The American Prospect #318

THE COVID VACCINE ROLLOUT OLIVIA WEBB

BIG TECH AND THE MILITARY JONATHAN GUYER

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

DEMOCRATS AND THE GOVERNMENT

TOGETHER AGAIN Organizing the Party

By Robert Kuttner Populism Wins in Georgia

By Eli Day The Incoming House Progressives

By Alexander Sammon

JAN/FEB 2021 $8.95 PROSPECT.ORG

BONUS ISSUE, 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

“We can meet the challenge of the climate crisis by unleashing American ingenuity and manufacturing to create millions of new high paying jobs.”

– Joe Biden, October 27, 2020

President Biden promised to “Build Back Better.” Now it’s time to get the job done.

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

It’s time to Rebuild America.

americanmanufacturing.org 36 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2020

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COLUMNS 4 PROSPECTS QUELLING OUR NATIONAL RIOT BY DAVID DAYEN

NOTEBOOK 7 THE WORLD WANTS THE U.S. TO GET SERIOUS ON CLIMATE BY GABRIELLE GURLEY 10 THE POLITICS OF COUNTING BY MARCIA BROWN 13 WHY DID OBAMA FORGET WHO BROUGHT HIM TO THE DANCE? BY MICAH L. SIFRY

FEATURES 16 THE MOVEMENT, THE PARTY, AND THE PRESIDENT BY ROBERT KUTTNER THE REPUBLICANS ARE CRACKING UP. CAN DEMOCRATIC UNITY HOLD? AND WILL THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION BE AN ALLY OF LONG-TERM ORGANIZING? 26 THAT OLD-TIME SOUTHERN POPULISM BY ELI DAY DEMOCRATIC VICTORY IN GEORGIA, AND ACROSS THE SOUTH, COMBINED LONG-TERM MULTIRACIAL ORGANIZING AND A PITCH TO DIRECTLY IMPROVE PEOPLE’S LIVES. 34 THE CLASS OF 2020 BY ALEXANDER SAMMON THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE SQUAD, IN THEIR OWN WORDS 42 SILICON VALLEY TAKES THE BATTLESPACE BY JONATHAN GUYER THROUGH AN OBSCURE STARTUP NAMED REBELLION DEFENSE, FORMER GOOGLE CEO ERIC SCHMIDT ATTEMPTS TO BUY HIS WAY INTO THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE. 48 A SHOT IN THE ARM BY OLIVIA WEBB HOW GOVERNMENT SUCCEEDED IN CORONAVIRUS VACCINE DEVELOPMENT, AND FAILED IN DISTRIBUTION

CULTURE 55 MANK IS FAKE NEWS ABOUT FAKE NEWS BY HAROLD MEYERSON 59 HOW BIDEN SHOULD PROSECUTE CORPORATE CRIME BY BRANDON L. GARRETT 62 LOVE, LABOR, LOST BY LAUREN KAORI GURLEY Cover art by Robert Meganck

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from the Editor

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f this issue had gone to press on January 4th, before one the most consequential 48-hour stretches in American history, all of us on the editorial staff would have kicked ourselves. We would have missed the triumph in Georgia, powered by multiracial organizers and two Democratic Senate candidates who backed into a winning strategy. We would have missed the storming of the U.S. Capitol by white nationalists, QAnon adherents, and self-styled revolutionaries, egged on by the head of the executive branch to attack the legislative branch. And that’s all aside from the deadliest days of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

The pace of magazine production doesn’t conform to an era of minute-by-minute news, where history rains down with hurricane force. But that’s the job, and we did our best to faithfully chronicle this moment, to build the plane while it’s in the air.

My initial response to the Capitol Riot was deep anger, at a conservative movement that stoked disunion for so long, well aware of where it could lead. My Prospects column, in only slightly more measured tones, lays out the Republican culpability for insurrection, and what should be done next to minimize the threat. (Spoiler alert: It’s not more anti-terrorism laws.)

We were fortunate to have the services of ELI DAY, a great young Black writer who spent a couple of weeks down in Georgia before the election for us. (Thanks to everyone who donated to our Eyes on Georgia coverage.) He comes back with a tour de force reported essay on how campaigning and organizing that fused race and class contributed to the victory, returning Georgia to its populist traditions.

So now that the Democrats have control, if barely, of Washington, where do they go from here? ROBERT KUTTNER reports on the almost byzantine nature of the Democratic Party, its relationship to the grassroots progressive movement, and how it must build on its success through long-term organizing. ALEXANDER SAMMON talks to four incoming progressive House members—you might call them the Squad, Part II—on their hopes to make change in the new Congress.

GABRIELLE GURLEY focuses on offshore wind as an example of where the Biden administration must break through the barriers of the past and move us to a clean-energy future. MARCIA BROWN notes that Donald Trump was unable to meet his goals for subverting the U.S. census, but may have done lasting damage anyway. And JONATHAN GUYER has a crackling piece about an obscure startup, Rebellion Defense, that managed to place multiple staffers in the Biden transition team, aided by their consigliere, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is attempting to comingle Big Tech and defense policy, in the latest incarnation of the military-industrial complex.

We haven’t forgotten the pandemic, of course. The big issue now is whether we can undertake the most monumental public-health project in history and immunize the country against COVID-19. OLIVIA WEBB looks at how government action was incredibly useful in developing the vaccine, but impotent in the early going in distributing it.

Our culture coverage features MICAH SIFRY on the Barack Obama memoir, BRANDON GARRETT on two books about white-collar crime, LAUREN KAORI GURLEY on Sarah Jaffe’s new book about working, and HAROLD MEYERSON on Mank, the David Fincher film that invents a motivation for the making of Citizen Kane that, though untrue, is more relevant to our current times than ever.

As a new administration enters office, we will be tracking it at prospect.org. Joe Biden appears to be at once willing to meet the moment with an expansive agenda of rescue and recovery, and yet somehow unwilling to use all the tools at his disposal to make it happen. We don’t expect history to be written out in tweets over the next four years. But that makes it more important than ever to understand the decisions made in quieter rooms, and we’re determined to bring that to you.–DAVID DAYEN

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EXECUTIVE EDITOR DAVID DAYEN FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH EDITOR AT LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON DEPUTY EDITOR GABRIELLE GURLEY ART DIRECTOR JANDOS ROTHSTEIN MANAGING EDITOR JONATHAN GUYER ASSOCIATE EDITOR SUSANNA BEISER STAFF WRITER ALEXANDER SAMMON WRITING FELLOWS MARCIA BROWN, BRITTANY GIBSON EDITORIAL INTERNS MIACEL SPOTTED ELK, SIERRA LYONS, ANNABELLE WILLIAMS CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MARCIA ANGELL, GABRIEL ARANA, DAVID BACON, JAMELLE BOUIE, HEATHER BOUSHEY, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, JOHN B. JUDIS, RANDALL KENNEDY, BOB MOSER, KAREN PAGET, SARAH POSNER, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, ADELE M. STAN, DEBORAH A. STONE, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, SAM WANG, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS, JULIAN ZELIZER PUBLISHER ELLEN J. MEANY PR DIRECTOR ANNA GRAIZBORD CONTROLLER SALLY FREEMAN COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST STEPHEN WHITESIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEHRSA BARADARAN, DAAIYAH BILAL-THREATS, CHUCK COLLINS, DAVID DAYEN, STANLEY B. GREENBERG, JACOB S. HACKER, AMY HANAUER, DERRICK JACKSON, ROBERT KUTTNER, ELLEN J. MEANY, MILES RAPOPORT, JANET SHENK, ADELE SIMMONS, GANESH SITARAMAN, WILLIAM SPRIGGS, PAUL STARR, MICHAEL STERN SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE STEPHEN WHITESIDE, 202-753-0937, INFO@PROSPECT.ORG PRINT SUBSCRIPTION RATES $36 (U.S.), $42 (CANADA), AND $48 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PROSPECT.ORG/PERMISSIONS VOL. 32, NO. 1. The American Prospect (ISSN 10497285) is published bimonthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2021 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, 1225 Eye St. NW, Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20005. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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Prospects

Quelling Our National Riot

BY DAVID DAYEN

I

nvoking the Nazi era in a political debate is typically dismissed as a bad-faith tactic for those without a compelling argument. But many of us, including many who grew up Jewish, could not ignore the rhyming of history after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. When photos emerged of vandals in shirts that read “Camp Auschwitz” or “6MWE” (which stands for “6 Million Weren’t Enough”), that feeling deepened.

It’s easy to point to the haplessness of the Capitol Riot and laugh at how short it fell of a real fascist coup. But the Beer Hall Putsch, an early Nazi uprising, never even got past a police cordon blocking one of Munich’s main squares. The threat was neutralized, and Hitler and his conspirators were apprehended.

It wasn’t until a decade later, when the Nazis were elevated to power, that it became clear that the putsch was a beginning rather than an ending. Revolutions, coups, and insurrections often fail before they succeed.

The well-documented events of January 6th have enabled us to learn a lot about the rioters quickly. There were the led and the misled, their anger stoked by social media and encouraged by a mountain of lies, from election fraud to a secret society of elite pedophiles. There were those I’ve seen described as chaos tourists, marching with their cellphones in front of them, “doing it for the ’gram,” for the refracted glory of being

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watched. There were off-duty policemen and Air Force veterans, personifying the links between cops and military figures and the far right. There were state lawmakers and corporate CEOs and dilettantes flying in on private jets. And there were very clearly organized and determined nationalists and racists, extremist leaders and militia members, sporting zip ties and weapons, explicitly seeking to do much more than scare the political class.

Puffed up with decades of hate, these disparate figures lashed out with violence against the state, justifying it as the only way to save America. It was bloody and could have been much bloodier. But more chilling was how exultant the display was. People were acting out fantasies harbored in the deepest reaches of their imaginations, typed out on Parler or spoken on a podcast and then made real. They reveled in it, and just by taking action, opened up possibilities for more cruelties in the future.

A taste of power doesn’t lead to abstinence.

The immediate aftermath saw an end-of-the-movie roundup of the conspirators, a simple task given the ubiquity of images of the riot. Within three days, 25 domestic-terrorism cases were opened. The zip tie guy, the guy with the horned fur hat, the guy who ran off with Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, and other assorted figures were arrested.

This response reveals two important things. First, we have

all the tools we need right now to bring lawbreakers who mean to tear down democracy to justice without further corroding civil liberties. And second, the brutally efficient machinery of the state has yet to be turned on those who truly led the uprising, rather than those who followed it. Only accountability up the ladder, not down, will stop short the escalating unrest, and the fracturing of the union.

YOU CAN’T SOLELY describe this attack through the actions of the on-site participants.

Dark-money groups connected to Trump campaign funders financed the rally that preceded the march on the Capitol.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed to have chipped in half a million dollars. Numerous spokes of the conservative machine, from Turning Point USA to Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni, supplied buses that brought Trump fanatics to Washington.

Republican members of Congress, by objecting to the certification of electoral votes, raised hopes that Joe Biden’s victory could be blocked. Reps. Mo Brooks (R-AL) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) reportedly plotted with right-wingers who went on to lead the riot, and at the least psyched up crowds to “fight for America.” One hundred and forty-seven Republican House members and senators, led by self-immolating Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), continued to object to the legality of Biden’s election even after the rioters were

cleared, still pushing the same falsehoods that had triggered the sacking of the Capitol.

Finally and most prominently, you have the inciter-inchief himself, who whipped his followers into a frenzy about a stolen election for months, summoned them to Washington, and set them loose on the Congress. People are searching for links establishing coordination between the White House and the rioters. But what happened during four years in public view tells enough of the story. Well before the election chaos, Trump projected a false picture of American catastrophe without him at the helm. He gave recognition to those with racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and xenophobic views; he created the space for them to emerge from the shadows. He told them his loss would signal the nation’s end.

Why wouldn’t believers in this apocalyptic vision take up arms to fight what Trump and the right described to them so vividly as the end-times?

Why wouldn’t they betray the country in the name of protecting it? Trump activated a long-simmering undercurrent of discontent and disunity, sending into battle those who would take America by force rather than submit to its multiculturalism and tolerance.

He broadened and deepened a movement for hate.

And once activated, that movement cannot be easily deactivated.

But even keeping the

Prospects

spotlight on Trump’s responsibility for stirring up a mob doesn’t tell the whole story.

Hatred and demonization of the other has been the trade Republicans have trafficked in for more than 50 years. In the 1990s, they took a centrist Democratic president and impeached him over infidelity.

In 2000, they threatened insurrection to stop a vote count and had the Supreme Court turn over power to an unelected candidate. They deemed the next Democratic president unfit to serve because he was a foreigner, according to a conspiracy theory to which large sections of the party gave credence. (As recently as 2019, 56 percent of Republicans believed that the statement “Obama was born in Kenya” was either definitely or probably true.) And just this January, the majority of Republicans in Congress signaled Biden’s illegitimacy with their votes to baselessly reject an electoral count. The overwhelming evidence is that the Republican Party, not just its most extremist faction, believes that it’s illegal for a Democrat to win the presidency.

That thinking leads directly and inescapably to ham-handed coup attempts. It’s bred by a right-wing media machine that treats the opposition as an enemy. It’s funded by a network of billionaires and corporate titans who tolerated the eliminationism so long as it led to low taxes and deregulation. It’s sustained by a sprawling network of “think tanks” and operatives and campaign strategists, who skillfully use racism and xenophobia to maintain a grip on power.

WHEN I SEE ARREST after arrest of Capitol rioters, I’m reminded of Lynndie England, the Army reservist convicted of torturing Iraqi soldiers at Abu Ghraib. She did not devise the policy she carried out, and her punishment had no effect on the policy’s architects, all

of whom went free. She was a lowly mob member, sacrificed so that nobody with power would see sanctions. Despite the arrests of the Capitol insurrectionists, there’s been no parallel effort against those who spent decades teaching the rank and file to hate, and provoked the inevitable by-product of that hatred.

This is why it’s necessary to impeach and convict Trump, even if he’s already out of office.

It’s why it’s necessary to tar the Republican Party as the instigators and enablers of the mob.

It’s why corporations that lavishly funded Republicans for years should not get away with a short-term pause in contributions during a time when there are practically no federal elections. The warning from conservatives that holding them accountable will just sow division and incite more rebellion is the logic of a hostage situation, where the assailants warn that their wishes must be granted to avoid bloodshed. There can be no unity without accountability.

You cannot impeach a party or arrest a corporation. (I wouldn’t mind seeing someone try.) There is such a thing as social accountability. Taking away a golf tournament from Trump’s resort, or disbarring one of his lawyers, makes a statement that their lives cannot and will not return to normal. Ask Republicans in North Carolina who felt such blowback from a transgender bathroom ban that they had to reverse the policy if social accountability works. In a country that for decades has failed the test of equal justice, it may be all we have left.

This accountability should not be pursued out of a sense of vindictiveness, but because it’s the only way to protect the nation. After the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler did see a jail cell but only served nine months, most of which he spent writing his manifesto Mein Kampf. The ruling parties dismissed the

Nazi threat, and thought they could contain it. Failing to enact swift consequences ensured that the wounds festered. Here in America, the government suppressed the post–Civil War revolutionary threat by methodically dismantling the KKK. After 1876, however, the government allowed white supremacists to reassemble, violently strip voting rights from Blacks, and institute Jim Crow. Accountability was the right choice until it veered off course.

In its fight against the Klan, the Reconstruction-era Congress gave the federal government new powers to enable the rooting out of domestic terrorists. We now have every possible tool necessary to fight sedition and conspiracy and attacks like the Capitol Riot. President Biden has talked about prioritizing a domestic-terrorism law, which has been in the works for a while. Such a statute would be completely unnecessary, however, as the immediate rolling up of the main rioters directly responsible for the violence makes strikingly clear.

Just as after 9/11, there’s a danger that in our need to diminish the threat of subversive violence, we could tilt too far toward repressive measures. Every time we add some new authority to the tool kit, it gets abused and often applied to groups far from its intended target. Suddenly, spies are scouring through library records or emails or the cameras attached to laptops, targeting marginalized groups and government critics based on suspicion and bias rather than facts. We should question the effectiveness of all this lost liberty. The bloated security industry, blessed with the most expansive surveillance apparatus in human history, couldn’t subvert the aims of a couple thousand Trump supporters who broadcast their plans all over social media.

Seeing liberals thrill to rioters being placed on no-fly lists (something requested by the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee) concerns me. Laughing at the stripping of rights without due process may lead us toward an even more menacing security state. In the hands of a president who might sympathize with right-wing groups—like the last one—you can be assured that even the most well-intentioned law will be perverted. There’s no doubt that such a president would have invoked new domesticterrorism statutes to crack down on last summer’s racialjustice protests, had they been in place. We should be rolling back the most invasive anti-terror abuses; we don’t need them to protect us from the threat of right-wing violence.

By the same token, glorying in the deplatforming of Trump and his cadres is misguided. I don’t think you can stop fascists from finding and communicating with one another using whatever technology they find available, be it burner phones or sealed letters or meetings behind locked doors. I do think Facebook and Google have a business model that incentivizes capturing attention in a way that can marinate people in hate speech. Just as overwhelming surveillance isn’t necessary in law enforcement, it’s not necessary to make Silicon Valley billionaires richer.

We should ban targeted advertising, which would stop the profitability that comes with social media addiction.

There’s no doubt that, in the absence of consequences for riotous and seditious actions, those actions will only metastasize. Planning is under way right now for future events. Mobs have a way of gathering their own fuel. We’ve allowed our politics to spiral, and we must collectively press our hands against the pinwheel, to keep it from spiraling further. n

JAN/FEB 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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notebook

After decades of fits and starts, the U.S. has one offshore wind farm, which can power only 17,000 homes.

The World Wants the U.S. to Get Serious on Climate Trump slowed, but did not stop, America’s grappling with the climate crisis. Under Biden, can the nation catch up with the rest of the developed world?

NICHOLAS-DOHERTY / UNSPLASH

BY G A BR I E L L E G U R L E Y IN THE NORTH SEA, 75 miles off the Yorkshire coast of England, the world’s largest offshore wind farm began producing electricity in 2019.

Powering more than one million homes, Hornsea 1 is the initial segment of a multipronged project to supply energy to millions more. It won’t hold that distinction for long, though, with construction under way on Dogger Bank, also in United Kingdom waters, which will be the world’s biggest offshore site, providing electricity to up to six million homes when fully powered up.

With a fraction of the coastline of the United States, the U.K. is the sixth-largest wind producer in the

world and, along with Germany, has transformed Europe into the largest offshore wind power–producing region on the planet. Today, the U.K. has some 40 offshore wind farms producing ten gigawatts of power.

(One gigawatt is equal to the output of one nuclear power plant.)

The U.S. has one offshore wind farm.

After decades of fits and starts, despite the nation’s nearly 100,000 miles of coastline and shallow waters suitable for wind farm construction and wind resources that could produce twice the amount of electricity as the U.S. currently uses, the Block Island Wind Farm, a small

30-megawatt facility off the Rhode Island coast that can power up to 17,000 homes, is all the U.S. has to show for offshore wind power.

The nonexistence of a robust offshore wind industry is a stark illustration of the lack of climate urgency in the U.S. when compared to countries like the U.K. The four-year U.S. absence from the Paris Agreement underlines how far the nation has slipped behind Europe in an area where it should excel.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration’s four-year defection from the battle to save the planet has barely dented the international consensus on the climate crisis. The question the U.S. must confront in the next four years is not so much whether it can catch up with its European allies on offshore wind but whether America can fulfill its own Paris Agreement climate targets and recapture a modicum of international credibility by moving swiftly toward zero carbon emissions.

The bright spot, if it can be called

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that, is that the United States was able to tread water on the transition to renewables like wind and solar because President Donald Trump’s quest to boost the coal industry ignored the fact that climate science had prevailed on supply and demand in U.S. energy markets.

But for the first time in modern history, the U.S. was isolated and humiliated on the international stage. Most countries lamented the spectacle of an American president defying scientific evidence and fulminating about “big, beautiful coal” or bloviating that wind turbine noise caused cancer and belched exhaust fumes. Trump replaced the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era regime that served as the foundation of U.S. climate targets, but nothing he did managed to revitalize a fossil fuel industry in decline.

To the contrary, over the past decade American consumers, utility companies, and state policymakers decided to jump-start the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, though their efforts paled alongside Europe’s. This marked a reversal among consumers. In the early 2000s, Americans ratepayers’ aversion to the higher energy prices that then came with wind and solar deterred the rise of these alternative energy sources. In one instance, it intersected with wealthy NIMBYs’ efforts to crush Cape Wind, a controversial Massachusetts offshore proposal that finally collapsed in 2017 after nearly two decades in development.

In Europe beginning in the 1990s, by contrast, broader support for clean energy and a willingness to support investment in the sector drove prices down over time. “Danish and German and British ratepayers paid more for electricity,” says Willett Kempton, the associate director and founder of the University of Delaware’s Center for Research in Wind.

“Now they have cost parity electricity from offshore wind, a heckuva lot of jobs, and industries that are exporting valuable project products which aren’t made elsewhere—and they were right.”

In the U.S., ratepayers gradually became more savvy about the

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consequences of continued reliance on fossil fuels. Over time, they actively sought out companies that integrated renewables wind and solar into the energy mix. Residential homeowners of means paid for solar panel installations. Small onshore wind facilities allowed municipalities to diversify their energy sources. And as awareness of the climate threat increased and interest in renewable energy rose, the energy markets pivoted.

As more onshore wind farms and solar plants came online, prices dropped to the point that they are equal to or below the costs of coal and natural gas, making them more attractive not just to consumers, but to utility companies as well.

Those price signals spurred new offshore projects in New England and Mid-Atlantic waters. Some 20 projects are currently in various stages of construction and development, and states are moving to put tens of thousands of megawatts of offshore wind sites in the water by 2035. The onshore wind sector continues to surge ahead, too, with ten new sites to power more than 600,000 homes across nine states, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

WITH THE MARKET and state and local governments pushing for clean energy and the Trump administration pushing the other way, the story of the past four years is mixed. The administration was largely unsuccessful in most of its environmental, energy, and natural-resources litigation that ended up in the federal courts, suffering unfavorable rulings or backing off potential lawsuits, according to data compiled by the Institute for Policy Integrity. The solar industry was also tied up in knots, however,

by Trump’s obsession with punishing China, which produces most of the world’s solar panels. By slapping a 25 percent tariff on those panels, Trump wreaked havoc on solar installations.

Some highly touted offshore wind projects also ran aground in the tumult. Trump’s first interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, was a

major supporter of offshore wind and acquiesced to wind leases off the coasts of Massachusetts and New York. His successor, David Bernhardt, took the opposite tack.

Fisheries interests joined him, sowing doubts about wind sites and their impact on fish stocks. The rising uncertainty about federal aims contributed to a pause for another Massachusetts wind project, the long-delayed Vineyard Wind off the southeast Massachusetts coast.

Vineyard Wind suddenly withdrew from the federal permitting process a month before an expected environmental-review decision in January of this year, and may be waiting for favorable input from Biden administration officials to proceed.

But the growing appeal of clean energy did not diminish; in particular, the job creation potential of wind and solar projects lured bipartisan support. The Obama-era wind and solar tax credits particularly were incentives that no jobseeking Republican governor could ignore. Texas is the largest producer of onshore wind energy in the U.S. (if it were a nation, it would be the fifth-largest producer in the world) and has the most suitable areas for offshore wind along the Gulf Coast.

Deep-red states have embraced solar, among them South Carolina, whose Republican governor, Henry McMaster, decried Trump’s tariffs on Chinese solar panels in testimony before the International Trade Commission two years ago.

Solar and wind tax credits were also included in the December pandemic stimulus package, with credits for offshore wind projects added to the tax code for the first time. The legislation also added funds for clean-energy research and development.

The pandemic has had a negligible effect on existing wind and solar projects in the U.S. After the initial jolt of implementing pandemic safety measures and grappling with workers’ health issues in the early months of COVID-19, work on various wind and solar projects continued. Globally, investment in renewables increased 5 percent in the first half of 2020, due largely to offshore wind projects.

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Rejoining Paris is one of Joe Biden’s easiest moves to make in his first year as president. His early decisions on climate, bringing together a deftly calibrated team of climate veterans led by former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry and EPA Director Gina McCarthy, impressed domestic audiences and international allies alike. Trump’s scuttling of the Clean Power Plan was a setback that Biden can undo to pursue more ambitious emissions targets.

However, Biden’s goals of achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and barreling ahead on tightening emissions standards that Trump tore down may run into major challenges with a federal judiciary and Supreme Court stacked with conservative Republican appointees.

AS BIDEN IS WELL aware, it’s not as if there’s time to waste. The pandemic led to the sharpest drop in global emissions since World War II, but that development was tempered by the caveat that the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continue to increase despite the curtailment of human activity over the course of a year.

The 2021 Climate Change Performance Index found that none of the 57 countries and the European Union, which together produce 90 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, are on a path to meet Paris goals to stave off the global average temperature rise in this century to well below 2 degrees Celsius by limiting increases to no more than 1.5 degrees. In the race to eliminate fossil fuels, the U.K. comes in fifth, while the U.S. is dead last.

A recent report from the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre, and BloombergNEF found that to rectify that, countries would have to install 3,000 gigawatts of renewables to meet the Paris goals. To date, countries and companies have committed to adding just 826 gigawatts of renewable power (excluding large hydro plants) by 2030.

Trump had little effect on the European and Chinese commitments to the fundamental precepts of the Paris Agreement. Under

Wind energy prices have dropped to the point that they are equal to or below the costs of coal and natural gas.

Obama, as the number one and two contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, China and the U.S. joined together to get the rest of the world to the negotiating table in Paris. With the exception of Brazil and its climate-denying president Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump confrere, there was no commensurate, widespread rollback of environmental policies to match what occurred in the U.S. To the contrary, “Europe was probably more aggressive as a result of Trump,” says Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “China was delighted to go from co-leadership to sole leadership.”

With Trump withdrawing from Paris, and with the EU and the U.K. preoccupied with Brexit, China skated easily into the leadership vacuum, maintaining an aggressive pace of construction of solar and onshore wind facilities. China has already announced a new climate target of net zero carbon emissions before 2060, in part by strengthening its requirements to reduce greenhouse gas production by 2030. How China plans to achieve those goals while continuing to rely heavily on coal will be closely watched.

For his part, Biden will seek to convince America’s European allies that the country is serious about improving on its nationally determined contributions (each country’s climate goals, in United Nations parlance). Under Obama, the target

was a 26 percent to 28 percent reduction below 2005 levels by 2025 and 32 percent by 2030.

At the next round of climate talks, to be held in Glasgow in November, the EU and the U.K. will be interested in seeing serious and detailed longerterm commitments. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced that the U.K. will aim to cut its greenhouse gas emissions at a faster pace, to 68 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.

Domestically, Biden’s climate team may find more favorable political tailwinds. A Democratic majority in the Senate means that the party has a chance to bring along Republicans on issues like tax credits. But progress on more serious climate legislation, like enshrining stronger climate action into law, could run into the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle, not to mention a conservative Supreme Court hostile to strong federal environmental regulation.

With the COVID-19 recession showing few signs of abating quickly, a Biden stimulus plan and infrastructure proposal may provide an opportunity to weave renewable components into the legislation—as they began to be in December’s emergency bill. “There will be bipartisan support for a little green tinge if not a deepgreen hue to an economic recovery package in the spring,” says Stavins.

“Another opportunity for greening is within infrastructure legislation, particularly for the electricity grid, because the electricity grid is going to have to be upgraded in order to have greater reliance on renewables.”

Johnson brought up the climate crisis in his first phone call with Biden, and the world will likewise be watching America’s response to the crisis. At Glasgow, the U.S. has to demonstrate that it can keep pace as the developed world comes forward with even more ambitious plans. But after four years of Trump and their own chaos, the U.K. and Europe may be magnanimous in the short term.

The Europeans are “thrilled” with the Democratic victory, says Stavins.

Indeed, he adds, “Biden may have a longer honeymoon in Europe than he does in the United States.” n

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The Politics of Counting The Trump administration attempted to subvert the census for political ends. How successful were they?

BY M A R C I A BR O W N ON DECEMBER 31, 2020, the Census Bureau missed a crucial deadline that caused a huge sigh of relief in Democratic circles. Statutory law dictates the Bureau must report the data that will determine reapportionment of House seats to the president by the end of the year.

But a global pandemic and administrative interference combined to make this impossible. It was the first missed census deadline since the December 31 date was established in 1976. As of January 12, bureau officials were telling courts that they were now working toward completing the count by March 6, 2021.

The delayed timeline puts the data out of the reach of Donald Trump. In 2019, his administration pushed to add a citizenship question to the census, but was rebuffed by the Supreme Court because of procedural violations, like failing to notify Congress about the changes. But Trump never gave up trying to exclude immigrant populations from the count that would be used for reapportionment and redistricting, in an effort to rob people of color of representation and to boost states with smaller immigrant populations.

Whether through the Bureau slow-walking the release or merely attempting to ensure an accurate count, the delay means that this attack on undocumented people has, for the moment, failed. “It’s better that it turns out this way. The route that we’re going now is the more cautious,” said Sam Wang, a neuroscience professor at Princeton who runs the Princeton Election Consortium.

Nevertheless, these efforts instilled fear in immigrant communities, and may have deterred them from responding to the census. Indeed, the shortened timeline imposed by Trump required that the Bureau take shortcuts that cannot be undone by the incoming Biden administration. And between this

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and other Trump administration machinations, an undercount is still very possible—even likely. Especially with the right wing entrenched on the Supreme Court for a generation, we could see significant game-playing with the census data, even in the near future. The near-miss from the departure of Trump, in other words, may still boomerang back to damage democracy.

THE DECENNIAL CENSUS— which is all about counting where people are on April 1 of the enumeration year—was clearly going to be complicated, given the pandemic.

Not only was the door-to-door follow-up hampered by fears of contracting COVID, but people had moved unpredictably: Impoverished people struggled to stay housed, college students left dormitories, young Americans moved back in with their parents, and elderly people moved out of nursing homes. The Bureau could no longer count on people being where they usually were, and hard-to-count populations became harder to count, making respondents likely to be whiter and more affluent.

“Folks who were already the easyto-count folks, households in the middle and upper-middle class in wealthy suburbs,” said Robert Santos, vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute.

“The folks who were most affected, lost jobs and they had to carry out online school, they also happened to be the folks who were the hardest to count.” Census officials supplement the count with high-quality administrative data like IRS tax forms, Social Security, and government health plan records, to estimate the number of people at a nonresponsive address.

But many people who live in the United States, particularly undocumented immigrants, would have none of these forms. “The hard-tocount communities are also the ones

that tend to have the worst administrative data available,” Santos said.

Civic organizations worked hard to try to spread the word in these communities, explained Beth Lynk, Census Counts Campaign director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She pointed to tele-town halls, partnerships with food banks and postmasters general to deliver gift bags with census information, and Stop the Knock campaigns that encouraged selfparticipation online for those afraid of contracting COVID or fearful of the government coming to their door.

“The infrastructure and the scope and scale of it was unprecedented,” Lynk said. The campaigns saw a marked increase in participation, and the model could be used to support disaster relief and vaccine distribution. “This is infrastructure that can be used for civic engagement,” Lynk explained.

During the “field period,” the Census Bureau attempts to count nonresponsive households. Because of the pandemic, Santos said there was a “general understanding” from Congress and the White House that the Bureau would have an extra 120 days for the field period. Instead, the White House demanded the Bureau meet the statutory deadline of December 31 for apportionment, condensing the time in the field. Not only did the administration shorten the period for door-knocking, but it also pushed the Bureau to rush the data processing, where the Bureau sorts out any anomalies, such as double-counting. “They had to cut corners and they had to find new ways to make the delivery,” Santos said.

In sworn testimony, Howard Hogan, a former demographer at the Bureau, emphasized the problems with a shortened timeline. “[T]he compressed schedule for post data collection processing carries a grave risk of a greatly increased differential undercount,” he wrote.

Furthermore, even after losing the citizenship question effort, the Trump administration continued to devise ways to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count. An executive order in July 2020 directed the Bureau to exclude undocumented

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RINGO CHIU / AP PHOTO

Civic organizations worked hard to spread the word about the census in hard-to-count communities.

people from apportionment of representatives to the states. This appears to be at odds with the plain language of the Constitution, which states that the census must count “the whole number of persons in each State.”

But if followed through, a state like California, with a high percentage of undocumented immigrants, would lose votes in the Electoral College and seats in the House of Representatives, while whiter states in the Midwest or the Plains could stand to gain.

A more devious executive order from 2019 asks the Bureau to share citizenship data. That data could be obtained by states to inform their redistricting process, where they set the district lines for seats in the House of Representatives, state legislatures, and other offices. Some experts argue that redistricting may be decided on different principles from apportionment. This could lead to whole populations being discounted in redistricting, leading to lower representation for immigrant-heavy communities.

One problem with this is that the ability to designate undocumented populations is limited, said Justin Levitt, a constitutional scholar at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “Trump said give me as close to a complete count of the undocumented population that we can,” he explained. “That’s not something we have the data for. That’s impossible and also illegal. We don’t have a database of the undocumented population. We don’t have a database of documented citizens and so there’s no way to actually get an answer that’s a real count.”

But a new president made much of this concern go away. On day one of his administration, Joe Biden signed an executive order reversing Trump’s two actions on the census. The policy reversal requires that all persons, including undocumented people, be included in the state population totals used to determine congressional and Electoral College totals, and that the census makes no effort

to collect and share data on undocumented people with states. The same day, Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, who faced criticism for rushing to complete a dataset of undocumented immigrants, resigned rather than wait until his term expired at the end of this year.

Nevertheless, Biden’s actions can’t undo all the harm. Indeed, if conservative states decide to fight to exclude undocumented immigrants in redistricting, using either federal data or data they’ve come up with on their own, Trump’s precedent will live on.

As Sam Wang notes, this attempt would certainly get challenged in federal court. “If it came to the Supreme Court—which has moved to the right—I think the likely path is that it will become possible,” he said.

Other experts think a state would lose in federal court, but the new makeup of the federal bench makes this unpredictable.

To understand the potential impact, think of a fast-growing area

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the first place—before it gets tested in court. But a statute barring states from excluding undocumented immigrants from redistricting would have to pass through the incredibly thin margins in Congress, which isn’t entirely likely. That leaves it up to the courts, which have gotten far more conservative over the past four years.

Even if states are barred from excluding immigrants from

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redistricting, the Trump administration’s scheming has “already done a fair amount of work to sabotage the accuracy of the census,” said Levitt. “That’s something that can’t be undone by a new administration. At this point, the records are what they are. Just the baseline records of how accurate the census is.”

census data. The census determines how a representational group is determined for public polling or how a real estate developer determines where to build. Whether a community gets a grocery store depends on how businesses read census data to decide whether their store would be profitable. The American Community Survey, which gathers in-depth SINCE ITS INCEPTION, the ceninformation more regularly but from sus has always been about political a smaller population, comes from power and who has it. In the Concensus data. The count of 2020—and stitution, the power to conduct the the undercount—will be the foundacensus comes first, before the power tion upon which thousands of other to levy taxes or make war. “It comes data points are based. before each and every thing the fedWith each census, there are eral government is given the power to renewed calls to make it more accurate. “Over the last 100 years, there have been big battles over the questions of accuracy and how to improve it,” said Margo Anderson, a historian of the U.S. census. But in 2020, the complications created by COVID-19 and the fear engendered in communities of color by the Trump administration are helping to set up significant undercounting. “It’s setting up for one of the worst undercounts of people of color that we’ve seen in a while,” Santos said.

Some political leaders have an interest in an undercount as a means to further entrench their power. The statistical portrait of America that Conservative states may fight Republicans prefer is to exclude undocumented simply whiter than realimmigrants in redistricting, ity, because white people with a favorable Supreme Court vote for Republicans at available to approve the action. higher rates. Trump’s interference was at least in do because the conduct of the census part about securing minority rule. determines political power and tells Bureaucrats are trying to do their you who the federal government is best to get the most accurate count and later shapes state and local reppossible. But they can’t make major resentation,” explained Levitt. statistical adjustments in the data, The statistics determine not only such as weighting to account for who has political representation, but undercounting. who gets funding. Congress slices “They [the Census Bureau] want up money to states for all sorts of to do the right thing,” Santos said. grants, from transportation to com“They’re simply not being allowed to munity development, based on the do the right thing.” n

YICHUAN CAO / SIPA USA VIA AP PHOTO

with a high immigrant population, like Fort Bend County, Texas. The population there has jumped nearly 40 percent since the 2010 census, according to the Bureau’s data, and only 32 percent of the county is now white and non-Latino, with large populations of Black, Latino, and Asian immigrants. If Texas can simply ignore what they believe are undocumented immigrant populations in redistricting, Fort Bend County would probably get packed into a district with whiter outlying areas, making it likely that the seat stays in Republican hands.

Wang says the best way forward is to prevent it from happening in

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Why Did Obama Forget Who Brought Him to the Dance?

His memoir is strangely silent about the people who organized for him.

BY M I C A H L . S I F RY I’ve recently spent a good chunk of time engrossed in reading A Promised Land, the first volume of President Barack Obama’s memoirs. After four years of the most impulsive and unstable president of my lifetime, hearing Obama’s calm and judicious voice in my head was like having a long, comforting talk with an old friend. His retelling of the challenges of his first two and a half years, from the global financial crisis and the passage of Obamacare to the Democrats’ midterm collapse in 2010 and the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden in May 2011, is full of revealing details and discerning insight.

But there’s a strange lacuna in A Promised Land, a missing thread that I kept looking for but never found. That thread is his popular base. To win his improbable bid for the presidency in 2008, Obama built his own powerful political army to beat Hillary Clinton, who had been building political support with her husband, President Bill Clinton, for decades. At its height, at the end of the 2008 election, Obama’s campaign had 13 million email addresses (20 percent of his vote total). Almost four million people had donated to him. Two million Obama supporters had created an account on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign’s social networking platform, which they used to organize 200,000 local events. Seventy thousand people used MyBO to create their own fundraising pages, which raised $30 million for his campaign.

But as is by now well known, once Obama entered office, he abandoned this army and staked his presidency on the inside-the-Beltway strategies of his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. It’s never been clear to me that Obama had to drop this ball. After the 2008 election, Obama’s trusted lieutenant and campaign manager, David Plouffe, took a well-earned

long leave of absence to enjoy his new role as a father. Plouffe could have followed colleagues like David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs into the White House, but other than wanting to continue to shepherd Obama’s campaign organization, Plouffe needed a break. And as Plouffe recounted in his own campaign memoir, The Audacity to Win, Obama called him the day after his daughter was born in early November with one request, to keep that movement, which was eventually called Organizing for America, going.

“I know you’re disappearing for a while to change diapers and play Mr. Dad,” Plouffe says Obama told him, “but just make sure you find time to help figure out how to keep our supporters involved. I don’t think we can succeed without them. We need to make sure they’re pushing from the grassroots on Washington and helping to spread what we’re trying to do in their local communities. And at the very least, we have to give them the opportunity to stay involved and in touch. They gave their heart and soul to us. This shouldn’t feel like a transactional relationship, because that’s not what it was. I want them along for the ride the next eight years, helping us deliver on all we talked about in the campaign.”

This was very much in tune with how Obama had talked about his grassroots base during the campaign. “Collectively all of you, most of you whom are, I’m not sure, of drinking age, you’ve created the best political organization in America, and probably the best political organization that we’ve seen in the last 30, 40 years. That’s a pretty big deal,” he said in a pep talk to his campaign staff the day after Hillary Clinton had conceded the Democratic nomination to him in June 2008.

Obama made clear then that he knew this organization was going to

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be critical to winning the battles that would come once he was in office. As he told his staff at that meeting, “We don’t have a choice. Now, if we screw this up, and all those people who really need help, they’re not going to get help. Those of you who care about global warming, I don’t care what John McCain says, he’s not going to push that agenda hard. Those of you who care about Darfur, I guarantee you, they’re not going to spend any political capital on that. Those of you who are concerned about education, there will be a bunch of lip service, and then more of the same. Those of you who are concerned that there’s a sense of fairness in our economy, it will be less fair. So, now everybody’s counting on you, not just me.”

As I’ve written before, however, Plouffe didn’t seem to think of Obama’s base in the same way. The campaign’s 13-million-name email list, for example, was for him a new kind of top-down broadcast system that he understood mainly as a tool for getting around the mainstream media. “We had essentially created our own television network, only better, because we communicated with no filter to what would amount to about 20 percent of the total number of votes we would need to win,” Plouffe wrote in his memoir. And once Obama was in the White House, Plouffe didn’t think much of all the people behind those 13 million email addresses, telling Ari Melber in a 2009 interview for The Nation, “In the White House, obviously you’re not really raising money and you’re not really doing organizing. The main focus is to help deliver message.”

All of this matters a lot, because while Plouffe demobilized the massive army that had gotten Obama to the White House, folding it into the Democratic National Committee and using its giant list mainly to ask supporters to buy Obama mugs and send occasional thank-you notes to members of Congress, the right wing was swiftly building up its own grassroots army to help block all of Obama’s initiatives in government, the Tea Party. In the critical months of the fight for health care reform, for example, Organizing for America was only able to muster about

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300,000 phone calls to members of Congress. Having won the White House by building a dynamic base of millions of volunteers, Obama went into his policy battles with one arm tied behind his back. When he complains in his memoir about unfair press coverage of his efforts or the Republicans’ ability to get away with legislative murder, he’s writing about an unbalanced political landscape that he, wittingly or unwittingly, helped create.

At the very end of his presidency, in late 2016 and early 2017, Obama gave several interviews where he seemed to acknowledge that his failure to keep organizing after winning the 2008 election was a critical mistake. To George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, who asked about the 1,000 seats lost by the Democratic Party at the state level during Obama’s eight years, he said, “I take some responsibility on that,” but he added, “my docket was really full here, so I couldn’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic

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Party and function as Commanderin-Chief and President of the United States. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.”

To NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Obama admitted, “I think that we haven’t done it as well as we need to. For example, we know that the Republicans, funded through organizations like the Koch brothers, have been very systematic at … building from the ground up and communicating to state legislators and financing school board races and public utility commission races. You know, I am a proud Democrat, but I do think that we have a bias towards national issues and international issues, and as a consequence I think we’ve ceded too much territory.”

So as I read A Promised Land, I kept looking for hindsight about cardinal political error. Obama offers none. The words “Organizing for America” don’t appear anywhere

in the book. To be sure, he was fully aware of how his campaign had tapped grassroots enthusiasm for his upstart bid and channeled it effectively, pointing, for example, to a “determined band of volunteers called Idahoans for Obama [who] had organized themselves” and helped him pick up crucial primary delegates from that unlikely state.

By the fall of 2008, he writes with praise of Plouffe for having invested in building up his grassroots army, noting that it had “fanned out across the country, registering hundreds of thousands of new voters and launching unprecedented operations in states that allowed early voting.” He adds, “Our online donations continued to flow, allowing us to play in whatever media markets we chose.”

And as Election Day approaches, Obama writes of his awe at the size of the crowds coming to his rallies and worries about having aroused too much hope, knowing that he might not be able to meet the

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expectations that some of his followers were pressing on him.

But after his election as president, the grassroots disappears from Obama’s story. The amnesia starts the night of his inauguration, when he attended ten formal balls with first lady Michelle Obama, but only the first one, where he was serenaded

by Beyoncé, and later one for members of the armed forces, make it into his memoir. The Obama for America staff ball, which was attended by 10,000 staff and where Obama reportedly spoke for 17 minutes, is gone from his memory. White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who managed the White House’s relationships with Democratic advocacy organizations, gets barely a mention for his role in the health care reform fight. The organizers who took him to victory in the Iowa caucus, who he says he “would still do anything for,” are nowhere in the rest of the book, even as one of them, Mitch Stewart, would come to run Organizing for America at the DNC. I don’t know why Obama forgot his base, though here are some theories.

First, he was a captive of the White House bubble, and no one in his intimate circle or among his top advisers spoke for the base. It’s striking to see who Obama refers to by their first names or nicknames in A Promised Land: Joe (Biden), Rahm (Emanuel), Axe (David Axelrod), Valerie (Jarrett), Gibbs (Robert Gibbs, his first press secretary), Favs (Jon Favreau, a top speechwriter), Ben (Rhodes, another key speechwriter), Samantha (Power, a human rights writer who served on Obama’s Senate staff and then went with him to serve as U.N. ambassador), Reggie (Love, one of his body men), Sam (Kass, the first family’s personal cook and Obama’s pool-playing buddy), and a handful of old friends from Chicago. These are the people with the most influence on Obama day to day, it appears.

As best as I can tell, none of them other than Power had any experience with or understanding of the power of grassroots organizing, and in her case it was all in the field of international human rights activism.

People who did have organizing DNA didn’t last long in the Obama

White House or they kept their profile low. Van Jones, who was a prominent Black activist given a top position on the Council on Environmental Quality to focus on green jobs, lost his job once the Republican right focused on some controversial statements he had made earlier in his career. He resigned in September 2009.

Kate Albright-Hanna, one of the leaders of the new-media team that was the heart of Obama’s online campaign army, lasted just a few months in the Obama White House, growing ever more frustrated as she saw the culture of “yes we can” organizing, which emphasized bottom-up community engagement and the knitting together of a nationwide movement, replaced by a “bloodless” and “technocratic” approach “made of big data.”

As she recalled a few years ago with a memorable piece in Civicist, the site I edited when I was at Civic Hall, that new kind of digital-engagement strategy, which became the dominant form of online organizing in Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign as well as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run, “rolled its eyes at narrative, on the ground feedback, and human political instinct. In place of late nights talking to dairy farmers in their kitchens, there were algorithms.”

A second reason is how Obama seems to have convinced himself of the limits of his own power. He blames the media for much of his inability to move the public, repeatedly citing how poorly it covered politics and frustrated his efforts to connect. He writes, “Whether out of fear of appearing biased, or because conflict sells, or because their editors demanded it, or because it was the easiest way to meet the deadlines of a twenty-fourhour, internet-driven news cycle, their collective approach to reporting on Washington followed a depressingly predictable script: Report what one side says (quick sound bite included). Report what the other side says (opposing sound bite, the more insulting the better). Leave it to an opinion poll to sort out who’s right.”

And yet, when he goes out on the hustings and has to deal with grassroots protests, from either Tea Party types or left-wing activists, Obama grudgingly admits that organizing matters, and also that the mood in

the country had shifted, in part by right-wing organizing against him (as well as left-wing dissatisfaction).

Writing of his efforts to shore up Democrats before the 2010 midterms, he admits that “even without looking at the polls, I could sense a change in the atmosphere on the campaign trail: an air of doubt hovering over each rally, a forced, almost desperate quality to the cheers and laughter, as if the crowds and I were a couple at the end of a whirlwind romance, trying to muster up feelings that had started to fade. How could I blame them? They had expected my election to transform our country, to make government work for ordinary people, to restore some sense of civility in Washington. Instead, many of their lives had grown harder, and Washington seemed just as broken, distant, and bitterly partisan as ever.”

Well, actually, they had expected to be brought along, to apply “yes we can” organizing to the changes needed too. But in this passage, as elsewhere in his memoir, Obama reveals more of what I think is finally the main reason the base is not in his book: He believed too much in himself. His superpower is also his kryptonite.

Obama was the kind of gifted political communicator who comes around only once in a generation.

Buoyed by a savvy circle of operators who built their careers around his campaign, he never saw how much of his original political success was the product of a unique fusion of political celebrity and community organizing.

It’s no wonder that once Obama entered the White House, he and his team obsessed about how much power the media had to shape the narrative of his presidency. He never understood that when enough people are successfully organized to move en masse, they can actually write history themselves. Instead, he thought he was the author of his story. And apparently, he still does. n Micah L. Sifry is the author of The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet). He writes a regular newsletter, The Connector, about democracy, organizing, technology, and social movements.

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ust em ice s

Justic e Dems

Sunris e Demand Progress

Indivisible

THEMOVEMENT, THEPARTY, AND AND THE THEPRESIDENT

he Republicans are cracking up. Can Democratic unity hold? And T will the Biden administration be an ally of long-term organizing?

By Robert Kuttner

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DIVISIBLE DEMOCRATS

In 2020, divisions and rivalries among the progressive infrastructure were papered over by the urgency of beating Trump. But tensions between reformers and regulars go back a century. Infighting that began in the 1990s between Clinton-era “New Democrats” and progressives reverberates today in the challenges posed by such groups as Justice Democrats, Sunrise, Data for Progress, and the Movement for Black Lives.

The Democratic center, however, has shifted to the left. Many young activists were brought into politics by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Black groups are on the march, yet practical about coalition and power. There is no grassroots group urging Democrats to be more centrist on economics or more cautious on racial justice. Inside the Biden administration, despite a corporate undertow, progressives have several major power posts.

All that said, mapping out this network of institutional and grassroots infrastructure is maddeningly complex. It includes the Democratic Party in its various incarnations, and closely allied national issue groups such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, or the League of Conservation Voters. There is also the labor movement; large donors; mass digital groups such as MoveOn; the new wave of post-2016 resistance groups such as Indivisible and Run for Something; established think thanks such as Public Citizen, Common Cause, Center for American Progress, the Economic Policy Institute, and Demos, which run from center to left; newer and younger groups such as Sunrise; and groups that reflect the new consciousness around racial justice and remediation such as Color of Change.

In addition, there are voter registration and mobilization groups such as Voto Latino and Black Voters Matter; the pathbreaking small-donor platform ActBlue; specialized groups that provide data services such as Catalist; ones that do training such the Midwest Academy; and smaller local groups with names like Tomorrow We Vote, Bay Rising Action, United We Dream, and literally thousands of others. Networks

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C es rti C DNe Pa DSC at C St C DC IN 2020, DESPITE DOWN-BALLOT

losses, the existential need to defeat Donald Trump produced more collaboration and less infighting than the Democratic coalition has seen in a long time. Progressives, notably hostile to Hillary Clinton in 2016, mustered enthusiasm for an ideologically similar Joe Biden. And Biden, having won the nomination with the weakest field operation of any modern candidate, needed to rely on the progressive ground game. His victory was built on a profusion of organizing with a scale, breadth, and diversity unlike any seen since the 1960s.

In a few states—Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia—it all came together. In Arizona, the anti-immigrant thuggery that ran from Sheriff Joe Arpaio to Donald Trump produced more than a decade of organizing and coalition building. Democrats carried the state for Biden-Harris, picked up a U.S. senator, held their own in the state House and flipped a seat in the state Senate. In Wisconsin, with a gifted party chair in Ben Wikler, collaborative organizing won back the state in the presidential race, held or gained legislative

seats to block a Republican veto-proof majority. And in Georgia, a ten-year organizing and mobilizing effort, led by Stacey Abrams in concert with burgeoning onthe-ground groups, turned the state blue.

But those successes, as role models, are more exception than norm. Two core questions remain: whether the intraparty unity can be built on, and whether the key players will draw the right lessons from 2020.

For some, it’s all about winning elections in the current cycle. But it’s also about building power and organization for the long term.

For this article, I interviewed upwards of 60 people at all levels of the progressive ecosystem. Nearly everyone agreed that the candidate- and donor-driven system invests too much money, too chaotically, too late in the election cycle. “If we had a national commitment to year-round organizing,” says Wikler, “we could find a lot of needles in a lot of haystacks.”

If anyone should appreciate that reality, it’s Joe Biden. Defending and increasing the slender Democratic majority in the House and Senate in 2022 and holding the White House in 2024, in a way that builds longterm strength, will require massive grassroots efforts, beginning now.

The new DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, is a favorite of the activist state party chairs.

Harrison, who was party chair in South Carolina before running for the Senate in 2020, tells me, “We missed an opportunity during the Obama administration to build a long-term effective grassroots organization. President Biden could be the greatest party builder in a generation.”

If the stars align, Harrison might bring just the right combination of presidential loyalty, party-building, and independent grassroots organizing.

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with national reach such as People’s Action, Community Change, the Movement Voter Project, and the Center for Popular Democracy combine year-round issue organizing plus election-year mobilization.

These activists are not only heavily Black, brown, and female. They are heavily young.

At best, this whole is greater than the sum of its parts. At worst, it invites dissension, schism, and sprawl. Though Trump has fractured his party, the deeper conservative infrastructure is all too resilient. There are no groups demanding the RNC recognize that rural lives matter. The right knows without being asked to make common cause with the NRA and the Fraternal Order of Police.

Efforts to bring coherence to this sprawl use what the cool kids refer to as “tables,” bringing all the players together for regular information exchange and strategizing.

There are state and national tables, as well as tables for donors and tables built on ethnicity, race, and issue causes. These have helped build collaborative coordination for a coalition that resists top-down dictation.

The State Voices is the national coordinating organization for 25 state-based tables of 501(c)(3) grassroots groups, providing funding and technical assistance for their voter registration and mobilization work. For example, Pro Georgia operates as one such anchor in the Peach State. Led by veteran organizer Tamieka Atkins, Pro Georgia has more than 30 member organizations, from Atlantans Building Leadership for Empowerment, to the Center for Pan Asian Community Services, to Women Engaged.

America Votes is the national table for large groups that do partisan 501(c)(4) independent-expenditure campaigns, led by unions, progressive organizations, and reproductive rights and climate groups.

“When we started in 2003,” says America Votes founding president Cecile Richards, the longtime leader of Planned Parenthood, “the heads of these groups didn’t even know each other. Collectively they raised a lot of money, but had no coherent strategy.”

This year, America Votes not only raised upwards of $100 million for coordinated campaigns in battleground states. It underwrote early recruitment, training, and stipends for organizers for the general elec-

18 PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2021

Just below the grim news of Democratic down-ballot losses are gains that confirm the argument for long-term organizing. tion, even before the primary was settled.

These helped jump-start Biden’s campaign against Trump.

DISAPPOINTMENTS AND SILVER LININGS

If all this mobilizing was so impressive, why did Democrats bomb down-ballot on Election Day? Voting data has yet to be analyzed in detail, but we can offer a few hypotheses. For starters, while Democrats abandoned live voter registration, big rallies, and door-knocking (until a panicky last few weeks in October), Trump’s campaign was at the doors and the president was on the hustings, exposing voters to his appeal as well as to COVID. Second, a slice of moderate Republicans, notably suburban women, could not stand Trump and voted for Biden, but then voted Republican down-ticket. Also, the Democratic base of younger, minority, low-propensity voters overperformed in 2018 when Trump was off the ballot, but underperformed relative to Republicans in 2020. There were also some unpleasant surprises, still to be fully analyzed and explained, in the shift of many immigrant areas to Trump, as well as a slightly increased Trump share of the Black vote. (This dramatically reversed itself in the Georgia runoffs, where relentless organizing of Black voters led Democrats to take over the Senate.)

But just below the grim top-line news are results that confirm the argument for long-term organizing. In several states, Democrats held their own or gained state legislative seats—and these were exactly the states where effective parties had organized, long term, in concert with movement groups.

In Washington state, Democrats are seemingly sitting pretty with a trifecta of governor, House, and Senate. “People think of Washington as a blue state. It’s not all that blue,” says the state party chair, Tina

Podlodowski. She became chair in 2017 after serving on the Seattle City Council and losing a run for secretary of state. “Out of that experience,” she says, “I realized how broken our infrastructure was.”

Podlodowski, who grew up in a union family and went on to work in the tech sector, set about to change that. When she became chair, Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats held the House by two seats. Now, after intensive party building, the Democrats hold the House by 16 and the Senate by 7.

They suffered no losses in 2020.

“I spend about 30 hours a week calling donors to support organizing,” says Podlodowski. “My budget is just under $5 million. I didn’t get a dime from the Biden campaign because I was not in a battleground campaign. He took out $56 million from my state, from my donors. I had to pay $60,000 for Biden yard signs. It took almost an act of God to get a two-minute video from Kamala Harris.”

Podlodowski appreciates that in 2020, battleground states had to get disproportionate money to beat Trump. But going forward, she insists that the funding be spread around. “In 2021, we literally have thousands of local races where we can build a bench for Democrats, test messages, and see how we move the needle,” she says. “The Republicans play the long game.”

The same lessons apply to states dismissed as hopelessly red, where a lot of voters in fact can be moved to vote blue.

“State parties are treated as afterthoughts,” says Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska party chair.

“They’re seen as bank accounts for national races. We haven’t been taken seriously since Dean was chair.” Even so, Kleeb says, “the Biden team was leaps and bounds ahead of the Clinton team in the way they treated our state party. They ran staff through us, as opposed to around us.”

In this cycle, Kleeb, an unpaid volun-

NATI HARNIK / AP PHOTO

teer chair with a staff of two, raised some through a voter registration coalition of 23 $700,000, and did a lot of grassroots work in local groups called One Arizona, and its concert with progressive organizations like political ally LUCHA. Over a decade, a milthe Heartland Workers Center, which orga- lion new voters were registered.

In 2011, organizers waged a successful nizes heavily Latino workers in Nebraska’s meatpacking industry. In a rough year, the recall campaign against state Sen. PresiDemocrats netted a gain of one seat in the dent Russell Pearce, a key architect of the Nebraska legislature, and also picked up a immigrant-bashing strategy and lead sponsupermajority on the state board of education. sor of SB 1070. In 2012, the Supreme Court Biden carried the competitive Second overturned most of SB 1070. Sheriff Arpaio House District (Omaha and suburbs) by was voted out of office in 2016. Latino voter 6.5 points, but the progressive congressio- turnout increased from 32 percent in 2014 nal candidate, Kara Eastman, fell short by to 49 percent in 2018.

The coalition was Latino-led but multi4.5 points. She nearly won in 2018, defeating a candidate favored by the Democratic ethnic. The Mormon Church was a key ally; Congressional Campaign Committee in a though far from liberal, it was actively recruitcontested primary. The DCCC retaliated by ing Latino converts. Sen. Pearce, a Mormon, giving her only token support in the general, was a big embarrassment; after the recall, which she lost by just two points. “The state he was succeeded by a more Latino-friendparty could use about $3 million for paid ly Mormon. “That law was not only a moral canvassers,” says Kleeb. “If we had that, affront to the Mormons,” says a senior Demowe’d be able to flip five more legislative seats crat. “It was bad for their business model.”

For most of the decade, the Arizona and win the Second House District.”

In Arizona, the party lagged well behind its natu“State parties are treated as afterthoughts,” says Jane Kleeb, ral constituency. Beginning the Nebraska party chair. in 2010, Republicans began sponsoring laws and ballot initiatives to harass immigrants and deny them services. These measures included the notorious SB 1070, allowing law enforcement officials to racially profile people and stop them at will to demand proof of citizenship. The law also criminalized helping the undocumented. Other measures prohibited non-English-language instruction in schools. This was the heyday of the notorious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who exercised his new policestate rights with relish.

The Latino community responded with mass protests, including a boycott of Arizona as a convention location for businesses. More critically, they engaged in inventive bottom-up organizing, loosely coordinated

Democratic Party leadership was of little help. “They thought that their only chance to win was to move to the right,” says Luis Avila, who helped organize a civil rights coalition, Somos America, in 2011. “They were largely irrelevant to our fight.” Over time, the party caught up with the people; or more precisely, the people took over the party. By 2020, one movement activist, Regina Romero, had been elected mayor of Tucson. Several others were elected to city councils and county offices.

Felecia Rotellini, the state party chair since 2018, worked closely with movement leaders to flip the Senate seat now held by Democrat Mark Kelly and to carry Arizona for Biden. Rotellini stepped down after the election success. The new party leader is expected to be state Rep. Raquel Terán of Phoenix, a leader of the movement against SB 1070 and the Pearce recall.

Jaime Harrison, who calls himself “a Howard Dean acolyte,” has said that he

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would work to a raise more money for the kind of long-term organizing that links party and movement. As a former red-state chair, he shares the frustration of supposedly red states being foolishly written off by the national party apparatus.

THE GRASSROOTS VS. THE WHITE HOUSE

These state successes mark the beginning of a long-overdue rebellion. To a far greater degree than Republicans, Democratic presidents concentrate power and money in the White House, at the expense of the party base and down-ballot candidates. When the president leaves office, the party has to be rebuilt all over again. Barack Obama was the worst offender, squandering a prodigious organizing apparatus, but he was only repeating a pattern.

A consummate outsider, Jimmy Carter built his own political operation under the snarky Hamilton Jordan (“My friends pronounce it Jerdan but you can call me Jordan.”) Carter swept into office on a massive post-Watergate tide that also

elected 295 Democrats to the House. He had little use for the party.

Carter’s first DNC chair, former Gov. Ken Curtis of Maine, proposed an ambitious plan to coordinate voter files and election analysis, and help state and local parties with voter registration and get-out-the-vote.

This was killed by Carter’s political team. In his first year, Carter refused even to lend his signature to a DNC direct-mail effort. By the end of the year, Curtis quit in frustration.

After Michael Dukakis’s defeat in 1988, Ron Brown, a Jesse Jackson lieutenant who had previously worked for Ted Kennedy, was elected to chair the DNC. Working with his legendary political director Paul Tully, Brown rebuilt the party grassroots.

When Bill Clinton won the 1992 nomination, Brown and Tully became part of the campaign. Brown went on to be Clinton’s secretary of commerce until his tragic death in a plane crash on a trade mission in 1996.

At first, Clinton grasped the importance of party building. His new DNC chair, Don Fowler, even hired Heather Booth, a widely admired organizer with radical credentials,

to design and direct organizer training. But after a promising start, Clinton increasingly centralized operations in the White House, using party resources mainly for his 1996 re-election campaign. He got entangled in a morass of fundraising scandals, like providing Lincoln Bedroom stays for donors and raising money illegally from foreign nationals. Steve Grossman, who became DNC chair in 1996, spent much of his time and talent on the thankless task of persuading donors to pay off party debts, and the ambitious plans for party building took a back seat.

After John Kerry’s 2004 presidential loss, Howard Dean’s famous grassroots 50-state strategy developed digital organizing strategies pioneered by the activists in his own presidential run. His tech team, led by Joe Rospars, went on to found Blue State Digital and then worked for Barack Obama.

They raised upward of half a billion online and built an email list of 13 million. (In 2010, the BSD crew cashed in, selling their creation to WPP, the world’s largest holding company for ad agencies, for a reported $100 million. So it goes.)

JEFF BLAKE / AP PHOTO

“We missed an opportunity during the Obama administration to build a longterm effective grassroots organization,” said Jaime Harrison.

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by Republican-lite in purple districts.

In 2018, populist J.D. Scholten, a former minor league baseball star, took on far-right incumbent Steve King in Iowa’s Fourth District. The DCCC considered the race unwinnable and provided no support.

Scholten lost by just three points. Two years later, the DCCC belatedly backed Scholten. But King lost the GOP primary to a moderate who handily beat Scholten in the general. The DCCC staffing and strategic advice to Scholten was like oil and water. “They kept sending me people who I ignored,” Scholten told me. “Their comms person came with me in rural Iowa, wearing a suit.”

Under former chair Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, the DCCC even blacklisted consultants who work for challengers.

The new chair, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, has ended the blacklist, but is not ending the practice of playing favorites in primaries. None of this has intimidated Justice Democrats and a newly energized progressive campaign machine, who keep running against centrist incumbents, and winning.

The DSCC, if anything, has an even worse record. Tightly controlled by Chuck Schumer, the DSCC likes centrists with military records, who can be magnets for funding appeals. A little-known fact is that when you send money via the DSCC to, say, Amy McGrath (who was trounced in Kentucky

by Mitch McConnell), only a fraction of the money actually goes to McGrath. The exact split is a matter of negotiation between the campaign and the DSCC, which uses the national appeal of a McGrath to raise funds to be spent elsewhere.

In Texas, the DSCC disdained two attractive progressive candidates, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, a Latina labor organizer, and Dallas state Senator Royce West, who is African American, in favor of a former Republican with a military background, M.J. Hegar. Tzintzún Ramirez and West got courtesy interviews, but the decision was made in Washington. In the general, Hegar was clobbered by incumbent John Cornyn, by more than a million votes, running well behind Biden. In North Caro-

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y Wall Street

Dean built an improbable coalition of anti-establishment progressives and state party chairs. He raised money to give every state party $60,000 a year for technology, plus funds to pay three to five staffers, a minimum of $25,000 a month. No DNC chair had ever done anything like that, and it was still a pittance compared to what the RNC does.

Obama won the 2008 nomination in red states that Hillary Clinton largely ignored, thanks in part to Dean. He created a prodigious volunteer army, Organizing for America (OFA). But after winning the presidency, Obama ousted Dean and folded OFA into the White House. The millions of volunteers who had been mobilized by Obama dissipated. It was one of most self-defeating moves in party history. Democrats paid dearly for the weakened grassroots in the 2010 midterms, when they lost 63 House seats, a modern record.

By 2016, under Obama’s DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also had a day job in Congress, the party machinery was moribund, contributing to Hillary Clinton’s defeat, and setting up an epic clash between the Sanders and Obama/Clinton factions on how to rebuild.

Sanders’s candidate, Keith Ellison, narrowly lost to Tom Perez, the candidate of the party’s Obama/Clinton wing. However, Perez, working closely with Larry Cohen, head of the Sanders group Our Revolution, named Ellison as deputy chair and agreed to many of the reforms demanded by Sanders’s allies. The two factions got behind a unity commission that

The Progressive Movement

recommended key changes to make the party more small-d democratic.

The DNC added incentives to induce caucus states to shift to primaries. There were seven caucus states in 2020, down from 14 in 2016. “With the shift to more primaries, participation rates went through the roof,” says Perez. “You build muscle memory, and you have far more diversity.” So-called superdelegates (party luminaries and elected officials) did not get to vote on the first nominating ballot of the 2020 convention.

Perez also increased the DNC annual grant to state parties. The reforms made the DNC chair a full-time job, with a $250,000 salary, so that the next chair will not be a part-timer reliant on an executive director. “In the end, Perez worked closely with us on party reform,” says Cohen. “He has supported the initial steps toward party building, but real change must come in the state parties.”

But even if Jaime Harrison turns out to be the second coming of Howard Dean, relations between local party activists and Washington-based party organs are poisoned by the party fundraising committees for House and Senate candidates, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The DCCC infuriates local party activists by taking sides in primaries, and then punishing candidates who have the effrontery to run against its favorites. It tends to favor centrists over progressives, both because they are often able to raise corporate money or self-fund, and on the theory that voters are attracted

JAN/FEB 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

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Enlisting large Democratic donors to invest long-term, rather than just in election-year candidates, remains a challenge. Billionaires also tend to have boundless self-confidence, which sometimes leads to impulsive patterns of support.

In 2004, most of George Soros’s political money went to an umbrella group called America Coming Together, whose goal was both to elect Kerry and to build progressive strength for the long term. “We had a grand plan to mobilize, year in and year out,” says Steve Rosenthal, the former AFL-CIO political director and widely admired strategist, who ran ACT. But after Kerry lost, Soros and ACT’s other big funder, Progressive Insurance’s Peter Lewis, pulled the plug and shut ACT down.

Sixteen years later, Michael Bloomberg put $100 million into Florida, with no results and no lasting infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Organizing Corps 2020, led

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lina, the DSCC endorsed the lackluster (and judgment-impaired) Cal Cunningham over two African American contenders.

“You don’t appoint candidates from inside the Beltway, based on who raises the biggest bankroll,” says Howard Dean.

“When we do this, we pick the wrong candidate. It takes grassroots.”

THE DONOR DOMAIN

Black Panthers, Tammany Hall, and the labor movement: blend service with political organizing. Nobody underwrote anything comparable on the Democratic side.

In 2003, Rob Stein, a former chief of staff to Ron Brown, created a nowfamous slideshow that anatomized in great detail the right’s disciplined long-term funding and the collective incoherence of the center-left. He enlisted George Soros, Peter Lewis, and Herb and Marion Sandler to found the Democracy Alliance, intending to solve this problem. After a shaky takeoff, marked by a lot of fuss to fund utterly safe and orthodox groups, the DA added major unions as stakeholders and was nudged left and longer-term by its current president Gara LaMarche.

Big DA donors still lavishly support the center-left Center for American Progress and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But since 2014, the list of DA-approved outfits now includes more insurgent groups such as Demos, Americans for Financial Reform, the Center for Popular Democracy, and People’s Action. Even so, the DA approved list is only a menu. Actual donations must come from individuals.

Today, nothing is more important than rebuilding the labor movement. But while billionaires sit at the same DA table with national labor leaders, few welcome labor organizers into their own businesses. In an era whose economics and politics are defined by grotesque inequality, it’s hard for a party reliant on billionaires to be progressive on pocketbook issues. This straddle confuses brand, mission, and message.

Progressives have long viewed small money as the antidote to big money. ActBlue has created an online small-dollar revolution. In 2020, millions of people engaged in phone-banking. Millions would have knocked on doors, but for the pandemic.

But for many, activism took the form of responding to online appeals and making a digital donation, not quite the same thing as doing neighbor-to-neighbor politics.

by Rachel Haltom-Irwin and Meg Ansara, was a multimillion-dollar effort to recruit and train over 1,000 organizers, with stipends, for the 2020 coordinated campaign in battleground states. The project worked through the DNC and state and local parties. When the election ended, all campaign staff, including these organizers, were dropped from the payroll, and are currently looking for jobs. There was no source of funds to keep paying them.

“The problem with too many donors is that they think like venture capitalists or hedge fund managers,” says Rosenthal.

“Try something and if you don’t win, cut your losses. But that’s not how investing in politics works. It needs to be long-term, you need to develop a relationship with voters.”

By contrast, the right provides massive long-term strategic funding to a relatively small number of core institutions. For years, the Koch brothers have been quietly funding a group called LIBRE, a combination service organization and indoctrination machine for Hispanic immigrants. At a LIBRE storefront, you can take English classes, get help with navigating the social service bureaucracy, and learn about the evils of socialist Democrats. What LIBRE does is a tactic known to groups as varied as Hamas, the original

THE CONSULTANTINDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The progressive infrastructure is heavily

reliant on what LaMarche calls the “consultant-industrial complex.” Most serious people in politics agree that far too much money is spent on TV ads. “All that TV late in the campaign is worse than ineffective. Instead of turning people out, you tune them out,” says Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. But the consultants who advise campaigns typically get 10 percent of all TV ad buys, and no commission if the campaign hires more organizers. So TV rules.

For decades, the issue of who controls voter files has plagued the Democrats. Each campaign controlled its own files, kept them for future use, and was wary about sharing them with others. In some cases, consultants got hold of the files and sold them for profit.

Meanwhile, in 2015, after years of planning and negotiation, the RNC joined forces with the Koch brothers to create the Data Trust, where data from all campaigns and major outside conservative groups would be pooled and shared in one master data bank. The Republicans even won a ruling from the Federal Election Commission permitting them to include voter data from hard-money and soft-money sources in the same database, as long as the sources were not disclosed.

Belatedly, it dawned on the Democrats that they could do the same thing. After several years of scratching for funds and haggling about who would participate, the Democrats created the Democratic Data Exchange (DDX), unveiled just in time for the 2020 campaign, and run in partnership with the DNC. The exchange allows campaigns, party affiliates, and independent groups to trade voter files, across the hard/ soft money divide. Participation is voluntary. The head of the DDX is none other than Howard Dean. “I was asked to chair the DDX not because I knew data but because I knew the politics,” Dean told me. “There has been a tremendous amount of distrust between state chairs and the DNC, but 41 of the state parties have now joined.”

Outside vendors who sell these services were mightily upset. Eventually, a deal was struck. Many became DDX partners or clients. DDX provides only data files and leaves the number-crunching to firms such as Catalist, a proven and well-respected

source of technical data expertise to progressive groups.

One failed startup, in roughly the same space, was called Alloy, launched in late 2018 by Silicon Valley billionaire and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn (sold to Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion in cash). Hoffman put up half of Alloy’s $35 million, thinking that Alloy could be the master data aggregator and vendor to the Democratic and progressive ecosystem. He hired several of the smartest veterans of the Dean-Obama ventures. But when the DNC decided to create its own data exchange, Alloy was doomed. The venture abruptly folded in late November.

The Democrats’ multiple Silicon Valley connections, coupled with the absence of money for people to be decently compensated as organizers, leads to an unfortunate career path. In late 2019, Jeremy Bird, a key Barack Obama grassroots strategist and former student of organizing master Marshall Ganz, put out the following statement: “I’ve spent my career fighting to change the world for the better … I have always believed in the power of people to make a meaningful impact on the way we all work, vote, and live our lives. That’s why I’m honored to announce today that I am taking on the role of Vice President of Public Engagement at Lyft.” Dozens of senior Obama alums made similar career moves.

THE OTHER SIDE

Compared to its progressive counterpart, the Republican/conservative ecosystem is simple and elegant. Steve Rosenthal uses the metaphor of the TV cooking contest Chopped. In the show, whose set includes a full kitchen, a contestant is handed a box of ingredients and asked to turn them into a meal. “On the Democratic side, we open the basket onstage and we throw it together as well as we can. The Republicans hire an executive chef, who buys all the ingredients he needs.”

Theda Skocpol, the Harvard social scientist who has studied the Democratic Party and citizen activism as much as anyone alive, observes that the Democrats believe in collectivism, but their approach to politics is laissezfaire. The Republicans believe in laissez-faire,

but their approach to politics is Leninist.

Though the various Koch-funded entities might have functioned as a parallel and rival to the institutional Republican apparatus, the two now operate nicely in tandem—because the Koch ideology is now the Republican ideology. The Koch network operates as an organizing, training, and candidate-incubating machine. At the state level, the Koch-funded ALEC provides template legislation to gut regulation, tax equity, and social spending. The RNC, meanwhile, showers money on state parties. Even Trump could not destroy a party and movement infrastructure that was nearly half a century in the making.

On the Republican side, there is no scrambling for jobs that compromise principles or mix messages. You can move from the Koch network, to the White House, to the Heritage Foundation, to the Hill, to a corporate job, with no ideological or partisan contradictions whatsoever. On the contrary, these career patterns and linkages only help strengthen the conservative ecosystem.

Skocpol, in her classic work Diminished Democracy, documented the decline of democratically organized, dues-paying, chapter-based liberal and civic groups.

Today, those groups are on the right: NRA locals, fundamentalist churches, right-tolifers. The left has mainly Washingtonbased advocacy groups run by professional staff and funded by foundations. The Sierra Club, with dues-paying members and real chapters, is the rare exception.

Two decades ago, when digital organizing and social media were new, the left had a big head start. This was the heyday of MoveOn (founded in 1998), and the early political bloggers, such as Prospect alum Josh Marshall (who started Talking Points Memo in 2000); Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos (2002); “Atrios” (Duncan Black); Jerome Armstrong’s MyDD; and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, among many others, plus Huffington Post (founded in 2005).

The hope was that a mass progressive base connected to the blogosphere, outside the stale structure of party insiders, would both democratize politics and push it left. They promoted Howard Dean, first for president, then for party chair. They refined

JAN/FEB 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

online giving and organizing technology, orchestrated live meetups, and nourished the 2007–2008 Obama campaign, which gained digital savvy and organizing genius far superior to that of either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

But the moment was surprisingly brief.

While MoveOn endured, blogs as insurgent communities morphed into either celebrity platforms or new media forms that were useful but not exactly radical. Huffington Post was sold to Verizon in 2016, which in turn sold it to BuzzFeed. Prospect alums Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias used Vox to do “explainer” journalism, and then moved on, Klein to The New York Times.

The next new thing is Substack, a platform for aspiring media soloists. Neither Vox nor Substack is a movement-building tool. The first-generation bloggers who stayed the course, like Josh Marshall, became players in an increasingly crowded space.

The right has figured out this game, underwritten it handsomely, and cleaned the left’s clock. Today, the right has more cogent media and messaging, as you would expect from an authoritarian movement. It is mostly comprised of businesses like Fox News, Breitbart, and talk radio—which not only rally the base but turn a profit. The right also has an advantage since it traffics in myths and lies, which turn into memes that are repeated and passed along, while the progressive left is largely fact-based and, as good liberals, values disputation for its own sake. The largest platforms are ideologically neutral, yet tailor-made for repetition of big lies. The recent actions of Facebook and Twitter to disable violent users are a temporary setback, but the right is finding other modes of communication.

Progressive funders, who have invested in all manner of infrastructure, have not seen traditional or social media as a priority.

The closest thing to a social media operation that tries to engage the right on its own terms, with memes and a mass following, is called Occupy Democrats. It was founded in 2012 by immigrant twin brothers then in their twenties, Rafael and Omar Rivero, as a Facebook group and later a website. With 30 million followers counting partner organizations, Occupy has the largest number of

24 PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2021

Facebook followers of any site on the left; it and Fox News regularly rank at the top.

In 2020, the Rivero brothers explicitly made their site into a pro-Biden propaganda outlet. The problem, however, is that Occupy Democrats is caught between its desire to engage the right and the need to be at least moderately truthful. Most funders are wary of it. “The right is willing to lie to their followers and their followers like being lied to,” Rafael Rivero told me. “Their followers are impervious to reality. They really are in a cult.” Despite their immense following, he and his brother Omar operate on a shoestring with a small staff. It’s an uneven contest, as is so much of right versus left.

THE LONG VIEW

In the 1970s, you could drive from Washington state to West Virginia by way of Montana, South Dakota, Minnesota, south through Iowa and Missouri, and east through Tennessee. In every one of these states, both senators were progressive Democrats. More precisely, they were labor Democrats. So much for the premise that the “original gerrymander” of equal Senate representation for small states leaves the Senate hopelessly red.

Labor Democrats of that era insisted that Democrats deliver for regular people. That’s why they got elected. The original PAC was the CIO Political Action Committee, created in 1943 to back Democrats after Republicans made major gains in the 1942 midterms.

There is nothing today that plays the core role, institutionally and ideologically, once played by the labor movement. Political scientist Daniel Schlozman observes in his important 2015 book, When Movements Anchor Parties, that on the right the conservative movement took over the Republican Party; while on the left the labor movement that once anchored a progressive Democratic Party got steadily weaker, as Democratic presidents became more centrist.

The practical question is whether a progressive movement as far-flung as the one we have today can play the anchoring role once played by labor. In our idealized conception of small-d democracy, having thousands of new, local groups is great.

Sometimes, David really can beat Goliath.

But can 10,000 mini-Davids, each with a niche organization and niche funders, beat the strategic Goliath of the modern conservative system? There are also schisms over such issues as affirmative action.

Even with multiple tables providing better communication and coordination, there are deep differences of perception, principle, and strategy. Should Democrats try to win in purple states and metro suburbs as moderates or economic populists?

How should race and class come together in Democratic appeals? Is the paramount task to mobilize the base, or convert former Trump voters?

Theda Skocpol, who has extensively studied the successful resistance movements that led to a net pickup of 40 House seats in 2018, cautions that this wave of activists were not all that progressive. They were substantially older, white, and female, and mainly they were appalled by Trump’s plain extremism.

Yet 2022 could be different. Georgia demonstrates that a kind of soft populism, built on such basics as pandemic relief and more reliable health coverage, can unite moderates and progressives.

The conventional wisdom is that progressive populists can’t win in the suburbs, or that we must choose between base and swing voters. Yet a gifted leader who motivates volunteers can defy that premise, as demonstrated by Jan Schakowsky of Chicago’s North Shore, Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County, Maryland, or Antonio Delgado of New York’s 19th District, a Working Families Party insurgent who f lipped a longtime Republican seat in 2018 in the Hudson Valley suburbs of New York. The recent Senate runoff victories in Georgia, where turnout broke records, were built on gains both in previously neglected communities and in suburbs. They were premised on a multiracial coalition and direct, simple appeals for economic relief in the form of emergency $2,000 payments. And all these wins ref lected organizing.

Within the Democratic Party, the struggle between reformers and regulars has echoes as far back as the Progressive Era, and resonances as current as the primary fights picked by Justice Democrats. In his classic

CAROLYN K ASTER / AP PHOTO

In Georgia, a ten-year organizing and mobilizing effort, led by Stacey Abrams in concert with burgeoning on-the-ground groups, turned the state blue.

work, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, published in 1905, journalist William Riordan quotes George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany boss, dismissing reformers as “morning glories.” According to Plunkitt, “A reformer can’t last in politics … Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the drygoods or the drug business. You’ve got to be trained up to it or you’re sure to fail.”

A few decades later, the Chicago reformer Abner Mikva, as an earnest young law student, showed up at his local Eighth Ward Regular Democratic Club to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson’s 1948 campaign for governor. “Who sent you?” the ward committeeman asked warily. “Nobody,” Mikva replied.

Said the boss, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”

Regulars, who indeed see politics as a business, are wary of new blood they don’t

control. That’s why the DCCC and the DSCC keep trashing insurgents and making sure that newly elected legislators are beholden to them. The practical question is whether today’s insurgents will turn out to be better at the long game than the regulars, or whether they will just be the latest generation of morning glories.

In fact, today’s insurgents are extremely good at politics, and they are in it for the long haul. The Working Families Party has been around since 1998, and it keeps getting stronger. WFP has moved beyond its origins in New York, and this year its affiliates picked up seats at all levels in Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Mexico. Three groups deeply committed to long-term organizing, People’s Action, Community Change, and the Center for Popular Democracy, the successor to ACORN, have been at it since the

1970s. And of course the labor movement dates to the 19th century.

Intriguingly and paradoxically, Joe Biden is the epitome of a party regular— who is very dependent on insurgents. He seems to know that, though the base will need to keep reminding him. “Insurgency is what renews the party,” says Howard Dean.

“One generation never steps aside—they have to be pushed.”

Every generation sends its heroes up the pop charts. In the never-ending story of challengers refreshing progressive politics, patterns repeat. Radicals had to play an insider/outsider game to work with—and sometimes against—FDR. The same process ensued as the civil rights movement kept pressuring LBJ to do more. Organizational forms change, but struggles endure. So it will be in the Biden era. n

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E M I T D L O T A TH

POPULISM Democratic victory in Georgia, and across the South, combined long-term multiracial organizing and a pitch to directly improve people’s lives.

BY ELI DAY ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT MEGANCK ON JANUARY 5TH, SENATE candidates Jon

Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their critically important races as populists. Within 24 hours, the recently defeated president, whom mainstream scribblers had also carelessly once labeled a “populist,” was inciting his followers to storm Congress in a bid to hold onto power as an unelected ruler.

It was a stunning split screen. Less than a full day after Georgians elected only the second Black Southerner to the Senate since the Civil War, along with a young Jewish investigative journalist, Trump loyalists were smashing their way into the Capitol Building, draped in the flag of a vanquished slave empire. And though we’ve spent four years designating Trumpism as the epitome of a 21st-century populist movement, when you look at both of these events in tandem— the arguments made, the villains cast, and the vision laid out for the future—it’s clear who the torchbearers of populism are.

Take a look at Ossoff and Warnock’s closing arguments. They weren’t ballads to restoring civility or returning to the

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chummy, backslapping days when Republicans and Democrats would come together to destroy welfare or pursue horrific wars of aggression. “Want a $2,000 check? Vote Warnock” was actual ad copy from the Warnock campaign, a raw appeal to people’s material concerns. It linked up nicely with Ossoff’s jugular attacks, casting Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue (both former CEOs) as a pair of self-serving elites, feasting lavishly at a time when millions face starvation. “We’re running against the Bonnie and Clyde of corruption in American politics,” Ossoff hammered.

“Who, when they learned about the pandemic that was bearing down on our shores, their first call was to their stockbrokers.”

One side of the screen shows us what can happen when a multiracial movement fights to widen political possibility and improve the lives of ordinary people, forming a new Southern Populism that echoes the original.

The other has climaxed in a white supremacist explosion on behalf of a wealthy scam artist turned authoritarian who faithfully

serves the rich and built his political fortunes on a very old divide-and-conquer blueprint that was first laid out by populism’s enemies.

As Thomas Frank writes in The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, “Populism was the first of America’s great economic uprisings, a roar of outrage from people in the lower half of the country’s social order” against “an inequitable system [of] elite failure.” This was Ossoff and Warnock’s closing argument in a nutshell. More importantly, it describes the network of independent progressive groups that powered them to victory, and which show no signs of simply relying on the goodwill of powerful figures, even friendly ones, to deliver the progressive agenda they’ve called for.

Even Joe Biden, who often mimicked the pointless rage of budget warriors as a senator and vice president, felt the populist currents coursing through Georgia. “If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington,” he said at an election eve rally, “those $2,000 checks will go out the door.”

JAN/FEB 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

History will show this to be important for more reasons than anyone can count. First and most critically, these victories and the populist currents that carried them have big implications for what Democrats can do, now that they control all three branches of government. Second and more subtly, it answers a question that has ricocheted across more than a century of Southern politics: whether a message that links racial unity with progressive economic policy can win in the South.

To state the obvious, Democrats must now actually wield the power they have.

It’s true that the phrase “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell” is a tune so sweet you have to play it back a few times. But if Democrats want it to last, they can’t repeat the mistakes that got them wiped out in the 2010 midterm elections. Namely, they must implement measures that improve people’s lives. There is no excuse, including the very abolishable filibuster, for failing to do this. Democrats have the ability to enact

28 PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2021

an aggressive economic agenda as millions face mass poverty, starvation, and eviction; to address our rapidly frying planet; to protect and expand workers’ bargaining power; and to install a robust voting rights regime. If Congress won’t budge, President Biden can accomplish at least some of these advances by his own authority. And blue states can take it even further.

But like any populism worth its salt, progressives can’t depend on the goodwill of powerful people. It will likely take constant shoves from the party’s left-wing grassroots to achieve anything of lasting significance.

After all, their majority was secured on these expectations.

IT WAS A POPULIST VISION of economic relief and a greater say in democracy that inspired organizers and everyday people to sweep across Georgia to rally the troops for the January 5th runoff elections. I hung out with a few of them while reporting there.

Shauna “Coco” Swearington of Marietta,

Georgia, for instance, knocked doors “every day, six days a week, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” she tells me. She let me tag along one afternoon, in one of Atlanta’s working-class Black neighborhoods. Coco was one of nearly 1,000 UNITE HERE canvassers who barely rested between the general election and the Senate runoff races. She told me that when COVID-19 hit, she “was displaced” from her job of 25 years as a server at the Westin hotel in Atlanta. “So now I’m out of health insurance,” she explained. “I’ve got diabetes and heart disease. I need my medications.

So it was very important for me to get on this campaign.”

By winning the Senate, Coco hoped to see worker-friendly policies that provide job security for those who have been laid off, increase the minimum wage, and make it easier for workplaces to unionize. She also recognized that working people are uniquely positioned to tag each other into the fight.

“We’re the common people, we’re the people out there in the trenches doing the

JOHN BAZEMORE / AP PHOTO

Black Voters Matter, whose co-founder LaTosha Brown is seen here in 2018, is one of many groups engaged in long-term organizing in Georgia.

Organizing and populist messaging turned out liberal voters, despite the lack of a Trump bogeyman on the ticket. work,” she said. “So who better to tell you, ‘This is my story, and this is why you need to go out and vote because this could be your story too.’” Her point is simple: Working people are the most convincing messengers on working-class concerns. And it’s even better if they’re empowered by political campaigns to talk to people about breadand-butter ideas like getting cold hard cash into working people’s hands. In Georgia, where 48 percent of people are reportedly poor or low-income, that turned out to be a winning message.

Biden’s historic victory in the Peach State was different. He eked out a win in Georgia thanks to a one-two punch: Stacey Abrams’s strategy of increasing turnout by tapping into an army of unregistered young people and people of color, and more importantly, suburban nausea with Trump, which gave big margins in the metro Atlanta suburbs to the Biden-Harris ticket. Despite the suburban reversal, Trump still came within inches of victory, and improved his numbers with voters of color. As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, that likely had something to do with Republicans being “in power when the government put a lot of money into the hands of a lot of people who didn’t have it before,” and, on the flip side, Democrats’ failure to put forward a compelling economic vision. Indeed, Biden promised during the campaign that “nothing would fundamentally change.”

With Trump on the sidelines, many pundits thought Georgia might be at the mercy of big money and Republican entreaties to “stop social-

ism.” What they largely missed was that an electorally powerful fusion dance had taken place. On one side, organizers did an extraordinary job keeping the state’s diverse electorate engaged. Turnout rates were almost at presidential levels, unheard of in these typically sleepy runoffs. And Black voters, Democrats’ most reliable and most neglected voting bloc, came out at even more impressive rates, decidedly fueling the runoff victories. This should humble anyone who thinks that no amount of organizing will change the reality that only the most obsessive voters show up to off-cycle elections.

On the other side, Ossoff and Warnock started arguing that the government has a duty to ensure everyone’s basic survival, calling for a $15 minimum wage, $2,000 emergency checks, and reopening closed hospitals, because “health care is a human right, not just a privilege for those who can afford it or live in the right ZIP code.” As Anat Shenker-Osorio, a leading researcher and voice on progressive messaging, puts it, “In the waning days they did an incredible job of providing an affirmative narrative: This is what we stand for, this is what we believe in, this is the kind of Georgia and country that we can have … [it was] obviously incredibly effective.”

The combination of organizing and populist messaging turned out liberal voters, Black and white, despite the lack of a Trump bogeyman on the ticket. The Biden win is what can happen when you have a historically unpopular opponent riling up the base. The Ossoff and Warnock wins are more sustainable, less reliant on the opponent. And they signal a winning formula for a new Southern populism, one that braids together the region’s rich diversity with a wildly popular economic message.

Until now, Democrats had barely wrapped their hands around the first. But after years of unsuccessfully chasing white moderates across the South, the Georgia runoffs uncorked a model for competing.

It’s one that has been there all along.

GEORGIA’S POPULIST STORY, like the

country’s, is nearly 150 years old, and unfolds across a vast ecosystem of independent, grassroots organizing. The mes-

sage to working people has always been straightforward: The business and political class are concentrating greater and greater amounts of wealth and power. They are numerically tiny and see our unity as a threat to be eliminated. But by recognizing our shared fates, and pooling our enormous numbers, we can whip the “money power” and rearrange our institutions to satisfy the public good.

When Georgia’s first populist wave touched down in the late 1800s, King Cotton had only recently been dethroned. The Civil War had just liberated four million kidnapped humans from unpaid labor, representing an epic expropriation of private property paved with 750,000 dead soldiers.

Almost immediately, some of these newly freed people pointed out that their wage labor looked an awful lot like forced labor.

In an 1883 speech, Frederick Douglass argued that “The man who has it in his power to say to a man you must work the land for me, for such wages as I choose to give, has a power of slavery over him as real, if not as complete, as he who compels toil under the lash.”

Douglass was teeing up his main argument. Since every worker was at the mercy of the boss, unity between Black and white workers was the key to overcoming the petty tyrants who ordered them around.

Just as importantly, he warned, “it is a great mistake for any class of laborers to isolate itself.” Instead, there should be a strong “bond of brotherhood between those” who shoulder the “hardships of labor.” With unity comes strength, in other words, and if white workers could overcome the myth that they were members of a special “skin aristocracy,” then working people might finally be able “to organize and combine for [their] own protection.” Otherwise, there would be no end in sight to “the sharp contrast of wealth and poverty” in which “the landowner is becoming richer and the laborer poorer.” The Populist Party wouldn’t have its launch party for another decade, but Douglass already had the battle lines clearly drawn.

For a brief and bright moment, there were signs that white laborers wanted in. When the Populist Party formed in 1892, Georgia was

JAN/FEB 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

one of its most powerful outposts. Emerging from the ashes of the old Farmers’ Alliance, their assessment was simple: The country’s economic and political systems loyally served the rich at the expense of everyone else. Outraged by the Gilded Age’s runaway inequality, the populists called for an egalitarian alternative, including aid for struggling farmers, expanded voting rights, and public ownership of key industries like railroads.

The connection to Douglass’s argument was clear. And though we don’t have any uplifting multiracial team chants to show for it, many white farmers saw the obvious strategic importance of linking arms with their Black peers in the fight for a fairer world.

(Black farmers, who wanted to join the Alliance but were pushed into separate, secondstring groups, did not need to be convinced of the importance of working-class unity.)

But it would all be pitifully short-lived.

A monument to Tom Watson, a giant of Georgia populism, sits across the street from the state Capitol in Atlanta. In an 1892 essay titled “The Negro Question in the South,” Watson argued that a union of Black and white workers would have “flung the money power into the dust” years ago.

The “crushing burdens which now oppress both races in the South,” he added, will force them to “become political allies” and “on these broad lines of mutual interest … the present will be made the stepping-stone to future peace and prosperity.”

But like its counterparts across the country, Georgia’s populist vessel was partly devoured from the inside. Watson would eventually win a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1920, long after the Populist Party’s official demise and only after swapping out pleas for “interracial cooperation” with “brutal political and social repression of Black Americans,” writes James Cobb, one of Georgia’s leading historians. Where he had once courted Black workers, Watson was now calling for their total disenfranchisement. Where he had once “urged that lynching be made ‘odious’ to whites,” he now argued “lynch law is a good sign … that a sense of justice yet lives among the people.”

Reading it now, it’s almost as if the 1892 essay was a warning letter to his future self. The earlier Watson saw clearly that

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all workers had a “similarity of cause and a similarity of remedy,” and that “you are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of … financial despotism which enslaves you both.” Future Watson said to hell with all that. By his own standards, racist tirades obviously undermined the actual goals of populism. But they had narrow perks for an ambitious Georgian at the turn of the 20th century.

I want to be careful here. The Populist Party had many powerful archenemies, including the “economic royalists” Franklin Roosevelt would eventually battle.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for its demise. That includes the Tom Watsons of the world, who sat on the inside of this promising vehicle for working-class power and started shooting out the tires before it could really take off.

It’s important to note, however, that Watson betrayed populism’s core principles. What made populism distinct was its diagnosis of what caused economic suffering in the country, and the target of its fury. Racism poisons every corner of American political life, and the popuOssoff (left) and Warnock (right) started arguing that the government has a duty to ensure everyone’s basic survival.

lists were no exception. But, Frank writes, “populists were not the great villains of the era’s racist system. That dishonor went to the movement’s archenemies in the southern Democratic Party, leaders who were absolutely clear about their commitment to white supremacy.” Populism, with its emphasis on broad working-class unity, “was an attack on these doctrines” and the elites who depended on them. If you undermined that unity, then you undermined the populist mission itself.

Watson’s story is so bizarre. It plays out like a twisted Shakespearian plot twist, except Watson does the double-crossing himself. By his own assessment, he ended up strengthening the hand of the exact group of wealthy landowners the populists furiously opposed, who stood to gain enormously from driving white and Black workers apart. But Watson’s ambition got in the way of his stated goals.

OTHERS WOULD FOLLOW. Episodes like the Savannah longshoremen strike of 1891 signaled the staying power of divide-andconquer politics. That fall, nearly 2,500 Black workers walked off their jobs at the docks, demanding higher wages, overtime

CAROLYN K ASTER / AP PHOTO

Just because attacks appealing to racial disunity are predictable does not make their success inevitable. pay, and union recognition. According to Temple University’s massive archival “Black Worker” series, “a committee of the Savannah commercial leaders organized” to break the strikers’ will. Since Black workers refused to cross the strike line, “company officials decided to hire white replacements.” What could have been a remarkable example of Black and white workers winning concrete gains only confirmed that “race could be used to divide the working class.”

Just because attacks appealing to racial disunity are predictable does not make their success inevitable. As Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, one of the many organizing groups working to activate voters of color, says, “There is a long history of radical resistance all across the state of Georgia.”

Popular movements like the abolitionist, women’s, civil rights, and labor movements successfully dragged the United States to greater levels of human decency, and all have deep roots in the American South.

Labor unions, for example, were arguably at their most dangerous when they teamed up with the civil rights movement, combining calls for racial and workplace justice based on the belief that “economic security and anti-discrimination were joined at the hip,” as Thomas Sugrue, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University, says.

Georgia’s own Dr. King spoke frequently before labor unions and their federations.

In a letter to the Amalgamated Laundry Workers in 1962, King wrote: “The coali-

tion that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.” King’s final mission before his death was in support of striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis.

King also constantly warned of the dangers of failing to directly address the deadly power of racism to wipe out working-class unity. In his 1965 remarks concluding the Selma-to-Montgomery march, King described a “southern aristocracy” shaken to its core by the “threat” of poor Black and white people coming “together as equals.”

To prevent this, “the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow,” which “he ate” when “his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide.”

This, he said, perhaps with Tom Watson in mind, “eventually destroyed the Populist Movement.” As Thomas Frank writes, “King was suggesting that the movement of the 1890s had an obvious modern counterpart. Working people of both races could come together once more to build a nation of justice and plenty.”

But the opposition, determined to keep workers segregated by race, in proximity and in consciousness, had modern counterparts too. Before civil rights legislation and working-class solidarity could even get off the ground, they were dusting off the predictable playbook: Flood the zone with enough racist garbage to split the coalition.

You have likely heard of its most infamous update: the Republican Party’s Southern strategy. Launched by Richard Nixon and echoed by fanatical champions across the country, including Georgians like Lester Maddox and Newt Gingrich, conservatives began serving up white resentment like hotcakes, gobbling up the Southern political map in the process. This came to be known as the cultural leg of the Republicans’ “threelegged stool.” The other two were nonstop fist-pumping for war and worship of free markets. But those either don’t reliably move people to vote, in the case of endless war, or actually repulse them, in the case of wildly unpopular conservative ideas like cuts to the social safety net and tax breaks for the rich.

The economic and military legs of the stool get you corporate campaign donations; they do not get you votes.

Long before Trump, conservative stars like Nixon, Gingrich, and Ronald Reagan would hammer “elites” for looking down their nose at everyday people. These seeds would eventually blossom into the Tea Party and the Trump campaign, long before being rebranded as “right-wing populism.” All the while, the GOP’s actual agenda has remained slavishly devoted to the country’s increasingly powerful business class. Trump’s signature legislation, remember, was a $1.9 trillion tax cut for the wealthy.

Until recently, the Southern strategy was treated as nearly irreversible. The best Democrats could do was hold onto a few seats and prevent the rest of the country from being swallowed by a sea of red. But the math is changing.

Before Biden’s surprise victory, Democrats had not won a presidential race in Georgia since 1992. For years, they told themselves that winning statewide office required at least 30 percent of the white electorate. This meant becoming a bootleg Republican Party: worshiping markets, dedicating themselves to world domination, and repeating right-wing bullshit about the moral decline of Black and poor people. It was designed to cleave off enough of a slice of the white vote to earn a victory. The typical messenger was a nondescript white man: John Barrow, Roy Barnes, Max Cleland, Zell Miller, Jimmy Carter’s grandson Jason.

Georgia Democrats rarely pushed that boulder uphill. The last Democratic gubernatorial victory was in 1998. By 2006, just three Democrats—Black officeholders Thurbert Baker (attorney general) and Mike Thurmond (labor commissioner), and 42-year agriculture commissioner Tommy Irvin— managed to win statewide. By 2010, the entire suite of statewide officers were Republican, and it stayed that way for a decade.

Stacey Abrams offered an alternative to this losing scenario. After entering the Georgia House of Representatives in 2007, she proposed that the party instead focus on mobilizing young people and people of color, who voice their disgust with politics by finding better things to do with their time.

JAN/FEB 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

THE QUESTION NOW IS how to make sure

it lasts. True to the populist tradition, every Georgia organizer I spoke with stressed the importance of building an independent progressive movement that “haunts the dreams” of politicians across the country to ensure they actually deliver for working people. Not a single organizer talked about how excited they were to go home and hope for the best, now that Democrats have a Senate majority. They see this as a time to apply relentless pressure to ensure a positive progressive agenda is carried out.

“The issues that are paramount to Black women’s lives just don’t get the air they deserve. Black women don’t get asked, ‘What’s important to you? What do you need?’” says Malika Redmond, the co-founder and executive director of Women Engaged, an Atlanta-based organization that fights “for social change through voter engagement and

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Georgia’s blue turn is unimaginable without Stacey Abrams’s years-long project to juice turnout among people of color.

reproductive justice advocacy.” Redmond’s organization knows that they cannot rely on mainstream institutions or parties to seriously address their priorities without constant activism. Women Engaged works to generate “something that we can hold the powerful accountable for,” Redmond says.

Each organizer was clear about the difficult battles ahead. “Elections are a snapshot of a moment in time,” says Gwen Mills, the secretary-treasurer of UNITE HERE. They tell us “how much organized power there is” and “who you can get elected at a particular time.” After “a short breather,” Mills says, it’s back to organizing in the streets and workplaces. You have to keep the grassroots fire burning, Mills says, because “the power and the money behind the corporate lobby is just staggering.” In other words, elections may clarify where things stand or even modestly improve the battle terrain, but they have very limited firepower beyond that.

Building a strong working-class army requires addressing the weak spots that the opposition exploits and, as we’ve seen, has always exploited. People of color make up about half of Georgia’s population (though still 39 percent of the vote, even in the Senate runoffs). And since racism is also a weapon used to loot the country’s most vulnerable—think housing segregation,

income and wealth inequality—workingclass issues are Black and brown issues.

“One thing we know is that if we’re not talking to our members, somebody else is,” says Marlene Patrick-Cooper, president of UNITE HERE Local 23, which covers a large swath of the South. “All over the country, there has always been an employer goal to divide the workers.” This is a lesson from the School of Hard Knocks. For decades, divide-and-conquer tactics have eroded unions, weakening their defenses against demolition efforts like “right to work.” As a result, union membership was pushed off a cliff in recent decades, falling from one-third of workers in the 1950s to barely 10 percent today. That fall tied weights to the ankles of wages, and they haven’t gone anywhere meaningful since.

Instead of running from the problem, UNITE HERE is tackling “the racial history of right to work” head-on, Patrick-Cooper says.

The union has established a two-day training session, where members learn how racism created cracks wide enough to ram policies like right to work through countless statehouses. “You cannot be successful as a union if you don’t have solidarity on the shop floor, if workers don’t all stand together,” Mills adds.

This is the kind of key defensive tactic that makes an offense possible. If solidarity isn’t built between elections, and if unions and

CURTIS COMPTON / AP PHOTO

Though Abrams didn’t win the governor’s seat in 2018, she came within 55,000 votes, closer than any Democrat in recent history.

She only won 25 percent of the white vote, supposedly a disqualifying condition. But Abrams put up unparalleled numbers with Black, Latino, and Asian American voters, bringing her within a few disenfranchised votes of victory. As FiveThirtyEight reported, Georgia’s blue turn is unimaginable without Abrams’s years-long project to juice turnout among people of color, even if the greater factor in the Biden victory was genuine suburban horror at Trump’s rotten personality.

With the victories by Ossoff and Warnock, Georgia’s political math has been recalculated. Neither candidate hit 30 percent of the white vote, though they came close. A new and more liberal electorate attracted to the fast-growing Atlanta metro area has made those numbers more reachable. And the runoffs spotlighted the overwhelming power of voters of color, including in Black rural areas, which saw presidential-level turnout.

These Democratic voters came to the polls in enough numbers to win because Ossoff and Warnock actually offered them something; populist messaging and multiracial organizing went hand in hand. The old wisdom about what it takes to win in Georgia has been shaken like an Etch A Sketch.

The failed strategy of Kelly Loeffler’s loss reveals a conservative movement that has nothing to offer and knows it.

other independent sources of power cannot secure concrete gains for working people between elections, then their coalitions will be repeatedly torn to pieces and forced to scramble frantically once election season rolls around. After all, it was the combination of long-term anti-racist work and Southern progressives’ positive vision for the future that made Georgia competitive in the first place.

Consider the split screen again. The conservative movement not only has a wildly unpopular agenda, but cultural resentment, warmongering, and free-market cultism just don’t pack the same electoral punch they once did. As Brooklyn College professor and author of The Reactionary Mind Corey Robin puts it, the reason Republicans under Trump have been turning up the volume on white rage isn’t because its powers are growing. They hope that the noise will compensate for the fact “that conservatism is actually weaker than it has ever been.”

White identity pays out thinner and thinner dividends to an increasingly miserable base.

As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton show, “deaths of despair” already had life expectancy for middle-aged white people declining before COVID-19. The same population who fueled the right-wing march that started 40 years ago is poorer than they were at the beginning, and they are arriving at death’s door ahead of schedule. During that time, the right’s agenda has dominated everywhere: privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and destruction of the country’s already pitiful social welfare state, not to mention violent opposition to civil rights gains like desegre-

gation. Everybody hates this agenda, with the possible exception of overthrowing the gains of the civil rights movement, a truly American pastime beloved by liberals and conservatives alike.

The point is, bigotry is all that’s left for the right. Kelly Loeffler, for instance, spent the runoff election blowing 150-year-old dog whistles in a losing campaign as grotesquely racist as any fire-breathing segregationist’s. She routinely painted her opponent, a Black pastor who preaches where Dr. King once stood, as a “radical liberal” hell-bent on bringing “socialism and Marxism” upon these delicate shores. “Loeffler and Perdue can’t run as themselves. They can’t run promising anything,” Shenker-Osorio tells me. “Because they don’t stand for anything that most people want. So the only thing left to them, and the Republican Party more broadly, is to try to scare people about the other side and to try to trade on and kind of exacerbate people’s feelings of resentment.”

Warnock counterprogrammed with campaign ads of him with puppies, offering a cuddly portrait. But more important, he countered with policy, populist progressive policy, meant to improve people’s lives and fortunes. Loeffler’s flailing race-based appeal fell short.

Her satisfying defeat, of course, does not mean that the right has been defanged. The last decade has provided explosive evidence for Robin’s warning that “weak movements can be dangerous movements,” leading right up to a clumsy but still highly organized insurrection. But the failed and tired strategy of her loss does reveal a movement that has nothing to offer and knows it.

They are now in survival mode. Everyone from Donald Trump to Mike Lee to Lindsey Graham admits that the Republican Party must either snuff out democracy itself or be snuffed out themselves. Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman has been carefully chronicling the entire landscape of modernday poll taxes and booby traps they’ve laid out to mutilate voting rights for Black and brown and poor people. So here’s what we have: an agenda that deposits larger and larger shares of the nation’s wealth into the bank accounts of a tiny few while basically telling everyone else, “Good luck and God

bless,” as they face avoidable crises like poverty, starvation, medical bankruptcy, and homelessness. And at the same time, they are working furiously to get the eligible voting pool back down to its 18th-century size because they cannot survive otherwise.

This is the phony populism of the right.

The original populist uprising, of course, had its share of hideous blemishes. But in terms of actual principles, today’s conservative movement is basically populism’s evil twin. It may dress itself up in populist clothing sometimes, but when you compare their deeper worldviews and aspirations, they clash furiously.

On the other screen, progressive and leftwing grassroots organizations are trying to fling the doors of democracy open wider to enact a sweeping progressive agenda.

Georgia is absolutely bursting with them.

The immigrant rights organization Mijente apparently contacted every Latino voter in the state during the runoff election. According to a press release, the New Georgia Project “reached out to Georgians through more than 10 million calls, texts and door knocks.” People’s Action, a network of state and local grassroots organizations, called 1.2 million low-propensity voters: students, Asian Americans, and voters in rural areas.

They held over 23,000 in-depth “deep canvass” conversations and got well over half of those voters to turn out for Ossoff and Warnock. Black Voters Matter spent the runoff zigzagging through often-neglected Black corners of the state. And UNITE HERE also passed the one-million-door threshold.

For many observers, the runoffs were a referendum on whether Georgia’s “multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, progressive majority,” as Nsé Ufot put it in a recent Intercept story, was sustainable. Could a genuine populist movement, one built on working-class solidarity across difficult fault lines, have enough punching power to whoop the far right in the Deep South?

January 5th provided an answer, though the work goes on. n Eli Day is a Detroit native and investigative reporter whose work has appeared in Current Affairs, Mother Jones, The New Republic, Vox, and In These Times.

JAN/FEB 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

THE O

The newest members of the Squad, in their own words

By Alexander Sammon

One of the most consequential developments in the last two years of Democratic politics began on Instagram.

Shortly after the 2018 midterm elections, Congresswoman-elect Alexandria OcasioCortez (D-NY) posted a photo of herself at a new-member orientation seated alongside fellow freshwomen Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), with a caption: “Squad.” A new locus of Democratic politics, a shorthand for a youthful left-wing electoral force, and a fresh archenemy of the Republican Party was born.

Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley were not a fully formed progressive phalanx before arriving in D.C. They ran on different priorities and won their elections in different ways. Pressley and AOC dispatched old white machine incumbents with decades of seniority in the Northeast; Tlaib and Omar triumphed in contested primaries for open seats in the Midwest.

But they were all young women of color, who had campaigned on progressive issues and brought with them a fearlessness and a proximity to movement activism that wasn’t common in Democratic politics, even among progressives.

One month later, that tendency was on display when AOC joined a peaceful sit-in

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in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding bold movement on climate. The Speaker was not amused. “AOC and her group,” Pelosi later told 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, is “like, five people.” AOC’s response: “All right, let’s go get more.”

Now, just over two years later, reinforcements have arrived. With the election of Missouri’s Cori Bush, New York’s Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones, and Illinois’s Marie Newman, all progressives with activist ties who either felled moderate incumbents or pushed them into retirement, the 117th Congress’s freshman class features four more Democrats with a similar mission as the Squad. All four ran on Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and a $15-per-hour minimum wage. Bush and Bowman are members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

While the original Squad entered with a wave of new Democrats, many of them moderates, and swept into an undisciplined Congressional Progressive Caucus, this year’s freshmen supplement that progressive bloc, with a reformed and more militant CPC. After several moderates lost re-election, progressives now account for a larger number and even larger percentage

of a party with a razor-thin House majority.

As it stands now, just five courageous progressives can derail any unfavorable Democratic proposal. The CPC is now the largest and most powerful caucus within the party, sporting 94 members in total.

Still, progressive legislation remains a difficult climb, for various reasons. Speaker Pelosi maintains control of the Chamber with a historically unilateral grip. Just as five progressives can stop legislation in the House, so can five of the surviving moderate Democrats. A surprising Senate majority will give Democrats a shot at real legislative advances, but a 50-50 Senate (including intransigent Democratic centrists like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin) is likely to frustrate the big-ticket policy commitments these reps ran on. And progressive voters, after two years of optimism, are getting antsy, and want to see some results, which has resulted in some ill-gotten factionalism and a confounding push for a Medicare for All floor vote.

This means that these new reps, like the Squad before them, will have to find ways to fulfill their goals, with different tactics and approaches as politicians than they had as

HE CLASS OF 2020 LESLIE ADKINS / AP PHOTO

Marie Newman ran as a close ally of movement politics, and overcame a DCCC-endorsed incumbent.

campaigners. They will have to work with, against, and around both Democrats and Republicans. And they’ll each showcase specific niches and styles and issue priorities. (For example, as progressive operatives on the Hill will tell you, Rep. Omar is much

more into the inside game and working within party channels, while Rep. OcasioCortez is much more disposed to outsidefacing strategy.) Whether they’re the new Squad or new additions to the current one remains a subject of debate: They’ll likely

vote as a bloc, but won’t act as a monolith, as the past two years have shown us.

In interviews with the Prospect, all four members laid out their vision for politics, the Democratic Party, and their top policy ambitions, like Medicare for All, democracy and police reforms, and the Green New Deal. They outlined how they plan to go about making the change progressives so desperately want. Already, they’ve made their presence felt. On January 6, just three days after they were sworn in, Cori Bush authored a resolution to expel Republicans who abetted the Capitol Riot and tried to invalidate the election result; it was co-sponsored by Jones, Newman, and Bowman in short order. The articles of impeachment for a lame-duck President Trump, drawn up by Omar, were cosponsored by all the other Squad members, old and new. After initial indifference, the House took up impeachment within days.

Marie Newman

Age: 56 Chicago, IL Newman won election in Illinois’s Third District, defeating incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski, one of the most conserva-

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tive and staunch anti-choice representatives in the Democratic caucus. Newman’s background is different from the rest of her cohort—she’s older than the average Squad member, and white. But she ran as a close ally of movement politics, elevated by progressive groups in her victory. As an anti-bullying and gun control advocate, Newman has experience with activism as well. She’s the vice chair of communications for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and will serve on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Congressional Labor Caucus, House Democratic Manufacturing Working Group, as well as the House Small Business Committee.

TAP: What do you make of these calls for bipartisanship when much of the Republican Party still refuses to acknowledge Joe Biden even won the election?

MN: While it is a good thing when we can have bipartisanship, it doesn’t mean that the solutions that we come to as a Democratic Party, and the majority, are less so because they are not bipartisan. I think pundits and the media sometimes think the only good solutions are bipartisan solutions … We have to understand that we have to do what’s best for the American people and what the American people want. Sometimes you have to do it when you’re in the majority and it’s what people want, it’s what the American people want by far. So for me [bipartisanship] is a nice-to-have, certainly if we can have it that’s great. But we don’t want to sacrifice what Americans want and need because it has to be bipartisan. To me it’s the wrong question.

After observing some of these committee fights within the party, there seems to be hostility from moderates toward progressives, at least in terms of elevating them to powerful or leadership roles. How does that strike you?

I’ve talked to 60 or 70 members within every part of the party, and I’ve not seen anything like open hostility. I know that’s a popular thing that we’re all at each other’s throats.

I’m experiencing good policy debates and questions, figuring out how we can get the next bill done, how are we going to get to

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“ I think pundits and the media sometimes think the only good solutions are bipartisan The Congressional Progressive Caucus solutions.” has undergone some significant internal Medicare for All, really big questions like that. We have a new DCCC chair, we have new committee chairs, I think there’s going to be further hearty debate. It doesn’t mean that we don’t respect one another; it also doesn’t mean we are in agreement on a myriad of things. We’re going to debate, that’s a part of this thing.

reforms. You took a leadership position within the caucus, and the new cpc seems like it could be more formidable as a voting bloc. What do you make of those changes?

Well, I think it brings more unity and more clarity. I think it will provide a situation where the CPC is the largest and most powerful caucus within the party. We will have more say and more power.

There’s this debate now about where to go strategy-wise. The Force the Vote calls come to mind, in particular. Where do you think we go strategy-wise as progressives?

I like strategies that work. I know there’s noise out there and I don’t understand that strategy, it’s articulated by folks who have never spent a day in Congress. I love the spirit and the passion, I’m with them on spirit and passion and desire for that legislation. It’s not like we’re sitting on our hands. We do have a plan to bring a Medicare for All bill to the floor. We’re working on it. We’re not going to let our cards be seen yet. But are we going to work really hard on Medicare for All? 100 percent. Are we going to get it to the floor? 100 percent. We have to bring Medicare for All to the floor in a responsible and powerful way that has good strategy. That’s the one I’m backing.

I’m not backing a super-risky, throw-thedice crapshoot model.

Throughout the past two election cycles, progressives have shown that primary challenges are a good pressure point for making change within the Democratic Party. You’re a perfect example of that, as someone who challenged a machine Democrat and beat him. Where are the other pressure points?

We have a grassroots infrastructure in this nation of progressive groups and advocacy

—Rep. Marie Newman (D-IL)

groups and, quite frankly, super-practically powered policies like a green economy and health care for all. Everything that Americans want. Good policies that are practical and proven. Every time we’ve gotten out of a recession we’ve invested in people, transportation, and infrastructure.

We’re going to do that again. We’re going to make those things greener. That makes sense because the planet is dying and we only have ten years.

We have to have health care for all. The pandemic shined a huge light on the issue that our health care system is continually breaking down and people are dying as a result. For the first time, our life expectancy has gone down by several years. Seventy percent of the nation backs Medicare for All and the ideas in the Green New Deal that would make our economy greener, and solve transportation problems. We get a two-fer when we do that.

How do you balance working inside the Chamber with that outside work of appealing to the grassroots?

Everybody has to manage their district and support their district. I would never ever tell somebody how to parent, right? You should always represent the district the way the district wants to be represented.

What I know about my district is that they want the end of the pandemic, to be safe and healthy, they want health care for all, they want an economy that is sustainable with good union jobs, they want to go back to work. It’s real simple for me. If I build policies that support all those goals for my

Cori Bush, a former nurse and mother of two, was once homeless.

LAURIE SKRIVAN / AP PHOTO

district, which really is a microcosm of the country, that is my inside and outside.

How would you describe the incoming group of freshmen progressives and where they fit within the larger Squad framework?

Those women who are referred to as the Squad are folks who I agree with an awful lot and I intend on supporting them in all their endeavors. And then the talk of this extended Squad brand: I like all of those folks too, and I just met them and I just love them. I don’t think it’s necessary to brand each other; I think what is necessary is that progressives stay in a cohesive strategy where we are all fighting hard for these super-practical solutions. I’m not in middle school, I don’t need to be in a clique or not in a clique, but I love all my colleagues and I think they’re all going to do a spectacular job.

Cori Bush

Age: 44 St. Louis, MO Bush took down a ten-term incumbent,

William Lacy Clay, whose father held the seat for 32 years before him. Bush’s activist background is perhaps the most robust of any member of the House, as a Black Lives Matter organizer in Ferguson. A former nurse and a mother of two, Bush was once homeless, and arrives in the Capitol with a reputation for fearlessness. She was the first member to introduce a resolution to expel Republican members who attempted to overturn the election result on just her third day in Congress. She’s a member of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and will serve as deputy whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

TAP: Given how difficult it is to get legislation through, what do you envision being the most effective method to get stuff done?

CB: Two things. First, I am proud to be able to serve as deputy whip of our Congressional Progressive Caucus. We just made meaningful reforms to ensure that we can move as a more unified voting bloc and that is going to be significant in my eyes. And just being in greater partnership with grass-

roots movements, groups I’ve been working with, some of whom for a long time. Having both of those groups to stand alongside, to help in this work and to work together, we are going to be able, I believe, to lead the charge for transformational change in our communities. I believe we will be able to use that in Congress.

How do you balance that inside and outside game?

I’m walking in the door as a “politicist.” I’m not taking off my activist hat in order to do this work. I will be the activist and the politician. As an activist, we apply pressure.

We are diligent, we’re persistent in our message, we advocate. That’s what we do. And the other side of that is being a politician who also has the power of the pen. Connecting the two of those. What I’ve been able to do this far is bring my lived experience to the table and make sure that people that may not have understood why we are pushing for certain things get to hear the lived experience of somebody who has not only gone through those things but is vulnerable enough to speak to those things and

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use that to inform legislation. We put all that together and we can see some change.

You’ve already been active using the bully pulpit, writing for Time magazine about abolishing the death penalty, going on CNN to advocate $2,000 checks. What’s your theory on using those popular channels?

Ferguson taught me if you don’t keep your narrative someone else will shape it. And when someone else shapes your narrative you lose ground, you lose power. So many families have lost loved ones to police violence. The empathy that the community could hold for their loved ones is snatched away before it can ever start, simply because of the narrative that goes out first. We learned that through Ferguson. Now I’ve decided, because I have a bit of a platform that whatever I feel needs to be said, to make sure we are giving a true voice to the people who need their voices heard, that’s what I’m going to do.

Does this new freshman-class Squad differ from the original Squad?

We just added to the Squad, of course.

There just became more of us. I don’t think we have a different style at all; I think we’re next. We’re the additions to the people that are already there. We are already functioning as one group. Even though they’ve been in Congress the last two years, because we’ve been doing similar work, we’re already able to start to work as one now. There is no separation. There are no two Squads or anything.

What are progressives to make of the bipartisanship that Joe Biden preaches? How do progressives engage with Republicans?

There has to be some bipartisanship. I feel like I learned a very important lesson a few years ago when I ran for the U.S. Senate.

I went into some areas where I was told I could not go. I went anyway. I stood before tanks in Ferguson and ran from bullets and dogs. You can’t scare me that easily. I showed up in this one particular place, the only Black people in the room were the ones that came with me. It was a very contentious environment. But by the time I finished my speech I had a standing ovation. I realized

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in that moment it was about exposure. It’s about speaking to each other and listening to one another. They said, we’d never seen a Black person before, all we know about Black people is what we’ve seen on TV, all the murderers and thugs.

Even a few weeks ago when we had our orientation and I had the Breonna Taylor mask on, and my Republican colleagues were like, “Hi Breonna.” They may not have known who she was at that moment. But you better believe they know who she is now.

No one has called me Breonna Taylor since that morning. But they know who she is and now they even know why we’re fighting. We have to be our authentic selves, genuine in our message. And I think that if we do that and we find that common ground and we are able to work together. I don’t care about my reputation or what people think about me. I care about getting people what they need, so I’m willing to make that happen.

What do you do to work around hostility from moderate Democrats?

If there is anger or division within the party I can’t say, because I did see people [who are] part of the CPC put on exclusive committee seats. I have been warmly welcomed. I will say I did not expect such a warm welcome from everyone. Even where there’s disagreement, we may disagree on an issue, we’re still able to break bread and have phone conversations. When we talk about how the Squad is treated, that could be better. When we talk about defunding the police or when we talk about Medicare for All, there could be better treatment of people who believe in those policies. And I believe that we can continue to work on that. But as far as being a progressive, I’ve been treated very well.

Jamaal Bowman

Age: 44 New York, NY Bowman won election in New York’s 16th District over 16-term incumbent Eliot Engel, one of the highest-ranking Democrats in the House. A former educator and middle school principal, Bowman is a father of three who was born and raised in

“ I don’t care about my reputation or what people think about me.

I care about getting people what they need.”

—Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) New York. He loves the Wu-Tang Clan and (sorry) the Knicks. Less than a week after being sworn in, Bowman drew up a bill to create a commission investigating law enforcement’s role in the January insurrection attempt. He sits on the Education and Labor Committee and the Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

TAP: Even though Democrats now control all three chambers of government, House Democrats, in particular, didn’t fare so well on election night, and the House majority is extremely small. Many suggested that progressive messaging was to blame. Do you feel like voters rebuked progressive policies or values?

JB: No I don’t. When you run for office you have to respond to the needs of your constituents. If your constituents feel you’re responding to their needs and you’re running an effective, strategic, and comprehensive—and that’s a key word there, comprehensive—campaign, then you should be fine in terms of your re-election.

I’m sorry to hear that many Democrats lost their seats and we don’t want that to happen, but the knee-jerk emotional blame game is not where we need to be right now as a party. We need to diagnose and dissect how we lost and make adjustments going forward.

How should Democrats be running going forward?

I know what was very helpful to us: tripling voter turnout, and tripling turnout amongst

Bowman won election over a 16-term incumbent, one of the highest-ranking Democrats in the House.

MARK LENNIHAN / AP PHOTO

young people and people of color. Prior to the pandemic we went door-to-door, once the pandemic numbers were dramatically decreased we went door-to-door. We were also engaging consistently on social media, via Zoom, we had phone-banking strategy, text-banking strategy, all of the above. What I learned in my race is you have to put multiple touches on voters, and you have to be authentic, and people have to feel you from a relational perspective, not a transactional perspective. That’s how we won our race.

That’s how my colleagues won their races.

In terms of the issues: Issues like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal don’t just resonate in our district, they resonate across the country and people who ran on those things won.

With the committee assignments you have for the upcoming session, where will your priorities lie and where do you see opportunities to get things done quickly?

For me, Education and Labor are huge, because of my experience as a union member my entire adult life and being raised by a union member. My mother was a postal worker. Understanding the need to grow organized labor and unions in our country is critical. Understanding the need to share

wealth between CEOs, managers, and labor is critical. And completely transforming our education system in a way that really meets the needs of all children is key.

You’re also on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. It seems like under President Biden infrastructure spending appeals to all parts of the Democratic Party.

Many parts of my district have transportation deserts, where people can’t get from one part of the district to the other, or people have two-hour commutes to and from work, which dramatically decreases their quality of life. And we have sewage leaking into the Long Island Sound; the same thing is happening in Yonkers into the Hudson River. We have a failing infrastructure and we have transportation issues that are paramount in our district. And then finally we need to really invest federally and rebuild the MTA here in New York City and upgrade infrastructure across the country. We need to become clean and green and renewable and that needs to happen right now.

You’re a member of the reformed cpc—are there any other caucuses you’re interested in?

I may be looking to start my own caucus,

either a reparations caucus or a hip-hop caucus, or both. People see hip-hop as only party music. It’s a cultural phenomenon that we need to really unpack and have a better understanding of. Reparations obviously goes without explanation. For us to really respond and reckon with our racist history as a nation and the impact it’s still having on us today. We need reparations for the Black community.

Given the composition of the Congress, there aren’t likely going to be many opportunities to legislate. What do you hope to see passed?

We need a stimulus package. That stimulus package needs to bring relief to cities and states and needs to make sure we’re protecting people from eviction through an eviction blockade. And put money in people’s pockets. Our argument has always been $2,000 a month as well as $600 a week unemployment insurance for those who have lost jobs. But people need a reprieve, man. We’re struggling mightily and we need to inject as many resources as possible into the pockets of individuals as well as cities and states.

After that it’s the same things that I ran on and the same things that the people in

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this district have mandated me to go to Washington and fight for. Affordable housing, fully funding our public schools, universal health care, jobs and job training programs. And because the parts of my district that suffer the most are Black and brown, the umbrella term that captures that all is reparations. That’s what I’m going to fight for as a first, second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth thing.

Do you have a theory of how you intend to use the bully pulpit, or to use nontraditional channels to political ends?

It’s what I’ve been doing since we won our primary. There’s a legislative agenda, and legislative action, and then there’s advocacy.

The advocacy part is something that helps to engage the public and sway public opinion. And the advocacy part is something I’m more accustomed to because it’s what I’ve been doing as an education activist through my career. So yes, that’s something I have been doing and will continue to do. Because the advocacy works better in alignment with the movements that are happening across the country also. We’re going to aim to do both very effectively.

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Mondaire Jones, along with fellow New Yorker Ritchie Torres, became the first openly gay Black congressman to win election.

Mondaire Jones

Age: 33 Nyack, NY Jones won election in the 17th District of New York, an open seat vacated by retiring Rep. Nita Lowey. A lawyer in the Obama Justice Department, Jones, along with fellow New Yorker Ritchie Torres, became the first openly gay Black congressman to win election. A vocal advocate of democracy and judicial reform, Jones made waves by filing and winning a suit in August against President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to reverse recent changes

made to the United States Postal Service that undermined the agency’s ability to deliver mail-in ballots. He sits on the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, the Education and Labor Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee, and is deputy whip of the CPC. TAP: You’re entering into a Congress where legislation is extremely difficult to accomplish. With that in mind, how do you envision being an effective legislator in the upcoming session?

MJ: I’m going to be a progressive leader in the U.S. Congress who works strategically and

CAROLINE BREHMAN / AP PHOTO

What’s the blueprint for Democrats to win consistently going forward?

I think the blueprint is being bottom-up, not top-down. I think the blueprint is listening to people in your district who don’t vote consistently and asking them why don’t they vote consistently. What is wrong with the current representation and how can we do better? When a teacher is planning a lesson, they always think about the child who struggles to gather the content. And then they think about ways to be adaptive to meet the needs of that child, and in being adaptive they become a better teacher for all children.

That’s what I think the DCCC has done for far too long. It’s been a top-down strategy driven by corporate interests, and corporate interests aren’t the end-all be-all. It isn’t everything. Just because the wealthy elite have been able to build wealth doesn’t mean they’re the authority we should listen to and allow our political system to be guided by.

“ Newer members of Congress can be thought leaders in their own way.

For me it will be the issue of democracy reforms.”

—Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY) effectively to deliver real lasting progressive change for the American people, including, most importantly, for the folks in Westchester and Rockland County who I will be representing. That means working with my colleagues from across the political spectrum, including progressive moderates and conservative Democrats with whom I actually think there is significant common ground.

What will your focuses be upon arriving in the Chamber?

I have been so focused on court and judicial reform. I was in fact focused on that even before the tragic passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And so I have really been a champion for democracy reforms. I want to strengthen H.R. 1, I want to make it less susceptible to being struck down by the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. And I want to do things like make Election Day a national holiday. We have to work to lay the foundation for progressive legislation to endure the test of time. That means giving people across this country the unfettered right to vote.

You’ve been vocal about expanding the Court, as well as other procedural and process reforms. How far should structural reforms go? Do you support statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico?

I am in support of D.C. statehood and I want to make sure that we follow the lead of the great people of Puerto Rico when it comes to determining whether or not they should have statehood or some other status that might be less formal than statehood.

That’s an ongoing conversation in the cau-

cus. You’ve got Alexandria [Ocasio-Cortez] and Nydia [Velazquez] on one side of that and Ritchie Torres and his predecessor José Serrano on the other. I’m watching and learning. And really interested in this issue.

Obviously filibuster reform is a Senate issue, but I’m assuming you’re on the side of that as well.

I view it as an issue for the House of Representatives because if we’re going to do Court expansion, which we must in order to save our democracy and to ensure the survival of any of the big-ticket items Joe Biden has been running on, then we have to do the commonsense work of Court expansion.

What do you see as the top legislative priorities for Democrats?

My top priorities are passing COVID-19 relief, and democracy reforms. To ensure that we don’t ever have to worry about losing the House of Representatives again. Because when everybody in this country is allowed to exercise their fundamental right to vote, Democrats win elections consistently. And that way the progressive legislation that working people in this country need and deserve is able to remain intact. And thirdly, frankly, for the folks in my district especially and throughout New York state, it is restoring the SALT deduction. Middle-class families were crushed in Westchester and Rockland Counties when that was capped at $10,000. We pay the highest property taxes in the entire nation in Westchester and Rockland. (Note: Restoring the state and local tax deduction, which allows tax filers to deduct all their state and local taxes from their federal tax bill, is more of a priority for Democrats in high-wealth, high-tax districts. Its benefits would overwhelmingly redound to the wealthy.)

You’ve written on some of these issues for publications like The Nation and Salon—how do you see yourself using the bully pulpit?

I think what we’ve seen with the freshman class before us is that newer members of Congress can be thought leaders in their own way. Alexandria on the question of the climate crisis. Ayanna [Pressley] on the question of criminal legal system reform.

For me it will be the issue of democracy reforms. I want everyone to start paying closer attention to that. We have a Supreme Court now that has veto power over democracy itself. Even Justice Roberts has joined in consistently undermining the rules of our electoral systems to further entrench Republican power.

How do you move the party from where it is currently to where it needs to go?

I’m grateful that the party is already shifting in a progressive direction. There has never been a moment in modern history when there has been more of a desire from the American people for the government to intervene and to help solve their problems.

We see that leftward drift in Joe Biden’s climate proposal, which is by far the most ambitious climate proposal of any majorparty candidate for the presidency in history. I think that people both running for president and who have been in Congress for a long time are prepared to meet the moment and yes, they may need some encouragement from folks like myself, but I am confident that we’ll get there.

One place where that leftward drift seems less obvious is the health care question.

There’s a bloc that backs Medicare for All, Joe Biden has supported the public option, and House leadership has focused just on expanding the aca. How do you think progressives should intervene there?

Imagine debating the merits of a public option versus Medicare for All when there is a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that will strike down the Affordable Care Act. So I push back on the idea that that’s going to be the nature of the fight.

Is there anyone in the Squad or the greater progressive caucus whose approach you want to emulate?

I’ve been grateful to be mentored already by so many incredible members of the Democratic caucus, including people who are not part of the Squad like Pramila Jayapal and David Cicilline. So I’m just looking forward to being mentored by everybody and by carving my own lane in the U.S. Congress. n

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SILICON VALLEY

BATTLESPACE TAKES THE

T hrough an obscure startup named Rebellion Defense, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt attempts to buy his way into the Biden White House. By Jonathan Guyer

DAYS AFTER WINNING THE NOVEMBER election, Joe Biden

announced the names of those staffing his transition. Big Tech landed prominent spots. Among the hundreds of personnel on the agency review teams serving the president-elect, there was one from Uber, two from Amazon, and one from Google. And then there were two people from Rebellion Defense, a shadowy defense startup.

The announcement sent Washington insiders scrambling to look up the company. No major defense contractors appeared on the list. “It’s sure odd that a year-old startup like Rebellion winds up with two employees serving on a presidential transition team,” Ken Glueck, the executive vice president of the tech company Oracle, told me.

What is Rebellion Defense? With a Star Wars allusion as its name, this firm is not your typical contractor. Rebellion launched in the summer of 2019 to craft artificial-intelligence (AI) software for the defense industry. Trade publications gushed about how innovative it was. It quickly raised $63 million, with the conspicuous backing of its board member Eric Schmidt. Schmidt is best known as the former CEO of Google, but he’s also a billionaire investor and an influential consultant to key government bodies.

Schmidt serves as chairman of an advisory board to the White House and Congress called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. From official positions, he has advocated for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to adopt more machine-learning technology. Meanwhile, as a venture capitalist, he has invested millions of dollars in more than a half-dozen national-security startups that sell those very technologies back to the government.

Government watchdogs consider those dual roles a conflict of interest. “He’s got many, many financial incentives to ensure that the Department of Defense and other federal agencies adopt AI aggressively,” said John Davisson, senior counsel for the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The Biden administration will need to tread carefully to avoid Big Tech taking over functions of government. Early in Obama’s presidency, Google representatives attended more than one White House meeting a week, leading some to jokingly call the administration Google. gov. More than 250 Google employees moved back and forth between the company and government during the Obama years. Schmidt is now poised to have even more sway within the new White House.

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GOOGLE RAPIDLY GREW IN THE ’90S. Its board hired Eric

Schmidt as CEO in 2001 to offer a businessman’s edge to the startup’s eccentric founders. Schmidt, a top executive at early tech stalwarts Sun Microsystems and Novell, served in that role for a decade. He then became executive chairman of Google’s new parent company, Alphabet, as the highly valuable, publicly traded search engine giant expanded into new fields, like artificial intelligence and national security.

Schmidt personifies the bonds between tech and government.

He was a frequent visitor to the Obama White House and sent strategy memos to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. When Obama’s healthcare.gov website overheated, the administration brought him in to clean up the mess. In November 2016, Schmidt wore a “staff” badge at Clinton’s election-night party.

For Schmidt, the big prize was the national-security sector. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Defense Department was by far the largest investor in research and development nationwide. The internet, of course, was at first a military platform. But by the 1990s, the Defense Department was spending more money on big weapons systems than on innovating the next big thing. The CIA and NSA had, through research conduits, provided seed money to Google in the early ’90s, but soon the latest innovations were coming from

Silicon Valley to government, not the other way around. By 2003, Google was selling technology to the NSA to help it sort through a barrage of data, in a project that came with Google tech support.

The Pentagon and intelligence agencies had fallen behind. Part of it had to do with the rigidity of the defense bureaucracy, the difficulty of bringing in outside talent from tech companies, and the convoluted processes of government contracting that privilege massive defense companies. All the while, the private sector was outspending the Defense Department almost 5 to 1 on new research.

Eight days after Obama was sworn in, he brought on Schmidt to offer an outsider’s view on how to run defense operations more like a tech company. Obama’s final defense secretary, Ash Carter, created a position for Schmidt on the Defense Innovation Board, which was pushing for what was mainstream in the private sector, but seen as radical in government offices—that the Defense Department needed new software. Carter and Schmidt jointly selected the other advisers.

Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, had suddenly obtained unprecedented access to political leadership and global military operations. He traveled to some 100 military installations worldwide, where he was quick to point out the Pentagon’s technological limitations. By the end of Obama’s sec-

Since the Obama administration, former Google CEO and executive chair Eric Schmidt has personified the bonds between tech and government.

44 PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2021

ROMUALD MEIGNEUX / SIPA

REBELLION WOULD DO WHAT GOOGLE WOULD NOT. THE PITCH SEEMED TAILOR-MADE FOR ERIC SCHMIDT. ond term, Schmidt had gathered a huge amount of influence within national-security circles. Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the founding head of the Pentagon’s newly formed Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told me that Schmidt was “a mentor to us.”

As board chair, Schmidt pushed the Obama administration to bring artificial intelligence, new software, and cloud computing into the department. He was “poking a finger in the secretary of defense’s chest saying, ‘You don’t get it. You don’t see what’s happening on the outside. AI is going to transform everything we do and you guys are stuck in the past,’” Shanahan said.

In 2017, Google won a $17 million contract from the Pentagon to examine drone footage using artificial intelligence, to enable drones to sift through potential targets with more precision. A year later, a dozen of the company’s employees resigned in protest.

Schmidt had promoted Big Tech playing a bigger role in national security, and now his own engineers had embarrassed him. (He said he had played no role in getting Google the government contract.) Lt. Gen. Shanahan ran that initiative, which became known as Project Maven. In press reports, the word “controversial” was almost always tagged onto it.

Schmidt has been thoroughly bipartisan. He sat next to Steve Bannon at Trump’s first convening of tech executives, and soon advocated that the Trump administration do more with AI. In 2018, Congress in its annual military-funding bill established an independent commission on artificial intelligence that would operate out of the Pentagon and advise Congress. The board’s first chairperson was Eric Schmidt.

Once Schmidt joined the new National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, he started telling Congress to use AI in everything. “It’s kind of a shitshow,” said someone with knowledge of the commission’s day-to-day operations. Eager to proselytize AI, commissioners knew little about the complicated laws that apply to different agencies and departments. The person described the commission as “constantly on a gerbil wheel generating content that was useless.”

The commission, in what lends the appearance of conflict of interest, hosts its reports on Google Drive and uses Gmail as its email platform. A spokesperson informed me that the commission’s staff selected Google’s federally approved suite of office products “without any input” from Schmidt.

Vice Chair Bob Work said in a statement, “Collectively, the Commission members monitor for potential conflicts of interest at our meetings and ensure our conversations do not veer into improper discussions of particular commercial interests.”

“Schmidt wields a tremendous amount of power in this space,

and we thought it was pretty alarming. It seemed like an obvious conflict of interest,” said Davisson, the lawyer with the privacy advocacy nonprofit EPIC. “It spoke to the strangeness of someone with so many financial entanglements chairing this commission.”

Each member of the commission submits an ethics disclosure.

For most commissioners, these documents run between 7 and 11 pages; Schmidt’s financial disclosure is 38 pages long.

Even Schmidt himself, who declined to speak with the Prospect through spokespeople, has acknowledged that there can be confusion. In November 2019, he alluded to his potential conflicts when he moderated the commission’s first public event. “It’s a real tragedy we don’t wear hats anymore,” Schmidt joked as he gestured toward a top Google official and Lt. Gen. Shanahan sitting next to him.

“I’m probably the only person who can say this in the entire world: I work with and for both of them.” Of course, as he tried to toggle between those two roles, it was clear that he was wearing no hat at all. It was impossible to tell on whose behalf he was speaking.

As the three of them talked through the work Google had done for the Defense Department, Schmidt effectively used the government event to market Google’s services to the audience of defense and AI experts. He asked the general and the Google official to each explain how Project Maven, the drone program that had led to the resignation of Google engineers, was even more successful than the media had reported.

Schmidt left Alphabet in June 2019. He was increasingly out of step with his engineers’ views of defense work, a mismatch that he himself admitted. “There’s a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly, if you will,” Schmidt said.

He proposed a solution: Tech entrepreneurs should establish new companies to fulfill contracts for soldiers and spies. “My guess is what will happen is that there will be tech companies founded that are more in alignment with the mission and values of the military,” he said.

And he put that into practice. A month after retiring, Schmidt’s venture capital firm invested in Rebellion Defense.

REBELLION’S FOUNDERS MODELED THE company after the

specialized Pentagon unit where many of them had worked before leaving to start the new business enterprise. The unit was a small operation called the Defense Digital Service, which brought in software experts from companies for short tours of service. Schmidt was an early fan, and he told Congress in April 2018 that the unit should be expanded to hundreds of people.

Members of the Defense Digital Service saw themselves as a band of outsiders within the Pentagon. They even put a plaque that said “Rebel Alliance” on the unit’s door. Its first director was Chris Lynch, a techie from Seattle who had founded a number of forgettable startups, including a word-game app and a hot-or-not site called CelebHookup. Lynch failed upward into a competitive position in the U.S. Digital Service, an Obama initiative, and then quickly parlayed that into a newly fashioned role at the Pentagon.

Lynch spoke quickly and deployed buzzy slogans. He went out

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Peter Thiel, chipped in. So did James Murdoch, son of the tabloid magnate, whose investment firm Lupa Systems has been buying up media outlets. Ted Schlein, a lesser-known name on Rebellion’s board, was perhaps even more influential. Schlein is a trustee of the CIA-backed venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, and brings in-depth knowledge of what spy agencies are investing in. And then there was the heaviest hitter of them all, Eric Schmidt.

Rebellion set up a website where it listed all of its key personnel. For board member Eric Schmidt, there was no bio. Instead, beside his photo there was a link that led directly to his profile on the Defense Innovation Board, the body advising Congress and the Pentagon on how to allocate resources toward the exact technology Rebellion was selling. It suggested that there was no firewall between Schmidt’s work for the government and the private sector.

Soon, Schmidt would be dropping by the Rebellion office to chat.

The company’s website had slogans to target national-security customers (“Rebellion Defense builds for the warfighter”) as well as ones that would resonate with Silicon Valley engineers (“Join the Rebellion”). Lynch even changed the greeting on his D.C. apartment’s call box to “We are the Rebellion.” (Rebellion Defense through a spokesperson declined to comment on the record or make staff available for interviews.)

In addition to the major investors and the hoodie-wearing hacker types on their team, Rebellion also needed buttoned-up former executives from the Defense Department. Its business side was composed of “a permanent team of national defense bureaucracy hackers” and “government procurement experts”—people who were perfectly placed to snag highly coveted defense contracts.

BLOOMBERG

of his way to lambaste Google Chris Lynch, a founder of failed startups includengineers who didn’t want to ing a celebrity hot-or-not work on killing machines. site, co-founded Rebellion Lynch continued to work Defense in 2019. The name is a reference to Star Wars. for the Defense Digital Service during the Trump administration and was given responsibility for leading the Pentagon’s transition to a single cloud, the incredibly complex $10 billion JEDI program. (The JEDI contract ended up going to Microsoft, after Trump allegedly personally vetoed Amazon as a prime vendor.)

Now that he had learned how to navigate the Defense Department, Lynch set out to move into the private sector. He co-founded Rebellion Defense in 2019 with British counterpart Oliver Lewis and Nicole Camarillo, who was still working for the Pentagon. A pitch deck for investors touted “her present leadership role in U.S. Army Cyber Command.” The trio started calling around to venture capitalists for funding.

Rebellion called themselves “a modern day Manhattan Project.”

They emphasized their recent knowledge of the Pentagon and Congress as a “substantial head start to the early-stage startups attempting to build products that are to be sold into government.”

Their three initial labs would include using AI for the military and policing, protecting large data systems, and creating the ultimate antivirus system. Each one would be worth billions of dollars. “The mission of national defense must be the place to be in tech,” Rebellion’s founders wrote. “This is an unconstrained ‘Project Maven.’”

Rebellion would do what Google would not. The pitch seemed tailor-made for Eric Schmidt.

One venture capitalist, who declined to be identified because he said he did not want to jeopardize existing relationships, said the pitch was weak. Rebellion wasn’t providing a new product.

Its founders were selling their know-how of the Pentagon, their experience working on contracts on the inside, and their relationships with senior brass. “It was pretty obvious that this among other startups were designed to capture outstanding military and intelligence AI contractors,” the investor told me. “If you can offer a big hammer with the letters ‘AI’ on the side, they’ll hand you a bag of money.”

Rebellion positioned itself as devotees of scrappy Luke Skywalker, but its backers looked a lot more like Darth Vader. In 2019, the firm raised $63 million with help from a murderers’ row of venture capitalists, $13 million more than the founders had hoped to initially secure. The Founders Fund, co-founded by Trump ally

Bob Daigle has been the money man at the Pentagon. From 2017 to 2019, he served as the director of the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, an office he had worked in at a senior level during the George W. Bush administration. Daigle’s job was to make sure every project was in budget, and now he was a founding executive of Rebellion. Tony Ierardi had been doing similar work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He retired as a lieutenant general in fall 2019 after almost four decades in the military and became the company’s chief of staff. (Like Schmidt, Daigle and Ierardi had time for another job, too. Both serve as consultants for Pallas Advisors, which Jim Mattis’s tech consigliere Sally Donnelly founded last year with a formidable roster of former top officials.) Another adviser to Rebellion, David Recordon, directed IT in the Obama White House and “modernized contracting strategies” for administration staff, according to his profile. Former Defense Secretary Ash Carter also advises the company.

The founders had told investors that they would “create a multibillion dollar challenger to the global defense industry,” and by 2020, Rebellion was getting contracts and growing. It added an office in Seattle and expanded its presence in London, where it recently recruited the former chief of staff of the Ministry of Defense. “We’re hiring (a lot),” one staffer posted on LinkedIn in November. Rebellion has 85 employees listed on the social media platform—and 19 job openings. This was quite a leap for a startup.

Rebellion acts like a tech company. It emphasizes its jaunty culture, plays up the Star Wars references, and filmed an intentionally cheesy Christmas video where staffers each sing along to Mariah Carey. In actual fact, this is a defense company.

Government awards flow to Rebellion in part because the company sponsored high-profile research that says the government should use their products. For example, in 2020, Rebellion funded the Center for Strategic and International Studies to urge the defense sector to use more machine learning in collecting and analyzing intelligence—the exact products that Rebellion peddles.

(A CSIS spokesperson said, “We stand behind the independence of our scholars and the quality of their analysis.”) Now, the people that Rebellion has been paying to write those think-tank reports are joining the Biden administration, too. The co-chair of that Rebellion-funded task force at CSIS was Avril Haines, now Biden’s director of national intelligence; its website listed Kathleen Hicks as a senior adviser, and Biden announced in December that she would be number two at the Pentagon.

SCHMIDT’S INFLUENCE IS NOW ASSURED within the Biden

administration. In September, he was a featured speaker at a Biden campaign fundraiser with Michèle Flournoy, a former defense official who has been consulting for Schmidt’s philanthropy. Now, Schmidt is feeding the pipeline of those in national-security positions who will owe him their start in the business. Through his charitable organization Schmidt Futures and with the advice of former Obama officials at the consulting firm WestExec Advisors, he is launching an initiative to seed more tech talent into the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.

Rebellion’s future is secured in two ways—through contracts and connections. In November, it won what could grow into the company’s biggest award to date, a contract to create a single data-sharing network for the Air Force. And then there was the transition team announcement, where the company joined the big leagues of Amazon and Google.

A year before, in its initial pitch to investors, Rebellion had said, “Traction inside of the Department of Defense and its allies is the primary driver of success—mission matters.” Now, by their own terms, they’ve won.

“The fact that they got two people on the landing teams was eyebrow-raising to say the least,” said Luther Lowe, who runs Yelp’s public-policy efforts in Washington. (Yelp has been a persistent critic of Google, and by association Eric Schmidt.)

Victor Garcia, who lists his job as “engineering rebel,” helped coordinate the Department of Defense’s transition. Engineering manager David Holmes helped coordinate the Education Department and the Social Security Administration’s transition. In January, the Biden team also appointed David Recordon, who advised Rebellion at its inception, to the Office of Management and Administration as director of technology.

Here was Schmidt, on all sides of all transactions. If he needed to reach someone in the Biden administration, he had plenty of options for who to call. n

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Shot A

in the Arm

How government succeeded in coronavirus vaccine development, and failed in distribution

THE CEO OF MODERNA , Stéphane Bancel, reads The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times every morning, searching for evidence of a developing pandemic like a meteorologist scans morphing weather patterns for a hurricane. So when Bancel saw a small column in December 2019 announcing a few strange respiratory illnesses in Wuhan, China, he took notice.

By January 11, a team of scientists in China had published the first draft of the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s genome. About 48 hours later, Moderna’s bank of computers, with assistance from NIH scientist Barney Graham and his research colleague Jason McLellan, had developed the molecular structure of a proposed vaccine to combat the virus that was causing the illness soon to be called COVID-19. “The vaccine that was reviewed by the FDA on Decem-

48 PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2021

ber 17th, it’s exactly the same vaccine that our guys designed in January in silico, we never changed one atom,” Bancel said on a podcast.

Less than a year later, the first semi trucks stocked with an approved, mass-distributed vaccine began rolling away from a plant in Portage, Michigan, manufacturing another vaccine, from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Two pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer and Moderna, had crushed the traditional vaccine timeline and kick-started the process of saving us from the perpetual fugue state of a coronavirus-dominated world.

But a month after the high of the vaccine approval, the U.S. found itself plunged deeper into the pandemic, suffering from rising case counts from the holidays and a punishingly slow vaccine rollout. If the pace of the first month is not accelerated,

it will be years before enough U.S. citizens are vaccinated to crush the virus.

Pharmaceutical companies, one of the most hated and least trusted institutions in America, made real scientific progress at an unprecedented rate. But it looks like state governments, health departments, and hospitals are all failing on the vaccine distribution front. What to make of this? The story reflects the best and worst approaches of federal intervention during a crisis—the initial supreme competence and the later reneging of duty.

As the pandemic bounded across the U.S. last spring, a group of government agencies and private companies, known as Operation Warp Speed, formed to streamline the vaccination process. OWS includes officials from the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department

JANDOS ROTHSTEIN

By Olivia Webb

JAN/FEB 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

of Defense. (The Food and Drug Administration, responsible for approving vaccines, is firewalled from participation lest it influence the approval process.)

By the end of 2020, OWS had spent tens of billions of dollars on vaccine contracts, syringe contracts, and expansion contracts for existing facilities. Many of these contracts were redundant—OWS contracted with at least two vial producers and one prefilled syringe producer—a sign that OWS officials were adept at supply chain management and prepared for potential disruptions. The contracts also balanced large and small firms, another strong planning tactic leading to a balanced portfolio of vaccines and vaccine-related commodities.

In perhaps its largest contribution, OWS realigned the incentive structure of vaccine research and development, making the search for a solution to the coronavirus catastrophe temporarily profitable, and creating a competitive race for manufacturers of all sizes. OWS contracts allowed technology from the (relatively) small outfits Moderna and BioNTech to shine on a public stage; research spending that Moderna has been prioritizing for a decade finally paid off.

But OWS’s planning seems to have extended only as far as vaccine production. No government agency or individual has stepped up to guide the largest-scale vaccine effort ever undertaken on U.S. soil. Pallets of vaccine have been left sitting in warehouses, as government officials and Pfizer point fingers at each other. A lack of confident messaging, and Donald Trump’s neglect at best and deliberate undermining of democracy at worst, created a wash of early skepticism and faux-scientific talking points about vaccine safety. This only feeds existing, generalized doubt about vaccines.

The quick vaccine development showcased the power of government properly incentivizing research from pharmaceutical companies, while holding them to high expectations. The federal government demonstrated its power to demolish potential stumbling blocks, in some cases exerting its power to push past slow suppliers. Unlike in a normal year, when pharmaceutical corporations are left to themselves under the guise of innovation and permitted to hike

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their prices at will, suddenly the government gave an infusion of cash, righted misaligned incentives, and unlocked the scientific potential of a few smaller companies with strong research-and-development spending.

But the rollout has shown the consequences of the f lip side: By not making decisions or providing firm guidance, the administration is reverting to the same hands-off, blame-federalism approach that proved disastrous in the spring. An everystate-for-itself policy just leads to bidding wars and undue burden on underfunded public-health departments. Many states have buckled under the pressure and left decision-making up to hospitals, which are crushed under a deluge of rising case numbers and have limited capacity to handle this additional weight. And overreliance on large systems means that bottlenecks and glitches can endanger many more people than a model with many small networks.

The vaccine, in other words, shows both the promise of muscular government action and the peril of laissez-faire market-dominated indifference.

IN EARLY 2020, the U.S. pharmaceutical

market did not seem like fertile ground for the most rapidly developed vaccine of all time. Once a beacon of scientific research and progress, U.S. drug companies have since fallen prey to easy wins and quick financial hits. Research and development is no longer a key part of most large pharmaceutical manufacturers’ budgets; almost 70 percent of the global drug pipeline originated in biotech and small pharmaceutical companies.

Huge drugmakers tend to get their research by absorption, rather than development; they buy up small companies with innovative ideas and either adopt the product or shut it down, lest it cannibalize the company’s existing drugs (what’s called a “killer acquisition”). Almost three-quarters of new drugs patented by large companies were developed at a smaller one and then acquired. As a result, U.S. drug development has gotten less innovative as consolidation becomes more common.

With fewer resources devoted to R&D, large pharmaceutical corporations have turned more of their energies to heavily

No government agency or individual has stepped up to guide the largest-scale vaccine effort ever undertaken on U.S. soil. patenting existing drugs, trying to extend patent monopolies for as long as possible.

Nearly 80 percent of new drug patents issued are for existing drugs, rather than new ones.

AbbVie, for example, has filed for at least 247 patents on the best-selling Humira, used to treat arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and more. With a long patent timeline, AbbVie has monetized Humira for all it’s worth. If Humira was a company itself, it would have ranked around 152 on the Fortune 500 from 2018.

But AbbVie hasn’t created any life-changing drugs as it works to maintain a Humira monopoly; the most it’s been able to do is acquire a few potential high-revenue drugs from Allergan (including Botox) and develop a few new immunosuppressants that don’t promise much more than Humira.

The incentive structure set up by Operation Warp Speed motivated these pharmaceutical companies to at least temporarily shake off their calcified strategies. OWS contracted with at least six drugmakers to manufacture vaccines. Within this diverse portfolio, it spread the risk by backing several different types of vaccines, in case one type of technology failed to come to fruition. The U.S. government also preordered enough doses to cover the U.S. population four times over, assuming all vaccines in the portfolio are eventually FDA-approved.

Most high-income countries followed this strategy; presumably, any excess doses can then be rolled out to lower-income coun-

PAUL SANCYA / AP PHOTO

Moderna, just around a decade old, has been working to develop mRNA vaccines for years.

tries, although it’s worth noting that it will still likely be years before all countries have adequate access to the vaccine.

The strategy of offering research funding and guaranteeing purchase of the resulting product was just the incentive pharmaceutical companies needed to get to work. Still, the first winners of the vaccine race serve as a testament to the power of R&D spending at smaller firms. Pfizer’s vaccine was developed in partnership with BioNTech, a small German company that’s been around since 2008 and has just 1,300 employees.

Moderna is also just around a decade old; it was launched as part of a venture capital incubator before going public in 2018.

A brief overview of the technology is helpful. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna both produced what’s called an mRNA vaccine.

All cells produce mRNA regularly. When a cell wants to make a protein (which is basically the main function of a cell), it copies its DNA using mRNA, and the mRNA is then translated into a protein.

The vaccines, then, provide the mRNA for a cell to manufacture tiny, nonviral bits

of protein that resemble the spike protein on the COVID-19 virus. The body recognizes these nonviral bits of protein as foreign, producing antibodies for it—all without ever having been exposed to an actual COVID-19 virus. It’s genius.

Scientists have known about the power of mRNA for a long time, but they haven’t previously been able to harness it. That’s because the human body is trained to recognize foreign bits of material like mRNA, and the immune system shreds the input before it ever gets inside a cell. The real innovation of BioNTech and Moderna lies in devising a system to get the mRNA into the cell.

Pfizer, having shuttered its infectiousdisease research unit years ago, partnered up with BioNTech, a firm devoted to research but without the scale or funding needed to run large-scale vaccine trials.

Moderna, which has been working to develop mRNA vaccines for years (and which has nine vaccines in its pipeline now, including the clinically approved COVID-19 vaccine), was able to quickly leverage its technology to create a COVID-19 vaccine; it then part-

nered with the much-larger Lonza corporation to manufacture at scale.

As Dr. William Schaffner, an internist and infectious-disease specialist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, noted, “[t]hey had a very mature technology that they could immediately apply to making a vaccine … Within a matter of weeks, we had created vaccines in the laboratory.

That was a huge triumph.”

Other types of coronavirus vaccines have yet to make it through clinical trials. Most of the other vaccines on the verge of seeking approval are more standard killed or deactivated virus–type vaccines. These will be crucial to achieving herd vaccination, but they are not part of the rollout yet.

The case of Pfizer, the second-largest pharmaceutical corporation in the world, particularly demonstrates the power that the federal government can still wield, even over large, multinational corporations.

Pfizer chose not to take OWS money directly, probably to avoid potential regulatory requirements. It did, however, sign a guaranteed-purchase agreement with the U.S. government for approximately 100 million doses. (In addition, its partner BioNTech took research funding from the German government.) In December 2020, after the Pfizer vaccine had been approved, The New York Times reported that the government had failed to contract for the full amount of doses that Pfizer offered, instead settling on 100 million. Operation Warp Speed, however, leveraged its power to get more doses. In return for using the Defense Production Act (DPA) to overcome supply chain constraints, OWS secured an additional 100 million doses from Pfizer.

With these guaranteed-purchase agreements and OWS stepping in on supply chain issues—and, most likely, the intensity of the spotlight on them—Pfizer officials followed OWS’s lead and pursued a redundant domestic supply chain process that could serve as a model for future pharmaceutical rollouts. The corporation retrofitted a plant in Andover, Massachusetts, to make the mRNA. It set up a plant in St. Louis to make raw material for the shots. And it purchased pricey machines that package the mRNA in nanolipids, sending them to manufactur-

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Government funding accelerated vaccine development and motivated drug companies to manufacture at scale.

tinues to closely hold its mRNA technology, which is the real scientific breakthrough of this vaccine. Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for the international group Médecins Sans Frontières, said in a press statement, “Moderna’s announcement to not enforce patents during the pandemic might be enough to get good press, but it isn’t enough to make sure people will have access to this vaccine at an affordable price.”

Interestingly, access to and pricing for the COVID-19 vaccine flips the typical U.S./international drug paradigm; usually, drugs like insulin are less expensive in countries like Canada, India, and South Africa because of government negotiations with pharmaceutical manufacturers. Now, it appears U.S. citizens will enjoy access to the vaccine first, while still paying far more for less-advanced drugs.

Whether having relatively inexpensive COVID-19 vaccines changes how U.S. residents view drug access remains to be seen.

The free market has not been producing the consistent advances the world needed. Now that people have seen government negotiation beget speed, innovation, and low costs, it’s possible Congress and voters will take

a kinder view of the government stepping in to shepherd pharmaceutical corporations toward scientific breakthroughs at lower prices.

IN THE EARLY 1970S, Japanese businessmen pioneered a new process of supplying their factories with the inventory needed for production. Rather than keeping a supply for several days or weeks of production, they began streamlining their logistics pipeline such that inventory arrived “just in time.”

This just-in-time stocking kept companies running leaner, with more liquidity. But it also makes supply chains more prone to disruptions. Unless there is redundancy built into the supply chain—with several manufacturers for each part—the whole system is a bunch of failure points waiting to be tripped.

Operation Warp Speed’s involvement helped correct for these fragile commodity markets. With a reported budget as large as $18 billion, OWS was given leeway to contract for all the complicated pieces of a mass vaccine rollout. OWS officials took the necessity of redundancy to heart. For example, consider that OWS has given $204

K ALE WILK / AP PHOTO

ing facilities in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Puurs, Belgium. In one anecdote recounted

by The Wall Street Journal, the manufacturing chief of Pfizer developed an idea to fit another machine in a factory, allowing the company to speed up its commercial timeline by six months. The manufacturing chief called the CFO and said, “I got an idea, and I need $10 million. Is it an issue?” The CFO responded, “Just do it.”

OWS’s purchasing agreements and R&D funding also motivated pharmaceutical companies to begin manufacturing at scale, even as trials were still going on. In normal times, a drug is only manufactured for the public once it is FDA-approved. But as Dr. Schaffner puts it, “what we did as taxpayers, we made a bet that these vaccines were going to work, so while the trials were still under way … we began paying the manufacturers to start manufacturing the vaccine in large volume and storing it in a warehouse.”

In his opinion, we “won the bet.”

Winning the bet in the U.S., of course, does not mean the world gets to reap those rewards. As Zain Rizvi, an expert in access to medicines at the advocacy organization Public Citizen, told me, “Warp Speed is yet another example of how the pharmaceutical industry uses government-funded research to develop products that are protected by government-granted monopolies … we are seeing scarcity because we have allowed one corporation to dictate supply.”

In Rizvi’s view, OWS’s failure to force Pfizer and Moderna to share their vaccine recipes with other manufacturing plants globally, even as those global plants sit idle, is “one of the great tragedies of this moment.”

Advocates with an eye to global access are frustrated that OWS and the federal government, which have provided years of general scientific-research funding and more acute funding for the COVID-19 vaccine, are not requiring Pfizer, Moderna, and the rest to turn their vaccine technology over to any global plant that wants it and has capacity.

Moderna publicly stated that it would not be enforcing its patents on the vaccine for the duration of the pandemic, although it appears to have reserved the right to decide when that is. This seemingly altruistic statement also elides that Moderna con-

In general, Operation Warp Speed has left vaccine decisions entirely up to the states.

million to Corning Glass in upstate New York to expand its production of borosilicate glass vials, another $143 million to SiO2 Materials Science for another type of vaccine vial, and $138 million (and a $590 million loan) to ApiJect, which offers as-yet untested prefillable syringe technology. Each of these three companies offers a different kind of vaccine delivery mechanism. If ApiJect’s technology fails to pan out, Corning’s time-tested vials can come through. If Corning’s expansion construction takes longer than expected, SiO2 Materials Science’s vials are available.

There is precedent in using a redundancy strategy, and in the government shoring up parts of the distribution process that might fail if left to unfettered capitalism. The U.S. agency tasked with preparedness for biological events, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, maintains a flock of secret chickens, constantly producing millions of eggs in the event of a novel pandemic flu. The influenza virus grows best in chicken eggs, and chickens only lay one egg at a time, so BARDA pays for the ongoing maintenance and egg collection of this flock to be prepared to create a mass flu vaccine at any point in time. This might not be seen as economically efficient to a large company, but the government has more things to think about than efficiency.

GIVEN THE POWER and speed of the government-incentivized vaccine manufacturing process, it’s been shocking to watch the subsequent vaccine rollout. Perhaps

it shouldn’t have been. The parts of the rollout that can’t be contracted for have been abysmal. There’s been a severe lack of information given to state planning agencies. Hospitals, already overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, have proven unable to handle the responsibility for distribution.

Although OWS officials put out a report in September outlining their process for helping jurisdictions develop distribution plans, it appears those plans lost their wheels as the distribution actually began.

Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told Bloomberg, “The only part of the pandemic Trump responded to was things he could get companies to manufacture.” This seems to apply to OWS as well—the military officials running OWS are undoubtedly good at securing procurement contracts, but they seem to have been caught unprepared for the messiness of the American health system and the publichealth challenges of a vaccine rollout. Dr. Jason Schwartz, an assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health, told me that OWS “really failed to provide a similar level of commitment and investment to the just-as-critical steps that occur as soon as vaccines are produced, manufactured, and shipped.”

In general, OWS has left vaccine decisions entirely up to the states. This could be a powerful strategy if states were prepared, but it appears that states were expecting stronger federal guidance. In October, for example, the National Governors Association sent a list of detailed supply chain and funding questions to the White House. The Department of Health and Human Services responded with largely vague answers; it’s unclear whether they ever developed stronger guidance.

States, in general, are leaning hard on hospitals to figure out distribution. But the process is complicated enough that even wealthy, well-connected facilities are struggling. Stanford Hospital in California spent weeks developing an algorithm meant to prioritize staff members at high risk of infection to receive the vaccine. But the algorithm fell short, naming just a handful of medical residents and instead choosing staff members who had been working from home for

the duration of the pandemic. In an unusual display of public frustration, Stanford medical residents picketed the hospital.

To handle non-hospital vaccine rollout, Operation Warp Speed has abandoned its strategy of redundancy and turned to just a few big players. In October, OWS and HHS named CVS and Walgreens as the health care partners that would be distributing the vaccine to long-term care facilities. Contrary to the myth that private enterprise can always handle tasks in a superior fashion to government, the two pharmacies already appear to be struggling.

Because of capacity limitations, CVS has the capacity only to visit each group home a total of three times to give out the two necessary injections of the vaccine. This means that nearly all staff members and residents have to be vaccinated simultaneously, in direct contradiction to the CDC’s recommendation that health systems stagger their vaccinations. This recommendation is because the vaccine may cause flu-like symptoms, a result of a person’s body mounting an immune response to the nonviral bits of protein. The CDC wants to avoid health workers and their patients all feeling sick and cranky on the same day.

As of early January, West Virginia was actually doing the best of all 50 states, because it didn’t partner with CVS or Walgreens. West Virginia has limited retail pharmacies, but the state does have a network of independent pharmacies with existing relationships with long-term care facilities in the state. As a result, West Virginia injected the highest percentage of delivered doses to its population over the first month of the vaccine rollout.

Other big players will purportedly handle other major steps of the vaccine rollout. For example, McKesson, one of the largest drug and medical equipment distributors in the world, will be responsible for distributing the vaccine to individual providers’ offices, once the vaccine is more widely available (it has also played this role in the annual flu vaccine rollout).

Even if these private-sector corporations are entirely successful, and they devote enough time, money, and manpower to the efforts instead of higher-revenue alterna-

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tives, OWS has undermined its earlier manufacturing strategy by creating just a few failure points in the system. Take this one example: If a freezer goes out in a doctor’s office, it is the loss of several dozen doses of vaccine. But if a freezer goes out at the CVS or McKesson distribution centers, it can mean a significant delay in the vaccination timeline.

We have a real-world example of this.

On January 4, a broken freezer in Ukiah, California, sent hospital personnel racing through the small town to administer 600 doses in two hours. They managed to get the job done because it was relatively achievable. A similar failure at a large distribution center would simply lead to mass spoilage.

OWS also neglected softer points of the vaccine rollout. The U.S. has had no mass, public efforts to build vaccine confidence; on the contrary, President Trump undermined scientists at almost every point during the COVID-19 crisis. In Dr. Schaffner’s view, the biggest failure of the federal government has been the lack of “communication-slash-education.” As he explained, “Not just education, which is a one-way street, but communication, which means listening, responding, and generating confidence in people. It’s not only important, it’s going to be essential.”

It may well be that the vaccine rollout had a bumpy start but will come together.

After all, no single country (except, as of this writing, Israel) has seen a rapid start.

In a press conference during the last week of December, Gen. Gustave Perna, the chief operating officer of OWS and the former head of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, sounded a note of confidence. “There’s a learning curve in the system,” he said. “As vaccines become more available in pharmacies, it will become more straightforward. I expect that things will move quickly. What we should be looking at is the rate of acceleration over the coming weeks.” Indeed, by the first week of January, dosage rates were hitting 700,000 a day, and rising.

THIS FINAL PHASE of the pandemic will

probably still prove the most frustrating.

Seemingly the most difficult part of the process, the manufacture of the vaccine, was completed in record time. Operation Warp

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The American people have watched a vaccine distribution process run directly into the balkanized American health system.

Speed proved adept at navigating supply chain crises and incentivizing the manufacture of unprecedented doses, despite a pharmaceutical industry that has never been more sclerotic.

Now, trapped inside, the American people have to watch a vaccine distribution process run directly into the balkanized American health system, one notoriously resistant to blanket incentives and already barely holding up under the strain of the virus. And OWS seems to be nowhere to be found. Certainly, its officials are not on the ground, working out the kinks that each health system may encounter. Nor are officials promulgating guidance that would ease the initial phases of the rollout.

But at the risk of finding silver linings in a storm that’s killing hundreds of thousands, there are some real takeaways from the vaccine manufacture and distribution so far. A strong central-planning team with experience in logistics and contracting, deliberately finding redundancies and funding a diverse portfolio of products, can crush previous scientific timelines. Smaller pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms are producing lifesaving research and should be both funded and protected from acquisitions, and the government should be able to reap the rewards on the behalf of the American people. Perhaps most importantly, the pandemic is also demonstrating that research-and-development spending

from the government is never a bad investment. In fact, more R&D spending on the public-health side might have built the infrastructure that would allow an easier vaccine distribution.

The innovation of private companies is real, but so is the power of the government in motivating and surfacing that research.

Operation Warp Speed’s early involvement in securing supply chains and creating a competitive portfolio of vaccines was crucial in getting us here, with several working vaccines just a year after COVID-19 was first described. But now we need even more.

To successfully roll out the vaccine, we need an influx of funding, a real effort from central planners, and an understanding of the dual effects of concentrated power and health care balkanization. To smooth all this over, OWS or other federal officials will need to take back the reins and give real, detailed guidance to jurisdictions on whom to prioritize, when, and how. They will need to circulate instructions, work through kinks, and be on the ground continuing to develop best practices. They need to spend heavily on public-health and distribution infrastructure, while also spending on a public, bipartisan campaign to shore up vaccine confidence.

Officials are responsible for building more redundancy—not only more manufacturers, but more storage facilities and distribution points to inject the vaccine (independent pharmacies would not be a bad place to start). And they’ll have to get creative: mobile vans to carry the vaccine, going door-to-door in neighborhoods to provide education and injections, pop-up sites in public parks. All of these decisions will require strong central government coordination, which the Biden team has begun to set up.

And then, when the vaccine is finally in the arms of enough Americans—a diverse, large group of Americans—they need to prepare for the next pandemic, using this hard-won playbook. n Olivia Webb is a policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project and the author of Acute Condition, a newsletter about health care consolidation and policy.

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Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and his wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton) enjoy a beverage in Mank.

Mank Is Fake News About Fake News But by inventing a plot point in his biopic about Herman J. Mankiewicz, David Fincher creates an inadvertent truth about our political moment. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

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• }}}}}}}}}} }}}}} Film[TELEVISION

entral to the lore of classic Hollywood are tales of disconsolate screenwriters rendered cynical and selfloathing by the indignities that producers and studio moguls heaped upon them, and by their own failures to walk away because they were being paid too much to leave. From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon to the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink and Hail, Caesar! the story of

the hard-bitten and much putupon screenwriter has long been the subject of novels and plays, of screeds and parodies.

But stories of screenwriters at work don’t really lend themselves to the big screen, or even the small one. Typing, dictating, even wadding up paper and throwing it away isn’t the stuff of high drama. William Holden’s occupation as a screenwriter in Sunset Boulevard is a

sidelight to a larger story about the evolution of movies, in which Gloria Swanson’s faded star is central. Humphrey Bogart’s screenwriter is the main character of In a Lonely Place because he may be a murderer.

That may be why films about actual screenwriters are so rare.

The sole exception to this rule is Trumbo, which dealt with the struggles of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was briefly

imprisoned for contempt of Congress for his refusal to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and then blacklisted by the studios for what they believed was his onetime membership in the Communist Party and his decision not to rat on his fellow lefties. During his decade on the blacklist, Trumbo authored screenplays under various pseudonyms, which won Oscars for other writers who’d been given the credit. He then broke the blacklist when Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger each decided they’d credit him for writing their respective films (Spartacus and Exodus). In other words, Trumbo told the story

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of a political period that shook the nation and the film industry, viewed through the prism of the Trumbo family’s ordeal.

There’s plenty of human drama in the life of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the subject of Mank, the new film by director David Fincher with a decades-old script by Jack Fincher, his late father. Mankiewicz was abundantly cynical and deeply self-loathing even before he got to Hollywood. But once he arrived, despite the contempt in which he held both the industry and its product, he thrived.

For a time, Mankiewicz recruited a generation of playwrights and journalists to come west to craft the words for talking pictures; produced some brilliant, anarchic comedies (including two Marx Brothers classics) himself; and turned out other scripts that pleased the studios, even when he knew they were dreck. On his own volition, he penned an antiHitler drama in the month following the Nazis coming to power in 1933, which predicted the murderous violence of the then-fledgling Third Reich. Mankiewicz tried to find a studio with the guts to produce it, but the studios, fearing the loss of their German market, turned him down.

By the mid-1930s, though, the subversion of propriety and logic that had once suffused his comedies had given way to a deeper subversion of his own talents. By the time we meet him in Mank, it’s 1940, and he hasn’t written or produced or even completed anything worthwhile in years. He’s still known as a devastating wit, and also for drinking himself into recurrent stupors and gambling away both his own money and whatever he’s sponged from studios and friends. But his fabled wit was confined to the spoken, not the written, word. (The alcoholism and gambling dated back at least to Mankiewicz’s college years at Columbia. His classmate, the great comedy writer Morrie Ryskind, told me when I interviewed him in the 1970s of the couplet he had composed that was affixed beneath Mank’s photo in the Columbia yearbook: We’ll say this much for HJ Mank / When anybody blew, he drank.)

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But we also meet Mankiewicz at a moment of potential resurrection.

His wit, and the brilliance behind it, attracted one more migrant from Broadway to Hollywood: Orson Welles, the 24-year-old theatrical phenom and radio genius. Welles spent hours with Mankiewicz, cooking up possible projects for his debut film.

They settled on dramatizing the life of a media baron modeled on William Randolph Hearst, whom Mankiewicz knew well, having been for a time a regular guest at San Simeon, home to Hearst’s palatial, bizarre estate. The result was the original script for Citizen Kane, which critics and historians have ranked over the subsequent eight decades as one of the greatest movies ever made.

Both Mankiewicz and Welles knew they were playing with dynamite by creating a character so unmistakably modeled on Hearst, whose papers not only helped ensure the success of Hollywood’s films and stars for decades, but also had no hesitation going after anyone whom Hearst wanted to target. (The one remaining American newspaper still functioning in the old Hearst spirit is Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.) Moreover, Hearst’s longtime friendship with the most powerful studio mogul, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, made the project even riskier. After Kane was finished but before it was released, Mayer actually offered RKO, the studio that had produced it, a cool million dollars in return for RKO destroying it. Fortunately, RKO refused the offer.

For Mankiewicz, Kane ran the risk that Hearst would view the film as a betrayal and sic his newspapers on him (which he eventually did three years later, when Mankiewicz’s drunk-driving arrest provided the pretext for front-page “exposés” in Hearst papers across the country for nearly a month). The Finchers endeavor to explain why Mankiewicz not only went through with the project, when he had dropped so many others, but also fought, successfully, to get credit for the screenplay, though his initial contract with Welles required him to ascribe credit for their work solely to the director.

Pride of authorship, pride of having

Both Mankiewicz and Welles knew they were playing with dynamite by creating a character so unmistakably modeled on Hearst. his name attached to what he knew would be a great film, pride in work that followed the great fall of his career—all these are the answers that Mank quite accurately provides.

But there’s no larger narrative framing Herman Mankiewicz’s life and career and decision to take on Hearst, something that could drive the story beyond the clicking of typewriters and the fight over screen credit. So the Finchers, in the best Hollywood tradition, invented one.

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n Mank, the heart of the drama is the belated revenge that Mankiewicz takes on Hearst and the studios for their attacks on the 1934 California gubernatorial campaign of author Upton Sinclair, a socialist who won the Democratic nomination that year. Sinclair, the muckraking writer who’d won national acclaim for exposing the abuse of slaughterhouse workers, the animals they dismembered, and everyone who ate meat, in his 1906 novel The Jungle, had run for governor of California twice before on the Socialist Party line, never winning more than 2 percent of the vote. The first year of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and the nation’s Depression-era leftward movement, however, led him to believe he could more effectively advance a socialist agenda by running as a Democrat.

Having won the Democratic primary, to general astonishment, on a platform to “End Poverty in California” (known as the EPIC movement), Sinclair appeared to be leading his Republican opponent, a reactionary named Frank Merriam, as November’s election drew near. Then, the state’s Republican establishment—in particular, Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times, Hearst’s several

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William Randolph Hearst, played

by Charles Dance in Mank

California-based papers, and the Hollywood studios—decided to do whatever it took to defeat Sinclair.

Hearst was no stranger to fake and manipulated news. His papers’ depiction of the explosion that had sunk the battleship USS Maine in Havana’s harbor in 1898 falsely attributed the Maine’s demise to the machinations of the Spanish government (Cuba was then a Spanish colony). His paper’s hysterical agitation for retaliatory military action played a key role in pushing the McKinley administration to embark on our first extra-continental imperialist war, in which we wrested control of both Cuba and the Philippines.

It was no great stretch, then, when Hearst’s California newspapers began running stories in 1934 that “reported” on Sinclair’s plans to expropriate small shops and homes (which didn’t actually exist). It was actually the L.A. Times, owned not

by Hearst but by Harry Chandler, that took the lead on this, but since Hearst is a key figure in Mank and

Chandler isn’t in the picture at all, the Times escapes unscathed in the Finchers’ film. (It didn’t escape Mankiewicz’s sardonic wit. Reviling not just the paper’s reactionary politics but the jejune boosterism that had it put a Los Angeles angle on every story it could, he once said that the quintessential Times headline would be “L.A. Dog Chases L.A. Cat Over L.A. Fence.”)

Of course, Americans had long been accustomed to political fabrications in newspapers, particularly those, like Hearst’s and Chandler’s, whose political slant was well established. The core method of destroying Sinclair’s political hopes highlighted in Mank, and the more innovative one, involved the production and distribution of fake newsreels that were screened before feature films—essentially, the first filmed attack ads in history.

Fiction films had long depicted completely false versions of history, of course (The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind being two prime

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examples). But the moviegoing public was unaccustomed to seeing fictional agitprop presented as documentary news. This hits home harder than newspapers’ fabrications, adding the greater authority of a filmed event: In newsreels, that was really FDR speaking, Hitler gesticulating, the Queen Mary docking in New York Harbor.

The studio moguls of 1934 had an ax to grind. They not only loathed Sinclair’s socialism, but also feared his promises to raise their taxes. (In the early 1930s, Mayer was the highest-salaried executive in the nation, and the finance chair of the national Republican Party.) And so, Mayer’s MGM, at the instigation of production chief Irving Thalberg, began assigning directors and cinematographers to film “interviews with prospective voters”—actually, studio extras—that were scripted to depict Merriam supporters as good, solid Americans and Sinclair supporters as foreignaccented Bolsheviks. They even appropriated footage from the Warner Brothers’ picture Wild Boys of the Road, and shot footage of their own of their extras jumping from freight cars, which the newsreel narrators said were shots of dangerous hobos arriving in California in anticipation of a Sinclair regime that would pay them to loll around and make trouble.

All this material was bundled together and presented as regular newsreels to the millions of Californians who went to the movies every week. Thus bolstered, Merriam staged a remarkable come-from-behind victory in November’s general election.

In order to posit Mankiewicz’s hatred of Hearst and Mayer as central to his determination to épater le bourgeoisie—at least the Hearst and Mayer wing of the bourgeoisie—in his screenplay for Kane, the Finchers place Mank squarely in the middle of the studios’ machinations. In an exchange with Thalberg, Mankiewicz refuses the studio’s demand that he, like all studio employees, contribute $20 to Merriam’s campaign. (In reality, only a handful of stars who were both so left and so popular that they could reject that demand— chiefly, Warner Bros.’ James Cagney—refused to pay and endorsed Sinclair.) As he leaves his meeting

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with Thalberg, Mank notes in passing that for an industry that had created fearful horrors like King Kong, it shouldn’t be all that hard to create a Sinclair as monstrous as Kong.

This sparks Thalberg’s idea for the phony newsreels. Mankiewicz then fights in vain to keep the studios from running them in every movie theater in California. The Finchers also create a budding director friend of Mankiewicz’s whom MGM hires to shoot those “newsreels”—who is so remorseful at the role they played in Sinclair’s defeat that he subsequently kills himself. Motivation aplenty for Mank’s scripted revenge!

One problem, however: None of this actually happened. There’s no record of Mankiewicz inspiring Thalberg, imploring MGM not to distribute the newsreels, or even favoring Sinclair. His younger brother Joe (better known today as the writerdirector Joseph L. Mankiewicz), then a lowly contract writer for MGM, actually penned some of the studios’ radio ads for Merriam, while the real director of the fake newsreels never showed any remorse for the deception. The entire motivating force of the Finchers’ film was conjured up out of whole cloth. But despite that, the story of Mank—if not Mank— resonates 80 years later.

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t’s only because of these Finchercreated motivations for their protagonist, and the quarter-century delay in finding a studio (Netflix) willing to produce the script, that the issues of socialists breaking out of the third-party ghetto by running as Democrats, and the efficacy of fake news to defeat any liberal candidate, have come to the screen at the very moment when they’ve never been more timely. Mank opened on Netflix one month and a day after the 2020 election, the very moment when the really fake news that only rampant fraud and Venezuelan voting-machine software had kept Donald Trump from a second term was inspiring perhaps the greatest threat ever posed to American democracy.

Fake news has been central to the American right’s political appeal for a long time. The 1934 Republican campaign against Sinclair featured not

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only the studios’ and the newspapers’ descent into fraudulence, but also the creation of the first professional campaign consultancy. As Greg Mitchell documents in his history of the ’34 election, The Campaign of the Century, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter came together to craft ads and mailings against Sinclair just as preposterous as the newsreels, then went on to pioneer campaign advertising and mailings over decades of work for right-wing candidates.

The attacks they waged against Sinclair set the template for attacks on later generations of progressive candidates. One young progressive who first became politically active on Sinclair’s campaign was Jerry Voorhis, the headmaster of a school for impoverished children who himself was elected to Congress from an exurban Los Angeles district two years later. There, he served for a decade until defeated in 1946 by an ambitious young Republican named Richard Nixon.

The distinguishing feature of Nixon’s campaign was to attack Voor­ his—a brilliant and creative liberal with social democratic beliefs—as a Communist sympathizer, though in fact Voorhis was a staunch and very outspoken anti-Communist. Nixon actually understood Voorhis’s real politics very well. Years later, when onetime Voorhis aide Stanley Long chided Nixon about his campaign, Nixon told Long, “Of course I knew that Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist. But it’s a good political campaign fire to use. I had to win.”

Does the continued efficacy of campaigns like Nixon’s validate the complaints of today’s centrist Democrats that the presence of avowed and voluble socialists in their party dims prospects in the swing districts Democrats need to win? One such Democrat, Harley Rouda, who was elected to the House in a historically Republican Orange County district in 2018, only to lose that seat to a Republican in 2020, has argued that the Democrats need to counter “the narrative that Democrats are more and more leaning toward socialism.”

But just as Sinclair inspired young leftists like Voorhis and Augustus Hawkins (who in 1934 became the

first Black person elected to the California legislature, having campaigned with EPIC’s backing) to run as Democrats, so Bernie Sanders inspired Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other young social democrats to run for and win congressional seats on the Democratic line. More fundamentally, after decades in which American capitalism has funneled all wealth and most income to the top, the most recent (2019) Gallup and Pew polls on the topic both found that 65 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism.

Rouda to the contrary, more and more Democrats are leaning toward socialism. That’s not fake news, though it certainly is fraudulent to depict most Democratic elected officials as socialists, or as willing enablers of their socialist colleagues.

Then again, from Sinclair to Voorhis to Obama to Biden, Republicans have depicted Democrats as socialists or Trojan horses for socialism (and worse: communism!) for nearly a century, whether they are or not.

There may be a historic statute of limitations on this attack, as the specter of communism recedes into the fuzziest of memories among Americans who came of age after 1989. But whether the right has socialism to rail against or not, the events of the past few months make clear that its ability to craft fake news that rouses the fury of its base against Democrats and modernity doesn’t depend on troublesome socialists.

Ironically, Mankiewicz was one of the very first film industry figures to sound the alarm about fake news— only it wasn’t the fake news that the studios had produced. It was the fake news that Josef Goebbels had produced, the anti-Semitic falsehoods that had played a central role in the Nazis’ rise to power. That’s a story the Finchers don’t tell, and it wouldn’t have provided the kind of direct motivation to Mankiewicz’s work on Kane that his Fincher-augmented anti-studio animus delivers. Then again, both Mankiewicz and Welles were “premature anti-fascists,” and who’s to say that those gut convictions didn’t contribute to the emotions and creativity that gave us Citizen Kane? n

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How Biden Should Prosecute Corporate Crime In top-to-bottom criminal justice reform, let’s not forget the top.

BY BR A N D O N L . G A R R E T T

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ow is an ideal time to reconsider how we approach a wide range of criminal offenses, as part of top-to-bottom criminal legal reform. Every new administration has put its stamp on federal prosecution policies, and the Biden Justice Department will not be an exception.

Just as important, many more prosecutors, defense lawyers, and lawmakers at the state and local level are committed to reform. COVID-19 has radically changed the stakes when a person is placed in custody, turning minor sentences into possible death sentences. We are also still dealing with the criminal response to the last financial crisis. There is so much work to do.

Two new books, Federal District Judge Jed S. Rakoff’s Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free and law professor Jennifer Taub’s Big Dirty Money, illuminate the choices we face in reforming a criminal justice system that readily offers leniency, but largely only to corporations and the most privileged.

Mass incarceration is a “scourge”: That is how Judge Rakoff begins. He then carefully describes how innocent people can and do plead guilty, faced with the overwhelming threat of prosecutorial power. Trials have almost disappeared today, and judges must often treat those guilty of crimes “like dirt” because of toughon-crime statutes that have imposed inflexible and draconian sentencing guidelines. Often former prosecutors themselves, judges may also be inclined to view long sentences not as a problem but as a solution.

Along the way, Rakoff explains, not only have vast numbers of people been sentenced to far more time in prison than they remotely deserve, but innocent people have been convicted, even sentenced to death, based on flimsy forensic evidence, coerced confessions, and lying informants.

DNA exonerations and a large body

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WHY THE INNOCENT PLEAD GUILTY AND THE GUILTY GO FREE: AND OTHER PARADOXES OF OUR BROKEN LEGAL SYSTEM

BY JED S. RAKOFF

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

BIG DIRTY MONEY: THE SHOCKING INJUSTICE AND UNSEEN COST OF WHITE COLLAR CRIME

BY JENNIFER TAUB

Viking

of scientific research have brought to light the “real and continuing” possibility of wrongful convictions due to eyewitness misidentifications. But in the face of all these concerns, the response from prosecutors has been slow, grudging, and sometimes vociferous in objecting to much-needed fixes. So the wheels of justice grind on without pause.

Yet, farther into the book, Rakoff turns to the types of offenders who can evade the scourge of mass incarceration by relying on the very discretion and mercy so often lacking in everyday justice: the white-collar and corporate offenders. Rakoff changes tone here and calls for speedier and harsher efforts to prosecute white-collar criminals. He bemoans that “not a single genuinely high-level executive was successfully prosecuted in connection with the Great Recession.” Our system is so “very aggressive,” but not where individuals have a “corporate shield” to hold over themselves, despite engaging in “colossal fraud.”

When we consider reforming our criminal legal system, a basic question is whether we level up or level down: Should we treat the poor more like the rich, or the rich more like the poor? In a system that over-criminalizes the poor for petty conduct, uses excessive police force, imposes fines that create cycles of debt, locks family members apart, superspreads COVID, and enforces pervasive racial injustice, it is hard to see the need for harsher justice. Yet the most privileged white-collar and corporate offenders receive kid-gloves treatment that arouses legitimate outrage, particularly when fraud begets systemic risk that endangers the entire economy. If we are to reorient criminal justice toward the crimes that matter and release the vast majority of people held for crimes of poverty and illness, we should re-examine how we treat those at the top of the social system, as well as the bottom.

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That deep divide between the privileged and the helpless lies at the heart of Rakoff’s book. As a lifelong servant of the law, who loves the law and speaks its language elegantly, he nevertheless asks: “How can we claim that justice is equal,” when every day in our legal system, “we imprison thousands of poor Black men for relatively modest crimes but almost never prosecute rich, white, high-level executives who commit crimes having far greater impact?”

The culture of corporate and white-collar impunity is Taub’s theme in Big Dirty Money. How, in the country of mass incarceration, with 2.3 million in prison, has no one been prosecuted for crimes ranging from Purdue Pharma’s illegal misbranding of OxyContin, to Pacific Gas & Electric’s role in the deadliest blaze in California history, to Wells Fargo’s abuses in setting up millions of accounts for customers who did not ask for them? The carceral drumbeat begins from the first pages of the book. Taub notes that from 2002 to 2006, the Department of Justice targeted large numbers of CEOs, corporate prosecutors, CFOs, and others.

Then, after the 2008 financial crisis, that pattern “broke down.”

We know so little about the extent or nature of many corporate crimes that it is hard to say whether more top-level prosecutions would matter.

In general, more severe sentences do not deter crime, but catching criminals more often does. Prosecutors have made efforts to target individual offenders in some areas, but it isn’t clear whether even high-profile cases, such as the Enron-era prosecutions, have made a difference in corporate behavior.

In 2015, in response to criticism, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates issued a new Department of Justice memo prioritizing individual investigations and prosecutions in corporate cases. Little changed. As I wrote at the time, bringing more such cases is easier said than done. It would take substantial resources to prosecute individuals in every corporate-crime case; I’ve described how the following years saw no rise in individual charging accompanying corporate prosecutions. Under the Trump

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administration, the Yates Memo was softened, reflecting the reality that the administration was unwilling to commit the resources necessary to prosecute cases against individuals in complex corporate environments.

We would need a serious corporatefraud task force to do it.

Why have privileged offenders escaped liability? Rakoff offers several diagnoses. Prosecutors “had other priorities”—like mass incarceration.

Corporate cases can involve technical financial rules, big data, and millions of pages of records, as well as employees with overlapping roles and authority. Understanding internal records and practices, and nailing down who did what, can require tens of thousands of hours and entire teams of lawyers. Federal prosecutors’ offices, as well resourced as they are, do not have the ability to bring many such cases. Only by prosecuting the company can prosecutors secure, from the company’s own team, access to all of that internal information. In effect, prosecutors deputize the corporation to investigate itself. Without vastly expanded regulatory enforcement wings across all of the relevant administrative agencies, relying on corporations to self-investigate and self-report is a fact of life.

A common theme that Rakoff shares with Taub is that corporations themselves distort prosecutions by focusing prosecutors on the firm itself rather than on individuals. As I have documented in my data-tracking, prosecutors have turned to informal deal-making, increasingly entering deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreements filed largely out of court, without the firm getting a criminal record. I agree with Rakoff that many of these agreements are “lax and dubious,” and I have detailed the sausage-making that goes into producing these settlements.

Despite the uneven results, there are still important reasons to target corporations. The corporation is the crime scene: Only the firm will have the emails, documents, and other records concerning who did what and where the money went. Speaking of money, jailing individual offenders does not make victims whole. Except in rare cases like the OxyContin

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litigation involving the Sackler family, individual executives usually cannot pay hundreds of millions of dollars to compensate victims. Individual offenders also cannot reform corporate practices to make sure that future misconduct is detected and prevented.

Rakoff and Taub do not suggest that targeting a few dozen more executives would accomplish meaningful deterrence or reform. Indeed, unless something more fundamental changes in our enforcement system, a firm will just discard former executives and move on to new schemes.

Instead, Rakoff and Taub mean to end a culture of impunity and lax enforcement. That desire can veer into populist retribution with little long-term impact. As Taub notes, after “top-shelf felons” such as Michael Milken and Jeff Skilling have been prosecuted and completed prison stints, they have been able to relaunch their careers “with little lasting stigma.” Those examples highlight the comparative injustice that poor people face from lasting sanctions after a conviction, whether it is loss of voting rights or disqualification from employment. We need to focus on leveling up: Successful re-entry is what we should want for all persons leaving custody each year in this country. It should not just be the largest corporations that receive rehabilitative deferred prosecution agreements. People should receive them, routinely.

Detecting corporate crime is particularly important, Taub correctly emphasizes, and investing in better detection may be far more effective than aiming to impose severe sentences on a few higher-ups. Fraud, by its nature, involves concealment, even from the victims who may be fleeced, whether they are customers, shareholders, the government, or the public. Expanding the rewards for journalists and whistleblowers would help to incentivize efforts to uncover corporate wrongdoing.

Much of that work may support civil, not criminal, investigations, but that is a good thing.

To end over-criminalization, civil enforcement can replace criminal enforcement. Recovering the money lost by victims requires hard work,

and prosecutors are not the best suited for it. Expanding investigative and enforcement resources is crucial. Taub notes that the IRS alone is unable to collect an estimated $800 billion in taxes that are owed each year. We also need to improve funding for corporate investigations at other agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Civil suits by private lawyers or statelevel attorneys general may also be more effective than federal prosecutions. We need more serious tools, including stronger regulatory measures, to ensure that hucksters do not act with impunity. Indeed, Rakoff asks whether the Trump administration’s “across-the-board deregulation” may have created new systemic risks of financial fraud. Criminal prosecutions cannot replace sound regulation and oversight of industries that can endanger the public.

Six Guidelines for Corporate Prosecutions There are changes that the Department of Justice can make to address the crisis that Rakoff and Taub illuminate. The Biden campaign promised it would focus on reducing incarceration, rooting out racial and income-based disparities in punishment, and strengthening rehabilitation. Although mass incarceration is largely a state phenomenon, new federal incentives and federal use of clemency can help reduce imprisonment. The Department of Justice can play a leadership role in policing reform. It could create an Innocence Commission to detect and remedy wrongful convictions. Federal legislation can promote bail reform, alternatives to incarceration, and improved criminal system data collection.

The guidelines for corporate prosecutions will also no doubt change under the Biden administration.

Here are six specific ideas.

First, out-of-court corporate deals should end. We need legislation to set rules for judicial approval of deferred prosecution agreements and their oversight. Whether or not that happens, the DOJ can take action. Federal prosecutors should not use

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Biden’s Department of Justice can end out-of-court corporate settlements and non-prosecution agreements.

non-prosecution agreements that are not filed in court, except in narrow circumstances. Pleas should be preferred, so that the corporation is on probation. And there should be an office of corporate probation created to ensure serious monitoring.

Second, we need to know whether compliance is working. In the past, corporate agreements ended without any meaningful check on whether the company had fixed the problems. Even in cases where there was an outside monitor, the reports and the work of those monitors were not made public.

Instead, compliance should be empirically validated, in specific cases and over time. Compliance should be tested by prosecutors and by administrative agencies, as Gregory Mitchell and I have written. Indeed, the DOJ and agencies can be a clearinghouse for self-critical data collected from such auditing, and for compliance practices that are shown to be successful.

Third, whistleblower programs should reward the reporting of malfeasance, over and above rewards to corporations that self-report. We need to uncover misconduct, hopefully before it festers and results in serious criminal conduct and social harm.

Fourth, corporate fines should normally be calculated to make sure that a company did not profit from crime.

In the past, fines have been heavily discounted, and under the Trump administration there was a focus on not “piling on” fines. To be sure, companies should not be double-fined, and setting off payments to other jurisdictions or countries is sensible.

Fifth, individual prosecutions should focus on the most responsible and senior individuals. The Yates Memo should be restored, but in a modified form to make clear that civil sanctions may be appropriate for many lower-level corporate figures and that it is equally important

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to change incentives within the firm to ensure internal discipline when people break the law.

Sixth, prosecutors should make public what happened in corporate criminal cases, including records of ongoing monitoring and compliance issues. Relatedly, repeat criminal action by corporations should bring clear and predictable penalties.

More severe consequences are warranted when a company cannot end its lawbreaking practices. Rakoff cites my data concerning corporate recidivism in my 2014 book Too Big to Jail and, unfortunately, these recurring patterns may persist. I created the Corporate Prosecution Registry, a collaboration between the law schools at Duke and the University of Virginia, because no tracking existed for corporate crime.

The world of corporate criminal enforcement has evolved considerably over the past two decades, and individual people should benefit from lessons learned. We need more diversion, deferred prosecution agreements, and rehabilitation for individuals, not just for corporations that pledge good behavior after being accused of the largest-scale crimes imaginable.

We need to channel understandable outrage away from our worst carceral impulses, toward criminal legal reform. Too often, the privileged walk free, when people languish in our jails because they cannot pay cash bail, or they are killed in police encounters over petty enforcement, or they lose their driver’s license because they cannot pay traffic tickets. The solution is not to draw tighter chains around both the privileged and the weak. As Rakoff puts it, “Our current system of justice is beset by hypocritical pretensions, conundrums, paradoxes, and shortcomings.” That’s not just a call to outrage. It’s a call to action. n Brandon Garrett is the L. Neil Williams Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. He directs the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke, and his latest book, Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics, will be released in March.

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Love, Labor, Lost To Sarah Jaffe, the idea that you can love your job has become a trap.

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wo days before a mob of Trump supporters stormed the halls of Congress and drowned out the rest of the news cycle, more than 220 workers at Google announced that they had unionized with the Communications Workers of America.

Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley industry leaders responded with disdain and mockery to the news. Coal miners and meatpacking workers were exploited and needed unions to protect them, their argument went, but it is hard to make the same case for Google’s software engineers, who chose their jobs, are passionate about what they do, and earn average compensation of over $164,000 a year to work in state-of-the-art offices complete with gyms, arcades, and foosball tables; massage rooms; and kitchens stocked with free Ghirardelli chocolates, organic string cheese, roasted seaweed snacks, La Croix soft drinks—the list goes on.

These superficial benefits mask significant labor problems at Google, from “systemic compensation disparities against women,” as the Department of Labor found in 2017, to the $90 million exit package awarded to former executive Andy Rubin after accusations of coercing a subordinate to perform oral sex, to the classification of at least half the workforce as contractors, without benefits or protections from discriminatory conduct or even access to town hall meetings and holiday parties. But the perks themselves are part of the problem. They are dangled at workers to keep them inside the building, working longer hours, devoting their entire waking moments to the company. It sounds privileged to frame foosball tables as a form of exploitation, but it contributes to a mentality of substituting work for the rest of your life.

In her sweeping new book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited,

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Exhausted, and Alone, veteran labor journalist Sarah Jaffe argues that it’s not just at Google or in Silicon Valley where there’s a startling dissonance between the passion, love, and care society tells workers to devote to their jobs and the exploitative realities they face at work.

“We’re expected to enjoy work for its own sake,” Jaffe writes. “[T]he things we used to keep for ourselves—indeed, the things the industrial workplace wanted to minimize—are suddenly in demand on the job, including our friendships, our feelings, and our love.”

Jaffe herself notes that, as much as she loves her job as a freelance journalist, and the moments of joy it brings, it still cannot be a source of true happiness. “Most jobs will not make us happy, and even the ones that do will often be a source of deep frustration,” Jaffe writes. “I am writing these words, for example, at 8:00 p.m., eating microwaved soup from its plastic container, having now spent twelve hours in front of a computer screen, and I have it pretty good.” (I too have it good, and have my dream job as a reporter at Vice, but it’s 7:00 p.m. and I am eating a bowl of week-old pasta after a long day of work as I write this article.)

The “labor of love” myth, or the impulse to love work, may appear to be a perennial. But in actuality, it developed in the post-Fordist, neoliberal era. Unlike today’s creative and care industry workers, General Motors autoworkers in the 1950s were never expected to project the appearance of gratitude or passion while assembling car parts. In the latter half of the 20th century, when corporations sent manufacturing jobs from the United States and Europe to the global South where labor was cheaper and regulations were nonexistent, jobs in services, retail, tech, and health care took their place. These jobs often require

WORK WON’T LOVE YOU BACK: HOW DEVOTION TO OUR JOBS KEEPS US EXPLOITED, EXHAUSTED, AND ALONE

BY SARAH JAFFE

Bold Type Books

workers to wear a smile no matter how they’re feeling, and buy into the “love what you do” concept, whether that be at Walmart, Planned Parenthood, or Google. (Perversely, working in an Amazon warehouse now demands some of this performative enthusiasm as well.)

Jaffe argues that these jobs demand total devotion and excessive emotional labor, tricking workers into thinking that there’s something deficient about them if they don’t achieve self-actualization at work.

Today’s workers should even be grateful for the opportunity to work; underpaid teachers and nannies should show up for children armed with an unlimited wellspring of love every day of the week; engineers, artists, and academics should come to work with a supply of passion and creative genius that never runs dry.

“Exploitation is not merely extrabad work, or a job you particularly dislike,” Jaffe writes. “Exploitation is wage labor under capitalism, where the work you put in produces more value than the wages you are paid are worth.” That’s how you can tell a story about a well-off programmer at Google, free artisanal snacks and soft drinks and all, being exploited by a company that raked in $34 billion in net income in 2019.

Jaffe’s book is divided into two parts. The first debunks the myth of the “labor of love” in care jobs, from its origins in the women’s domestic sphere in the home to paid domestic work, teaching, retail, and the nonprofit sector. As she notes, she could have just as easily filled this section with deep dives into the emotional labor of nurses, grocery store cashiers, call center operators, or restaurant servers. Case studies feature contemporary workers living both in the United States and United Kingdom, where Jaffe has spent much of the past few years. A running theme throughout this section is that jobs that require the most emotional labor are often lowestpaid or unpaid, and feminized, with the expectation that women should fill these roles.

These chapters reflect Jaffe’s years of interviewing workers and reporting in the field, from the Los Angeles

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teachers strike of 2019 to a workerled campaign against Toys “R” Us’s liquidation in 2018 to a union drive at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains in 2017. Many of these labor organizing stories are featured in her indispensable podcast and archive of the labor movement, Belabored.

In a chapter on teaching, Jaffe traces how public-school teaching jobs came to be so poorly compensated and devalued, through a short history of the profession. Originally a parttime job for men in the earliest days of the United States, teaching transformed into low-paid women’s work in the 1830s. Labor wars in Chicago and New York City in the early 1900s led to unionization, and swift demonization from politicians and administrators, condemning teachers as “hellraisers” instead of “saints.” Jaffe describes how reformers de-skilled teachers in the 2000s by adding standardized-testing

Internships are really just a justification for the most egregious race to the bottom. requirements that put interpersonal skills into the background, and introducing programs like Teach for America, where college graduates were parachuted into charter schools for short-term gigs. A wave of wildcat teachers strikes swept conservative states in 2018 in order to lift povertylevel wages and get students basic supplies.

It becomes clear through this

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case study how the dynamics of capitalism since its earliest days have shaped such contradictory and impossible expectations for teachers, who are asked to give all of their time and love to their students with little compensation.

The second section of Jaffe’s book focuses on the creative industries, from the video game programmer to the unpaid intern and the adjunct professor to the pro athlete. Jaffe investigates how workers in creative careers, herself included, came to be “expected to find the work itself rewarding, as a place to express their own unique selves, their particular genius.” Yet heaps of invisible and tedious labor go into making a magazine like Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, a video game like Dungeons and Dragons, or a Jeff Koons art installation. “In these jobs,” Jaffe writes, “we’re likely to be told that we should

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A “Red for Ed” teacher solidarity action in Bloomington, Indiana

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be grateful to be able to work in the field at all.”

As Jaffe writes in her chapter on interns, most interns work “in order to one day get one of those jobs that are worth loving.” Scholars have defined internships as “hope labor.” Interns are often expected to perform emotional labor as well as the task at hand for free, even and especially in the most prestigious workplaces—the U.S. Congress, the U.K. Parliament, Hearst and Harper’s magazines. Because they’re competing to be hired for paid jobs, interns often have no choice but to act grateful for the opportunity. In 2019, when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) decided to pay her interns $15 an hour, she sent shock waves through the House of Representatives. At the time, 90 percent of House members did not pay interns. In 2012, an accessories intern at Harper’s Bazaar, Diana Wang, sued Hearst Magazines for violating federal and state labor law by requiring that she work for 55 hours a week unpaid until 10 at night, which became a federal class action lawsuit.

Internships, in other words, are really just a justification for the most egregious race to the bottom. They also reproduce economic and racial stratification in certain industries based on who can afford to take an internship, i.e., who has the financial security to work for free for months on end, often in an expensive city. “[T]he internship actually drives down wages by introducing a new wage floor—free—into the system,” Jaffe writes. “[T]hey must be willing to do whatever is asked and do it with a smile.” (Full disclosure: I interned at The American Prospect in 2015 for a $400 weekly stipend—and financial help from my parents and college.)

Jaffe’s solution again is found in collective action, with a joyfully militant moment in the winter of 2019 when tens of thousands of unpaid interns marched in the streets of Quebec to demand a fair wage and formal recognition under the law. Part of the problem with the internship setup is that interns, who are not technically employees,

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Heaps of invisible and tedious labor go into making a magazine, a video game, or a Jeff Koons art installation, seen here.

have no formal processes to report sexual harassment or discrimination. These Canadian interns, Jaffe writes, “questioned why certain jobs were well-paid while others were undervalued, and they challenged the rules of behavior that taught young workers, most of them women, to be meek and retiring and always ready to serve.”

As a journalist myself, I can thank my union, the Writers Guild of America, East, and the organizing of my colleagues who came before me for most of the good things about my job—my annual salary increases, my editorial freedom, my six-week severance package if I get laid off, and my relatively inexpensive health and dental insurance.

Should this “labor of love” myth be

put to an end? Jaffe says it’s complicated. As long as humans live under capitalism, ordinary people don’t have much of a choice but to continue spending the majority of our waking hours at work to sustain our lives.

Workers across the board—interns, public-school teachers, even Google engineers—should take every opportunity they have to organize and demand less time at work and more free time for pleasure, relaxation, and personal growth with friends, family, lovers, and neighbors. As Jaffe writes, “Work will never love us back. But other people will.” n Lauren Kaori Gurley is a senior staff writer at Vice’s tech desk, Motherboard, and a former Prospect intern.

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Defenders of democracy

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS Sarah Lerner knew that the images of armed rioters could be triggering for her students. Lerner teaches English and journalism at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 students and faculty members died in a shooting massacre nearly three years ago. “We understand what it’s like to be running, hiding, not knowing who’s out there or if I am next,” she said.

ike Sept. 11, 2001, when foreign terrorists permanently changed our lives, the attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, by domestic terrorists, incited by President Donald Trump, to violently overthrow our government and assassinate leaders at the Capitol, will forever change America.

Even as the Biden administration embarks on its ambitious agenda, Trump and his most strident allies are still perpetuating the big lie that the election was stolen, to sow distrust and undermine our democracy.

As this new chapter in our history is unfolding, America’s teachers are helping students examine in real time these dangerous and disturbing events.

The day after the storming of the Capitol, Lerner brought it up in her classes, sensitive to how students might be feeling. “I let them know that I’m here to talk or listen or refer them to someone if I can’t help them.” They thanked her, but most wanted to get on with the lesson. Lerner is the adviser for the school yearbook. She talked to her editors the day after the siege. They didn’t want to get “too heavy,” Lerner said, but the yearbook will cover the insurrection, because, like every year, “it’s a time capsule of the year.”

Adrian Reyna, an eighth-grade U.S. history teacher in San Antonio, had planned a lesson contrasting the 1918 flu pandemic and the coronavirus pandemic.

But when his students entered class after the Jan. 6 seige, Reyna shifted gears to discuss the events at the Capitol. Because of the pandemic, he had to do this both online and in person, focusing first on “the human part of what we do in school,” checking to see how students were feeling. Then, mindful of the initial confusion and chaos during events like 9/11, Reyna reminded his students to “make sure we’re working with facts and correct information.”

Sari Beth Rosenberg teaches 11th-grade social studies and U.S. history at the High School for Envi-

ronmental Studies in New York. Once her students processed their reactions—from lack of surprise to outrage—Rosenberg made sure they understood basic facts. “The certification of Electoral College votes isn’t on most Americans’ minds, and definitely not most kids’ minds,” she said. She wanted her students to know why protesters, many of whom became insurrectionists, were in Washington, what Congress’ duty was, and that, despite the storming of the Capitol and some members of Congress baselessly seeking to decertify votes, democracy worked.

“A lot of kids are getting their news on TikTok and Instagram, some of it good, some of it bad,” Rosenberg said. Teachers need to fill in the gaps and help students discern facts from falsehoods, she continued, adding that she is especially concerned about the spread of debunked conspiracies.

“Events are constantly changing,” Rosenberg said. “Our students are looking to us.”

American democracy itself is at stake. I take comfort in knowing that the new administration is committed to our democratic ideals, and that America’s teachers are guiding young people to think critically, to discern fact from fiction, to appreciate diversity and respect differences, and to develop the muscle to be engaged citizens. Thank you, America’s educators.

America’s teachers are helping students examine dangerous and disturbing events in real time.

The class had just studied the Supreme Court ruling that speech creating a “clear and present danger” (such as “falsely shouting ‘fire’ in a theater,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote) was not protected by the First Amendment. Reyna assigned students homework: Watch a 13-minute clip of Trump’s remarks at the rally before the riot at the Capitol, then consider whether the First Amendment protects his speech or if he should somehow be held accountable for it.

When Lazar opened the discussion on Jan. 7, “It was the horror of the inaction of the police that students wanted to talk about, so we did,” he said. “But then I showed them the speeches of senators—Democrats and Republicans—berating the insurgents and putting forth a vision of an America that perhaps never was, but one day could, and I choose to believe will, be.”

Photo: Adam Derstine

For Stephen Lazar’s students, the insurrection was a personal affront. “What they saw more than anything else was white privilege,” said Lazar, who teaches a U.S. history and English humanities course to 11th-graders at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York. “They felt deeply the double standard of policing of protest, many of them having experienced the threat of riot police when marching through New York’s streets in Black Lives Matters protests last spring and summer.”

Weingarten, right, on Oct. 9, 2020, with Marcia Howard, a Minneapolis high school English teacher, whose students live near where George Floyd was killed. Howard is here every day, protecting the youth and demanding justice.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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