OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
How populism stumbles
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian
Clay Williams high-fives students at John Jacob Astor Elementary
along with other students from Astoria High School’s 2016 gradu-
ating class during their celebratory graduation walk last year.
Graduation rates
are ticking up, but
need improvement
T
he state Department of Education released its newest data
on four-year graduation rates last week, and the news
came with mixed blessings.
Statewide, the Class of 2016 had a graduation rate of 74.8
percent, up a full percentage point from 2015, and three points
more than 2014. State officials, including Gov. Kate Brown,
lauded the continued improvement.
But the mixed blessing of the overall uptick is that it still
leaves Oregon, which ranked 48th in the country in 2015 in
awarding four-year diplomas, woefully far behind the national
average of 83 percent and ahead of only Nevada and New
Mexico. Most other states have not yet released their 2016 data
for a more recent comparison. But the new numbers show the
dramatic and continuing need for educational improvement and
sustainable funding, especially since the state has set an ambi-
tious goal of attaining a 100 percent graduation rate by 2025.
In 2015, the states at the top of the national list with the highest
rankings posted 90 percent four-year graduation rates.
In Clatsop County, only the Jewell School District — which
has the lowest enrollment and only awarded 10 of 12 possible
diplomas in 2016 — had a graduation rate above the state aver-
age. The county’s largest school district, Astoria, with a student
enrollment of about 1,800, saw its graduation rate drop 1.97 per-
centage points to 72.68 percent in 2016 from 74.83 percent in
the 2014-15 school year. The Seaside School District’s rate also
fell by 1.03 points, from 75.41 percent in 2014-15 to 74.38 per-
cent this past year. On the upside, the Warrenton-Hammond
School District improved by 5.15 points from 69.09 percent in
2014-15 to 74.24 percent this past year and the Knappa School
District rose by 3.6 points, from 66.67 percent in 2014-15 to
70.27 percent this past year. For the Warrenton-Hammond
District it marked the sixth consecutive year of graduation
improvement and Superintendent Mark Jeffery and the district’s
educators should be congratulated for their continuing progress.
The numbers, though, show the obvious need for improve-
ment, especially in rural areas like the North Coast.
State funding from the voter-approved Measure 98 may help,
as Astoria Superintendent Craig Hoppes points out. Hoppes says
educators are focusing on how much money the county’s school
districts will receive from the measure, which was pitched to
voters as a support mechanism to improve the state’s graduation
rate. The measure, if legislators follow through with the voters’
mandate, is expected to pump approximately $800 per student
into adding career-technical offerings, providing more college
credit courses in high school and supporting dropout prevention
programs. Hoppes and others believe the career-technical offer-
ings will help draw interest from students who may otherwise
drop out to pursue work.
Joint planning for that enhanced career-technical curriculum
should be a priority at the local districts so that the programs can
get a jump start when the state does provide the funding for the
next school year.
At the state level, when the rate figures were released Gov.
Brown made clear that graduation improvement is a priority,
saying, “I remain committed to improving Oregon’s graduation
rates, and will prioritize investments in the upcoming legislative
session that empower communities and educators to improve
graduation rates, particularly for historically underserved and
rural communities.”
That legislative session began Wednesday, and it’s time for
the governor and the state’s senators and representatives to work
together to provide the needed funding for our children’s educa-
tion and future.
P
opulisms vary, but their
genesis is generally the same.
Some set of ideas commands
public support but lacks purchase in
elite policy debates.
Then a combination
of elite failure and
popular pressure
makes that tension
ripe for exploita-
tion, and some new
figure or movement emerges, prom-
ising to follow the will of the people
and override the ruling class.
Donald Trump is obviously such
a figure, and his freeze on refu-
gee admissions to the United States
is one of those ideas. Just as most
Americans favor lower immigra-
tion levels than the bipartisan immi-
gration deals hatched in Washing-
ton, D.C., envision, many Americans
are doubtful about admitting large
numbers of refugees from terror-
ism-scarred countries. Trump’s pri-
mary-season proposal to temporar-
ily bar all Muslims from entering the
United States had only minority sup-
port. But when he shifted to advo-
cating a refugee freeze and coun-
try-by-country restrictions, he was
on more solid populist ground.
So it’s not surprising that he’s
attempting to keep this promise. It’s
also not surprising that it’s been a
mess.
This is not because the basic
idea is infinitely beyond the pale.
I oppose the Trump refugee freeze
because I think the United States has
a particular moral obligation to help
people in Iraq and Syria given our
own blundering actions in the region.
I also don’t see strong evidence
the refugee program was creating
a major terrorism risk, or threaten-
ing to create the kind of unassimi-
lable enclaves that Europe is deal-
ing with today. The temporary freeze
on travel from seven Muslim-major-
ity countries might make sense if the
Trump administration had a brilliant
new vetting procedure in mind, but
there’s little evidence of that.
At the same time, all refugee pol-
icies involve limits, most refugees
need to be helped much closer to
home, not every refugee population
will have an easy time adapting to
American life, and the annual ceil-
ing in Trump’s order — 50,000 — is
still close to the number of refugees
admitted in most years of the Obama
and Bush presidencies.
Moreover, some of the details of
the Trump policy are perfectly defen-
sible. The proposed preference for
religious minorities, for instance, has
been attacked as Christian chauvin-
ism. But the reality is that Middle
Eastern Christians (and Yazidis, and
other groups) are often in a partic-
ularly desperate position — facing,
for instance, persecution within refu-
gee camps — and deserve more help
than our efforts have afforded them
to date.
None of this is to minimize the
cruelty involved in narrowing the
doorway for refugees. But foreign
policy is a realm of cruel choices,
and it is not clear that the suffering
caused by a narrower gate for refu-
gees is obviously worse than the suf-
fering caused by drone strikes and
bombing runs and “kinetic military
actions,” all policies that consistently
command bipartisan support.
So why the weekend frenzy, the
screaming headlines, the surge of
protest? Because of several features
inherent to populism, which tend to
undermine its attempts to govern no
matter the on-paper popularity of its
ideas.
First, populism finds its voice by
Matt Masin/The Orange County Register
More than a hundred people listen as speakers come to the micro-
phone during a protest and vigil at the University of California, Ir-
vine, on Tuesday against President Donald Trump.
pushing against the boundaries of
acceptable opinion. But in the pro-
cess it often embraces bigotries and
extremisms that in turn color the
reception of its policies.
In this case, it’s Trump’s origi-
nal “Muslim ban” forays (and the
clash-of-civilizations rhetoric of his
inner circle) that has shaped how
his freeze has been received. His
defenders may protest that most
Islamic-majority countries are not
affected, that any counterterrorism
policy will disproportionately affect
Muslims, and that the White House
order draws on a list of countries that
President Barack Obama targeted
for (much more modest) visa restric-
tions. All of this is true, but still …
Donald Trump ran for president call-
ing for a temporary ban on Muslims.
Once he crossed that line (and many
others), it became inevitable that
any move like this would be seen as
a second-best path to religious dis-
crimination, and resisted fiercely and
understandably on those grounds.
But what
we’ve watched
unfold with
refugee policy
suggests that
chaos and
incompetence
are much
more likely
to define this
administration
than any kind
of ruthless
strength.
Second, having campaigned
against elites and experts and all their
pomps and works, populists imagine
that their zeal can carry all before it,
that proceduralism and institutional
knowledge are for losers and toad-
ies and men with soft hands, and that
a few guys in the White House can
execute a major overhaul of a del-
icate system without bureaucratic
patience or rhetorical finesse.
This assumption is deeply mis-
taken, for reasons evident this week-
end — in the chaotic scenes at air-
ports, the spectacle of people already
in transit being turned away, the
crazy attempt to apply the ban to
permanent residents, the absence of
obvious carve-outs and exceptions,
the failure to get adequate buy-in or
advice from Cabinet officials, and
the blowback from Trump’s political
allies as well as his opponents.
Then, finally, because populism
thrives on its willingness to shatter
norms, it tends to treat this chaos and
blowback as a kind of vindication
— a sign that it’s on the right track,
that its boldness is meeting inevita-
ble resistance from the failed ortho-
doxies of the past, and so on through
a self-comforting litany. That makes
it hard for populists to course cor-
rect, because they get stuck in a
“the worse the better” loop, reas-
suring themselves that they’re mak-
ing progress when actually they’re
cratering.
Meanwhile, on the other side of
the divide, the ascent of populism
also creates an unusual level of soli-
darity among elites, who feel moved
to resist on a scale that they wouldn’t
if similar policies were pursued by
normal political actors. Thus Trump,
not even two weeks into his pres-
idency, has already faced unusual
pushback from the intelligence com-
munity, the Justice Department, the
State Department and other regions
of the bureaucracy, even as the
media-entertainment complex unites
against him on a scale unseen even
in previous Republican administra-
tions, and the Democratic Party is
pressured into scorched-earth oppo-
sition before policy negotiations are
even joined. These tensions ratcheted
up over the weekend; it’s difficult to
see how they ratchet down.
The great fear among
Trump-fearers is that he will deal
with this elite opposition by effec-
tively crushing it — purging the deep
state, taming the media, remaking
the judiciary as his pawn, and rout-
ing or co-opting the Democrats. This
is the scenario where a surging pop-
ulism, its progress balked through
normal channels, turns authoritarian
and dictatorial, ending in the sort of
American Putinism that David Frum
describes darkly in the latest issue of
The Atlantic.
But nothing about Trumpian pop-
ulism to date suggests that it has
either the political skill or the pop-
ularity required to grind its opposi-
tion down. In which case, instead of
Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the more
relevant case study might be for-
mer President Mohammed Morsi
of Egypt, the Muslim Brother-
hood leader whose brief tenure was
defined both by chronic self-sabo-
tage and by the active resistance of
the Egyptian bureaucracy and intelli-
gentsia, which rendered governance
effectively impossible.
The Egyptian deep state’s sabo-
tage of Morsi culminated in a coup.
This is not my prediction for the
Trump era. But what we’ve watched
unfold with refugee policy sug-
gests that chaos and incompetence
are much more likely to define this
administration than any kind of ruth-
less strength.