Obama and the illusion of leadership

• 
• • Jeremy Seabrook
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Sunday July 27 2008

Why such obsessive concern with the "leaders" of the world, when these have never been of such indifferent quality, and their capacity to lead seriously undermined by globalisation? Is it because of their diminished power and lowered status that debate concentrates on character and idiosyncrasies, personal qualities, their charisma, or lack of it?

The contrast between aspirant Barack Obama and falling star Gordon Brown illustrates the point. So mediocre has the quality of leadership in the world been over the past two decades that Obama is hailed as a deliverer; a role he clearly does not repudiate. The crowds that turned out for a self-consciously historic occasion in Berlin demonstrate both the hollowness of contemporary leadership and the yearning – never entirely banished – for someone to show us the way, to inspire and to move us.

It is, of course, a mercy that the visionary leaders of the 20th century who sought to impose their malignant version of the world upon their own – and other – peoples, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, should have departed. But to a world hungry for idealism and hope, surely the pedestrian lack of purpose of today's global leaders represents something more than a salutary corrective to the overarching ideologies of the last century. This, perhaps, is why Obama seems a redemptive figure.

It may well fall to him to restore the "image" of the United States, especially among the poor, non-white majority of the world - an eloquent comment on the disreputable shabbiness of the Bush years. But it would be folly to imagine he will do anything that runs counter to US interests. The most we can expect is some skilful choreography, a "performance" to reconcile the peoples of the world with American supremacy once more.

Just as the hope vested in Obama is excessive, so the obloquy heaped upon Gordon Brown is also unbalanced. The worst he has been guilty of is hypocrisy – claiming Prudence as his handmaiden when the going was good, and urging Patience when global turbulence and events beyond his control throw the economy into possible recession.

The obsession with leaders – the private life of Sarkozy, the manipulativeness of Berlusconi, the new-found assertiveness of the Russians, a newly emollient China anxious to prove itself a modern, responsible power – suggest they are now flamboyant individuals rather than representatives; it is as though they have nothing to do with us. People of meagre talent and modest imagination now pose as "world leaders", guides and instructors of an imaginary, shifting "international community".

Preoccupation with individuals, of course, deflects attention from the powerlessness of the people, the voiding of democracy, even in places where the most highly sophisticated "electoral process" prevails. Leaders are keen to display their control over events over which they have waning influence, an influence they have willingly ceded to the stark urgencies of globalism. The great movements of goods and money around the world, and the vanity of efforts to deter humanity from following this licit and highly profitable mobility, clearly indicate the limits of their power.

The fascination with leaders is an alibi for democratic impotence. The tendency of people to disengage from electoral politics is not evidence of a terrible apathy, but is a perfectly understandable refusal to play their walk-on part in the farce of popular sovereignty. Whoever voted for globalisation? Where is the majority in favour of concentrations of wealth and power in a handful of individuals who control more wealth than the GDP of whole countries? Who cast a ballot in favour of the de-industrialisation of Britain? Who, indeed ever voted for the establishment of manufacturing industry in the first place? Where is the universal suffrage that produced inequality in the world, which even the collective might of the United Nations and its pious millennium goals appear incapable of putting into reverse?

No wonder so much must be invested in the leaders of tomorrow – the Obamas and Camerons, fair of mien and full of promise (like Tony Blair only yesterday) – since they too must defend an existing order which, at a time of crisis, must be "mended", so that it will resume growth and expansion in perpetuity. For all our futures are already inscribed in the deterministic landscapes of universal industrial happiness. It is reminiscent of the middle ages, when rulers and kings, repenting their misdeeds, arranged for masses to be said "in perpetuity" in the cathedrals of Europe.

Perhaps it is because the function of leadership is now the management of a more or less autonomous global economy, that people of great talent, intelligence and insight simply do not put themselves forward. They do not join the exhausted political formations and clapped-out parties of right or left, in a world that has left behind the sclerotic inheritance of a time when universal suffrage still seemed a guarantor that the will of the people would be respected and implemented.

Power and privilege will always find ways round efforts to create economic and social justice. And so it has been in our time. The principal participants in the global theatre are increasingly masks of some gigantic harlequinade or Noh play. The script is pasted in the wings. It is their business to offer prospectuses of freedom and constant improvement to the people, to receive acclaim, to fail, and be scorned and repudiated for their venality and dishonesty. They know this. This is why they tend to expend so much effort providing against the time of their downfall; sometimes corruptly, usually within the loose limits placed upon their right to accumulate and prepare for the day when they will be hounded from power in defeat.

It is the ignoble shabbiness of their role that has created a highfalutin language of "governance", "high office", "senior politicians", "veteran leaders", "statesmen and women"; as well as the global babble about "transparency", "accountability" and of course, the "empowerment" and "participation" of the people. The grandiose words are merely decorative. No one should be under any illusion about the emancipatory potential of Barack Obama, and nor should we be quite so vengeful over the shambling figure of Gordon Brown who strings together cliches much as our grandmothers knitted kettle-holders. Their destiny is to strut and fret their hour upon the stage, to exit and not mess with the decor.

Is America Ready for a Post-American World?

Francis Fukayama, Johns Hopkins Univ.
The American Interest, July 7 2008

The following is a transcript of a commencement address by Francis Fukuyama, delivered at the Pardee Rand Graduate School, Santa Monica, CA, June 21, 2008.

I’m really deeply honored to be asked to be the commencement speaker for Pardee Rand Graduate School this year, and to able to serve on the boards of both the PRGS and now the RAND Corporation.

I’d like to extend my congratulations to all of those receiving degrees today. I’ve been there before, I know what a struggle it is to make it this far. I’d like to congratulate the families, the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, spouses, children, because without their support, it really is not possible to achieve this educational level. And I’d also like to congratulate Frank Carlucci and Alain Enthoven who are getting honorary degrees today. I can’t imagine two people more deserving of this honor for their lifetime of public service to get honorary degrees. And finally, I’d like to acknowledge the hard work of the faculty and staff at PRGS.

I attended my son’s high school graduation last week, and at that event, people say the usual things about how you’re just starting on a long road in life, and you’ve got your futures ahead of you. Those of you, particularly those of you getting PhDs today, aren’t really in that position. I would say that you have already committed yourselves to a certain road. I don’t think there’re many of you who are going to become architects, or accountants, or stand-up comedians; maybe that’s in your future. But I suspect that having invested this amount of time in the serious study of public policy you are committed really to that way of life. And so, you are now in the business of helping your country, whatever country that is, make better choices in the public realm. And so, in a sense, this is less of a commencement than a rededication to a path that you have chosen some time ago. The only difference is that now, perhaps, you’ll be able to earn some money in the process of doing it.

Now, the subject that I want to address today, is how the world has changed. I think that the period from when I started at RAND as a summer intern in 1978 to the present is an amazing period in history, during which we’ve gone through three distinct phases.

In 1978, we were in the midst of the cold war, and at that time I was one of about a dozen full-time people here at RAND who studied the former Soviet Union. People overstate how simple and predictable the world was back then, but, the Cold War did in fact provide a very recognizable framework that all of us operated in. When I left RAND, or at least when I left Santa Monica, we entered a post-war world, one that was characterized by American hegemony. I think in that respect both the Clinton and the Bush presidencies, despite their political differences, shared a common assumption, that the United States was absolutely the predominant power in the world and that American power would be sufficient to shape outcomes all over the world. I think the Clinton administration tended to emphasize this in the area of economic policy, and the Bush administration in the area of security, but, in that respect, they both were the beneficiaries and practitioners of American hegemony.

Today, we are evidently entering a very different kind of world. The Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria has labeled this a “post-American world”. I’m not sure he’s right about this, but I do get a very strong sense that as we speak, conditions in the global economy are changing in very dramatic ways, and I don’t think that the assumptions that undergirded either the cold war world, or this extended period of American hegemony, are going to be sufficient to guide us in the world that is emerging.

Let me go over some of the ways in which the world is changing. The first obviously has to do with the emergence of a multi-polar world. This is not a story about American decline. The United States remains the dominant power in the world, but what is happening is the rest of the world is catching up. The power shift in terms of economic earnings is very dramatic. Russia, China, India, the states of the Persian Gulf are all growing while America is sinking into a recession; something that underlines the stark differences in a way the rest of the world has become decoupled from the American economy.

In the Clinton years and in the Bush years, the United States was used to lecturing the rest of the world about how to get it’s economic house in order, but it seems to me that those kinds of lectures tend to ring a bit more hollow now that we have suffered the kind of financial crisis that we’ve experienced in the past year. The most dramatic evidence of this shift in power is the simple facts about the endebtedness of the United States, and the accumulating reserves on the part of a lot of countries in the rest of the world. The People’s Republic of China has something like one and a half trillion dollars in reserves; Russia $550 billion, Korea $260 billion, Thailand $110 billion, Algeria $120 billion. The little states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, collectively have about 300 billion in reserves. Saudi Arabia just by itself is saving money at the rate of approximately 15 billion dollars every single month, as a result of energy exports.

Obviously this kind of accumulation of reserves is a phenomenon that in the short run doesn’t signal a shift in power because money of this sort doesn’t obviously translate into military or other kinds of power. On the other hand, a few hundred billion dollars here, a few trillion dollars there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. I suspect that as time goes on, this kind of earning power is going to be translated into important shifts in the way that countries interact. Down the road, I think it is inevitable that we are going to be facing a world in which American options are much more constrained. This may be due to shifts in the military balance of power down the road, but it’s also in terms of soft power. Today, the Chinese and Indians export movies, there are Korean pop stars that are popular all over Asia; the Japanese produce anime and manga; there are, in short, other sources of cultural creativity besides the sort that comes out of this particular city, Los Angeles. One particularly worrying trend is the growing reluctance of foreign students to study in American Universities due to the obstacles we ourselves have put up to their coming here. I’m glad to see that in the PRGS class, non-Americans are extremely well represented, but over the past few years, students from around the world have been finding other alternatives than going to American universities.

The emergence of this economic multi-polar world has been much commented on. But there’s a second important respect in which the world has changed, which has to do with the very character of international relations today. If you look at the part of the world that extends from North Africa through the Middle East into the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, all the way to the borders of the Indian sub-continent, you are dealing with a world that I think is quite different from the classical world that is taught in international relations theory courses, or that characterized the world of the 20^th century.

That world was dominated by strong, centralized states, and international politics was the story about the interaction of these strong, centralized states—Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, and the like. What is different about today’s international world is that it is dominated not by strong states, but by weak and sometimes failing states where the usual instruments of power, in particular, hard military power, don’t work that well.

The characteristics of the weak state world were noted after the Lebanon war in 2006 by Henry Kissinger, who said that Hezbollah “is in fact a metastasization of the Al Qaeda pattern, it acts openly as a state within a state, a non-state entity on the soil of a state with all the attributes of a state and backed by the major regional powers, is something new in international relations.”

Well, unfortunately, it’s not simply new, and it’s not simply characteristic of Lebanon, it is true of many countries throughout that part of the world. Why does this weak state world exist? I think it has to do with a lot of different factors. It has to do with the fact that around the world as development occurs, we have the mobilization of new social actors and groups that were formally excluded from power, like the Shiites in Lebanon, but, it extends to our continent as well. We’ve had tremendous turmoil in the Andean region of Latin America because of the fact you have indigenous peoples in places like Bolivia and Ecuador who were largely cut out of power, and who are now demanding their share of it, and are consequently destabilizing the democratic institutions that are in place there.

There is furthermore a dark side to globalization. We have gotten used to celebrating globalization as a source of international trade, investment, and therefore, economic growth. Countries like China and India have benefited enormously from globalization. But globalization means a reduction in the barriers to things crossing international borders, and sometimes those things are bad things—they can be things like drugs or international gangs. They can be laundered money, they can be blood diamonds, or they can be militias and political parties that act fluidly across international boundaries using the Internet. We have a big trade in international gangs between Los Angeles and Central America.

And there is a strange world that is now appearing in which national development is intimately connected with international affairs. Today in sub-Saharan Africa, a region widely recognized as the poorest part of the world, some 10% of the GDP of that entire region comes from international donors. The international community both helps countries there develop, but also makes if difficult for states to consolidate themselves in ways that European states did in the 400 years after the Reformation. For all of these reasons, this weak state world I think is here to stay for some time.

This weak state world has a lot of implications for American power. We need to consider this very perplexing fact: The United States spends as much on its military as virtually, the entire rest of the world combined, and yet, when you look at Iraq, a country of some 24 million people, it is now five years and counting since the United States invaded and occupied that country, and to this day we have not succeeded in pacifying it fully. And the reasons for that I think really have to do with the nature of power itself, because we are trying to use an instrument—hard military power—that we used in the 20^th century world of great powers and centralized states in a weak state world, and that instrument does not work as well. You cannot use hard power to create legitimate institutions to build nations, to consolidate politics and all of the other things that are necessary for political stability in this part of the world.

There are other things afoot in international politics because of American dominance over the last two decades: other countries are mobilizing against the United States. You have alliances like the Shanghai Cooperation Council that had organized themselves to push the United States out of Asia, after our post September 11 entry into that region. We cannot call on our democratic allies to the extent that we used to be able to. This was obviously true in Iraq, but even in a country like Afghanistan, where our allies in principle agree with the legitimacy of the intervention, we have had tremendous difficulties in getting them to pony up the necessary resources, troops and support. Even a country like Korea that has been a traditional American ally has been convulsed with anti-American demonstrations over the past couple of months because of the controversy over imports of American beef.

And so, we face a world in which we need a very different set of skills. We need to be able to deploy and use hard power, but there are a lot of other aspects of projecting American values and institutions that need to underlie a continuing leadership role for the United States in the world. Let me give you one illustration. Back in the early 1990s, my colleague at Johns Hopkins, Michael Mandelbaum, wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs. It was a critique of American foreign policy as social work, in particular of the Clinton administration’s efforts in the Balkans and Somalia and Haiti to do nation building. His message was that real men and real foreign policy professionals don’t do this kind of nation building or deploy soft power, but rather deal with hard power with military force.

But in fact, American foreign policy has to be preoccupied with a certain kind of social work today. If you look at the opponents of American power around the world, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hammas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mr. Ahmadinejad in Iran, as well as populist leaders in Latin America like Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, or Evo Morales, all of them have succeeded in coming to power because they can offer social services directly to poor people in their countries. The United States, by contrast, has really had relatively little to offer in this regard over the past generation. We can offer free trade, and we can offer democracy, these are very good and important things, the basis for growth and political order. But they tend not to appeal to poor populations that are the real constituents of this struggle for power and influence in the world.

So the requirements of an American leadership role are quite different and the question that arises; “Is America really ready to deal with a world in which it cannot assume its own hegemony?” Now, I want to make one thing very clear at the outset. I do not believe in inevitable American decline, and this is not going to be a talk about how we are declining. The United States has enormous assets in technology, in competitiveness, in entrepreneurship, flexible labor markets, and financial institutions that are in principle strong (laughter), but are having a little bit of difficulty at the present moment.

I think one of America’s greatest advantages is its ability to absorb people from other countries and cultures. Virtually all developed countries are experiencing the severe demographic crisis. They are getting smaller with every passing year, because of falling birthrates of native-born people. Any successful developed country in the future is going to have to accommodate immigrants and people from different cultures, and I believe the United States is unique in its ability to do so.

I think that the problems that the United States faces are really ones that are of our own creating. None of the problems and challenges that the United States faces are insoluble. The problems are really political and institutional ones.

First, we face a number of long term fiscal challenges. I don’t have to explain to anyone at RAND about the long term health care liabilities that we are creating for ourselves. A single program, Medicare, is going to punch this enormous hole in the federal budget if we do not act to do something about it. Social Security is similarly a long term time bomb, and there are long deferred investments in infrastructure that have not been made over the past few years. But, in principal, all of these problems are soluble.

I would identify three particular areas of weakness that we must remedy if we are to get through this particular set of challenges. These three are, first, the diminishing capacity of our public sector; secondly, a certain complacency on the part of Americans about understanding the world from a perspective other than that of the United States; and third, our polarized political system that is incapable of even discussing solutions to these problems.

Let me go over each of these. Let’s begin with the problem of the declining capacity of the public sector. We have seen in the past few years a depressing number of policy failures due to the inability of our public officials to actually carry out, plan and implement policies that we agree on. The most obvious case of this was the failure to adequately plan for the occupation and subsequent counter-insurgency war that broke out in Iraq. Part of that was the result of a political miscalculation as to how the United States would be received, but even after it was clear that the United States was in Iraq for the long haul, it took an extraordinary amount of time to adjust to those conditions and move to move to a counter-insurgency strategy. Indeed, it took President Bush longer to find a good general, General Patraeus, than it took Lincoln to find Grant in the Civil War. There are many other examples where we have actually agreed on policies, and have not been able to follow through.

We’ve engaged in two major reorganizations of the federal government in Washington over the last few years; the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and reorganization of the intelligence community. I would say that as a result of these reorganizations, we are less capable in both of those areas than we were, had we not done the reorganizations in the first place. The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to enable the United States to respond to major urban disasters, and yet, the response to Hurricane Katrina was a total fiasco.

Let me site one further case that some of you here at RAND may know about, the Freedom, which is a new class of littorall combat ships, was recently launched by the US navy. Now, this program has been repeatedly delayed and is more than twice over budget as a result of some major design flaws. RAND knows a lot about military procurement, and I’m sure that long time observers of the procurement process will say that this is nothing new. We’ve had a lot of similar fiascos like this in the past. What caught my eye though was a comment by our Navy Secretary about this case that was quoted in the New York Times. He “lamented the Pentagon’s eroding expertise in systems engineering—managing complex new projects to ensure that goals are achievable and affordable—and faulted the notion that industry could best manage ambitious development projects.” Now, this one procurement case is not in itself too significant, but I do not think there is a single agency across the entire federal government where you could not tell the similar story, where the capacity of the public sector to adequately manage the contractors and to retain within itself the capacity to carry out complex projects has not eroded over the last thirty years.

The causes of this erosion are complex. Some people blame it on politicization of senior offices. That may be the case, but, I’m afraid there may be a deeper problem in our public sector. It is very hard to attract bright young people to go into public service today. It’s partly because there are a lot of competitive jobs in the private sector that offer better pay. It’s also because in public service, we have managed to tie ourselves into knots where people in public service end up dealing more with process than with substance. Since the late 1990s, the US State Department by statute has been forced to dedicate itself to protecting its own personnel as its primary job, not representing the United States to foreign governments, and as a result, diplomats spend their time holed up in massive concrete bunkers, rather than going out and dealing with people in other countries. Stories like this, I think, are spread across the American public sector.

The second issue has to do with complacency about the outside world. After Sputnik in the late 1950s, the United States responded to the Soviet challenge by making massive investments in basic science and technology. This proved to be a very successful set of investments that reaffirmed American technological leadership. After September 11th, we could have reacted in a similar way, by making large investments in our ability to understand complex parts of the world that we did not understand very well like the Middle East. It is a scandal that in this monstrous new embassy we’ve created in Baghdad, we only have a handful of fluent Arabic speakers. As I was driving to work the other morning, I was listening to an NPR radio program in which they were praising their own coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and of China in general. They said “We have a reporter on staff in Beijing, and he actually can speak Chinese!” I’ve heard that there are some reporters in the Chinese press agency Xinhua in Washington who can in fact speak English.

The final issue I think really has to do with the political deadlock that we face with our political system. Again, this has been commented on a great deal. The polarization has put off the table serious discussion of how to solve some of these long term and very clear challenges that every public policy expert understands. It is not possible to talk about raising taxes to pay for badly needed public goods on the Right. It is not possible to talk about issues like privatizing social security, or raising the retirement age on the Left. Neither the Left nor the Right has had the political courage to suggest raising energy taxes, which has been the obvious way of dealing with foreign energy dependency and encouraging alternative sources of energy. And so the political culture that we have created as a result of this kind of politics is incapable of making the decisions that we need.

I’ve spoken a lot about the United States today. I realize that among our graduates, there are many people who are not Americans, and many of you will return to your countries and will pursue public policy analysis there. Everybody, I believe, will benefit from better policy analysis of the sort that a PRGS education provides. But I don’t think that anyone around the world will benefit from an America that is inward looking, incapable of executing policies, and too divided to make important decisions. That hurts not just Americans, but, I think, the rest of the world as well. Graduates should be very proud of their having spent the time and effort to dedicate themselves to learning how to make better public policy. This is a noble objective, and one that is sorely needed in both in this country, and abroad.

RAND is dedicated to objective non-partisan research, but I suspect that all of you who have pursued degrees at PRGS have done so because you have a certain passion, an individual passion for public issues, and you want to make those policies better. So, as you leave RAND, I think that it is important that you maintain your objectivity and your credibility in your mode of doing research, but that you safeguard that passion because that is what is going to drive you to do good things out in the world.

Thank you very much.
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The Professions in America Today: Crucial but Fragile

Howard Gardner, Harvard University
Lee S. Shulman, Stanford University

Daedalus / Summer 2005


Whether one sees the professions as a high point of human achievement, or, in George Bernard Shaw’s piquant phrase, as a “conspiracy against the laity,” there is little question that they have played a dominant role in industrial and postindustrial society since the early twentieth century. It is difficult to envision our era without the physicians, lawyers, and accountants to whom we turn for help at crucial times; or the architects and engineers who shape the environments in which we live; or the journalists and educators to whom we look for information, knowledge, and, on occasion, wisdom.


Some forty years ago, in a Dædalus issue devoted entirely to the professions, guest editor Kenneth Lynn declared, “Everywhere in American life, the professions are triumphant.” He went on to comment, “Given this dramatic situation, it is truly extraordinary how little we know about the professions.”


We appear to know much more about the professions now than we did forty years ago; certainly there is no paucity of scholarly and popular literature on specific professions, if less on the professions in the aggregate. But the professions themselves have not remained frozen over that time. Indeed, they have recently been subjected to a whole new set of pressures, from the growing reach of new technologies to the growing importance of making money.


In recent years, the professions have not always had good press. Worried by evidence of incompetence and dishonesty, the general public seems to have lost its uncritical admiration for the pro-fessional. Some in higher education see creeping professionalism as the enemy of liberal learning. Perhaps most dramatically, potent market forces, untempered by forces of equivalent power, have made it increasingly difficult to delineate just how professionals today differ from those nonprofessionals who also have power and resources in the society.


Triumphant on the one hand, under critical scrutiny on the other, the professions stand in need of fresh attention today. In the essays that follow, our authors review the professions in contemporary America–and the very idea of having a vocation or calling. We raise the question of whether the professions will survive in their recognizable form, evolve into quite different entities, or dissolve entirely; and whether the methods that have been developed for educating professionals are adequate to the current intellectual, practical, and ethical demands of these roles.


Generically, professions consist of individuals who are given a certain amount of prestige and autonomy in return for performing for society a set of services in a disinterested way. At midcentury, American sociologists like Bernard Barber, Everett Hughes, Robert Merton, and Talcott Parsons limned the defining characteristics of the professions. Barber, for example, identified four attributes: a high degree of generalized and systematic knowledge; a primary orientation to community interest rather than personal interest; a high degree of self-control of behavior through a code of ethics; and a system of monetary and honorary rewards that symbolize achievements of the work itself. In more recent times, important studies of specific professions have been carried out by Andrew Abbot, Howard Becker, Elliot Freidson, Anthony Kronman, and Paul Starr–just to name a few who have approached the professions from a sociological perspective. These authorities have stressed the role of explicit training regimens, formal licensure, and procedures whereby untrained, incompetent, or unethical individuals can be excluded from practice.


In our view, six commonplaces are characteristic of all professions, properly construed: a commitment to serve in the interests of clients in particular and the welfare of society in general; a body of theory or special knowledge with its own principles of growth and reorganization; a specialized set of professional skills, practices, and performances unique to the profession; the developed capacity to render judgments with integrity under conditions of both technical and ethical uncertainty; an organized approach to learning from experience both individually and collectively and, thus, of growing new knowledge from the contexts of practice; and the development of a professional community responsible for the oversight and monitoring of quality in both practice and professional education.


The primary feature of any profession –the commitment to serve responsibly, selflessly, and wisely–sets the terms of the compact between the profession and the society. The centrality of this commitment defines the inherently ethical relationship between the professional and the general society. It also sets up the essential tension between the two poles of professional responsibility: the duty to serve the interests of one’s immediate client and the obligation one has to the society at large. The lawyer’s dual responsibilities of serving as both an officer of the court and as a zealous advocate for her clients exemplify this tension. Failure to deal responsibly with this tension frequently creates the conditions that we have termed ‘compromised practice.’
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Full-text available; click here.

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Accommodating Faith in the Military

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

Over the past few years, there have been several controversies over religion's role in the military. Most recently, students and staff at the U.S. Naval Academy and West Point have complained of pressure from their supervisors to engage in religious activities. Three years earlier, there were similar allegations at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Other controversies have arisen over whether military chaplains may offer faith-specific prayers at official military events. With cadets, military officers and chaplains asserting competing constitutional rights, these disputes have raised multifaceted and complicated questions. To clarify these issues, the Pew Forum turns to church-state scholar Robert W. Tuttle.

Featuring:
Robert W. Tuttle, David R. and Sherry Kirschner Berz Research Professor of Law and Religion, George Washington University Law School

Interviewer:
Jesse Merriam, Research Associate, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In this Q&A:
Background on the controversies
The chaplaincy paradox
Will there be more litigation in the future?

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Question & Answer

Recently there have been several disputes over religion’s role in the military. Can you give us some background on these controversies?

There is a very long relationship between religion and the military in the United States, going back to the early days of the Army, which had chaplains funded by the Continental Congress. But over the last 30 years, the military, like many other parts of our society, has become much more religiously diverse. This diversity has produced some of the recent controversies.

For example, a few years ago there were complaints that some Air Force Academy faculty members and more-senior cadets were pressuring cadets to participate in religious activities. Those who investigated the complaints expressed concerns about a culture of proselytizing at the academy. There also have been a number of stories of service men and women in various branches of the military being pressured to participate in prayers.

When thinking about these controversies, it’s important to distinguish between mandatory and voluntary religious activities. All service academies used to require everyone to attend religious services. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found this requirement unconstitutional in Anderson v. Laird (1972), the Naval Academy still holds pre-meal prayers, and attendance at these meals is required. This has recently stirred up some controversy, leading some students at the Naval Academy to seek legal help from the American Civil Liberties Union. A similar practice of mealtime prayer at the Virginia Military Institute was held unconstitutional by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Mellen v. Bunting (2003).

Most of the recent controversies over this issue, however, have involved social pressure rather than official requirements. These disputes are about whether a person in authority has been too aggressive in urging others within the military to participate in some religious activity. In the past, this might not have caused a dispute, but now there are serious controversies over this issue because people are much more willing to object to the pressure.

The military chaplaincy seems to present a constitutional paradox in that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause restricts the government’s authority to fund and endorse religion, but the military funds chaplains who promote religious messages. Can you explain why, despite these constitutional restrictions, the chaplaincy exists?

The chaplaincy does present something of a paradox. The government pays the chaplains’ salaries. The government also pays for the places of worship and even for the worship materials themselves. So the chaplaincy does appear to be an oddity under the Establishment Clause.

The reason that the chaplaincy is likely constitutional, despite the Establishment Clause restrictions you mentioned, has to do with the principle of religious accommodation. While the Establishment Clause generally prohibits the government from funding and sponsoring religious activities, there is one important exception to this rule: The government may fund or sponsor a religious activity if the government does so to accommodate the religious needs of people who, because of government action, no longer have access to religious resources. Thus, when the military has isolated service members from their normal worship opportunities, the government may then facilitate worship by providing the necessary religious resources, like chaplains. In such situations, the government is merely responding to a religious need and is therefore not promoting religion.

Have courts upheld the constitutionality of the military chaplaincy on the basis of this accommodation principle?

The U.S. Supreme Court has never heard a case directly involving the military chaplaincy. But in Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), a landmark decision that prohibited public schools from leading Bible reading, several justices argued that the military chaplaincy is a valid accommodation of religion under the Establishment Clause. The court in Schempp rejected the argument that school-sponsored Bible reading is a permissible way of accommodating students with religious needs. The court said that since students have plenty of opportunities to read the Bible outside of school, whether before or after the school day, school-led Bible reading doesn’t accommodate religious students but rather promotes religion.

In their written opinions on the case, some of the justices contrasted the religious needs of students with those of service members. Because military duties might take service members into isolated and hostile environments, service members might not be able to participate in civilian worship communities or receive spiritual counsel from civilian clergy. Given this inability of service members to worship outside the military base, some of the justices concluded that the military may provide chaplains to accommodate the religious needs of service members. These comments about the chaplaincy, though, don’t have any direct legal effect because the Schempp case dealt only with the constitutional question of Bible reading in public schools.

The only federal court decision directly dealing with the military chaplaincy’s constitutionality is Katcoff v. Marsh (1985), a case decided by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In Katcoff, the 2nd Circuit upheld the U.S. Army’s chaplaincy on the ground that service members have a constitutional right under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to engage in religious worship, a right that the Army would unduly burden if it did not provide chaplains.

Today, it is very unlikely that a court would follow the reasoning in Katcoff because courts have interpreted the Free Exercise Clause much more narrowly over the last 20 years. (For more information on how courts have narrowed the religious liberty guaranteed by the Free Exercise Clause, see A Delicate Balance: The Free Exercise Clause and the Supreme Court.) Nevertheless, courts today would probably reach the same outcome – upholding the chaplaincy’s constitutionality – but for different reasons. Instead of finding that the Free Exercise Clause requires the military to establish a chaplaincy, as the Katcoff court did, most courts today would likely find that the Establishment Clause permits the military to provide chaplains so long as it does so in response to the religious needs of service members.

But what if the government responded to these religious needs by providing chaplains in a way that favored some religions over others?

That precise question has been raised in a series of cases, going back a decade, over the way that the U.S. Navy selects chaplains. These lawsuits allege that the Navy has hired chaplains using a “thirds policy.” According to the people bringing the suits, the Navy used a formula dividing its chaplains into thirds: one-third consisting of liturgical Protestant denominations (such as such as Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Presbyterians); another third consisting of Catholics; and a last third consisting of non-liturgical Protestant denominations (such as Baptists, evangelicals, Bible churches, Pentecostals and charismatics) and other faiths. The lawsuits claim that the Navy’s criteria are unconstitutional because they disfavor non-liturgical Protestants, who make up a great deal more than one-third of the Navy, while Catholics and liturgical Protestants each make up less than one-third.

In April 2007, a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., rejected one of these challenges to the Navy’s chaplain selection criteria. The court held that the Navy had abandoned the thirds policy and said that its current criteria were constitutional because the Navy has broad discretion to determine how to accommodate the religious needs of its service members. This decision was affirmed in 2008 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

What if the military asked a chaplain to pray at an official event and the chaplain offered a prayer specific to his faith tradition – for example, by praying in Jesus’ name? Would that be constitutional?

Your question touches on what has become, over the past couple of years, the most public and heated controversy within the military chaplaincy. To understand this issue, it’s important to distinguish between what is and isn’t involved here. We’re not talking about a faith group’s private worship. Rather, this controversy is about public events, such as a ceremony for a change of command, at which the military might ask a chaplain to give an invocation. In addition, the controversy isn’t about whether the Constitution allows chaplains to provide an invocation at these public events. Instead, this controversy is about whether the chaplains may provide faith-specific prayers.

Some argue that chaplains violate the Establishment Clause by offering faith-specific prayers at public events because such prayers represent the government’s official endorsement of that particular faith and also impose religious experience on those who are required to attend the event. But others say that the military must permit these faith-specific prayers because the chaplains have a constitutional right to pray as their specific faith requires; they argue that this right is guaranteed by either the Free Exercise Clause, which protects religious liberty, or the Free Speech Clause, which limits the government’s ability to restrict the content of private speech. So one side is arguing that the Constitution prohibits faith-specific prayers and another side is arguing that the Constitution guarantees chaplains a right to offer faith-specific prayers.

While no court has yet had to address this question, I think that if this issue were presented, a court would likely disagree with both sides. On the one hand, the Constitution probably permits faith-specific references in prayers at official events, even if service members are required to attend those events, as long as chaplains don’t use the prayers to proselytize. But there would of course be stronger arguments against such faith-specific prayers if they were offered on a regular basis. On the other hand, the Constitution probably permits the military to prohibit chaplains from making any faith-specific references during a public invocation because the government has broad authority to control what public officials say. And I think a court would find that chaplains act as public officials when they speak at official events. Thus, courts are likely to hold that the military has the discretion to decide whether chaplains may offer faith-specific prayers at public events.

How does the “war on terror,” a conflict with obvious religious overtones, relate to this notion of accommodating religious needs? What if, for example, the military wanted to build mosques and fund imams to serve the many devout Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, who, due to the war, might be deprived of adequate religious resources? Would that be constitutionally appropriate?

That’s an interesting and very relevant question, but it’s hard to answer because it raises the unresolved issue of whether the Establishment Clause applies to action taken by the U.S. government outside its territory. Although the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Lamont v. Woods (1991) ruled that the clause does apply overseas, the Supreme Court has never addressed this issue, and there are good arguments on both sides. Some say that the clause should not apply abroad because the two primary purposes of the clause – protecting religious liberty and avoiding religious conflict in America – deal only with actions either occurring within the United States or affecting U.S citizens. Others say that the clause should apply to the government’s overseas conduct because the government’s overseas expenditures on religion can burden American taxpayers in the same way that domestic expenditures do.

Do you anticipate an increasing or decreasing amount of litigation over religion’s role in the military?

I think that the litigation is likely to increase. Service members feel increasingly entitled to have their beliefs respected by those in positions of authority. At the same time, supervisors feel that they are entitled to express their religious beliefs to peers and subordinates. This conflicting sense of entitlement often produces litigation.

Do you expect any of these cases to go to the Supreme Court?

I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court heard any of these cases. I say this for two reasons. One, I think that the military has been working very hard to follow this accommodation principle we’ve been discussing. The military has instructed its chaplains and commanding officers to respect the rights of non-believers and to facilitate the religious needs of all service members. Two, the court has generally deferred to military authorities and hesitated to intervene in issues involving the military. For these two reasons, I think it’s unlikely that the court would agree to hear any of these cases.

http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=191

The United States in Comparative Perspective

The United States in Comparative Perspective: Measures of Social and Economic Well-Being
Peter Dreier, Occidental College, LA
Contexts Magazine, Summer 2007
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Most Americans are unaware how the United States compares to other affluent nations on various measures of economic and social well-being. This makes it difficult for them to consider whether another America, if not another world, is possible, because they have no basis of comparison other than anecdotes, stereotypes and an often misguided view that the U.S. is “number one” in terms of most indicators of the good life. At the same time, there is a growing unease among many Americans that their economic security and well-being are deteriorating -- but without a clear understanding of whether these trends are reversible, or whether there are lessons to be learned from other countries that may do things differently and, in some cases, better. So how does the United States compare?
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The U.S. is the third most prosperous country among affluent nations, following Norway and Japan, countries once far behind (per capita income using market exchange rates, 1960-2004, 2004 dollars)
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The U.S. ranks second, just behind Switzerland, in the concentration of wealth owned by the richest 10 percent of the population. In the U.S., the top 10 percent own 69.8 percent of the nation’s private wealth...
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The U.S. has the widest income gap. This is due to the fact that, in other countries, the poor are better off and the rich are not as rich as their U.S. counterparts. In many affluent countries, the poor have higher real incomes -- purchasing power -- than their counterparts in the U.S. In the U.S., the income of households at the 10th percentile is 39 percent of the country’s median household income. In Denmark, the income of households at the 10th percentile is 42 percent of median household income in the United States. In Norway, the income of households at the 10th percentage is 47 percent of median household income in the United States. At the other end of the spectrum, in the U.S., the income of households at the 90th percentile is 210 percent of the country’s median income. In Denmark, the income of households at the 90th percentile is only 115 percent of median income in the United States. Only in Luxembourg are the households at the 90th percentile better off, in terms of purchasing power, than their U.S. counterparts. But the income gap in Luxembourg is much narrower because the poor in that country are much better off than the poor in the U.S.
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Tables and the full-text are available at:
http://contexts.org/magazine/docs/resources_vol63.pdf
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The Post-American World

Fareed Zakaria
May 2008 / WWNorton Publishers

(Watch Video)
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The Rise of the Rest

It's true China is booming, Russia is growing more assertive, terrorism is a threat. But if America is losing the ability to dictate to this new world, it has not lost the ability to lead.

Americans are glum at the moment. No, I mean really glum. In April, a new poll revealed that 81 percent of the American people believe that the country is on the "wrong track." In the 25 years that pollsters have asked this question, last month's response was by far the most negative. Other polls, asking similar questions, found levels of gloom that were even more alarming, often at 30- and 40-year highs. There are reasons to be pessimistic—a financial panic and looming recession, a seemingly endless war in Iraq, and the ongoing threat of terrorism. But the facts on the ground—unemployment numbers, foreclosure rates, deaths from terror attacks—are simply not dire enough to explain the present atmosphere of malaise.

American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world. In almost every industry, in every aspect of life, it feels like the patterns of the past are being scrambled. "Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus," wrote Aristophanes 2,400 years ago. And—for the first time in living memory—the United States does not seem to be leading the charge. Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people.

Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

These factoids reflect a seismic shift in power and attitudes. It is one that I sense when I travel around the world. In America, we are still debating the nature and extent of anti-Americanism. One side says that the problem is real and worrying and that we must woo the world back. The other says this is the inevitable price of power and that many of these countries are envious—and vaguely French—so we can safely ignore their griping. But while we argue over why they hate us, "they" have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

I. The End of Pax Americana
During the 1980s, when I would visit India—where I grew up—most Indians were fascinated by the United States. Their interest, I have to confess, was not in the important power players in Washington or the great intellectuals in Cambridge.

People would often ask me about … Donald Trump. He was the very symbol of the United States—brassy, rich, and modern. He symbolized the feeling that if you wanted to find the biggest and largest anything, you had to look to America. Today, outside of entertainment figures, there is no comparable interest in American personalities. If you wonder why, read India's newspapers or watch its television. There are dozens of Indian businessmen who are now wealthier than the Donald. Indians are obsessed by their own vulgar real estate billionaires. And that newfound interest in their own story is being replicated across much of the world.

How much? Well, consider this fact. In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew their economies at over 4 percent a year. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa. Over the last two decades, lands outside the industrialized West have been growing at rates that were once unthinkable. While there have been booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term "emerging markets," has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world's next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India, two from China, and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa. This is something much broader than the much-ballyhooed rise of China or even Asia. It is the rise of the rest—the rest of the world.

We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. It also led to the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the Western world. The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the 19th century, was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For the last 20 years, America's superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged—something that's never happened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago. During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically. And that expansion is the driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest.

At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar world. But along every other dimension—industrial, financial, social, cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. In terms of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and art, this will produce a landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now—one defined and directed from many places and by many peoples.

The post-American world is naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be. This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else. It is the result of a series of positive trends that have been progressing over the last 20 years, trends that have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

I know. That's not the world that people perceive. We are told that we live in dark, dangerous times. Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear proliferation, financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and illegal immigrants all loom large in the national discourse. Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia are all threats in some way or another. But just how violent is today's world, really?

A team of scholars at the University of Maryland has been tracking deaths caused by organized violence. Their data show that wars of all kinds have been declining since the mid-1980s and that we are now at the lowest levels of global violence since the 1950s. Deaths from terrorism are reported to have risen in recent years. But on closer examination, 80 percent of those casualties come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which are really war zones with ongoing insurgencies—and the overall numbers remain small. Looking at the evidence, Harvard's polymath professor Steven Pinker has ventured to speculate that we are probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence."

Why does it not feel that way? Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding. The last 20 years have produced an information revolution that brings us news and, most crucially, images from around the world all the time. The immediacy of the images and the intensity of the 24-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hype. Every weather disturbance is the "storm of the decade." Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS. Because the information revolution is so new, we—reporters, writers, readers, viewers—are all just now figuring out how to put everything in context.

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America's Top 100 Newspapers

Mondo Newspapers covers the top 100 American newspapers in depth, based on readership data from the Newspaper Assocation of America.
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Top 100 USA Newspapers - By Readership
Rank	Newspaper	Readership	Location	Owner
1	USA Today	6,864,923	McLean, Virginia	Gannett Company, Inc.
2	Wall Street Journal	5,147,565	New York, New York	Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
3	New York Times	4,749,874	New York, New York	The New York Times Company
4	New York Daily News	2,695,132	New York, New York	Daily News, L.P.
5	Los Angeles Times	2,392,096	Los Angeles, California	Tribune Publishing
6	New York Post	2,061,324	New York, New York	News Corporation
7	Washington Post	1,716,778	Washington, DC	Washington Post Company
8	Chicago Tribune	1,628,403	Chicago, Illinois	Tribune Publishing
9	Newsday	1,483,717	Melville, New York	Tribune Publishing
10	Chicago Sun Times	1,383,572	Chicago, Illinois	Hollinger International Inc.
11	Houston Chronicle	1,228,322	Houston, Texas	Hearst Corporation
12	Dallas Morning News	1,086,383	Dallas, Texas	Belo Corporation
13	Newark Star Ledger	1,073,919	Newark, New Jersey	Newhouse Newspapers
14	Arizona Republic	1,055,492	Phoenix, Arizona	Gannett Company, Inc.
15	Boston Globe	1,024,182	Boston, Massachusetts	The New York Times Company
16	Minneapolis Star Tribune	1,015,903	Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota	Avista Capital Partners L.P.
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