful 2008 story line. It was, after all, a Democratic version of “Morning in America.” Like Reagan, he made citizens believe in the possibility of a better future. But unlike the former president, he insisted that change would come only by embracing an activist federal government that would work to better the lives of all Americans.

In 2012, Obama can learn from Reagan by steadfastly looking to a hopeful future rather than the disappointing past four years. He needs to re-engage his original promise of action. He recently pledged to be a “warrior for the middle class”—that has the right heroic ring to it, if he can demonstrate that he is a determined initiator rather than a weak conciliator.

But mostly, Obama needs to appeal to the imaginations, and even the fantasies, of the widest possible audience; he needs to remind the faithful and independents of what he told them in February 2008. “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

Can a restatement of his 2008 story line again win millions of votes, and can it help Obama govern more successfully in his hope for second term? Yes, it can. Poll after poll indicates that Americans want change they can believe in now more than ever. An effective narrative moves voters, and mobilized voters move Congress — as tea party supporters have shown and as Occupy Wall Street activists hope to show. Citizens did this with and for Reagan, and they can do it with Obama—if once again his story inspires them to believe, to act and to vote.

An eminent historian of film, Steven J. Ross is recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Films Scholars Award and author of Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics.

This article appears courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.
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Despite your legal training, you’ve decided to pursue a career in business. This career change will immediately raise a red flag for business employers. Your answer can make or break your chance of employment.

Why do you want to work in business rather than law?

The question is especially vexing if your heart has been set on working as an attorney. That’s the reason you went to law school. Even today, if you a law firm offered you a job, you’d choose it over business. But, legal jobs are scarce in this economy.

If you voice those thoughts, the interviewer will politely thank you and usher you out the door.  You’ve touched a fear-arousing hot button.

To understand the interviewer’s concerns, consider the expenses of filling an important job. An employer’s costs of the full hiring process are roughly twice the amount of the position’s starting salary.

Employers count on recouping these expenses, so they must hire an individual who will stay long enough to justify their investment. Their greatest fear is that you’ll get bored and seek employment as an attorney.  They can’t afford the risk of hiring you if there’s the slightest suspicion you’ll bail out in a year or two.

Your answer to the key question must make them feel completely confident that you’re 100% committed to a long term career in business. How can you remove an interviewer’s doubts and still give an honest answer?

For several years your life has been centered exclusively on law school. Your education and your dreams have pointed to one goal–becoming a lawyer. As a result your current employment decision is conceived in terms of leaving the law and settling for a business job.  Try reframing the choice.

How would you like a job that: (1) utilizes your legal training; and that (2) involves you in exciting and complex business ventures? Realistically, you know that many attorneys get bored with the law after a few years and end up hating their work. Contrast that scenario with a career that will be filled with ever changing challenges and will provide financially rewards commensurate with your accomplishments.

From a long term perspective, life as an attorney isn’t necessarily more attractive than the alternative. If you reach a similar conclusion, then you have a forthright answer to the job interview question. Begin with a statement that affirms your commitment to business, such as, “I’ve realized business is the only career track that’s perfectly suited to my temperament and my drive to succeed.”

Explain that during law school you recognized you’d probably become bored with the detailed repetitiveness of legal practice.  You need to use your analytic skills and legal knowledge to real world decisions and results.  You then realized you could only find lasting fulfillment in the business world.

When phrased in your own language, your answer will remove any doubts about your commitment, and you’ll ace the interview.

Jerald Jellison, Ph.D., has been a Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California for three decades. For fifteen years he taught a skills-based course on transitioning from the university to business. Jellison is the author of Life After Grad School: Getting From A to B.

On 11 January 1992 the Algerian President, the white-haired sixty-one year old Chadli Bendjedid, announced live on television that he was standing down as head of state with immediate effect. Nervous and ill at ease, the president read out a brief prepared statement. In it he explained his decision as a necessary one. Why? Because the democratic process which he had put in place two years earlier could no longer guarantee law and order on the streets.

Most ordinary Algerians were stunned. The country was in the middle of two round multi-party elections, the first of their kind since independence from the French in July 1962. Within this process the first round on 26 December 1991 had delivered a massive victory to the Islamist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) which had gained 188 of the 231 seats outright as against 15 for the National Liberation Front (FLN) and 25 for Socialist Forces Front (FFS). With the second round elections planned for 16 January 1992, the FIS leadership leader, Abdelkader Hachani, was ecstatic. With only 199 seats to be decided in the second round, few doubted that the FIS was poised for power, especially since President Chadli was seemingly ready to arrive at some sort of pact.

This long march to power had begun in the wake of the fall-out from the riots of 1988: the most significant single event in post-independence Algeria. Then, on 5 October, thousands of young people, fed up by economic hardship and widespread corruption, had ransacked central Algiers. Chanting ‘Rise up, Youth’ the rioters targeted symbols of authority and wealth in a relentless fashion. Monuments were pulled down. Cars set alight. In one run down neighbourhood local policemen were forced to parade along the streets shouting ‘I am a braggart, I am a betrayer’. The violence lasted several days and quickly spread to the rest of the country. In response the army declared a state of siege and used tear gas and tanks to restore law and order. By 10 October some 500 people, mostly young men, had been killed.

In the months after ‘Black October’ President Chadli, in power since 1979, ushered in a multi-party system which, in theory, limited the army to a purely military role. He hoped that this experiment would give fresh impetus to the ruling FLN, but in practice the main beneficiary was the FIS, formed in March 1989. Led by Abbasi Madani, a veteran of the 1954-62 war against the French, and the firebrand cleric, Ali Belhadj, the FIS offered an alternative interpretation of the long struggle against colonial rule which began after the French invasion of 1830. They argued that the original Islamic principles of anti-colonialism had been betrayed at independence, when pro-French Algerians, such as French-trained officers like Khaled Nezzar who led the repression of ‘Black October’, had infiltrated the FLN and imposed a Francophone system on the Arab-speaking masses. What was needed, the FIS leaders claimed, was a new jihad that would finally cleanse the country of this poisonous legacy, whether it is secular ideologies, the French language or Western-style fashions and music.

The FIS’s emergence as the main opposition party was emphatically confirmed by the local elections in June 1990. Open air mass meetings saw the FIS use lasers to project religious slogans in the sky, while in the election itself the FIS took overall control of over half of the country’s local councils. Frightened by these events, the government tried to block the FIS’s rise by postponing national elections set for 27 June 1991, arresting Madani and Belhadj and changing the system into single member constituencies whereby only the two parties with the most votes in the first round would go through to the second ballot. Through this strategy the government wished to confront the country with a stark choice – either the FLN or the FIS – in the hope that enough Algerians would vote against the spectre of an Islamist regime.

After the first round it was clear that this scare strategy had failed, although talk of a FIS landslide needed to be qualified. In reality only 59 per cent of the electorate voted meaning that imminent FIS victory was based upon 24.5 per cent of those eligible to vote. By this token the largest vote was an abstention, even if it was difficult to gauge whether this non-participation was out of indifference or an explicit rejection of the political choices on offer.

The question now was whether the government would let the second round go ahead. Everywhere ordinary Algerians debated the arguments for and against. On 3 January 1992 the FFS brought three hundred thousand supporters on to the streets of Algiers with the chant ‘neither police state, nor Islamic state, but a democratic state’. Addressing the crowd, the FFS leader, Hocine Aït Ahmed was absolutely clear that the electoral process must continue and called for opposition to any military coup.

Given this feverish atmosphere, this is why so many Algerians could not understand Chadli’s action. As the head of state he was seen by many as the one figure of authority who bring about some sort of compromise. Yet, in the days that followed it became clear that this had been a ‘televised coup d’état’. With Chadli jettisoned the Supreme Court now stepped in, arguing that, since this was an unprecedented situation, power had to be handed over to the High Security Council, a hastily convened body whose core was made up of three senior military officers: Khaled Nezzar, Larbi Belkheir and Abdelmalek Guenaizia. Unsurprisingly the High Security Council immediately used Chadli’s resignation as the pretext for the cancellation of the second round of elections.

On 14 January presidential power was transferred to a newly created institution, the State High Committee. This was to act a provisional government until new presidential and parliamentary elections could be held at a later, unspecified date. At its head was Mohammed Boudiaf, one of the historic leaders of the anti-colonial struggle who returned from exile in Morocco, determined, he claimed, to save the country from implosion.

Amongst FIS supporters there was immediate anger. They felt cheated of victory and on 8 February there were violent clashes with the army around mosques in the major towns and cities across the county. On the following day the State High Committee deployed tanks on the streets and declared a ‘state of emergency’ across the country. Eight thousand FIS members or suspected members were imprisoned in detention centres in the Sahara desert. The on 4 March the FIS was officially banned as a political party. By this point clashes between Islamists and the army had left 103 dead and several hundred wounded.

In neighbouring Arab countries President Ben Ali in Tunisia, President Mubarak in Egypt and Colonel Qaddafi in Libya immediately expressed support for the new regime. Fearful of an Islamist victory in Algeria which could have become a beacon for similar movements throughout North Africa and the Middle East, they welcomed the anti-FIS crackdown. While in Britain, France and the USA the response was muted. There governments talked of being ‘concerned’ but hung back from any condemnation of the coup, a line which led Time magazine to ask whether the West was tacitly condoning an anti-democratic act for its own selfish interests.

Throughout the first six months of 1992 a violent atmosphere was all pervasive in Algeria; a mood which deepened when Boudiaf was assassinated on 29 June, almost certainly on orders from someone within the military who felt threatened by his promise to root out high-level corruption. The country was on the edge of a precipice and finally tipped over into it in spring 1993, when armed Islamist groups unleashed a wave of violence which met with full-scale repression by the army. Over the next decade some 200,000 people would die in this horrific undeclared civil war.

Martin Evans is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Portsmouth and author of Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. You can read more by Professor Evans here and here.

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The first votes for the 2012 elections have been cast. Clearly the headline from last week’s Iowa caucuses is the Santorum surge in the last couple of days, better timed than any of the other candidates who had had their day in the sun. Oh, and Mitt Romney eked out about an 8-votes win matching his own performance by percentage points in 2008.

So let’s get down to the real results. Santorum has the most room for growth among the top three finishers in Iowa. Most important, Gingrich is furious, and he will be taking Romney on in the days to come (even if he would be wiser to go after Santorum so he doesn’t sound like a petulant child). That leaves Santorum free to try to get a decent showing in New Hampshire, which is why he has decided to put his chips in that state rather than divide it equally between there and South Carolina, where presumably, he expects to do well with the social conservatives there as he did in Iowa. Meanwhile, if Bachmann or Perry drop out, their votes are now up for grabs. They may go to Gingrich, but Santorum will be vying hard for then. All this points to Santorum as the potential anti-Romney candidate in the days to come, but things are very fluid because Santorum does not have an ground operation set up the way Romney does, it does not look to be a year for social (values) conservatism, and the media has done a darn good job of shining the spotlight on and taking down every anti-Romney candidate who has emerged in the last couple of months — and they have already started.

Here are some non-stories that are worth exploring. That Ron Paul, who is at the fringe of the Republican Party and who has not ruled out a third-party run, came in third suggests that his message cannot be taken lightly. Add his support to Santorum’s support and one can almost say that the shake-up of the Republican establishment is underway. But this is still anybody’s game because number 2 and 3 are as far apart ideologically as any two contenders in the Republican primary could possibly be. This is unusual, and suggests a party in deep self-introspection. This is a chance for a serious recalibration, but clearly also a chance for a drawn out battle that will benefit the incumbent, Barack Obama. (Incidentally, turnout was about the same as it was in 2008, at 122,000 – good news for Democrats who are expecting an enthusiasm gap in the Republicans’ failure this time.)

Romney’s best chance forward is to say that he is the candidate with the best chance of defeating Obama. He should repeat that ad nauseum, and remind people that he visited Iowa only 9 times this round (Santorum had visited every county) after his embarrassing defeat in 2008. Romney is clearly a seasoned operative who knows how to play this game. Even more important, a win in New Hampshire, which the polls right now predict, could give him the earliest hint of an inevitable winner. Why? Because he would be the first non-incumbent Republican candidate to win both Iowa and New Hampshire. (Edmund Muskie in 1972 and Al Gore in 2000 managed that on the Democratic side.) For all the talk of a disunited Republican party, this would be a non-trivial milestone if Romney maintains his considerable lead in New Hampshire.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.

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It’s hard not to feel at least a little sorry for Iowa’s conservative Republicans. Although three-quarters of the votes in Tuesday night’s caucus went to conservatives of one stripe or another, the winner by a bare eight votes was Mitt Romney, the most moderate candidate running – and “moderate” is an obscenity for conservatives. They don’t like Romney, and the feeling seems to be mutual. But even the relatively moderate Iowa Republicans who voted for Romney don’t seem terribly excited by him. The word his supporters most commonly use to describe him is “electable,” which is faint praise on the order of calling a meal “edible.” Nonetheless, his Iowa victory makes it all but certain that the former Massachusetts moderate, despite being the least preferred candidate of a majority of Republicans, will be the party’s champion for the presidency in 2012. This is an unhappy marriage of convenience that even Madame Bovary might pity.

Why are the Republican front-runner and the party’s base so at odds with each other? The answer lies in the party’s history, and particularly in the tension between moderates and conservatives that has been a constant theme of the GOP since the first incarnation of the New Right coalesced around the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.

The conservative movement has flared up at regular intervals ever since, like cicadas or herpes. Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in the early 1960s was followed by Ronald Reagan’s efforts in 1976 and 1980, the Newt Gingrich-led Congressional insurgency of 1994, and the Tea Party over the past several years. In all of these incarnations, the primal enemy for the conservative activist has been not so much the liberal Democrat as the moderate Republican.

In the conservative view, the Democrats are foes to be overcome, but moderates are traitors to be exterminated. Moderates strike conservatives as a haughty establishment, unresponsive to the people’s wishes and in thrall to the elite media and “informed opinion.” Were it not for the moderates’ unprincipled willingness to compromise with Democrats, so the conservative thinking goes, the welfare state would long since have been repealed, and few of the pernicious progressive developments of the twentieth century would have come to pass.

Business-minded moderate Republicans, naturally, have a different perspective. In their minds, they represent the party of prosperity, stability, pragmatism, and efficient government. They think of liberals as fiscally incontinent hacks, but conservatives are something even more dangerous: Southern and Western populists and crony capitalists who abandoned their natural home in the Democratic Party and took over the GOP.

Moderates see conservatives as radicals hellbent on destabilizing the international system, debauching the country’s finances by heedlessly cutting taxes even in the face of massive deficits, and threatening domestic order by rendering government dysfunctional and seeking to polarize the political parties along ideological lines. As one prominent moderate Republican warned Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s, “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.”

That long-ago moderate Jeremiah, as it happens, was George Romney, father of Mitt. As the governor of Michigan during the 1960s, the elder Romney fought for good-government reforms, defended citizen interests against both big labor and big business, balanced the state budget by implementing an income tax, and increased spending on education, unemployment relief, and local governments. As a candidate for president during 1967-68, he battled conservatives to put the GOP on the side of minority civil rights and called for the U.S. to disengage from the bloody Vietnam war. George Romney was undoubtedly the person Mitt most looked up to, and as Massachusetts governor he was a moderate Republican in his father’s tradition.

For many conservatives, the Romney family history of moderation disqualifies Mitt as a true Republican standard-bearer. It doesn’t matter to them that he has disavowed positions he once clearly believed, on issues such as the environment, abortion, and health care. They would remain unconvinced even if he succeeded in conveying the enthusiasm of a real convert rather than the flexibility of a contortionist.

Romney’s real problem, though, may be that the conservative enmity to his candidacy isn’t matched by corresponding moderate enthusiasm. Obviously many moderates are put off by his opportunism, and Romney’s appeal to moderates and independents will wane further if he moves farther right in the Southern primaries. But he may not be more appealing when he tacks back toward the center, because Mitt’s moderation seems amorphous and lacking content, particularly in comparison with his father’s example.

Granted, it will always be hard to fire up voters with the moderate virtues of prudence, efficient government, and fiscal responsibility. But George Romney excited moderates with his enthusiastic support for civil rights and civil liberties, his embrace of bold new ideas, and his real concern for equal opportunity and the problems of the disadvantaged. He kicked off his presidential campaign with a nationwide tour of American poverty, from rural wastelands to Watts, and implored his fellow citizens to “listen to the voices from the ghetto.”

Can anyone see Mitt doing the same? If he’s really a moderate at heart, is there more to his moderation than technocracy and a yen to cut taxes and business regulation? These are questions Romney will have to wrestle with long after the memories of Iowa have faded.

Geoffrey Kabaservice has written for numerous national publications and has been an assistant professor of history at Yale University. He is the author of the National Book Award-nominated The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment and, most recently, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. He lives outside Washington, DC. Rule and Ruin was reviewed in this Sunday’s New York Times.

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On January 3, America’s quadrennial race for the White House began in earnest with the Iowa caucuses. If you find yourself wondering precisely what a caucus is, you’re not alone. The Byzantine process by which the US political parties choose their presidential nominees has a jargon all its own. Below is a brief guide to some of the terminology you can expect to see and hear in the coming months as the Republican Party chooses its presidential nominee (the Democratic nominee will be the incumbent, Barack Obama).

caucus: A caucus is a local meeting at which party members express their preference for the party’s presidential nominee. Unlike a primary election, a caucus is run by the party itself, not the state or local government. The most famous caucus is Iowa’s, which is the first major electoral event of the nominating process. Other early states which use a caucus system are Nevada, Maine, Colorado, and Minnesota.

primary: The majority of states hold a primary instead of a caucus. Whereas caucuses are private events, primary elections are operated by state and local governments using the same equipment as a general election. The primaries of 2012 will be spread over more than six months, starting with New Hampshire’s on January 10, and ending with Utah’s on June 26.

beauty contest: In some cases, a state holds a nonbinding primary in addition to its caucuses. That vote is known as a beauty contest. In 2012, Missouri will hold a beauty contest primary on February 7, prior to its binding caucuses on March 17 .

open primaries and closed primaries: An open primary is one in which any voter may participate, even if he or she is not a registered member of the party. A closed primary is open only to registered party members.

Super Tuesday: Tuesday is the traditional day for elections in the United States, and during the presidential nominating process, the Tuesday on which the largest number of states hold their primaries is known as Super Tuesday. This year, Super Tuesday is March 6, when 10 states will hold their primaries, choosing a total of 526 delegates (almost half of the 1212 delegates needed for a Republican candidate to win the nomination).

delegate: Technically, most caucuses and primaries are indirect elections, at which voters choose delegates to their party’s nominating conventions, rather than directly voting for the candidates themselves. The degree to which the voters’ choice binds these delegates varies by party and state.

convention: By the time the primaries and caucuses are finished, the parties’ choice of nominee is known, but it doesn’t become official until the national convention at which party delegates cast their votes. In 2012, the Republican Convention will be held in Tampa, Florida in August, while the Democratic Convention will be held in Charlotte, North Carolina in September.

unpledged delegate: Most of the members of state delegations to the national conventions are pledged, meaning that they are expected to vote in accordance with the rules of their state party. However, each state also has unpledged delegates (sometimes also called superdelegates), usually party officials and officeholders, who are free to vote for whomever they please.

GOP: GOP, an initialism for Grand Old Party, is just a nickname for the Republican Party. According to the OED, the term has been in use since the nineteenth century.

Katherine Connor Martin is a lexicographer based in OUP’s New York office . This post first appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Newt Gingrich’s brief turn as presidential front-runner was only the latest paroxysm of a tumultuous Republican primary season. What’s going on? Tensions within the Tea Party help explain the volatility of the Republican primary campaign, as candidates seek to appeal to competing elements of the Tea Party with varying success.

For our new book, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, we interviewed Tea Party activists across the country over a sixteen-month period and found that the movement is not the monolith it is sometimes portrayed as. The conservative political upsurge has grassroots and elite components with divergent interests and goals. Mitt Romney, no favorite of the Tea Party grassroots, is currently pitching his candidacy to Tea Party elites, while Newt Gingrich and other contenders are vying for the rank-and-file Tea Party supporters.

We learned about grassroots Tea Party groups by attending their meetings, interviewing active members and reading hundreds of their websites and message boards. In early 2011, these Tea Partiers had no consistent favorite for the Republican nominee, supporting everyone from Ron Paul to Mike Huckabee to Donald Trump, but they did have one goal in mind for 2012: beating Barack Obama. As one Tea Party member we met in Virginia put it, “we have to get Obama out. Obama and the Communists he’s surrounded himself with.”

In recent weeks, Gingrich has reached out to these grassroots Tea Party voters, older white middle-class conservatives who remember him from his glory days as an insurgent Democrat slayer. Gingrich’s aggressive style and blistering critiques of the Democrats resonate with Tea Party voters. Gingrich has accused Democrats of socialist tendencies for decades; as early as 1984, he claimed that a Democratic member of the House of Representatives was distributing “communist propaganda.”

But Gingrich has also tapped into what we identified as Tea Partiers’ most fundamental concern: their belief that hardworking American taxpayers are being forced to foot the bill for undeserving freeloaders, particularly immigrants, the poor and the young. Young people “just feel like they are entitled,” one member of the Massachusetts Tea Party told us. A Virginia interviewee said that today’s youth “have lost the value of work.”

These views were occasionally tinged with ethnic stereotypes about immigrants “stealing” from tax-funded programs, or minorities with a “plantation mentality.” When Gingrich talks about “inner-city” children having “no habits of working,” he is appealing to a widely held sentiment among the Tea Party faithful.

What’s more, Gingrich’s comparatively humane stance on immigration reform — offering immigrants a path to legal status with the approval of local community members — is more palatable to Tea Party members than one might expect. First, it reduces federal authority over a key Tea Party issue, a policy that appeals to the “states’ rights” conservatives who fill the seats at Tea Party meetings. Crucially, Gingrich is not offering, as Rick Perry did, taxpayer-funded benefits to unauthorized immigrants, a policy described by one Tea Party activist we spoke to as money wasted on “moochers.”

Continue reading this article at NYTimes.com…

Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, and Vanessa Williamson, a graduate student in government and social policy at Harvard, are the authors of the new book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.

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The charitable status of private schools raises strong passions, both for and against. Those in the ‘anti’ camp were heartened by the Charity Act 2006. Section 3(2) explicitly provided that there was to be no presumption that purposes in the first three headings listed in s.2(2) – education, religion, prevention and relief of poverty – were for the public benefit. The Act also required the Charity Commission to provide Guidelines on what amounted to public benefit. Section 4(6) required trustees of charitable trusts to ‘have regard to’ such guidance. The Guidelines duly appeared in 2008 and in 2009 the Commission conducted an assessment of five schools to test whether they were satisfying the requirement of public benefit. Two of the schools failed to satisfy the Commission which in 2010 accepted plans increasing the percentage of financial assistance as a percentage of gross fee income from zero to 4.9% for Highfield Priory and from 2% to 3.7% for St Anselm’s.

In 2010 the Independent Schools Council applied for judicial review of the following parts of Commission’s published Guidelines on public benefit.

- 2b Where benefit is to a section of the public, the opportunity to benefit must not be unreasonably restricted by geographical or other restrictions; or by ability to pay any fees charged
- 2c People in poverty must not be excluded from the opportunity to benefit

The Attorney General also initiated a reference to consider how the public benefit requirement might be satisfied in respect of a range of scenarios concerning a hypothetical school charging fees of £12,000 p/a. Both proceedings were heard together before the Tax and Chancery Chamber of the Upper Tribunal. The lengthy, and somewhat elliptical, decision given on 13 October reached the following conclusions.

- the law on public benefit remains unchanged from before the 2006 Act and the removal of the presumption is not relevant to the key issue of whether a sufficient section of the public benefits from the charitable purpose as this was never subject to any presumption.
- the Charity Commission’s Guidelines in 2(b) and (c) do not accurately reflect the pre-existing law with their reference to ‘unreasonable’ restrictions. Provided there is a more than merely token benefit, there is not necessarily any obligation to give the poor the opportunity to benefit. The Tribunal’s further decision of 2 December details exactly which parts of the Guidelines will need to be rewritten.
- However, a trust which excludes the poor from benefit cannot be a charity. Although no case decides the point, the Tribunal ‘…consider it is right as a matter of principle, given the underlying concept of charity from early times. (para 178)’
- ‘The poor’ for this purpose does not necessarily mean the same as it does in charitable trusts for the relief of poverty.
- A trust which by its constitution does not exclude the poor must still operate for the public benefit, ie to make ‘adequate provision other than the provision of education to fee-paying students’( para 214).

The devil, of course, is in detail. This is where the analysis of the reference at the end of the decision is particularly useful. The Tribunal gave no definitive ruling on the various hypothetical scenarios but its remarks give the following indications as to how educational charities that charge fees can show they are operating for the public benefit.

- Providing scholarships and bursaries at a figure between 1% and 10% of entrants, depending on the circumstances of the particular school, such as the size of its endowment fund, if any, its geographical location, and whether it provided a ‘luxury’ education. A higher percentage would be expected for scholarships than for bursaries.
- A 75% remission on fees of £12,000 p/a would be acceptable – a family which could afford 25% fees but no more would arguably be ‘poor’.
- Provision of all of the following: making available its internal examination papers to the public on-line; providing some forms of teaching assistance to local state schools; allowing local state schools free use of its football pitches; co-sponsoring a local academy by paying £1m over five years to its endowment fund. However, only the last of these, on its own, would suffice, assuming such payments fell within the school’s constitution.

The message for fee-charging schools is this. If you are a charity you will need to show that you are operating for the public benefit, either by providing bursaries and scholarships to between 1% and 10% of entrants or by investing heavily in co-sponsoring a local academy. Although the Charity Commission’s Guidelines are flawed and will need rewriting, it seems its 2009 assessments of Highfield Priory and St Anselm’s were correct.

Simon Baughen is a Reader of Law at the University of Bristol and as a qualified solicitor practiced in maritime law as a claims adjuster at A. Bilbrough & Co Ltd. He co-authored The Law of Unincorporated Associations with Nicholas Stewart QC and Natalie Campbell.

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J. Lynn Helms, who served as Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) during the first years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, died on December 11, 2011. Helms played an instrumental role in breaking the 1981 strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). A former Marine Corps fighter pilot and business executive, who had little sympathy for labor unions in general and who believed that there was no place for a union organization of air traffic controllers at the FAA, he helped persuade President Ronald Reagan and top administration officials that they could weather a controllers’ strike, even if it meant firing more than two-thirds of the workforce.

By Joseph A. McCartin

I am often asked whether PATCO could have won its strike if it had managed to persuade another one thousand or so controllers to join its walkout. Although I don’t like answering counterfactual questions, I usually answer this one by saying that I don’t think that would have made a difference. The U.S. government was determined to break the strike whatever it took. It would not give in to pressure from a union. No one better exemplified that determination than Helms. On May 3, 2002, I had a chance to interview him at his Westport, Connecticut home for Collision Course. There he recounted for me a key episode in the 1981 strike: his response to a decision by Canadian air traffic controllers in Gander, Newfoundland, on August 10, 1981, one week into the U.S. strike, to refuse to handle flights into the United States. Their boycott threatened to block air travel between the U.S. and Europe and could have helped the U.S. controllers win their strike. The Americans were determined to break the boycott. Helms led the response. He arranged for U.S. military personnel to move into position to take over the traffic usually handled by the Gander controllers if they boycott wasn’t ended. Here is how he explained it:

So I got on the phone and called Verne Orr, who was secretary at the Air Force. And I said “I can’t get a hold of [Secretary of Defense] Cap [Weinberger], I need your help.” And he said, “I’ve given you so many controllers.” And I said, “Well, I need your help for something else.” And he said, “Well, what’s that?” And I said… “I want two AWACS airplanes, and I want them at [Loring] Air Force base in Maine. And I’d like to have one of them by 10 o’clock in the morning and the other by 1 o’clock tomorrow. And he said, “Lynn, what the hell have you got in mind?” And I said, “I’m going to take over air traffic control in the North Atlantic …. I’m going to put controllers in ‘em and with your in-flight refueling, why we’ll stay there, and those two airplanes are going to control everything that across the North Atlantic from 30,000 feet.” He started laughing. And he said, “I think you’re serious.” And [he] said “how long you gonna want ‘em?” And I said “Oh, at least two weeks.”

Helms then called the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, who agreed to make an Aegis cruiser available to the FAA, stationed off the coast of Iceland for a month, directing transatlantic air traffic from its communications center. Having secured this help, Helms called a counterpart in the Canadian government the next day to explain that the U.S. was ready to take over Canadian airspace if Canadian controllers didn’t clear flights to the United States.

I told him I had two AWACs airplanes coming in, I got an Aegis cruiser coming in that will be departing at 12 o’clock that will be 14 hours steaming up there off Boston to pick up my controllers and in another 6 and a half hours they’d be on station up off Iceland. And he was silent for a minute, “You son of a bitch,” he said. “You did all of this this morning.” I said, “Yup.” I said “God damn it, Mac, if we’re going to run these shops, let’s run ‘em….”

Faced with this threat and pressure from their own government, the Canadian controllers suspended the boycott. Did Helms’s intervention turn the tide? It is hard to say definitively. The odds were against the U.S. controllers from the beginning. And it is unlikely that the Canadians could have kept up their boycott long enough to rescue their U.S. counterparts. But whether Helms’s threat was the key or not, one thing is clear: his actions showed how far the Reagan administration would go to defeat the PATCO walkout. Thirty years later the effects of that strike still loom large. Unquestionably, J. Lynn Helms was instrumental in shaping the legacy of that turning point event.

Joseph A. McCartin is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University and Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. He is the author of Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America.

As every baseball fan knows, Albert Pujols has signed a ten year, $254 million contract with the Los Angeles Angels. Pujols, a three-time MVP who has hit 445 home runs so far in his major league career, deserves every penny he is paid. The competition for Pujols demonstrated meritocracy and markets at their best.

Pujols is not a poorly-performing CEO whose salary has been inflated by a compliant compensation consultant and ratified by a passive board of directors the CEO himself has selected. Pujols’ salary was established in a transparent and open marketplace by purchasers seeking his services on an arms-length basis against other bidders, baseball teams trying to win more games. Pujols has earned the rewards of the marketplace in a truly competitive fashion.

Pujols joined the proverbial 1% honorably, through hard work and professional success. I suspect that many of the folks who identify with Occupy Wall Street will disagree, but Pujols should not be lumped together with overpaid, underperforming CEOs – of which there are many.

Pujols will pay lots of taxes. Since his salary will, for federal income tax purposes, be characterized as ordinary income, he will pay roughly a third of his income to the federal government. Pujols will play in California, a high tax state. Even if he does not become a California resident, he will owe nonresident California income taxes on the portion of his salary properly allocable to his time and effort in the Golden State. When Pujols deducts his California income taxes from his federal taxable income, he could trigger, for federal income tax purposes, the alternative minimum tax (AMT).

Is Albert Pujols undertaxed? Acknowledging the inherent subjectivity of the question, my answer is “no.” Pujols will make millions annually, but will not benefit from the lower rates applicable to capital gains income.

Indeed, Pujols’ tax situation (as best we can tell) exemplifies an important lesson which emerged in discussion of the Buffett Rule: There are actually two types of millionaire taxpayers, those taxed at regular rates on ordinary income and those taxed at lower capital gains rates.

The real debate we should be having is whether to increase capital gains rates. Albert Pujols will pay plenty of tax on his ordinary income. And he deserves every penny he earns.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears here.

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The Republican game of musical chairs continues. One thing remains: Mitt Romney has held on to his seat as a leading contender for the nomination in the last four years.

Newt Gingrich’s rise and fall in the past month has several lessons to tell. First, no self-serving candidate would ever dare commit himself to a positive campaign again. Gingrich tried, and by refusing to counter fire with fire until recently, his poll numbers have dipped under a relentless barrage of negative ads coming from the Perry campaign and the Romney superPAC. What was particularly foolhardy about Gingrich’s pledge to remain positive is that the anti-Romney vote had shifted to him precisely because he had the fire in the belly that conservatives felt was missing in Romney. Second, this is only the most recent proof that negative ads work. Of course, what is bad for the candidate is even worse for the country. But in the heat of the campaign, no one cares. And the heat is on for 2012. Third, Gingrich’s failure to get on the Virginia ballot tells a cautionary tale to any candidate who tries to play a national strategy when elections in this country are won by an organized war on the ground, state by state. Gingrich’s failure to get his organizational act together only reinforced the narrative that he was erratic and not up to the grueling task of a long campaign.

As Gingrich supporters in Iowa return to the Romney camp, others have gone to Rick Santorum and especially to Ron Paul. This should not be surprising. Ron Paul is the original article, a Tea Partier before the (modern) Tea Party who has spent the better part of his life advocating his libertarian, small government philosophy. Between Paul and Santorum, Paul is likely to finish nearer to the top because 2012 will be about the economy, not culture. What the Republicans want more than anything else (other than to defeat Obama) is to overturn Obamacare, not protect human life or restore DADT in the military. Cultural issues, in any case, are not going to be salient in a primary race where everyone already agrees on them. This is one reason why all the ads Rick Perry are putting out touting his Christian faith are gaining so little traction. (They will be enough, however, to split the socially conservative vote between him, Michele Bachmann and Santorum so a Huckabee-like surprise victory as in 2004 is not likely.)

As a sign of his newfound confidence, Mitt Romney’s closing argument in Davenport, Iowa, as the campaigns wind down for the New Year just days before the Iowa caucuses was focussed entirely on Joe Biden and Obama, not any of his rivals who are struggling for political relevance. Having survived the Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and Gingrich insurgencies, Romney has proven his mettle to many who had doubted him before that he can take on Barack Obama. And that – a competent candidate – is what Republican primary voters are ultimately looking for.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears here each week.

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After two centuries of consolidation and closing down of small breweries, a counter-revolution is under way. Fed up with the lack of variety and the control of large brewing holdings over their favorite drinks, beer lovers have taken their beverage back into their own hands. All over the world, new beers and breweries are emerging every day. What started as the micro-brewery movement in the USA has spread to other countries and created a remarkable turnaround in convention. For instance, in Belgium – famed for its influential beer culture – when consolidation threatened the availability of beer varieties, the fastest growing segment in the beer market is now beers brewed by monasteries and ‘abbey-style’ beers.

Until the thirteenth century, monasteries were the only places where beers were manufactured on anything like a commercial scale in Europe. Beer was brewed for the monks and for guests, pilgrims, and the poor. Later, monks started to brew beer for noblemen, to sell their brew in ‘monastery pubs’, and provide their produce for church celebrations and feasts where peasants could drink for free.

However, monastic beer production became increasingly undermined by commercial breweries from the fourteenth century onwards. Demand for beer increased with income growth, the expansion of trade and towns, and an increasing awareness of water pollution. Traveling merchants wanted lodging, food and drink, and ‘inns’ and ‘taverns’ sought to provide it. Cities of trade – such as London, Bruges, Hamburg and Munich – soon became important centers of brewing.

The decline in monasteries’ beer production was also influenced by innovation and local politics. The introduction of hops was a major innovation that would ultimately transform the global beer economy, however, it took centuries to be widely accepted because of its impact on local taxes. Before hops, local rulers taxed breweries through a tax (‘grutrecht’) on herb mixes (‘grut’) to flavor and preserve beer – of which they controlled the production and sales. While hops improved the taste and preservation of beer and allowed for transportation over longer distances, hops threatened the local rulers’ tax revenue as they could not control the sale of hops. To compensate for the lost tax income, rulers wanted to impose taxes on beer itself. Yet as monasteries were absolved from paying taxes, rulers favored seeking their supplies from commercial breweries which they could tax.

Intertwined geo-political and religious changes also played a role in the historic decline in monastery-brewed beer. During the Reformation, many Catholic monasteries were destroyed in large parts of Europe – and, with it, their beer production ceased. Inevitably, commercial breweries replaced them. The final straw was the French Revolution which clamped down on the Catholic Church. Under Napoleon, the French expansion destroyed the remaining European monasteries – and their breweries too.

Scientific discoveries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also caused a dramatic transformation of the beer industry. Increased knowledge of yeast, steam engines, and refrigeration made it possible to produce new types of beer and to control the production process more accurately. Thus, the brewery industry embarked on the road to industrialization, causing notable consolidation of the market. In the USA, the number of breweries decreased from just over 1800 breweries in 1900, to only 1345 in 1915. In 1950, that number had decreased to 407, and by 1950 there were only 101 breweries still in business. Conversely, the average brewery output grew from 2.6 million liters in 1900 to 219.2 million liters in 1980. In the UK, the number of breweries collapsed from 6447 in 1900, to just 142 in 1980, whilst their average output grew from 0.9 million liters to 48.1 million liters over the same period.

Consolidation was reinforced by scale economies in distribution and the arrival of TV advertisements and globalization. During the 1980s and 1990s, breweries started looking abroad for expansion. Breweries such as Heineken (Holland), SABMiller (South Africa), and Interbrew (Belgium) acquired breweries in Eastern Europe, North and South America, and Asia. The largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch Inbev NV, is a product of the 2004 merger between (Belgian) Interbrew and (Brazilian) AmBev and the 2008 merger with Anheuser-Busch. This holding now produces 25% of the world’s beer.

Furthermore, all over the world, traditional ales largely produced with top fermentation lost market share to lager beer brewed with bottom fermentation. Lager beer (‘pils’) came to dominate the beer market globally. A further shift to even lighter beers was caused by grain shortages in the first half of the 20th century and growing consumer preferences for low-calorie products. Cheaper grains such as corn and rice were used, resulting in ‘light lager’ like Budweiser. In response to a growing demand for low calorie foods and drinks, brewers discontinued the production of dark beer and produced ‘diet’ or ‘light’ beers, such as Miller Lite. Light beer quickly became the most popular option in the US.

However, the growing domination of increasingly standardized lager and light beers produced by increasingly fewer brewing companies has led to a counter movement, which started in the US. New breweries with ‘special beers’ and ‘older’ style beer were labeled ‘microbreweries’ because of their small scale. Similar developments can now be observed in many countries. While the share of the microbreweries in the total global beer production is still relatively small, they are growing rapidly.

In countries like Belgium, beer brewing in (collaboration with) monasteries and abbeys has witnessed a remarkable revival and abbey beers are now the fastest growing segment of the Belgian beer market. Yet only a few of them – mainly the very popular Belgian Trappist beers – are still produced in monasteries. Most are recipes new and old brewed by smaller breweries, yet others are attempts by larger beer brewers to imitate the microbreweries or even take them over.

Because of their success, some of these breweries have since outgrown the ‘micro’ level, but are still labeled microbreweries because of the style of beer they are producing. Some are now referred to as ‘specialty brewers’. Paradoxically, today the largest US owned brewery is the Boston Brewing Company, which started only a few years ago as a microbrewery. This example powerfully illustrates how the global beer markets appear to have come full-circle via consolidation, global mergers, and acquisitions, back to the growth of the microbrewery.

Johan Swinnen is Professor and Director of the LICOS Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance at the University of Leuven, a Visiting Professor at Stanford University, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Brussels. He was previously Lead Economist at the World Bank and Economic Advisor at the European Commission. He is President-Elect of the International Association of Agricultural Economists. He holds a PhD from Cornell University. He has published widely on political economy, institutional reform, trade, and agricultural and food policy. His latest book is The Economics of Beer.

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