Vermont is still by-and-large a mountainous idyll, an unimpeachably beautiful place that in many ways serves as a positive stereotype of itself.  From the time one leaves the city limits of Burlington and heads eastward, there are practically no big-box stores; there are no billboards; the highway ambles between compact, centuries-old villages, boxed into vales by shaggy hillsides.  This cultural and topographical preservation is not an organic development.  It relies on a cavalcade of comprehensive regulations, including the state’s revolutionary Act 250, which affords regional planning boards the ability to reject projects larger than one acre for any “adverse effects” they may have on local “aesthetics, scenic beauty, historical sites, or natural areas.”  Also included in these initiatives are an outright, statewide ban on billboards and hundreds of byzantine, yet effective local zoning ordinances that have single-handedly limited the number of Wal-Marts in the state to four.  If such regulations seem grounded in government intrusion into the minutiae of construction, it’s because they are; these comprehensive measures are made possible by the semi-collectivist nature of Vermont politics and the civic fabric of its citizenry, represented by an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature and a self-described “socialist” senator in Bernie Sanders.  As a liberal, I have no philosophical quarrel with this form of politics, and I imagine that even conservatives with a strong predisposition against the process would admire the sprawl-less, civically harmonious, and aesthetically beautiful end.  Nevertheless, I realize that the libertarian argument is deontological, focused on the intrusive means of government, rather than the aesthetics of the result.

Across the border in New Hampshire, this libertarian reasoning has definitively triumphed.  Upon crossing the Connecticut River while traveling eastward on Interstate 89, those with an eye for municipal planning might as well be crossing the River Styx.  This isn’t to say that I hate New Hampshire; it is, in many places, one of the most beautiful states in the nation.  But whereas the journey in Vermont is completely devoid of bland corporatism, the traveler entering New Hampshire is immediately confronted with pallid seas of asphalt and big-box obelisks, a Kmart, a Ninety-Nine Restaurant, a TJ Maxx, a Kohl’s, a Verizon outlet, an Olympia Sports, a CVS, and a Payless Shoe Source all lining the highway within its first mile.  A local conservative poet, Robert Frost, wrote in one of his anthologies, “Mountain Interval,” of a boy who is killed by a buzz-saw while he overlooks the Connecticut, a buzz-saw that churns out identical, monotonous slices of stove-length wood in a process symbolic of modernity.  Ninety-two years after the poem was written, it is clear that it was not only the boy who was killed by the apathetic strokes of the modern machine, but the community surrounding him as well.  In the violent expansion of sprawl, local identity has been gobbled up into strip malls, parking lots, and retail chains, making once compact yankee villages indistinguishable from the highways of Dixie or the suburbs of LA.  Far too much of the journey’s remainder is scarred by this demeaning form of development, a frustration expressed by author and New Urbanist, James Howard Kunstler, in his 1996 book, The Geography of Nowhere:

Most of this [new development] is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading – the jive-plastic Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk food joints, the Orwellian office parks featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield…the whole, destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”

Kunstler is generalizing a bit in the last part of his quote.  Many non-Republican politicians (and even, admittedly, some Republicans) can distinguish between responsible and irresponsible development.  But in the rural north of New Hampshire, where distrust of government is a societal dogma, the difference between responsible and irresponsible growth has become an irrelevant, peripheral point of argument.  Regulation has become poison, and the idea that government action could preserve local identity, heretical.

Upon reaching the borderlands of Maine and New Hampshire the traveler is offered a respite against the soulless sprawl that springs from this anti-government virulence.  Partially out of local design, mostly out of neglect and isolation, the most rugged uplands of the White Mountains are free of Arby’s and Applebee’s, and a lack of business investment softens the SmartGrowth debate.  However, once the traveler arrives in my home in a tourist-laden corner of bumpy western Maine, just to the east of the Appalachian spine, local communities are once again confronted by the continuous prospect of architectural conformity.  What’s more, the zoning debate here is made particularly contentious by the composition of the local population: a broad base of Ron Paul libertarians (multiple inland counties of Maine, from Piscataquis to Aroostook,  did vote for Ron Paul), sprinkled with a healthy number of Vermont-style, cosmopolitan transplants.

In 1997, current Harvard Business Review writer Joshua Macht wrote an article about this debate, focusing on the regional village of Bethel, Maine, titled “Entrepreneurs Collide: Will Zoning Take Town Downhill?”  Within its pages, one paranoid businessman, Rick Whitney, explicitly analogized local zoning proposals with Stalinist Russia, quipping “ ‘There were plenty of comprehensive plans and 10-year plans in the USSR.  But did citizens have their freedom?”  Another local entrepreneur effectively sums up the libertarian argument, adding  “ ‘There are people in this town that wouldn’t mind regulating everything.  But they take away some of the Maine heritage I know.’”

Fifteen years after Macht’s profile, the regulations have hardly strengthened, and Rick Whitney has by-and-large thwarted the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy afoot amongst a third of the county’s population (including myself, apparently).  What’s more, the same Rick Whitney has managed to build several hideous lumber warehouses on the outskirts of town, part of the wave of concentric sprawl that has emanated outward from Bethel over the last two decades.  In my own neighboring village of eight-hundred and two residents, a recent comprehensive planning proposal was voted down easily, but not before it exploded into an armed encounter between a belligerent anti-Zonist and one of the plan’s drafters.  Thus, it seems that my town of Greenwood will, for the foreseeable future, be as susceptible as ever to the prospect of corporate obelisks gobbling up our hamlets and degrading our community, naturally and architecturally.

In recent years, the political climate for those of us fighting against this “geography of nowhere,” as James Howard Kustler put it, has only deteriorated.  On the state level, Maine’s Tea Party-backed governor Paul LePage, former executive of the big-box retailer Marden’s Surplus and Salvage, has effectively destroyed the Informed Growth Act, our state’s watered down version of Vermont’s Act 250, which had previously mandated several town meetings before a community accepted a gross retailer’s construction permit.  The Bangor Daily News deemed that LePage opposed the act because he worried that the statutes contained a “bias against big-box stores.”  But LePage seems not to understand the spirit of the law.  Of course there is an ingrained bias.  Does the governor think, after all, that we’re interested in holding twelve town meetings every time a bohemian pottery shop moves to town?

To be sure, this hatred of SmartGrowth by the Tea Party tranche of the Republican Party is not a purely local phenomenon.  Focusing on the anti-sprawl Agenda 21 passed by the United Nations in 1992, the Republican Party has denounced compact-growth policies as a form of “destructive and insidious” internationalism, and Tea Partiers have occupied countless zoning meetings throughout the country in an attempt to thwart the supposed multilateral conspiracy.  In any case, this brand of Republicanism is not a force for the ironic destruction of local autonomy just in my mountainous slice of Maine, nor in just the states of northern New England for that matter, but in all crannies of the nation where civic-minded citizens are attempting to wrest a sense of cultural uniqueness from the slings of architectural conformity.  Such realizations give me a headache, and I’ll have to go down to the new, obeliskoid RiteAid in order to medicate myself as the local apothecary has been driven out of business.  Perhaps my neighbor down the slope, the one with the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag on her lawn, will ascend the hillside to ask if she can borrow my axe-helve.  I won’t be here, but that is no matter.  She can simply travel down to the newly constructed Wal-Mart and purchase a new blade, sold by a man she has never met, manufactured in a country she can’t pronounce, destined to cut the boundary lines of a subdivision populated by flatlanders with whom she’ll never interact.  Hopefully, she’ll experience a cathartic moment beforehand, but if not, I my fear that only by surrounding herself with defeated geography and hollow interaction, will this Tea Partier realize which parts of “the Maine heritage,” as she put it in Macht’s article, are most worth defending.

Ron Paul has a campaign problem and no one seems to want to take to the podium to remedy the situation.

For all intents and purposes, 2007 was a success story in mass grassroots fundraising. The Paul campaign broke the single-day fundraising record in the U.S. by raising over $6 million on the backs of individual donors in December 2007, for example. He packed 100,000+ members into thousands of meet-up groups in cities across the country, the most of any GOP contender at the time. Rep. Paul managed to garner between 5 and 8 percent of national support during the primary contests for those—especially younger voters with a strong Web presence—who gravitated toward the man for reasons other than conventional campaign outreach efforts from volunteers.

The problem was simple back then: resources were allocated poorly in that nearly all the campaigning was decentralized and devolved to local meet-up groups and savvy Internet surrogates – true to the Ron Paul credo – and a national strategy barely had an exoskeleton upon which to rely. This may have led to what social psychologist Gustave Le Bon would call “group mind,” in which a throng of followers exerts influence over its members, or simply acts independently. In both the short- and long-term, this might have actually helped the Paul campaign reach its various campaign goals, yet the supporters were also able to wield disproportionate influence over the campaign, diverting crucial resources toward a campaign blimp as opposed to television advertisements or the like.

The Paul campaign did well in learning from its amateur mistakes, rebounding almost immediately by the time 2011 rolled around. The remaining campaign funds were used as seed money for Campaign for Liberty, a 501(c)(4) organization with national outreach and local offices in key states that proselytized the libertarian message and organized against pressing legislative agendas, such as the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act. They hired seasoned campaign operatives like Trygve Olson that helped his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), pull off an upset in 2010, as well as savvy ad man Jon Downs, who worked on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Office space has been in place for months, advertisements have saturated the airwaves in Iowa and New Hampshire, and volunteers have been plugging away at the phones and the doors of voters. In Paul’s own words, the American people were finally “swimming to him.”

Then, the newsletters resurfaced, alleging that Rep. Paul is racist, homophobic, and potentially anti-Semitic. As in 2007, the campaign has summarily disavowed Rep. Paul’s involvement with the newsletters without pointing to any particular staff member who may have written them in Rep. Paul’s name. In lockstep, his fervent libertarian supporters  have labeled this as the latest example of a “smear campaign” orchestrated by the mainstream media to discredit Rep. Paul’s campaign and bring down his poll numbers. His supporters obviously waste little to no time in responding collectively on behalf of their candidate of choice, on constant vigilance for signs of negative press coverage. However, there is not one singular centralized response to the accusations, which could cause a problems in terms of filtering and maintaining control over the campaign’s core message.

A Super PAC devoted to Rep. Paul’s nomination has stepped up to defend Paul from the media onslaught, as well, and just recently uploaded a video in which a middle-aged African American male from Texas details a supererogatory act of kindness by Dr. Paul toward him and his family several decades ago: Dr. Paul tended to his wife in the hospital when no one else would and did not charge the man a penny for his services.

What about his official campaign?  There is nothing on his official site that links or discusses the issue at all. The campaign had to know this was an inevitability, though, because every other candidate who has made a splash in the early polls, as Paul has of late, has had every part of his or her private and public life exhaustively scrutinized. Herman Cain has even been pushed out of the race entirely, as a consequence.

Ron Paul does not have a race problem. He has a campaign problem. As evidenced by the lack of response to the recent racist allegations, there seems to exist the belief within the campaign that the issue will simply dissipate over time and that the current “brush it under the carpet” strategy will work through the primary season. What should the campaign have done, and what can it do to effectively put this potentially fatal thorn behind it?

For starters, it could do what it has done so well over the past several months and release a professional advertisement in which sound bites of Rep. Paul narrate how his philosophy of personal liberty aims to turn the page by empowering Americans of every race, ethnicity, and orientation to promote the central American ideals of tolerance and freedom. Gary Johnson did this well with a low-budget, so I could only imagine what the Paul campaign could create.

Second, Rep. Paul would be wise to heed Michael Tomasky’s intriguing suggestion that he deliver an informal talk or speech focused solely on racism as candidate Barack Obama did in March 2008. In 2008, the speech did wonders for candidate Obama in moving beyond the inflammatory language of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and demonstrating leadership on the issue of race in the United States. Tomasky may believe that there are not enough GOP voters who care about alleged racism for Paul to respond, but would it hurt to speak for himself as any man of presidential caliber would, and put the matter behind him sooner rather than later, especially as some question his electability?

Should Ron Paul win this Jan. 3 in Iowa, his campaign should expect the entire weight of the GOP establishment and mainstream media to compound atop the campaign headquarters with even sharper scrutiny of statements published under his name. It may not be Rep. Paul’s personal style to put on his politician’s hat, but a presidential race is about demonstrating bold leadership. Overreliance on a heterogeneous, but well-intentioned score of supporters worked well in the past, but 2011 should be a time for the Paul campaign to reflect on its non-interventionist ways politically. After all, it just might help Paul’s chances of winning in the long run.

Photo Source: Gage Skidmore

Gary Johnson is a former two-term governor of New Mexico and current candidate for the GOP nomination for President. He is known for his low-tax libertarian views and is an avid mountain climber and triathlete.

For an audio version of this interview, click here.

Harvard Political Review: Where do you differ with fellow libertarian-leaning presidential candidate Ron Paul?

Gary Johnson: I have the unique experience of leading a start-up business that eventually employed over 1,000 people. I also served 8 years as governor of New Mexico and, while Ron Paul got to register his principled “no” vote on issues he disagreed, I got to debate and discuss my vetoes for weeks on end. Lastly, I am not a social conservative. I would describe myself as a classical liberal, and I support a woman’s right to choose.

HPR: What is the Gary Johnson plan for economic recovery?

GJ: I believe we are on the verge of a monetary collapse. We’re not immune to the mathematics of continuing to spend more money than we take in. If elected, I will submit a balanced budget to Congress in 2013 that will reduce federal spending by 43%. I also promise to veto any legislation where expenses exceed revenue and to advocate for throwing out the entire federal tax system and replacing it with Fair-Tax. I share in the outrage of Occupy Wall Street protesters that government picks winners and losers, and implementing FairTax would fix this.

HPR: How do you explain being left out of nearly every primary debate?

GJ: No matter how you cut my exclusion, I think you just have to judge it as grossly unfair. CNN excluded me from the second debate after coming up with a rule that I had to be at 1% in 5 national polls, even though I met that criteria. During my last debate, Fox News Network chose to interpret the rule as the last 5 national polls where my name appeared and, as a result, I was included. I don’t want to claim to be ahead of others that have been given opportunity, but I just want to claim equal footing to those individuals and I’m not being given that equal footing.

HPR: What would you do today in the Middle East if you had the chance to reshape American foreign policy?

GJ: I would get out of Afghanistan and Iraq tomorrow. I would not have participated in Libya. I think involvement needs to start with a military threat and that occurred in none of these countries, including Iraq. I originally thought involvement in Afghanistan was totally warranted, but I think we wiped out al-Qaeda after the first 6 months. We’re building roads, schools, bridges and hospitals in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries and we have those same needs here.

HPR: Can you explain your policy on marijuana legalization?

GJ: I’ve advocated legalizing marijuana. Control it, regulate it, tax it. I’m opposed to the drug war but right now Republicans can’t grab ahold of the notion that half of what we spend on law enforcement, the courts and the prisons is drug-related, and to what end? We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and this is America? I think if we legalize marijuana we will take giant steps as a nation to come to grips with rational drug policy in this country which starts with looking at drugs as a health, rather than criminal justice, issue.

HPR: Where do you view the viability of your campaign right now?

GJ: The viability at this point depends on being in these debates, so I’m not viable. This is a real uphill battle and just not being treated fairly, which is what I actually expected to be the case, leaves a real bad taste. I continue to be out here on the road talking to as many people as I can, but that doesn’t quite compare to the debates where millions of people can tune in.

Naji Filali ’14 is a Staff Writer. This interview has been condensed and edited.

Photo Credit: Ron Hill, Wikimedia Commons

The dynamism of the metropolis

Much of the demographic shift toward the city comes from the developing world and newly industrialized countries, such as China where the urban slice of the population will increase by 20% by 2030, and Nigeria where it will increase by 25%.  In nations such as these, where economies are initially developing and modernizing, urbanization can be seen as a parallel process to industrialization as workers are drawn into the urban matrix by the prospect of lucrative labor.  Just as the fervently pro-urban Harvard economist Edward Glaeser points out in in his new book, The Triumph of the City, new urban zones foster competition-through-proximity, and allow for social mobility and political participation by breaking down traditional, agronomical hierarchies.  Adapting the viewpoint of the environmentalist, compact cities, replete with skyscrapers and vertical development, foster more eco-friendly lives as the need for transporting resources, and humans themselves, is reduced.  Thus, from the pragmatic eyes of the academic, the influx of residents into developing cities, like Nigeria’s Lagos and China’s Xinjiang, is something to be celebrated, a triumph, economically, politically, and environmentally.

At home, in the United States, the rise of the city and the subsequent cost-benefit analysis is less clear, mainly because modern urbanization in the developed world is profoundly different from its counterpart in the developing world.   While Americans are vacating rural areas, migration and population growth is not contributing to the rise of the metropolis, but rather to the rise of urban sprawl.

A rejection of individual dignity

Already half of Americans live in suburbs, and 80% of all urban growth over the last three decades, (which in turn comprises the vast majority of general growth), occurred in suburban areas.  The ectoplasm of subdivisions, extending out from major cities and sweeping across accommodating topographies in cookie-cutter rows of soulless prefabricated McMansions is absorbing our new, rapidly expanding population.  The very structure of these “communities” rejects the rugged individualism of the countryside and the cosmopolitanism of the city.  Like the lost Connecticut suburbanites of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, modern American suburb-dwellers are confronted with the prospect of overweening conformity, if nothing else, through the uniform architecture of modern suburban sprawl.

Although the rapid pumping of the new American population into suburbs and low-density, peripheral cities rejects individualism and destroys the romantic edge of the demographic extremes, I admit that many of these judgments are just that, judgments, subjective and open to personal interpretation.  After all, if somebody’s life goal is to occupy a home at the end of a cul-de-sac in a faux stucco subdivision in the Arizona desert, who am I to denigrate their conception of the American dream?

Still, there are quantitative reasons to despise the new demographics of American population growth.  First of all, the environmental benefits of the compact city that Edward Glaeser espoused are reversed, as suburbanites are forced to commute usually over twenty minutes to work, rarely taking advantage of public transportation that is more readily available to their colleagues in the city proper.  The competition-through-proximity, media proliferation, and incentives for innovation that are present in the metropolis, fade alongside waning population density.  Perhaps a more serious toll of modern suburbanization, however, is the impact that our new suburban sprawl has on both ecosystems and the human landscape.  Unlike a city that expands upward, an outward-expanding city comes at the expense of rural and even wild regions, a reality as concerning to academia as it is to the environmental activist bloc.

The dearth of interface competition, the sprawling strip malls, the end of country, and the overweening reliance on the car, have pushed city and even state leaders to encourage urbanization but fight it in its limp, suburban form.  Portland, Oregon currently serves as the prime example, of the anti-sprawl, compact growth city, where the urban population will grow by approximately 80% over the next few decades, but officials have only allowed a for a 6% increase in land to be zoned for residential tracts.  Even in Vermont, the least urbanized state in the nation, thorough initiatives are in place to fight the sprawl and suburbanization characteristic of the displacement of that state’s population. If no governmental measures are put in place, the population explosion will still lead to a form of urbanization, just not the desirable form, not that of the modern metropolis, the marketplace of ideas, the harbinger of tolerance, a place of man-made beauty with minimal encroachment on its natural counterpart.

From the libertarian perspective, the idea of smart growth, of channeling the population into certain demographic categories is an Orwellian nightmare.  After all, the decision of where one is to live is, by and large, personal.  That said, it is when the cumulative decision to populate the urban periphery leads to the destruction of plains, forests, and farms, pollutes the air with the fumes of commuter traffic, and dilutes the dynamicity of metropolises that once served as one of the romantic roots of American culture, that personal decisions rise up to a new emergent level, worthy of political tampering.

American urbanization, in its modern, decentralized form, is nuanced and unfortunately lacks the innate and significant benefits of third world population concentration.  Without government action and the political popularization of anti-sprawl principles, it will be only in developing nations that the compact metropolis will sustain itself.  In the United States, unlike in the developing world, the population explosion will be synonymous with suburbanization and the de-concentration of urban living.  On a national level, this still constitutes concentration, and the building up of urban peripheries is by far preferable to the degradation of purely rural landscapes.  Still, with the proper policies, we can avoid what amounts to the unraveling of the vertical metropolis, and it is through succeeding in this task that we can preserve two key institutions in American culture: the country and the city.

Photo credits: Carl De Souza/Agence  France-Presse – Getty Images; foreignpolicy.com

On Saturday afternoon I noticed a sizable parade of Occupy protestors walking through Boston’s Downtown Crossing.

The majority of the signs seem to give a largely representative sample of the general composition of the movement:

1) Pro-peace activists upset at the government’s current foreign military campaigns:

"War is a Racket" - Major General Smedly Butler

"Truth Ends Wars of Occupation"

"Stop Torture"

2) Those dissatisfied with the handling of the financial crisis:

3) Advocates of more progressive taxation and financial regulation:

The "Invisible Hand of the Market" is a Mugger

But I also detected a few other interesting protestors dispersed throughout the crowd:

"I'm Voting for Peace - Ron Paul: President 2012"

What is one to make of this?

As Corinne notes, there exists a very real potential for some ideological overlap between the two camps. The most obvious issue of common ground is both groups’ opposition to the United States’ recent foreign policy.

There is great reason for skepticism, however, on whether these two respective movements really “belong together.”

My skepticism largely comes from observing the vast fundamental ideological differences that separate the movements: as well as opposition to war, Ron Paul also stands for reducing (and eliminating large parts of) federal taxation, regulation, and spending. Dr. Paul believes in “standing against” Wall Street, but only in ending regulatory and legal privileges for corporations, as well as engaging in systematic reform of the country’s banking sector.

But it precisely Dr. Paul’s ideological commitment to free markets and a much smaller state which seems to conflict with the values and desires of the Occupy movements. Though both camps express discontent with the privileged position of banks and corporations in the current legal framework, the solutions offered by today’s Occupiers appear to directly oppose the values espoused by Dr. Paul. Rather than simply end legal privileges for corporations and banks, the Occupy movements advocate for greater regulation and state supervision of these institutions. Rather than advocate the protection of property rights through limiting the state’s power of taxation and confiscation of wealth, Occupiers seem to advocate even more progressive rates of taxation: the “taking back” of wealth by the 99%. The rhetoric of free markets and commercial liberty which Dr. Paul continuously espouses seems to be precisely of the kind condemned by the Occupiers.

Unless the members of the Occupy protests experience a radical change in their economic views, one should not expect much to come from this temporary alliance.

Those hoping for something more might perhaps benefit from learning more of the similar experiences of Murray Rothbard, one of the greatest libertarian intellectual activists of the 20th century, and his history of alliance (and later disillusionment) with elements of the American Left on an anti-war platform in the late 1960s.

Liberal protesters and conservative voters – what could be more different? Before coming to Washington D.C., I expected the two events to be as polar as any two opposites could be, but the cries of “End the Fed!”, complaints over bank bailouts, and hatred of foreign wars at both events struck me as a surprising overlap between both ends of the spectrum that could not be ignored.

Walks on Washington

Comprised of students, hipsters, hippies, and the overgrown middle-aged counterparts to each, the OccupyDC protesters had a jumbled mix of complaints and goals. While the majority of protesters supported increasing taxes on the wealthy and ending corporate influence in politics, the list of “goals” written out by members of the protest stretched in every different direction. While most protesters supported the other goals of ending the foreign wars and abolishing the Federal Reserve, there were even more assorted demands such as restoring small farms, improving infrastructure, or abolishing capitalism and the state altogether.

The mix of ideas that were scattered among the crowd seemed to dilute their main arguments and muddle the focus of their message, indeed showing that they did represent the 99% – the true, divided United States. Regardless, the protest united a mass of people through a several-mile march through the streets of DC featuring some great picket signs, including “Glenn Beck is my Dad!” and “I’m an English Major!”

Core Conservatism

On the other end of the political spectrum, the Values Voter Summit had its own share of spectacles to behold, including a man dressed in colonial-era attire (the conservative version of a hippie?), but a similar discontent voiced by the citizens who attended. Featuring speakers Glenn Beck, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Laura Ingraham, and many of the Republican presidential candidates, the event seemed to be a hotbed of conservatism.

Indeed, the sponsor booths were enough to prove so: distributing goodies such as the Heritage Action Scorecard for scoring the members of Congress based on votes for balanced budgets and other conservative issues (Cambridge’s own Rep. Michael Capuano scoring a 16%), the several leaflets from the Institute for Creation Research arguing that dinosaurs lived in the same time period as humans, and the literature dedicated to upholding  “traditional American values” showed clearly that there were many well-defined conservatives sponsoring the events and the candidates (from whom I now have plenty of copies of the Constitution).

Unobserved Overlap

The two groups superficially couldn’t seem more different. However, when the chants of “End the Fed!” were chanted by Ron Paul supporters at the summit, it was harder to distinguish which event I was attending. When Paul’s denouncements of our foreign wars, corporatism in Washington, and bank bail-outs were met with standing ovations from his supporters, the protesters’ message seemed to be just as present, if not stronger, at the conservative summit. The “Don’t Tread On Me” symbol was displayed at both events, and there were even Ron Paul supporters at the protest. Clearly the two ends of the spectrum overlap, but do the labels of “liberal” and “conservative” prevent the two sides from seeing their common thread? And if this common thread is realized, will Ron Paul win more than 37% of the 99%?

That depends. Other areas of the two groups are more opposed: while most of the Occupy protesters favor an increased tax of the wealthy to create funding for redistributive programs, Paul supports tax cuts and a scale-back of government-run welfare. This certainly puts the two groups at odds with one another – in fact, a Paul supporter at the OccupyDC protest was asked if he was wearing his “Atlas Shrugged” T-shirt ironically. However, Ron Paul is also an ardent supporter of giving more power back to state governments, which gives the flexibility needed for states to pursue welfare programs of their own if they choose. That stance, which does not rule out welfare from the lives of citizens, could potentially mend relations between the two groups on that issue, but it seems a long shot.

Another strong connection between the two would be their consideration as “marginal.” Despite Paul’s wins in the Values Voter Summit, CPAC, and California straw polls (plus a strong second place in the Ames poll), the media frequently ignores his success and labels him as more of a spoiler than anything else (see Jon Stewart’s hilarious segment on how the media never mentions him). Likewise, the Occupy Wall Street protests are being frequently lampooned as aimless, often likened to the Tea Party in its formative stages, making any kind of message it promotes lose credibility.

Even so, the Republican debate in New Hampshire on Tuesday evening demonstrated that both groups have had a strong impact. Ron Paul’s idea of ending, or at least auditing, the Federal Reserve came up frequently in the debate, and there were multiple references to the Occupy Wall Street movement by both the moderators and candidates.

So how can Occupy Wall Street be taken more seriously as a collective? Solidifying their demands would certainly help. While Paul’s ideas are not always considered “mainstream,” their consistency is never contested, which has helped them gain relevance in the broader discussion. By determining several key goals and values, the Occupy movement could gain the momentum it needs to push a new progressive agenda.

President Obama may be just as addicted to overseas intrigue as his predecessor.

In 2008, a host of Americans expected a president with similar political steadfastness who would turn the ship 180 degrees from President George W. Bush’s dark legacies. It is safe to say some three years later that that ship has barely turned 10 degrees under the captaincy of President Obama. Indeed, America’s foreign policy has been surprisingly neoconservative since his inauguration.

Let’s quickly look at the key facts:

1.        On the campaign trail, Candidate Obama unequivocally promised that he would “close down the detention facility at Guantanamo.” In one of his first acts of office, he intended to return America to the “moral high ground” in the war on terrorism by signing an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay in a year and end the previous administration’s controversial torture and detention practices. The detention facility remains open and operational to this day.

2.        Branching off of that, he continues to support President Bush’s Military Commissions Act, allowing the United States to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and international justice standards, despite his initial promise to scrap it altogether.

3.        President Obama has belied his generally receptive approach from a year ago in 2010, when he was hopeful for “an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations – an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.” Several weeks ago, President Obama flatly said he would veto any such resolution out of fear of its impact on the Middle East peace process – a rapid change of heart.

4.        On Iraq, the President was warmly received by progressives desirous of withdrawing from Vietnam-esque Iraq, and sure, he might have messed up the earlier intended timeframes, but the end-of-the year deadline means he followed through, right? Wrong. As Harvard Prof. Stephen Walt astutely observes, the U.S. may technically violate its original troop withdrawal targets, the bulk of concern lies in the hundreds of C.I.A. personnel and thousands of paramilitary security contractors lying about. We certainly are not fooling the anti-American Sadrists.

5.        I would mention the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, but that was actually one of his promises, which I dutifully note. Instead, I will point to the “conflicts” or engagements (covertly and openly) initiated in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya.

6.        Most recently, President Obama directed an unprecedented assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki by predator drone without due process. This offends Candidate Obama’s reasoning that he wanted to show the world that America would follow its founding tenets. Al-Awlaki may have been one evil S.O.B., and I know he will not be missed by many, but what example do we set if we break with over 200 years of American history and have leaders with the authority to murder American citizens without the opportunity to plead their case for their acts? This creates a new precedent of unparalleled executive authority.

These are the main offenses that come to mind when I think of American foreign policy over the past several years. I do not need to tell you that the realities of office tend to change the president’s actual executive policies, but the policies we are all witness to today are not a few minor adjustments here and there – they are a wholesale reversion to interventionism in the Middle East.

Photo Credit: Mirror News UK

Ten weeks have come and gone in the blink of an eye and here I am, putting a neat little bow on the tidy story I have composed of my adventures in and around the Capitol this summer. From first meeting Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in Part 1, to attending Senate and House Committee hearings in Part 2, to speaking to individuals from both sides of the aisle over the intense debt ceiling debate in Part 3, and even attending the Congressional Baseball Game in Part 4, this summer has been like no other. It has certainly been a blast getting to know everyone in Senator Paul’s office, and Senator Paul himself, and I will not forget any of my experiences anytime soon. Many would be reduced to tears at the mere thought of completing such an enlightening and altogether enjoyable internship, but as Churchill so aptly put it, I look at the past as the beginning of my immersion into the “liberty” movement and the future as the continuation of a more durable and long-lasting political journey.  Let me shift gears, though, before I become sappy and insufferable.

The journey has not ended because the internship has.

The Last Week

My final week as an intern could not have come at a more wild time, in retrospect: the debt ceiling deadline was Tuesday, Aug. 2^nd, and as events turned out, I would be in the nation’s capital for a bird’s-eye view of the historic vote. The Monday before the deadline, a compromise deal was struck between Republicans in the House and President Obama to raise the debt limit by over $2 trillion now, and giving powers to a 12-man “Super Committee” to hash out guidelines for deficit reduction. While on the phones that rang incessantly on Monday, I heard it in both ears from Tea Partiers and Democrats alike: the former felt the compromise was a half-hearted political stunt, and the latter felt it was a “Satan sandwich” that overly favored the GOP.

One individual from the right thought that “President Obama was not one to be trusted,” while someone from the left thought the “Tea Party was hijacking the economy” for political gain. Both stuck to the major theme of the debt negotiations: compromise was either a necessary force for good or antithetical to a stand on principled fiscal policy.

Combine this with the noted spike in faxes from Americans sick of Congress’s job in handling the debt crisis, and my first day back on the Hill was quite eventful. Try hearing, seeing, and saying the word “debt” about three thousand times in a single day – wow, what a day.

If my internship were a story, then Tuesday, Aug. 2 would undoubtedly be the climactic moment. Moments before the vote, Senator Paul summoned the interns to his office. Much to our surprise, he requested our presence to accompany him to the Capitol to watch the procession from the Senate Gallery. Along with his Chief of Staff and Communications Secretary, we walked outside with Senator Paul to the front doors of the Capitol (about a two-minute walk). Along the way, we saw a modest group of individuals holding up signs urging the legislators to oppose any compromise short of a balanced budget amendment, and had to walk past rather tight security around the Capitol since Vice President Biden was in attendance.

Senator Paul made his way in through the member’s entrance, while we entered through the upstairs Gallery entrance, which was filled to absolute capacity. The vote was rather predictable, but the gravity of the matter was obvious. Every Senator congregated in small partisan pockets on the Senate floor, buzzing with political talk, while staffers outside all typed into BlackBerry’s at a feverish rate. We interns and the spectators were all hushed, half-deferential to the decorum of the Senate Gallery and partly acknowledging of the ponderous nature of the compromise bill. We all knew what the final vote would be like, but to be there was nonetheless surreal.  Senator Paul cast a “No” vote with 25 other Senators since he felt it lacked a balanced budget amendment and would add $7 trillion in new debt over the next decade. Afterwards, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) convened an early recess, citing the long hours and hard work put in by both sides and their staffs over the past few weeks.

Well, I finally got my recess, but afterwards, Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) e-mailed supporters of his Senate Conservatives Fund PAC with a list of conservative Senators who had voted against the debt compromise, urging them to take a moment to thank them. Even though we were in recess, we received calls for the next two-days from people all over the country thanking Senator Paul for his vote. The average call only lasted about 45 seconds, and all were supportive, making it a whole lot easier than the tall task of placating detractors.

On Thursday, we were all invited to a staff luncheon, at which the Chief of Staff surprised us all with pizza and informed us that the office would be closed on Friday as a thank you to those staffers who had worked late over the weekend. That means it would be my last day as an intern. After lunch, I counted down the hours and minutes to the end of my stay, and when that time arrived, I said my final goodbyes to every staffer I could find and turned in my Senate ID badge. It was a fun ride, and I was getting back into the New York groove, after all.

Looking Back…

It has been the experience of a lifetime, that much is certain, but if I were to generalize and share some lessons that I have taken away from my experience, these would be the ones:

1. Enjoy Every Minute On the Job. No matter how you are feeling on a given day, it is always encouraging to reinforce your place in the world. “You are interning on Capitol Hill,” definitely does the trick. Constituent calls can be draining, but it is doubly gratifying to assist an individual answer a question or resolve an issue. Logging correspondence online could be monotonous, but it means someone out there is getting his or her voice heard. There really is no way to look at the internship in a negative light: the essence of public service is helping others with a smile and that stands out most. Well, there are the infinitesimal perks associated with Capitol Hill interning, too…
2. There Is Always Something Happening on the Hill. At any given hour of any given day of the week, there is always some random event occurring. Be it a free lunch hosted by the CATO Institute or National Rifle Association, or a Committee Hearing in the House or Senate, or an ice cream social on the Capitol lawn, you can never go a day without a semi-busy schedule.
3. Volunteer As Much As Possible. Ostensibly, running errands around the office buildings does not seem so glamorous, but it is quite the treat for political junkies. I cannot count how many times I have run into Senators and Representatives by walking the halls of the Capitol. I have seen everyone from Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.). It is especially intriguing to ride in the same underground Capitol subway car with a Senator and his staffers before an impending floor speech.
4. Take Initiative. It reflects well upon you and can fill a vital need in the office.
5. It Is Possible to Have Fun on the Job. Even if dealing with a seemingly insurmountable pile of work, it is possible to have fun doing it. Just by striking up a conversation with a fellow intern or staff member and living vicariously through their experiences, you can increase your net enjoyment twentyfold. Washington may be like a stalled automobile, but the individuals who keep the wheel turning are unlike any you are likely to find out there, so make the most of every minute.

Before I punch out, I would just like to thank Senator Paul and his staff for putting my résumé aside in the spring and bringing me aboard. It was the experience of a lifetime.

The opinions of this blog are solely those of Naji Filali and do not reflect the beliefs of Senator Rand Paul or his staff.

Photo Credit: The Christian Science Monitor

Read the full article at the Harvard Political Review.