The American Prospect #328

Through Breaking

BY DAVID DAYEN

POLITICS & POWER

How the Democrats (finally!) passed their agenda

It’s time to finish the job.

Global events like the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain crisis have proven just how important it is for the United States to make the things we need. Finally, policymakers are putting an industrial policy in place to strengthen American manufacturing, and companies are making major investments in the factories of the future.

But all of these investments will be for naught if the United States fails to see things through. A combination of smart policy and strong trade enforcement is needed to ensure the United States doesn’t fall back into old habits and offshore factories once current crises abate.

Join us in holding our policymakers accountable! Let’s make sure our future is Made in America.

americanmanufacturing.org

Features

12 How Policy Got Done in 2022

To understand the Democrats’ big climate and health care bill, you must go back decades. By David Dayen

24 Industrial Policy Without Industrial Unions

Democrats’ new industrial manufacturing plan leaves unions behind, fumbling a moment of relative leverage for organized labor. By Lee Harris

32 Reclaiming the Deep State

How the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the longtime graveyard of regulation in the public interest, became its unlikely champion

By Robert Kuttner

40 Waters Run Dry, Lawsuits Run Hot Alabama, Florida, and Georgia would rather litigate than cooperate on planning for the seasons of drought to come.

By Gabrielle Gurley

46 Abortion Doctors Under the Microscope

The task of defending reproductive rights from the Dobbs ruling is being led by progressive doctors, but everyone has a stake in the outcome. By Ramenda Cyrus

Prospects

04 Generation Union By Harold Meyerson

Besiege the Ivy League By Jane Chung

The Dobbs Election By Alexander Sammon

46

Soraya Roberts on Abbott Elementary

Brian Kettenring on Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World

Adam M. Lowenstein on The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

62 Yalidy Matos on Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality

64 Parting Shot: Spook Scabs By Francesca Fiorentini

by Angie Wang

ON THE Campaign Trail

Our Midterm Tracker covers elections across the country that will determine control of Congress and more.

Punishing People for Being Sick

The Prospect and Type Investigations team up for a web feature that looks at how San Quentin prison continues to put incarcerated people in brutal solitary confinement if they’re suspected of having COVID.

THE BIDEN AGENDA

Want to learn about the signature climate, health, and tax legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act? We have you covered.

Twitter Spaces

Our new live interview series hosted by executive editor David Dayen and staff writer Lee Harris talks to experts and leaders in clean energy, student loan reform, state and local government, and more.

What is the Biden administration getting done? Follow along as we chart the important executive action efforts.

EXECUTIVE EDITOR David Dayen

FOUNDING CO-EDITORS Robert Kuttner, Paul Starr

CO-FOUNDER Robert B. Reich

EDITOR AT LARGE Harold Meyerson

SENIOR EDITOR Gabrielle Gurley

MANAGING EDITOR Ryan Cooper

ART DIRECTOR Jandos Rothstein

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Susanna Beiser

STAFF WRITER Alexander Sammon

JOHN LEWIS WRITING FELLOW Ramenda Cyrus

WRITING FELLOWS Jarod Facundo, Lee Harris

INTERNS Robert Hitt, Daniel Netter, Madeline Rosenberg

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Marcia Angell, Gabriel Arana, David Bacon, Jamelle Bouie, Jonathan Cohn, Ann Crittenden, Garrett Epps, Jeff Faux, Francesca Fiorentini, 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

PUBLIC RELATIONS SPECIALIST Tisya Mavuram

ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR Lauren Pfeil

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Daaiyah Bilal-Threats, Chuck Collins, David Dayen, Rebecca Dixon, Shanti Fry, Stanley B. Greenberg, Jacob S. Hacker, Amy Hanauer, Jonathan Hart, Derrick Jackson, Randall Kennedy, Robert Kuttner, Ellen J. Meany, Javier Morillo, Miles Rapoport, Janet Shenk, Adele Simmons, Ganesh Sitaraman, William Spriggs, Paul Starr, Michael Stern, Valerie Wilson

PRINT SUBSCRIPTION RATES $60 (U.S.), $66 (CANADA), AND $72 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL)

CUSTOMER SERVICE 202-776-0730, ext 4000 OR info@prospect.org

MEMBERSHIPS prospect.org/membership

REPRINTS prospect.org/permissions

Vol. 33, No. 5. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049 -7285) is published bimonthly by American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Ste. 600, Washington, D.C. 20005. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. , and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2022 by American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without consent. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of American Prospect, Inc. POSTMASTER : Please send address changes to American Prospect, 1225 Eye St. NW, Ste. 600, Washington, D.C. 20005. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

Thank You, Reader, for Your Support!

Convert Your Print Subscription to a Full Prospect Membership

Every membership level includes the option to receive our print magazine by mail, or a renewal of your current print subscription. Plus, you’ll have your choice of newsletters, discounts on Prospect merchandise, access to Prospect events, and much more. Find out more at prospect.org/membership

Update Your Current Print Subscription prospect.org/my-TAP

You may log in to your print account for change of address, to give a gift or purchase back issues, or to manage your payments. You will need your account number and zip-code from the label:

NUMBER

EXPIRATION DATE

ZIP-CODE

To renew your subscription by mail, please send your mailing address along with a check or money order for $60 (U.S. only; Canada: $66; other international: $72) to:

The American Prospect

1225 Eye Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20005 info@prospect.org | 1-202-776-0730 ext 4000

PROSPEC

HAROLD MEYERSON

Generation Union

According to the

2022 edition of its annual Labor Day poll, Gallup reports that a bare 3 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 belong to unions. The poll also shows that the percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 who approve of unions is about 24 times higher than that: 72 percent.

That 3 percent figure reflects the longstanding and myriad obstacles that workers seeking union membership must somehow overcome: chiefly, the adamant opposition of American employers to having their workers unionize, and the decades-long enfeeblement of the National Labor Relations Act, which once actually protected workers’ rights to form and join unions.

But what does that 72 percent figure reflect? Certainly not a childhood spent in the company of unionized elders or an environment celebrating organized labor. “A lot of us grew up hearing anti-union messages,” says Jaz Brisack, who, at age 25, straddles the line between Gen Zers and millennials. In her mid-teens, Brisack encountered the play Inherit The Wind, about the Scopes Trial, which piqued her interest in Scopes’s attorney Clarence Darrow, which piqued her interest in an earlier Darrow client, socialist Eugene V. Debs, who in 1894 led a nearly nationwide strike of railroad workers.

Brisack has been militantly pro-union ever since. She’s the Buffalo barista who led the first successful unionization effort at a Starbucks and who since has counseled union-seeking baristas across the country on their fights.

Today, the unionization efforts that may seem

to have sprung out of nowhere are dominated by young workers. While the majority of members in long-established, shrinking industrial and crafts unions are mostly in their forties, it’s 20- and 30-somethings who are organizing at warehouses (Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Smalls is 34), and at retail and food outlets ranging from REI and Starbucks to Chipotle and Trader Joe’s. It’s younger professionals who are organizing at nonprofits, museums, think tanks, and state legislatures, and young aspiring professionals who constitute the grad student unions steadily growing at universities.

For companies like Starbucks that are working mightily to keep employees from having a say in their work conditions, the new unionists pose a particularly knotty challenge. The company can, of course, fire workers and close facilities to keep workers in line. It can offer higher wages or better benefits only to those workers who aren’t going union. Starbucks has done all of that, and more. But there’s an ideological and generational gap between these uppity baristas and the preceding couple of generations of workers whom firms managed more successfully to intimidate. This new generation seems more determined to try to unionize than any since the 1930s.

Part of the reason is ideology. For most of the past decade, young Americans have provided some startling (if sensible) answers when polled about our political economy. Since the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011 called attention to the stratospheric economic inequality that has overtaken the nation, large percentages and sometimes slim

majorities of young Americans have a positive view of socialism. The outpouring of young people’s support to Bernie Sanders, the only socialist presidential candidate in American history who got more voters than Debs, when he began his first run in 2015 surprised everyone—including Sanders himself. But a look at the preceding half-decade of polling on ideology made clear that Sanders didn’t so much create a new American left as he revealed it and gave it expression.

The ideological shift of the young tracks an economy that’s been particularly dysfunctional for them. The Great Recession of 2008 and the grindingly slow recovery took a very long time to reach young people, and did so in such a haphazard and incomplete way that their net worth still trails that of their predecessor generations at comparable ages. Since World War II, only the recession of 1981-1982 was as deep, but that was a shorter, if severe, downturn, and those it permanently damaged were disproportionately the nation’s industrial workers, who saw the states where their jobs were clustered turn into the Rust Belt. As the political evolution of Ohio makes clear, that generation of workers has tended to move right rather than left, and the steady diminution since then of decent-paying blue-collar jobs has rolled that rightward movement on.

The political effect of 2008 and its aftermath was quite different. The damage wasn’t centered in one region or sector. It caused millions of Americans—disproportionately Black Americans—to lose their homes, though as this coincided with Barack Obama’s presidency, it didn’t lead to a Black exodus from Democratic ranks. Job and pay cuts particularly hit the nation’s public sector, another area that is disproportionately Black. Teacher ranks and wages were reduced; universities substituted non–tenure track and adjunct professors and graduate students for more costly tenured faculty; student debt rose as job opportunities fell.

Economist Noah Smith has argued that the post-2008 generation has suffered from what he terms “elite overproduction.” College students flocked to humanities and social science majors in the first decade of the century, only to see job markets in law, journalism, publishing, teach ing, and academia shrivel after 2008. None of them have come close to regaining their pre2008 levels since. Millions of college graduates were compelled to take jobs for which they were overqualified, while paying off student debt and navigating an increasingly tight and pricy housing market they could not afford to enter.

Rafael Jaime is a teaching assistant at

UCLA pursuing a Ph.D. in a field that has unemployability written all over it: medieval and early modern English. He notes that a recent study found that only 50 percent of Ph.D. candidates in English from the ten top-rated universities in the field were able to find jobs at colleges or universities. “And that was before the pandemic,” he adds.

Jaime is now the president of United Auto Workers Local 2865, the 19,000-member union of the University of California system’s grad uate student teaching assistants and tutors. They’ve recently been joined by a new sis ter local, this one of UC’s 17,000 grad student research assistants, who voted to go union in January. Add the two locals to the postdocs and others and you get roughly 48,000 UC employ ees who belong to the UAW. That’s more UAW members than currently work at Fiat Chrysler. Jaime put the grad students’ average age in the mid-twenties.

The growth of unions at UC and other colleges and universities is no mystery. “Though most of us came to UC not really knowing what a union was,” Jaime says, “just seeing the university dete riorate year after year, with tightened budgets, profitdriven priorities, and work ers increasingly treated as expendable, made many of us realize that the only way to reorient the university’s pri orities was to come together and use our power to shift those priorities.”

For years, the UAW has been unable to unionize the auto factories that European and Japanese automakers have opened in the South. At the same time, it has suc ceeded in organizing a num ber of college and university campuses. Today, roughly 100,000 of the union’s approximately 400,000 members are university employees. At its convention this summer, the union voted to re-establish its Western States Region 6. In the postwar decades, that region had been home to over 100,000 auto and aerospace workers, but as the West Coast auto plants closed down and the aircraft factories radically downsized once the Cold War ended, regional membership grew so small that the union abolished the region and consolidated it with a Midwestern region head quartered in St. Louis. The newly re-established

Region 6 will have precious few manufactur ing workers, however; the vast majority of its members will be grad students.

The union’s previous president, Gary Jones (who’s since been convicted of misappropriating union funds for personal purposes) was cool to grad student organizing. The UAW’s new president, Ray Curry, appears to understand that it’s a source of renewal and possible militance that the union sorely needs. But granting those students what in effect will be their own region signals not only the union’s growth among young academics but also what I suspect is its uncertainty about how they mesh with actual autoworkers.

The rebirth of Region 6 is a distinctly posi tive development, but it also points to the gap that exists between older, established unions

ed has been discreetly guiding the unionization efforts at Starbucks, while other unions—chief ly the American Federation of Teachers—have provided needed funding and facilities to the Amazon Labor Union. But, as former New York Times labor reporter Steve Greenhouse and I have written, the kind of huge commitment of resources that Mine Workers president John L. Lewis and Clothing Workers president Sid ney Hillman made to industrial workers of the 1930s to build unions like the UAW and the Steelworkers is nowhere in evidence today.

Lewis was nobody’s radical; until the coming of the New Deal, he’d tended to back Republicans. But in enabling the generation of 1930s leftists to form unions, he under stood that if unions were to grow more pow erful, they’d have to incorporate groups and beliefs that had been outside of their comfort zones. A similar challenge faces today’s union leaders. Today’s young union activists gravitated to Bernie Sanders even as established union leaders were more at home with Joe Biden. They are more inclined to rank-andfile power, to racial and gender justice, to addressing the cli mate crisis than many (though definitely not all) union lead ers. The young will push labor leftward—and if their organiz ing efforts don’t succeed, the movement’s direction will be neither leftward nor rightward, but downward.

Perhaps union leaders are waiting for the current iteration of labor law reform to be enact ed, as they have for decades. But moments such as this are all too infrequent, and the current opportunities all too fleeting.

and a new, much younger generation of union ists, many college-educated, many clearly on the left. For years, the share of union members who are college graduates has been steadily rising; according to a 2021 study by the Eco nomic Policy Institute, 46.5 percent of workers covered by union contracts have a bachelor’s degree or more. In recent years, those workers have been disproportionately joining unions.

If these new unionists speak a language that today’s CEOs don’t really understand, it’s not clear that all that many established unions understand it, either. To be sure, Workers Unit

Now, as in the ’30s, a new gen eration of militants have made organizing inroads no one really expected. Now, as then, the federal government, at the NLRB, at the Department of Labor (which recently posted a how-to guide for workers seeking to form a union), and even at the White House, is clearly promoting unionization.

Millennials and Gen Zers can change the trajectory of worker power in America and revitalize our democracy in the process. But they can’t do it alone. Realizing Generation Union’s potential requires support and solidarity from the rest of us to create the kind of transformation our nation clearly needs. n

Rafael Jaime, president of UCLA’s United Auto Workers chapter

The greatest threat to democracy from media isn’t disinformation, it’s the paywall

As David Dayen wrote in April, “The information that an informed citizenry needs to make choices about who governs them and what is happening underneath the surface has been privatized, gated, and kept from those with an inability to pay…. The loss of trust in journalism is tied up with a loss of access—the coverage vacuum in many cities has led many to turn to paranoid, reactionary Facebook groups. If your media diet comes from the equivalent of McDonald’s, you’re not going to be able to work it off as easily.”

Foster the free flow of information

When you support The American Prospect, you’re supporting fellow readers who aren’t able to give, and countering the class system for information

There are many ways to give

Browse the options at Prospect.org/donate

There you will find links for PayPal, ActBlue, Givebutter, Benevity, and DAF Direct for Fidelity and Schwab.

Text the word TAP to 53-555 and add your support in just a few clicks. You can even donate with cryptocurrency. Paper checks are always welcome; mail to American Prospect Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005-5960. Your donations are 100% tax deductible. FEIN 52-1617061.

NOTEBOOK

Besiege the Ivy League

We can have a better higher-education system, or we can have schools that cater to the elite and privileged. We can’t have both.

By Jane Chung

Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 of student debt is a step toward solving the college affordability and student debt crisis. But it does not fully address the depraved higher-education system’s hunger for profit that will continue to prey on young peo ple in years to come. Organizers have long paired the demand for debt cancellation with an associated demand for tuition-free college. This is not only reasonable—it is possible to achieve. A tuition-free college system that is attractive to most young peo ple, however, requires not only funding, but also the curtailing of the popularity and prestige of wealthy, elite private colleges like the Ivy League.

The Ivy League represents the most egregious actors among modern universi ties, which operate more like sophisticat ed financial institutions, extracting public funds ($52 billion just in 2017) under the guise of educating young people and serv ing the public interest. Sociologist Charlie Eaton has explained that wealthy private colleges are essentially “ivory tower tax havens” that benefit from multiple tax breaks on assets and endowments, which are investment vehicles that grow past prof its. Elite private schools fare far better than public universities in this regard: Princeton receives $105,000 in tax subsidies per stu dent, while Rutgers gets $12,000.

Wealthy universities enjoy these tax breaks because they are classified as 501(c)3 tax-exempt organizations, which are meant to be “operated exclusively for … educational purposes.” Yet there is undeniable evidence and a growing con sensus that wealthy universities operate mostly to make money as real estate titans, hedge funds, and private equity investors. Receipts of their expenditures are proof: These universities pay fund managers more than they invest in students, or pay educa tors. And they are shameless and explicit in their pursuit of profit; Harvard boasts that

it is the oldest corporation in the Western hemisphere. Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, wrote in his book about the commercialization of higher education, “Universities share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there is never enough money to satisfy their desires.”

These schools contributed to the 2008 financial crisis through their reckless investment strategies, and continue to bury their funds over seas to evade taxes, investing them in oil, gas, and coal, thereby acceler ating the decimation of our planet.

Wealthy universities also rep licate and exacerbate wealth and racial inequity. They enroll more students from families in the rich est 1 percent than from the poorest 50 percent combined. At the most elite schools, 4 percent of students were from the lowest quartile of socioeconomic status, while 69 per cent were from the highest. In an interview, Tom Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, confirmed, “These schools were created by the rich, are funded by the rich, and are for the rich. Most of their discussions about equality and equity ring hollow when you look at the [low] share of their undergradu ates that are Pell grant recipients.”

As Darrick Hamilton and William A. Darity Jr. have written and demonstrat ed, “Race is a stronger predictor of wealth than class itself.” Indeed, according to the Department of Education, the percentage of students who received Pell grants, fed eral grants awarded to undergraduates who “display exceptional financial need,” was highest for Black students (72 percent) and lowest for white students (34 percent).

A well-known contributing factor to these inequities is legacy admissions poli cies at elite colleges. At schools like Harvard and Yale, legacy students make up roughly 14 percent of the student body. Meanwhile, research from Tom Mortenson and Nicole Brunt of the Pell Institute finds that only 12 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate stu dent body benefits from Pell grants. Simi larly, recruited athletes help the white and wealthy overrepresent at elite schools. Ten percent of the incoming class to Harvard

College in 2021 were recruited athletes; 83 percent of those athletes are white, com pared to 53 percent of the freshman class overall.

As employers, elite colleges increasingly pass off the critical work of educating to “non-tenure track” faculty, adjuncts, and graduate students, increasing the precarity of work in academia, and creating an under class of workers in lockstep with the rest of the corporate world. It’s no wonder graduate students across the country are organizing and striking for living wages, benefits, and job stability—and winning.

For these reasons and more, we can and should besiege the Ivy League and their wealthy, elite, and private institutional peers. We can do that by diminishing the two types of capital that make elite colleges elite: financial and social, the latter being reinforced through the selectiveness of their admissions processes, their perceived value in the job market, and their wealthy and powerful alumni networks. We can start by holding in check the unfettered growth of their financial capital. Here’s how.

We must revoke wealthy private uni versities’ 501(c)3 status, because they do

not meet its criteria for tax exemption. Again, they exist not explicitly to educate, but rather to extract and profit. Alter natively, the government can make their tax exemption status contingent on grow ing the share of undergraduates with Pell grants they admit, a proposal that Tom Mortenson and Nicole Brunt of the Pell Institute presented at a conference earlier this summer.

We must also revoke direct federal, state, and local funding, or make it contingent on overhauling the admissions process. Eaton found that the richest 5 percent of schools have admitted about the same number of undergraduates for the last 40 years, and he told me that requiring schools to increase their enrollment is a key to making their student bodies more diverse. We could also abolish legacy admissions policies, and con sider making federal funding contingent on lottery-based admissions programs that orient toward promoting wealth and racial equity. Think tanks spanning the politi cal spectrum, from New America to the American Enterprise Institute, have pro posed as much.

One potential way to both decrease the financial power of elite colleges and free up

The Memorial Church at Harvard University

funding for broad access to higher educa tion is through the tax code.

There is precedent for taxing wealthy schools. In 2017, Donald Trump signed into law a 1.4 percent tax on net invest ment income among the richest schools. But a 1 percent tax is laughably inadequate, especially given the unfathomable levels of wealth these colleges hoard. The 24 rich est private universities collectively own $390 billion in their endowments. College endowments in the country booked aver age returns of 31 percent in 2021; among the top 24 richest colleges, the average rate was 40 percent.

Here is a simple thought exercise that demonstrates the stunning wealth of these schools’ endowments, even with a more ambitious tax. Assuming a 2021 growth rate, if starting next year we levied a 13 per cent annual tax on the total endowments of just the top 24 universities, after a decade we would surpass $1 trillion in yearly tax revenue. (A 13 percent tax is a lower rate than the income tax my mother paid when I applied to college.) This tax would hardly make a dent in the colleges’ wealth, which would collectively be well over $7 trillion at the end of those ten years. The largest individual endowment would be worth over $1.75 trillion, and each school’s endowment would still grow over that period, on average by 764 percent.

If we are successful in our multipronged besiegement tactics, endowments will grow more slowly in the next decade than they did in 2021, perhaps even diminishing in total value. But the tax revenue would still be prodigious even if these elite schools only earned half as much as we begin to suffocate their sources of financial and social capital.

Imagine all we could do with all that money. The University of California, Berke ley, a high-quality public college, has a bud

get of $3 billion, which it uses to educate about 45,000 students each year. With $1 trillion a year, we could educate 15 million young people a year—without taking a cent in tuition. That’s just about the total popu lation of young people currently pursuing higher education.

We could use the funds to supplement existing public universities, community colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, minority-serving institu tions, tribal colleges and universities, and technical schools. Or we could boost the woefully inadequate Pell grant system, which today covers just 29 percent of the average costs of public college—the lowest level it has covered in more than 40 years. These investments would meaningfully improve racial equity. Mark Paul, Alan Aja, Darrick Hamilton, and William A. Darity Jr. estimated in 2016 that tuitionfree college could add a million more Black and Latinx graduates.

Eaton told me he sees two benefits to this type of tax, “both as a tool to redirect resources to institutions that actually serve students from diverse racial and economic backgrounds, but also as a tool to provide incentives for elite institutions to them selves become inclusive and empowering.” He suggested taxes could be reduced or waived for elite schools that increase enroll ment, and in particular for students from diverse backgrounds.

Of course, there are other ways to fund debt-free college. Economist Doug Hen wood points out that we could make high er education completely free if we simply prioritized it in our national budget. In countries like Norway, Finland, Luxem bourg, and Austria, public sources fund over 90 percent of higher education. (In the U.S., that figure is 64 percent.) Pub lic universities in Norway, as a result, are free for all—even foreign-born students. Alternatively, legislators like Bernie Sand ers and Pramila Jayapal have introduced legislation that would make Wall Street pay for free college; Elizabeth Warren, during her bid for the presidency, intro duced a plan that would make the ultrawealthy pay.

Whatever the funding mechanism, we must consider whether and how it reduces the stranglehold that elite private colleges have over the American psyche. Eaton told me, “Institutions like Harvard will continue to poison the popular imagination of college

as long as they continue to have massive endowments that are used to the benefit of the very few.”

To this point, he emphasized the impor tance of wealth taxes and policies that close private equity tax loopholes to “go to the source of endowment wealth” and curtail it. In other words, besiege the elite univer sities, skimming off their profits to fund free public higher-education options while they choose to become more inclusive and beneficial to the public, and less elite; or die.

In her book about for-profit colleges, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote, “We accept that a small, selective group of young adults will go to Harvard every year … But knowing that some young person not born to privilege will, on occasion, make it to Harvard is part of why we put our faith in the vast, stratified system of higher edu cation institutions that span community colleges to the Ivy League.”

I am that person, not born from privilege, who managed to slip through the cracks and make it into Harvard. Because my family was poor, the university waived my tuition for all four years. And I have benefited immensely since. As a Harvard graduate, I have handily escaped from poverty and now make more than three times my family’s total income when I first went to college.

Everyone should have the opportunity to escape from poverty through education, debt-free—just like I did. (Actually, I think no one should have to be in poverty in the first place, but I digress.) Young people should have the opportunity to learn and grow and make a living wage after college in a system that doesn’t fetishize a handful of wealthy and white schools, trick 17-yearolds into taking loans that inflict lifelong financial distress, and leave poor, working, and Black and brown families out to dry. I simply don’t think we need the Ivy League alone to do it.

In this world, we would not have to put our faith in the vast, stratified system of corporatized and financialized American higher education. We do not have to accept the continued existence of this system. We can change it for the better, and besieging the Ivy League is a good start. n

Jane Chung runs campaigns at The Worker Agency to build worker power, fight for envi ronmental justice, and dismantle the Big Tech–powered surveillance state.

One potential way to both decrease the financial power of elite colleges and free up funding for broad access to higher education is through the tax code.

NOTEBOOK

The Dobbs Election

Democrats look to the ballot to punish Republican overreach on abortion.

By Alexander Sammon

The day after the May leak of the majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s Dobbs case, which would soon overturn Roe v. Wade , Rep. Antonio Delgado announced he would leave his position representing New York’s 19th Congressional District to become the state’s lieutenant governor. The race to replace Delgado, an August special election, began as the decision in Dobbs was formally released, with Democrat Pat Ryan running on abortion explicitly. Early voting began just after voters in Kansas overwhelmingly defeated an attempt to change the state con stitution to pave the way for a ban of their own. “The whole campaign paralleled that,” Ryan told me.

By the time Election Day came around, the campaign had drawn national atten tion as an abortion bellwether. New York’s 19th is a true swing district, having gone Obama/Trump/Biden in successive elec tion cycles. It’s the sort of district that the president’s party, at least histori cally, would expect to lose ahead of the midterms. Add to that a substantial fun draising advantage for Republican Marc Molinaro, a historically unpopular presi dent, and even Democratic polling showing a comfortable lead for the Republican, and the result looked certain.

But Ryan won the special election in the 19th by more than two percentage points, thanks in part to an unexpected turnout surge. On the heels of the Kansas abortion referendum just three weeks prior—which produced the highest-turnout primary elec tion in state history—came proof to election watchers that abortion politics could save congressional Democrats from a crushing defeat come November. “It’s time to adjust your expectations for November,” decreed Politico Playbook in the wake of Ryan’s win. “Democrats have now outperformed Biden’s numbers in each of the four U.S. House spe cial elections since the Dobbs decision in June,” according to Inside Elections’ Ryan Matsumoto. That was just one in a torrent of such proclamations, which came in every

thing from data publications like FiveThir tyEight to editorials like New York magazine.

In a fractious Democratic party, whose politicians, strategists, consultants, and fundraisers have been at loggerheads for almost the entirety of the Biden presidency, the fate-making impact of the Dobbs deci sion has become something akin to common sense. Voter registration numbers are up with women, especially in red states. Even polling in The Wall Street Journal has found that abortion has become markedly more popular nationwide since March, and that voters claimed that the Court’s decision was the most likely reason for them to vote in November. Fewer than 1 in 10 Americans support total abortion bans.

Democrats are taking advantage of the opportunity, too, centralizing their messag ing on abortion in a number of races. Incum bents in tough races who once thought their road to re-election came through punching the left, like Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, are now attacking opponents for support ing abortion bans. This has put Republi

Voters wait outside a polling place in August in Kansas, which soundly rejected an initiative that would have facilitated an abortion ban.

can candidates on the defensive, scrubbing their websites and backpedaling on public statements.

If having abortion on the ballot only implicitly has driven turnout and delivered multiple percentage points of advantage to congressional Democrats in special elec tions, it would stand to reason that getting explicit abortion referenda on the ballot in November would be even more powerful in reversing the typical trend of the party with the presidency losing seats in a midterm. In fact, there are a number of abortion mea sures planned for statewide ballot placement in November, and most of them are being put there by liberals. In California, Vermont, Michigan, Montana, and Kentucky, there are going to be ballot measures weighing in, one way or another, on abortion.

In some cases, those measures are being taken up for reasons that are not wholly unrelated to Democratic aspirations for holding the House majority. In California, with its Democratic supermajority, abortion is absolutely not under threat of a statewide ban. The proposal, which would enshrine the right in the constitution, is arguably made redundant by pre-existing privacy protections already in place. But there are approximately seven suburban and exurban swing congressional seats in the Golden State, where an abortion rights measure may pull liberal abortion rights support

ers to the ballot box. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambitions also factor in.

In Michigan, meanwhile, a judge recent ly overturned the state’s 1931 abortion ban, also making redundant its own initia tive. Still, abortion advocates gathered a record number of signatures, more than double the requirement, to ensure the ref erendum’s place on the ballot. The state’s Republicans on the Board of State Can vassers fought hard to keep the measure from getting on the ballot anyway, knowing that an unpopular policy will not win pop ular support. They also know that incum bent Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will benefit from an abortion initiative on the ballot, as she seeks re-election against an anti-abortion opponent.

Vermont is quite blue, and already sports

a state law on the books codifying abortion rights, but the state also has its own refer endum. Its open Senate seat replacing the retiring Patrick Leahy isn’t really in dan ger of a flip to the Republicans, but having an abortion measure drawing out voters doesn’t hurt.

After the resounding Kansas defeat, red states have few of these campaigns in the works; a Kentucky constitutional amend ment backed by anti-abortion forces hopes to supersede a judge’s ruling that froze the state’s trigger law, and a Montana measure would mandate medical care for babies “born alive.” But by and large, Republicans aren’t rushing to capitalize on the Dobbs ruling. And it’s not a bug that the abortion referenda are supposed to help Democrats up the ballot.

But there’s plenty of reason to believe this won’t work as resoundingly as some hope. In recent years, there have been a number of highly popular ballot measures relating to policies embraced by Democrats that have done nothing for Democratic politicians. In places like Florida, Missouri, and Oklaho ma, we have seen things like a $15 minimum wage and Medicaid expansion triumph without a single congressional Democrat on the ticket reaping the benefit; we’ve also seen right-to-work laws downed without lifting any Democratic congressional boats.

As Zachary Donnini noted in Decision Desk HQ, the timing of Dobbs has made it an easier answer to a complex politi cal quandary. Multiple issues converged around the time that Democrats started far ing better in special elections. “Given that economic issues consistently outpoll social issues in importance to American voters, it is also notable that inflation has finally begun to decline and Democrats passed a reconciliation bill including popular provi sions such as lowering prescription drug costs and raising taxes on large corpora tions,” Donnini wrote.

The Dobbs decision looks (and maybe is) consequential, but it would be foolish to overlook the fact that it also coincided with gas prices finally beginning to turn, inflation abating, and the Biden administra tion at long last striking a combative pose toward Republicans and large corporations, using executive power to overcome congres sional obstructionism, and passing popular, party-line legislation that abandoned the fetish of bipartisanship.

The polling firm Data for Progress’s generic ballot saw the Republican advantage

dwindle to just one point in late August, a two-point drop from late July. That period included zero movement on abortion (Dobbs dropped in June), but did feature the Demo crats’ partisan climate, drug pricing, and taxation legislation as well as the student debt cancellation order.

Even Congressman Ryan headed me off at some point in our discussion about the strategic merits of running on abortion. “I’m not sure if you want to go here, but the other and equal thing, in terms of what I talked about on the trail, was a strong posi tion against corporate monopolies,” he told me. “Here in Ulster County we had a utility company ripping people off, and speaking to their economic pain was huge. That was equally if not more resonant knocking on doors.” The campaign’s largest paid media spend came on an ad denigrating that util ity company for its monopolistic practices, and touting Ryan’s record taking them on.

It’s definitely true that the large and sud den increase in voter registration among women coinciding with the Dobbs ruling, and the marked shifts in polling on atti tudes toward abortion and its importance in voter decisions, cannot be ignored. In that sense, the midterms could look like 1992, the “Year of the Woman,” when the high-profile Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings galvanized women to run for office and win in record numbers with high turn out, especially among young people. The midterms of 1998, where voters delivered a backlash to Republican obsessions with the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky sideshow, with Democrats gaining seats in the House, could serve as another model.

But while taking a firm stance on abor tion rights, something that Democrats had been wary to do even in the days and weeks after Dobbs, has thus far been a critical and winning strategy, the willingness to take a firm stance and fight, period , is what vot ers may be responding to, especially after a 16-month stretch where the Biden adminis tration did little of it. By the same token, if gas prices kick back up in the fall or inflation reignites, and Democrats get wiped out as previously expected, it won’t be the fault of having been too strong on fighting for abor tion rights, or anything else for that matter.

“What we stood for is critical, but the willingness to stand up and fight clearly, strongly; that was the most important thing,” Ryan told me. “That’s what made the difference for us.” n

PHOTO

While taking a firm stance on abortion rights has been a winning strategy, the willingness to fight, period, is what voters may be responding to.

HOW POLICY GOT DONE IN

To understand the Democrats’ big climate and health care bill, you must go back decades.

BY DAVID DAYEN ILLUSTRATION BY ANGIE WANG

Ten years before Joe Biden signed the centerpiece of the Democratic legislative agenda, the Inflation Reduction Act, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) was thousands of miles from home, looking out at the dense forests of West Virginia from an oversized van. Depending on the outcome of the 2012 elections, either Wyden or his Republican counterpart, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, would take over the leadership of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Both of them came to the Mountain State at the invitation of a freshman Democrat not even two years into his term named Joe Manchin.

The committee leaders were asked to visit all of the energy projects West Vir ginia had to offer: wind, hydroelectric, shale gas, solar, and a strip-mining opera tion in the ancient southern coalfields. “At one point I almost said, ‘Are you sure? Tour coal plants?’” Wyden recalled.

But Manchin had heard about Wyden’s ability to work across party and ideological lines in the Senate. “You listen to everyone and you have ideas,” Manchin told him.

The energy facilities were spread out across the state, giving the senators lots of time to talk. Manchin told him that when ever energy and climate issues came up, his

constituents felt like they were an after thought, forced to succumb to greater pri orities. Wyden, taking the opening, decided to bounce a concept off his colleague.

For years, lawmakers interested in reduc ing greenhouse gas emissions had tried to use federal resources to boost the fortunes of specific types of energy production. What if, Wyden said, Congress shifted to a tech nology-neutral approach? As long as the energy produced drove down carbon emis sions relative to the status quo, it would get the credit. “That means solar and wind, but you can do carbon capture, hydrogen, and nuclear?” Manchin asked. Wyden said

that was the general idea. Nobody knew in the future what the big carbon reducers would end up being, Wyden explained. A tech-neutral approach could be driven by scientific breakthroughs, and stay in place until emissions receded.

Later that day, at a press conference in Charleston, Wyden referred to an idea that would use “tax funds to put people to work diversifying the country’s energy portfolio.” Democrats held the Senate in 2012, Wyden did take over the Energy Committee, and he and Manchin kept talking.

Last summer, Wyden took a look at a leaked document, a tentative agreement between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Manchin on what was then called the Build Back Better Act. It included a line that Wyden recognized: “Spending on innovation, not elimination. Fuel neu tral.” Wyden knew that was referring to the conversation he started with Manchin nine years earlier. “We met him where he is,” Wyden said.

Since World War II, Democrats have only had a handful of real windows for governing, most of which were bungled and botched. Harry Truman’s second term was marred by the unpopular Korean War. Jimmy Carter stumbled through a mostly unproductive presidency, Bill Clinton had two modest years, and Barack Obama had two modest years.

The one exception was Lyndon John son’s Great Society, when an overwhelm ingly Democratic Congress finally outvoted the senior Southern Dixiecrats who held most of the critical committees, and passed one progressive priority after another, from Medicare to federal education and housing funding to anti-poverty aid, and of course three civil rights laws. What all of the Great Society measures had in common was that they had been on the Democrats’ to-do list of unfinished business since the Roos evelt era three decades earlier. And though Joe Biden’s working majority in Congress

CLEAN-ENERGY

1976: Al Gore elected to Congress, holds first hearings on global warming

is minuscule compared to LBJ ’s, the same pattern held.

Most of the media tick-tocks about the Inflation Reduction Act focus on the final few weeks, when Manchin swung from rejecting the climate and tax provisions to embracing them, or the final few days, when Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) made demands as the price of her vote. But to really com prehend the IRA , you must go back further. Everything that made it into law, from tack ling the climate emergency to improving the Affordable Care Act, from restaffing the IRS and taxing wealthy corporations to reduc ing the cost of prescription drugs, has ori gins like Wyden’s van trip to West Virginia, an extended backstory rooted in learning from failures, building coalitions, sacrific ing important elements, and sometimes waging furious battles to reach consensus.

That policies must have decades of build up before Congress can take them seriously is troubling in a world that doesn’t move at the same glacial pace. The thinnedout Inflation Reduction Act left behind a dysfunctional early child care system, an unaffordable higher-education system, a borderline immoral housing crisis, a nonexistent paid leave system, an inac cessible in-home elder care system, and a child poverty rate that is the highest in the developed world. All of these catastrophes were once addressed in Biden’s agenda, which shrunk from $4 trillion in spending to about $400 billion.

1988: NASA’s James Hansen warns Con gress about global temperature rise

But structural factors and lawmaker comfort set the path of legislative poli cymaking in America. This restricts the ambition of new ideas, often submerging priorities through established systems like the tax code, and building unusual power centers in agencies without subjectmatter expertise.

Over two dozen White House officials, key members of Congress, current and for mer Hill staffers, advocates, and experts detailed for the Prospect this long game of policy development, debate, and resolution. Whether you think the IRA is a world-his torical achievement or a massive disap pointment, it’s important to understand the dynamics that produce breakthroughs in Washington. Only then can the right lessons be drawn for the next time that window slides open.

Since the Middle East oil embargo of 1973, presidents have been obligated to vow energy independence as a national-secu rity imperative. Some forward-thinking Democrats wanted that shift to serve an additional goal: reducing carbon emissions. A freshman representative from Tennes see named Al Gore held the first hearings on global warming after his 1976 election.

After NASA climate scientist James Hansen warned Congress in 1988 of the dangers of climate change, the desire to solve the chal lenge became more broadly shared. (Biden is fond of mentioning that he authored one of the nation’s first global warming bills, which established a presidential-level task force back in 1987.)

President Clinton’s effort to tax the heat content of energy (measured in British ther mal units, or BTUs) passed the House but fell apart amid endless concessions to cor porate lobbyists and intraparty sabotage. Under Barack Obama, Democrats labored

That policies must have decades of buildup before Congress can take them seriously is troubling in a world that doesn’t move at the same glacial pace.

INCENTIVES

1992: Production tax credit (PTC) for wind energy established

1993: Clinton BTU tax fails

1999: PTC extended, the first of 12 extensions

2005: Van Jones kicks off “green jobs” campaign

2012: Ron Wyden and Joe Manchin take energy tour of West Virginia

2009: WaxmanMarkey Act passes House; it would never get a Senate vote

2006: ITC extended, the first of several extensions

2005: Investment tax credit (ITC) for renewables established

2014: Wyden named Senate Finance Committee chair; he would lose the chair to Republicans the next year

2015: Wyden’s Clean Energy for America Act first introduced

2018: Green New Deal campaign launched

2019–2020: Democratic presidential primary features multiple climate plans

2022: Inflation Reduction Act passes with 90 percent of Clean Energy for America intact

2021: Wyden regains chair of Senate Finance Committee

to pass the Waxman-Markey Act, more comprehensive legislation that would have capped carbon emissions and established a system for less-polluting entities to trade allowances to higher emitters. But again, a Democratic White House compromised the proposal into mush, as a classic New Yorker article detailed. Obama’s team con sistently gave away provisions for free that Democratic lawmakers wanted to use as trade for Republicans to support the bill; in the end, the White House did little to prioritize climate.

The big lesson Wyden took from Wax man-Markey’s failure was that putting a price on energy, however efficient econo mists believed it to be, just wasn’t a good rallying point. Even in blue states like Washington, prices on carbon could not

pass in initiative campaigns. “As I talked to the moderates and conservatives in the Senate, they said, ‘This doesn’t add up for us. We just don’t really see a path to explaining how it would be good,’” Wyden told me. It also was too easy for industry to just carve themselves out of caps or mandates.

Wyden was in a unique position, as a senior senator on both the Energy and Nat ural Resources Committee and the Finance Committee, the main tax-writing panel. There was an existing architecture for boosting clean energy through the tax code. The production tax credit for wind energy was established in 1992, and extended and expanded 12 times thereafter. In 2005, an investment tax credit for renewables built on an existing ITC, and also limped through multiple reauthorizations.

The short life spans and uncertain future made investors wary of dumping money into clean energy, only to have the tax benefits pulled later. “Renewables are temporary and the stuff Big Oil cares about is perma nent,” Wyden said. “Why do tax [credits] for renewables have the shelf life of a carton of eggs?” A patchwork of 44 different energy tax measures, all with different timelines and rules, was difficult to decipher and impeded the flourishing of new technolo gies. Even with the downsides, renewables became cheaper than coal, but to accelerate an energy transition consistent with climate goals, investment incentives had to be fixed.

“I set out from the beginning to get as close to throwing the energy provisions of the tax code in the garbage as I could,” said Wyden. His bill, which took five years to construct, replaced all energy tax credits with three main buckets: clean electric ity (including grid improvements), clean fuels, and energy efficiency in buildings. The credits would be technology-neutral: Any thing that brought emissions down could qualify. They could be given as direct-pay

grants to electric utilities that didn’t pay taxes, like public power operations and other tax-exempt facilities. And they would stay in place until an emissions target was reached, creating that long-desired certain ty for investment.

The biggest enthusiasts thought the investment impact would far outstretch the government outlay. “When you score a tax credit, you say the tax credit is $1 billion,” said Reed Hundt, a former chair of the Fed eral Communications Commission who cofounded and chairs the Coalition for Green Capital. “You multiply them by 7, 8 times to get the investment number.” So a few hundred billion in tax credits would sum to trillions in investment, by his calculations.

This flipped the typical script used to defeat climate policy. Instead of taking fire for establishing a tax on energy, lawmak ers could highlight the job creation poten tial, the prospect of America becoming a global export leader, and the resulting lower costs for heating and fuel. The fram ing dates back to Van Jones’s “green jobs” pitch of the 2000s. “The focus always kept coming back to this as an opportunity for domestic manufacturing that will make things,” Wyden said.

It also had a model that Democratic law makers could easily understand, and that could be quickly spun up. A Republican president can reverse regulations; taking money from industries that have already retooled would be a harder sell. “People are very comfortable building policy through the tax code,” said Jamal Raad, executive director of Evergreen Action, which has worked closely with the White House and Congress on climate policy. “The idea of a whole new program is scary. Lengthening and extending a tax credit that exists, or lift ing up a state policy that worked … Some thing with a track record is so much easier and less scary for a politician.”

In a stroke of good fortune, Wyden became the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee in 2014, when Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) was named U.S. ambassador to China. His concept was first introduced as part of comprehensive energy legisla tion in 2015, but would be split out as a Finance Committee bill, the Clean Energy for America Act, in 2017. The initial versions paired the emissions-driven incentives with the repeal of multiple fossil fuel tax breaks, totally redesigning the energy tax code.

Every two years, Wyden added new co-

sponsors; Manchin never signed on, but his and Wyden’s staff shared ideas through out. Wyden initially thought he could win Republican support, but Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) shut that down. Clean Energy for America had to incubate, waiting for its moment.

The Wyden bill came at a time when what everyone in Washington refers to as “the groups”—the collection of think tanks, singleissue advocates, and progressive organiza tions that signal priorities, and in many cases write policy—were spending the years after Waxman-Markey’s demise simmering with anger. Waiting until Democrats regained governing power in Washington again was incompatible with gloomy scientific assess ments, raging floods, and extreme heat.

Many activists, desperate to raise aware ness, grew militant: getting arrested in front of the White House by the hundreds, camp ing out for weeks to block pipeline construc tion, walking out of schools in protest. After Democrats won back the House in 2018, the Sunrise Movement immediately occupied incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to demand prioritizing the climate emergency.

Young people in particular signified rising concern about global warming among the party base. And large donors were perhaps even more convinced about the crisis, with a bigger megaphone to make it happen. Democratic lawmakers were hearing one imperative from the people they listen to the most: Act on climate.

The groups had motivation, momen tum, money, and a seemingly endless sup ply of bodies for the fight. They didn’t have a plan, as Robinson Meyer detailed in a 2017 Atlantic article. They hadn’t pulled together anything on decarbonization that could forge both a policy direction and a slo gan for action. Environmentalists were still talking about carbon taxes, standards, and mandates. There was no consensus about whether to push to ban the dirtiest types of energy or to subsidize the cleanest.

The slogan came first: the Green New Deal. But it was more aspiration than blue print. Preparing for the next Democratic majority, the groups convened meetings of labor, environmental justice groups, and cross-factional green groups, from the left to the mainstream, to fill in the details. The con versations focused on common ground and past successes, and resulted in three basic priorities: investment, justice, and standards.

Though now thought of as a comprehen sive welfare-state transformation to a zeroemission economy, the initial Green New Deal concept placed trillions of dollars in public investment at its core, in line with the New Deal’s expansion of industrial policy, through the Reconstruction Finance Corpo ration and other interventions. Investment had a modern proof of concept in the Obama stimulus package’s Energy Department loan program, which helped Tesla thrive and had begun to build a clean-energy industry. In addition, “green banks” providing capital for clean-energy technologies, which then-Rep. Jay Inslee had introduced as an amendment to Waxman-Markey, were being assembled in places like Connecticut and New York. And Congress had been granting tax credits to consumers to purchase electric vehicles since 2008.

An investment-led approach to lowering emissions could bridge divides within the party. The Democrats who would eventually champion green finance were people like Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Chris Coons (D-DE), who are often viewed skeptically by the left. As one progressive involved with climate policy put it, “We call it industrial policy, they think of it as industry.”

The justice piece foregrounded displaced workers and frontline communities that have traditionally been brutalized by ener gy transitions. Inslee was now governor of Washington, and his 2019 clean-energy law tied its incentives to high workforce standards like prevailing wages and proj ect labor agreements, aligning labor with the transition. Meanwhile, environmen

“I set out from the beginning to get as close to throwing the energy provisions of the tax code in the garbage as I could,” said Wyden.

tal justice in federal policy had often been relegated to executive orders, but activists wanted direct appropriations, with the goal of at least 40 percent of all climate spending flowing to marginalized communities, an idea known as “Justice40.”

The groups thought standards remained critical to reach emissions goals, though not with a price on carbon. Clean-electricity standards, requiring certain levels of zerocarbon energy by a date certain, had become popular at the state level. If the best way to realize a net-zero future was to make all electricity clean, while electrifying polluting sectors like transportation and buildings, the best way to ensure the transition was to set a specific date for zero-carbon power.

The presidential primary forced ambi tions higher and created a pseudo think tank for the green revolution. “Multiple can didates with multiple climate plans, that had never happened before,” said Raad, who became a top official on the most cli mate-centric of those campaigns, for Inslee. “Something very generative came out of the ideas in the presidential campaign that built that consensus.” Plus, the need for econom ic recovery post-pandemic gave oxygen to green energy as a job creation engine. For a movement that had faced decades of defeats and inattention, the stars were aligning.

After two Senate victories in Georgia gave Democrats the barest of majorities in the

Senate, Wyden assembled the members of the Finance Committee and told them, “It’s time to go.” He knew he’d still have to appeal to Manchin, who was now chairing his old seat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. But Wyden had years of dis cussions to fall back on to earn Manchin’s trust. “I think with some of the other issues, everyone worked on the policy and hoped Manchin would come along in the end,” said one senior Finance Committee staffer. “With clean energy, particularly because of 2010, it was designed with him and other members of the caucus in mind.”

Parochial issues would eventually come into play. Manchin didn’t want to phase out existing fossil fuel subsidies that his indus

The origins of the climate invest ments in the IRA came out of a West Virginia road trip Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) took in 2012.

try friends coveted, instead preferring to layer the clean-energy tax credits on top. He also made sure that the investments covered carbon capture and hydrogen, technologies that could extend the life of fossil fuel pro duction. (Industry CEOs brought up carbon capture when meeting with Wyden.) And he added a one-sentence rider that offers $700 million for methane emission reductions at “marginal” oil and gas wells; the biggest owner of these in the country, Diversified Energy Co., happens to have given Manchin more campaign donations than any other politician this election cycle.

Standards were another high-profile casualty. Because Republicans would reflexively oppose anything climate-relat ed, Democrats had to use a process called budget reconciliation, a once-a-year way to avoid the Senate filibuster and clear legisla tion with a simple majority. But everything in reconciliation would also have to be pri marily budgetary in nature, channeled into taxing and spending authorities.

Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) had introduced a clean-electricity standard in 2019, but she had to transform it into a “clean electricity performance program” (CEPP), which would reward power companies that raised their percentage of clean electricity and penalize those that didn’t. Modelers estimated that this use of carrots and sticks would get the country to 82 percent clean electricity by 2030. Smith worked hard to get the caucus on board, but Manchin wouldn’t agree to paying utilities to go green and punishing them for using coal and oil. “He told me he just couldn’t get there,” Smith recalled. There’s a strong case to be made that CEPP

drew incoming industry fire away from the other elements of the proposal. Polluters concentrated opposition on standards, which had to die so the rest of the bill could live. “You don’t want to be the sacrificial policy,” Smith told me. “But at the end of the day you have to focus on results.”

Justice advocates fared a little better. Labor got bonuses written into the tax cred its if recipients offered prevailing wages and used a threshold percentage of qualified apprentices. Domestic-content require ments for electric-vehicle rebates also leans the bill toward homegrown industry. Envi ronmental justice groups secured extra tax incentives for “energy communities” that already host fossil fuel projects.

The White House estimates that $60 bil lion out of the $369 billion in climate fund ing goes toward environmental justice. But that sums to about 16 percent, well short of Justice40. There’s also one deviation from the “tech-neutral” principles of the policy: a measure that bars any leasing for renewable energy on public lands and waters unless millions of acres are first offered for leasing to oil and gas. More carbon dioxide will flow into the atmosphere as a result, particularly

in poor communities of color. Rather than the investment/justice/standards model, the bill came out closer to investment/ investment/investment.

In that context, the policy approach with the oldest pedigree was the one that held up. Wyden estimates that he got 90 percent of what he initially laid out in Clean Energy for America. “At the end, I talked to environ mental folks in D.C. and Oregon,” he said. “And I’d say, ‘There will be a couple things in here we’re not going to like’ … I remember one group who said, ‘If you can get anything resembling what you wanted, it would be a big part of the future.’”

The Inflation Reduction Act’s other major policy advances shore up the signature achievement from the last Democratic window of opportunity, the Affordable Care Act. Even before that law was signed, it was clear that the insurance exchanges, designed for people who made too much money to qualify for Medicaid but weren’t offered coverage at work, were inadequately designed.

To save money in the ACA , premium subsi dies to help people afford insurance phased

MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG NEGOTIATION

1993: Clinton health care plan includes Medicare price negotiation of prescription drugs

2003: Medicare Modernization Act passes, barring Medicare from negotiating drug prices

2006: Democratic “Six for ’06” promises Medicare price negotiation

2007: House passes price negotiation bill; Senate doesn’t take it up

The Inflation Reduction Act’s other major policy advances shore up the signature achievement from the last Democratic window of opportunity, the Affordable Care Act.

out too quickly, with individuals making very low wages needing to pay thousands of dollars annually. In addition, only house holds making less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level (currently $54,360 for an individual and $92,120 for a family of three) qualified for subsidies. Go even one dollar over the “subsidy cliff,” and in some parts of the country, you would have to spend 20 percent or more of income on health insurance. Though Democrats were selling the program as universal, affordable coverage, it was neither.

As a candidate, Joe Biden made fixing the subsidies a primary plank of his health care plan, adopting a consensus hammered out over the intervening years. There were two broad principles: Make the subsidies more generous at the low end of the scale, and get rid of the subsidy cliff, so nobody on the exchanges would pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on health insurance. The American Rescue Plan, Biden’s early pan demic relief legislation, adopted the sub sidy fix for two years. It attempted to fulfill a moral promise Democrats had made for decades, that the government would make sure that no American would be priced out of the health care system.

The Build Back Better Act would have made the subsidy fix permanent. When that faltered, enhanced subsidies were due to expire at the end of 2022. Exchange cus tomers would get notices in October, just a month before midterm elections, informing them of massive cost spikes. Once Demo crats figured out the political implications of creating their own October surprise, they

found a way to insert it into the IRA , spend ing $64 billion to extend the subsidies to 2025.

The other unfinished business from the ACA was lowering prescription drug prices, a Democratic promise since at least Bill Clinton’s health care plan in the 1990s.

Republicans under George W. Bush passed the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, which in a backroom deal added a priva tized prescription drug benefit to Medicare, but barred Medicare from actually negotiat ing pharmaceutical prices. Billy Tauzin, the Republican chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who negotiated the deal, resigned a few months later to become the head of PhRMA , the industry’s top lob bying group.

House Democrats promised in 2006 that they would pass Medicare negotiation for prescription drugs in the first 100 hours of regaining the majority, as part of their “Six for ’06 ” agenda. But Republican obstruc tion made Senate passage impossible. The ACA offered another opportunity, but President Obama opted to avoid criticism from the pharmaceutical industry, cutting a deal with them instead that maintained the ban on price negotiation, in exchange for an excise tax on drug revenues and allow ances to reduce senior out-of-pocket costs.

Continued failures in the face of a nobrainer reform that Democrats promised to secure year after year demonstrated the sheer power of the industry. Party leaders knew they had to actually accomplish this one thing, or risk having voters tune out all their promises.

Wyden, a longtime senior advocate who co-founded the Gray Panthers in Oregon before entering Congress, was again at the center of the solution. Though most media analyses of the IRA correctly praise Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for dog gedly getting Manchin to agree to a deal, on the policy side, politicians in the trenches like Wyden are mostly responsible for what advanced.

After becoming chair of the Finance Committee in 2014, Wyden sat down with one of the senior Republicans on the committee, Chuck Grassley, who flat-out said his party wouldn’t go for Medicare negotiation. “I said, ‘I don’t know how there can be a bill,’” Wyden recalled. “And Grassley looked at me and said, ‘You’re a smart guy, think some thing up.’” So Wyden designed a provision to cap the annual cost increase of any prescription drug to the rate of infla tion. Prices for hundreds of drugs went up more than three times that on aver age. Under Wyden’s concept, the govern ment would claw back anything above the inflation threshold. The hope was that, if drug companies wouldn’t see any benefit from jacking up prices, they would start to moderate. Wyden pitched it to Grass ley, who said, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

The Wyden-Grassley bill, introduced when Grassley took over the committee in 2019, started with the inflation cap as a foundation, and added a limit on out-ofpocket expenses. Both of these only benefit ed seniors, major consumers of prescription drugs but not the entire population. And it

2022: Inflation Reduction Act passes with drug price reform measure

2021: H.R. 3 becomes baseline for Build Back Better drug price reform, but corporatefriendly Democrats water it down

House passes compromise H.R. 3 to negotiate prescription drugs

2019: Wyden and Chuck Grassley introduce inflation rebate and outof-pocket cap for seniors

2010: President Obama makes deal with drug companies to maintain negotiation ban

2010: Republicans take back the House

2018: Democrats run on Medicare price negotiation and win the House

2019: Nancy Pelosi and progressives fight over Medicare negotiation bill

just limited price increases; only negotia tion could bring them down.

Designing Medicare negotiation became a pitched battle in the House. Throughout 2018, progressives had been building sup port for a proposal from Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), which would pull drug patents from companies if they refused to negotiate. But when Democrats regained the House major ity, Pelosi’s powerful health care staffer Wendell Primus short-circuited that idea. His initial proposal relied on a third-party arbitrator to settle negotiations. Oddly, the arbitrator was pegged as the Government Accountability Office, which has no exper tise in drug pricing or arbitration.

The plan was based on a 2008 study in Health Affairs and written by the think tank of former House stalwart Henry Waxman with a funding grant from the Arnold Foun dation, a philanthropy effort run by a former hedge fund manager. It spoke to the relative poverty of policy ideas inside the Capitol, and the dominant role of the groups. But progressives balked at the arbitration mea sure as a giveaway to industry that would lead to higher prices. A compromise used a high excise tax on gross sales as the forcing mechanism for negotiation, an idea from then–Center for American Progress health adviser Topher Spiro.

Pelosi combined price negotiations with the Wyden-Grassley provisions in her bill, known as H.R. 3. But there remained sev eral industry-friendly elements, intended to win the support of the Trump administra tion, which had paid lip service to lowering drug prices. Even though Trump had turned away from the bill by the end of 2019, the industry concessions stayed in, like a floor of only 25 drugs per year being negotiated at the outset. This suggested that the drug industry’s favorite Democrats, not Trump, were driving the outcome.

Progressives threatened to tank the bill without changes. The left’s top presiden tial candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Ber nie Sanders, came out against Pelosi. In the end, progressives had modest success, getting the minimum drugs negotiated to increase to 50 by year two, and opening up prices from negotiation and the inflation cap to all payers instead of just Medicare. The bill passed the House in 2019, leashing the entire caucus to a consensus framework.

Drug price reform was a strong can didate for the Biden governing window, because unlike practically everything else

Democrats proposed, it saved the govern ment money that could offset other spend ing. But pharma-friendly Democrats went back on the deal. Their ringleader, Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), said he’d only voted for H.R. 3 to advance the debate; now that it might actually become law, he wanted to water it down some more.

Peters, Kathleen Rice (D-NY), and Kurt Schrader (D-OR) were enough of a bloc on the House Energy and Commerce Committee to prevent the entire drug price reform from advancing. Peters unveiled an alternative plan that would only allow negotiation on

against the drug companies, breaking their aura of invincibility. Congress put itself on the hook for lowering drug prices, and can improve the mechanisms now in law to do so in the future. And by making H.R. 3’s design better—particularly by killing the arbitra tion idea—progressives made it easier to build on success. “The whole thinking at the time,” said a senior House staffer, “was we’re not governing now but what we pass in the House will be the basis.”

Since the adoption of a constitutional amendment establishing the right of gov

CORPORATE MINIMUM TAXES

2011: Reports surface showing corporations paying little or no U.S. tax

1986: Reagan tax reform establishes corporate alternative minimum tax

drugs that had gone off-patent, preserving the patent monopoly that is the source of high industry profits. It also limited the inflation cap to Medicare. Senators like Sinema and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) were simultaneous ly weakening the bill from the Senate side.

The final compromise largely swallowed the pro-pharma concessions. Only ten drugs would get negotiation initially, up to 20 drugs in subsequent years. The reference price for negotiations became a percentage of the average manufacturer price in 2021, when prices were already high. Reconcilia tion rules meant that only public programs like Medicare could benefit. And patients won’t see the fruits of negotiations until 2026. With the votes of the holdouts needed for passage, progressives could only watch. “It’s about how much of a margin you have. Any one person can block stuff,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who personally fought to improve the bill for years.

Despite the fractious debate, the final agreement secured an elusive victory

2017: Trump tax cuts eliminate corporate alternative minimum tax

ernment to impose income taxes in 1913, practically every administration has fiddled with them in some manner. Going into the 2020 election, the expectation was no dif ferent. Every Democratic candidate had devised a tax plan for repealing the Trump tax cuts, yielding trillions of dollars for their growing ambitions.

One of those candidates was Elizabeth Warren, and her campaign was a paradig matic example of using the public spotlight to push policy solutions to the center of the discussion. Getting ideas on the agenda is difficult in a Senate where seniority is every thing, and earned over decades. But as a presidential candidate, Warren could com mand a microphone, and mainline an idea.

On taxes, broad majorities agree that rich people and large corporations pay too little. Warren’s team could easily locate examples of companies like Amazon or Occidental Petroleum reporting billions in earnings and paying no taxes; the phenomenon had been reported on for decades. It was largely

due to deductions and exemptions in the code that reduced tax liability, but the public read it as unfair.

The old way of thinking was that you could fix this in two ways: Close the loop holes, or impose higher nominal rates to capture more earnings. Instead, Warren put a new spin on an old idea: the corporate alternative minimum tax, which was part of the Reagan 1986 tax reform but was zeroed out by Donald Trump. She introduced the plan in April 2019 as the real corporate prof its tax. Large corporations would have to pay a minimum rate, but it would be based

2022: Inflation Reduction Act passes with corporate minimum tax

2021: Kyrsten Sinema rejects tax rate increases for Build Back Better, endorses corporate minimum tax

panies earning over $100 million into his campaign platform. The Warren campaign had set the terms of the debate. “There’s no doubt that promoting this idea on the cam paign trail helped increase its visibility and change hearts and minds both within the Democratic Party and among the American people,” said Warren.

The next hurdle was getting everyone underneath Biden to accept it. Careerists at the Treasury Department considered it inefficient and simplistic; if corporate taxes were a complex problem, the solution just had to be more complicated. Warren had

enue onto a menu, something that could be chosen from in the final compromise. But while Warren and King were building sup port last fall, a howitzer from Arizona blew a hole in that menu. Kyrsten Sinema said that she would not accept any increase in individual and corporate tax rates.

But the corporate minimum tax was not a rate increase. Warren saw her moment and made the leap to talk to Manchin and Sine ma directly about her idea. She demurred at telling me the details of the conversations, but in talking about the book profits tax she’s always foregrounded the concept of fairness. “Today, the tax code is so riddled with holes that wealthy individuals and large companies persistently dodge paying anything regardless of marginal tax rates,” she said. “That’s not fair for families and businesses that do pay their fair share.”

2021: Angus King co-sponsors corporate minimum tax

2019: Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign proposes corporate minimum tax based on book profits

2020: Biden campaign adopts corporate minimum tax into platform

on “book profits” reported to shareholders. “Corporate CEOs shouldn’t be able to brag to investors that profits are soaring while telling Uncle Sam they don’t owe a dime,” Warren told me.

The minimum tax presented to the public as relatively low and therefore reasonable. But even a low rate on the largest companies could take in $1 trillion over a decade, War ren’s team estimated. And tying it to book profits could reverse the usual dynamic: Corporations wanted to brag to investors about their terrific financial performance, so they would find it hard to underreport profits. Smaller businesses paid higher effec tive tax rates, so a minimum tax on large companies would also level the playing field.

During the 2020 primary, the talking point that Amazon paid no taxes became too irresistible to practically everyone, including the eventual winner, Joe Biden. It was one of his favorite talking points, and after the primary, he adopted a cor porate minimum tax of 15 percent on com

2021: Biden includes weak version of the corporate minimum tax in fiscal year 2022 budget

to work to convince the president’s aides to keep the tax alive. Getting it into the president’s fiscal year 2022 budget was a big moment. Unfortunately, Treasury had hacked away at it, thinning it down to rais ing only $148 billion over a decade. But War ren saw its very inclusion as the key. “[It] was an important early show of support from the president that helped give the pro posal strong momentum,” she said.

Warren went shopping for a partner who could appeal to the more moderate elements of the caucus, eventually approaching Sen. Angus King (I-ME). She told King that it was popular policy with a path to success, and his involvement would increase the odds. King decided to come aboard. Warren told me that the bill wouldn’t have become law without King, particularly due to his ability to get senators from across the Democratic ideological spectrum to listen to the idea on its merits.

Wyden, as Senate Finance Committee chair, placed all the options for raising rev

In late October 2021, just six days after news leaked about the Sinema rejection of tax rate hikes, she released a statement say ing that she could agree to the corporate minimum as a “commonsense step.” Man chin had already privately agreed to the concept three months earlier. By default, it became the most attractive item on the menu. Sinema hacked away at the details at the end, throwing in a few exemptions. War ren’s team believes that having to wait a year after the consensus moment exposed the tax to lobbyist regrouping. But the lobbyists couldn’t kill it once everyone was on board.

Every other tax policy that made it into the Inflation Reduction Act shared a simi lar, years-long trajectory. Democrats had been angry since 2017 that the Trump tax cuts failed to surge investment and mainly led to companies buying back their own stock to reward shareholders and exec utives. So they put a 1 percent buyback tax into the bill. This will likely prove too small to deter buybacks, and really only cuts the government in on the buyback scam. But it is a modest first step to tax ing returns to shareholders, which are too transparent to be avoided.

Since Reagan, Democrats had despaired about an underresourced IRS, particularly after Tea Party Republicans took Congress in 2010. Significant effort went into defin ing the “tax gap,” the amount of taxes that went uncollected every year. The Senate Finance Committee got IRS commissioner Charles Rettig to admit in 2021 that the tax gap approached $1 trillion per year. An investment in the IRS to fund enforce

The Treasury Building in Washington. Pulling most policy through the tax code gives the Treasury Department enormous power.

ment, it was proposed, would bring back hundreds of billions of dollars. That also made it into the bill.

Even a small provision requiring the U.S. to study a free public tax filing option had been a fight as far back as 2002, with the tax planning industry co-opting it into a pro gram that relied on them and then making it harder for taxpayers to find it and avoid charges. Bills had been filed continuously in the 2010s, with free-file always getting dropped at the last minute.

Certainly, there were last-minute addi tions to placate lawmakers, like drought assistance for Arizona or the replenishment of the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, which has unique benefits for Joe Manchin’s state. But broadly speaking, the final agree ment deals with health care, which Demo crats had been working on for a hundred years; energy, which Democrats had been working on for about 50 years; and taxes, which every president works on periodically. These issues have deep wells of policy net

works, a common language that party mem bers understand, and a consensus forged in the blood of decades of fights. Manchin might have thought he had free will when he narrowed the scope of Build Back Bet ter to these items, but he was pulled by a strong current.

There are serious consequences to running a country this way. Policy having to prove itself over decades in the congressional octagon makes government inflexible to growing challenges. An opioid addict or a city manager whose water source has dried up doesn’t want to hear that it’ll take another few years to get everyone in Washington comfortable with solving the problem. “The reality is that we don’t have decades to address the existential threat of the climate crisis,” said Sen. Smith. The collateral damage of Capitol Hill’s slothlike tendencies is real.

The slowness of Washington puts pres sure on every window for governing. It’s in

some ways unfair to force the narrowest Democratic majority in history to make up for the failures of 50 years of policy. But the leaders shouldering this burden helped institutionalize the tendencies that bog pol icy advances down in the mud.

The party’s history of incremental expan sion—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and many more programs started much smaller and built over time—means that a lot of policymaking just builds on exist ing structures, correcting errors and inad equacies. You see that in the IRA with fixing the inadequate subsidies in Obamacare, and fixing the clean-energy tax credits that failed to properly incentivize investment. Even the breakthrough Medicare negotia tion on prescription drugs is rather weak, and will itself need to be improved over time, probably in the next window for Dem ocratic governing.

This inch-by-inch manner of legislat ing dulls policy innovation. An institu tionally conservative environment where

lawmakers go with what they know means that approaches rarely get rethought. The ACA leaves intact the problem of most Americans relying on their employers for health insurance, in an era of ever fewer long-term jobs. But it’s familiar, and over hauling it would embarrass a previous gen eration of Democrats and the groups that designed it. So it stays in place, with minor improvements. It’s the familiar problem of path dependence.

More critically, because budget reconcili ation is the only way to circumvent the fili buster, an enormous amount of policy gets pulled through the tax code. State “labora tories of democracy” can raise the profile of new approaches, but the path depen dence flows more to making everything a tax credit, granting enormous power to the Treasury Department, which sets the tax rules through the IRS. “Treasury plays an important role of what is the economic policy of any given administration,” said one progressive leader. “The more you do stuff like this, the more it’s true.” That creates its own bias, as Treasury is the agency most wedded to an economic style of thinking about policy matters, one that often values efficiency over equality.

It’s become received wisdom that the tax code is more resistant to a change over in power. Getting a tax-based cleanenergy program in place, and getting businesses to commit to that reality, can forestall the inevitable efforts from Republicans to throw it out. This reveals a truth about Washington: Progress comes on the heels of getting one set of corporate interests to offset another. “I would love to have a new agency,” said the progressive leader. “But at some level, the political economy is so messed up, if you want to make things happen, using the tax credit, submerged state apparatus is superior for pragmatic reasons.”

The reconciliation escape valve, because it’s available only once a year, also leads to cramming dozens of items into a sin

gle bill. In the Great Society or New Deal eras, momentum grew through dozens of separate victories. The politics get trickier with one multitrillion-dollar bill that is impossible to explain. “It makes it hard er to communicate what you’re actually accomplishing,” said Tré Easton, a for mer legislative aide to Sen. Patty Mur ray (D-WA), now a progressive strategist at the Battle Born Collective. “I work in this stuff and I still have trouble explain ing these bills.”

Reconciliation was never intended to be a mechanism for domestic policy advance ment, let alone the only one. The compre hensiveness of the initial $4 trillion Build Back Better package was both a strength, because everyone had a stake in it, and a weakness, because the ultimate price tag was going to be way too expensive for the tipping-point senator, Joe Manchin. Reconciliation rules also stipulate that all spending must zero out after the tenyear budget window. This is why you see a lot of policies in reconciliation sunset, to game that requirement, or start later, to reduce the overall cost. This just makes policy worse to satisfy an artificial Senate rule. It also forces lawmakers who want to boast about policy victories to explain why nobody will see the benefits for years.

As a policy matter, reconciliation walls off regulatory measures from public invest ment, subordinating goals like clean air or climate mitigation to federal budgetary authority. “It’s not as efficient than if you had all of the tools at your disposal,” said Sen. Smith. “That is the cost of obstruction in the Senate that I think we have to go to work to fix.”

Killing the filibuster would solve a ton of policy problems. But even without it, law makers are just going to be more inclined toward policies with a track record that have been vetted and tested, even if it leads them down the same path repeatedly. Even slight variations on an existing theme, like Smith’s rebuilt-for-reconciliation clean-energy

standard, encounter bumps in the road.

Sometimes, new trails can get plowed open. “When I first came to the Hill, climate was this lefty, fringe-y thing,” said a Senate leadership aide. “It’s where I give progres sives a lot of credit. They take these ideas and they push.”

One progressive House staffer pointed to a moment in the House Education and Labor Committee markup for Build Back Better, when progressives and swing-dis trict Democrats joined forces to ensure that the child care benefit capped expenses at 7 percent of income for all families. The bill initially had a means test at 150 percent of the state median income. The progressive/ swing-district coalition got that eliminated. (The means test reappeared in the final ver sion as a phaseout after three years, which became a huge point of contention that was ultimately changed again. Policy newness generates a lot of these dynamics.)

The child care policy ended up falling out of the bill, but the House staffer explained how getting the House on the record for universality will matter down the road. “It is where we start the next conversa tion when we have a trifecta with a bigger majority,” the staffer said. “We will be able to say, ‘Every House member passed a bill with universal child care.’” Similarly, the one-year enhanced Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue Plan, delivered monthly and able to reduce child poverty by an esti mated 40 percent, helps build the case for making it permanent next time.

As Wyden explained to me, the act of losing prepares you for winning. He had a big policy loss in Build Back Better: the Billionaire Income Tax, a hybrid of a markto-market tax on annual asset gains that he had been pitching for years and Elizabeth Warren’s two-cent wealth tax from her cam paign. The idea was killed within about 24 hours after it was floated. But Wyden thinks the work that went into crafting the idea into legislation will eventually pay off. “If you have a big idea, you’re persistent, you get the facts and stay at it,” he said.

That’s the position of family care advo cates and child poverty advocates, build ing momentum for that next opening of the window. Wyden offered three pieces of advice: Figure out what went wrong, boil down the ideas that can get broad support, and build your coalition. “Call me old-fash ioned, call it outdated,” he said, “but I think that’s what public service is all about.”

Budget reconciliation was never intended to be a mechanism for domestic policy advancement, let alone the only one.

INDUSTRIAL POLICY WITHOUT INDUSTRIAL UNIONS

Democrats’ new industrial manufacturing plan leaves unions behind, fumbling a moment of relative leverage for organized labor.

By Lee Harris

ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT MEGANCK

In August, as President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, pledging to build American semiconductor factories, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker posed on the White House lawn, flanked by the chief executives of vehicle companies Ford, Lion Electric, and Rivian. Thanks to billions of dollars in federal and state investments, Pritzker said, his constituents could expect a manufactur ing revival, and “good-paying, union jobs.”

Illinois is refashioning itself as a center for electric vehicle (EV) production and a cluster of related industries, such as microchips. The state just passed the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, its flagship industrial-policy plan, and has passed MICRO, a complement to federal CHIPS subsidies. Pritzker is hungry for

Chicago to host the upcoming Democratic convention and take a victory lap at factory openings.

But he may have to trot out non-union autoworkers at the ribbon cuttings.

Ford, a “Big Three” union automaker, boasts that the F-150 is a “legendary unionbuilt vehicle,” but battery production is being outsourced to non-union shops. Bus pro ducer Lion Electric is under pressure to use organized labor, but has yet to make public commitments on allowing a union election without interference. Electric-truck startup Rivian, which is 18 percent owned by Ama zon, has been plagued by workplace injuries and labor violations. Illinois’s attorney gen eral recently uncovered a scheme to renovate its downstate plant with workers brought in from Mexico, who were cheated out of over time pay.

Democrats are giddy about the arrival of green industrial policy. With last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, CHIPS, and the new Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Con gress has poured money into setting off green growth. The main messaging behind this policy is that government investment can create attractive jobs, and a new politi cal base, by manufacturing the clean tech nologies of the future.

If you squint, you could almost mistake the IRA’s robust Buy American provisions for worker protections. They are often men tioned in the same sentence. But while new spending is likely to onshore manufactur ing, it largely lacks provisions ensuring that those new jobs will adhere to high-road labor standards, let alone that they will be unionized.

Instead, the political logic of the bill is a gamble. The energy sector is still dominated by oil and gas. To accelerate the transition, it will be necessary to create large counter vailing industries. After decades of offshor ing, the first aim for green manufacturing is to make sure that it happens here at all. The IRA alone could produce as many as nine million jobs over the next decade, according to an analysis by University of Massachu setts Amherst and the labor-environmental coalition BlueGreen Alliance. Many of those jobs will be in old Democratic strongholds where the party is now hemorrhaging sup port, like mining in Nevada and auto pro duction in the Midwest.

Supporters hope that once new green jobs are created, a mass labor coalition could follow. As Nathan Iyer, an analyst at the cli mate consultant RMI, told the Prospect in a recent podcast, “It’s hard to have a workers-

based movement, and build workers’ power, if there are no workers.”

But if low-quality jobs are created first, it could prove hard to level up later. Decar bonization is an early-stage industry, and standards set now are likely to be locked in. Early signs are worrying. The Big Three automakers are using the transition to electric cars as an opportunity to bring on an underclass of nominally unionized but lower-tier workers, or to skip unions at new factories altogether.

As states and the federal government make an unprecedented wealth transfer to the next generation of clean-energy com panies, Democrats selling green industri al policy are not following through on the promise to make green jobs good union jobs. They may only have a short window to get it right.

As a 23-year-old union painter in 1986, David Bentley helped stand up Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing in Normal, Illinois. To prevent export restrictions, the Japanese automaker had agreed to open plants in the Midwest, in exchange for the freedom to sell more of its small, fuel-efficient cars in the American market.

“Mitsubishi made me,” Bentley told

Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) has not yet endorsed a union organizing effort at electric-truck startup Rivian.

the Prospect . After painting the original steel structure, he worked on several plant expansions. He also started his own com pany, Commercial and Industrial Coatings, which grew to become one of Mitsubishi’s top contractors. But annual vehicle pro duction shrank from more than 200,000 in 2002 to just 64,000 in 2014, and Mitsubishi eventually left the U.S. to focus on the grow ing Asian market.

Bentley was overjoyed when Rivian announced in 2017 that it would buy the old campus. Given his extensive knowledge of the site, he expected to be tapped for renova tions. The following winter, ahead of a visit by CEO R.J. Scaringe, Bentley heard that Riv ian leadership wanted to remove the faint “ MITSUBISHI ” lettering on the side of the building, and replace it with a “RIVIAN ” sign visible from the nearby interstate highway. With his crew, Bentley said, he worked in the cold and ice to remove the old lettering, anticipating bigger rehabbing projects down the line. “I did it for next to free, just to get in with them.”

But those bigger jobs never came. Bentley offered extensive site consultation, produc ing samples and mock-ups, and bid on a project to polish two million square feet of concrete, but his local team was not chosen. Instead, he learned, Rivian was turning to outside contractors. In 2019, he closed Commercial and Industrial Coatings, which at its height had employed more than two dozen union workers.

It wasn’t just Bentley. Other local work ers have struggled to get hired by Rivian, despite generous public subsidies luring the company to Normal. “We had conver sations with the top brass. They did not want us in that plant,” said Mandy Ganiea ny, organizing director for Painters District

Council No. 30 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), based in Aurora.

The city of Normal gave Rivian approxi mately $3 million in tax breaks between 2017 and 2022, according to a project devel opment agreement, without requiring resi dents to be hired locally. (It does require that salaries not fall beneath average local wages.) Illinois has promised $49.5 million in state tax credits if Rivian creates 1,000 jobs over a decade.

“They rolled out the red carpet for this company,” Ganieany said. Yet elected offi cials were unhelpful as unions pushed for hiring local workers, she said.

Not all the work has been outsourced. Local contractor P.J. Hoerr, for example, won a remodeling deal. But Ronnie Paul of the local laborers union said that Rivian has run into labor issues, particularly “when they start[ed] hiring these out-of-state, out-ofcountry contractors to come in here, who aren’t familiar with Illinois law.”

For example, Painters USA, a firm domi ciled in Chicago and Dallas, brought in work ers from South Texas during the $1.2 billion renovation of Rivian’s plant, according to one person familiar with the company’s practices. One worker shot himself in the hand with a paint gun, the person said, leading to an OSHA investigation. Rivian has been the sub ject of numerous OSHA complaints, including a 2020 violation involving a “falling object protection” in which it was charged a penalty of $5,969. (Painters USA did not respond to requests for comment.)

To build assembly lines at the plant, an investigation by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul found, companies hired by Rivian “used an elaborate subcontracting arrangement to deny overtime pay to Mexi can laborers.” Rivian initially hired MINO Equipment, a China-based subcontractor used by several American EV companies, including Tesla. MINO contracted the work to firms based in Florida and Spain. Those companies further subcontracted out to Mexico-based SDS and LAM Automation, which hired workers from Mexico for the construction jobs in Illinois.

At least 113 Mexican workers were denied overtime, the investigation learned, as they routinely worked between 60 and 80 hours per week. Raoul recovered back wages and civil penalties totaling more than $700,000.

Raoul only learned of the labor viola tions due to a tip from the local electricians

union, he told the Prospect . Precisely for that reason, he believes workers at cleanenergy plants should be unionized. “The contractors probably didn’t seek out Illi nois workers for the scheme, likely because they knew Illinois workers would be more apprised of the laws that protected them,” Raoul said. “It was but for a tip from orga nized labor, in the interest of protecting workers, that we unraveled this.”

Ironically, local politicians don’t share his perspective. Chris Koos, the Democratic mayor of Normal, argued that bringing in out-of-state and even foreign workers is a net positive. “If people are willing to travel here to work, it’s good-paying jobs,” Koos told the Prospect. “If they’re in another state, or downstate, or Chicagoland, and they’ve got people idle, it’s good.”

Asked about the state investigation into wage theft, the mayor denied knowing about it. When pressed, Koos said, “That was a subcontractor, it wasn’t Rivian.” He added, “I know that things out at that plant are going 100 miles an hour.”

In his campaign, Biden proposed to make union neutrality, where companies agree to not contest a union vote, a condition for employers to receive federal funding. He also vowed to pass fines for employers who violate labor laws when firing employees. Neither of those provisions appears in the IRA

Biden also wanted consumer rebates to go specifically to union-built cars, which would have added $4,500 onto the $7,500 federal tax credit extended by the bill. This was personally axed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who called the proposal “not Ameri can” at an event at Toyota’s non-union West Virginia components plant.

Union neutrality provisions were also stripped out of CHIPS and the bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL). In each case, there were hurdles to including pro-union lan guage: IRA was a reconciliation bill, restrict ed to spending, making it tough to include standards, and the bipartisan bills faced Republican political opposition to labor provisions. That means agencies allocat ing the funding will play a crucial role in whether federal dollars support union work.

Over the past several months, the Depart ment of Energy has released funding oppor tunity announcements on grants created by the bipartisan infrastructure law. A Pros pect review of available applications found

Democrats selling green industrial policy are not following through on the promise to make green jobs good jobs.

that they do not include requirements relat ed to employer neutrality or right to bar gain, and most do not mention workforce protections. (An application for recycling EV batteries does contain strong pro-union language, including inviting applicants to include letters of commitment from unions, though it does not specify whether that will be weighted in selection.)

When touting the pro-union bona fides of the IRA, Democrats mostly point to one win: prevailing-wage laws and apprenticeship pro grams. That’s an important victory for some workers, though it applies narrowly to jobs in the construction sector.

Prevailing-wage requirements discour age cutthroat bidding by contractors. Under the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, federal con tractors must pay prevailing wages for con struction work, matching the hourly rate of similarly employed workers in a region. The bill prevents tradesmen from being under cut by out-of-town builders, who are often exploited, like the Mexican workers brought in by Rivian subcontractors.

Typically, Davis-Bacon has only applied to federal contractors, such as building crews for the Department of Transportation. The IRA extends it to ordinary employers. Businesses seeking tax credits for install ing electric-vehicle charging infrastructure, or making buildings more energy-efficient, will receive five times the credit if they meet prevailing-wage requirements and hire reg istered apprentices.

Mike Monroe of NABTU, the building trades division of the AFL CIO, called this potentially transformational. “We’re all competing now on a level playing field,” he told the Prospect. “We think that that will lead to increased unionization, in conjunc tion with other public policies this admin istration has helped push out.”

But even prevailing-wage bonuses, IRA’s biggest direct achievement for labor, don’t apply to all manufacturing incentives. For example, a new “Section 45X” tax credit for solar, wind, and battery parts production is not subject to requirements for prevailing wages or apprenticeship.

Industrial trades, meanwhile, said that the priority on builders above other work ers in federal legislation is echoed at the local level. United Auto Workers (UAW) Vice President Cindy Estrada told the Prospect that Gov. Pritzker hasn’t done enough to push for union labor at auto plants in Illi nois. “He’s doing a lot of good work with the

building trades, making sure that plants are built union,” she said. “But we also want to make sure, once those four walls are up, that they’re union.”

Inside the Rivian plant in Normal, a union drive has taken off. Mitsubishi workers at the factory were part of UAW, and workers are now betting it can be organized again. Current Rivian employees told the Prospect that the plant is run in a disorderly manner that reduces their formal protections, mak ing their schedules unpredictable and their jobs less safe.

Assembly line workers are sent home when the plant runs out of parts. During those production pauses, several Rivian employees said, workers are asked to use their paid time off, eating up much of a poli cy that is officially meant to be used for sick leave or emergencies.

Unfair leave policies were a top concern for Anakin Fox, until recently a Rivian worker in production control who brought parts to the line for the company’s Amazon Prime vans. Fox left his job at the plant in August, after deciding that it was too tough on his health.

“There is a huge lack of safety in Rivian,” said another worker who spoke on the con dition of anonymity. The worker explained that employees are expected to adapt to last-minute changes, which the company excuses as the growing pains of a startup. “It’s basically like a blind-faith test that your managers are going to be managing you right.”

Scheduling and staffing issues also trou ble Janet Schaar, a material handler at Riv ian, who told the Prospect that managers have been unhelpful when she has raised concerns. Schaar arrives at 6:30 a.m. and is given half an hour for lunch at 10:45 a.m. After that, she has three ten-minute breaks until her day ends at 7:10 p.m., when she takes a shuttle bus to the parking lot before driving home, when it is often too late to make dinner.

At 50, Schaar is looking for a job that can be a career. If she stays in this position, her raises will max out in three years at $23 an hour. Depending on the shift and overtime, she said, some workers at the local Wendy’s make more.

“But we’re in auto manufacturing,” Schaar said. “There is a skill set to build ing these vehicles, and we should get the pay to match that.” Those frustrations, and

particularly a desire for greater control over unpredictable scheduling and time-off poli cies, got Schaar interested in organizing with UAW

It is something of an existential moment for UAW, which has not managed to organize a single EV producer. The union has weath ered several high-profile failures at foreign and non-union plants, compounded with a spate of internal corruption scandals.

“Workers in auto understand their power and the moment they’re in,” Estrada told the Prospect. The union says it is adopting more radical tactics and emphasizing grass roots organizing. They might even be will ing to strike for recognition, Estrada said, an escalation that birthed the modern union autoworker movement, after the famed sitdown strikes of the 1930s. That would be a departure from UAW ’s more recent efforts to work through the National Labor Relations Board process, which, she said, is “rigged against workers.”

“What you never can skip is just good organizing,” Estrada added. “We’re working with those workers to build strong, public, worker-based committees.”

Not all workers see that happening on the ground, however. While working at Rivian, Fox saw the organizing committee grow from a few dozen people to hundreds. Yet even as excitement grew, UAW emphasized process and organizing infrastructure, rath er than actions, Fox said. “The campaign was being guided by staff, not owned by the workers.”

Too much external emphasis on process can be a mistake, according to some labor experts. “Success comes from grassroots

Agencies allocating the funding for Biden’s publicinvestment bills will play a crucial role in whether federal dollars support union work.

organizing,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University. “Not just some big muckety-muck coming in from out of town.”

When actions have happened, Fox said, UAW organizers have sometimes learned about them after the fact. Earlier this year, workers in the body shop had been asked to work on a Saturday, and were told last-minute that they had to work more overtime. Work ers organized an informal line strike, raising broader concerns about their paid-time-off policy. They were successful, immediately winning concessions from management.

“That was all the workers. People were fed up, and said, ‘OK, we basically have 100 percent pro [support for walking off] in our area, we’re just going to do something about it,” Fox said. Afterward, UAW was pleased with the outcome, he added. “It’s interesting that when they take a step back, it works, but in the actual infrastructure of our organizing committee, when they’re very involved, it was a little harder for us to get good work done.”

On the pace of the campaign, Schaar said, “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”

The race at Rivian has not been helped by politicians reluctant to go to bat for labor. Asked about a union drive, Koos, the mayor of Normal who helped attract Rivian, told the Prospect, “I haven’t heard a word.”

In the South, the right-wing political establishment has been instrumental—and resourceful—in defeating union efforts. In 2014, the first time UAW tried to organize

a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Ten nessee, former Gov. Bill Haslam threatened to withhold $300 million in tax incentives for a proposed expansion at the plant if the union drive succeeded. The second time, in 2019, Gov. Bill Lee visited the plant to discourage unionizing.

Yet Democratic politicians have been hesi tant to act as a counterweight to promote union organizing, partly out of fear that fac tories will go to the South. Asked whether Pritzker supports the unionizing effort under way at Rivian, a spokesperson said, “The Governor believes that organized labor has always been the backbone of our state.”

Organizing any non-union company is an uphill battle. But Rivian is a particularly grueling fight because most automaking, including the emerging EV sector, has been functionally non-union for many years. The first pulse of investments into electric cars coincided with the financial crisis, when nearly all auto jobs were being restructured.

Tesla, bolstered by Obama-era Depart ment of Energy loans, is the only non-union, U.S.-based automaker. CEO Elon Musk is particularly vocal in his anti-worker ani mus, and has received little more than a slap on the wrist. After the NLRB ordered Tesla to remove an anti-union tweet, it remains up. A factory ban on wearing union T-shirts was illegal, the NLRB ruled; the penalty was to put a sign up in the break room that union shirts are allowed.

Tesla stands to benefit from the new tax

credits—as do non-union foreign automak ers as they pivot assembly to North Ameri ca. Tesla had earned out of the EV consumer tax rebates after hitting a quota of 200,000 sales. But those limits were lifted in the IRA , without adding any pro-labor requirements.

During the Great Recession, legacy auto companies in receivership took huge con cessions for new workers. General Motors’ lower-tier job system, known as Subsystems, is a cost-cutting invention in which the com pany hires workers under the rubric of “GM Subsystem Manufacturing LLC,” a wholly owned subsidiary of GM. This workaround, invented to pay reduced wages to some GM workers, was born in 2009 at GM’s Brown stown, Michigan, facility, the first lithiumion battery plant at a major automaker.

Employees at the Brownstown plant pay dues to UAW, but they are not covered by the national contract. A $105.9 million grant from the Department of Energy helped Brownstown open its doors. The idea was to rebuild union ranks, while remaining com petitive with foreign producers. But rather than a temporary mechanism, the use of a subsidiary with lower-tiered pay has spread as more battery plants have opened.

In America’s shop-by-shop unionism, any new technology introduced—even a slight tweak or innovation—offers an opportunity for the corporation to say that the produc tion doesn’t fall under the auspices of the old union contract. The same is true, for example, in Hollywood. As reality shows became more popular, networks and pro

Rivian trucks are made in Normal, Illinois, in a plant that used to be a union shop owned by Mitsubishi.

duction companies claimed that “unscript ed” TV fell outside old union contracts.

UAW President Ray Curry has fought this tendency, arguing that “our members should be compensated at the appropriate level” for manufacturing battery packs, at the same scale as engine and transmission parts. But that will require new bargaining. Plus, it takes up time that could be spent organiz ing new plants and battling the slow creep of the tiered wage system.

Organizing efforts have often been lack luster. The Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) reform caucus of the union proposed a resolution for worker-led organizing at EV, battery, and foreign-owned plants. But it never made the floor at August’s UAW con vention in Detroit. Among the reformers’ demands: hire 100 full-time organizers. A member told the Prospect that UAWD has been unable to find out from UAW how many orga nizers are currently employed by the union.

Meanwhile, even after the recovery, Subsystems jobs have continued to spread. Estrada sent a letter to union members in 2018 explaining an agreement with GM for “outsourcing” at plants in Lordstown, Ohio, and Lake Orion, Michigan. The jobs went to Subsystems employees, though the letter doesn’t name Subsystems. In 2019, GM closed the Lordstown plant, despite an array of inducements to remain.

The Department of Energy is now making fresh loans to non-union plants. Lordstown is one of three sites where Ultium Cells, a joint venture between GM and Korean electronics manufacturer LG Chem, is building a new battery plant. Jobs at joint venture plants are expected to pay less than top wages.

The DOE ’s Loan Programs Office announced a $2.5 billion loan to Ultium through its Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, which received an additional $40 billion in funding in the IRA . The government cannot make loans contingent on unionization. But it can use soft power, and prioritize labor standards in criteria for loans.

Ultium originally said it would leave the question of unionizing up to the workforce in Ohio and Tennessee. But UAW leadership did not draw up a formal neutrality agree ment, and the company reversed course. In May, UAW Vice President Terry Dittes told local leaders that their card-check agree ment proposal had been “flat-out rejected.”

The Ultium loan is not just bad labor

policy—it may be bad lending. The legal premise of project labor agreements for construction is that labor disputes are a risk. The Obama administration argued in 2009 that this could serve as a foothold for union neutrality in procurement, since the government “has a proprietary inter est in ensuring that those contracts will be performed by contractors whose work will not be interrupted by labor unrest.”

Stephen Lerner, a labor and commu nity organizer who is currently a fellow at Georgetown University, made a similar argument. “Why would the government give a $2.5 billion loan to Ultium, when it has not agreed to a process for workers to union ize?” he asked. “That’s a risky loan, if they’re headed toward a labor dispute.” Shortly after that interview, in early September, Lords town employees struck for representation.

But as new government funding pumps out to the auto sector, UAW has contin ued making concessions. At another DOE funded Ultium joint venture in Spring Hill, Tennessee, UAW regional leaders and Local 1853 signed a memo of understanding with GM in June 2020 for hundreds of jobs to be performed by Subsystems employees, The Detroit News reported. After workers learned of the secret agreement, local lead ership resigned.

Asked about signing over jobs to Subsys tems workers, Mike Lewis, vice president

of Local 1853, told the Prospect, “I don’t like the fact that they would be lower-tier jobs. I think everyone should be on the same play ing field, get the same money.” But pressed on the agreement, he said, “That’s actually something for the national party to decide. Not really on the local level.”

The upshot is that even union jobs in the emerging EV sector won’t necessarily be good jobs, said Jonah Furman, an organizer and writer for the publication Labor Notes. “As you let GM go to lower-tier jobs, you don’t lose the union jobs, but you turn them into something like meatpacking.”

UAW leadership says it is ready to meet the moment ahead of next year’s Big Three con tract negotiations. It is attempting to stand up a National Auto Worker Committee com prised of representatives from non-union automakers. A May meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, drew more than 60 autoworkers from Tesla, Rivian, Honda, Volkswagen, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, and others.

“We need a sectoral rate in this country,” Estrada said. “During the auto crisis we put unions, labor, management, and the admin istration in the same room to figure out how to save these companies. And the solution was, they need to go down to Toyota’s nonunion rate. The problem with us all going to Toyota’s rate to be competitive is, they have no union.”

In interviews, several UAW workers

An electric-vehicle battery from Ultium Cells, a joint venture between GM and Korean electronics manufacturer LG Chem

described their exasperation with leader ship calling for sectoral bargaining. It comes too late, they said, with the union bargaining from a position of weakness. Plus, switching to a more European model would require political mobilization that is unlikely, because unions are now fighting over the scraps of what they previously organized.

“You can’t have a sectoral approach unless you’re organized sectorally,” said Scott Houldieson, an electrician at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant. “We couldn’t even get the PRO Act or something like card check passed when we had a supermajority in the early years of the Obama administration. So it’s baffling to think that leadership relies on government to help them. We need to do the hard work ourselves.”

Labor provisions that couldn’t pass in Biden’s legislative agenda might make it through in a mix of oversight measures, regulatory reforms, and creative uses of executive power.

Public procurement, which creates some $2 trillion a year of economic activity, or almost 10 percent of U.S. GDP, is a huge leverage point. States and school districts purchase bus fleets, and every contract is an opportunity to examine the supply chain, including by stakeholders outside govern ment. Teachers unions have organized for school bus fleets to be built with union labor.

Using procurement contracts as lever age helps explain why unions have made inroads into bus manufacturers. The Unit ed Steelworkers organized Proterra; Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Work ers (SMART) Union organized BYD; and the Communications Workers of America has formed a union with workers at New Flyer. Coalitions like Jobs to Move America are focused on winning community benefit

agreements in places like Illinois, where labor and environmental groups are call ing on Lion Electric to allow employees to decide on union representation.

Meanwhile, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh has quietly undertaken the biggest reform to prevailing-wage law since Ronald Rea gan gutted construction worker pay in 1983. Reagan’s Labor Department enacted a num ber of debilitating modifications, including eliminating a rule that said a given wage was the “prevailing” rate if more than 30 percent of workers in an area were paid that amount—typically the union rate. A 2011 Government Accountability Office report found that wage rate surveys were so out-ofdate that in some areas, Davis-Bacon wage rates were below federal minimum wage.

DOL’s proposed rule would restore the 30 percent rule, which stands to benefit workers in states hostile to unions. Requir ing higher labor standards is also likely to protect undocumented workers frequently employed as cheaper labor at construction sites. The new rule also ramps up enforce ment, which will be crucial as prevailingwage requirements are extended beyond federal contractors in the IRA . Obama’s 2009 infrastructure spending bill also included Davis-Bacon requirements, but DOL’s Wage and Hour Division struggled to enforce compliance.

Other regulatory battles loom. Unions are concerned that workers in new sectors will be misclassified as lower-skilled workers, so that contractors can avoid paying prevail ing rates for crafts that require technical training. Clean-energy industry representa tives have lobbied the Department of Labor to create job classifications for “installers,” which organized labor sees as an effort to carve away a new wage category that is not subject to union rates.

“Calling someone an ‘EV installer’ means you want somebody with minimal skills so you can pay them less,” Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA), told the Prospect. Union Laborers work on many types of infra structure projects, from wind and solar to bridges and water treatment plants, O’Sullivan said. “Nobody calls a worker a ‘bridge installer.’ It’s not a thing. Because skilled workers are needed across the industry.”

A warlike surge in spending on the energy transition could propel economy-wide growth, lifting workers in sectors outside of

new green industries. Economists like J.W. Mason of the Roosevelt Institute argue that as in World War II, when the biggest wage gains for workers were seen outside the “war industries,” bargaining power from green growth may show up in unexpected parts of the economy, like the retail and service sector. Given that, Mason argued, “it’s a bit myopic to focus just on the standards built into particular jobs.”

Others are wary of the analogy to a war time boom. O’Sullivan, of the Laborers Union, pointed out that the energy produc tion and investment tax credits in the IRA are available for at least the next ten years. “Whatever the urgency of the climate crisis, I don’t think we should compare it to a war mobilization. This is a steady and long-term investment,” he said. “A thousand things can change in 10 to 15 years when some sectors may slow, others may emerge.”

Even with unions depleted, the sheer scale of investment in the clean-energy sec tor suggests some new jobs will be union ized. Mine workers in West Virginia, for example, have secured a deal for laid-off coal miners to be hired by the battery manu facturer SPARKZ. The agreement came out of a White House meeting with union leaders and renewable-energy entrepreneurs, said Phil Smith, top lobbyist for the United Mine Workers. Smith said that the company has agreed to card-check neutrality.

Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, states with anti-union “right to work” laws, will receive many of the new jobs created by the domes tic mining boom. Those battleground states represent another organizing opportunity. (The Steelworkers, not the UMWA , organize much of the hard-rock mining in the West.)

“On paper, organized labor did pretty good. It could have been better—we could have gotten provisions in the PRO Act in. But conceptually, we didn’t do too bad. What’s important now is making sure the followthrough is done properly,” Smith told the Prospect. “We’re back to basic organizing.”

Despite labor’s weakened position, sev eral workers said that they are heartened by the surge of spending on American industry. Houldieson, the Ford electrician, said he is focused on next year’s contract negotiations, where he hopes to make new electric-car factories part of UAW ’s master agreement.

“Where was the union movement in 1925? It was moribund,” he said. “We’ve been here before. What we’re talking about is not impossible.”

Using procurement contracts as leverage helps explain why unions have made inroads into bus manufacturers.

Reclaiming

The government agencies of the New Deal revolution were created to check the cruelties of unregulated capi talism. They were born progressive. Their leaders were deeply committed to their goals. This match of ideol ogy, agency, and mission lasted for about a generation. Though strategic reactionaries like Steve Bannon claim that the administrative state is still an impregnable bastion of liberalism, the Rooseveltian deep state was already on the ropes half a century ago, assaulted from multiple directions.

As New Deal fervor waned and corporations regained political power, one assault was regulatory capture by regulated industries. The original Nader’s Raiders, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, wrote scathingly accu rate investigative reports, with arch titles like “The Interstate Commerce Omission.” The corruption of the regulatory state helped set the table for deregulation.

Jimmy Carter, having bashed government rhetorical ly, became a full-on convert to bashing it in practice, deregulating airlines, railroads, trucking, and energy. Even liberal lions like Ted Kennedy helped him along with some deregulation that promised greater competi tion, notably airlines.

Carter’s Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 created an obscure but powerful agency lodged in the White House called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The idea was to have a final filter to make sure that regu lations proposed by other branches of government were consistent with the president’s program. OIRA was given the power to review, revise, or veto the regulations of other government agencies. It was a deep-state agency explicitly created to undermine the deep state.

theBeginning with Reagan, whose Cabinet departments were plenty hostile to health, safety, environmental, labor, or consumer regulation, OIRA was mobilized to block any regulations that might slip through. Reagan’s Executive Order 12291, signed in 1981, required OIRA to use cost-benefit tests in a manner that systematically understated benefits and overstated costs. It explic itly prohibited regulations unless the benefits could be shown to outweigh the costs.

The use of OIRA to gut regulations reached its apo theosis not under Reagan but under Barack Obama, when it was headed by Obama’s friend Cass Sunstein. Obama had gotten to know Sunstein when they were both law professors at the University of Chicago.

A quirky, conservative liberal who reveres markets, Sunstein has spent much of his career trying to square an impossible circle: tinkering with market norms rath er than overriding them with regulations. A favorite Sunstein conceit is the “nudge.” The idea is to encour age ordinary people to behave more like Chicago school economists. Sunstein’s preferred “default rules” would gently prod rather than require people to buy fuel-effi cient cars, or put more money into retirement savings. Sunstein terms this strategy “libertarian paternalism.” The are no notable examples of its success. Sometimes a coy oxymoron is just a contradiction.

By Robert Kuttner

Sunstein has been enamored of OIRA ever since its birth. In 1981, as a Justice Department lawyer, he helped write Reagan’s OIRA regulations. In 2009, Obama appointed Sunstein to his dream job as head of the agency, allowing him to leave the academy for a labora tory with real power, to test his pet theories.

How the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the longtime graveyard of regulation in the public interest, became its unlikely champion.

At OIRA , Sunstein became a scourge to progressives. He used OIRA to gut regulations proposed by federal agencies. Delays of final rules doubled in duration com pared to the Bush years. After leaving office, Sunstein bragged that “the Obama administration issued fewer regulations in its first four years than did the Rea gan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations in their first four years.” He wrote that his goal at OIRA was to “proliferate veto points on regu

latory activity … because regulation was an obstacle to economic growth and job creation.”

An egregious case was the EPA rule on ground-level ozone, commonly known as smog, which causes respi ratory problems as well as heart disease. Ozone pollu tion comes from power plants, factories, and vehicles. The Clean Air Act explicitly directs the EPA to reduce such pollutants to a level consistent with public health, irrespective of cost. The Supreme Court, in a 2001 deci sion written by Justice Antonin Scalia (!), upheld EPA’s mandate to regulate pollutants such as ozone without a cost-benefit analysis. The vote was 9-0. In January 2010, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that she would set the standard at between 60 and 70 parts per billion, because Bush-era levels “were not legally defensible given the scientific evidence in the record.” But in September 2011, after extensive industry lobby ing and OIRA review, Jackson was told that the White House was rejecting the EPA’s standard because of the cost of compliance.

Following Sunstein’s disastrous reign, which was compounded by Trump’s further gutting of regulation, many progressives hoped the next Democratic president would just neuter or eliminate OIRA , so that regulatory agencies could do their mandated jobs. But a young law professor named K. Sabeel Rahman, who during part of the Trump years served as president of Demos, had a more ingenious idea. What if OIRA could be turned into its opposite? Suppose OIRA could review plans by government departments to make sure they were effec

Reclaiming StateDeep

The New Executive Office Building, home of OIRA

tively regulating in the public interest—and use OIRA’s own resources to help them do so?

Like Sunstein, but in reverse, Rahman would get the chance to put his ideas into practice. Today, he serves as OIRA’s associate administrator, charged with mak ing over the agency into an ally of effective regulation. He is part of a network of progressives who are turning what was once a roadblock to activist use of government into a facilitator.

Rahman first published the germ of his concept in a 2017 book, Democracy Against Domination , which addressed the relationship of the regulatory state to participatory democracy. Rahman contended that regu lation had become an insider’s game, overly technical and vulnerable to industry and ideological capture. He posed the question: How might the regulatory process itself become part of a movement to energize democratic participation?

Rahman became involved with an informal working group on enhanced democracy and the state. In 2020, two scholars at the Roosevelt Institute, Todd Tucker and Raj Nayak, fleshed out the idea in a paper titled “OIRA 2.0.” As part of our Day One Agenda series on things the next president could achieve by executive action, the Prospect hosted a roundtable in April 2020, in which several scholars and experts argued the case, pro and con, for abolishing OIRA versus repurposing it.

In the meantime, Rahman had gone to work for the Biden campaign, where he was put in charge of several regulatory issues. When Biden was elected, Rahman became the transition team’s leader in charge of OIRA and other areas of regulatory reform. Picking up on an idea promoted by the Prospect as far back as fall 2019, Biden issued several Day One executive orders drafted during the transition. One of them, crafted by Rahman, set in motion the strategy of reversing the role of OIRA .

The memorandum, issued on Biden’s first day in office, directed the Office of Management and Budget, where OIRA is housed, to use the OIRA regulatory review

process to “promote public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations.”

Biden’s memorandum also called for a revision of cost-benefit tests to promote “policies that reflect new developments in scientific and economic understand ing,” and also take into account “the distributional consequences of regulations,” and to assure that regu lations “do not inappropriately burden disadvantaged, vulnerable, or marginalized communities.”

The memorandum explicitly requires OIRA to “play a more proactive role in partnering with agencies to explore, promote, and undertake regulatory initiatives that are likely to yield significant benefits.” It directed OMB to undertake a study and submit recommenda tions within six months. All this was revolutionary, and admirably specific.

A week later, on January 27, 2021, Rahman was appointed senior counselor at OIRA—a position that did not require Senate confirmation—and prime architect of its role reversal, with a game plan ready to go. During the campaign and transition, Rahman worked closely with Sharon Block, a Harvard law professor who was featured in the Prospect roundtable taking the side of reimagining OIRA . Block took a leave from Harvard to serve as OIRA’s acting administrator. The White House was well aware that finding a confirmable administra tor committed to OIRA’s radical remake would be a challenge, and was happy to begin with acting chiefs and nonconfirmed counselors.

The reversal of OIRA’s mission is a case study on an aspect of governing and empowerment where conserva tives often outplay progressives. Though Republicans abhor activist government, the right has become expert in learning the details of how government actually works, the better to throw sand in the gears. The left has the reputation for policy-wonkery, but too few progres sives spend the time in the bowels of the government working out the practical details. It’s more exhilarating to work on the policy from 30,000 feet and assume that implementation will take care of itself. “Progressives have never cared enough about this level of governing,” says Sharon Block.

Today, however, there is a notable group of expert progressives who do care about this level of governing, and they are in it for the long haul. They include Rah man and New York University Law professor Richard

Rahman is part of a network of progressives who are turning what was once a roadblock to activist use of government into a facilitator.

Revesz, whom Biden appointed OIRA administrator in early September, subject to Senate confirmation. Raj Nayak, co-author of the Roosevelt study on OIRA , is now assistant secretary of labor for policy. Nayak had previously been deputy director of the National Employ ment Law Project, and knows these regulatory issues in fine detail. Nayak’s deputy is another careful student of the deep state, Alex Hertel-Fernandez, who has been specifically assigned to work with OIRA . And there is a whole backup contingent at the Roosevelt Institute, Public Citizen, and other public-interest groups, keep ing close watch on OIRA’s makeover.

One area where previous administrations had either deliberately weakened regulations, or slow-walked them for fear of being reversed by the courts, was occupation al safety and health. At the Labor Department, Nayak has worked closely with Rahman to strengthen them.

OSHA , which is part of the Labor Department, issued a proposed standard to protect workers against trans missions of infectious diseases in 2010. The regula tion just sat there for the remainder of the Obama and Trump administrations. The new assistant secretary responsible for OSHA , Douglas Parker, testified last May that such a standard would have been useful in reduc ing transmission of COVID. In his previous job, as head of California’s state worker safety and health agency, Parker was a leader in enforcing a state standard on workplace transmission of infectious diseases.

With the leadership of Parker and Nayak, reinforced by Block and Rahman at the White House, the Biden Labor Department issued two emergency worker safety and health standards and got them finalized in record time. In June 2021, OSHA issued a standard on health care workers and COVID. The initial rule was sent to OIRA for review on April 26 and was finalized less than seven weeks later. A second rule, mandating vaccines and testing for large employers, was sent to OIRA by the Labor Department on October 12 and completed November 4. That rule was stayed by the Supreme Court in January, pending resolution of several lawsuits filed by employers.

Bulletproofing regulations against reversal by rightwing courts has become an OIRA priority. In the Infla tion Reduction Act, Congress explicitly defines carbon dioxide as an air pollutant, potentially making it harder for courts to undermine EPA’s work.

In nearly all cases, relations between agencies and the new OIRA are collaborative. In the case of Biden’s executive order requiring a $15 minimum wage for fed

K. Sabeel Rahman

eral contractors, OIRA worked with the Labor Depart ment to devise a rule that would be as expansive as possible. Another pending Labor Department/OIRA rule will strengthen enforcement of the Davis-Bacon Act, requiring “prevailing” wages (typically union-scale wages) on federal construction contracts.

In the case of the FDA rule allowing over-the-counter sales of hearing aids, which will drastically cut costs to consumers, this was a personal Biden priority that was explicitly mentioned in the president’s executive order to enhance competition and reduce monopoly power. The law requiring the rule passed in 2017, but the rule had been held up for five years. “The White House, the National Economic Council, FDA , and OIRA all worked together on that one,” recalls Sharon Block.

A lot of the discussion between OIRA and the agencies is at the technical level, where the agency advises the best way of achieving regulatory goals.

For the most part, such collaboration is the norm, though under Biden, OIRA occasionally prods agencies to be tougher. In one case last December, OIRA reviewed EPA’s draft regulations on greenhouse gas emissions for cars and light trucks, advising EPA that its standards were inadequate. EPA’s draft rules had been the subject of extensive lobbying by the auto industry, which was complaining about increased costs to automakers and

consumers. The rules aim to increase the average fuel economy of new passenger cars and trucks between 5 and 10 percent each year from model year 2023 through 2026.

EPA initially had proposed offering automakers incentives for pollution reduction through model year 2025—such as double-counting electric-vehicle sales and extra credit for certain technologies. OIRA urged EPA to limit those incentives to just model year 2023. The final rule compromises, allowing the incentives for model years 2023 and 2024. Environmental activ ists had criticized EPA for being a little too solicitous of the auto industry, which has struggled during the pandemic. “It’s unprecedented for OIRA to strengthen a rule to increase net benefits,” James Goodwin, a senior analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform, said in an interview with E&E News. “To my knowledge, that argument has never been made.”

As a matter of law, OIRA did not have to compromise. In principle, it has the authority to block agency rules until they meet its criteria. In practice, the president or the White House chief of staff has to balance OIRA’s view against the agency’s. For the most part, OIRA’s rela

Sharon Block

tionship with EPA has been excellent, and the Biden EPA has pushed to toughen regulation. But OIRA , instead of reinforcing industry pressure, as it did under Sunstein and all Republican administrations, has served as a salutary counterweight.

Very infrequently, relations become testy. Agencies still remain accustomed to OIRA meddling to weaken their authority, and occasionally resist OIRA as a matter of turf. In several rulemakings on energy efficiency stan dards, the Department of Energy, having been repeat edly burned by OIRA under Trump, resisted providing information requested by OIRA , fearing delay, lead ing to a standoff. As of August, five of eight standards awaiting OIRA approval exceeded the required 90-day review period. “It got adversarial and slowed down the entire process, producing the opposite outcome from the one DOE wanted,” Block says. “But this is very much the exception.”

At least one energy efficiency rule, for manufactured homes, wound up weakened , though that was likely due to Department of Housing and Urban Develop ment concerns that tougher standards would weaken affordability. That mirrored the claims of manufactured home owners, though DOE’s analysis showed costs would be lower.

Last winter, as the White House was negotiating with Joe Manchin on Build Back Better, EPA was work ing on a regulation to reverse a Trump rule and restore tougher Obama standards on emissions of mercury and other toxic substances from oil- and coal-fired power plants. OIRA itself had reviewed the rule and basically okayed it in just 30 days. But then the EPA draft rule was delayed another 90 days, presumably due to interven tion at a higher political level than OIRA , out of sensi tivity to Manchin. But climate groups were outraged and blamed EPA , which in turn blamed OIRA . Relations have since improved.

“It’s clear that OIRA finished its technical and policy review of the mercury rule, but then delayed the rule by making it look like it was still under review in order to appease Sen. Manchin,” says Amit Narang, who covers OIRA for Public Citizen. “This shows how easily OIRA review can be manipulated for political purposes, and

how badly we need transparency and accountability reforms at OIRA as envisioned under the Modernizing Regulatory Review memo.”

Six months to the day after Biden’s Day One order on repurposing OIRA , the agency sent Biden the first requested report, on revising OIRA to promote equity. The report called for department-by-department equity assessments, noting that the government had never undertaken a comprehensive review of how its diverse programs and policies promote or impede equity. One intriguing observation in the report, which turns OIRA’s usual premises upside down, is the insight that admin istrative burdens often fall on the intended beneficiaries of public programs, deterring access.

“These burdens include time spent on applications and paperwork, but also factors like time spent traveling to in-person visits, answering notices and phone calls to verify eligibility, navigating web interfaces, and collect ing any documentation required to prove eligibility,” the report noted. It also highlighted the essential inequity of administrative burdens that lead to underutilization among the most marginal: “Burdens that seem minor when designing and implementing a program can have substantial negative effects for individuals already fac ing scarcity.”

This insight is a revolutionary reversal. Typically, the rhetoric about regulation has focused on the compliance burden on corporations, not on citizens. The right delib erately loads up programs for the poor with eligibility tests and paperwork requirements that at worst are intended to deter participation and at best have that direct effect. The best government programs are ones like Social Security and the enhanced Child Tax Credit under the 2021 American Rescue Plan, where eligibil ity is virtually automatic. The worst ones have complex enrollment and eligibility tests, as in the Affordable Care Act, undermining both participation in the pro gram and faith in government generally.

Biden’s OIRA is also using its review of the “regulatory agenda,” a twice-a-year look ahead by the agencies of the regs they plan to do in the upcoming year, to ask agencies to take into account the customer experience, in addition to meeting presidential priorities on equity, the pandemic, climate, economic recovery, and the new initiative around competition.

Michael Lipsky’s classic book, Street-Level Bureau cracy, studied all of the ways that red tape overwhelmed intended beneficiaries and frontline government work ers. Bureaucrats tend to cover their butts by requiring even more documentation; no bureaucrat ever got in trouble by finding someone ineligible. This OIRA ini

tiative is the first government-wide intervention on the other side. President Clinton’s project, Reinventing Government, began by seeking ways to make govern ment more efficient, but soon joined conservatives in bashing and weakening government. Clinton’s meanstested Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, the one that “ended welfare as we know it,” is a textbook case of using complex eligibility tests to deter benefits.

In April 2022, OMB issued a follow-up directive, requiring all government agencies to formulate plans to reduce information and compliance burdens, including increased outreach to stakeholder groups. It’s brilliant for the left to take a favorite theme of the right—burden some rules—and make it a progressive cause. Getting this sensibility included in both the crafting of legisla tion and the drafting of regulations will be no mean feat. OIRA’s initiative is a promising start.

But the real great white whale for reformers is revers ing OIRA’s use of cost-benefit analysis, which has been biased toward deregulation since the agency was estab lished. The OMB guidance governing regulatory criteria and procedures for OIRA and other agencies, known as A-4 , was implemented in 2003 under President George W. Bush, and has never been revised or repealed. Like the predecessor documents beginning under Rea gan, the conception of cost-benefit analysis is tilted to emphasize cost.

A section of A-4 titled “The Presumption Against Economic Regulation” begins, “Government actions can be unintentionally harmful, and even useful regu lations can impede market efficiency.” The circular also endorses the widely discredited QALY (quality-adjusted life year) metric, which systematically devalues the lives of poor people relative to rich people, older people relative to younger ones, and people with disabilities entirely. The use of QALYs has been criticized on both ethical and technical grounds. In addition, traditional cost-benefit analysis systematically understates the

Typically, the rhetoric about regulation has focused on the compliance burden on corporations, not on citizens.

value of new technologies that are stimulated by pro hibitions of hazardous substances.

“There are so many things that are not easily shoe horned into a conventional cost-benefit analysis,” Rah man said at a White House summit on evidence-based policymaking last April. “We really want to make sure we’re thinking about human dignity, equity, the inter generational effects of climate change, among other considerations.”

Before A-4 was issued, it was reviewed by an outside panel of reviewers. The lead reviewer was Cass Sunstein. Another prominent reviewer was an extreme foe of regulation, W. Kip Viscusi of Harvard Law School, who has argued against tobacco litigation on the ghoulish premise that deaths from smoking are offset by the sav ings to the health system when people die prematurely.

If OIRA manages to fix cost-benefit analysis, then it will have completely transformed the regulatory landscape in the U.S. As it happens, the person just appointed as OIRA administrator has made this objective the focus of his scholarly work.

For the first two years of the Biden administration, the effort to transform OIRA was largely directed by Block and Rahman, neither subject to Senate confir mation. But as this piece was going to press in early September, the White House officially nominated and sent to the Senate a permanent OIRA administrator, Richard Revesz, a professor of administrative law and former dean at the NYU law school. Revesz is a longtime scholar of OIRA and critic of its use of ideologically tilted cost-benefit analysis. He is also an advocate of the argu ment that some areas involving rights, issues of social justice, and planetary survival cannot be reduced to cost-benefit calculations at all. When Block and Rah man were setting out to reposition OIRA , Revesz served as an informal adviser.

Revesz recently published an exhaustive law review article on the failure of traditional cost-benefit analysis to address distributive justice. The piece, co-authored with Revesz’s student Samantha Yi, is titled “Distri butional Consequences and Regulatory Analysis.” It begins by praising Biden for issuing his order directing OIRA to require agencies to systematically assess distri butional consequences of regulations, and adds, “This Article focuses on what it would take for the Biden effort to succeed where the Clinton and Obama efforts failed.”

The piece concludes, “The review of the academic literature coupled with our review of the major EPA regulations promulgated during the Obama adminis tration establishes that despite repeated presidential directives to do so, agencies have not seriously consid ered distributional impacts …” Rather, agencies simply assert that “because pollution disproportionately affects disadvantaged communities and the regulation in ques tion is designed to reduce pollution, it follows that the distributional consequences of the regulation are good.”

Revesz and his co-author go on to point out that costs and benefits may hit different classes and races differently. Suppose costs were imposed mainly on the poor (which is the history of the failure to regulate pol lutants) while benefits went to the rich. And suppose a regulation reversed that pattern. Distributional analy sis would show that it is well worth enacting, in contrast to traditional cost-benefit analysis, which looks at aver ages or, worse, values the life of a poor person as worth less than the life of a rich one. Revesz, assuming he is confirmed, will soon get the chance to put these revo lutionary concepts into practice. The week Revesz was appointed, Rahman was elevated from senior counselor to associate administrator, the number two job at OIRA

There is an instructive backstory here. Last spring, the White House vetted Vanderbilt University law pro fessor Ganesh Sitaraman for the OIRA administrator post. Sitaraman is also a close adviser to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her former senior staffer. (Sitara man, who also serves on the Prospect board, told me that he could not discuss what had occurred, even off the record.) Other sources have confirmed that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) had advised the White House that she could not support Sitaraman. The White House then spent several months looking for an OIRA admin istrator whom Sinema could live with. That turned out

Revesz is a longtime scholar of OIRA and a critic of its use of ideologically tilted cost-benefit analysis.

to be Revesz, who had the support of OIRA careerists as well as the new, pro-regulation regime.

This broad-church backing of Revesz makes some on the left ambivalent about his appointment. Narang calls the idea of reversing the thrust of cost-benefit analysis “a fool’s game,” arguing that subjecting health, safety, or environmental regulation to economic tests at all is a slippery slope. He adds that under Trump, OIRA sim ply ignored cost-benefit analysis and just deregulated willy-nilly. For the most part, however, supporters of converting OIRA into an ally of regulation view Revesz as part of their movement, bringing deep technical expertise as well as being a source of reassurance to OIRA’s career staff.

Systematically taking back the regulatory state while also connecting it to enhanced democracy requires a combination of vision, a passion for excruciating detail, and a commitment to the long term. One also needs to pay careful attention to what our colleague Paul Starr terms entrenchment . Given that Republicans govern as well as Democrats, how should progressives best struc ture criteria for good regulations, so that they are not undone as soon as the pro-business party takes power? And how to maximize opportunities during periods when progressives govern?

The obstacles are immense. Even under Democratic presidents, corporate Democrats abound, both inside agencies (Sunstein) and in Congress (Sinema). Sitara man was superbly qualified, but his close connection to Warren made him radioactive to corporate allies of centrist Democrats. The power and money of corpo rate lobbies and their lawyers tends to overwhelm both public-interest groups and understaffed public agencies, and intimidate elected officials. It is so much easier to go with the flow and give business what it wants.

During their eight years of power, Obama’s OIRA appointees did not bother to revise the Bush-era A-4 document, because they accepted its deeply conser vative premises. Biden’s people, thankfully, are not making the same mistake. Congress can also help by limiting the ability of courts to overturn regulations on fanciful grounds.

That said, however, it’s inevitable that there will be periods of backsliding. This suggests the power of Rah man’s insight that regulation, rather than being an insider’s game, needs to be anchored in participatory

democracy. The more that the citizenry values health, safety, environmental, consumer, and labor regulation, and the more visible its benefits are, the higher will be the political price if Republican administrations try to reverse it.

Even so, keeping the administrative state in the role of effective ally of the common people is a labor of Sisyphus. With great struggle, the rock can stay put for a long time. We had 30 years of strong, effective unions, which helped a generation of working people become middle-class. We made progress on race in the 1960s, which the rightwing courts are now trying to undo. We are belatedly making gains on climate. We won reproductive rights in the courts; now we will need to win them politically. Nothing lasts forever, but the joy is in the struggle. As Camus wrote in the famous last line of his essay, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” n

Richard Revesz

DRY

LAWSUITS RUN

HOT WATERS RUN

BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

Easterners watch the Western megadrought, the worst on the North American continent since the Middle Ages, with some thing approaching grim relief. Receding lakes and reservoirs, galloping wildfires, and extreme daytime heat that nightfall fails to cool down are slowly forcing tens of millions of Westerners to come to terms with how their 21st-century lifestyles are wildly out of sync with extreme water scar city in desert habitats.

In the wet, humid lands of the Southeast beyond the Continental Divide, the perils of drought are out of mind for now. As extreme heat surged into the West, Northwest Geor gia saw torrential rainfall and flash floods. Summer rains, sudden apocalyptic down pours, and a slow start to the hurricane sea

son make it easy to take water for granted. But the Southeast can dry up too. The megadrought should be a heads-up for a water-rich region that is occasionally prone to short, intense dry spells that can wreak havoc. Nearly two decades ago, a historic drought followed by a second severe dry period compromised the ApalachicolaChattahoochee-Flint (ACF) River Basin that supplies water to dozens of Georgia coun ties, plus areas of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. The depleted water sources forced state officials to balance the demands of their municipal, agriculture, energy, navi gation, and fisheries users.

When dealing with water that flows through several states, one state’s internal logic can have little to do with its neigh bors. Drought has been a major, if underap preciated, factor in the decades of lawsuits that became known in the Southeast as the “tristate water wars.”

Americans have feuded over water since the days when English common law was the law of the land. But as the planet heats up, legal wrangling threatens to clog up court dockets. Water allocation in the ACF Basin has produced an encyclopedic amount of litigation ever since Alabama first sued the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages

Alabama, Florida, and Georgia would rather litigate than cooperate on planning for the seasons of drought to come.

HOT Lake Lanier, northeast of Atlanta, Georgia

Osyter farmers pull their catch out of Apalachicola Bay along the Florida Panhandle. Florida closed the bay to fishing in 2020.

water flows in the basin’s reservoirs, more than three decades ago.

The most notable recent case moved for ward in 2013. Arguing that excessive water use by metro Atlanta and South Georgia agriculture had reduced water flows to the Apalachicola River and caused the massive die-off of its very lucrative oysters, then–Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) went straight to the Supreme Court, in what turned out to be a nearly decade-long losing battle. Florida v. Georgia , one of the few recent interstate water disputes to reach the Supreme Court, looked at the impacts of Georgia’s upstream water allocations on downstream river and bay waters flows into Florida.

Last year, Florida suffered a resounding 9-0 defeat on the narrow ecological ques tions after failing to prove that excessive water consumption by Georgia had killed off the Apalachicola Bay oysters. The ruling outlined a confluence of factors that did the deed, even backed up by some of Florida’s own data—multiple seasons of drought, saltier water, more predators, shifting rainfall patterns, Army Corps of Engineers operations, and oyster overharvesting. Out of options, Florida closed the bay in 2020.

Using concrete, limestone, and recycled oyster shells to create “oyster reefs,” Florida is working to re-establish the oyster popula tions in Apalachicola Bay through several projects, including a $20 million effort. Yet

after two years, there are only the faint est signs of progress. Chad Hanson, a Pew Charitable Trusts science and policy ana lyst, monitors the work and connects with the people who used to harvest the shell fish. “Some of the fishermen will say the bay essentially closed itself,” he explains. The bay is scheduled to reopen to harvest ing in 2025.

But with all the media hype on the metro Atlanta vs. oysters battle, one could be for given for losing the thread in Florida v. Georgia . The case demonstrated that the inability of the states to collaborate on solu tions to regional water allocations could drag them all down. Florida discovered the hard way that litigating issues as complex as water flows, reservoir releases, irrigation metering, and species preservation is a long, inconclusive slog. Georgia avoided having the high court decide how river waters should be shared.

Back East, the general public is more attuned to the consequences of excessive rainfall—flooding—than to drought’s effects on crops and drinking water sources. Only when farmers hold up shriveled-up husks of corn for the TV cameras and water restric tions begin does the realization sink in that these hazards are not unique to the West.

States have options for interstate coordi nation on water scarcity and drought. They can negotiate formal compacts that require

signatories to outline how water resources will be allocated, and the steps that will be taken when disputes arise. Or they can set up more complex frameworks, which offer a comprehensive suite of tools to handle every thing from data collection to planning and management to dispute resolution. Or they can gamble and set up informal ties during emergencies, as some Northeastern states did during the first year of the COVID pandemic.

The East has yet to meet a drought that it cannot manage, but regional climates are too unpredictable to rely on the way things used to be. “You have to have that plan before it happens, right? And that’s where we’ve been stuck for decades and why we’ve seen lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit, because we’ve not come up with an equitable plan for the sharing of the water,” says Georgia Ackerman, executive director of Apalachic ola Riverkeeper, a regional environmental advocacy group. “The Apalachicola River is at the end of that system, and so we take the hardest hit during times of drought.”

The Apalachicola River is the downstream waterway in a basin system that spreads over some 20,000 square miles, and pro vides water for nearly seven million people. In North Georgia, the Flint and the Chat tahoochee Rivers flow from metro Atlanta and run parallel south through Columbus, the state’s second-largest city, and on to

smaller towns and farms until they merge into Lake Seminole. The Apalachicola River emerges on the other side of the lake, along the Georgia-Florida border, and drains into the Gulf of Mexico.

Built and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers, Lake Lanier sits at the top of the ACF Basin on the Chattahoochee River, 50 miles north of Atlanta. It is the primary water source for the city and the still-grow

ing suburban communities that encircle the ninth-largest metro area in the country. About two-thirds of the area’s water comes from Lake Lanier; the rest comes from either Allatoona Lake, another Army Corps reservoir, or smaller reservoirs built by local communities. For the past decade, the city has made significant strides in reducing water use: When all residential, commer cial, and industrial uses are considered, per

Home of the Tristate Water Wars

ALABAMA

GEORGIA

capita water usage is about 100 gallons per day in metro Atlanta.

The media story line that pitted metro Atlanta residents against the oyster fisher men of Apalachicola is “a caricature,” says Robin Craig of the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law. The agricul ture sector is the biggest user of water in the basin. Producing roughly $2 billion in crops annually, Southwest Georgia farmers rely heavily on the Flint River. The Chattahoochee also provides water for power generators and other municipal and industrial users.

Franklin County, in the Florida Panhan dle, is the site of one of the fiercest, longest interstate water fights. Ackerman regularly hears lines like “we can share the water and work this out” from her metro Atlanta mem bers, and from visitors who travel to take in the pristine bays, riverways, and beaches of one of the world’s richest ecosystems. But governors are not as magnanimous as tourists on sharing fresh water, particu larly when most of the basin’s downstream stakeholders are at the mercy of upstream activities and environmental impacts.

ACF BASIN Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, Flint Rivers

FlintRiver

“See you in court” could be the motto for the three ACF states as they jockey for the upper hand on the basin’s water policymak ing. The Army Corps is the major target. The Corps oversees five federal reservoirs in the ACF Basin and controls the basin’s water flows in the system. There are cur rently five active lawsuits against the Corps. Overall, Florida and Alabama believe that the Army Corps unfairly prioritizes North Georgia’s supply needs and fails to provide them with enough water for their down stream demands.

In 1990, Alabama filed multiple lawsuits against water allocations for Atlanta that the state asserted were having adverse impacts on downstream communities and environ ments. A 2000 Georgia lawsuit to obtain more water failed, and interstate arrange ments also sputtered, stalled, and petered out. More lawsuits and orders churned through the courts until the Supreme Court decided in 2012 that Atlanta could secure more water, setting the stage for Florida’s Supreme Court gambit.

Gulf of Mexico

Ap a lachicola River

FLORIDA But the 2006-2008 drought compromised the basin’s water resources. There were only five hurricanes in 2006 (compared to the previous year’s 15); it was the third-driest year on record for both Florida and Geor gia. The agricultural sector buckled under the extreme aridity, with more than a bil

ATLANTA COLUMBUS

MONTGOMERY

BIRMINGHAM

TALLAHASSEE

C h a t tahoocheeRiver

Lake Lanier

Lake Seminole

lion dollars in losses. A nuclear power plant shut down and water restrictions took over, particularly in northern Georgia.

The two-year drought, the worst in the region’s history, coincided with metro Atlanta’s population boom. In 2010, Geor gia embarked on a residential and munici pal water conservation and management program that sharply curtailed usage. The state legislature passed a Water Steward ship Act that mandated water conserva tion measures; revised plumbing codes for toilets, urinals, showerheads, and other fixtures; and required water suppliers and water utilities to perform water loss audits. Metro Atlanta’s water usage has dropped substantially while agricultural permitting and metering programs helmed the conser vation programs in southern Georgia.

Georgia considers its 2021 high court win as vindication for its water conservation strategies, while Florida has one of the coun try’s most well-regarded water management systems to oversee water supply and quality. But Alabama dropped the baton. During the drought, the legislature went all in on water management studies, a precursor to a water management framework championed by former Gov. Robert Bentley.

But Bentley resigned after a sex scandal in 2017, and his successor Kay Ivey abandoned the plan and began conducting “periodic summaries of water use and availability” in 2019. “We have momentum around water

planning and water management when we have droughts,” says Cindy Lowry, execu tive director of Alabama Rivers Alliance, an environmental advocacy group. “[But] the influencers over [the governor] are those large entities that use a lot of water and that don’t want more regulation.”

Alabama excels on the science—for example, investigating how much water the state has in the watersheds within its own borders. But it lags on water manage ment planning. Instead of permits, the state relies on “certificates of use” that simply recognize that a user is using water. Such a deregulated system is no small matter in the courts, where interstate water allotment decision-making unfolds in data-driven environments, and puts Alabama at a dis tinct disadvantage.

Outside the West, the Southeast risks the greatest overall climate impacts and periods of drought. The spring of 2022 saw abnor mally dry conditions in South Georgia; some areas did not see rain for six weeks. Georgia has experienced five consecutive years of warming from 2016 to 2020 (2016, 2017, and 2019 were the hottest years on record), following the droughts of the 2000s and the early teens. Florida’s two-degree increase in temperature since the beginning of the 20th century, compared to Georgia’s 0.8 over the same period, puts the Sunshine State on a path to more severe droughts.

Unlike Georgia and Florida, Alabama is one of the few places in the world to experience no new net warming in the last century; but sea level rise has increased faster in the state than in the rest of the world.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns of “increase[d] com petition for limited water resources, such as the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint River basin, which currently supports large population centers in multiple states.” Com petition between states without a venue to sort out disputes before they escalate effec tively translates into “see you in court.”

“We live in a world of roulette. Where is the water going to fall and where is it not going to fall? Who is going to get hit next?” says Jim Olson, the founder and senior legal adviser of FLOW, a national water advocacy group.

“We have the science, but we don’t have the legal frameworks. The law needs to catch up to science and the reality of climate change.”

Water law in the United States rests on two very different legal schools of thought conceived long ago. The English commonlaw system of riparian rights that informs Eastern water law assumes that there is more than enough water for everyone and for all reasonable uses; it gives rights of water use to all landowners whose proper ties connect to a particular body of water. Predicated on water scarcity, Western water jurisprudence rests on the doctrine of prior appropriations. The doctrine established a

In 1961, President Kennedy signed the Delaware River Basin Compact, establishing the first regional commission to manage water resources.

“first in time, first in right” access to water. Senior rights supersede more junior ones; vested (homesteading) rights can cancel out both, while federal reserve rights (tribal, national parks and forests) are determined by date. Certain purposes, such as agricul ture, can obtain ranking access when water is scarce.

The doctrine underpins the Law of the River, a body of federal statutes, compacts, and other agreements that pertain to the Colorado. A 1922 interstate compact divides the seven Interior West states into upper and lower basins in order to manage and allocate water flows from the Colorado River. The Colorado River “is very unusual,” says Erin Ryan, director of the Center for Environmental, Energy and Land Use Law at Florida State University’s College of Law. “We talk about the Law of the River because it’s the only one that really has a lot of law attached to it.”

For practically everywhere else, there is little settled law, so the Supreme Court would prefer to take as few of the highly technical interstate cases—which require special masters to analyze the finer points of water flows, sediment deposits, species harms, and the like—as possible. “For all these other states that are fighting about water, Texas and New Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska, Florida and Georgia, their only means of really answering these questions is to work it out by themselves,” says Ryan. Interstate disputes proceed on a spe cial pathway. Under the doctrine of origi nal jurisdiction, states can bypass lower courts and go straight to the high court for a ruling. The rationale underpinning these original jurisdiction cases is that these dis putes could lead to more serious conflicts. In the early 20th century, Missouri sought to stop Illinois from dumping sewage into waterways that ultimately emptied into the Mississippi River, near St. Louis. As Jus

tice Oliver Wendell Holmes explained in the 1906 case Missouri v. Illinoi s, “the only question presented was whether, as between the states of the Union, this court was com petent to deal with a situation which, if it arose between independent sovereignties, might lead to war.”

In 2021, the Roberts Court also decided Mississippi v. Tennessee. Mississippi want ed the Court to declare that Mississippi “owned” the Middle Claiborne Aquifer, and that Tennessee was, in effect, stealing its water. The Court ruled that Mississippi had no such exclusive right, and that one state could not claim exclusive access to ground water that (like surface water) spanned sev eral states. Mississippi must consult another water use doctrine, equitable apportion ment, to guide its determination of what a fair division of the water could be. In other words, Mississippi has to share.

The Delaware River Basin Commission got lucky. On September 8, the DRBC planned to set in motion a mid-October drought watch operation that would include a water supply emergency declaration. New Jersey, New York City and its surround ing areas, some three dozen Pennsylvania counties, and the city of Philadelphia had already asked residents to conserve water. But the commission paused the plan after a stretch of rain and a forecast of addi tional precipitation.

President John F. Kennedy and the gov ernors of Delaware, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania signed an agreement in 1961 creating the DRBC, the country’s first regional compact to manage freshwater resources. A 1954 Supreme Court decision compelled the state of New York and the city of New York to guarantee water allocations to meet downstream needs of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. When the most severe drought in its recorded history hit the Delaware Valley the following year, the DRBC took steps to reduce water alloca tions, and had the tools to declare a water supply emergency that allowed the commis sion to take over management of the major reservoirs in the basin, operating them in a coordinated fashion to conserve water.

The most striking feature of the commis sion? The DRBC signatories could not take disputes to the Supreme Court for 100 years. There are now 39 to go.

The ACF Stakeholders, a tristate group of agriculture, municipal, industry, environ

mental, and other interests, stepped into the leadership vacuum in the ACF Basin after the drought of the 2010s. In 2015, they published a sustainable water man agement plan for the ACF Basin that held up the DRBC as a model. Their proposal calls for a “transboundary water management institution,” an entity that would assem ble good data, consult reputable planners and other experts, prioritize water drought management, and set up strong mediation components.

The DRBC can command the room, since the commission members are the four governors of the participating states (who appoint alternates) and the Army Corps’s North Atlantic Division commander. The three Southern states’ effort to chart their way out of what seems to be a near-perma nent state of litigation stands to benefit the Army Corps, which needs to be at the table, for starters. As long as it is consistent with the Corps’s own mission and congressional directives, there “is a willingness from the Corps to participate in any compact that the states come to an agreement on,” explains James Hathorn Jr., the Corps’s chief of water management.

In recent years, Georgia and Alabama’s governors have been engaged in informal conversations about creating a framework to support more permanent allocations of water in the ACF Basin. But despite Repub lican trifecta control in all three states, there appears to be no movement beyond these kinds of preliminaries. A spokesman for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp declined to comment, citing active litigation. An attor ney for the state of Alabama declined to comment. Both states are involved in pend ing lawsuits against the Army Corps. (The Florida Department of Environmental Pro tection did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

With water scarcity and drought at the top of the climate threat matrix, Georgia came out of the Supreme Court with a Pyr rhic victory. It has the upper hand in the uneasy status quo that remains in place on water flows and storage in the ACF Basin. But the win did not move the states any clos er to the substantive agreement on water sharing that will ultimately be necessary. As control over the Apalachicola-Chatta hoochee-Flint River Basin water is sure to intensify, a commission appears to be the least worst alternative to another decade of futile litigation. n

Outside the West, the Southeast risks the greatest overall climate impacts and periods of drought.

Abortion Doctors Under the Microscope

BY RAMENDA CYRUS

WWhen Jody Steinauer was growing up in the ’80s in Nebraska, Roe v. Wade had been decided less than a decade earlier. The important women in Steinauer’s family, especially her mother, made sure to express to her that reproductive care was essential to the life of a woman and that abortion was a universal right.

The task of defending reproductive rights from the Dobbs ruling is being led by progressive doctors, but everyone has a stake in the outcome.

As Steinauer’s career progressed and she became a senior ob/gyn at the University of California, San Francisco, the need for abortion access only became more salient. “Abortion provision and training was just core to what I love and care about as an ob/ gyn,” Steinauer told me. As a student, she was one of the founders of Medical Students for Choice, a student-led organization that continues to work to destigmatize abor tion training, as well as convince affiliated schools to include “abortion as a part of a comprehensive reproductive health services curriculum.”

“One of our core tenets at the very begin ning was that every physician needs to grad uate with knowledge about abortion and be able to competently provide compassionate, nondirected pregnancy options, counsel ing, and referral, no matter what,” Stein auer said. She also emphasized the need for physicians to “work out their own feelings about abortion.”

But anti-abortion groups and Roe detrac tors were hard at work stacking courts and shoehorning unconstitutional laws so that in 2022, the nearly 50-year effort to overturn Roe and return abortion from a constitu tionally protected right to a felony charge reached its peak. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision has allowed abortion to become effectively ille gal in half the country. An entire medical field has been thrown into disarray, leaving many practitioners unemployed, morally compromised, and unduly burdened. People with uteruses have to contend with a future without a right that for nearly half a century has been protected in America.

Doctors have historically been cohesive in their ethics and standards, but the Dobbs decision challenges that on the national level. The fight against restrictive abortion bans has to ask whether more providers will join Steinauer in the recognition that these bans will not only have long-lasting effects on women’s care, but will impair all health care, as well as compromise the duty of doctors to their patients and their ethics.

In 1993, Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider, was murdered outside of the clinic where he worked in Pensacola, Florida. That same year, thousands of medical stu dents, including Steinauer, began receiv ing “vulgar and menacing” anti-abortion pamphlets through the mail. Long before the Dobbs decision, reproductive rights had

been under assault, in ways that were both crude and insidious. A 1991 study detailing how only 12 percent of ob/gyns received training in routine abortion care illustrated the gap in education.

The Kenneth J. Ryan Program, which Steinauer now leads from her post at the UCSF Bixby Center for Global Reproduc tive Health, was created in response to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medi cal Education (ACGME) mandate requir ing abortion training as part of obstetrics and gynecology residencies. The program is partially responsible for the more than 60 percent of providers who now receiving specialized abortion training, when it was able to operate in a world where Roe was considered settled.

But after the Dobbs decision, at least a dozen Ryan Program iterations that func tion in states that are restricting or ban ning abortion face an uncertain future. This means that in states like Louisiana, where abortion is banned in nearly all cases, ob/ gyns are forced to either travel out of state or never comprehensively complete their residencies.

In addition, the decision has opened up the risk of a further loss of practitioners in restrictive states. One month after the Dobbs decision, there were 43 fewer clinics offering abortions across 11 states that had severely restricted or banned the practice, according to a Guttmacher Institute analy sis. The remaining clinics all operate within states that have six-week bans instead of total bans.

Nicola Moore, family doctor, has been an abortion provider for over a decade, and was working with Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas when the Supreme Court issued Dobbs. Moore had been acquaint ed with severe restrictions in Texas before the decision, due to the Texas Heartbeat Bill (HB 1500) that was passed in late 2021. Under this law, Moore would perform ultra sounds and determine whether there was a heartbeat, making her the last person many would see before they were denied an abortion.

Moore would do her best to inform patients that, while the law prevented her from performing an abortion if she detected a heartbeat, other states, like New Mexi co, could be a refuge—but it was hardly a comfort.

“The work was very different after the

heartbeat bill because there was a lot more dealing with very emotional things with patients,” Moore told me. She described the demeanor of her patients after the bill as “stressed and frantic.”

Moore also had her own future to worry about. The Dobbs decision would have left her unemployed if not for the fact that she traveled for work regularly, having worked in six other states over her career. Still, the ruling threw her life into disarray. Not only did Moore have to deal with worrying about her next source of income; there was also the emotion of leaving a crew at Planned Par enthood Texas that she had come to dearly cherish.

After Dobbs took away her Texas job, Moore secured her Florida license. She plans to work in Tallahassee, an area she chose out of a desire to be “useful,” and because Talla hassee is closest to the abortion desert in the South. Abortions are banned after 15 weeks in Florida, the least restrictive among the Deep South. In Tallahassee, Moore will be at the intersection of Florida and Georgia, where they have already seen large increases in patients, especially travelers. One NPR affiliate quoted a doctor estimating a 30 to 40 percent increase at a clinic in Tallahassee a month after the Dobbs ruling. As Politico reported, nearly 5,000 women traveled to Florida to get an abortion in 2021.

Moore’s history of traveling put her in a slightly less precarious situation, she told me. Other providers who, perhaps, have families or roots in a restrictive state may not find it so easy to leave.

Now that Roe has been overturned, the option to travel is more stressful than it may seem. Less restrictive states have seen an increase in patients, as well as wait times, placing a strain on systems and practitio

Doctors have historically been cohesive in their ethics and standards, but the Dobbs decision challenges that on the national level.

ners who have kept their jobs. A month after the decision, the Chicago Sun-Times report ed that one clinic in Skokie, Illinois, had seen a 130 percent increase over 2021 of inperson visits. The New York Times reported in July that five out of eight New Mexico abortion clinics had wait times longer than

three weeks for an abortion, mostly due to interstate travel.

“The capacity at clinics across the coun try is stretched,” said Elizabeth Nash, the principal policy associate for state issues with the Guttmacher Institute. In addition, “the train is on the track” for more closures

and deeper contraction of providers, she told me.

In some states, the laws are changing so rapidly that providers are unsure of what might happen week to week. Michigan, for example, has been in a legal back-and-forth over an 1846 law last updated in 1931 that makes providing an abortion a felony. The law was struck down in September by the Michigan Court of Claims; in Judge Eliza beth Gleicher’s decision, she asserted that the law “denies women of their ability to control their bodies and their lives.” There will be a referendum on the November bal lot to make abortion rights constitutionally protected.

And in states where the law criminalizes performing an abortion, Nash said, “there are very limited exceptions to these abor tion bans and there are steep penalties for violating the law. Providers are going to be very risk-averse.”

Providers worry about their liability when it comes to performing even a proce dure they understand to be legal. In states like Oklahoma, doctors can be sued for up to $10,000 for performing an abortion. In most cases, it carries a felony charge. “In Missouri, every abortion must be reported to the state, and prosecutors can request a court order to examine records and con firm a medical emergency was present,” Stat News reported. A prosecutor who wants to make a case against a provider—or simply wreak havoc—has an avenue to do so.

Gretchen Borchelt, litigator with the National Women’s Law Center, constantly fields legal questions from doctors after the Dobbs decision. Doctors wonder if instances that need emergency abortion or miscarriage management are unlawful; Borchelt has even had social workers wor ried about their liability were they to suggest an abortion.

“There’s not a situation like this where it’s just outlawed, and providers are having to worry about criminal liability for providing care that 1 in 4 women will need in their lifetime,” Borchelt said.

Practitioners also have to worry about who would protect them were they to find themselves needing defense against a restrictive abortion law. This is new territo ry for lawyers, as well, Borchelt told me. And while insurance covers medical malprac tice, a felony charge is rarely insured, and carries with it a loss of licensure in many places. Kate Dielentheis described to me a

Jody Steinauer was a founder of Medical Students for Choice, and today works as a senior ob/gyn at the University of California, San Francisco.

The up-front cost to a patient for an abortion in a state where it remains legal can be burdensome.

situation where the thought of being sued by a patient for medical malpractice is the lesser of two evils, between that and being sued by the state for a felony charge. The result of this grotesque cost-benefit analysis can be a patient not getting timely, neces sary care.

Dielentheis works in Wisconsin provid ing obstetrics and gynecology care. An 1849 law banning abortion took effect after the Dobbs decision. As a generalist and ob/gyn, Dielentheis is prohibited from doing “a big chunk” of her job. She expressed frustration about how this old law can disrupt such an important part of her and other women’s lives.

“This is a law that came before ultra sounds, before the modern-day pregnancy test. This was a law that came so far before the vast majority of our medical knowledge,” she said. “It’s really hard to take that law and extrapolate it to how we practice medicine because a lot of this wouldn’t have been rec ognized in 1849.”

Dielentheis also trains residents, but she is no longer able to provide abortion train ing in the state of Wisconsin. She and other doctors are working on a way to create con nections with other programs so that they can provide the full scope of training to the many residents who feel this training is essential.

“From a health care perspective, it’s incredibly important that they have that training in order to be able to take care of patients in the future,” Dielentheis said.

Doctors swear the Hippocratic oath, declaring that they will do no harm and work only to aid people medically. Abor tion bans are in direct conflict with this oath, leaving doctors in a position where they must sacrifice legal security or battle internally with the moral question of help ing someone over their own livelihood.

The resulting emotional deliberation forces doctors into an uncomfortable posi tion. Ultimately, many feel sad and angry to be put in this position. Sarah Prager, an

ob/gyn at the University of Washington in Seattle, has seen a lot of gratitude from her patients. But it brings her no joy.

“I don’t feel like you should be grateful to have what is routine health care that, in the last 50 years, has been accessed by a third to a quarter of all people with a uterus,” she said.

Steinauer’s family did not just decide one day that abortion was important. This fam ily, like millions, went through the stigma around unintended pregnancies and abor tions before Roe was handed down.

After Steinauer graduated from college, she learned of two other women in her fam ily having unintended pregnancies, as well. One had a pre-Roe abortion and the other was wed as a result.

“I had all three outcomes of an unintend ed pregnancy, right in my family unit,” she said. “That definitely made it clear.”

It is “extra sad” for Steinauer to think about how prior family generations might feel about the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. The

emotion that comes with having a right stripped away, after being unilaterally pro tected, is a tough one. Steinauer knows this professionally and personally.

When it becomes clear that their hands are legally tied, doctors are seeing patients upset, angry, and frightened. Many patients have to spring into action arranging trans portation, funds, and support as they pre pare to travel out of state.

If a patient is able to secure an appoint ment and timely transportation, the up-front cost of an abortion is addition ally burdensome. Abortions can cost up to $2,000 out of pocket. According to a study published in the journal Women’s Health Issues , among patients who traveled 50 miles or more, nearly 60 percent reported difficulties related to missing work; more than 35 percent reported delays due to financial costs. This is further complicated by many states barring the use of Medicaid for nonresident patients. Then there are the costs associated with travel. Patients may have to worry about gas money, plane tick ets (or car rentals), child care, and lodging.

In addition to the logistical frustration and general emotion doctors are seeing, Dielentheis noted the incredulousness she faces from patients. When she tells them that—even in the event of a nonviable pregnancy—she cannot help them, “people are surprised, and they’re frustrated, and they’re angry,” she said.

Hospitals have been facing staffing and funding shortages for years. With the Dobbs decision, Bloomberg reported that “[s]pecialists in obstetrics and gynecolo gy—frequent targets of medical malpractice lawsuits—especially are wary of taking jobs in states where the laws could limit their practice.” There has also been a particularly devastating contraction of rural hospitals.

Now, providers are considering whether they can stay in their state and provide care that fits their conscience, or even adequate care. And the residents that end up receiv ing training in another state may elect to not come back. As Roll Call reported, “The choice of where to train could have a long-term effect,” as over 55 percent of doc tors practiced within the same state they received the training.

“Many of [the residents] are electing not to stay in Wisconsin,” Dielentheis said. “It’s going to be harder to get people to work in certain areas, where care is really needed.”

And an important pipeline has now been removed. Catholic hospitals have never per formed elective abortions. Before the Dobbs decision, however, some Catholic medical professionals were able to essentially out source patients who needed an abortion to a clinic or hospital that would or could perform the surgery. Without Roe v. Wade to protect those institutions and the care they provide, access is further restricted and the Catholic absolute ban becomes law in dozens of states.

“We now have no backup plan for those patients in the states with abortion bans,” said Lori Freedman, a researcher on Catho lic hospitals with the Bixby Center. “Catho lic health care has been dependent on the providers to pick up where they are and to prevent harm.”

For Prager, maternal mortality rates ris ing as a result of the Dobbs ruling is about “when,” not “if.” The United States already has a disproportionately high maternal mortality rate among developed countries.

In states where abortion is permitted in the event of a medical emergency or “to save the life of a mother,” the vague distinction has left hospitals and patients reeling. Doc tors are being forced to wait until a person is on the verge of death, hesitating out of fear that acting too early could be interpreted as an illegal abortion. Providers need to run a decision to help a patient up the hierarchical ladder of the institution, and administrators then consult with legal and ethics boards before passing down a decision on whether a doctor can save a life.

Providers also report that more people are coming in inquiring about permanent sterilization. Prager is used to performing maybe ten sterilization procedures a year in just her clinic; she says the number has jumped to eight to ten approvals for the procedure per month.

“These are people who are in their twen ties, who have never had children and don’t ever want to chance it,” Prager said. “They now don’t feel secure in the fact that they will have options.”

“People are not realizing how this has really impacted desired pregnancies as well,” Dielentheis said.

The lack of control that people have over this personal decision is alarming. It is a gross manipulation of the medical system, placing countless barriers in the way of someone obtaining care they need. State legislatures were not prepared for the way this decision would impact the entire health care system. Drugs with dual purposes—abortifacient and nonabortifacient—such as methotrexate, are being restricted. Contraception and other forms of reproductive care are being threatened; all the while, patients with uteruses suffer.

While the future looks bleak and hostile, reproductive rights groups are hardly back ing down. Abortion could still be codified into law, through either federal or state leg islation or referenda or, as Borchelt sees it, even a constitutional amendment.

And there have been surprising success es, such as Kansas’s landslide vote against a restrictive anti-abortion law. Meanwhile, doctors and patients alike are rising up to protest for their autonomy. There have been numerous national protests in the after math, from Washington, D.C., to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

The popular backlash against the Dobbs decision, and the impractical, cruel ways that several states are carrying it out, has energized progressives and surprised the anti-abortion lobby. What remains to be seen is whether more doctors will join this struggle, in the spirit of medical leaders like Jody Steinauer.

The medical profession is notoriously risk-averse and heavily commercialized. With the exception of the activist doctors who battle for abortion rights and singlepayer health insurance, physicians tend to shun controversy. But now controversy that doctors didn’t seek has come to them—and their professional autonomy and duty to their patients are at risk. Whether repro ductive rights and women’s health as a right will be defended could very well depend on whether the medical profession as a whole leaves its comfort zone. n

Abortion bans force doctors to sacrifice legal security or battle internally with the moral question of helping someone over their own livelihood.

CULTURE

Don’t You Forget About Abbott Elementary

By Soraya Roberts

It’s kind of funny that Abbott Elementary quotes The Breakfast Club . The last episode in the first season of Quinta Brunson’s ABC series echoes the last scene of John Hughes’s 1985 coming-ofage film about a bunch of subur ban Illinois high schoolers—some rich, some poor; some popular, some

not—forced to sit together in Saturday detention.

“We think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are,” the titular Hughes collective writes. “You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions.” In Brunson’s version, a handful of elemen tary school kids, who have been left with the crackpot custodian because they

don’t have permission slips for a zoo out ing, produce an updated take on that letter. But because it’s 2021, their assignment is to write about their favorite superheroes. “We think it’s bananas to make us write about ‘what superhero is our favorite,’” they write, “because our real heroes are our teachers.”

The kids in Hughes’s teen movies are always insisting in various ways that when you grow up, your heart dies. Brunson turns this tradition on its head by distilling the teachers in Abbott Elementary to nothing but heart. “What if we took the approach that teachers are real people instead of heightened stereotypes?” she asked herself.

Janelle James plays the delightfully loopy principal of Abbott Elementary, Ava Coleman.

CULTURE

In the 13-episode sitcom, which swells to 22 for the second season premiering Septem ber 21, a documentary crew embeds itself amongst the staff at Philadelphia’s under funded and predominantly Black Willard R. Abbott Elementary School.

With little pay and even fewer resourc es, most of the faculty burns out fast. But enthusiastic, wide-eyed second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (Brunson) and gay wannabe-ally and history teacher Jacob “Ta-Nehisi Quotes” Hill (Chris Perfetti) sol dier on. Alongside them are the lifers who have been making the best of it for years, like stern veteran kindergarten teacher Bar bara Howard (a pitch-perfectly imperious Sheryl Lee Ralph) and street-smart secondgrade teacher Melissa Schemmenti (Lisa Ann Walter). They are joined by bubbleheaded principal Ava Coleman (a delight fully loopy Janelle James) and the guy who should have gotten her job, first-grade sub stitute Gregory Eddie (Tyler James Wil liams, expert fourth-wall breaker).

Launching in December 2021 amidst

Show creator and star Quinta Brunson, seen here with co-star Tyler James Williams, believes that the show took off precisely because it isn’t overtly political.

pandemic-fueled discourse around teach ers being undervalued in American society, Abbott Elementary was praised by educators for its realism. Its wider audience (close to three million on average per episode) made it a hit and the face of ABC’s prime-time lineup, causing it to be hailed many times over for rejuvenating the network comedy. Unfortu nately, at the same time, the conflict around vaccinations and mask mandates in schools, along with debates over critical race theory and what children are being taught, marked a renewed politicization of public education.

Hughes took a stance against authoritar ian adults on screen, but off-screen he voted Republican, the same party that these days accuses teachers who educate kids about sexual orientation and gender identity of grooming, and claims they are poison ing those same kids’ minds by addressing systemic inequality and racism. Hughes bought into the American dream, and the continued dominance of white conserva tism, even though it was as much of a fan tasy as superheroes.

The irony of Abbott Elementary ’s success is that the show took off, Brunson believes, precisely because it isn’t overtly political. In fact, she was aghast when, in the wake of the Uvalde elementary school tragedy, someone suggested an episode on school shooters, which she considers a matter for politicians, not pop culture. Her characters are too busy for such big conversations anyway, which is why she thinks they struck such a chord.

“They don’t have time to sit down and have an articulate debate,” Brunson told The New York Times. “I think that was refreshing for people—because the debate stuff entered television, but it’s rarely how people out side of New York and Los Angeles are talk ing.” Abbott Elementary ’s fictional teachers aren’t at odds with their students but with the crumbling institution in which all of them are embedded. That is highlighted by Brunson choosing to set her show in an ele mentary school, where the kids need their teachers to survive.

“I’d say the main problem in the school district is, yeah, no money,” Janine says in

the pilot. “The city says there isn’t any, but they’re doing a multimillion-dollar renova tion to the Eagles stadium down the street.”

Abbott Elementary makes it very clear that there is no such thing as fairness. Ava, the ineffectual, doomsday-prepping, social media–savvy principal, who brought in the documentary crew in a tribute to her own vanity, nabbed her job by blackmailing the superintendent, and is constantly misap propriating funds. This educational sys tem is not a Hughes-style meritocracy; the wealth is being systematically distributed improperly. And when you look at the fact that wealthier white school districts—like the one where the students from The Break fast Club matriculate—get over $1,000 more per child than others, it stops being a mere punch line. “It’s a bigger commentary on America’s treatment of lower classes,” Brunson told The Los Angeles Times of the series, adding, “our funding should definite ly be going more into the pockets of these schools than it is a billionaire’s venture.”

The tagline for Abbott Elementary “Working their class off”—is a clever play on these kinds of built-in hierarchies, sug gesting that the teachers ultimately need to pull off the impossible and transcend their social status. But the difficulty of disrupt ing the system is also embedded into the show. Janine writes a letter complaining about Ava spending $3,000 earmarked for supplies on an exterior sign for the school, only to have the email bounce back to Ava, because the administrators in power are derelict in their duties. Jacob, meanwhile, starts growing vegetables on school prop erty to improve the cafeteria food, only to be told that the cooks have no time to fit the new ingredients into their workflow. Then there’s the successful social media cam paign to secure Barbara supplies (a com mon activity for teachers at poorly funded

schools in our age of inequality), which Ava based on falsehoods, showing how even minor advances can be corrupted.

The series depicts a generational divide between the younger and the more seasoned staff. Barbara regularly guffaws at the forti tude of the junior teachers with an under standable but outdated cynicism. She works with what she’s got so she’s never let down. Instead, she is resourceful, like when she sets a parent-teacher meeting at a nail salon. Her Italian colleague Melissa calls in various bor derline-illegal favors (“I got a guy for every thing”); both she and Barbara take the easier route to keep breakdowns at bay (“More turn overs than a bakery,” Barbara quips of the school’s rotating staff). Brunson has talked in the past about the “constant day-after-day support you get” from teachers like Barbara and Melissa that can’t be quantified; they are able to provide this support by managing their expectations. As Melissa says, “We care so much we refuse to burn out.”

Brunson is too smart to be unaware that the generational divide is a meta-reflection of Abbott Elementary ’s existence itself: a network show with huge reach that is peppered with subtle social messaging. Brunson was inspired to create the series after watching and more importantly expe riencing her mother, who was a teacher for years, in action. She wanted TV audiences to have an inside look at the school system like she did. “It’s one thing to laugh at teach ers, it’s another thing to laugh with them,” she told Deadline.

Brunson only hired writers who had some experience with the education sys tem, and her own past is threaded through much of the show. In the pilot, Janine bends over backwards trying to replace a rug in her class—which she refers to as a “huge Xanax for kids to sit on”—that has been soiled by one of her students. Brunson had seen her mother pay for her own rug (it was that important) because it was so filthy by the end of the year. The creator and star even modeled elder stateswoman Barbara on her own mother (as Janine, Brunson even “mistakenly” refers to her as mom), and has Barbara’s daughter observe her at work, just like Brunson did. Even the school is named after one of Brunson’s particularly inspiring sixth-grade teachers, Mrs. Abbott.

“Even with no help from the higherups and no money from the city, I can get things done,” Janine says. “Money would still be nice though.” We are no longer in

John Hughes’s Reagan era, decrying welfare queens and praising up-by-your-bootstraps self-reliance. Abbott Elementary is firmly situated in the 2020s and is an inherently socialist show, if not quite an exercise in full activism.

In one episode, Janine, realizing she is inadvertently challenging her smart kids by enlisting them to grade the other students, suggests an enrichment program involving hatching chicken eggs. The problem is that all of the kids in her class really want to be part of it. Without the money to teach all of them the same way, the school ends up getting cut-rate eggs that turn out to be for snakes (a biblical symbol if I ever saw one). In a separate scene, Gregory explains to Janine that being told he was dumb eventu ally turned him away from school, and that there are many ways to be gifted—special treatment always ends up working against the collective student body. Who knew an ABC sitcom would be such a convenient vehi cle for Marxist instruction?

The first season of Abbott Elementary consciously remained, for the most part, in the school. “I have a very firm belief that workplace comedies should take place in the workplace,” Brunson said in Deadline. It was appropriate to initially drive home the systemic mandate of the series. But now firmly established, Abbott Elementary ’s sec ond season plans to venture outside and who knows where else. Brunson told Elle she has plans for as many as nine seasons.

Perhaps like The Breakfast Club, one of those seasons of Abbott will explore the life of Mr. Johnson, the not-all-there custodian who keeps popping up, and who was recently pro moted to a series regular. “You guys think I’m just some untouchable peasant? Serf? Peon?” Carl the janitor tells the teens in Hughes’s film. “Well, maybe so. But following a broom around after shitheads like you for the last eight years, I’ve learned a couple of things. I look through your letters. I look through your lockers. I listen to your conversations, you don’t know that, but I do. I am the eyes and ears of this institution, my friends.”

Abbott ’s custodian Mr. Johnson could produce a similar memorable monologue. Except this time around, he would be talk ing not to the kids, but to the teachers, and they would be right there beside him. n

Soraya Roberts is a contributing writer at Defector and editor at large and columnist for Pipe Wrench magazine.

Brunson only hired writers who had some experience with the education system, and her own past is threaded through much of the show.

After

By Brian Kettenring

Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World

By Rana Foroohar Crown

You don’t necessarily expect trenchant critiques of Wall Street and Big Tech from Financial Times columnists, but in the case of Rana Foroohar’s first two books, that’s exactly what you get. In Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street (2016), Foroohar laid bare how specu

lative finance distorts economic outcomes and shifts investment away from produc tive economic ends. Three years later, she followed up with a critique of the giants of the internet age: Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles—and All of Us (2019). What’s most helpful about these two books is the way they inaugurate a com prehensive critique of our modern form of capitalism and the powerful interests that buttress it. But how do we build a different economy? Now, with her third book, Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World , Foroo

har does something even more interesting: point to what’s next for the economy.

Homecoming hangs its hat on metaphors of place. Foroohar’s vision is, as the title makes clear, rooted in a rebalancing: away from the intense globalization of the past 40 years and toward the interests of local communities. “The bottom line is that glo balization as we’ve known it for the last half century is over,” she writes. “But a certain amount of deglobalization is not a retreat or a failure. In fact, it’s both necessary and welcome, for economic, social, political, and environmental reasons.”

After the shocks of COVID -19, the Ukraine war, and intensified competition with China and Russia are fully priced in, deglobaliza tion makes economic sense. The book is a tour through the United States in search of communities and companies seek ing new ways to produce economic value. From vertical greenhouses that use land more efficiently to high-technology textile firms resisting the tides of globaliza tion in the Carolinas to 3D printing firms

Foroohar depicts the green shoots of a new, deglobalized economy.

that facilitate the reshoring of manufactur ing, Foroohar depicts the green shoots (pun intended) of a new economy.

Foroohar’s work here is equal parts jour nalism and visioning, offering a host of case studies of how we might produce and consume differently while simultaneously painting a picture of a more resilient and rooted economy. In the course of demon strating these alternatives, Foroohar also brings to life ways in which the assump tions undergirding our economy—our para digm—have been proven just plain wrong.

Debunking standard theory, she shows how economist David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage—the foundation on which the entire edifice of unfettered global ization was built—has been largely disprov en. “In a world that is more regionalized,” writes Foroohar, “there are inherent tensions within the Ricardian model, and cracks that are only just now beginning to show.”

The problem Foroohar aims to solve is obvious enough. Since the 1980s, the United States has had an economy that privileged wealth over work, that exacerbated econom ic and racial disparities, that degraded the planet in the extreme, and, ironically, that failed to deliver the level of growth seen in the postwar era when unions were stronger and taxes on corporations and the wealthy were much higher. This way of doing things, this paradigm, is most accurately termed “neoliberalism,” an ideology that values markets and efficiency over community and resiliency.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the “neoliberal order,” as historian Gary Gerstle calls it, came into being. And with the rise of Trump on the right and Sanders on the left, and with the outbreak of COVID -19, that same neoliberal consensus came undone. Homecoming offers a way out of the morass with a vision of communityrooted economics that redraws the con nection between capital and community. By coming at the neoliberalism problem through the lens of globalization, Foroohar offers up “localnomics” as an alternative. Will it work?

Any reading of recent U.S. economic and political history will point to three key elements that ultimately come together to create a new form of “political economy.” The first of these is a conceptual framework that predominates in society, what has been called a paradigm, originally given life in

the history of science by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), now applied to the study of society. The second is economic forces, both microand macro-, which combine with dynam ics like technological innovation to shape what kinds of economic forces comprise our political economy. Interacting with the paradigm and with these economic forces is politics, in particular the dominant politi cal forces that tend to align with evolving economic forms; political orders.

These political realignments are often lagging indicators, triggered by tectonic economic forces that generally evolve slow ly—except when they don’t. A generation of historians and political scientists study ing the rise and fall of the New Deal (1932–1980) and neoliberal (1980–2018) orders—or political realignments in general—have demonstrated the extraordinary richness and complexity of the forces that conspire over time to pull down one set of electoral majorities and elevate another. Part of the intensity of the struggle over our democracy today is driven not only by the authoritarian turn on the far right, but also by the recogni tion that the next set of rules is soon to be written for a generation or two.

In the late 1980s, political economist Peter Hall pointed out the ways by which economic ideas hold sway with a study of Keynesianism aptly named The Political Power of Economic Ideas. First, Hall point ed out, frameworks like Keynesianism or neoliberalism are deployed in economic policy debates; see today’s debate among economists about inflation, for example. Second, economic ideas influence the think ing of those in government, often those making practical decisions such as how to manage a budget. Finally, economic ideas are deployed by the political class to build their coalitions. Here, the relative value or demerit of a particular set of ideas corre lates to its potency at mobilizing segments of the electorate. Hall’s point was that each of these use cases of economic thinking has its value; the most persuasive theories deployed them all. This is where names like the Federalist Society, the Chicago school of economics, and the Mont Pelerin Society enter the picture.

During the heyday of New Deal liberalism, these conservative thinkers and activists built an ecosystem of neoliberal ideas that was available when the economy hit a wall in the early 1970s and policymakers sought

out new approaches. By Reagan’s election in 1980, many of these intellectuals and their institutions had matured to the point that they were prepared to govern; many entered government directly. These ideas became so pervasive that ultimately a Democrat, Bill Clinton, embraced the neoliberal frame work in many respects, famously declaring an end to “big government.”

In addition to the power of ideas and shifting political tides, economic forces and developments in particular industries or regions can drive broader changes in soci ety. In Foroohar’s new book, the author points to some of these forces, though often the geopolitical forces she describes—for example, decoupling from China—feel more powerful than the purely economic forces driving toward inclusion.

“The economic decoupling of America and China and, more particularly, the trade war and new cold war between the two nations is sometimes thought of as a result of the misguided policies of the Trump administration,” she writes. “In fact, the conflicts between the two countries and their systems were there long before, hiding in plain sight.”

Foroohar adds that the premise that growth in trade was unambiguously good for the United States has been an ideologi cal commitment for decades, irrespective of party. Even trading with corrupt or hostile countries was seen as beneficial. “But the downsides to globalization,” writes Foroo har, “which range from the loss of important jobs and skill sets, to the vulnerabilities of complex and far-flung supply chains and financial networks, to the fact that China wasn’t, in fact, becoming freer as it got rich er—were papered over for decades.”

So geopolitical reckonings are reshap ing our economics, and Foroohar is right to lift up some of the progressive possibili ties of decoupling. But when you bring back in Foroohar’s earlier work on the power of finance and Big Tech, you appreciate the persistent political obstacles.

The relentlessness of exclusionary eco nomic forces is brought home by a new book by Texas A&M historian Fritz Bartel, who explains how economics eats geopolitics. Bartel’s thesis in The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism is that in the imme diate postwar years the Western and Com munist blocs competed to raise working standards for their working classes to show

CULTURE

that their economic systems were superior. “Democratic capitalism,” Bartel writes, “pre vailed because it proved capable of impos ing economic discipline on its own citizens. Communism collapsed because it could not.”

But this dynamic was reversed under a new logic of austerity driven by the vora ciousness of the energy and finance sectors. This phenomenon played out on both sides of the Iron Curtain, its relentless economic logic driving the end of communism and the rise of neoliberalism—“broken promises” to the world’s working classes.

The economic dynamics that anchored the New Deal, and then brought on neolib eralism and contributed to the unmaking of communism, occurred in other historical periods. Thomas Ferguson, writing in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930–1980 (1989), argued that emergent sectors of capital aligned with FDR’s electoral coalition. It wasn’t just workers, Black voters, and the poor who anchored the New Deal coalition, but also segments of finance: “a new ‘histori cal bloc’ … of capital-intensive industries,

investment banks, and internationally ori ented commercial banks.” Historian Louis Hyman has argued something similar about the New Deal; that it wasn’t merely public spending that mattered, but also the ways in which government directed the private sector—telling businesses, in essence, that they could make money in particular arenas to build the economy, with government help, but not in an exploitative manner.

Returning to Foroohar’s latest work, we can see that for her vision of an economics of resilience to predominate, several require ments must be met. For one, the ideas and policy prescriptions need to be fleshed out and these need to work in multiple settings; with economists, for policymakers, and with the electorate. Further, the prevail ing economic structures and incentives in society need to be harnessed to this vision. And third, the politics need to buttress this emergent paradigm. The United States is in such a dangerous place right now precisely because a competing alternative, an antidemocratic ethnonationalism—Trump

ism—is on the march. Foroohar points this out, noting that “populism is a natural result of this disconnection between the global economy and national politics.” A key, then, to defeating the forces of ethnonationalism lies in our successfully realigning interna tional political economy with the interests of local communities at home and abroad.

Foroohar may not have set out to write a trilogy, but by starting with critiques of finance and Big Tech, she has laid the predicate for a new form of political econ omy. The question for the 2020s is, how do we get from here to there? Homecom ing persuasively argues that the process is already under way, but some of the essen tial ingredients for an inclusive political economics are very much up for grabs. Can we develop and deploy the ideas quickly enough to outmaneuver both neoliberal and ethnonationalist alternatives? Further, can we mobilize the public behind state action to rein in finance and tech? And third, will macro-level economic dynamics, sometimes predictable, sometimes not—think of the energy and commodity shocks brought on by the Russian invasion of Ukraine—rein force or undermine an inclusive form of economics? This last element is extremely hard to predict or to control.

The elements, then, that are most within our control are the ideas—and the infra structure to buttress these—and the orga nized public demand for elected officials and regulators to meet a much higher stan dard when it comes to building a new eco nomics. As Foroohar’s new book spells out in vivid detail, we have our work cut out for us to bring the economy home. n

Brian Kettenring, a longtime community organizer and strategist, is director of the Economy and Society Initiative at the Wil liam and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which provides financial support to the Prospect.

If the progressive response to neoliberalism fails, anti-democratic ethnonationalism— Trumpism—looms as an alternative.

During the New Deal, it wasn’t merely public spending that mattered, but also the ways in which government directed the private sector.

A Progressive, and Persuasive, Case for a Politics of Persuasion

Anand Giridharadas’s The Persuaders profiles activists, organizers, and change-makers charting a path to power through changing minds and ‘calling in.’

By Adam M. Lowenstein

The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

By Anand Giridharadas Knopf

Last fall, in an early instance of a pattern that would come to characterize the first two years of the Biden presidency, progres sives’ second-least-favorite Democratic sen ator refused to make up her mind. In this case, Kyrsten Sinema, whose state of Arizo na is home to nearly 275,000 people living in the United States without documenta tion, was unwilling to commit to pushing for a pathway to citizenship in Congress’s Build Back Better bill.

Suddenly, and perhaps unexpectedly for someone in a position to perpetually sequester herself from people affected by her decisions, Sinema found herself sharing an Arizona State University restroom with a group of protesters organized by Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA

“We knocked on doors for you to get you elected,” one protester told her. “We can get you out of office if you don’t support what you promised us.”

The protest drew the headlines, but as Anand Giridharadas recounts in his new book, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democ racy, bathrooms were not the only battle ground in LUCHA’s fight for human rights.

The group also practiced another form of politics, one that was less likely to make the news, and one that might sound less

confrontational. The approach, known as “deep canvassing,” is about seeking out time-intensive, often uncomfortable, conversations with people who may not even hint that they’re open to hearing what you have to say—let alone support ing your cause—and trying to change their minds.

Deep canvassing isn’t confrontational in the way that following a U.S. senator into a bathroom is. But it is confronta tional in that spending untold hours with people who might seem unlikely ever to back your candidate or campaign rejects some of the foundational assumptions that have guided Democratic politics for years: namely, that people’s beliefs are fixed and unchanging, and the way to win elections is simply to get the people who already agree with you to the polls.

“On one front,” Giridharadas writes, the LUCHA organizers in Arizona “were attract ing attention to a form of protest that very visibly and confrontationally called Sinema out, while on another front they engaged in … a promising experiment in persuasion by door knocking, grounded in increasingly hard-to-muster behaviors of empathy, curi

CULTURE

osity, and nonjudgment, fueled by an almost mystifying faith that people can change.”

Can people change?

That question is the project of The Per suaders, a meandering, humanizing, and thoroughly hopeful exploration of the ten sion between calling out and calling in, between confronting and coaxing, between welcoming and writing off.

There is, Giridharadas writes, “an idea at the heart of democratic theory: that you change things by changing minds—by persuading.” While the idea has fallen out of favor with many on the left, from the beginning of the book Giridharadas’s view seems clear: Persuasion is essential, both for achieving progressive victories and for preserving American democracy.

The question, however, is whether per suasion is still possible.

Giridharadas approaches his task through reported profiles of people and groups pur suing the work of persuasion: activists and organizers like Linda Sarsour and Alicia Garza, hosts of diversity and inclusion work shops, the progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, elected officials like Alex andria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

“When fighting for justice and change,” Giridharadas writes, “how do you bring others along—those who are not there yet, and those who are actively complicit? In the movement to end oppression, is there space for imperfect allies? How imperfect is too imperfect? Do people who are part of a problem have a place in the search for solutions?”

Early in the book, Giridharadas tells the story of Loretta Ross, an activist, execu tive, professor, and intellectual who has spent decades wrestling with some of the fundamental questions facing the left today. Her story shows such questions are not new. What makes The Persuaders so unique, and so compelling, is not the ques tions themselves, but how Giridharadas explores them. He doesn’t purport to deliv er the answers—refreshing in itself—but explores how to ask the questions in a new way, and offers structure and context to help the reader understand how some of the left’s most effective persuaders are try ing to answer them.

The book’s lack of stridency brings in people who might otherwise find them selves exhausted by debates about “can cel culture” and righteous punditry about what Democrats need to do to win. Girid

haradas is determinedly willing to let the subjects of his reporting speak for themselves. It’s a style characterized by description, rather than prescription. Giridharadas deployed a similar approach in his 2018 bestseller, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World , which skewered the executives and elites who insist that they can make money and make the world a better place without making any sacrifices.

Persuaders takes the style of Winners and amplifies it. The book focuses almost entirely on the subjects of his reporting, leaving mostly unstated what appears to be Giridharadas’s thesis: that the organiz ers, activists, and change-makers advocat ing and agitating for justice will win policy fights and real power only if they persuade more people to join their fight.

The journey of the activist, author, and organizer Alicia Garza illuminates one of the key dilemmas of the politics of per suasion: Is bringing different groups into your movement a savvy tool for building “durable power,” or an act of yielding to existing power?

For decades, Democrats have promised that the road to victory is paved with cen trism. This thinking argues that you get power by building a big coalition, and you build a big coalition by accommodating existing power.

What emerges from Giridharadas’s con versations with Garza, a co-creator of the Black Lives Matter movement, is something different. You still have to build a big coali tion; you still have to make “room for the waking among the woke,” as Garza puts it. But from the beginning, you also make clear that you’re building that big coalition in order to challenge power, not to capitu late to it.

Consider the phrase “white supremacy.” White supremacy is about power, and the conventional Democratic wisdom says not to challenge the power of those who already have it.

Garza says otherwise. “I might not use the term ‘white supremacy’ with somebody who I’m quite sure has never heard those words before,” she tells Giridharadas. “But I would not not talk about white supremacy to white people because it makes them uncomfort

Giridharadas profiles Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as they attempt to persuade voters and policymakers.

able. Not using the term ‘white supremacy’ with white people because it turns them off defeats the whole fucking purpose of fight ing this shit in the first place.”

Giridharadas describes it as “the art of seeking radical outcomes by working with those who are not radical”: You can find new ways to acquire power, but without compromising why you fight for power or what you do once you have it. Or, as another organizer puts it, “It’s not about giving up your principles, and it’s not about changing your positions, but it is about opening up your posture.”

That journey of that organizer, now Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, reflects both the possibilities and challenges of persuasion. Years before she defeated a member of the House Democratic leadership in a congres sional primary that catapulted her to promi nence and political office, Ocasio-Cortez felt defeated—by her job, by health insurance, by life. The 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign changed how she saw herself.

“I used to, frankly, abuse myself mentally about how I’m nothing,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Watching the Sanders campaign, “I realized that I need to choose myself because if I don’t, I’m just going to waste away. I’m just going to give up.” As Giridharadas describes it, Ocasio-Cortez “wasn’t saying Bernie had persuaded her into an ideology—at least not at the beginning. She wasn’t saying he had enlisted her in the battle for a particular policy. He had persuaded her that she was human, fully human.”

Persuasion, in this telling, is not neces sarily about telling people who you are, or convincing them to join your side. It is a process of helping people see themselves differently, helping them understand how they might fit in the world, helping them feel that they are seen and heard, that they have agency, that they matter.

In the book’s longest chapter, Giridha radas chronicles Ocasio-Cortez’s journey

from persuad ee to persuad er, revealing how that journey shaped her politics and her approach to changing minds. OcasioCortez’s “opening argument” in her first campaign for Congress, she tells Giridha radas, was not about the Green New Deal or Medicare for All. It was something more fundamental: “I want you to know that you matter to me.”

Like Garza, Ocasio-Cortez refuses to change her ultimate destination. She is, as Giridharadas puts it, “playing the game to overturn it; being human and personal for the sake of dismantling structures.” But, also like Garza, she is more than willing to consider new ways to get there.

For those who depend on Democratic vic tories for their well-being and even survival, the task of persuasion is an existential one. Some can afford to be fatalistic about the project of changing minds; they can simply retreat if the democratic project fails and public services crumble or disappear. But they are few in number.

It’s easy to be cynical about persuasion, particularly given how extreme Republican politicians have become. In many ways, this cynicism echoes the just let them secede dis course in which some progressives in safe ly blue states respond to anti-democratic, even fascist, victories in Texas or Florida or Idaho with some version of we’re better off without them .

But to “just let them secede,” to give up on persuasion, is to abandon the millions of Americans who believe in the progres sive agenda or depend on the policies and protections that Democrats fight to pro vide for the whole country. It is also to discard the egalitarian notion that we take care of other people whether or not they have “earned” it—the notion that other people matter.

Here you find the foundational aim of Giridharadas’s book: to persuade the per suaders. To convince the pundits and poli ticians, power brokers and party elites, activists and organizers, volunteers and vot ers—everyone who might be in a position to shape the left’s political approach—not to give up on people

That’s a major undertaking, and, inevi tably, Persuaders leaves some important topics largely untouched.

While Giridharadas acknowledges the difficult and time-intensive nature of changing minds, the book leaves the reader wondering how to surmount not just mis

information but completely disconnected information ecosystems that create stark disagreement about how the world is. Even if you do manage to break into a different silo, how do you overcome the economic and algorithmic incentives that drive media and technology platforms to cash in on conflict, anger, and outrage?

Giridharadas, moreover, is a member of the progressive elite he’s trying to persuade. While he makes appearances throughout the book, I wanted more insight into his journey. Did Giridharadas have to be per suaded to believe in persuasion, as he’s seeking to do for others, or was he always a believer? How did spending years on the “front lines” of these fights change how he thinks about persuasion?

While those looking for a “solutions” sec tion will be disappointed, Giridharadas is right not to outline some ten-step plan for securing permanent progressive majori ties or promise a clear path toward saving democracy. The reason is that at the end of the day, persuasion is not a science. There is certainly some art to it, and the book introduces the reader to some of its most effective artists.

Mostly, though, there is trial and error. What The Persuaders does best is bring these trials and errors to life, and provide proof that they can succeed. People can change. Persuasion is possible.

Through story and anecdote and human experience, the book injects nuance and humanity into debates and dilemmas that are all too often fatalistic and cynical. The Persuaders brings its subjects to life, por traying their successes and struggles in a way that manages to leave the reader with a sense of solidarity and hopefulness, a con viction that the project of democracy is not lost, and an inspiration to get to work.

“No matter where you are on the political spectrum, the moral of coalition building is this idea that we need each other, espe cially when it comes to organizing around social change,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells Giridharadas. “The thing I keep com ing back to is that it really isn’t one or the other. It’s that we need each other.” n

Adam M. Lowenstein (@amlowenstein) is a writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Lever, Long Now, and more. He publishes “Reframe Your Inbox,” a newsletter of essays and interviews about capitalism and corporate power.

Persuasion is not necessarily about telling people who you are; it is a process of helping people see themselves differently.

CULTURE

Confronting Latino Anti-Black Bias

Civil rights lawyer Tanya Katerí Hernández takes up a sensitive but critical subject.

By Yalidy Matos

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality

By Tanya Katerí Hernández Beacon Press

The Latino vote has confounded Democrats who were expecting it not only to grow but also to become a bulwark of a new progressive majority. While a majority of Latinos voted Democratic in the past two presidential elections, the share voting for Donald Trump increased by an estimated eight percentage points between 2016 and 2020. That shift, along with more recent polling data, has prompted scholars and journalists alike to ask why Latinos would support a party whose nominee for president was overtly racist and anti-immigrant.

argues that Afro-Latinos and African Americans suffer from discrimination at the hands of Latinos “who claim that their racially mixed cultures immunize them from being racist.” This is what Hernández calls “Latino racial innocence,” a form of collective denial that enables “Latino complicity in US racism.” Ignoring Latino anti-Blackness, Hernández says, undermines the ability to combat racism not only through public policies, such as antidiscrimination laws, but in everyday life as well.

restaurant while white patrons were swiftly seated. They filed a claim of discrimination in U.S. federal court in Puerto Rico and successfully reached a settlement.

Hernández details similar cases of dis crimination against Afro-Latino students by Latino school officials. At a predominantly Dominican public school in New York City, educators treated dark-skinned students as less competent and more prone to mis behavior. Afro-Latino and African Ameri can children and adolescents are often perceived as older than they are and sub jected as a result to harsher punishments. This “adultification,” Hernández argues, “is where the school-to-prison pipeline begins.” Hernandez shows us how the school-toprison pipeline is experienced within the Afro-Latino community; this type of adul tification has real-world consequences that can change the course of these students’ lives. In Texas, for example, students who are suspended or expelled are about three times more likely than other students to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year. Nationwide, Black and Latino students face suspension and expul sion more often than whites. And once in the system, a high percentage of juvenile offenders, about 40 percent, were incarcer ated in an adult prison by the time they turned 25.

Books

In Racial Innocence , Tanya Katerí Hernández points to Latino anti-Black bias as one answer to this puzzle. A professor of civil rights law at Fordham University, Hernández draws on legal cases from 1964 to 2021, individual stories, interviews with leaders, educators, and attorneys, and academic research to make the case for openly discussing and confronting antiBlack racism within the Latino community.

As an Afro-Latina herself, Hernández explains how her own family history motivated her interest in the topic. Her mother suffered mistreatment and exclusion even by family members, part of a larger pattern of colorism in the Latin world that affects family relations, public spaces, educational institutions, workplaces, housing, and the criminal justice system.

For many in the United States and across the Americas, the phrase “Latino antiBlackness” may sound paradoxical. How can Latinos, a racialized group of “people of color,” be racist or prejudiced? Hernández

The complexities of race within the Latino community perplex many researchers in the social sciences and Latino and ethnic studies. The historical onedrop rule in the United States, which has held that one drop of “Black blood” makes a person Black, does not capture race in Latin America and the Caribbean, where different racial conceptions come into play. One of the strengths of Hernández’s book is that it shows how race works within a community that is itself often racialized as a homogenous group. Latinos are not a race but an ethnicity; they can be of any race or a mixture of multiple races, as many Latinos are. “Latino expressions of color bias,” Hernández writes, “are intimately connected with assessments of phenotype, hair texture, size and shape of noses and lips, and socioeconomic class standing.” Racial differences matter, but they matter in a different way than among non-Hispanics.

Latinos racially police public spaces and discriminate against Afro-Latinos, Hernández argues, citing the growing number of legal cases in Latin America challenging the exclusion of Afrodescendants from such places as dance clubs. These cases “parallel the narratives” of Afro-Latinos who enter spaces dominated by white Latinos in the United States and its territories. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, for example, Héctor Bermúdez Zenón and his friends were denied entrance to a

Cases of bias against Afro-Latinos also arise in the workplace, but Hernández argues that because judges are inclined to see all Latinos as a homogenous group, they often miss discrimination by and among them. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of “color” as well as “race” and “national origin,” but judges have acted as if the categories “do not relate or reinforce each other” and tended to reject colorism claims. José Arrocha, a dark-skinned Afro-Panamanian, was an adjunct faculty member at the Medgar Evers College campus of the City University of New York, where he was not reappointed after a supervisor, who was herself Latina, gave him a negative evaluation. The judge in the case rejected the possibility that discrimination might be involved because 5 out of 8 of the adjunct instructors who were hired or reappointed were of South or Central American origin. From the judge’s perspective, all the Latinos involved were racially and ethnically interchangeable. Latino racial innocence, the idea that “Latinos can’t be racist,” results

in less legal protection for Afro-Latinos and African Americans when their cases involve Latino employers, supervisors, landlords, and defendants.

Over the course of the last six years, there has been more media attention to far-right white nationalism in the Latino commu nity, an extreme example of the anti-Black ness rampant in less obvious forms. Latino leaders prefer to see their community as homogenous and hardly ever acknowledge anti-Blackness as an issue. But the problem of anti-Blackness isn’t limited to Latinos who are strongly white-identified; Latinos of all shades and racial backgrounds are drawn toward whiteness.

Latinos, as a group who are victims of racism and discrimination, are also in pursuit of a higher social status. Accord ing to social identity theory, all human beings are motivated by wanting to belong to a group that is seen in a positive light.

Hence for Latinos, as Hernández briefly touches on, the pursuit of social status “is entangled with denigrating Blackness as a device for performing Whiteness. To police the boundaries of Latino White spaces (metaphorically and often literally) from unwanted Black incursions is to effective ly embody Whiteness itself, regardless of one’s racial appearance.” Latinos are not only victims of racism themselves “but also part of the problem of White supremacy,” and if racial equality is what we are after, this is an uncomfortable truth that can no longer be ignored.

In her last chapter, Hernández high lights how consequential ignoring Latino anti-Black bias truly is for understand ing electoral politics, policy choices about the census, and Latino–African American racial coalitions. Anti-Black bias in the Lati no world is not just an academic question; it’s a political challenge.

Hernández has not only written a muchneeded book for judges and attorneys; she has also written a book for readers like me.

As a Black Latina woman, I felt a sense of belonging when I read about stories that reflect some of my own life experiences.

As a Black Latina scholar, I have often felt excluded from both Black politics, where I am not Black enough, and Latino poli tics, where Blackness is usually ignored. Hernández has written a book where people like me feel like whole human beings rather than bifurcated versions of ourselves. My hope is that Racial Innocence is widely read by all who say they care about racial equal ity and equity. n

Yalidy Matos , assistant professor of political science and Latino and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University, studies the intersections of race, ethnicity, and public opinion and politics.

The share of Latinos voting for Trump increased by an estimated eight percentage points between 2016 and 2020.

PARTINGSHOT

SPOOK SCABS

An open letter from Halloween ghouls about the midterms

By Francesca Fiorentini

We, the undersigned, are ghosts, witches, graveyarddwellers, devils, werewolves, mummies, creepies, crawlies, and birthday clowns. We are fright workers, who make a liv ing scaring the living. Most of us are independent contractors, working in dangerous condi tions night after night terrifying children, or lurking for hours in the shadows without bathroom breaks.

We are writing to express our deep concerns about the growing attempts to replace real spooks with living ghouls through the mortal ceremony you call “elections.” It’s bad enough that every two years these pointless dog and pony shows eclipse our sacred All Hallows’ Eve. In late October, mortals are busy “writing letters to voters” and “text banking” instead of holding makeshift séances or exploring haunted houses. Putrid. All because of your elections and your candi dates, who are threatening the livelihoods of ordinary zombies trying to make an honest buck. These are nothing more than spook scabs.

While our ghosts take pains to cover their hideousness in shrouds, they’re being made irrelevant by the living, who don’t even both er wearing white sheets. Take Blake Mas ters, the man running for a Senate seat in Arizona. Masters is a venture capitalist, a white nationalist, and has praised the writ ings of the Unabomber. He refuses to pick a scare lane, which goes against the basic principles of fright. (You think Dracula doesn’t ALSO want to turn into a wolf when there’s a full moon out?!) Masters’s embrace of “great replacement” theory and calling immigration “an invasion” threatens the

hard work of legendary creatures like the Chupacabra, who says no one even mentions her anymore.

Did you know children don’t even say “Bloody Mary” three times into the mirror anymore to summon her mutilated body? No. Now they say “Kari Lake,” Arizona’s GOP candidate for governor. At a rally, Lake said that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has “Big DeSantis Energy,” which when he heard this, made Jason Voorhees vomit inside his hockey mask. How is he supposed to do his job now?

Over in Pennsylvania, the freaks are also out. Republican candidate for gov ernor Doug Mastriano promotes a shad

owy cult that worships a dark lord who lies in wait and goes by the name of “Q.” How are we supposed to compete with that? The bogeyman is anony mous too, but when’s the last time Chardonnay-soaked soc cer moms set up a Facebook fan page in his honor?

We would also mention Dr. Oz, but he scares no one. Plus, John Fetterman is quite liter ally the same height as Fran kenstein, which honestly puts the ole boy on edge.

In Georgia, Senate candi date Herschel Walker’s pop ularity, despite his inability to speak, is a direct knockoff of hard-working mummies. Where are their royalties for his cheap imitation? Mean while, J.D. Vance of Ohio stalks the Senate race while offering his head up to the highest bid der—Peter Thiel or the Mer cer family. We already have the Headless Horseman! And “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a far better read than Hillbilly Elegy

We, the merchants of screams, have had enough. We are the true soulless opportunists who unneces sarily spread fear, and no Republican will replace us! Their scabbing has led to a speedup of scares and nightmares that we ghouls haven’t seen in hundreds of years. We have appreciated the years of sup port and the opportunities that the living have offered us, from haunted hayrides to never getting rid of that old grandfather clock in your living room. But we are now joining in one bloodcurdling howl to say BOOOOOOOOOOOO. Vote these imposters out and save fright workers everywhere.

Sincerely, The Undead

Back to school

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

Ihave been crisscrossing the country lately, as students and staff start the new school year. For the first time since March 2020, school feels familiar. There are challenges, of course, including staff shortages and worries about gun violence. But scientific advances and funding from the federal government have given us the tools to address COVID-19. Educators didn’t need to see declines in test scores to know what to do right now: Focus like a laser on helping our kids recover and thrive. Teach them core skills and knowledge, and to think critically. Teachers will need all the support we can give them.

In Medina, Ohio, I checked out the Confetti Project. (The name is inspired by the saying “Spread kindness like confetti.”) Eighth-grade teacher Jody Keith started the project in 2021 to help students deal with the strains of the pandemic and the angst of adolescence. Students select books that inspire them on topics such as leadership, grief and overcoming anxiety, and then they are paired with a teacher or another adult mentor from the school district who has read the same book. While, as one student told me, “books are the starting point,” a teacher I spoke with emphasized that “the conversations with students are the selling point.” The program aims to build relationships—students with adults, students with students, and schools with communities—and it should spread like confetti.

A few days earlier, I was with students and faculty at Milwaukee Area Technical College. They welcomed President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation announcement. But they know that students often must choose between staying in college and paying for their basic needs. MATC faculty have set up the FAST Fund for students experiencing economic emergencies. FAST (which stands for Faculty and Students Together) provides rapid financial support to help students with food, rent, child care and other necessities so they can remain enrolled. This year alone, MATC’s FAST Fund has assisted 765 students with nearly $220,000 in direct aid, helping 157 students avoid eviction, providing 184 students with tuition or debt payments, and assisting 157 students with book costs or exam fees. An AFT grant will support establishing FAST funds on at least nine higher education campuses in the Midwest.

Closer to home, I visited PS 48 Michael J. Buczek Elementary School in Washington Heights, N.Y. In one classroom, first-grade students were engrossed in a lesson about germs. “Soap makes germs VANISH,” a very excited student told me. In a third-grade art class, students created collages, inspired by

Matisse paintings on the smartboard and soothed by the soft music their teacher plays to create a peaceful atmosphere. The joy of learning was evident throughout this school, which is named in honor of a police officer killed in the line of duty.

This is the unheralded work that happens in public schools every day, in every community across America. But, too often, ideologues’ scaremongering and sensational headlines divert attention from educators’ dedication and from what is needed to support high-quality teaching and learning for all children.

As extremists are trying to ban books, the AFT is well on our way to giving away 1 million books this year—and we will give another million books to kids and families next year. From Scranton to Socorro, from Nashua to Neshaminy, children are delighting in picking out books of their own. As critics complain about student debt forgiveness, the AFT is working to make higher education accessible without a “debt sentence,” by offering student debt clinics, suing fraudulent loan servicers, and promoting public service loan forgiveness so people can choose professions like teaching without being forever buried in debt. And as extremist politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis make baseless, politically motivated claims that there is “woke indoctrination in our schools” around race and sexuality, educators are doing everything they can to create safe and welcoming environments for students and to help

them recover and thrive—academically, socially and emotionally. The AFT’s What Kids and Communities Need campaign is grounded in a simple premise: Teachers want what students need. Those needs are great due to the systemic inequities that have always existed in our schools and society, the trauma and disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the strain of teacher and school staff shortages, and the cynical attacks on educators and schools by extremists.

The message from parents is equally clear: They don’t want culture wars infiltrating our schools. They support honest, age-appropriate teaching of history. Polling shows that parents like their public schools and appreciate educators’ herculean efforts to support students during the pandemic.

This is the time to bring joy and support into our schools, not politics and hate. This is the time to support America’s largest civic institution—our public schools—to bring our divided country together and nurture our children’s and our nation’s healing. Educators and families are leading the way.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: twitter.com/RWeingarten

Weingarten speaks with participants in the Confetti Project at Buckeye Junior High School in Medina, Ohio, Sept. 13.

Photo: Pamela Wolfe

Educators know what to do right now: Focus like a laser on helping our kids recover and thrive.

listen!

LEFT ANCHOR

This podcast, sponsored by TAP and hosted by managing editor Ryan Cooper and Alexi the Greek, provides a grounded, novel, and irreverent perspective on current events and political theory.

From Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx, from Reconstruction to the January 6th putsch, each week Ryan, Alexi, and their fascinating guests offer fresh takes…

Access FREE episodes and excerpts at Prospect.org/podcasts

Support the Prospect with a POWER level membership for access to ALL episodes Prospect.org/membership

The PESSIMIST complains about the wind; the OPTIMIST expects it to change; the REALIST adjusts the sails.

WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD