Non-interventionist Internationalism: Toward a Left Foreign Policy

I have recently read a number of pieces in left-of-center publications lamenting the lack of a coherent Left foreign policy, the most recent being Ed Burmila's "Naughty by NATO" in the Sept/Oct issue of The Baffler. These articles carry a couple of common themes. For starters, the authors argue that the Left does not spend enough time focusing on foreign policy, preferring the territory of domestic policy instead. This leads to a situation in which the Left only evaluates foreign policy on a case-by-case basis, without any clear overarching priorities or goals. Furthermore, to the extent that the Left does have a foreign policy, it is based simply on opposing Washington's neoliberal/neoconservative consensus of interventionism, without articulating any positive vision of how the US should engage with the world beyond refraining from the use of military force.

I generally agree with these critiques. As someone whose own political radicalization began with an exploration of the horrors of US foreign policy, I find myself disappointed that today's Left does not spend enough time talking about it beyond mere lip service. That being said, there have been some on the Left who have done a good job of illuminating what the questions at hand are. The Nation, for instance, has done an excellent job of covering both the Trump administration's foreign policy misdeeds, as well as the international movements promoting peace and global solidarity. Yet such a focus has been generally lacking elsewhere, especially in the coverage of the presidential election. The Democratic primary has mostly been centered on domestic policy issues like health care; even discussion around climate change and immigration - issues inherently international in nature - have mostly been referred to only in terms of the domestic response. The lack of attention to the threat of nuclear annihilation is also concerning.

Especially in the face of a Trump presidency, and the clear desire of the foreign policy establishment to wrest back control, the need for a real Left foreign policy is urgent. This post is my attempt to contribute to this conversation - in however small a way - by putting into writing for the first time the vision for such a foreign policy that I have had in my mind for a while. I refer to such an approach as "non-interventionist internationalism".

As its name suggests, non-interventionist internationalism effectively consists of two parts. The first part, non-interventionism, is what might be considered more familiar territory for Leftists: the reduction of the use of US force around the world. This should be thought of in terms more broadly than simply disengaging from specific conflicts or countries. What's ultimately needed is the ending of all US overseas operations, the withdrawal of all US military and intelligence personnel from abroad, and the closing of all US overseas bases. The Left should call on the US to renounce all unilateral use of force abroad, and to renounce the right to destabilize and overthrow foreign governments. The Left also needs to call for the end to overseas arms sales, foreign military aid, and the training of foreign security forces.

While such policies would reverse the harm the US is currently doing abroad, by themselves they do not address how the US should engage with the rest of the world. This is where the principle of internationalism comes in. Internationalism is not something often discussed on the Left, but to my mind is absolutely foundational to what any Left foreign policy should look like. The central aspect of internationalism is engagement with the existing framework of international organizations and treaties set up in the aftermath of World War II. Under such an approach, the UN would be the key avenue for the US to pursue its foreign policy.  For instance, any US forces that would be sent overseas would do so only as part of UN peacekeeping missions. No more would the US act unilaterally, or under the guise of "multilateral" organizations like NATO. Of course, in order for such a policy to be truly viable, the UN itself would need to be reformed, starting with abolishing the veto power of the permanent security council members.

International law is also crucial to such an approach. While there is a large body of existing international law, much of it is toothless, as the US - as the most powerful nation in the world - either refuses to abide by it or does so only as it suits its interests. The Left should focus on getting the US to sign onto and ratify treaties it is not yet a party to, and then subject itself to the same level of accountability as the rest of the world. The idea is to build both the UN and international law into credible avenues for advancing the goals of the Left on the international stage: mitigating the effects of climate change; abolishing nuclear weapons; finding diplomatic solutions to ongoing conflicts; preserving the sovereignty of indigenous populations; promoting the rights of women; and so on and so forth.

The UN is not the only international venue by which a Left foreign policy should be pursued. For instance, the US is a major power in regards to the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO. The Left should focus on transforming these institutions away from promoting neoliberalism, and toward reducing global income and wealth inequality. Similarly, the Left needs to focus less on nationalistic rhetoric around international trade agreements, and more on establishing a global fair trade regime that works for the benefit of working people and not multinational corporations.

The Left should also take a greater look at how "domestic" policy priorities, like immigration, are actually very much tied to US foreign policy as well. American interventionism, the American-led global War on Drugs, and the American promotion of neoliberal policies have all played key roles in driving people to seek refuge and asylum in the US. The Left should pursue policies that both reduce these harms and repair the damage done. An example of one such policy could be something akin to the "Marshall Plan for Central America" proposed by Julian Castro. Another is open borders, which the mainstream Left has been reluctant to call for so far, but which should be looked at as a form of reparations for the harm the US has done around the world.

Overall, the domestic implications of such a foreign policy would be enormous. The cost savings associated with reducing (and ultimately abolishing) much of America's armed forces and intelligence services could be put back into a "peace dividend", in the form of domestic spending priorities like health care, education, and green infrastructure. In theory, the US would no longer have a standing army at all, with only a transformed National Guard and Coast Guard remaining for the purpose of defense. The curbs to executive power that this would entail means Congress could finally reassert its authority over foreign policy, while simultaneously being subject to the long-ignored requirements of international law - which would have major implications for the well-being of the domestic population.

What I have laid out here is simply a loose framework for what a Left foreign policy should look like, the granular specifics of which I do not have the capacity to delve into at this point. My intention here, again, is simply to give an idea of what the Left should start to think about and focus on more in regards to foreign policy. This is not the end of a conversation, only the beginning of one.

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Walden, Found

Last month, I traveled up to Burlington, Vermont, where I had previously lived for two semesters while attending Burlington College. While there, I stopped by Phoenix Books, where I stumbled across an intriguing title, The Road to Walden North, written by Sheila Post. After quickly scanning the dust jacket, I decided that I should purchase it, and brought it back home with me to Albany. I spent the past week reading through it.

Walden Pond, which I pilgrimaged to in August 2017

The novel focuses on the story of a character named Kate Brown, who is starting her first semester as a tenure-track professor at Harvard University. Although she has written her dissertation on Herman Melville's Moby Dick, she is tasked with teaching a freshman course on Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Kate undergoes a transformation through the course of teaching the book, which is accentuated through her encounters with William and Heather Channing, a father and daughter who live a "Thoreauvian" lifestyle at a location in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom referred to as "Walden North". By the end of the novel, Kate finds herself leaving Harvard after just one semester, much to the chagrin of her dean, and of her academic acquaitance Blake (with whom it is alluded that she has a romantic relationship). Instead, she decides to move to Vermont, taking a position at a small college there ("Dewey College") and assisting William Channing with his vision for a "Findhorn-Vermont" (based on the Findhorn commune in Scotland).

As I read through Post's novel, I found some truly uncanny parallel's between her description of Kate Brown's story and that of my own. As a freshman in college, I attended the relatively elite Fordham University in New York City. However, after just a few weeks on campus I became quickly disillusioned with both the school and what I felt it stood for. After some painstaking soul-searching, I decided that I needed to leave Fordham, and applied as a transfer student to Burlington College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Around the same time, I started reading Thoreau's Walden, and found myself completely enraptured by it. I ultimately left Fordham after just one semester, and began attending classes at Burlington College the following fall, spending my sophomore year there before the school's unfortunate closure.

Unlike Kate, my decision to leave my elite university for a small school in Vermont was not directly influenced by Walden. In fact, the more direct influence was that of William Deresiewicz, whose book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite I read immediately prior to discovering Burlington College. However, I had been familiar with Thoreau for a number of years prior to reading Walden, having done previous writing assignments on both him and transcendentalism while in middle and high school, respectively. It was while writing the second of these papers that I ended up purchasing a copy of Walden, which I ended up bringing with me to Fordham (although more so because a copy of "Civil Disobedience" was included at the end).

When applying to Burlington College, I ended up titling my personal statement "Looking for Walden". After referencing my growing admiration for Thoreau and his "experiment of living" at Walden Pond, I wrote the following:

I seek a similar experience. This is not to suggest that my ideal existence is to be found in a cabin in the woods. Rather, I seek to be able to pursue that life of a philosopher, society be damned. There are, unfortunately, few places where this can be properly accomplished. Even the modern university, it seems, is no longer fit for such activity. In my experience there is much pedantry on the one hand, and “phoniness” on the other. Those who teach have an ‘order’ to defend, that mystical realm that is academia. Those students (or perhaps more appropriately, pupils) who attend have a specific goal in mind, of future career and wealth; university is just another stepping stone along the way.

In other words, I was looking for a space where I could "seek knowledge for its own sake", just as Thoreau had. I found that I could not do so at Fordham University, just as Kate Brown found she could not so at Harvard University without being forced to "conform, conform, conform".

A central theme of The Road to Walden North is the dichotomy between experience and theory. Kate, herself a lifelong academic, found herself drifting from elite academia's primacy of theory over experience to a Thoreauvian view of the need for valuing experience over theory. As Thoreau himself put it in Walden: "To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! - why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it." The fictional college Kate ends up leaving for - Dewey College - is clearly a reference by Post to the educator John Dewey, one of the leading proponents of experiential education.

One of the aspects that most attracted me to Burlington College was its emphasis on experiential learning. Indeed, the first reading I was assigned at Burlington was Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed". As I wrote while still attending Fordham, "Education should be experiential learning complemented by reading, writing, thinking, and speaking. It should be largely self-directed." This is exactly what I found at Burlington, a school whose mission was "to guide students to become skillful and reflective practitioners, lifelong learners, and active citizens engaged in fostering a just, humane society and sustainable, beautiful communities." Instead of professors seeking to impart their knowledge upon students, at Burlington they served more as facilitators of student's own learning. Among the pedagogic tools used at Burlington were seminar classes, small-group discussions and projects, guest speakers, field trips, films, music, and self-directed assignments, among others - many of the same techniques Kate Brown is advised against using at Harvard.

Post's repeated references to Findhorn, through the character Channing, also caught my attention. I originally became aware of Findhorn through the film My Dinner with Andre, which was shown during an epistemology class I took in high school. It was one of the few films I have voluntarily chosen to rewatch on multiple occasions - one of those being while I was at Fordham, in the midst of my discovery of both Burlington College and Walden.

As with Kate, it was not easy for me to decide to leave behind the seemingly predestined academic path that I found myself on. Even while at Burlington College, I had professors who wondered aloud why I decided to leave behind a school like Fordham to go "there". The unorthodoxy of such a decision is reflected perfectly in by this quote from Channing, spoken to Kate as she moved closer to departing Harvard:

You reach others, whether you realize it consciously or not. And whether they, as in the case of your, um, colleagues and dean, like it or not. Your example has touched them, and I would venture to say, that a significant part of their unease, even open rejection of your initiatives, stems from their own internal ambivalence over their chosen approaches.

In reading those words, I was instantly reminded of a quote from Deresiewicz, one which I decided to record in my journal on the eve of attending Burlington College:

The morally courageous person tends to make the individuals around him very uncomfortable. He doesn't fit in with the ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and he makes them insecure about the choices they themselves have made - or failed to make.

Kate's final confrontation with her dean, in which she decides to deliver her resignation directly to him, was a very satisfying moment to read of. It reminded me of my own departure from Fordham, when I decided to write a lengthy email to one of my professors - on New Year's Eve, no less - describing why I was leaving, and why I was deciding to instead transfer to Burlington College. It was one of the most cathartic experiences of my life, even if I did end up failing the professor's class (which I encouraged her to do). Unfortunately, I no longer have access to the text of that email, nor did I ever find out if the professor responded or not.

The Road to Walden North ends before we are given any glimpse as to Kate's future fate in Vermont. However, I can recount from my own experience that I did indeed find my own "Walden" while attending Burlington College. Life there was simpler and slower-paced, one in which I found a deeper connection with the rest of the natural world, all while being able to engage intellectually even beyond the requirements of the courses I was taking. Most spectacularly, I was able to do all of this without having to fully extricate myself from the rest of humanity. In fact, no where else have I ever felt so close to other people. I only wish that such a place still existed today.

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A Commuter Tax for Albany?

This past week, I attended the summer staff meeting for the organization that I work for. During a conversation with one of my colleagues, the concept of levying a commuter tax came up as one way of raising revenue for Albany, New York, the city where I live and work. As I found this idea intriguing, I decided to do some more research on it upon returning home. The following is what I discovered.

The city of Albany is the state capital of New York, and hosts a number of state government buildings and offices, among them the Empire State Plaza and the Harriman State Office Building Campus. The city is also home to a number of colleges and universities, as well as hospitals and medical research facilities. These properties are exempt from paying city property taxes; overall, 63% of the property value in the City of Albany is non-taxable, a very high percentage. Although some of these institutions provide the city with payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) or other sources of revenue, particularly the state government, there is still a disproportionate burden of property taxes levied on city homeowners and business owners. [1] In the fiscal year 2017 budget, these property taxes composed $58 million out of the overall $177 million in revenue projected to be collected by the city - approximately one-third of the total. [2]

A map of tax-exempt property in the City of Albany (from All over Albany - click for full size).

Another factor that exacerbates the City of Albany's revenue problem is that the majority of the people who work at these and other institutions do not even live in the city itself. Out of a total workforce of 110,749 (estimated 2010-12) in the City of Albany, 85,125 of those workers do not live within city limits - some 76.9%. [3] Although these workers use city services on a regular basis, the only tax revenue that they contribute to the city are sales taxes, which are collected by Albany County and allocated to the city. No property taxes can be can be collected from these individuals, and the lack of a city income tax deprives the city of a potentially vital source of revenue. Instead, many of these commuting workers live in lower-tax neighboring towns like Bethlehem or Colonie - which provide far fewer services to their residents - or in surrounding counties.

One possible solution is a commuter tax. In brief, "a commuter tax is a tax (generally on either income or wages) levied upon persons who work, but do not live, in a particular jurisdiction." [4] Commuter taxes have been used by other cities to raise revenue, including New York City, which had a commuter tax until 1999, when it was repealed due to politics at the state legislature. [5] Such a commuter tax would enable the City of Albany to capture as revenue some of the income that is generated within its city limits.

If Albany implemented a 0.45% commuter tax on income for non-resident workers - which was the rate in New York City - it would have the potential of generating over $20 million in annual revenue. This figure is based on an estimated non-resident workforce of 85,125, with an average annual salary of $55,055 for workers in the city, which would mean annual revenue of $21,089,506. [6] This is no small sum for a city with a budget of $177 million. It could help fund expansion of current programs and addition of new ones, while also allowing for some property tax relief for existing homeowners and business owners.

Meanwhile, the cost to commuters would be minimal; at an average annual cost of $248, it would be less than $1 per workday. This policy could be made even more progressive by having a graduated scale to take into account the greater ability-to-pay of commuters with higher incomes, and by exempting low-income commuters and those who commute using public transportation such as CDTA.

Attempting to implement such a policy would present challenges. Commuters would surely protest what they might view as an arbitrary tax, and would appeal to their state legislators to prevent such a tax from being levied. A past city report noted that a commuter represents a source of missing and potentially unobtainable revenue for the city, lamenting that "creation of such a tax for Albany would require City and State legislation that is not currently considered feasible." [7] It would likely take a determined effort by both city residents and elected leaders to have any hope of putting such a policy into place.

Of course, the best case solution would simply be to secure an increased dedicated stream of income from the state, or earn the right to tax the currently exempt properties within city limits. Given the enormous political hurdles for either of those ideas to come to pass, a commuter tax may represent the policy solution most likely to actually happen

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Vision Project: The Politics of a "New Economy"

Anthony Flaccavento’s run for Congress in Virginia’s 9th district suggests a new way forward for progressive politics. His issue platform incorporates many of the ideas he puts forward in his book, Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real-World Experience for Transformative Change. A farmer from rural western Virginia, he presents a modern articulation of communal and agrarian values that emphasizes community control of the economy and a return to respect for the land as the ecological base for society. He adopts a pro-business yet anti-corporate stance, emphasizing the need to “level the playing field for workers, local businesses and the community banks that lend to them” while also “reinvigorat[ing] anti-trust laws to reverse the extraordinary concentration of power held by a handful of giant corporations.” Focusing on health care, education, energy, and agricultural policy – issues important to rural voters – he calls for Medicare for All, free community college for all, and a “Marshall Plan” for Appalachia based on a just transition away from coal, among other progressive ideas.

           Flaccavento’s platform is not without its limitations. For instance, he does not discuss issues of particular importance to people of color, immigrants, or the LGBTQ community, including criminal justice and immigration reform and non-discrimination legislation. He also does not discuss housing or transportation policy, which is particularly important to urban voters. He also makes no mention of foreign policy, nor of the need to protect civil liberties. However, such omissions do not necessarily mean he doesn’t have a progressive stance on these issues. Instead, he is simply not emphasizing them in a 90% white, pro-Trump rural district. Importantly, he does not take a conservative stance on any of the issues he does take a position on. In other words, while his platform may not be comprehensive, it is noncompromising. He takes explicit pro-choice and pro-gun control positions, which is refreshing to see coming from a Democrat running in a conservative area.

Flaccavento’s book and platform are part of a broader trend of economists and activists, including Gar Alperovitz, Marjorie Kelly, David Korten, Bill McKibben, and Richard Wolff, who advocate for what has been dubbed the “New Economy” – the transition to a cooperative economic system. Such a system relies on neither markets nor states, although it does not completely eschew either. Instead, it is based on constructing new economic institutions that promote direct democratic control by workers and communities, including cooperatives, worker-owned and self-directed enterprises, locally owned small businesses, and publicly owned enterprises. Such a system aligns with the thinking of Elinor Ostrom, the first (and to date only) woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics, whose Nobel lecture was titled “Beyond Markets and States”. Best known for her work analyzing the commons, Ostrom advocated for bottom-up, democratized control of the economy, as opposed to top-down private or state management.

Flaccavento’s platform would go a long way toward addressing the issues laid out by Steven Stoll in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. Employing a critique of capitalism similar to that of Karl Polanyi, Stoll describes the rise of industrial capitalism through the lens of the Appalachian agrarian. He emphasizes that throughout history humans have lived subsistence lifestyles based on household economies. Private ownership of property, by contrast, is a very recent development, one which led to enclosure of the commons, destruction of the subsistence economy, and mass dislocation of whole societies – a process which continues to this day. Like Polanyi, Stoll argues that capitalism was not inevitable, but came together due to the conscious commodification of land, labor, and money. For his part, Polanyi puts forward the idea that a market-based system is not the natural organization of society, and like private property is a recent development in human history. He argues that the creation and maintenance of a market-based system has produced unsustainable social dislocation. (Psychologist Bruce Alexander in part used Polanyi’s analysis to develop his “dislocation theory of addiction” – for which the opioid epidemic across Appalachia unfortunately provides further evidence.) Such dislocation in turn has produced a “countermovement” designed to protect society from the effects of the market-based system.

This analysis of capitalism by Stoll and Polanyi serves as a particularly useful framework for understanding the development of neoliberalism and the increasing rejection of it from both Right and Left in recent years. In the 2016 election, this manifested itself in the form of support for the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Flaccavento’s run for Congress represents another rejection of neoliberalism, as he seeks to end both the limitless extraction of the Earth’s resources and the exploitation of workers and the communities they work and live in. Furthermore, Flaccavento wants to start to rebuild the household economy referenced by Stoll, and make sweeping changes to our current economic system as a whole to make it based less on generating profit and more on building community and protecting the ecological base – in other words, decommoditizing  land, labor, and money.

I think that what Flaccavento and others argue for is largely missing from the Left’s mainstream narrative and agenda, which I feel limits the political potential of the Left. From a public policy perspective, promoting alternative institutions would help build relocalized, more sustainable economies. It would also help to rebuild communities and their social capital and begin to reverse the dislocation caused by capitalism, especially its neoliberal manifestation. Politically speaking, advocating for alternative institutions would help provide a path forward for the growing numbers of people who are skeptical of capitalism and open to social democratic or even socialistic ideas. While current Left thinking seems to focus mostly on “countervailing” or “leveraged” power (i.e. taxation, regulation, and unionization) – which assumes that corporations will remain the dominant economic institution – I prefer that workers take power directly. Additionally, because such solutions do not typically rely on the government, they can have broader appeal than other programs more reliant on the state. It would also help promote a narrative that begins to shift from thinking of government as some separate entity known as “the state” and toward actually being made up of “the body of the people”.             

I see enormous political potential for this public policy platform, particularly as it relates to the Democratic Party. It is no secret that Democrats have struggled mightily to win votes outside of urban areas and college towns. Looking at a precinct level map of the 2016 presidential election results displays just how stark the situation is. Of course, Democrats can and do win in rural communities of color, including in the Black Belt of the South and in the Latino and Native areas of the West. Nonetheless, the Democratic strategy, vividly on display during Hillary Clinton’s campaign, has been to court college-educated suburbanites. This has led to alienation of rural and small town voters as well as depressed turnout in the inner cities. If the Democrats want to retake power at the state and federal levels, they’ll need to build a multiracial, class-based urban-rural coalition.

To do so, Democrats need to move away from the neoliberal, corporate-based “blue state” economic development model described by Thomas Frank, and instead adopt the bottom-up, local community-based one proposed by Flaccavento and others. In New York this includes rejecting the economic development model of Governor Andrew Cuomo, which is based on providing subsidies, tax breaks, and other incentives in an attempt to bring in large firms and enterprises from elsewhere (e.g. his failed STARTUP-NY plan). Doing so could help to bridge the so-called “urban-rural divide” that has dominated New York State politics. To that end, I am encouraged by gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon’s recent tweet: “It’s time for a smarter, bottom-up approach to economic development in New York state. The community must be included in the decision making process and all projects should meet local needs and serve local populations.” Although not quite as comprehensive as Flaccavento’s vision, it is still refreshing to hear a Democratic politician employ such rhetoric. Let’s hope that more politicians – Democratic or otherwise – start to take a similar approach.

Further Reading:

• Alexander, Bruce K. The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008.
• Alperovitz, Gar. America beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, & Our Democracy, 2011.
• Alperovitz, Gar. What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution, 2013.
• Flaccavento, Anthony. Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real-World Experience for Transformative Change, 2016.
• Frank, Thomas. Listen Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?, 2016.
• Kelly, Marjorie. Owning our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, 2012.
• Korten, David C. The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, 2006.
• McKibben, Bill. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, 2007.
• Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2001.
• Stoll, Steven. Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, 2017.
• Wall, Derek. Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives beyond Markets and States, 2017
• Wolf, Richard. Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, 2012.

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A Well-Regulated Militia: Perspectives on the Second Amendment

I have recently taken the time to read two fascinating books on the history of the Second Amendment: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, published in 2018, and Michael Waldman's The Second Amendment: A Biography, published in 2014. Both authors argue that the United States has a long-standing "gun culture", with the right to gun ownership taken for granted down through the generations, particularly among white men. They differ, however, in how this gun culture affected the drafting of the Second Amendment. Waldman argues that the amendment was created simply to ensure that the state militias could continue to be armed without interference, reflecting fears that a powerful standing army would emerge following the enactment of the Constitution. Dunbar-Ortiz, going a step-further, argues that these militias themselves were a reflection of America's then-nascent gun culture, one already deeply rooted in racism and settler-colonialism. Even if her interpretation of the historical record is not as precisely argued as Waldman's, it is still highly valuable due to her narrative framing in the context of America's long-standing white supremacy, particularly regarding Indigenous peoples and African-Americans.

The two authors take separate approaches to lay out their arguments. Dunbar-Ortiz emphasizes the social and cultural history of gun ownership and violence in the context of the Second Amendment, whereas Waldman focuses on the legal and judicial history of the Second Amendment itself. Despite these differences, and despite the differing theses put forward, I believe their arguments are wholly compatible and can be coherently interwoven. As Waldman explains, the Second Amendment protected the individual right to a gun to fulfill the duty to serve in a militia. Dunbar-Ortiz encourages the reader to think more expansively about what the purpose of the militia actually was. Beyond just serving as a military force designed to prevent the rise of tyranny - whether from within or without - the militia was also, perhaps primarily so, used to conquer the Native nations of the continent (often through ranger units) and preserve the institution of slavery (through slave patrols). Dunbar-Ortiz traces this history throughout her book, while Waldman's book alludes to it as well, though never focuses on it.

Dunbar-Ortiz, both through Loaded and her previous work An Indigenous People's History of the United States, has helped to reframe my views on US history in at least two major ways. First, she argues that the United States is not just an ethnically-based settler-colonial project, but one that is based on the idea of the "covenant", with Americans viewing themselves as God's chosen people. She compares the US to apartheid South Africa and Israel; all three nations have promoted this covenant ideology, with some version of ethnic "exceptionalism" being core to their national identity. The US version has taken on many names and faces over the years, from being "a shining city on a hill" and having a "Manifest Destiny" to being "leader of the Free World" and mankind's one "indispensable nation". Of course, such mythology has almost always been far removed from reality, and has usually been used to advance the causes of militarism, imperialism, and white supremacy.

Secondly, Dunbar-Ortiz views the early development of the United States through the lens of its impacts on Native Americans. She argues that the genocidal tactics employed by colonial militias formed the basis for the counterinsurgent and anti-guerrilla strategies that have proliferated through to the present day, used by the US military from the Philippines to Vietnam to Iraq and beyond. She frames conflicts such as the American Revolution and the War of 1812 as being driven by a desire by settlers to conquer Native lands, and that they were as much Indian Wars as conflicts against British imperial power. In doing so, she reminds the reader that it was not just the American West but also eastern North America that was conquered by European-Americans, a fact often conveniently glossed-over in the mainstream narrative of US history.

It is worth noting that, in telling their stories of the modern developments surrounding gun violence and the Second Amendment, both Waldman and Dunbar-Ortiz tangentially trace the rise of the Right over the past few decades. Waldman focuses on the institutional New Right, including the NRA, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Federalist Society, as envisioned by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell in the early 1970s. Dunbar-Ortiz, meanwhile, traces the rise of the "grassroots" Right, particularly white nationalist militias, the Tea Party, and the so-called "alt-right". In the face of a weakened institutional Left after the Sixties, these forces combined to propel Ronald Reagan to the White House in the 1980 election, and later Donald Trump in 2016. Both authors implicitly argue that a stronger institutional Left is necessary not just to counter the power of the NRA and the gun lobby, but also the broader Right as a whole. This is a lesson that should certainly be taken to heart given the present political climate.

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A Tale of Two Colleges

Earlier this evening, I finished reading Part II of Johann Hari's Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions. In this part, Hari lays out what he describes as the nine real causes of depression and anxiety, each of which are tied to the concept of disconnection. As I read through these, I realized that what he was describing would serve as a remarkable lens through which to contrast my college experiences at Fordham University and Burlington College. In this post, I will do exactly that, by briefly examining whether or not the six environmental factors Hari has identified were present during my experience at each school. (I will not examine the three psychological/biological factors, as those are not directly applicable.)

Cause One: Disconnection from Meaningful Work
At Fordham University, I came to feel that the work that I was doing there had little meaning, that it lacked connection to the realities of the world beyond the campus. Additionally, I had almost no control over determining what the work was that I would be doing in the first place. My course schedule was almost completely prescribed for me, and would remain so for the foreseeable future. I had no input into the content of each course, and little leeway regarding the parameters of the individual assignments. This lack of control led me to feel disempowered and disillusioned regarding my own education.

At Burlington College, however, the situation was almost the exact opposite. Every single class that I took there had direct connections to the problems of modern society. I had much more flexibility in determining which courses I would be taking in route to my major. In some classes my fellow classmates and I had the ability to actually determine what we wanted to study and explore. Almost every professor gave me the opportunity to conduct open-ended research, and present the results to my peers. As a result, my education felt much more self-directed, and in turn more meaningful.

Cause Two: Disconnection from Other People
Despite attending a school with thousands of other students, in the largest city in the United States. I felt very lonely at Fordham University. I formed no meaningful friendships, either on- or off-campus. I spent most of my time alone outside of the classroom, even on the occasions when I decided to venture out into New York City. I felt no connection to my roommate, the other students in my residence hall, or my classmates. I had no real relationships with any professors or staff. In fact, it got to the point where I convinced myself that being a loner was my natural status in life. It is extraordinary to me to think that upon leaving Fordham, there was no one there that I felt the need to say goodbye to.

Burlington, of course, was a much smaller city, and Burlington College was one of the smallest schools in the country. Despite this - or perhaps because of it - I was able to develop a strong sense of community at multiple levels. I formed the closest friendships of my life while living at the Cottage, the on-campus residence hall. In general, I had solid relationships with my fellow housemates, classmates, and other students at the school. As my best friend told me during my second semester there, I had really "come out of my shell"; I could feel my social anxiety fading with each passing day. I was also able to form connections with my professors, the staff, and even to some extent the president of the school. I felt a genuine sense of pride in attending Burlington College, a sense that we were all "in this together". Unlike in New York City, I also was able to form some connections off campus. Overall, I felt a much strong sense of community while living in Burlington, compared to my time in the Bronx.

Cause Three: Disconnection from Meaningful Values
One of the initial factors in the process that led me away from Fordham was when I began to question why I was there in the first place. I came to realize that my motivation was almost exclusively extrinsic (a term I only discovered upon reading in Hari's book). In other words, I was attending classes and doing assignments not because I really wanted to, but because I felt I had to. I viewed it as me simply trying to get the grades, so I could get the credits, so I could get a degree in the end. It was nothing more than credentialization. Eventually, as my depression worsened this extrinsic motivation was no longer strong enough, and I stopped doing assignments for some classes altogether. This led me to fail a class entirely, for the first and only time in my life.

When I submitted my personal statement to Burlington College as part of my application, I stated that I sought knowledge for its own sake. For the most part, that was exactly what I was able to do there. I attended classes and completed assignments because I was genuinely interested in and engaged with the subject at hand. There were numerous instances where I would go beyond the requirements of an assignment simply because I wanted to. I felt real pride in my work, something that had been absent in my time at Fordham. In Burlington, the emphasis was far less on the outcome and more on the process of learning itself. As a result, I was able to return to a state of academic success and intellectual enrichment that was far more familiar to me.

Cause Five: Disconnection from Status and Respect
For me, my time in New York City was a classic example of "be careful what you wish for". One of the motivating factors that led me to Fordham in the first place was a desire for "anonymity", for the ability to "blend into the crowd". As I learned, however, that was not what I had hoped it would be. I felt a depleted sense of identity, as if I was a "nobody" compared to previous experiences. I felt that I lacked the respect of my peers - and to be honest, felt little respect for them as well. Perhaps most devastatingly, for the first time in my life, I felt as if I was not "smart", as if I had nothing meaningful to contribute to conversations either inside or outside the classroom.

At Burlington College, I experienced something dramatically different: popularity, or at least some version of it. My friends genuinely seemed to value the time they spent with me and the conversations we had together. At times it almost seemed as if they were competing for my attention! My housemates had so much respect for me that they effectively drafted me to run for president of student government - an office they then voted me into. While serving as student-body president, I felt a sense of responsibility and duty to my peers, unlike anything else I had ever experienced. The remarkable thing about all of this was that this popularity and respect was based not on my academic ability but rather on my actual personality - a truly heart-warming fact.

Cause Six: Disconnection from the Natural World
When I first applied to Fordham, I had the option to choose either Lincoln Center in Manhattan or Rose Hill in the Bronx for my campus. I chose Rose Hill, because I wanted a "real campus", one with green space and trees and things like that. I must admit that it was actually a beautiful campus, with a well-manicured landscape. However, with every day that I spent there my opinion began to shift, and I felt that this beauty was achieved simply through artificial means. I could hear the landscapers constantly outside my room with their lawnmowers and leaf blowers. There was very little "natural" about it, which became only more apparent the more I read Henry David Thoreau's Walden. The fact that the world beyond the campus gates was the concrete jungle of New York only increased my sense of isolation form the natural world.

Burlington College, on the other hand, could not have been placed in a much more beautiful setting if it tried. On one side there was a view of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains in the distance; on the other was the Green Mountains. At night when I left my windows open in my dorm room, all I would hear were the sounds of wind blowing through the trees, the waves of the lake lapping on the shore, and the insects chirping and buzzing in the late summer air. I took frequent walks - both alone and with friends - through the myriad parks and trails that surrounded the school. The campus itself featured a large, hilly field dotted with trees, which by springtime I found myself reading books under. It was in Vermont that I discovered just how beautiful - and dark - the night sky could be.

Cause Seven: Disconnection from a Hopeful and Secure Future
For the first month or so I spent at Fordham, I had a number of issues. I spent much of that time busy, sick, and broke. However, I felt that those would pass and that I would end up having a great experience. By October that illusion vanished. When I returned home for Columbus Day weekend it fully dawned on me just how much I disliked being there, and found that I had absolutely zero desire to return to campus. From that point on, I knew I had no future at Fordham. My desperation became so bad that I began to consider dropping out of school altogether. The only thing that kept me going through the end of the semester was the prospect of being able to transfer to Burlington College.

In Burlington, the one significant problem I did have was a near-constant state of anxiety that I experienced: the existential fear that my time at Burlington College would come to a premature end. This fear was driven by both my own personal financial problems as well as those of the school itself - and which unfortunately were proven justified when the school abruptly closed just one year into my attendance. The odd silver-lining was that this anxiety drove me to try to get the most out of my experience at Burlington College, as if any given day could be my last one there. And, for the most part, I was able to do exactly that.

Conclusion
I spent much of my time at Fordham - and the period immediately afterward - in a state of severe depression, one of the most severe episodes of my life. It is not hard to see why. I was doing meaningless work to which I assigned little value, surrounded by people I felt little connection to or respect for, while being almost completely isolated from the natural world. It was, simply put, the single worst experience of my life.

Burlington College, meanwhile, was the happiest period of my life. I built strong relationships with people built on shared experiences and mutual respect, did meaningful and relevant work that I valued for its own sake, and was in a community that recognized the importance of its relationship to the natural world. Unfortunately, that experience came to a premature end, and I have found it difficult to move on with my life in the aftermath of the school's closure. In many ways, that sudden severing of connections at so many different levels was a traumatic experience for me, one that I may never fully recover from. However, the lessons I learned there will stay with me forever, and will guide me as I continue the project of rebuilding my life.

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On Gun Control, Disarmament, and Demilitarization

There has been a renewed call for gun control legislation by liberals in the wake of the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, just one of many daily acts of gun violence that take place in the United States. Given the size and scope of the problem, this response is reasonable. However, I am concerned that the push for such policies misses the broader problems presented to American society, and may not serve as the silver bullet, so to speak, that liberals believe them to be.

The United States is the most heavily armed and militarized country in the history of humanity. However, when liberals call for gun control, they are only referring to reducing and/or eliminating the possession of guns by the civilian population. While doing so is certainly a worthy goal, it is woefully incomplete. In my opinion, the following steps should also be taken to demilitarize and disarm the United States: elimination of the US's stockpile of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; banning of arms exports to foreign countries and non-state actors; withdrawal of US special operations and other armed forces stationed abroad; closure of US military bases in foreign countries; demilitarization of US law enforcement; and disarming of US police forces. These policy changes would go a long way toward reducing the (usually ignored) systemic violence perpetrated by the US government against populations both foreign and domestic.

Of course, such policies would not necessarily address the culture of violence that emanates through American society. Much of this culture is based on the masculine ideology that I have referred to before, which may be more pervasive and deep-rooted in the United States than in any other nation. (There is no more perfect example of this than the militarism and violence associated with American football - which has been dubbed the "national religion" of the United States.) Confronting this masculine ideology head-on with a broad-based feminist movement is thus also a major prerequisite toward reducing gun violence and militarism in the US.

In addition to these measures, attention must be paid to other factors that contribute to the demand for and use of guns in the US. As Johann Hari points out, one of the most significant is the War on Drugs - or, perhaps more accurately, the "War for Drugs" - the fight among criminals for control of the drug trade. This "drug-related violence" - acts done to establish, protect, and defend drug territory in an illegal market - could effectively be eliminated with the legalization of narcotics. Some experts have estimated that ending drug prohibition could reduce the murder rate by as much as 75%.

There has also been much discussion around the relationship between mental illness and gun violence. For instance, liberals have derided President Trump's decision last year to repeal a rule blocking mentally ill people from buying guns. While such policies certainly have merit, there must be caution regarding potential unintended consequences. I and others noted at the time that such a policy may actually discourage those with mental illness from seeking counseling and treatment, for fear that they may lose access to their guns - potentially exacerbating the problem. It is important to work to destigmatize mental illness and ensure access to treatment and care for all those who do have mental and emotional health issues.

As long as we do continue to have such a prolific quantity of guns in American society, it is also important to educate the public about proper use, handling, and storage of said firearms, particularly among youth. Liberals have generally ignored or rejected such an approach, on grounds that sound similar to the conservative arguments for "abstinence-only" education and "Just Say No" drug policy. Encouraging ignorance does nothing to address the problem of accidental shootings that seem increasingly common in American society any more than it did for teenage pregnancies or drug overdoses.

This is certainly not a complete assessment of the causes of gun violence and issues related to gun control policy in the US. I have not discussed, for instance, the role of poverty in gun violence, the history of the racial politics of gun control, or the need to build trust within communities as a potential solution. However, I hope I have laid out a way of looking at gun violence and gun control that moves beyond the traditional liberal-conservative dichotomy and encourages a deeper, reality-based conversation

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