Steve Harris
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Three-State Solution

5/28/2021

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The latest round of violence in Israel and Gaza has revived debate about the feasibility of peace processes in the Middle East; that perennial epitome of futility. Jesus’ admonition has not prevented the casting of stones (much less rockets and smart bombs); despite the robust accumulation of sin on all sides.

Among the many distinctive attributes of this dispute is its reliance on history as a justification for claims of territory as well as of self-righteousness; much of which is nonsense. Not factually nonsense, of course. Jews have been in the neighborhood for thousands of years, although not particularly so in the five hundred years leading up to the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948 (and they haven’t been a majority since the 4C). As late as the start of WWI, they comprised just over 5% of the region’s population. Muslims arrived in the 7C and dominated the population since the 12C.

The larger question is what this might mean. What do the actions of my ancestors some generations back entitle me to? They moved (under a variety of circumstances and degrees of choice). Have Jews (or Hispanics, for that matter) established a right of permanent interest in various neighborhoods of Manhattan just because their ancestors lived there thirty or 130 years ago? Most Anglo-American legal systems have a concept called “adverse possession,” under which, if someone lives on “your” land for 30 or so years, they extinguish your claim. But law is one thing, and culture is another.

Historical resonance certainly was essential to the Zionist movement of the late 19/early 20C. European Jews, continually excluded/discriminated against felt that they, too, were entitled to their piece of the nationalist pie that led to the creation of Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, etc. What better place to send them than where they had “come from” (even if it had been a while)? Thus, the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which the British (by then having taken over the region from the Ottomans) accelerated a process of recognition, if not of right. European guilt over the Holocaust locked things in and a branch of Europe was set up to spread liberal democracy amid the benighted heathens.

Jewish claims are, therefore, a bit patchy, to put it kindly. On the other hand, the so-called “Palestinians” have comparably-sized holes in their own historical claims, even if based on a stronger record of continuous residence. The biggest one is that there is no “Palestine,” at least not in any meaningful sense until the local Muslims fled/were pushed out in the middle of the 20C when Israel was created. The Ottomans controlled the areas, using various configurations of administrative districts from their conquest in the 16C, until their empire collapsed in WWI. Claims of the locals to any sort of ethnic coherence (the usual starting point for any “national” status) below the level of “Arab” seem pretty much post-hoc, especially since many nearby folks happily became “Jordanian,” “Egyptian,” or “Lebanese” as borders shuffled around.

So, who are “Palestinians”? The ~700k people who were ousted/fled the territory occupied by Israel in 1947-8? Some went east (to the “West Bank”) others to the south-west (to “Gaza”). How about their 4.5M descendants today (only about 75K actual refugees are still alive)? Do they have anything in common otherwise (other than being abused by Israel and their own Arab confreres)?

To say that there is no “Palestinian” nation is, however, not to say anything about the fact that these people have been oppressed and abused. And that they are as entitled to peace, justice, security, and opportunity as anyone else. Israel has thrown away much of its moral stature in its treatment of Arabs both within in boundaries and those in the West Bank and Gaza. The record of Arab countries is (only marginally) better. People without power have been cruelly used by established elites on both sides. It’s no wonder that their anger boils over. It’s no wonder that they seek the status and apparent security of their own state.

The resort to history on all sides is a result of their status and behavior in the current environment and recent (since WWII) past. But it is, as we have seen, no panacea; it’s just a distraction.

We live in a world of nation-states and, despite the historical dubiousness of the concept or its lack of utility in the future, such statehood seems a necessary attribute of societal organization/growth in the early 21C. Israeli Jews have a (not unreasonable) fear that they would be ‘drowned in a sea of Arabs’ if all the refugee/descendants were combined into a larger Israel (the “one-state” solution). Israel, itself isn’t going away. As Secretary of State Kerry said a few years ago to Israel: “You can have a democratic state, or you can have a Jewish state; you can’t have both.” Thus, more-or-less officially on all sides since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the hopes for peace have rested on a “two-state” (Israel + Palestine) solution.

It won’t fly. I doubt it would have worked even before the Fatah/Hamas split of the past 30 years has embedded an animosity in some ways deeper than that between Arabs and Jews. Once Hamas took over the government of Gaza in 2007 and Fatah continued to govern in the West Bank, the chances of reconciliation have dimmed. Nor is there any particular reason (other than this dubious claim of commonality), why there should be one “Palestinian” state. All their connections would find Israel in the middle; Arab-oriented cultural and economic ties would push them outward, towards Jordan and Egypt, respectively. It is reminiscent of the creation of Pakistan in 1947, two Muslim-dominated regions on the flanks of India. That fell apart in a messy war in 1971.

So, why not a three-state solution? Assuming both groups of Arabs could agree on who got to use the term “Palestine,” it might work. Hamas and Fatah could go their own separate ways (no different than Jordan and Syria). People could look to the future and build some peace and prosperity. All that would be lost is the chance to argue over history (best left to academic conferences) and the myth of a coherent “Palestine” which has fed so much hate, anger, and pain for the past 75 years.
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Representing the People

5/21/2021

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As part of my intermittent series on constitutional changes, today’s topic is rethinking the nature of representation in the US House of Representatives. My idea is a bit radical, but it would bring many benefits, along with some risks inherent in changing a long-standing institution. I have been noodling on this idea for some time, but the rise of remote work during the past year has increased the feasibility of my concept.

Modern representative democracy was invented in Philadelphia in 1787. The premise was that competent people with a stake in society (i.e. males, white, not slaves, usually with some degree of wealth) should be in charge. However, unlike the model democracy of ancient Athens (also limited to males, not slaves) there were too many of them and they were spread out over too big an area to get together in one place to sort things out on a regular basis. Over the following two hundred years, the number of such males increased, Blacks and women were included and wide-spread education enhanced the capabilities of voters to understand the issues which they charged their representatives to resolve. We have now come to the point where we accept that every adult has a recognizable stake that needs to be represented.

The Founding Fathers believed that a close connection between the people and their representatives was essential. Debates at the Constitutional Convention looked to ratios of one representative to  30,000-50,000 people. With the growth of the population, the average congressional district (2020 census) now has over 760,000 people. By contrast, only California  and Texas have larger state legislative districts (State Senate districts are almost a million people and over 800k, respectively), but most have  a lower house members representing fewer than  50,000 people. Similarly, on a world-wide basis, only India has larger districts (2.2M/seat) than the US House.

Among the many problems with our current system is that representatives hardly know anybody (other than wealthy donors) in their districts. Another problem is that with the demands of being “on-site” in Washington, they can’t spend all that much time in their districts (yes, even Congresspeople should get vacations (other than to Cancun)). Finally, with the size of districts, it costs a lot of money to run, so members have to spend a disproportionate amount of time fundraising for re-election.

The idea of representation is important. I’m not great fan of plebiscitary democracy on any sort of on-going basis. Issues are complex and need more focused attention than almost all folks have the time/education for. Still, in one essential way, I’d like to go back to where we were in the 18C. One representative for every 40,000 people. A House of Representatives of just over 8,000 members. And, most of the time, they would live and work in their districts; conducting most votes and hearings and meetings remotely.

The main benefit of this model is that representatives would actually be in touch with their constituents. Since most of their “Washington work” would be done remotely (just proved-in via the Pandemic), they would be in the neighborhood a lot. People could actually be in touch with their representatives and might have a little more connection with the political process.

In addition, Small districts wouldn’t require much money for elections, so there wouldn’t be a need to focus on fundraising. Communities would be represented, reducing both the demand for and feasibility of gerrymandering. Corporate and other big-moneyed interests still couldn’t afford to overwhelm members, reducing the impact of lobbyists and generally breaking out of the “inside-the-Beltway” mentality that distorts much of US policy-making.

Occasionally mooted incremental increases in the size of the House don’t really solve any problems other than slightly reducing district size. Even doubling the House (a thousand House districts each with 331,000 people would take us back to the ratios of the 1940s) would still require doubling the House infrastructure in the middle of Washington DC, not to mention finding a room for them all to meet. Still not much chance of knowing your Congressperson (or vice-versa).

There are several risks/problems associated with this idea (besides the inertial thinking of incumbents). Committee staffs would likely gain sway in the legislative process (how about creating 10 regional centers around the country where committees would be based, further dispersing DC power?). Ditto for the federal bureaucracy. The sociology or organizational dynamics of this new House are hard to predict. A variety of new means of communications and negotiation methods and technologies would need to be explored. Party structures and the House “leadership’s” management of the flow of business would need to be rethought.

More fundamentally, our political structure has become like the weather: “everybody talks about it, but no one does anything about it.” We need a radical shift to ‘shake up’ the system: the sclerosis , the alienation, the inundation of money.

House districts of 40,000 people would mean that San Francisco would have 22 representatives (twice the number of the Board of Supervisors) and an average district would be a bit over two square miles: this is what community representation would look like. Oakland County, Michigan, where I grew up, filled with suburbs of various socio-economic mixes, would have 32 representatives. Even Wyoming, the epitome of rural America (49th in density) would have 15 seats, each about twice the size of a state Senate district.  With so much local community representation, what would be the point of gerrymandering? Would it even be feasible?

Local representation would mean that the locus of representation would return to the relationship between citizens and their representative, away from the political/media/money hothouse of Washington, D.C. It would be a bold step towards a new mode of democracy in America.
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Forever Wars

5/14/2021

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The recent announcement that US troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 has brought forth the predictable spate of hand-wringing about military futility and “sending American boys [and, now, girls] to die in far-off, foreign lands.” Without entering the debate about the specific opportunities and costs faced by the US in this decision, it struck me as indicative of the common fallacy faced by military strategists and planners for centuries, i.e., fighting (or, in this case, not fighting) the “last war.” Curiously, this over-sensitivity to history is paired with the US’ usual lack of awareness of military history generally and our sense of entitlement as to what kind of wars we should be engaged with.

The nature of war has changed pretty dramatically over the years, often driven by new technologies (e.g., stirrups, rifling, motors, computers), tactics, logistics, and national cultures (e.g., the levee en masse during the French Revolution brought about the era of mass armies and total national participation in the war effort). In (some of) our own lifetimes, we have seen the rise of highly mobile and mechanized forces and planes and missiles projecting force at distance: the stretch from WWII to Vietnam to Desert Storm.

How well military thinkers have adapted to these changes in the 21C is a topic for another day. My concern here is with how the general population perceives and understands how wars work and their resulting expectations. Taking down Saddam Hussein (2003-2010) was, from a military perspective, pretty comparable to prior actions. The war in Afghanistan was another kettle of fish entirely. No lines, no fronts, embedded guerilla opponents, weakly maintained government in “controlled” areas; all a la Vietnam, only more so. The difference with Vietnam is that the earlier conflict was all about territorial control and stabilizing our local proxy government. In Afghanistan, the goal was global terrorism suppression: eliminating one country as a hub of radical Islamic terrorism. It’s not clear, even if we had “won” in Afghanistan, that we would have accomplished our goal.

It’s really hard for an organized state army to defeat motivated and well-supported guerillas. In Vietnam we finally realized that we couldn’t and quit (as did the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the British in the 19C). As we found lately in Iraq (and Libya) nation-building is also really hard and requires at least a couple of generations. It’s taken us much longer to come to terms with this in Afghanistan, but to the same result, because nation building was only a means to a global end.

From a domestic perspective, the US left Vietnam because of military frustration and difficult PR undermined popular support for the massive number of troops necessary to fight and even have a shot at winning. The war in Afghanistan avoided that problem by keeping US troop levels (under 30K, except for the Obama “surge” from 2009-13, and only briefly hitting 100k) and casualties (under 2500 deaths) relatively small. But this was not sufficient to withstand the rising weariness with the war (even if domestic protests were proportional to the US casualties, compared to Vietnam).

So, what was the problem? I think we just got bored with the “Global War on Terrorism.” Any war that we couldn’t win reasonably quickly wasn’t worth fighting. This attitude comes from our 20C experience of wars (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm) in which victory parameters were clear and—win-or-lose—resolvable at some sort of peace conference. 21C war against non-state actors, principally anti-terrorist/guerilla in nature, requires changing (as they said in Vietnam) “hearts-and-minds.” Its slow and arduous work. It also requires thinking non-spatially. Maps (at least at the strategic level) aren’t much use; it’s not about controlling territory, but changing people. It’s a different kind of war and we don’t have the patience for it.

US attitudes are also colored by the fact that most of us don’t know what war is actually like. There hasn’t been a sustained war on US territory in over 150 years (and the only one in the last 200 was a domestic war). The last “all-in” mobilization was over 75 years ago (16 M served, over 10% of the total population; for Vietnam, it was 2.7M or only 1.3%, Afghanistan, even if twice as long, is even less). Vietnam was unique visible because of TV coverage, but the war in Afghanistan gets only a tiny fraction of media attention compared to Vietnam.

As a result, we face the political issue of maintaining a war that is unwinnable in the short-to-medium term, without the support of people who aren’t so much opposed to it as bored or mystified by it. The esprit de corps which might have animated us if the war were on our territory, visible or clear-cut is lacking. The (potentially dire) consequences of giving the Taliban a breather seem too distant as a motivation either. Domino theory rationalizations for sending US troops half-way around the world went out of style fifty years ago.

Nonetheless, established states and societies remain at risk from asymmetric disruptive forces which take advantage of our complacency and our unwillingness to deal with a mode of warfare in which don’t fit into neat military tactics and John Wayne-style denouements. The story of military technology over the past 500 years has been the dispersal of power, not its concentration in formal state organizations. This has not only heightened the risk from biological/cyber/nuclear attacks but enabled a wider range of those dissatisfied with the existing global political order to support disruption for longer and for less money than ever before.

The era of relatively short, well-defined wars is not over, but it’s no longer the only game in town. If those—on both the left and the right—don’t have the attention span to recognize that a much more determined, strategic, stance is necessary to fight a quasi-permanent form of warfare, then things will get messier, sooner.
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Flunking out of the Electoral College

5/7/2021

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As part of my intermittent series on US Constitutional issues, today I am taking on the venerable Electoral College component of the US election system. In prior discussions, I have touched on the undemocratic distortions in the US Senate (10/09/20), the need for a fourth branch of government (12/11/20), reforming federalism (02/19/21), and the general need for a wholesale rewrite of the Constitution (02/05/21). In an upcoming posting, I will take on the composition of the US House of Representatives. Compared to these, the Electoral College seems like easy pickings.

Recent discussions of the Electoral College have pointed out that the Democrats have won the popular vote for President seven times in the last eight elections, only to be “robbed” by the anachronistic electoral college on two of those occasions. Most then jump to a call for moving to a national election by total popular vote. In so doing, they combine their critiques of several aspects of the Electoral College and thus skip over an intermediate solution (which, given our deep propensity for incremental change) may well be more likely.

To be specific, there are three problems with the current structure.
1. Voting by states – Our current (since 1787) system is based on a union of independent states, each casting its own votes on its own terms.
2. Small states bonus – Since the Electoral College provides that each state have a number of votes equal to the sum of its House and Senate seats, small states have a disproportionate share of the vote. This is comparable to the problem with the Senate’s democratic deficit.
3. Winner-take-all – Each state casts all its votes for the candidate who won a plurality of the popular vote in its election.

There are other issues, such as the problem of “faithless” electors, but, as with fraudulent popular voting, this is talked about far more than the actual practice.

One could design a revised approach that solves one, two, or all three of these concerns (in several combinations).

Before getting to potential solutions, it is worth noting that very few (none?) other countries have similar problems. Many use a parliamentary system (even if they have a ceremonial President) which, by definition depend on multiple parties/individuals having a share of power, unlike a Presidential system in which there is only one person at the top. Prime ministers usually must win their own seats and then are elected to head up the government by the collective vote of the other parliamentarians. Countries with the presidential system (e.g. France, Russia, and many of the countries established in the 20C) are unitary, not federal, systems; so there are no sub-units whose representatives would choose a national president. Finally, the vast majority of countries were established in the 20C or sufficiently late in the 19C so that their democracy assumes an informed, widespread popular electorate; unlike our system which was created in the 18C when literacy was low and most ordinary citizens (e.g. a farmer in Pennsylvania) had little means of knowing anything about a Governor/Senator from other state who might be a contender for national leadership.
The “winner-takes-all” mode seems to be the biggest problem. It has pernicious effects, particularly the effective disregarding of ‘minority’ voters in states with a substantial party majority (e.g. California or Wyoming). Of course, since it is likely that a fair number of Californians or Wyomingites know how their state will vote in any presidential election; they don’t think it’s worth their time to vote and we can only guess how close a vote would be if all votes counted. The other problem is that all media and campaign attention gets focused on the “battleground” states which distorts coverage, understanding, and political positions. (The benefit is that those of us in those states are spared unceasing advertising and get-out-the-vote phonebanks/robocalls).

However, the “winner-take-all” mode is NOT a constitutional issue. It’s up to each state to determine how to allocate their electoral college votes. Many have joined together to enact conditional laws shifting to some form of allocation based on majority national popular vote, once other states with a majority of electoral college votes do so (currently  states representing 193 votes out of the necessary 270 are signed up).

This effort, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, is not a bad patch on a broken system, but it’s definitely a ‘work-around’ for the absence of more basic constitutional change. It is a voluntary surrender of state sovereignty in favor of a national political coherence. It would likely address much of the general popular concern with the current electoral college system. However, for die-hard originalists, any change risks opening the flood-gates of constitutional modernization and is to be resisted, even if to no substantive purpose (analyses show no long-term partisan effect of getting rid of the “winner-take-all” mode or other aspects of the current system).

Still, a constitutional amendment would be preferable as part of a more comprehensive solution; particularly one that addressed the other two failings.

As I argued previously, we should remove federalism from all aspects of the national electoral process and reserve it to questions of governmental jurisdiction and operations. We are no longer a country made up of states; we have a national political culture and state boundaries play no role in how we should address questions of national policy.

Similarly, the small state bonus—a remnant of the 1787 compromise to protect small states and southern states (and their slavery laws)—should go by the board. I could even see small states agreeing to give up their rights here in return for preserving some extra clout in the Senate; should it come to that.

The downside is the need to go through the arduous amendment process; which is difficult in ordinary circumstances (38 states required), and much more challenging in our fraught political environment. Of course that same set of atmospherics makes the Compact route almost as difficult. So, the Electoral College in its current form is likely to be with us for a while until there is a sea change in our political culture.


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    Condemned to Repeat It --
    Musings on history, society, and the world.

    I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

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