The American Prospect #317

STOPPING THE SUPREME COURT COHEN/BROWN

PREVENTING PLUTOCRACY DAVID DAYEN

Cleaning Up the Mess

NOV/DEC 2020 $8.95 PROSPECT.ORG

HEALING AMERICA ROBERT KUTTNER

I D E A S, P O L I T I C S & P O W E R

BONUS ISSUE, 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

President-elect Joe Biden Promised to Build Back Better.

Now It’s Time to Get the Job Done.

Investing in infrastructure and clean energy will lay the groundwork of our economic recovery, creating millions of good paying jobs and building a more sustainable future.

It’s time to Rebuild America.

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contents

VOLUME 31, NUMBER 7 NOV/ DEC 2020 PAGE 16

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COLUMNS 4 PROSPECTS: THE PANDEMIC’S HORRIFYING CLIMAX BY PAUL STARR

NOTEBOOK 6 THE STATE OF THE PARTIES BY HAROLD MEYERSON 10 PROSECUTING TRUMP IS THE ONLY WAY TO HEAL THE NATION BY ALEXANDER SAMMON 13 RETURN TO MOTHER EMANUEL BY BRITTANY GIBSON

FEATURES 16 HOW TO COUNTERACT THE COURT BY RACHEL M. COHEN AND MARCIA BROWN CONGRESS HAS THE POWER TO OVERRIDE SUPREME COURT RULINGS BASED ON STATUTORY INTERPRETATIONS. 26 HEALING AMERICA BY ROBERT KUTTNER WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO BIND UP THE NATION’S WOUNDS? 34 SOCIAL DISTANCING BY DAVID DAYEN THE WEALTHY HAVE PULLED OUT OF THE ORBIT OF THE REST OF THE COUNTRY. CAN THEY BE LEASHED BACK? 42 PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IN CRISIS BY GABRIELLE GURLEY THEIR RIDERSHIP SLASHED IN THE PANDEMIC, URBAN AND RURAL SYSTEMS NEED FUNDING, WHICH CONGRESS HAS REFUSED TO PROVIDE. HERE’S HOW SOME SYSTEMS ARE COPING—AND SOME AREN’T. 48 THE LUCRATIVE AFTERLIFE OF A TRUMP OFFICIAL BY JONATHAN GUYER TRUMP’S FORMER APPOINTEES ARE PROFITING FROM THEIR TIME IN THE WHITE HOUSE—H.R. MCMASTER MOST OF ALL.

CULTURE 53 THE POWER OF IDEAS AND THE IDEA OF POWER BY ZACH CARTER 57 THE EBB AND FLOW OF RACIAL PROGRESS BY RANDALL KENNEDY 61 WHY SO MANY BLACK HORROR FILMS ARE HORRORS THEMSELVES BY CATE YOUNG 64 PARTING SHOT: THE U.S. ELECTION: VIEWS FROM THE ARAB WORLD BY JONATHAN GUYER Cover art by Steve Brodner

1

from the Editor

P

resuming that Donald Trump’s ham-handed, desperate attempts to overturn the results of the election fail, we are on the precipice of a new era. And since Joe Biden became the president-elect, I’ve been reminded of that pitch-perfect final scene of the 1970s classic The Candidate. Bill McKay (Robert Redford), just elected as senator from California, gets a moment of privacy with his campaign manager before the deluge of well-wishers and hangers-on engulfs him.

All he can say is “What do we do now?”

For four long years, the energy of the Democratic Party, the grassroots resistance, and the progressive left has been largely channeled into driving Trump from office. It worked, if barely. Now that question, which was hanging in the background, is paramount: What do we do now? If there’s a theme to this issue, it’s that: how to sweep away the shattered pieces of the Trump regime, and push forward to make progress.

What do we do about the widening political divisions within the country, which occasionally flare up into paroxysms of violence? ROBERT KUTTNER talks to people on the front lines of repairing these cleavages in America, and assesses the long but necessary path forward for healing. ALEXANDER SAMMON looks at another end of this lens: accountability for the Trump regime and its myriad of crimes. JONATHAN GUYER also has accountability on his mind, this time for Trump’s enablers: He uses the case study of former national-security adviser H.R. McMaster, now raking in dollars on the board of directors for Zoom.

What big challenges will linger from the twin legacies of Trump and the pandemic?

I write in this issue about inequality, which has soared into the stratosphere since the coronavirus hit. Can we reverse a schism so profound that the mega-rich haven’t even felt so much as a pinprick during the economic crisis? GABRIELLE GURLEY examines the future of public transportation, a devastated, necessary sector that suffered severe cutbacks at the state and local level, while the federal government has thus far not stepped in with meaningful help.

Perhaps Trump’s greatest legacy is his impact on the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, now in a 6-3 conservative split. In a special partnership between us and The Intercept, MARCIA BROWN and RACHEL COHEN tell us to reject despair, as Congress has the power to override a surprisingly large number of Supreme Court decisions simply by clarifying statutory intent. It’s a great piece that I’ll be referring back to for years.

Of course, we also have you covered with analysis of the past election. PAUL STARR muses about why the coronavirus wasn’t such a big factor in the results, and how the pandemic will emerge from its most dangerous phase. HAROLD MEYERSON looks at the potential and pitfalls for both party coalitions after the election. And BRITTANY GIBSON was on the ground in South Carolina and Georgia during the election; she reports for us about Mother Emanuel Church, where you could say the hatred and racial animus of the Trump era began.

Plus, we have a rich culture section in this issue. There’s ZACH CARTER on the literary output of the anti-monopoly movement; RANDALL KENNEDY on Isabel Wilkerson’s new book about Black America, Caste; and CATE YOUNG with a survey of the newly ascendant genre of Black horror films and television shows.

We also have some exciting initiatives at prospect.org. Our DAY ONE AGENDA series, from the Fall 2019 issue, has been expanded, with new items about what a Biden administration can do on Day One without any new legislation. Visit dayoneagenda.org for all of our coverage. We’re tracking the personnel of the Biden administration at Cabinet Watch (prospect.org/cabinet-watch). And we’re sending a reporter to Georgia to cover the runoff elections that will determine control of the Senate. At the Prospect, we never ask, “What do we do now?” We just do it. –DAVID DAYEN

2 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2020

EXECUTIVE EDITOR DAVID DAYEN FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH EDITOR AT LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON DEPUTY EDITOR GABRIELLE GURLEY ART DIRECTOR JANDOS ROTHSTEIN MANAGING EDITOR JONATHAN GUYER ASSOCIATE EDITOR SUSANNA BEISER STAFF WRITER ALEXANDER SAMMON WRITING FELLOWS MARCIA BROWN, BRITTANY GIBSON EDITORIAL INTERNS MIACEL SPOTTED ELK, SIERRA LYONS, ANNABELLE WILLIAMS CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MARCIA ANGELL, GABRIEL ARANA, DAVID BACON, JAMELLE BOUIE, HEATHER BOUSHEY, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, JOHN B. JUDIS, RANDALL KENNEDY, BOB MOSER, KAREN PAGET, SARAH POSNER, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, ADELE M. STAN, DEBORAH A. STONE, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, SAM WANG, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS, JULIAN ZELIZER PUBLISHER ELLEN J. MEANY PR DIRECTOR ANNA GRAIZBORD CONTROLLER SALLY FREEMAN COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST STEPHEN WHITESIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEHRSA BARADARAN, DAAIYAH BILAL-THREATS, CHUCK COLLINS, DAVID DAYEN, STANLEY B. GREENBERG, JACOB S. HACKER, AMY HANAUER, DERRICK JACKSON, ROBERT KUTTNER, ELLEN J. MEANY, MILES RAPOPORT, JANET SHENK, ADELE SIMMONS, GANESH SITARAMAN, WILLIAM SPRIGGS, PAUL STARR, MICHAEL STERN SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE STEPHEN WHITESIDE, 202-753-0937, INFO@PROSPECT.ORG PRINT SUBSCRIPTION RATES $36 (U.S.), $42 (CANADA), AND $48 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PROSPECT.ORG/PERMISSIONS VOL. 31, NO. 7. The American Prospect (ISSN 10497285) is published bimonthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2020 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, 1225 Eye St. NW, Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20005. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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Prospects

The Pandemic’s Horrifying Climax

BY PAUL STARR

J

ust as the numbers came in on the presidential vote, the numbers went up in the pandemic, soaring past 100,000 new COVID-19 cases a day and setting new daily records for hospitalizations in the two weeks after the election.

Even as encouraging reports broke about the vaccine trials by Pfizer and Moderna, the immediate reality was the “dark winter” that Joe Biden warned about during the campaign. The White House had given up— “We are not going to control the pandemic,” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had told CNN in late October. It was what it was. The country was locked on course for spiraling increases in illness and what will likely be the pandemic’s tragic, final climax: a wave of winter infections and deaths before a vaccine can bring the disease under control sometime in 2021.

This is the prospect that Biden faces: a likely horrific toll leading up to the inauguration and at the beginning of his term; a daunting rollout of one or more vaccines; and potentially the easing of the crisis later in his first year. In a rational political world, what would the American people and the government do in this situation? The people would agree to make short-term sacrifices and comply with public-health protections, while the federal government would provide economic aid to get us through this winter’s valley of suffering.

But we cannot count on either of those happening.

Trump and the Republicans have thoroughly politicized public-health protections. It’s

4 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2020

not just refusing to wear a mask that Republicans have elevated into a symbol of personal autonomy; as an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association reports, resistance has apparently risen to testing for the virus. People don’t want to face the inconveniences of testing positive, such as isolating themselves. In the party that calls itself “pro-life,” freedom has become an argument for the right to remain ignorant and pass on a deadly infection to your grandmother.

Early in 2020, we needed strong, unified national leadership to promote social distancing and wearing masks and to organize and finance testing, isolation of the infected, contact tracing, and quarantine of the exposed. Under Trump, we didn’t have that effort—in fact, Trump undermined it—when it could have kept the pandemic at much lower levels. Now it will be difficult for Biden to overcome the oppositional thinking that has become ingrained among Republicans, who, like their leader, have come to equate their rights, indeed, their very understanding of America, with the narrowest conception of self-interest.

Unless Democrats win the two runoff Senate races in Georgia, Biden will also likely face Republican obstruction in Congress on the economic aid to workers, companies, and states and local governments needed to get through this winter. Without that aid, many people will see public-health measures that interfere with their businesses or work as a threat to their economic survival. Republicans will not be unhappy if they do.

Despite Biden’s victory, the election should be taken as a cautionary lesson on the pandemic. It wasn’t as devastating to Republicans as it might have been. When political leaders fail catastrophically—for example, when they have been defeated in war or had the economy collapse on their watch— they usually face retribution from the voters at the polls.

Trump deserved to lose, but he deserved to lose by much bigger margins than he did. And instead of being held accountable for enabling Trump, congressional Republicans did surprisingly well.

The pandemic may not have produced a backlash against Republicans because of voters’ worries that Democrats would impose a new economic lockdown. Biden said that wasn’t his intention. During the second presidential debate, when he warned of a “dark winter,” he also said he wanted to “shut down the virus, not the country.” But he didn’t make clear that the primary focus can and should be targeted measures to stop transmission.

The early lockdowns were partly a reflection of how little was known last winter and spring about the epidemiology of COVID-19. Research since then has shown that risks come mainly from close and prolonged contact in crowded indoor venues and from contact without facial coverings. Large indoor gatherings have repeatedly been shown to have been superspreader events. We don’t need to close down transportation or much retail business.

Except where the pandemic is raging, we shouldn’t be closing

schools across the board, especially not primary schools. We should instead be paying restaurants, bars, and similar venues to stay shut for the winter and barring gatherings of ten or more people in confined spaces (including homes and churches), emphasizing that these are temporary sacrifices necessitated by an out-of-control disease.

Lockdowns in the form of general stay-at-home orders should be a last resort.

Since the Trump administration has abandoned the field, Biden’s coronavirus advisory group—not Biden himself— should try to provide the missing scientific leadership in the dangerous weeks ahead. The opposition even to targeted measures will be fierce. But state and local officials need a reference point for policy, and if the federal government will not provide it, the government-inwaiting should try to fill the void insofar as it is possible without formal authority.

WHILE TRUMP AND his aides

have encouraged resignation to the immediate course of the pandemic, they have also created the opposite problem about a vaccine: unrealistic certainty about how quickly and completely it will end the crisis. As of mid-November, according to The New York Times vaccine tracker, 12 vaccines were in Phase 3 trials, with dozens of others in earlier stages of development. This effort has no historical precedent, but the history of vaccines urges care and caution.

Some promising vaccines have failed in the past; some successful ones have had problems in manufacturing and distribution affecting their safety. We can rely on

NANCY LANE / AP PHOTO

Prospects

vaccines only because the methods for developing, testing, and reviewing and regulating them have been so rigorous. A failure in this case would endanger public confidence in vaccinations of all kinds.

The November announcements by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, as well as

by Moderna, that their vaccines were proving 90 percent or more effective was certainly good news, but they were only press releases about Phase 3 trials, not yet full publication of scientifically reviewed findings.

If the vaccines are shown to be both safe and effective, the rollout will pose staggering logistical challenges. Pfizer’s will be particularly demanding since it must be stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit until shortly before being administered, and those receiving it will need a second dose three weeks after receiving the first.

Countries with well-organized public-health systems and high levels of public trust will be able to handle the vaccination campaign. Unfortunately, the United States is not one of those countries. What may make things especially difficult is that health care facilities are already under stress from the surge of COVID cases, and states and local governments are under financial stress and haven’t received sufficient federal support for the vaccination effort.

We know who stands at greatest risk of being overlooked in our system: people with low incomes and others who do not have a regular source of medical care and live in minority and rural communities. Like systemic racism, systemic neglect of public health is a built-in obstacle to both justice and good health in America.

Assuming that the Pfizer, Moderna, and possibly other vaccines are rolled out within the next several months going into the spring, important questions will probably remain

unresolved at the point we are being asked to make crucial decisions about our families and ourselves. We will not know how long protection lasts. We are unlikely to know how well different vaccines perform with the particular age and risk factors we face. None of the vaccines will yet have been tested on children. We may not know whether a vaccine that protects us against getting ill with COVID-19 (functional immunity) also prevents us from spreading the virus to others (sterilizing immunity). If a vaccine does

for people who are expected to show up for work every day and may lose their jobs if they don’t.

An emergency authorization for paid sick leave for people suffering side effects from the vaccine ought to be part of the vaccination campaign.

All the many uncertainties about the vaccine increase the chances of legitimate confusion as well as misinformation and conspiracy stories. Put together this past year’s COVID “infodemic” with the miasmas now likely to emanate from the anti-vax, QAnon, and other

A protest against coronavirus restrictions in Boston

still allow transmission, people may let down their guard, stop wearing face masks, abandon social distancing, and cause new COVID outbreaks.

The Pfizer vaccine has side effects that could deter many people from taking it. As Kaiser Health News reported, “Scientists anticipate the shots will cause enervating flu-like side effects—including sore arms, muscle aches and fever—that could last days and temporarily sideline some people from work or school.” In a country where many low-wage employees lack paid sick leave, that will be a significant deterrent

fever swamps, and the Biden administration will likely have its hands full getting accurate information to the public.

But let us imagine that despite all these obstacles, the vaccine campaign succeeds and the end of our dark winter also closes this dark chapter in our history. What will it be like coming out of the crisis?

This past year has been a year of loss: loss of lives, loss of close contact with family and friends, lost jobs, lost progress for kids in school, loss of peace of mind.

Just having the anxieties of the past year lifted should bring an immense wave of relief.

But the economy is not going to return to its pre-pandemic state. As a result of increased use of technology, some jobs are gone for good. Some shopping malls and downtown business areas have been dealt blows that they are not going to recover from quickly. The country faces a long-term challenge in economic reconstruction together with all the other urgent needs for social investment deferred during the Trump years. If Democrats had won a decisive victory in congressional races, they would have been able to start that reconstruction. It is going to be a struggle to get it going now. Mitch McConnell and other Republicans in Congress would like nothing better than to stop Biden from doing anything so that they can accuse Democrats in 2022 of doing nothing.

This battle is inevitable, but there is one partially compensating possibility. The pandemic has seen a rise in savings rates among the employed, who haven’t spent money on restaurants, travel, entertainment, and other activities outside the home. So there should be a lot of pent-up consumer demand, which could provide the kind of stimulus the American economy received after World War II. If the worst of the pandemic is behind us by 2022, the economy could be rebounding, and Biden and the Democrats might enjoy some attendant goodwill. I realize that’s a rosy scenario, but it could turn out to be important as we go into the midterm elections. As this dark winter unfolds, we are entitled to dream about spring. n — November 18, 2020

NOV/DEC 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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The State of the Parties Not since 1860 have the parties represented such distinct and mutually opposed publics. And unlike 1860, neither party effectively commands a majority.

BY H A R O L D M E Y E R S O N LIKE WALT WHITMAN, America’s

two major political parties are large and contain multitudes. Unlike Whitman, they don’t contradict themselves—at least, not as much as they once did.

One hundred years ago, the Democrats were both the party of the segregationist, nativist South, and the Northern big cities packed with immigrants. Sixty years ago, they were still the party of the Jim Crow South, and also of the pro–civil rights North.

As for the Republicans, at the turn of the 20th century, they were the party to which big business went when it wanted to purchase a legislature, while at the same time, they were also the party to which “good government” reformers flocked to

6 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2020

diminish the robber barons’ hold over the legislative process.

Today, while each party is still rife with complexity, each has largely come to stand for an increasingly distinct set of values that is shared by increasingly distinct publics. Democrats are urban, multiracial, disproportionately college-educated, and disproportionately young; Republicans are precisely the reverse: rural, still overwhelmingly white, disproportionately non-college-educated, and disproportionately older.

Consider, for instance, how each party’s level of support along the urban/rural continuum is the precise upside-down image of the other’s. According to the Associated Press/NORC exit poll (and I readily acknowledge the considerable

flaws in this year’s exit polling, but I cite them only to compare their own numbers with their own numbers), Joe Biden carried the urban vote by a 65 percent to 33 percent margin over Donald Trump, while Trump carried the rural vote by a 65 percent to 33 percent margin over Biden. Biden won 54 percent of the suburban vote to Trump’s 44 percent, while Trump carried 55 percent of the small-town vote to Biden’s 43 percent.

Each party’s defining beliefs more neatly match their defining demographic characteristics than has commonly been the case in American political history. That largely explains why there was so little ticket-splitting in this year’s election. Most voting booths (much less mail-in ballots) no longer provide the option of pulling a lever that casts a vote for all of a party’s candidates, but most Americans vote that way regardless. Each party stands for a coherent set of values (one cosmopolitan, the other more white- and male-supremacist and arrayed against cultural liberalism)

KYODO

The jubilation at the White House after Biden’s election victory was confirmed belies the narrowness of the win and the likely political deadlock.

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that doesn’t vary much from region to region or state to state. That’s why, to the Democrats’ dismay, the Democrats picked up Senate seats only in states that Biden won and lost all the races they’d hoped to win in states where Trump prevailed. (The sole ticket-splitting exception was Susan Collins’s victory in Maine, which Biden carried.) That’s why they lost House seats they’d expected to hold in districts that Trump carried.

One additional reason why it’s a bad time for down-ticket outliers— Democrats who represent otherwise red districts, Republicans who represent otherwise blue—is the decimation of local news coverage. A voter didn’t have to be particularly attentive in the past to know who their congressional representative was and what they stood for. But with the disappearance of local newspapers and the rise of nationally focused cable news, the distinct centrism of Blue Dog Democrats and moderate Republicans, if such still exist, tends to be eclipsed by the political identities of the national parties.

DEMOCRATS AND progressives

have long believed that they can break on through to the other side with economic issues that register across party lines. That’s a plausible belief if, and only if, they can make such issues so central to the party’s identity that they outweigh (or at least, aren’t outweighed by) the party’s commitment to other, less directly economic issues that have largely come to define the Democrats.

That’s no simple task, as some November election results and exit polls make clear. In Florida, for instance, fully 61 percent of voters backed a ballot measure to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15, while only 48 percent voted for Biden.

Clearly, a large number of Trump voters supported the measure; just as clearly, that didn’t dent their support for Trump. Ballot measures to raise the minimum wage have been passed by voters in a host of red states; that suggests that such issues don’t shift voters from the blue column to the red in today’s America.

Similarly, the AP/NORC exit poll found that 69 percent of Americans,

8 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2020

URBAN RURAL SUBURBAN SMALL TOWN

BIDEN TRUMP

65% 33%

TRUMP BIDEN

65% 33%

BIDEN TRUMP

54% 44%

TRUMP BIDEN

55% 43%

ASSOCIATED PRESS/NORC EXIT POLL

including 35 percent of Republicans, favored being allowed to purchase a government health care policy (aka a public option, not that the pollsters called it that). Making such issues more salient, and more prominent to voters’ sense of what the Democrats stand for, is a challenge Democrats have to address. For now, however, the defining issues and values that many voters associate with each of the parties are less economic than they are cultural and racial.

Unions, of course, were once the institution upon which Democrats relied to boost awareness of the economic distinctions between the parties. However, as union membership has been eroded to barely a tenth of the workforce, following decades of employer opposition, labor’s capacity to define or redefine election issues or distinct party identities has diminished accordingly.

In November’s election, the hotel employee union UNITE HERE played a key role in turning out Latino and working-class voters for Biden in Nevada and Arizona. But the union’s impact was an exception to the rule in some other states. While the AP/ NORC national exit poll showed Biden carrying the union vote by a 55 percent to 42 percent margin, its polls in some states showed little difference between the union member and non-member vote. (In Pennsylvania, the difference was 3 percent, and in Wisconsin a bare 1 percent.) Among their white working-class members, unions often don’t loom as large in shaping electoral calculations and attitudes toward the parties as Fox News and right-wing talk radio do.

MORE SHOCKING TO the Demo-

crats on election night was the Latino

vote, which exit polls showed Biden winning by a little under 2 to 1, a considerably smaller margin than the Democrats had expected. The level of Latino support differed substantially from state to state, however, with (by the admittedly limited AP/ NORC numbers) Biden getting 69 percent in California, 62 percent in Texas, 59 percent in Arizona, and 54 percent in Florida. Within Texas, Trump appears to have run even or a little better than even in the almost entirely Latino counties that stretch along the Rio Grande (way down from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 massive advantage in these counties), while decisively losing the Latino vote in the state’s major cities. The cities are home to a far higher percentage of Latino immigrants than the border counties, however, whose residents largely come from families who’ve been there for many generations.

We can posit some guesses as to why the Rio Grande Latino vote went the way it did. The high poverty rate there has led some residents to take jobs in what we might term Trumpian occupations, working in oil fields or guarding the border (“guarding” is, of course, a euphemism, but that’s the subject of a different piece). As a rather static and traditional community, the Rio Grande region also has some commonalities with the largely white rural areas of Central Pennsylvania or Southeast Ohio.

Some might assume that Trump’s white nationalism would keep the Rio Grande in the Democratic camp.

But white supremacy isn’t the only traditional order that’s under attack in today’s America. As my colleague Paul Starr has noted, the supremacy of men over women, the native-born over immigrants, straights over gays,

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and the religious over the secular are also under attack, and the Democratic Party is seen as the party that’s furthering those attacks, if often less zealously than right-wing media claim. Each of these revolutions in power relationships has triggered its own counterrevolution, as all revolutions do, and the vast majority of the counterrevolutionaries have migrated to the Republican column, if they weren’t already there.

How then, do we explain California, where Latinos have pushed the state well to the left over the past quarter-century? To begin, the most prominent and politically effective Latino institutions in the state since the Latino population exploded with the wave of immigrants in the 1980s and ’90s have been Latino-led or heavily Latino unions. In their own street organizing and contractual campaigns and electoral work for Democratic candidates and ballot measures, those unions have shaped Latino public opinion. They’ve led movements for immigrant rights, higher minimum wages, more funding for public schools, and more access to affordable health care. On the considerable number of ballot measures to promote those causes over the past couple of decades, Latinos have approved them at rates even higher than those of Black voters. In so doing, those unions have raised the salience of economic issues and the identification of the Democrats with those issues within the state’s Latino communities. In Texas, no comparable unions exist (indeed, hardly any unions have a presence there). In Nevada and Arizona, while they’re still a relatively small presence, they’re sufficiently strategic and determined to have helped push those states into Biden’s column.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE the two

parties, each a representative of a distinct world, neither commanding a political majority over the other?

The prospects for Republicans turning away from Trumpism are dim. The 73 million (and counting) votes Trump managed to turn out vastly exceeds anything any previous Republican was able to corral. It’s too big for less Trumpian Republicans to

seek to move in a different direction, not least because the party’s zealots and their media allies wouldn’t permit it. A Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley, should they run for president in 2024, would doubtless raise other issues, but they couldn’t really repudiate the nativist and racist themes to which the Republican base vibrates and still win the nomination. They might bring back some of the collegeeducated Republican suburbanites who decamped to Biden this year, but they’d lose the backing of the bulk of the party to a Trump successor.

The Trump successor might be Trump himself. As I write, he’s been reported to be thinking about declaring his candidacy for 2024 as soon as the Electoral College anoints Biden this December. Such a move would effectively freeze the party in its current condition, turning any other Republican presidential candidate or proto-candidate into a heretic, and posing a genuine conundrum for Rupert Murdoch and big-time Republican donors who’d like to see the party move on.

Despite Biden’s success in reassembling the “blue wall” this November, Republicans’ long-term prospects in the Midwest look pretty good. As the nation as a whole grows more multiracial and college-educated, as millennials and Gen Zers move the electorate leftward, Midwestern states will largely resist these trends. Their young people will move away to more dynamic economies (for which reason immigrants will go elsewhere, too), and their cities will continue to shrink.

Democrats will have to meet this challenge not only by doing their damnedest to hold these states, but

Democratic leaders should make popular economic-justice issues that win support in red states and districts the centerpiece of their identity and purpose.

by trying to hasten the Sun Belt dynamics that enabled them to squeak to victory this year in Arizona and Georgia. Texas disappointed the Democrats this year, but even with the setback in the Rio Grande Valley, Biden still did better there than he did in Ohio and Iowa. Democrats are going to have to make long-term investments in North Carolina, Florida, and, yes, Texas if they’re going to become the majority party electorally. If the popular vote were determinative for president, of course, such concerns would be a good deal less acute, so organizing around the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would also be a worthwhile Democratic mission.

The Democrats’ advantage in the popular vote will continue to grow.

Millennials and Gen Zers aren’t left because they’re young; they’re left because they’ve borne the brunt of the most dysfunctional economy since the 1930s, and because they’re far more racially diverse than older generations. Even as they swell the Democrats’ numbers (chiefly, in states that, unfortunately, are already blue), they’ll continue to highlight issues like racist police practices—as well they should, as well they must.

The Democratic establishment’s response shouldn’t be to tell them to shut up, which is pretty much what party leaders like Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) have counseled. Rather, hard though it may be, those leaders should work to enact the kind of popular economic-justice issues that win support in red states and districts, and, more than just enact, to make them the centerpiece of the Democrats’ identity and purpose.

President-elect Biden at least partially understands that; whether he understands just how much appointees from the Wall Street wing of the party undercut the repurposing that the Democrats need remains to be seen. Even if he exceeds the Democratic left’s expectations, the party still faces an arduous future.

As Democrats’ popular majorities continue to grow, so will Republican efforts to suppress their votes.

Nothing about either party’s future is assured. The state of the parties is hostile equipoise. n

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Prosecuting Trump Is the Only Way to Heal the Nation Letting him off the hook for multiple crimes would reinforce Trump’s own contempt for the rule of law.

BY A L E X A N D E R S A M M O N Going out as it came in, the Trump campaign’s last days were ablaze with misconduct, corruption, and illegal activity with no regard for the law and no fear of consequence.

According to the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, the final three weeks of the campaign produced a flurry of FEC filings with plainly illegal individual contributions far beyond the individual limit of $2,800. All told, the campaign took on $2.7 million in wrongful and excessive donations in the last 20 days. The Biden campaign’s FEC reports over the same period showed no similar pattern.

That impropriety is barely a blip in the course of the Trump experience, where outright contempt for the law and the expectation of total impunity has been perhaps the most coherent and consistent direction of the president’s four years at the helm. Trump himself and his various appointees engaged in crimes far more grievous than campaignfinance violations. The stuff we know about—the violations of the Emoluments Clause, the solicitation of foreign interference in elections, the tax cheating, the use of the military on civilian protesters, the sexual assault allegations and the attempted use of the Justice Department to fight them, the obvious and repeated obstruction of justice, and on and on—may be dwarfed by the crimes we haven’t yet been made aware of.

Trump was impeached for a tiny percentage of this, and then he and his enablers in the attorney general’s office and the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security kept on unabated.

The need for a Trump Truth and Reconciliation Committee, for some exposition of the breadth of misconduct to allow for just the possibility of accountability, was a popular refrain in the lead-up to

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the November election. But since Election Day came to pass, the volume on those calls has dropped dramatically. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested in November that the time for accountability was close at hand, her comments were met with alarm. Politico, in what purported to be a non-editorial piece, broke the fourth wall to assert that the suggestion that Trump et al. be prosecuted for their prodigious lawbreaking was “[r] arely a healthy sign in any democracy,” while quoting an anonymous White House official on the topic of accountability: “It definitely should scare the American people more than it scares me. That type of rhetoric is terrifying.”

That’s the messaging, somehow, that’s coming from many liberals as well. After rattling off various types of truth and reconciliation commissions in a recent column for The Washington Post (postwar, postgenocide, post-slavery, post-Nazi), historian Jill Lepore resolves that “[n]one of the conditions of a truth and reconciliation commission apply to Trump’s four years in the White House,” and “what the nation needs, pretty urgently, is self-reflection,” before decreeing that “history, not partisans, prosecute Trump.” But if history has taught us anything, it’s that history makes for extremely weak prosecution. Self-reflection is an antidote for bad behavior only in lenient preschools.

What exactly to do about Trump, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, and their epic corruption will be a defining question of the Joe Biden presidency.

For many Democrats, the prospect of hauling a political rival before the courts is too messy and excessively political, the sort of thing done in banana republics and not in the highminded and high-functioning political culture of American democracy.

So appalled were Democrats by Trump’s calls to lock up Hillary Clinton, most are determined to overcorrect by proposing to give Trump’s crimes a pass.

The modern Democratic Party tries to model good behavior. It rejects actions that could be perceived as partisan (seemingly still unable to internalize the fact that the GOP has remade every democratic procedure as partisan); it’s antithetical to their commitment to national “healing”—the process by which Democrats cede ground to Republicans after voters rebuke the GOP by taking the presidency away from them.

But that conventional wisdom on the impropriety of prosecuting presidents is dangerously ill-conceived. A failure to bring Trump to account before the law would mark a profound politicization of the legal system, one that would call into question the legitimacy of our rule of law and notch a new low in its undermining. The defining feature of a sickly democracy or a plain autocracy is crimes committed by the powerful going unpunished. If the facts are there, the choice should be clear.

Observation of laws is not voluntary, nor is enforcement of consequence predicated on who is breaking them.

All the world’s bipartisan commissions would do less to heal the country than merely proving that the rich and powerful are bound by the same set of laws as everyone else.

For decades, Democrats have projected a general queasiness when it comes to the process of accountability. In the 45-plus years since their tough stance on Watergate brought Richard Nixon to the brink of removal and conviction for the Watergate crimes and forced his resignation, they declined repeatedly to see through the process of prosecuting crimes of powerful transgressors who happen to be Republicans, especially at the very top. They’ve mustered a wide array of excuses, from optics to perceived unpopularity.

But that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

President Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Nixon was so unpopular that it cost him re-election. Still, Democrats soon embraced Ford’s decision

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in the name of national healing, helping to usher in Ronald Reagan just six years later.

Barack Obama swept into office with an impressive popular mandate, with large majorities in the House and Senate, in a stunning rebuke of Republican president George W. Bush. Obama’s campaign-trail suggestion that Bush would be held to account helped deliver his electoral blowout. But though Obama reversed Bush’s torture policies, he did not repudiate the USA Patriot Act, nor did he seek to hold Bush legal adviser and torture architect John Yoo to account. Obama’s Justice Department failed to indict any of the major banking executives whose illegal actions caused the collapse. Obama refused to use any of his considerable political capital on upholding the rule of law, only to give that capital up for nothing. The Republican Party, once so thoroughly discredited it was thought to be on its deathbed, came surging back within just two years, and soon reclaimed the House, the Senate, and eventually the presidency. Bush is now a famous portrait painter who doesn’t deign to weigh in on partisan politics, admired by Democrats as a beacon of rectitude compared to Trump. The Democrats’ refusal to prosecute obvious crimes has not only politicized and undermined the rule of law in the past, it also seeded their own political defeat in 2016, allowing those same Republicans to return to office more brazen and emboldened than ever.

In the impeachment and interference investigations of Trump, there was plenty of evidence to show that the president had committed crimes.

But Democrats dithered, delayed, and got outplayed by both special counsel Robert Mueller and Attorney General Bill Barr. Still, Trump is vulnerable to multiple prosecutions once he leaves office, and while Mueller felt it inappropriate to fully pursue a sitting president, he left ample evidence of Trump’s criminality lying around, ready to be put to use. If Trump arranges for a pardon, either resigning in favor of Mike Pence or by trying to pardon himself, he cannot be prosecuted for federal crimes. But if he is not pardoned, or

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The defining feature of a sickly democracy or a plain autocracy is crimes committed by the powerful going unpunished. if the Supreme Court rejects the idea that a president can pardon himself, Democrats are certainly not bound

by Mueller’s prosecutorial timidity, and need to have a plan in place.

On the campaign trail, Biden initially pledged not to pull punches: In 2019, he unequivocally committed to not pardoning President Trump. But the closer he’s gotten to having the ability to actually do that, the more he’s wavered. Prosecuting Trump, he told NPR in August, would be “a very, very unusual thing” and “probably not very—how can I say it?—good for democracy.” No mention, of course, of how subversion of the uniform enforcement of the rule of law would be good for democracy.

Biden, like Obama, is an institutionalist, the sort who worships at the altar of bipartisanship and decorum that would never prosecute a political rival. He also staggers more than sweeps into the White House, thanks

to a narrow Electoral College victory, no likely Senate majority, and a net loss in the House. He’ll have limited ability to accomplish anything legislatively in his first (and only) term.

But any plan for process reforms, which Democrats of all types have indicated is top priority for the Biden presidency, has to include the process of seeking accountability and redress as the law requires.

Early indications are not promising. Biden’s rumored appointees for his Justice Department are descendants of the lineage of people who thought it was inappropriate for the Obama administration to pursue criminal bankers, torturers, or presidents. The person with the strongest reputation for ass-kicking likely will be Sally Yates, whose rep doesn’t exactly match her record. In fact, Yates is currently a partner at King & Spalding, one of the three major firms that supplied lawyers for Trump’s election strategy. That’s hardly the profile of someone who’s going to charge headlong in the task of rounding up Trump’s abettors.

It’s likely, moreover, that Biden is simply hoping other jurisdictions will do his dirty work. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, has made something of a reputation of going after Trump and his affiliate acts at the state level; ditto District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in Manhattan. Accountability is not a legislative act, nor is it a political one, and it remains one of the few places where Biden can accomplish something that is good for the long-term health both of the country and of the party. If he wants to heal the nation—he’s repeatedly sold himself as a the protector of America’s soul—prosecuting Trump and affirming the rule of law is the best way to do it. Trump’s supporters will cry foul and lash out in extreme fashion. But they’re likely to do that in response to anything Biden does—even something as apolitical as counting votes has merited an armed response from Trump’s most militant. If Biden’s only lasting legacy is to have brought about the end of the era of elite impunity, his presidency will have been well worth it. n

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Mother Emanuel was founded in 1816, and there is a resilience rooted in its history.

SPENCER MEANS / CC SHARE ALIKE

Return to Mother Emanuel The site of the 2015 hate crime that killed nine parishioners was in many ways a preview for an ugly era in race relations and politics.

BY BR I T TA N Y G I B S O N CHARLESTON, S.C. – “With fear and trembling” is how the Rev. Eric S.C. Manning reacted in 2016 when he found out that he would be assigned to Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South

Carolina, one year after nine people were killed by white supremacist Dylann Roof at their weekly prayer meeting.

It was the same fear and trembling that Manning felt when he first felt

called to serve the church at 27 years old. But he never could have anticipated that calling would lead him to one of the oldest Black churches in the United States, and one that was so fatally targeted by racist intent.

“I have a tendency of always being honest—brutally honest I think at times—and I shared with the congregation that morning that I have no earthly idea how to lead a congregation through this,” Manning said in an interview with the Prospect about his first Sunday service. That morning he read from Psalm 23, in a sermon that reflected on the trust in God to lead. “I believe that it’s God that has sent me here and He will lead us all through this together,” Manning said that morning.

A year earlier, Manning was at home with his family when his daughter told him there was a shooting at a church in Charleston. Manning recalls that at the time he said, “That couldn’t be … I would have gotten a call by now.”

Then his phone rang.

Details were slow to come in that night, and when senior pastor and state senator the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney couldn’t be reached, Manning and his family immediately started to pray. Pinckney was killed in the attack, along with eight other members of that night’s prayer group, while his wife and young daughter were in an adjacent room.

Manning would eventually learn that the church he was serving on June 17, 2015, Bethel AME Church in neighboring Georgetown, was also on Roof’s list of possible targets. “As time progressed, it started to sink in how much hate this young man had and how confused he was, especially in regard to the race relations within this country,” Manning says.

Since the massacre, church members have been healing on their own timelines, Manning explains.

Through a grant, Mother Emanuel has been able to work with the Medical University of South Carolina and has set up an empowerment center, which is the central hub of nine different trauma response programs and services, to support the mental health of the victims, first responders, and members of

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the congregation in the aftermath of the tragedy. The grant allowed Mother Emanuel to bring in clinicians and trauma professionals to aid the church, as well as train church leaders on how to best support the congregation. Manning saw it as part of his duty as Mother Emanuel’s leader.

But at the same time, the horrors perpetrated in Charleston have not abated. The last five years have all seen an increase in the number of reported hate crimes in the United States, according to a report by the California State University, San Bernardino Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. The Mother Emanuel massacre was a dark signal of the expressions of white supremacy, hate speech, and bigotry America was to endure in the Trump years, from the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to spasms of deadly violence this year in places like Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin.

“Every time something like this happens, it thrust Mother Emanuel back into that space,” Manning says.

“It can’t necessarily just be something you pass by or pass through, but you need to call and check on members and make sure everyone is doing all right … it puts everyone back in that space, as if to say, here we go again.”

Part of this year’s presidential election served as a referendum on the tolerance of hate speech, bigotry, and extremism. President-elect Joe Biden says he decided to run after seeing how President Donald Trump sat by during the Charlottesville rally. After a year with one of the lowest levels of hate crimes in the United States in recent decades, the Mother Emanuel shooting in 2015 was the start of an uptick in hate and extremism that would go mostly ignored under Trump’s first term, if not outright encouraged. As hate and anger stews nationwide, and a demagogue eggs it on, all roads lead back to Mother Emanuel.

Evidence indicates that hate crimes can be linked to presidential rhetoric, explains Brian Levin, director of the CSUSB Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. When

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people are paying attention to leaders, their words can correlate to different behaviors. For example, six days after 9/11, President George W. Bush spoke at the Islamic Center of Washington, and hate crimes dropped “precipitously” the next day and into the next year, Levin says.

By contrast, when President Trump spoke about the 2017 Charlottesville rally—a gathering of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, neofascists, and Klansmen that emboldened mostly white men to march through the streets of a small Virginia town chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” while waving tiki torches and Confederate and Nazi flags—he said there were “very fine people” on both sides.

After Trump’s remarks, hate crimes peaked.

As far back as December 2015, when Trump, then a candidate for president, revealed his “Muslim ban” plan for the first time, the data showed an increase in the frequency

“I understand the historical significance of being the pastor of Mother Emanuel and I do not have the option to sit on the sidelines,” Manning says. and severity of anti-Muslim attacks.

By this point, Trump was regularly receiving wall-to-wall coverage, with networks showing live footage of his empty podium in anticipation of what he would say or do next. This became a conduit for hate, which spread across the country over the next five years.

“We see this [link] with a fair

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degree of consistency,” Levin says.

“When leaders speak around visceral or fear-inducing, panic-inducing events, their words correlate to things like an increase in hate crime.”

Trump’s presidency has made life harder for the Mother Emanuel congregation. Manning shares that people still call the church and leave hateful voice mails. The church has also had to increase physical security at their building. Manning adds that Trump’s resistance to acknowledge white supremacy in the United States has hurt as much as his overall lack of empathy.

“It’s hurtful when you don’t want to come to a place to understand why it’s so hurtful,” Manning says. “You have to remember in history, when torches were coming down the road, there was no good thing on the other end; from an African American perspective, that meant a lynching was getting ready to take place.”

Today, we know that lynchings were not just acts of violence and hate, but also a tool used to scare African Americans away from voting. A recent study shows that wherever there were more lynchings in the 20th century, there are fewer registered Black voters even today.

Recent data also shows an uptick of extremist attacks around elections, Levin explains, sometimes mirroring the rhetoric of the moment. The worst month for anti-Black hate crimes in the last 30 years was during the 1996 presidential campaign, when much of the discourse was fixed on the “welfare queen” stereotype and the welfare reform bill passed under President Clinton.

This year, the U.S. hasn’t seen as many attacks, which may be because of COVID-19 keeping people indoors.

But there was an attempted plot by an extremist group to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. The trends show that hate and extremism has gotten “leaner and meaner,” Levin explains.

While there are comparatively fewer attacks, they are more severe.

There are also more ways someone can be radicalized today. Groups like QAnon, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo movement, and others can spread information on social media

and online forums easily. Social media companies are currently playing catch-up when it comes to purging their sites of hate groups, and indeed their algorithms promote provocative and sometimes hateful content, spreading it around their platforms.

Roof was radicalized by looking at statistics of “Black on white” crime and browsing the Council of Conservative Citizens website, not by the most “over-the-top, swastikabearing websites,” Levin explains.

You could argue that his massacre at Mother Emanuel set off a global competition for the most egregious homicides. While one of the United States’ largest national-security threats is domestic terrorism, it is also an international threat, with attacks in New Zealand, Germany, Norway, and across the globe.

The usual targets of hate groups are also expanding to what Levin calls more of a revolving carousel of hate. “The traditional list that we would use for intergroup violence … we still track it, but the number of folks that are targeted because of prejudice is now expanding into other things because it’s more politically acceptable,” he says. Hate becomes, Levin says, “‘I don’t hate Black people, but I hate the Marxist Black Lives Matter.’”

In the first presidential debate in late September, Trump was asked by moderator Chris Wallace to condemn the rise in white supremacy and extremism in the United States.

Instead, he told a hate group called the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” The phrase was later printed on Proud Boys merchandise and apparel.

But within targeted groups, there is a resilience rooted in history. Mother Emanuel, which was founded in 1816, was targeted when its leaders tried to coordinate a slave rebellion. Thirty-four men were hanged and 35 more banished from the state, and the church building was destroyed. Roof was not the first person to try to destroy this place of worship. Rev. Manning says he thinks about Mother Emanuel’s history every single day.

Manning also uses his position to continue to encourage his

This year’s presidential election served as a referendum on the tolerance of hate speech, bigotry, and extremism. congregation to stay involved. That means reminding people to vote during Sunday services and daily prayer Facebook live streams. He also marched with Black Lives Matter protests this summer, not shying away from the racial-justice movement of the moment.

During the 1960s leading up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, voting in itself was an act of protest. But this year, even as Trump is voted out of office, it will not remedy the emotional fervor that predated him, leading to domestic terrorists like Dylann Roof. And Manning stresses the importance of holding elected officials accountable after Election Day. “We’re going to hold you accountable as well,” Manning says. “We gave you our voice; we gave you our vote. And we are expecting to further our dialogue and we expect to have adjusted what needs to be adjusted.”

Manning and his son, who’s in his early twenties, streamed their presence live from one protest, and Manning was told by members of the congregation how proud they were that their pastor was participating.

But Manning sees his participation as nonnegotiable.

“It comes back down to the conviction that I have, in which I understand the historical significance of being the pastor of Mother Emanuel and I do not have the option to sit on the sidelines,” Manning says. “I must be involved and I must speak out when these kinds of injustices are taking place and encourage others to not just talk about doing something but do something.” n

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HOW TO COUNTER

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RACT

URT

FROM 1979 UNTIL HER retirement in 1998,

Lilly Ledbetter worked at Goodyear Tire and Rubber’s plant in Gadsden, Alabama.

Once she had left the job, she learned a disturbing fact. When Ledbetter had started, her supervisor salary was comparable to that of men in similar positions. But with each performance review, the men she worked alongside got bigger raises, and she gradually fell further and further behind.

By the time she retired, she was earning $3,727 a month, hundreds of dollars less than the lowest-paid man in her position, and significantly below the average man.

Ledbetter took Goodyear to court, alleging a blatant violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which guarantees equal treatment in the workplace. But in 2007, the Supreme Court held that the statute of limitations on her claims had expired, and she could no longer seek redress. She would have had to file her claim shortly after Goodyear hired her, the Court ruled.

This was an absurd request—Ledbetter didn’t know how she was being cheated until after she retired—and it served to gut the ability of any woman to reasonably enforce the law.

The Court had issued what’s known as a statutory ruling, which is distinct from a constitutional ruling. In other words, the Court had not deemed the law itself to be unconstitutional, but merely ruled that the way the statute had been written rendered it unavailable to Ledbetter.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a dissent that urged Congress to intervene. The Court’s interpretation, Ginsburg said, was out of step with modern wage discrimination and the realities of the workplace. She recommended Congress amend the law, and fix the Court’s “parsimonious” reading, so workers like Ledbetter could have a shot at restitution. Ginsburg added: “[T]he ball is in Congress’ court.”

Ledbetter became a proxy for the cause of equal pay for equal work, and Democrats pledged to fight the ruling the first chance they got. And they did, rewriting the statute so that the clock would start ticking on the statute of limitations each time a discriminatory paycheck was issued,

Congress has the power to override Supreme Court rulings based on statutory interpretations.

By Rachel M. Cohen and Marcia Brown ILLUSTRATIONS BY MIKE HADDAD not at the time an employee was first hired.

The very first piece of legislation President Barack Obama signed in 2009 was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. What makes Ledbetter so unusual is that Democrats have not similarly fought equally absurd yet consequential rulings from the Court, instead throwing their hands up in despair at the unfairness of a particular decision and then moving on.

But a joint review by The Intercept and The American Prospect of hundreds of Court cases finds dozens of statutory rulings similar to Ledbetter’s that Congress could overturn simply by tweaking the statute to remove whatever ambiguity the Court claimed to find in its text. Even where the Court has ruled on constitutional grounds, there is often much room left to legislate the boundaries, just as conservatives have done in relation to Roe v. Wade (1973) and abortion restrictions. From salvaging the Voting Rights Act gutted by Shelby County v. Holder (2013) to protecting workers’ freespeech rights on the job to safeguarding reproductive rights, the list of cases awaiting a creative Congress runs long.

Overrides can be passed on an individual basis, as part of larger omnibus bills, or even tacked on to unrelated appropriations or debt ceiling bills. Even the Affordable Care Act, which is currently under judicial review yet again, could be rescued from the Court’s clutches with a simple legislative

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tweak. Most of the legislation necessary to overturn these decisions is short, just a few lines to reinforce congressional intent in a way that the judiciary cannot distort it.

These statutory overrides offer a road map for progressives left paralyzed by the Court’s new composition, with the installation of Amy Coney Barrett as a sixth conservative justice. Congress can place an important and ever-needed check from a co-equal branch on an increasingly conservative judiciary, which has not shied from defanging legislation, especially regulatory law. Just as the Court sets the boundaries of congressional intent, Congress can move those boundaries.

Since the death of Ginsburg in September, the left has debated various options for reforming what many see as an overly partisan judiciary. Some have called for increasing the number of justices to help restore the Court’s ideological balance. Others have suggested term limits, or requiring a supermajority for certain decisions. In mid-October, then–presidential candidate Joe Biden said that if elected, he would convene a bipartisan group of scholars to make recommendations on Court reform.

While changing the rules and the makeup of the judiciary holds promise, demoralized activists should not lose sight of Congress’s power to temper or reverse existing Court decisions. Statutory overrides and chipping away at conservative constitutional decisions should be part of any future progressive agenda, and the set of demands brought to negotiations by the White House and Democrat-controlled House of Representatives.

Overriding judicial decisions, while always an important tool in Congress’s legislative toolbox, has fallen by the wayside over the last two decades. One study, by Yale law professor William Eskridge and then–federal law clerk Matthew Christiansen, traces the turning point in the nation’s history of judicial overrides to the mid-1970s, when emboldened post-Watergate Democrats passed major omnibus legislation (like the Tax Reform Act of 1976) that updated law and rejected various Supreme Court decisions at once. It helped that this new wave of overrides overlapped with big increases in congressional staff; House committee staff

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increased by two-thirds between 1973 and 1975, and the House and Senate Judiciary Committees grew by even more.

For the next 20 years, up until 1998, Eskridge and Christiansen found that the Democratic-controlled Congress was “energized, aggressive, and highly … interventionist in matters of state policy” and therefore “happy to denounce and reverse antiregulatory” judicial rulings. Popular policy areas targeted for judicial overrides included civil rights, federal jurisdiction, and tax law, but were not limited to those.

Even in the polarized decade of the 1990s, Congress overrode more than 80 rulings, more than in any of the preceding four decades. But following President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, judicial overrides slowed to a trickle.

Federal lawmakers currently take something of a piecemeal approach to judicial overrides. Several recent bills that have passed the House override Court decisions as part of more comprehensive larger legislation, like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and the For the People Act. But Congress has yet to take up the mantle of congressional overrides as an organized, concerted strategy to take back power.

Some observers, like University of California, Irvine law professor Rick Hasen, predict that judicial overrides would likely require near-unified control of Congress and the presidency, like Democrats had in 2009 when they passed the Lilly Ledbetter Act. In other words, whether Democrats retake the Senate following two Georgia runoffs in January could have a major impact on their ability to get judicial overrides through the legislative grinder, especially as many areas of once bipartisan lawmaking, particularly civil rights, have grown more polarized.

However, despite Congress’s hyper-partisanship, there may be some opportunity for lawmakers to take action on judicial overrides where there’s bipartisan agreement. Moreover, even if Democrats can’t push multiple judicial overrides as standalone legislation, lawmakers could try to tack fixes onto must-pass legislation like the annual National Defense Authorization Act. (These bills—known in congressional

jargon as “riders”—are a common way lawmakers leverage the appropriations process to push pet projects through each year.)

Some of this is about finding the right window of opportunity, but a great deal is about refocusing the minds of federal lawmakers, who have for too long accepted the rulings of the Supreme Court as intractable, when they have the power to respond in many cases. “The energy has just not always been there,” said Charlotte Garden, a professor at the Seattle University School of Law who specializes in labor and employment law.

Congress should be reinvigorated to use its power, and not simply sit back in resignation.

For lasting progressive change, history shows us that simply passing a judicial override won’t be enough. University of Indiana law professor Deborah Widiss found that legal research services like Westlaw and LexisNexis do not reliably detect congressional overrides, especially if lawmakers do not explicitly identify in the law which case their new statute overturns. Advocacy groups will need to vigorously educate attorneys and judges about them, or the overrides could go ignored for years by the courts. “You might assume that all you have to do is change the law, but my research suggests courts don’t always implement even really prominent overrides,” Widiss says, pointing to the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, which updated the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.

While the future of judicial reform is hazy, holding courts accountable to changes

Federal lawmakers have for too long accepted the rulings of the Supreme Court as intractable, when they have the power to respond.

Overturning statutory Court decisions would have dramatic impacts for reproductive rights.

is a challenge that lawmakers and activists, working together, can meet. By zeroing in on statutory decisions, Congress can reclaim its power, and advance change for millions. Here are several areas where progress can be made.

JOSE LUIS MAGANA / AP PHOTO

Reproductive Rights

While current legislative momentum for reproductive rights is focused on over turning the Hyde A mendment—a federal provision that since 1976 has barred Medicaid funding for abortion services—and the long-term desire to codify Roe v. Wade into legislation, there are other statutory measures lawmakers could take to strengthen reproductive rights.

One way is by clarifying that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993—the statute that was at the heart of the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case in 2014—cannot be

used as a tool of discrimination. RFRA was itself a statutory response to a poor 1990 decision that many groups felt weakened religious freedom, particularly for religious minorities. But advocates say RFRA has been twisted and abused over the last decade, not only allowing organizations to deny contraception coverage to their employees, but permitting the firing of transgender workers, and enabling federally funded child welfare providers to deny potential foster and adoptive parents deemed the “wrong” religion. In the Hobby Lobby case, five justices concluded that RFRA permits for-profit companies to deny contraception coverage to employees based on a religious objection.

To fix all this, Congress could quickly pass the Do No Harm Act, an existing bill backed by several civil and reproductiverights groups that would clarify that RFRA is meant to protect religious freedom without allowing harm inflicted on others, such as denying groups contraception. It was introduced in the House in 2019 by Reps.

Joe Kennedy (D-MA) and Bobby Scott (D-VA) and in the Senate by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), the vice president–elect. To date, it has 215 House and 31 Senate co-sponsors.

Brigitte Amiri, a deputy director at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said the Do No Harm Act would be a “more robust” way to get at cases like Hobby Lobby because it would bar RFRA lawsuits if they discriminate against third parties.

Voting Rights

Perhaps the most consequential legislation passed in the 20th century lost its potency in a S upr eme C ou r t decision decided on statutor y grounds, Shelby County v. Holder (2013).

The Court held in a party-line 5-4 vote that section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of

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1965, which required jurisdictions with histories of discrimination to get federal preclearance before changing voting laws, put untenable burdens on states, because the conditions at the time of the legislation are no longer true.

The decision was a disaster for voting rights advocates. In the aftermath, dozens of states implemented voter ID laws, including a North Carolina law that a federal court said discriminates against Black voters “with almost surgical precision.” The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights documented that after Shelby, more than 1,600 polling places were closed. One of the most blatant f lourishes of this renewed ability to curtail voting rights was Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s gubernatorial campaign.

While secretary of state, Kemp removed 1.5 million voters from the rolls, as well as another 500,000 during his campaign for governor.

Courts have found at least ten instances of intentional discrimination in voting rights decisions since Shelby, a direct counEnvironmental law largely rests on legislation passed 50 years ago. Democrats could update those statutes.

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ter to Justice Roberts’s majority opinion that conditions in 1965 no longer exist.

Like in the Ledbetter decision, the minority dissent made clear that an updated preclearance formula—which the Court called unconstitutional—can and should be designed by Congress. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020, which overrides Shelby County, among other voting rights protections, has already passed the House.

The bill would update the statutory language for preclearance, as well as add new voter protections.

Democrats’ first bill of the 116th Congress was the For the People Act of 2019, legislation that expands voter protections, ratchets up ethics requirements for candidates and the Supreme Court, and provides for new campaign-finance rules. It addresses another voting rights case that can be overturned through a congressional override, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (2018), which ruled that Ohio’s voter purges were legal.

If a voter in Ohio hasn’t voted in two years, they receive a card in the mail, and if they

don’t return it, and do not vote in the next four years, the voter is kicked off the rolls.

Voter advocates alleged that the policy violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), which explicitly bars states from removing someone on the basis of their not voting. But the Court decided that the law does not violate the NVRA because the failure to vote is not the only reason for removal—Ohio’s law also requires that the voter not respond to the mailed notice. The voter purges disproportionately impact Black voters, especially in Ohio’s three largest metro areas—which are also Democratic-leaning.

The For the People Act specifically overrides Husted by making voter purge schemes like Ohio’s illegal under the NVRA. The bill also tackles another court decision, Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which famously prohibited the federal government from restricting political expenditures by corporations under the First Amendment.

Because the decision was on constitutional grounds, Congress can’t overturn it simply by updating the law, and a constitutional amendment remains unlikely. But the new

“ Congress can have a real dialogue with the Court, even when the Supreme Court strikes down a law Congress has passed.” legislation seeks to temper its force through public financing, requiring more transparency, and restructuring the Federal Election Commission.

“Congress can have a real dialogue with the Court, even when the Supreme Court strikes down a law Congress has passed as unconstitutional,” said Dan Weiner, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Election Reform Program. The strategy is not dissimilar to how the right reacted to Roe v.

Wade, chipping away at the decision over time, he said. “If the other side doesn’t treat Supreme Court decisions as final, and continues to look for ways to accomplish its goals, I certainly think progressives should do that too.”

STEVE HELBER / AP PHOTO

Disability Rights

Despite a bipartisan congressional disability rights caucus with over 50 House members, little energy has been put forth to proa c t ively rol l back statutory decisions that harm individuals with disabilities.

The most consequential case that Congress could address would be Buckhannon Board and Care Home, Inc. v. West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, a 2001 decision that has fundamentally distorted civil rights litigation over the last two decades. In that 5-4 decision authored

by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the Court effectively rendered moot the possibility for a lawyer to collect attorney’s fees

if a defendant corrects the issue before the case is completed.

The decision “has meant that far fewer civil rights lawyers take disability cases, since they know there’s a high chance they won’t get paid,” said Sam Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan who has argued four cases before the Court.

To fix Buckhannon, Congress would need to clarify the so-called “catalyst theory,” a rule courts used to rely on that says that if a plaintiff’s lawsuit was the catalyst for a change that benefited the plaintiff, the plaintiff would be treated as having prevailed even if the plaintiff didn’t have to litigate all the way to a final judgment.

“I think you could write a statute that gives attorney fees to an attorney who makes a demand letter to a defendant that says, ‘Look, I’m going to sue you unless you make these changes,’” Bagenstos said. “It’s not like the plaintiff lawyer would get some big windfall, but it would ensure they get paid evenly for the time spent on the case to that point.” The Civil Rights Act of 2008 included a measure to overturn Buckhannon, but policymakers at the time were more focused on the economy and health care. A new Congress could revive it.

Congress could also make it easier for lower-income families to seek redress under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act by effectively repealing Arlington Central School District Board of Education v.

Murphy. In that 2006 case, the Court ruled that expert witness fees were not compensable under the act, meaning families who wanted to bring in expert testimony would need to pay for that out of pocket. Arlington Central also disincentivized lawyers from taking cases for families who wouldn’t be able to bring in the kind of evidence necessary to win.

“There are notorious class divides in IDEA cases,” said Bagenstos. “Upper-middle-class and middle-class parents do far, far better, and a lot of the issues really do require an expert witness to help families effectively press their case.”

Congress could also clarify that the burden of proof in IDEA cases rests on schools, not parents, which would be a reversal of the Court’s 2005 decision in Schaffer v. Weast.

“It’s hard to get people excited about burden of proof because they don’t understand it, but there’s no question that putting the burden of proof on the plaintiff as opposed to the schools makes it harder for families to enforce their rights,” said Chris Edmunds, a disability rights attorney.

Sasha Samberg-Champion, another disability rights attorney, said Congress should look at lower-court decisions too, since advocates have largely avoided bringing new disability cases over the last decade to what they view as a hostile judiciary.

For example, Congress could clarify that the statute of limitations for an Americans With Disabilities Act case starts from the time someone with a disability is discriminated against by an inaccessible facility, not the time when the inaccessible facility was first constructed—an issue similar to the one Congress addressed with the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Congress could also confirm that the ADA covers online-only businesses.

“It used to be that if we got a bad circuit court decision we could file for Supreme Court review, but we don’t dare do that now since we’d risk only making things worse,” Samberg-Champion said. “That makes it even more important for Congress to step in and provide relief where the Supreme Court won’t.”

Environmental Law

Unlike other areas, environmental law largely rests on legislation passed 50 years ago during the Nixon administration. In the subsequent yea rs, conservatives have carved out exceptions to protect their environmental interests from the judiciary—such as with laws around endangered species. Now, as federal agencies strain to meet new and growing challenges like climate change, Democrats should push for updates to those statutes.

Although experts say comprehensive legislation is preferable to statutory overrides, Congress could strengthen climate change regulations by clarifying that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered under the

NOV/DEC 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

Clean Air Act. That would overturn Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency (2014), which said that the EPA had overstepped its authority by regulating greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles. An earlier case, Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), determined that air pollution included carbon emissions.

But without clarifying language in the statute, carbon reduction policies are effectively subject to a conservative court.

The Clean Water Act also badly needs clarification. The law regulates “the waters of the United States” but doesn’t specify which waters. In one prominent case, Rapanos v.

United States (2006), the Court allowed for an “expansive” interpretation of the Clean Water Act but left “waters of the United States” undefined. Defining which waters are included would preserve important ecosystems and better protect the public.

A decision this year, U.S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture River Preservation Assn.

(2020), allowed the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to crisscross the Appalachian Trail twice by sidestepping the Mineral Leasing Act, which allows the U.S. Forest Service to grant permits to pipeline companies. The decision allowed the Forest Service’s reach to extend into the Appalachian Trail, for which the National Park Service is technically responsible but which traverses national forest. A quick legislative fix could clarify that the trail is protected NPS land, and thus not subject to Mineral Leasing Act permits. But D.J. Gerken, lead counsel for Cowpasture River Preservation Association, also said Congress could go further by amending the Mineral Leasing Act and requiring pipeline companies to prove that the best possible route is through federal lands.

Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA regulates water pollutants that go into waters, like a pipe discharging into a lake, and the Army Corps of Engineers regulates filling in wetlands, such as a developer with a bulldozer. To better protect the environment, Congress could update the statute to require that mining companies obtain permits from both agencies, to avoid a repeat of the Court’s decision in Coeur Alaska, Inc. v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (2009).

Trying to graft environmental rules onto

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decades-old policies has proven difficult. In EPA v. EME Homer City Generation (2014), the Court upheld the EPA’s 2011 Transport Rule, which regulated cross-state air pollution from upwind states to downwind states, as required under the Clean Air Act. But the case left the EPA with a flawed regulation program. Ann Carlson, environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that advocates have sought a cap-and-trade program to regulate cross-state air pollution, which would be cheaper and more cost-effective than regulating individual plants. “But the statutory language is really short and unclear, so it would be super helpful to have a statutory fix,” she said.

Other cases are relatively straightforward. In Michigan v. EPA (2015), the Court ruled that the agency must determine costs when regulating power plants. An easy statutory fix would allow the EPA to deem those costs irrelevant.

A divided Congress has made bedrock climate change difficult to accomplish.

“Environmental law is no longer bipartisan,” explained Lisa Heinzerling, a law professor at Georgetown. “It’s also because the interests are incredibly vocal and well resourced, the interests arrayed against environmental protection.”

But statutory overrides offer “room for tinkering on the edge,” Carlson said. “It seems crazy to not do anything.”

Police Misconduct

When George Floyd was killed in May, millions learned about qua lif ied immunity for police misconduct. In a 1982 decision, Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court ruled that government officials, including police, can avoid civil liability for violating an individual’s rights under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act when those rights are not “clearly established.” It’s become clear since then that this provision protects rogue and violent cops, but despite a number of federal cases challenging the constitutionality of qualified immunity,

the Court announced this past summer it would not be taking up any of them.

Congress can fix this, and a bill passed by the Democratic-controlled House in June, the Justice in Policing Act, would end qualified immunity for police officers. (Joe Biden has said he supports “reining in” the doctrine.) As a group of criminal justice scholars explained, widespread indemnification would put the primary burden of liability on municipalities, not individual officers, which then puts more pressure on the institutions that most influence those officers. Restricting or eliminating qualified immunity would also force courts to confront constitutional questions in policing they can currently dodge.

“Section 1983 is relatively straightforward, and one idea is Congress could simply amend that law to address qualified immunity,” said Hernandez Stroud, counsel for the Justice Program of the Brennan Center for Justice. Congress could also add a damages action against federal officials who violate constitutional rights, which would be consistent with the 1971 Bivens v. Six Unknown Agents decision. Some states have already started to do this: Earlier this year, Colorado passed a law creating a path for Coloradans to sue police officers in state court.

Another way Congress could increase accountability for government misconduct is by addressing a 2017 decision, Ziglar v.

Abbasi, which ruled that the hundreds of immigrants held in mass detentions following 9/11 could not bring charges against federal officials for their confinement.

Amy Fettig, executive director of the Sen-

The courts have always treated immigration law as an exception, dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

There are several Supreme Court cases on immigration that are ripe for congressional override.

tencing Project, said cases like Ziglar have helped to “gut the power of people to protect themselves” from constitutional violations.

“We know from history that when you want to roll back rights you start with a vulnerable and unpopular population, but it never stops there,” she said. “That’s just how you normalize it.”

ERIC GAY / APPHOTO

Immigration

The courts have a l w ay s t r e a t e d immigration law as an exception, dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country and precipitated more exclusionary immigration law. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the Supreme Court upheld the plenary power doctrine, allowing Congress and the executive branch to legislate around immigration without fear of court censure.

That lack of oversight enabled Trump administration policies like child separation, extended detention, and ICE raids— measures that “as the Supreme Court itself has acknowledged, would be f latly and unquestionably unconstitutional if they were U.S. citizens,” as Kevin Johnson, dean of the University of California, Davis School of Law, wrote in a law review article.

Over time, the Court has allowed Congress and the executive branch less immunity from judicial review. This year’s decision overturning Trump’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is one prominent example. The Court did not question Trump’s authority to end DACA, but censured the administration for not doing so in accordance with administrative law.

With a newly strengthened conservative majority, the Court’s newfound tendency to treat immigration law like other law merits congressional action to prevent further anti-immigrant policy. There are several Supreme Court cases ripe for congressional

override. In Demore v. Kim (2003), the Court said that the Immigration and Nationality Act’s provision for no-bail civil detention did not violate immigrants’ due-process rights.

Jennings v. Rodriguez (2018) and Nielsen v.

Preap (2019) contested immigrants’ rights to periodic bond hearings during long-term detention. The Court said no.

The simple fix, explained UCLA law professor Ingrid Eagly, is to grant everyone these same due-process rights. The New Way Forward Act, introduced in the House last year

by Rep. Jésus G. “Chuy” García (D-IL), would end mandatory detention in some cases, end for-profit detention facilities, and bolster due-process rights. It would bar immigration officers from interrogating someone on their immigration status based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or spoken language. Although it hasn’t passed, it has support from dozens of advocacy organizations and more than 30 members of Congress.

In another case, Sessions v. Dimaya (2018), the court ruled that the Immigration and Nationality Act’s “crime of violence”

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Labor

Since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, lawmakers and the courts have stea d i ly eroded workers’ rights, and congressional attempts to repeal those changes failed— most notably in 1978 and 2009.

Many labor experts say Democratic lawmakers have been too deferential to antilabor court decisions. “Democrats would rather raise money on Republican atrocities than change them,” said Shaun Richman, the program director of the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State College.

That said, the usual torpor is starting to change. In February, the House passed an omnibus labor reform bill, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which

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Many labor experts say Democratic lawmakers have been too deferential to anti-labor court decisions.

would overturn a number of anti-worker Supreme Court decisions. Among them are the 1938 NLRB v. Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co. decision, which effectively allows employers to “permanently replace” workers who go on strike; the 2002 Hoffman Plastics v. NLRB decision, which prohibits the National Labor Relations Board from securing relief for undocumented workers; and the 1970 H.K. Porter Co., Inc. v. NLRB decision, which ruled that the NLRB could not force an employer to reach an agreement during bargaining.

Congress could also make it easier for workers to bring class action lawsuits when their employers harm them. Legislation could address the 2011 Walmart v. Dukes decision, which was a case based on rule of civil procedure that disallowed 1.6 million women from banding together to sue over pay discrimination; and the 2017 Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis decision, which held that employers can force workers to give up the right to bring a class action and instead go through a mandatory arbitration system. For Walmart, Congress could clarify that class members should be analyzed based on the similarities of their claims, not their differences; for Epic Systems, Congress could simply clarify that allowances to engage in class actions via the National Labor Relations Act override

the Federal Arbitration Act. There are several other detrimental statutory decisions that the PRO Act does not address and that Congress could fix through legislation. A number of rulings, like Chamber of Commerce v. Brown in 2008, have held that the National Labor Relations Act preempts state law related to unions and collective bargaining, even though the NLRA does not actually contain a preemption clause. Over time, this has had the effect of blocking labor-friendly states from doing more to deter unfair labor practices. Congress could adopt the approach taken in the Fair Labor Standards Act, which says federal law sets the floor on policies like the minimum wage, and states can go further.

Congress could also address a 2009 decision, 14 Penn Plaza LLC v. Pyett, which held that a worker could not bring an age discrimination claim to court given that their union contract required such issues to be handled through arbitration. Congress could amend the National Labor Relations Act to clarify that a collective-bargaining agreement does not override an individual’s right to sue an employer for alleged violations of federal or state law.

Another area pro-labor lawmakers could address is the so-called “management rights” clauses in collective-bargaining agreements that the Supreme Court

KIRK SIDES / AP PHOTO

provision was unconstitutionally vague, which in this case protected the Filipino national James Dimaya. But clarifying and narrowing the “crime of violence” provision, as the García bill does, could strengthen immigrant protections.

Bradley Jenkins, a lawyer for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, said that in addition to the García bill, there’s precedent for Congress to clarify who might be eligible for special asylum protections, just as Congress created a special immigration status for Cubans. He added that Uighurs, a persecuted ethnic minority in China, would be good candidates for special protection.

Jenkins also suggested that a right to counsel for noncitizens and independent immigration courts are additional candidates for congressional action.

A case argued in October, Pereida v.

Barr, addresses the burden of proof in deportation proceedings. Depending on the outcome, it, too, could be a candidate for statutory override.

“I think people are shocked that some bureaucrat in Washington can say, ‘You’re deported and I won’t give you a good reason why,’” Johnson said. “We get more due process on a parking ticket than that.”

deemed lawful (like in NLRB v. American National Insurance Co. in 1952). Congress could clarify that management cannot insist on such clauses in collective-bargaining agreements, and that if worker and employer rights are ever alleged to be in conflict, it’s Congress’s intent that employees’ rights are given priority.

To strengthen workers’ rights on the job, Congress should also override decisions like NLRB v. Electrical Workers (Jefferson Standard), which said workers could be fired for “disloyalty,” and other decisions that radically reduced the scope of bargaining, such as NLRB v. Wooster Division of Borg-Warner (1958) and First National Maintenance Corp. v. NLRB (1981).

“All these cases have combined to eviscerate the duty of employers to bargain over what is likely the most important decision to workers, if their job will continue to even exist,” said Brandon Magner, a union-side labor lawyer. The NLRB under recent Democratic administrations did little to tackle this, Magner said, “nor have Democrats in Congress seriously attempted to overturn the aforementioned cases.”

Corporate Power

One area where bipar tisan compromise may be possible is in antitrust law. In October, t he Hou se Antitrust Subcomm it t e e’s D emo cratic majority released a 400-page report detailing monopoly practices in the digital economy. In their recommendations, which went beyond Big Tech and addressed how to improve antitrust policy more generally, subcommittee staff identified several Supreme Court cases Congress should overturn. Indeed, many of the problems of a highly concentrated market stem from Court decisions themselves, subcommittee staff found.

“The courts have significantly weakened [antitrust] laws and made it increasingly difficult for federal antitrust enforcers and private plaintiffs to successfully challenge anticompetitive conduct and mergers,” the report

reads. “The overall result is an approach to antitrust that has significantly diverged from the laws that Congress enacted.”

Republican subcommittee member Ken Buck (R-CO) released a simultaneous report he called “The Third Way” for antitrust enforcement. Though Buck said in a statement that he doesn’t agree with the majority’s proposals, he plans to work with Democrats to find a solution. “Antitrust enforcement in Big Tech markets is not a partisan issue, I support the ongoing, bipartisan investigations of these companies,” he said in a statement.

In his report, Buck cited Ohio v. American Express (2018) as one case where he believes “there is common ground.” In that case, the Court made it harder for antitrust plaintiffs to sue corporate behemoths by ruling that middleman American Express could only be cited for anti-competitive conduct if it harmed its cardholders and merchants. Congress could specify that plaintiffs don’t have to “establish harm to both sets of customers.”

The Court has also manipulated congressional intent in antitrust law through its interpretation of “tying,” where a dominant firm controls the purchase of a separate product or service and forces customers to use both. Historically, this was considered de facto anti-competitive. But in Jefferson Parish Hospital District v. Hyde (1984), the Court disagreed. Congress could clarify that the statute specifically states that “tying” goods and services together to force consumer adoption is anti-competitive.

Congress could easily override Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan, which requires a monopoly “actually monopolize” a second market, by lowering that standard.

Lawmakers could also make clarifications and updates to the Sherman Antitrust Act, which the Court, in Illinois Brick Co. v. Illinois (1977), interpreted in a way that denies indirect purchasers of goods and services in a supply chain the right to sue for antitrust violations—even though they may also experience injury from anti-competitive behavior. Congress could overrule and specify the ability for indirect purchasers to sue.

In Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v.

PSKS, Inc., the Court loosened a Sherman Act

requirement that had made mandatory-minimum price agreements automatically illegal.

Congress could overrule and provide that vertical price constraints are per se illegal.

Two other cases, while not directly concerning antitrust law, similarly limit plaintiffs’ ability to bring lawsuits against corporations in particular. The Court’s interpretation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal (2009) created stricter pleading standards that apply to all areas of the law, making it more difficult for plaintiffs to contest environmental degradation, anti-abortion laws, workplace safety standards—or any other area where the law is not being enforced. The Twombly/ Iqbal standards are some of the most cited cases by federal courts of all time, allowing powerful parties to easily dismiss cases before they even reach court. Jones Day, a law firm known for defending corporate clients, called the decisions a “welcome development.” Both decisions are based on Court interpretation of a federal rule, which can be changed through the federal rulemaking process promulgated by Congress. In 2009, Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Jerry Nadler introduced companion bills in the House and Senate that would restore the more plaintiff-friendly standards of Conley v. Gibson (1957). A Democratic majority should tackle these cases again.

As the subcommittee report outlined, antitrust law is relatively toothless right now—and that’s partly because the Court has so ratcheted up the standards for what kinds of cases parties can bring. “The practical effect is that antitrust laws are not routinely enforced. The goal of reform efforts is to ensure that the antitrust laws can actually reach antitrust violations,” said Lina Khan, a Columbia law professor who helped draft the majority report. Making it more difficult to be heard in court is a trend across the board, but Khan says it’s especially pronounced in antitrust law. But all this could change with Congress. n Rachel M. Cohen is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., and a former American Prospect writing fellow. Marcia Brown is a current Prospect writing fellow.

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Healing Ame What will it take to bind up the nation’s wounds?

By Robert Kuttner

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erica

AS JOE BIDEN PLEDGES to be president of all the people, his most daunting challenge will be to reduce the hatred afflicting America. This raises immediate difficulties, because much of what Biden has to do will further inflame the far right.

The Biden Justice Department and the FBI need to resume tracking and arresting domestic terrorists. Biden must also end the war on immigrants, use executive power to advance racial justice, and protect the fundamentals of democracy itself. All of this will rile up the very groups responsible for most of the hatred and division.

The far right, egged on by Trump, has fomented violence, created militias, and used force and the threat of force to intimidate.

Research by the political scientist Larry Bartels finds that 40 to 70 percent of Republican voters embrace such frankly authoritarian views as “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands” or “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.”

Many kinds of reconciliation needed are evidently at odds with each other. There are contradictions between overdue racial reparation and outreach to a partly racist Trump base. There are tensions between the project of healing the country and the more frankly partisan project of reclaiming Trump voters based on common economic interests. And of course, Mitch McConnell will do everything possible to try to make Biden fail, stoking these divisions even as Biden extends a hand.

Fortunately, much of the work of national healing happens not in Washington but on the ground. For this article, I spoke with about two dozen people who have worked to counter polarization and soften the tendency to demonize others: pastors, anti-racism activists, educators, moral philosophers, community organizers, and social scientists.

Social theorist and negotiator John Paul Lederach, author of The Moral Imagination, has worked to move former enemies beyond intractable polarization in settings as diverse and challenging as Ghana, Colombia, and Northern Ireland. He speaks of the need to “re-humanize” perceived ene-

mies. “Trust is the first victim of conflict,” he says. “Polarization is the first killer of curiosity. When people live in closed systems, they are secure in the knowledge of who their enemy is. Coming out of a cycle of violence, people have to take risks to sit down with enemies.”

This counsel may sound a little touchyfeely, but it is practiced by America’s shrewdest organizers as well as those with spiritual or diplomatic objectives.

This sensibility also informs such work as the restorative-justice movement, in which criminal offenders and their victims acknowledge each other’s humanity in the spirit of redemption rather than revenge. Much of this work might be called pre-political. If we can begin with active listening and acknowledgment of common humanity, the recognition of common interests and political depolarization may follow.

Most people drawn to Trump are not hardcore haters beyond redemption. Trump voters, seated across a kitchen table, express many of the same concerns that vex their Democratic counterparts. The challenge is to give people space to step back from the binary, tribal thinking in which you are either a friend or an enemy.

The good news is that a lot of creative work is going forward. The not-so-good news is that divisions will get worse before they get better. Trump’s fall from power will enrage his base, and the ex-president, aided by the echo chamber of Fox News and rightwing social media, will work to intensify that rage. The challenge is to pursue common ground without giving ground to hate.

The Soft Power of Deep Listening Arlie Hochschild, whose classic 2016 book on Tea Party supporters, Strangers in Their Own Land, saw Trumpism coming, spent hundreds of hours at kitchen tables in Lake Charles, Louisiana, between 2011 and 2015, trying to gain a better appreciation of why so many people evidently voted against their economic self-interest. Hochschild, a sociologist practicing a kind of political ethnography, was not trying to convert her subjects, just to understand them.

NOV/DEC 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

You see people cutting in line ahead of

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you! … They are being given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships, jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches. … Women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers—where will it end?

Your money is running through a liberal sympathy sieve you don’t control or agree with. … Unbelievably, standing in front of you in line is a brown pelican.

One of her Louisiana friends emailed back, “I live your analogy.” Another said, “You’ve read my mind.”

Four years later, Trump has not made life better for Hochschild’s subjects and their neighbors. Trump’s war on the EPA makes the Lake Charles area even more polluted. His assault on the Affordable Care Act makes health coverage more precarious.

But attitudes, once entrenched, are very hard to dislodge, especially when reinforced by Fox News, right-wing talk radio, social media, and fundamentalist churches. On November 3, Tr ump carried Calcasieu Pa r i sh (L a ke Charles) 67 to 31.

“We have the Deep Story, but after 2016 we have ne w c h a p t e r s ,” Hochschild says.

“OK , we elected someone who will stop the people cutting in line.

He will make us great again. Tell me about your experience.

Is life really better for you? Did coal come back? Do you have better job prospects?

Is your health coverage more secure? So now we need new bridges and new deep conversations with reality testing.”

People’s Action, a group that began in the 1970s to build multiracial coalitions to resist redlining, is today one of the nation’s largest progressive organizing projects, operating in 29 states, with 358 paid canvassers and 35,000 volunteers. In 2017, after Trump’s win, People’s Action’s

longtime director, George Goehl, began an initiative called the DEEP CANVASS. The idea was to train organizers and dispatch them into rural red America, to hear what was really stressing lower-income white people, and then to move the conversation to areas of common interest.

“We’ve found that when people start to see the dissonance between what they believe and what they actually want, their views change,” Goehl has written. In the election year, this work had frankly partisan goals—to have extended conversations to move Trump voters into the Biden camp.

By Election Day, canvassers for People’s Action had logged more than 200,000 conversations in battleground states.

A report by social scientists David Broockman of Berkeley and Josh Kalla of Yale, working with Goehl, found that these active-listening conversations shifted 3 percent of voters who had been planning to vote for Trump to Biden, including 4.9 percent of women. That may not sound like a lot, but Biden won the key battleground states by 2 percent or less, and Broockman and Kalla reported that DEEP CANVASS work is more than 100 times more effective in shifting preferences than conventional phone-calling and door-knocking.

With the election over, People’s Action plans to redouble these efforts. Over the long term, the DEEP CANVASS is intended to gain a better understanding of how conservative voters translate life experiences and legitimate grievances into political attitudes, and how to build new coalitions around true common interests.

A lot of this work is counterintuitive.

Many of these organizers working deep in Trump territory are Black or immigrant.

One of Goehl’s canvassers, Maria Elena Fournier, has a heartbreaking and uplifting life story. She grew up mostly in Puerto Rico. Her mother died of cancer when she was eight. Her father moved the family to Miami, but had to be hospitalized with Alzheimer’s. He died when Maria Elena was 14. Neither parent had adequate health care.

She was raised by siblings, in poverty. Somehow, Maria Elena made it to community college in Michigan, excelled, and transferred to Ann Arbor to study public health.

CLAY BANKS / UNSPLASH

She found, first, that these were mostly good-hearted people, happy that someone from Berkeley of all places was asking nonjudgmental questions. Many became her friends, and remain so several years later. People in Lake Charles, she learned, turned to the Tea Party because they felt their government was no longer serving their interests. For all the power of the EPA, chemical companies were destroying their bayous. They felt culturally ridiculed by mainstream media. Their alienation was compounded by the perception that the government seemed to care about immigrants, minority groups benefiting from racial preferences, and even endangered species more than people like themselves.

Hochschild devised a parable called the Deep Story, which she sent to her subjects to see whether she had gotten their concerns right.

The DEEP CANVASS pursues better understanding of how conservative voters translate legitimate grievances into political attitudes and how to build new coalitions around true common interests.

Her passion is working as a deep canvasser. Knocking on the door of a trailer park home in Monroe County, Michigan, she encountered a frail 82-year-old woman named Inga. “I usually start off with something like, Hello my name is Maria Elena and I’m reaching out to members of the community to see how you’re doing and to see if your needs are being met,” she tells me.

Inga’s needs were not being met. She was dealing with a broken bone, and did not have adequate health insurance. Her husband, a Korean War vet, had recently died of Alzheimer’s, and the family was so strapped financially that they had had to choose between eating and paying for medication. “I started telling her that my mother unfortunately passed away from cancer because we couldn’t get access to the proper health care, even though the hospitals were right there near us.”

It developed that Inga was also an immigrant, originally from Germany. When the conversation began, Inga was hostile to the idea of universal health insurance, least of all for immigrants. After two hours of talk about shared struggles, Inga’s views had softened. “She began in a place where everyone needs to pay for themselves,” Fournier told me, “and by the end she realized, I lost my husband to a lack of health care, I am

struggling with my own health because of this lack of health care, and I don’t want my granddaughters and my daughters to have to go through the same.”

Sharing stories with another immigrant named Ahmed, in Flint, Michigan, she learned that he was so traumatized

by Trump’s anti-immigrant policies that Ahmed had decided not to vote even though he was now a citizen and legally qualified.

“He was terrified that the system would try to hurt him,” Fournier recalls. “He didn’t even feel comfortable seeking health care because he felt they might take away his citizenship status.” By the end of the conversation, he had resolved to vote—against Trump. Maria Elena Fournier is 21.

Hope in the Next Generation As a junior at Yale, David McCullough was awarded a two-semester fellowship for an independent research project. He chose to spend the summer driving around the country to engage unfamiliar places and people. He ended up spending time in Cotulla, Texas; inner-city Cleveland; and on the Pine Ridge Reservation. By the time he returned, McCullough had the germ of an idea. High school students who dwelled in separate cultural silos needed to “study abroad in their own country,” as he puts it. Maybe it was too late to save many parents and grandparents, who were often frozen in their own prejudices, but the next generation was more open and pliable. Some of the kids might even educate their families.

After a year of grad school, McCullough moved back in with his parents in Sudbury, Massachusetts, supported himself by teaching high school as a sub, raised some money, and launched the American Exchange Project in the fall of 2019. As mentors, he had Paul Solman of PBS, a journalist who is especially good at active listening himself, and Robert Glauber, a Harvard Kennedy School lecturer who served as George H.W. Bush’s Treasury undersecretar y and is committed to efforts at depolarization.

McCullough recruited students from liberal Massachusetts and conservative Louisiana and East Texas. But before he

could launch, COVID intervened. So the project’s first year occurred, like so much else, via Zoom. The kids, high school freshman through seniors, meet five days a week online as a drop-in lightly moderated by McCullough, with some scheduled sessions with guest stints by Solman and Glauber. “It’s kind of like the cafeteria table at which any kid in America can sit, at any time of day,” he says.

Topics range from fanciful to silly to quasi-political. One early ice-breaker exercise invited the students to imagine a car trip to any four locations in the world.

They could bring three people—a famous person, a dead person, and a friend or family member. Many of the Southern kids wanted to bring Jesus. The Northern kids wanted to bring Lincoln or Robin Williams. But the students discovered they liked many of the same sports and movie stars, and found things to admire as they learned about each other’s families.

“The conversations were entirely studentled and organic,” McCullough says. “It helps create friendship and understanding across the divide. It’s the old Atticus Finch idea to step out of your shoes and into someone else’s.”

One day, after a fair amount of trust had been built, McCullough decided to lob a small grenade. “Allison,” he asked one of the Louisiana girls, “if you are a 21-year-old in Lake Charles, what are the odds you’ve had a run-in with pregnancy?” Allison replied, “Oh, 40 percent at least.”

“You could see the faces of the kids from Wellesley and Sudbury just fall to the floor,” McCullough recalls. Why don’t you believe in abortion, they wanted to know.

She said, “Well, because it’s just not what we think down here. No one would say it’s a good idea to have a baby as a teenager, but they don’t talk a lot about birth control either.” The Southern girls, in turn, were stunned at how casually the Massachusetts kids spoke about abortions. But then Allison flipped the question: “I thought you guys were liberals, you’re supposed to be open-minded to the mistakes that people make.”

So far, over 100 students are participating, and this will soon grow to over 200.

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The live student exchange, planned for next summer, awaits the end of the pandemic.

Last May, after the program’s first year was ending, they surveyed the students.

They found that 93 percent of kids said they had made great friends; 93 percent said they had gained more empathy for different lifestyles and new perspectives; 97 percent reported that they came across perspectives they never considered before; and 100 percent wanted to remain involved in the program. Despite deep differences on some of the most polarizing issues, they felt they had made valued new friends.

Every student in America could benefit from this program or something like it.

But this is going to be a long slog, because the cultural pulls to stay in your own silo are so intense. The much-lauded educational program Facing History and Ourselves has been at it since 1976. Facing History began as an educational effort to deal with Holocaust denial, and quickly broadened out to enable students to connect discussions of historical conundrums—how would you have behaved in Nazi Germany or Reconstruction Mississippi—to current ethical dilemmas in their own lives. The curriculum is used in tens of thousands of high schools, by 125,000 teachers. Millions of students have learned from it.

A cynic might respond: Great, but America still elected Donald Trump. True enough. However, attitudes have grown steadily more open-minded on such hotbutton cultural issues as race and LGBT rights. A majority of all Americans now have no objection to intermarriage, but support among millennials is overwhelming.

Preliminary exit polls suggest that voters 18 to 29 supported Biden 62-33, compared to a 51-48 margin generally. The project of active engagement of the young goes forward, while we wait for the bigots to die off.

Amazing Grace?

America’s churches would seem like good places to pursue common ground. After several conversations with pastors of diverse faiths, I can report that some churches are making episodic progress on race, but not on cultural schisms.

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Martin Luther King famously said that the most segregated hour in the week is 11 a.m. on Sundays. Part of this is not just the legacy of white racism but ref lects the fact that the Black church has been a cherished center of cultural and political identity and self-preservation. However, Sunday morning has slowly become more integrated racially, while the divisions between conservative evangelicals and everyone else have hardened. Indeed, in the past year, three major denominations—the Southern Baptists, the Episcopalians, and the United Methodists—have faced schisms over such issues as LGBT rights, reproductive rights, and the role of women.

The role of the white evangelical church as a de facto arm of the Republican Party resists efforts at bridge-building. Robert P. Jones, a Baptist theologian and social scientist who heads the Public Religion Research Institute, explains in his book White Too Long that Southern pastors were long part of the white power structure, and white supremacy was deeply ingrained in church doctrine. It was only in the late 1970s that the anti-abortion crusade became central to this toxic brew of racism and cultural fundamentalism.

“In the years right after Roe v. Wade,” Jones reminds me, “the Southern Baptist Conference had no objection to abortion.

The main objection came from the Catholics.” But on the eve of the 1980 election, GOP strategist and Catholic conservative Paul Weyrich brokered a deal in which the Southern Baptist theology would become officially anti-abortion. The Rev. Jerry Falwell bought in, not because he cared about abortion, but because he was livid that after the Civil Rights Act, the federal government had challenged Bob Jones University’s tax exemption.

This corrupt deal was all part of the Reagan administration’s coalition with the religious right. Anti-abortion was not rooted in church doctrine. But two generations later, white evangelicals have internalized these beliefs and are more fervent right-to-lifers than Catholics (a majority of whom do not oppose abortion). “The original fuel wasn’t abortion or gay rights,” Jones says. “It was

“You can’t have a political revolution if you don’t talk to people who disagree with you.” civil rights.” Thus does the white evangelical church reinforce its anti-liberalism with both race and culture.

The Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, the longtime pastor of All Souls Church in downtown Tulsa, is one of that fraught city’s best bridge-builders. In 2004, a prominent Black Pentecostal bishop, Carlton Pearson, a personal protégé of Oral Roberts, was formally declared a heretic for preaching what he called a gospel of inclusion, questioning whether biblical Hell literally existed.

Lavanhar invited Pearson and his remaining flock to share his church, creating Tulsa’s most racially and theologically diverse religious space. (A movie about Pearson’s ordeal, Come Sunday, premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2018.)

But when it comes to seeking common ground with white fundamentalists, Lavanhar has encountered zero reciprocal interest. Ecumenical activity in Tulsa is mostly limited to liberal and mainline congregations and pastors, says Lavanhar, with occasional participation by Catholic parishes. Social issues remain toxic. In late October, after the Oklahoma Conference of Churches launched a yearlong “No Hate in the Heartland” campaign, the Catholic bishop of Tulsa withdrew support because of language supporting LGBT rights. “Can you imagine?” Lavanhar asks. “They rejected No Hate in the Heartland.”

Bishop T.D. Jakes, one of the best-known megachurch pastors, presides over a Pentecostal Dallas congregation known as the Potter’s House with 30,000 members, and a physical church that can seat over 8,000.

Jakes’s congregation is mostly Black, with a sprinkling of whites and Latinos. He stays away from party politics. “I’m sure we have some Trump voters,” he tells me. He too has had little success reaching out to white

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fundamentalist pastors. At a three-hour interdenominational meeting of Black and white pastors after the 2018 police murder of Black accountant Botham Jean, he says, the white evangelicals were mainly upset at being stereotyped.

“The bridges are somewhat easier to build among the younger Caucasian pastors,” Jakes told me. “I am not saying that the older ones are consciously bigoted.

I think the biases are woven into the fabric of our history and right now the frightening thing for America, as the demographics change, is the relinquishing of power.”

The Rev. Glenn Young, of the First Baptist Church of Kilgore, Texas, is a prominent conservative evangelical who has worked hard both to engage the community on racial issues and to reach out to liberals. After the murder of George Floyd, Rev. Young called a meeting of the city’s pastors, Black and white. “We had several listening sessions, including the mayor and the chief of police,” he told me. “A lot of the pastors came in. Some of our meetings were just allowing Black leaders to talk.”

There had been no racial violence in Kilgore, but Blacks felt excluded. Much of the conversation was about better economic opportunities. A letter on racial healing was composed. The letter said in part:

isters did sign. Young says, “People are OK if you use language like ‘systematic inequality.’

But if you tell people that they are racists and don’t even know it, you lose them.”

For Young, progress on race is possible.

The deal-breaker with liberals is abortion.

“I’m a limited-government conservative, but I could not vote for Trump,” he says. “But I could not vote for Biden either. I believe a fetus is a human life. I’d have a hard time endorsing a Democratic candidate who is a good person but who is pro-abortion.”

Young acknowledges the quandary. “So you end up settling for a bad person. Morally, issues that horrified evangelicals with Clinton—they excuse Trump. He’s an adulterer, he runs casinos. Publicly they back Trump, privately there is a lot of hand-wringing about it, and nobody has an answer.”

For several decades, some in the reproductive-rights community have sought to engage anti-abortion activists. All of these efforts have ended in failure. If you believe that abortion is murder and that defenders of reproductive rights are babykillers, why would you want to seek common ground with murderers? This has wider ramifications in the broader quest for depolarization, since it serves as a general stumbling block.

The good news, once again, is generational. As Robert P. Jones points out, in 2008, white evangelicals were 22 percent of the population. Today, they are 15 percent. The median age of members of evangelical congregations has risen to 57. Just 9 percent of parishioners are under 30, and despite their strict religious upbringing, most leave the church in high school.

Remarkably, the hardcore fundamentalist right is losing its young. Home, church, family—and sometimes bigotry— are a package. The more fundamentalist the faith, the more you are at risk of betraying your family if you open yourself to heterodox friends and ideas. Tara Westover’s wrenching bestseller, Educated, recounts the continuing gravitational pull of her abusive family, even as she was becoming a celebrated scholar ostensibly liberated from ultra-fundamentalism. Yet the young are inherently and increasingly more open-minded, and can be reached.

eorge Floyd’s death is a symptom of the G deeper disease of racism that plagues our society. … “[In Kilgore] we rejoice that we are able to live together, and in many cases work together, in relative peace and concord.

Yet, we grieve that disparities still exist. We grieve that we do not see equal representation of all people of color in positions of civil and educational leadership.

The letter was drafted by one of the most liberal preachers in the group, a Presbyterian who had been to seminary in the North—and it used language that some regarded as inflammatory, such as “structural racism.” Still, nearly fifty min-

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The Paradox of Outreach to the Oppressor The summer of 2020 w ill be remembered a s a moment when Bla ck demands for national recognition of racial wrongs f inally reached a pitch where whites of goodwill acknowledged the need for radical remediation. The sadistic police murder of George Floyd, coming after so many others, pricked the white conscience. Black Lives Matter went from being a marginal slogan to a credo embraced by a majority of whites. Radical police reform and even reparations became topics for mainstream conversation. It was the greatest upsurge of white support for civil rights since the 1960s.

This was the vindication of decades of anti-racism work. There are countless efforts all over America to engage whites to accept the continuing reverberations of America’s original sin, and the need for drastic reparation. Some of these efforts are heroic and touching. There is the occasional “amazing grace” moment, where a former bigot frankly acknowledges their crude racism. But for the most part, these conversations, whether white-onwhite or in mixed groups, tend to involve whites who are already woke, or at least open-minded.

Meanwhile, at least some Black leaders declare that America is fast becoming a majority-minority country. In political terms, that means that efforts should be directed toward expanding the rainbow base; no concessions in narrative or policy should be made in the vain hope of winning back working-class whites with a history of racism.

Yet the voting statistics of 2020 suggest the importance of a coalition of both race and class. Black turnout dramatically increased over 2016, in places like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee. But Biden was also able to reduce Trump’s share of the white working-class vote by about five percentage points. Trump won Macomb County, Michigan, archetypal Reagan Democrat territory, by 12 points in 2016.

In 2020, he won it by eight. With Trump’s increase in the Latino vote, most notably in Florida and South Texas, it’s also an

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illusion that all people of color vote as a progressive bloc.

The progressive organization Demos has done pioneering work to develop what it calls the Race-Class Narrative, finding language that reinforces commonalities as well as a frank acknowledgment of the need to overcome racism. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has spent several years developing a strategy and a language on Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT), and now has local projects in 14 cities.

The Dallas TRHT project works to bring together people of diverse racial and economic backgrounds to share personal histories and learn more about the history of Dallas. The project’s materials explain how Dallas was built on land stolen from native peoples, with slave labor. “When folks begin dealing with that truth,” says Jerry Hawkins, the project’s director, “they are then ready to move into the healing space, a space of listening, hearing, and sharing, where you have to think differently about who you are.”

For the most part, those who participate are already open to working for greater racial justice. The harder part is figuring out how to find some common ground with the more than 47 percent of Americans who voted for Donald Trump. George Goehl says his DEEP CANVASS project has met occasional resistance from his usual allies, who have little stomach for engaging with racists. “You can’t have a political revolution if you don’t talk to people who disagree with you,” he says.

“Trump reinforces polarization almost in religious terms,” Arlie Hochschild observes.

“He says, ‘I’m surrounded by enemies— the press, the deep state, the Democrats.

I suffer for you. I need you to protect me against my enemies.’ He takes on the role of Jesus Christ. He gets COVID, and then he is resurrected.”

Steven Hassan, who has studied a wide range of cults, observes in his book The Cult of Trump that the parallels are striking: the air of confidence, the talent at sowing fear and division, the need for total loyalty, the pathological lying and creation of alternative realities, the demonization of

A good shorthand for what we are trying to recover is the Enlightenment— the ancient argument of reason versus blind faith. critics and apostates. “These are the same methods used by [Sun Myung] Moon and other cult leaders such as L. Ron Hubbard, David Koresh, Lyndon LaRouche, and Jim Jones,” Hassan writes.

What happens when the Leader turns out to be a false Messiah? In 1956, the social psychologist Leon Festinger wrote a classic book called When Prophecy Fails.

It was based on his study of a cult whose leader, Dorothy Martin, claimed to have received signals from superior beings from another planet warning that a massive flood would destroy the Earth on December 21, 1954. When no f lood occurred, Martin explained that the world had been spared because “the forces of Good and Light” (in the cult) had proved too powerful for the forces of evil planning the flood.

Many members of the cult only intensified their faith, though others left. From this study, Festinger coined the term “cognitive dissonance” to describe the propensity to hold firm to beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence.

Looked at in terms of rational self-interest, a lot of people supported Trump based

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on cognitive dissonance. Yet, because of the practical benefits of being white in a racist system, especially for the working class, it’s naïve to conclude that whites and Blacks necessarily have common interests. Dr. King famously observed, at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965: “The Southern aristocracy … gave the poor white man Jim Crow. … And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the Black man.” Unless lower-income whites can look forward to better economic lives, those racist habits will persist for lack of anything better.

In both Northern Ireland and in IsraelPalestine, there have been creative efforts to put young people from both sides into neutral settings where they can overcome generations of mutual distrust and better get to know each other just as people. The Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine does this with Israeli and Palestinian teens. But there is one key difference. In Northern Ireland, the British, long the colonial master, actually relinquished some power. Not so the Israelis. So when the Palestinian Seeds of Peace kids return home, there is scant reason to build on a summer of personal trust.

The philosopher and historian Susan Neiman, in her recent book Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, describes the decades-long educational process by which ordinar y Germans came to terms with their nation’s responsibility for the Holocaust and World War II. At first, most Germans, having suffered horribly in the last years of the war, thought of themselves more as victims. Neiman points to the uncanny similarity with the white South, which has long considered itself the victim of the Civil War. In Germany, stumbling stones remind citizens where Jews once lived and worked.

A Holocaust museum is located in the center of Berlin. In the U.S., while some Confederate statues have been toppled

and Jackson, Mississippi, has a museum about the civil rights movement, there has been only the bare beginning of a general acknowledgment of the brutal realities of slavery and Jim Crow. Until that process moves for ward, accomplished by a true shift in who makes the rules, lions can converse politely with lambs but with little real change.

The Winding Road Back to America Speaking last year at a dinner in Concord, New Hampshire, Joe Biden declared, “With Trump out of the White House, you will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.” That’s exactly what is not going to occur.

“Normally,” says pollster and strategist Stan Greenberg, “a party that gets trounced at the polls moves towards the center.” Not this time, he points out. As long as the base remains far-right, most winning GOP primary candidates will be those who run hard right, at least for another few election cycles.

Stuart Stevens, one of the leaders of the Lincoln Project, correctly writes in his confessional book, It Was All a Lie, that Trump is not a break with the post-1980

Republican Party but its logical conclusion. Stevens’s hope is that a successor, traditional center-right party might emerge from the post-Trump wreckage. Someone like Mitt Romney could base a bid for the 2024 nomination on that premise, but he is likely to be disappointed.

Over time, the task is to reduce the power of the cultish Trump base with a long-term process of deprogramming, which engages their concerns with curiosity and respect, alters the policy terrain on which these clashes are fought, tries to meet economic needs, and looks for greater openness in younger generations. Even with all this, the hardcore Trump base is likely to be at least 30 percent for a long time to come. But that’s a lot better than 48 percent.

This far-flung local work should not be misunderstood as a progressive version of George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light.” Deep listening needs to be informed by deep political strategy. The wager is that tolerance is infectious; that if citizens can become more open to different views and different people, and more willing to examine evidence, such a shift will make people less anti-science and less susceptible to demagogues and cults. The not-so-hidden agenda is to help Americans, especially younger ones, to open their minds and hearts. Yet if elites continue to beat down ordinary people, they will continue to look for scapegoats. So deep listening needs to be combined with deep practical help and deep economic reform.

To say that this is a long-term project is the mother of understatements.

A good shorthand for what we are trying to recover is the Enlightenment— the ancient argument of reason versus blind faith. It dates to Galileo versus the Church, Copernicus versus Ptolemy, and the Salem witch trials versus modernity. One of America’s founding myths is the idea of progress, something that Biden keeps invoking as he tells us that the future keeps getting better. But we have learned from our four-year brush with fascism that history does not move in one direction. Dark eras of regression can last for decades, even centuries. The work never ends. n

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B

SOCIAL

y late October, the best grasp of America’s perilous economic situation was coming from GoFundMe, the internet’s largest donation platform. The website had already become a de facto large insurance company, as hundreds of thousands of patients struggling with exorbitant medical bills started fundraising campaigns every year. By 2019, one-third of all donations on GoFundMe went toward health care costs, according to former CEO Rob Solomon.

But the pandemic created a new kind of precarity in America. From March 1 to August 31, just 3.2 percent of all donation campaigns went toward medical bills.

Demand grew so much for other needs that GoFundMe announced a new fundraising category: Rent, Food, and Monthly Bills.

GoFundMe’s October 22 Medium announcement about this read more like an earnest white paper from a liberal think tank: “According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 10 percent of American adults reported they sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat within the past week, and 179 million Americans are at risk of losing utilities services such as water, heat, and energy … Eight million more people have slipped into poverty since May. Millions of families across the country can’t pay rent and many are facing eviction.”

On the same day as this announcement, real estate appraiser Miller Samuel and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate spoke for another part of the country.

They released a report showing a new record for home transaction prices in the tony residential locale of the Hamptons. Average prices jumped to $1.2 million in the third quarter of 2020, the highest figure ever reached,

The wealthy have pulled out of the orbit of the rest of the country. Can they be leashed back?

By David Dayen ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN INZANA

up 40 percent from the year before. Overall sales rose by 51 percent, the biggest increase in six years. As Todd Bourgard of Douglas Elliman Real Estate told Bloomberg News, “At one point, everyone out here wanted to have a second home. Now their feeling is they need to have a second home.”

This is happening in the same country: desperate requests for food and shelter and multimillion-dollar mansion listings, sometimes within miles or blocks of one another. Runaway inequality has created a greater divergence between aristocrats and a seemingly permanent underclass than at any time in American history.

It’s reached the point where under the current system, no event, no matter how cataclysmic, can halt the gravitational pull of the mega-rich away from everyone else.

Economic crisis typically hits the poor the hardest, and the pandemic is no different. But even in the 2008 financial crisis, the wealthy sustained some damage in stock and bond losses. By contrast, five months after the pandemic hit the U.S., high-wage employment had almost fully recovered, according to a data analysis from Opportunity Insights. At the same time, employment for those in the bottom quarter of wage earners fell by 20 percent. Key economic indicators correlated with wealthy people, like home sales and stock prices and even bidet sales, have skyrocketed. U.S. billionaires are nearly a trillion dollars richer than they were before the virus began. The self-protection has gone well beyond masks and face shields, as the elite retreated into opulent emergency shelters, for their families and their money.

Only ambitious policy buoyed by persistent organizing can begin to put the brakes on this runaway train.

The biggest challenge of the next four years remains what was the biggest challenge of the past four decades: how to harness and tame organized money. During the campaign, Joe Biden put forward decent ideas to pull

the wealthy back to Earth, but recent history indicates such policies struggle when they come in contact with the political system.

But we cannot be content with cynical despair. We’ve all watched post-pandemic outcomes in real time, with no economic relief delivered to ordinary people for months while the rich ignore the pain. This is a moment, just like certain discrete moments during the first Gilded Age, to identify the unequal Americas proceeding in parallel, and demand an end to the social and economic distancing that has threatened the pursuit of happiness for the broader public.

A FAMED ECONOMIC POLICY Institute chart shows that

productivity and wages, which previously had a tight correlation, began to break away in 1979. Since then, productivity has grown six times more than pay. Moreproductive workers should be paid a wage that matches their increased value, but in this 40-year stretch, the lion’s share of the benefits have gone to corporate treasuries and owners of capital. An analysis by the RAND Corporation released in September found that the bottom 90 percent of American workers would be taking home $2.5 trillion more per year if economic inequality were at the same level it was in 1975. That’s about $50 trillion transferred from one class to another.

To anyone paying attention, this has been obvious for some time. A research note written by Citigroup analysts in October 2005 begins: “The World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest.” Plutonomy, a portmanteau of plutocracy and economy, refers to countries utterly dominated by the ultra-rich. The authors encouraged U.S. investors to seek out businesses selling luxury goods and products that cater to the wealthy. Because they took such a large share of national resources, they were the only consumers that mattered.

Countries trend to plutonomy for several reasons, the Citi analysts said. They include financial innovations that engineer profits and extract wealth from the working and middle class; oligopolies dominating the tech sector and other industries that shift wealth upward; and laissezfaire, low-tax governments that were too unconcerned (or captured) to build a more equitable society. All of those elements were present in America by 2005, and we now have 15 more years, an entrenched financial sector despite the 2008 crisis, the dominance of Big Tech and big business, and multiple rounds of tax cuts to deepen the picture.

Ajay Kapur, one of the authors of that research note, amusingly said last year that the age of plutonomy was coming to an end, amid antagonism from left-leaning politicians and public. He underrated the sheer political power of the rich. And like most of us, he obviously never saw the coronavirus coming.

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When the spread became uncontrollable, the primary instinct among plutocrats was to use their power and resources to separate themselves from the outside world.

As early as March, media reports announced spiking sales of luxury bunkers in wealthy enclaves, complete with special air filtration systems, steel encasements, movie theaters, swimming pools, bowling alleys, panic rooms, and even shooting ranges. One company estimated that bunker sales increased fourfold.

Others retreated to private islands in the Caribbean, or luxury yachts. New Zealand, practically the only English-speaking nation to crush the virus, became an elite destination. For those required to remain near global financial centers, the aforementioned Hamptons swelled to its normal summer size by March. If they needed to pop in to Manhattan, they could always charter a chopper for a quick commute. Those who could afford it filled freezers with months of provisions and hunkered down.

The essential workers producing the food they hoarded, stocking the shelves they ransacked, cleaning the rooms they retreated to never had a chance.

The rich also built their own education systems.

“Learning pods” with private tutors teaching small groups of children became a growing trend. This has further exacerbated existing inequities in education. Hiring teachers for private learning siphons them away from public schools. And the digital divide makes it impossible for low-income students without the benefit of in-person instruction to thrive.

Mega-rich physical distancing was immediate; economic distancing was not far behind. On March 23, the Federal Reserve announced that it would engage in direct purchases of corporate bonds for the first time in history, and that night Congress agreed on a deal, the CARES Act, that would support this bond-buying with $454 billion in loss-absorbing capital. The Fed promptly used that cash to support up to $4.5 trillion in lending, creating the largest private bank in the world, parked just offshore of Wall Street to let investors know they mean business.

The biggest challenge of the next four years remains what was the biggest challenge of the past four decades: how to harness and tame organized money.

Just the pre-positioning of these resources has been enough to reinflate capital markets, despite little actual spending. While the substantive benefits for ordinary Americans in the CARES Act—enhanced unemployment benefits, one-time $1,200 stimulus checks, forgivable loans for small business—all expired by the end of July, the benefits for corporations and the investor class endured, with stocks near record highs, corporate borrowing at a frenzied pitch, and the cost of that borrowing increasingly affordable.

Whatever you think about the importance of the Fed to keep markets stable, the effect of Congress’s actions have been a widening gap in distribution of economic benefits.

“If you judge America by the stock market, everything’s fine,” said Stephen Lerner, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. “There’s a crisis for most of America and not for them. If you don’t confront them, nothing will change.”

This dichotomy has not been hidden. The Institute

for Policy Studies (IPS) has been tracking the wealth of the nation’s 644 billionaires since March 18, roughly the beginning of the pandemic, using data gleaned from Forbes. As of mid-October, those billionaires have seen an increase of wealth of $931 billion, a gain of 31 percent. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made $90 billion during the period; Tesla’s Elon Musk saw a $68 billion gain; for Daniel Gilbert of Quicken Loans it was $42 billion. Most of the money came from stock gains.

Economic concentration, which has accelerated in the pandemic, is likely to make things worse. The tech sector now accounts for 40 percent of the value of the S&P 500, their greatest market share ever. The top four platforms (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google) raked in $38 billion in profits in just the third quarter of 2020 alone. Except for Amazon, with its legions of low-paid warehouse pickers, these companies do not employ large numbers of workers in the U.S.

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When the coronavirus hit, high-end residential communities saw spiking sales of luxury bunkers.

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The combination of new habits (like working from home, or transitioning to online shopping), greater reserves to weather economic uncertainty, and government policies favoring large companies that can secure borrowing from capital markets, while smaller businesses get wiped out, have all increased the market share of tech companies and other large businesses. And it’s poised to get worse: Goldman Sachs president John Waldron told a conference in October to expect more job loss as a result of corporate takeovers. Typically, mergers create “efficiencies,” a pretty word that really means layoffs.

These accumulations of wealth have done very little for anyone outside the investor class. Only 1 in 6 employees work for a firm in the S&P 500. There’s almost an inverse relationship between corporate hiring and its stock price; investors prefer “lean and mean” companies that keep labor costs low. The Fed did not tie its lifeline of corporate bond purchases to employee retention; dozens of companies whose bonds the Fed has purchased subsequently laid off workers and paid out dividends.

“I think we’re moving toward a classic oligarchy,” said Chuck Collins, the heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune who gave away his inheritance and now studies inequality for IPS. (He’s also a Prospect board member.) “You not only

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have wealth but the power to defend your wealth, and the conditions to set rules around it. It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose economy.”

One incredible demonstration of what has been termed the K-shaped recovery—the rich go up, everyone else goes down—is the statistic of total employee compensation.

It took 14 months for this aggregate of all salaries and benefits to increase on a year-over-year basis after the Great Recession. But in September, total compensation rose 0.5 percent. This is extremely counterintuitive, because there are at least seven million more people out of work since the pandemic began, with millions of others enduring pay cuts.

But those still working—especially those at the top— are making more, and those who’ve been laid off weren’t making very much. The low-wage industries most dramatically affected by the crisis include retail—a sector that saw more brick-and-mortar store closures in the first half of the year than ever before—restaurants, entertainment venues, and hotels. Eight times as many low-wage jobs have been eliminated, relative to higher-wage ones, according to a Washington Post study. Younger workers, the last into the workforce, were the first ones out; they are usually paid less as well.

VINCENZO IZZO /AP IMAGES

The coronavirusfueled economic crisis has led to a doubling of food insecurity, as food banks struggle to pick up the slack.

Perfunctory economic statistics now teach a lesson in what it means to live in an unequal society.

By contrast, higher-wage industries and more established workers have barely felt the virus’s impact. Regular promotions and pay increases and bonuses have overtaken the compensation loss from millions of low-wage workers. Those who can work from home, who tend to be more educated workers, correlate with higher wages as well.

Women, young people, and people of color disproportionately hold the low-wage jobs that have vanished in the pandemic shock. Lack of child care options has stunted the labor participation of women even further. The plutonomy that has resulted, consequently, plays out along race and gender lines alongside class.

“I live in the ZIP code that had the peak infection rate here in Arizona,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who represents mostly poor and Latino sections of Yuma, Nogales, and Tucson. “I think the inequity issue has been educational for the American people in general. Because of the portal the COVID crisis opened up for everybody to see, you can’t deny that anymore.”

Perfunctory economic statistics now teach a lesson in what it means to live in an unequal society. Home sales have surged, particularly for second homes, a side effect of the flight of the wealthy to protected enclaves.

Mortgage demand spiked 25 percent year over year in September. The stock market has hovered around record highs; the “bear market” induced by the recession was the shortest in history. Home remodeling has seen serious growth; one-time purchases like cars and dishwashers have been strong. The workers who stay employed from more sustained consumer spending have been left on the sidelines.

An economy with strong sales in homes and durable goods is usually strong overall. It does not usually coincide with 26 straight weeks of jobless claims above any previously recorded postdepression level. It does not coincide with the biggest increase in long-term unemployment in history, and a doubling in food insecurity, and an expected burst of evictions after a makeshift (and possibly ineffective) moratorium expires. It does not coincide with a rising consumer debt bubble threatening to collapse in a wave of defaults.

Suicidal thoughts, overdoses from opioids, and other

signs of despair are all rising. The levels of stress, fear of loss of power or heat, and feelings of hopelessness are all pinning red while the macroeconomic statistics look fine at a glance—net worth is at a record high, for example.

This places little pressure on policymakers to act.

“While the working class struggles with job and income loss, the rich have by and large kept their incomes and are piling up wealth they cannot spend,” explained Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a key researcher into inequality. Saez’s colleague Gabriel Zucman estimated that the ratio of household wealth to national income reached a new high in 2020, a level not seen since 1933. As this wealth gets stored and not circulated, the economy sags and those on the wrong side of the divide fall further behind.

INEQUALITY CORRELATES WITH A wide variety of social

ills: greater sickness and mental illness, increases in violent crime and drug abuse and imprisonment. These aftereffects raise costs on law enforcement, hospitals, jails, and the judiciary. Even seemingly disparate statistics like infant mortality, obesity, literacy, and teenage pregnancies are tied to rises in inequality.

Perhaps most of all, inequality correlates with breakdowns in social cohesion. When people are born into what amounts to a caste system, with little or no opportunity for advancement, frustration, dejection, and class anger simmers. It makes people susceptible to easy demagoguery, finding a channel for this resentment. And the pandemic breaks these community bonds even further.

“My motivation is understanding unequal sacrifice in this moment,” said Chuck Collins. “It undermines the solidarity we need to get through this.”

The next four years must tackle this corrosive social problem. That became a far more difficult task after Election Day, with Joe Biden’s opportunity for a Democratic Congress now reliant on a bank shot of two Senate special-election victories in Georgia in January. Even if that’s successful, a 50-50 Senate is unlikely to bring about sweeping changes on much of anything, as literally every senator in the Democratic caucus can fashion themselves as an obstacle.

Quietly, Biden had a few impactful ideas for addressing inequality, mostly by fiddling with the tax code. His tax plan would raise $2.5 trillion over a ten-year period, entirely on corporations and individuals making over $400,000 a year. The proposals included increasing the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, raising marginal tax rates and limiting deductions for the rich, taxing capital gains and dividends as ordinary income for millionaires, and eliminating the “step-up in basis,” an insidious facilitator of dynasty that allows unrealized capital gains to go untaxed when the asset holder dies. Attacking capital

NOV/DEC 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

income, the money people make by having money, as the real source of wealth inequality in American society made the Biden plan significantly more egalitarian than his Democratic predecessors’.

“The policy required both for justice and faster macroeconomic recovery is to support incomes of the struggling working class and middle class,” said Emmanuel Saez. “As a government, you can do this by borrowing from the rich, what we’ve done so far, or by taxing the rich. Sooner or later though, taxes on the rich will have to increase. Because of the rise in inequality and the risk of further plutocratic drift, I think we should not delay taxing the rich more.”

Before the election, the mega-rich reacted by once again finding luxury bunkers, this time for their own money. They packed their fortunes into trusts, sold off family businesses, and accelerated the bestowing of giant financial gifts to their children. “There’s more money moving to the shadows,” said Collins. “The restaurant bill is coming due and people are slipping out the back door.”

But then the election appeared to create divided government, and the rich were positively exultant. Stock prices went on a roll right after Election Day, with investors satisfied that changes to the tax code would be hard to come by, and the benefits of the Trump tax cuts would remain in place. Gridlock is good for the elite class.

40 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2020

Just because the legislative picture is bleak, however, doesn’t mean that the wealthy are off the hook. Or at least, it shouldn’t. A President Biden would have many tools at his disposal to at least slow down if not reverse America’s staggering inequality. And those are opportunities he must take.

First of all, the Trump IRS has been completely taken off the field of ensuring compliance with the tax laws.

As journalist David Cay Johnston has reported, of the 23,400 richest households in America, in 2018 the IRS audited seven. Part of this is due to the systematic gutting of the IRS budget, but it’s also indicative of a shift in priorities; IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig responded to questions from Congress about why it audits the working poor at a rate of nine times the wealthy by admitting that it’s cheaper and easier to go after the poor. By targeting whatever resources at where the money actually is, a Biden administration can make sure the rich at least pay their fair share of an unbalanced tax code, if it cannot balance it. Biden’s IRS can also use its authority as interpreters of the tax laws to make the system more fair.

Next, Biden can go after the heart of corporate power simply by having his lead antitrust agencies take a more skeptical eye toward mergers and acquisitions. We know that these deals are bad for workers, farmers, startup firms, and pretty much everyone except for investors

CAROLYN K ASTER / AP IMAGES

Joe Biden campaigned on addressing inequality through the tax code.

With little hope for legislative progress, he’ll have to use executive authority to rein in the mega-rich.

and executives. Better competition policy would not only slow the pipeline for mergers, but also prevent things like noncompete clauses that prevent workers from migrating within their industries to different rivals, or “pay-fordelay” deals where prescription drug companies pay off generic manufacturers to not make competing versions of their products. The weakening of corporate dominance should lead to a more vibrant economy and channel into a compression of wages and increase of jobs.

Ordinary people obtain most of their income through wages, and raising them should be a primary priority.

Statewide ballot measures to increase the minimum wage are undefeated since 1998, a string of 23 in a row.

More statewide efforts along with pressuring private businesses to increase wages, as Bernie Sanders did with Amazon in 2018, could help millions get a raise.

Better rulings from the National Labor Relations Board would give workers more power to share in the fruits of their productivity by making it easier to join a union.

One critical administrative measure would turn more independent contractors in gig work and other jobs into employees.

Economist Dean Baker likes to talk about “predistribution,” the changes in institutional rules that push national wealth upward. Patent and copyright monopolies allow holders to enjoy greater rewards without challenge; the government can seize drug patents (with just compensation) and issue them to manufacturers that agree to sell them at reasonable prices, distributing wealth through the pharmaceutical supply chain. Corporate governance rules enable runaway CEO compensation, and could be changed internally at the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators. Cracking down on financialization through proper regulations would be another area to reduce the extraction of wealth upward.

Younger people cannot build wealth when they’re burdened by student loans; the Education Department can cancel substantially all of that debt on its own authority.

States like California offer retirement savings accounts for people who don’t have that option at work; that concept should be exported across the country.

Finally, local governments can act where the federal government refuses. The states, facing tremendous revenue shortfalls from the coronavirus economic collapse, cannot fill those gaps through borrowing, due to balanced-budget requirements. That makes taxation of the super-rich even more urgent, and some state lawmakers have made such proposals: a billionaire tax in New York and an extreme wealth tax in California, for example. Arizonans just approved a surtax on wealthy residents to fund education, and New Jersey approved a millionaire tax in October.

Of course, the rich will fight these measures at every

step. They will lobby regulators and lawmakers. They will threaten to pull up stakes and leave states, depriving them of their taxes and spending. They will dangle campaign contributions or dark-money independent expenditure groups over the heads of politicians. They will claim that attacking inequality is just “punishing success.”

Stephen Lerner, the architect of SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign that made gains for some of the most powerless people in our society, believes the key lies in confronting the rich directly. “One part is to start to bring the crisis to their doorstep,” he said, describing caravans he helped organize to homes in Greenwich, Connecticut; Long Island, New York; and other high-end areas, sometimes literally with pitchforks, demanding progressive taxation and greater equity. Lerner’s group also has a capital strategy, pressuring pension funds to divest from the type of investments, like hedge funds and private equity, that bolster the ultra-rich. But the real work is to build a movement of jobless people, of those at risk in the pandemic, of union members and state employees, to force the political system to rein in the rich.

“We can’t let them live in self-isolation anymore,” Lerner said. “People say it’s not fair to go to their homes, where else should we go? Our side needs to get comfortable with going where the bad guys are. The point of direct action is that it’s direct.”

Joe Biden, who hails from the corporate-heavy, banking-heavy state of Delaware and had hundreds of wealthy bundlers raising mounds of money for his campaign, may be made uncomfortable by such open warfare. But Biden has a choice to make, for himself and his party, about using the powers of the presidency to tangibly improve the lives of his constituents, even if it takes those high-dollar contributors down a peg. If he shies away from this, Biden sets the stage for more right-wing faux populism, which purports to rescue forgotten working-class Americans, but in practice just shovels more largesse to plutocrats.

Biden’s decision will bear heavily on the question of whom government works for. We had another time in American history characterized by close elections and rabid partisanship. It was the only other period that had two presidential elections where the winner did not win the popular vote. That was the first Gilded Age, and while the political parties closely contested and jostled for power, the nation knew they weren’t actually in charge. Behind the scenes, the robber barons and tycoons controlled America, and their puppets in government put on shadow plays for entertainment. Do we have the same dynamic today? Are the mountains of ink spilled on politics and polls and who will occupy the White House just cover for the moneyed aristocracy’s rule? The next four years will answer these questions, one way or the other. n

NOV/DEC 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

IN CRISIS PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

Their ridership slashed in the pandemic, urban and rural systems need funding, which Congress has refused to provide.

Here’s how some systems are coping—and some aren’t.

ON A SUNNY WEEKDAY midafternoon

in Philadelphia, a SEPTA 21 bus trundled through the downtown shopping district traffic. Most riders on one of the city’s busiest lines wore masks, or at least had them on their chins. After the bus crossed the Walnut Street Bridge into West Philadelphia’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, new passengers came aboard, squeezing past seats plastered w ith social-distancing decals to stand, wedging themselves between others already crammed into the aisle. As they gingerly shifted positions, the driver began bypassing stops, leaving people on street corners to frown, yell, and curse. Sometimes bus riders heckle operators who strand customers. This day, nobody on the bus said a word.

On the bus and subway lines that connect the city’s neighborhoods of color with jobs and shopping in Center City, Pennsylvania’s largest employment center, ridership hasn’t decreased that much on buses like the 21,

42 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2020

which serves a diverse ridership of essential employees, hospital and postal workers, some college students, and seniors hauling groceries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the story of SEPTA’s 21 bus is far from American transit’s whole story. In the nation’s capital, most downtown office workers toil at home. Along the predominantly white Connecticut Avenue corridor of Northwest Washington, the few bus riders still board buses, where they find room to spare. Rush hour crowds no longer exist on Washington’s Metrorail Red Line, the system’s busiest prior to the pandemic. A rider is as likely to be the lone occupant of a subway car at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday as she is on an early Sunday morning.

The crisis in public transportation is real, dire, and unprecedented. It’s no surprise, then, that since the onset of the pandemic, doomscrolling pundits have proclaimed the death of cities or its corollary: the demise of public transportation. These narratives recount the work-from-home transition of

professionals, but miss the millions of other workers in cities or rural areas who have no such work-at-home options.

Across the country, transit systems have a mixed record in responding to the pandemic.

Most operators have mastered the virus precautions, requiring masks, social distancing, and deep-cleaning and disinfecting. Some have coped better than others, though, in rethinking how to serve passengers who are no longer living in 9-to-5 worlds, and accepting the new realities about how to retain and secure funding at a time when Republican elected officials have blocked any federal response since last spring.

ABSENT THAT FUNDING, most agencies

have had to cut their services. A September American Public Transportation Association (APTA) survey of 128 transit agency members, including 25 of the largest U.S. transit agencies, found that the majority may close financial gaps by cutting back on service. Fully 80 percent of the largest

ZZ / JOHN NACION / STAR MAX / IPX

By Gabrielle Gurley

NOV/DEC 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

transit agencies plan to reduce their service and/or pare back capital plans.

Cutting services, of course, means laying off employees like bus drivers. Bus drivers are expensive to train, and anyone who loses a job may not be as easily enticed back when systems need them. So, those layoffs carry long-term risks, says John Costa, the international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union. “Once the ballparks open up, concerts open up,” he adds, “there [will be a new] demand for that service. So what are you going to do” when the drivers aren’t there?

CARES Act funding provided the dollars to run buses and trains into the summer and fall. Agencies had access to $25 billion in public-transit operating and capital grant funding. As the end of the year approaches, however, this funding is slowly starting to run out. The agencies have sought an additional $32 billion in emergency funds to cover COVID-19 costs and revenue shortfalls.

The $3.4 trillion HEROES Act that passed the House in May allotted nearly $16 billion for public-transit agencies, with $11.5 billion going to the largest metro areas and the balance to an emergency grant program. But Senate Republicans balked at the size of the package. After the election, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed openness to a new round of negotiations.

But with the Kentuckian’s own proposal amounting to just a small fraction of the relief provided by the HEROES Act, getting a few billion more out of the Senate for transit is unlikely to happen.

How public-transit operators experience the crisis depends on their respective funding sources. The largest urban systems run on a combination of fare revenues, dedicated taxes, and often some local, state, or federal contribution. Jennie Granger, Pennsylvania’s deputy secretary for multimodal transportation, says that, overall, the state’s 52 transit agencies (including SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, and the Port Authority of Allegheny County, serving greater Pittsburgh) are stable through the end of the 2021 fiscal year in June, or, worst case, until the end of the calendar year. But the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh agencies have each seen about a 65 percent decrease in ridership

44 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2020

between July and September compared to 2019. “Some of the bigger systems like SEPTA and the Port Authority depend upon how quickly ridership comes back,” Granger says, “and that’s a moving target.”

If there is no second stimulus, and ridership lags, Pennsylvania transit systems will have to take a closer look at business, labor, and fuel costs, along with service cuts and scaled-back operating hours, according to Granger. Transportation-based financing options such as congestion pricing, transportation network charges on ridesharing companies, and local revenue-raising opportunities are also under active consideration.

One system taking a fiscal gut punch is San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency. Like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, the SFMTA is heavily fare-dependent. Roughly 50 percent of its operating budget comes from fares, parking fees, and fines (the remainder comes from city and county general-fund transfers and operating grants), and some of those sources have dropped 80 to 90 percent.

Ridership in neighborhood commercial districts served by San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency is recovering, and bus lines that serve those areas have returned almost to pre-COVID levels. Ridership in and out of the central business district is another story. “Downtown financial areas are nearly empty and the commuter rail is nearly empty,” says Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA’s director of transportation. The number of riders has plummeted. “Without the fare revenue from those commuters, our whole financial structure collapses,” Tumlin says.

Tumlin wants Washington to come up with a new stimulus package. “If your fare revenue drops, and you’re no longer able to sustain certain levels of frequencies, so you cut frequency, then transit becomes progressively less attractive to anyone who has a choice of modes,” he says. “You end up in a spiral of endless service cuts to the point where all you’re left with is something so miserable that only people who literally have no other choice [use it]. And that’s the path we’re on right now unless the federal government issues another stimulus to help us survive.”

In July, SFMTA officials projected that the agency would “fall off a financial cliff

Cutting services means laying off employees like bus drivers, and anyone who loses a job may not be as easily enticed back when systems need them. in 2023.” However, Tumlin says that the agency’s “financial projections keep tracking along its worst-case scenario.” The authority’s CARES Act funding runs out in December, at which time it will dip into its reserves. It’s already shut down its light-rail system due to a combination of mechanical issues and employee health precautions early in the pandemic. Nor can the agency expect much help from the state of California, due to the state’s own fiscal emergency and the failure to partially repeal Proposition 13, which caps property taxes, in November’s election. “We will likely run out of money in 2022,” Tumlin says.

IN THE PACIFIC Northwest, Sound Transit is in an enviable position. Not only is the Seattle regional area system not experiencing the same degree of fiscal stress that most agencies are, it is actually in the midst of the country’s largest transit expansion projects, a $54 billion light-rail, commuter rail, express, and bus rapid transit extravaganza. In 2016, voters approved the expansion of the light-rail, commuter rail, bus rapid transit, and other advancements through increases in property, sales, and motor vehicle excise taxes in the Puget Sound’s King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties. Overall, ridership dropped 87 percent during the pandemic. As in other systems, however, bus routes serving transit-dependent workers in communities of color did not drop off as sharply. CEO Peter Rogoff says his “biggest lift” is rescheduling capital expansion expenditures in response to an estimated

COURTESY OF SOUND TR ANSIT

Despite the pandemic, Sound Transit is moving ahead with expanding its Link light-rail system. Here, a train nears Seattle’s Mount Baker station.

$8 billion to $12 billion revenue shortfall.

Most other transit district CEOs across the country have bigger lifts than his.

Back East, when the work-from-home option emptied out central business districts, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Agency, Ohio’s largest, cut service by about 15 percent. Gone were the downtown trolley and the park-and-ride options (which have been restored on a limited basis). Ridership dropped to as low as 30 to 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels, but it’s now up to about 65 percent on a good day.

Less brutalized by financial constraints than many of its peers (a local sales and use tax, fare revenue, federal contributions, and a modest state contribution fund the system), the GCRTA has used the pandemic lull to initiate a major service redesign. The agency conducted rider surveys, community meetings, and studies that devised two alternatives. One scenario would focus on providing service every 15 minutes every day including weekends, but only to areas with the greatest rider demand, such as suburban employment centers like Steelyard Commons and educa-

tional institutions like the Cuyahoga Community College, with the remainder only to certain transit-dependent areas.

The second alternative would allocate 50 percent of the budget to cover high-demand areas and 50 percent to low-demand areas, with every area getting less-frequent service. The benefits would accrue to people across the region who don’t have cars, can’t drive, or live in difficult-to-access areas that would see an existing route extended. “It becomes a conversation of frequency versus coverage,” says India Birdsong, the GCRTA general manager. “It’s no longer the case where your ridership is coming in at 8 a.m. in the morning, and everybody’s going back out at the end of the day,” she says. “Maybe we look at adjusting our bus network to be able to expand coverage, but at the same time, we’ve got to be frequent.”

Innovation is key, and frequency may be the barometer by which effective public transportation may be measured in the new normal. By reducing crowding, frequent transit would also alleviate some of the safety fears that will persist after mass distribu-

tion of a vaccine. Public transit will have to inspire confidence, and passengers are unlikely to tolerate the sardine-like conditions that they’d previously endured. Express buses, bus rapid transit, and the streetscapes that can accommodate these routes can alleviate crowding on buses, not to mention traffic congestion on heavily traveled lines.

Other concepts that have guided the provision of service—such as morning and evening rush hours—no longer fit how people work or travel, especially if a certain percentage of people never return to downtown office spaces, says Jim Aloisi, a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation who teaches transportation policy at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

“The old idea of the rush hour approach to running transit is gone; it’s antiquated,” says Aloisi. “It was going away gradually before the pandemic because people weren’t all in the traditional 9-to-5 environment. But now it’s happening on an accelerated scale.”

RURAL RIDERSHIP DECLINES have not

been as dramatic, in part because these

NOV/DEC 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

routes serve some of the same transitdependent, low-income people who, like those in cities, have no other options. In western Pennsylvania, ridership in the small towns of Warren, Crawford, and Butler decreased by 23 percent, 32 percent, and 28 percent, respectively. Granger, the Pennsylvania deputy secretary, says the state has seen smaller declines in rural areas partly because COVID-19 arrived later there and ridership numbers were not as high as in the larger transit agencies.

Bus and van systems fill a critical niche for small towns and tribal communities that are far from regional employment centers, health care, education hubs, and intercity transportation links like Greyhound and Amtrak. In addition to taking residents on errands and students to schools and colleges, they provide non-emergency medical transportation for dialysis and chemotherapy patients through contracts with local health care providers.

With 54 vehicles, Prairie Hills Transit, based in Spearfish in western South Dakota, is firmly embedded in the regional medical network, moving people to and from facilities run by Monument Health, the region’s largest health care provider, independent

46 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2020

hospitals, and clinics. For Barb Cline, Prairie Hills Transit’s executive director, the pandemic has meant fewer non-emergency medical trips around the 16,500-squaremile service area that spans eight counties and 15 communities, including Rapid City.

COVID-19 arrived late to South Dakota, but the state has experienced one of the country’s fiercest outbreaks. Although schools remain open and people continue to shop and run errands, nursing homes are locking down and have scaled back residents’ trips to routine appointments. Prairie Hills Transit moved early to take up protective measures. They had ample supplies of PPE like masks and gloves. Cline had a team of two doctors and two nurses evaluate and advise them on their cleaning and disinfecting protocols. They required passengers to wear masks, installed plexiglass barriers for drivers, and used electrostatic sprays to clean and disinfect vehicles between trips, which is particularly important when transporting people who have tested positive for COVID-19.

While before the pandemic, the transit system ran 300 to 400 trips each day, from March to July, trips dropped to between 60 and 100 per day. In addition, the reduction in routine appointments for Medic-

aid recipients has cut into the payments the transit system receives for those trips.

Despite those budget shocks, Cline has few worries for the next year or so. The system is primarily funded by state, federal, and local grants, fares, and donations. The agency also received $1.2 million in CARES Act funding. She is more concerned about COVID-19 and the health of her passengers and employees. “They weigh more heavily on me than the financial piece of it,” she says.

More than anything else, the string of successful transit ballot initiatives that passed in urban areas and small towns on November 3 makes clear the strong confidence in the importance of public transportation that exists in many localities.

Missoula, Montana, voters gave the city’s Mountain Line bus service a $3 million boost through an increase in mill (property) levies. Riders there will gain Sunday service for the first time ever, more frequent buses, increased funding for zero-fare rides, and eventually an all-new electric fleet. The changes are set to debut in 2022.

Seattle voters approved a six-year renewal of their sales tax to fund King County Metro bus routes, maintenance, and capital improvements, and low-income fare pro-

NED AHRENS / COURTESY OF KING COUNTY METRO

SEPTA bus routes connecting residents in communities of color like West Philadelphia with jobs and shopping downtown remain busy. But transit system revenue outlooks are grim nationwide.

The string of successful transit ballot initiatives on November 3 makes clear the strong confidence in the importance of public transportation. grams for seniors, students, essential workers, and low-income riders. Austin green-lighted two proposals, a $7 billion Project Connect transit expansion plan for two light-rail lines, a commuter rail line, bus rapid transit, and a bicycle-pedestrian improvement plan. San Antonio passed a measure to fund improvements to its VIA Metropolitan Transit system beginning in 2026.

APTA has reported that 32 out of 34 transportation ballot questions nationwide passed since January.

IN GENTRIFYING METRO areas like San

Francisco and Washington, D.C., workers pushed out to suburban towns in their search for affordable housing are even more transitdependent than they were before—unless they work from home. How workers across the nation will assess the pros and cons of working from home once the pandemic is over has become a crucial determinant in shaping the future of public transportation.

A June Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research study found that 42 percent of employees work from home, and 26 percent are going to physical locations to work, while 33 percent are not working.

But, the Stanford study also concluded, only half of the people who work from home can do their tasks as productively as they could when they commuted to work. Some may not have adequate internet connectivity or IT support, or work in a bedroom or another less-than-ideal workspace, a situation the Stanford researchers labeled a “ticking inequality time bomb.” They concluded that working two days per week at home may emerge as the optimal compromise.

In metro Seattle, tech giants aren’t

expecting all employees to permanently cocoon in home offices. Indeed, they’re making real estate purchases to house new groups of workers. In June, Amazon announced a new 111,000-square-foot office space for 600 web workers in Redmond, Washington, even after COVID-19 hit Washington state early and hard. Microsoft plans to expand its Redmond campus, and local businesses have expressed concerns about the company’s recent announcement that would allow employees either to work from home, return to offices, or even relocate.

“I don’t know that we as a nation are going to stay at home,” says Rogoff of Sound Transit, who served as federal transit administrator and undersecretary of transportation for policy during the Obama administration. “For all the talk of telecommuting, I’m seeing that Microsoft is not slowing their multibillion-dollar expansion of their campus out in Redmond. Facebook just in the last few months has contracted for enough space for 7,000 employees,” he told The American Prospect. “There’s going to be a desire to get employees back to a workplace, if not every day, with some frequency.”

Perhaps the biggest vote of confidence in the return of physical workplaces comes courtesy of New York, the perennial subject of death-of-cities and demise-of-transit gloom. The New York Times reported that since the pandemic began, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google have acquired more than three million square feet of office space in the city. If a worker actually wants to get somewhere in New York, buses and subway are the smartest options.

The fate of public transit also affects the fate of the planet. In the United States, transportation is the key producer of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change, and cars and other light vehicles are the primary sources of those emissions. If anything, the pandemic gave the Earth a short breather. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that CO2 emissions from the transportation sector plummeted 40 percent in the first half of 2020, and overall emissions declined 8.8 percent, more than during World War II, the Great Recession of 2008, or the oil crisis of 1979. As people adapt to a post-pandemic new normal, whether traffic congestion and cli-

mate change dangers exceed pre-pandemic parameters may hinge on whether publictransportation systems can switch gears and restore confidence that buses and trains are safe, clean, and more efficient than driving.

On the fiscal front, Republican members of Congress appear content to let transit and other COVID-ravaged sectors languish.

The perennial inability of Congress to act indicates that states and local communities increasingly will have to find their own way to pay for transit, though they will never have the sums at their disposal that the federal government can muster.

But as necessary as a new stimulus package is, it’s only a short-term fix. The prospects for longer-term federal funding are even bleaker. Public transportation can’t rely on the federal gas tax boost to fill the coffers of a Highway Trust Fund that is well on its way to insolvency. Besides, raising the gas tax would take political courage that few in Washington possess, even though it could provide a short-term bridge to the electrification revolution and new mechanisms such as congestion pricing.

If he can persuade Congress to join him, Joe Biden could be the first American president since Dwight Eisenhower established the interstate highway system to have the opportunity to reshape how Americans move. Biden has likely spent more time as a public-transportation commuter, relying on skilled Amtrak workers to get him from home to work and back again, than any of his presidential predecessors. Rogoff notes that during his tenure at the Transportation Department, Biden was engaged in making sure that Great Recession stimulus funds got to communities like Detroit struggling with transit problems. “The guy used to burn me a new eardrum when he talked about Amtrak funding,” Rogoff says. “It’s not an amorphous thing for him, he’s really quite committed to it.” If Biden can translate his enthusiasm into federal dollars and concrete reforms, not only will public transportation survive the pandemic, but the millions of Americans who use it will thrive. n This article is a part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.

NOV/DEC 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

THE LUCRATIVE

OF A TRUMP OFFICIAL

Trump’s former appointees are profiting from their time in the White House— H.R. McMaster most of all.

By Jonathan Guyer ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE BRODNER 48 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2020

When Trump

said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, many started turning away from the president. CEOs distanced themselves from the White House. Republican leaders denounced his remarks. But on a Sunday talk show the next day, national-security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster came through to champion his boss.

“The president’s been very clear,” McMaster said in 2017. He emphasized that Trump wasn’t a bigot, and he offered no apologies on the president’s behalf. Instead, he talked about American values in the abstract and evaded Trump’s equivalency between white supremacist and anti-racist protesters.

Journalists described McMaster as part of the “axis of adults” that was supposed to curb Trump’s worst instincts, but during his 13 months in the administration, he more often used his own credibility in Trump’s defense. He stood by as the administration implemented the Muslim ban, he covered up Trump’s divulgence of highly classified military intelligence to Russian officials, and he created an entire national-security process tailored to Trump’s nativist worldview.

Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, would those who carried out Trump’s policies be held accountable?

In a sign of what other departing Trump appointees are likely to encounter when they look for their next jobs, McMaster has faced no repercussions for any of this.

Instead, like many of Trump’s early political appointees, he has leveraged the time he spent in the administration into previously unobtainable prestige and wealth.

Interviews with 20 current and former national-security officials from the Trump administration show that those who worked with the president at the highest levels have been welcomed back into the establishment fold. The fact that so many Trump advisers have landed in powerful positions suggests no one who served the administration is too tainted for a university, consultancy, law firm, or corporation. Once again, Trump’s presidency is less a Republican anomaly than an intensification of business as usual.

McMaster has made out particularly well, with appointments at Stanford

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FOR MANY IN THE political establishment,

joining the Trump administration was initially considered to be a mark of shame. In 2016, more than 100 Republican staffers signed a Never-Trump letter.

Trump alumni may have worried that they might struggle to find new jobs in Washington or Silicon Valley or Wall Street.

(And certainly a lot of people have cycled out given the administration’s record turnover.) But almost universally, former Trump appointees are profiting from their time in the White House. Even before Trump concedes the election and leaves the White House, they have been normalized.

Despite those initial expectations of a Trump stigma, it’s in fact the people who quit in protest who have suffered most.

Kyle Murphy, a former senior defense analyst, decided to leave the Pentagon in June after Trump ordered a military helicopter deployed to scare Black Lives Matter protesters outside of the White House.

But publicly resigning and criticizing the administration hasn’t helped this career civil servant land a full-time job. “The scariest and saddest thing is that there are a substantial number of people who back these ideas. They’ll still have a constituency, isolated from the mainstream,” Murphy told me. As for Trump’s political appointees who remained loyal, he says, “I think it’s unlikely they’ll hurt for money or for work.”

Trump’s closest advisers have prospered.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis has a board seat at the giant weaponsmaker General Dynamics, a day job at the powerful consultancy the Cohen Group, and a fellowship from Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Homeland Security Secretary

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John Kelly has gotten a job on the board of Caliburn International, a for-profit company with lucrative government contracts to operate shelters for migrant children.

Chief of staff Reince Priebus, White House counsel Donald McGahn, and director of national intelligence Daniel Coats parlayed their administration experience into jobs at top corporate law firms. Economic adviser Gary Cohn landed at a new consultancy. National-security adviser John Bolton, with a $2 million advance in hand, authored a best-seller. Even press secretary Sean Spicer landed a prestigious fellowship from Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

Lesser-known aides have also thrived.

National-security assistant Dina H. Powell McCormick secured a senior fellowship at Harvard’s Belfer Center (alongside many Biden officials-in-waiting). She returned to Goldman Sachs and was immediately promoted to a more senior role. Mira Ricardel, Bolton’s deputy, is now consulting for the Chertoff Group, and Nadia Schadlow, McMaster’s chief strategist, got a plum job at the far-right Hudson Institute think tank, where fellow Trump compatriots sit.

In Washington, hiring managers are unlikely to disqualify Trump appointees.

“Everyone who served is a grown-up, and everyone understands the exigencies of serving,” a researcher at a conservative think tank told me. “I’m not big on guilt by association.”

And then there was H.R. McMaster, doing the best of all.

MCMASTER WAS 54, ready to retire and start a second career in academia, when the Trump administration came calling in 2017. The administration considered him for a role as envoy in the State Department, where he would run the global campaign against ISIS. It seemed like a good fit for a veteran of both Iraq wars. He was still being vetted for the job when Trump suddenly fired his first national-security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, after news broke that Flynn had held secret meetings with Russian officials.

McMaster was walking down Walnut Street in Philadelphia’s Center City, in town for a think-tank conference, when he

universally, former Trump appointees are profiting from their time in the White House. received a phone call from a blocked Washington number: Did he want to audition for the national-security adviser post? It was quite the leap from an obscure position at State. Few jobs in the entire U.S. government provide closer proximity to the president.

The only catch was that the president whom he’d be so close to was Donald Trump.

“His career had hit a dead end, and this was an opportunity to reignite it,” a former senior intelligence official in the Trump administration told me. “He thought of it as a career-advancing opportunity, his way to pull a Colin Powell and become a four-star.”

The White House needed a new nationalsecurity adviser quickly, and with so many traditional Republican national-security operators denouncing Trump, the roster of eligible candidates had narrowed.

McMaster flew to Mar-a-Lago for the job interview that weekend, and, after beating out a couple of other contenders, he was offered the job. At that time, there was little doubt of the president’s priorities: McMaster was smart enough to know what he was getting into.

His new, high-profile job was an instant boon for sales of McMaster’s book, Dereliction of Duty. The 23-year-old study of the Vietnam War hit the Amazon best-seller list and earned him $100,000, according to his executive-branch disclosure forms.

At first, analysts speculated that McMaster would act as a balancing force. Days into the job, he argued that Trump should remove Iraq from the travel-ban list of six countries. His Iraqi counterparts, generals he had trained and served alongside, could no longer travel to the United States. His advo-

JOHN RUDOFF / AP IMAGES

University, board seats at distinguished nonpartisan institutions, and a lucrative position at Zoom.

“There is no honorable way to serve a corrupt and racist president,” Paul Yingling, a retired military officer who served in combat alongside McMaster in Iraq, told me.

“President Trump has this capacity to sense in people that corruption that allows you to trade your integrity for proximity to power.

He found it in Jim Mattis. He found it in John Kelly. He found it in H.R. McMaster.”

cacy was successful, and the White House withdrew Iraq from the next iteration of the Muslim ban. Months later, Trump expanded the ban to eight countries total. McMaster declined to comment about whether he pushed back on any of these other additions.

McMaster had thought he could steer the president, but quickly fell into line—and seemed to be fine with a submissive role.

“He was willing to make compromises—why would you take a job that you disagree with the president on, on almost every issue? Because he wanted something for himself. He saw it as a vehicle,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s a status thing for him.”

Within months, McMaster became the person willing to say what was needed. He became the trusted person to go on TV and explain away the latest scandal, as he did when defending Trump’s Charlottesville remarks. When The Washington Post

revealed that Trump had shared sensitive intelligence with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval Office, McMaster stood in the White House driveway and offered a cover story, without denying the substance of the Post’s report.

“Colin Powell’s statement before the American invasion of Iraq tarnished his entire career. McMaster’s driveway moment is of that same category,” said Yingling, who couldn’t square this behavior with the leader he had so admired in Iraq.

“He misled the American public for political purposes and traded on the integrity of his office for partisan gain.”

Yingling emailed McMaster that night saying as much. They haven’t spoken since.

“He has no idea what he’s talking about,” McMaster told me.

As Trump grew more extreme in his policies, McMaster still sought ways to support

him. He had dedicated himself to creating processes at the NSC that added solid policies to Trump’s “America First” sloganeering. He enlisted a team of Republican defense hands to write a National Security Strategy in less than ten months, which former officials told me was quicker than any previous administration. In it, McMaster followed the latest fashion in conservative foreign-policy circles: extreme hawkishness toward China. The plan was released to much fanfare, though Trump was said to have never read it. It became a cover story to retrofit actions that didn’t sit well in the public sphere: Trump’s coddling of autocrats, his disregard for human rights, and his belligerence toward Iran.

Maybe McMaster should have resigned when Trump pushed for Saudi Arabia as his first overseas trip. A presidential visit was an honor that had historically been bestowed upon allies like the U.K. or France, in contrast to the kingdom, which is undemocratic, unequal to women, and draconian in its public policies. McMaster told me that he did not register dissent. The visit emboldened Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to consolidate his power and jail his rivals, events that analysts believe led to the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

No adult in the room could curb Trump’s militarism. Drone strikes abroad increased and the U.S. military dropped the mother of all bombs in Afghanistan, breaking convention by deploying the largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal. And diplomatically, the U.S. broke convention by moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Brinkmanship, love letters, and meet-ups with Kim Jong Un reversed decades of policy, which encouraged North Korea’s reckless behavior.

But then McMaster put a foot wrong at the Munich Security Summit in early 2018.

During a question-and-answer session, he made a passing reference to the fact that Russia had meddled in the U.S. election. It was the thing Trump was the most sensitive about, and nearly five weeks later he forced McMaster out.

When McMaster left the building in April 2018 for the last time, hundreds of staffers clapped him out down West Executive Avenue. Vice President Mike Pence

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shook his hand. One senior adviser recalled seeing McMaster wipe away a tear. He left on good terms with everyone save the president himself, his former colleagues told me.

But it was the president who cast a shadow over his résumé. Having served Trump during a critical period as a political appointee, would he be able to find work?

MCMASTER HAD BEEN earning a fine salary

in the military after coming up in a family of modest means. But by Trump-world standards, McMaster was poor. During his last job in the Army, he took home about $200,000 a year and had saved less than $250,000, according to previously unpublished financial disclosures obtained by the Prospect.

After leaving the White House, he quickly rose to the top of the think-tank industry.

The Hudson Institute endowed a new role for him with support from the Japanese government. He also joined the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Soon, he was invited to sit on the boards of the Atlantic Council, Foreign Policy Research Institute, International Republican Institute, Smith Richardson Foundation, and West Point.

Academia welcomed him, too. He snagged a two-book deal from HarperCollins and went to write the first book at Stanford.

The university’s Hoover Institution named him the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow. In the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, Dick Cheney cited Fouad Ajami as saying that Iraqis would celebrate the Americans’ arrival. That forever war had framed much of McMaster’s career, so an appointment with the late scholar’s name seemed fitting.

Condoleezza Rice now directs the Hoover Institution, where COVID quacks Scott Atlas and Richard Epstein sit. (In a press release, Stanford recently rebuked Atlas, who serves on the White House coronavirus task force, but McMaster declined to comment on his colleague.) Above all, McMaster was excited to join a center that was once home to Milton Friedman. “It’s been a vibrant place for so long,” McMaster told me.

As the pandemic hit, it became harder to defend Trump, but McMaster studiously avoided discussing Trump’s mishandling of the virus even as he spoke publicly about global trends related to the pandemic. Now,

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with his career doing better than ever, the world’s hottest company came calling.

Zoom’s business was booming, growing from ten million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to over 300 million daily in April. Overnight, it became a verb.

But the company wasn’t prepared for the spotlight. Tech researchers pointed out its poor security and the problems inherent in its choice to maintain servers in China, and employ engineers and developers there.

China hawks were particularly wary of the rapidly growing company. “We have concerns about using technologies built by companies that are subject to the Chinese cybersecurity law,” a current Trump White House official told me.

Soon, Zoom was beset by legal trouble.

Consumer groups brought lawsuits against it for misrepresenting the strength of its encryption, members of Congress called for inquiries, and the FBI and Federal Trade Commission started paying close attention to the company. “Zoom’s alleged security failures warrant serious action,” wrote Federal Trade Commissioner Rohit Chopra. A Zoom spokesperson noted several improvements to its systems, including a separation between China and U.S. operations and enhanced encryption. But as a San Jose company that offered a previously niche software, Zoom didn’t have the Washington presence to confront the crisis. Like Facebook and Twitter, it needed lobbyists and protectors in the capital.

The company quickly staffed up. Since its founding in 2011, Zoom’s board had featured only techies, investors, and executives. It didn’t have any Washington experience and needed someone to coach it through these new security challenges. Critics accused Zoom of being too close to Beijing, so someone who was hawkish on China would be useful. There were many potential choices, but there was one top contender, someone who had recent national-security experience at the highest level: H.R. McMaster.

“During his decorated military career, he has built an expertise in leading through challenging situations and has demonstrated tremendous strength of character,” wrote Zoom CEO Eric Yuan in a statement in May announcing the hire. The almost 900-word press release went over McMaster’s aca-

demic and military experience. It noted that he’d written a best-seller and had served as “the 26th assistant to the president for National Security Affairs,” but left out one important detail: that the president he had served was Donald Trump.

McMaster doesn’t want to revisit the details of his time in the White House and doesn’t regret having served Trump. He’s ready to move on. “I’m on the board, hopefully, to make a positive contribution to a great company, a great company that is just trying to do the right thing,” he told me.

Still, he draws on former White House colleagues for advice. When McMaster was set to brief the board recently, he reached out to a former NSC colleague, Robert Spalding, who wrote a memo advocating for the nationalization of 5G networks that leaked and spooked Silicon Valley companies. “I’m not a fan of Zoom,” Spalding told me, but he was happy to offer guidance to McMaster.

(McMaster told me he had reached out to Spalding with regard to a separate project.)

McMaster’s board seat came with 118 shares of stock. Since he joined Zoom, its stock price has rocketed, from $150 to as high as $500 a share.

This fall, McMaster launched his second book, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World. The cover shows him in military uniform, as if he himself were defending the world. In 560 pages, he goes out of his way to not pass judgement on the Trump administration. Some speculated that he wanted to maintain access. “I don’t think that there’s a lot about Donald Trump that people don’t know already,” McMaster said.

McMaster had a way of only remembering the successes of his time in office, perhaps hoping that everything he had done for Trump would ultimately be overlooked. It was as if he was still in the role of defending the president, as he had done on Sunday talk shows and on the White House driveway. With universities, research institutions, and corporations welcoming McMaster in, he must have felt vindicated.

As he told me in October, “I think there’s just tremendous rewards associated with government service that are difficult to see these days, you know, because of how partisan it has become.” n

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Amazon’s city-sized warehouses are a symbol of the increasing economic and political power of large corporations.

The Power of Ideas and the Idea of Power The progressives won the debate about whether there is a power elite. Now they need to keep the corporate elite from destroying what’s left of our democracy.

BY Z A C H C A R T E R

PAUL HENNESSY / AP PHOTO

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hough it may be difficult for young readers to believe, there was a time when Americans turned to academics for guidance on great social questions. For most of the 20th century, whole disciplines vied with each other hoping to lay claim to the Great Theorist of the Age. John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman became household names from the realm of economics, while philosophy departments held up John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Hofstadter offered not only accounts of social movements

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and political figures, but sweeping theories of America, the state, and history itself. Even political science, a field now bedraggled by statistical regressions to nowhere, once grappled with grand ideas, arming democratic theorist Robert Dahl for intellectual combat with radical sociologists Floyd Hunter and C. Wright Mills.

The great intellectual clashes of this era all had to do with power. In 1953, Hunter, a little-known sociologist at the University of North Carolina, published Community Power Structure, a dry book with a dry title that sent shock waves

through the academy. Studying the city of Atlanta’s informal policymaking process, Hunter concluded that while the city was officially governed by elected officials, a narrow clique of corporate leaders controlled the agenda. Much of what voters cared about—better housing or a higher minimum wage—never came up. Instead, city government was focused on policies that boosted returns on real estate assets and increased revenues for downtown retailers.

Three years later, Mills reached a similar conclusion in The Power Elite—the rich were running the show. Hunter and Mills were not Marxists in any traditional sense, but their books presented nuanced reformulations of the old Marxist idea that the state was controlled by capitalists who exploited the political apparatus to further their own interests.

The reforms of the New Deal era had strained that idea, but Hunter and Mills sought to demonstrate that in the postwar

world, American democracy was not so democratic as it seemed.

They were right. But their ideas steadily fell out of favor in the years following Robert Dahl’s 1961 study Who Governs?

Dahl concluded that despite a few imperfections, elected leaders really did respond to public concerns. There were special interests, of course, with unjustified levels of influence over the political process, but there were a lot of them, and no particular group controlled the overall agenda. It was elected leaders, surveying this plurality of interests, who exercised real power in the American system, which was, all things considered, a pretty healthy and democratic way of organizing a society.

Dahl was wrong, and subsequent critics—most notably G. William Domhoff—persuasively demonstrated that he had misunderstood his own study. But his ideas were perfectly attuned for a new age of American ideas just over the horizon.

By the 1980s, all this talk of

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power had been buried by a new faith in the genius of financial markets.

Public demand for great questions about the way of things dried up.

Everyone already knew the answers.

Growth and efficiency were the correct goals and intellectual justifications; their absence the ultimate indictment.

The high era of American political theory came to a close. We had entered the Age of the Economist, but a peculiar sort of economist who explicitly eschewed the significance of social ideas and of power. New Jerusalem would be built from mathematics alone, its temples constructed of algebra. What seemed to the untrained mind like a festering social problem was, to the learned economist, merely a passing flaw soon to be perfected. Everything would work out fine, by definition.

The financial crisis of 2008 demolished this thinking, along with much else. The intellectual contest to define our current era has been live for some time now, and the most politically effective school of thought to emerge so far has been antimonopolism. In Washington, the fruits of its labors are everywhere, from the Trump administration’s blockbuster antitrust suit against Google to a devastating 16-month Big Tech investigation by House Democrats that concluded Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are actively “undermining both political and economic liberties.” Beyond the Beltway, millions of people who have always hated Facebook can now enjoy a sophisticated canon detailing why, exactly, they should.

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wo new entries in that corpus demand our attention: Liberty From All Masters, authored by anti-monopoly ringleader Barry Lynn, and Break ’Em Up, the latest book from progressive law professor and New York political agitator Zephyr Teachout. Along with recent works from Matt Stoller and Prospect executive editor David Dayen, Lynn and Teachout have reinvigorated the public debate around the relationship between public and private power in America that raged for much of the 20th century.

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LIBERTY FROM ALL MASTERS: THE NEW AMERICAN AUTOCRACY VS. THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE

BY BARRY C. LYNN

St. Martin’s Press

BREAK ’EM UP: RECOVERING OUR FREEDOM FROM BIG AG, BIG TECH, AND BIG MONEY

BY ZEPHYR TEACHOUT

All Points

For Lynn and Teachout, the most pressing evil among us is the tech platforms—Silicon Valley behemoths that do not merely connect individuals or collect data, but order digital life and commerce. The trouble with Facebook, Google, and Amazon is not measured in excessive profits or consumer prices, but in the way they each create independent systems of power insulated from public accountability.

“Monopoly,” Teachout writes, “is a rival form of government burrowing its way into democratic government.”

Where Mills and Hunter detailed the way that midcentury corporate elites corralled public officials into doing their bidding, Teachout and Lynn show how today’s monopolists often simply bypass official mechanisms of democracy to issue their own edicts about who can conduct what activity on what terms.

Amazon, for instance, is not merely a portal for customers but a warehouse business, shipping network, payment processing platform, data server operation, and even advertising arena that can require separate terms for each one of these aspects of its operation. The rules it imposes on its third-party sellers—the retailers responsible for most of the actual goods that move through Amazon— frequently change, and sellers must also abide by an extra set of unwritten standards. Without buying advertising space from Amazon or agreeing to use Amazon’s shipping service, for instance, many sellers report that their products are functionally erased from Amazon’s search results. If they complain, Amazon withholds its private infrastructure.

When the book publisher Hachette objected to the terms of an Amazon contract, Amazon imposed a twoweek shipping delay on the delivery of Hachette’s books to consumers.

Even seasoned Big Tech critics will learn much from the abusive practices detailed in Teachout’s book. In her telling, Big Tech companies are not so much internet businesses as federal regulators and public utilities. As Mark Zuckerberg put it, “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company.”

For all the horrors that Lynn and

Teachout present, they both resist the nihilistic determinism that other students of power often fall prey to.

If the rich control the government, after all, how can the tools of government ever be turned against them?

For Lynn and Teachout, the rise of today’s monopolies is not woven into the fabric of capitalism. It is a relatively recent phenomenon, created by specific policies and a particularly lax attitude about antitrust laws. Bringing monopolies to heel is merely a matter of the government and the public waking up to what is happening.

As descriptions of what has gone wrong in the digital economy and a prescription for what ails it, Break ’Em Up and Liberty From All Masters ring true. Both books are punchy and accessible. Lynn writes with the flair of a seasoned business journalist; Teachout with the rhetorical fire of an effective activist.

But Lynn seeks to be more than our guide through the present digital hell; in Liberty From All Masters, he offers an intellectual history of the United States, a comprehensive critique of the Age of the Economist, and a top-to-bottom theory of political economy. These are ambitious projects, and Lynn stumbles on occasion. Important aspects of his historical narrative are wrong.

Perhaps more importantly, by claiming to call back an age-old American system of thought, Lynn sells short his own creativity. For better and for worse, Liberty From All Masters is in fact a new intellectual cocktail, mixing left-wing ideas about democratic management with right-wing ideas about the virtues of the market. The political potency of this combination is evident in the anti-monopoly takeover of Washington intellectualism, but its appeal as a fundamental theory of democracy is less apparent.

Lynn’s story begins with the American Revolution, where he offers a timely and overlooked reminder that the Boston Tea Party was not merely a tax revolt, but an attack on the undemocratic power of the East India Company. He then traces discomfort with concentrations of power, both public and private, that runs through key

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American political disputes since America’s founding. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in Lynn’s telling, was not inventing a new system of government, as Ira Katznelson argued in Fear Itself, but refining a set of broadly shared American principles.

The narrative picks up steam in the 1980s with the emergence of neoliberalism as a political force. The “overthrow of America’s system of antimonopoly law,” Lynn writes, was “the single most important act of neoliberal sabotage,” as politicians in both parties fell “under the thrall of radical right-wing and left-wing philosophies.” This bred a cancer on the body politic. “It’s vital to understand that monopoly is not one of many economic problems but rather the political economic problem of our time.”

The connection between the political right and neoliberalism is well understood—Quinn Slobodian, Angus Burgin, and Daniel Stedman Jones have all written thorough, readable accounts of different aspects of the history. Lynn’s claim that the radical left was a key contributor to the development of

neoliberalism is innovative, but wrong. The centrist Democratic Party of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council was beguiled by neoliberalism—but not the radical left, which organized enormous protests against key neoliberal initiatives such as World Trade Organization treaties and opposed deregulation generally.

Lynn’s Exhibit A is John Kenneth Galbraith, the most influential leftliberal economist at midcentury and a well-documented antitrust skeptic.

“Here his hatred was virulent,” Lynn writes, citing Galbraith’s 1973 book Economics and the Public Purpose as a kind of coming-out party for his radical monopoly-friendly views. In Lynn’s telling, Galbraith’s influence extended to Ralph Nader and Robert Reich, infecting the Democratic Party and fueling the Clinton administration’s turn to NAFTA and bank deregulation.

Moreover, what Galbraith wrote in Economics and the Public Purpose is more closely aligned with Lynn’s own views than he acknowledges.

“The antitrust laws are now eighty

The Boston Tea Party was not merely a tax revolt, but an attack on the undemocratic power of the East India Company.

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years old,” Galbraith wrote. “Nothing has yet happened to arrest the development and burgeoning power” of big business. “What might be dangerous agitation for effective regulatory action or for public ownership or socialism comes out safely as a demand that the antitrust laws be enforced.”

Antitrust, in other words, was not enough, and led to a dangerous complacency about other potential remedies. When he criticized antitrust laws, Galbraith was attacking a narrow conception of antitrust action—breaking up companies and blocking mergers—in favor of a more comprehensive governing regime that included regulatory action and public ownership. These are remedies that Lynn himself discusses as appropriate political responses to monopoly power.

Nor were Galbraith’s ideas about antitrust new in the 1970s. In American Capitalism (1952) and The New Industrial State (1967), Galbraith assumed that big industrial conglomerates were here to stay, arguing that they might be turned to public purposes with the countervailing powers of trade unions and the democratic state. And perhaps most importantly, by the time neoliberalism achieved its political ascendance, Galbraith’s ideas were out of fashion. His portrait of 20th-century capitalism largely missed the financial reorganizations of the late 1970s and 1980s, and by the Clinton years, top administration economists were not only invoking his archrival Milton Friedman, but openly mocking Galbraith in books and speeches.

The important point is that neoliberalism was not, as Lynn suggests, a triumph of the radical extremes over the reasonable center. It was a thorough right-wing intellectual conquest of both parties.

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eoliberalism began its takeover of American ideas and politics in the late 1970s. Its evils soon began to exhibit themselves in the form of wage stagnation and surging economic inequality. American households were feeling this sting long before what Lynn calls the first stage of monopolization began in the late

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1990s, and far earlier than the Silicon Valley explosion of the 21st century.

Lynn deserves credit for identifying monopoly as a key and particularly dangerous feature of neoliberalism— but it is not the ultimate essence of the beast. If we cannot slay the neoliberal dragon with an arrow to its soft monopoly underbelly, then monopoly is not, in fact, the single political economy problem of our time.

My own view is that neoliberalism is best understood as the financialization of public life, and that financialization breeds, among other things, monopoly. The good news here is that all of Lynn’s anti-monopoly proposals—breakups, regulation, nationalization—are effective tools for fighting financialization.

We know this because, as Lynn notes, they were key features of the New Deal, which not only stymied the financialization of the Roaring Twenties, but created the basis for an economy grounded in production rather than speculation.

This is a left-liberal critique. But even lefties and liberals uncomfortable with Lynn’s political hybrid can recognize that it is bearing fruit.

Monopolists are indeed powerful barriers to progress in America today, and the anti-monopolists have turned the intellectual tide against them in Washington. This is in no small degree a product of the conservative currents running through the project, particularly Lynn’s faith that markets can work beautifully once we purge them of the monopoly men.

Lynn, who heads the Open Markets Institute, has even recruited some conservative allies to his antitrust project, such as Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.

Consider Lynn’s praise for Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist and founder of the Mont Pelerin Society, which coined the term “neoliberal.” Lynn lauds Hayek’s depiction of the price system as an information distribution network that can alert the public to social problems.

“Market prices,” Lynn writes, “allow the public … to take political action, if they think it necessary, to address the reason why a particular good is in short supply or oversupply.” When we see that the price of a

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particular good remains elevated, we recognize that there is something amiss and begin to investigate. “The public price … plays a major role in making the public the public,” Lynn adds.

This is a deeply conservative conception of the market and indeed the public itself. John Maynard Keynes, for instance, devoted a great deal of time and energy to discrediting the idea that prices convey all meaningful information about public needs and wants. If market prices are largely determined, as Keynes argued, by uncertain views about the future, then they cannot tell us much of anything about what is really happening on the ground—only what people expect to come. Market failures are ubiquitous and not merely a product of bigness, as any student of the environment, labor, or financial crisis can attest.

Monopolists are useful political symbols; the cartoonish behavior of men like Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos helps crystallize the injustices of an economy system that creates vast inequality. But there are limits to the democratic power of anti-monopolism. People vote on household problems like child care, health care, and unemployment. Convincing them that the market will tend to these needs once the monopolists are tamed seems like a roundabout electoral project at best, with the important exception of farm country, where households are not only workers but producers who bristle daily at the predations of financial and agricultural monopolies.

A political theory that claims John Kenneth Galbraith as a father of neoliberalism and Friedrich Hayek as an antidote needs some work. But you would be hard-pressed to identify a single Capitol Hill staffer who is interested in any of these objections.

Even top Democratic policy hands now accept the premise that markets will work just fine if purged of a few imperfections. Much of anti-monopolism’s new appeal among the nation’s power brokers is a result of its concessions to the

American right. Lynn’s story about reviving True Capitalism may not hold up, but if it can persuade Washington to rid us of Silicon Valley’s robber barons, few will hold his history against him. n Zach Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost and the author of the New York Times best-selling book The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.

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Alabama state troopers pummel nonviolent protesters near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, 1965.

The Ebb and Flow of Racial Progress Is this one of those rare breakthrough moments like Lincoln’s emancipation and the civil rights era of the 1960s— or prologue to more disappointment?

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ate in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson recounts a conversation in 2018 with fellow journalist Taylor Branch on the state of race relations in America. Branch described the situation as reminiscent of the 1950s on the eve of the Second Reconstruction. Wilkerson countered that the situation was reminiscent of the approximately 70 years beginning around 1880, when white supremacism defied the promised anti-racism of the First Reconstruction. Branch’s optimism soon waned. He declared that the key question of the moment was how

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many Americans, given a choice between democracy and whiteness, “would choose whiteness?” Wilkerson writes that “[w]e let that settle in the air, neither of us willing to hazard a guess …”

The outcome of the 2020 presidential election offers an ambiguous answer. By selecting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the United States electorate dodged utter and immediate ruination by depriving Donald Trump of a second term.

Nearly half the electorate, however, some 70 million voters, preferred Trump. And the Trumpist Republican Party gained seats in the House

of Representatives and seems likely to hold on to its majority in the Senate. Tens of millions of Americans indicate that they are all too ready to choose whiteness over democracy.

In Caste, Wilkerson seeks to reveal the horrific lineage of the racism pervasive in American society.

Hasn’t this tragic tale been told at length before? Yes, it has. Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, first published in 1968, remains unsurpassed in its analysis of the origins of Anglo-American Negrophobia. And there exists a library of books exposing the centrality of racial slavery, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the depredations of Jim Crow segregation, the resistance to the civil rights movement, and the persistence of the race line. But the educational radiations of even great books fade quickly, while there exists a constant need to instruct newly maturing audiences. The great

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Samuel Johnson once observed that “[p]eople need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” Caste is an elaborate reminder of things that many Americans of all races would just as soon forget. It is a catalog of racial degradation.

Wilkerson is worth reading as a curator of racial wrongs. The offense she mines most deeply is slavery, noting that “[t]he vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.” Wilkerson impresses upon readers in vivid detail what slavery meant, showing how “loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally inflicted gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings.” She quotes the Virginia General Assembly mandating in 1662 that “all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother,” a provision that revised the English common law under which children inherited the status of the father. This revision was an acknowledgment of the frequency with which enslaved Black women were bearing children fathered by white masters. The revision was also an incentive for sexual exploitation to continue, since children born of it enlarged masters’ estates. This provision, Wilkerson writes, “converted the black womb into a profit center … as neither mother nor child could make a claim against an upper-caste man, and no child springing from a black womb could escape condemnation to the lowest rung.”

The mistreatment of Black women under slavery has seldom received the attention it warrants. Abolitionists did focus upon this feature of “the peculiar institution”; it was, for example, an important aspect of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But after the Civil War, when defeated Confederates and their allies succeeded in concocting an influential myth of plantation benevolence, mention of the slave regime’s pervasive sexual criminality was

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resolutely repressed. It remained, however, an excruciating presence in the minds of many Blacks. “I hate every drop of the rapist’s blood that’s in me,” Malcolm X declared. This summer, during the George Floyd moment, the Black poet Caroline Randall Williams authored a striking column in The New York Times challenging the valorization of Confederates by monuments across the country, but particularly in the South. “[I]f they want monuments,” she wrote, “well, then, my body is a monument.” Damning her white male ancestors, she observed: “I have rape-colored skin.”

Wilkerson is similarly attentive to the sexual tribulations of Black men, particularly their victimization at the hands of those who have believed widespread tales that Black men are obsessed with white women and thus threatening to the purity of white bloodlines. She describes in detail the lynchings of Black men accused of sexual crimes against white women.

The most memorable of the stories she recounts, however, involves neither a man nor an accusation of rape. In 1943 in Live Oak, Florida, a 15-yearold Black boy named Willie James Howard sent a Christmas card to a white girl named Cynthia. When he learned that his card may have displeased the girl, Howard wrote a note of apology in which he said, “I know you don’t think much of our kind of people but we don’t hate you, all we want [is] to be your friends.” The next day, in retribution for this violation of racial etiquette, the girl’s father and two other white men dragged Willie James and his father to the banks of the Suwannee River. They “hog-tied Willie James and held a gun to his head. They forced him to jump and forced his father at gunpoint to watch him drown. Held captive and outnumbered as the father was, he was helpless to save his only child.” The men who committed this crime admitted that they abducted the boy but claimed that he jumped into the river on his own. No criminal prosecution against them was ever undertaken.

Confronting one of the great mysteries of modern times, Wilkerson asks how it was that the America that twice elected Barack Obama to

the presidency could turn around and elect Donald Trump? For her, Obama’s election amounted to the “greatest departure from the script of the American caste system” in the history of the United States. She suggests, though, that there were indications from the outset of Obama’s rise that his ascendancy would mark not so much a harbinger of new possibilities as a miracle with little likelihood of repetition. “To break more than two centuries of tradition and birthright,” she observes, “it would take the human equivalent of a supernova.” Noting that Obama is the child of a white American mother and a Black man born in Africa, Wilkerson hypothesizes that the origin story of the former president freed many whites inclined to support him from having to think about commonplace racism or commonplace Blacks.

White folks, she ventures, “could regard him with curiosity and wonderment and even claim him as part of themselves, if they chose.” Even so, only 43 percent of whites who voted supported Obama in 2008, and only 39 percent supported him in 2012.

In Wilkerson’s view, the story of the white reaction that culminated in the election of Donald Trump is largely the tale of a massive racial freak-out by whites. Many of them have been unhinged, she argues, by anxieties over racial status. They are fearful of the demographic transformation that will make them a minority in a few decades. And they resent the emergence of people of color who are sufficiently assertive to proclaim the virtue of being unapologetically Black. Many millions of white Americans grew up under the spell of an unspoken curriculum which taught that the USA was a white man’s country. For them, the spectacle of a Black family occupying the White House was shocking indeed.

Many commentators have struggled to explain why whites of modest means vote for Republican candidates whose pro-rich economic policies seem so apparently at odds with the interests of those voters.

For Wilkerson, there is no mystery.

As she sees it, many of the middling whites who vote for Republicans are not victims of false consciousness

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but consumers and practitioners of caste consciousness. In supporting politicians who are either consciously or unconsciously committed to perpetuating the traditional racial pecking order, many whites are voting their interests—as they define those interests. The comfort of being ahead of “them” even in the grip of decline is a sufficient psychological premium that many whites are willing to “forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their longterm interest in [America’s racial] hierarchy as they had known it.” That is why, Wilkerson concludes, in “the pivotal election of 2016 … the majority of whites voted for the candidate [Donald Trump] who made the most direct appeals to the characteristic most rewarded in the caste system.

They went with the aspect of themselves that grants them the most power and status in the hierarchy.”

The ubiquity of Black Lives Matter is a reflection of African American power as well as vulnerability.

Wilkerson argues that racism is a toxin that hurts not only racial minorities but the entire population.

She insists that racism, as much as anything else, accounts for the primitive and truncated state of American social welfare policy. She maintains that racism vitiates the interracial communal empathy needed to undergird generous governmental supports for those in need. “Caste does not explain everything in American life,” Wilkerson observes, “but no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering

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caste.” It is because of racial caste that “the United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the leading countries in the world.”

Infant mortality in the United States is the highest among the richest nations. American women are more at risk of death during pregnancy and childbirth than women in other wealthy countries. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, while life expectancy is the lowest among the 11 highest-income countries (beneath the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Japan, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark).

Wilkerson’s deployment of the idea of caste, however, sheds little new light on our understanding of racism. She writes that “[c]aste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a fourhundred-year-old social order.” She observes that a caste system “uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.” She posits that in the American caste system, “race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.” She declares that while caste is “fixed and rigid,” “[r]ace is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition.”

These various formulations, albeit initially interesting, do not offer substantial guidance in exploring the race question in America.

Nor did I glean much from her comparisons of anti-Black repression in the United States and the repression of Jews in Germany and “untouchables” in India. She portrays these examples of oppression as uniquely similar, writing that “[t]hroughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India.

And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary

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to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.” Is there really an analytic payoff in grouping these three regimes? Or are they just the ones with which Wilkerson and her likely audience are already most familiar? To make the claim of uniqueness persuasively, one would have had to study many brutally repressive, rigidly hierarchical societies across the globe and over many eras and then make comparisons among them. There is little indication of such study in Wilkerson’s volume.

Wilkerson writes that while her book “seeks to consider the effects on everyone caught in the hierarchy, it devotes significant attention to the poles of the American caste system, those at the top, European Americans, who have been its primary beneficiaries, and those at the bottom, African-Americans.” What about Native Americans? They are given virtually no attention by Wilkerson.

It is frequently said that slavery was America’s “original sin.” Yet much of the land mass constituting the United States of America was seized from Indian nations by conquest, duress, and fraud. Indian peoples have been slaughtered, enslaved, detained, removed, segregated, vilified, and subjected to forced assimilation.

Academic historians have documented these atrocities; note, for example, the volumes by Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the Californian Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, and Jeffery Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. Overall, though, the conquest and mistreatment of Native Americans occupy the American mind with nowhere near the saliency of Black slavery and anti-Black segregation. Even liberal politicians routinely render Indian peoples invisible by paeans to “pioneers” who “settled” an “empty” wilderness.

While the misery index among Black Americans—rates of incarceration, impoverishment, unemployment, risk of victimization by criminality, premature death—is scandalously high, the misery index among Native Americans is just as

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alarming, if not even worse. Black Americans, though, have been far more effective than Native Americans in publicizing their plight, aspirations, and demands. The ubiquity of Black Lives Matter is a reflection of African American power as well as vulnerability.

Throughout American history, some whites have been willing to subordinate virtually everything—even the survival of their governments—to white supremacy. During the American Revolution, George Washington suggested to his comrades in South Carolina that in order to defeat the British, they might have to arm at least some of their slaves and promise them emancipation as payment for fighting on behalf of the rebels. The South Carolina authorities indicated that they would rather lose to the British than arm their Black slaves. During the Civil War, some secessionists begged their new government to arm slaves and promise them freedom in return for fighting on behalf of the Confederacy. But the racism of the Confederacy prevented it from taking this step even to save itself. During World War II, there were bigots who said that they would prefer to see white soldiers die than have them transfused with blood offered by Black volunteers. Almost two decades later, the governor of Arkansas closed all of the high schools in Little Rock for a year rather than submit to a federal court decision ordering the continued desegregation of one of the schools. Asked why she supported the governor, even though his policy would cost her educationally, a white teenager responded forthrightly: “I’d rather be dumb than go to schools with niggers.”

So, yes, the depth, pervasiveness, and intensity of racism is a profound and inescapable part of the American story. But so, too, are contradictory sentiments, a key feature of the American story that Wilkerson slights. One need not avert one’s gaze from Thomas Jefferson’s wicked hypocrisy to acknowledge the ageless grandeur of his liberatory rhetoric. From Frederick Douglass to Huey Newton, champions of the Black freedom struggle have quoted approvingly Jefferson’s declaration

CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS

BY ISABEL WILKERSON

Random House

that “all men are created equal.” One need not defend the moral crimes of the Founding Fathers to note that a faction of them did succeed in preventing the nation’s founding Constitution from expressly embracing or encouraging racial slavery. One need not apologize for the deficiencies of the statesmen who hammered out the Reconstruction Amendments to recognize that they are, as Eric Foner has recently argued, quite exceptional in world history in the extent and alacrity with which they elevated (male) slaves to citizenship and to full participation in government.

Although anti-Black racism has been on vivid and grotesque display throughout American history, it has also been constantly challenged, frequently limited, and even sometimes stirringly routed. An African American was twice elected president of the United States. A Black woman will soon become vice president of the United States. Black voters in South Carolina played a decisive role in elevating Joe Biden to the front of the pack in the campaign to be the Democratic Party standardbearer. And Black voters constituted a strong and essential segment of the coalition that lifted Biden to the presidency. This summer, during the nationwide protests against police brutality in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, African American demonstrators were joined by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators of various racial backgrounds who insisted as one that Black Lives Matter. Many other markers of progress and protest could be pointed to even as we continue to feel the foreboding shadow of Trumpism. Yes, we remain mired in the muck of racial caste.

But we are also beneficiaries of antiracist struggles upon which can be built future campaigns for enhanced racial equity. The struggle for racial decency goes on. n Randall Kennedy has been a contributing editor of the Prospect since 1995. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University.

His several books include The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency.

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(L to R): Laverne Cox in Bad Hair, Jada Harris in Lovecraft Country, and Janelle Monáe in Antebellum.

Why So Many Black Horror Films Are Horrors Themselves While there are some notable exceptions, most of the film and TV entries in the current Black horror genre fail to dramatize the real horrors inflicted on Blacks.

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hen Jordan Peele released his directorial feature debut Get Out in 2017, he reinvigorated interest in the Black horror genre. Horror, fantasy, and science fiction have always been ideal genres to work through America’s original racial sins, and the tautly written film demonstrated exactly why. Through the fraught dynamics of an interracial romantic relationship, Peele found a way to tell an

entertaining story that laid bare the literal and figurative harms whiteness has historically inflicted upon Black people and their bodies. Most importantly, it illustrated how those harms are perpetuated in the present.

To put it more directly, it did a single thing extremely well. But as the genre has picked up steam in the years since Get Out’s release, it has also gotten exponentially more

ambitious. In both film and television, Get Out successors such as Antebellum, Lovecraft Country, Bad Hair, Watchmen, and Peele’s own sophomore effort Us have demonstrated that the triumphs of Get Out are much more hard-won than was immediately apparent.

The problem, naturally, is that a meaningful radical politics tends to take a back seat when entertainment and commerce meet. Many of the aforementioned projects, though entertaining, ultimately fail because they do not do the hard ideological work necessary to give them the cultural and political meaning to which they aspire. They fall into the gaping hole where art and capitalism generally intersect.

Case in point is this year’s Antebellum—a horror film written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, both making their

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feature directorial debuts. The film stars Janelle Monáe as Veronica Henley, a writer and public intellectual who is kidnapped from her life and deposited into what seems to be a modern-day plantation. Beaten, branded, and given the new name Eden, Veronica must find a way to escape and return to her family.

It is clear that Antebellum truly believes it has something deeply resonant to say about race in America.

Unfortunately, it never gets around to telling us what that something is.

The impressive potential of the story is undermined almost immediately by its reliance on pat dialogue best suited for a viral Twitter thread. By the film’s end, we learn that Veronica and her fellow abductees have been forcibly installed as living participants in a deranged senator’s Civil War re-enactment fantasy. Veronica has been selected and targeted specifically because she is publicly but vaguely vocal about general issues like “patriarchy,” “revolution,” and “intersectionality.”

The film begins and ends on the plantation, cleaving in two at its midpoint to show us Veronica’s life before she is metaphorically pulled back in time. According to a Q&A with Interview magazine, the directors included this detour in order to “show Veronica in her full power in a completely different world.” Supposedly, we are meant to make the connection between her thriving life and career before this experience and the forgotten lives of enslaved Africans before they were stolen and brought to new lands.

Noble as that intention may have been, it is not reflected in the film’s actual story. It is never made clear what Veronica’s politics actually are other than presumably leftist.

“Within our authenticity lies our real power and that’s even in those environments which by design demand our complete and total assimilation,” she says to an eager crowd at a conference. For some reason, this milquetoast combination of buzzwords and airy rhetoric elicits cheers from her audience.

But Antebellum’s biggest sin is that it mistakes cinematography for a narrative point of view and uses

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brutality to gesture at seriousness and depth. The film begins with the capture and murder of a fleeing Black woman, and only escalates from there. Bush and Renz never meaningfully explore either their protagonist or their villains, constructing both as empty shells positioned as adversaries in an ill-articulated battle. They show us the terror of life on this plantation for Veronica, but they do not bother to explain what motivated its existence in the first place.

Antebellum has all the aesthetic signifiers of a Very Important Film™, but it never bothers to acknowledge the contours of whiteness or dig into the ramifications of what it would mean for something like this to actually happen in our current climate.

Black audiences are no stranger to white violence, but here Bush and Renz have defanged it by stripping it of all meaning or motivation.

Misha Green’s recently concluded first season of her HBO series Lovecraft Country suffered from the opposite problem. Rather than providing a scarcity of information, Green packed her story with so much detail it was hard to discern who or what its actual focus was. A clever subversion of H.P. Lovecraft’s racism, Lovecraft Country took its namesake’s mythical monsters and aligned them squarely with whiteness. In the story, Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) finds himself caught up in the malevolent forces of magic that he has inherited from his bloodline. In this universe, monster and man represent the same level of danger if you’re Black.

But the series’s impressive and terrifying pilot gives way to “monster of the week” shenanigans that only loosely connect to one another, leaving the audience confused and disoriented. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could summarize the season’s plot, because it never fully cohered. Green’s characters were brave and bold and determined to stand up to the new, supernatural threats they had stumbled upon, but the show was never able to successfully delineate who or what those threats were.

On the small scale—usually on a scene-to-scene basis—the show was excellent at making clear that the

In Get Out, Jordan Peele laid bare the harms whiteness has historically inflicted upon Black people. racial dynamics of 1950s America permeated every aspect of its characters’ lives. Intimate relationships were speckled with the loss and yearning of potential thwarted by racial terror. But in the aggregate, Lovecraft Country failed to make its point. The show was jam-packed with backstory and lore about everything from a secret cabal of wizards to a murderous doctor experimenting on Black people. But with its first season concluded, the politics the show gestured at were not threaded through the narrative in a way that held up to scrutiny.

Even internally, the show’s issues with colorism and gender undercut its presumed assertions about race, history, and trauma. The story’s most violent and repressed Black male character was also its darkestskinned. Its dark-skinned female characters were brutalized and killed. The unceremonious death of an Indigenous two-spirit character prompted an online apology from Green. Even to itself, the show could not justify its scattered politics.

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Justin Simien’s Bad Hair is yet another example of a Black horror film grasping for political resonance where none exists. The film is nominally about an ambitious young Black woman whose life is derailed when she has a new weave installed that turns out to be possessed. Bloodthirsty and murderous, the weave— and the story—makes a mockery of Black women’s real-life struggles with hair by simplifying them past the point of realistic recognition.

Simien has called the film a “satirical horror love letter” to the strength of Black women. While his intentions were surely pure, what he produced instead was a reductive story that did not engage with the complexities of Black beauty politics, or how the thorny politics of presentation have impacted Black women’s ability to move through, be accepted by, or ascend within white institutions.

In her review of the film for Vulture, culture critic Angelica Jade Bastién argued that

Simien, from my vantage point, reflects Black men’s own strange, thorny relationship to the beauty rituals of Black women and the intimate spaces in which they take place. Both the script and direction pathologize Black women’s relationship with their hair, falling on tired tropes that frame wanting to get a relaxer or weave as a reflection of Black women striving for white acceptance and power (although the villains shown throughout the film are primarily Black women, which in itself is telling).

Rather than being a new way to explore the realities of an age-old problem, Bad Hair contributes to it, chiefly by laying the blame for the endlessly perpetuated Eurocentric beauty standard at Black women’s feet. In this universe, true, proud Black women do not fall prey to the allure of silky weaves or “creamy crack.” Though why the film then chooses to also kill off these “naturalista” characters (those who don’t alter their natural hair) is never explained.

The film’s ending (truncated from its Sundance run time) positions weaves and other protective styles as something from which Black women

need to be saved. In Simien’s mind, a weave can only be a source of torment or shame. Weaves and hair extensions are depicted as the bogeyman at the heart of Black women’s internal conflict, without ever meaningfully addressing the white and capitalist order that is at the root of the need for them to assimilate in order to survive.

It’s almost ironic that Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen is the story that best balances the concerns of fantasy storytelling with real-world considerations of racial dynamics.

Lindelof—who is white—adapted the limited series from the comic books of the same name. Watchmen took creative liberties that expanded and contextualized the story’s narrative.

It built a world that commented on our current climate around policing while retaining the spirit of the comic’s original story.

What makes Watchmen both a successful adaptation and example of how fantasy can inform Black politics is that it gets the very first step right: It explicitly names whiteness as the ever-present villain in the lives of everyday Black men and women.

White people are individually presented as antagonists, sure. But the series makes the point over and over again that whiteness and adherence to the tenets of white supremacy are the animating factors in the chaos and violence that stalk its characters.

Black police officer and masked vigilante Angela Abar (Regina King) is sprung into action when her white mentor and boss is found lynched from a tree, apparently by an enfeebled old man. As she investigates how this seemingly impossible sequence of events could have occurred, she is drawn into a decades-old conspiracy involving her own family, the institutions she trusts, and the very foundation of her identity.

Watchmen cleverly flips its world’s racial landscape, making it the opposite of our own. In this world, the police are the good guys, and the explicit enemies of the resurgent neo-Nazi group the Seventh Kavalry. But as the show’s narrative progresses, it slowly reveals that the mythic “White Night”—in which the Kavalry murdered nearly the entire police force in a coordinated

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set of home invasions—was actually orchestrated by cooperating forces.

Abar’s beloved police chief and an ambitious senator collaborated on the deadly evening as a way to hasten the blurring of lines between police and vigilante groups.

With this revelation, the show dramatizes a fact that many already understand to be true—the real hindrance to American progress is the latency of good old-fashioned antiBlack racism. No matter how you shift institutions around, whiteness and white supremacy persist because they are hardy ideologies that must be directly confronted and challenged, not wished away. Even in a world in which the police are the heroes, they are still the villains. There is no way to cleave these institutions from the inherent wrongs that were embedded in them from their inception.

But Watchmen and Get Out are, sadly, the exceptions in the new Black horror genre. The through line of the many failed stories is their reckless deployment of spectacle over substance. In many ways, by contrast, Get Out is a very quiet film. Its protagonist, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), spends most of his time merely observing the white people around him. It is effective because it uses the discrepancies and oddities that he takes notice of as a way to frame a larger story about white resentment and dissonance. Stefon Bristol’s See You Yesterday also pares down a fantastical premise—the invention of time travel—to a deceptively simple premise: Not even the scientific brilliance of two young Black minds can save them from the everyday horrors of police violence.

It is this simplicity that makes these stories sing, because they take realworld pain and trauma, and respect the truth that they are inescapable. No amount of fantastical rendering can obscure the fact that for many Black people, every day is a horror. n Cate Young is a podcast producer and film and culture critic based in Los Angeles. A former fellow at Bitch Media and Rotten Tomatoes, her writing has appeared in Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Jezebel, Vulture, and The Cut, among others.

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Parting shot

The U.S. Election: Views From the Arab World “It’s something I’ve always said: The world needs to vote in American politics,” the Sudanese cartoonist Khalid Albaih told me recently. He had been pinging me all week of the election, asking when the result would come. Trump, from his perspective, has nursed bigotry and violence worldwide, and he wants “Americans to realize how much their political system and who they choose affects the lives of millions outside.”

Millions were closely following every nuance of the election, as the cartoonist Anwar noted in a Cairo newspaper. The “stars of the

red carpet”—the stories Egyptians couldn’t put down—featured the coronavirus and the American ballot box.

But caricature can be risky in the Arab world. Jordanian authorities arrested veteran cartoonist Emad Hajjaj for mocking an Emirati leader in August. The United Arab Emirates had just signed an accord with Israel, brokered by Trump, which the cartoonist saw as an arms deal. “It’s not a big deal to say this, it’s my right as a cartoonist,” Hajjaj told me when he was released days later. He quickly returned to lampooning the powerful.

—Jonathan Guyer

Anwar (Egypt) Emad Hajjaj (Jordan)

Khalid Albaih (Sudan)

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Joe Biden’s potential to bring the country together

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS mericans came out, in the middle of a pandemic, and voted in record numbers to elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Despite this decisive result, the country is bitterly divided over social issues, race and gender.

Fully 56 percent of Trump voters said they support him because he “stands up for America’s values, history and culture.” That is incomprehensible to those of us who both love America and fight to make it fairer and more just. But our divisions mask an important commonality: We all want to feel safe—economically, emotionally and physically. In the midst of overlapping crises—a pandemic, a recession, a climate emergency and a reckoning with racial injustice— most of us don’t feel secure. President-elect Biden will not only confront these crises, he will work to make the country more united, just and secure.

The unrelenting march of the coronavirus pandemic—from early outbreaks on the coasts to nearly every state being in the red zone—has blanketed the country in fear.

The economic downturn has cast 8 million more people into poverty. Even before the pandemic, 40 percent of Americans said they couldn’t cover a $400 emergency. Many people who never worried about their financial security feel very vulnerable now.

The murders of innocent Black Americans, the peaceful protests in response, and the false characterizations of those protests as “mobs” reveal we have much hard work and healing to do. Racism—in law enforcement, healthcare, education and the environment—is so pervasive that public health experts say simply being Black can be harmful for your health. Race played a role in the elections, from dog-whistle warnings of voter fraud to outright voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

States must get the coronavirus under control. Experts on the Biden COVID-19 task force are already at work on plans to reduce the spread of the virus, ensure vaccines are safe and implement basic virus control measures scientists have long begged for: a national system for testing and contact tracing, targeted closures when necessary, and promoting mask-wearing as both a safeguard and a patriotic act.

Protecting Americans from the coronavirus will make it possible to pursue other priorities, such as in education. This has been the most challenging school year most of us have ever experienced— from the lack of consistent safety guardrails and guidance, to the shortage of resources, to the limitations of hybrid and remote learning, despite educators working harder than ever.

President-elect Biden is committed to working with Congress to pass a COVID-19 relief package with robust aid to schools, towns, cities and states, so they can invest in safeguards to reopen schools safely.

In addition to public health components, the relief package will provide crucial funding to help schools

recover from the devastating academic, social, health and nutrition effects of the pandemic on children.

The Biden-Harris education plan fulfills the promise and purpose of our public schools as agents of opportunity and anchors of our communities by pledging to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and triple funding for Title I to help low-income students. It will provide high-quality universal prekindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds. It will expand community schools, which is vital to help a generation of students recover from the effects of COVID-19 and this recession. It will restore the mission of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. And Biden and Harris have pledged to provide much-needed relief to borrowers crushed by student loan debt.

Their economic recovery plan will create millions of jobs in manufacturing, innovation, infrastructure, clean energy and education. These are jobs you can support a family on, jobs that will help restore hope that there is a better future ahead.

The Biden administration will protect and build on the Affordable Care Act, giving Americans more choice, reducing healthcare costs, protecting those with pre-existing conditions and expanding coverage.

The American people have spoken. We want leaders who care about our well-being and will unify all Americans with better leadership, honesty and integrity, justice and equality, caring and respect. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the leaders we need.

America’s divisions mask an important commonality: We all want to feel safe.

The thing that families place so much hope in—their children’s education—now causes so much angst. We worry that children will contract the virus at school or unknowingly bring it home; we see our children losing out academically with remote learning and growing isolated and depressed as the months drag on.

Healthcare workers are exhausted, angry and, yes, very afraid. Many still lack necessary protective equipment as infections rage. Hospitals across the country are reaching capacity and face dire staff shortages, leading North Dakota’s governor to make the outrageous declaration that healthcare workers who test positive for COVID-19 can continue working.

President-elect Biden knows that to revive our economy and achieve any of our priorities, the United

Photo: Pamela Wolfe

Joe Biden joins Weingarten, AFT members and students at an AFT Votes town hall in Houston on May 28, 2019.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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