I just finished watching Widow’s Bay, and all I can think about is how Mayor Tom Loftis, played by our favorite Welshman Matthew Rhys, was bad at economic development. Between the boogeymen and the creepy dungeons and the inexplicable Chris Fleming tornado was the real horror: poor institutional design.

If you haven’t seen the show, it’s basically if Lost were set in Massachusetts. Already a strong candidate for horror. Tom Loftis is the mayor of the island town Widow’s Bay, who begins the show desperate to turn his home into the next Martha’s Vineyard. Trouble ensues, with the island revealing more of a curse that is seemingly impossible to escape from. The actual mystery is fairly narrow; given how real the town experiences the various tragedies and fantastical elements, it’s hard to explain the curse as being a figment of their imagination. From its inhabitants’ perspective, the island’s curse is very much real and holds actual, tangible power over them. The story unfolds as a centuries-long curse, dating back to the first mayor’s bad shrooms trip in 1702. Their plight is endemic and unrelenting, with Tom Loftis unable to change the trajectory of his little island hamlet.

So, was Tom Loftis a good mayor? What should we expect from our leaders, and should those expectations be different for leaders in places as genuinely cursed and small as Widow’s Bay?

He wasn’t that bad

While Loftis was elected unopposed, we should still treat his election as a binding mandate— he was empowered with responsibility to manage and lead his town. His constituents, at least the ones who still valued the authority, entrusted him with the outcomes of their community. So, it is understandable that he would aspire to Martha’s Vineyard heights; he clearly wants the town to succeed.1 Becoming a popular summertime tourist destination is not an unreasonable goal for a New England town, notwithstanding the monsters.

Were these ambitions right? In the first few episodes, he succeeds in bringing more foot traffic to the island. Widow’s Bay receives a quite positive review in the New York Times that seemingly changes their fortunes, which Loftis can somewhat take credit for.2 He managed to stimulate demand in a previously unheard-of town that lacked a road connection, a historical or natural landmark, or seemingly any nice amenities. From what we can tell, the only inn sucks so much that the innkeeper won’t stay there. So clearly, they are enjoying some extra economic success.

Are communities scary?

Pretty soon after the tourists arrive, things go awry. There’s a hag, a domineering fog, an evil punch bowl, an actual boogeyman, and teens that sneak out of the house and smoke weed sometimes. All of these begin to overwhelm Loftis, taking over his time, energy, and sanity. He loses track of his actual festivities and programming, leaving it in the hands of his somewhat inept staff. He tries to confront increasingly dangerous aspects of the island’s curse, alongside Patricia, his assistant3 and Wyck, the local grumpy fisherman. His son constantly leaves the house at night to smoke with his genuinely annoying friends, which further stretches his attention. The local sheriff, who seems like the only competent one, throws in the towel by the end. All of these characters, and the curse that seemingly controls them, represent the community and the institutions that make it up: ill-equipped bureaucracy, dying industry, the restless youth, even Loftis as the ambitious yet ignorant elite. They all eventually fall prey to the curse, which, while it looks very real, is really held together by the community’s fear and eventual anger.

Over the centuries, they have assuaged their fears around the curse with sacrifices. They rationalized, not necessarily unjustifiably, that the tragedies that befall them can only be corrected with terrible deeds, usually through murdering one of their neighbors. Their groupthink around the curse is extremely hard to shift; it not only stands up in the face of real success, but it also finds genuine reasons to support itself. Not until the end does Loftis realize that fighting this curse of groupthink is ultimately impossible to do alone. As his predecessor, the first mayor said, “fearful men do desperate things.”

The macroeconomics of curses

When the group is unable to correct maladjusted tendencies, institutions matter a lot.4 But to be useful (or even possible), institutions must actually work in context. As Loftis recognizes by the end, he should have just listened to the history of the island and taken the curse seriously. In institutional terms, there was no mechanism by which the constituents could reveal their real preferences. It took real badgering by Wyck, basically just a random angry guy, to get him to appreciate the forces that influence the economic success of the island. Whether these forces were real or just the interplay of community dynamics kind of doesn’t matter; they must be resolved before he can reach his goals of a more prosperous community. That is where the creativity of institutional design comes in.

Loftis had a singular goal of replicating the success of a completely different place; for one thing, Martha’s Vineyard reportedly has had zero curses. Every path towards success ultimately must be tailored towards the community and environment it travels through. Consider a key part of the curse: native born Widow’s Bay residents cannot physically leave the island without some insane fate befalling them. This is an actual throttling of brain drain. Loftis would do well to harness that, perhaps through the local boating apprenticeships to keep institutional knowledge of a core island industry alive. It’s futile to force a new arrangement on a place instead of responding to what’s actually going on. Unfortunately, it must be relearned time and time again. While we know a lot of things may work (like internet access or good utilities), since it’s still just people living in a place, communities ultimately prosper when their specific needs are met and they have space to grow into.

Before the commonwealth option can be analyzed, it is important to understand what commonwealth means. For all official purposes, Puerto Rico is known as a commonwealth. This status arose in the 1950s from the founder of the PPD and first elected governor, Luis Munoz Marin. He fought to establish Puerto Rico as a commonwealth, a position his party still supports. Commonwealth status was meant to confer Puerto Rico a high degree of autonomy with respect to the US and end their colonial relationship. However, the term commonwealth has never had the legal weight that Marin had desired. According to the US State Department’s official manual, “The term ‘Commonwealth’ does not describe or provide for any specific political status or relationship.” This fact becomes clearer when the relationship between, for example, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico reveals little information regarding their respective rights. While the PPD and other proponents allege that commonwealth status can afford a particular arrangement of autonomy, the framework that governs Puerto Rico refuses to enable such an option, leaving only statehood as viable.

To further examine the validity of the proposed options, the historical legal doctrine must be understood. Following the annexation of Puerto Rico, the Supreme Court embarked on answering Puerto Rico’s question of status. In the landmark decision Downes v. Bidwell, Justice Edward White established the doctrine of incorporation in his majority opinion, stating that unless Puerto Rico is incorporated by Congress, legislators are free to use their plenary powers from Article IV of the Constitution to unilaterally govern the island. Absent from this majority opinion is whether commonwealth status implies incorporation. Since Downes, different justices have completely contradicted one another as to whether Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status means it is incorporated. This inconsistency has left the question of Puerto Rico’s political status and its sovereignty over its local government wholly unanswered.

This judicial neglect to give a concrete opinion does little to empower the Puerto Rican people. A common misconception is that a clear majority of Puerto Ricans in a plebiscite is all that is needed to solve this crisis. This condition has already been met, as multiple referenda have yielded undeniable preference for alternatively both the statehood and the commonwealth option. However, Congress can and has deliberately ignored these votes. Considering the controversy revolves around congressional unilateral power over Puerto Rico, Congress itself must take an active role in this situation. After all, a colonial relationship cannot be truly dismantled without a conscious abdication of power by the ruler.

However, even if Congress acknowledged a plebiscite of the Puerto Ricans, it could not dutifully accept a preference for the commonwealth option. The Constitution can guarantee full, unconditional, and irrevocable citizenship only to entities mandated by the Constitution, like D.C. or the states. A lack of commonwealth status language in the Constitution means such a guarantee would be “necessarily and unavoidably modifiable at the will of Congress and that commonwealth status therefore cannot become a permanent solution.” There is currently no legal mechanism that genuinely gives Congress the authority to enter an irrevocable compact for commonwealth; unless Congress is bound by an amendment or article of the constitution, “its legislative powers cannot be compromised by prior legislation.” Rep. Patrick Kennedy was referring to the illicit nature of the commonwealth option when he testified before Congress that any referendum must have its options approved by Congress to be considered bound to the results. Because Congress would be able to renege on any commonwealth arrangement made with Puerto Rico means that Congress is also necessarily empowered to abridge the rights of the people that live there. Couple this lack of constitutional protection with Downes’ implications, and it becomes unmistakably clear that a commonwealth option cannot secure all rights and liberties for the Puerto Rican people.

When considering self-determination chiefly in a global sense, Puerto Ricans are fully entitled to determine their future, including the status of commonwealth. Multiple other colonial powers, including Spain and the United Kingdom, had devolved their control over their respective colonies within irrevocable law. However, these foreign laws carry no weight in the American courts’ application of the Constitution. Therefore, they are functionally irrelevant in analyzing the choices Puerto Rico faces. This peculiarity of the Constitution means choosing the commonwealth equates to “self-[determining] itself out of the right to self-determination”, a legal paradox that must be avoided at all costs. This necessary condition for equal protection under the law is purely a feature of American jurisprudence, and an unavoidable constraint on the available choices of Puerto Ricans.

An important qualifier to note is that the Constitution is a dynamic document that consistently needs to be demystified and reinterpreted. While Congress must act according to its powers, asits disregardfor explicit “constitutional protections…when they become inconvenient” is the very reason why this entire problem exists in the first place, there are multiple paths to resolution. Suits likeU.S. v. Vaello-Maderoare currently being heard before the Supreme Court, and hopefully will make this article moot with a bold opinion. If it is truly within the desire of the Puerto Rican people to do so, a Constitutional amendment can readily supersede all these claims. Notwithstanding that this newly created constitutional entity would be uncharted waters, it is important to not fall victim to “law [that] doesn’t move concurrently with circumstance”, for it is well within “the spirit and genius as well as with the words of the constitution” to determine our future.

The Thermidorian reaction is a historiographical model of revolution that plots the rise of opportunistic reactionaries such as Napoleon Bonaparte in response to French Revolution and its reforms. After a decade of revolutionary fervor, Napoleon declared himself emperor under the guise of stabilizing France as a centralized state. We can apply this model of reactionary revanchism that follows revolution to 200 years later when Putin ascends to the presidency and methodically centralizes the state, with the pretext of injecting order into Russian society, to strengthen himself. The language of strengthening the Russian State, and the policies of stabilization are Putin's personal Thermidorian reaction to living through the Cold Revolution of the 1990s.

To understand this characterization of Putin’s reaction, we must contextualize the Cold Revolution and the three major institutions that irrevocably shifted. Boris Yeltsin had the difficult task of transitioning Russia from Soviet autocracy to capitalist democracy. Over nine years, however, Yeltsin would preside over the devastation of the Russian Parliament, the presidential transfer of power, and the relationship between the Kremlin and the various regional oblasts. The failure of these institutions contributed to the overall instability and soft revolution of the period. In 1993, Yeltsin faced intense pushback from the parliament over the initial failed execution of his economic “shock therapy” liberalization scheme. Yeltsin, having little appetite for compromise, abolished the parliament, and when they defied him and put up a new acting president, he promptly shelled the parliament into submission. As the victor of the confrontation, Yeltsin stripped the parliament of its oversight capabilities. This fundamentally altered the checks and balances between the executive and the legislature and destabilized the government. Yeltsin also facilitated a shift in a fundamental democratic faculty of the electoral transfer of power. In the 1996 election, Yeltsin found himself categorically unequipped to fend off his opposition, and so he turned to the plutocracy to secure his reelection. In exchange for positive press and campaign contributions, Yeltsin would rig the privatization of Russia’s assets to their favor. In doing so, he would secure himself a second term in office. However, he would further destabilize the institution of the presidency and transfer authority from the office to himself. Finally, Yeltsin changed the balance of power in the federal-regional relationships. The First Chechen War and Chechnya's success emboldened various leadersof ethnic-minority and industrial regions to assert themselves and receive political powers, from veto power over federal legislation, tax revenue abatement, and unilateral foreign relations. Each regional governor signed separate bilateral agreements with Yeltsin, creating an arbitrary and antagonistic system that transitioned sovereignty from a federal republic to a confederacy. The destabilization of these institutions resulted in the political instability of the 1990s, and gave Putin the opportunity to embark on a corrective Thermidorian reaction.

Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric entering office in late 1999 would reflect this formative part of his life and greatly inform us on how he intended to rule the nation. His rise to power was meteoric, catapulting from Deputy Chief of Staff to President in less than three years. However, while he rose through the ranks, he saw a state that failed to coordinate a stable relationship among its various institutions, and an opportunity to strengthen the Russian state. He described the state’s flaws and what he wanted to do about it in his Millennium Manifesto to the State Duma. He spoke of the desire to convert Russian State institutions into “the source and guarantor of order,” and having “guiding and regulating” power over society, for society must serve the state's interests of stability. Instead of a state that secured Russian society, Putin saw a lack of the capacity to govern and of quality governance. His language reflects the underlying reaction he had towards this period. He would choose not to correct the lack of legislative oversight, electoral fairness, or confederal incongruence, but rather undermine the perception that the state could not prevent Russia’s collapse. He would create a strong Russian state, with him at the center, and from that strength stability would follow.

Putin's first term was critical for his execution of his stabilization reforms that embody Thermidorian reaction. In these first years of his presidency, he created the umbrella United Russia party that gave him control over the legislature, empowered the state security services to deter plutocratic opposition, and enacted policies that nullified the federal system. Putin successfully nullified parliamentarian opposition by combining the two largest, non-communist parties in the country into United Russia, solidifying control over the legislature that otherwise would seemingly destabilize the country. He also utilized the KGB’s successor security agencies to successfully counter the oligarchs that had paralyzed Yeltsin. The widely publicized arrests of plutocrats such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Boris Berezovsky were an implicit signal of deterrence to the other wealthy oligarchs of Russia that the state would always supersede the power of their wealth, and the instability that came with it. Furthermore, by 2004, he made the position of the regional governor, the one that just five years prior had held almost absolute control over local state authority, subordinate and subservient to the president. The combination of these reforms are the meat of Putin’s Thermidorian reaction. They are all guided by the perception that the Cold Revolution of the 1990s was critically destabilizing, and his duty as leader of the state was stability through centralized control.

Vladimir Putin cemented the Kremlin’s role as the source of order through his series of reforms that brought the power back from the fringes and into his own hands. This vision of a state matured during the Cold Revolution of the 1990s and closely follows the path of reactionaries seizing control as prescribed by the Thermidorian Reaction model. While the model largely describes this phenomenon, it has key limitations. A particular caveat is that other revolutions that underwent a Thermidorian reaction, such as the French Revolution or the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, all involved intense, brutal political violence. In contrast, the 1990s in Russia involved revolutionary changes in the political structure and the soveriegnthy of the state but lacked the mass beheadings seen in France or civil war in the case of the USSR. Therefore, the extent to which solely the Cold Revolution, as opposed other formative moments such as his time as a KGB officer in Dresden, informed Putin is ambiguous. His time as a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany, likewise also informed Putin on his views about what Russia needed. In addition, this ambiguity also means this path for Russia was not inevitable. While there were many other KGB officers and military officials who likely could have taken Putin’s place in the Kremlin, there were also liberal reformers, such as Boris Nemstov, who posed real possibility for positive progress in Russia. Despite these limitations, viewing the 1990s as a Cold Revolution gives that decade credence for the magnitude of change it experienced, and it is therefore no surprise that the successor to this period would be equally responsible for the change that followed. The reality is that the second President, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, will be responsible for the infamous illiberalism he reinforced in Russian society.