California may have the size and economy and independent spirit of a good-sized country. But California is not a nation. Which is precisely why it would be so self-destructive to seek to become one.

Yes, it’s understandable why, with the election of an evil white supremacist swindler as president of the United States, the idea of California going off on its own suddenly has such great currency. The movement for an independent California has taken off on social media; its supporters are appearing on TV, putting up billboards, and planning a referendum. Our state’s elected leaders are speaking of how Trump’s victory makes them feel like strangers in their own country. And many Californians are rightfully renewing strong objections to how America’s outdated 18th century governing system, from the Electoral College to the U.S. Senate (with just two senators per state, no matter the size) works against California’s interests.

Last week, I was constantly asked about the possibility of California’s independence while running a global forum on direct and participatory democracy. The conference was held, fortuitously, in Spanish Basque Country, whose people are experts in the difficulties of seeking independence, having sought their own nation within the Iberian Peninsula for centuries.

So, after failing to joke away such inquiries, I answered California independence questions with my own query: Do you think we would be better off trying to go our own way?

The responses—from political scientists around the world, and especially the Basques who hosted—were sobering. It’s impossible to know how any secession will turn out, and the process of winning independence is always costlier and harder than would-be secessionists think.

Such efforts are bitter, divisive struggles even for a cohesive nation like the Basque Country, whose people have assiduously protected their distinctive language and culture. When I asked the president of the Basque Parliament, Bakartxo Tejeria, what distinguished Basque democratic culture, she mentioned three things: stubbornness, a very long collective memory, and a determination to never run from a fight.

Such feistiness is inspiring, especially when experienced up close.

But it is not very Californian.

We are open-minded, not stubborn; we celebrate and seek out new incursions of language and culture and migrants, instead of defending against them. And Californians don’t just have short memories of our shared history; most of us never bothered to learn the history in the first place.

And we largely see these aspects of our character not as failures, but as virtues.

We are not a nation. To the contrary, we are best understood as one of the world’s leading un-nations. The word nation, after all, comes from Latin and from old English and French words for “birth” (naissance). But more than a quarter of Californians were born in some other country and millions entered the world in some other state. Nations are defined by common descent, history, language or culture, but Californians pride ourselves on our lack of shared history, which is what makes us so cool, so diverse, so darn good-looking.

If our un-nation can be said to be any one thing—and we are hard to generalize about—it is that we are a sanctuary, for Americans and the rest of the world, who must flee from stubbornness and fighting. When the United States gets into wars—from the Civil War to World War II—its citizens head here to heal and start over. “Things better work here,” Joan Didion famously wrote of her native state, “because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

It is our inclusive un-nationhood, and not just our recent political preference for Democrats, that makes California the natural opposition to the prospect of a federal government peddling racist and xenophobic nationalism. Which is precisely why the idea of an independent California country—so long discussed and joked about—is now newly serious. And newly dangerous.

To be blunt: Do we really want to answer Trumpian nationalism with our own? For our un-nation to pursue its own nationalist project would be a capitulation to the forces of separatism. And it would be nothing less than a betrayal of ourselves, a suicide of the universalist California idea.

It also would be, as a practical matter, a very nasty business. The conflict could last decades, and the costs would be felt not just in politics but in treasure—and quite possibly blood.

We’d have to battle Congress and other states to get their support if we wanted to leave peacefully, and we’d certainly have to take more than our share of America’s debts with us. And if things got so bad that we chose to leave without permission? Do you really think a country as armed and violent and war-prone as the United States would let its greatest province exit without a fight? In the Basque Country, scholars of nationalism from Asia to South America reminded me of what happened in other independence struggles: Koreans killing Koreans, Chinese killing Chinese, Irish killing Irish, and, less than two centuries ago, Americans killing Americans.

Inevitably, the fighting would pit Californian against Californian. Many of us would not want to leave the U.S. And most of us identify more closely with our distinct regions than with the state as a whole, a tendency that could divide us. And don’t forget: While Hillary Clinton won California by 29 points and more than 3.5 million votes, one third of California voters cast ballots for Trump—representing an uncomfortably large Fifth Column with which to coexist.

What sense would it make to take on an independence war of choice when we already face so many other consequential fights? Climate change threatens like the big waves that I watched crest and splash over the top of Basque sea walls. The whole world confronts regional wars and a migration crisis, and Western countries face a calamity of stagnant incomes and retreating democracies.

Let’s also remember that, if we managed to leave, we’d win only the ice-cold comfort of trying to sleep every night next door to an unstable, nuclear-armed country bitter at our departure.

Given the world and the America we now face, Californians shouldn’t waste another second contemplating independence or secession. We must instead focus on defending our nation and protecting its people, regardless of race, religion or legal status, against whatever horrors the haters in Washington D.C might send our way.

But in doing so, we must be careful to avoid escalating the conflict. Ours will have to be a strategy right out of the Cold War. Contest every incursion of the Orange-Haired Empire, while carefully avoiding rhetoric or actions that lead to greater conflict or violence. Build our own alliances and collaborations with states and countries that share our values.

We will have to be especially disciplined about impugning the motives of those who support the new American regime. Instead, we must relentlessly urge them to change their minds, and assure them that when they realize their mistake, we will welcome them like the sanctuary we’ve always been. We’ll have to challenge the nativists and racialists within our own borders with the same spirit.

In other words, we have to stay strong—and stay chill.

We’ll also have to work on improving the power of our own example—we’ll need to get better at governing, and more effective at meeting our state’s economic, educational, and environmental goals. We’ll need to give new meaning to the old adage: Living well is the best revenge.

So, on this Thanksgiving weekend, let’s begin by avoiding rancor or worry at the family table. Instead let’s give thanks for the United States, and for the fact that we’re its biggest, most powerful state, with plenty of weight to throw against Washington.

And let’s remind ourselves that America, for better and for worse, is California’s nation. Why would we ever surrender it?

The post California’s Not Built to Become Its Own Nation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m not kidding. Yes, a handful of our fellow Californians—prominent citizens from Samuel L. Jackson and Bryan Cranston to Miley Cyrus and Barbra Streisand—proclaimed themselves so disgusted with the sorry state of American democracy that they pledged to depart the United States after the November elections. And yes, none of them have made actual arrangements for their exile; perhaps their Golden State digs are too swank to flee.

But I do know at least one non-celebrity Californian, whose humble abode is eminently flee-able, who is taking his frustrations with California and American-style democracy overseas. This weekend, in fact, he’s decamping for Europe, where he’ll work to figure out where his country and state are going wrong democracy-wise.

That departing Californian is yours truly.

I must confess: this is not my first such journey. Every couple of years for the past decade, I’ve helped bring together scholars, journalists, activists, election administrators, and politicians who work on participatory democracy, including the initiative and referendum processes for which California is well known. Each gathering is in a different country—South Korea, Uruguay, Tunisia, Switzerland, and even San Francisco. This time our destination is San Sebastián, in Spain’s Basque Country.

I don’t enjoy long-distance travel and would be happy never to go east of the Sierra Nevada. And I don’t particularly enjoy organizing the events, which often requires dealing by Skype and email at odd hours with prickly foreign professors or officials who speak languages I don’t.

But I do it because, by listening to people from around the world explain their challenges, I get a much clearer idea of what’s wrong with our version of democracy, and how we might improve it.

As the French realist Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

I wish every American, every Californian, would do the same—travel outside the country not for business or for tourism but to grasp how other places make democratic decisions, so that we might better comprehend ourselves. Goodness knows that such understanding is lacking; surveys show big majorities of Californians know little about the most basic functions of their state and local governments.

Unfortunately, too many people here consider the very idea of looking for answers overseas as daft, even preposterous. When I give talks to Californians—from leaders to college students—and start describing how other countries tackle ballot initiatives or elections or budgeting in smarter ways than we do, the audience quickly tunes out. The singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow has been receiving fairly dismissive treatment for a petition she’s circulating urging the U.S. to limit the poison of endless electoral politics and adopt a shorter election cycle, like Canada and Great Britain. In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, Crow lamented the discounting of those foreign models:

“Yes, they’re both parliamentary systems. But really? That means we shouldn’t have the conversation about what we can learn and apply in our own system?”

The resistance to foreign ideas is especially strong in Sacramento, where political staffers and lobbyists heap ridicule on those who make such suggestions (I speak from personal experience). And heaven help an elected official who wants to go overseas to learn more about democracy—he or she is all but certain to be pilloried for taking an expensive “junket.”

I find this cynicism dispiriting—and surprising. After all, Californians can be among the most open people in the world when it comes to embracing fashion or design or entertainment or technologies from around the world. But we have the opposite attitude when it comes to democracy and governance. We are convinced that our system is so singularly distinctive that the world has little to say to us.

It’s hard to overstate just how wrong we are. Almost nothing in California government is a native invention. We borrowed our two-house legislative system from our British colonial masters, plagiarized our first constitution from Iowans and New Yorkers (and by extension, the Dutch), took our top-two-runoff election system from the French-speaking world, and established our direct democracy system explicitly on the Swiss model. California prides itself on being a leader in social advances like women’s suffrage because we were ahead of nearly all other states. But in truth, we were just following the example of New Zealanders, Aussies, and Swedes when women won the right to vote.

Our reluctance to look overseas for fixes for our many democratic problems makes little sense in the aftermath of this election. Nearly every democratic institution in this country—the presidency, Congress, law enforcement, state election officials, intelligence agencies, the media—took a beating in 2016, and finds its credibility diminished as a result. In California, our first open U.S. Senate seat in a generation produced a desultory race, and we turned direct democracy into a bludgeon, littering ballots with 17 complicated and confusing statewide initiatives (plus as many as 25 additional local measures in some places).

Despite widespread disillusionment with aspects of our democracy, there are few big ideas being advanced for reform. We’re not looking far and wide enough for them, and so our insularity embitters us. As Mark Twain famously noted in The Innocents Abroad:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

In San Sebastián this week, I’m looking forward to learning more from the world: About how Germans support grassroots groups that want to bring ideas to the ballot, how Tunisians are creating a new system of local government, how Seoul, South Korea, and Vienna, Austria have found smarter ways to engage citizens in local questions, and how Basques have built economic and governance structures around cooperatives, instead of the massive conflict-ridden systems we favor in California.

I wish I could transport a plane full of local and state officials overseas with me, so they could compare notes and learn firsthand from their counterparts elsewhere, the way American businesspeople and scholars seem more comfortable doing.

“If I cannot add to my own level of understanding, I could ill afford to try to raise that of others,” said the Basque Country’s own Saint Ignatius of Loyola. In these times of great anxiety and little understanding, leaving the country might be the most patriotic thing you could do.

The post Why We All Need to Leave the Country After This Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By day, I witnessed a mixed race, mixed aged group of Americans share their most vulnerable and unguarded selves. By night, I guiltily wallowed in televised coverage of the most craven of American political traditions—the nominating convention. The morning after Donald Trump’s acceptance speech, I showed up at the training jangly and exhausted. I was worn down by the emotional effort of the week and by the angry and exclusionary rhetoric from the podium of one of our major political parties.

The trainer—a woman of Chicana and Puerto Rican descent who has led social justice workshops around the world—finally stood up and said: “Here’s the deal—and I am especially talking to you white people—you need to love Donald Trump.” I set my coffee cup down between my feet.

“What in the actual hell?” I whispered to my co-worker.

“No I’m serious,” she went on, “People don’t act like that for no reason. He’s yours to figure out, and I guarantee there is some particular suffering at the root of all that anger.”

I’ve been mulling that exhortation nearly every day since, trying to imagine what could possibly be the suffering at the heart of the hateful rhetoric spewed by Trump—and even more disturbingly—by his whipped-up followers. Most of the time, my imagination fails me.

That failure may be the problem. To the extent that presidential elections can tell us anything about the American character, this one seems to be revealing a stunning atrophying of the imagination.

The core assumption upon which a representative democracy is built is that while an elected official cannot share the precise experiences of all her constituents, she can imagine herself into their particular and varied life circumstances. The larger the number of constituents, the greater the need for a broad and rich imagination—and the greater the need for a cultivated sense of empathy.

The President—for example—needs to be able to imagine the lives of and empathize with both the injured logger hooked on opioids and his wife who can no longer tolerate the volatility of the home. The President needs to imagine himself or herself into the life of a young African American man who is terrified he will be shot by the police and the white patrol officer who fears for her life every day. The President needs to imagine the terror and desperation of parents who pack up their small children and flee violence in their home country and the Rust Belt textile worker who is afraid she will never work again. Because presidents—or for that matter mayors or city council members—can never be all those things, it is essential that they be able to empathetically consider the circumstances of millions of strangers living their own lives and enduring their own particular form of pain.

That’s a tall order, because empathetic imagining is both challenging and agonizing. After all, we citizens come to the public square already bearing our own scars and carrying our own suffering. And now we are asking our elected officials—and ourselves—to take on more hardship and need. In that struggle, I am reminded of “I Just Missed the Bus and I’ll Be Late for Work” by Chilean poet Ariel Dorfman:

I’d have to piss through my eyes to cry for you,
salivate, sweat, sigh through my eyes
I’d have to waterfall
I’d have to wine
I’d have to die like crushed grapes
through my eyes,
cough up vultures spit green silence
and shed a dried-up skin….
I’d have to cry these wounds
this war
to mourn for us

That kind of searing bodily empathy begins in the imagination, and it is relentless work. And I fear we may be out of practice.

If this election cycle is any indicator, many of us don’t have any trouble projecting evil motives and nefarious plans on immigrants and Muslims and people in dozens of countries around the globe. So it seems our collective dark imagination is in fine working order. But this campaign has also revealed just how weak our brighter, empathetic imagination has become. The rhetoric of many—if not most—of the candidates has embraced black-and-white thinking and an us-versus-them ethos poisonous to a flexible, empathetic spirit. The name-calling, the otherizing, the appeals to the fight or flight levers of the reptile parts of our brains all impede us from being able to get outside ourselves and beyond our basest fears.

This is a global disease. The current brand of populism, both in the U.S and around the world, is rooted in individual grievance and is suspicious of collective action and the institutions designed to support it. Demagogues gain by warning us there are barbarians threatening our families and homes and ways of life. Atomization—even atomization leading to an angry but diffuse mob—is preferable to empathy and understanding if you are seeking to maintain power and wealth.

You can’t just blame the powerful or the greedy. The rest of us are also responsible for this ugly state of public imagination, and the vulnerability to demagoguery that comes with it. In the same way that our elected officials are called to imagine themselves into our lives, we are called to consider their lives as well.

Every time I take a Monday morning flight from my outpost in Oregon to the East Coast, I run into one of our members of Congress flying back to Washington. Yes, it’s their job, but try to imagine that reality. Seven Oregonians fly home nearly every weekend to try to maintain some semblance of a family life while connecting with constituents with sometimes grievous problems—before flying back across the country to try to represent those interests in a fractured and fractious institution.

And that’s the least of it. Imagine making life and death decisions for American service members every single day. In tough budget times, imagine trying to decide whether to cut services for the elderly or the disabled or the young. Or to use an extreme example from history: put yourself in President Truman’s position as he weighs whether to use the atomic bomb to end the war with Japan. As Joe Biden said about the administration’s decision to promote and support the economic bailout of the financial system: “[V]oting to support TARP in the Congress was like … putting rattlesnakes in people’s kitchens … I mean—because the very people they blamed for the problem were being bailed out.”

When we fail to consider the burdens and responsibilities and no-win decisions facing those we elect, we are unable to imagine the pressures, the sleeplessness, the terror and agony of making a mistake. Rather, we get swept up in our own grievances, unrealistically expecting perfection and polish and demanding entertainment in the form of witty sound bites. And then, the whole undertaking of representative government becomes a partisan game rather than a shared human activity for which we are all responsible.

This presidential campaign has brimmed over with ugliness and divisiveness that could take us years—maybe decades—to recover from. But the great thing about the imagination is it’s an internal state. Each of us can start there, within ourselves. Maybe we can cultivate a practice of standing in one another’s shoes, including the shoes of those who seek to represent us. Maybe we can imagine ourselves into the life of a neighbor from the opposite political party or a member of Congress or even a presidential candidate.

Truth be told, even after all these months of mulling, I can’t honestly say I love Donald Trump. I don’t know that I ever will. But I do try to imagine the burdens he seeks to take on, and those are heavy ones for anybody.

The post Imagine Yourself in Your Politicians’ Shoes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Clinton ad imitated an offering from Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential campaign. That year, a Johnson ad featured quotes from three prominent Republican governors—Nelson Rockefeller of New York, William Scranton of Pennsylvania, and George Romney of Michigan—denouncing their party’s nominee, U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The ad concluded, “Even if you’re a Republican with serious doubts about Barry Goldwater, you’re in good company.”

Much like Trump in 2016, Goldwater ran an outsider’s campaign, far more popular with the party’s grassroots than its establishment. Goldwater’s uncompromising anti-communism and vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which he considered an unconstitutional federal intrusion on states’ rights) attracted support from conservative Democrats, especially from the South. But his campaign’s high-profile defenders of segregation, most notably U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, repelled moderate Northern Republicans. So did the candidate’s intemperate statements on the campaign trail, as when Goldwater mused about lobbing nuclear weapons into the “men’s room at the Kremlin.”

President Johnson effectively served as his own chief strategist. During the summer of 1964, he lamented the media’s excessive interest in the backlash—Southern Democrats who were abandoning the party because of its support for civil rights legislation. “They talk about all the South quitting me, and they talk about everybody quitting me,” Johnson complained to one aide in August. But polls indicated that the greater number of partisan defections had come from Republicans, who distanced themselves from Goldwater. It was time, Johnson believed, to focus on “the Republican backlash—all these extreme statements [by Goldwater], and Ku Klux Klan, and all this other stuff.”

Johnson eventually deemed the phenomenon “the frontlash” (a term he thought would appeal to journalists). Upper middle-class independents and moderate Republicans normally didn’t vote Democratic in national elections, but they could be wooed through a relentlessly negative campaign that portrayed Goldwater as a dangerous extremist. Talk “about the danger of a woman having a two-headed baby, and men becoming sterile, and drinking contaminated milk, and these things,” Johnson privately explained, and “they’ll know who they ought to be scared of without our ever saying so.”

This strategy reached its most aggressive point on Sept. 7, 1964. A Johnson commercial featured a little girl, plucking the petals off a daisy, counting one to ten as she did so. Her voice, then image faded, eventually replaced by a bomb countdown and a mushroom cloud. Finally, Johnson’s voice emerged: “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

The daisy ad, the most famous attack ad in any presidential campaign, generated furious protests from Republicans, who argued it unfairly demonized their nominee. The commercial, which appeared only once but received massive media attention, helped firm up the connection between Goldwater and nuclear war.

While Johnson’s strategy was tactically brilliant, it came with a drawback: the President struggled to articulate a positive agenda. Instead, he fell back on clichés about patriotism and biblical values, generic themes that would alienate neither the union activists who then formed the Democratic Party’s base nor the traditionally Republican suburbanites, mostly women, who he hoped to attract to his coalition.

Clinton has run her version of a frontlash campaign in 2016. But the problem that Johnson confronted has, if anything, become even more pronounced. Bridging the enormous ideological gap between millennials who backed Clinton’s primary rival, Bernie Sanders, and “never Trump” Republicans would challenge even the most talented politician. As a substitute for Johnson’s paeans to patriotism, Clinton has relied on appeals to identity politics, but, like Johnson in 1964, her approach has primarily been negative, focused on convincing voters that electing her opponent could have catastrophic consequences for the republic.

On Election Day 1964, Johnson carried 44 states and won 61 percent of the popular vote. The next day, however, the President worried that his enemies would present the outcome as the voters having voted against Goldwater without embracing the specifics of his program. Journalists, he lamented, would ignore the “love and affection” voters had shown him. Instead, they would present him as “the lesser of two evils. Corn pone. Southern.”

Even a Johnson victory lacking a meaningful ideological mandate yielded significant congressional gains for his party. In the 1964 House contests, Democrats picked up 37 seats, giving them a more than 2-to-1 advantage for the 1965-1966 session. And despite holding 26 of the 35 Senate seats up for election, Democrats gained two additional Senate seats in 1964. But the surge was temporary; Democrats suffered major losses in the 1966 midterm elections. And the party’s popular vote came in almost 20 points below Johnson’s 1964 level in 1968, when Richard Nixon’s victory returned Republicans to the White House.

Although Clinton has never enjoyed a polling lead comparable to LBJ’s in 1964, the lessons of the past would suggest that her updated frontlash strategy should produce a victory this November. But it seems unlikely a Democratic Congress will accompany any victory. For the party to secure even a one-seat majority in the House, Democratic incumbents would have to go undefeated and Democratic challengers would need to win 27 of the 29 seats the non-partisan Cook Political Report currently lists as either toss-ups or leaning toward Republicans. The party’s Senate chances initially looked more promising, but in recent weeks, declining fortunes in Ohio and Florida mean that the Democrats might need to win on unfavorable terrain in either Missouri or North Carolina to retake the Senate.

In our vastly more polarized era, it might well be that only a positive message from the top of the ticket—such as that offered by Ronald Reagan for Republicans in 1980 or Barack Obama for Democrats in 2008—will meaningfully affect down-ballot races. But at the presidential level, Johnson’s frontlash model has been revived more than 50 years later, with the Democrats once again facing a Republican whose political and personal positions render him particularly vulnerable to the tactic.

The post Hillary Clinton’s Negative Ad Campaign Style Is Vintage appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If you answered “both,” you’d be correct. We don’t tend to think of FDR as a conservative today, and at certain points he would have rejected the label, but in 1936 that was how he wanted to be understood. He was three years into his first term and it was far from clear there would be a second. The mandate from his 1932 landslide victory seemed exhausted. Americans were seven years into the catastrophe of the Great Depression, which had destroyed whole industries and spread economic pain across the country.

Most of all, Roosevelt faced withering criticism for his signature agenda, the New Deal. While his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had resisted using the powers of government to battle the Depression, Roosevelt argued that the economy had changed in ways that required bigger government. The railroad, the telegraph, the automobile, and the modern corporation had pulled the American people into a tighter web, so economic pain could more easily spread.

Roosevelt had used his 1932 presidential campaign to dramatize his cause of remaking government for the new economic challenges. During the Democratic National Convention, he departed from the usual tradition in which a candidate was notified by telegraph of his nomination after the convention is finished. He instead telegraphed party leaders, after hearing of his nomination, with the request that they hold the convention in session while he flew from New York to Chicago—a very rare thing at the time—in order to accept the nomination in person. When Roosevelt finally appeared before the delegates, he told them, “Let it also be symbolic that . . . I broke traditions.” He was committed to bringing about a new political order.

When Roosevelt was elected in a landslide, he set about creating program after program that rewrote rules for American manufacturing, limited production on American farms, and changed the structures of the credit system. The New Deal was astounding in its scope, promising to rework basic structures of the American economy.

But well before the 1936 re-election campaign, Roosevelt was met with resistance. Many businessmen became concerned about the way that the New Deal was infringing on their power and profits. “It must have now become clear to every thinking man,” Irénée du Pont, of the DuPont Company, wrote to a friend, “that the so-called ‘New Deal,’ advocated by the Administration is nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another name.” To battle this threat, du Pont enlisted his family and friends in a campaign to bring down first Roosevelt and then the entire New Deal. Their strategy was what they hoped would be a grassroots campaign, conducted through a new organization called the American Liberty League.

Yet the businessmen realized that they could not just use the League to advocate for the protection of private property. That would turn off the common man in a time of deep economic depression. So as they cast about for an organizing principle, the League’s secretary, W.H. Stayton, suggested that they come up with what he called “a moral or an emotional purpose,” rather than merely the defense of property rights.

Stayton thought he knew one that would work. Not many issues, he wrote in a memo to the other leaders, “could command more support or evoke more enthusiasm among our people than the simple issue of the ‘Constitution.’” With all Roosevelt’s changes to the structure of government and the economy, Stayton suggested, he was threatening the Constitution. “The public ignorance concerning it is dense and inexcusable,” he wrote, “but nevertheless, there is a mighty—though vague—affection for it. The people, I believe, need merely to be lead and instructed, and this affection will become almost worship and can be converted into an irresistible movement.”

Stayton flatly acknowledged that his devotion to the Constitution was a ruse. He wanted to change it in various ways, starting with the elimination of the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized an income tax that hurt the rich more than others. But for the purposes of the 1936 election, Stayton suggested, the League needed to act as though “the Constitution is perfect.” “We do not seek to change it,” he said, “or to add to it or to subtract from it; we seek to rescue it from those who misunderstand it, misuse it and mistreat it.”

Roosevelt immediately saw the problem that the League posed to his program. So he faced a choice. He could continue to advocate for a new political order, as he had in the 1932 election, but that would leave him open to the claims that he was subverting the Constitution and departing from the ideals of the Founders. Or he could do something else.

Roosevelt decided to make what we would today call “a pivot.” During the 1936 State of the Union in January, the president abandoned his call for a new political order and rhetorically remade himself into a conservative who defended the Constitution from usurpation by the rich.

In a combative address, he charged his political opponents with appropriating “the livery of great national constitutional ideals” to obscure their selfish political goals. He claimed that the Founders were against entrenched privilege and so would have supported him in his policies. And from that point forward, in address after address, Roosevelt wrapped himself in founding ideals to defeat his opponents.

At no point was the change in message more obvious than during the 1936 Democratic National Convention, held in Philadelphia. The location gave Roosevelt the opportunity to claim the symbolic covering of the founding era. Unlike his address four years earlier, where he first promised a new political order, he now said that his purpose was primarily conservative. They had gathered at the University of Pennsylvania football stadium, he explained, “to reaffirm the faith of our fathers, to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom, to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776—an American way of life.”

That pledge turned out to be extremely powerful, even though it was totally at odds with his earlier rhetorical strategies. As Roosevelt rode around the stadium after the address, with the crowd of 80,000 going wild, many observers concluded that the election was, for all intents and purposes, over. Roosevelt won the most sweeping victory since James Monroe’s unopposed election in 1820. He won every state but two. And he carried so many allies with him into Congress that the Democratic U.S. senators, all 75 of them, were unable to fit into their side of the Senate chamber.

The problem is that neither Roosevelt nor his business opponents really sought to restore the government to the way it was understood by the Founders. The Depression had created new challenges unknown in the late 18th century. It would be impossible to go back. But the 1936 election demonstrated the power of rhetoric invoking the Constitution as it was originally understood, or at least as politicians claimed it was to be originally understood.

From that point forward, both Democrats and Republicans have gestured to the founding moment to criticize their opponents and to justify their policies, especially when they are in trouble. The Founders and the Constitution have become a political football that each side needs to score points. And it is that rhetorical pattern that is, in many ways, the most significant legacy of the election of 1936.

The post 1936, When “The Dictator” FDR Was Bent on Constitutional Destruction appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One candidate was a natural politician, affable and gregarious, a true man-of-the-people who favored flashy suits and a trademark derby hat. Reporters loved him and admirers thronged his events.

The other contender could easily be classified a misanthrope. He was a miserable public speaker who hated crowds and disdained the campaign regimen of shaking hands and kissing babies. For months, even after secretly directing his staff to launch his campaign, he publicly disavowed interest in the presidency. He made a total of five major speeches in the course of the campaign, each time promptly retreating afterward to his home in Washington. He brushed off the press corps, speaking only to trusted correspondents.

And yet it was the misanthrope, Herbert Hoover, who won the 1928 presidential election in a landslide. The loser was Al Smith, a popular mayor of New York just as America was swinging from its rural past to its urban future. But in that moment, he didn’t fit the popular ideal of “presidential.”

It was the height of the Roaring ‘20s, and the electorate delivered a startling result that made sense only in a time that seemed to define itself by defying convention. In choosing their political leaders, the voters of the ‘20s appear to have decided that the decade’s fads were for the dance floor; that when it came to politics, sober and circumspect was the order of the day. Thus it was the famously quiet Calvin Coolidge who prevailed in 1924; thus it was Herbert Hoover, a dour and self-effacing Quaker, who was chosen his successor (in an election that bore all the marks of inevitability).

Certainly, it wasn’t policy that decided the election. There was little to distinguish, in those days, between the Republican and Democratic agenda. In fact, when Hoover first emerged as a public figure eight years before, both major parties recruited him as a prospective standard-bearer.

At that point, Hoover’s ambivalence got the best of him and he rebuffed all comers, preferring to accept a Cabinet position. He built his reputation from there, gaining public trust as secretary of commerce under successive Republican presidents.

Eight years later, he ran with the party he served under. But there was no great policy gulf between Republicans and Democrats at the time. Both parties voiced support for limited government, both sought alliance with big business, both supported arms control, and both decided, reluctantly, to abandon Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations as politically unfeasible.

Even the sole longstanding division between the parties, over trade policy, was muted. In that day Republicans stood for tariff protection to foster domestic industry, while Democrats touted the benefits of free trade. During the campaign, however, Smith softened his opposition to tariffs, and emphasized his support for business, in part to meet the challenge of the Republican alliance with business, and in part because Smith fully subscribed to the idea that free enterprise meant opportunity for all.

The one real divide came over Prohibition. Hoover enjoyed an occasional martini, but true to his repressed character, he embraced the ban on drink as the will of the people. On the other hand, as a Catholic and an urbanite, Smith saluted Prohibition as the law of the land but acknowledged that he personally opposed it.

John Raskob, a financier with offices at both DuPont and General Motors, was a great friend of Smith’s and became his primary financial backer in 1928. He summed up the contest in a memo to a business colleague. “Governor Smith’s ideas of protecting big business are quite in accord with yours and mine,” Raskob wrote in July. “Personally, I can see no big difference between the parties except the wet and dry question.”

New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith, nearing the close of his campaign for president, addresses supporters in a packed house at the Academy of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y., Nov. 3, 1928.

 
Neither Hoover nor Smith focused on Prohibition in their personal appearances, but Hoover surrogates kicked up headlines by attacking Smith as a “wet” sympathizer who had fostered in New York “lawlessness and disregard for the Constitution.” At their national convention the Democrats adopted a plank supporting enforcement of the law, but Smith bridled, vowing in a telegram to seek “fundamental changes” in the ban on drink.

In the South, Prohibition mixed with race into a volatile electoral cocktail. The Ku Klux Klan led cultural attacks against Smith’s fellow Catholics as well as against blacks and Jews, while some Hoover speakers denounced Smith as “Romish,” code for foreign, immigrant, and wet—all anathema to white supremacists. But for all these efforts, Hoover and the Republicans couldn’t quite defeat the Democratic Party’s virtual monopoly on racist politics. While Hoover broke into the Democrats’ “Solid South” for the first time since the Civil War, taking Florida, Texas, and North Carolina, the South remained a Democrat stronghold, and delivered Smith six of his seven state victories.

In the end it wasn’t race or booze that decided the contest of 1928. It was the impulse to drive politics out of politics.

The great political event of the 1920s was not war, or peace, or faction, but scandal. Teapot Dome was the name given to an oil-lease kickback scheme that reached to the highest levels of the government in the administration of Warren G. Harding. Evidence suggests that Harding himself didn’t know about it—when he learned of the scam he was so unnerved that the distress it brought on is believed to have killed him. He died in a hotel in San Francisco, two-and-a-half years into his first term, in August 1923.

Allegations of misconduct first surfaced in 1922, but the hearings and trials that ensued dragged out for the rest of the decade. At the same time, America’s cities were dominated by political machines, none more corrupt than New York’s political organization Tammany Hall, where Al Smith had got his start.

Hoover presented himself as the antidote to politics as usual. He was a member of the Harding Cabinet but adroitly avoided the spreading stain of Teapot Dome. Instead he relied on his accomplishments as a mining engineer, as a business executive, and as administrator of major relief projects during World War I to claim the mantle of practical, prosaic competence. At a time when the public was disgusted with politics, he was the definitive anti-politician.

New York Times correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick spoke for the electorate when she wrote, in 1929, “We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being solved. The modern technical mind was for the first time at the head of a government… Almost with an air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.”

What followed was the crash on Wall Street, and the Depression. Hoover was active, but he failed to connect with a suffering populace. His financial policies were innovative but they worked no miracles, and the idea of a politician allergic to the practice of politics quickly lost its charm.

There are few political maxims that serve in every circumstance, as the career of Herbert Hoover should demonstrate. But if the election of 1928 holds a lesson for today it might be this: Be careful what you wish for.

The post How Herbert Hoover Skirted Scandal to Win the White House appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But no candidate for President carried the reform banner for honesty and competence more naturally, or tragically, than Horace Greeley. In 1872, Greeley was the nation’s leading newspaper publisher and editor. His incisive analysis of contentious issues, dramatic, witty, and prolific writing, his insertion of literary content, and appeal for higher journalistic standards, elevated the entire newspaper profession. In his words: “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.”

For three decades, Greeley was among the loudest advocates for important and sometimes odd causes. The New York Tribune, which he founded in 1841 at age 30, was “anti-war, anti-slavery, anti-rum, anti-tobacco, anti-seduction, anti-grogshop, anti-brothel, and anti-gambling house.”

Greeley also advocated for cooperative economic movements and was called “The Farmer of Chappaqua” because he tended several acres near that small town north of New York City. Expansion of the free common school was one of his deepest passions—though his family’s meager circumstances afforded him just three years of schooling, he read the entire Bible by age five. He promoted trade unions and was the first president of the Printers’ Union. “Honest Horace” believed in American progress and good government.

Horace Greeley, 1868.

 
Then he entered it. In 1848-1849, he was appointed to fill a vacancy in Congress for three months as a Whig. In Washington, he introduced the first bill to give small tracts of free government land to settlers. But when he exposed abuses in reimbursement to members of Congress for travel, he became the target of their personal abuse. By 1852, the Whigs were breaking apart as a political party over the question of slavery, so Greeley opted not to seek re-election.

In any case, he was an unlikely politician. His appearance alone was alarming. He was tall and angular with long stringy hair, chin whiskers, and wire-rim glasses. He carelessly dressed in a long linen coat called a Duster, and wore a tall white hat—his trademark. As the nation’s leading reformer and political oracle, Greeley had many detractors who called him a moral zealot and “scatter-brained.”

In 1854, Greeley was among those who, along with Joseph Medill and Alvan B. Bovay, gave the Republican party its illustrious name—co-founding it on a platform opposing expansion of slavery. He churned out editorials in favor of the first two Republican presidential candidates, John C. Fremont and Abraham Lincoln. But in 1868, his support for General Ulysses S. Grant was lukewarm—he’d condemned Grant as a “drunk” during the Civil War.

Horace Greeley and family.

 
Greeley’s fears about Grant’s competence were quickly realized. The 18th President was cozy with Wall Street speculators and handed out government positions to family, friends, and army acquaintances, some of whom engaged in corruption that soiled his administration.

On May 1, 1872, a month before President Grant’s re-nomination at the Republican convention in Philadelphia, a desperate collection of several hundred “anyone but Grant” Republicans—Liberal Republicans, they called themselves—convened in Cincinnati. “The Civil Service of the government has become a mere instrument of partisan tyranny and personal ambition and an object of self greed,” their platform charged. The reform party also denounced Grant’s “hard money” policies that hurt western farmers and helped eastern bankers who held their debt.

The President had agreed with Greeley’s editorial advice and persuaded Congress to pass the anti-Ku Klux Klan Act. But Liberal Republicans thought the law put too much power in the hands of the federal government to suppress individual rights. They called for “universal amnesty” for Southerners, and feared Grant’s tough Reconstruction policy would fuel long-term hatreds and turn the South against Republicans for decades.

Having adopted a platform of principles, the Liberal Republicans turned to the main business of nominating a presidential candidate. Greeley hoped it would be him and had sent his top editorial assistant, Whitelaw Reid, to Cincinnati to help organize support. On the convention’s first ballot, Charles Francis Adams, son of one president and grandson of another, took the lead and Greeley came in second.

But Adams had sailed for a European vacation and had refused to say if he would accept the nomination. So on the second ballot, the New York publisher took a two-vote lead, which continued to build until he won a majority of delegates on the sixth ballot.

Chappaqua Farm, Westchester County, N.Y.: The residence of the Hon. Horace Greeley. By Currier & Ives, 1872.

 
Some 10,000 Greeley supporters greeted news of his nomination with a “monster rally” in New York City under a fire sign declaring him, “The People’s Choice.” Greeley clubs sprung up across the country and supporters donned “the white hat of peace,” like the one worn by their disheveled political hero.

A month after the regular Republicans re-nominated President Grant in June, Democrats convened in Baltimore for the strangest convention in party history: it lasted just six hours. Party leaders could not agree on a Democrat to become nominee. But they were determined to find someone to challenge President Grant, whose military occupation of southern states they hated. And Greeley, though not a Democrat (he’d been a bitter critic of Democrats for decades) opposed Grant forcefully. There was no prohibition against becoming the nominee of two parties. So the Democrats, with fewer other options, turned to Greeley. The Democratic party adopted the Liberal Republican platform, including support of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that had outlawed slavery and given citizenship to former captives.

Greeley’s campaign was frenetic. He traveled by carriage and train through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, drawing massive crowds (who wanted to see the eccentric reformer) and delivering upwards of 200 speeches—more than any candidate before him.

“Let us forget that we have fought,” he exhorted. “Let us remember that we have made peace…” He called for a “New Departure” to heal the wounds of Civil War. He answered hundreds of letters, turned out campaign literature, and met with hordes of well-wishers. By mid-summer Greeley’s supporters were confident that his message of national reconciliation was taking hold and that he would win.

But the incumbent president counter-attacked. Grant-backing hecklers disrupted Greeley’s rallies, relentlessly denouncing him as “Old Chappaquack” and a “Know-Nothing.” Cartoonist Thomas Nast lampooned him on the pages of Harper’s Weekly. One caricatured him shaking hands with John Wilkes Booth over the grave of Lincoln. The cartoon stung—Greeley had been among those who posted bail for Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

Horace Greeley honored on a 1961 U.S. postage stamp.

 
During the summer, the strain of the campaign and the attacks proved too much. Greeley was sidelined with “brain fever.” Then, a week before the election, his invalid wife Mary died. “I am not dead, but I wish I were,” Greeley told a friend.

On election day, Nov. 5, 1872, some Liberal Republicans abandoned Greeley because he cared little about civil service reform and did not support the party’s free trade sentiments. And many Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to vote for their recent rival. Grant, still a war hero to many American people, attracted nearly 3.6 million votes or 55.6 percent of the total. Greeley swayed 2.8 million voters. Broken and humiliated by his loss, Greeley wrote, “I stand naked before God, the most utterly, hopelessly wretched, and undone of all who ever lived.” He was committed to a sanitarium where he died on November 29, just three weeks after the election.

On Dec. 4, 1872, President Grant’s carriage led the editor’s funeral procession down Fifth Avenue. Tens of thousands of admirers joined the cortege, including Vice President Henry Wilson, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, numerous Congressmen and the city’s mayor. Horace Greeley had lost an election, but the nation grieved its loss of the man poet John Greenleaf Whittier called “our later Franklin.” Grant’s second term was marred by even more scandals than the first. Reform would have to wait for another day.

The post The Untold Story of the Presidential Candidate Once Named ‘Our Other Franklin’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Despite efforts to unify the early United States around President George Washington, two factions quickly developed around his administration’s most articulate, forceful ideologues—Thomas Jefferson, who believed that the government governs best that governs least, and Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist who favored a robust national government that would have the power and revenues to do big things.

Hamilton and Jefferson realized that if they wanted their philosophies to have a practical impact, they would need political allies. But with no party system in the U.S., Hamilton and Jefferson turned to the only institutions that reached large numbers of men interested in public affairs: the newspapers.

Hamilton and Jefferson actively recruited newspaper editors who were sympathetic to their views. Those editors could not only spread the word, they could help readers figure out which candidates for office were on “their side.” In the absence of party labels, primaries, or advertising, the newspaper editors of the early Republic stepped into the vacuum and identified candidates who were “Jefferson men” or “Hamilton men.”

In this setting emerged one of the most vicious and dangerous of all the partisan writers and editors: the hard-drinking Scottish immigrant James Thomson Callender.

Callender seemed to have had a knack for finding trouble. Born in Scotland, he was charged with sedition and fled to America. He arrived in Philadelphia in May 1793—alone and nearly penniless. Within months he was offered a job reporting on the debates in Congress for the Philadelphia Gazette. He was quickly sacked, just around the time his family crossed the Atlantic and joined him. Struggling to make ends meet, he moved his wife and children onto Philadelphia’s docks and began drinking heavily. (At the time, most Americans drank what we would consider prodigious amounts of alcohol, from sunup to sunset. Even in that setting, those in the newspaper trade were known to have an especially strong thirst, and among them Callender’s was perhaps the most unquenchable of all.)

Callender fell in with Jefferson’s Anti-Federalists—they were called Republicans. In July 1797, Callender took on Hamilton, then the Treasury Secretary. In a lengthy pamphlet Callender revealed that Hamilton had transferred money to a convicted swindler named James Reynolds, insinuating that Hamilton and Reynolds were scheming to speculate in Treasury certificates, which were under Hamilton’s supervision.

Callender’s accusation forced Hamilton to reply, which he did, denying the charges of financial chicanery in hopes of preserving his public honor. But in order to explain the money transfers, Hamilton had to confess that he was having an affair with Reynolds’s wife, Maria. The money he was transferring to Mr. Reynolds was blackmail, intended to keep him from telling the story of Hamilton’s liaison with Mrs. Reynolds.

Callender didn’t think much of Hamilton’s explanation, and in a follow-up article he mocked Hamilton: “The whole proof … rests upon an illusion. ‘I am a rake, and for that reason I cannot be a swindler.’ ” Callender was prepared to believe that Hamilton was both a rake and a swindler. In any case, the damage was done. Politically, Hamilton was now ruined. Callender may have benefitted from a “leak” by one of Hamilton’s other rivals, James Monroe. But Callender was the messenger, the one who “broke” the story and made it a public scandal.

Hamilton’s disgrace naturally improved the standing of Jefferson, who encouraged Callender to pursue his slashing style of journalism. After all, Callender was laying waste to Federalists, which could only advance Jefferson’s political agenda. What could go wrong?

In the election of 1800, the Republican Jefferson defeated the Federalist John Adams (Washington’s successor as president), setting the stage for the first peaceful transfer of power between presidents who really disagreed with each other.

In the aftermath of victory, Jefferson faced many decisions, including the novel political question of how many positions on the federal payroll should be taken away from their Federalist occupants and turned over to Republicans. One of those who came calling on Jefferson after the election was none other than James Callender.

Callender must have felt that he had a strong claim to some of the spoils of office. After all, he had knee-capped Hamilton, the brightest star in the opposition camp, and he had even served time in jail for the Republican cause. Jefferson, however, was unmoved. Callender was hardly the well-born, talented sort that Jefferson thought should be serving in his administration, and the president sent him away empty-handed. Bad move.

Callender set out to get even. He promptly switched parties, revealing himself to be not a committed partisan but a hack, a mercenary who would attack either side—or both. In February 1802, Callender went into partnership with a Federalist editor in running the Richmond Recorder.

“The President, Again” published on September 1, 1802. By James Thomson Callender.

 
Callender assigned himself the job of bringing down Jefferson. Acting on the basis of rumors that he had picked up from anonymous sources, he let fly in print with the accusation that Jefferson had engaged in sexual relations with one of his slaves, later identified as Sally Hemings.

It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, [Jefferson] keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the president himself. … By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighbourhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it.

Callender’s story was repeated in many Federalist papers, sometimes accompanied by lurid speculation about the “black Venus” at Monticello. In the two centuries since then, Callender’s assertion has become the focus of intense debate, both among Jefferson and Hemings family descendants and among historians. Recent DNA studies have tended to vindicate Callender’s reporting and indicate that the story is almost certainly true—that Jefferson was one founding father who found a way to father more than one branch of his family.

As for Callender, he was nearly finished. Having set the bar in the practice of scandal-mongering about the sex lives of presidents, his own life quickly went downhill. In December, he was the victim of a public beating and again succumbed to his great thirst. The following summer, in July 1803, during another of his periods of heavy drinking, Jimmy Callender was found in Virginia’s James River, floating facedown, dead at age 45.

From Examiner, July 27, 1803.

 
Meanwhile, Jefferson, burned by the partisan press he had helped develop, began having serious doubts about the virtues of a free press. In his private correspondence, Jefferson complained bitterly. By the time of his second inaugural address in March 1805, Jefferson was coming to view the press as a menace to decency itself.

“During the course of this administration,” he complained, “and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science, are deeply to be regretted.”

Plainly exasperated, he allowed himself the political luxury of speculating publicly about whether new state or federal laws might be needed to rein in the press. Like Donald Trump, he mused in public about the need to strengthen the libel laws.

No inference is here intended, that the laws, provided by the state against false and defamatory publications, should not be enforced; he who has the time, renders a service to public morals and public tranquility, in reforming these abuses by the salutary coercions of the law …

Even while still serving as president, Jefferson found time to engage in press criticism. In 1807, late in his second term, he corresponded with a Republican named John Norvell, who had written to the president to inquire about starting another new Republican newspaper. Jefferson saw the issue darkly:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. … I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them …

Clearly, Jefferson had abandoned his earlier hope that newspapers would serve the nation as the guardians of the people’s liberty. His comments radiate a sense of an immense sadness and regret, coming from a man who fought for a free press but perhaps later wished that he had not, and who fought to secure his good name only to find it constantly in jeopardy in such a putrid and mendacious vehicle as a newspaper.

The post Think the Press Is Partisan? It Was Much Worse for Our Founding Fathers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s not just the intriguing possibility of Russian involvement. Nor is it that FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials took the notable step of confirming the penetration and warning state election boards to conduct vulnerability scans.

It’s that the targets of the hacks—state and local election data—don’t have the same obvious incentives as attacks before them. Missing are the monetary rewards for the perpetrators of large retail data breaches; lacking is the espionage value of a hack like the massive compromise of data from the Office of Personnel Management. Instead, these intrusions target the system at the heart of our democracy, and the incidents are rightly being treated as a very serious problem. But how do we fix it?

For his part, Department of Homeland Security director Jeh Johnson has discussed the idea of including U.S. voting systems on the list of federally designated “critical infrastructure”—a protective designation it gives to resources such as nuclear power plants, banking and finance systems, and the electrical grid. However, unlike our nuclear or financial systems, both the institutional and network infrastructures that underpin our local elections have been cobbled together in troubling ways. They were done incredibly cheaply, over years and numerous eras of technology, and with virtually no standardization or even minimum security practices.

To be clear, it would actually be very hard for hackers to meaningfully alter a national vote count given our decentralized election systems. (As Johnson himself pointed out after the August state breaches, we’ve got some 9,000 jurisdictions at the state and local level involved in the process.) But changed ballots aren’t the only meaningful consequences that can result from such attacks. Other less clear costs—from weakened public confidence in election results to increased auditing expenses—pose serious concerns. Assessing this impact will be challenging, as will making changes to prevent future hacks. The vulnerabilities exposed by the Illinois and Arizona breaches, and credible concerns about the possibility of new ones, have exposed just how behind state and local governments are when it comes to protecting their systems and data.

Part of the reason for this comes down to serious funding and personnel constraints. Almost all local governments struggle to recruit and retain generally qualified IT professionals, let alone those specializing in cybersecurity. With short supply and high demand, many are unable to pay competitive salaries and often rely on contractors for most or even all of their information security. This wouldn’t be a problem if the local governments knew exactly what they needed and had sophisticated contracting capabilities, but this is often not the case. The most resource-constrained jurisdictions aren’t taking steps to beef up their cyberprotections. And when it comes to electoral processes, these local setbacks become national issues.

The other reason that state and municipal governments have fallen behind on cybersecurity is a phenomenon known as “security debt.” The idea behind the term is that computers and computer networks allowed institutions—companies, organizations, and governments alike—to decrease their costs, increase their efficiency, and shrink their staff levels. The problem is that the upsides of the switchover are front-loaded in the early years of deployment, and this new, efficient way of doing business becomes the norm. Only later, sometimes years down the line, do costs like network vulnerabilities become apparent. Malware and Trojans. Data breaches. Ransomware. Most result from pre-existing or unpatched vulnerabilities. This is the security debt coming due.

The problem is that too many organizations quickly adopted these new systems without sufficiently planning for their inevitable future costs and vulnerabilities. The resulting security debt is especially problematic for local governments, which are often unable to mitigate the unplanned costs in an era where their funding is declining and more is expected of them. And it’s not just electoral processes that have been put at risk. Think of all of the information your municipal government has on you—voting data, tax information, property records, criminal history, driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers. Think of, if your kids go to public schools, all of the data they have on your children. There’s perhaps no better case study of governments diving into a new system without thinking of security and privacy pitfalls than the fast-paced adoption of educational technology. Few examples have a bigger security debt—what kind of data are these companies collecting? Who can use this sensitive student information? How secure is this data?—than these digital learning tools. The impulse to chase after the newest, shiniest technological aide doesn’t help either.

We expect our local governments to do quite a bit of work for us—from policing to collecting taxes to repairing roads to operating elections. In a modern world, all of those functions require information systems housing large amounts of sensitive data. Frankly, we haven’t thought enough about what goes into these processes. And when we have, we’ve mostly assumed that governments were taking reasonable measures to keep these systems secure. It’s not clear that those were good assumptions.

There are, however, ongoing discussions about how to fix these problems. They include ideas like having local governments consolidate, adopt cloud-computing solutions, outsource to managed security services, or connect with federal and state programs that would pool resource capabilities. All of these, if implemented with care, provide promising potential for future solutions. Until then, we should concede that we will be paying a high “interest” rate on our growing security debt—interest that is likely to manifest as data breaches, intrusions, and emergency costs to respond to incidents and patch vulnerabilities.

It’s also worth noting that, even with good tools, there are no simple answers to these challenges. Federal financial and technical support to better secure local electoral process, for example, are sometimes viewed skeptically. Numerous state election officials have suggested that this represents creeping federal control over their elections, something many don’t want to see. Roadblocks like these pose serious challenges for a nation that relies on selecting leaders at every level at local ballot boxes. As we do so, we’re pushing the operations of our voting infrastructure to the most underfunded, understaffed, and underequipped levels of government.

Justice Louis Brandeis famously described the states as the “laboratories of democracy.” In an age with more of our civic life online and more threats to it from around the world, we certainly have an interesting experiment on our hands.

The post The Hackers Could Be Coming For This Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The allegations that the Russian government has been plotting to interfere with America’s elections has been baffling, as we’re far more used to hearing Putin, his propaganda machine, and almost every public official beneath him, accuse the Americans of meddling in our affairs. Putin himself accused Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of the State, of fomenting the massive protests against his re-election. And accusing the American government of being the culprit behind every Russia’s shortcoming—from anti-government demonstrations to fiscal woes to potholes—has become such a pervasive propaganda trope that there’s now countless online memes and jokes lampooning it. There’s even a fake Obama Twitter account that portrays, among other made-up hijinks, the American president ordering the State Department to raise the price for a Moscow metro ticket by 70 rubles (slightly more than $1) and to freeze the construction of a controversial soccer stadium mired in corruption and mismanagement. To see this same accusatory rhetoric turned on its head and used against Russia is as comical as it is stunning.

On the other hand, frankly, we’re a little flattered. Russian State TV hosts relish every accusation hurled against our country with a mixture of indignation and pride: Hooray, we’re relevant again! Russians in general have a conflicted relationship with the West. Those old enough to remember the Soviet days resent whatever role they imagine the U.S. played in the downfall of the U.S.S.R., and the unseemly gloating the “winners” of the Cold War engaged in. But there’s more to it than that. As it’s been since the days of Peter the Great, we’re anxious to know how we measure up to the West. What do you think of us? Are you treating us fairly? Is Western media coverage of Russia outrageously biased? Call us sensitive.

In my years as a journalist, I’ve attended countless press conferences held by visiting Western pop stars, and invariably the first question Russian journalists ask is what the outsider thinks of our country. This holds true even when it is painfully obvious that the two hours the star has spent between the airport VIP lounge, the limo in from the airport, and the hotel were not enough to form an educated opinion about the state of our nation.

Media outlets, advertisers, and meme makers are also known to make up sensational fake quotes said by foreign celebrities about Russia (be they from dead statesman Otto von Bismarck or the current leader of China), and sometimes respected news agencies fall for the crude fabrications. The Interfax news agency, for instance, recently published a completely made-up quote by Donald Trump in which he supposedly called Olympic officials “morons” for barring the Russian Paralympic team from the Rio Games. The fake quotes not only are used to issue praise, but also to support anti-Russian conspiracy theories (one of the most popular nowadays is the co-called “Dulles Plan,” which alleges that the U.S. is injecting false values into Russian society, actively undermining the Russian sense of morality from within). In both extremes, the urge to fabricate panders to our collective sense of injured pride and grand ambition.

Russians’ attitude toward the outside world and its media is full of paradoxes. We Russians may come off as self-absorbed in our own informational vacuum and susceptible to our government’s propaganda. Yet foreign media have never been more popular in Russia. Articles from abroad that make even passing mention of Russia or Putin are translated by both mainstream media and specialized websites that attract many readers and commentators. No foreign article about Russia, no matter how insignificant the outlet or author, goes unnoticed.

I know this, in part because I was involved in it. Between 2012 and 2014, I edited InoSMI.ru, a website dedicated to translating and disseminating foreign media to Russian audiences. The website had been founded a decade earlier by a patriotic journalist with the explicit goal of “showing what kind of blatant lies the biased Western media spreads about Russia.” Over the years, it built a small but fiercely loyal following. Today it’s the most popular—but certainly not the only—news translation website on the Russian Internet with over a million daily hits.

If you look at InoSMI, you’ll see that its readers are hugely interested in the U.S. election. As I write this, the website’s home page features no less than a dozen translations from publications like The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, and The National Interest. The attention given to the American presidential campaign is also reflected in the robust comments sections, which repeat the questions you already hear on the streets here. If Russia is the declining power in economic disarray so often portrayed in Western media, how can it have a decisive influence on what is alleged to be the world’s strongest democracy? Or, how is it Putin’s fault that American democracy is so flawed it can succumb to a populist charlatan like Trump?

Russians also keep a careful eye out for moral relativism in America’s shortcomings. If the U.S. does it, whatever “it” is, than it should be okay for us to do as well (or, at least, should immunize us from American criticism for the same misdeeds). Hillary Clinton accusing Russia of fomenting party disunity instead of confronting an email leak that made her party look less than democratic? We’re familiar with that blame game. The Kremlin, too, likes to accuse protestors of being pawns of Washington in order to dismiss their grievances. Superpowers make great scapegoats.

Plenty of Russians may roll their eyes at their own government’s portrayal of America and its intentions, but we’re also aghast at the simplistic and alarmist image your media and politicians have been projecting of us too. So you’d better be careful. We might just do something about it.

The post America, We Russians Thank You for Your Paranoia appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.