National Review

Away from the Gated Communitiy

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:33:00 -0400

Demography is destiny in politics, or so we have heard. In 2004, the growth of the exurbs was said to be generating a permanent Republican majority. Now the strong support for the Democrats by young people, Hispanics, and non-Christians is said to be creating an unstoppable trend toward liberalism.

Battle For the 'Burbs

Ron Tang — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:34:00 -0400

* This article is adapted from Reihan Salam's and Ross Douthat's Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

It was only four years ago that conservatives -- and a great many liberals -- were convinced that the Democratic party was doomed to become a purely regional institution: "a national party no more," to borrow the title of Georgia Democrat-turned-Bush supporter Zell Miller's 2003 memoir. Pundits brandished county-by-county maps showing blue enclaves drowning in a sea of red; they talked up the growth of GOP-leaning regions and constituencies and the daunting demographic gaps (God, babies) facing the Democratic party; they murmured in awe about the unbeatable political machine Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman had built. To most observers, the Republicans looked like America's natural majority, while the Democrats looked like a liberal rump, confined to the coasts and big cities, and permanently alienated from the American heartland.

Now the situation is reversed. Now it's the Democrats who expect to control the presidency and both houses of Congress come January, and perhaps for years to come. Since 2004 the GOP has lost ground on nearly every demographic and geographic front -- white collar and blue collar, Hispanic and redneck, Catholic and evangelical. The party has been routed in the Northeast, taken heavy losses in the Midwest and Mountain West, and even tasted defeat deep in the South.

Perhaps the only good news for the GOP is that it has the example of the Democratic party's rapid turnabout to ponder as it attempts to break out of its current box. True, the Republican road back probably won't be smoothed by an unpopular war, a sagging economy, and an opposition-party president with Carteresque approval ratings, as the Democrats' revival has been. Even so, there are lessons for the GOP in the Democratic party's transformation from blue-state rump to national juggernaut.

The biggest problem facing any flailing political party is its need simultaneously to accomplish two seemingly contradictory feats: re-energizing its core supporters while cutting into the other party's natural base. Over the last four years, the Democratic party has managed to do both. First a shared hatred of George W. Bush and then a shared enthusiasm for Barack Obama has made the party's base -- blacks and white, well-off, web-savvy liberals -- more excited about being Democrats than they've been since 1992, or possibly even 1964. Meanwhile, the national party has pursued an initially derided, eventually lauded "50-state strategy" aimed at rebuilding itself in solidly Republican regions as well as swing states. The result has been a slew of successful local candidates who have expanded the definition of what it means to be a Democrat, and in the process swiped votes from constituencies the GOP was supposed to own.

For Republicans, the road back to power involves pulling the same feat off in reverse. On one hand, the GOP needs to consolidate and energize its base, especially the middle-class and working-class voters in flyover states who formed the backbone of George W. Bush's majority. (This task will be made more difficult by the fact that many Republicans seem to think that "energizing the base" means appealing to a set of D.C.-based interest groups rather than actual voters.) But on the other hand, Republicans need a set of issues and candidates that can do what Democrats Travis Childers and Don Cazayoux just did in Mississippi and Louisiana, respectively -- win elections in areas that have been trending to the other party for years or decades. If the challenge for the Democrats' 50-state strategy has been to win over the vast middle-American constituency that has been termed "Sam's Club conservatives," the challenge for a Republican 50-state strategy is to win over a very different demographic: the affluent, well-educated, increasingly liberal upper middle class.

The Upper Middle Class Moves Left

There was a time when this group was the backbone of the GOP. The correlation between rising education levels and rising Republican affiliation was once a constant in American politics: Except for the LBJ landslide, managers and professionals voted for the GOP ticket in every presidential election between 1952 and 1988. Well-educated voters in that era tended to identify with business rather than with government; they valued fiscal prudence over liberal extravagance, and social stability over rapid change; and they prized a suburban way of life that seemed threatened first by creeping statism and then by the left-wing radicalism of the 1960s.

But as America changed, so did the upper middle class, growing larger and steadily more liberal. The upheavals of the 1960s produced a generation raised in affluence but steeped in a radicalism that would diminish but not disappear with age. The causes of their youth -- feminism, environmentalism, secularism, gay rights -- became the orthodoxies of their adulthood, and the result was the rise of an upper-middle-class lifestyle politics defined by its rejection of mid-century social norms and its support for the new social order that the 1960s and 1970s had ushered in.

This cultural turn dovetailed with the changing economic landscape. The women who flooded into the post-Sixties workplace, delaying marriage and childbirth for the sake of professional success, have become a key liberal constituency (in the Eisenhower era, women favored the Republicans, but no longer), as have the growing ranks of professionals who depend on an activist government for their livelihood -- social workers, trial lawyers, lobbyists, unionized teachers. More broadly, the old labor/management/government triangle of the industrial era, in which the upper middle class tended to identify with management and the free market against union bosses and government regulators, has given way to a post-industrial landscape in which the professional classes tend to identify as artists or caregivers or activists as much as entrepreneurs. This new "creative class," to swipe Richard Florida's fawning description, prides itself on trafficking not in dollars and products but in concepts and information and ideas. They define themselves against what they perceive as the crassness and sterility of corporate America, justifying their success as capitalists -- what their younger selves might have described as "selling out" -- with dollops of activism and social consciousness, and down-the-line Democratic voting.

Above all, the upper middle class has grown richer and larger and more mobile than it used to be, which in turn has insulated many of its members from the forces that used to make well-to-do voters conservative. In a sense, the post-Reagan Republican party is a victim of its own success at cutting taxes and crime and spurring economic growth -- and pushing the Democrats toward the center on all three fronts. But the GOP is also a victim of the upper middle class's success, which has made well-educated, well-off voters less sensitive to tax rates and crime rates -- and just about everything else, in fact -- than ever before, and left them free to vote their values rather than their investment portfolios.

For a long time, though, these trends have actually benefited the Republicans, who gained working-
class votes even as they slowly lost their grip on the professional class and won a majority in the process. In his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips urged the GOP to give up on wooing what he termed "silk stocking" voters in favor of a politics that aimed "to resurrect the vitality and commitment of Middle America -- from sharecroppers and truckers to the alienated lower middle classes." To the extent that the Right followed his advice in subsequent decades, it reaped benefits at the polls, earning enough working-class votes to more than offset the leftward migration of the upper-middle-class bloc.

What was true in the Seventies and Eighties has been true in the Bush era as well. Many voters who might once have been flinty Rockefeller Republicans or pocketbook-conscious Orange County conservatives voted, reluctantly or eagerly, for Al Gore and John Kerry. But for every lost Santa Barbara suburbanite, Bush won a socially conservative white Catholic; for every ex-Republican stockbroker working on his third wife, he captured a middle-income Hispanic. In the 2004 election he lost Connecticut but won New Mexico; lost California but made inroads into the Old Northwest, taking Iowa and coming close in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The heirs of Nelson Rockefeller are trending Democratic, but Bush found a way to attract a fraction, if not a majority, of the descendants of César Chávez, Hubert Humphrey, and Robert La Follette.

Yet doing so won him barely half the vote, compared with the landslides that similar achievements won for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira call this phenomenon "George McGovern's Revenge": The upper middle class has steadily grown, along with the number of black and Latin voters, to the point where McGovern's 1972 coalition is nearly large enough to command a national majority. At the same time, the white working class has slowly shrunk. The share of adults over 25 who are non-college-educated whites has gone from over 80 percent in 1940 to under half today. So while Republicans remain broadly in line with the values of this crucial constituency, they are in the uncomfortable position of relying on ever-larger majorities of an ever-shrinking group.

In upcoming decades, then, the GOP will increasingly be in a position with the upper middle class that the Democrats have been in with the working class since the Clinton era: It's a demographic they don't need to win outright, but one in which they can't afford to get slaughtered on Election Day. Obviously there's no imaginable future in which the Republican party wins over Bobo bastions like San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass. But if the national GOP wants to win 55 percent of the vote instead of 51 percent, and to compete in 50 states -- as Nixon and Reagan did -- rather than 35, it isn't enough to reconstitute the Bush majority; it needs to be expanded as well.

Upward, Outward

So far, Republicans have pursued two main strategies to woo well-educated voters. One is simply to mimic candidates of the center-Left, offering a me-too politics that promises to combine the comforts of voting for a liberal with the frisson of being independent-minded. This might be called the Lincoln Chafee approach, after the Rhode Island senator who campaigned and legislated as a Democrat in all but name, and Chafee's fate (he was defeated for reelection in 2006) suggests the approach's limits as a political strategy: In a polarized climate, it's awfully hard to persuade liberal-leaning voters to go with the RINO when there's a real Democrat available. (This is to say nothing, obviously, of the Chafee strategy's uselessness in actually advancing conservative ideas.)

The second strategy might be called the Giuliani approach, after the former New York mayor's ill-fated 2008 presidential bid, which was supposed to make the GOP competitive again among northeastern and West Coast suburbanites by kicking away one leg of the Republican stool: doubling down on the tax-cutting and hawkishness, but losing the social conservatism. This is the strategy that has been urged on the GOP by a generation of pro-choice Republicans, from Christine Todd Whitman to Pete Wilson. But the failure of the Giuliani campaign is a reminder of why it hasn't been adopted. Yes, there are districts and regions -- such as Rudy's New York City -- where backing socially liberal candidates who are otherwise conservative makes sense for the Republican party. But any effort to rebrand the national party as neutral, indifferent, or liberal on abortion would amount to destroying the coalition in order to save it.

The broader problem with both of these approaches is their assumption that the Republican party mainly needs to subtract a set of issues in order to increase its share of the upper-middle-class vote. Obviously, blurring the differences between the two parties can be helpful -- just ask the pro-life, pro-gun Democrats who've been winning elections in the heart of Red America. But in the long term, parties don't peel away voters just by minimizing their differences with the opposition party; they peel them away by emphasizing the differences that their opponents don't want to talk about.

Consider that the GOP's best performance in recent years among voters with postgraduate degrees, the heart of the mass upper class, came in the 2002 midterms, when they backed Republican congressional candidates by 51 percent to 45 percent. Had the GOP gone wobbly on abortion or suddenly embraced gay marriage? Of course not: It was the difference between the two parties on national security, suddenly reasserting itself after a decade of abeyance, that made all the difference. Similarly, the new wave of culturally conservative Democrats have used their pro-life, pro-gun stances to neutralize attacks from the right -- but they've been winning with a neo-populist economic message that sharpens rather than elides the distinctions between Left and Right.

The challenge for Republicans is to find a set of wedge issues that will enable them to do the same thing with the upper middle class -- issues that convince proto-Bobos in Northern Virginia or suburban New Jersey that they have more in common with Sam's Club conservatism than with the silk-stocking liberalism that they're increasingly embracing. With this in mind, here are four avenues that the GOP might pursue.

School Choice for the Suburbs. The educational arms race is central to the lives of upper-middle-
class suburbanites. That's one reason President Bush championed tough standards and accountability in 2000 -- to signal that he understood that reforming education was a high priority. But No Child Left Behind was aimed at improving educational outcomes for poor children, not the vast majority of suburban kids. The real educational crisis for most suburban families is a crisis of affordability, in which home prices and tax rates in above-average school districts climb as ambitious parents struggle to give their children a leg up.

This is where conservatives usually sing the virtues of school vouchers, which decouple home prices from the quality of schools by letting money follow students according to the discretion of their parents. It's an attractive vision for the inner city, or for a tabula rasa world, but in the real world, suburban parents -- conservatives as well as liberals -- have proved resistant to vouchers. Decoupling home prices from school quality would be a great thing for young couples just starting out, but it's a potentially terrible thing for families that have already invested most of their wealth in their homes. At the same time, families who have fled the cities fear that school choice will open up their schools to children from the communities they deliberately left behind.

That's not the most generous impulse, but protectiveness of this sort isn't going to go away. To win these voters back, Republicans need to sidestep the voucher debate and instead emphasize real local control of schools. Conventional, union-dominated public schools have to abide by spending formulas and staffing ratios set by a central board of education. Local management -- that is, the principal who knows the situation close at hand -- has relatively little discretion. This is the great advantage of charter schools, which allow principals to be innovative and entrepreneurial, allocating funds and making hiring decisions to address the needs of parents and children, rather than to satisfy the dictates of the bureaucracy.

It's no surprise that administrators in conventional public schools are annoyed by the attention lavished on charters. If they had the same freedom, they argue, they could match or exceed charter-school results. So why not give it to them? Instead of slowly expanding the number of public charter schools, why not offer the same spending discretion to every public school in a district? In the areas we're discussing, many districts contain multiple schools at each grade level, so the potential for competition is great.

The approach, called the weighted-student formula, is simple: The more students a public school attracts, the more public money it gets -- and that money is spent at the discretion of the principal, not unions and bureaucrats. To attract students, schools within a district have to differentiate themselves and deliver results. And they have to be accountable, since centralized spending decisions -- always fat targets for self-dealing -- would give way to transparent spending decisions made at the local level.

At present, the weighted-student formula is being championed by reformist liberals in one-party cities like San Francisco and New York. But only Republicans can take the idea nationwide, since it threatens to divide and weaken the teachers' unions, on which the national Democratic party has come to depend. It's a cause that could make mince-meat of the Left's claim to represent the interests of children. And by leaving district boundaries and funding more or less intact for purposes of administrative convenience while encouraging experimentation within each district, the weighted-student formula would allay suburbanites' fears about seeing their kids bused into unsafe schools while delivering many of the benefits of a voucher program.

The Greening of Conservatism. For the moment, Democrats own the environment as an issue, in large part because Republicans have conceded it to them. That needs to change. For many upper-middle-class voters, the environment is as much a values issue as abortion is to social conservatives. And as the consensus surrounding the role of human-produced carbon emissions in climate change has grown stronger, conservatives have often taken a head-in-the-sand approach, which in turn has fit neatly into a larger left-wing narrative of a know-nothing, anti-science Right -- a narrative that has become one of the many drags on the GOP's ability to woo professionals.

John McCain deserves credit for recognizing these realities. Unfortunately, with his support for cap-and-trade, he's pulled a Chafee on the issue, copying Democratic proposals rather than advancing a conservative alternative. By aping liberalism's call for a regulatory approach to climate change, the McCain approach allows Democrats to continue to pose as visionaries on the issue, rather than exposing them for what they are: top-down statists who are imposing a distaste for industrial society and the suburban lifestyle on what is fundamentally a question of problem-solving. (More encouraging is McCain's proposal to build 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030.)

By debating liberals on the best approach for fighting climate change, conservatives can make the case for an environmentalism that is pro-growth and pro-jobs. One approach, advanced in these pages by Jim Manzi and elsewhere by reformist liberals Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, is to eschew punitive approaches like carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade system -- which would be a messier and more complex form of carbon taxes -- and instead embrace large investments in alternative technologies. For instance, conservatives could propose an agency dedicated to funding alternative-energy research -- modeled, perhaps, on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has sparked dramatic advances in the realm of defense technology. Here, too, McCain has a good idea with his proposal of a $300 million prize for the inventor of an improved automobile battery. The threat posed by global warming is real, the Right should argue, but massive new regulatory burdens will undercut the growth and innovation we need to build lasting and effective solutions. That message -- that we should innovate, rather than regulate, our way out of our energy dilemma -- will resonate with upper-middle-class voters, particularly when they understand how the costs of cap-and-trade will impact their lives.

The Politics of Commuting. An innovation-driven approach to fighting climate change would also enable conservatives to define themselves as the champions of the suburban lifestyle, against a liberalism that seeks to dramatically raise the costs of gas and homeownership. Whether you're talking about Phoenix or Atlanta or Chicago or Philadelphia, suburban families share at least two interests: They want enough elbow room to raise their families, and they want to keep traffic moving. The modern commute is a sleeper issue that a pro-family, pro-suburb party ought to exploit.

As Nicholas Kulish of the New York Times has pointed out, 25 years ago the average American spent just 16 hours annually sitting in traffic; by 2003, the figure was up to 47 hours, at a cost of $63.1 billion (and 2.3 billion extra gallons of gasoline burned) per annum. America's highway infrastructure simply hasn't been modernized enough to keep up with population growth. Vehicle-lane miles (a measure of how much use highways are getting) have increased by nearly 150 percent since the 1970s, but America has added just 5 percent in highway capacity, putting an immense strain on commuters' schedules, pocketbooks, and tempers. Naturally, the problem is likely to get worse. In The Road More Traveled, their manifesto for an improved transportation policy, Ted Balaker and Sam Staley estimate that traffic delays will increase by another 65 percent over the next quarter century.

Liberals generally insist that the traffic problem can be alleviated only with mass transit, because building more highways "induces demand" and leaves the roads just as congested as before. But as Balaker and Staley note, increasing pavement reliably reduces commuting delays: Dallas has twice as much pavement per person as Los Angeles, and (surprise!) half the congestion. And more lanes are just the beginning of the sort of solutions Republicans should support: Private-public partnerships, in which toll highways are administered by companies with an interest in maximizing movement through their toll booths, can provide needed funds for infrastructure; traffic-signal patterns can be optimized and freeway ramps monitored to keep the flow of traffic steady throughout a commute; and differential pricing on lanes and highways can reduce congestion by drawing more commuters into off-peak hours. (Sometimes new tolls would have to be imposed to pay for the construction, but the benefits would be well worth the cost. The point is to establish Republicans as pro-car and pro-road.)

This last solution will require a shift toward flexible work schedules, but this is already happening in many industries, and it brings us to another potential conservative response to the commuting crunch: public investments in telecommuting infrastructure. Telecommuting is one of the great boons of the Internet age, and 44 million Americans already telecommute part-time. Working long-distance promises not only to shore up the suburban way of life -- by enabling parents to live in cheaper areas and spend more time with their children -- but to reduce our economy's environmental footprint.

Moreover, a new national-infrastructure strategy would dovetail with the conservative crusade against earmarks. As Kulish points out: "Because there is no national vision of how money should be spent to upgrade America's physical plant, the money that is allocated for it is being spent piecemeal on dubious projects." The "Bridge to Nowhere" isn't just a waste of money, Republicans should tell suburbanites -- it's the reason you have to sit in traffic an extra 20 minutes every day.

Defusing the Crime Bomb. The GOP's appeals to law and order in the face of the post-Sixties crime wave were crucial to building the Reagan majority, and the declining importance of the crime issue, in turn, has been crucial to upper-middle-class voters' leftward swing. But crime, like commuting, is a sleeper issue for the GOP. It still matters to suburban voters, as evidenced by everything from the national panic over sex offenders to the rising fears of immigrant gangs in states like California and Virginia. The trouble is that the long-running conservative answer to the crime problem -- tough sentencing and mass incarceration -- while successful, has reached a point of diminishing returns.

Indeed, the unintended consequences of this draconian approach may be on the verge of spurring a new crime wave. Huge numbers of prisoners who have been locked up since the 1980s, when tough sentencing spread nationwide, will be released from prison over the next decade. Most of these men were arrested early in life, and most have had very little in the way of education. And the opportunities for illicit activity are likely to increase just as this generation is hitting the streets. The imported drugs that landed many of these men in prison in the first place are being replaced by homegrown drugs that are virtually impossible to interdict.

A similar cocktail of demographic change and criminal opportunity led to a crisis of authority in the 1970s. A new crime wave, particularly one linked to Hispanic immigration and black recidivism, could set us back by decades and lead to renewed racial tension and resentment. And as gang violence spreads beyond the inner cities -- something that's already happening in many regions, as programs designed to break up pockets of concentrated poverty disperse lawbreakers into the suburbs -- voters living in the inner suburbs will find themselves on the front lines. Already voter anxiety is rising: The percentage of Americans who told the General Social Survey that they are "afraid to walk in their neighborhood at night" rose five percentage points between 2004 and 2006, after declining every year since 1994.

Instead of waiting for a crime explosion, conservatives should find policies to prevent it. And the best prevention is simply having more cops on the beat. It wasn't just prisons that brought the last crime wave to a halt in the 1990s. It was also the dramatic increase in the size of police forces, whose per capita numbers rose by 10 percent between 1994 and 1999, with sharper increases in the biggest cities. We're still a long way from having a law-enforcement glut: According to an estimate by economist John Donohue, the United States would need to hire 500,000 more police officers before reaching the point of diminishing returns. To put that number in context, there are only 665,000 police officers in the United States at present.

Moreover, a shift to a policing-first strategy would enable the national GOP to follow the lead of figures like Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and advocate prison reform as well as prevention. In the struggle to win upper-middle-class votes, this two-pronged approach could offer Republicans the best of both worlds: They'd be asking suburbanites to vote their fears and their consciences at once.

Outside the Box

What all of these proposals have in common is the capacity to divide the upper middle class against itself, pitting rich liberals who are insulated from the costs of voting Democratic -- longer commutes and higher gas prices, uncompetitive schools and higher crime rates -- against upwardly mobile centrists who aren't. None of these ideas are likely to turn the suburbs of New York or Los Angeles dark red anytime soon. But they might just help the GOP break out of its current regional and demographic box and become a national party again.

Population Bombing

Ron Tang — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:46:00 -0400

In the 20th century, a global network of colluding activists, institutions, and governments sought to engineer solutions to various real and perceived social problems by, as Matthew Connelly puts it in his new book, planning "other people's families." In its most egregious expression, this movement led to the forced sterilization of millions of people around the world, including many thousands in the U.S., on the grounds that they were -- genetically or otherwise -- unfit. California alone had sterilized 7,500 people by 1931, and the practice continued in other states up until the 1970s.

This movement also, through philanthropies and government-directed foreign aid, spent billions of dollars distributing sometimes-dangerous birth-control devices and funding abortion clinics throughout much of the developing world, even though fertility rates across the globe were already plummeting. Connelly writes: "The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people's interests better than they knew it themselves... The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the 'unfit,' or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them."

Connelly, a professor of history at Columbia University and the youngest of eight children in a Catholic family, offers a new history of the population-control movement that is evenhanded and sensitive to historical context, if also naïve in its ideal of libertarianism in population matters. His chief scholarly claim is to have been the first to explore the relevant archives of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Population Council, International Planned Parenthood, the World Bank, key U.N. agencies, and other institutions deeply involved in efforts to curb world population growth. From this research, he emerges with the conclusion that while no formal, genocidal conspiracy existed, "some of the leading protagonists did, in fact, act in underhanded ways, pretending to be advancing one agenda while secretly harboring another."

Unfortunately, Connelly's heavy reliance on archival material from these institutions has led him to write a narrative that for the most part depicts the population-control movement as an endless series of international conferences -- from the sixth "International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference" in New York in 1925 to the 1994 U.N. "Cairo Conference" -- at which various factions engaged in doctrinal debate. This institutional perspective is important, but often makes for dull reading and misses the deeper psychology behind the actors in the movement. Connelly does discuss, of course, the large personalities involved, such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich. But their stories appear in fragments throughout the book and Connelly makes little effort to sum up or judge their underlying motives and character.

For example, while discussing how the Holocaust affected public opinion on population matters, Connelly mentions Sanger's view only in passing. Quoting a 1950 address to Planned Parenthood by Sanger, he lets drop that this icon of today's feminist Left "pointed to the death camps as conclusive proof of the 'widespread devaluation of human lives' and the urgent need for policies to improve them,' beginning with the sterilization of those with dysgenetic qualities of body and mind.'" Was this, truly, the meaning of the Holocaust for Sanger, and if so, what does it say about her?

Connelly does, however, get the broad outlines of the population-control movement right. It originated in the late 19th century, when Western elites began noticing their own falling fertility and the increasing population of "the unfit" (both at home and in Western colonies). Some, like Theodore Roosevelt, responded to the threat of what he and many others called "race suicide" by exhorting educated women to have more children. Later, many Western governments, including Germany and Italy under fascism, turned to, and today are returning to, pro-natalist policies, such as offering large family allowances and "baby bonuses."

But during most of the 20th century, the dominant strain of the population-control movement rejected pro-natalism and embraced a negative eugenics. In a passage Connelly does not quote, for example, Sanger wrote in 1922: "The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes." Rather than haranguing the well-to-do about their small families, Sanger argued that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism."

Into this mix of motives came two other strains of ideology, particularly as the century wore on: a libertarian strain of feminism emphasizing reproductive rights, and a Malthusian form of environmentalism. Sanger, when she wasn't talking about the need to improve "the race," justified birth control as a right of women to control their own bodies. She sometimes did this in the same sentence, as in: "Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment."

Meanwhile, as world population doubled, then doubled again in the 20th century, figures such as Paul Ehrlich justified negative eugenics (the effort to weed out "undesirable" traits) in the name of avoiding world famine and preserving the planet, including the vanishing habitats of his beloved butterflies. Responding to Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi's policy of coercing millions of her countrymen to undergo vasectomies in the Seventies, Ehrlich regretted that Western governments had not done more to facilitate the campaign. "We should have volunteered logistical support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments," Ehrlich wrote (in another comment not quoted by Connelly). "We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause."

Connelly goes easy on Ehrlich and others who share his Malthusian mindset. Indeed, he proclaims what is (to me at least) an obnoxious moral equivalence between supporters of forced sterilization and social and religious conservatives opposed to birth control and abortion. But he does score two strong points against the negative-eugenics movement that are highly relevant to how we should think about population control and the environment.

One is that fertility rates were in steep decline in both the developed and the developing world long before the introduction of modern birth-control devices. Indeed, in countries such as Brazil, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, in which contraceptives were difficult to obtain, birthrates fell just as quickly as in countries that made massive efforts to suppress population growth.

Demographers now agree that human beings have long known how to control their own fertility and have done so when it made individual economic sense -- as it does now for most of the world's inhabitants. Today's global decline in birthrates results primarily from the rapid urbanization of the Third World and the increasing educational attainment of women, both of which have dramatically raised the direct and opportunity cost of children. Also at work, many demographers say, is the diffusion of individualistic, and by extension anti-natalist, values through television and other global media.

(An aside: If birthrates were plummeting around the world, why did population grow so much in the 20th century? Mostly it was because of dramatic reductions in infant mortality, especially in the developing world. But while we are still far from eliminating infant mortality, its incidence is already low enough that continuing progress on that front adds little to population. This, combined with continuing falling birthrates, particularly in developing countries, leaves global population aging rapidly and on a course toward absolute decline by as early as mid-century.)

The other important point Connelly makes is that while growth of human population is not the problem many people once thought it was, growth in the world's number of cars, air-conditioned houses, and other sources of energy demand and pollution undeniably is a challenge, and population controllers are in large part responsible. As families have grown smaller throughout most of the world, their standard of living has increased, and so too has their environmental footprint. Not only does a population of small families and childless individuals require more housing units per person, the resources freed up by low fertility typically increase per capita consumption of everything else, from beef to oil and coal. Nowhere is this truer than in the two countries where population controllers had the most influence: India and China. In India, fertility rates dropped 22 percent between 1990 and 2003 and are now below replacement levels in the southern provinces. At the same time per capita carbon-dioxide emissions increased by 50 percent as more and more Indians achieved Western living standards. Meanwhile, China, with its famous "one child" policy, saw its per capita CO₂ emissions increase by 53 percent, according to the World Bank. Each of those single-child "little emperors" who constitute the rising generation in China produces far more pollution than his peasant forebears.

Those who today point to the specter of global warming in hopes of reinvigorating the negative-eugenics movement of the last century should be careful what they wish for. The first-order effect of Zero Population Growth, let alone negative population growth, would most likely be a further increase in greenhouse-gas emissions, as individuals diverted investment in children into higher personal consumption. At the same time, the specter of global aging and population decline, particularly in the West, will undoubtedly strengthen the voices of those on the other side of the population-control debate who have long sought stricter limits on birth control and abortion. Consistent with the long history of mankind, population control is not about to go away.

Book reviewed in this article

Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, 544pp., Harvard.

Letter From Riyadh

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

In the sprawling desert city where Osama bin Laden was born almost half a century ago, last week the Saudis held their first international counterterrorism conference. A couple of days after the conference ended, Riyadh was the first city to vote in the only nationwide elections that have been held since the modern Saudi kingdom was founded three quarters of a century ago. Neither the conference nor the election -- which was for only half of the seats on Riyadh's municipal councils -- was anything more than an incremental step along the road to an honest self-assessment about how al Qaeda was incubated within the kingdom, but both are indicative of a gradualist Saudi glasnost that may mark the beginnings of democratization and an enlarged civil society no longer amenable to the breeding of terrorists.

It is hard to imagine either the terrorism conference or Riyadh's election taking place except in the context of the wave of more than 20 terrorist attacks that swept the kingdom beginning in May 2003 -- attacks that targeted Western expatriates, Saudi security personnel, and oil workers and killed 129 people. The multiple terrorist strikes gave those urging some measure of political reform a powerful argument with which to overcome the objections of those who wanted to maintain the House of Saud's monopoly on power. And where previously Saudi officials such as Prince Nayef, the powerful minister of the interior, publicly denied the existence of al Qaeda in the kingdom and opined that Zionists were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, a different tone has been struck in the past year as the royal family has come to realize that al Qaeda poses a substantial threat.

Tackling Terror

In the first phase of eliminating al Qaeda, the Saudi strategy has been an aggressive military and intelligence effort to capture or kill terrorists such as Abdalaziz al-Muqrin, the group's local military commander, who personally executed American helicopter-maintenance specialist Paul Johnson last June. Two days after a video of Johnson's beheading surfaced on the Internet, security forces killed al-Muqrin. According to Saudi officials, over the past two years more than 90 other militants have been killed and 800 detained. An important facet of this counterterrorist effort are U.S.-supplied drones equipped with infra-red heat-seeking technology that fly over sparsely populated areas along the Yemeni-Saudi border locating remote farms where members of al Qaeda are holed up.

The second phase of the counterterror campaign is a hearts-and-minds operation to persuade the Saudi public of the evils of terrorism. Public-service announcements on Saudi television now routinely show the gruesome aftermath of terrorist attacks, while ATM machines print out messages conveying their harms. More important, a number of senior Saudi clerics have released statements condemning the terrorists. Most prominent among them is the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, a direct descendant of Muhammad bin Abdul-Wahhab, the cleric whose religious and military alliance with the Saudi family in the 18th century created the first Saudi kingdom. In a statement published in al Madinah newspaper, al-Sheik said, "Attacking a building and throwing explosives, killing innocent people, frightening the populace and undermining the stability of society run contrary to the teaching of Islam." Al Sheik also condemned the 9/11 attacks as "gross crimes and sinful acts." While such statements are open to the criticism that they come from "government sheiks" toeing the new Saudi line, the fact remains that there has been widespread condemnation of terrorism amongst senior clerics in the past year. In addition, some 2,000 of the Kingdom's 100,000 clerics have lost their jobs for making inflammatory statements, although, after what one Saudi official describes as "retraining," most of those fired clerics have been reinstated.

The Saudis are also turning one of al Qaeda's key weapons, the Internet, against the group. For the past several years al Qaeda's Saudi arm has maintained two web-based magazines, Al Battar and Sawt-al-Jihad, where one can find training tips about how to clean AK47s and strategic advice urging attacks on economic targets. Now Saudi clerics are using the Internet to persuade al Qaeda sympathizers that they have strayed from the path of true Islam. Islamic Affairs minister Saleh al-Sheikh told reporters at the terrorism conference, "We conducted a dialogue with 800 of them and more than a quarter were convinced." It is not easy to assess the validity of such claims, but a similar dialogue between clerics and al Qaeda sympathizers in neighboring Yemen has yielded positive results.

The terrorism conference opened on February 5th as delegates from some 50 countries arrived at Riyadh's King Abdul Aziz conference center, a vast palace decorated in a tasteful version of the Louis Farouk style favored by Middle Eastern potentates. Security was intense with helicopters buzzing overhead, hundreds of soldiers lining the approaches to the conference center, and blast barriers ringing the site. The last thing the government wanted was an attack in the middle of the conference that had attracted media organizations from around the world enticed by an unusually relaxed visa policy.

Inside the conference center, under chandeliers the size of a Manhattan studio apartment, Crown Prince Abdullah delivered the keynote address, making no mention of al Qaeda and explaining instead that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance and emphasizing that terrorist groups benefit from arms-smuggling, drug-trafficking, and money-laundering. Over the next four days of the conference those uncontroversial themes were reiterated constantly -- a shrewd way of taking off the table thorny questions about the causes of terrorism that would have derailed the conference. The role of authoritarian governments in the Middle East or the Arab-Israeli conflict in spawning terrorist groups was nor discussed, nor was there discussion of state sponsors of terrorism such as Syria and Iran, both of which sent delegations to the conference. (Israel was not invited.) After his address, the 80-year-old crown prince, the de facto Saudi ruler, shook the hand of each of the several hundred people attending the conference who all then repaired to a Versailles-sized banqueting hall to tuck into a sumptuous lunch of Scottish smoked salmon, fresh lobster, and veal medallions in black-truffle sauce served by fleets of liveried servants.

Quite what the Saudi conference will achieve in the long term is not easy to say, though the fact that it happened at all may be achievement enough. Crown prince Abdullah's key proposal was for the establishment of an international counterterrorism center, the mechanics of which were never described. The head of the U.S. delegation, Homeland Security advisor Frances Fragos Townsend, cautioned reporters that "the center would not end the need for bilateral exchange of information. Nothing would." The proposal for an international center may eventually devolve into something more practicable, such as the proposal made by Bahrain for a regional counterterrorism center consisting of countries in the Gulf, several of which are now facing attacks by al Qaeda-affiliated groups.

"The beginning of something"

It is also unclear what the long-term implications of the election in Riyadh will be. Certainly, the election held on February 10 is a precedent, albeit a small one, as voters cast their ballots for only half of the members of their municipal councils and the government will continue to appoint the rest. While women were not allowed to participate in the elections either as voters or as candidates, the Arab News reported that more than 5,000 male prisoners were encouraged to cast their votes, perhaps in an effort to increase the pool of voters, only 150,00 of whom had registered out of a possible 600,000 eligible to do so. The lethargic rate of voter registration may have reflected skepticism among the public that the elections would achieve much of anything.

But then a strange thing happened as election day drew near; campaign posters started appearing on every street corner and more than 600 candidates declared candidacies for the seven open seats on the Riyadh city council. Retail politics Saudi style involved candidates' setting up tents that drew hundreds of men to listen to campaign speeches and to feast on lavish spreads of lamb and rice as they warmed themselves by log fires to ward off the chill of the desert night.

None of this comes cheap. Abdulrahman al-Humedhi estimated he spent $100,000 on his campaign -- a lot of money for a college professor, which he is. Al-Humedhi said his platform "stresses providing service for the poor, libraries, and parks." He admitted it was a "risky investment" with so many candidates running, but even if he lost it was worth it, he said. "I'm happy to get myself exposed."

Badr Saedan, the 41-year-old scion of a Riyadh real-estate dynasty, who ran one of the splashiest campaigns, explained that he was running on a nuts-and-bolts platform of affordable housing and a clean environment. Saedan said his Ph.D. in construction management from Dundee, Scotland, made him well qualified to deal with some unglamorous but important issues: "We don't have enough sewage coverage for the city. We have a problem with landfills that are not safe because the city is expanding." Milling around by the food tables, Faisal al-Rwali, a 40-year-old financial analyst, said that "tonight I made up my mind" to vote for Saedan. Al-Rwali expressed the hope that the municipal election was "maybe a test from the government to see how we act, to later give us a parliament." Mohamed al-Qudhaieen, a heavily bearded professor of linguistics who was also attending the campaign rally, said he remained undecided how to vote, but "it's great for the country. Our hope is there will be more."

The day of the election, most of Riyadh's population of 4 million went about its business as usual, as foreigners, women, and males under the age of 21 -- the vast majority of the population -- could not vote. At a polling station set up in the basketball court of a school in a middle-class neighborhood, dozens of men in headscarves and long robes milled about, dealing with the complexities of a ballot featuring hundreds of choices. Sitting at one end of the court was 44-year-old Abdullah al-Amari, who was fingering a set of yellow prayer beads. Al-Amari, who teaches water-source management, was savoring the moment after voting: "This is the beginning of something. My way of thinking, it's excellent." For those who had not registered to vote he said they had made, "A big mistake, they should vote for their children's future."

On the northern side of town, an area of opulent marble houses sheltered by high walls, I found another polling station, this one used by members of the royal family. A tall prince regally dressed in a black robe with gold fringes, Mohamed bin Saud bin Khalid, told a gaggle of reporters that he voted for "someone I know well, someone I know is competent." A French TV crew asked him the $64 billion dollar question: "Is the future of the kingdom to be a constitutional monarchy?" The prince replied, "Let's wait and see" -- which is what the House of Saud has been doing with some success for decades.

A senior Saudi official emphasized why a wait-and-see policy is prudent: "If there were general elections tomorrow the Islamists and tribals would win because they are the most organized." A similar point was made by Professor Saleh al-Mani, an urbane political scientist at King Saud University, "The elections in Iraq have elected the mullahs." Unlikely support for a gradualist approach also came from Soliman Al-But'hi, a landscape designer who once also worked for the El Haramain charity, which has been designated by the U.S. Treasury department as a supporter of terrorism. As a result, the Saudi government has banned Al-But'hi's travel out of the kingdom and has frozen his bank account. As we sat cross-legged on the floor of a restaurant built around a courtyard designed to evoke the desert heartland of Arabia, Al-But'hi asked me, "If the House of Saud leaves what happens? Without the House of Saud there is chaos."

Air Heads

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 03 May 1999 00:00:00 -0400

In Things to Come, Alexander Korda's classic 1936 version of the novel by H. G. Wells, a petty dictator in a war-ravaged corner of Europe is waging a campaign against the neighboring "hill people." The year is 1970. The "Boss," a Milosevic type played by Ralph Richardson, is thwarted by Wings Over The World (WTW), a group of scientists and engineers planning to rebuild civilization along rational and cosmopolitan lines. Their colossal, high-tech aircraft easily best the Boss's primitive planes and humanely neutralize his population with the harmless, sleep-inducing Gas of Peace. Standing over the corpse of the Boss-a casualty, evidently, of obsolescence-the allegorical John Cabal, played by Raymond Massey, declaims: "Poor old Boss. He and his flags and his follies. And now for the rule of the Airmen-and a new life for mankind!"

Substitute NATO for WTW, and the silver-haired Bill Clinton for the silver-haired John Cabal, and you have something like today's war of the West against Serbia. Unfortunately, the absence of a Gas of Peace in NATO's arsenal almost certainly ensures that in real life, unlike in the movies, a utopian New Order is unlikely to be realized by means of air power alone. Unlike H. G. Wells in the 1930s, we know that air power seldom if ever wins a war. Even Japan's decision to surrender in World War II following the atomic bombings might have been influenced by Soviet entry into the Pacific war. Bombing failed to defeat Nazi Germany, bombing alone did not roll back North Korean forces, and bombing did not prevent North Vietnam from continuing its ultimately successful war against South Vietnam. Bombing by itself would not have liberated Kuwait from the forces of Saddam Hussein, whose regime, moreover, has survived repeated rounds of massive U.S. bombardment, including that of last winter.

Nevertheless, the Clinton administration chose to bomb Serbia, with no back-up plan for the employment of ground forces in case the bombing failed. The result-the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by Serb forces, while the bombs fall on Belgrade-is the greatest military humiliation for the United States since the fall of Indochina.

THE WRONG LESSON

Indeed, the disaster in Kosovo has demonstrated that Americans-and American conservatives, in particular-learned the wrong lesson from the Vietnam debacle. For a generation, many conservative civilians have credited the claims of some military officers that more intense U.S. bombing of North Vietnam could have quickly and easily ended the Vietnam War. In his 1976 memoir, A Soldier Reports, Gen. William C. Westmoreland wrote that "the war still might have been ended within a few years, except for the ill-considered policy of graduated response against North Vietnam. Bomb a little bit, stop it a while to give the enemy a chance to cry uncle, then bomb a little bit more but never enough to really hurt. That was no way to win." Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the latter part of the Vietnam War, claimed in 1987 that without restrictions on bombing "we could have polished those clowns off in six months."

In retrospect, it is clear that the Vietnam War could not have been won by air power alone. The Johnson administration's limited bombing campaign failed to deter Ho Chi Minh, a ruthless Stalinist tyrant as willing as Saddam to inflict enormous costs on his hapless subjects; the more intense campaign favored by the Pentagon probably would have failed as well. Nor is there any merit to the argument that a "sharp knock" instead of gradual bombing would have changed the outcome of the war. The historian Robert A. Pape, in Bombing to Win (1996), notes that a twelve-week bombing campaign from August to October 1967 "closely approximates the air chiefs' plans. There is no evidence that executing the sharp knock in 1965, instead of 1967, would have produced better results." Apart from ruling out some targets for legitimate strategic and diplomatic reasons, Johnson did not "tie the hands of the military." In 1966, for example, U.S. aircraft flew 81,000 attack sorties and 48,000 combat-support sorties against North Vietnam; in the panhandle of Laos there were 48,000 attack sorties and 10,000 combat-support sorties. Johnson and his advisors could not possibly have supervised these.

Air power could not be used to destroy North Vietnam's industrial base because there was none. The industrial base of North Vietnam was the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites and China. The Communist Great Powers funneled supplies to the Vietnamese Communists overland through China, through North Vietnamese ports, and also through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville.

Nor was bombing an effective approach to combating the Vietcong insurgents. "Not to denigrate what we accomplished against Hussein, but Hussein was no military strategist," former secretary of the Navy James Webb wrote after the Gulf War. "If Ho Chi Minh had put 60 percent of his army in one spot where there were not any trees, we would have blown them away in 40 days too." Only after North Vietnam switched to a conventional invasion strategy, following the decimation of the Vietcong guerrillas in the Tet Offensive of 1968, did Communist forces became more vulnerable to the kind of air power Nixon used in halting the Easter Offensive in 1972.

The genuine Lesson of Vietnam, then, is not that air power is a military panacea; rather, it is that the U.S. military was not, and arguably is not, prepared to fight long-term, low-intensity wars on the ground. This bias reflects the traditions of the Army, and its offspring the Air Force. For various reasons, including the low toleration for casualties on the part of the American public, the indiscipline of militiamen and conscripts, and the comparative advantage of the U.S. in industrial production, the military has preferred to "spend shells, not men." The emphasis on long-range firepower shared by Winfield Scott, an artillery officer, and Ulysses S. Grant, who manned a cannon during the Mexican War, lives on in the doctrine named after Colin Powell, like Scott and Grant a product of the Army. The Powell doctrine, which holds that the U.S. should use massive firepower if it goes to war at all, effectively rules out the use of the military in situations in which an all-out offensive would be inappropriate.

The only one of the services with a tradition of expertise in low-intensity conflict is the Marine Corps, which, unlike the Army, played the major role in long-term pacification efforts in the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua. It is no coincidence that Marine generals like Victor "Brute" Krulak and Lewis W. Walt were among the most insightful critics of the firepower-intensive attrition strategy in Vietnam devised by that Army general, Westmoreland.

Given the American military's preference for air power and attrition tactics, and the reluctance of American presidents to risk the lives of ground troops, it was perhaps inevitable that bombing would become the instrument of choice in the coercive diplomacy of the United States. Before Clinton tried to bomb Milosevic into negotiations, Reagan bombed Libya to punish it for terrorism (the result was the Libyan bombing of Pan Am 103). Although light-infantry formations are most appropriate for the kinds of low-intensity conflicts in which the U.S. is likely to take part in the near future, including the war in Kosovo proper, the Army today has even fewer light-infantry formations, compared with armored and mechanized divisions, than it did during the Cold War. A rational great power tailors its tactics to its grand strategy. For decades the United States has been tailoring its strategy to its tactics. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.