Rewriting the Antitrust Setlist: Examining the Live Nation-Ticketmaster Lawsuit and its Implications for Modern Antitrust Law Katya Tolunsky Author Malcolm Furman Arjun Ray Editors I. Introduction On November 15, 2022, the music industry witnessed an unprecedented event that would become a turning point in discussions about ticketing practices and market dominance. Millions of devoted Taylor Swift fans were devastated when they failed to secure tickets for the highly anticipated Eras Tour. The ticket release sparked chaos, with fans enduring hours–even days–on Ticketmaster’s website, battling extended delays, technical glitches, and unpredictable price fluctuations. Despite their unwavering persistence, many “Swifties” were left empty-handed. This high-profile debacle ignited a firestorm of criticism from politicians and consumers alike, who questioned Ticketmaster’s apparent lack of preparedness for the overwhelming demand. While not an isolated incident of consumer dissatisfaction, the scale of this event and the passionate outcry from Swift’s fan base catapulted long-standing issues with ticket availability, pricing, and fees into the national spotlight. The “Swift ticket fiasco” became a catalyst for broader scrutiny of Ticketmaster’s business practices. Lawmakers and consumer advocacy groups called for investigations into the company’s business model, while accusations circulated about Ticketmaster leveraging its market power to stifle competition and maintain high fees. This perfect storm of events set the stage for a renewed examination of antitrust concerns in the live entertainment industry, bringing the anticompetitive practices of Live Nation-Ticketmaster into the public political and legal spotlight. On May 23, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment (the merged company) for allegedly violating the terms of a 2010 settlement, which required Ticketmaster to license its software to competitors and prohibited Live Nation from retaliating against venues that use competing ticketing services, and engaging in anticompetitive practices. The DOJ’s complaint argues that Live Nation has used its control over concert venues and artists to pressure venues into using Ticketmaster and to punish those that don’t, effectively excluding rival ticketing services from the market. the DOJ is suing Live Nation-Ticketmaster for violating Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act and monopolizing markets across the live concert industry. This suit raises important questions about the application of the Sherman Act and the evolving approach to antitrust enforcement in the United States. At the heart of this case lies a fundamental clash between two competing philosophies of antitrust enforcement. For decades, the Chicago School approach has dominated American antitrust law, focusing narrowly on consumer welfare through the lens of prices and economic efficiency. However, a new perspective has emerged to challenge this framework. The “New Brandeis” movement, named after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and championed by current FTC Chair Lina Khan, advocates for a broader understanding of competition law that considers market structure, concentration of economic power, and impacts on democracy—not just consumer prices. As this movement antitrust movement gains prominence and momentum, the Live Nation-Ticketmaster case represents a critical test for the application of Section 2 of the Sherman Act in the digital age. The outcome of this case will set important precedents for how antitrust law is applied to companies that dominate multiple interconnected markets. This paper seeks to analyze the evolution of antitrust law in the context of this Live Nation-Ticketmaster lawsuit. First, this paper details the 2010 LiveNation/Ticketmaster merger, the extensive criticism of this merger, and the terms of the merger. Second, this paper delves into the relevant history of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the evolution and enforcement of antitrust and monopoly law in the last one hundred years. Additionally, to illustrate the scope of anticompetitive behavior and ways in which past antitrust cases have been prosecuted, the paper examines several notable cases concerning Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Third, this paper explores the recent shift in approach, characterized by the New Brandeis movement, to antitrust law and the broader debate surrounding the purpose and scope of antitrust enforcement. Lastly, this paper seeks to situate the Live Nation-Ticketmaster lawsuit in the context of this debate and analyze the implications and potential outcomes of this suit. Ultimately, this paper seeks to show that the DOJ’s original approval of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger in 2010 with behavioral remedies was inadequate in preventing anticompetitive practices and protecting consumer interests, and that structural remedies (such as breaking up the company) are necessary to restore effective competition in the live entertainment industry. The Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger in 2010 and its subsequent negative impact on consumers and the live entertainment industry serve as an excellent example to illustrate the insufficient nature of the traditional consumer welfare-focused antitrust enforcement in addressing the complexities of modern markets, particularly in industries like live entertainment where vertical integration can lead to subtle forms of anticompetitive behavior. By examining how Live Nation's market power is reinforced through its data advantages and “flywheel” business model, this paper demonstrates why traditional antitrust frameworks struggle to address such modern competitive dynamics. Ultimately, this paper argues that the Live Nation-Ticketmaster case demonstrates the need for a broader interpretation and more aggressive enforcement approach of antitrust law, aligning with the New Brandeis approach. II. The Live Nation-Ticketmaster Merger: Antitrust Considerations and Regulatory Response In 2010, Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, merged with Ticketmaster, the world’s dominant ticketing platform. At the time of the merger, Ticketmaster held an effective monopoly in the ticket sales market, with an estimated 80% market share for concerts in large venues. In 2008, Live Nation launched its own ticketing platform, positioning itself as a rival to Ticketmaster by offering competitive pricing, leveraging its existing relationships with venues and artists, and promising to reduce service fees. This direct competition in ticketing, combined with Live Nation's dominant position in concert promotion, posed a significant threat to Ticketmaster's monopoly, which the merger would eliminate. Critics argued that the merger would lead to higher ticket prices, reduced competition, and a worse experience for consumers. In his 2009 testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, Senior Fellow for the American Progress Action Fund David Balto said, “Eliminating a nascent competitor by acquisition raises the most serious antitrust concerns…By acquiring Ticketmaster, Live Nation will cut off the air supply for any future rival to challenge its monopoly in the ticket distribution market.” Despite this widespread criticism of the proposed merger and its potential consequences, the DOJ approved the merger. However, the DOJ still recognized the potential threats and consumer criticism of the merger. In response to these concerns, the DOJ referred to the limits of antitrust enforcement, noting that the DOJ’s role is to prevent anticompetitive harms from mergers, not to remake industries or address all consumer complaints. In a speech delivered on March 18th, 2010, titled “The Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger Review and Consent Decree in Perspective,” Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division Christine A Varney said: “Our concern is with competitive market structure, so our job is to prevent the anticompetitive harms that a merger presents. That is a limited role: whatever we might want a particular market to look like, a merger does not provide us an open invitation to remake an industry or a firm’s business model to make it more consumer friendly…In the course of investigating this merger, we heard many complaints about trends in the live music industry, and many complaints from consumers about Ticketmaster. I understand that people view Ticketmaster’s charges, and perhaps all ticketing fees in general, as unfair, too high, inescapable, and confusing. We heard that it is impossible to understand the litany of fees and why those fees have proliferated. I also understand that consolidation has been going on in the industry for some time and the resultant economic pressures facing local management companies and promoters. Those are meaningful concerns, but many of them are not antitrust concerns. If they come from a lack of effective competition, then we hope to treat them as symptoms as we seek to cure the underlying disease. Where such issues concern consumer fairness, however, they are better addressed by other federal agencies.” Varney’s statement delineates a narrow view of the DOJ's role in merger review, focusing primarily on preventing specific antitrust violations rather than addressing broader consumer concerns or industry trends. This approach suggests that the DOJ saw its mandate as limited to addressing anticompetitive harms directly related to the merger, rather than using the merger review process to address wider industry problems or consumer dissatisfaction that fall outside the scope of antitrust law. The merger itself included both horizontal (direct competitors merging) and vertical (different levels of supply chain merging) integration concerns. The DOJ approved the merger with certain conditions: Ticketmaster had to sell Paciolan (its self-ticketing company), Ticketmaster had to license its software to Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), and most importantly, LiveNation was prohibited from retaliating against venues that use competing ticketing services. In the merger settlement, the DOJ stated that they would monitor compliance with the agreement for ten years and establish an Order Compliance Committee to receive reports of concerning behavior from industry players. The DOJ also emphasized the importance of industry participation in monitoring and reporting potential violations of the agreement or antitrust laws. These conditions were intended to address the most immediate competitive concerns raised by the merger. Thus, the DOJ primarily relied on behavioral remedies rather than structural changes, an approach that would later be criticized as insufficient to prevent anticompetitive practices. Structural changes, in contrast, could have involved more drastic measures such as requiring the divestiture of certain business units, breaking up the merged entity into separate companies, or imposing limitations on the company's ability to operate in multiple segments of the live entertainment industry. These types of structural remedies aim to fundamentally alter the company's market position and capabilities, rather than merely regulating its behavior. In addition, the reliance on industry self-reporting and time-limited monitoring also raised questions about the long-term effectiveness of these measures. In retrospect, the DOJ’s approach to the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger exemplifies the limitations of traditional antitrust enforcement in addressing complex, vertically integrated industries. By focusing on narrow, immediate competitive effects and relying heavily on behavioral remedies, the DOJ underestimated the long-term impact of the merger on market dynamics in the live entertainment industry. This case would later become a touchstone in debates about the adequacy of existing antitrust frameworks and the need for more comprehensive approaches to merger review and enforcement. III. The Sherman Act and the Evolution of Antitrust Jurisprudence The Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, was a landmark piece of legislation that emerged from the economic and political turmoil of the late 19th century’s Gilded Age. This era saw rapid industrialization and the rise of powerful trusts and monopolies that dominated key industries such as oil, steel, and railroads. These business entities, through their immense economic power, were able to stifle competition, manipulate prices, and exert immense influence on the political process. Public outcry against these practices grew, with farmers, small business owners, and laborers demanding government action to curb corporate excess. In response to these concerns, the Sherman Act became the first federal legislation to outlaw monopolistic business practices, particularly by prohibiting trusts. A trust in this context was an arrangement by which stockholders in several companies would transfer their shares to a single set of trustees, receiving in exchange a certificate entitling them to a specified share of the consolidated earnings of the jointly managed companies. This structure allowed for the concentration of economic power that the Act sought to prevent. The Sherman Act outlawed all contracts and conspiracies that unreasonably restrained interstate and foreign trade. Its authors believed that an efficient free market system was only possible with robust competition. While the Act targeted trusts, it also addressed monopolies – markets where a single company controls an entire industry. While the Sherman Act broadly addresses anticompetitive practices, Section 2 is particularly relevant to analyze the Live Nation-Ticketmaster case as it directly pertains to monopolization. Section 2 of the Sherman Act specifically prohibits monopolization, attempted monopolization, and conspiracies to monopolize. Essentially, it outlaws the acquisition or maintenance of monopoly power through unfair practices. However, it’s important to note that the purpose of Section 2 is not to eliminate monopolies entirely, but rather to promote a market-based economy and preserve competition. This nuanced approach taken by Section 2 recognizes that some monopolies may arise from superior business acumen or innovation, and only seeks to prevent those achieved or maintained through anticompetitive means. The Sherman Act laid the foundation for antitrust law in the United States, reflecting a societal commitment to maintaining competitive markets and limiting the concentration of economic power. Its passage marked a significant shift in the government’s role in regulating business practices and shaping the economic landscape. While the Sherman Act laid the groundwork for antitrust law in the United States, it was supplemented by two important pieces of legislation in 1914: the Clayton Antitrust Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act. The Clayton Act expanded on the Sherman Act by prohibiting specific anticompetitive practices such as price discrimination, exclusive dealing contracts, tying arrangements, and mergers that substantially lessen competition. The Federal Trade Commission Act created the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as an independent regulatory agency to prevent unfair methods of competition and deceptive acts or practices in commerce. Together, these Acts addressed some of the Sherman Act’s limitations and provided more specific guidelines for antitrust enforcement, further solidifying the government’s commitment to maintaining competitive markets. The distinction between the Clayton Act and Sherman Act is particularly relevant to understanding the Live Nation-Ticketmaster case. Section 7 of the Clayton Act governs merger review, requiring pre-emptive intervention to prevent mergers that may substantially lessen competition. In contrast, Section 2 of the Sherman Act addresses anticompetitive conduct by existing monopolists. The 2010 Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger was reviewed under Clayton Act Section 7’s forward-looking standard, while the 2024 case challenges ongoing anticompetitive conduct under Sherman Act Section 2. This dual application of antitrust law to the same company highlights the complementary yet distinct roles of merger review and monopolization enforcement. The early enforcement and interpretation of the Sherman Act were shaped by landmark cases that helped define the scope and application of antitrust law. In Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States (1911), the Supreme Court established the “rule of reason” approach to analyzing antitrust violations. This case resulted in the breakup of Standard Oil, demonstrating the Act’s power to dismantle monopolies. The Court held that only “unreasonable” restraints of trade were prohibited, introducing a more limited interpretation of the Act. The “rule of reason” approach meant that the Court would consider the specific facts and circumstances of each case to determine whether a particular restraint of trade was unreasonable. The case also established that the Sherman Act should be interpreted in light of its broad policy goals rather than strictly construed. This approach had a significant impact on future antitrust enforcement. It allowed for a more flexible and adaptive application of the Act, enabling courts and regulators to address new forms of anticompetitive behavior as markets evolved. This interpretive framework empowered enforcers to look beyond the literal text of the Act and consider the overarching aims of promoting competition and protecting consumer welfare. As a result, antitrust enforcement could more effectively respond to changing economic conditions and business practices, particularly as industries became more complex and interconnected in the 20th century. Later, in United States v. Alcoa (1945), the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit further refined the interpretation of the Sherman Act. Judge Learned Hand’s opinion clarified that merely possessing monopoly power is not illegal; rather, the Act prohibits the deliberate acquisition or maintenance of that power through exclusionary practices. Alcoa thus established an important distinction between achieving monopoly through superior skill, foresight, and industry, which is lawful, and maintaining it through anticompetitive conduct, which violates the Act. These cases illustrate the evolving understanding of the Sherman Act, moving from a strict interpretation to a more nuanced approach that considered market dynamics and the effects of business practices on competition. The mid-20th century saw a significant shift in antitrust enforcement characterized by a structural approach that focused on market concentration and firm size. This era, roughly spanning from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, was characterized by a prevailing view among federal antitrust authorities, economists, and policymakers that high market concentration was inherently harmful to competition. The passage of the Celler-Kefauver Act in 1950, which strengthened merger control, exemplified this approach. Influenced by economists from the Harvard School of industrial organization, particularly Joe Bain, antitrust authorities presumed that market structure determined conduct and performance. This “structure-conduct-performance” paradigm, central to the Harvard School's approach, posited that industry structure (like concentration levels) directly influenced firm behavior and market outcomes. This led to aggressive enforcement actions, including the breakup of large firms and the blocking of mergers that would have significantly increased market concentration. However, by the mid-1960s, antitrust thinking began to evolve, considering both market structure and firm conduct. This shift was reflected in the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case United States v. Grinnell Corp. , which established the modern two-part test for monopolization. The Grinnell test requires proof of both “the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market” and “the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.” This test, while still considering market power, introduced a focus on how that power was obtained or maintained. While the earlier era did consider power acquisition to some extent, the Grinnell test formalized and emphasized this aspect. It required a more comprehensive examination of a firm’s conduct and its effects on competition, moving beyond the primarily structural approach that often presumed anticompetitive effects from high market concentration alone. The Grinnell test has since been widely applied in monopolization cases under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, reflecting a more nuanced approach that aims to preserve competition without necessarily eliminating all monopolies. This evolution in antitrust enforcement demonstrates a move towards balancing concerns about market structure with considerations of firm conduct and efficiency. However, this balanced approach would soon give way to a more dramatic shift in antitrust philosophy that prioritized economic efficiency above other considerations. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Chicago School of Economics profoundly influenced the trajectory and scope of antitrust law and policy in the United States. This approach, led by economists and legal scholars such as Robert Bork, Richard Posner, and George Stigler, represented a significant shift in antitrust thinking. The Chicago School advocated for the “consumer welfare” standard as the primary goal of antitrust policy. This approach focused on economic efficiency and lower prices for consumers, rather than protecting competitors or maintaining a particular market structure. They argued that many practices previously considered anticompetitive could actually benefit consumers through increased efficiency. For example, Chicago School theorists argued that many mergers, even those that increased market concentration, could lead to efficiencies that benefit consumers. These efficiencies could manifest in several ways: through economies of scale that reduce production costs and potentially lower prices; through improved resource allocation that enhances product quality or variety; or through increased innovation. The Chicago School contended that these efficiency gains could outweigh potential negative effects of increased market concentration, ultimately resulting in net benefits for consumers in the form of lower prices, better products, or increased innovation. This led to a more lenient approach to DOJ merger review, with a higher bar for proving that a merger would harm competition. Vertical mergers (between companies at different levels of the supply chain) were viewed particularly favorably, as they were seen as potentially efficiency-enhancing. The Chicago School was skeptical of claims that vertical integration or vertical restraints (like exclusive dealing arrangements) were inherently anticompetitive. They argued that these practices often had pro-competitive justifications and should be judged based on their economic effects rather than per se rules. The Chicago School was driven by a strong belief in the self-correcting nature of markets. This thinking greatly influenced antitrust enforcement agencies and courts during the Reagan administration and beyond. It led to a significant reduction in antitrust enforcement actions and a higher bar for proving anticompetitive harm. This shift represented a move away from the structural approach of the mid-20th century towards a more economics-focused, effects-based analysis of competitive harm. Antitrust attorney William Markham offers a scathing critique of the consumer welfare standard’s impact on antitrust enforcement. He argues that since the late 1970s, courts have adopted increasingly restrictive antitrust doctrines based on this standard, which he views as misnamed and harmful to consumers. Markham contends that these doctrines have allowed various forms of monopolistic and anticompetitive practices to flourish unchecked. He states that the standard permits such practices “so long as the offenders take care not to charge prices that are demonstrably and provably supracompetitive.” This critique highlights how the narrow focus on consumer prices under the consumer welfare standard may overlook other forms of competitive harm. It’s important to understand this context when examining more recent developments and debates in antitrust law, including the challenges posed by digital markets and the arguments of the New Brandeis movement. IV. Judicial Interpretation of Section 2: Key Cases and Anticompetitive Practices To better understand how Section 2 of the Sherman Act has been applied in practice, it’s important to examine key antitrust cases that have shaped its interpretation and enforcement. These cases not only illustrate various types of anti-competitive practices but also demonstrate the evolution of antitrust thinking, particularly the rising influence of the Chicago School’s consumer welfare standard and subsequent challenges to this approach. Anticompetitive practices can take many forms, including refusals to deal, predatory pricing, tying, and exclusive dealing arrangements. Their legality often depends on specific facts, market conditions, and the prevailing economic theories of the time. This section examines several landmark cases that highlight these practices and trace the trajectory of antitrust law from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, a period marked by significant shifts in antitrust philosophy and enforcement approaches. The 1985 Supreme Court case Aspen Skiing Co. v. Aspen Highlands Skiing Corp. marked a significant development in antitrust law’s approach to refusal to deal practices, a type of anticompetitive behavior where a firm with market power declines to do business with a competitor. The case involved Aspen Skiing Company, which owned three of four ski areas in Aspen, CO, discontinuing a long-standing joint lift ticket program with Aspen Highlands, the owner of the fourth area. While the Chicago School approachgenerally viewed refusals to deal as permissible, the Court in this case took a different stance. It ruled that this refusal to continue a voluntary cooperative venture could violate Section 2 of the Sherman Act, as it lacked any normal business justification and appeared designed to eliminate competition. This decision, occurring early in the ascendancy of the Chicago School, demonstrated a willingness to consider factors beyond short-term consumer welfare in antitrust analysis. Justice Stevens’ opinion emphasized the importance of intent in determining whether conduct is “exclusionary,” “anticompetitive,” or “predatory,” introducing a more contextualized approach to assessing market behavior. While not fully embracing the consumer welfare standard, the Court did consider the impact on consumers, noting that the joint ticket was popular and its elimination inconvenienced skiers. This case thus represents a crucial step in the evolution of antitrust law, bridging the gap between earlier, more aggressive interpretations of the Sherman Act and the more economics-focused analyses that would follow. It expanded the scope of antitrust enforcement by establishing that, in some cases, even a unilateral refusal to deal could be considered anticompetitive. Aspen Skiing set the stage for later cases dealing with complex market dynamics, particularly in industries where control over key resources or platforms can significantly impact competition – a concept that becomes increasingly relevant in the digital age and in cases like the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger. As antitrust thinking continued to evolve, the influence of the Chicago School became more pronounced, as evidenced in subsequent landmark cases. This shift was reinforced by changes in the Supreme Court’s composition during the 1970s and 1980s, with appointments by Presidents Nixon and Reagan bringing more conservative justices to the bench who were often sympathetic to Chicago School economic theories. This changing court composition, coupled with the growing academic influence of the Chicago School, contributed to the changes in antitrust jurisprudence. The 1993 Supreme Court case Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. marked a significant move in the treatment of predatory pricing claims, reflecting the growing dominance of the Chicago School’s consumer welfare standard. Predatory pricing occurs when a firm prices its products below cost with the intention of driving competitors out of the market, allowing the predator to later raise prices and recoup its losses. In this case, the Brooke Group accused Brown & Williamson of predatory pricing in the generic cigarette market. The Court established a two-pronged test for predatory pricing: (1) the plaintiff must prove that the prices are below an appropriate measure of cost, and (2) the plaintiff must demonstrate that the predator had a “reasonable prospect” of recouping its losses. This stringent standard, making predatory pricing claims extremely difficult to prove, clearly reflects the Chicago School’s skepticism towards such claims against firms. The Court’s reasoning prioritized short-term consumer benefits (lower prices) over long-term competitive concerns, embodying the consumer welfare standard. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion explicitly cited Chicago School scholars, demonstrating how economic theory had come to dominate antitrust jurisprudence. This case illustrates how the Chicago School approach narrowed the scope of antitrust enforcement, potentially allowing some anticompetitive practices to escape scrutiny if they resulted in short-term consumer benefits. In the context of cases like Live Nation-Ticketmaster, this ruling underscores the challenges in proving anticompetitive behavior when short-term consumer benefits are present. The rise of the digital economy in the late 1990s and early 2000s presented new challenges to antitrust enforcement, leading to a reconsideration of established doctrines. While the Chicago School’s influence remained strong, the emergence of new technologies and business models began to test the limits of its consumer welfare-focused approach. The United States v. Microsoft Corp. (2001) case marked a pivotal moment in antitrust law’s application to the emerging digital economy, introducing new considerations for tying and monopoly maintenance in software markets. Tying occurs when a company requires customers who purchase one product to also purchase a separate product, potentially leveraging dominance in one market to gain advantage in another. The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly in the PC operating systems market by tying its Internet Explorer browser to the Windows operating system and engaging in exclusionary contracts with PC manufacturers and Internet service providers. This case challenged the Chicago School's typically permissive view of tying arrangements, which often saw them as enhancing efficiency from a consumer welfare standpoint. The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that Microsoft had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, finding that Microsoft’s practices, in aggregate, served to maintain its monopoly power by stifling competition from potential disruptors like Netscape’s browser and Sun’s Java technologies. While the court’s analysis still employed the consumer welfare standard, it showed a willingness to consider a broader range of anticompetitive effects, including harm to innovation and potential future competition. This approach reflected a nuanced evolution of antitrust thinking, acknowledging the unique characteristics of software markets and the rapid pace of technological change. Microsoft set important precedents for how antitrust law could be applied to fast-moving technology markets and platform economies, influencing later cases involving tech giants and potentially informing the analysis of platform-based businesses like Live Nation-Ticketmaster. It demonstrated that even in the era of Chicago School dominance, courts could adapt antitrust principles to address new forms of market power in the digital age. The resulting settlement, which imposed behavioral remedies rather than structural ones, sparked ongoing debates about the adequacy of traditional antitrust tools in addressing the unique characteristics of digital markets. Despite the more comprehensive and context-specific approach in Microsoft , the influence of the Chicago School remained strong, as demonstrated in the next significant case. Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP (2004) significantly narrowed the scope of antitrust liability for refusal to deal, revisiting and limiting the principles established in Aspen Skiing . In this case, Trinko, a law firm and Verizon customer, alleged that Verizon had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by providing insufficient assistance to new competitors in the local telephone service market, as required by the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The Court, in a unanimous decision authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled in favor of Verizon, significantly limiting the circumstances under which a refusal to deal could violate antitrust law. Unlike in Aspen Skiing , where there was a history of voluntary cooperation, the Court emphasized that firms, even monopolists, generally have no duty to assist competitors. This ruling clearly reflects the Chicago School’s skepticism towards government intervention in markets and its focus on efficiency over other competitive concerns. The Court emphasized the importance of allowing firms to freely choose their business partners, arguing that forced cooperation could reduce companies’ incentives to invest and innovate. This aligns with the Chicago School’s concern about “false positives” in antitrust enforcement – the idea that overly aggressive antitrust action might mistakenly punish pro-competitive behavior, potentially discouraging beneficial business practices. By setting a high bar for refusal to deal claims, the Trinko decision further constrained the reach of antitrust law, potentially allowing monopolists more leeway in their dealings with competitors. By setting a high bar for refusal to deal claims, the Trinko decision further constrained the reach of antitrust law, potentially allowing monopolists more leeway in their dealings with competitors. This legal environment, which emphasized a narrow interpretation of anticompetitive behavior, set the stage for future mergers that consolidated market power across related industries. The 2010 approval of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger is a prime example of how this permissive approach to antitrust enforcement allowed for the creation of a vertically integrated entity with unprecedented control over the live entertainment industry. This case exemplifies how the Chicago School approach may have inadvertently created blind spots in antitrust enforcement, particularly regarding the long-term effects of monopoly power on innovation and competition. These cases collectively demonstrate the complex evolution of Section 2 application across various industries and business practices. From the nuanced approach in Aspen Skiing , through the height of Chicago School influence in Brooke Group and Trinko , to the adaptation to new technological challenges in Microsoft , they illustrate how antitrust law has grappled with changing economic theories and market realities. The cases show a clear trajectory of increasing influence of the Chicago School’s consumer welfare standard, but also reveal moments of resistance or adaptation to this approach when confronted with novel market dynamics. The Microsoft case, in particular, marks a significant point in this evolution, demonstrating how courts began to recognize the unique challenges posed by the digital economy. By examining these cases, it is possible to trace how the interpretation and application of Section 2 of the Sherman Act has shifted over time, reflecting changing economic theories and market realities. This evolution provides crucial context for understanding current debates about antitrust enforcement, particularly in rapidly evolving digital markets, and sets the stage for the emergence of new approaches like the New Brandeis movement. In considering the Live Nation-Ticketmaster case, this historical context helps to understand the complex landscape of antitrust enforcement and the challenges in addressing anticompetitive behavior today. V. The New Brandeis Movement: Redefining Antitrust for the Modern Era The landscape of antitrust enforcement is undergoing a fundamental shift as new perspectives challenge long-held assumptions about competition law. The limitations of the Chicago School approach, particularly evident in cases like Microsoft and Trinko , have sparked a reimagining of antitrust’s fundamental purposes and tools. As University of Michigan Law Professor Daniel Crane noted recently, “the bipartisan consensus that antitrust should solely focus on economic efficiency and consumer welfare has quite suddenly come under attack from prominent voices [from the political left and right] calling for a dramatically enhanced role for antitrust law in mediating a variety of social, economic, and political friction points, including employment, wealth inequality, data privacy and security, and democratic values.” At the heart of this antitrust approach evolution lies a debate between the traditional consumer welfare-focused approach and the emerging New Brandeis movement. For decades, the standard approach has emphasized consumer welfare as the primary goal, focusing on economic efficiency and preventing practices that directly harm consumers through higher prices, reduced output, or decreased innovation. This framework has generally led to a more permissive attitude toward mergers and a higher bar for finding antitrust violations. In contrast, the New Brandeis movement, championed by figures like FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan, advocates for a broader understanding of antitrust law’s goals. This perspective, sometimes critically dubbed “hipster antitrust,” contends that enforcement should consider additional factors such as market structure, the distribution of economic power, and the impact on workers, small businesses, and political democracy. The movement’s proponents have been particularly vocal about the need to reassess antitrust approaches in the context of the digital economy, expressing concern over the power wielded by large tech platforms. Lina Khan, a prominent figure in contemporary antitrust discourse, has developed an extensive body of work articulating the principles of the New Brandeis movement. In her article “The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate,” Khan outlines this approach, which draws inspiration from Justice Louis Brandeis’s support of “America’s Madisonian traditions—which aim at a democratic distribution of power and opportunity in the political economy.” The movement represents a significant departure from the Chicago School of antitrust thinking. While the Chicago School emphasized efficiency, prices, and consumer welfare, the New Brandeis approach advocates for a return to a market structure-oriented competition policy. Key tenets include viewing economic power as intrinsically tied to political power, recognizing that some industries naturally tend towards monopoly and require regulation, emphasizing the structures and processes of competition rather than just outcomes, and rejecting the notion of natural market “forces” naturally leading to optimal economic outcomes or consumer welfare, instead understanding markets as fundamentally shaped and structured by law and policy. In her article “The Ideological Roots of America’s Market Power Problem,” Khan further critiques the current antitrust framework, arguing that it has weakened enforcement and allowed high concentration of market power across sectors. She asserts that addressing this issue requires challenging the ideological underpinnings of the current framework, writing, “Identifying paths for greater enforcement within a framework that systematically disfavors enforcement will fall short of addressing the scope of the market power problem we face today.” Ultimately, Khan and other New Brandeis proponents argue for a fundamental rethinking of antitrust’s goals and methods, advocating a return to its original purpose of distributing economic power and preserving democratic values. Building upon her critique of current antitrust frameworks, Khan has written extensively about the unique challenges posed by big tech companies, arguing that traditional enforcement methods are inadequate to address their market power. In her influential article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Khan contends that the current antitrust framework is ill-equipped to tackle the anticompetitive effects of digital platforms like Amazon. These platforms, she argues, can leverage their market power and access to data to engage in predatory pricing, disadvantage rivals, and entrench their dominance. Khan writes in the abstract, “This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to ‘consumer welfare,’ defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output.” The article explains that despite Amazon’s massive growth, it generates low profits, often pricing products below cost and focusing on expansion rather than short-term gains. This strategy has allowed Amazon to expand far beyond retail, becoming a major player in various sectors including marketing, publishing, entertainment, hardware manufacturing, and cloud computing. Khan argues that this positions Amazon as a critical platform for many other businesses. She further elaborates, “First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible.” Khan argues that in platform markets like Amazon's, predatory pricing can be rational even if product prices appear to be at market rates. This is because the goal is not immediate profit, but rather to rapidly expand market share and establish dominance. The company can sustain short-term losses or razor-thin margins on product sales because the real value lies in becoming the dominant platform, which can lead to long-term profitability through various means such as data collection. Traditional antitrust doctrine, however, often assumes that below-cost pricing is irrational unless the company can quickly recoup its losses through higher prices, which may not apply in these complex, multi-sided markets. This creates a “paradox” where Amazon’s practices may be anticompetitive, yet they escape scrutiny under existing regulations. To address Amazon’s market power, one of Khan’s major suggestions includes restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles to its more structure-oriented approach. Khan’s influential academic critiques of current antitrust frameworks, particularly her analysis of Amazon’s market power, laid the groundwork for her approach as FTC chair, where she has sought to translate these ideas into concrete enforcement actions. Since Lina Khan’s appointment as chair of the FTC in 2021 by President Joe Biden, the agency has embarked on a more aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement, challenging some of America’s largest corporations and implementing significant policy shifts. This new direction has yielded mixed results and sparked debates about the future of competition policy in the United States. Khan’s FTC has increased scrutiny of Big Tech, filing an amended antitrust complaint against Facebook (Meta) that challenges its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and suing to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, citing competition concerns in the video game industry. The agency has also initiated actions against other tech giants like Amazon. Under Khan’s leadership, the FTC has implemented stricter merger enforcement, including a more aggressive approach to reviewing mergers, particularly vertical mergers. The agency withdrew the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines, signaling skepticism towards vertical integration, and revised merger guidelines in collaboration with the Department of Justice. There’s also been an increased focus on “killer acquisitions” where large companies buy potential competitors. Khan has emphasized structural remedies over behavioral ones, advocating for more dramatic interventions like breaking up companies in certain cases. Additionally, recognizing the growing importance of data as a competitive asset, the FTC has integrated privacy and data protection concerns into its antitrust approach. For instance, the agency pursued a case against data broker Kochava for selling sensitive geolocation data, highlighting how control over user data can contribute to market power and potentially anticompetitive practices in the digital economy. The implementation of Khan’s approach has seen both successes and setbacks. Partial victories include the FTC v. Facebook (Meta) case, where the court allowed a revised complaint to proceed, and the FTC v. Illumina/Grail case, where the agency successfully challenged a vertical merger, albeit on largely traditional antitrust grounds. However, the FTC faced a setback when its attempt to block Meta’s acquisition of Within Unlimited was rejected. Ongoing challenges persist as courts have shown varying degrees of receptiveness to the expanded view of antitrust harm. As of April 2024, there had been no definitive high-level court ruling fully endorsing or rejecting the New Brandeis approach, with many decisions still relying heavily on the consumer welfare standard. Khan also faces political opposition and challenges to her rule-making initiatives. While Khan has successfully shifted the FTC’s focus towards more aggressive antitrust enforcement and brought increased attention to issues like data privacy and labor market effects, the legal and practical adoption of the New Brandeis philosophy remains a work in progress. The evolving legal landscape sets the stage for analyzing how future cases, such as potential actions against Ticketmaster, might proceed under this new, more expansive view of antitrust enforcement. VI. The Live Nation-Ticketmaster Case: A Critical Analysis of Market Power and Competitive Effects In May 2024, the DOJ, in addition to 30 state and district attorneys general, filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiary Ticketmaster “for monopolization and other unlawful conduct that thwarts competition in markets across the live entertainment industry.” More specifically, the DOJ accused Live Nation for violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act. In a subsequent press release, the DOJ highlighted several key issues resulting from Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s conduct. The DOJ argued that the company’s practices have led to a lack of innovation in ticketing, higher prices for U.S. consumers compared to other countries, and the use of outdated technology. Further, the DOJ asserted that Live Nation-Ticketmaster “exercises its power over performers, venues, and independent promoters in ways that harm competition” and “imposes barriers to competition that limit the entry and expansion of its rivals.” The lawsuit, which calls for structural relief – primarily the breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster – aims to reintroduce competition in the live concert industry, offer fans better options at more affordable prices, and create more opportunities for musicians and other performers at venues. The DOJ claims Live Nation-Ticketmaster uses a “flywheel” business model that self-reinforces its market dominance. This model involves using revenue from fans and sponsorships to secure exclusive deals with artists and venues, creating a cycle that excludes competitors. The complaint outlines several anti-competitive practices, including: partnering with potential rival Oak View Group to avoid competition, threatening retaliation against venues working with competitors, using long-term exclusive contracts with venues, restricting artists’ venue access unless they use Live Nation’s promotion services, and acquiring smaller competitors. The DOJ argues these practices create barriers for rivals to compete fairly. Live Nation Entertainment is the world’s largest live entertainment company, controlling numerous venues and generating over $22 billion in annual revenue globally. The DOJ’s action aims to address these alleged monopolistic practices in the live entertainment industry. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said, “We contend that Live Nation uses illegal and anti-competitive methods to dominate the live events industry in the U.S., negatively impacting fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators. This dominance leads to higher fees for fans, fewer concert opportunities for artists, reduced chances for smaller promoters, and limited ticketing options for venues. It’s time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.” Beyond traditional market control, Live Nation’s monopolistic position is further entrenched by its significant data advantages, which raise additional competitive and privacy concerns. Through its ticketing operations and venue management, Live Nation amasses vast amounts of consumer data, including purchasing habits, musical preferences, and demographic information. This data not only enhances Live Nation’s ability to target marketing and adjust pricing strategies but also creates a major barrier to entry for potential competitors who lack access to such comprehensive consumer insights. Moreover, the company’s control over this data raises privacy concerns, as consumers may have limited understanding of how their information is being used or shared across Live Nation’s various business segments. These issues mirror broader debates in the digital age about the role of data in maintaining market power, with parallels to concerns raised about tech giants like Google and Facebook. As such, any antitrust action against Live Nation must consider not only traditional measures of market power but also the competitive advantages and potential privacy implications of its data practices. This aspect of the case underscores the need for antitrust enforcement to evolve in response to the increasing importance of data in modern business models. Notably, the DOJ focuses on Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s anticompetitive tactic of threatening and retaliating against venues that work with rivals. In the press release, the DOJ writes, “Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s power in concert promotions means that every live concert venue knows choosing another promoter or ticketer comes with a risk of drawing an adverse reaction from Live Nation-Ticketmaster that would result in losing concerts, revenue, and fans.” This directly violates the terms of the 2010 merger agreement, in which LiveNation was prohibited from retaliating against venues that use competing ticketing services. Considering that the current lawsuit’s main goal is the breakup of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, there exists an undeniable irony that the DOJ is seeking to undo their own actions (approving the merger in 2010). The head of Jones Day’s antitrust practice Craig Waldman said, “The DOJ is breaking out a really big gun here — seeking to blow up a company that was created with its approval. That looms large even though the DOJ has and will continue to try to frame Live Nation’s conduct as going well beyond the scope of the merger.” In hindsight, it is clear that the DOJ’s approval of the 2010 merger was an egregious mistake. Vice president and director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute Diana Moss said, “The Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger was allowed to proceed in 2010, but the decision was an abject failure of antitrust enforcement. Instead of blocking the merger, the DOJ required the company, then with an 80% share of the ticketing market, to comply with ineffective conditions.” The continued anticompetitive practices and market dominance of Live Nation-Ticketmaster after the approved merger demonstrate that behavioral remedies were insufficient to protect competition. As such, structural remedies, specifically breaking up the company, are necessary to restore competition in the live entertainment industry. That extensive pushback and criticism of the merger took place at the time of its approval highlights the limited scope and approach of antitrust enforcement, particularly when it comes to mergers. The Live Nation-Ticketmaster case will proceed in New York’s Southern District, known for its slow litigation process, potentially delaying a trial until late 2026. In its defense, Live Nation argues that it does not hold a monopoly, claiming that its profit margins are low and that ticket prices are influenced more by factors like artist popularity and secondary ticketing markets than by its own practices. Live Nation contends that the efficiencies achieved by merging with Ticketmaster benefit the industry by offering better services and prices compared to separating the companies. The company emphasizes that its vertical integration—combining promotion and ticketing services—creates a more efficient and artist-friendly business model. Live Nation also asserts that the secondary ticketing market, rather than its own practices, is primarily responsible for high ticket prices. The case will scrutinize whether the efficiencies claimed by Live Nation justify its market control or if the harm to competition outweighs these benefits. The DOJ’s push for a breakup, and refusal to settle for anything less than a breakup, reflects the relative success of the New Brandeis movement, particularly when considering the FTC’s revised merger guidelines in collaboration with the DOJ. When analyzed through the lens of the Grinnell test, Live Nation’s conduct clearly meets both prongs for monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. First, Live Nation undoubtedly possesses monopoly power in the relevant markets of concert promotion and ticketing. With an estimated 80% market share in ticketing for major concert venues and its dominant position in concert promotion, Live Nation far exceeds the typical thresholds courts have used to identify monopoly power. The company’s ability to impose high fees, dictate terms to artists and venues, and persistently maintain its market position despite widespread consumer dissatisfaction further evidences its monopoly power. Second, Live Nation has willfully acquired and maintained this power through exclusionary practices, not merely through superior products or business acumen. The DOJ’s complaint outlines numerous anti competitive tactics, including threatening retaliation against venues that use competing services, leveraging its control over artists to pressure venues, and using long-term exclusive contracts to lock out competitors. These practices go well beyond legitimate competition based on merit. Moreover, Live Nation strategic acquisitions of potential competitors and its alleged collusion with Oak View Group to avoid competition further demonstrate its willful maintenance of monopoly power. The company’s “flywheel” business model, while potentially efficient, serves to entrench its dominance across multiple markets in ways that foreclose competition. Thus, Live Nation’s conduct satisfies both prongs of the Grinnell test, strongly supporting the DOJ’s case for illegal monopolization. It’s important to note, however, that while the Grinnell test remains a fundamental framework cited in monopolization cases, its application in modern antitrust law has evolved and become more nuanced. In recent decades, courts have increasingly used the Grinnell test as a starting point rather than a definitive standard. The test is now supplemented with more sophisticated economic analyses. Therefore, while the Grinnell test will likely be referenced in the Live Nation case, the court's analysis is expected to be more comprehensive, potentially incorporating more recent precedents and economic theories to fully capture the nuances of Live Nation’s market position and conduct. The Live Nation-Ticketmaster case illuminates several fundamental limitations in current antitrust doctrine. First, the case demonstrates how the Chicago School’s permissive approach to vertical mergers, embedded in Clayton Act enforcement, systematically underestimates the long-term competitive threats posed by vertical integration in platform markets. Second, the case exposes the inherent weakness of behavioral remedies in addressing vertical merger concerns. The failure of the 2010 settlement’s behavioral conditions—despite their specificity and ongoing oversight—suggests that such remedies are fundamentally inadequate for controlling the conduct of vertically integrated firms with substantial market power. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the case reveals the challenging burden facing regulators under Section 2 of the Sherman Act once a vertically integrated entity has established market dominance. Even with clear evidence of exclusionary conduct, proving harm under current Section 2 doctrine requires navigating complex questions about market definition and competitive effects that may not fully capture the subtle ways in which vertical integration can entrench market power. The Consumer Welfare Standard, which has dominated antitrust analysis since the 1980s, is inadequate in fully capturing the anticompetitive harm caused by Live Nation’s practices. While this standard primarily focuses on consumer prices and output, it fails to account for the multifaceted nature of competition in the live entertainment industry. Certainly, the high ticket prices and fees imposed by Live Nation are relevant concerns under this framework. However, this narrow focus obscures the broader and more insidious effects of Live Nation’s market dominance. For instance, the standard doesn’t adequately address the reduced choices faced by venues, who often feel compelled to contract with Live Nation for fear of losing access to popular acts. Similarly, it fails to capture the constraints placed on artists, who may find their touring options limited by Live Nation’s control over major venues and promotion services. The standard also struggles to account for the barriers to entry the industry created by Live Nation’s vertically integrated structure and exclusive contracts, which stifle potential competitors and innovative business models in the ticketing and promotion markets. Moreover, the Consumer Welfare Standard’s short-term focus on prices neglects long-term impacts on innovation, diversity, and the overall health of the live entertainment ecosystem. It fails to account for how one company’s dominance can lead to less diverse music options and harm smaller venues and independent promoters who are crucial for supporting new artists. By focusing mainly on short-term price effects, the standard overlooks the broader, long-term damage to competition in the industry. This limitation of the Consumer Welfare Standard in the Live Nation case underscores the need for a more comprehensive approach to antitrust analysis, one that aligns more closely with the broader concerns of the New Brandeis movement. Building on the limitations of the Consumer Welfare Standard and the evolving application of the Grinnell test, it becomes clear that a more comprehensive approach to antitrust enforcement is necessary in the Live Nation case. The failure of the 2010 behavioral remedies further underscores this need. Despite prohibitions on retaliatory practices and requirements to license ticketing software to competitors, Live Nation has continued to dominate the market and engage in exclusionary conduct. This persistence of anticompetitive behavior, even under regulatory oversight, demonstrates that more robust, structural solutions are required. In retrospect, it is evident that the DOJ should have never approved the merger in the first place, as the vertical integration of Live Nation and Ticketmaster created a entity with unprecedented market power and clear incentives for anticompetitive behavior. In light of these considerations, the DOJ should argue for a full structural separation of Live Nation and Ticketmaster as the primary remedy. This breakup would reintroduce genuine competition into both the concert promotion and ticketing markets, addressing the root causes of Live Nation’s market power more effectively than behavioral conditions. To ensure a competitive landscape post-separation, the court should also consider supplementary measures. These could include prohibiting exclusive deals with venues and imposing limits on the percentage of a market’s concert promotion that Live Nation can control. By advocating for these comprehensive structural changes, the DOJ can align its approach with the more aggressive, market structure-focused enforcement advocated by the New Brandeis movement. This approach not only addresses the immediate concerns in the live entertainment industry but also sets a potential precedent for future antitrust cases in similarly complex, vertically integrated industries. It recognizes that in today’s interconnected markets, protecting competition requires looking beyond short-term price effects to consider the broader ecosystem of industry participants, from artists and venues to emerging competitors and consumers. VII. Conclusion The Live Nation-Ticketmaster case serves as a stark illustration of the inadequacies of traditional antitrust enforcement in addressing the complexities of modern markets. The DOJ’s original approval of the 2010 merger, despite widespread criticism and concerns, highlights the limitations of the consumer welfare-focused approach and the ineffectiveness of behavioral remedies in curbing anti competitive practices. The subsequent dominance of Live Nation in the live entertainment industry, characterized by its “flywheel” business model and alleged exclusionary practices, demonstrates the need for a more comprehensive and aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement. This case represents a critical juncture in the evolution of antitrust law, potentially marking a shift towards the more expansive view advocated by the New Brandeis movement. The DOJ’s pursuit of structural remedies, specifically the breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, signals a recognition that protecting competition in today’s interconnected markets requires looking beyond short-term price effects to consider the broader ecosystem of industry participants. 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The Burden of Innocence: Arendt’s Understanding of Totalitarianism through its Victims Elena Muglia Author Emerson Rhodes Meruka Vyas Editors Hannah Arendt set out to describe an ideology and government that burst past understandings of politics, morality, and the law asunder. In Origins of Totalitarianism , Arendt argues that totalitarianism could not fit into previous political typologies. Instead, it navigates between definitions of political regimes like tyranny and authoritarianism, as well as distinctions historically made between lawlessness and lawfulness, arbitrary and legitimate power. Even then, Arendt holds on to the idea that totalitarianism can be described and analyzed despite escaping traditional understanding as a political ideology and system. In the preface of the first edition, Arendt expresses this hope, writing that Origins was: “Written out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration where everything seems to have lost specific value and has become unrecognizable for human comprehension, unusable for human purpose.” One of the traditional elements of our “political and spiritual” world that she inquires about are questions of innocence, guilt, and responsibility. How can these concepts, which have both moral and legal implications, be applied and understood in the case of Nazi Germany, a regime void of morality and legality? Many political theorists have explored Arendt’s understanding of guilt in her report Eichmann in Jerusalem . In the report, Arendt utilizes Adolf Eichmann’s case—a Nazi Party official who helped carry out the Final Solution—to provide a concrete example of someone who is guilty but does not fit traditional understandings of what is required to be criminally guilty. Alan Norrie points out that Arendt exposes the tension between Eichmann’s lack of criminal intent, mens rea , and his criminal and evil actions (Norrie 2008. 202). The totality of totalitarianism complicates his criminal guilt, as Nazi Germany rendered every member of society complicit in its crimes. To unpack this complex nexus of guilt and responsibility, Iris Young looks at two of Arendt’s essays; “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” and “Collective Responsibility” (Young 2011, 90). Young outlines how Arendt understands guilt as centered on the self, while responsibility implies a relationship with the world and membership in a political community (Young 2011, 78). Guilt arises from an objective consequence of somebody’s actions (Young 2011, 79) and is not a product of someone’s subjective state. With this understanding, everybody in Nazi Germany was responsible (irrespective of whether they took up political responsibility), but not everybody was guilty. Those who acted publicly against the Nazi Regime, like the Scholl siblings, took up political responsibility in a positive sense (Young 2011, 91). Richard Bernstein, who also discusses Eichmann, shares this understanding with Young—Eichmann is criminally guilty, but bystanders are not. Bernstein, however, elucidates that the bystanders’ responsibility is imperative to understand because their complicity was an “essential condition for carrying out the Final Solution” (Bernstein 1999, 165). By focusing on the areas of guilt and responsibility and primarily looking at Eichmann, however, these scholars leave a theoretical gap in understanding the relationship between the victims—the stateless and Jewish people for Nazi Germany—and totalitarian ideology. These groups lack political responsibility within the totalitarian system because their innocence implies a separation from the world and a political community. In her essay “Collective Responsibility,” Arendt notes that the twentieth century has created a category of men who “cannot be held politically responsible for anything” and are “absolutely innocent.” The innocence of these victims and their apoliticality strikes at the heart of why Arendt postulates that totalitarian ideology and terror constitute a novel form of government—“[it] differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship.” Totalitarianism targets victims en masse , but their status as victims is not based on any action they take against the regime. While Norrie, Young, and Bernstein all address that Arendt thinks that any “traditional” conception of the relationship between law and justice cannot be applied to totalitarianism directly, by focusing primarily on Eichmann, they are missing and understanding of a group of people that allowed totalitarianism to explode these notions. By tracking and parsing through Arendt’s understanding of the innocents and innocence in Origins of Totalitarianism and placing it in conversation with her understanding of action in The Human Condition, I elaborate on the unique and lack thereof, political relationship between totalitarian ideology and the innocents. I argue that the condition of innocence of the victims represents the essence of totalitarianism’s unique form of oppression and negation of the human condition. The positioning of the innocents in a totalitarian society acts as a lens for how totalitarianism aims to reshape traditional notions of political, moral, and legal personhood. I demonstrate this by first outlining what created fertile ground in the 20th century for the condition of rightlessness of the innocents. Second, I highlight how the targeting of innocents in concentration camps lies at the heart of totalitarianism’s destruction of the juridical person—someone who is judged based on their actions. Third, I argue that by bending any notions of justice, totalitarianism destroys the moral person, a destruction that is best expressed in the innocents’ lack of internal freedom. Finally, I argue that all these components entail severing the victims from a world where they can appear and be recognized as humans. Overall, I contend that while many of the techniques unleashed on the innocents apply, to an extent, to everyone under totalitarianism, including people like Eichmann, the innocents represent the full realization of totalitarianism’ attempt to alter the essence of a political and acting person. To understand how totalitarian regimes created a mass of ‘superfluous’ people who existed outside the political realm, it is first necessary to highlight what conditions Arendt thinks sowed fertile ground for totalitarian domination and terror in the first place. A crucial condition is rooted in the failures of the nation-state in dealing with the new category of stateless people in the interwar period in Europe. Following WWI, multiethnic empires, like the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, dissolved, which led Europe to resort to the familiar nation-state principle—presuming that each nationality should establish its state. As Ayten Gundogdu writes, “the unquestioning application of this principle turned all those who were ‘ejected from the old trinity of state-people-territory’ into exceptions to the norm” (Gundogdu 2014, 31). These exceptions to the norm, as were Jewish people, could not be repatriated anywhere because they did not have a nation. Instead of integrating these minorities and making them fully-fledged political members, policies like Minority Treaties codified minorities as exceptions to the law. The massive scale of refugees that existed outside a political community left a set of people without any protections apart from the ones that the state gave out of their own prerogative and charitable actions. This stateless crisis crystallized, for Arendt, the aporia of human rights—even though human rights guarantee universal rights, irrespective of any social and political category, they are enforced based on political membership. Human rights end up being the rights of citizens, leading the stateless to a condition of “absolute rightlessness.” This condition of rightlessness does not entail the loss of singular rights—just like the law temporarily deprives a criminal of the right to freedom—but a deprivation of what Arendt calls the right to have rights. Defined by Arendt as a right to live “in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions.” Instead of being judged based on actions or opinions, the stateless are judged based on belonging to a group outside the nation. This innocence, an inability to be judged based on one’s deeds and words, is the defining mark of the statelessness’ loss of a “political status” (Arendt 1951, 386), which primes these groups of people for the particular form of oppression that totalitarianism entails. While the stateless and their condition of rightlessness was constructed even before Nazi Germany, the existence and the continuous creation of a mass of innocents lies at the core of the raison d’étre of totalitarian politics. According to Arendt, totalitarianism operates based on a law of Nature and History, which has “mankind” as an end product, an “‘Aryan’ world empire” for Hitler. Mankind becomes the “embodiment” of law and justice. Jewish people, under Nazi Germany, are portrayed as the “objective enemy” halting nature’s progression, whereby every stage of terror is seen as a further development that is closer to achieving the development of the ultimate human. This continuous need to follow a Darwinian law of nature leads Arendt to define one of totalitarianism’ defining features as the law of movement: the only way that totalitarian regimes can justify their existence, expansion, and domination, and it relies almost entirely on the group of innocents. The innocents are crucial components of the concentration camps because they are placed there alongside criminals who have committed an action. If they only targeted “criminals” or those that committed particular actions, the Nazi party would have scant logic to fulfill its law of movement. The “innocents” are “both qualitatively and quantitatively the most essential category of the camp population.” in the sense that they exist in an “enormous” capacity and will always be present in society. Totalitarianism relies on innocents because their existence removes any “calculable punishment for definite offenses.” Totalitarian politics aim, eventually, to turn everyone into an innocent mass that could be targeted, not because of their actions, but their existence. Even criminals were often sent to concentration camps only after they had completed their prison sentences, meaning they were going there not because of their criminal activity but rather arbitrarily, sacrificing a mass in favor of the laws of history and nature. The condition of rightlessness combined with total domination, exerted through the concentration camps, obliterates the juridical person for all the victims of totalitarianism. The juridical person is the foundation of modern understandings of law, constituting a person who bears rights and can exercise rights and who, in derogation of the law, faces proportional and predictable consequences. By destroying the juridical person and turning its victims into a mass of people who exist outside any legal framework and logic, totalitarianism operates beyond any previously conceived notions of justice. As Arendt explains: “The one thing that cannot be reproduced [in a totalitarian regime] is what made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace. For in the human estimation, there is no crime and no sin commensurable with the everlasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common sense, which asks: What crime must these people have committed in order to suffer so inhumanly? Hence also the absolute innocence of the victims: no man ever deserved this. Hence finally the grotesque haphazardness with which concentration camp victims were chosen in the perfected terror state: such punishment can, with equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on anyone .” By “traditional conceptions of Hell” tolerable to man, Arendt means a Hell where every individual will be judged based on their actions and nothing else on the day of the Last Judgment. Totalitarianism shatters this idea and any existence of an “absolute standard of justice” through the concentration camps, which creates Hell on earth but without any rightful last judgment. Even more importantly, because of these innocents and the arbitrariness and “haphazardness” of the way they are chosen, Arendt explains that state punishment can be “inflicted on anyone.” A tyranny targets the opponents of a regime or anyone who causes disorder, but totalitarianism cannot be understood through such a utilitarian lens. As Arendt points out in various places in Origins , without understanding totalitarianism’ “anti-utilitarian behavior.” it is difficult and impossible to understand its use in targeting people who commit no specific action against the regime. Concentration camps and terror materialize the law of movement like positive law materializes notions of justice in lawful governments. The guilty are innocents who stand in the way of movement. Totalitarianism does not only operate outside any traditional forms of legality and juridical personhood but also transcends any understanding of morality—the moral person is destroyed just as the juridical one is; and this is, once again, fully expressed through the treatment of innocents who become the ideal subject of totalitarianism. The ideal subject of totalitarianism lacks both internal and external freedom—which is precisely what is imposed on the victims. A lack of internal freedom implies an inability to distinguish right and wrong. As Arendt explains, “totalitarian terror,” in the concentration camps, achieves triumph when it cuts the moral person from “the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience questionable and equivocal.” The Nazi Regime achieved this by asking the innocent to make impossible decisions that involved balancing their own life and the ones of their families. This often involved a blurring of “the murderer and his victim.” by involving even the concentration camp inmates in the operations of the camp. Concerning this, Robert Braun talks about Primo Levi’s discussion of the complicated victim—explaining that those who survived the concentration camps are always seen as suspect because of these blurred lines (Braun 1994, 186). Arendt has a parallel opinion to Levi that focuses more on those victim’s subjective state, explaining that when they return to the “word of the living,” they are “assailed by doubts” regarding their truthfulness. The innocents represent the perfect totalitarian subject as their doubts represent an inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, which Arendt describes as the “standards of thought.” What is most striking about the destabilization of conscience is that it results in an inability to a freezing effect and an inability to act. As Arendt explains, “Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total.” Regardless of what “good” entails, doing it entails committing an action that is for others. Doing good can be understood as analogous to how Young interprets Arendt’s understanding of political responsibility… further explaining how the victims are left to a condition of non-responsibility through their inability to both distinguish what is right and wrong, and act on it. The erasure of “acting” in totalitarianism gains new meaning, or rather a more comprehensive explanation, when looking at Arendt’s discussion of acting in The Human Condition. Arendt’s work in The Human Condition illuminates the full extent of why acting becomes impossible under totalitarianism, especially for its victims. As Nica Siegel explains, an essential aspect of her understanding of action in The Human Condition is the spatialized logic that grounds action in a space where one can “reveal their unique personal identities and make their appearance in the world.” Only in this way can an action take place as it has a “who”—a unique author—at its root, and thus has the potential to create new beginnings. With this understanding, totalitarianism is the antithesis of action for everyone, to an extent, but completely for the innocent. Totalitarianism removes their space to act internally—through the destruction of conscience explained in the previous section—and externally—removing any place to appear publicly. The innocent are removed from the rest simply by being in the concentration camps, isolated from everyone else but also from one another. This means that totalitarianism, in practice, removes any source and space for spontaneity. Arendt defines spontaneity in Origins almost identically to how she defines action in The Human Condition , saying that spontaneity is “man’s power to begin something new out of his resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment or events.” This condition of the innocent also illuminates why creating new and making a political statement is impossible under totalitarianism. As Arendt explains, “no activity can become excellent if the world does not provide a proper space for its exercise.” As with many other tactics in totalitarianism, this lack of excellence and new beginnings is rooted in the fate of the innocents. Nobody’s actions can “become excellent” if they face the same consequences of the concentration camp as the mass of those who commit no action. This is why under totalitarianism, “martyrdom” becomes “impossible.” Just as totalitarianism assimilates criminals with innocents in their punishment, political actors are also assimilated to this category, as they are “deprived of the protective distinction that comes of their having done something,” just as the innocents are. What totalitarianism does to its victims is, therefore, a symptom of its wider perversion of human individuality and action in general. Even perpetrators like Eichmann lose their sense of individuality—A.J. Vetlesen has described the phenomenon as a double dehumanization between the victims and the perpetrator Every bureaucrat in Nazi Germany was replaceable and totalitarianism made them feel, paradoxically, “subjectively innocent,” in the sense that they do not feel responsible for their actions “because they do not really murder but execute a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal.” Jalusic argues that both aspects of humanization have in common, the “loss of the human condition.”, but what Jalusic misses is that Vetlesen, by arguing that it is the persecutors that dehumanize themselves to avoid personal responsibility and alienate themselves from their actions—thus going against the cog in the machine theory. The perpetrators retain a level of agency that is ultimately denied to the victims. The victims do not alienate themselves from their actions, as they cannot act in the first place. When Nazi officials send victims to the concentration camp, they lose any ability to appear and thus face a loss of the human condition, as Arendt describes in The Human Condition, “A life without speech and without action, on the other hand-and this is the only way of life that in earnest has renounced all appearance and all vanity in the biblical sense of the word-is, literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” The emphasis she places on action as being an essential part of living “among men” explains why, according to her, totalitarianism, unlike other forms of oppressive governments, transforms “human nature itself.” While she uses the term “human nature,” she makes a strict distinction between human nature and condition in The Human Condition , arguing that it is impossible for us to understand human nature without resorting to God or a deity. Even in Origins , when talking about human nature, she criticizes those, like the positivists, who see it as something fixed and not constantly conditioned by ourselves. In light of her understanding of the human condition, I argue that Arendt means that totalitarianism undermines an essential part of the human condition, not human nature. Arendt views the human condition, as opposed to human nature, as being rooted in plurality. By plurality, she means that each individual is uniquely different but also shares a means of communication with every other individual, and thus, the ability of each individual to make themselves known and engage with one another. With this in mind, “human plurality is the basic condition for both action and speech,” as each individual can make a statement and be understood by others. The treatment of victims and their innocence as their defining factor highlights that fellow humans can distort and condition crucial aspects of our human condition in favor of laws that pretend that humans can instill justice and nature on earth. To a degree, totalitarianism subjects everyone to the conditions of “innocence” that victims face. What distinguishes the victims from other agents under totalitarianism is that they demonstrate the ability of totalitarian ideology to instill a complete condition of innocence by playing a person entirely outside any political and legal realm and, by extension, outside of mankind. Innocence under totalitarianism is not a negative condition—in the sense of not having done anything, not taking action—but it is primarily a lack of positive freedom—the ability to do something and act. Arendt’s understanding of innocence elaborates on the unique condition of superfluousness under totalitarianism. This ‘superfluousness’ is justified through a legal and political doctrine that explodes past legal and normative frameworks by being based on movement instead of stability. The law of nature is in a constant process of Darwinian development, with the superfluous innocents as the sine qua non to keep going. A lot of what happens to the innocents, as their obliteration of a space to act, does happen to everyone under totalitarianism; however, the innocents bear the full expression of totalitarianism and fight past notions of moral, political, and legal personhood. The innocents are not only cut off from this personhood but also from what Arendt thinks it means to be human, as they represent an inability to do what human beings do, which is to create beginnings through spontaneous action. The unique condition of innocence that the victims of totalitarianism face exposes totalitarianism’s own legal and political theory. The Law of Nature that Nazi Germany espouses here cannot exist without the realization of a group of innocents who prove the nihilistic idea that humans can be sacrificed for perfected mankind. As Arendt explains, the concentration camps are where the changes in “human nature are tested.” We can only understand how totalitarianism could occur by looking at this unique political erasure. The terror and fate of the innocents act as proof for everyone in the totalitarian regime that they could be next. The status of the victims also sheds lights on the inexplicable deeds that Eichmann committed, as Arendt writes that one of the few, if not only one, discernible aspects of totalitarianism is that “radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.” Totalitarianism proves that it is fellow humans who are dehumanized, albeit to a different degree, who completely sever an individual’s ties from political and legal structures meant to protect them. This conclusion and elaboration of the peculiar form of oppression and domination of totalitarianism has pressing practical and theoretical implications for modern-day politics. As Arendt explains, totalitarianism is born from modern conditions, and so looking at how modern polities can and do create superfluousness can be a thermometer for descent into totalitarianism. After all, it is important to remember that statelessness in the 20th century came before totalitarianism’s domination and terror. References Arendt, Hannah. “Collective Responsibility.” Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt , edited by S. J. James W. Bernauer, Springer Netherlands, 1987, pp. 43–50. Springer Link , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3565-5_3. ---. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . Penguin Books, 2006. ---. The Human Condition: Second Edition . Edited by Margaret Canovan and a New Foreword by Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press. University of Chicago Press , https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo29137972.html. Accessed 8 May 2024. ---. The Origins of Totalitarianism . 1951. Penguin Classics, 2017. Benhabib, Seyla. “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt’s Thought.” Political Theory , vol. 16, no. 1, 1988, pp. 29–51. JSTOR , https://www.jstor.org/stable/191646. Bernstein, Richard J. “Responsibility, Judging, and Evil.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie , vol. 53, no. 208 (2), 1999, pp. 155–72. JSTOR , https://www.jstor.org/stable/23955549. Braun, Robert. “The Holocaust and Problems of Historical Representation.” History and Theory , vol. 33, no. 2, May 1994, p. 172. DOI.org (Crossref) , https://doi.org/10.2307/2505383. Gundogdu, Ayten. Rightlessness in an Age of Rights . Oxford University Press, 2015. DOI.org (Crossref) , https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199370412.001.0001. Jalusic, Vlasta. “Organized Innocence and Exclusion: ‘Nation-States’ in the Aftermath of War and Collective Crime.” Social Research , vol. 74, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1173–200. JSTOR , https://www.jstor.org/stable/40972045. Norrie, Alan. “Justice on the Slaughter-Bench: The Problem of War Guilt in Arendt and Jaspers.” New Criminal Law Review , vol. 11, no. 2, Apr. 2008, pp. 187–231. DOI.org (Crossref) , https://doi.org/10.1525/nclr.2008.11.2.187. Siegel, Nica. “The Roots of Crisis: Interrupting Arendt’s Radical Critique.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory , vol. 62, no. 144, 2015, pp. 60–79. JSTOR , https://www.jstor.org/stable/24719945. Vetlesen, Arne Johan. Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing . 1st ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005. DOI.org (Crossref) , https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610776. Young, Iris Marion, and Martha Nussbaum. Responsibility for Justice . Oxford University Press, 2011. DOI.org (Crossref) , https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195392388.001.0001.

Author Name < Back Ronald Reagan and the Role of Humor in American Movement Conservatism Abie Rohrig In this paper, I argue that analysis of Reagan’s rhetoric, and particularly his humor, illuminates many of the attitudes and tendencies of both conservative fusionism—the combination of traditionalist conservatism with libertarianism—and movement conservatism. Drawing on Ted Cohen’s writings on the conditionality of humor, I assert that Reagan’s use of humor reflected two guiding principles of movement conservatism that distinguish it from other iterations of conservatism: its accessibility and its empowering message. First, Reagan’s jokes were accessible in that they are funny even to those who disagree with him politically; in Cohen’s terms, his jokes were hermetic (requiring a certain knowledge to be funny), and not effective (requiring a certain feeling or disposition to be funny). The broad accessibility of Reagan’s humor reflected the need of movement conservatism to unify constituencies with varying political feelings and interests. Second, Reagan’s jokes were empowering—they presume and therefore posit the competence of their audience. Many of his jokes implied that if an average citizen were in charge of the government they could do a far better job than status quo bureaucrats. This tone demonstrated the tendency of movement conservatism to emphasize individual freedom and self-governance as a through line of its constituent ideologies. In the first part of this paper, I offer some historical and political context for movement conservatism, emphasizing the ideological influences of Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley as well as the political influence of Barry Goldwater. I then discuss how Reagan infused many of Meyer, Buckley, and Goldwater’s talking points with a humor that is both accessible and empowering. I will conclude by analyzing how Reagan’s humor was a concrete manifestation of certain principles of fusionism. Post-war conservatives found themselves in a peculiar situation: their school of thought had varying constituencies, each with different political priorities and anxieties. George Nash writes in The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945 : “The Right consisted of three loosely related groups: traditionalists or new conservatives, appalled by the erosion of values and the emergence of a secular, rootless, mass society; libertarians, apprehensive about the threat of the State to private enterprise and individualism; and disillusioned ex-radicals and their allies, alarmed by international Communism” (p. 118). Conservative intellectuals like Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley attempted to synthesize conservative schools of thought into a coherent modern Right. In 1964, Meyer published What is Conservatism? , an anthology of conservative essays that highlight the similarities between different conservative schools of thought. Buckley founded the National Review , a conservative magazine that published conservatives of all three persuasions. Its Mission Statement simultaneously appeals to the abandonment of “organic moral order,” the indispensability of a “competitive price system,” and the “satanic utopianism” of communism. 2 Both Meyer and Buckley thought that the primacy of the individual was an ideological belief through the line of traditionalism and libertarianism. Meyer wrote in What is Conservatism? that “the freedom of the person” should be “decisive concern of political action and political theory.” 3 Russell Kirk, a traditionalist-leaning conservative, similarly argued that the libertarian imperative of individual freedom is compatible with the “Christian conception of the individual as flawed in mind and will” because religious virtue “cannot be legislated,” meaning that freedom and virtue can be practiced and developed together. 4 The cultivation of the maximum amount of freedom that is compatible with traditional order thus became central to fusionist thought. Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona and the 1964 Republican nominee for president, championed the hybrid conservatism of Buckley and Meyer. Like Buckley in his Mission Statement, Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention included a compound message in support of “a free and competitive economy,” “moral leadership” that “looks beyond material success for the inner meaning of [our] lives,” and the fight against communism as the “principal disturber of peace in the world.” 5 Goldwater also emphasized the fusionist freedom-order balance, contending that while the “single resolve” of the Republican party is freedom, “liberty lacking order” would become “the license of the mob and of the jungle.” 6 Having discussed the ideological underpinnings of conservative fusionism, I turn now to an analysis of how Reagan used humor as a tool for political framing. First, Reagan’s humor is distinctive for its accessibility: by this I mean that there are few barriers one must overcome to laugh at Reagan’s jokes. In his book Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters , philosopher Ted Cohen calls jokes “conditional” if they presume that “their audiences [are] able to supply a requisite background, and exploit this background.” 7 The conditionality of a joke varies according to how much background it requires to be funny. In Cohen’s terms, Reagan’s jokes are not very conditional since many different audiences can appreciate their content. Cohen presents another distinction that is useful for analyzing Reagan’s humor: a joke is hermetic if the audience’s “background condition involves knowledge,” and it is affective if it “depends upon feelings … likes, dislikes and preferences” of the audience). Reagan’s jokes are not very conditional because they are at most hermetic, merely requiring some background knowledge to be appreciated— not a certain feeling or disposition— and that this makes his jokes funny even to people who disagree with him. There are two ways in which Reagan’s humor is accessible. The first is that many of his jokes have apolitical premises. By apolitical, I mean that the requisite knowledge required to make a joke funny does not directly relate to government or public affairs. For instance, Reagan said at the 1988 Republican National Convention, “I can still remember my first Republican Convention. Abraham Lincoln giving a speech that sent tingles down my spine.” To appreciate this joke, one only needs to know that Reagan is the oldest president to even hold office. This piece of knowledge does not pertain to the government in any direct way— in fact, this joke would remain funny even if it were told by a different person at a nonpolitical conference with a reference to a nonpolitical historical figure. Another example of Reagan’s apolitical humor is a joke he made in the summer of 1981: “I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.” All one needs to understand here is that long meetings are often boring and sleep-inducing. One can even love long meetings and still find this joke funny because they understand the phenomenon of a boring, sleep-inducing meeting. Reagan made hundreds of these jokes during his time in office, all of which were, with few exceptions, funny to just about any listener. Their apolitical content ensured that no one political constituency would be unable to “get” Reagan’s jokes. The second way in which Reagan’s humor is hermetic is that his political jokes were playful and had relatively innocuous premises, meaning that one did not have to agree with their sentiment to laugh. Reagan’s political jokes can be differentiated from his apolitical jokes because they do require knowledge about government or public affairs in order to be funny. One such piece of knowledge is the inefficiency of government bureaucracy. For example, in his speech, “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan says that “the nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this Earth is a government program.” In another speech, Reagan quips, “I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress.” The premises of these jokes, though political, are not very contentious. To find them funny one simply needs to know that bureaucracy can be inefficient, or even that there exists a sort of joke in which bureaucracies are teased for being inefficient; one does not need to hate bureaucracy or even want to reduce bureaucracy. Cohen might offer the following analogy to explain the conditionality of Reagan’s bureaucracy jokes: one does not need to think that Polish people are actually stupid to laugh at a Polish joke, one simply needs to understand that there exists a sort of joke in which Polish people are held to be stupid. Reagan’s inoffensive political jokes are playful, lighthearted, and careful not to alienate or antagonize the opposition by presuming a controversial belief. The accessibility of Reagan’s humor reflects the overall need for fusionism to appeal to a wide variety of conservative groups— traditionalists, libertarians and anti-communists. Instead of converting libertarians to traditionalism or vice versa, Nash writes that fusionists looked to foster agreement on “several fundamentals” of conservative thought. Reagan’s broadly accessible humor is both a concretization and a strategy for fusionism’s broadly accessible ideology. The strategic potency of Reagan’s humor lies in its ability to bond people together. Cohen writes that the “deep satisfaction in successful joke transactions is the sense held mutually by teller and hearer that they are joined in feeling.” Friedrich Nietzsche expresses a similar sentiment when he writes that “rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.” This joint feeling brings people together even more than a shared belief since the moment of connection is more visceral and immediate. One might ask, however; is it not the case that all politicians value humor as a means to connect with their audience and unify their constituencies? Why is Reagan’s humor any different? While humor can be used for a broader range of political goals, politicians often connect with one group at the expense of another. For example, when asked what she would tell a male supporter who believed marriage was between one man and one woman, Senator Elizabeth Warren responded, “just marry one woman. I'm cool with that— assuming you can find one.” 9 Some democrats praised this joke for its dismissal of homophobic beliefs, but others felt that the joke was condescending and antagonistic. This is the sort of divisive joke that Reagan was uninterested in— one that pleases one of his constituencies at the expense of another. Reagan would also avoid much of Donald Trump’s humor. For instance, Trump wrote in 2016, “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!” Trump’s dismissal of “political correctness” is liberating to some but offensive to others. By contrast, Reagan’s exoteric style of humor welcomes all the constituencies of conservative fusion. Nash writes that fusionists were “tired of factional feuding,” and thus Reagan had no motivation to drive a larger wedge between traditionalists and libertarians. 1 The second thing to note about Reagan’s humor is its empowering tone. This takes two forms. First, Reagan elevates his audience by implying that if they controlled the government, they could do a far better job, a message which presumes and therefore posits their competence. For instance, in “A Time For Choosing,” Reagan argues that one complicated anti-poverty program could be made more effective by simply sending cash directly to families. In doing so, Reagan suggests that if any given audience member were in charge of the program, they could do a better job than the bureaucrats. Second, Reagan’s insistence on limited government affirms the average citizen’s capacity for self-government. Reagan famously states that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Since this implies that government aid will leave you worse off, it also posits the average citizen’s capacity for autonomy and therefore their maturity, level-headedness, and overall competence. The empowering tone of Reagan’s humor reflects fusionism’s emphasis on individual freedom and independence. Meyer writes that “the desecration of the image of man, the attack alike upon his freedom and his transcendent dignity, provide common cause” for both traditionalists and libertarians against liberals. Yet, a presupposition of a belief in freedom is a belief in people’s faculty to be free, to not squander their freedom on pointless endeavors or let their freedom collapse into chaos. This freedom-order balance is fundamental to fusionism as an ideology that straddles support from libertarians who want as little government intervention as possible with traditionalists who want the state to maintain certain societal values. By positing the competence of the free individual in his jokes, Reagan affirms Russell Kirk’s idea that moral order will arise organically from individual freedom, not government coercion. In this paper, I argue that one of Reagan’s marks on the development of conservative thought was his careful use of humor to reflect certain ideological and practical commitments of post-war fusionism. By making his jokes accessible to the varying schools of conservatism and propounding the capacity of the individual for self-government, Reagan’s humor functioned as both a manifestation and a strategy for fusionism’s post-war triumph. References “A Selected Quote From: The President’s News Conference, August 12, 1986.” August 12, 1986 Reagan Quotes and Speeches. Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute. Accessed August 6, 2022. https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/reagan-quotes-speeches/news-conference-1/ . Buckley Jr., William F. "Our Mission Statement." National Review 19 (1955). Campbell, Colin. 2016. “Donald Trump Announces to the World That He Won’t Call Megyn Kelly a ‘Bimbo.’” Insider . January 27, 2016. https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-fox-news-debate-megyn-kelly-bimbo-2016-1 . Cohen, Ted. Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. “‘George - Make It One More for the Gipper.’” The Independent. August 16, 1998. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/george-make-it-one-more-for-the-gipper-1172284.html . “Goldwater’s 1964 Acceptance Speech.” Washington Post. Last Modified 1998. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/may98/goldwaterspeech.htm . Harris, Daniel I. "Friendship as Shared Joy in Nietzsche." Symposium 19, no. 1, (2015): 199-221. Meyer, Frank S., ed. What is Conservatism? Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2015. Open Road Media. Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 . Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014. Open Road Media. Panetta, Grace. 2019. “Elizabeth Warren Brings Down the House at CNN LGBT Town Hall With a Fiery Answer on Same-Sex Marriage.” Insider . October 11, 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-warren-brings-down-house-cnn-lgbt-town-hall-video-2019-10 . Reagan, Ronald. “A Time for Choosing.” Transcript of speech delivered in Los Angeles, CA, October 27, 1964. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan/time-choosing-speech-october-27-1964#:~:text=%22The%20Speech%22%20is%20what%20Ronald,his%20acting%20career%20closed%20out . Sherrin, Ned, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations . 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wilson, John. Talking With the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Adithya V. Raajkumar “Victorian Holocausts”: The Long-Term Consequences of Famine in British India Adithya V. Raajkumar Abstract: This paper seeks to examine whether famines occur- ring during the colonial period affect development outcomes in the present day. We compute district level measures of economic development, social mobility, and infrastructure using cross-sectional satellite luminosity, census data, and household survey data. We then use a panel of recorded famine severity and rain- fall data in colonial Indian districts to construct cross-sectional counts measures of famine occurrence. Finally, we regress modern day outcomes on the number of famines suffered by a district in the colonial era, with and without various controls. We then instrument for famine occurrence with climate data in the form of negative rainfall shocks to ensure exogeneity. We find that districts which suffered more famines during the colonial era have higher levels of economic development; however, high rates of famine occurrence are also associated with a larger percentage of the labor force working in agriculture, lower rural consumption, and higher rates of income inequality. We attempt to explain these findings by showing that famine occurrence is simultaneously related to urbanization rates and agricultural development. Overall, this suggests that the long-run effects of natural disasters which primarily afflict people and not infrastructure are not al- ways straightforward to predict. 1. Introduction What are the impacts of short-term natural disasters in the long-run, and how do they affect economic development? Are these impacts different in the case of disasters which harm people but do not affect physical infrastructure? While there is ample theoretical and empirical literature on the impact of devastating natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, there are relatively few studies on the long-term consequences of short-term disasters such as famines. Further- more, none of the literature focuses on society-wide development outcomes. The case of colonial India provides a well-recorded setting to examine such a question, with an unfortunate history of dozens of famines throughout the British Raj. Many regions were struck multiple times during this period, to the extent that historian Mike Davis characterizes them as “Victorian Holocausts” (Davis 2001 p.9). While the short-term impacts of famines are indisputable, their long-term effects on economic development, perhaps through human development patterns, are less widely understood. The United Kingdom formally ruled India from 1857 to 1947, following an ear- lier period of indirect rule by the East India Company. The high tax rate imposed on peasants in rural and agricultural India was a principal characteristic of British governance. Appointed intermediaries, such as the landowning zamindar caste in Bengal, served to collect these taxes. Land taxes imposed on farmers often ranged from two-thirds to half of their produce, but could be as high as ninety to ninety-five percent. Many of the intermediaries coerced their tenants into farming only cash crops instead of a mix of cash crops and agricultural crops (Dutt 2001). Aside from high taxation, a laissez-faire attitude to drought relief was another principal characteristic of British agricultural policy in India. Most senior officials in the imperial administration believed that serious relief efforts would cause more harm than they would do good and consequently, were reluctant to dispatch aid to afflicted areas (ibid). The consequences of these two policies were some of the most severe and frequent famines in recorded history, such as the Great Indian Famine of 1893, during which an estimated 5.5 to 10.3 million peasants perished from starvation alone, and over 60 million are believed to have suffered hardship (Fieldhouse 1996). Our paper focuses on three sets of outcomes in order to assess the long-term impact of famines. First, we measure macroeconomic measures of overall development, such as rural consumption per capita and the composition of the labor force. We also use nighttime luminosity gathered from satellite data as a proxy for GDP, of which measurement using survey data can be unreliable. Second, we look at measures of human development: inequality, social mobility, and education, constructed from the India Human Development Survey I and II. Finally, we examine infrastructure, computing effects on village-level electrification, numbers of medical centers, and bus service availability. To examine impacts, we regress famine occurrence on these outcomes via ordinary least-squares (OLS). We use an instrumental-variables (IV) approach to ensure a causal interpretation via as-good-as-random assignment (1). We first estimate famine occurrence, the endogenous independent variable, as a function of rainfall shocks–a plausibly exogenous instrument–before regressing outcomes on predicted famine occurrence via two-stage least-squares (2SLS). Since the survey data are comparatively limited, we transform and aggregate panel data on rainfall and famines as counts in order to use them in a cross-section with the contemporary outcomes. We find for many outcomes that there is indeed a marginal effect of famines in the long-run, although where it is significant it is often quite small. Where famines do have a significant impact on contemporary outcomes, the results follow an interesting pattern : a higher rate of famine occurrence in a given district is associated with greater economic development yet worse rural outcomes and higher inequality. Specifically, famine occurrence has a small but positive impact on nighttime luminosity–our proxy for economic development–and smaller, negative impacts on rural consumption and the proportion of adults with a college education. At the same time, famine occurrence is also associated with a higher proportion of the labor force being employed in the agricultural sector as well as a higher level of inequality as measured by the Gini index (2). Moreover, we find limited evidence that famine occurrence has a slightly negative impact on infrastructure as more famines are associated with reduced access to medical care and bus service. We do not find that famines have any significant impact on social mobility–specifically, intergenerational income mobility–or infrastructure such as electrification in districts. This finding contradicts much of the established literature on natural disasters, which has predominantly found large and wholly negative effects. We at- tempt to explain this disparity by analyzing the impact of famines on urbanization rates to show that famine occurrence may lead to a worsening urban-rural gap in long-run economic development. Thus, we make an important contribution to the existing literature and challenge past research with one of our key findings: short-term natural disasters which do not destroy physical infrastructure may have unexpectedly positive outcomes in the long-run. While the instrumental estimates are guaranteed to be free of omitted variable bias, the OLS standard errors allow for more precise judgments due to smaller confidence intervals. In around half of our specifications, the Hausman test for endogeneity fails to reject the null hypothesis of exogeneity, indicating that the ordinary-least squares and instrumental variables results are equally valid (3). How- ever, the instrumental variables estimate helps address other problems, such as attenuation bias, due to possible measurement error (4). Section 2 presents a review of the literature and builds a theoretical framework for understanding the impacts of famines on modern-day outcomes. Section 3 describes our data, variable construction, and summary statistics. Sections 4 and 5 present our results using ordinary least-squares and instrumental two-stage least- squares approaches. Section 6 discusses and attempts to explain these results. 2. Review and Theoretical Framework 1. The Impact of Natural Disasters Most of the current literature on natural disasters as a whole pertains to physical destructive phenomena such as severe weather or seismic events. Moreover, most empirical studies, such as Nguyen et al (2020) and Sharma and Kolthoff (2020) , focus on short-run aspects of natural disasters relating to various facets of proxi- mate causes (Huff 2020) or pathways of short-term recovery (Sharma and Kolthoff 2020). Famines are a unique kind of natural disaster in that they greatly affect crops, people, and animals but leave physical infrastructure and habitation relatively unaffected. We attempt to take this element of famines into account when explaining our results. Of the portion of the literature that focuses on famines, most results center on individual biological outcomes such as height, nutrition, (Cheng and Hui Shui 2019) or disease (Hu et al. 2017. A percentage of the remaining studies fixate on long-term socioeconomic effects at the individual level (Thompson et al. 2019). The handful of papers that do analyze broad long-term socioeconomic outcomes, such as Ambrus et al. (2015) and Cole et al. (2019), all deal with either long-term consequences of a single, especially severe natural disaster or the path dependency effects that may occur because of the particular historical circumstances of when a disaster occurs, such as in Dell (2013). On the other hand, our analysis spans several occurrences of the same type of phenomenon in a single, relatively stable sociohistorical setting, thereby utilizing a much larger and more reliable sample of natural disasters. Thus, our paper is the first to examine the long-term effects of a very specific type of natural disaster, famine, on the overall development of an entire region, by considering multiple occurrences thereof. Prior econometric literature on India’s famine era has highlighted other areas of focus, such as Burgess and Donaldson (2012), which shows that trade openness helped mitigate the catastrophic effects of famine. There is also plenty of historical literature on the causes and consequences of the famines, most notable in academic analyses from British historians (contemporarily, Carlyle 1900 and Ewing 1919; more recently Fieldhouse), which tend to focus on administrative measures, or more specifically, the lack thereof. In terms of the actual effects of famine, all of the established literature asserts that natural disasters overwhelmingly influence economic growth through two main channels: destruction of infrastructure and resulting loss of human capital (Lima and Barbosa 2019, Nguyen et al. 2020, Cole et al. 2019), or sociopolitical historical consequences, such as armed conflict (Dell 2013, Huff 2019). Famines pose an interesting question in this regard since they tend to result in severe loss of human capital through population loss due to starvation but generally result in smaller-scale infrastructure losses (Agbor and Price 2013). This is especially the case for rural India, which suffered acute famines while having little infrastructure in place (Roy 2006). We examine three types of potential outcomes: overall economic development, social mobility, and infrastructure, as outlined in section three. Our results present a novel finding in that famine occurrence seems to positively impact certain outcomes while negatively impacting most others, which we attempt to explain by considering the impact of famines on urbanization rates. Famines can impact outcomes through various mechanisms; therefore, we leave the exact causal mechanism unspecified and instead treat famines as generic shocks with subsequent recovery of unknown speed. If famines strike repeatedly, their initial small long-term effects on outcomes can escalate. In order to distinguish long- run effects of famines, we construct a simple growth model where flow variables such as growth quickly return to the long-run average after the shock, but stock variables such as GDP or consumption only return to the average asymptotically. Our intuition for the basis of distinguishing a long-run effect of famines rests on a simple growth model in which flow variables such as growth quickly return to the long-run average after a shock, but stock variables such as GDP or consumption only return to the average asymptotically (5). Thus, over finite timespans, the differences in stock variables between districts that undergo famines and those that do not should be measurable even after multiple decades. As mentioned below, this is in line with more recent macroeconomic models of natural disasters such Hochrainer (2009) and Bakkensen and Barrage (2018). Assume colonial districts (indexed by i ) suffer n i famines over the time period (in our data, the years 1870 to 1930), approximated as average constant rates f i . The occurrence of famine can then be modeled by a Poisson process with interval parameter f i , which represents the expected time between famines–even though the exact time is random and thus unknown–until it is realized (6). For simplicity, we assume that famines cause damage d to a district’s economy, for which time r i is needed to recover to its assumed long-run, balanced growth path (7). We make no assumptions on the distributions of d and r i except that r i is dependent on d and that the average recovery time E[ r i] is similarly a function of E[ d ]. If the district had continued on the growth path directly without the famine, absent any confounding effects, it would counterfactually have more positive out- comes today by a factor dependent on niE[tf] and thus n i , the number of famines suffered. We cannot observe the counterfactuals (the outcome in the affected district had it not experienced a famine), so instead, we use the unaffected districts in the sample as our comparison group. Controlling for factors such as population and existing infrastructure, each district should provide a reasonably plausible counterfactual for the other districts in terms of the number of famines suffered. Then, the differences in outcomes among districts measured today, y i , can be modeled as a function of the differences in the number of famines, n i . Finally, across the entire set of districts, this can be used to represent the average outcome E[y i ] as a function of the number of famines, which forms the basis of our ordinary-least squares approach in section four. This assumes that the correlation between famine occurrence and outcome is equal to 0. To account for the possibility their correlation is non-zero, we also use rainfall shocks to isolate the randomized part of our independent variable in order to ensure that famine occurrence is uncorrelated with our outcome variables. The use of rainfall shocks, in turn, forms the basis of our instrumental variables approach in section five. The important question is the nature of the relationship between d and ri . While f can be easily inferred from our data, d and especially r are much more difficult to estimate without detailed, high-level, and accurate data. Since the historical record is insufficiently detailed to allow precise estimation of the parameters of such a model, we constrain the effects of famine to be linear in our estimation in sections four and five. 2. Estimation Having constrained the hypothesized effects of famine to be linear, in section four, we would prefer to estimate (1) below, where represents our estimate of the effect of famine severity ( famine i), measured as the number of famines undergone by the district, on the outcome variable outcome yi, and Xi is a vector of contem- porary (present-day) covariates, such as mean elevation and soil quality. The con- stant term captures the mean outcomes across all districts andis a district-specific error term. Much of the research on famine occurrence in colonial India attributes the occurrence of famines and their consequences to poor policies and administration by the British Raj. If this is the case, and these same policies hurt the development of districts in other ways, such as by stunting industrialization directly, then the estimation of (1) will not show the correct effect of famines per se on comparative economic development. Additionally, our observations of famines, which are taken indirectly from district-level colonial gazetteers and reports, may be subject to “measurement” error that is non-random. For example, the reporting of famines in such gazetteers may be more accurate in well-developed districts that received preferential treatment from British administrators. To solve this problem, we turn to the examples of Dell et al. (2012), Dell (2013), Hoyle (2010), and Donaldson and Burgess (2012), who use weather shocks as instruments for natural disaster severity. While Dell (2013) focuses on historical consequences arising from path dependency and Hoyle (2010) centralizes on productivity, the instrumental methodology itself is perfectly applicable to our work. Another contribution of our pa- per is to further the use of climate shocks as instruments. We expand upon the usage of climate shocks as instruments because they fit the two main criteria for an instrumental variable. Primarily, weather shocks are extremely short-term phenomena, so their occurrence is unlikely to be correlated with longer-term climate factors that may impact both historical and modern outcomes. Secondly, they are reasonably random and provide exogenous variation with which we can estimate the impact of famines in an unbiased manner. We first estimate equation (2) below before estimating (1) using the predicted occurrence of famine from (2): We calculate famine as the number of reported events occurring in our panel for a district and rainfall as the number of years in which the deviation of rainfall from the mean falls below a certain threshold, nominally the fifteenth and tenth percentiles of all rainfall deviations for that district. As in (1), there is a constant term and error term. As is standard practice, we include the control variables in the first-stage even though they are quite plausibly unrelated to the rainfall variable. This allows us to estimate the impacts of famine with a reasonably causal interpretation; since the assignment of climate shocks is ostensibly random, using them to “proxy” for famines in this manner is akin to “as good as random” estimation. The only issue with this first-stage specification is that while we instrument counts of famine with counts of lo w rainfall years, the specific years in which low rainfall occurs theoretically need not match up with years in which famine is recorded in a given district. Therefore, we would prefer to estimate (3) below instead, since it provides additional identification through a panel dataset. Any other climate factors should be demeaned out by the time effects. Other district characteristics that may influence agricultural productivity and therefore famine severity, such as soil quality, should be differenced out with district effects, represented by the parameters. Differences in administrative policy should be resolved with provincial fixed effects. Unfortunately, we would then be unable to implement the standard instrumental variables practice of including the control variables in both stages since our modern-day outcomes are cross-sectional (i.e, we only have one observation per district for those measures). Nevertheless, our specification in (2) should reason- ably provide randomness that is unrelated to long-term climate factors, as mentioned above. Finally, we collapse the panel by counting the number of famines that occur in the district over time in order to compare famine severity with our cross-sectional modern-day outcomes and to get an exogenous count measure of famine that we can use de novo in (1). To account for sampling variance in our modern-day estimates, we use error weights constructed from the current population of each district meaning that our approach in section 5 is technically weighted least-squares, not ordinary. While this should account for heteroscedasticity in the modern observations, we use robust SM estimators in our estimations (McKean 2004, Barrera and Yohai 2006) to assure that our standard errors on the historical famine and rainfall variables are correct (8). The results of these approaches are detailed in section six. 3. Data 1. Sources and Description Our principal data of interest is a historical panel compiled from a series of colonial district gazetteers by Srivastava (1968) and details famine severity at the district level over time in British India from 1870 to 1930. Donaldson and Burgess (2010) then code these into an ordinal scale by using the following methodology: 4 – District mentioned in Srivastava’s records as “intensely affected by famine” 3 – District mentioned as “severely affected” 2 – Mentioned as “affected” 1 – Mentioned as “lightly affected” 0 – Not mentioned 9 – Specifically mentioned as being affected by spillover effects from a neighbor- ing district (there are only four such observations, so we exclude them) In our own coding of the data, we categorize famines as codes 2, 3, and 4, with severe famines corresponding to codes 3 and 4. We compute further cross-sectional measures, chiefly the total number and proportion of famine-years that a district experienced over the sixty-year periods. This is equivalent to tabulating the frequency of code occurrences and adding the resulting totals for codes 2 to 4 to obtain a single count measure of famine. Our results are robust to using “severe” (codes 3 and 4) famines instead of codes 2, 3, and 4. Across the entire panel, codes from 0 to 4 occurred with the following frequencies: 4256, 35, 207, 542, and 45 respectively. We also supplemented this panel with panel data on rainfall over the same time period. Several thousand measuring stations across India collected daily rainfall data over the time period, which Donaldson (2012) annualizes and compares with crop data. The rainfall data in Donaldson (2012) represents the total rainfall in a given district over a year, categorized by growing seasons of various crops (for ex- ample, the amount of total rainfall in a district that fell during the wheat growing season). Since different districts likely had different shares of crops, we average over all crops to obtain an approximation of total rainfall over the entire year. We additionally convert this into a more relevant measure in the context of famine by considering only the rainfall that fell during the growing seasons of crops typically grown for consumption in the dataset; those being bajra, barley, gram (bengal), jowar (sorghum), maize, ragi (millet), rice, and wheat. Finally, to ensure additional precision over the growing season, we simply add rainfall totals during the grow- ing seasons of the two most important food crops - rice and wheat - which make up over eighty percent of food crops in the country (World Bank, UN-FAOSTAT). The two crops have nearly opposite growing seasons, so the distribution of rainfall over the combined growing seasons serves as an approximation of total annual rainfall. Our results are robust with regards to all three definitions; the pairwise correlations between the measures are never less than ninety percent. Moreover, the cross-sectional famine instruments constructed from these are almost totally identical as the patterns in each type of rainfall (that is, their statistical distributions over time) turn out to be the same. As expected, there appears to be significant variation in annual rainfall. The ex- ample of the Buldana district (historically located in the Bombay presidency, now in Maharashtra state) highlights this trend, as shown in Figure 1 on the following page. In general, the trends for both measures of rainfall over time are virtually in- distinguishable aside from magnitude. As anticipated, famine years are marked by severe and/or sustained periods of below-average rainfall although the correlation is not perfect. There are a few districts which have years with low rainfall and no recorded famines, but this can mostly be explained by a lack of sufficient records, especially in earlier years. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are a few districts that recorded famines despite above-average rainfall, which could possibly be the result of non-climatic factors such as colonial taxation policies, conflicts, or other natural disasters, such as insect plagues. However, the relationship between rainfall patterns and famine occurrence suggests that we can use the former as an instrument for the latter especially since the correlation is not perfect, and famine occurrence is plausibly non-random due to the impact of British land ownership policies. Figure 1: Rainfall over time for Buldana from 1870 to 1920 Notes : The dashed line shows mean rainfall for all food crops; the solid line shows the total rainfall over the wheat and rice growing seasons. The blue and purple lines represent the historical means for these measures of rainfall. The rad shading denotes years in which famines are recorded as having affected the district. We construct count instruments for famines by first computing the historic mean and annual deviation for rainfall in each district. We can then count famines as years in which the deviation was in the bottom fifteenth percentile in order to capture relatively severe and negative rainfall shocks as plausible famine causes. For severe famines, we use the bottom decile instead. The percentiles were chosen based on famine severity so that the counts obtained using this definition were as similar as possible to the actual counts constructed from recorded famines (see above) in the panel dataset. For modern-day outcomes, we turn to survey data from the Indian census as well as the Indian Human Development Survey II, which details personal variables (ex. consumption and education), infrastructure measures (such as access to roads), and access to public goods (ex. hospital availability) at a very high level of geographical detail. An important metric constructed from the household development surveys is that of intergenerational mobility as measured by the expected income percentile of children whose parents belonged to a given income percentile, which we obtain from Novosad et al. (2019). Additionally, as survey data can often be unreliable, we supplement these with an analysis of satellite luminosity data, which provides measures of the (nighttime) luminosity of geographic cells, which should serve as a more reliable proxy for economic development, following Henderson et al. (2011) and Pinkovsky and Sala-i-Martin (2016). These data are mostly obtained from Novosad et. al (2018, 2019) and Iyer (2010), which we have aggregated to the district level. The outcomes variables are as follows: 1. Log absolute magnitude per capita. We intend this to serve as a proxy for a district’s economic development in lieu of reliable GDP data. This is the logarithm of the total luminosity observed in the district divided by the district’s population. These are taken from Vernon and Storeygard (2011) by way of Novosad et al. (2018). 2. Log rural consumption per capita. This is taken from the Indian Household Survey II by way of Novosad et al. (2019). 3. Share of the workforce employed in the cultivation sector, intended as a mea- sure of rural development and reliance on agriculture (especially subsistence agri- culture). This is taken from Iyer et al. (2010). 4. Gini Index, from Iyer (2010), as a measure of inequality. 5. Intergenerational income mobility (father-son pairs), taken from Novosad et al. (2018). Specifically, we consider the expected income percentile of sons in 2012 whose fathers were located in the 25th percentile for household income (2004), using the upper bound for robustness (9). 6. The percentage of the population with a college degree, taken from census data. 7. Electrification, i.e. the percent of villages with all homes connected to the power grid (even if power is not available twenty-four hours per day). 8. Percent of villages with access to a medical center, taken from Iyer (2010), as a measure of rural development in the aspect of public goods. 9. Percent of villages with any bus service, further intended as a measurement of public goods provision and infrastructure development. Broadly speaking, these can be classified into three categories with 1-3 representing broad measures of economic development, 4-6 representing inequality and human capital, and 7-9 representing the development of infrastructure and the provision of public goods. As discussed in section two, our preliminary hypothesis is that the occurrence of famines has a negative effect on district development, which is consistent with most of the literature on disasters. Hence, given a higher occurrence of famine, we expect that districts suffering from more famines during the colonial period will be characterized by lower levels of development, being (1) less luminous at night, (2) poorer in terms of a lower rural consumption, and (3) more agricultural, i.e have a higher share of the labor force working in agriculture. Similarly, with regards to inequality and human capital, we expect that more famine-afflicted districts will have (4) higher inequality in terms of a higher Gini index, (5) lower upward social mobility in terms of a lower expected income percentile for sons whose fathers were at the 25th income percentile, and (6) a lower percentage of adults with a college education. Finally, by the same logic, these districts should be relatively underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure, and thus (7) lack access to power, (8) lack access to medical care, and (9) lack access to transportation services. Finally, even though our independent variable when instrumented should be exogenous, we attempt to control for geographic and climatic factors affecting agriculture and rainfall in each district, namely: - Soil type and quality (sandy, rocky or barren, etc.) - Latitude (degree) and mean temperature (degrees Celsius) - Coastal location (coded as a dummy variable) - Area in square kilometers (it should be noted that district boundaries correspond well, but not perfectly, to their colonial-era counterparts) As mentioned previously, research by Iyer and Banerjee (2008, 2014) suggests that the type of land-tenure system implemented during British rule has had a huge impact on development in the districts (10). We also argue that it may be re- lated to famine occurrence directly (for example, in that tenure systems favoring landlords may experience worse famines), in light of the emerging literature on agricultural land rights, development, and food security (Holden and Ghebru 2016, Maxwell and Wiebe 1998). Specifically, we consider specifications with and without the proportion of villages in the district favoring a landlord or non-land- lord tenure system, obtained from Iyer (2010). In fact, the correlation between the two variables in our dataset is slightly above 0.23, which is not extremely high but enough to be of concern in terms of avoiding omitted variable bias. We ultimately consider four specifications for each dependent variable based on the controls in X from equation (1): no controls, land tenure, geography, and land tenure with geography. Each of these sets of controls addresses a different source of omitted variable bias: the first, land-tenure, addresses the possibility of British land-tenure policies causing both famines and long-term development outcomes. The second, geography, addresses the possibility of factors such as mean elevation and temperature impacting crop growth while also influencing long-term development (for example, if hilly and rocky districts suffer from more famines because they are harder to grow crops in but also suffer from lower development because they are harder to build infrastructure in or access via transportation). We avoid using contemporary controls for the outcome variables (that is, including infrastructure variables, income per capita, or welfare variables in the right- hand side) because many of these could reasonably be the result of the historical effects (the impact of famines) we seek to study. As such, including them as controls would artificially dilate the impact of our independent variable. 2. Summary statistics Table I presents summary statistics of our cross-sectional dataset on the follow- ing page. One cause for potential concern is that out of the over 400 districts in colonial India, we have only managed to capture 179 in our sample. This is due chiefly to a paucity of data regarding rainfall; there are only 191 districts captured in the original rainfall data from Donaldson (2012). In addition, the changing of district names and boundaries over time makes the matching of old colonial districts with modern-day administrative subdivisions more imprecise than we would like. Nevertheless, these districts cover a reasonable portion of modern India as well as most of the regions which underwent famines during imperial rule. The small number of districts may also pose a problem in terms of the standard errors on our coefficients, as the magnitude of the impacts of famines that occurred over a hundred years ago on outcomes today is likely to be quite small. Table 1 – Summary Statistics Source : Author calculations, from Iyer (2010), Iyer and Bannerjee (2014), Novosad et. al (2018), Asher and No- vosad (2019), Donaldson and Burgess (2012). 4. Ordinary Least Squares Although we suspect that estimates of famine occurrence and severity based on recorded historical observations may be nonrandom for several reasons (mentioned in section two and three), we first consider direct estimation of (1) from section two. For convenience, equation (1) is reprinted below: As in the previous section, famine refers to the number of years that are coded 2, 3, or 4 in famine severity as described in Srivastava (1968). X is the set of con- temporary covariates, also described in section three. We estimate four separate specifications of (1) where X varies: 1. No controls, i.e. X is empty. 2. Historical land tenure, to capture any effects related to British land policy in causing both famines and long-term developmental outcomes. 3. Geographical controls relating to climatic and terrestrial factors, such as temperature, latitude, soil quality, etc. 4. Both (2) and (3). Table II presents the estimates for the coefficients on famines and tenure for our nine dependent variables on the following page (we omit coefficients and confidence intervals for the geographic variables for reasons of brevity and relevance in terms of interpretation). In general, the inclusion or exclusion of controls does not greatly change the magnitudes of the estimates nor their significance, except for a few cases. We discuss effects for each dependent variable below: Log of total absolute magnitude in the district per capita : The values for famine suggest that interestingly, each additional famine results in anywhere from 1.8 to 3.6 percent more total nighttime luminosity per person in the district. As mentioned in section three, newer literature shows that nighttime luminosity is a far more reliable gauge of development than reported survey measures such as GDP, so this result is not likely due to measurement error. Thus, as the coefficient on famine is positive, it seems that having suffered more famines is positively related to development. This in fact is confirmed by the instrumental variables (IV) estimates in Table III (see section five). Curiously, the inclusion of tenure and geography controls separately does not change the significance, but including both of them together in the covariates generates far larger confidence intervals than expected and reduces the magnitude of the effect by an entire order of magnitude. This may be because each set of controls tackles a different source of omitted variable bias. As expected, however, land tenure plays a significant role in predicting a district’s development; even a single percent increase in the share of villages with a tenant-favorable system is associated with a whopping 73-80% additional night- time luminosity per person. Log rural consumption per capita : We find evidence that additional famines are associated with lower rural consumption, albeit on a minuscule scale. This suggests that the beneficial effect of famines on development may not be equal across urban and rural areas but instead concentrated in cities. For example, there might be a causal pathway that implies faster urbanization in districts that undergo more famines. Unlike with luminosity, historical land tenure does not seem to play a role in rural consumption. Percent of the workforce employed in cultivation : As expected, additional famines seem to play a strongly significant but small role with regards to the labor patterns in the district. Districts with more famines seem to have nearly one percent of the labor force working in cultivation for each additional famine, suggesting famines may inhibit development of industries other than agriculture and cultivation. Our instrumental variables estimates confirm this. Puzzlingly, land tenure does not seem to be related to this very much at all. Gini Index : The coefficients for the number of famines seem to be difficult to interpret as both those for the specification with no controls and with both sets of controls are statistically significant with similar magnitudes yet opposite signs. The confidence interval for the latter is slightly narrower. This is probably because the true estimate is zero or extremely close to zero, and the inclusion or exclusion of controls is enough to narrowly affect the magnitude to as to flip the sign of the co- efficient. In order to clarify this, more data is needed – i.e for more of the districts in colonial India to be matched in our original sample. At the very least, we can say that land tenure clearly has a large and significant positive association with in- equality. Unfortunately, this association cannot be confirmed as causal due to the lack of an instrument for land tenure which covers enough districts of British India. However, as Iyer and Banerjee (2014) argue, the assignment of tenure systems itself was plausibly random (having been largely implemented on the whims of British administrators) so that one could potentially interpret the results as causal with some level of caution. Intergenerational income mobility : Similarly, we do not find evidence of an association between the number of famines suffered by a district in the colonial era and social mobility in the present day, but we do find a strong impact of land tenure, which makes sense to the reported institutional benefits of tenant-favorable systems in encouraging development as well as the obvious benefits for the tenants and their descendants themselves. Each one-percent increase in the share of villages in a district that uses a tenant-favorable system in the colonial era is associated with anywhere from ten to thirteen percent higher expected income percentile for sons whose fathers were at the 25th percentile in 1989 although the estimates presented in Table II are an upper bound. College education : We find extremely limited evidence that famines in the colonial period are associated with less human capital in the present day, with a near-zero effect of additional famines on the share of adults in a district with a college degree (in fact, rounded to zero with five to six decimal places). Land tenure similarly has very little or no effect. Electrification, access to medical care , bus service : All three of these infra- structure and public goods variables show a negligible effect of famines, but strong impacts of historical land tenure. Ultimately, we find that famines themselves seem to have some positive impact on long-term development despite also being associated with many negative out- comes, such as a greater share of the workforce employed in agriculture (i.e as opposed to more developed activities such as manufacturing or service). Another finding of note is that while famines do not seem to have strong associations with all of our measures, land tenure does. This suggests that the relationship between land-tenure and famine is worth looking into. The existence of bias in the recording of famines, as well as the potential for factors that both cause famines while simultaneously affecting long-term outcomes, present a possible problem with these estimates. We have already attempted to account for one of those, namely historical land tenure systems. Indeed, in most of the specifications, including tenure in the regression induces a decrease in the magnitude of the coefficient on famine. As the effect of famine tends to be extremely small to begin with, the relationship is not always clear. Other errors are also possible. For example, it is possible that a given district experienced a famine in a given year, but insufficient records of its occurrence remained by 1968. Then, Srivastiva (1968) would have assigned that district a code of 0 for that year, but the correct code should have been higher. Indeed, as described in section three, a code of 0 corresponds to a code of “not mentioned”, which encompasses both “not mentioned at all” and “not mentioned as being affected by famine” (Donaldson and Burgess 2010). While measurement error in the dependent variable is usually not a problem, error in the independent variable can lead to attenuation bias in the coefficients since the ordinary least-squares algorithm minimizes the error on the dependent variable by estimating coefficients for the independent variables. The greater this error, the more the ordinary least- squares method will bias the estimated coefficients towards zero in an attempt to minimize error in the dependent variable (Riggs et al. 1978). For these reasons, we turn to instrumental variables estimation in section five in an attempt to provide additional identification. Table 2 – Ordinary Least-Square Estimates Notes : Independent variable is number of with recorded famines (famine code of 2 or above). Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. These are more table notes. The style is Table Notes. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). 5. Weather Shocks as an Instrument for Famine Severity As explained in section two, there are many possible reasons why recorded famine data may not be exogenous. In any case, it would be desirable to have a truly exogenous measure of famine, for which we turn to climate data in the form of rainfall shocks. Rainfall is plausibly connected to the occurrence of famines, especially in light of the colonial government’s laissez-faire approach to famine relief (Bhatia 1968). For example, across all districts, mean rainfall averaged around 1.31m in years without any famine and around 1.04m in districts which were at least somewhat affected by famine (code 1 or above). Figure 2 below shows that there is a very clear association between rainfall activity and famines in colonial India, although variability in climate data as well as famine and agricultural policy means that there are some high-rainfall districts which do experience famines as well as low-rainfall districts which do not experience as many famines, as noted in section three. Figure 2: Associations between famine occurrence and rainfall trends It should be clear from the first three scatterplots above that there is a negative relationship between the amount of rainfall a district receives and the general prevalence of famine but more importantly, the total size of the rainfall shocks and the total occurrences of famine in that district. From the final plot we see that when we classify low-rainfall years by ranking the deviations from the mean, counting the number of years in which these deviations are in the bottom fifteenth percentile corresponds well to the actual number of recorded famines for each district. In order to use this to measure famine exogenously, we first estimate (2) (see below, section two and section three) where we predict the number of famines from the number of negative rainfall shocks as represented by deviation from the mean in the bottom fifteen percent of all deviations before estimating (1) using this predicted estimate of famine in place of the recorded values. Our reduced form11 estimates, where we first run (1) using the number of negative rainfall shocks directly, are presented on the following pages in Table III (11). The reduced form equation is shown as (4) below as well: Table 3 – Reduced form estimates for IV Notes : Independent variable is number of years in which deviation of rainfall from the historic mean is in the bottom fifteenth-percentile. Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. These are more table notes. The style is Table Notes. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). From Table III, it would appear that negative rainfall shocks have similar effects on the outcome variables as do recorded famines in terms of the statistical significance of the coefficients on the independent variable. There is also the added benefit that we can confirm our very small and slightly negative effects of famines on the proportion of adults with a college education: for each additional year of exceptionally low rainfall in a district, the number of adults with a college education in 2011 decreases by 0.1%. In addition, whereas the coefficients in Table II were conflicting, Table III provides evidence in favor of the view that additional famines increase inequality in a district as measured by the Gini index. However, the magnitudes of the effects of famines or low-rainfall years are pre- dominantly larger than their counterparts in Table II to a rather puzzling extent. While we stated earlier in section three that famines and rainfall are not perfectly correlated, it might be that variation in historical rainfall shocks can better explain variation in outcomes in the present day. In order to get a better understanding of the relationship between the two, it would first be wise to look at the coefficients presented in Table IV, which are the results of the two-stage least-squares estimation using low-rainfall years as an instrument for recorded famines. Table IV follows the patterns established in Table II and Table III with regards to the significance of the coefficients as well as their signs; famines have a statistically significant and positive impact on nighttime luminosity, a significant negative impact on rural consumption, and a positive impact on the percent of the labor force employed in agriculture. The results with respect to Table II, concerning the impact of famine on the proportion of adults with a college education, are also very similar. Most other specifications do not show a significant effect of famine on the respective outcome with the exception of access to medical care. Unlike in Table II and Table III, each additional famine is associated with an additional 11.2 to 12.5 percent of villages in that district having some form of medical center or service readily accessible (according to the specifications with geographic controls, which we argue are more believable than the ones without). However, this relationship breaks down at the level of famines seen in some of our districts; a district having suffered nine or ten famines would see more than 100% of its villages having access to medical centers (which is clearly nonsensical), suggesting we may need to look for nonlinearity in the effects of famine in section six. Unfortunately, unlike in Table III, it seems that we cannot conclude much regarding the effect of famines on intergenerational mobility as the coefficients are contradictory and generally not statistically significant. For example, the coefficient on famine in the model without any controls is highly significant and positive, but the coefficient in the model with all controls is not significant and starkly negative. The same is true for the effect of famines on the Gini index. One possibility is that the positive coefficients on famine for both of these dependent variables are driven by outliers as our data was relatively limited due to factors mentioned in section 2. The magnitudes of the coefficients in Table IV are generally smaller than those presented in Table III but still significantly larger than the ones in Table II. For ex- ample, in Table II, the ordinary least-squares model suggests that each additional historical famine is associated with an additional 0.5 to 0.9 percent of the district’s workforce being employed in cultivation in 2011, but in Table IV, these numbers range from 1.5 to 4.3 percent for the same specifications, representing almost a tenfold increase in magnitude in some cases. One reason for this is the possibility attenuation bias in the ordinary least-squares regression; here, there should not be any attenuation bias in our results as the use of instruments which we assume are not correlated with any measurement error in the recording of famines excludes that possibility (Durbin 1954). On the other hand, the Hausman test for endogeneity (the econometric gold standard for testing a model’s internal validity) often fails to reject the null hypothesis that the recorded famine variable taken from Srivastava (1968) and Donaldson and Burgess (2012) is exogenous. To be precise, in one sense the test fails to reject the null hypothesis that the rainfall data add no new “information”, which is not captured in the reported famine data. It is possible that our rainfall instrument, as used in equation (2) is invalid due to endogeneity with the regression model specified in equation (1) despite being excluded from it. The only way to test this possibility is to conduct a Sargan-Han- sen test12 on the model’s overidentifying restrictions; however, we are unable to conduct the test as we have a single instrument. It follows that our model is not actually overidentified (12). Table 4 –Instrumental Variables Estimates Notes : Independent variable is number of years with recorded famines (famine code of 2 or above), instrumented with number of low-rainfall years (rainfall deviation from historic mean in bottom fifteenth percentile). Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. These are more table notes. The style is Table Notes. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). We also need to consider the viability of our instrumental variables estimates. Table V on the following page offers mixed support. While the weak-instrument test always rejects the null-hypothesis of instrument weakness, for models with more controls, namely those with geographic controls, the first-stage F-values – the test statistics of interest– are relatively small. Which is not encouraging as generally a value of ten or more is recommended to be assured of instrument strength (Staiger and Stock 1997) (13). In Table IV, we show confidence intervals obtained by inverting the Anderson-Rubin test, which accounts for instrument strength in determining the statistical significance of the coefficients. These are wider in the models with more controls, although not usually wide enough to move coefficients from statistically significant to statistically insignificant. However, additional complications arise when considering the Hausman tests for endogeneity. The p-values in Table V suggest that around half of the regression specifications in Table IV do not suffer from a lack of exogeneity, meaning that the ordinary least-squares results are just as valid for those specifications. A more serious issue is that the Hausman test rejects the null-hypothesis of exogeneity for four out of nine outcome variables. Combined with the fact that the first-stage F-statistics are concerningly low for the specifications with geographic controls, this means that not only are the ordinary least-squares results likely to be biased, but the instrumental variables estimates are also likely to be imprecise. This is most concerning for the results related to rural consumption and percent of the workforce in agriculture. Conversely, the results for nighttime luminosity are not affected as the Hausman tests do not reject exogeneity for that outcome variable. While we might simply use the ordinary-least squares results to complement those obtained via two-stage least-squares, the latter are lacking in instrument strength. More importantly, the differences in magnitude between the coefficients presented in Table II and in Table IV are too large to allow this use without abandoning consistency in the interpretation of the coefficients. Ultimately, given that the Hausman tests show that instrumentation is at least somewhat necessary, and the actual p-values for the weak-instrument test are still reasonably low (being less than 0.05 even in the worst case), we prefer to uphold the instrumental variables results as imperfect as some of them may be. We argue that it is better to have un- biased estimates from the instrumental variables procedure (IV), even if they may be less unreliable, than to risk biased results due to endogeneity problems present in ordinary least squares (OLS). Table 5 – Instrumental Variables Diagnostics Notes : The weak-instrument test p-value is obtained from comparison of the first-stage F-statistic with the chi- square distribution with degrees of freedom corresponding to the model (number of data points minus number of estimands). Independent variable is number of years in which deviation of rainfall from the historic mean is in the bottom fifteenth-percentile. Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. 6. Discussion Our data suggest that there are long-run impacts of historical famines. Tables II, IV, and VII clearly show that the number of historical famines has a[72] [73] [MOU74] statistically significant, though small impact on the following: average level of economic development as approximated by nighttime luminosity, the share of the population employed in cultivation, consumption, inequality, and the provision of medical services in contemporary Indian districts. There appear to be no discernible effects on intergenerational income mobility or basic infrastructure such as electrification. The effects are quite small and are generally overshadowed by other geographical factors such as climate (i.e., latitude and temperature). They are also small in comparison to the impact of other colonial-era policies such as land-tenure systems. Nevertheless, they are still interesting to observe given that the famines in question occurred nearly a hundred years prior to the measurement of the outcomes in question. We contend that they reveal lasting and significant consequences of British food policy in colonial India. Table IV suggests that a hypothetical district having suffered ten famines - which is not atypical in our data - may have developed as much as ninety-four percent more log absolute magnitude per capita, around forty percent less consumption per capita in rural areas , 150% percent more of the workforce employed in cultivation, and a Gini index nearly ten percent greater than a district which suffered no famines. As to the question of whether or not the famines were directly caused by British policy, the results suggest that, at the very least, British nineteenth-century laissez-faire attitudes to disaster management have had long-lasting consequences for India. Moreover, these estimates are causal as the use of rainfall shocks as instruments provides a means of estimation which is “as good as random.” Therefore, we can confidently state that these effects are truly the result of having undergone the observed famines. In considering whether to prefer our instrumental estimates or our least-squares estimates, we must mainly weigh the problems of a potentially weak instrument versus the benefits of a causal interpretation. We argue that we should still trust the IV estimates even though the instrument is not always as strong as we would like. First of all, the instrumentation of the recorded famine data with the demeaned rainfall data provides plausible causal estimation due to the fact that the rainfall measures are truly as good as random. Even if the recorded famine measure is itself reasonably exogenous as suggested by the Hausman tests, we argue that it is better to be sure. Using instruments for a variable which is already exogenous will not introduce additional bias into the results and may even help reduce attenuation bias from any possible measurement error. The Hausman test, after all, can- not completely eliminate this possibility; it can only suggest how likely or unlikely it is. In this sense, the instrumental estimates allow us to be far more confident in our assessment of the presence or absence of the long-run impact of famines. Though the first-stage F-statistics are less than ten, they are still large enough to reject the null hypothesis of instrument weakness as shown by the p-values for this test in Table V. We argue that it is better to be consistent than pick and choose which set of estimates we want to accept for a given dependent variable and model. We made this choice because the differences in magnitude between the IV and OLS coefficients are too large to do otherwise. A more interesting question raised by the reported coefficients in Table II, Table IV, and Table VII has to do with their sign. Why do districts more afflicted historically by famines seem to have more economic development yet worse out- comes in terms of rural consumption and inequality by our models? This could be due to redistributive preferences associated or possibly even caused by famines; Gualtieri et al. pose this hypothesis in their paper on earthquakes in Italy. We note that districts suffering more famines in the colonial era are more “rural” to- day in that they tend to have a greater proportion of their labor force working in cultivation. This cannot be a case of mere association where more rural districts are more susceptible to famine as our instrumental estimates in Table IV suggest otherwise. Rather, we explore the possibility that post-independence land reform in India was greater in relatively more agricultural districts. Much of the literature on land-tenure suggests that redistributing land from large landowners to smaller farmers is associated with positive effects for productivity and therefore, economic development (Iyer and Banerjee 2005, Varghese 2019). If the historical famines are causally associated with districts having less equal land tenure at independence, then this would explain their positive, though small, impact on economic development by way of inducing more land reform in those districts. On the other hand, if they are causally associated with districts remaining more agricultural in character at independence, and a district’s “agriculturalness” is only indirectly associated with land reform (in they only benefit because they have more agricultural land, so they benefit more from the reform), this would indicate that famines have a small and positive impact on economic development through a process that is less directly causal. Although we are unable to observe land-tenure and agricultural occupations immediately at independence, we are able to supplement our data with addition- al state-level observations of land-reform efforts in Indian states from 1957-1992 compiled in Besley and Burgess (2010) and aggregate the district-level observations of famines in our dataset by state (14). If our hypothesis above is correct, then we should see a positive association between the number of historical famines in a state’s districts and the amount of land-reform legislation passed by that state after independence, keeping in mind that provincial and state borders were almost completely reorganized after independence. Although this data is quite coarse, being on the state level, it is widely available. However, the plot below suggests completely the opposite relationship as each additional famine across the state’s districts appears to be associated with nearly 0.73 fewer land-reform acts. Even after removing the outlier of West Bengal, which underwent far more numerous land reforms due to the ascendancy of the Communist Party of India in that state, the relationship is still quite apparent; every two additional famines are associated with almost one fewer piece of land-reform legislation post-independence. Figure 3: Historical Famine Occurrence vs Post-independence land reforms Figure 3 with West Bengal removed Therefore, there seems to be little evidence that famines are associated with land-reforms at all. This is quite puzzling because it is difficult to see how famine occurrence could lead to positive economic development while hurting outcomes such as inequality, consumption, and public goods provision. One potential explanation is that famines lead to higher urban development while hurting rural development, which would suggest a key impact of famine occurrence is the worsening of an urban-rural divide in economic development. This would explain how high er famine occurrence is linked with higher night-time luminosity, which would itself be positively associated with urbanization but is also linked with lower rural consumption, higher inequality (which may be the result of a stronger rural-urban divide), and a higher proportion of the workforce employed in the agricultural sector. For example, it is highly plausible that famines depopulate rural areas, leaving survivors to concentrate in urban centers, where famine relief is more likely to be available. Donaldson and Burgess (2012), who find that historical famine relief tended to be more effective in areas better served by rail networks, support this explanation. At the same time, the population collapse in rural areas would leave most of the workforce employed in subsistence agriculture going forward. Thus, if famines do lead to more people living in urban areas while simultaneously increasing the proportion of the remaining population employed in agriculture, then they would also exacerbate inequality and worsen rural, economic out- comes. If the urbanization effect is of greater magnitude, this would also explain the slight increase in night-time luminosity and electrification. This is somewhat supported by the plots in Figure 4, in which urbanization is defined as the proportion of a district’s population that lives in urban areas as labeled by the census. It appears that urbanization is weakly associated with famine occurrence (especially when using rainfall shocks) and positively associated with nighttime luminosity and inequality while negatively associated with rural consumption and agricultural employment as hypothesized above. However, instrumental estimates of urbanization as a result of famine detailed in Table VI only weakly support the idea that famine occurrence causally impacts urbanization as only the estimation without any controls is statistically significant. Figure 4: Urbanization Rates vs. Famine occurrence and Development outcomes Notes : The first two plots (in the top row) depict urbanization against famine occurrence and negative rainfall shocks. The rest of the plots depict various outcomes (discussed above) against the urbanization rate. Table VI –Urbanization Vs. Famine Occurrence Notes : Independent variable is percent of a district’s population that is urban as defined in the 2011 Indian census. Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). Nevertheless, this represents a far more likely explanation for our results than land reform, especially since the land reform mechanism implies that famine occurrence would be associated with better rural outcomes. In other words, if famines being associated with land-reform at independence was the real explanation behind our results, because the literature on land-reform suggests that it is linked with improved rural development, we would not expect to see such strongly negative rural impacts of famine in our results. Therefore, not only is the explanation of differential urban versus rural development as a result of famine occurrence better supported by our data, it also constitutes a more plausible explanation for our findings. While we do not have enough data to investigate exactly how famine occurrence seems to worsen urban-rural divides in economic development (for example, rural population collapse as hypothesized above), such a question would certainly be a key area of future study. Conclusion In this paper, we have shown that famines occurring in British India have a statistically significant long-run impact on present-day outcomes by using both ordinary least-squares as well as instrumenting for famine with climate shocks in the form of deviated rainfall. In particular, the occurrence of famine seems to ex- acerbate a rural-urban divide in economic development. Famines appear to cause a small increase in overall economic development, but lower consumption and welfare in rural areas while also worsening wealth inequality. This is supported by the finding that famines appear to lead to slightly higher rates of urbanization while simultaneously leading to a higher proportion of a district’s labor force remaining employed in the agricultural sector. Even though our ordinary-least squares measures are generally acceptable, we point to the similar instrumental variable estimates as stronger evidence of the causal impact of the famines. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that negative cli- mate shocks combined with certain disaster management policies, such as British colonial laissez-faire approaches to famine in India, may have significant, though counter-intuitive, impacts on economic outcomes in the long-run. Endnotes 1 One can essentially understand this technique as manipulating the independent variable, which may not be randomly assigned, via a randomly assigned instrument. 2 The Gini index measures the distribution of wealth or income across individuals, with a score of zero corresponding to perfectly equal distribution and a score of one corresponding to a situation where one individual holds all of the wealth or earns all of the income in the group. 3 The Durbin-Wu-Hausman test essentially asks whether adding the instrument changes bias in the model . A rejection of the null hypothesis implies that differences in coefficients between OLS and IV are due to adding the instrument, whereas the null hypothesis assumes that the independent variable(s) are already exogenous and so adding an instrument contributes no new information to the model. 4 Attenuation bias occurs when there is measurement error in the independent variable, which biases estimates downward due to the definition of the least-squares estimator as one which minimizes squared error on the axis of the dependent variable. See Durbin (1954) for a detailed discussion. 5 Classical growth theory, such as in the Solow-Swan (1957) and Romer (1994) implies long-run convergence and therefore that districts would have similar outcomes today regardless of the number of famines they underwent. However, this is at odds with most of the empirical literature as discussed previously, in which there are often measurable long-term effects to natural disasters. 6 A Poisson process models count data via a random variable following a Poisson distribution. 7 Although we use the term damage, the impact to the economy need not be negative – indeed, we find that some impacts of famine occurrence are positive in sections four and five, which we attempt to explain in section seven. 8 Normally, OLS assumes that the variance of the error term is not correlated with the independent variable(s) i.e the errors are homoscedastic. If this is not true, i.e the errors are heteroscedastic, then the standard errors will be too small. Robust least-squares estimation calculates the OLS standard errors in a way that does not depend on the assumption that the errors are homoscedastic. 9 So, for example, if this value is 25, then there is on average no mobility on average, as sons would be expected to remain in the same income percentile as their fathers. Similarly, if it is less than (greater than) 25, then there would be downward (upward) mobility. A value of 50 would indicate perfect mobility, i.e no relationship between fathers’ income percentiles and those of their sons. 10 For a brief overview of the types of systems employed by the East India Company and Crown administrators, see Iyer and Banerjee (2008), or see Tirthankar (2006) for a more detailed discussion. 11 While reduced form estimates–that is, estimating the outcomes as direct functions of the exogenous variables rather than via a structural process–are often not directly interpretable, they can serve to confirm the underlying trends in the data (for example, via the sign of the coefficients), which is why we choose to include them here. 12 The Sargan-Hansen test works very similarly to the Durbin-Wu-Hausman test, but instead uses a quadratic form on the cross-product of the residuals and instruments. 13 To be precise, this heuristic is technically only valid with the use of a single instrument, which is of course satisfied in our case anyway. 14 To be clear, the value of famine for each state is technically the average number of famines in the historical districts that are presently part of the state, since subnational boundaries were drastically reorganized along linguistic lines after independence. 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The European Union Trust Fund for Africa: Understanding the EU’s Securitization of Development Aid and its Implications Migena Satyal Author Jason Fu Sophie Rukin Editors Abstract Migration policies in the European Union (EU) have long been securitized; however, the 2015 migration crisis represented a turning point for EU securitization of development aid to shape migration outcomes from various African countries. In 2015, the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Stability and Addressing Root Causes of Irregular Migration and Displaced Persons in Africa (EUTF) was created at the Valletta Summit on Migration to address the drivers of irregular migration such as poverty, poor social and economic conditions, weak governance and conflict prevention, and inadequate resiliency to food and environmental pressures. The duration of this fund was from 2016-2021. Central to the strategy of the EUTF was addressing “root causes” however, the fund came with security dimensions. Under its objective of improved migration management, the EU directed capital to various security apparatuses in Africa to limit the movement of irregular migrants and prevent them from reaching Europe. This method diverted aid from addressing the existing problems faced by vulnerable populations in the region and contributed to practices and organizations that are responsible for implementing coercive measures to limit movement of migrants and committing human rights abuses. This paper examines the political and ideological motives and objectives behind the EU's securitization of development financing via the EUTF, how it has strategically used the “root causes'' narrative to secure these arrangements, and the ways in which this pattern of interaction is inherently neo-colonial. Introduction: The European Union Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) The European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Stability and Addressing Root Causes of Irregular Migration and Displaced Persons in Africa (EUTF for Africa) was passed in November 2015 at the Valletta Summit on Migration where European and African heads of state met to address the challenges and opportunities presented through the 2015 migration crisis. African and European heads of state recognized that migration was a shared responsibility between the countries of origin, transit, and destination. They were joined by the African Union Commission, the Economic Community of West African States, states parties to the Khartoum and Rabat Process, the Secretary General of the United Nations, and representatives of the International Organization for Migration. The Valletta Summit identified the root causes of irregular migration and forced displacement which became the guiding narrative to create and implement the EUTF. The Action Plan of the Summit stated, “the Trust Fund will help address the root causes of destabilization, forced displacement, and irregular migration by promoting economic and equal opportunities, strengthening the resilience of vulnerable people, security, and development.” Therefore, addressing these issues via development aid would limit irregular migration. The European Commission claimed that “demographic pressure, environmental stress, extreme poverty, internal tensions, institutional weaknesses, weak social and economic infrastructures, and insufficient resilience to food crises, as well as internal armed conflicts, terrorist threats, and a deteriorated security environment” needed to be addressed within the EUTF framework. However, the root cause narrative itself was partially based on assumption rather than empirical evidence. Economic data analyzing the correlation between economic development aid and migration show that the two variables have an inverse relationship. Economic and human development increase peoples’ ambitions, competencies, and resources, encouraging them to emigrate. Migration has a downward trend only when a country reaches an upper-middle income level. This concept is also known as a migration hump. Although EU officials were aware of this phenomenon, they ignored the underlying issues of the root causes narrative and proceeded to create the fund. Between 2016 and 2022 the EUTF dispersed approximately EUR 5.0 billion across 26 African countries in the Sahel and Lake Chad, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. This funding was on top of pre-existing EUR 20 billion annual aid from the EU to these geographical regions. Despite packaging the EUTF as development aid and extracting the money almost exclusively from the European Development Fund (EDF), which specifically targets economic, social, and cultural development programs, the EUTF fell within the 2015 European Agenda on Migration, introducing a security dimension to development financing. The EU and African partner countries used a significant amount of aid from the EUTF to bolster migration management initiatives via the funding and strengthening of security apparatuses that are responsible for targeting migrants within Africa, before they could embark on their journeys to European states. Under the EUTF, improved migration management constitutes “contributing to the development of national and regional strategies on migration management, containing and preventing irregular migration, and fight against trafficking of human beings, smuggling of migrants and other related crimes, effective return and readmission, international protection and asylum, legal migration, and mobility.” It includes increasing logistical capabilities by providing capital to train border agents, and bolstering surveillance infrastructure to monitor citizens’ movement, and expanding logistical capacities. In some cases, it also relies on encouraging certain policies in recipient countries to align with the priorities of the donor countries. As shown in EUTF annual reports (Figures 1.1-1.6), there was an increasing diversion of capital towards funding migration management projects in Africa, which came at the expense of economic development projects. By using aid to fund security goals, the EU securitized and politicized development financing. Securitization in migration policy refers to the externalization and extra-territorialization of migration control through border controls and reclassification of various activities like drug trafficking, illegal immigration, and delinquency of migrants as national security concerns. Still, some EUTF funding went towards projects geared at economic development. As stated in the Action Plan and shown in subsequent annual reports, the EUTF implemented programs that promoted job creation, education, entrepreneurship, and building resiliency. However, they also used the money from the development package to strengthen migration management initiatives and shift responsibilities to third countries in Africa, ultimately creating “legal black holes” where European norms about human rights did not apply. Despite the clear evidence of the EU’s contribution to abuses towards African irregular migrants, the EU continues to implement repressive policies through various externalization mechanisms and faulty narratives that have been empirically proven to not work – such as the root causes narrative – in order to further its own interests in the African continent. Research Question The practice of funneling capital toward security-related migration management projects raises the following question: Why has the EU opted to securitize its development aid through EUTF in the aftermath of the 2015 migration crisis? Furthermore, what are the implications of aid securitization in terms of development aid effectiveness, human rights practices, and the EU’s external legitimacy as a normative actor? To answer these overarching questions and understand the promotion and proliferation of migration policies through pacts like the EUTF requires an inward look into the European Union and its political and ideological interests in the migration policy domain. Therefore, I propose that the EUTF was a neo-colonial mechanism through which European member states could further their migration policy priorities into certain African states thereby reinforcing their colonial legacy hierarchies. Methodology First, I will provide background information about the EUTF, highlighting its objectives and strategies for development aid implementation and effectiveness. Then, I will provide quantitative data regarding the dispersion of money from the EUTF to show the increasing investments toward migration management schemes. Understanding these specificities and inherent challenges of the EUTF will contextualize my hypotheses. Next, I will support my hypothesis through case studies of specific EUTF security operations in African countries, analysis of the EU’s previous migration policies, interviews with African and European Union stakeholders about EUTF’s development and impact, and various theories to help explain how the EU navigates its migration policies. Finally, I will assess the implications of aid securitization in both Europe and Africa. My research will rely on official documents from the EU about its migration agenda and policies. It will also use data from academic journals and previous literature that have examined the trajectory of the EU’s migration-development nexus, specifically through the EUTF. Assessing the current nature of the EU’s migration policies will be useful in helping guide future policies. As migration becomes an increasingly salient issue, it is crucial to determine strategies or “best practices” that are humane and sustainable to address it. Adhering to human rights norms should be at the center of these policies. Background The Action Plan of the Valletta Summit was based on five priority domains: Reducing poverty, advancing socio-economic development, promoting peace and good governance. Facilitating educational and skills training exchanges between EU and EU member states as well as the creation of legal pathways of employment for migrants and returnees. Providing humanitarian assistance to countries needing food assistance, shelter, water, and sanitation. Fighting against irregular migration, migrant smuggling, and trafficking. Facilitating the return, readmission, and reintegration of migrants. During Valletta, Martin Schulz, the former President of the European Parliament stated, “By boosting local economies through trade, for example through economic partnership agreements and through ‘aid for trade’ programs, by investing in development and by enhancing good governance people will be enabled to stay where they want to be ‘at home.’” He reiterates that the purpose of the EUTF is not “fight the migrants” but rather, “fight the root causes of migration: poverty and conflict.” This seemingly proactive approach underscores the belief that addressing the primary drivers of migration by promoting development measures will empower people to remain in their respective countries by choice rather than feeling compelled to migrate elsewhere. “Root Causes”: Overlooking Evidence The problem with the EU’s understanding and use of the “root causes” narrative is that it ignores how wage differentials contribute to migratory patterns. Wage differentials refers to the discrepancy in wages for similar jobs due to factors like industry or geography. While development aid can be effective, it is not enough to redistribute wealth and address the deep structural inequalities of the global economy that drive migration to more developed and wealthier countries. Subsequent sections will elaborate further on the adoption of the root causes framing. EUTF Annual Aid Reports (2016-2022) As stated in the Valletta Summit political declaration, the EU was committed to “address the root causes of irregular migration” through the EUTF. However, aid allocation data (Figures 1-1.6) from EUTF annual reports, which highlight the distribution of aid in amount and percentage terms by geographical window and five of the EUTF’s objectives, show an increased prioritization of implementing migration management schemes at the expense of development projects between 2016 and 2022. In 2016 (Figure 1), when EUTF was in the implementation phase, EU officials distributed significantly more funds for economic development projects across North Africa, the Sahel, and Horn of Africa than any other domains which aligned with the root causes narrative that was emphasized at Valletta. In 2017 (Figure 1.1), the allocation for improved migration management significantly increased across the three regions. In North Africa, funding for economic development, strengthening resilience, and conflict prevention was eliminated while EUR 285 million was given to migration management. This pattern is strategic due to the geographic proximity of the region to southern European borders. In 2018 (Figure 1.2), North Africa remained the biggest recipient of migration management funds but did not receive funding for development projects. In 2019 (Figure 1.3), 31.56 percent of total funding was invested in migration management. In 2020 (Figure 1.4), 2021 (Figure 1.5), and 2022 (Figure 1.6), improved migration management projects continued to receive most funding at the expense of other objectives. The funding patterns outlined in these reports show the EU’s increased focus towards its migration objectives. Figure 1: EUTF Projects Approved in 2016 Figure 1.1: EUTF Projects Approved in 2017 Figure 1.2: Projects Approved in 2018 Figure 1.3: Projects Approved in 2019 Figure 1.4: Projects approved in 2020 Figure 1.5: Projects approved in 2021 Figure 1.6: Projects approved in 2022 Taking the background information and data into account, I will prove my hypothesis, explaining why the EU increasingly invested in migration management projects in the following sections. Defining Neo-Colonialism The concept of ‘neo-colonialism; was coined by Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, in which he argues that neo-colonialism is a contemporary form of colonialism that is perpetuated through less traditionally coerciece methods, such as development aid. This theory can be applied when assassing relations and interdependency between former colonial states with formerly colonized states. Interdependence is manufactured by former colonial powers that “[give] independence” to their subjects, only for them to follow up by allocating aid.” They speak about guaranteeing independence and liberation but never implement policies to preserve them in an effort to maintain their influence and objectives via unobstrusive and monetary means rather than directly coercive ones. As a result, these countries’ economic system, and thus their political policy, is “directed from outside” through foreign capital.” EUTF as a Neo-Colonial Instrument In the 19th and 20th centuries, European powers reshaped all aspects of African society, through colonialism, for their own strategic imperatives. These included, but were not limited to, extraction of material resources, manufactured dependency, and assertion of European institutions and policies at the expense of indigenous cultures and institutions. The complete overhaul of pre-colonial Africa interrupted economic and political development in the region and led to its continued structural subordination despite achieving independence from European colonial states in the 21st century. As a result, the repercussions of colonialism have contemporary implications in EU-Africa relations. During the colonial era, colonial powers used military power and additional forms of coercive strategies to assert foreign influence; currently, former colonial powers capitalize on the weaknesses of African countries and use political and economic measures to gain influence. Colonialism never disappeared, but rather, evolved into neo-colonialism. This concept is demonstrated in the framework of the EUTF which, despite being a development aid package and product of a seemingly coordinated multilateral process, imposed conditionalities and security measures on African states to achieve political goals in the field of migration. Under the EUTF, patterns of cooperation between European countries and their former colonies to limit migration are also prevalent, especially in the case of Libya and Niger. These initiatives safeguard colonial-era power structures and undermine the sovereignty of the respective African states. The EU took advantage of its status as a donor institution through three mechanisms that enforced hierarchies between African and European powers: The governance structure,designed to dismiss African stakeholder engagement EU’s imposition of positive and negative conditionalities to certain African states The strategic partnerships between European and African states to implement migration management programs These steps demonstrate the EU’s broader goals to assert their influence in the region’s migration policies by implementing security schemes, jeopardizing the needs of African states and the preservation of human rights in the process. The use of EUTF to conduct such projects signals the “de facto policy purchase” on the African government’s stance on migration. Consequently, African states become an “instrument” for European neo-colonial policies, especially in the migration domain. Eurafrica to Modern EU-Africa Relations The legacy and discourse of colonialism and neo-colonialism are not equal among EU member states. Many European countries were colonial powers, with the exception of Ireland and Malta, along with several central European countries that were subjugated to the authority of larger imperial powers. However, specific past actions hold little significance when discussing the broader nexus between European integration, the European Union, and colonialism. In Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism , Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson argue that there was a vast overlap between the colonial and European projects. Several African countries, under colonialism, have historically played a key role in efforts towards European integration and unity from the 1920s to the 1950s under the geo-political concept of Eurafrica. According to this idea, European integration would only occur through “coordinated exploitation of Africa and Africa could be efficiently exploited only if European states cooperated and combined their economic and political capacities.” The pan-European movement in the interwar period was based on conditions for peace through a “united colonial effort” in Africa. Eurafrica turned into a political reality with the emergence of the European Economic Community (EEC) made up of Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany, along with colonial possessions that were referred to as “overseas countries and territories” (OCTs). For the EEC, Africa served as a “necessity,” “a strategic interest,” “an economic imperative,” “a peace project,” “a white man’s burden,” and “Europe’s last chance.” Put differently, “Africa was indispensable for Europe’s geopolitical and economic survival.” Africa became the guiding force of European integration and Eurafrica became a system through which colonial powers could preserve their empires. Eurafrica, in its original form, did not materialize because African countries took back control from European colonial powers, but its legacy is crucial to the development of the EEC and modern EU-Africa relations. Today, the EU describes its relationship with Africa in terms like “interdependence,” and “partnership of equals.” Nonetheless, the EU’s colonial past still plays a significant role in its foreign policy with Africa as it promotes the adoption of European rules and practices in its “normative empires.” The continuation of these empires has cemented core-periphery dynamics of interaction, which ultimately advances European interests, especially in the migration domain. Specifically, the EU’s externalization of border and migration management efforts to transfer the European model of governance to third countries have transformed them into “southern buffer zones” to curtail unwanted migration and enhance Europe’s sense of security. Such measures demonstrate the separation of physical borders from functional regimes in Europe’s fluid borderlands, which are antecedent to imperial practices when control was extended beyond territorial boundaries. These practices are evident in the EU’s security operations through pacts like the EUTF, EU-Turkey Deal, and Operation SOPHIA. These externalization policies ensure the continuity of the vision derived from the Eurafrica project in the 21st century. Conditional aid The EUTF was conditional as it leveraged development aid to finance security-related migration projects and imposed positive and negative conditionalities that were used as leverage for African cooperation. When the European Commission announced its Migration Partnership Framework in 2016, it stated that development and trade policies will use positive and negative conditionalities to encourage cooperation on EU’s migration management projects. The “more for more, less for less” framework embedded into development financing means that “African governments use migration cooperation as a bargaining chip for procuring finance through renting inherent powers of state sovereignty to control entry and exit.” This coercive and concessional method contradicts the nature of cooperation that was emphasized at the Valletta Summit in 2015 and undermines the autonomy of the African states as these conditionalities perpetuate neo-colonial practices. EUTF Governance Structure and Oversight The EUTF was a product of a multilateral decision-making process. However, its governance structure, which limits proper stakeholder engagement from African representatives, signals the EU’s push to prioritize its policies over development in Africa. The European Commission claims that it is taking a bottom-up approach where the EU delegations play a key role in identifying and formulating the EUTF through consultations and dialogues to build partnerships with local stakeholders (civil society organizations, national and local authorities, and representatives). Subsequently, proposals are created by the EUTF for African teams based on EU Commission Headquarters and EU delegations. Then, the proposal is submitted to the Operational Committee for approval. Once approved, the proposals are implemented via EU member states’ authorities, developmental and technical cooperation agencies, civil society organizations, international or UN organizations, and private sector entities. The governance of the EUTF is dependent upon the Strategic Board and Operational Committees for each of the three regions where the EUTF distributed funds. The Strategic Board is responsible for “adopting the strategy of the EUTF, adjusting the geographical and thematic scope of the EUTF in reaction to evolving issues, and deciding upon amendments to the guiding document establishing the internal rules for the EUTF.” The board is chaired by the European Commission and composed of representatives and contributing donors. The Operational Committee is responsible for “reviewing and approving actions to be financed, supervising the implementation of the actions, and approving the annual report and accounts for transmission to the Strategic Board.” In the Board and the Committee, the African partner countries can only act as observers and do not hold decision-making powers. This management framework is ineffective as it is designed to limit the participation of African parties that have more comprehensive knowledge regarding the needs of the continent and areas where funds need to be directed. However, they are structurally silenced. The classification of the EUTF as development aid from the EU to Africa also provided a loophole under which parliamentary oversight was not required. The European Development Fund, which operates outside the EU budget, funded most of the aid, bypassing conventional parliamentary procedures, allowing for swift implementation of the fund. As a spokesperson for the European Commission’s DG DEVCO claimed that simplifying the procedures allows for more flexibility so projects can be implemented earlier. Proponents of the fund believe that the easy implementation process is what makes it advantageous. However, opponents of the fund like Elly Schelien, a member of the European Parliament’s Development Committee, claimed that the EU Parliament has not been given “the right democratic scrutiny” of the fund. The framing of the fund as an “emergency instrument” led to retracted bureaucratic measures to increase effectiveness as project cycles were much shorter than traditional development programming. The consolidation of power to the EU institutions and representatives meant that EUTF projects were “identified at the country level under the leadership of the EU Delegations, discussed and selected by an Operational Committee.” Engagement from African stakeholders and civil society was not required. An interview with a representative from the Operational Committee revealed that EUTF “projects were simply approved without discussion. Negotiations took place upstream between EUTF managers, European agencies, EU delegations, and partner countries.” This form of decision-making amplifies hierarchical structures between European and African representatives. Strategic Partnerships Certain EU member states partnered with African states to implement migration management programs in which they exercised authority over the movement of migrants within Africa, especially in the origin and transit countries. Not only do these policies directly conflict with the EU’s stated commitments regarding development aid and cooperation with partner countries, but the EU’s agenda is antecedent to European empires leveraging local African officials to undertake security operations in the continent. Today, this exploitative relationship is parallel to the EU’s allocation of capital, military equipment, and capacity-building instruments to African representatives who adhere to the needs of EU leaders. This pattern is visible in various projects and funding executed under the EUTF. Though reluctant to enter into such agreements with Europe, African policymakers are forced into a “perpetual balancing act, juggling domestically-derived interests with the demands of external donor and opportunity structures.” This concession stems from inherent power asymmetry between relatively weak and powerful states, upholding colonial legacy hierarchies. Case Studies on Libya and Ethiopia In the following section, I use Libya and Ethiopia as case studies to provide evidence that EUTF’s prioritization of funding migration management projects, increasing policing and surveillance in these countries, and imposing positive and negative conditionalities are reflective of neo-colonial practices to assert dominance over the movement of African irregular migrants. I chose these countries to study because each one falls within one of the two geographical windows and serves either as a popular departure or transit country where the European Union is heavily involved in migration management projects. Libya Libya is a major departure country for migrants from West African countries of origin such as Nigeria, Guinea, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Mali, and Senegal. Italy demonstrated strategic interest in Libya due to its geographical proximity and colonial legacy. Between 2017 and 2022, the Italian Ministry of Interior (MI) led implementations of various migration management projects that sought to curb the arrival of migrants into Italy. In 2017, MI led the first phase of its project called “Support to Integrated Border and Migration Management in Libya” with a budget of EUR 42.2 million and a EUR 2.23 million co-financing from Italy. The principal objective of this phase was migration management. Focus areas included strengthening border control, increasing surveillance activities, combatting human smuggling and trafficking, and conducting search and rescue operations. The second phase of this project was launched by MI in 2018 until 2024 for EUR 15 million. This phase was focused on capacity-building activities and institutional strengthening of authorities such as the Libyan Coast Guard and the General Administration of Coastal Security. It also advanced the land border capabilities of relevant authorities and enhanced search and rescue (SAR) capabilities by supplying SAR vessels and corresponding maintenance programs. The beneficiaries of this project included 5,000 relevant authorities from the Libyan Ministry of Interior (MoI), Ministry of Defense (MoD), and Ministry of Communications. The indirect beneficiaries include “future migrants rescued at the sea due to the procession of life-saving equipment to Libyan Coast Guard and General Administration for Coastal Security for them to be able to save lives.” Italy’s actions under the EUTF compromise the proper use of development financing tools by diverting them for the use of security-related projects. Its engagement and strengthening of Libyan security apparatuses such as the Libyan Coast Guard also undermine the values of human rights that EU member states claim to promote in their foreign policies as the Libyan Coast Guard is notorious for violating non-refoulment principles and committing human rights violations such as extortion, arbitrary detention, and sexual violence against migrants and asylum seekers. Recognizing brutal actions by the border authorities and the deplorable living conditions in detention centers in Libya, the Assize Court in Milan condemned the torture and violence inflicted in these centers. In November 2017, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights released a statement criticizing the EU’s support for the Libyan Coast Guard as “inhumane” as it led to the detention of migrants in “horrific” conditions in Libya. Despite institutional disapproval of the EU’s and Italy’s involvement in Libya, funding for these security projects continued. Ethiopia While Ehtiopia was never formally colonized, it remained under Italian occupation from 1935-1941 and subsequently fell under (in)formal British control from 1941-1944. The EUTF initiatives in Ethiopia do not show the same patterns of cooperation as seen in Libya and Niger, since Ethiopia served as a key interest to the EU due to its status as one of the main countries of origin, transit, and destination for migrants and refugees. EUTF report from 2016 highlighted that Ethiopia hosts over one million displaced people. It is also the biggest recipient of EUTF funding in the Horn of Africa. Its geographical proximity to countries like Eritrea, Somalia, and South Sudan has vastly affected its migration demographics, making it a focus area for the EU’s development aid under the EUTF. While there pre-existing migration management schemes in Ethiopia, they were concerned with the returns and reintegration of irregular Ethiopian migrants and refugees rather than building up the capacity of various security actors as seen in other regions. This objective was linked with positive conditionalities as the Third Progress Report on the Partnership Framework with third countries under the European Agenda on Migration links progress in the returns and readmissions field with more financial support for refugees that reside within Ethiopia. Additional projects in Ethiopia were geared towards economic development and focused on addressing the root causes as outlined in Valletta. Some of these initiatives included job creation, providing energy access, healthcare, and education to vulnerable populations which are in line with development cooperation. However, the European Union’s increasing focus on returns and readmission of Ethiopian migrants can decrease revenue derived from remittances which contribute three times more to the Ethiopian economy than development financing. This approach ensures the fulfillment of the EU’s migration interests while undermining Ethiopia’s economic needs. Ethiopian officials also expressed disappointment with the EUTF measures because they were guided by the EU’s focus on repatriation, thereby eroding migration cooperation with Ethiopia. In regards to EU interests in Ethiopia, an EU official claimed: “We can pretend that we have joint interest in migration management with Africa, but we don't. The EU is interested in return and readmission. Africa is interested in root causes, free movement, legal routes, and remittances. We don't mention that our interests are not aligned.” This non-alignment in interests is irrelevant to the EU because it is the more dominant actor and has the power to assert its priorities by using money as leverage. However, this pattern of interaction comes at the cost of losing cooperation with Ethiopian stakeholders and diverging finances from refugee and migrant populations in Ethiopia who need humanitarian assistance. Perspectives from Africa African representatives and ambassadors displayed suspicion about the fund’s motives and called on the EU to fund projects that increase economic opportunities in their respective countries. As Nigerien mayor of Tchirozerine Issouf Ag Maha stated, “as local municipalities, we don’t have any power to express our needs. The EU and project implementers came here with their priorities. It’s a ‘take it or leave it’ approach, and in the end, we have to take it because our communities need support.” Maha’s statement highlights the role the EU plays in shaping the direction of development money and how its priorities overshadow decisions and input from local officials, who are significantly more knowledgeable about the needs of their communities. Despite diverging interests and priorities, African officials concede to their demands because their communities require financial resources to alleviate hardships. President Akufo-Addo from Ghana claimed that “ instead of investing money in preventing African migrants from coming to Europe, the EU should be spending more to create jobs across the continent.” Similarly, Senegalese President Mackey Sall and former Chairperson of the African Union warned that the trust fund to tackle the causes of migration is not sufficient to meet the needs of the continent stating, stated that “if we want young Africans to stay in Africa, we need to provide Africa with more resources.” The allocation of aid to security-related projects comes at the expense of funding genuine development projects that align with the needs of African communities. It also takes advantage of the ‘cash-starved’ governments.” These statements underscore the necessity of the EUTF to direct capital towards structural and sustainable economic development as opposed to combatting, detaining, or returning migrants. However, the EU has not been responsive to these inputs from its African stakeholders despite stressing the importance of cooperation and partnership during the Valletta Summit. Reinforcing Power Imbalances The imposition of European policies and priorities through the EUTF takes advantage of African nations' relatively weaker economic standing and agency, showing that the political and security needs of powerful states and institutions determine where and how development aid is designated. It also shows the continued influence and intervention of European interests into their ostensibly independent former colonial holdings, therefore reiterating Nkrumah’s theory that foreign capital, such as development aid, can be used for the exploitation of developing countries by their former colonial powers. This hypocrisy goes against the EU’s normative approaches to its foreign policy while also continuing to reinforce power imbalances and colonial-era hierarchies between Europe and Africa. Discussion Critically examining the European Union Trust Fund in the broader context of EU-Africa relations demonstrates how EUTF represents a complex intersection of historical legacies, political interests and expediency, and political ideologies that determine attitudes towards migrants and refugees and thus, shape policy outcomes. These factors reinforce each other by showing the multifaceted nature of migration governance. The neo-colonialism lens in my hypothesis provides historical context to show how enduring colonial legacies continue to guide policies today. This lens also forms the basis for discourse about EU-Africa relations because of the visible power imbalances that are sustained through policies like the EUTF which are structurally designed to achieve European political interests at the expense of the needs of African states. As seen through the case studies on Libya, Niger, and Ethiopia, development aid is not always allocated for the benefit of the recipient. Rather, aid can be abused as a political tool to reach the objectives of the donor institutions. Despite the rhetoric of cooperation between stakeholders, preservation of human lives, equal partnership, and addressing root causes, as stated in Valletta, the strategic policy design of the EUTF highlights the persistence of neo-colonialism because it continues historical patterns of exploitation and hierarchies between Europe and Africa. Conclusion The findings in this paper show that EUTF was not merely a development instrument but also a political one that came with negative consequences for African irregular migrants. The securitization of aid along with the EU’s other externalization policies have not effectively solved the problems that have caused the migration crisis. Instead, it has reinforced them. The model of the EU’s migration policies under the EUTF has also created issues beyond the realm of migration. As discussed, it continues to sustain power imbalances between Europe and Africa, shift aid priorities, and undermine development goals.Addressing the migration crisis will require a paradigm shift in the EU migration policy domain. The EU needs to deviate away from a security-based approach to a holistic and rights-based approach. This ideological reform requires the EU to look inward to address its own limitations and failures by recognizing its neo-colonial practices, acting out of mutual rather than political interests, and lastly, collectively humanizing migrants and refugees arriving to Europe for safety and opportunities. Through these measures, the EU and African stakeholders can address the true root causes of migration – which stem from structural global inequalities. References “A European Agenda on Migration.” European Commission. 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In the Augenblick, Not the Moment: A Heideggerian Critique of Temporal Inauthenticity Lukas Bacho Author Gabriel Gonzalez Alexander Gerasimchuk Matthew Wong Editors “Be in the moment!” In our chronically online and attention-deficient age, this admonition is a constant refrain. It usually means: “Focus on neither the past nor the future, but rather the present—what is happening right now. ” A favorite instruction of guided meditations, it may also be heard as a protest against the impulse to sully a beautiful view with a photo shoot. Too often, our minds are clouded by remorse for past events or anxiety about future events that we are unable to appreciate the present for what it is. Clearly, there is some truth to this. However, the normative force of “Be in the moment!” relies on the misleading descriptive claim that we are only ever in the moment (so why try to exist outside it?). This, in turn, rests on a conception of time as a series of punctual moments, as on a timeline, that seem linked only because we perceive them as such. Martin Heidegger had a name for this understanding: “now-time,” or the “ordinary” (Vulgär ) conception of time. I seek to argue, with Heidegger’s help, that the admonition to “be in the moment” obscures essential features of our temporality, thereby diminishing our potential for authentic living. My primary aim is to reconstruct Heidegger’s accounts of now-time, world-time, originary temporality, and the authentic mode of relating to all of these. What emerges is the foundation for a more authentic way of relating to time whose explanatory priority lies not in one’s present situation but in one’s future possibilities. Now-time (Jetzt-Zeit ) is the most proximal conception of time according to which we humans, as Dasein , live our lives. On this understanding, Heidegger writes, “time shows itself as a sequence of nows which are constantly ‘present-at-hand,’ simultaneously passing away and coming along. Time is understood as a succession, as a ‘flowing stream’ of nows, as the ‘course of time.’” The language of “sequence” and “succession” indicates that time is here understood as a series of discrete moments so short that their continual coming and going seems to constitute a flow, but in fact does not. Each moment, or “now,” is “present-at-hand” in the sense that it has an objective (and thus constant) duration. One can quibble about how long exactly the “now” is, but most would say a fraction of a second. Heidegger calls this conception “now-time” because it views time as nothing but these infinitesimally short “nows,” linked by nothing but one another; for “the sequence of nows is uninterrupted and has no gaps.” Now-time resembles a popular position in contemporary philosophy known as the cinematic or snapshot view of time, which holds that “neither our awareness itself nor its contents have temporal extension.” But now-time is also the idea we live by in our everyday lives, most obviously in our use of clocks. The convention of designating the current “now” with clock-time reflects our conception of time as a series of discrete moments: 4:17 comes after 4:16, the fourth second of a minute comes after the third, and so on. Heidegger emphasizes that now-time existed far before the invention of clocks, for Dasein has always measured its time, whether by the sun or some other means; the only difference is that the units of measurement have changed. If time were divided into sufficiently short instants, the logic goes, there would be nothing between them. Indeed, now-time is so integral to our everyday existence that it is hard to imagine any other way to conceive of time. Now-time is implicit in our telling someone to “be in the moment.” To show how, let us begin by acknowledging that the imperative asks one to exist in the present, at the exclusion of both the past and the future. What is the present? Although the word “moment” seems to leave the present’s length ambiguous—it could be a split second, or the multi-hour duration of an activity—the statement’s exclusion of the past and future actually requires that the “moment” be infinitesimally short. If one were to “be” in the next minute or even the next second—that is, anticipate or worry about what will happen then—one could not claim to be in the moment. Thus, the perception of time as a succession of constantly fleeting nows underlies “be in the moment.” But that is not all: the insistence upon the singularity of the moment betrays the idea that there is only ever one moment to be in. In fact, the moment has no duration: like the instants of now-time, the moment is a point . Thus, “be in the moment,” as a statement of now-time, objectifies the present in such a way that there is nothing significant about it except the fact that it is the present. Why should we be in the present? Because it is the present—because it is all that is. Heidegger complicates this picture by introducing the notion of world-time (Weltzeit ). If now-time is responsible for our sense of the present’s punctuality, world-time is responsible for our sense of the present’s universality, and is thus explanatorily prior to our conception of now-time. As Heidegger puts it, world-time is “that time ‘wherein’ entities within-the-world are encountered.” In other words, it is the kind of time that enables us to encounter things in the world. We can clarify what world-time is by examining its four constitutive aspects in turn: publicness, datability, spannedness, and worldhood. The most accessible of world-time’s four aspects is publicness (Öffentlichkeit ). Indeed, Heidegger often calls world-time “public time.” Publicness is the characteristic of world-time whereby we take ourselves to be in the same “now” as one another at any given time. Publicness allows me to say to another person, “Now it is twelve o’clock,” knowing that if they are in the same time zone, it is now twelve o’clock for them, too. If they are not in my time zone—if we are talking on the phone, for instance—I still understand that while it is currently another time for them, we are fundamentally in the same now . And publicness extends beyond the now: only because we understand time as public, as shared, as out there in the world, can we say that we “use,” “buy,” or “borrow” time. Publicness is perhaps the aspect of world-time that is least concealed in now-time, since the measurement of time with clocks and timeliness obviously presupposes that any quantified time will be intelligible as the same “now” by everyone. Still, the fact that we take ourselves to be in the same now remains hidden in now-time. We take for granted that “now” is simply now —that when one person says “be in the moment,” the other will know what time they mean. A second aspect of world-time is datability (Datierbarkeit ), the structure by which Dasein assigns a temporal structure to its experience. In practice, datability refers to our assignment of times to events and events to times, even “before” we impose the numerical values of now-time (like “November 8” or “9:15 a.m.”) on those events. For example, when we say “It is cold,” we mean “It is cold now ,” just as when we say “It was cold,” we mean “It was cold formerly .” Conversely, time has content for us, for “When we say ‘now,’ we always understand a ‘now that so and so.’” Although datability includes the word “date,” it has nothing to do with numerical dates. Instead, datability simply means that all that happens is happening at a time, and every time is a time when something is happening. Clearly, datability enables the conception of now-time, since interpreting time as a sequence of nows makes sense only if Dasein has an intuitive idea of its existence within a structure of past, present, and future. If Dasein could not date itself, time could not seem to be a “flowing stream,” since Dasein would not be fixed in relation to it. In this admittedly murky way, now-time reveals datability as a feature of world-time. Mostly, however, now-time covers up datability, for the now of now-time is not understood to be “now, when x ,” but rather simply “now.” This is especially glaring in “Be in the moment!” In the moment when you are doing what? The admonition suggests that the moment is a space where you need not do anything, when in fact every moment is always a moment when you are doing something. The aspect of world-time which may be most obscured by now-time is spannedness (Spanne ), which affords every “now” the property of duration. Heidegger introduces the concept of spannedness by observing that we understand there to be a length of time—not just a series of nows—between any “now” and a future “then.” This liminal length is itself datable with expressions like “during” and “meanwhile,” which shows that we can conceive of a future “now” (and by extension, any past or present now) with a duration we ourselves have determined. Spannedness accounts for how I can simultaneously say “Now I am writing,” “Now I am a student,” and “Now I am alive,” even though these nows are of vastly different lengths. In fact, no now to which we refer is ever punctual; every now is temporally extended. Even the clock, our paradigmatic instrument of now-time, reveals the spanned nature of world-time by designating as an hour an arbitrary number of minutes and as minute an arbitrary number of seconds. Seconds may be in turn divided into milliseconds, nanoseconds, and so on—there are infinite nows between one second and the next—though the clock does not show this directly. Assigning numbers to time requires that we pin down the now as if it were punctual, when in fact it is spanned. Much like a clock obscures the spannedness of seconds, the statement “be in the moment”—in its exclusion of anything that might be called past or future—obscures the spannedness of said moment, despite the fact that “moments” are by definition variable in length. The fourth aspect of world-time is worldhood (Weltlichkeit ), which situates every time in a normative structure of significance. As Heidegger explains, “The time which is interpreted in concern is already understood as a time for something. The current ‘now that so and so…’ is as such either appropriate or inappropriate .” He returns to the sun for a primitive example: depending on the context, the now of dawn is understood implicitly as the time for waking up or the time for going to work. The clock, as an instrument of now-time, obscures this aspect of world-time by seeming to give every “now” equal status. But it is in light of the worldhood of time that clocks are useful to us: 8:00, for example, is not just a string of numbers—“the time it is now”—but “the time for waking up,” or whatever the case may be. Moreover, the design of a clock—which assigns the hour and half-hour to the extreme points of its vertical axis, and the fifteen-minute intervals between these to its leftmost and rightmost points—reflects our taking certain numerical times to be more appropriate than others as times for anything. For instance, 9:00 is a more “appropriate” time than 9:03 or 9:10 not by itself, but rather for setting an alarm to wake up, holding a meeting, etc. The statement “be in the moment” similarly covers up the worldhood of time by suggesting that the moment is not “for” anything but itself. When someone leading a meditation says it, they want the one hearing to “forget” that they have made the moment significant as a moment for meditating. When a photo-averse person says it, it is because they have designated the moment as a moment for enjoying the scenery, not a moment for taking photos. The worldhood of time entails that by doing anything, I am implicitly asserting that now is the right time to do it. As we have seen, the admonition to “be in the moment” covers up all four aspects of the kind of time (world-time) from which we derive our ordinary conception of time (now-time). Yet Heidegger shows us that world-time is in turn explicable only by an even more basic kind of time, originary or primordial (ursprünglich ) time. Primordial time is the kind of time that Heidegger has been working to uncover throughout Being and Time ; it is “the condition which makes the everyday experience of time both possible and necessary.” In Division II, Chapter 6, he gets primordial time into view by observing that Dasein is not just Being-towards-the-end (i.e., death), but also Being-towards-the-beginning (i.e., birth). To see this, we need not look further than Dasein’s characteristic activity of thrown projection, by which Dasein claims the circumstances it has been thrown into from birth , even as it reinterprets them by projecting its own possibilities until death. Because of the bidirectional gaze of thrown projection, “Dasein does not exist as the sum of the momentary actualities of Experiences which come along successively and disappear.” In other words, Dasein does not exist exclusively in now-time, for Dasein is not just the sum of its experiences at a series of present-at-hand nows. Rather, Dasein is also its past circumstances and future possibilities. As Heidegger puts it, Dasein “is stretched along and stretches itself along ” primordial time via its own activity. The scope of primordial time is Dasein’s entire lifetime, without which the four aspects of world-time could not exist. The now could not be public, datable, spanned, or worldly without the finite being that discloses the now as public, dates the now, relates the now to the broadest now of its own life, and renders the now a time for something in light of its finitude. Therefore, primordial time is the kind of time that makes Dasein a whole and undergirds its Being as care (cf. ). Encouraging someone to “be in the moment” obfuscates primordial time, thereby exemplifying an inauthentic relation to time that Heidegger calls “making-present” (gegenwärtigen ). Making-present describes a state of “falling into the ‘world’ of one’s concern”—the everyday realm where Dasein’s perspective is confined to the objects it encounters as equipment for fulfilling immediate ends. In making-present, Dasein’s attention becomes myopic: it seems to forget its Being as thrown projection, which is to say it forgets that it goes about all its everyday tasks in the context of broader priorities. Of course, the most global context Dasein forgets in making-present is its own finitude, in virtue of which all its priorities matter. The imperative to “be in the moment” epitomizes making-present because it disallows making sense of what one is doing now in light of anything futural; thus, it stands opposed to the maxim “live every day as if it were your last,” even though similar sentiments may motivate the two statements. To “be in the moment” is to forget not only that one has priorities, but also that everything one does is an implicit articulation of those priorities. Consequently, one’s experience of time becomes “an inauthentic awaiting of ‘moments’—an awaiting in which these are already forgotten as they glide by.” Time seems never to arise, but only to pass away; one conceives of oneself not as stretching oneself along time, but rather passively lost in its flow. What making-present makes present, then, is primordial time itself, whose past and futural aspects are subjugated to the cult of the present “moment.” Heidegger reveals our potential for a more authentic relation to primordial time and world-time by contrasting making-present with his concept of the Augenblick , in which Dasein recognizes its past, present, and future as inseparable aspects of its own wholeness. The Augenblick is “the resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern.” Bearing in mind both its possibilities (projection) and its circumstances (thrownness), Dasein does not lose sight of its priorities amid the world of its concern, but sees those priorities themselves as objects of concern to be constantly actualized and reevaluated. In the Augenblick, Dasein understands its Being as care and itself as finite, but not in such a way that it is afraid of its own death; its rapture is resolute , at once unflinching in its acknowledgment of mortality and steadfast in its commitment to living. The Augenblick is an “ecstasis” in the sense that it allows Dasein to stand outside the world of its concern—outside the punctual present of now-time—and grasp world-time and primordial time, if only implicitly, as the grounds of its temporal experience. Crucially, the Augenblick does not mean an escape from the present—where all experience occurs—but rather expands the present to include one’s whole life. If we translate it as “moment,” we had better bear in mind the English word’s other meaning of “importance,” from which we get “momentous.” The Augenblick renders the present important—i.e., consequential—precisely by being the “gaze of the eye,” for it is in the present (both right this second and during one’s life ) that one judges practically what is worth attending to by focusing on certain things rather than others. The Augenblick, then, could not be more different from the “moment” of “be in the moment,” for while the former imbues the now with momentous stakes by maximally dilating it, the latter deflates the stakes of the now by maximally contracting it. Even the English word “moment” obscures the essential relation between Dasein and time, whereas the German word Augenblick identifies Dasein’s caring activity—its gaze—as the precondition for temporal experience and Dasein’s sense of continuity from one moment to the next. It is an inevitable consequence of the Augenblick’s expansion of the now that the future acquires explanatory priority over the present in the question of Dasein’s Being. While the inauthentic understanding of one’s potentiality-for-Being “temporalizes itself in terms of making present,” Heidegger observes, the Augenblick does so “in terms of the authentic future.” This means that while making-present confines the implications of one’s activity to the punctual now of now-time, the Augenblick discloses those implications as primarily futural. Thus, the Augenblick is explicable not in terms of the vulgar “now” (dem Jetzt ), but in terms of future possibilities: as the “gaze of the eye,” it “permits us to encounter for the first time what can be ‘in a time’ as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand.” In the Augenblick, Dasein discovers itself in the equipment that constitutes the world of its concern, which in turn leads it to recognize that it is the one responsible for stretching oneself along and projecting itself toward certain possibilities rather than others. The worldhood of time becomes particularly apparent, for the current “moment” no longer seems trivial; every “now” becomes significant in terms of what it is a time for , which is to say in terms of its bearing on the future. So while “be in the moment” suggests that the present is all that matters, the Augenblick insists that the present matters only because the future does. In Heidegger’s categories of inauthenticity and authenticity we find the foundation I promised for a more authentic way of relating to time. “Be in the moment” exemplifies an inauthentic mode of relating to time—i.e., making-present—that obscures world-time and primordial time as the fundamental structures of our experience. To be in the Augenblick, on the other hand, is to relate to the now authentically : it means to own up to the present as datable, public, spanned, and worldly; and to understand it as inseparable from the past and future. In the inauthentic mode, one is lost in one’s immediate concerns rather than seeing the “big picture,” and passively awaits the future rather than owning it as the ground of one’s priorities. Thus, although “be in the moment” seems to inflate the status of the present, it actually diminishes the present into a kind of hollow shell. But in the authentic mode, one owns up to both the past and future—stretching back to one’s birth and forward to one’s death—as constitutive of who one is and what one does. Heidegger’s authenticity is proto-ethical in that it denotes appropriation of one’s own temporality as the ground of one’s reasons for doing this rather than that in any given case. Yet authenticity is not fully ethical, for while it describes a relation to one’s reasons (the “subjective ought”), it fails to prescribe specific actions (the “objective ought”). The extent to which one could derive the latter from the former is doubtful, at least within the framework of Being and Time. Yet authenticity, if proto-ethical, is far from irrelevant. We could retort that relating authentically to time is further than most people get in life—never mind living ethically. By saying things like “be in the moment,” we evacuate ourselves from the now, only to reinsert ourselves in it as passengers. We say that time is a flowing stream, forgetting that we are the ones stretching ourselves along. At worst, we pretend indifference, when in fact—as being in the Augenblick reminds me—there is nothing more fundamental to our experience than that we care. References Hägglund, Martin. “Lecture 25: Now-Time, World-Time, and Originary Temporality.” Lecture. PHIL 402: Being and Time, Yale University, 24 April 2024. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . 1927. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper Perennial, 2008. Phillips, Ian, editor. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience . Routledge, 2017.

Bess Markel Rural Despair and Decline: How Trump Won Michigan in 2016 Bess Markel Introduction When Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote in 2016, he shocked the entire world. In part, people believed he could never win because he would never crack the Democrats’ famous “Blue Wall”: the combination of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But he did, winning counties that John McCain and Mitt Romney could not. Political pundits asked themselves: How did this entitled, brash, inexperienced New York millionaire appeal to rural voters? What seems like thousands of think-pieces have been written on the issue, each suggesting that Trump won the election because of Russian interference, deeply rooted misogyny, racial backlash to Obama’s presidency, the rise of social media, and a myriad of other factors. However, some scholars have suggested that Trump’s unexpected triumph could be traced to another factor: pain and discontentment across rural America. Over the past several decades, America’s working class has seen its way of life disappear. With a loss of jobs due to innovative technology, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, and mass migration out of Rust Belt states, residents of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin—areas that used to be vibrant parts of America’s heartland—feel left behind (1). Some believe that this downward trajectory helped spark the rise of Trump. While this might seem counterintuitive at first because Trump is viewed by the liberal media as an uncaring, East Coast elite, scholars have strived to understand the appeal of Trump among working-class, white voters, particularly in the Midwest. This line of research is particularly important for the future of electoral politics. The movement Trump’s election sparked, and even Trump himself, are not going away anytime soon. Understanding Trump’s appeal can explain his continued support and how other candidates can seize upon the movement he built. This research paper will explore the connection between despair and the rise of Donald Trump. It will use data on unemployment, education levels, and levels of drug- and alcohol-related deaths and suicide taken from the swing state of Michigan, which narrowly helped Trump win the 2016 election. The data section will show that Trump performed better in places where residents seemed more likely to feel economically and socially left behind. However, we must first classify and understand what scholars mean when they discuss despair in rural, working-class America. Understanding Rural Support for Trump Political scientist Katherine Cramer, in her book Politics of Resentment, argues that rural politics can be understood as stemming from the creation of a rural community consciousness, rooted in resentment toward “elites” and urbanites (2). Through interviews with a group of locals in rural Wisconsin, Cramer discovered what rural consciousness looks like and defines it as three sentiments: caring about perspectives of power, primarily that urban areas have all of it and rural areas have none; respect for the “rural way of life”; and the perspective that too few resources are allocated to rural areas (3). All in all, her definition of rural community consciousness paints a picture of rural Americans feeling that urban Americans, and by extension government officials who are overly influenced by urban values, have no respect for their way of life, and are draining rural resources and livelihoods through welfare programs and other legislative efforts that advantage urban areas. This perceived allocation of resources toward exclusively urban areas is not actually the case, and many government funds and programs target rural areas. However, governmental bodies do not always prioritize marketing their budget allocations and as a result many rural communities are uninformed about the inner workings of the political system. In addition, because rural Americans are disillusioned, they have low desire to learn about government activities, leading these causal beliefs to go unchallenged and unresearched (4). This breakdown in communication and understanding has long-reaching effects. The Republican Party has seized upon these sentiments to further its agenda. Many rural Americans are wary of governmental employees and programs that they view as elite and guilty of stealing rural money for personal or political gain (5). Journalist Thomas Frank understands the power of rural resentment but argues that it is not necessarily about a lack of understanding of budgetary inner workings or community anger but is rather about character assessment. He asserts that while resentment and hostility are important in understanding the rural vote, the most crucial factor is actually authenticity.6 Republicans, he argues, have successfully rebranded Democrats as out-of-touch city elites worthy of scorn. Even as Republican political figures push legislation that hurts working-class Americans, they successfully market themselves as relatable, the politicians that a voter would want to have a beer with (7). This authenticity wins them voters despite their lack of concrete political achievements for lower-income, working-class Americans. When putting these scholarly findings in conversation with the campaign message on which Trump ran, it is easy to see how in 2016 Trump played upon the resentment and despair of rural areas by framing the Democrats, and by extension the urban liberal elite, as the cause for all problems. Throughout the campaign, Trump had a habit of saying exactly what was on his mind, perhaps giving him an air of over-a-beer-authenticity and relatability—he certainly appeared honest due to his unfiltered dialogue. Moreover, his lack of political experience likely worked in his favor in areas where government officials are seen as untrustworthy. By contrast, his opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had held governmental office at various levels for many years, which played into Trump’s painting of her in the eyes of many rural communities as an urban elite living off the people’s hard earned money. Further complicating the relationship between rural and urban areas is the perception that urban areas are more liberal or have different ways of life. Sociologist Jennifer M. Silva argues that some rural voting patterns can be explained by the considerable amount of fear that exists in many of these places, both around shrinking economic opportunities and the general future of communities (8). This fear often manifests itself as a feeling that America must return to “disciplined values” such as hard work, or worries that immigrants are stealing all the well-paying jobs. In his campaign, Trump certainly identified these fears (9). This could be seen in his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric, seemingly placing the blame on them for the lack of decent-paying jobs. Trump also emphasized his skills as a businessman, arguing that they would help him run the country and increase the job market. Many authors believe that Trump’s strong performance in rural counties can be explained by the “landscapes of despair” theory, arguing that all of the areas in which Trump over-performed or Clinton underperformed have experienced immense social, economic, and health declines over the past several decades. These authors believe that Trump appeals to voters who are not necessarily the poorest in America but whose lives are worse off than they were several decades ago (10). Trump spoke to that pain and offered these Americans a message that appealed to their despair. Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens find that economic conditions have changed over time throughout rural communities, with urban centers becoming more prominent and fewer agricultural jobs available. However, they find that not all rural areas are doing uniformly poorly economically across America. Instead, there has been “profound structural change” in most of these areas in terms of the types of employment available (11). This structural change could contribute to the feeling among many rural Americans of having been left behind and could also explain some of the draw to Trump’s nationalism, as trade and increased globalization, along with new technology, have contributed to this extreme change (12). Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown agree with this theory and find a correlation be- tween higher rates of opioid addiction in a county and the percent of the county that voted for Trump (13). They found that opioid addiction is one way to measure the sociocultural and economic factors that often created support for Trump and noted that simple unemployment measurements fail to capture this same trend. These two pieces of data imply that the voting patterns of Trump’s supporters do not correspond with being worse off economically than the rest of America, but rather are related to whether people personally feel like they and their communities are backsliding, with opioid addiction as an indicator of this attitude. Gollust and Miller argue that the opioid crisis triggered support for Trump, not necessarily because it is a measurement of sociocultural factors within communities, but because it triggered a comparison in the minds of people living in communities where the crisis was rampant (14). Through experimentation, Gollust and Miller found that Republicans and Trump supporters were more likely than Democrats to view whites as the political losers in the country (15). It is easy to see how Trump’s aggressive rhetoric appealed to people who felt like they were losing and that they needed a fighter to advocate for them. Journalists and Political Research Associates Berlet and Sunshine believe that Trump’s rise can be attributed to changing ways of life and Trump’s connection to right-wing populism (16). They argue that there was a rise in the notion that the white-Christian-heterosexual-American way of life is “under threat” in the years preceding the election. They believe that Trump’s brash candidness, his willing- ness to invoke Islamophobia, homophobia, and xenophobia, and his appeals to Christianity and the patriarchy tapped into a deep-simmering rage that had been growing among rural people (17). In this way, white racial antagonism contributed to Trump’s success. Rural Americans redirected their despair into rage toward those individuals and collectives that they perceived as a threat to their way of life. This argument is heavily focused on the effects of bigotry and anger on people’s voting choices, whereas several other authors, such as Cramer and Frank, believe that rural support for Trump was much less rage-based and much more about a lack of trust in government and the feeling of being neglected for years. We believe that the theories of despair and feelings of backsliding can explain some of the trend toward rural support for Trump in 2016. We believe that data will show that the most important despair factors depict not how badly off a community was in 2016, but rather the comparative: how much worse off it was in 2016 compared to several decades earlier. Finally, we agree with Cramer’s theory of rural consciousness and feel that it may have played a role in general distrust for Clinton as a candidate, but found it impossible to test those attitudes given the data available. Methodology To test the effect of rural pain and despair in connection to GOP voting share in Michigan, we used data at the county level, primarily from 2016, which came from the United States Census Bureau and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (18). We focused specifically on the 2016 election because of the connection between Donald Trump’s share of the vote and struggling rural voters, which was higher than previous GOP candidates Mitt Romney and John McCain (19), as well as Trump’s reputation as an outsider (20). We chose to look at data from all Michigan counties, regardless of which candidate the county voted for or whether the county flipped parties between 2012 and 2016. We chose not to look exclusively at flipped counties because Trump flipped only twelve counties in Michigan. In order to obtain a statistically significant and unbiased result about the effects despair factors had on county result data, more than twelve data points were needed. We instead measured the effect of despair factors on the vote share that Trump received in each county in 2016. We defined six despair factors to represent the challenges and pains each county faced at the time of, or leading up to, the 2016 election. The first three of these factors are defined as the percent change in age-standardized mortality rates be- tween 1980 and 2014 for the following: alcohol use disorders, drug use disorders, and self-harm injuries ( alcoholchange , drugchange , and selfchange , respectively). The source from which we obtained information on drug use disorder–related fatalities did not provide a breakdown by substance so we are unable to determine how much of this factor can be attributed to the ongoing opioid crisis. However, due to the sweeping nature of the crisis, particularly in rural working-class communities, we believe there is some relationship between the drug-use-disorder mortality rate and the opioid crisis (21). Factors that measure changes in living conditions over time, such as changes in fatal overdoses, alcohol deaths, and suicides, will test whether despair is truly about voters’ communities becoming worse than they were before. The fourth despair factor ( undereducated ) represents the education level of each county, using the percent of adults over 18 whose highest educational attainment in 2014 was a high school degree or less. This is an important factor to examine while exploring despair because lower levels of education limit career and income options and are often correlated with greater instances of feeling trapped or stuck in a community (22). The final two factors in the exploration are unemployment and the percentage of the county population that died of any cause in 2016. This last factor is important to consider because higher death rates often show that a county has an aging population and can accordingly suggest that younger people are choosing to leave. If the theories described above are true, unemployment should not matter as much because the “landscapes of despair” theory focuses on decline in communities and in economic opportunities, meaning many voters could be employed but working longer hours, harder jobs, getting paid less, or feeling like they have fewer opportunities than they once did. To test this we ran the same statistical analysis for unemployment but specifically looked at whether the variable was statistically significant in predicting the Trump vote. If it was not, that would prove Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s theory that unemployment is not the best measure of Trump’s support in 2016. We used two statistical methods of analysis. First, we used histograms to compare a single despair factor, such as percent change in alcohol use disorder–related deaths, against the way that the county voted in 2016 to see if certain factors of despair disproportionately affected one party’s vote share. Second, we used the regression equation below to test our hypothesis that the six aforementioned despair factors led to Trump’s higher vote share in Michigan. Finally, we analyzed the despair factors individually to show their discrete effects on the GOP vote share in Michigan’s 2016 election. TRUMPSHAREi = β0 + β1DRUGCHANGEi + β2ALCOHOLCHANGEi + β3SELFCHANGEi + β4UNDEREDUCATEDi +β5UNEMPLOYMENTi +β6PRCNTDEATHSi +εi We fit the model using the county-level data we gathered to examine whether the test statistic led us to reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between these six despair factors and the percent of the vote share that Trump received in Michigan in 2016. We also used the R-squared from this regression to determine how strong the linear relationship of the regression equation was. Results and Discussion The results we found conclusively show that we can reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between the six despair factors and Trump’s success in a county. The first statistical method we used was comparing histograms of each factor broken down by party identification. We found graphical evidence to suggest that death rates, suicide, undereducation, and unemployment were disproportionately higher in Republican counties. Changes in alcohol and drug deaths ( alcoholchange and drugchange ) did not seem to be strongly correlated with one specific party, though counties that voted very strongly for Republicans did seem to have the highest values (highest percent changes from 1980 to 2014) for both of these variables. In some respects, the fact that many of these despair factors were higher in counties that voted Republican makes sense. By 2016, Barack Obama had been president for eight years, and often people who are unhappy with how the economy has been faring or who are unemployed vote for the candidate from the opposite party of the sitting president. However, large values of other factors, such as percent change in deaths from self-harm, are more alarming, as these first three variables measure changes dating back to the 1980s. We were surprised that alcohol and drug deaths seemed to be more evenly spread out between the parties than self-mortality, which was particularly unexpected due to the amount of literature on the correlation between those affected by the opioid epidemic and votes for Trump (23). Perhaps Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s theory that increased opioid usage is a good instrumental variable for Trump support still holds because this data only looks at drug mortality, not drug use. It is entirely possible that Trump counties have higher drug use, but we could not make a conclusion based on the data (24). However, due to the large percentage of drug overdoses that can be attributed to the opioid crisis, it is surprising that more of Gollust and Miller’s and Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s theories did not seem to be supported in this data set (25). The 3-D graphs in the appendix look at the relationships between the vote share that Trump received and percent changes in alcohol, drug, and self-harm mortality rates (26). The regression planes on these 3-D graphs show that percent change in self-harm mortality is the only variable with a clearly positive relationship to Trump votes. The other two changes in mortality variables have weaker linear relationships with Trump votes in part due to several county outliers. Exploring those outlier counties more and investigating why specifically they might not follow the common trend would be an interesting topic for ethnographic research. When we ran the regression analysis the first time, we included all six of the variables we categorized as measures of despair. We also ran the regression analysis with different combinations of these variables to see if we could increase the adjusted R-squared variable, which shows the accuracy of adding another variable to the model. We found that the model was most accurate when we excluded the unemployment value, and because its t-test statistic was not statistically significant, we made the decision to exclude it from the final regression we ran in order to have a more accurate model. At first, we were surprised that unemployment was not significant in the model; however, this seems to support the theory that many “despair voters” do have jobs—they are just low paying and highly stressful (27). This supports Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s analysis that the unemployment level is not a good measurement alone of whether a county voted heavily for Trump. More- over, the histogram shows that high levels of unemployment are not necessarily correlated with high percentages of the vote going to Trump. Clearly, there are other factors at play that this statistic fails to capture, and unemployment could be an incomplete benchmark for despair because it does not measure satisfaction in jobs nor whether a job pays a living wage. Overall, we found that a model with the five factors of despair besides unemployment gave an R-squared of .552, meaning that 55% of the variance among the percentage of votes Trump won in a certain county could be attributed to these factors alone. This is remarkably high considering that neither policies nor previous voting records were added into this regression. However, the only variables that were found to be statistically significant on their own were percent changes in self-harm deaths and percent of undereducated voters. We were surprised that percent changes in alcohol and fatal drug overdoses were not more significant than changes in self-harm deaths, but again, that could be partially attributed to the fact that the data only measures overdoses rather than frequency of use. While one would assume that there would be a positive representative relationship between the two, it is hard to know for sure. However, we can say that, on average, increases in despair in certain aspects of life are correlated with an increase in support for Trump in the 2016 election, supporting the original hypothesis of this paper that rural despair played into Trump’s win in Michigan in 2016. However, we fail to find definitive conclusions regarding some of the connections drawn in previous scholarly literature between opioid overdose and the Trump vote. Perhaps the most striking analysis is running the same regression but with Democratic vote share in the 2016 election and comparing the results with those from the Republican vote share. As seen in the table below, the coefficients for each variable nearly flip signs. A decrease in suicide-, alcohol-, and drug-related deaths, or other despair factors, can be expected on average to be associated with a positive increase among the percentage of the county “voting blue.” Counties that vote Democratic, at least on average, tend to have had some sort of positive change, on the individual or communal level, around certain measures of despair (28). This does not mean that Clinton voters were necessarily better off than all Trump voters across Michigan, but rather that Clinton voters had seen their lives improve, if only marginally, and Trump voters had not. Theories of despair regarding rural voters do not compare the lives of rural voters to those of voters in other areas of the state but rather investigate whether rural communities are worse off than they were several decades ago. Similarly, just because certain counties have seen an improvement in certain despair factors does not mean that their communities are not also grappling with alcohol, drug, and mental health issues. Additionally, better-educated counties tend to vote Democratic, with less-educated counties voting Republican. This is a reversal of certain historical trends (29). Again, at some level it is logical that voters who are doing better vote for the party that has been in power for the past several years. However, the data in these studies capture decades of crumbling communities. There is a downward trend in these communities in terms of levels of despair that shows that regardless of which party these counties vote for (whether they vote for the opposite party when they feel dissatisfied with the current one, or for the same party when things seem to be going well), neither party has been able to stop the 34-year trends of increases in suicide-, drug-, and alcohol-caused deaths. This validates theories of “rural consciousness” and “rural despair” by Cramer and Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens that rural communities clearly see and feel suffering in their communities and perceive a lack of attention and resources given to them (30). One could also argue that this supports Silva’s theory that many rural communities fear for their futures based on the downward spiral these communities have experienced for several years or decades (31). This fear could motivate voters to act more drastically or to believe that a massive change is necessary. In the voting booth, this could lead to their voting for a more unconventional candidate. Trump’s main slogan was “Make America Great Again,” suggesting that, at some level, he understood and was trying to court those experiencing this sense of despair. For many voters, America is the best it has ever been: we have unprecedented levels of rights and acceptance for women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Going back seems like regression, not progress. But as shown by this data, many of the counties that voted for Trump in 2016 were better off by certain metrics in 1980 than they are now. It makes sense that residents of these counties could be worried about the continuing decline of their communities and could want to go back to a better time and quality of life. Not to mention, according to Cramer’s thesis of rural consciousness, voters in rural Michigan could be very distrustful of any type of governmental employee promising change. Trump’s brand as a businessman with no prior political experience could have especially appealed to those affected by rural-consciousness thinking. His role as an outsider was relatable. His phrase “drain the swamp” directly spoke to the prevailing belief in these communities that Washington, DC is full of people who take taxpayers’ money and waste time. His opponent had been in the public eye for years in various government positions and was by extension seen, and marketed by conservative news outlets, as the leader of the “liberal elite.” Particularly in contrast with her, Trump could have seemed particularly appealing to those rural voters. The data we found strongly supports Cramer’s thesis that rural despair and resentment led to the crumbling of the Blue Wall. In order for Democrats to rebuild their former strongholds in these states, the party must examine the real pain and anger that many rural voters experience. They need to understand the hopeless- ness people are feeling and recognize why Trump specifically appeals to them. Trump, and the Republican Party, have been strategic in tapping into the anger, fear, and pain that rural voters feel. Democrats contributed to the phenomenon of rural consciousness and the belief that Democrats are coastal elites who neither care about nor understand middle America (32). Clinton and other Democrats have made several public missteps, including making fun of these voters, that have further reinforced this idea. Trump has succeeded in directing rural voters’ anger and mistrust toward the government, specifically bureaucracy and governmental programs that could actually help rural areas. Overall, Democrats need to strengthen their relationship with white working-class voters, and understanding rural despair and consciousness might be the first step to doing so. They need to consider creating messages that specifically address and appeal to rural voters and find and support candidates who can connect with them. To win back rural voters, Democrats also need to focus on messaging in rural America. That includes creating programs that provide resources and relief to these struggling areas, but also, perhaps more importantly, it requires making sure that rural communities are aware of these resources. If rural communities still view government as ineffective and uninterested in their problems, these programs will not be sufficient. It will take significant effort and messaging on behalf of Democrats to convince enough voters that the Democrats’ party, not Trump’s, actually represents rural Americans’ best interests. While President Biden managed to do this in 2020, very narrowly, it remains to be seen whether other Democratic candidates will be able to or will even want to capitalize on this messaging. It also remains to be seen which candidates will seem authentic to rural voters—clearly this was a big factor in Trump’s victory and was maybe an even bigger factor contributing to Clinton’s loss. Going forward, the Democrats will need to support candidates who can reach rural voters effectively and authentically, which remains a tall order. While Trump, not establishment Republicans, created a new coalition that drew on rural pain and despair, it would be naive to assume that the Republican Par- ty will not continue to take advantage of rural despair to win elections. Since Trump’s defeat, the messaging of the Republican Party has remained largely the same as when Trump was in office. If Democrats do not devote resources to successfully addressing these voters, they will have to accept the possibility that their once reliable Blue Wall will fall again or will never be rebuilt, and they will need to find another sizable coalition of voters to target in order to win elections at every single level. Appendix Endnotes 1 Pottie-Sherman, “Rust and Reinvention,” 2. 2 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment, 11. 3 Ibid., 54. 4 Cramer and Toff, “The Fact of Experience.” 5 Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 127. 6 Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, 113. 7 Thomas, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, 119. 8 Silva, We’re Still Here, 45. 9 Inglehart and Norris, “Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Parties.” 10 Monnat and Brown, “More than a Rural Revolt.” 11 Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens, “The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond,” 101. 12 Ibid, 117. 13 Goodwin et al., “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” e180450. 14 Gollust, and Miller, “Framing the Opioid Crisis: Do Racial Frames Shape Beliefs of Whites Losing Ground?” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 45, no. 2 (April 2020): 241-276. 15 Gollust, and Miller, “Framing the Opioid Crisis: Do Racial Frames Shape Beliefs of Whites Losing Ground?” 16 Berlet and Sunshine, “Rural Rage,” 480–82. 17 Ibid, 490. 18 Foster-Molina and Warren, Partisan Voting, County Demographics, and Deaths of Despair Data. 19 Monnat, “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.” 20 Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 127-137. 21 Florian Sichart et al., “The Opioid Crisis and Republican Vote Share.” 22 Autor, Katz, and Kearney, “The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market.” 23 Goodwin et al., “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” e180450. 24 Ibid. 25 Imtiaz et al., “Recent Changes in Trends of Opioid Overdose Deaths in North America.” 26 Created with the help of Ella Foster-Molina. 27 Torraco, “The Persistence of Working Poor Families in a Changing U.S. Job Market.” 28 We do not mean to suggest that Democratic voters do not face their own share of struggles, rather that this data on average suggests that counties that voted Democratic were less affected by these specific measures of despair in 2016. 29 Harris, “America Is Divided by Education.” 30 Goetz, Partridge, and Stevens, “The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 40, no. 1 (February 16, 2018). 31 Kim Parker et al., “Similarities and Differences between Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities in America.” 32 Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 127-137. Bibliography Autor, David H, Lawrence F Katz, and Melissa S Kearney. “The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market.” American Economic Review 96, no. 2 (April 1, 2006): 189–94. https://doi.org/10.1257/000282806777212620. Berlet, Chip, and Spencer Sunshine. “Rural Rage: The Roots of Right-Wing Populism in the United States.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 46, no. 3 (April 16, 2019): 480–513. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2019.1572603. Cramer, Katherine J. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker . Chicago Studies in American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Cramer, Katherine J., and Benjamin Toff. “The Fact of Experience: Rethinking Political Knowledge and Civic Competence.” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 3 (September 2017): 754–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717000949. Florian Sichart, Jacob Chapman, Brooklyn Han, Hasan Younis, and Hallamund Meena. “The Opioid Crisis and Republican Vote Share.” LSE Undergraduate Political Review , February 13, 2021. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ lseupr/2021/02/13/the-opioid-crisis-and-republican-vote-share/. Foster-Molina and Warren. Partisan Voting, County Demographics, and Deaths of De- spair Data , February 2019. Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Goetz, Stephan J, Mark D Partridge, and Heather M Stephens. “The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 40, no. 1 (March 2018): 97–118. https://doi. org/10.1093/aepp/ppx061. Goodwin, James S., Yong-Fang Kuo, David Brown, David Juurlink, and Mukaila Raji. “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Pat- terns in US Counties in 2016.” JAMA Network Open 1, no. 2 (June 22, 2018): e180450. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.0450. Harris, Adam. “America Is Divided by Education.” The Atlantic, November 7, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/11/educa-tion-gap-explains-american- politics/575113/. Imtiaz, Sameer, Kevin D. Shield, Benedikt Fischer, Tara Elton-Marshall, Bundit Sornpaisarn, Charlotte Probst, and Jürgen Rehm. “Recent Changes in Trends of Opioid Overdose Deaths in North America.” Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 15, no. 1 (December 2020): 66. https://doi. org/10.1186/s13011-020-00308-z. Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. “Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Par- ties: The Silent Revolution in Reverse.” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 2 (June 2017): 443–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717000111. Kim Parker, Juliana Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn, and Ruth Igielnik. “Similarities and Differences between Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities in America.” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Pew Research Center, May 22, 2018. https:// www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/what-unites-and-di- vides- urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/. Monnat, Shannon M. “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” 2016. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.27976.62728. Monnat, Shannon M., and David L. Brown. “More than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election.” Journal of Rural Studies 55 (October 2017): 227–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrur- stud.2017.08.010. Pottie-Sherman, Yolande. “Rust and Reinvention: Im/migration and Urban Change in the American Rust Belt.” Geography Compass 14, no. 3 (December 7, 2019). https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12482. Silva, Jennifer M. We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Torraco, Richard J. “The Persistence of Working Poor Families in a Changing U.S. Job Market: An Integrative Review of the Literature.” Human Re- source Development Review 15, no. 1 (March 2016): 55–76. https://doi. org/10.1177/1534484316630459. Previous Next

Two Forms of Environmental-Political Imagination: Germany, the United States, and the Clean Energy Transition Realism, Perspective, and the Act of Looking A Comparison of Chinese Cinematic Representations of the Second Sino-Japanese War Isaac Leong Brown University Author Zoe Zacharopoulos Alexander Vaughan Williams Lillian Schoeller Nicole Tsung Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (28 pages) Introduction Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep (2000) and Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death (2009) belong to a new generation of Chinese cinema representing the traumas of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). As sixth-generation Chinese filmmakers, Jiang (born 1963) and Lu (born 1971) both began their filmmaking careers in China’s post-socialist era when the gradual opening of China’s film market to foreign investment transformed the landscape of Chinese cinema.[1] Their films, in many ways, reflect on the social contradictions of their time—not only in regard to China’s unequal economic rise, but also to the amnesia that celebrates China’s spectacular imperial past while ignoring its more recent and less glorious history.[2] In this context, China’s “War of Resistance against Japan” is perhaps the most brutal part of its “century of humiliation and exploitation.”[3] Undeniably, the atrocities inflicted on the Chinese people during the Sino-Japanese War have left a lasting wound on the national psyche. Yet, collective memory of this period—more specifically, its cinematic representations—has evolved alongside the changing priorities of the Chinese government. With fierce contestations for political legitimacy between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the exiled Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party, early Chinese films depicting the war tended to glorify the CCP as the only resolute and successful force fighting Japanese imperialism. Simultaneously, these films typically portrayed the KMT as corrupt, incompetent, or otherwise traitorous collaborators.[5] Echoing the Japanese narrative that pinned wartime responsibility on a narrow “military clique,” the socialist “Red Classics” of this period also avoided elaboration on Japanese war crimes for fear of “disseminating sentimentalism and capitalist humanism.”[5] It was not until the 1980s, with the attempt to heal the Communist-Nationalist fissure, that the official narrative of the war began to sharply change emphasis, stressing the Chinese-Japanese conflict much more than the domestic, ideological one. In these representations, the nationalistic message of popular resistance against the Japanese enemy is emphasized, and anyone who collaborates with the Japanese is quickly and uncritically denounced as an unpatriotic traitor. This narrative of righteous resistance offers a kind of vindication for the Chinese nation who, while remaining historically defeated by the Japanese, can find celebration of victorious battles on screen. As Chinese writer Yu Hua notes, there is “a joke that more Japanese have been ‘killed’ at Hengdian (China’s largest film studio) than at all the actual battlefields put together—more, even, than the total population of Japan.”[6] Set against this new backdrop of Chinese war films, Devils on the Doorstep and City of Life and Death seem to depart radically from traditional cinematic representations of the War of Resistance, and perhaps as a consequence, caused significant controversy in China. The former was banned from formal release in China, with the Chinese Film Bureau citing “errors in historical representation” and labelling the film as being “insufficiently patriotic.”[7] The latter, although not banned, was criticized by the Chinese media for its sympathetic portrayal of, and even identification with, its protagonist: a Japanese soldier plagued by guilt for witnessing the atrocities committed by his fellow soldiers against the Chinese. In this regard, the strong reaction to both films indicates how uneasily they sit with usual nationalist narratives about the Chinese “self” and Japanese “other.” Not only is the Japanese enemy humanized in some way, both films also problematize the issue of wartime collaboration and sideline the CCP’s role in leading the national resistance. The relationship between both films extends beyond the content of their similarly controversial and unconventional representations of the war. Though utilized for somewhat different purposes, Lu Chuan’s use of the black-and-white format in City of Life and Death owes a certain “creative debt” to Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep , which pioneered the use of the medium to represent the Second Sino-Japanese War in an age of color cinema.[8] Undoubtedly, this aesthetic decision to film in black and white is an attempt by both films to grapple with the broader issues of realism and artificiality, especially within the context of historical trauma. In representing the traumas of the war, both films also employ first-person perspectives and narratives, albeit in different ways. While Devils on the Doorstep depicts the experiences of war from the narrow perspective of an ordinary Chinese peasant, City of Life and Death adopts an approach common in the genre of docudramas by switching between different perspectives, though focusing on the experiences of a conscience-stricken Japanese soldier. Despite both films showing some commitment to representing the ordinary and subjective experiences of the war, the latter’s approach effaces individual histories and uses the victim’s perspective merely as melodrama in a more conventional narrative of Chinese victimhood.[9] By comparing both films in their relationship to realism and nationalist remembrances of the war, I argue that while the representation of the war in City of Life and Death reflects predominant historiographical problems concerning the Sino-Japanese War, Devils on the Doorstep is a more self-reflexive attempt to subvert and deconstruct nationalist narratives of the war. Set in the last year of the war in the Japanese-occupied part of northern China, Devils on the Doorstep captures the horrors and absurdity of the war from the perspective of a group of Chinese villagers who are mysteriously tasked by the Communist resistance to house and interrogate two captives—a Japanese soldier and his Chinese translator. Among the villagers, Ma Dasan—a strong, straight-minded, credulous and bumbling peasant—becomes the unwilling protagonist. Initially a farcical comedy depicting the confusion of the villagers who are unsure about how to deal with this unexpected and unwanted disruption of their lives, the story takes a darker turn when Dasan is tasked with killing the two prisoners. Partly because Dasan is unable to do the deed, and partly because the executioner he employs turns out to be a fraud, Dasan and the villagers eventually agree to return the prisoners to the Japanese army in return for food. While this deal is initially honored by the Japanese army, the celebratory banquet unexpectedly turns into a cold-blooded massacre of the entire village by the carousing Japanese soldiers, leaving Dasan as the sole survivor and witness of the massacre. When the war ends and the Japanese soldiers are pardoned by the returning Nationalists, Dasan finds himself unable to deal with the guilt and tries to kill every Japanese soldier he can in revenge. However, he is quickly subdued and in an ironic turn of events, executed, at the order of the returning Nationalist government by the same Japanese soldier that he saved. As a docudrama about the Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death adopts a vastly different approach to represent the traumas of the Sino-Japanese War. Switching primarily between the perspectives of the ordinary Japanese soldier Kadokawa Masao, the Nazi Party member John Rabe, and his fictional secretary Tang, the film tells a “collaged” story about the fall of Nanjing and the establishment and subsequent dissolution of the Nanjing Safety Zone.[10] Without a coherent dramatic narrative, three plot points stand out in the film, each centering around one of the three main characters: Rabe is pressured into providing the Japanese army with one hundred Chinese comfort women from the Safety Zone he sets up; Tang collaborates with the Japanese in an attempt to protect his family after Rabe announces his recall to Germany; and Kadokawa, stricken by guilt after witnessing the horrors and brutality of war, releases two Chinese prisoners and commits suicide at the end of the film. Given Lu Chuan’s style of realistic representation, it is needless to say that scenes of executions, mass shooting, and rape form the mise-en-scène of the film. The Gaze in Cinematic Realism Borrowing from Daniel Morgan, I propose that cinematic realism can be thought of in two different ways that correspond with the two films discussed in this paper.[11] Following the canonical understanding of André Bazin’s theorizations of film realism, the first conception, corresponding with Lu Chuan’s interpretation in City of Life and Death, sees realism as “a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.”[12] On the other hand, as Morgan argues, realism need not be understood as a set of stylistic conventions that have come to define the realist aesthetic. Instead, he suggests that Bazin “sees a more complicated relation between style and reality. Though a film, to be realist, must take into account… the ontology of the photographic image, realism is not a particular style, lack of style, or a set of stylistic attributes, but a process and mechanism.”[13] Seeing realism as a way of interpreting reality thus enables “realist” films, like Devils on the Doorstep , to explore alternative stylistic and imaginative resources in their representation of reality. Discussing the use of black and white in City of Life and Death , the film’s cinematographer Cao Yu explained how the use of black and white not only provided the film with “a sense of reality” and “spiritual abstraction,” but was also necessary in avoiding the gory excesses and pornographic pleasures of the horror genre.[14] However, when mediating between these sometimes conflicting goals, the film seems to prioritize the achievement of authenticity and realism. In conducting research for the film, Lu Chuan and the rest of the production team spent weeks on end at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Sichuan combing through close to five hundred thousand photographs depicting the Sino-Japanese War with the main purpose of imitating the “reality effect” of the most compelling historical photographs.[15] The pursuit of realism and authenticity in cinematic representations of the Nanjing Massacre is not new and is perhaps, in the context of Japanese denial of the massacre for more than half a century, a symptom of a broader national anxiety to “‘prove’ that it actually happened.”[16] A comparison can be made here between City of Life and Death and its cinematic precedent, Mou Tun-fei’s Black Sun (1995). Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, Black Sun integrates documentary footage of the Nanjing Massacre into its dramatized and fictional narrative. In one of the most shocking images of the film, the meticulously reenacted execution of an elderly Chinese monk by a Japanese soldier cuts to the actual photograph which the scene is based on just as the gunshot is heard. In many ways, the recreation of such gory and violent images seems to be, at best, an attempt to bear testimony to the most excessive, horrific, and spectacular scenes of the Nanjing Massacre, and at worst, an exploitative atrocity film. Even though Lu Chuan disavows the medium of horror in representing the Nanjing Massacre and does not use archival footage to shock the audience in the same way that Black Sun does, there is a similar attempt to mimic reality in City of Life and Death . Using the existing visual culture of the Sino-Japanese War to create the film’s “aura of authenticity,” Lu Chuan develops the setting of the film by drawing on documentary photographs that would be familiar to a Chinese audience exposed to scenes of a war-ravaged Nanjing.[17] The appropriation of and reference to archival footage in the name of historical realism, however, poses its own problems. In referring to “historical analogues” in the name of realism, there is an underlying assumption that archival photographs and film footage can capture the past as it happened—an objective, dispassionate record of scenes and events.[18] Yet, as Susan Sontag suggests, this is an impossible task for photography as “people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.”[19] In the context of war and genocide, however, the issues of realism are not only a theoretical debate, but have implications for our attempts to understand that past. Aside from film footage taken by the American missionary John Magee and a few other exceptions, the vast majority of all surviving visual records of the massacre were produced by the Japanese.[20] The collection of photographs that City of Life and Death was based on was in fact acquired from Japan and taken by Japanese soldiers and camera crew during the invasion of and subsequent massacre in Nanjing.[21] Although the motivations that lie behind the production of these images were very different from those of contemporary filmmakers like Lu Chuan, the mimicking of these photographic visions risk reproducing the very gaze of the perpetrator. As Elie Wiesel discusses in the context of the Holocaust: For the most part the images derive from enemy sources. The victim had neither cameras nor film. To amuse themselves, or to bring back souvenirs back to their families, or to serve Goebbel’s propaganda, the killers filmed sequences in one ghetto or another…The use of the faked, truncated images makes it difficult to omit the poisonous message that motivated them…Will the viewer continue to remember that these films were made by the killers to show the downfall and the baseness of their so-called subhuman victims?[22] Yet as Wiesel recognizes, these photographs serve an important purpose, whether for “eventual comprehension of the concentration camps’ existence” or as a representation of how the perpetrators perceived their role in war and genocide.[23] In this context, the problem with Lu Chuan’s appropriation of the photographic record is how it treats these photographs as an objective truth that allows one to unproblematically access the past. Rather than acknowledging the limits of the visual archive for our understanding of the Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death seems to reproduce the gaze of the perpetrators without self-reflexivity. In a startling sequence, hundreds of disheveled Chinese men, mistaken by the Japanese to be Chinese soldiers, are passively herded to the execution grounds and later mowed down by a barrage of bullets. At the end, the audience is almost made to identify with the Japanese perpetrators as the camera zooms in on the back of a Japanese soldier looking down on a sea of individually indistinguishable corpses, accompanied by non-diegetic and somewhat triumphant martial music. A Japanese soldier, standing on a pedestal, gazes out on a sea of Chinese corpses after a mass shooting. Scene from City of Life and Death. In relying on historical photographs, the realist cinematography of City of Life and Death also runs the risk of being tacitly pornographic in its depiction of sexual atrocities committed as part of the Nanjing Massacre. By transforming grainy photographs of women’s bodies into the aesthetic medium of cinema, the naked bodies of rape victims become a spectacle to fulfill the “public fantasies” associated with watching rape on-screen.[24] The relationship between reality and interpretation must again be problematized, and the gaze of the perpetrator is even more pernicious in inscribing meaning onto sexual atrocities. As film scholar and feminist Tanya Horeck argues, since the same scene of rape can be interpreted differently depending on the viewer and context, representations of rape in cinema are “battles over the ownership of meaning and of reality.”[25] In the context of City of Life and Death , sexual assault survivors are depicted as passive and disenfranchised victims whose voices never get heard. The subjectivity of the rape victim is not only effaced by the photographic gaze of the Japanese perpetrator, but continues to be suppressed in representations of rape within national discourse. As Chungmoo Choi convincingly argues in reference to the comfort women issue in Korea, “comfort women discourse displaces the women’s subjectivity, which is grounded on pain, and constructs the women only as symbols of national shame. As such, the primacy of the discourse on comfort women attends not to the welfare of women’s subjectivity but to the national agenda of overcoming colonial emasculation.”[26] Applying Choi’s analysis to the context of the Nanjing Massacre, it is telling how the “Rape of Nanking” continues to persist as a popular moniker for the “Nanjing Massacre,” which has been for many years the standard in both English and Chinese language scholarship. By conflating actual experiences of sexual atrocities with the metaphorical rape/penetration of the national homeland, the name appropriates rape into a masculine national discourse that obfuscates individual experiences of pain and trauma. In its representation of rape, City of Life and Death operates firmly within this national discourse. Depicting most of the Chinese characters in the film as an indistinguishable mass, Lu again represents the massive scale of sexual victimization at the cost of reducing the nature of these women to mere victims of rape. Like the “numbers game” which dominates national contestations over the history of the Nanjing Massacre between China and Japan, it is not the individual and subjective experiences of trauma, but its scale that counts towards the national narrative of victimhood.[27] Images of rape and sexual abuse abound in the film, but two female Chinese characters seem to stand out: Xiao Jiang, a prostitute, and Jiang Shuyun, a teacher. In one of two moments of dramatic self-sacrifice in the film, Xiao Jiang is the first to volunteer herself as one of the “100 comfort women” given to the Japanese army so as to spare the rape of other girls within the Safety Zone. While in the other sequence the Nationalist soldier Lu Jianxiong calmly stands up to face a certain but heroic death, Xiao Jiang’s sacrifice of her body is “naturalized by virtue of her being a prostitute in the first place.”[28] Raped to death, Xiao Jiang’s nude body is tragically and unceremoniously tossed into a pile of other bodies. Conversely, Shuyun’s death happens in a far more merciful and sympathetic manner. Captured by Japanese soldiers near the end of the film, Shuyun begs Japanese soldier Kadokawa to shoot her so as to save her from being sexually abused. It is thus implied that while Shuyun’s chastity is more important than her survival, for Xiao Jiang the sacrifice of her body and ultimately her life to protect the “pure” schoolgirls is an expectation. In doing so, the film fetishizes both the chastity of the schoolgirls and the illicit sexuality of the prostitutes. Such a portrayal fails to explore the individual subjectivities of the female characters, instead presenting them as symbolic rather than real figures. Like the discourse surrounding comfort women that prioritizes “a narrative of virgins forcefully kidnapped and raped over other experiences of victimhood,” the filmic representation of rape in City of Life and Death marginalizes the traumas suffered by individual rape victims, as it is the “compromised” and “indecent” women who are raped and their deaths neatly mark the national humiliation as a distant past.[29] Objectivity and Authenticity Entangled with the film’s quest to “recreate the world in its own image,” the pursuit of an objective representation of the Nanjing Massacre seems to be the film’s raison d’être. In this regard, a significant portion of City of Life and Death is framed from the perspective of the detached and presumably impartial Western observer.[30] Without a coherent narrative arc, the film is framed by a series of postcards written in English, by the American missionary Minnie Vautrin.[31] The film opens with a series of postcards that establish the historical background of the Nanjing Massacre, narrating the progress of the Japanese army from Beijing to Shanghai and finally to the then-capital Nanjing. Interestingly, there is no evidence that Vautrin actually wrote and sent postcards like these during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, even though she and Rabe—the two Westerners central to the film—detailed the fall of Nanjing extensively in their own diaries.[32] It is thus revealing that the film chose to imagine what Vautrin, rather than any Chinese character, would have written in her correspondence. In this case, the film’s quest for authenticity is implicated by the same notions of objectivity and detachment that plague the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre. Even though a vast collection of oral testimonies given by survivors has been collected, historical scholarship on the Nanjing Massacre has been slow to acknowledge and use these testimonies as reliable evidence.[33] Significantly, when Japanese reporter Honda Katsuichi published an extensive collection of interviews with Chinese survivors of the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese war crimes, he was accused of “presenting the Chinese side of the story uncritically” and deniers were quick to seize on any discrepancies in the testimonies as “evidence of the fabrication of the Nanjing Massacre.”[34] While there are undoubtedly limits to the ability of oral testimonies to serve as unquestionable facts, the testimonies of victims illuminate a particular contingent and subjective truth that cannot otherwise be understood. The fetishization of objectivity and neutrality thus leads one to prioritize the written records of detached Western observers, consequently obscuring a historically significant part of the Nanjing Massacre. Considering how Western foreigners were either expelled from the city by December 15 or otherwise confined within the Safety Zone, they could have only witnessed at best “a fraction of what actually happened afterwards in a larger area with hundreds of thousands of residents.”[35] In the face of continuing Japanese denial, reflected most notably in a statement made in 2012 by Mayor Takashi Kawamura stating that the “so-called Nanjing Massacre is unlikely to have taken place,” the quest for objective detachment is simultaneously understandable and obfuscating.[46] On one hand, the eyewitness testimonies of detached Western observers like John Rabe and the American missionaries present at the scene of the Nanjing Massacre are perceived, even within China, to provide an objective account of the massacre that can be used in the battle against denial. Yet on the other, the testimonies of Western observers can only be testimonies of themselves and of their immediate context. If, as Leo Tolstoy suggests, the gap between a real event and the various fragmentary and distorted recollections of it can only be overcome “by collecting the memories of every individual (even the humblest soldier) who had been directly or indirectly involved in the battle,” then the attempt to frame and understand the Nanjing Massacre from the narrow perspective of Western observers elides the voices of Nanjing residents and survivors who undoubtedly experienced and remembered very differently from foreign bystanders.[37] Even though the choice to emphasize the role played by Western observers may not have been an ideal one for Lu Chuan, it is nonetheless an inadvertent effect of historiography that relies on written-documentation generated by Western observers—the famous The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang is one prominent example.[38] Belonging to a different world, the computer-animated yet realist postcards written in Vautrin’s hand reveal the limits of a Western perspective in representing the trauma of the Nanjing Massacre—its language is detached and devoid of the emotions that often underlie the testimonies collected from Nanjing residents and survivors. One of the postcards written by Minnie Vautrin shown immediately after brutal scenes of massacre and rape. Scene from City of Life and Death. Rethinking Realism Even though City of Life and Death and Devils on the Doorstep share the distinctive stylistic feature of black-and-white cinematography, its use in the latter film subverts the canonical understanding of realism and reveals the constructed nature of the photographic image. Jiang’s endeavor is an interesting and ambitious one, not only because cinematic realism originated in black-and-white cinematography, but also because, as highlighted earlier, war newsreels are frequently incorporated into documentary and docudrama films to enhance the authenticity of historical narratives. In a similar way, historical documentation is often perceived to possess a certain realist quality as a black-and-white text with fixed meaning, even though like photography, it is mediated by layers of language and interpretation.[39] Like City of Life and Death , Jiang’s film shares a close relationship with historical photographs of the Second Sino-Japanese war. In an interview, Jiang revealed how, in preparing for the film, they “took photographs of our actors in their costumes and made Xerox copies of them and placed them next to Xeroxes of actual historical photographs. No one could distinguish between them.”[40] Yet, unlike City of Life and Death , Devils on the Doorstep makes neither pretension to being a documentary nor attempts to imply the historicity of the narrative.[41] Instead, the film uses the visual medium associated with realism to make a self-reflexive critique of the relationship between history as the past and history as a representation. In the final moments of Devils on the Doorstep , the black-and-white aesthetic switches to color just as Ma Dasan is beheaded in an execution ordered by the returning Nationalist government. In this scene, we are shown Dasan’s execution first from the perspective of a Chinese villager watching the public execution, and then, in the only subjective shot in the entire film, from the disturbing perspective of Dasan’s decapitated head, watching as the crowd cheers.[42] Unlike scenes of execution and death in City of Life and Death , the depiction of violence in this scene is swift and hardly pornographic. The lack of sentimentality and horrific excess—the two elements that characterize portrayals of violence in City of Life and Death —makes this scene, in some ways, even more brutal and disturbing. On one level, by shifting attention away from the violence and to the act of watching it, Jiang criticizes the passive act of spectatorship that the surrounding Chinese villagers are guilty of and that we, as the audience, are complicit in. The spectating peasants exhibit no sympathy for Dasan, laughing and howling in a manner reminiscent of how the Japanese soldiers laughed and watched while butchering Dasan’s entire village. While parallels can be drawn between the reactions in these two situations, the contexts and the actors within it are obviously not analogous. Yet it is also the semblance of law and order in the case of Dasan’s execution that makes this scene especially troubling. While the Nationalist government claims to restore civilization to a village previously ruled by the savage Japanese devils,[43] they are guilty of what Michael Taussig calls “mimetic excess” by appropriating the very savagery they are meant to abolish.[44] Of course, this critique folds back on and implicates the spectators, who are not troubled by the brutality but behave with a veneer of civility which they believe divorces them from the plight of the victims. On another level, the shifts in perspective in this final scene expose the inherent gap between representation and reality, and consequently, the appropriation of wartime suffering and trauma by national narratives of the past. As the camera shifts away from Dasan’s perspective and to a frontal shot of Dasan’s decapitated head, the moving picture transforms into still photography and then into iconography.[45] Not only is this implied by the woodcut-like texture of the final shot, the image itself closely resembles widely-circulated atrocity photographs that have become a cliché in depicting Japanese wartime cruelty. In this way, the multiple shifts in perspective force the audience to question the truth and reliability of each perspective and to eventually acknowledge the gap between these different representations of reality and reality itself. Jiang further interrogates the relationship between representation and reality using Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q, to which Jiang frequently compared his film.[46] The novella tells the story of an ordinary Chinese peasant with the ability to transform personal humiliations and defeats into victories through deliberate renaming and misnaming. Though Ah Q is eventually publicly executed for committing theft, the narrator turns away from his satirical tone and presents this moment in a sympathetic and reflective manner. Lu Xun writes at the end of the novella: “Naturally all agreed that Ah Q had been a bad man, the proof being that he had been shot; for if he had not been bad, how could he have been shot?”[47] Turning the target of satire from Ah Q to the villagers, Lu Xun highlights the artifice of allegedly true representations: whether Ah Q’s stories of his defeats/victories, the court’s narrative of Ah Q’s guilt, or even, in a self-reflexive turn, the narrator’s/ Lu Xun’s “true story” of Ah Q.[48] While the motivations for Lu Xun’s literature must be read against the social and intellectual milieu of the May Fourth Movement, his critique of the “violence of representation” and of the privileging of certain voices over others remains highly relevant to the study of Chinese representations of the War of Resistance.48 In this regard, Jiang’s dialogue with The True Story of Ah Q highlights how conventional historical narratives about the war, framed as narratives of heroic national resistance and eventual triumph, ultimately purge history of its horrors and violence. Deconstructing Nationalist Tropes Like Lu Xun’s novella, Devils on the Doorstep must also be situated within the social context in which Jiang grew up. In various interviews, Jiang reveals how the images of Japanese “devils” in the film are based on “their looks, as I remembered them.”[49] Born in 1963, Jiang obviously did not see Japanese soldiers firsthand, but nonetheless had a certain image of them based on the representations of the war he grew up with. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Jiang was familiar with images of the Japanese devil created in the “Red Classics” and other revolutionary films of that time. In these black-and-white propaganda films, such as Railroad Guerrillas (1956) and Mine Warfare (1962), the Japanese soldiers, always referred to colloquially as guizi,[50] were treacherous but ultimately silly and comical figures that would be easily ambushed and defeated by patriotic villagers.[51] Cognizant of the problems with such representations, Jiang resists conventional stereotypes of the Chinese peasant as ones which would avenge the nation for Japan’s brutal occupation. Devils on the Doorstep attempts to do this by considering how ordinary people experienced the war and faced up to the “prospect of imminent death during wartime.”[52] Like “Survival,” the novella from which the film was adapted, Devils on the Doorstep shifts away from the dominant perspective of patriotic Chinese soldiers and focuses on ordinary peasants’ quotidian struggle for survival.[53] Even though the mysterious resistance fighter catalyzes the tragic chain of events, he is ultimately a marginal figure in the film, appearing only once to drop off the two prisoners and, unlike in the “Red Classics” that Jiang alludes to, is never a heroic figure that leads the peasant resistance. Thus, resistance against the Japanese, the arch-signifier of the Chinese war mythology, is represented in the film as an abstract ideology foisted on the reluctant peasants, with a heavy and palpable dose of the absurd.[54] Rather than portray heroic and martial resistance, the film depicts the daily life of a Chinese village under Japanese occupation as if told from the perspective of the peasants themselves.[55] Devils on the Doorstep opens not with a scene of soldiers fighting or of Japanese “devils,” but of daily life in an ordinary village in Japanese-occupied China. It is clear from the opening sequence that despite having been a base for Japanese navy reservists for eight years, the village has been relatively untouched by the war. As Japanese sailors parade through the village playing their jaunty naval song, local Chinese children clamor in excitement while waiting for the Japanese commander to hand out candy. The commander then stops to bark instructions at one of the adult villagers to bring him clean water that night and the latter responds pliantly, like one of the children, even calling the Japanese soldier sensei (Japanese for “teacher”). While there is certainly a clear sense of hierarchy governing their interactions, and perhaps some fear in the peasant receiving the orders, there is no hatred and vengefulness as one might expect. Instead, the villagers adapt to the occupation with ingenuity, compromising with Japanese soldiers so as to create for themselves a space of autonomy and local “resistance.” From this perspective of the peasants, one can appreciate how the daily life of the war was motivated by a palpable sense of survival more than any abstract and ideological notion of nationhood. Yet it is also the everyday struggle for survival that reveals both the cruelty of war and the resilience of humanity, whose historical struggles against violence often get drowned in “black-and-white versions of history that pay attention only to the grand schemes of antagonism, such as class, nation, and ideology.”[56] Chinese peasant children dancing to the tune of the Japanese naval song, excitedly awaiting candy from the Japanese naval commander. Scene from Devils on the Doorstep. By representing the War of Resistance from below, Jiang also blurs the lines between wartime collaboration and resistance, perhaps explaining state and popular censure against Devils on the Doorstep .[57] The issue of collaboration during the War of Resistance has been a thorny issue in Chinese national memory. Broadly remembered as a “good war” which legitimized the nation, the party and the experiences of some who lived through it, national remembrances of the Second Sino-Japanese War tend to emphasize the Chinese as “positive and patriotic figures who are at the same time victims of savagery by others, rather than authors of their own misfortune.”[58] In this national narrative, collaborators, like the translator Dong Hanchen in Devils on the Doorstep and Rabe’s secretary Mr. Tang in City of Life and Death , are dismissed and demonized as hanjian, a term that is conventionally used to mean “traitor” but literally means a “betrayer of the Chinese race.”[59] Even though both films address the issue of collaboration, the discourse of salvation in City of Life and Death ultimately places the nation above the individual and fails to challenge nationalistic representations of collaboration. Hoping to protect the rest of his family from the brutality of the Japanese army, Tang collaborates with the Japanese by informing on Chinese “soldiers” living within the Safety Zone, simultaneously earning for himself the titles of tomodachi (Japanese for “friend”) and hanjian.[60] While this portrayal of Tang humanizes him far more than most representations of collaborators in Chinese cinema, and consequently seems to put him in a moral gray zone, the film ultimately adopts the nationalist narrative as Tang redeems himself and sacrifices his life for the sake of another, morally untainted Chinese compatriot.[61] By making Tang atone for his sin of collaboration, Lu projects patriotic heroism as a form of fantasy and an imaginative attempt at self-salvation. By telling the story of wartime collaboration as a heroic narrative of salvation, City of Life and Death not only obfuscates individual narratives and understandings of collaboration, but also suggests that the individual may somehow lose his life to save the nation to which he belongs. It is telling that Tang’s last words to his Japanese executioner were “my wife is pregnant again,” suggesting again that his patriotic death ensures the longevity of the Chinese nation.[62] In this regard, the film seems to be an attempt to “undo Japanese imperialism and injustice through a patriotic narration of the unity of the Chinese nation,” subordinating the individual to the nation, and ultimately failing to uphold collaboration as a possible moral choice.[63] In contrast, Devils on the Doorstep problematizes the meaning and morality of collaboration. Even though the most obvious collaborator—the translator Dong Hanchen—dies at the end of the film, his death is not a heroic one that absolves him of his guilt or puts the Chinese nation on a pedestal. It is instead an absurd execution filled with grim irony. When the KMT soldiers return and replace the Japanese dictatorship with a Nationalist one, the first order of business is the punishment and execution of wartime collaborators. Made an example by the Nationalist government, Hanchen is denounced as “scum who aided the Japanese to slaughter their own compatriots.” He is portrayed by the KMT military spokesperson, a comical figure speaking with a high-brow accent that distinguishes him from the village folk, as having “aided tyranny and avoided arrest,” his hands “stained with Chinese blood,” and “only execution will quell the masses anger.”[64] The irony of the KMT’s statements cannot be more clear—not only are Hanchen’s hands not “stained with Chinese blood,” Hanchen himself is not the typical opportunistic collaborator who has betrayed his people to serve the enemy. Rather than acting strictly as a translator for Hanaya, the Japanese soldier for whom he works, Hanchen deliberately mistranslates Hanaya in an attempt to preserve the peace. For example, the comical opening encounter between the villagers and the prisoners reads something like this: Village head: So, what’s his name? Have him tell us himself. Hanaya (in Japanese): Shoot me! Kill me! If you’ve got the guts, cowards! Villagers: How come his name is so long? Village head: Has he killed Chinese men? Violated Chinese women? Hanaya (in Japanese): Of course, that’s what I came to China for! Hanchen (translating): (hesitating) He’s new to China. Hasn’t seen any women yet. He’s killed no one. He’s a cook. (turning to Hanaya) Why are you doing this? Hanaya (in Japanese): I want to anger these cowards! I won’t cooperate with swine! Hanchen (translating): He begs you not to kill him! From this sequence, it can be observed how Hanchen is not a spineless stooge of the Japanese and does not merely “turn Japanese into Chinese and Chinese into Japanese.”[66] Through his mediation of language, he instead opens up a “humane channel of communication” that offers some hope of rapprochement between the Chinese and the Japanese.[67] In contrast, without a translator, the town square becomes like the Tower of Babel when the Chinese KMT first return. It is comical how the KMT representative and the accompanying American and British soldiers, despite their military rank, are unable to “order” a Japanese peddler to move his goods off the road or even just to stand still. Unable to communicate with each other whatsoever, they eventually drive their military jeep over his goods and use the language of force to achieve their goals. Seen in this context, Hanchen is not merely a passive translator who is servile to his Japanese masters but is instead an active agent who uses language as a way to shape reality and avoid violence. In his use of language, Hanchen can perhaps be compared to Guido in Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), a controversial film that similarly used both humor and surreal scenes to represent the Holocaust. As the main character who generates most of the comedy of the film, Guido turns the threats issued by concentration camp guards into instructions for a game so as to shelter his son from the horrors of their experience. Unable to stop the perversity of the camp and the likely death that awaits both of them, Guido’s translations are at least an attempt to protect his son’s childhood and innocence. In this regard, Guido and Hanchen both purposefully severe the link between words and their signified reality so as to seek a way out of an otherwise entrapping situation and to reclaim the possibility of survival.[68] Crucially, Hanchen’s “translations” help the peasants overcome the social and cognitive distance that Hanaya strives to enlarge with his racist vitriol and yearnings for martyrdom, possibly avoiding violent confrontation and defusing the situation. Dong Hanchen and Hanaya Kosaburo panting after frantically shouting over each other during the interrogation – Hanaya shouting in Japanese and Hanchen in Chinese. The latter deliberately mistranslates Hanaya’s demands to be killed. Scene from Devils on the Doorstep. By looking at the discourse surrounding collaboration (hanjian) from the perspective of the villagers, Devils on the Doorstep also exposes the ambiguous and populist aspects of the label. Even though the Nationalist legislature established the hanjian crime as early as August 1937, in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack in Beijing, the term was broadly defined and indiscriminately used.[69] In part, this may have been because positions about collaboration and resistance were constantly evolving. Despite its efforts to present itself as a resistance government, the KMT practiced a policy of non-resistance towards Japan for years and did not completely reject the idea of peace talks with Japan until August 1937.[70] Combined with the encouragement of popular vigilantism in the prosecution of collaborators, the label of collaboration gained a populist valence that empowered passive victims of the war with “an opportunity to redeem their passivity with a display of patriotic fervor.”[71] Not only is this evident at Hanchen’s public execution, the villagers in the film constantly throw around the term hanjian, struggling to reach a stable meaning for the term and to reconcile that meaning with their own understandings of right and wrong. Is it collaboration to return the prisoners to the Japanese? Is it collaboration to feed the prisoners? Conversely, what if one were to starve them to death instead? What about the simple act of referring to the Japanese soldiers as “teacher” (sensei)? Eventually, however, the decisions made by the villagers remain outside the demands of nationalistic loyalties and discourse. When they find out the Japanese prisoner Hanaya is a peasant like them, the villagers, rather than “coming out with hackneyed expressions of hatred for a despised enemy,” acknowledge respect for someone with whom they have common ground and find solidarity with.[72] While their identification with Hanaya and exchange with the Japanese army may be seen through the nationalist lens as collaboration and fraternization with the enemy, the villagers ultimately complicate the nationalist dichotomy between collaboration and resistance, and open up the possibility of acknowledging the indiscriminate use of the demonizing label hanjian.[73] Unlike in City of Life and Death , collaboration in Devils on the Doorstep is always presented as an active choice, albeit under the oppressive conditions of war and occupation. By representing the war from the perspective of a single village, Jiang Wen confronts the complexity of communal decision-making in the village and avoids portraying his characters as one-dimensional and passive victims of the war. In contrast, the capacity for choice is evaporated in City of Life and Death when a kaleidoscope of perspectives is presented without interrogating any single one. Tang’s collaboration with the Japanese is presented as a natural consequence of his fear and uncertainty upon hearing about Rabe’s recall to Germany. Likewise, even the film’s protagonist—the sympathetic Japanese soldier Kadokawa—is presented as a character stripped of choice. In many ways, he is the morally upright and pure Japanese soldier corrupted by the brutality and arbitrariness of war. In the only scene where he kills, his shooting is an impulse without any lethal intention.[74] He is also only an observer to the brutal scenes of rape and massacre, seemingly absolving him of responsibility by attributing these acts to the universal character of war. Forced to witness the brutality, yet in no position to stop it, Kadokawa endures the trauma and guilt of war, himself becoming a victim of the war he is complicit in perpetrating. Confronted with this choiceless situation, Kadokawa ultimately commits suicide to rid himself of his guilt.[75] Such representations of the dehumanizing aspect of the Sino-Japanese war are, however, neither new nor exclusive to cinematic depictions of the war. Many soldiers who testified to the atrocity in Nanjing put the blame squarely on the war, and while these statements are truthful and useful to some degree, ...blaming everything on the war is at best inadequate and at worst can be used as an excuse to avoid confronting the crucial issue of agency, for even in the most brutal of wars not everyone killed or raped civilians. Acknowledgment of the dehumanizing impact of war, although highly important, cannot replace a critical analysis of the individual decisions as well as the particular political institutions.[76] Even though Devils on the Doorstep focuses more significantly on the Chinese experience of the war, it can be considered a cinematic attempt at critically analyzing the individual decisions made during the war. Jiang’s attempt at doing so can be appreciated by comparing his film with the original novella on which it is based. Told using the mode of heroic resistance, You Fengwei’s “Survival” presents the village chief who receives the two prisoners as acting primarily out of a sense of political duty. As kind-hearted folks, the villagers treat the prisoners humanely; but when it is revealed by the communist leadership that the prisoners are no longer of use and should be executed in situ, the villagers eventually carry out what amounts to a military command.[77] When confronted by the interpreter-prisoner, the chief’s only defense is: “Tell you what, you and the Jap devil’s capital punishments were decided by the resistance fighters, not us. We are just carrying out their orders. Understand?”[78] By justifying their actions as an order, the villagers are able to relieve themselves of the moral burden. In contrast, the film version presents the choices available to Dasan even amidst the oppressive conditions of occupation. Even though the mysterious resistance fighter forced Dasan to take in the prisoners at gunpoint, Dasan is later conscious of the choices available to him and his fellow villagers. For example, he speaks out against the option of killing the two prisoners even though they present a palpable and constant threat to the lives of the villages. To Dasan, killing the prisoners is “just not right” and he insists that “we [the villagers] can’t just decide to kill them. It’s just not good.”[79] Even though he eventually fails to convince the other villagers and it is decided through the drawing of lots that the task of executing the prisoners would fall on him, Dasan is still able to carve out space for himself to do what intuitively feels right to him. Acting against fate, he chooses to hide the prisoners instead of killing them as was ordered by his fellow villagers. Thinking of himself as an active agent rather than a passive victim, Dasan ultimately blames himself for the Japanese massacre of his village and attempts to seek revenge for it. While holding himself responsible for the deaths of his fellow villagers denies him “the complication of moral luck,” it is nonetheless clear that attributing what happened purely to luck “voids the subject of moral responsibility.”[80] In this context, Devils on the Doorstep presents the possibility for choice, no matter how limited, under the conditions of war and occupation. For Jiang, the conditions of nationalism and war are no longer adequate or exculpatory justifications for acts of violence—not only did Dasan choose to shelter the prisoners in spite of an execution order, the Japanese soldiers also chose to commit the senseless acts of violence even after the Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s surrender. In the final scene of the war, the burning village is disturbingly set against Hirohito’s radio announcement of unconditional surrender, ironically asserting: “Should we continue the fight, not only would the Japanese nation be obliterated, but human civilization would be totally extinguished.”[81] Framed in this way, the orgy of violence at the end of the war is not so much a direct military command even if it is linked symbolically with the Emperor, but is instead a choice made by Japanese soldiers, having fraternized with the Chinese, to purge themselves of the polluting effects of proximity. Conclusion By visualizing wartime atrocities, cinema claims a place in the public consciousness of history by recording, re-envisioning, and investigating the past. For City of Life and Death , the representation of trauma is an indisputable testament to the violence and brutality of the Second Sino-Japanese War. In adopting the aesthetics of conventional cinematic realism, the film posits that the past can be recreated in its own image and that the audience can thus be somehow transported back into that past. Referring to the use of three-dimensional dioramas in the War of Resistance Museum just outside Beijing, the museum guide states that by “cleverly taking models, artifacts and tableaux and making them into one, so that the eye cannot distinguish between what is painting and what is a model, [it feels] as if you were placing yourself on the battlefield at the time [of the event itself].”[83] While used in a different context, the realist sensibilities of dioramic representation seem to be equally characteristic of City of Life and Death . Yet as Hayden White argues, the scale and intensity of the traumatic events of the twentieth century make it impossible for any single human agent to have a full and conscious view of the causes, effects and moral implications of such events. Consequently, any expectation of representational objectivity must be set aside as well. The failure of humanist historiography for White means abandoning realist storytelling techniques and seeking literary modernism, which “provide the possibility of de-fetishizing both events and the fantasy accounts of them which deny the threat they pose, in the very process of pretending to represent them realistically.”[84] Nonetheless, the relationship between realism and other modes of representation are far more complicated. In this regard, Devils on the Doorstep is realistic without necessarily being realist.[85] By acknowledging that the past cannot be recreated in its own image, the film forces a critical rethinking of cinematic realism that achieves, in some ways, a more truthful representation of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Endnotes [1] Vivian Lee, “The Chinese War Film: Reframing National History in Transnational Cinema,” in American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows, eds. Lisa Funnell and Man-Fung Yip (New York: Routledge, 2014), 101. [2] Gary Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 38-39. [3] Yinan He, “History, Chinese Nationalism and the Emerging Sino-Japanese Conflict,” Journal of Contemporary China 16, no. 50 (February 2007), 8. [4] Timothy Tsu, Sandra Wilson and King-fai Tam, “The Second World War in postwar Chinese and Japanese film,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, eds. King-fai Tam, Timothy Tsu and Sandra Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2-3. [5] Yinan He, “Remembering and Forgetting the War: Elite Mythmaking, Mass Reaction, and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1950-2006,” History & Memory 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007), 49. ‘Red Classics’ (translated from the Chinese term hongse jingdian) refer to art works that reflect the ideological underpinnings of the CCP and often are used with reference to works that were approved during the Cultural Revolution. [6] Yu Hua, “China Waits for an Apology,” New York Times, April 9, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/opinion/yu-hua-cultural-revolution-nostalgia.html. [7] Timothy Tsu, “A genealogy of anti-Japanese protagonists in Chinese war films, 1949-2011,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 23. [8] Jie Li, “Discolored vestiges of history: Black and white in the age of color cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, no. 3 (2012), 250. [9] Dai Jinhua, “I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human,” Social Text 29, no. 4 (2011), 141-142. My understanding of melodrama is borrowed from Amos Goldberg’s exploration of the relationship between the victim’s voice and melodrama. See Amos Goldberg, “The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History,” History and Theory 48, no. 3 (Oct 2009), 220-237. [10] Yanhong Zhu, “A past revisited: Re-presentation of the Nanjing Massacre in City of Life and Death,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, no. 2 (2013), 87-88. While most of Lu’s characters are ostensibly “historical analogues” inspired by real characters that have been written about, the two Western foreigners in the film—John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin—are actual people who lived in Nanjing during the massacre and documented it extensively in their diaries and correspondence. Together with other foreigners, they helped to set up the Nanjing Safety Zone. [11] Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006), 443-481. [12] André Bazin, What is Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 25. [13] Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin,” 445. [14] Li Yue, “Dancing with the Camera: A Special Interview with Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Cinematographer Cao Yu” (in Chinese), May 11, 2009, http://old.pku-hall.com/WYPPZZ.aspx?id=456. Note that Nanjing! Nanjing! is the alternative English-language title for Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death. [15] He Xi, “Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Sichuan Connection” (in Chinese), April 24, 2009, http://www.cinema.com.cn/YingYuTianXia/2245.htm. I borrow the concept of the “reality effect” from Roland Barthes, who argues that what we call “real” is “never more than a code of representation.” See Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 80. [16] Michael Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” East Asia 19, no. 4 (2001), 88. [17] Rebecca Nedostup, “City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing! 2009) and the Silenced Nanjing Native” in Through a Lens Darkly: Films of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, eds. John Michalczyk and Raymond Helmick (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 64. [18] Shao Yan, “In the film we have kept our integrity: Exclusive interview with Lu Chuan” (in Chinese), Dianying shijie, April 2009, 24-29. [19] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 88. [20] Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” 95. [21] He Xi, “Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Sichuan Connection.” [22] Elie Wiesel, “Foreword” (trans. Annette Insdorf) in Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xii. [23] Wiesel, “Foreword,” xii. [24] Amanda Weiss, “Contested Images of Rape: The Nanjing Massacre in Chinese and Japanese Films,” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (Winter 2016), 437. [25] Tanya Horeck, Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (New York: Routledge, 2013), 13. [26] Chungmoo Choi, “The Politics of War Memories towards Healing” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), eds. Takashi Fujitani, Lisa Yoneyama and Geoffrey White (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 399. [27] Daqing Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on Historical Inquiry,” in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, ed. Joshua Fogel (Berkley: University of California Press, 2000), 151. See also Fujiwara Akira, “The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview,” in The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38, ed. Bob Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 51-52. [28] Nedostup, “City of Life and Death,” 65. [29] Weiss, “Contested Images of Rape,” 437. [30] As Michael Berry notes, the reliance on presumably impartial and objective foreigners to authenticate the Nanjing Massacre is not new to Chinese cinema, and he traces this “legitimizing power of the West” to Luo Guanqun’s Massacre in Nanjing (1987). See Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” 90-91. [31] Kevin Lee, “City of Life and Death,” Cineaste 35, no. 2, Spring 2010, https://www.cineaste.com/spring2010/city-of-life-and-death/. [32] John Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, trans. John Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Minnie Vautrin, Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). [33] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 139-143. Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking also describes the Chinese trauma of the Nanjing Massacre primarily through the lens of Western observers, relying heavily on the diaries of American missionaries Minnie Vautrin and John Magee, as well as the German businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe. See Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic, 1997). [34] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 142; Honda Katsuichi, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998). [35] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 139. [36] Paul Armstrong, “Fury over Japanese politician’s Nanjing Massacre denial,” CNN, February 23, 2012, https://www.cnn.com/2012/02/23/world/asia/china-nanjing-row/index.html. [37] Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 95. [38] Lu Chuan declined an offer to direct a film about the Nanjing Massacre that, according to him, “valorized” the role of John Rabe. See Keen Zhang, “City of Sorrow: Competing film portrayals of the Nanjing Massacre,” China.org.cn, April 30, 2009, http://china.org.cn/culture/2009-04/30/content_17702091.htm. Interestingly, the heavy influence of Western-centric historiography on City of Life and Death can be observed from how the main character Kadokawa Masao was reconstructed from a “historical analogue” found in Vautrin’s diaries. See Vautrin, Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing. [39] This is encapsulated in the Chinese phrase “白纸黑字” (baizhi heizi), which literally means “white paper with black words” and refers to the fixity/conclusiveness of written evidence. [40] Li, “Discolored vestiges of history,” 250. [41] Jerome Silbergeld, Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 150. [42] In doing so, the film departs the realm of conventional realism and into the realm of surrealism. See Kristof Van den Troost, “War, Horror and Trauma: Japanese atrocities on Chinese screens,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 62-63. [43] This is, of course, a reference to the eponymous “devils” in the film. In fact, Jiang Wen’s connection of the “devils” to the Japanese soldiers is even clearer in the original Chinese-language title of the film “鬼子来了” (guizi lailie), with the guizi (literally “devils”/”ghosts”) being frequently invoked in both wartime and postwar parlance to refer to the Japanese. See Julian Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war: the devils and buffoons of Jiang Wen’s Guizi Laile,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 2, no. 2, September 2004, 107-108. [44] Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992). David Wang applies the same concept to his analysis of Lu Xun’s literature, who was traumatized by his experience of the First Sino-Japanese War and subsequent turned to writing literature as a way of ‘saving China’s soul’. See David Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 35. [45] Li, “Discolored vestiges of history,” 254. [46] Lu Xun, “The True Story of Ah Q,” in Call to Arms (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2010), 141-212. Cheng Qingsong and Huang Ou, My Camera Doesn’t Lie (in Chinese) (Beijing: Zhongguo Youyi, 2002), 72-73. [47] Lu Xun, “The True Story of Ah Q,” 209. [48] Feng Zongxin, “Fictional Narrative as History: Reflection and Deflection,” Semiotica 170, no. 1, 2008, 189; Andrew Jones, “The Violence of the Text: Reading Yu Hua and Shi Zhicun,” Positions 2, Winter 1994, 593. See also Martin Huang, “The Inescapable Predicament: The Narrator and His Discourse in ‘The True Story of Ah Q’,” Modern China 16, no. 4, October 1990, 435. [49] Cheng and Huang, My Camera Doesn’t Lie, 75. [50] A derogatory term referring to the Japanese and other foreigners. See note 42. [51] Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 107-108. See also Xu, Sinascape, 43-44. [52] You Fengwei, From ‘Survival’ to ‘Devils on the Doorstep’ (in Chinese) (Beijing: Beijing Publishing House, 1999), 5. [53] You Fengwei, “Survival,” in Life Channel (in Chinese) (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue, 2005). [54] Haiyan Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 256. [55] Much of the film is shot within the claustrophobic interiors of village houses, where the villagers discuss and deliberate what to do with the prisoners. The use of language and poetry also reflects the playfulness and lyricism of peasant storytelling methods. See Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 112. [56] Xu, Sinascape, 44. See also Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 113. [57] Even though Devils on the Doorstep won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, Jiang’s success was almost completely ignored in China. His film was later banned for release in China. Chinese critics have argued that the film was “insufficiently patriotic” and had “grave errors in the representation of historical truth.” See Wang Fanghua, “Devils on the Doorstep’s Black and White Emotions through a Color Filter” (in Chinese), Dianying Pingjie, August 2013, 36-37. [58] Rana Mitter, “China’s ‘Good War’: Voices, Locations, and Generations in the Interpretation of the War of Resistance to Japan” in Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia, eds. Sheila Miyoshi Jager & Rana Mitter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 188-189. [59] Yun Xia, Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 5. [60] Not only is the line between “soldier” and “civilian” blurred in the film and in reality, where a significant portion of the Chinese resistance army was composed of poorly trained and ill-equipped conscripts, most of the “soldiers” in the Safety Zone were also injured and disarmed, as Tang makes clear. [61] Zhu, “A past revisited,” 102. [62] Lu Chuan, Nanjing! Nanjing!: City of Life and Death, 2009. [63] Siu Leng Li, “The theme of salvation in Chinese and Japanese war movies,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 82. [64] Wen Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep, 2000. [65] Paola Voci, “The Sino-Japanese War in Ip Man: From miscommunication to poetic combat,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 46. [66] Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep. [67] Silbergeld, Body in Question, 93. [68] Paola Voci, “The Light out of the tunnel: Re-thinking Chinese cinema’s war film realism,” Parol XXVII, no. 25, 2014, 93. See also Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1, 2001, 255. [69] Xia, Down with Traitors, 11-12. [70] Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 203. [71] Xia, Down with Traitors, 7. [72] Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 114. [73] Xia reaches a similar conclusion from the analysis of postwar trial records of Chinese hanjian. See Xia, Down with Traitors, Chapter 2. [74] Stephanie Brown, “Victims, Heroes, Men, and Monsters: Revisiting a Violent History in City of Life and Death,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32, no. 6, 2015, 531. [75] Zhu, “A past revisited,” 95-97. [76] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 157-158. [77] Tian Yu, “From Red Sorghum to Devils on the Doorstep: Conceptual evolution in Chinese film adaptations,” Postscript 23, no. 3, Summer 2004. [78] Translation from Haiyan Lee. See Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, 258. [79] Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep. [80] Translation from Haiyan Lee. See Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, 262. [81] Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep. [82] Silbergeld, Body in Question, 105. See also Xu, Sinascape, 49. [83] Rana Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History, and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987-1997,” China Quarterly 161, March 2000, 288. [84] Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 32. [85] Silbergeld, Body in Question, 82-86. Bibliography Armstrong, Paul. “Fury over Japanese politician’s Nanjing Massacre denial.” CNN. 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Author Name < Back Interview with Geoff Mulgan Catherine Nelli JPPE: Great. So, we'll start off speaking about your new book, Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination . Could you explain what political imagination and radical political imagination are before speaking about what the book is about, your argument, and your process researching and writing it? Mulgan: So I became more and more concerned in the last few years that we might have a worsening problem of political imagination. And there were various signs of this, there was a kind of obvious one which the many activists, the many people who are politically enthusiastic can very easily see into the future, how things could go horribly wrong, could see ecological disaster, climate catastrophe, and so on. Which in many ways is a good thing, but very much harder to imagine or describe almost any kind of social progress, what would be a significantly better way of organizing welfare, or democracy, or health, or education. I observed that we have a huge capacity now for technological imagination. Vast sums of money spent on think tanks and conferences, looking at smart homes or smart cities or AI and so on, but almost nothing comparable in terms of serious work thinking about how our future society or economy could be run, rather than just the hardware. Politics—it's very striking. On the one hand, how many leaders now talk about going back to make America great again, or France or Britain or China or India. The last US election was a contest between two old men who haven’t really said very much about where they would want the world to be in a generation or two from now. I have increasingly felt that this sort of failure of imagination was fueling in a very subtle way a sort of fatalism—a sense that actually the world won't get better. Just as in our own individual lives, if we can't see something good on the horizon, something which might be better for us a year, five years down the line, it's quite hard to be happy and thriving. I think there's something equivalent for societies and the whole world. What I did in the book is partly researching the past of social and political imagination. And there'll be many ways in which people tried to look ahead; they did it through writing utopias, and there are hundreds, if not 1000s, of utopian writings from feminist utopias of the 15th century through to the great 19th century ones, like Bella , which was, I think, at the time the second best selling author ever in the US. There were attempts to create model communities, model towns, model organizations. There's the role of generative ideas. And one of the things I point out in the book is that often quite generic ideas like human rights or a circular economy may be a bit vague at first, but they then spawn lots of other ideas which become useful and change the world. And a large part of the book is about methods: what are the methods we could be using now to get better at thoughtful, rigorous imagination of the future a generation or two from now? How do you use methods, often from creativity and design, to expand your menu of options, you can then interrogate each of those, many of them might not be attractive, but at least to cultivate the habit towards the muscle of thinking creatively ahead. I look at the role of universities in that, I look at the role of political parties, which at times in history have played a big role in imagination, but have largely vacated it in much of the world. And also the role of places—how to create museums, galleries, physical places where people can come together to imagine into the future. And if nothing else, I hope the book will spark at least a bit of a debate on the question: Do we have a problem? Maybe some people will say we don't have a problem. Some people may say, well, actually, imagination is always bad, it leads to terrible results, and many of the blueprints in the last century, and many of the utopias did have horrible results. And one of the arguments I make is that now, we need to combine imagination with experiments. So you don't impose a fully formed blueprint on a city or a society; you try it out in a much more organic, experimental way. And others may say actually, technology is the answer to everything and we don't have social imagination because we don't need it. We can fix everything with a new anti-aging drug or some fantastic ecology, which will sequester carbon and so on. As I say, I think all of those will be wrong, but at least hopefully that will get a debate going. JPPE Do you look at a sort of comparative analysis of case studies from different countries? Or is the structure of the book more idea based? Mulgan It’s ideas. Basically, there were lots of references to real examples, either from history or from the present. And one of the parts of the book which is a bit more like comparative political analysis is trying to compare the dominant political imaginaries of the next 20 or 30 years globally. What are they? And I argue probably the most powerful ones or the strongest ones are nationalist techno authoritarian ones, particularly China, Xi Jinping thought, but in a different way the BJP’s to visions of the future in India. Putin doesn't really have one in Russia. But he and Erdoğan are other examples. And I argue that this is a very powerful semi-imaginary which actually is rather vague about the future but tries to tie together, in some ways, quite traditional authoritarian nationalism with high technologies. It's very 19th century Prussian militarism. I look at different imaginaries of the Green Movement and some of the frictions and issues in deep and less deep ecological thought. I look at what might happen to liberalism, a revived neoliberalism, and different strands of conservatism. But essentially, that is an attempt at a comparative analysis of both current and future imaginaries. JPPE Do you think digital technologies detract from or contribute to radical political imaginations? What are the different ways that they could contribute or detract? And in what way should they be conceptualized and used to the benefit of imagination? Mulgan So I've got quite a background in digital technology—my PhD is in telecoms and I've probably been immersed in all these things. And my answer is essentially “both and.” So sometimes thinking about things digitally can be very useful because as happened to retailing, or banking, or relationships, all sorts of things, if you look at it through a digital lens, you often deconstruct what's going on. And then you can remake it in a completely different way. So you end up with Amazon, not with, you know, high street shops or with match.com rather than people meeting in bars. And in that sense, actually, digital technology is quite useful for social imagination. And any imagination of where democracy might be in 50 years time has to have a substantial digital element. And those places like Taiwan and Iceland are reinventing democracy. The US still seems to be stuck in an 18th century model of democracy. We don't quite understand why, but that's another story. Digital is part of that, but if you only think in a digital way, as so much of the movement around smart cities, smart data, and smart homes did, you usually end up with results which are not very pleasant for humans to live in or which lose all sorts of dimensions of the present. And I think this was a big failure of the internet, where there was some incredibly naive techno optimism about how on its own the internet would spread democracy, equality, removal, corporations, etc. And often the exact opposite happened. And that tells us there was a major intellectual failure amongst the sort of Silicon Valley thinkers who simply didn't understand what they were part of. And that's why thinking simultaneously with a social lens and a technological lens is vital for the next 50 or 100 years. JPPE What’s the difference between social and political imagination? How do they coincide and interact? Mulgan I think they overlap with each other. There isn't a straightforward boundary line. By politics we tend to mean the things which politicians end up talking about put into their programs, maybe pass laws about in Congress or Parliament or the Bundestag. And that is the world of politics, which often does include or has at times included powerful visions of where society might head. There are many examples of where that happens outside politics much more through social movements and daily life. And people are getting on with social innovation and were ignoring the political realm. And often things start off social and then become political, so many ecological ideas, like the idea of a circular economy and radical recycling or veganism, you know, these tended to begin very much with social movements, and much, much later, became politicized, became an issue for laws and elections and programs and carbon taxes and so on. So one of the things I try to look at in the book is this dynamic between the social and the political, and then back into the social. For example, when you pass new laws on equality they in turn then affect the norms within every organization, ultimately, maybe back to the household and the family too. JPPE You speak about the tapering off of visions of the future. There seems to be a desire for change within the social world but very few productive outlets to channel this desire. How do you foresee this changing over time and how would you wish it to change to spark future action? Mulgan I think one answer to that lies with institutions and what role they play, especially powerful institutions can either encourage this sort of work or discourage it. So take universities. I've been doing a parallel strand of work, looking at why it is that in universities, and particularly in social science, the sort of exploratory design work, thinking ahead work, has largely disappeared from most universities all over the world. It's disappeared partly for good reasons, as people have become more data driven and more empirical, and partly because a lot of the radicals moved into a safe space of critique, rather than proposal. That was one of the weird things which happened to Marxism in universities in the last 20 or 40 years. It moved out of real active politics into academic critique. And founders haven't rewarded it because they've tended to reward deepening work within disciplines, whereas exploratory creative work has spread across multiple disciplines. And in a paper I published last year in Germany, I tried to set out in more detail what a probe of exploratory social sciences would be; what it would look like for the universities to have significant interdisciplinary teams working on the design options of a zero carbon economy or a radically transformed mental health system. And that's what I hope universities could do. At the moment they have almost no role in this and it’s incredible in a way. There's so much brain power in universities, and they don't play an active role. JPPE What would it take for them to do that? Mulgan Leadership. Money. You have to have a debate, you have to believe there's a problem. People at universities acknowledge there is a problem needing to be solved. So one of my purposes is at least a debate about that. And then political parties. I mean, the political parties in much the world have rather atrophied, hollowed out, hardened. And often it's the new political parties who are more creative than the old ones, which dominate your country and my country and some others. But if you were inventing a political party now, it would probably have much more of its core purpose being to organize a dialogue with the public about options for the future, about ideas. Instead, they tend to be captured by interest groups. They just work on winning elections or their money goes into election fighting rather than thinking. They’ve lost the capability of having broad open dialogues as opposed to campaigning, and so on. And it's interesting. Some of the newer parties have experimented with much more interesting methods of social dialogue like the Five Star Movement in Italy, Podemos in Spain, and there are quite a few others. I wouldn't say they've got there. But a political party which aspires to run a country should be owning part of this conversation about the options for the future. I think cities can do it. Good mayors often do have the resources to bring the whole of a city into a discussion about its physical future. So for example, just now we've just finished a really interesting session with a group of cities. A project I coordinate looks at what can be done over the next five or 10 years for cities to really prioritize population level mental health. And that's something which, you know, much of the public thinks is kind of obvious, that they should be doing that. And yet, politics lags far behind and nearly all the money is still in physical health, and hospitals and things like that. And very few political parties would feel comfortable actually even talking about mental health as a priority. They’re stuck in an anachronistic way of seeing the world. JPPE When did you first become invested in the power of political imagination and creative imagination? And how did you first identify the lack of the imagination that you see now? Mulgan I don't know, I suppose in different ways I’d probably be part of this. I've had a career which has partly been working in governments top-down, and I was part of some quite good exercises of political leaders trying to spark this. So Tony Blair, who has both strengths and weaknesses, but did at various times try to encourage big public conversations about the future and future priorities. I worked for an Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who did a huge exercise, getting the whole country thinking 15, 20 years ahead on climate change and pensions and water, and then bringing 1000 people into parliament to talk about the results. So I have seen how good leaders can do this from the top down. And from the bottom up, lots of grassroots organizations, social innovation projects, I've automatically tried to think radically about the future. But I guess since the financial crisis in particular, I think horizons have shrunk right in amongst leaders, but also amongst NGOs, social movement organizations, they'd be more in case of trying to survive. And that's happened alongside this growing sense of imminent ecological catastrophe. And these have all contributed to squeezing out the capacity to imagine radically. JPPE So does it require different methods of funding so they can move past survival mode? Mulgan I think there's certainly a big role for philanthropy. Your country has enormous amounts of spare money in philanthropy, but almost none of it goes into this. There are some good reasons for that, obviously, philanthropy tends to come from the beneficiaries of the old system, so they're never likely to be very radical in challenging it. I still think a little bit more effort on the part of the Fords and Rockefellers and Hewletts would have paid off because this isn't very expensive. But who else is going to create the space for people to think, to look ahead, to range a bit more widely? And I’ve spent most of my life on much more short term practical, pragmatic problem solving. But we all need some sense of the bigger picture, what that's leading towards, to help make sense of the actions in the present. And that's what's missing. And I would say in the US, politics, philanthropy, and higher education have all essentially failed their societal role in that respect. JPPE So as you said, it requires opening the debate so that people know that there's a problem. What are the steps after that? Mulgan Well then I think it's about organizing and funding and orchestrating the more detailed work, which needs to be done. And I do use the analogy with art or film or writing. Everyone can take part in it a little bit. We can all make our movies on Tiktok and so on. But actually, if you want really good films, it's actually quite hard, it's quite skilled, it's quite professional. It requires quite a lot of people. Or for a good Netflix TV series. And it’s the same for social imagination. You can start off with sparks and some of it can be very open and participatory. But if you are going to do a detailed thinking through how to regulate or organize a netzero economy that requires a highly specialized knowledge, interrogation, and argument, and so on. That's what universities should be doing. I work with a lot of governments around the world, you know, 10 to 15 at any one point. And if they're looking at a new policy area, you sort of assume there must be off the shelf, lots of lots of options, which they could consider. Let's say a new kind of universal basic income is one, which I've been a bit involved in, and is much talked about in much of the world. And there are quite a lot of pilots now of UBIs, but the quality of the work of it is still very thin. And if you are a government wanting to introduce one, actually, you will have to do most of the work designing it, thinking through its impact. There is not a menu of options you can draw down. And the same is true with almost any field. Let's say bringing the circular economy principles to fashion or whatever, the legwork and hard labor has not been done to prepare the options for others to draw on. And this is also true at a global level. The UN was set up in the 1940s, benefitting from lots of hard work, which had been done imagining what a UN could be in the dark years of the 30s. I've been doing work recently on what could be new global governance arrangements, if conditions became more favorable. There's nothing out there in terms of well thought through options. There's lots of good description, lots of good analysis, lots of good critique of all that's wrong with the UN. But it's as if the people who are the experts feel too nervous to ever put their names to a proposal, which someone else might shoot down. So we have this sort of bizarre deficit of looking ahead, whereas in other fields, like in sciences, or the life sciences or AI, lots of people are paid to think speculatively to design possible new genomic treatments or new algorithms. And the imbalance between a world of science and tech, which was too good looking ahead, and the world of the social and the political, which has given up on it, I think it's really become a serious problem.

Oliver Hicks The Necessity of Perspective: A Nietzschean Critique of Historical Materialism and Political Meta-Narratives Oliver Hicks Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche both contributed immensely to 19th century political philosophy and laid the foundation for countless revisions, interpretations, and new theories throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. While they share a common goal of exposing hidden, socially constructed restraints in order to liberate the individual, they differ sharply on both the nature of those societal restraints and what liberation actually looks like. I present these thinkers as foils: Marx guided by a normative approach that sees liberation as an inevitable conclusion of current social conditions, and Nietzsche describing liberation as necessary but ultimately ambiguous. Ultimately, I assert that this ambiguity is a necessary acceptance of true liberation that ought to humble any assertion of truth, morality, or rationality. I. Introduction But everything is fair It’s a paradox we call reality So keepin’ it real will make you A casualty of abnormal normality - Talib Kweli, Respiration (1) The above remarks are from a verse of the 2002 duet album Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star , in which artist Talib Kweli describes his inner-city New York landscape. The broader context of the song speaks to the harsh and often hopeless reality of a low-income Black experience. It begins with a dialogue from the seminal hip hop documentary Style Wars , in which a New York graffiti artist describes a recent work titled “Crime in the City.” The work implicitly asks the audience whether “crime” is all his city has to offer or if it is simply what one chooses to see when examining the New York streets. Kweli contributes his own perspective in the aforementioned line, in which he calls his reality a “paradox” where everything in this world is fair. Thus, nothing can be unfair with the proper perspective, lending itself to the paradox of never being able to pin down what is truly right or wrong. Kweli speaks of inter-gang violence, where young Black men are pitted against each other for the scarce resources present in their desolate environment. Yes, success is good, but at what cost to the broader struggle of their community? The second part of his stanza questions the efforts of anyone in this world to be truly “real,” as Kweli plays with a definition that is so integral to one’s identity in the hip hop community. Hip hop and rap are built around delivering viscerally authentic, or “real,” stories, usually about struggle, persecution, and ultimately perseverance against an adverse world. Thus, “keeping it real” becomes the idealized form of living as opposed to whitewashed versions of struggle or falsified stories for commercial success. But what does “realness” actually entail, and is it captured by this idealization? Kweli would answer that it is less objective than it might seem. Any attempt at authenticity is undermined by another perspective, and thus the vanity that accompanies an allegedly “real” individual instead makes them a casualty: they are not truly real, authentic, nor honest versions of themselves, but rather they are only “real” by an externally defined perspective, one that society wants for them. Kweli is inverting a pillar of rap culture by arguing that what is deemed true “realness” by people in the city is actually defined by the same subjective standards used to define its opposite. Put simply, the inner-city stories to which Kweli is referring are authentic as defined by what is expected of the storytellers: to be hard, cold-blooded, and insensitive to the harsh world around them. But does this produce genuine versions of who these individuals could be given different circumstances? Or are they simply buying into the “abnormal normality,” one defined by social constructs that is ultimately abnormal to whatever their “real” selves might be? The question of authenticity amidst veiling social norms is one discussed by a variety of modern political theorists, all seeking to understand who we are in order to understand who we ought to be—and how we ought to be governed. From descriptions of a primordial state of nature proposed by early contract theorists to Karl Marx’s world-encompassing system of historical materialism, these modern thinkers attempt to sketch out the natural, psychological, and social undercurrents of our behavior. Though Marx was the first to usher in a hermeneutics of suspicion by critiquing existing philosophical norms in search of hidden truths, he did so with the intent of outlining his own normative conception of humanity's goal (or his own end point on the linear timeline that is progress): communism. Decades later, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed “we are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge” in his preface to On the Genealogy of Morals. He proposed a philosophy that sought to interrogate reigning value systems that presented themselves as natural or self-evident without replacing them with his own explicit normative solution (2). Nietzsche recognized the limitations of philosophical inquiry while operating within the system he was critiquing. Humans lack a basic sense of what is good as enshrined in the concept of natural law or historical materialism because our entire system of moral values is a product of changing power dynamics. More importantly, we cannot see any semblance of truth unless we shed these artificial moral constructs. The relativity inherent in our ability to make judgements of ourselves and fellow citizens ultimately moves the goalposts of political theory itself: we are no longer moving toward that ideal form with which Plato was so obsessed because we cannot accurately define it. There are no political meta-narratives, no slate of criteria with which we can accurately and objectively identify our deepest human nature—to do so would be to dismiss far too many factors and make far too many assumptions. Rather, we must instead work to interrogate our unwavering beliefs in perceived truths or ideal forms in order to understand how we might escape them as they arise. As shown by Talib Kweli in his aforementioned lyrics, the inability to shed the social, moral, and ethical constructs that surround a particular Black experience raises questions regarding the obscuration of truth and the need for a variety of perspectives. Using Nietzsche’s skepticism of philosophy and morality as a foil for Marx’s historical materialism, I will draw on a number of their works to discuss the validity of any proposed political meta-narrative. First, I will present a brief model for viewing history as forward-facing in the pursuit of a realized ideal form, courtesy of Marx. Then, I will use Nietzsche to reject the notion of an ideal form and instead emphasize the need for perspective to understand any type of truth, political or otherwise, in order to escape the social constructs that mystify this truth and enslave us to normative ideals. II. Historical Progress as Forward-Facing: Marx’s Determinism Marx famously remarked at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”(3). More importantly, however, was the history that Marx was proposing henceforth. Communism was not just a prescription for the ills of capitalism, but a prediction of the inevitable collapse of the market economy itself: the contradictions intrinsic to capitalist function would ultimately lead to its own demise. Communism would simply be the final and best option for a post-revolutionary society. In this way, Marx lays a deterministic view of human progress. If humanity keeps moving forward as is, we will reach an inflection point; if we actively work to deconstruct the status quo, we will reach that same inflection point sooner. Though bleak, this notion of progress posits its own normative assumption that society is moving forward : ideology has simply masked antagonistic class divides while capitalism exploits them, but we will inevitably overcome this stain on history to usher in a new and better world. This deterministic presentation of history, or historical materialism, is one of Marx’s greatest contributions to political philosophy. Using this dialectical approach, Marx identified two main forces that drive historical change: the division of classes and the division of labor. The evolution of class systems is best articulated in the first section of the Manifesto , where Marx focuses primarily on Europe’s transition from feudal to modern societies, namely bourgeois societies. Feudal societies were composed of complex hierarchies: feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs, and more. Among these classes existed a constant dynamic of oppression, wherein higher classes dominated subordinate ones as defined by the material conditions of each (14). Centuries of global exploration, however, produced ever-expanding markets and ever-increasing demand that revolutionized the modes of production and condensed class antagonisms into Marx’s binary: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This defined the “Modern Industry” that Marx witnessed in the 19th century, wherein “the modern bourgeoisie is itself a product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange” (5). Underlying this series of class revolutions are developments in the division of labor: first in tribal communities, then ancient communes, feudal states, commercial states, and finally the capitalist state of the bourgeoisie. The division of labor reflects both the growth of the productive capacities of these communities as well as the growth of divided interests among individuals. For example, Marx argues that the division of labor within a nation first leads to the “separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labor, hence to the separation of town and country… [then] to the separation of commercial from industrial labor” and so on (6). Occurring simultaneously are infinitesimal divisions within these branches “among the individuals cooperating in definite kinds of labor” (7). Ultimately, Marx places the modern industrial state, with all of its complex and specialized divisions, on an historical timeline that inevitably moves toward the maximization of its productive capacities since it is constantly in competition with similarly structured nations. This maximization, however, along with its own internal contradictions, begets its own destruction. The consolidation of “scattered private property” into the consolidation of “capitalistic private property” in the hands of an increasingly smaller elite becomes too heavy to support itself, and the fetters that confine the socialization of labor for exploitation ironically lead to the organization of a massive, oppressed class that revolts against their slave-wage masters (8). This revolution, Marx argues, is a smoother transition than the original consolidation of private property via the socialization of labor, since the latter is the “expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers,” but the former is the “expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people” (9). However, the light at the end of this tunnel that is capitalism and the driving force behind this expropriation of the few by the many is Marx’s concept of “species-being.” As human beings, Marx considers our most basic and fundamental essence to be our drive to engage in productive activity; it is our “working-up of the objective world,” in which “[man] duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created” (10). This creative process, when done freely, consciously, and socially, is what separates us from animals and satisfies our life purpose: we choose what to make and when to make it in order to survive. Capitalism disrupts this process by commodifying labor and subsequently alienating the laborer first from their product, second from their process, third from themselves, and finally from each other (11). As a result, the worker becomes antagonistic to the entire system of private property: they are resentful of the bourgeois capitalist, suspicious of their fellow worker, and disillusioned with themselves, all because of alienation from their species-being. The rediscovery of our species-being is the natural epilogue to the implosion of capitalism. And yet, this conclusion relies on Marx’s own crypto-normativity. Like the early contract theorists who came far before him, Marx is simply making his own normative assumption regarding human nature: we live to create the world around us, and are only satisfied by seeing ourselves in that world. One could argue that the exploitation of this process is a violation of a Marxist natural law, and that a communist revolution is a means of retributive justice. As noble as it may be to argue that communism is the inevitable end point of a history structured by material conditions, Marx’s theory is limited by its own dogmatic assumptions. However, he was not alone in proposing human history as a deterministic teleology. Marx built his theory off the critique of Hegel, who argued a similar conception of history driven by conflicts in ideas rather than material conditions. Adam Smith falls into this same category, emphasizing the ability to improve society through the accelerating efficiency of mutually beneficial economic transactions and production (he even titled his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations —“Nations” being plural to suggest collective benefit in pursuing capitalistic ends). Immanuel Kant believed in the ability of individual societies to develop the faculties of humankind over time, leading again to the upward trajectory of progress and the inevitable achievement of our full potential. However, each of these thinkers suffer from the same flaw: they boldly claim to know the end stage of humanity and the final form to which political philosophy strives while being limited by their own historical context and intellectual horizons. III. Rejection of the Pure Form: Nietzsche’s Response Though his work is filled with a multitude of social and moral critiques, Nietzsche claimed that “the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of all errors so far was… Plato’s invention of the pure spirit and good as such” (12). Consistent with Nietzsche’s long-standing critique of religion was his belief that Christianity had become “Platonism for ‘the people’” by providing an ideal form to which, by restricting one’s indulgences and taking leaps of faith, one could strive and achieve a good moral life. To Nietzsche, however, faith extends far beyond theology: it applies to every corner of philosophy and knowledge. Philosophers’ pursuits of knowledge are done in vain, since each proposes an alleged “cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic” that is, in reality, simply “an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration’... that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact” (13). A particularly heinous example of this prejudice is Kant’s “discovery” of a new human faculty, one that allowed him to argue man’s capacity to make synthetic judgements a priori . Nietzsche argues this discovery was in fact not a discovery at all, but a lazy leap of faith that compelled him to answer his own questions “by virtue of a faculty” and essentially invent his own causa sui (14). Consequently, Nietzsche argues that we ought to approach knowledge with suspicion. By questioning the value of truth and certainty in the face of their opposites, Nietzsche rejects the idea of proposing a fully contained and explanatory system for any type of knowledge, since “in the philosopher… there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all, his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is ” (15). Dogmatic philosophy and its ideal forms, therefore, are less interesting to Nietzsche than the necessity of our belief in them. Rather than ask what our beliefs say, a better question to pose is what these beliefs say about us . By accusing all philosophy of being dogmatic, Nietzsche is drawing attention to the philosophical limitations of any single individual. As such, a new generation of philosophers ought to embrace “the dangerous ‘maybe’ in every sense,” instead putting their faith in possibilities rather than certainties (16). To recognize one’s own inability to offer an all-encompassing system for the world is to endorse the necessity of perspective, the variety of which is the only way to understand the true nature of anything. To deny this necessity, which Nietzsche calls “the basic condition of all life,” is to instead continue the pursuit of that Platonic good spirit or ideal form (17). Rather than working to defend knowledge as we come to understand it, philosophers should be constantly interrogating knowledge in an attempt to free themselves from their own prejudices. In doing so, one rejects the idea of truth as purely objective and “knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge” (18). Nietzsche draws attention to the fact that there is no view from nowhere: “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be” (19). Put differently, one can liken Nietzsche’s concept of truth to a statue: any singular view of the statue only provides a singular picture of it. The view from the front of the statue will give a completely different image than that from the back, assuming we could even agree upon which is front and back in the first place. A plethora of angles upon which to view the statue, therefore, is necessary to truly understand it since any individual view is inherently limited by their position relative to the object. “Free spirits,” then, unlike those who throughout history have proposed their singular view of the statue as correct, are that new generation of individuals who constantly question their own prejudices and adopt new angles (20). In this way, one could argue that Nietzsche rejects the concept of Truth altogether, and perspectivism becomes a practical tool for understanding the world around us as we develop our own concepts of knowledge. At the very least, Nietzsche seems to suggest that regardless of the existence of any Truth, we cannot even begin to understand Truth unless we prioritize an ensemble of perspectives over any individual one. In doing so, we can use the former to prevent us from being limited by the latter. Once again, Nietzsche’s perspectivism has less to do with its relationship to truth (capital-T or otherwise) and more to do with its relationship to the individual and their inherently limited perspective. This concept of agency and power in the face of social restraints is consistent throughout Nietzsche’s works, and one of the most obvious ties is in his critique of Christianity. Nietzsche makes explicit his disdain for the church in The Genealogy of Morals by arguing that the church itself pioneered a type of slave morality that inherently limits the capability of man by suppressing his instincts. Throughout history, however, this morality was used strategically by the weak (namely priests) to seize some semblance of power from the nobility, whose morality is entirely self-affirming, contemptible towards things outside itself, and emphasizes power over restraint (21). Not unlike Talib Kweli’s description of his catch-22 lifestyle as a gangster in inner-city New York, Nietzsche asks us to consider a bird of prey and a lamb: “there is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey—but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs” (22). In fact, he continues, the lambs would be perfectly well off to regard anything like a bird of prey as evil, since it is the source of violence against them; the bird of prey, however, might view this “somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: ‘we don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb” (23). The perspective that is intrinsic to these qualitative judgements of good and evil both undermines their objectivity and highlights a cornerstone of Nietzsche’s philosophy: will-to-power. With regard to Marx, Nietzsche dismisses one of his most basic assumptions using this concept of the will-to-power: … life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation; —but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal—it takes place in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavor to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendency—not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely Will to Power… “Exploitation” does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life (24). By arguing that exploitation is not inherently evil, it is easy to dismiss Nietzsche as equally normative with different assumptions. The difference, however, is that Nietzsche’s critique does not lead him to propose a political solution or theorize a political meta-narrative meant to end suffering as he sees it, for that would be replacing one restraining superstructure with another. Will-to-power, according to Nietzsche, is not a facet of human nature that must be complemented by politics nor economics: the will-to-power is a means to finding that solution. It is the unaffected and unfettered ability of truly “free spirits” to escape the confines of “good” and “evil” themselves. As discussed above, no philosopher is truly impartial nor void of their own prejudices, and political meta-narratives such as Marx’s unwavering rejection of exploitation cannot exist to serve their purpose without accepting some degree of dogmatic assumptions. Nietzsche himself is no exception, which is why he hypothesizes these free spirits rather than identifying with them. But continuing to engage in philosophy, particularly political philosophy, without interrogating these assumptions and prejudices is distracting; we cannot begin to construct new worlds until we have deconstructed old ones. Earlier in Nietzsche’s career, we see a similar critique of Christian morals in a different context. In On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life , Nietzsche argues that Christianity seeks to define an end point for humanity by predicting “an end to life on earth… and [condemning] the living to live in the fifth act of the tragedy” (25). By limiting the scope and potential of humanity, Christianity restrains the true potential of the strong and capable, or those who might have the potential to transcend the social or moral limitations they have inherited. Moreover, Nietzsche argues that “Christianity would like to [destroy] every culture which incites to striving further and takes for its motto memento vivere … [it] rejects with a shrug of the shoulders everything in the process of becoming, and spreads over it the feeling of being very late arrivals and epigoni” (26). Though Marx’s calls to action for the proletarian revolution seem counterintuitive to a feeling of being “late arrivals” or “epigoni,” Nietzsche’s critique holds true with regard to Marxism’s crypto-normative, deterministic approach to social organization. Marx provides an all-encompassing system that is meant to both explain and predict the movement of human progress, which owes itself entirely to factors and conditions that are beyond the individual. In a way, this parallels Nietzsche’s diagnosis that we are products of our society to a degree much higher than we realize. The difference, however, lies in their prognosis. Marx believed that the course of these societal effects, namely material conditions, would inevitably lead to the implosion of the status quo that, if properly prepared for, could usher in his optimal form of social organization. Individuals, therefore, might not be “late arrivals” nor “epigoni,” though Marx certainly seems to think that these individuals are entirely at the behest of their own material conditions. The asymmetrical influence that these material conditions have on us—the proletariat being exploited by these material conditions and the bourgeoisie benefitting from them—leads Marx to draw moral conclusions: exploitation is bad and satisfaction of species-being is good . What Marx fails to do is recognize that he is a product of his own material conditions, and so are his theory and determinations of “good” and “bad.” The quasi-utopian society that is only permitted by the revolution is itself borrowing descriptions from the idealized lifestyles of the bourgeoisie. In The German Ideology , Marx suggests that man in a capitalist society is “a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his livelihood,” which is true for most working-class individuals. He then adds that in a communist society that same man may “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as [he has] a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (27). The ability to actively satisfy one’s species-being, or to do as one pleases without the alienating incentives required by capitalism, is simply the universalization of bourgeois life—it’s not hard to imagine that these hypothesized jacks-of-all-trades did exist in 19th century Europe, they just happened to be the elite. He who can labor (or engage in any productive activity) without being defined by that labor is a privilege of the ruling class—and one that Marx identifies as good and therefore preferable. In other words, a communist society destroys class conflicts by creating the conditions of one class for all classes. This is not to say that Marx is proposing an egalitarian utopia as his positive project, since he does believe in a relatively heterogeneous society living by the mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”(28). Moreover, the concept of class itself is theorized to dissolve post-revolution, but this does not mean that Marx’s ideal conditions for all human beings aren’t plagiarizing the conditions of a single class as observed pre-revolution. When workers own the means of production rather than capitalists, they will have the resources, leisure time, and material conditions to produce in accordance with their species-being and satisfy Marx’s normatively defined purpose (or achieve his own concept of “good”). Like Kant, Marx is creating his own causa sui . A Nietzschean contribution to Marxism might argue, then, that capitalism must be deconstructed in the same way that we might deconstruct Christian morality: not with the intent of replacing these superstructures with our own normative solution, but by interrogating them to essentially see where it takes us. Again, the elusive free spirit is not an indirect, self-congratulatory description of the value of Nietzsche’s own theories, nor is it a pessimistic and nihilistic acceptance that nothing truly matters. Rather, it is a new theory in itself—one that considers the possibilities of a new generation of entirely self-affirming thinkers stripped of their prejudices and social restraints. IV. Conclusion Marx’s ultimate conclusion is that a history of society determined by material conditions leaves us no choice but to reject our current modes of production in favor of a society that complements the satisfaction of our species-being. If we don’t, then capitalism will destroy itself anyway. Marx certainly presents himself as a revolutionary determined to unite the working men of all countries toward a common purpose, but it’s difficult to reconcile this call for individual agency toward a collective purpose with the material conditions that seem to govern us regardless of that agency. Marx’s own logic is, again, itself determined by the superstructures he seeks to identify; he is no more or less a product of them than any of the characters in his theory. The vain assertion of a universal truth that is species-being simply uses his own normative definition of what is good by borrowing language from those who have already determined what is good: the bourgeoisie. Consequently, we see his proposed political meta-narrative, that contradictory principles of capitalism inevitably lead to the realization of human emancipation, is at best incomplete and at worst deeply flawed. In the case of the former, we can at least use Marx’s critique of capital to understand how material conditions have shaped our world views: they can determine incentives, exploit workers based on factors beyond their immediate control, or assign value to both people and commodities. These are invaluable critiques that have wide-ranging implications, but they are nowhere near close enough to providing an all-encompassing system of human behavior. In the case of the latter, however, we are met with the dangerous hubris of which Nietzsche is so suspicious. The true nature of anything can only be understood by simultaneously interrogating our prejudices and assumptions while recognizing the need for multiple perspectives. Truth ought to be sought after, but it is extremely elusive and mystified by social constructs, whether they be political, material, moral, sexual, racial, or otherwise. From a postmodernist perspective, Nietzsche was perhaps prodigal. Today, we live in a pluralist world that is constantly challenging the normative assumptions that structure so much of our interconnected lives. Critical race theory has interrogated the fundamental principles of our facially neutral laws; emerging disciplines of queer and feminist studies have reshaped the way we understand and perform our gender and sexuality; successive generations of increasingly agnostic individuals have undermined religiously-grounded social norms to further liberate the arts and create a vibrant pop culture. Social media alone has become one of the greatest conduits for self-expression and has created channels of communication that the world has never before seen. Everything from college campuses to corporate boardrooms have acknowledged the importance of representation and diversity in order to create more inclusive communities. The 21st century is an era of interrogation that requires one to accept a multiplicity of perspectives. Ultimately, it could be said that we are unified by a common obligation to better understand each other. In a way, Marx becomes the casualty to which Talib Kweli is referring in his verse. The idealization of a satisfied species-being is arguably a normality defined by what is expected of human beings in a capitalistic world: to enjoy their work. It is not difficult to imagine that this is actually abnormal, and the entire concept of labor as we understand it could transform or even wither away in the epochs to come due to technology, climate change, or some other unforeseen development. Nietzsche therefore becomes a critical theorist superseding even Marx, for he seeks to critique not just one superstructure but all the superstructures that limit our ability to define for ourselves what is good, bad, evil, true, rational, or authentic. Political philosophy ought to continue elevating the voices that provide these pointed critiques and encourage generations of free spirits as they come. As Kweli might argue, to truly engage in philosophy is to suspect any normality as actually abnormal, and not suffer as a casualty of its misleading assumptions. Rather, we ought to use these suspicions in the service of life and work towards the most ideal form of social organization we can find while recognizing that there is always work to be done. Endnotes 1 Black Star. “Respiration (feat. Common).” Track 11 on Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star . Rawkus Records, 1998, CD. 2 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 451. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. 3 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 473. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. 4 Ibid, 474. 5 Ibid, 475. 6 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 150. New York: Norton, 1978. 7 Ibid, 150. 8 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Capital, Volume One.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 437. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. 9 Ibid, 438. 10 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 76. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. 11 Ibid, 72-77; Marx describes species-being at length throughout the Manuscripts. 12 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Beyond Good and Evil.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 193. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. 13 Ibid, 202. 14 Ibid, 207-208. 15 Ibid, 204. 16 Ibid, 201. 17 Ibid, 193. 18 Ibid,. 555. 19 Ibid, 555. 20 Ibid, 242-243. 21 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 472–479. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967.; Nietzsche describes his master-slave dichotomy of morality throughout the first essay of his Genealogy , though particularly in sections 10, 11, 12, and 13. 22 Ibid, 480. 23 Ibid, 481. 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Beyond Good and Evil.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 393. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life . Translated by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980. 44 26 Ibid, 45. 27 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 160. New York: Norton, 1978. 28 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 531. New York: Norton, 1978. References Black Star. “Respiration.” Track 11 on Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star . Rawkus Records, 1998, CD. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 437–601. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 469–500. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 146–200. New York: Norton, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Capital, Volume One.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294–438. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 66–125. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Beyond Good and Evil.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 179–435. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 437–601. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life . Translated by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 525–542. New York: Norton, 1978. Previous Next

Non-Self Through Time Anita Kukeli Author Hansae Lee Koda Li Nahye Lee Editors Buddhism, like other major religions, has a particular philosophical framework underpinning its teachings. In other words, Buddhism and other religions might be thought of as offering a set of answers to philosophical inquiries, such as questions about moral right and wrong or questions about our position in the universe. The area of philosophical inquiry with which this paper is concerned is the philosophy of self. What does it mean to be a person? Buddhism engages with this debate. Foundational Buddhist thought, or Theravada Buddhism, offers a particular conception of personhood called anatman , or “non-self.” The idea here is that the commonly accepted notion of the self if mistaken; we are not selves. Ordinarily, pre-philosophical reflection on the question of what a person is, one might likely respond that a person it a unified individual entity, such as you or me. Philosophical views depart from this common concept to varying degrees. Some define a person as a human body, comprised of cells and ultimately governed by biological processes. Alternatively, perhaps a person is a mind, constituted most fundamentally by their beliefs and feelings and decisions. Maybe personhood is some mix of the two, or something else entirely. In contrast, the Buddhist conception of personhood rejects the notion of the self as a definable single entity entirely. At first glance, this may seem unacceptable to someone unfamiliar with Buddhist teachings. However, by reproducing the arguments presented in early Buddhist texts, I will show that anatman is on its own a plausible view. I will argue that the real trouble for anatman arises when considered within the broader tradition of Buddhist thought, especially in regard to samsara and karma . Samsara refers to the Buddhist idea of a cycle of rebirth, closely related to karma. Both samsara and karma involve the self persisting from one lifetime to the next. But, if there is no self, how can it persist? Surely, for something to persist through time, that thing must exist. So, it seems that if we accept anatman , and there is no such thing as a self, then we cannot accept samsara or karma. To resolve this tension, there must be a description of this persistence through time that does not require the existence of a self. I will argue that the Buddhist concept of dependent arising accomplishes this, and therefore resolves the tension between anatman on the one hand and samsara and karma on the other. Anatman The argument for anatman derives from the concept of the five aggregates. This is a Buddhist concept that refers to five constitutive parts of a person. The five aggregates are translated various ways, but for the purposes of this paper I will offer them in simple terms. The five aggregates consist of 1) material form, 2) sensation, 3) perception, 4) volitional force, and 5) consciousness. A foundational Buddhist text, the Questions of King Milinda, includes a conversation in which a Buddhist monk named Nagasena purports that the self does not exist. His interlocutor, King Milinda, then asks, what is it that the name Nagesna is denoting? Does it refer to material form? To sensation? He continues through each of the five aggregates, and Nagasena responds that it is none of these (Milinda’s Questions 36). To explain how that may be, he uses an analogy of a chariot. A chariot is not its wheels nor its axle nor its pole, though it is also not an entity separate from these things (37). In this case, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore, the chariot, as an entity, doesn’t exist. Rather, “chariot” is merely a term used to denote a collection of things and nothing more. Similarly, Nagasena’s name is just a useful term referring to the collection of constitutive parts called aggregates, but not to an individual self (34). The self cannot be reduced to any one of the five aggregates, and it is also not an entity separate from them. Indeed, when understood in this way, the self simply doesn’t exist. Samsara Samsara , or the cycle of rebirth, is another foundational Buddhist concept. It posits that when someone dies, they are reborn. This means that each of us have past lives that we don’t remember, from which we died and were reborn. So, we persist through one lifetime into the next. This notion of samsara is closely related to the Buddhist concept of karma , which ascribes a desert component to this cycle. Karma drives the rebirth cycle by attributing the quality of the life into which a person is reborn to the actions of their past lives. If someone commited immoral acts in their past lives, they would face the consequences by being reborn into a hellish miserable life. Conversely, if someone committed good acts, they would be reborn into a happy beautiful life (Sayings 203). This causal explanation between the actions someone undertook in their past lives and circumstances of their current life is what’s referred to as karma . In foundational Buddhist thought, Karma governs the persistence within a person from one lifetime to the next, and thus is related to samsara . The concepts of saṃsāra and karma , hand in hand, appear to be incompatible with anātman . If we grant that no person can point to any of the five aggregates and claim — “That is me!” — but, at the same time, a person is nothing more than those aggregates, we can accept the claim that the self does not exist. That is the structure of the argument presented above by Nagasena. However, accepting that the life a person is living right now is a consequence of a life they lived in the past requires that that person is persisting over time. That is, if we are to correctly say that Anita, for instance, deserves the poor quality of her life because she undertook immoral actions in her past lives, it must be that the Anita experiencing this poor-quality life is the same Anita who undertook those immoral actions. Otherwise, the immoral actions of the past lives couldn’t be attributed to the person who is living the consequentially poor-quality life. So, karma and saṃsāra require persistence. However, if the self doesn’t even exist, surely it cannot have the quality of persisting over time. Persistence necessitates existence. This is the tension that arises with the consideration of anātman in conjunction with saṃsāra ; it seems we cannot accept one without rejecting the other — unless, that is, we have an account of non-self that involves persistence through time. Dependent Arising The concept of non-self can extend through the dimension of time with the inclusion of dependent arising. In another early Buddhist text, the Buddha delineates a series of causal chains. He says, “Conditioned by ignorance there are volitional forces, conditioned by volitional forces there is consciousness, conditioned by consciousness there is mind-and-body, conditioned by mind-and-body there are the six senses…” until he arrives at suffering (Sayings 210-211). This causal chain is called dependent arising. Within this series of states, each caused by an earlier one and causing the next, we find the five aggregates: between volitional forces, consciousness, and mind-and-body. So, the five aggregates we refer to when we speak of the self are themselves just parts within a system that extends beyond them. In this way, the non-self is positioned within a greater system of causal chains. If this understanding is applied to the earlier concepts of saṃsāra and karma , the tension between them and anātman may be resolved. Initially, the idea that there is a cycle of death and rebirth called saṃsāra seems to presuppose the existence of a self, particularly as an individual entity that persists through time. Moreover, the proposition, known as karma , that the conditions of one’s present life are a consequence of past lives ascribes continuity within a self as it undergoes multiple life cycles. It seems to follow from this that one’s past actions result in one’s current experiences, meaning that the person who commits the actions must be the same person who has the current experiences. So, there must be a self that persists. But, if the cycle of rebirth driven by karma is reconsidered through a lens of dependent arising, there is no need to account for the existence of an individual entity called a self. It need not be the case that there is a self who at one point both committed certain actions and is now experiencing the effects. There need not be an individual entity to which these actions are attributed. Rather, there can be certain actions committed and resultant effects being experienced. Indeed, the constitutive parts of a person, the five aggregates, are nothing more than steps within a greater causal chain. By accepting dependent arising, we can understand what was once necessarily the persistence of the self through time as, instead, a causal relationship and no more. Earlier states bring about later states. There is no self. Conclusion By including an account of non-self over time, such as dependent arising, the tensions between saṃsāra and anātman are resolved. The argument for anātman in a given moment, what I’ve referred to as static non-self, derives from the five aggregates. As expressed in the chariot analogy, a person is not any one of the five aggregates and a person is not anything more than them. Therefore, the existence of a unified self is a mere illusion. This is an important claim within Buddhist thought because it is included in a foundational teaching: that clinging to the self is the cause of suffering. This might be enough to motivate letting go of the idea of the self, for the purpose of ending suffering. However, the idea that clinging to the self causes suffering isn’t enough to justify the plausibility of non-self. It must also be consistent with other teachings in Buddhism. Initially, it seems to be incompatible with the teachings of saṃsāra and karma . These teachings seem to necessitate a self that persists through time, because surely it must be the same person who lives through the multiple lives involved in a particular cycle of rebirth driven by their own karma . But, if the self doesn’t exist even for a given moment, how can it exist from one moment to the next? Indeed, it doesn’t. This can be explained through the concept of dependent arising, a dynamic picture of non-self. Through this lens, the five aggregates are placed in a causal chain of events. This way, there can be causal continuity within a person's life — or lives — without there necessarily being a self. Past events cause later events, and so goes the cycle of rebirth. Finally, there is no incompatibility between anatman and the rest of Buddhist teaching, and it can be justifiably accepted as a plausible account. In this manner, dependent arising resolves the tension initially faced between anatman and saṃsāra . References Gethin, Rupert. 2008. Sayings of the Buddha : a selection of suttas from the Pali Nikayas, Oxford world's classics. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. Gethin, Rupert. 1998. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford [England] ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Travis Harper More Than Just a Thought Crime? A Retributivist View of Hate Crime Legislation Travis Harper Most are familiar with the common conception of a hate crime: a violent act that involves some form of animus towards a particular group, usually a protected class. “Hate crimes” are considered to be more morally reprehensible than their counterparts that are not motivated by any particular animus or hatred. Accordingly, different jurisdictions have enacted legislation criminalizing these types of acts, oftentimes associating them with harsher penalties than crimes committed for other reasons. Still, while hate crimes seem like a simple and intuitive concept, the actual statutes that different legislatures enacted to criminalize them tend to vary in their definitions and application. In the United States, for example, anyone who “willfully causes bodily injury to any person... because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person” shall be found guilty of a federal hate crime (1). Germany, however, takes a different approach. While “under German criminal law, ‘politically motivated’ (2) hate crimes do not constitute explicit offenses or give rise automatically to higher sentences,” judges have a wide latitude to take aggravating factors into account when sentencing (3). Germany does , however, have a statute which criminalizes those who “incite hatred against” and “violate the human dignity” of populations or individuals on “account of their belonging to a... national, racial, or religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origin” (4) Clearly, the concept of a hate crime is not as intuitive as it seems to be. Thus, the question remains: What is a “hate crime”? Moral and legal theorists have wrestled with this same question, along with raising other concerns. “Hate crimes” are unique in that their mens rea element, the requisite intent of the perpetrator in order to be found guilty of the crime, typically entails proving some form of hatred or bias. Thus, hate crimes effectively criminalize specific “hateful” mental states. Whether or not a person has committed a hate crime does not depend on their actual physical actions; rather, it depends on their motivations in doing so—whether they did so because of some animus towards their victim or a particular group of people. Naturally, this begs the question: To what extent is this justified? Can we punish offenders for their motivations in committing a crime along with their actions? Heidi Hurd, lawyer and legal theorist, sought to answer questions akin to these in her article, “Why Liberals Should Hate ‘Hate Crime Legislation’.” In doing so, Hurd argues that when “hatred and bias are construed as mens rea elements... they [become] alien to traditional criminal law principles”(5). She also argues that hate crime legislation—at least how it is conceived of today—is unjustifiable. Specifically, Hurd outlines that hate crime legislation has no place within our “act-centered theory of criminal punishment” and “liberal theory of legislation” because of the way it effectively criminalizes “emotional states... [that] constitute standing character traits rather than occurrent mental states (intentions, purposes, choices etc.)” (6). Hurd’s critique is quite comprehensive and forces all advocates for hate crime legislation to ask themselves: is there any justification for hate crime legislation that is in line with a liberal theory of legislation? This is the question that this paper seeks to answer. Through a critical analysis of Hurd’s argument, references to other legal theorists and philosophers, and empirical evidence, I will argue that within a retributivist theory of punishment, hate crime legislation is justifiable and morally accept- able. A retributivist theory of punishment prioritizes proportionality, the principle that the punishment associated with a crime varies based upon the severity of the crime, or how morally reprehensible the crime is, which can be determined by the amount of harm an action causes. I will argue that hate crimes cause more severe harm to the victim than do crimes committed for other reasons. Further, since hate crimes are unique in that they cause harm to both the victim and their community, they constitute both a public and private harm. Thus, not only is it morally acceptable, but rather it is required to make hate crimes distinct within the criminal law with increased punishment compared to crimes that are not committed due to any particular animus. Further, I will argue that hate crime legislation does not merely criminalize mental states or political beliefs; rather it criminalizes the explicit intent to cause increased harm to a specific group of people. This is a standard that any hate crime statute should make abundantly clear. It is worthwhile to clarify what this paper does not seek to address. This paper will not weigh the merits of a retributivist’s conception of punishment against that of a consequentialist; surely, a consequentialist’s justification of hate crime legislation would be vastly different, most likely focusing on the possible benefit that could arise from specifically criminalizing hate crimes. Additionally, the paper will not analyze hate crimes and hate crime legislation from a sociological perspective; rather, it will focus on the moral and philosophical implications that legislators must consider when drafting hate crime legislation. Hurd’s Argument Within her critique of hate crime legislation, Hurd offers two possible arguments in support of making hate crimes distinct within the criminal law, entailing harsh- er punishment. The first of these relies upon a precedent within Anglo-American common law. Specifically, it is not uncommon for those who have “particularly vicious reasons for action” to be more harshly punished (7). For example, some jurisdictions have enhanced punishments for pre-meditated murder, those that deliberately take the life of another. Hurd also highlights the existence of “specific intent crimes,” or “crimes that require defendants to commit prohibited actions with certain further purposes” (8). Burglary, for instance, is an example of a specific intent crime as it requires that someone “must break and enter with some further intention, say to steal, rape, or kill” (9). Hurd posits that neither of these doctrines serve as justifications for hate crime legislation, primarily due to her contention that “hatred” and “bias” are emotional states, not occurrent mental states like intentions. If this is the case, then hate crime legislation is inherently criminalizing mental states, leaving those who support hate crime legislation with two lines of argumentation. Firstly, they might argue that the types of hatred and bias typical to hate crime legislation, contending that, for example, “racial hatred or gender bias is morally worse than greed, jealousy, and revenge” (10), or any other motive for that matter. Secondly, they might further a utilitarian argument, claiming that “hatred and bias are uniquely responsive to criminal sanctions in a way that greed, jealousy and vengeance are not” (11). Both of these arguments, however, violate liberalism in the way that they arbitrarily choose a specific motive to be either considerably more morally reprehensible or responsive to criminal sanctions. I take two main responses to Hurd’s argument. First, I take issue with Hurd’s characterization of hatred and bias when they are construed as mens rea elements; hatred and bias can be considered to be occurrent mental states when they are understood as the intent of the actor to create the increased harms associated with hate crimes, not just the actor’s bigoted views in and of themselves. Second, even if this were the case, and hate crimes did criminalize bigoted views, I argue that considering hatred and bias to be particularly culpable mental states is justified. Hate crimes are considerably more morally reprehensible than crimes committed for other reasons because of the aforementioned increased harm they cause, and they deserve increased punishment accordingly. I will address these two concerns separately. Hate Crimes and Specific Intent Crimes One of the key concerns that Hurd addresses is the extent to which hate crime legislation can be drafted within the bounds of liberalism and Anglo-American Common Law. One of Hurd’s main contentions within her article is that hate crime legislation, at least in the way that it is conceived of today, criminalizes emotions or dispositions, as opposed to occurrent mental states. I argue that this is not the case, because of the fact that hate crime legislation does not and should not criminalize the mere fact that a perpetrator holds a specific belief; rather, it should criminalize their intention to cause specific harms to their victim and the victim’s community at large. Michael Moore, in his work The Moral Worth of Retribution, defines “intentions”—within a retributivist theory of punishment—as “function states whose roles are to mediate between background states of motivation and those (bodily) motion-guid- ing states of volition that are parts of actions” (12). Moore illustrates this distinction through the analogy of a person deciding to get their hair cut. The background state of this action is that they “desire to get a haircut,” their intention is the belief that “if [they] go to the barber shop, [they] will get a haircut” and finally, the “motion-guiding state of volition” is that they indeed make the decision in their mind to “go to that barber shop” (13). Thus, the intention that is relevant in regards to criminal liability is one in which the actor decides on a means to reach a specific goal. Applying this framework to hate crimes, the “emotional states’’ that Hurd references are not the intentions that are legally relevant; rather, they are background states of motivations. They are the deep desires of the actor. The intention , however, is the actor’s decision to act upon their bigoted motivations in order to accomplish a variety of goals, whether that be spreading a message, or intimidating members of the group they are targeting. The intention that is legally relevant is that an actor decided to resort to violence in order to spread their bigoted beliefs. Admittedly, most hate crime statutes do not make clear this distinction. Often, they simply mandate that the perpetrator chose their victim “for reason of” one of their specific identities. Thus, any hate crime statute must be clear in that if someone is to be convicted of a hate crime, then they must have intended to cause some specific harm to a particular community. With this understanding of intentions, the mens rea element of hate crimes does not criminalize an emotional state; rather, it criminalizes a specific intent to cause harm, not just to a person but to a broader community. As I will argue later, these harms are legally relevant because they cause hate crimes to be particularly more morally reprehensible than crimes committed for other reasons. Hurd’s critique, in this case, is mostly doctrinal, but it does carry key moral implications. Even if a hate crime causes considerably more harm, the physical action is not different from crime that is completely devoid of any hatred or bias motivation. Is it reasonable to criminalize someone based on the fact that they have hateful beliefs? Is this a violation of the liberalism that grounds Anglo-American common law? The next section of this paper seeks to answer these questions by discussing the morality of hate crimes. Hate Crime Legislation and the Harm Principle In order to justify the distinction within the criminal law between hate crimes and other crimes—particularly when they tend to carry harsher punishment—we must identify a principle that can aid in determining which actions are crimes, and the extent to which they should be punished, if possible. This principle must have two characteristics: (1) It must align and be consistent with a retributivist theory of punishment by being sufficiently “backward-looking” and (2) it must allow for the differentiation of crimes beyond mere moral intuition— differentiating crimes that are “worse” than others, deserving harsher punishment, while aligning with a liberal theory of punishment. John Rawls has famously characterized this theory as one that emboldens the state to enforce the “right” and not the “good” (14). These two specifications ensure that the justificatory logic underpinning hate crime legislation aligns with traditional Anglo-American common law principles, and falls within the scope of this paper and Hurd’s argument. The first of these specifications naturally flows from the scope of this essay. The principle used to justify any sort of hate crime legislation must be “backward-look- ing” or focused on the act itself. This is in opposition to any sort of principle or justification that is consequentialist or “forward-looking.” A consequentialist “approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question” (15), with the “party” at hand being society as a whole, or even the actor themselves. Clearly, a consequentialist’s justification of hate crime legislation is different than that of a retributivist, which this paper intends to address. The second consideration is directly relevant to Hurd’s argument and, naturally, my critique thereof. One of Hurd’s primary critiques of hate crime legislation is that, if “hate” as a mens rea element is not considered to be an “occurrent mental state,” then hate crime legislation effectively criminalizes emotional states. Further, Hurd argues that criminalizing emotional states shifts from a “liberal theory” to a “perfectionist theory” of criminal law. This “liberal theory” of the criminal law extends from the general theory of Political Liberalism. Specifically, in draft- ing legislation, criminal or otherwise, the “government should be neutral among competing conceptions of the good life” (16). Within a society, there will be multiple conceptions of the good life, and the government should only be emboldened to enforce rights that are the result of an “overlapping consensus” that mediates “among conflicting views” (17). Hatred and bias, when not directly connected to an action, are generally considered to be moral beliefs or character traits—and as Hurd notes, “liberals have long believed that theories that construe certain character traits as virtuous or vicious belong to the province of the Good, rather than the Right” (18). Considering that I intend to argue that hate crimes primarily carry harsher sentences due to their being significantly more morally reprehensible than crimes committed for other reasons, the principle used to justify this distinction must aid us in determining which crimes are indeed “more morally reprehensible” beyond one’s moral intuition which would align with a liberal theory of punishment. It is quite easy and normal to determine what crimes “feel” more morally reprehensible based upon our own individual moral intuitions. Legislators, however, cannot simply draft criminal legislation based upon their own subjective moral intuitions on a case to case basis; that would not be entirely consistent with political liberalism. Any principle that we use in determining which crimes are more morally reprehensible must not only be applicable to hate crimes, but to any crime which is being considered. As Aristotle notes, “all law is universal” and legislators must take into account and legislate based upon “the usual case” (19). Thus, the principle used to justify hate crime legislation must also be one that is universally applicable. The principle that is most fitting is the “harm principle,” or the concept that the only actions that can be considered crimes are those that cause harm to others or the public. The most classic explication of this principle can be found in the work of John Stuart Mill, in which he claims that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (20). Put simply, the government can justify criminalization and punishment, overriding some individual rights, based upon the degree to which one being punished has caused “harm” to others. This principle aligns with the two specifications outlined earlier. The harm principle is sufficiently retributivist; If one were to justify punishment based upon the harm principle they would be focusing on the actions of the individual. Applying the harm principle compels legislators to ask: How much harm did the individual cause in their actions? The answer to this question directly affects whether or not their actions are considered criminal and the extent to which they should be punished. Further, Mill was an ardent liberal, and naturally, the “harm principle” aligns with a liberal theory of punishment. The harm principle works upon the liberal logic that an individual has the right not to be subjected to undue harm. While the harm principle does meet the specifications laid out earlier, “nowhere does [Mill] give an explicit general stipulation” as to what constitutes harm. In order to understand how hate crimes should be considered under the harm principle, we must further define our understanding of “harm” (21). Joel Feinberg, in his work Harm to Others, provides a useful definition of “harm.” Concretely, Feinberg defines it as a “setback to interests” (22) that can relate to an individual or to a wider group of people, where interests are “a miscellaneous collection, [consisting] of all those things which one has a stake” (23). While there are nuisances that could be considered harms—a person’s stock performing poorly, for example, could certainly be understood as a setback to interest—these nuisances only become harms in the legal sense when they are the results of an invasion by others. Further, Feinberg provides that this “invasion” becomes legally relevant if the actor is “in a worse condition than [they] would have otherwise been had the invasion not occurred at all” (24). Take, for example, an instance of a person being physically violent towards another. Physical violence towards another person to which they did not consent would certainly be a setback to the victim’s interests—perhaps to their interests in their own health and wellbeing, especially if they had been injured. Further, they would most definitely be in a worse condition due to the physical “invasion” by the other person. Additionally, harms can also manifest themselves as public or private harms. There are many crimes that most would consider to be harms that do not thwart the interest of one specific person. Take, for instance, those who counterfeit money; they are not harming any one person; rather, they are harming society as a whole, thwarting the interests of society by negatively affecting the economy. Working with this understanding of harm and how it operates within the harm principle, we can begin to analyze hate crimes and the harms that they cause. Subsequently, we can begin to analyze whether or not they are considerably more morally reprehensible, warranting increased punishment. I argue that hate crimes indeed cause significantly more harm because they cause an increased amount of harm to the individual in addition to causing public harm as well. Hate crimes cause increased private harm to their victims given that hate crimes do not just attack a person ; they attack their identity as well, causing a fractured sense of security and identity and leading to a myriad of negative effects, or harms . “Crimes... communicate a message to the victim that they do not count and are not worthy of respect” (25) and once someone becomes the victim of a hate crime, they begin to cope and rationalize why they specifically were targeted. While those who aren’t victims of hate crimes could just cite that they were “at the wrong place at the wrong time,” victims of hate crimes cannot adopt this as a possibility. When one is the victim of a hate crime, they will know that they have been target- ed based upon an aspect of their identity, and this in turn causes their identity to become “central to their internal awareness of why they have been victimized” (26). The unique way in which hate crimes target identity causes a variety of immeasurable harms to victims. They often cite increased sentiments of shame and guilt compared to those that have been victimized for other reasons. Not only that, hate crime victims report increased levels of anxiety and depression compared to those that have been victimized for other reasons. Certainly these negative effects are setbacks to interests as defined by Joel Feinberg. They fracture the victim’s sense of self and cause actual physical ailments, leaving them in a much worse condition than that in which they would have been if they had not been attacked at all, and especially if they had not been victimized because of their identity. Beyond the increased harms that hate crimes cause to their victims, they also cause additional public harm uncharacteristic of crimes committed for other reasons: harm caused to the wider community of the targeted group. While hate crimes are attacks on specific individuals, they are more so “symbolic messages to society about the worthiness of certain groups of people” (27). This message is a signal to minority communities that they are “unequal, unwelcome and undeserving of social respect,” and more pertinently, this message is a threat as well. The message of hate crimes creates a heightened sense of vulnerability and insecurity amongst minority communities that leads to an intense fear of victimization, inhibiting community members from living life without extreme caution. Members of minority communities that have been affected by hate crimes often note that the “fear and anxiety” felt by the victims of hate crimes “spreads to other community members” (28). This can be considered a public harm within the framework of the harm principle that I outlined earlier. The effects that hate crimes cause to minority communities can be defined as a setback to interests; again, it is certainly within our interest to be able to live our lives without fear of persecution or assault. Hate crimes deprive minority communities of their ability to do so. When hate crimes are considered within the framework of the harm principle, it is clear that they are more morally reprehensible. Does this naturally lend itself to the conclusion that they deserve increased punishment? I argue that, within a retributivist theory of punishment, it does lend itself to this conclusion given the principles of proportionality. Within the retributive model proposed by Immanuel Kant, the degree of punishment should adhere to “the principle of equality, by which the pointer of the scale of justice is made to incline no more to the one side than the other” (29). Considering the concept of proportionality within the framework of the harm principle, the degree of punishment for a crime should be proportional to the harm created by the crime. If that is the case, then hate crimes surely warrant increased punishment because of the increased harms that they cause, not only to their direct victims, but also to the communities that they affect. Conclusion This paper sought to provide a justification for hate crime legislation that con- formed to the principles of liberalism and aligned with a retributive theory of punishment. I found that harsher punishment for violent crimes related to hatred or bias towards a specific group can be justified when examined using the harm principle. Because hate crimes cause considerably more harm to their victims and minority communities, they are considerably more morally reprehensible than crimes committed for other reasons. When assessing whether or not these increased harms warrant increased punishment, we can rely on the notion of proportionality —that punishment for a crime should be proportional to the harm it creates. When examined in this way, increasing criminal sanctions for hate crimes is justified. Further, there are a variety of considerations that need to be taken into account when drafting hate crime legislation: specifically, hate crime legislation should be written to construe the mens rea element of the crime to be the intent to cause the increased harms to the individual and the minority community. Hate crimes are intuitively more morally reprehensible. At first we may think that they deserve increased punishment based upon how these crimes make us feel ; however, we should constantly question ourselves, examining whether our gut moral instincts align with the moral doctrines that guide our actions and the criminal law. In this case, hate crimes do indeed deserve increased punishment based upon these moral doctrines. Thus, legislatures intending on criminalizing hate crime legislation, or any crime for that matter, should not only take doctrinal considerations into account, but should also consider the moral justifications for why these actions deserve criminal liability. If this is the case, the law will begin to be much more consistent and comprehensive with the moral doctrines that we have adopted as a society. Endnotes 1 “Hate Crime Acts,” 18 U.S.C § 249 (2009), https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC- prelim-title18-section249&num=0&edition=prelim. 2 According to the German Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, a “politically motivated” crime includes crimes committed for reasons of the victim’s race, “political opinion, nationality, ethnicity, race, skin color, religion, belief, origin, disability, sexual orientation.” 3 Human Rights Watch, “The State Response to ‘Hate Crimes’ in Germany: A Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper,” Human Rights Watch, December 9, 2011, https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/09/state-response-hate-crimes-germany. 4 “Incitement of Masses,” German Criminal Code § 130 (1998), http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_ stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1241. 5 Heidi Hurd, “Why Liberals Should Hate ‘Hate Crime Legislation,’” Law and Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2001): 216. 6 Hurd, 216. 7 Ibid, 218. 8 Ibid, 218. 9 Ibid, 218. 10 Ibid, 226. 11 Ibid, 226. 12 Michael Moore, The Moral Worth of Retribution (Oxford University Press, 2010), 449. 13 Michael Moore, “The Metaphysics of Basic Acts III: Volitions as the Essential Source of Actions,” in Act and Crime: The Philosophy of Action and Its Implications for Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 1993), 136–37. 14 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Expanded Ed., Columbia Classics in Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2005). 15 Jeremy Bentham, “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bentham-an-introduction-to-the-principles-of-morals-and-legislation. 16 Michael J. Sandel, “Political Liberalism,” Harvard Law Review 107, no. 7 (1994): 1766. 17 Sandel, 1775. 18 Hurd, 230. 19 Aristotle, “Politics,” trans. Benjamin Jowett, 1994, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.5.five.html. 20 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Batoche Books, 1859), 13. 21 D.G. Brown, “The Harm Principle,” in A Companion to Mill, ed. Christopher Macleod and Dale E. Miller (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 411. 22 Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others, vol. 1, 4 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1984). 23 Feinberg, 1:38. 24 Feinberg, 1:34. 25 Mark Austin Walters, “The Harms of Hate Crime: From Structural Disadvantage to Individual Identity,” in Hate Crime and Restorative Justice (Oxford University Press, 2014), 71. 26 Walters, 73. 27 Mark Austin Walters, 84. 28 Ibid, 84. 29 Morris J. Fish, “An Eye for an Eye: Proportionality as a Moral Principle of Punishment,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 28, no. 1 (2008): 63. 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