When Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia on December 17^th, 2011, it started a revolution that sent aftershocks around the world, from Egypt to Syria, with plenty others in between.

When the subprime mortgage bubble collapsed in the United States it too affected much of the world, as we saw during the eerily similar crises that followed around Europe.

Now, the world seeks to contain the European sovereign debt crisis.

Italian PM Mario Monti (credit: pbs.org)

All over Europe, people are dissatisfied with the mutli-party political systems that have been in place since World War II. The current frameworks are too divisive for times of such extreme economic distress, and political vitriol is destructive for the health of any nation, as the United States discovered when an argument over the debt ceiling forced its credit rating down to an “AA+”.

In place of party politicians, so-called “Technocrats” – officials not linked to a career in politics, but rather to expertise in their given academic field – have provided beacons of hope for the European (and thus, the world) economy.

In Italy, Mario Monti is pushing to reign in sovereign debt and make Italy a leaner competitor on the world stage. An economist by trade with experience in the European Union, Monti has been described as “competent,” and “gifted,” far cries from Italy’s previous PM, Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi, a media magnate with a wild personality and a history of scandals during his time in office, stepped down as economic conditions in Italy worsened.

Last November, Greece saw the appointment of Lucas Papademos as interim Prime Minister. Papademos, with a background in banking and academia, is arguing for cuts to Greece’s pension system, as well as tax and benefit reform.

Greece's interim, Papademos (credit: telegraph.co.uk)

More and more often, countries are looking for a scientific approach to solving fiscal dilemmas. Two European leaders throughout the current crisis, France and Germany, are working to keep the Eurozone afloat by insisting on tight budgets and lowered deficit spending. Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor and an austere star in the economics world during these past few months, has come out particularly strongly against irresponsible government and tax policies.

Even in the United States, Republican presidential hopefuls have battled over their respective commands of business knowledge. In the end, it seems as if Mitt Romney – who holds business and law degrees from Harvard University – will be the party’s presumptive nominee to run against Barack Obama in the 2012 general election.

So, why a push towards Technocracy? In an economic age in which the complexity of problems is outweighed only by the difficulty of their solutions, leaders with strong academic foundations and little interest in lengthy careers in government offer answers outside of the day-to-day political battles that now seem so petty.

One is reminded of the story of Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in a time of war, was called by his fellow citizens to take the role of dictator and save Rome from attack. They found him in his back yard, maintaining his fields. He exchanged his plow for a sword, and led Rome to victory. 16 days after assuming the dictatorship, he returned voluntarily to his farm.

Cincinnatus’ story rings true with many around the world struck with the current sovereign debt crises. Politicians interested in short-term victories and long-term legacies aren’t what Europe is looking for, and the technocratic option has risen to become the most viable one. For now, the deft guidance of expertise will try its best to lead Europe through the storm.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton pushed the last bill through Congress to increase the gas tax. Even this, however, was watered-down reform; the tax was not indexed to inflation and increased the price of gas by only 4.3 cents per gallon. The modesty of the increase should not be surprising: since 1993, no prominent American politician has seriously supported a major increase in the gas tax. Virtually everyone agrees that supporting the gas tax is political suicide. As Michael Cragg, an energy consultant at The Brattle Group, told the HPR, “It’s hard to see in this political environment how you’d get a gas tax passed.”

A similar consensus exists among economists, but on a different issue. According to a study in the Journal of Economic Literature, the vast majority of economists support a gas tax in order to make the private cost of driving a car reflect its actual social costs: global warming, air pollution, traffic congestion, and highway maintenance. Economists from across the political spectrum—Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and even the chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, N. Gregory Mankiw—have come out in support of raising the gas tax.

How can a policy make so much economic sense and garner so little political support? Significant obstacles, including the anti-tax movement, vested interests in low energy prices, regional differences, and America’s short election cycle, have historically made the gas tax unpopular and unfeasible. Our energy future and climate security depend on either tweaking the tax to make it more politically palatable, or exploring creative alternatives.

The Anti-Tax Establishment

Perhaps the most fundamental reason why a higher gas tax is so controversial is because it hits everybody, and hits them in a very public way. William Gale, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Tax Policy Center, told the HPR that the anti-tax movement “will seize on every tax,” and the gas tax is an easy target. Represented by vocal advocacy groups such as Americans for Tax Reform and the various Tea Parties, the anti-tax movement “does not make a distinction between distortionary and distortionary-correcting taxes,” Gale said.

“They just hate all taxes,” he continued, “and every attempt at an increase in taxes becomes an opportunity for [their] political gain.”

Looking closer at the particulars of the gas tax raises an equally problematic obstacle: the culture of low energy prices. According to Henry Lee, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, America’s energy policy has been governed by a single goal for the last 40 years. “Americans for almost two generations have lived under the idea of cheap energy,” he explained, making it almost impossible to pass laws involving price increases. At this point, such laws could seem almost un-American.

Democratic Divisions

The gas tax also raises a thorny question of fairness. Rural inhabitants, who drive farther and more often than do urban residents, would face steeper costs if the federal gas tax went up. Politicians that represent rural districts are simply responding to their constituents’ concerns by opposing the gas tax.

Gale identified this “urban-rural divide” as one of the two most salient obstacles to the gas tax, in addition to the anti-tax movement. Recognizing these regional disparities raises questions about institutional problems in American democracy. To say, as many do, that lack of progress on the gas tax is part of a Big Oil conspiracy ignores the ways in which representative democracy can often forestall consensus.

America’s short, two-year election cycle is a major barrier to passing a higher gas tax. Politicians tend to ignore proposals that involve an immediate, perceivable cost and provide less tangible, long-term benefits. Thomas Sterner, former president of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, told the HPR that this is the “big problem” of gas tax politics. In countries with short electoral cycles of two to four years, attempts to increase the gas tax “will only cause protests,” Sterner said. It can be very difficult to promote farsighted, technocratic solutions in a political environment defined by short-term gratification.

Tweaking the Gas Tax

Recognizing that political barriers will make increasing the gas tax difficult, policymakers need to start thinking outside the box. One possibility, Sterner proposed, is the “fuel price escalator,” raising the tax gradually over the course of many years. Sterner said that this is “the only workable model.”

By making the price increases less immediate, the fuel price escalator resolves some of the difficulty posed by an electoral system focused on short-term gain. This explains, in part, how the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher was able to move from a relatively low gas tax to one that charges over 300 percent of the retail price, the highest in Europe.

Efficient use of revenue from the gas tax, Sterner said, is also important. The careful use of rebates can correct the regressive elements of the tax and can also make the increase in fuel prices more palatable to rural residents. Furthermore, the gas tax is essential for deficit reduction. “It’s becoming abundantly evident that we need the money,” Gale said.

The current gas tax can no longer keep up with escalating road and highway spending; this year’s highway appropriations were made possible only by siphoning funds from the general budget, which, according to Lee, has never been done before. Lee noted, “You’re going to have to have a change in the system in the next five years,” because there is “no way” Congress can continue propping up the transportation budget with general funds.

A final component of a revised gas tax might be a price floor, which would keep the price of gas relatively stable by taxing the difference if the price dipped below a certain mark. This would create a predictable environment for long-term investment in new-energy technologies that hold the key to a low-carbon economy. As Lee explained, “[Oil price] volatility gets people to under-invest.” By giving investors a stable price they can use to gauge the cost-effectiveness of future energy sources, a price floor could contribute to innovation.

The disconnect between good policy and good politics is one of the most frustrating dilemmas of American democracy. Absent substantive change in the near future, the United States risks heightened fuel price volatility, decreased economic competitiveness, and the negative effects of climate change.

Policymakers will need to search for creative solutions that are both true to the spirit of economic efficiency and more palatable to constituents focused on short-term interests. If they are able to do this with the gas tax, they might learn lessons that can be applied in other difficult and thorny areas of public policy, like immigration and entitlement reform.

Will Rafey ‘13 is a Staff Writer.

Infographic: Neil Patel

Photo Credit: Flickr (Indy Charlie)

Such exhortations often contain an ambiguity, and Carillo’s is no exception. Is he criticizing liberals on substantive grounds, i.e. for their support for separation of church and state and their “neutral stance on issues of faith”? Or is he just saying they need to get better at speaking in the code of religiosity, i.e. they need better messaging and marketing? He says, for instance, that Democratic candidates in 2010 should “emulate” Obama’s religious outreach and try to “shed the stereotype of condescension toward faith.” It seems incongruous to talk about the Social Gospel and Martin Luther King if all you really want is for Democrats to improve their marketing tactics and stop being allergic to speaking in churches.

Unless, that is, Carillo wants Democrats to shed their anti-religious image by actually becoming a more or less sectarian political party like the GOP and rejecting secularism outright. Perhaps his vision is of a two-party system: evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and Mormons on the right; liberal Protestants, reformist Catholics, and Jews on the left. The rich American tradition of secularism, and the vibrant American nonreligious community, would seem to have no place in such a system. Perhaps they’d form a third party?

Now of course I’m just riffing on Carrillo’s column. I’m sure he doesn’t want to kick secularists out of the Democratic Party. But it’s not clear whether he buys into the misconception that today’s secular liberals have “socioeconomic concerns detached from moral premises,” or whether he just thinks that’s an image problem. Carrillo’s historical narrative, including his praise for “Social Gospel theologians, Catholic priests and nuns in the social justice tradition, and Reformed Jewish lawyers,” unfortunately implies the former—that modern liberals have gotten away from their genuine moral (read: religious) roots.

But secularists are not “detached from moral premises” at all. And they participated actively in all the major liberal movements that Carrillo mentions. Carrillo says, “The Civil Rights movement was cultivated in Southern Black Baptist churches,” implying, of course, that it was cultivated there only. The role of secularists and humanists in the Civil Rights movement is tragically under-appreciated. King’s close friend, adviser, and speechwriter Stanley Levison was a nonreligious Jew. As were Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, the two Northerners who were murdered along with a local black man, James Chaney, by Klansmen in 1964. As was Viola Liuzzo, a middle-aged mother and activist from Detroit murdered in 1965 while driving between Selma and Montgomery. There was a reason the Civil Rights movement was called “communistic” and “atheistic” by its white opponents.

Carrillo’s claim that the “feminist, environmental, and anti-war movements were spiritual if not religious in nature” is particularly confused. First, it’s not even clear what this means. Does it mean that all those whose political beliefs are “moral” in some way, as opposed to “technocratic,” are spiritual if not religious? If so, it seems a desperate attempt to steal good people and good ideas away from the humanists and the secularists and to claim them for the “spiritual” and the religious. But the feminist movement, for one, was an obvious rebuke to the traditional and, for many, religiously mandated division of family labor. If that was “spiritual,” the word loses all meaning.

Of course, Carrillo is not wrong to say that politicians must speak to the “whole human,” and appeal to moral premises as well as material interests. But he’s wrong in thinking, or at least implying, that the religious have a monopoly on moral premises and on connection to the “whole human.”

After decades of one-party rule, the Liberal Democratic Party falters

In the United States last year, “change we can believe in” became a national catchphrase. In Japan this past August, the slogan of the victorious opposition party was seiken kotai, meaning “political change.” The triumph of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which won 308 of 480 seats in the powerful lower house of Parliament, marked the end of over 50 years of nearly uninterrupted rule by the center-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

Observers in the West heralded the change as a landmark in Japanese politics, but were skeptical about the DPJ’s commitment to reform. The Washington Post, for instance, applauded the end of one-party domination while lamenting that the DPJ had “bought the votes of farmers with money and protection.” In addition to ushering in an era of increased political competition, however, the party has begun to push for substantial, long-awaited reforms in the Japanese political system and a new, more independent approach in relations with the United States, promising signs that the DPJ may substantiate its promises.

Bureaucracy, Technocracy, and One-Party Rule

Japanese politics has historically been dominated by a massive civil service bureaucracy, with over a million employees in various government ministries today. The bureaucrats gained increasing influence over the political decision-making process following World War II, in part due to Japan’s technocratic, government-managed model of economic development. By 1975, the power of the civil servants had grown so much that one minister in Parliament griped that the legislative branch was “an extension of the bureaucracy.”

But in a country known for its conservative political culture, the LDP remained in power even as the bureaucracy mushroomed and the country slogged through the “lost decade” of economic stagnation in the 1990s. During his tenure in the early 2000s, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi battled many of his fellow Liberal Democrats to shrink and privatize the 400,000-member government-run postal, insurance, and financial conglomerate known as “Japan Post.” Although the initiative was ultimately successful, it took years of political maneuvering and intense infighting to pass the legislation.

After Koizumi’s departure in 2006, the LDP was unable to produce another popular candidate. The party replaced its prime minister three times in three years, foreshadowing its landslide defeat at the hands of the DPJ in this year’s elections. The new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, appears to have a mandate for change with an approval rating hovering around 70 percent.

The DPJ includes many former LDP members, but the parties diverge in their governing style and foreign policy orientation. Gerald Curtis, professor of political science at Columbia University, said in an interview with HPR, “the differences are very coherent and dramatic. It is the biggest change in more than half a century in Japan. The two parties have totally different views on how to govern.” Although the DPJ has center-left roots, it has taken a hard line on taming the bloated bureaucracy and crafting an Asia-centered foreign policy.

Taming the Bureaucratic Monster

In its first months in power, the DPJ has faced the challenge of reforming the Japanese civil service head on. The party leadership has focused on increasing accountability and transparency in the government by restoring power to appointed ministers. Michael Green, Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the HPR that the DPJ “has been trying to give politicians more control, and leave the bureaucrats in a more implementing role.” Whereas the LDP lacked the political will to confront its allies in the bureaucracy, the DPJ’s plan has achieved considerable success in a short period of time. “The DPJ has managed in only a month in office to fundamentally change this system … . In today’s climate, if bureaucrats actively oppose a policy, they will lose their jobs,” Curtis explained.

With the influence of the bureaucracy in check, policymaking has become less opaque. Prior to the recent elections, top civil servants in each ministry were allowed to hold weekly decision-making meetings without the participation of politicians. The DPJ quickly banned those meetings, to the acclaim of most of the Japanese public.

The Beginning of a “Different” Friendship

The DPJ has also gained popularity for its new approach to foreign policy, which many Japanese had perceived as too dependent on the United States. Hatoyama has repeatedly declared that he will pursue a “more equal relationship” with America. This attitude stems in part from a sense among left-leaning politicians in the DPJ that close ties with the U.S. have not sufficiently benefited Japan. In particular, they point to Japan’s extensive cooperation with the Pentagon and the establishment of dozens of American military bases on the Japanese islands. The largest set of bases, in Okinawa, occupies 18 percent of the island’s territory. Located close to residential areas, they are unpopular among the public. The DPJ’s vision of an “equal relationship” with the United States entails the removal of many of these bases. In another sign of the new order it wishes to establish, the DPJ has reduced Japan’s involvement in Afghanistan. The DPJ recently ended the controversial refueling of NATO ships in the Indian Ocean.

Japan’s consul general in New England, Masaru Tsuji, downplayed the changes in an interview with the HPR. “Although American relations remain a cornerstone for the country, the new regime wants to emphasize equal partnership. Both countries have a new administration and thus require a new type of cooperation,” Tsuji argued, noting that Japan remains the third largest contributor to economic reconstruction in Afghanistan.

Yet there is little doubt that there has been a shift in rhetoric and policy. Shoichi Itoh, an expert in U.S.-Japan relations at the Brookings Institution, told the HPR that the DPJ “desires a more independent foreign policy,” and would be less deferential to Washington than its predecessor. 

In a pre-election op-ed in the New York Times, Hatoyama called for a “new path for Japan” and the creation of an “East Asian community” for collective security. “We must not forget our identity as a nation located in Asia,” Hatoyama wrote. “I believe that the East Asian region, which is showing increasing vitality, must be recognized as Japan’s basic sphere of being. … The financial crisis has suggested to many that the era of U.S. unilateralism may come to an end.”

Hope and Change

The DPJ has thus begun to give seiken kotai concrete meaning at home and abroad. Its victory portends not only an era of increased competitiveness and accountability in Japanese politics, but also a significant departure from the LDP’s domestic and foreign policy. Prime Minister Hatoyama seems set to pursue many long-anticipated changes as a reformer. But the real test for his party may be whether reform produces renewed economic growth and a new model of capitalism for Japan. If he is successful, the Japanese may soon see the benefits of their more competitive democracy in a tangible way.

Image Credit: m-louis (Flickr)

An ambitious attempt to reshape the Republican promise

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
by Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam, Doubleday, 2008, $23.95, 256 pg.

It is no longer morning in America. Something has gone wrong with the conservative vision, a vision now lost amongst the sands of Iraq, an economy in malaise, and a culture divided. As the frustrated Bush era ends and Democrats are enthroned in Washington, one question—“What must be done?”—has hung over the American right. Providing a provocative answer to that question are Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in their new book, Grand New Party. Douthat and Salam, two young and rising conservative writers, call on Republicans to adopt a radically new agenda attuned to the working class. Proposals that fall outside the standard tax-cuts-and-culture-war “return to roots” rhetoric that often seizes the GOP in times of doubt deserve our deep attention.

An American Struggle

Grand New Party’s backbone is a unique account of American history; while the authors pay some service to the American tradition of limited government, the narrative is one of a nation unafraid to use government to address economic change, and of the failures and successes of politicians to exercise that judicious activism. The book begins by detailing the Progressive era reforms early in the last century, describing the rise of the welfare state as a natural reaction to the advance of industrial capitalism. Above all, the New Deal occupies a central place in the author’s attentions and prescriptions. We often view the New Deal as a seamless element in the long march of liberalism. But Douthat and Salam emphasize the socially conservative, “maternal” side of the New Deal; how Social Security, housing policy, unionization, and welfare all promoted the interests and mobility of working-class families, albeit in an unabashedly traditionalist and patriarchal sense.

In Douthat and Salam’s view, a resulting Golden Age of working-class stability and upward mobility lasted until the social and cultural maelstrom of the sixties. That decade, they argue, saw the beginnings of an assault on the working class via a wave of crime, family breakdown, the “hardening of meritocratic arteries,” and an increasingly polarized culture. At the same time, they write, the Democratic Party swung to the left, failing to make the sale to culturally conservative working-class voters. From that point forward, the old liberal consensus was finished, but not to Republican gain; Republicans were unable to articulate a conservative New Deal to tackle this breakdown of the working class. (The authors do make a claim to the Nixon and Reagan legacies, noting that neither actually governed as a small-government conservative.) All this while, globalization was taking its toll in what the authors clearly believe is the greatest economic challenge to the working class.

Problem and Solution

It is in the last decade that the crises of the working class and conservative difficulties have coalesced. George W. Bush’s presidency began in a way seemingly amenable to a Grand New Party agenda of family-focused institutions and policies. His “compassionate conservatism” appeared to mirror the prescriptions proposed here. But Iraq and political squabbles overtook the Bush presidency, and eight years later, illegitimacy has increased and marriage has weakened, knocking out the family support crucial for social mobility. In the author’s analysis, the upper class gets by in the global economy while immigration and the labor glut emaciate working class wages. In order for either party to win the allegiance of the working class, it must address the resulting economic inequality and anxiety. Neither party has done so.

What is the way out? The plan offered here for Republicans would be the most cohesive attempt at social transformation since the Great Society or the New Deal. The authors recommend changing the tax code to favor poorer taxpayers and families, especially traditional two-parent ones; subsidies for homemakers; investments in infrastructure to revitalize suburbia; a reinvention of government involvement in healthcare and education; wage subsidies and “green collar jobs” to encourage employment; a wave of new police officers; and a crackdown on illegal immigration. The policy recommendations reflect Grand New Party’s role as a conversation-starter rather than definitive manifesto, drawing mostly from approaches suggested by other policy thinkers. And there are a few gaping omissions from the potpourri; the drug war, for example, an effort as bipartisan as it has been disruptive, disproportionately targets the working class, especially the African-American and Hispanic segments the authors are eager to draw into the new Republican coalition. But serious reform on that issue goes unconsidered here.

Prospects for Renewal

This plan for an active, class-conscious conservatism is nothing if not bold. And it may well become the new orthodoxy, if only because the small-government bogeymen of Grand New Party, who would ignobly obstruct compassionate government, are practically impossible to find these days. Nearly all the rising star governors of the Republican Party demonstrate the reformist tendencies that are in sync with the authors’ plans, whether those governors are managerial centrists such as Mitch Daniels and Mitt Romney, populists such as Mike Huckabee, or technocratic reformers such as Bobby Jindal. If these strands of conservatism do not take over the GOP, it will not be because of the ghost of Goldwater; the sheer inertia of formulaic conservatism may be its biggest foe. There is also the possibility that these managerial schemes will fall victim to the same interest-group politics, bloat, and miscalculation seen in the Bush experiment in compassionate conservatism.

An equally possible future for this new flavor of politics, in fact, is one that is outside the conservative movement altogether. The proposals here are bound to be popular with the working classes and, partially due to their hostility to free trade, the proposals already lean Democratic. Given the new president’s penchant for preaching the virtues of parenting and his hobbyhorses of green collar jobs and economic reform, it is possible that Democrats could seize most of this new conservative thunder. After all, very little here is poison to the left; “God, guns, and gays” social conservatism is explained as legitimate part of working-class insecurity but is not an active requirement for the authors’ policies. Liberals willing to hide their cultural colors could very well ride this new reaction against the vicissitudes of capitalism and modernity.

We do not know how Grand New Party’s brave new welfare state may play out. There is no denying that there is a political harvest to be reaped, however, and as the working class continues to be buffeted by economic and social insecurity, whoever offers up a plausible set of solutions will be rewarded. Grand New Party offers a cogent case for Republicans to change course and take that road back to power. It is now up to them to decide whether they want to offer this next New Deal to the working class.