The American Prospect #315 by The American Prospect

GANESH SITARAMAN ON THE ROOTS OF INDUSTRIAL POLICY MICHAEL MASSING ON PANDEMIC JOURNALS

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

Election 2020 Robert Kuttner | Harold Meyerson Stanley B. Greenberg | Brittany Gibson David Dayen | Gabrielle Gurley Alexander Sammon | Justin H. Vassallo

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contents

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COLUMNS 4 PROSPECTS THE TERROR OF THE UNFORESEEN BY ROBERT KUTTNER

NOTEBOOK 6 HERE’S HOW JOE BIDEN COULD REVIVE THE ECONOMY BY HAROLD MEYERSON 10 HOW TRUMP IS LOSING HIS BASE BY STANLEY B. GREENBERG 13 THE CONSERVATIVE VOTER FRAUD SWARM BY BRITTANY GIBSON 16 PROSPECT ESSAY CONTEST WINNERS

FEATURES 18 THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT BY DAVID DAYEN PROJECTING THE 78 HARROWING DAYS AFTER THE ELECTION 26 NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT BY GABRIELLE GURLEY ON THE EVE OF THE CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY, THE NEW PROGRESSIVES MUST PUSH THE GROUP TO BE BOLDER ABOUT THE PROBLEMS FACING AFRICAN AMERICANS. 34 ORIGIN STORY BY ALEXANDER SAMMON A FATEFUL DECISION FROM THE HOUSE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP INADVERTENTLY CREATED A PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL FORCE. 42 POPULISM AFTER TRUMP BY JUSTIN H. VASSALLO JOSH HAWLEY’S COMMUNITARIAN NATIONALISM ECHOES THE ‘SOCIAL’ NATIONALISTS OF EUROPE. 48 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONARIES BY GANESH SITARAMAN TO UNDERSTAND HOW TO REVITALIZE OUR ECONOMY, YOU ONLY HAVE TO LOOK BACK TO THE FOUNDERS.

CULTURE 55 THE UNBEARABLE DEAFNESS OF POWER BY SHAMUS KHAN 58 PROPHET OF A LOST WORLD BY NELSON LICHTENSTEIN 61 THE AFFLICTIONS OF THE COMFORTABLE BY MICHAEL MASSING 64 PARTING SHOT ONE MILLION MINUTES B.C. BY PETER KUPER Cover art by AJ Dungo

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from the Editor

ou’re reading this as we head into the final weeks of one of the most consequential, yet also oddly peripheral, elections in American history. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of who wins the presidency in November: The choice could define the future of representative democracy in the United States, just for starters. And yet the run-up to the election has been relegated to the sidelines, amid a pandemic that has thrown the lives of millions into upheaval, and a fight for racial justice that continues to bubble over. The election is everything, and yet its presence in daily life is missing. Canvassing and arena rallies and the general hum of electoral politics is absent. Sickness and disunity and uncertainty are present. And yet the decision in November, for president and Congress, for state governors and legislatures and ballot initiatives, will outlast the street clashes, the economic pain, and even the coronavirus. It will set the course for how we handle these interlocking crises. And it’s more than worth our attention in this, the final regular issue we will publish before the election. Off the top, ROBERT KUTTNER and HAROLD MEYERSON set the stakes, for the future of the nation and for Joe Biden. As Kuttner writes, history only has an inevitability in retrospect, and what gets called progress could easily be a descent, once the winners shade the story. Meyerson reaches back into his well of historical knowledge to offer suggestions for how Biden might dig the country out of an economic crisis on par with what faced both Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt. Legendary pollster STAN GREENBERG has a stunning recounting of working-class swing voters mired in a health care and economic crisis, the kind of voters who need a lifeline from Biden that may be beyond his incremental comfort zone. GANESH SITARAMAN tracks the below-the-surface traditions of industrial policy we will also need to rediscover in order to right the economic ship. ALEXANDER SAMMON and GABRIELLE GURLEY look back at primary season, and the continued pitched battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. Sammon recounts how the newly energized progressive campaign infrastructure emerged from a mistaken provocation from the House Democratic leadership. Gurley looks at how the Congressional Black Caucus will incorporate a new wave of fiercely ideological Black progressives. And JUSTIN VASSALLO profiles the potential future of the Republican Party, edging toward a “communitarian nationalism” that resembles many right-wing, anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe. My piece this issue is about everything that could happen after Election Day—the potential chaos of counting and contesting the votes, the uncertain transition in the event of a Biden victory, and the looming presence of the pandemic, along with a potential vaccine, which would only be the largest logistical undertaking in world history, on top of all the tumult. Also in this issue, we recognize a new generation of progressive thought. This year, we ran our first-ever high school student essay contest. Students read one of four books and composed an essay based on those themes. You can read excerpts from our two winning essays, and at prospect.org/essaycontest, you can see the full versions of the winners and the runners-up. It’s remarkable how much resonance the books we assigned to the high schoolers had to the current moment: Matthew Desmond’s great work about evictions, Isabel Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration and racial struggle, Robert Reich’s and Barbara Ehrenreich’s musings on the inadequacies of the modern economy. Reading through the essays, I was struck by the passion of these young writers, the ferocity of their thought, their determination to envision a better world. It was a heartening reminder in these difficult times that the world will someday be placed in the hands of better stewards. –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 SHERA AVI-YONAH, BLAISE MALLEY, ALEX ROUHANDEH 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 CONTROLLER SALLY FREEMAN COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST STEPHEN WHITESIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEHRSA BARADARAN, DAAIYAH BILAL-THREATS, CHUCK COLLINS, DAVID DAYEN, STANLEY B. GREENBERG, JACOB S. HACKER, AMY HANAUER, DERRICK JACKSON, ROBERT KUTTNER, ELLEN J. MEANY, MILES RAPOPORT, JANET SHENK, ADELE SIMMONS, GANESH SITARAMAN, WILLIAM SPRIGGS, PAUL STARR, MICHAEL STERN SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE STEPHEN WHITESIDE, 202-753-0937, INFO@PROSPECT.ORG PRINT SUBSCRIPTION RATES $36 (U.S.), $42 (CANADA), AND $48 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PROSPECT.ORG/PERMISSIONS VOL. 31, NO. 5. The American Prospect (ISSN 10497285) is published bimonthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing ofﬁces. Copyright © 2020 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, 1225 Eye St. NW, Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20005. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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The Terror of the Unforeseen BY ROBERT KUTTNER

e will soon know whether America will surmount its worst catastrophe since the Civil War. We have every reason to worry. Not only does Joe Biden need to win by a theftproof margin and bring along the Senate. If he does win, Biden needs to govern as a transformative president—not just restoring a badly impaired democracy but redeeming a deeply corrupted economy. Otherwise, Democrats could lose their narrow working majority in the 2022 midterms, and his presidency could be a four-year interregnum ushering in a more competent version of Trump. Biden performed superbly at the convention, projecting all the values of decency that Trump mocks. But at 77, can Biden change fundamentally, as Franklin Roosevelt did when he became president at age 50? While we need another FDR, Biden seems set in his ways, ideologically akin to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, comfortable with the veterans of those eras. Miracles do happen. Some Biden policy proposals have been startlingly progressive, reflecting the urgencies of the moment. At the same time, his senior appointees could be all too mainstream. So fervent support for BidenHarris should come without illusions. As progressives psych themselves up to go all out to defeat Trump, they can be forgiven for feeling a little like Charlie Brown and his football, with the American elite in the role of Lucy. We’ve seen this movie before.

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I have taken my title from Philip Roth’s chillingly prescient 2004 novel The Plot Against America. In it, Roth imagines that the isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh wins the 1940 Republican election, goes on to defeat Franklin Roosevelt, and makes a separate peace with Hitler. Roth locates his story in Jewish Newark, where eight-year-old Philip encounters the rising menace to his family, his secure life, and the America he knows. Reflecting on himself as a schoolboy, Roth writes: “Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.” Events seem inevitable only after they happen, and are safely in the history books. But today, catastrophic events are unfolding before our eyes, and we have no idea how things will turn out when our grandchildren read them as history. WE AMERICANS grow up learn-

ing our history as a chronicle of near disasters that narrowly come out right. The British nearly defeat the inexperienced army of American patriots, but Washington rises to the occasion and Cornwallis surrenders. The young republic almost collapses from anarchy, but along come Madison, Hamilton, and the Federalists, and the Constitution of 1787 is the rock on which the country develops. Slavery is a stain on American

ideals. It takes another four score and seven years, but Lincoln, after nearly losing the Civil War, emancipates the suffering Blacks. Then comes the mother of all Perils of Pauline reverses: FDR’s magnificent use of the Great Depression to harness capitalism in the public interest. He then escapes the pull of isolationism just in time to fight and win World War II. Postwar America becomes the hegemonic power, and uses its global influence mostly for good, averting nuclear Armageddon, keeping the Soviet Union at bay, as George Kennan advised, until communism collapses of its own weight. Meanwhile, democracy steadily is expanded to Blacks, women, and 18-year-olds. Trusts are broken up, trade unions empowered. Opportunity is enlarged. Airbrush alert: You don’t need to be a radical to appreciate that the country was stolen from the natives; that Reconstruction failed; that racial progress briefly surged in the 1960s and has been resisted ever since; that America’s global role is blighted by the imperialism that began with McKinley and continued with appalling overreaches from Vietnam to Iraq. Even at home, things often did not come round right: rising inequality, aborted reforms, stolen elections, assassinations. Now, we are at another inflection point where history could go disastrously wrong. Roth had to resort to a deus ex machina to get history back on its right track. Lindbergh’s plane disappears; his widow appeals to the vice president to restore democracy; a

special election is called in 1942; FDR wins and benign history resumes its course. Trump may yet catch the coronavirus, or choke on his hair. He may abdicate in exchange for a pardon. He may even accept an overwhelming election defeat. But we can’t count on any of that. So the terror of the unforeseen keeps unfolding, in real time, as we live it. Things have already occurred that were inconceivable to most Americans. A president seeking to destroy the post office in service of a rigged election? An American leader working with the Russians to promote his election and re-election? A president declaring that he might not abide by the results? How can Trump escape accountability for bungling the containment of a pandemic that will soon kill more Americans than died in World War II? How can the attorney general, as chief law enforcement official, relentlessly help his president break the law? How do elected Republicans excuse conduct that goes against their most fundamental principles, such as a strong defense, small government, and fiscal responsibility—so long as the result is low taxation, weak regulation, control of the courts, and maintenance of political power? America’s corporate and financial elite, given a corrupt, incompetent dictator who serves their economic interests, will choose the dictator over a democracy that might trim their billions. This is full-on fascism— the alliance of the business class with a tyrant who confuses the masses with appeals to jingoism and racism, while the plutocrats

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steal working people blind. Yet a hardcore 40 percent of the voters still support a comic-opera president who is certifiably nuts, and an instrument of the plutocracy that keeps trashing ordinary working people—who weirdly still view Trump as their champion. Trump is the logical extreme of a long downward spiral. We suffered eight years of a farright president whose political genius was rooted in his skills as an entertainer, and who screwed the Reagan Democrats just as Trump screws his base. There were times when Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson seemed as self-absorbed and clinically insane as Trump. Trump’s abuse of executive power was prefigured by Dick Cheney. Plenty of high officials got rich via the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street even under the most personally unblemished of recent presidents, Barack Obama; and under the not-so-squeaky-clean Bill Clinton. In the meantime, money relentlessly crowded out citizenship, while economic concentration and political concentration fed on each other. The other part of the spiral is the descent into outright racism, beginning with Goldwater, then Nixon’s Southern strategy, and the Republican Party taking on the old role of the Dixiecrats as the party of white supremacy and Black suppression. Once again, Trump merely makes flagrant what was tacit. IT WILL BE A long road back, if

at all. The usual script calls for a near miss and a happy ending. America escapes its brush with fascism, and democracy is restored. But take a hard look at what that will require. Taking back our democracy only begins with reversing the overt damage to our institutions and putting government back on the side of expanding the franchise rather than

undermining it. It will necessitate a massive assault on economic concentration, so that democracy has economic space to breathe. That means a refurbishment of the rusty tools of antitrust. It means reversal of the deregulation of Wall Street. It means government empowering the trade union movement in a manner not seen since Franklin Roosevelt, and the use of other federal powers to raise wages and restore job security. This is all of a piece—the interaction of the economic with the political. But there

evil that we should embrace as a positive good. The federal judiciary has not been enlarged since the Carter administration, though the nation’s population has grown by 110 million since Carter took office. We need an expansion of district and appellate, as well as Supreme Court judges. As the Prospect has pointed out, some policies can be reversed by statute because they do not involve constitutional issues. But many others will run into roadblocks by far-right courts using newly invented doctrines.

are two serious obstacles to accomplishing any of this, much less all of it. One is the capture of the courts. Trump’s voter-suppression maneuvers and those of his red-state allies rely heavily on the destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder. Congress can pass an enhanced act, but far-right courts will still side with the forces of voter suppression. Reclaiming democracy will require reclaiming an honest judiciary. The impolite word for this is court-packing. Republicans have been so relentless in their blockage of Obama appointees and their ramming through of far-right judges that the very legitimacy of the judicial system is in question. Expanding the courts is a lesser

Secondly, in a Biden-Harris administration, there will be an undertow of immense influence by corporate power brokers and the conventional wisdom of Biden’s long-term intimates. During the convention, Ted Kaufman, the most progressive of Biden’s inner circle, blurted out that there would be no large-scale public spending in 2021 because “the pantry is bare.” That totally contradicted the eloquent calls in Biden’s acceptance speech for massive public investment in everything from infrastructure to climate, industrial policy and health care to relief of student debt. Which Biden will prevail? There are talented progressive candidates for the Biden Cabinet. Will Biden appoint them? We will surely get some, in posts

like Labor and HHS. But Biden’s corporate allies will press to keep the real power positions such as Treasury secretary, OMB director, and U.S. trade representative in safe hands so that the administration does not fundamentally challenge the current financial structure. Absent massive citizen pressure, the overwhelming likelihood is for yet another Democratic administration whose default setting is centerleft: liberalish on social issues, but not serious about challenging the economic concentration from Wall Street to Silicon Valley that has led to depressed life chances and massive disaffection among working people. Another center-left administration that does not fundamentally alter the structure of power in America is simply not good enough to halt deep economic discontent and the slide into neofascism. The next administration will face a host of other imperatives that require breaking the constraints of conventional wisdom. The trillions of dollars created by the Fed to bail out investors and traders need to be shifted to climate, infrastructure, and reparations. Public institutions that have been hollowed out, from the CDC to NOAA, EPA, and OSHA, need to be rebuilt. The secret government that has been created by presidents of both parties since 9/11 needs to be dismantled. Massive recovery spending must start on day one, so that there are palpable gains well before the 2022 midterms. And all of it must be done at a time when expectations have been raised for making unprecedented and overdue gains on race. This is an epochal shift. It is not a reversion to normal. If “harmless history” is restored to a benign trajectory, and the U.S. begins living up to its promise, it will be the narrowest of great escapes ever. n

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Here’s How Joe Biden Could Revive the Economy And ’twere best done quickly, if the Democrats are not to be wiped out in the following midterm election. BY H A R O L D M E Y E R S O N LET’S ASSUME—AND hope this isn’t too far-fetched—that come next January 20, the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, and that a vaccine that confers immunity to COVID-19 has been produced and is being distributed. The primary challenge before the newly installed President Joe Biden, then, would be roughly the same as that which confronted Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama at the beginning of their presidencies: how to revive a terribly damaged economy. (Biden will also have to deal with a bitterly polarized nation—but reviving the economy can at least partially help to de-escalate those tensions, too.) At first glance, both the Roosevelt and Obama precedents appear to offer the same lesson: Increased federal spending that creates jobs is the way to climb out of a catastrophic economic hole. At second glance, however, the two presidents’ policies differ significantly. Each initially sought to revive the economy by investing in long-overdue projects: Roosevelt in dams and other powergenerating projects to create longterm improvements in the economies of the South and the West; Obama in clean energy and other new infrastructure investments that would downsize America’s immense carbon footprint. Both these initiatives, however, took time to put in place; neither generated a large number of jobs very quickly. Six months into his presidency, Roosevelt realized this, and transferred some of his stimulus funding to basic construction and maintenance projects that generated nearly four million jobs in the subsequent four months (this in a nation of just 125 million people). The Obama administration, by contrast, never found a way to generate employment swiftly, save through providing

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funds to state and local governments to keep public employees on the job. This divergence in economic policy led to a divergence in political power. In the midterm election that followed FDR’s success in job creation, the Democrats actually increased their numbers in Congress—one of just two times the party of a newly elected president has won midterm gains. In the midterm election of 2010, however, the Democrats lost both houses of Congress (including a modern record loss of 63 seats in the House), and to this day have yet to regain both in the same session. Like Roosevelt and Obama, Joe Biden has put forth ambitious, progressive plans to increase investment and employment in ways that would produce permanent changes in the nation’s economy. His plans for infrastructure investment, greening the economy, and boosting the caregiving sector for children and seniors are versions of ideas that had been incubating for years in liberal think tanks and activist groups. Each plan, if funded at the levels that Biden has called for, would boost aggregate employment over time. Whether they boost employment quickly enough to significantly reduce the nation’s massive level of unemployment, however, depends on Biden and the Democrats’ ability to proceed with Rooseveltian speed. That, in turn, will likely determine whether the Democrats’ hold on power and policymaking is a long-term endeavor or a two-year blip that paves the way for the next Trump. THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE of the past

half-year has so devastated particular sectors of the economy that high levels of long-term unemployment are hardwired into our future— absent smart and massive federally financed job creation. In the September report from the Bureau

of Labor Statistics, unemployment was at 8.4 percent of the workforce, and stood at 21 percent in the “leisure and hospitality” (chiefly, hotel and restaurant) sector. While many of the layoffs have been temporary, many have been permanent: By one estimate from economists Gabriel Chodorow-Reich of Harvard University and John Coglianese of the Federal Reserve Board, between six million and nine million of the jobs lost are not coming back. Perhaps more sobering still, a study from Oxford Information Technology estimates there will be four million business failures this year, and only 1.3 million business formations. How successfully would Biden’s proposals for public investment stanch these wounds? University of Massachusetts economist Robert Pollin has produced a report for the Sierra Club that estimates the total number of jobs that would be created by Biden’s pledges to increase spending on infrastructure, clean energy, and caregiving, and arrives at the figure of 11.6 million jobs per year. (That figure includes the 1.4 million manufacturing jobs he estimates will be created yearly by the increased spending on those three initiatives.) Of those, 5.2 million would result from the boost to spending on infrastructure, 4.1 million from the boost to clean energy, and 2.3 million from the boost to the caregiving sector. Economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute has estimated a comparable number of jobs to those that Pollin projects would be created in caregiving each year—from 1.8 million to 2.4 million. But can the jobs envisioned in Biden’s plan be created quickly? Many will require extensive training, others will require lengthy public approvals for projects to be constructed or renovated, and a lot will require both. For the kind of senior care and child care that Biden’s proposal calls for, new workers will need training, as will workers new to construction jobs. Just as time-consuming, if not more so, will be setting up the establishments required for universal child care and senior care, and making sure that new infrastructure and energy developments pass

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The Wealth of the Nation by Seymour Fogel

environmental and political muster. Projects requiring buy-in from state governments may well not get it if those governments are Republicancontrolled. (Despite the Obama administration providing funding for new tunnels running under the Hudson River, Chris Christie—then the Republican governor of New Jersey—refused to go ahead with the project.)

If Biden wins, his hold on power depends on his ability to proceed with Rooseveltian speed.

THE FATE OF THE $787 billion Obama

governments whose revenues had collapsed in the Great Recession’s wake—worked as well as the funding would permit. States that had laid off many thousands of teachers, for

stimulus illustrates what can go wrong with a Democratic president’s best-laid plans. One part of that plan—sending money to state

instance, were able (if they were so inclined—see Chris Christie, above) to recall a number of them, though no state received enough money to come even close to avoiding layoffs altogether. States willing to accept more Medicaid funding from the federal government got it. This year, the stimulus that the Democratic House passed in May (which the Republican Senate has subsequently ignored) included a trillion-dollar appropriation to the states to keep them from having to cut untold thousands of their employees from the rolls. Biden supported that bill, and would likely

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make such a bailout to the states an immediate priority once he takes office. But the rest of the Obama stimulus took a good deal of time to trickle down to its intended recipients. For a set period of time, its Recovery Act reduced payroll taxes, but rather than do so in one lump sum that recipients could have recirculated, and would have noticed, it did so by adding small amounts to each payroll check, which may have reduced its economic impact and surely reduced its political effect. The real hang-up, though, came in initiating the kind of projects that Americans expected a stimulus to jump-start: public works, whether related to infrastructure, green energy, or both. The problem wasn’t a lack of will: The Obama administration understood that 2009 was a time for big government to resurface after decades spent submerged under

As vice president, Biden managed the stimulus package, which went well but suffered from a lack of shovel-ready infrastructure projects.

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right-wing ideology. The problem was that progressive big government smacked head-on into progressive good government: a need for public sign-off and vetting that hadn’t been a comparable factor when Americans employed by the New Deal were building post offices and paving roads. “I kept hearing that we had lots of projects that were shovel-ready,” one Obama administration official told me in 2010. “But they weren’t. We have think tanks that make a compelling case for Keynesian stimulus. What we need, it turns out, is a think tank that tells us how to actually do a stimulus—how we can get the dollars out there now.” Of the $787 billion in the Recovery Act, $85 billion was targeted for America’s mega-state, California. Much of that went to Medicaid and school districts, but the public-works funding, which was administered

through the Departments of Energy and Transportation, was very slow to appear. Of the $10.6 billion the state received in infrastructure funding, only $1.2 billion had been spent in the program’s first year. By 2009’s end, the stimulus had funded 50,138 jobs in education, but only 1,656 in transportation. In 2010, Laura Chick, a former Los Angeles city controller (and a liberal Democrat) whom Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had appointed as the state’s inspector general of stimulus spending, explained the hang-ups to me. “To be shovel-ready is much more complicated now than it was in 1933,” she said. “Environmentalimpact reviews, historic-preservation safeguards, unionization of government workers—these are good things, but they’ve changed the way government can operate. “There are no exemptions from [federal] regulations that came with

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the stimulus funds,” she added. “They didn’t waive the requirement for competitive bidding; they stressed competitive bidding. You can’t just build a new bridge. You’ve got to do environmental-impact reports, you have to open up the decision to community input, you face potential lawsuits. I’m not saying concern for environmental impacts should go away, but it makes it harder to deal with an economic crisis.” “We got $25 million of the $256 million in Department of Energy (DOE) grants to the state Energy Commission to make 250 state office buildings more energy-efficient,” Scott Harvey, the chief deputy director of California’s Department of General Services, told me in 2010. “We do competitive bidding for the jobs.” By year’s end, of the $25 million, only $5.4 million had gone out to contractors. Yet the Roosevelt administration encountered similar constraints to getting its own stimulus up and running. In its fabled first hundred days, it had persuaded Congress to appropriate $4 billion—a huge sum of money for its time—for public works. Those funds had gone to the Department of the Interior, whose secretary, Harold Ickes, was a stickler not just for exhaustive competitive bidding but for crossing every I and dotting every T before a construction contract was let. His initiative—the Public Works Administration—was to do great work, building the Boulder and Bonneville Dams, the Triborough Bridge, and several of the aircraft carriers that were to smash the Japanese navy in the Battle of Midway. But with unemployment at nearly 25 percent, and with the enactment of unemployment insurance not yet accomplished, the PWA was taking too long to gear up. That September, Roosevelt’s federal relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, came to him with a dire warning: Americans were likely to starve during the coming winter unless the government could generate jobs, and quick. Hopkins proposed establishing a labor-intensive employment program that could be geared up immediately, and Roosevelt agreed—funding it by taking $1

Could a Biden administration create a 21stcentury equivalent of the Civil Works Administration? billion of the $4 billion allotted to the PWA and giving it to a program Hopkins would throw together, the Civil Works Administration. Hopkins proved to be America’s master mobilizer. The CWA began operations on November 9 and, working with governors and mayors (and in 1933, not even Republican politicians turned down federally funded job projects), had put 4.3 million unemployed Americans to work by the following February on 180,000 small-scale projects. That 4.3 million amounted to 3.4 percent of the nation’s population of 125 million; an equivalent percentage of today’s population would come to 11.2 million. Most of the jobs created required only the use of shovels and pickaxes; the CWA’s workers paved airport runways and the roads connecting farms to market, built playgrounds, and constructed or made improvements to 40,000 schools. The CWA was conceived as a onewinter-only emergency project, but in 1935, it was reconceived as the Works Progress Administration, which through the remainder of the decade employed millions more on kindred projects. COULD A BIDEN administration create

a 21st-century equivalent of the CWA? It would, of course, have to deal with the high levels of unemployment by enacting the $600 weekly federal supplement to unemployment insurance that the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have refused to renew. But it will be no less urgent—economically and politically—to lower the unemployment rate with federally funded jobs. A number of Obama veterans

have recognized the need to create jobs more quickly this time around. Writing in The Nation, Pollin, who worked with the Department of Transportation on the green investments in the Obama stimulus, noted that this time, “we need to identify the subgroup of green investment projects that can realistically roll into action at scale within a matter of months. One good example would be to undertake energy-efficient retrofits of all public and commercial buildings … The administrative issues around mounting such projects could begin today. The on-site work could then begin on the first day that it is safe to do so.” The severity of that problem should require the administration to cut much of the red tape that would slow down its job creation. One way to do that would be to put some of those new jobs directly on the federal payroll, rather than send funds to the states to establish the very same jobcreating projects, for which they’d have to constantly check with the feds to ensure that they were meeting the federal criteria. The CWA and WPA worked with state and local governments to identify needs and get signoffs, but by reserving for themselves the role of direct employer, they sped the process along. Another time-saver would be to shorten some of the good-government processes that delay projects’ implementation. There’d be no small irony, I acknowledge, in limiting the time prescribed for an environmental-impact report on a clean-energy project, but that may be what the administration needs to do to pull the economy back from the abyss—and to ensure that clean energy isn’t short-circuited by the right wing returning to power in two or four years. What all this means is that the Biden campaign’s policy wing, and the liberal infrastructure that has helped inform it, needs to be working now not only on policies that will create a more thriving and egalitarian economy, but on those which can be made to thrive in the shortest amount of time. That’s no easy task, but one that both the economy and the nation’s political future demand. n

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How Trump Is Losing His Base Focus groups with working-class and rural voters show the deep health care crisis in America, and trouble for Trump’s re-election.

Trump’s Declining Support Among White Working-Class Voters 2016

2018

Aug ’20

BY S TA N L E Y B. G R E E N BE RG THE HEARTBREAKING HEALTH care cri-

sis that is ravaging working-class and rural communities threatens to cut short Donald Trump’s political career, and demands a forceful response from opposition Democrats. It will teach big lessons about how to reach working people who are struggling, regardless of color. That is clear to me after listening to white working-class voters in Zoom focus groups for the American Federation of Teachers and Voter Participation Center in the first week of August, outside of metropolitan areas in rural Wisconsin, the Mahoning Valley region in Ohio (also known as Steel Valley), northern Maine, and suburban Macomb County, Michigan. The results of these sessions also fit with the results of a phone survey I conducted of working-class voters in the 16 battleground states, after Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris for vice president and the launch of the Democratic National Convention, though before his finalnight acceptance speech. In 2016, a white working-class revolt enabled Trump to win men by an unimaginable 48 points and women by 27. But disillusionment was real in the midterms: The Republican House margin dropped 13 points across the white working class. In the new poll, Trump lost a further 6 points with white working-class women, where Biden only trailed Trump by 8 points (52 to 44 percent). While Trump has been throwing a lot of red meat to his base, white working-class men have not been dislodged from their trajectory, as Trump’s margin eroded another 4 points. These are mostly low-wage families, many with children raised by a single parent. They are consumed with rising opioid deaths and disabilities and a deadly expensive health care system. That was a big part of why they voted for Donald Trump

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in 2016: so he could end Obamacare and its costly mandate, and deliver affordable health insurance for all. When he failed to do so, many voted against the Republicans in the midterms. But the pandemic was the perfect storm. I have never seen such a poignant discussion of the health and disability problems facing families and their children, the risks they faced at work, and the prospect of even higher health care and prescription drug costs. The final straw was a president who battled not for the “forgotten Americans,” but for himself, the top one percent, and the biggest, greediest companies. That is why most in the Zoom focus groups pulled back from President Trump. Three-quarters of these voters supported Trump in 2016, but less than half planned to vote for him now. Even those who still supported him did not push back when other participants expressed anger with his doing nothing about health care, fostering hatred and racism, dividing the country, siding with the upper classes, and having no plan for COVID-19. This is a life-and-death issue for them, as much as nearly any other group in American society. The same voters were still very cautious about Joe Biden, who seemed old and not very strong, but most importantly offered the prospect of only minor changes to the health care system and seemed unlikely to challenge the power of the top one percent. Like lots of other working people, they are looking for a leader who will make big changes in health care, fight for working people over big business, and unite the country to defeat the current economic and public-health crisis. Working-class anger with the establishment after the financial crisis of 2008 ran deep into the Democratic base of Blacks, Hispanics, unmarried women, and millennials,

+48 +34 +30 MEN

+27 +14 +8 WOMEN DEMOCR ACY CORPS/VPC

too. Many were not initially enthusiastic about the Affordable Care Act, and in election after election failed to rally fully for Democratic candidates until the 2018 midterms, when Democrats ran on “health care, health care, health care!” The pandemic may allow progressives to battle for working people, regardless of color. IN TODAY’S WORKING -class and rural communities, health care is everything. In introductory remarks, participants in the focus groups went right to the personal health care crises they were facing every day. “My wife is disabled,” said one man from Wisconsin. “My daughter has 30 percent immune system left so she’s bouncing around from doctor to doctor and the wife says don’t bring [the pandemic] home.” Another Wisconsin man spoke of his terminally ill sevenyear-old son. A woman in Maine explained how she nearly bled to death and had a $24,000 medical bill “on my credit report for who knows how long.” One woman from Ohio had two kids with autism, and another had a grandson with allergies, requiring access to a lifesaving EpiPen. “I haven’t been able to get him one for the last three years, I can’t afford it … my insurance won’t cover it,” the woman said. Prices have skyrocketed for EpiPens and remain stubbornly high.

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WENDY VAN / GET TY IMAGES

Left-behind communities suffer from elevated levels of disability and a crisis of health care affordability.

As I was observing the Zoom group, I initially wondered whether the focus group recruiter had used some specialized list to find the participants. But then I checked the census data on disabilities. Across the country, 12.6 percent of the population has disabilities, rising to 15.1 percent in rural areas. Black and Native American populations are more likely to have disabilities than their white counterparts. The rate is over a quarter for those 65 to 74 years old and half of those over 75 years—all groups

that are overrepresented in these rural areas. And structural racism has played a powerful role here: 20 percent of Blacks with disabilities were employed at the beginning of this year, compared to 30 percent of whites and Hispanics with disabilities. Then I looked at census data for the congressional districts where these sessions were being held. It was a new window into America in the pandemic. In suburban Macomb County, the disability rate looks like the rural areas, with 14 percent of

both whites and Blacks disabled. In northern Maine, the numbers show one in five with disabilities, slightly more for whites. In Ohio’s Sixth Congressional District, both one in five whites and Blacks are disabled. And seniors in these areas are even more disabled than other rural Americans. So COVID violently brought together the personal health crises of these people and the failed and corrupted government response, breaking their emotional bond with Trump. Just throw out the words “health care,” and people relayed a train

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of horrors: a “$16,000 deductible,” employers throwing them off health insurance, “ridiculous” premiums, a $400 bill for their asthma medicine paid for out of pocket. They spoke of the frustrations of making too much money to be eligible for Medicaid but not enough to stay in the solid middle class. They explained how people avoid treatment because they can’t pay the associated costs. “The way we deliver health care is just unbelievable,” said one woman from Michigan, “the amount of waste and how much it costs to let people go bankrupt to pay for medical bills.” Most of the respondents live on the edge in a virtual “minimum wage” economy, where companies don’t care about their employees and look just to enrich themselves. “You’re just a number now,” said one Ohio woman. They fight for every dime, as they are being overwhelmed by a health care crisis that they recognize Donald Trump has failed to fix. And importantly, for working families outside poverty, the health care reforms passed by the Democrats—the Affordable Care Act and insurance on the health care exchanges—just were not much help. Discussion of the Affordable Care Act did not sound ideological, as they talked about their direct experience with insurance on the exchanges, which in the words of one woman “costs a lot of money and doesn’t pay for much of anything.” The health care system is failing them, and they want someone to fix it. And Joe Biden’s rhetoric has not been very reassuring that he would make big changes. “He’s been vague on health care,” one woman from Wisconsin said. “I want to know the specifics of what he’ll do to make it better.” THESE WORKING -class and rural swing voters voted overwhelmingly for Trump, but their response to him is now profoundly shaped by what has happened in the COVID-19 crisis. They think he failed to take the virus seriously and has just made a mess of it. They think he is failing at the most important issue for them. What was striking is how the usual Trump deflect-and-blame strategy no longer works with these

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What was striking is how the usual Trump deflect-and-blame strategy no longer works with these voters. swing voters. “It seems like a lot of the stuff he’s saying could be proven wrong,” said one man from Wisconsin. “He just won’t admit where things are, he’s out of touch with reality,” said another woman. “It’s just embarrassing to have a country with the highest COVID cases, highest COVID deaths,” said a man in Michigan. “We’re supposed to be the leader in the world and we completely fumbled the ball on this.” Respondents despaired about the lack of a national plan of action, with everyone “just left on their own.” Meanwhile, there was dismay that the president gave more care to his family’s businesses than the rest of the nation. One woman theorized that he didn’t shut down domestic travel “because he owns hotels.” These participants are paying a lot of attention to the position of Trump’s family in the administration and how the bailouts and loans are benefiting his family business, his cronies, and the top one percent. At the same time, they are on a financial knife’s edge, worried about being one bad break away from being homeless. The focus groups happened after the $600 federal unemployment benefit ended, and those in the groups who were out of work despaired of getting by without that. Nearly all of them supported Trump in 2016 because he was a businessman who would grow the economy. But now they’re scared about the economic damage. Trump reminding these voters of his great economic successes before the pandemic fell flat. His economic bravado was not reassuring at a terrifying moment. “I remember my father watching the news and crying, and I find myself crying sometimes when I watch the news,” related a woman from Wisconsin. “And I think, oh

god, I’m turning into my parents. You have no choice. The things you see are gut-wrenching.” In emails we asked the participants to send to President Trump, you can feel that the spirit that led them to join the working-class revolt is just broken. While some hope he will get back in the right direction, most used their email to express their deep disillusionment. You can feel that they wanted a president who didn’t divide the country and make it a “laughingstock” (two writers used that exact word) internationally. They wanted a president who put the interests of the people, not just big business, first. “I supported you in the beginning over Hillary but in the end unfortunately, you show me you’re just not for the people,” wrote one man from Wisconsin. “You lied to the American people about COVID,” wrote another. “You are everything that is wrong with America, you have effectively ruined this country,” added a woman from Ohio. “Congrats, you suck.” It is critical to listen for what they did not say: “What an ass I was to vote for that guy in the last election.” They did not regret or say they made a mistake. All working Americans have been in financial trouble since the 2008 crash, and rising health care problems and disabilities, health care costs and deductibles, and empowered insurance and pharmaceutical companies were an explosive brew. It is why many working people voted for Trump in 2016. It is why many working-class Democrats of color and millennials failed to turn out and defend Obamacare in midterm elections and in 2016. All these voters had reasons for those choices. COVID has shattered so many lives, but also seemingly insurmountable political barriers. The great majority of working people, regardless of color, are desperate for a government that stops taking direction from the pharmaceutical companies, and brings the boldest feasible changes to our health care system. n Stanley B. Greenberg, a founding partner of Greenberg Research and Prospect board member, is author of RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans.

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The Conservative Voter Fraud Swarm Interlocking sets of legal organizations comprise what amounts to a marketing campaign for the false narrative of stolen elections. BY BR I T TA N Y G I B S O N Conservative legal groups have keyed on vote-by-mail as a means to restrict ballot access.

MEDIAPUNCH VIA AP PHOTO

ELECTION YEARS ALWAYS play host to

active litigation around the laws and procedures of voting. But the unique conditions of the 2020 election have made voting rights lawsuits more urgent and more aggressive. Lawyers have fanned out across the country to address what can be changed by the courts to make November’s election as fair as possible. In reliably Republican Texas and deep-blue New York, groups have sued over whether all voters can access an absentee ballot without needing an excuse. In South Carolina and Virginia, suits have been filed over the requirement that someone

else must witness and sign your mailin ballot, a hardship during this time of social distancing and home quarantine. In Wisconsin and North Carolina, lawsuits challenge the legality of voter ID laws. In all these cases, conservative groups are attempting to keep restrictive laws in place. The Republican National Committee has dedicated about $20 million to its legal strategy, and the Trump campaign is also spending large sums on voting rights suits. But they have been bolstered by the emergence of charities and legal groups built specifically to throw money at suppressing the vote. This

includes groups with all sorts of connections to the conservative movement, like the Honest Elections Project, a legal alias for the Judicial Watch Project, which advocated for the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and which is connected to the Federalist Society and the Koch brothers network. Several more-established conservative legal groups mask themselves with the branding of well-known pro–voting rights organizations. There’s the American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU; formerly the American Civil Rights Union), which could easily be confused with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). There’s also the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), not to be mistaken for the Public Interest Law Fund. And there’s the Lawyers Democracy Fund, which often refers to itself in emails as LDF, the same nickname for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. “This is consistent with a naming trend where we see conservative anti-voter groups trying to co-opt the names of existing pro-voting groups,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, in an interview with the Prospect. “There is a concerted effort among these organizations … And they are bringing the same types of claims across the country.” While these groups do not technically work together, they share similar views about mass voter fraud in their rhetoric and legal arguments, inside and outside of the courtroom. For instance, in December 2019, PILF filed a lawsuit pushing for the City of Detroit to “properly clean its voter rolls,” which could be interpreted as purging people’s names from the official registered-voters list. It claimed, based on census data, that about 2,500 people were dead, almost 5,000 names were doubled or tripled, and about 16,500 should be removed because the date of registration was missing. PILF voluntarily dismissed the case on June 30. But that didn’t stop the Honest Elections Project from supporting a suit filed on June 9 against the Michigan secretary of state based on the same premise,

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Security measures like specific bar codes give election officials numerous warning signs that a ballot may be fraudulent.

civil rights attorney in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, who used his office mostly to allege and try cases of discrimination against white people, most notoriously the phony “New Black Panther” voter intimidation case, which became a rallying cry on the right. Donald Trump appointed Adams to the United States Commission on Civil Rights this August. Adams was also formerly a board member at the ACRU. Speaking of the ACRU, most of the board is an older-aged group of former members of Ronald Reagan’s administration, but also among their top ranks are a former executive director of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a former legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a board member at the Cato Institute, and Hans von Spakovsky, a notorious voter fraud promoter (and Adams’s former boss in the Bush Justice Department) whom President Trump appointed to his Commission on Election Integrity (along with Adams) in 2017.

ALEC, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation all receive money tied to the Koch network and their various charities. Harvey Tettlebaum heads the Lawyers Democracy Fund, but he also serves as outside general counsel for the Missouri Republican Party, and before that he was a state delegate to the Republican National Convention. And the Honest Elections Project is run by Leonard Leo, co-chairman of the Federalist Society, who is also credited with having unique influence on how President Trump has reshaped the courts. VICTORIES FOR THESE organizations

often come not from judges, but from promoting voter fraud concerns and creating a credible distraction for election officials. “The damage is almost done in the moment that they file these cases,” says Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

JESSICA HILL / AP PHOTO

with a press release using the same language, asking Michigan to “clean up” the voter rolls. The plaintiff in this case is Tony Daunt, whose legal team includes William S. Consovoy, the personal attorney to President Donald Trump, along with two other lawyers from his practice, as well as Jason Torchinsky, who is a contributor to the Federalist Society and a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association. It’s also not unusual for these organizations to rescind their claims when a win on the merits appears unlikely. Often the evidence isn’t clear when it’s presented in court, according to several experts. In one Wisconsin case from 2014, the judge wrote in his decision that “[s]ome of the ‘evidence’ of voter-impersonation fraud is downright goofy, if not paranoid.” In this case over voter IDs, Frank v. Walker, the defense argued that voter ID laws would stop buses from transporting foreigners to vote in U.S. elections, though there was no proof provided. More to the point, there is little to no evidence that there are people trying to vote under a false identity, the kind of fraud that would be prevented with an ID law. “Whether it’s PILF, or the Honest Elections Project, or the ACRU, there’s a pattern that is repeated across these jurisdictions to try to bully or compel these underfunded, underresourced local officials into purging their rolls when that is not necessary and it’s certainly not what’s required by the National Voter Registration Act,” Sweren-Becker explains. The Honest Elections Project did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment. It won’t be possible to know who is funding these efforts until November 2021, when their respective 990 forms can be made available upon request. Even then, most of these organizations will not have to disclose their donors, or their identities will be masked under different LLCs. But personnel files can be an effective way to show the track records of these groups and map out connections between them. The president and general counsel of PILF, J. Christian Adams, is a longtime right-wing activist and former

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The cases are part of a larger messaging campaign, functioning as evidence in news stories or posts on social networks, which are not obligated to connect an initial filing to a case’s ultimate decision (or dismissal). Additionally, the legal teams at these conservative organizations can work in tandem with ad campaigns. In addition to its legal work, the Honest Elections Project has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars this year on ads with the slogan “Easy to Vote, Hard to Cheat.” This all happens despite the lack of evidence of voter fraud in the United States. A Brennan Center report looking at voter fraud in the 2000s revealed that voter impersonation, both for in-person voting and mail-in ballots, occurred between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent of the time. As the report states, “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.” President Trump has recently used Twitter and his daily press conferences to advocate that mail-in voting is uniquely susceptible to fraud,

despite the fact that he also votes by mail in Florida. Another study from the Brookings Institution specifically evaluated the Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud map and database for mail-in ballots, finding that: “There is surprisingly little voter fraud and not nearly enough to justify blocking vote-by-mail systems in a pandemic.” Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, describes the voter fraud marketing effort as pure fearmongering. “It’s like when you say what could happen, and if it sounds like it could happen then people think, ‘Well, it probably is happening.’ But what people don’t understand is all of the security provisions that are in place to make sure it doesn’t happen.” Such security measures include things like bar codes on mail-in ballots that are specific to every individual voter. Ballots are not just meticulously designed (albeit not always for an ideal user experience) but are also printed on custom paper, mailed with custom-sized envelopes, and given certain types of postage. These features give election officials numerous potential warning signs

Leading right-wing legal groups working on the 2020 election, and their ties to other parts of the conservative movement:

Honest Elections Project—A division of Judicial Watch. Executive director worked for the Heritage Foundation. Connected to the Federalist Society and Koch network.

Public Interest Legal Foundation—President is right-wing voter fraud activistJ. Christian Adams.

Lawyers Democracy Fund—President is general counsel for the Missouri Republican Party.

American Constitutional Rights Union— Top adviser is notorious voter fraud promoter Hans von Spakovsky. President is a former executive director of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

that a ballot may be fraudulent, Albert explains. This conservative assault, whether successful or not, exacts a cost on democracy, Sweren-Becker says. “Just by calling into question the integrity of mail voting and just by sending notice letters and threatening lawsuits against local election administrators, these groups are siphoning off resources from these local election administrators that should be devoted to undertaking and administrating elections this year, which are occurring in unprecedented conditions and come with new price tags for new supplies that are needed to conduct an election during a pandemic.” Voting rights groups opposing this conservative swarm of litigators have made progress on removing barriers to voting in November, similar to the actions taken for primary elections this summer. However, the litigation won’t be over on Election Day. It is inevitable that a new wave of suits will be filed over the fairness of how these laws were implemented: whether absentee ballots arrived on time, how they are verified, whether voters have an opportunity to fix mail-in ballot errors. One implementation lawsuit like this already occurred in New York’s primary this summer, when a mixup over postmark rules and absentee ballots not being sent out on time caused confusion and left two races undecided until more than a month after voting. The procedural issues were partially caused by the limited resources of the Board of Elections, and its inability to execute a primarily vote-by-mail election—a transition that many states are also navigating ahead of the general election. “I was in college during the 2000 election, I remember 34 days,” Albert says, referring to the vote-counting showdown in Florida that culminated in the Supreme Court’s vote in Bush v. Gore. “I expect that in multiple states. I would not be surprised if there are ten states where they are doing very careful recounting of ballots and there are lawsuits around which signatures were appropriate and whether there’s postage. So those are the things to come.” n

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ESSAY CONTEST WINNERS

The Prospect

has always been interested in nurturing a new generation of journalists and political thinkers. This year, in conjunction with the Omidyar Network, we ran a high school essay contest, asking students to read one of four books—Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, or Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism—and reflect upon the need for economic and racial justice in America. Out of all the entries from around the world, we chose winners for the Freshman-Sophomore and Junior-Senior categories, along with runners-up. Twenty honorees in all split almost $30,000 in prize money. Below are excerpts from our two first-place entries. For the full essays from all our winners, visit prospect.org/essaycontest.

Evicted Winner, Freshman-Sophomore Division: Sara Cawley, Walter Payton College Prep, Chicago, IL Evicted by Matthew Desmond

hy is the American housing system still failing so many citizens in the 21st century? Both governmentoperated and privately owned housing markets are composed completely of systems designed by people with privilege and power. These systems keep operations easy to handle for those who control them, and they benefit those in positions of power fiscally. However, the majority of people in these systems are at the bottom of them. They have no control over how the systems that decide when and where they get to live work, or what they get out of them. Many of these people at the bottom stay in cycles of poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, emotional abuse, and physical abuse their entire lives. Those who benefit from these

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Runners-Up FreshmanSophomore:

2nd place: Ryunosuke Hashimoto, Hiroo Gakuen High School, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan 3rd place: Remington Kim, Bergen County Academies, Hackensack, NJ

systems explain the exploitation of those at the bottom with phrases along the lines of “That’s just how capitalism works” or “If they want to stop suffering they should just work harder.” What these short and uninformed expressions fail to address is that the systems in our society didn’t create themselves. People in power formed these broken systems that fail so many of our citizens, and these systems need to be greatly reformed if we want to one day live in a country with freedom and justice for all. In Evicted, Matthew Desmond walks us through the lives of several low-income families struggling with constant evictions in the inner city of Milwaukee, as well as the lives of their landlords. The renters differ greatly in personality, family life, and job status, but they share one very important thing in common; the renting system is not set up to benefit or protect them. They are single mothers, people in severe poverty, drug addicts, differently

abled people, people of color, and victims of abuse. Our American housing system has never served their needs or had sympathy for their situations. […] Desmond spends a lot of time discussing the struggles a single mom, Arleen, and her two sons experience in the face of constant evictions. Arleen has a hard time holding down a job because of her severe depression and unstable housing situation, so she and her kids rely on Social Security checks to support them. They move constantly, which means Arleen’s sons, Jori and Jafaris, change schools several times a year and miss the majority of their classes. Because the boys are never able to stay in one place for an extended period of time, they are unable to build communities within their schools. […] One way to give these kids the stability their lives lack is by implementing a universal housing voucher program. Desmond highlights how this voucher program would benefit all low-income families, by having them dedicate only 30 percent of their income to housing. This voucher equalizes the playing field for parents who are used to spending the majority of their income on housing. Children in our society would no longer be plagued by fears of losing their homes, and parents would be able to dedicate more time to their children’s education. This would lead to long-term emotional and academic success in children, and fundamentally change our system so that young people are able to remove themselves from cycles of poverty. Those that are affected by poverty and unstable housing cannot enjoy the full human experience. They must keep their hopes and dreams small so as not to be disappointed by a system that will almost certainly fail them. In order for Americans currently in poverty to live fuller and safer lives, we must fundamentally revolutionize the system that continues to force them into a state of suffering.

Saving Capitalism Winner, Junior-Senior Division: Joseph Mullen, Cypress Bay HS, Weston, FL Saving Capitalism by Robert Reich

t the pandemic’s climax, an interview with venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya live on CNBC stunned America’s elite. Asked about government bailouts of the airline industry, Palihapitiya retorted that “on Main Street today, people are getting wiped out. Right now, richs CEO s are not, boards that have horrible governance are not … you have to wash these people out.” The interviewer taken aback, Palihapitiya concluded by reiterating, “Just to be clear on who we’re talking about. We’re talking about a hedge fund that serves a bunch of billionaire family offices, who cares? They don’t get the summer in the Hamptons?” The fear that the politicians the ultra-rich had purchased wouldn’t return on the investment was a sharp divergence from the 2008 financial crisis, where they were “too big to fail.” Palihapitiya exposed the virus infecting the heart of American capitalism […] The pandemic should reveal to “free market” advocates that the invisible hand is attached to a corporate arm, with a clutch on

Runners-Up Junior-Senior:

2nd place: Ethan Jiang, Seven Lakes HS, Katy, TX 3rd place: Beatrice Han, Millburn HS, Millburn, NJ

market rules like bankruptcy to benefit the elite. This will change. Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism elucidates how to prevent pre-distribution of wealth during the pandemic. The central tenet of Reich’s work reveals that “the market is a human creation.” A truly free market depends on a democratic economy with countervailing power from the people. […] Reich analyzes the foundations of capitalism: property, monopoly, contracts, bankruptcy, and enforcement. Reich details how corporations abuse intellectual property, using the example of vaccines. While products from nature once could not be patented, “in the 1990s, the rules changed. Pharmaceutical companies were allowed to patent the processes they used to manufacture vaccines and other products from nature.” Additionally, the use of pay-for-delay agreements has prevented cheap alternatives, with approval from the government. “In 2012, Congress authorized U.S. customs to destroy [generic alternatives].” If a pharmaceutical company patents the COVID-19 vaccine, they could exploit the vaccine for profit. This hypothetical demonstrates why we must democratize market rules to revitalize competitiveness within the market of intellectual property. Modern monopolies have frightening implications. “A handful of giant corporations are reaping the rewards of … network effects. The larger their networks become, the more data they collect, and therefore the more effective and

powerful they become.” Amazon presents the perfect example, as Reich describes anti-competitive practices contributing to a cycle wherein “as Amazon’s economic power increases, so does its political clout.” These monopolies use their clout to annihilate competitors. […] We can’t rewrite the rules before expunging the “congressional patrons” from office. Countervailing power for the democratically represented American citizen would “end the upward pre-distributions currently embedded in market rules” that enable corporations to odiously increase their power during this pandemic. By reforming the pillars of capitalism and democracy, we can safeguard against future inequality. If the election of political leaders who rebuke the tether of corporate interest isn’t implemented first, the congressional patrons will continue to rig the game. We return to Chamath Palihapitiya’s treatise: Perhaps this pandemic, in exposing the failures of capitalism, serves as the perfect opportunity to extirpate the congressional patrons and the boards they bail out. If we don’t act, our nation has a lot more to lose than a summer in the Hamptons.

This essay contest is a partnership between The American Prospect and Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. Established in 2004 by philanthropists Pam and Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, the organization has committed more than $1 billion to innovative for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations to catalyze economic and social change. To learn more, visit www.omidyar.com, and follow on Twitter @omidyarnetwork.

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WINTER DISCONTENT THE

OF OUR

PROJECTING THE 78 HARROWING DAYS AFTER THE ELECTION BY DAVID DAYEN

ILLUSTRATION BY JOSEPH McDERMOTT

This is a horror story.

Maybe you think that way about the past three years: the corrupt self-dealing, the fusillade of lies and ignorance, the corporate handover of the regulatory state, the authoritarian repression. The oncoming election may provide you with a crack of hope for America to reverse what many consider a grave mistake. But while Election Day will signal the end of a campaign, it’s not the end of Donald Trump’s term in office. The 78 days from November 3 to January 20, known as the transition, have kept me awake at night since I started reporting out this article. The coming interregnum is likely to be one of the most politically, economically, and socially fraught periods in American history, one that could set the trajectory for the nation’s future. “If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can,” Michelle Obama counseled in her Democratic Convention speech. Trust me on that as well; they will, immediately after the election. We have had a few catastrophic transitions in the past. After the 1860 election, seven states seceded from the union rather

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than endure under President Abraham Lincoln, who had to sneak into Washington with armed guards for the inaugural to avoid assassination plots. The 1876 election between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes wasn’t decided until just a couple of days before the term began, with an election commission flipping three states to Hayes in exchange for his agreement to remove federal troops from the South, ushering in nearly 100 years of Jim Crow. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt romped over Herbert Hoover, and then watched banks fail, European debtors default, and the economy deteriorate. Hoover refused to intervene unless Roosevelt gave up on the New Deal and accepted his policies, while threatening to veto key relief measures as the country sank further into depression. Roosevelt also narrowly dodged an assassination attempt during the transition, which killed Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. The Hoover-Roosevelt transition was so bad that Congress shortened the length of all future transitions by a month and a half. This post–Election Day interregnum will be much worse. Several elements of those historic failures

exist today: political disunity, economic collapse, the possibility of a razor-thin electoral margin, and corrupt challenges to the results. But none of those other transitions incorporated all of that at once, and a deadly pandemic. And none of them featured someone like Donald Trump. Whether he wins, loses, or just decides that he’s won, the whole nation must prepare to navigate treacherous territory this winter.

The Election

Democrats have rightly preoccupied themselves with what will happen before November 3, not just by persuading voters but by making sure they can overcome barriers to participation: the slowdown of the mail, Trump’s threats to place 50,000 poll watchers (and even law enforcement) at the polls, and the extra costs of running a safe election in a pandemic. Layer that on top of the usual voter-suppression tactics and just casting a ballot may feel like surmounting an obstacle course. Even if everyone who wants to cast a ballot in the election can—an optimistic scenario—the battle then moves to counting. In 2018, 40 percent of all votes were cast

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either early or through mail-in balloting. The percentage in 2020 will be substantially higher, due to the pandemic. Mail-in ballots in particular simply take longer to sort, verify, and move through the system; in some states, officials cannot even open those ballots until after the election concludes. Primary elections in New York City, conducted mostly by mail, took well over a month to complete, and that slow count may be an ominous harbinger for November. A collection of over 100 political veterans from the policy and campaign worlds got together in June for a “tabletop exercise” assembled by the Transition Integrity Project (TIP). Participants were handed various election scenarios and asked to role-play actors in the system (the Trump and Biden campaigns, Republican and Democratic elected officials, career government employees, the media) and game out their response. One of the primary findings of the exercise was the expectation of an extended counting process. “We’re probably not going to know the election results, and people should just go to sleep” on election night, said Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and public affairs director at Democracy Forward, who participated in the simulation. “But that goes against everything the media sets up.” The holographic maps and slew of panelists push broadcasters toward announcing a definitive result. Somebody will be ahead once dawn breaks—but he may not be the ultimate victor. Surveys show that more Democrats plan to vote by mail than Republicans. No matter the true outcome, you can expect Trump to declare victory, but especially if he leads on election night and then falls behind. Losing an early lead with late-arriving mail ballots feeds into Trump’s stated contention that the only way he can be defeated is if the election is rigged against him. (Some Democrats have encouraged early voting to prevent this scenario.) Trump and the Republicans have tested out this strategy. They fumed at how latearriving ballots flipped outcomes in the 2018 Arizona Senate race and several House seats in California. In Florida, Trump stated that election night totals must be honored, as Democrats made up ground in

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Trump’s clamoring about the election will likely be matched with unyielding tactics, both legal and extralegal.

the late vote in campaigns for Senate and governor. (The Republicans ultimately won both races.) Last year, Kentucky’s Republican governor Matt Bevin cited unidentified “irregularities” in voting, after he lost a close election to Democrat Andy Beshear. Bevin called for a recanvass, which showed no changes, and he finally conceded, but not before Kentucky’s Senate president intimated that the legislature could decide the race. These near misses and eventual concessions did not involve Trump’s own reelection. In November, Trump’s clamoring will likely be matched with unyielding tactics, both legal and extralegal. As Brittany Gibson has detailed in these pages, Republican lawyers are already contesting rules for tallying mail-in ballots, including when they must arrive at election offices and whether they require a witness signature. The Republican National Committee has earmarked $20 million for this fight, and that’s likely just the beginning. At first, it will look familiar. We saw Republicans working to toss out provisional and late absentee ballots, and Democrats demanding their inclusion, in the 2000 election fight in Florida. That got plenty nasty, with young Republican operatives staging “Brooks Brothers riots” to prevent vote-counting and practically every ballot being questioned in a pitched battle. With Trump at the helm, it could become more “confrontational and unmoored to truth,” said Rick Hasen, election law expert and professor at the University of Califor-

nia, Irvine. Attorney General Bill Barr did not shut down the possibility raised in congressional testimony that the Justice Department would step in and demand that ballot-counting stop. Right-wing media would amplify rhetoric about a stolen election. And this may not play out in just one state, but several with close margins. The scenarios quickly get more extreme. Trump has alleged that any election with high levels of mail-in votes is fraudulent and cannot be trusted. “Rather than just litigate, what if Trump tries to convince a Republican legislature to take back their power under the Constitution to appoint electors directly?” Hasen explained. “They would be canceling the election for president and picking the president themselves.” This is theoretically constitutional, in that each state has the power to choose electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court conf irmed that state legislatures can legally determine electors themselves, rather than via a vote of the people. Florida’s legislature made preparations to do this, in fact, though the ruling rendered it unnecessary. Does anyone believe that Trump couldn’t convince

Republican state legislators to act on his behalf and overturn the election process? It’s not clear whether governors could veto a legislature wresting control of electors. But Arizona and Florida, two key battleground states, are controlled by Republicans at all levels, so there wouldn’t necessarily be a check on this activity. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Republicans control the legislature but Democrats hold the governor’s mansion; there, you could see competing slates of electors, one from each branch of government. (This happened in 1876, with the HayesTilden election leading to separate slates in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana.) Public outcry would be intense. “We’re talking about an intentional effort to use retroactive voter suppression and overturn a democratic result,” said Norm Eisen, a Brookings Institution fellow who served as counsel for the House Judiciary Committee in the impeachment process. Progressive activist groups are already preparing for the possibility of mass street protests, using an umbrella group called Protect the Results. Trump supporters would likely take to the streets as well. Many of the TIP scenarios ended in general strikes and riots. Of course, at least until January 20, Trump would be in control of military forces confronting protesters, as we’ve already seen. Underlying this tumult are some deadlines. Per the Federal Election Commission, states must report results by December 8. Electors cast their votes in the Electoral College on December 14. The incoming 117th Congress certifies the election on January 6. In a protracted fight, some or

even all of those deadlines could be missed. State courts or the Supreme Court could get involved at any step along the way, with the Supremes foreclosing challenges before states must report on December 8. But in 2000, the Court was able to do that with one ruling, ending ballot-counting in Florida. There could be several states embroiled in litigation, with different challenges in each. The calendar becomes a factor. In addition, a resolution depends on the Supreme Court retaining authority among all participants. Al Gore’s acceptance of the ruling in Bush v. Gore ultimately resolved that dispute. In one tabletop scenario, Democrats refused to accept a Trump Electoral College win if he lost the popular vote by millions, pushing to overturn certified results in states with Democratic governors. The person in the simulation making that call was John Podesta, former Bill Clinton chief of staff, Barack Obama counselor, and Hillary Clinton campaign chair. “I’m a little bit more on the lefty side of things,” said Adam Jentleson. “I don’t think people were too surprised that me and my team would contest the election. It had a lot of impact that Podesta would do the same thing.” The result of all of this is that, on January 6, there may not be a winner to certify, either because of disputed electors or different chambers of Congress accepting different slates. If no candidate definitively has 270 electoral votes, we move to a process not seen in American politics, except for the Corrupt Bargain of 1824 and the fifth season of Veep: a presidential election decided in the House of Representatives. Each state would get one vote for president; under the current partisan makeup, Republicans control 26 state delegations and Democrats 23, with one tied (Pennsylvania). The current Republican advantage gives the party an incentive to dispute results and have friendly legislatures refuse to submit electors in states Biden needs to put him over the top. “If I’m the Trump team, my goal would

be to deny 270,” said Jentleson. But the outcome of the 2020 House races could shift the landscape; one Democratic pickup in Florida and a shift to the Democrats in Pennsylvania would create a tie, and utter chaos. Even if a contested election ends in Biden’s favor, Trump could in theory refuse to leave the White House, or invoke some dubious “emergency action,” as House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn theorized, to stay in power. The timelines are constitutionally clear—the term of office ends on January 20, and the president would move from the commander in chief to an unauthorized houseguest as the clock struck 12 noon—but that would be uncharted territory for the nation, and a crisis not seen since the union broke apart in the winter of 1860-1861. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell when he served as secretary of state, participated in the tabletop exercises. “We found out the Constitution has so many holes in it, it’s pitiful,” said Wilkerson, now a professor at William & Mary. “The only things that patched the holes over time were precedent, protocol, and decency. We have discovered in this White House that ethical behavior is utterly absent.”

The Transition

Even with an overwhelming Biden victory that Trump would be forced to accept, he would retain immense power to undermine the transition, the 11 weeks between the election and the inauguration. Trump will retain full control of the executive branch for this period, and his cooperation will be crucial to a peaceful transfer of power. U.S. history offers plenty of examples of tolerable handovers. Barack Obama’s transition team was inside agencies within two days of his election victory. President Eisenhower briefed John F. Kennedy on the Bay of Pigs invasion preparations during the transition. But Trump critics strongly suspect his attention won’t be focused on putting Biden in a position to succeed. “I can’t imagine them cooperating at all,” said Mike Lux, a veteran of both the Clinton and Obama transitions. “Trump has violated pretty much every unwritten norm out there.” Some legal requirements mitigate this possibility. The Presidential Transition Act

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requires that appointees set up transition teams in the White House and the General Services Administration, which Trump has accomplished. Before a May 3 deadline, career officials, not political appointees, were put in charge of transition planning at each federal agency. During the 2000 election, the Clinton administration did not allow George W. Bush’s team

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security clearances or office space until the outcome was decided. Wilkerson contended that these barriers had real-world impacts. “No one picked up on the fact that there were people with their hair burning on al-Qaeda,” he said. After amendments to the Transition Act, it’s now law that, by September 1, Biden’s transition team gets office space, equipment, and security clearances for designated officials. “The people below Trump are doing a good job and approaching it responsibly,” said David Marchick, director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service. But Marchick remembers the 2016 transition from Obama to Trump. Then, too, the Trump team had a well-designed plan, devised by former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and run by his former chief of staff Rich Bagger. “And then what happened, Trump threw it out,” Marchick recalled. Trump fired Christie and showed a reluctance to have staffers attend agency transition meetings. The same thing could happen in reverse in 2020. If Biden wins, he and Trump must sign a memorandum of understanding after the election, giving the new team access to documents and entry into federal agencies. Trump could refuse to endorse the agreement. National-security teams are supposed to brief their Biden counterparts; that could be canceled. Memos from agency heads to their counterparts could go unsent. Processing for approximately 4,000 incoming political appointments, including over 1,000 needing Senate confirmation, could be delayed. “If you come in to talk to the Cabinet officer, he won’t talk to you,” said Wilkerson. “You want to know the policy for Iran, the plan for taxes,

there’s nothing there. It’s like if someone left you in the West Wing and said, ‘Welcome to the circus, dude.’” The Biden team, likely to be one of the most prepared to enter government in history, with a vice president just four years removed from the executive branch, could weather a lot of this. (Ted Kaufman, the transition chair, co-authored the law that improved presidential transitions.) With only 50 Senate votes needed to confirm executive branch appointees, opportunities for quickly advancing his Cabinet selections exist if Democrats regain control. But there’s a more troublesome possibility in the transition dysfunction. Trump, said Mike Lux, “will be so bitter having just lost the election, he will do everything in his power to sabotage things.” The veil of ignorance could allow Trump and his top officials to “burrow” political appointees into career service positions, keeping them in place after the transition. “They will contaminate the administration throughout unless you ferret them out,” said Wilkerson. “They will implement the previous administration’s policies in your administration.” Further acts of sabotage range from petty office pranks—messing with computers or phones—to far more consequential options. Trump could authorize bombings or guerrilla actions abroad before the inauguration, similar to George H.W. Bush sending Marines to Somalia in December 1992. He could turn in a final census report early, cementing congressional apportionment data in a way that could undercount communities of color. He could just destroy evidence that might be used in future investigations against him. And he could issue executive orders and change agency regulations, which could all be reversed, but would take time and effort early in Biden’s term. “Anything that’s done by rule requires rulemaking to change it,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “Given how active the Trump administration has been with regulations, it’s going to take a lot more action to reverse that.” The goals would be twofold. First, ideologues would strive to finish Trump’s term with as many conservative triumphs as

“ At 11:45 a.m. on Inauguration Day, you can have Trump pardon Pence, and then resign, and Pence pardons Trump.”

possible. Second, as Trump views practically everything as zero-sum, entangling the early Biden term with hardships would give credence to his likely postinaugural message of a “failing” new administration. An uncooperative transition would of course come at the worst possible time. The economy remains severely depressed from the fallout of the pandemic and the continued inability to allow large numbers of people to congregate. There remains no agreement on another coronavirus relief package, and Trump’s executive actions are already proving next to meaningless. Even if a deal is reached, most of the relief in the current bills extends only to December, leaving weeks with Trump as president and no fiscal support for the economy in place. The combination of economic pain, an uncertain election, and public-health challenges could roil markets, while mass evictions and foreclosures ensue. Like Hoover, Trump could threaten to veto any economic relief in the 11-week stretch, or even potentially shut down the government if no long-term budget agreement emerges. Governing of any kind would grind to a halt. In one sense, this would suit Democrats just fine; they don’t want to see Mitch McConnell’s Senate filling every judicial vacancy, or having a say in coronavirus legislation, if the chamber will switch to Democrats on January 3. “The goal for Democrats should be to do as little as possible in the lame-duck session,” said Adam Jentleson. But Trump isn’t likely to have a governing

impulse, anyway. He is instead overwhelmingly likely to focus the transition on selfenrichment and self-preservation. What if the lame-duck Trump administration signs government procurement contracts that give preferential treatment to his own properties? What if Trump makes deals with other countries along the same lines for their U.S. visits, or alters foreign policy in exchange for emoluments? What if he directed emergency coronavirus relief funds to Trump hotels on the barest of pretenses? What if he set a price for doling out pardons or regulatory relief? The Trump Organization has already billed the government $900,000 for travel and lodging during his presidency; imagine Trump moving to Mar-a-Lago for the transition to transfer more public dollars over to his business. “The kinds of naked looting which he’s done more slowly he could do now more aggressively,” Eisen mused. “Trump has demonstrated over and over again, it’s not America first, it’s Trump first.” That leads to the unique power presidents have availed themselves of habitually at the end of their terms: the pardon. Trump could pardon anyone and everyone involved in nefarious schemes throughout the course of his presidency: Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Michael Flynn, whomever. One scenario in the tabletop simulation involved Trump pardoning Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden’s son Hunter, just to create suspicion around their wrongdoing. Whether Trump can pardon himself

is constitutionally unclear, as it’s never been tried before. What would be legal is a bizarre scenario laid out by Erwin Chemerinsky. “At 11:45 a.m. on Inauguration Day, you can have Trump pardon Pence, and then resign, and Pence pardons Trump,” he said. “There is no limit on the pardon power in the Constitution.” This would not protect Trump or his cronies from state legal action. But Trump could make a final deal with the incoming president: He will only peacefully accept election results and leave quietly if Biden and congressional Democrats agree to end all investigations and encourage state prosecutors to act accordingly. If there’s legal immunity available, Trump is exactly the type of person inclined to take it. In other words, even in the relatively calm scenario of a standard transition, we could see kleptocracy and impunity on an accelerated scale. Said Wilkerson: “Those 78 days worry me as much as the days before.” And that’s before you get to the virus that will have killed over 200,000 Americans by Election Day.

The Virus

The pandemic could loom larger as the leaves begin to fall and a chill hits the air. Experts have always warned of a resurgence in autumn and winter. Viral spread is more favorable both in lower temperatures and in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, which cooler weather forces people into. Case counts and deaths finally started to fall toward the end of August, but remain stubbornly high, and the return to schools and campuses could keep infections elevated in the coming months. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has already warned of “the worst fall in U.S. public health history.” That augurs an even worse winter. On top of that, the normal epidemic we always face at this time of year looms: influenza. Last year’s flu season, based on early estimates, led to as many as 56 million cases, 740,000 hospitalizations, and 62,000 deaths. Flu season starts right around the election, and during the potential transition. This creates several problems simultaneously. Given the similar symptoms, it’s

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harder to distinguish between diagnoses of the flu and COVID-19, each of which have different treatments and practices. “If you walk into the ER with flu, you’re put aside,” said Gregg Gonsalves, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine. “But with COVID, you’ve got to get people into isolation.” Misdiagnosis, therefore, could increase spread. Meanwhile, hospitals already strain to find enough intensivecare beds for flu patients every year; added to coronavirus patients, systems could be overwhelmed. There are some signs of hope. The same social-distancing measures and mask usage that mitigate the spread of coronavirus also tamp down flu infections. Countries in the southern hemisphere, where winter has commenced, report practically no flu cases this year, and sharply declining numbers for other respiratory ailments like pneumonia. But most of these countries never had out-of-control COVID-19 infections like the United States, which shows that social distancing only goes so far here. And those same precautions may also prevent people from getting flu shots, making communities more vulnerable. The CDC has purchased millions of additional doses of the flu vaccine and handed out funding to states to carry out stronger interventions. Health officials have urged Americans to get shots as soon as they’re available, to minimize a double epidemic. “Getting vaccinated early will protect you earlier and take pressure off the system,” said Jim Blumenstock of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), a coalition of chief health officers. “That’s the campaign we’re messaging now, get it early.” But the flu shot isn’t the vaccine Americans are anticipating; they’re waiting on a vaccine for coronavirus. When we will have that is anyone’s guess.

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Right now, several experimental vaccines have advanced, and the Trump administration has prepurchased hundreds of millions of doses from six different manufacturers. The initiative, known as Operation Warp Speed, has accelerated vaccine production by absorbing the development costs. But skeptics of a speedy resolution have warned of a Trump “October surprise,” where he announces a vaccine breakthrough prior to the election. In his Republican Convention acceptance speech, Trump promised that his administration will “produce a vaccine BEFORE the end of the year, or maybe even sooner!” The plausible fear is that Trump, seeking electoral advantage, would rush a vaccine to market before its efficacy and safety are confirmed, distorting the scientific evidence and overruling or intimidating experts. “Everything is in place to do it right,” said Gonsalves. “The only thing wrong is if the president interferes with the approval process.” For his part, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn has said definitively that efficacy would not be sacrificed for speed. But already there are reports that the White House has pressured the FDA for an October rollout. The FDA could potentially issue an emergency use authorization for a vaccine before trials conclude, as the Financial Times has reported could be in the works for a U.K. option developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. Claire Hannan of the Association of Immunization Managers, a coalition of state and territorial directors, said that her organization has “been told to be ready in October.” In the past few months, two therapies, anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma, have been given emergency use authorizations. Hydroxychloroquine ultimately proved less than useful and even harmful. The plasma authorization came right after Trump angrily tweeted that the “deep state” was delaying treatment approval to destroy his re-election chances. The FDA has denied political influence, but it’s hard to avoid that conclusion. If this scenario is repeated with the vaccine, Trump would be putting not only individual recipients at potential risk, but the entire immunization process.

The reality is that you can only accelerate vaccine development so much, particularly at the critical Phase 3 trial stage, which several manufacturers are currently engaged in. “The trials currently planned are for 30,000 people,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s vaccine education center and part of a vaccine group at the National Institutes of Health and the FDA. Offit explained that those people must be recruited and split into vaccine and placebo groups. All of the vaccines in trial require two shots spaced out as much as a month apart. Then you have to wait a couple of weeks for immunity to kick in, and observe for symptoms. Until there are a sufficient number of visible COVID cases from the sample, the data isn’t useful. “There would have to be a clear efficacy signal,” he said. Trump may not be keen to wait. Meanwhile, just announcing the vaccine sets off what will be the largest logistical project in the history of mankind. Billions of doses would need to be manufactured and distributed worldwide, and all of the elements for production—active ingredients and chemicals, sand to make glass vials, syringes, farflung materials like horseshoe crab blood and shark livers and something called a “vaccinia capping enzyme”—are required in large quantities. Officials will need to decide what populations get the vaccine first, how to get multiple vaccines from multiple manufacturers delivered safely nationwide under the extremely cold temperatures needed for storage, whether health care provider locations need to be supplemented with pop-up vaccine clinics, how to protect workers administering the vaccine when the disease is still contagious, how to differentiate COVID vaccine shots and flu shots that could be needed simultaneously, how to reach vulnerable people without a doctor or insurance who need the vaccine, how to ensure that hundreds of millions of people getting one dose come back for the second, and how to track inventory and delivery so there isn’t vaccine wasting away on a shelf. This will necessitate extreme levels of coordination across multiple manufacturers, federal and state government agencies, tens of thousands of health care providers and vaccine distributors, private- and public-sector shippers and logistics spe-

A busted COVID vaccine rollout would feed into conspiracy theories and distrust of government.

The swine flu debacle gave fuel to skepticism about vaccinations, and made people wary of annual flu shots. The botched vaccine had public-health impacts for decades. That’s what’s at stake with getting the COVID vaccine right, and why putting the decision in the hands of a self-absorbed president, more consumed with poll standing than lifesaving, is so dangerous.

Mitigating the Damage

cialists, and even the military, according to the initial planning. The existing infrastructure for federal dispersal of immunizations, known as the Vaccines for Children Program, inoculates a few million children per year; COVID vaccines could increase the scale a hundredfold. Many of the key decision-makers are career bureaucrats, who serve no matter who is in power. But leadership at the top will play an undeniable role. And the last people you would trust to execute this well would be in a Trump administration consumed with clinging to power postelection. Furthermore, there’s no way vaccine dissemination would be complete by January 20, even if it starts before then. So the Trump team, if he loses, will have to hand off this massive undertaking to Team Biden. Counting on Trump to cooperate on that is dubious. It will be impossible enough with dedicated leadership, let alone from dilettantes. How the vaccine process plays out from the outset will be critical for the future of public health. Any kind of problem—well-connected individuals able to “jump the line” and get the vaccine first, a breakdown in delivery (like with H1N1, when manufacturing problems caused inadequate initial supply, and then a massive excess of doses), a rushed product that fails to fully work or sickens people, or profiteering among the manufacturers—will sap the public trust needed to pull off something like this. Experts stress the need for open, truthful communication throughout

every step of the process, not exactly a Trump administration hallmark. A busted COVID vaccine rollout would feed into a public conversation already given over to conspiracy theories and distrust of government. Undisclosed side effects or other problems would give significant oxygen to the anti-vaxxer movement. And if people stay away from the vaccine, it’s harder to reach the herd immunity needed to protect the public. “Our national experience with COVID-19 has created a situation of low public trust and high public anxiety,” said Kelly Moore, a former director of the state immunization program at the Tennessee Department of Health, now a professor at Vanderbilt University. Lowering that trust and heightening that anxiety would be disastrous. A previous October surprise testifies to the potential downside. In February 1976, a novel strain of the swine flu cut through the military outpost at Fort Dix, New Jersey. President Gerald Ford, facing re-election and fearing a pandemic, sprung into action with a vaccination program, which rolled out doses by October. News outlets published pictures of Ford himself getting a shot, and 45 million were vaccinated. But the government used a “live virus” that led to hazardous side effects, with 450 people incurring Guillain-Barré syndrome, which causes paralysis. Meanwhile, the swine flu only induced mild effects and quickly died out; the vaccines were delivered, and hundreds were paralyzed, for nothing.

None of these scenarios have to happen, and knowing about them is the first step to preventing them. “My advice would be to have every worst-case scenario plotted out now,” said Mike Lux. “If you’re doing that at the moment that it’s happening, it’s too late.” That means Democrats educating the public that the vote simply won’t be completed on election night, and securing the resources to carry on for months. It means promoting early voting to minimize the “blue shift.” It means political leaders bolstering state elections officials’ ability to do their job responsibly. It means recognizing the potential for massive street resistance to the most extreme possibilities. It means Biden transition officials gathering whatever information they can get about government operations if Trump cuts off communication. It means trusting and empowering career public-health officials at the state level to do their job with the utmost transparency. Still, even the most precise strategizing will overlook some possibilities. Nothing about it is perfectly knowable. And each crisis folds in on itself. Bad turns in the coronavirus fight will make it impossible for the economy to rebound. A political crisis will create economic uncertainty and distract from the virus fight. America’s adversaries have occasionally viewed political transitions as moments of opportunity, as the political leadership turns inward. While the coronavirus isn’t sentient, and America’s adversaries not typically residing inside the White House, you could see the same dynamic at play. “This could be the 1918 flu meeting the Great Depression meeting a right-wing revolution,” Gonsalves said. “It’ll already be a bad situation this winter even if things go well politically. But if we’re not going to see any leadership, we’re walking into a wall of fire.” n

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Karen Bass, in her first term as CBC chair, will need to manage tensions between the young insurgents and old guard of the Caucus.

NECESSARY EVEN AFTER WINNING their primaries,

the new generation of Black congressional insurgents has continued to pound the streets. In Missouri, one week after she’d upset longtime metro St. Louis congressman William Lacy Clay, son of a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, Cori Bush led a mid-August demonstration to the entrance of the Cole County Jail in Jefferson City. There, the Black Lives Matter activist challenged police to support criminal justice reforms then before the state legislature. In 1949, Clay’s father, William Lacy Clay

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Sr., survived a brush with local police who tried to frame him for a crime that he didn’t commit. Elected to Congress after the 1968 riots, he championed jobs and housing for African Americans and predicted, “This country is on the verge of a revolution and it is not going to be a revolution of Blacks, but of dissatisfied American people, Black and white.” Two years ago, the younger Clay, who in 2000 had succeeded his father in representing the district, trounced Bush by 20 points. This year, Bush supporters made sure that voters knew that Clay, a Wall

Street apologist, had argued for Republican and Wall Street plans that would disadvantage African Americans. When the Clay campaign belatedly recognized the threat, it went nuclear with mailers that darkened Bush’s skin tone, in an appeal to the oldschool Black colorism that still persists, particularly among older voters. In New York, one month after he unseated 16-term member Eliot Engel in the primary, Jamaal Bowman held a “people’s hearing” on COVID-19 and conditions for the inmates and workers in jails and prisons.

On the eve of the Congressional Black Caucus’s 50th anniversary, the new progressives must push the group to be bolder about the problems facing African Americans. By Gabrielle Gurley

But Not TOM WILLIAMS / CQ ROLL CALL VIA AP IMAGES

SUFFICIENT Engel, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was a white friend of the CBC who’d supported the group on bills from policing to reparations. CBC powerhouses Gregory Meeks (Engel’s fellow New Yorker), South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn (third-ranking Democrat in the party’s House caucus), and California’s Maxine Waters (chair of the House Financial Services Committee) gave their fellow senior member effusive support. Mondaire Jones, who won a primary for an open seat just north of New York City, plans to team up with Rep. Alexandria

Ocasio-Cortez to work on the Green New Deal and environmental issues in public housing. And New York City Councilman Ritchie Torres, who dispatched an aging Bronx power broker in another open-seat primary, is calling for an investigation into possible New York Police Department work stoppages amid rising crime. Barring unforeseen developments, these four candidates will carry their overwhelmingly Democratic districts in November’s general election and head to Congress next year. “The Squad is big, y’all,” Rep. Ayanna

Pressley, the Massachusetts member of the group, declared at the Netroots Nation convention after the spate of progressive primary victories. Indeed, this second squad of Black progressives is poised to join Pressley and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota in the Congressional Black Caucus, where they’ll be a vocal minority. As legislative blocs go, the CBC is a formidable one, and its power is rooted in numbers. The CBC has 54 members, so it’s a sizable force in the House, where it constitutes nearly a quarter of the 232-mem-

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low long timers like Engel over unknowns like Bowman. Bet ween t he old guard and the younger insurgents stands Karen Bass. Her long career as a community activist makes her closer in life experience to the insurgents, but she also has a Pelosi-like talent to build majorities and talk to all sides, a talent that helped elevate her to Speaker of the California Assembly. As a young woman, she traveled to Cuba with the Venceramos Brigade, and later founded Community Coalition, the South Central Los Angeles group that worked to fight poverty, crime, police harassment, and mass incarceration. Ba ss combines a backstory similar to Conyers’s and Dellums’s, the CBC’s radical founders, with that of an accomplished legislator. As California Assembly Speaker, she worked closely with Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to navigate California through the Great R e c e s s ion w it hout totally dismantling its social programs. This summer, Bass proved able to steer a police reform bill through the House—the Senate, of course, hasn’t taken it up—winning the votes not only of every House Democrat, but of three Republicans. To find votes on the police reform bill

JOHN MINCHILLO, ROBERT COHEN, BEBETO MAT THEWS / AP PHOTO

ber Democratic Party caucus. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi understood its influence as she furiously wheeled and dealed to preserve her speakership in 2018. The insurgent challenge to Pelosi collapsed after the popular California Rep. Karen Bass, a favorite of the liberal Democratic wing who’d hoped that she might serve as their standard-bearPrimary winners Jamaal er, declined to take on Pelosi. Bowman (top), Cori Bush, Today, the CBC’s clout extends (center) and Mondaire Jones (bottom) will all likely be new beyond the House into Joe CBC members in 2021. Biden’s campaign for president. Bass, the outgoing CBC chair, was a vice-presidential contender. Jim Clyburn singlehandedly resuscitated Biden’s bid on the eve of the South Carolina primary, and Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana is a Biden campaign co-chair. The Squad and the new primary victors can claim to be renewing the politics of some of the CBC’s founders like John Conyers, Ron Dellums, and Augustus Hawkins. But their presence will likely exacerbate divisions within the Caucus. Some of the Caucus’s most prominent members—Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Gregory Meeks among them—are recipients of donations from major corporations and Wall Street, with voting records that are notably friendly to those interests. Some members, like Alabama’s Terri Sewell, hail from more conservative terrains in the Deep South; some are Blue Dogs, like Reps. David Scott and Sanford Bishop. Once elected, many had lifetime sinecures, like John Lewis and John Conyers, who in his last term was the most senior member of the House. chair committees and subcommittees. They Though some of them may have begun their have a stake in the seniority system, and careers as activists and radicals, many now rather than slay that beast, they back fel-

For several decades, corporate dollars have flowed heavily through the CBC ecosystem. and similar legislation, Bass and her CBC colleagues get cast in the complex role of racial explainer, corralling white Democratic fence-sitters who don’t understand how police often function in Black communities. They have to make the case for why a bill that bans chokeholds, limits military equipment transfers to local police forces, and facilitates the prosecution of police officers for abuse is good not just for African Americans but for their white constituents, too. (Arguing that legislation principally benefits Black Americans can be a nonstarter.) “They just didn’t understand,” Bass says. So she shared her stories of being harassed by police for her political activities and her fears about surviving those encounters. The massive protests since George Floyd’s murder changed the political terrain, but like their white colleagues, CBC members are cautious on issues like ending the militarization of the police. In 2014, just seven members of the CBC voted to end the transfer of heavy military equipment like grenade launchers to police departments. In this year’s policing bill, the CBC supported oversights that required reports, certifications, and local approvals for the Defense Department’s 1033 program—but not terminating the program altogether, as the ACLU and other groups have demanded. THE HOUSE PASSAGE of the police reform

bill was no more than a small victory, coming in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, historic jobs losses, economic dislocation, and more police killings—all of which have

taken a fearsome toll across Black America. The summer of frustration, protests, and violence in the streets tells a story quite different from legislative success. “When you look in terms of influence, the CBC would seem to be at an apex of its power,” says Katherine Tate, a Brown University political science professor who has studied the Black Caucus. “But you have African Americans also saying, what has all this power in Washington gotten us?” That skepticism is one of the factors that powered the progressives to victory in this year’s primaries—and it’s making some longtime Democrats, including longtime CBC members, nervous about any Tea Party– like developments on the left. The progressives’ attacks on corporate power—attacks that echo those of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—set them apart from a number of the CBC’s more prominent members. Historically, Black candidates have faced more difficulties raising money, even though they typically spend less on their campaigns than white candidates. Coming from low- and moderate-income Black districts, they know campaign contributions are an inconceivable luxury for the majority of their constituents. Many had little choice but to turn to smallbusiness donors—and for some, corporate donors, too. And as Black candidates came to represent districts that also stretched to include more well-to-do suburbs, it became easier to identify and court wealthier individuals and tap into other networks. For several decades, then, corporate dollars have flowed heavily through the CBC ecosystem and into two of its offshoots, CBCPAC and the CBC Foundation. The foundation provides scholarships, fellowships, internships, and study-abroad programs for students, and is viewed as a pipeline for staff positions on Capitol Hill. Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois, a former CBCF intern, is the youngest Black woman to serve in Congress. The foundation has sent election observers to Kenya, publishes research and reports, and conducts public-awareness campaigns. It also spends heavily on events like its annual legislative conference, billed as an empowerment and networking event that provides shoulder-

rubbing opportunities for the members, Black policymakers, and business leaders. More than half of the foundation’s board of directors are representatives from corporations, among them Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Ford, and Toyota North America. A 2017 annual report noted that State Farm, the insurance company that is the foundation’s largest donor, has contributed roughly $8 million to the foundation programs in its 17-year partnership with the CBC. Sometimes, the foundation spends so much on fundraising that not much remains for its other activities. A 2018 CBCF tax return shows that the bulk of the $4 million it brought in through fundraising activities went right out the door to pay for those events, leaving less than $1 million for programs. The heavy corporate presence means it’s difficult for the foundation’s research arm to produce the kind of unbiased information that lawmakers need to write legislation. Nor does the foundation focus on the deep political institution-building or policy advancement initiatives that founders like D.C. Delegate Walter Fauntroy would launch. Upset that John McMillan, a South Carolina segregationist, consistently blocked D.C. self-determination bills in the House, Fauntroy and others worked on recruiting an opponent who could run for his South Carolina seat. McMillan lost in 1972; home rule finally came up for a vote, and D.C. gained home rule the following year. “I don’t see any members with that level of political sophistication and that personal investment in the institutions rising within the CBC today,” says George Derek Musgrove, an associate professor of history who specializes in Black politics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. CBCPAC members appear to be more interested in using the Caucus’s campaign finance arm as the institution-building tool of choice, rather than for recruiting candidates to run against members (like McMillan) who oppose CBC priorities. Representatives from T-Mobile, General Motors, Boston Scientific, and Microsoft sit on the CBCPAC’s 27-member board, along with Bass, Jeffries, Meeks, Underwood, and other Caucus members. The CBCPAC threw

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its support behind Joe Biden in April; most CBC members supported Biden early on. An all-star lineup of corporations contributes heavily to Meeks and Jeffries, whose voting records reflect the source of their funding. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Meeks’s three top corporate donors for the 2019-2020 cycle are the global investors KKR & Co., the Blackstone Group, and New York Life Insurance. Rounding out his top 20 contributors are companies including FedEx, Citigroup, KPMG, the American Bankers Association, and the Mortgage Bankers Association. Meeks, who represents the borough of Queens in Congress, told City & State New York magazine, “Clearly, I’m not a socialist. I’m a capitalist.” He opposes taxing financial transactions and did not approve of the fight that ousted Amazon from Long Island City, Queens. In 2015, Meeks supported the TransPacific Partnership even though most Democrats opposed the pact; he was the only Democrat to accompany Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans on a TPP promotion

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swing through Asia. New York state and local politicians attacked his stance and argued that more jobs would head overseas from Queens if the TPP were ratified. Jeffries’s fourth-largest donor, Microsoft, and his 11th, T-Mobile, are both on the CBCPAC board; a Microsoft representative also sits on the foundation board. Jeffries, who also benefits from hedge fund and financial/insurance/ real estate companies, has been criticized for his support for hedge fund–backed groups like Democrats for Education Reform, a charter school astroturf organization. In 2014, Meeks and Reps. Gwen Moore, David Scott, Terri Sewell, and William Lacy Clay backed efforts to protect derivatives, the financial instruments that helped produce the Great Recession. The Philadelphia Tribune, an African American newspaper, noted that the support for derivatives “angered other members, who while publicly chastising their colleagues, stopped short of naming the obvious reason for the seeming abandonment of their core constituents. But you already know the reason, and you prob-

ably also understand why caucus leadership hasn’t said the word out loud. Money.” At a time of rising progressive anger, corporate support may no longer be the boon that some CBC members have long counted on. William Lacy Clay is gone. Georgia’s David Scott prevailed over three challengers, his first serious ones in years. Meeks beat back two challengers. But as the Clay case shows, a challenger’s second run may have a different outcome. For those members who don’t want to take corporate dollars, becoming internet famous has its benefits. Mondaire Jones raised $1.7 million for his race, largely through the digital progressive infrastructure; one of his opponents, the son of a billionaire, spent $5.4 million. Jones understands the nervousness some members may have at this change in funding campaigns. “A lot of more senior members of the CBC take umbrage at the sort of pressure not to take corporate PAC money,” he says. “That’s going to continue to be a thing on which people disagree.”

DEV O’NEILL / CQ ROLL CALL VIA AP IMAGES

CBC co-founders Parren Mitchell (D-MD, seated), Charles Diggs (D-MI, center), and Walter Fauntroy (D-DC, right) meet with then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill in 1980.

Indeed, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s decree that vendors and consultants working with and for candidates who challenged incumbents would no longer be able to do business with the organization drew praise from wellfinanced CBC moderates like Rep. Joyce Beatty, who faced, and trounced, a progressive Democratic primary challenger in her Columbus, Ohio, district. The battle between incumbents facing progressive challengers who baffle them with grassroots, small-dollar fundraising strategies has turned the ideological cold war over campaign financing hot. Grassroots fundraising gives an edge to socialmedia-savvy progressives who can cultivate thousands of followers willing to make small-dollar donations to fuel campaigns. Now an incumbent, Ayanna Pressley raised nearly 50 percent of her $1.6 million war chest for the 2019-2020 cycle through contributions of $200 or less. Jamaal Bow-

Generational and political differences have been with the CBC since its formation. man got off to a slow start, but once his campaign gained national attention, small donors contributed more than half of his $2.3 million bounty. “As we fight for a culture shift in this country, we must also fight for a power shift,” Pressley told the Netroots Nation convention. A few more victories by Black candidates eschewing corporate donations might dent traditional CBC corporate fundraising strategies and tilt power in unexpected ways. MONEY MAY BE A hot-button ideological

issue at the CBC, but the clash of generations, along with temperaments and styles, compounds the Caucus’s differences. Roughly

half of the CBC members range in age from 65 to 84. Age can be deceptive, though: Lawmakers from predominantly Black communities who were politically active in the 1960s have been more liberal than many of their younger colleagues. Older representatives like John Lewis began to be supplanted by more moderate Black politicians (like Barack Obama) with statewide or more diverse local constituencies in the 1990s and 2000s. The late civil rights leader was an outspoken Black Lives Matter supporter who continued to counsel and mentor young civil rights activists and members of Congress throughout his career, right up until his final illness. Rep. Barbara Lee, an Oaklandarea community leader who once worked with the Black Panthers, teamed up with progressives Pressley, Ocasio-Cortez, and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois to repeal, so far unsuccessfully, the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal abortion funding. Lee and Jamaal Bowman have discussed the challenges of activist-legislators. Karen Bass has endeavored to bridge the generational divide with informal mentoring arrangements to pair new members with veteran lawmakers. (It would be up to a new chair to continue the arrangement, since it doesn’t exist in the bylaws, she says.) If this buddy system won’t temper impatience with seniority, Bass has waityour-turn advice: “In your second term, all of a sudden seniority is not so bad,” she says. Seniority definitely has elevated CBC members to positions of power. By ousting Engel, ironically, Bowman, whom the CBC refused to support in his New York Democratic challenge, has now cleared the path for Meeks to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Bass lands on “We are like a family” to describe the culture of the Black Caucus, but also acknowledges that “we have differences. But the people in the Black Caucus know each other, are close to each other, and get along with each other well,” Bass insists. “Family” does signal that a united front and mutual support system still exists deep in the bowels of an institution that perpetuates white supremacy and patriarchy. “Family” is also shorthand for not putting family business out on the street,

because CBC members can be close to each other—until they can’t be. With Nancy Pelosi vowing to step down after 2022, jockeying in the next speakership battle has already begun. It will feature at least three possible CBC contenders and, it’s safe to say, a fair amount of ferocious infighting. Bass’s ascent, including her presence on Joe Biden’s vice-presidential short list, puts her on a collision course with Jeffries, the Democratic Caucus chair and a centrist who was once widely believed to have the inside track. Barbara Lee, Dellums’s successor in his Berkeley-Oakland district, is a wild card. Jeffries bested Lee once before, elbowing her out of the number five leadership slot and earning the ire of Democratic women and progressives who backed Lee in the contest. Her vote against adding marijuana legalization to the 2020 Democratic Party platform—she heads the Cannabis Caucus and has been a longtime advocate for legal pot—could be an indication of concessions she needs to display before trying for the top spot. Generational and political differences have been with the CBC since its formation. Among the founders, Charles Diggs was the quiet centrist; and John Conyers and Dellums were socialists (Dellums was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America). Augustus Hawkins first won election to the California State Assembly in 1934 as a supporter of socialist Upton Sinclair running as a Democrat for governor. Dellums was a leader of the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Conyers introduced reparations proposals beginning in 1989 until his retirement in 2017. Following in the footsteps of Augustus Hawkins, Conyers also introduced a full-employment bill in session after session. “Conyers was out there,” says Paul Delaney, the first African American reporter in The New York Times Washington bureau. Notwithstanding its divisions, the Conscience of the Congress, as the CBC has long been known, has nudged Democrats leftward and forced the institution to bend to ideas that were once anathema, including a trade embargo against the South African apartheid regime, greater social spending, and LGBTQ rights. One reason for its pro-

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gressive reputation is its alternative budget proposal, a vision of what federal spending that benefited African Americans and middle- and low-income Americans generally would look like, which it updates and presents in each congressional session. In 2018, that budget included $3.9 trillion in new revenues, partly by repealing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; investments in infrastructure and in historically underserved communities; universal health care through an ACA public option; and significant outlays for K-12 education and historically Black colleges and universities. The CBC’s founders never anticipated that there would ever be enough Black lawmakers to constitute a political force. The Caucus started out as a bid for selfpreservation and mutual support in a sea of white and often unwelcoming faces. Shirley Chisholm of New York was one of its founders, along with 12 men: Reps. William Lacy Clay Sr. of Missouri; George Collins and Ralph Metcalfe of Illinois; John Conyers and Charles Diggs of Michigan; Ron Dellums and Augustus Hawkins of California;

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Parren Mitchell of Maryland; Robert N.C. Nix Sr. of Pennsylvania; Charles Rangel of New York; Louis Stokes of Ohio; and Walter Fauntroy, the District of Columbia delegate. Chisholm had to deal with the “double whammy” of sexism and racism as the first Black woman in Congress and the only woman in her freshman class in 1969. The CBC men didn’t like her. “She didn’t take any guff from anybody,” says Delaney. The men planned to select one of their own to run for president in 1972, a move they thought would give them more clout in Congress. But Chisholm announced her run before they even had a chance to meet. Though the Caucus considers itself one of the most progressive forces in Congress, it wasn’t progressive enough for Ron Dellums and Maxine Waters, who joined with Bernie Sanders and others in 1991 to establish the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Yet Waters’s liberal reputation has not immunized her from progressive dissent on the Financial Services Committee. Pressley, Ocasio-Cortez, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib secured plum seats on the Financial Ser-

vices Committee but have made her life difficult over votes on her priorities like the Export-Import Bank. There is cross-pollination between the Black and Progressive Caucuses: Nearly two dozen African Americans are members of the CPC. Presidential politics is a different story: In the Democratic primaries, the majority of the Black CPC members supported Biden. Omar was the only Bernie Sanders supporter. Ayanna Pressley came out for her Bay State colleague, Elizabeth Warren. “The insurgent character of the early CBC of the ’70s or the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party simply does not exist within the CBC,” says Musgrove, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County professor. Only four of the eight Black Republican members of Congress elected since 1971 have joined the CBC, and the two Black Republican senators—Edward Brooke, a Massachusetts liberal, and Tim Scott, a South Carolina conservative—both declined the invitation. When districts with substantial non-Black populations began electing moderate Black Democrats, those members hesitated to get

JOHN DURICK A / AP PHOTO

Shirley Chisholm dealt with sexism and racism as the first Black woman in Congress.

New CBC members will have to grapple with whether to maintain party solidarity, or to resist conceding on deeply held principles. out in front of so-called Black issues like reparations. A majority of the CBC has supported legislation to set up a reparations study commission, but several members declined to sign on to the bill. For many members, “the natural progression,” says Michael Minta of the University of Minnesota, “is to work on issues that are not exclusively racial, such as the battles over the economic system and the macro-micro policies that disproportionately affect Blacks and Latinos.” Diverse districts are no deterrent to the new progressives. “I can’t think of a single thing that is for Black Americans that isn’t something that people in my district are similarly committed to legislatively,” says Jones, whose district, comprising Westchester and Rockland Counties, is 60 percent white, 22 percent Latino, 10 percent Black, and 6 percent Asian; the median income is slightly more than $100,000. “I don’t think that you can be a moderate and have the best interests of the Black community at heart.” He rejects the idea that progressives have to moderate their views to be influential and move up the ladder in Congress. “Dismantling systemic racism and attaining racial justice requires a radical reimagining of our institutions relating to equity and fairness,” he says. TODAY, MANY BLACK Americans have

grown skeptical of their Black representa-

tives in Congress, whom they view as having done little to revitalize communities with poor schools and anemic job opportunities. African Americans continue to wrestle with job discrimination, heavy-handed police tactics, and health care disparities regardless of ZIP code. Judy Richardson, a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that fought for civil rights in the South in the 1960s, reflects on how Black politicians once relied on the votes of middle- and upper-middle-class Blacks. As they moved to the suburbs, politicians fell out of step with lower-income Blacks, who voted in fewer numbers and had even less influence in local politics. She views the new progressives as more likely to live in underrepresented communities and more willing (once the pandemic has passed) to knock on doors and engage residents. “Not enough Black politicians see themselves as accountable to regular working people,” she says. The conflicts now in play in the CBC may unfold over several more sessions before a new direction takes hold—if, indeed, it does. Interest in holding leadership positions and moving up the ranks has a way of moderating some members’ politics, so long as moderation dominates the congressional Democratic Party. For now, there are enough members of the CBC old guard to see that those prerogatives are respected. New CBC members will have to grapple with whether to vote to maintain party solidarity and mollify the Speaker, or to resist conceding on deeply held principles. The new progressives will surely make themselves heard. “I don’t think they are going to shut the hell up,” says Richardson. “Because they represent a large segment of communities that have not been represented before, even by Black elected officials. These folks will continue to get elected because they understand the ground game now.” What powered both the Squad and this year’s progressive insurgents to victory is a new militancy, particularly among the young, in communities of color and the broader Democratic electorate. Some younger civil rights leaders say that the CBC has failed to recognize this epochal shift.

Nse Ufot, the executive director of the New Georgia Project, a statewide voting rights group, wants to see “decisive leadership” and “clear articulation of a federal Black agenda.” Ufot has a different slate of agenda items: restitution from the mortgage crisis that decimated Black family wealth; a new voting rights act; and action on environmental justice issues in vulnerable communities. “The CBC,” Ufot says, should “lead from the front.” Richardson, who works with young people like Ufot, is encouraged to see a new generation of activists out in neighborhoods working with residents who understand that members of Congress should put communities first, not monied interests. African Americans should not “mistake presence for power,” said Color of Change’s Rashad Robinson in this year’s Netroots Nation closing session. “Sometimes we think that we have won more than we have, that we are further along than we actually are, working to diversify racist structures rather than tearing them down,” he said. “Sometimes we think that if we just get inside of the system, we can make it align to fit what we need,” adding, “Corporations continue to put their hands on the scale.” And not just corporations. In 2020, police forces in every corner of the country have sent dissatisfied Blacks and whites into the streets in a national moment of reckoning that William Lacy Clay Sr. foretold decades ago. The Congressional Black Caucus has yet to meet that moment. Right now, for the most part, they are playing catch-up with the activists and ordinary people who are out in front and in the streets. Older Black voters may remember when their member of Congress came to open the senior center. But young people have an impossible time reconciling their brilliant Black members of Congress with the food deserts, the failing schools, and the police maimings and killings that they live with, seemingly every day. “When you are talking about young folks who are not in the Links, not in the Deltas, not a member of Alpha Phi Alpha,” says Musgrove, referring to the Black social and Greek-letter societies, “they don’t see those little pocketbook things that members are bringing home. They see the cops.” n

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A fateful decision from the House Democratic leadership inadvertently created a progressive political force. By Alexander Sammon

THE NEW YORK CITY NATIVE progressives

thought they’d be celebrating this election cycle was Brooklyn’s own Bernie Sanders. Instead they’ve been celebrating Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal from the Bronx. Bowman resoundingly defeated Eliot Engel, the 16-term chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in New York’s 16th Congressional District, in one of the biggest takedowns of a Democratic leader in years. Nearly everything had to fall into place perfectly to even imagine the outcome. Engel did his part to lose the election, making high-profile gaffes and avoiding his hard-hit district during the worst months of the coronavirus. Bowman, meanwhile, took

to the streets during the George Floyd protests, allying himself with a powerful local movement, and showcasing his particular skill as a speaker and campaigner. But it wasn’t just what Bowman did, or Engel didn’t do, that made the race so important. Bowman’s campaign was advised, supported, and flanked by a rapidly evolving progressive electoral apparatus that, on that night in late June, announced itself as a fully formed campaign coalition. Numerous firms providing advertising, polling, email, and voter outreach, many of them outside the usual wheelhouse of Democratic politics, emerged as a viable force that could face up to the most powerful members of the Democratic establishment and win. The left has long been criticized for its disorganization. And yet here was a multi pronged battalion of independent groups

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toppling an entrenched incumbent. How did that happen? What brought this growing assemblage of progressive campaign infrastructure together was not the charming principal from New York; it was instead a staggering strategic misstep from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democrats’ official recruiting, fundraising, and campaign organizing body in the House. As the 2020 election cycle was getting under way, the DCCC attempted to preempt the new progressive electoral movement before it took off. And it backfired spectacularly. In March 2019, just weeks after the 116th Congress was sworn in, the DCCC issued a formal statement that any firm, consultant, vendor, strategist, or pollster that signed up to work on a primary challenge would be forbidden from receiving any future contracts to work on other DCCC-run races. The DCCC has long been

known to be averse to primary challenges; its business is incumbency protection. But this was something different. While the language officially referred to barring vendors from working with any “opponent of a sitting Member of the House Democratic Caucus,” everyone knew it was directed at progressives challenging incumbents from the left. The move was unprecedented and shocking. Progressive primary challenges were hardly an existential threat to Democratic incumbents. The Squad was only a few weeks old, and half of its four members had won in open seats. But the goal was clear: stanch the flow of talent and resources to progressive candidates, fatally wounding their chances to take on sitting members of Congress. The decision, made by DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos and upheld by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, did exactly the opposite. Rather than scatter and isolate progressives, it drove them into collaboration. Exiled from the walled garden of the Democratic establishment, this newly activated pool of strat-

egists, pollsters, campaigners, vendors, email writers, and video makers pulled together to create a self-contained political ecosystem that could challenge incumbents, despite financial limitations and outlaw status. They methodically identified districts where incumbents might be vulnerable, where the voter base had moved left of their representation, and where, with the right strategy, a challenger could compete if these groups all piled in to help. And they did so with a newfound urgency: If they didn’t win, there would be no contracts from other races to tide them over. “For the first time ever, progressive organizations and vendors were literally pledging to work on primaries,” said Waleed Shahid, spokesperson for Justice Democrats. “It happened because Cheri Bustos overplayed her hand.” The strategy paid off. Bowman won

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handily, and one month later, Cori Bush did the same thing in Missouri, knocking off ten-term incumbent William Lacy Clay, a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee. Clay’s father held the seat before him; next year, the district will have its first representative outside the Clay family in 52 years. Bowman and Bush joined Marie Newman, who defeated anti-choice eight-term Democrat Dan Lipinski in Chicago. Add to that Mondaire Jones, whose looming campaign announcement was rumored to have pushed 30-year incumbent Nita Lowey into retirement, who then bested several challengers in that open seat in the district next to Bowman’s. Add that up, and progressive newcomers took down 98 years of seniority in just a few weeks. Just 18 months on, the blacklist has been the best thing ever to happen to the progressive movement, the surprise catalyst that helped transform some promising if scattered political elements into a powerful compound in a surprisingly short time. “The ecosystem for support is the best it’s been since 1936 when the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] was helping people get elected to office,” said Shahid. If the left continues on this road, building a critical mass and beginning to meaningfully sway the direction of Democratic policy, they will have Cheri Bustos to thank. THE QUESTION OF WHEN this story begins

is the subject of some disagreement. What’s certain, however, is that even a few years ago, a winning progressive campaign infrastructure didn’t exist. And without Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly successful presidential run in 2016, it still wouldn’t. Spores of that campaign flew to various groups, and germinated new ones, many of which focused on the thin progressive bench in Congress. In 2016, only one senator (Jeff Merkley of Oregon) and seven sitting House Democrats endorsed Sanders; progressives hadn’t focused enough attention down-ballot. A combination of seasoned progressives frustrated with the status quo and a horde of newly animated young people set to work on competing in electoral politics, a playing field where previous versions of the left had seen little success. Brand New Congress, Jus-

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tice Democrats, and Indivisible all sprung up basically overnight, while more veteran groups, like Democracy for America and the Working Families Party, recommitted anew. Many of these groups were headed up by people in their twenties, who, perhaps to a fault, believed in Bernie’s near-miss result. “Bernie’s candidacy in 2016 made a lot of people realize that transformative populist left politics was possible at a big scale,” said Joe Dinkin, campaign director at the Working Families Party. Developing various electoral theories, recruiting candidates, honing messaging strategies, and building a base and fund raising on the f ly, these upstart groups aimed at the 2018 midterms with buckshot. Brand New Congress endorsed 30 candidates; Justice Democrats recruited 12 candidates and endorsed another 66. In some sense, they picked up in 2018 where Bernie left off: losing. Running multiple candidates for office requires a lot of cash, which they didn’t have. The progressive seal of approval wasn’t enough against an entrenched, well-funded, and experienced electoral machine. Many of the races were long shots, but the results weren’t all that heartening. Justice Dems won under 10 percent of their races in the first cycle; Brand New Congress saw just one of its 30 endorsees win office. There were some near misses—Indivisible nearly got endorsee Andrew Gillum over the hump in the Florida governor’s race—but elections, in many ways, are like horseshoes. You only win if you win. After those losses, some wondered whether starting out in the House was presumptuous, and whether building the bench in state legislatures and city councils was the better way to go. If Sanders winning would’ve meant building electoral power from the top down, and state legislatures represented more of a bottom-up approach, targeting the House was like starting in the middle. (Indeed, the Working Families Party did work hard on those local and state races in 2018, with some success.) Meanwhile, the mainstream press and some Democratic establishment politicos delighted in the perceived 2018 flop. They insisted repeatedly that Democrats retook the House in spite

The DCCC blacklist has been the best thing ever to happen to the progressive movement. of progressive challengers, and on the backs of the unassailable moderates. But there were two shock exceptions. First, of course, was Alexandria OcasioCortez in New York City, one of the most exhaustively analyzed primary races in history. Catalogued in everything from major magazine profiles to a Netflix documentary, the story of a 28-year-old former bartender knocking off a ten-term incumbent and member of the House leadership, Joe Crowley, made for an irresistible political story in the post-Obama era. The AOC victory “was a major turning point,” said Lucy Solomon, independent expenditure political director at Indivisible. “It proved that it was possible for progressives to compete and win even against longtime incumbents.” And then, a few months later, Boston city councilmember Ayanna Pressley toppled Michael Capuano, another ten-term incumbent. Pressley was an experienced politician, and Capuano pretty progressive in his own right. But there was a common thread: two left-wing women of color defeating white men in diverse, heavily Democratic districts. Once is an aberration, twice is a trend. “Losing sucks,” said Luke Hayes, a veteran progressive staffer who in 2020 became Jamaal Bowman’s campaign manager. “But winning—the door opens.” The shared traits in those victories by Pressley and AOC, in tandem with Squad colleagues Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib winning open seats in deep-blue districts, sketched the contours of a possible strategy going forward. The way to put progressives

in power, it seemed, was not to go wide on dozens of candidates, but to get narrow on a small number of races, mostly in liberal neighborhoods, and go all in, building compelling narratives around particular candidates over a sustained period of time. The Democratic establishment and the D.C. press corps continued to dismiss progressives as the new Congress was sworn in. “They f lipped exactly zero House seats. Zero point zero,” boasted senior vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way Matt Bennett, not entirely correctly (California’s Katie Porter, a progressive, won a narrow red-to-blue victory in the state’s 45th District). But if the party showed no concern outwardly, the DCCC blacklist issued in March 2019 belied that confidence. CHERI BUSTOS, A FOUR -term moder-

ate from the Quad Cities area of Illinois, unveiled the policy in the 2020 DCCC preferred-vendor form, swaddled in a statement on the committee’s commitment to diversity. Bustos, a former PR director for hospital networks who after being elected to Congress joined the bipartisan group “No Labels,” immediately took heat for the decision; even her predecessor, Rep. Ben Ray Luján, termed it counterproductive. But she stuck with the rule, and its implicit attack on progressives. So much viability in politics comes down to money, and the DCCC is lifeblood for firms working in Democratic politics, especially “red to blue” races, where it spends lavishly to try to flip seats held by Republicans. For some firms, a contract on one redto-blue race can cover the bills for all its other work. Of course, the DCCC approves which consultants and vendors get those

contracts, steering candidates to their approved firms. So for the committee to formally foreclose on the possibility of any firm working with a primary challenger to ever receive such a contract was a galling escalation. When House members in the past were primaried from the right, this response didn’t come. The Republican Party has no similar standard. No one in Democratic politics, progressive or otherwise, harbored any illusions about the DCCC’s penchant for playing favorites with vendors and consultants, or its tendency to intervene in races for preferred candidates, or even its leaders’ own politics. But protecting incumbents against Republican challenges is a different task than stopping intraparty races in safe seats. At first, the blacklist did have its intended effect. Cut off from the money needed to sustain their livelihoods, some people jumped

CHARLES REX ARBOGAST / AP PHOTO

Bernie Sanders’s surprising 2016 presidential campaign showed the viability of progressive politics.

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ship. Marie Newman, gearing up at the time for a second go at legacy incumbent Dan Lipinski, saw her vendors flee right as the campaign was getting started. “There was a chilling effect for recruiting talent,” said Morgan Harper, who announced a progressive primary challenge against Joyce Beatty in Ohio shortly after the blacklist was published. “You could see the fear in people.” Monica Klein of the newly blacklisted Seneca Strategies wrote in The Intercept, “[A] client told me that two consultants dropped out that morning—and now the candidate may not run at all.” Staring down what looked like an existential crisis, Justice Democrats came up with a solution: They bought the URL. Quickly, they got dcccblacklist.com up and running, which featured a list of blacklisted firms that were ready to help progressive challengers. “It was one of the smartest things ever,” said Rebecca Katz, whose New Deal Strategies was only a month old when the blacklist was announced. The site, built by the blacklisted digital strategy firm Middle Seat, proudly displayed the names of all the blacklisted firms in two long columns, beneath its own call to arms: “The DCCC is using their financial leverage to intimidate and blacklist many hardworking people in our movement in a blatant attempt to protect a handful of outof-touch incumbents.” Rather than be bullied into submission, they announced themselves proudly as a ragtag bunch, slingshots in hand, staring down the DCCC’s Goliath. There was Think Rubix, a racial-justice consulting firm; Mijente, a Latinx organizing and campaigns organization; Left Rising, a fundraising organization; Grassroots Analytics, a digital fundraising and strategy firm. The list featured 29 groups in all, many of them no more than a few years old, many of them minority-owned, plus more veteran groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the Center for Popular Democracy, Color of Change PAC, and more. For those outside the inner circles of politics, the blacklist made the Democratic establishment look villainous, and its outcasts sympathetic. Liberal Democrats and young voters of color became allied

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Dcccblacklist.com became a one-stop shop for would-be candidates to get the campaign support they needed.

with the challenger movement almost by default. “We were trying to turn the attack into something positive, our movement was growing,” said Shahid. SHORTLY AFTER, NEW DEAL Strategies

began using its blacklist status in advertising. “It was very comforting to be on the

blacklist, with other people that share the ideology, working together for a common good,” said Katz. “Instead of it being scary, they were actually opening up a whole new door for us. Those races would not have hired many of us anyway because the DCCC has a whole situation going with their preferred consultants.”

The blacklist validated that progressive upstarts were a threat to the House Democratic leadership. But it wasn’t merely an act of defiance; it proved to be a tactical advantage. All of a sudden, progressive hopefuls and would-be candidates had a one-stop shop to find all the vendors, consultants, strategists, and pollsters needed to make a go of it, gathered under the aegis created for them by the DCCC’s overreach. And because the DCCC had made working for progressive challengers an actual matter of life or death, they expedited progressive groups’ development process, as they built the internal capacity to provide everything a client would need. It grew into a freestanding, independent election machine. “Firms, vendors, and strategists that are locked out of DCCC now have to work exclusively on progressive candidates,” said Dinkin, of the Working Families Party. “That decision crystallized who was in and … who was out.” The blacklist even altered the trajectory of more mainstream groups. Indivisible, a post-2016 Resistance outgrowth with local chapters across the country, worked for plenty of DCCC-approved candidates in 2018. But with its endorsement process, it became an ally in the districts progressive primary challengers could win. Soon enough, the national organization was spending on major television ad buys to boost candidates like Alex Morse, who ultimately lost his race against powerful House Ways and Means Committee chair Richard Neal.

The progressive electoral infrastructure was still young—it existed properly in only one cycle, and was still figuring things out. But thanks in no small part to Bustos’s misstep, they’d managed to create a formal alliance, with a clear, shared vision. Before long, “the blacklist” became shorthand for their website, not the DCCC’s decision. “There was constant communication with other progressive groups on where people are seeing energy,” said Solomon, of Indivisible. It became the “ideological and intellectual center on what our theory of change is.” The DCCC could see that ideological center too, however, as the blacklist flushed the perceived enemy out into the open. While Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley had snuck up on their incumbent challengers, that would not happen again. But the blacklist also validated that progressive upstarts were a threat to the House Democratic leadership. Four years prior, it remained an open question as to where progressives should be looking to start gaining a meaningful electoral foothold. House districts that fit a certain set of criteria seemed like a winning possibility, but that was just a guess. “What it confirmed is that the party establishment was scared that we were making inroads there and wanted to do whatever they could to stop that from happening,” said Shahid. Meanwhile, blacklisted groups began to refine their approach, incorporating new strategies and technologies. REACH, an app used in the Ocasio-Cortez race, helped identify registered voters and steer them to their local polling places. Groups drafted candidates based around strong, progressive policy commitments, and began to attack incumbents for the substance of their records in a way that hadn’t been done before. Fight Corporate Monopolies, a new group formed in the summer, began making major TV ad buys hammering incumbents on past votes. Sanders 2020 campaign manager Faiz Shakir is an outside consultant to the group, and Morgan Harper joined after her campaign concluded. Most importantly, progressives began to devise a strategy that would raise enough money for competitors to stay competitive with well-funded incumbents, relying

on online donors at the national level and quick, small-dollar appeals throughout the campaign cycle. That was a drastic departure from the DCCC approach, which starts out with how much money a candidate can raise from max donors, and goes from there. “They’ll tell you if you don’t think you can raise $200,000 out of the gate, you probably shouldn’t even bother,” said Harper. “On the establishment side of things, there’s an endless source of money.” None of these races was going to see a progressive challenger outraise the incumbent, even with an animated national base. But following the Sanders model in 2016, Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, and Sanders’s blowout fundraising operation in 2020, there was plenty of reason to believe the smalldollar strategy could provide campaigns enough money to at least stay in the neighborhood of those with max-level donors and DCCC support. While trying to raise money down-ballot could seem difficult during a presidential cycle with progressive candidates fundraising in record numbers, it had more of a cumulative effect. And once his presidential race was over, Sanders chipped in, blasting out fundraising calls to his network for a handful of these challengers. Where candidate dollars couldn’t reach the heights of the incumbent war chests, the groups made a controversial decision: Groups like Justice Democrats and Sunrise created super PACs to run outside ads on digital, TV, and radio, paid for through their networks. Money in politics has long been a cornerstone issue for these progressive candidates; swearing off corporate PAC money has been a minimum requirement. But the question of super PACs was a thorny one. Sanders condemned them categorically in his presidential run. For primary challengers, name recognition is often the biggest deficit to overcome; their fundraising strategy, too, relied on it. So being able to compete on the airwaves, and channel additional resources in tight races, outweighed the moral discomfort. THIS STRATEGY HELPED Bowman tread

water against the well-funded Engel campaign, with multiple major ad buys on TV and radio from the Working Families Party

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campaigns out to be ninth-dimensional chess. It’s not that,” said Hayes. “Those in charge are being exposed as frauds in some way.” The first post-blacklist cycle has still featured losses, some in heartbreaking fashion. In March, attorney Jessica Cisneros, just 26 years old, came within four points of knocking off Henry Cuellar in Texas’s 28th Congressional District. Cuellar, who votes with Republicans consistently and sports an A rating from the NRA, showcased the same dinosaur sluggishness that caught Engel, Lacy Clay, and others flat-footed, first refusing to engage with Cisneros’s challenge at all, then calling in favors with five-alarm urgency. If Nancy Pelosi hadn’t traveled to Laredo to campaign for him in the race’s final days, he may have succumbed. Still, Justice Democrats, which radically narrowed its focus this cycle, has won five of the ten races it has targeted. Marie Newman’s victory, which came just a few weeks after Cisneros’s loss, featured a watershed moment for the blacklist team. EMILY’s List, a pro-choice women’s electoral outfit with very institutional liberal commitments, seen by many as simply an extension of the party, made the surprising decision to defy the DCCC and support Newman, the progressive outsider. At the time, Cheri Bustos was supposed to hold a fundraiser with Lipinski, similar to Pelosi and Cuellar, to bail some water out of his sinking campaign. Shortly thereafter, she had to cancel the event, owing to a backlash from abortion rights groups. Among other things, that decision showed just how formidable the blacklist groups who were boosting Newman had become: Mainstream, party-friendly campaign organizations were now unafraid to flout blacklist prohibitions to team up with them. Newman’s successful two-cycle challenge shares more than a few things in common with Cisneros’s race against Cuellar, should she run again. Of course, the blacklist was never just about incumbent protection, a tacit reality made explicit during the 2020 cycle as well. Antone Melton-Meaux, a more moderate challenger to incumbent Ilhan Omar in Minnesota’s Fifth District, engaged in

Jamaal Bowman’s race showed that, with a solid ground game and a little outside help, these campaigns could be won. numerous campaign finance violations in his race, all but admitting to having used shell corporations to circumvent the DCCC blacklist and get access to vendors and strategists that were supposed to be reserved for incumbents only. That resulted in legal action, and in early August, MeltonMeaux got wiped out anyway, 58 to 39. Nancy Pelosi did endorse Omar. But then, in late August, Pelosi broke ranks to endorse a primary challenger, Joe Kennedy, in his failed attempt to take down incumbent progressive Sen. Ed Markey, co-sponsor of the resolution for the Green New Deal (“the Green Dream, or whatever” in Pelosi’s words). Pelosi’s defense for that action was that she supports “my members,” which … decide for yourself what that means. If it wasn’t clear before that incumbency wasn’t inviolable and sacrosanct, Pelosi’s endorsement cleared that up. “Cherry-picking races, saying all of these consultants can go help Joe Kennedy isn’t lost on us,” said Rebecca Katz. “It’s not about working for a challenger, it’s working for a challenger on the left.” And it didn’t help; Markey trounced Kennedy anyway. The wave of progressive primary challenges in the country’s big cities brought a number of enthusiastic young people into the world of campaigning in New York City, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere, people whom the Democratic Party had no inter-

EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ /AP PHOTO

and Justice Dems. “Engel and their independent expenditure groups were always going to outspend us on TV,” said Hayes. “But if you’re halfway, you’re in the mix.” Outside ads from blacklisted independentexpenditure groups helped to increase Bowman’s name recognition and highlight the most grievous parts of Engel’s record. “Those outside groups looking at our race found weak spots,” Hayes explained. Bowman enjoyed a massive ground game, with Justice Democrats and Sunrise teaming up to make over a million phone calls. Data for Progress supplied polling and New Deal Strategies communication services. The campaign did voter outreach on the Reach app and email from Grassroots Analytics. The Engel campaign, relying on the DCCCapproved vendors and strategists, constantly lagged a step or two behind. When his campaign tried to highlight endorsements that kept coming in from just about every top-ranking Democrat and senior New York congressmen, their digital graphics firm churned out designs that looked like they had been made on Microsoft Paint and expedited via time machine from 2002. So while Jim Clyburn, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and more came running to Engel’s aid, they triggered derision rather than fear. In one particularly illustrative moment in the race’s final weeks, the Bowman campaign paid $5,000 for a poll from Data for Progress, to get a sense of where they were in the final days. Meanwhile, the Engel campaign had to turn to pre-approved DCCC pollsters for their data, many of which are known to enjoy exorbitant negotiated rates. For polling data in a similar window, the Engel camp spent $45,000, a ninefold markup. And the Engel poll ended up being wrong, giving them false assurances that they weren’t decisively behind. The poll the Bowman campaign commissioned had him up by ten points; in the final tally, he won by 15. Bowman’s race showed that, with a solid ground game, talented video and email outreach, and a little outside help, these campaigns could be won. “The establishment tries to scare you off by making

est in bringing on board, unless they were willing to run moderate red-to-blue races in exurban swing districts. The party was closing itself off to new technologies, strategies, and talent that could help them win, over an unnecessary incumbent protection gambit. There’s no reason the DCCC would have to be so adversarial toward progressive primary challenges. They should be a part of any healthy democratic system, and for the Democrats in particular, they’re an effective way of bringing in young talent and building a bench in a party that has an extremely old leadership class and that has struggled to develop, elevate, and maintain young representatives. Not only did a wave of primary challenges from the Bowman’s election night party in June. He ultimately defeated House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Eliot Engel by 15 points.

right resurrect what looked like a flatlining Republican Party in the post-Bush era, there have also been plenty of times when the blacklisted firms and the DCCC are on the same page. Last cycle, the DCCC resisted spending money on progressive Kara Eastman in the swingy Second District in Omaha, Nebraska, and she lost the general election by just a couple of points. But this year, with Eastman winning the primary again and the district within reach for Joe Biden (Nebraska issues its electoral votes by district), the DCCC is playing there. “Sometimes we are in close alignment,” said Solomon at Indivisible. What’s the future of the blacklist? In some ways, it doesn’t matter. Even if the

blacklist is repealed, its legacy in catalyzing a robust and ever-expanding progressive coalition, which still doesn’t even have two full cycles under its collective belt, has been cemented. “We’ve got a nice positive feedback loop going now,” added Hayes. Even in the final months of the cycle, the strategy has evolved and scaled up its ambition, making inroads in districts that wouldn’t have seemed competitive even early in the year. While AOC and Pressley, and to some degree Bowman, won in urban districts with large minority populations and white representatives, Cori Bush’s win in St. Louis came over a fellow Black candidate in Lacy Clay. Bush beat him as much on his record as anything. With that trend in place, progressives can now credibly pressure sitting moderates to the left in their legislating, for fear of a forthcoming primary challenge. And with the movement understanding how to handle progressive House races, and redistricting in 2022 potentially opening up new targets, there will be plenty of opportunities to add to the Squad next cycle. And there could be a new frontier: the Senate. Senate races are far more expensive, spread across a larger geographical region, and require many more votes to win. The grip of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is more iron-clad than the House’s DCCC. But momentum continues to build. Ed Markey’s victory proved that progressives could defend a Senate incumbent from challenge. Charles Booker, a state senator from Louisville, nearly pulled off the unthinkable in a narrow defeat in Kentucky in June, and that was without the total support of the blacklist. The 2022 cycle isn’t far off. And in the epicenter of the progressive left, New York, Chuck Schumer is on the ballot. n

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Josh Hawley’s communitarian nationalism echoes the ‘social’ nationalists of Europe. BY JUSTIN H. VASSALLO

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WHEN JOE BIDEN ASSERTED a year ago

that “history will treat this administration’s time as an aberration,” he captured the mainstream belief that Donald Trump’s populism can be erased through a return to “normal” government. Among corporatefriendly Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans, the presumption is that American politics will return to the neoliberal path set by Reagan, and core ideas about limited government and free markets will remain static. Progressives are resisting this return to the default settings of American politics, pressuring Biden to set a new course. On the right, the future is more uncertain. However, at least one prominent Republican, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), is gesturing toward refining Trump’s populism into a far more disciplined counterrevolution to the goals of the left. Although inchoate, post-Trump populism is evolving into a right-wing conception of statecraft that allows for a mixed economy dominated by “patriotic” firms— something long considered alien to mainstream American conservatism.

Hawley’s politics advances the communitarian nationalist framework of heterodox conservative intellectuals and “anti-globalist” media personalities, which Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have also flirted with. Of course, it’s far from guaranteed that this will become Republicans’ dominant philosophy; it’s just as likely that the right will further descend into rank conspiracy-mongering. But with an emphasis on productive national capitalism, as opposed to global capitalism, the populist right could very well coalesce the GOP around a figure whose platform resembles the “social” nationalism of Europe’s radical right, marrying industrial policy and a moderately expanded welfare state with conservative social values and an antiimmigrant agenda. If there is one ascendant Republican leader who could undertake that transformation, it’s Hawley.

belies his elite résumé. A Stanford- and Yale-educated lawyer who led Hobby Lobby’s Supreme Court fight against the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act and later tried to overturn the ACA as Missouri’s attorney general, Hawley decisively won Claire McCaskill’s Senate seat in 2018, continuing the GOP’s rout of purple- and red-state Senate Democrats that began in the 2014 midterms. Early profiles of Hawley in national publications like The Atlantic and New Republic painted him as a folksier yet more intellectual version of your standard congressional Republican. His ties to Koch money and support for a rightto-work bill in Missouri during his campaign for attorney general, these articles concluded, did not differentiate him from his party’s reflexive embrace of big business. Indeed, in most respects, Hawley remains an unremarkable Trump loyalist. FiveThirtyEight calculates that he agrees with the Trump administration almost 85 percent of the time, which has included supporting the border wall, co-sponsoring legislation to restrict legal immigration, and attempting

POPULISM AMONG HAWLEY’S STRENGTHS is his

deceptive appearance, in which he comes across as merely another soldier for the Christian right whose populist rhetoric

(AFTER TRUMP)

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to formally dismiss the impeachment process as “bogus.” Consistent with his party’s deepening suspicion of international institutions and Trump’s flirtation with trade wars, Hawley is also an avowed China hawk. Before the pandemic, Hawley stood out for his fixation on how to curb the concentrated power of Big Tech. His critique has encompassed anti-monopoly and data privacy stances, as well as hackneyed assertions about the censorship of conservative speech on social media and search engines. Hawley’s antitrust beliefs possibly date to the book he wrote in his twenties on Theodore Roosevelt. But as far as policy niches go, his crusade against Big Tech was visible but safe terrain for a new Republican senator courting coverage on partisan cable news. More recently, Hawley has amplified his call to revive American industry and challenge international trade priorities. In May, he drew attention for proposing to “abolish” the World Trade Organization in a New York Times op-ed, arguing that a new trade system should be developed “without compromising nations’ economic sovereignty and their internal control of their own economies.” Though he fumbled the origins of the post–Cold War acceleration of free trade and outsourced manufacturing, Hawley has evinced a clear grasp of how deindustrialization has aff licted smaller cities and towns, unlike his mostly indifferent Republican colleagues. Powerful U.S. multinationals and financial firms have for decades encouraged conservatives to ignore this consequence of globalization, yet Hawley makes it one of his core themes. Hawley’s critique overlaps in part with progressive concerns over the effects of trade liberalization, which have grown since China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. During the Democratic presidential primary, for example, Elizabeth Warren unveiled a new trade plan as part of her vision of “economic patriotism,” emphasizing the loss of U.S. jobs to China and other countries due to corporations seeking lax regulatory environments. Hawley’s attacks on the WTO reflect a greater preoccupation with China’s economic might and geopolitics, with no mention of climate change or social jus-

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tice, but his convergence with progressive dissent from the conventional wisdom on trade points to the role industrial policy will increasingly play in a post-COVID-19 economy. Hawley’s professed support for mutually respected “economic sovereignty,” moreover, is indicative of how certain traditionally left-wing attacks on globalization have migrated into the discourse of the modern populist right. Beneath Hawley’s preppy exterior and unwavering loyalty to Trump lies a deeply ideological interpretation of political purpose and social order. It reflects the conviction that conservatism equals moral governance, not anti-government politics. As such, Hawley is invested in a narrative of national betrayal that holds both parties culpable for moral, social, and economic decline. This expands upon Trump’s theme of American carnage, threatening to turn his superficial, fleeting challenge to entrenched economic elites into a more forceful critique. In a speech at last summer’s National Conservatism Conference—a title whose foreboding historical echoes organizers and attendees must have willfully ignored— Hawley decried a “cosmopolitan consensus,” determined to implement “closer and closer economic union, more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade on whatever terms.” According to Hawley, this consensus has enriched elites in finance, tech, and entertainment, while leaving Middle America “with flat wages, with lost jobs, with declining investment and declining opportunity.” The themes resembled Hawley’s first Senate speech, which also pitted an “arrogant aristocracy” against a disrespected, lonely, despairing American middle. Hawley largely eschews the “individual responsibility” politics of traditional conservative thought, instead attempting a philosophical fusion between communitarianism, as expressed in his praise for “strong religious communities” and traditional marriage, and a right-wing vision of an activist state. Far more than any Republican angling to extend the party’s hold on working-class whites, Hawley is assimilating the “social” nationalism characteristic of European

Hawley is invested in a narrative of national betrayal that holds both parties culpable for moral, social, and economic decline. right-wing populists like France’s Marine Le Pen and Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński. While tailored to the political dynamics of each country, “social” nationalism reflects a strategic move toward the left on economic issues, often encompassing welfare benefits, higher wages, public services, housing, infrastructure, and industrial policy. Beyond the familiar welfare chauvinism that seeks to exclude immigrants and refugees from state benefits, Europe’s most prominent right-wing populists aim to prove they represent a vast precariat alienated from the continent’s global cities, and that only they can restore each country’s national cohesion through a strong state. Since Europe’s widespread imposition of austerity measures following the financial crisis of 2008-2009, these populists have honed a policy-based vision of rightwing solidarity that recalls early strands of fascism that were more overtly critical of capitalism, which split labor’s support for social democratic and communist parties. Amidst an unprecedented economic crisis, it is a political model primed for export and Americanization, especially in light of the United States’ stark regional inequalities. IN HIS MOST ideological speeches, Haw-

ley has already employed the Euro-populist framework to dramatize his calls for a new social contract. However, the global pandemic has created an opportunity for Hawley to test the boundaries of Republican policymaking. The objective is twofold:

TOM WILLIAMS / CQ ROLL CALL VIA AP IMAGES

Hawley has emerged as one of the few Republican senators calling for direct payroll support during the pandemic.

to elevate Hawley as a future savior of the party, and to hone an image as a sincere public servant that can transcend polarization, without giving the appearance of betraying Trump. As the pandemic cratered the economy, Hawley emerged as one of the few Republican senators calling for direct cash assistance as well as a solution to keep workers on payroll. Before passage of the CARES Act and its weekly provision of $600 in additional unemployment insurance through July, Hawley introduced a plan to provide monthly transfers of $1,446 to $2,206 for families with one to three children. While the proposal excluded individuals and was modest compared to progressive calls for a monthly universal basic income of $2,000

for the pandemic’s duration, it demonstrated Hawley’s eagerness to position himself as a rare figure on the right willing to provide economic relief to working families beyond a single stimulus check. More surprising was his “Rehire America” plan, which aimed to stave off the explosion of unemployment insurance claims as the national lockdown went into effect in late March. The plan envisioned the federal government covering up to 120 percent of business payroll for all rehired workers and 80 percent of wages for businesses facing revenue shortfalls, capped at $50,000 per worker. In a New York Times interview in late April, Hawley f lexed his relative independence from Republican economic orthodoxy, touting that he consulted econo-

mists across the political and ideological spectrum to develop his plan. Although it went nowhere in the Senate, it notably tilted toward the recovery programs implemented by Western and Northern Europe. A more expansive version of this payrollsupport concept has been embraced across the Democratic ideological spectrum, from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), though the House version didn’t make it into the Democrats’ pandemic response bill, the HEROES Act. Part of Hawley’s broader strategy is to be recognized as a responsible public servant “just doing [his] job,” which has entailed occasional bipartisanship with some of the Senate’s more economically progressive Democrats. Last summer, he introduced

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a bill with Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) to close the U.S. trade deficit through new taxes on foreign capital inflows. Following reports that debt collectors and some banks were seizing stimulus payments from indebted people, Hawley joined Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in demanding the Treasury Department act to ensure no one was denied their full relief check. When the dire shortage in medical supplies came to light in advance of the shutdown, Hawley introduced an act to secure critical supply chains; he has since signaled interest in working further with Baldwin and Brown on industrial policy. As public-interest watchdogs and investigative reporters sounded the alarm over the gargantuan corporate bailouts in the CARES Act and related bills, Hawley took aim at United Airlines for reducing thousands of employees’ hours despite protections against this in the airline bailout terms, insisting that United return the money if it did not reverse course. Most of these forays into areas of government oversight and public welfare have been just that: loose threads of public statements, letters of concern, and proposed legislation. Despite having no major legislative impact, Hawley’s shrewd instinct for a longterm political calculus has been on display throughout the pandemic. He has earned bursts of attention for acknowledging the severity of the economic crisis, while most of his party has resisted extending more aid to struggling Americans. This has given him the luxury of building a policy portfolio with a few seemingly bold, heterodox positions that could distinguish him from his party’s leadership in the event of an electoral collapse in November, without having to singularly own a piece of actual legislation. Of course, Hawley’s rhetorical flourishes and gestures toward economic heterodoxy cannot entirely mask his evasion of deeper, more structural causes of inequality. His silence, for instance, on the penurious federal minimum wage and obfuscation of the role of unions in securing shared prosperity illustrate the limits to his attempt to assemble a few pro-worker bona fides. Because he cannot possibly denounce the litany of firms, executives, and dark-mon-

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ey entities behind decades of Republican assault on the U.S. welfare state, Hawley’s narrow critique of capitalism can only serve to advance an illiberal conception of the social peace. On one hand, his ideas echo the century-old Republican prescription that a protective tariff serves industry and labor alike. On the other hand, his patchwork approach to industrial policy suggests a neo-corporatist agenda, in which a privileged segment of labor can have input on wages and benefits, but not challenge the broader regulatory environment. That trade-off, which would strain and divide the labor movement, would also create major obstacles to a worker-led and internationalist Green New Deal as the country and the globe near an irreversible climate crisis. Like his European counterparts, Hawley is much more in his element lambasting the depredations of foreign or “cosmopolitan” capital that sap the national strength embodied by humble, “left behind” citizens. His lamentations over today’s “shrinking middle” reflect the ahistorical view that economic life is shaped between virtuous, patriotic capitalism and its parasitic opposite. This stokes Trumpian resentment toward “globalist” elites for their support of multiculturalism and immigration, which in Hawley’s worldview most jeopardize Middle America’s cohesion and traditions. What is clear enough is that Hawley’s modulated apostasy on free-market ideology is no mere exercise. His political icon is Theodore Roosevelt, whose “new nationalism” attempted to curtail labor’s ratcheted militancy through moderate concessions from capital and the state. Should he seek the presidency in 2024, Hawley’s favorable attributes—he is telegenic, has intellectual curiosity, and lacks overt malice—wildly surpass those of Tom Cotton, another contender for Trump’s heir. IT REMAINS TO be seen whether Hawley

is the kind of politician who would actually follow through on a few measures that would anger Wall Street and the Republican donor class in the pursuit of higher office. The appeals to working people that would be required in 2024, however, are contingent on who is elected in November and what

Hawley could manipulate mainstream media into portraying him as the right’s answer to Elizabeth Warren.

is done to maximize economic recovery. Against a backdrop of mounting bottom-up pressure, improving the real economy would at a minimum include meaningful antitrust legislation, a revamped industrial policy, expanded child care and paid family leave, raising the minimum wage, and a major infrastructure plan. A figure like Hawley, who could manipulate mainstream media into portraying him as the right’s answer to Elizabeth Warren, will have ample ideological space to confound corporate Democrats while making a forceful pitch to voters willing to trade zombie neoliberalism for a modicum of economic well-being. Between the country’s extreme polarization and worsening inequality, the stakes couldn’t be higher for Democratic policymakers over the next four years. This summer’s nationwide revival of Black Lives Matter protests granted a glimmer of hope that public opinion is recognizing how deleterious and pervasive racism and white supremacy continues to be in the United States. In a matter of weeks, protesters exposed the vulnerabilities of complacent Democrats, but more significantly, they blindsided the right. The reactions have varied between authoritarian bloodlust, disbelief of calls to defund the police, and somber appeals to perhaps a now fictive silent majority. Two days before Cotton previewed his unvarnished neofascism in a notorious New York Times op-ed, Hawley gave a speech on the Senate floor that tried to reconcile the outmoded principle of color blindness

with a circumspect condemnation of the police brutality George Floyd and other Black Americans have suffered. He then pivoted to a rebuke of rioters, a defense of the overall integrity of American police departments, and a sermonizing message that economic policies that provided dignity from rural America to the “urban core” could bring about national healing. That speech could be seen as evidence of an idea to run as a “uniter” in 2024, but Hawley does not seem prepared for how rapidly political ground is shifting. The same, though, could be said for Joe Biden. Despite a new political reality defined by the pandemic and protests against police violence, Biden’s general-election campaign strategy has mostly affirmed the perception that the country’s crises begin and end with Trump. Yet the myriad forms of racial, economic, and other social inequalities that have crystallized into the most sweeping rejection of American political order since the 1960s demonstrate that a return to the status quo ante Biden represents is no less morally bankrupt for America’s multiracial working class than the routine perfidy of contemporary Republicanism. Insofar that a Democratic victory in November is predicated on a voter desire for normalcy, the dramatic decline in Trump’s support among boomers suggests Biden’s resolutely nonideological appeal to decency, stability, and competence is the surest path. Recent signals about Biden’s actual agenda, from both his advisers and Biden himself, have oscillated considerably, reflecting as much the pressures of satisfying a diverse and economically polarized coalition as the looming institutional constraints that would impede a forthright pursuit of wideranging reforms. But if Biden governs under the myth that society prefers gradualism at any cost, he will be as hard-put as ever in meeting progressive demands that are antithetical to his conception of what American politics is fundamentally about. Set next to Biden’s promise to “restore the soul of this nation,” Hawley’s own vision of national cohesion seems no more corny or quixotic. It adapts Sherrod Brown’s refrain about “the dignity of work” while weaving a narrative about an honorable middle and

working class under the foot of self-serving elites. The untrained ear will miss the antiSemitic connotations in Hawley’s attacks on cosmopolitanism, but it might perceive in his critique of America’s power structure a broad agreement with Bernie Sanders. Hawley’s attempt to acknowledge grievances of the “urban core” is likewise more deliberate than innocuous. Where Trump’s white nationalism fuses shock-jock provocation with the crude invective of George Wallace, Hawley has a preacher’s conviction in the rightness of a patriarchal social order, one that would reinforce the country’s racial hierarchy but not openly disparage the basic dignity of racial minorities—at least those who are citizens. Anachronistic appeals to color blindness may well provide a balm to sections of the middle and working classes fatigued or threatened by the more militant calls for justice that today’s activists utilize. Therein lie the qualities that make Hawley’s ascent in national politics both compelling and unnerving to watch. His deft fluctuation between solemn tributes to traditional values and community and fiery, anti-elite rhetoric exemplifies the choreographed mass politics of the radical right. In order to rehabilitate the Republican Party, it is very likely that its next presidential nominee will offer a Faustian bargain to reform the country’s miserly social contract, dividing the working class and further siphoning off white moderates who fetishize, above all else, romantic notions of decency, decorum, and leadership. Of the foreseeable contenders, Hawley has shown every inclination to sanitize and yet further radicalize the Trumpist trajectory. Such a ploy would be especially potent if Washington’s chronic dysfunction fails to abate. Should Hawley ultimately helm the postTrump Republican Party, it is unlikely he will fully emulate Trump, in either style or governance. For one thing, he simply doesn’t radiate over-the-top, authoritarian swagger. At present, he is an uncertain bridge between the intellectual realm of heterodox conservatives and the libidinal nationalism of Trump’s base. But his own charisma may yet make him the ideal political vehicle for the “common-good constitutionalism” espoused by Harvard Law School professor

Adrian Vermeule, which echoes the fusion of “moral” economics, a strong state, and a defense of national culture and Christian heritage endemic to Europe’s anti-globalization right. Were Hawley to breach conservative opposition to the welfare state, or at least impose regulations to compel big business to spur investment in the real economy alongside novel fiscal expenditures for redevelopment in the aging industrial belt, it would serve to veil the authoritarianism that Trump has activated in Republican politics while leaving the central theme of “law and order” undisturbed. The mounting clash between an activist left, a neoliberal center depleted of vision and mandate, and an ever more illiberal right is dissolving one myth of American exceptionalism: that the modern fragmentation and realignment of political parties endemic to Europe’s developed democracies cannot happen here. Another myth is also in the process of being disproven: that a critique of capitalism could not possibly take form on the right, let alone within the top ranks of a political party more associated with the zealous expansion of “free markets” than any other in the history of the world. As the economy continues to undergo grave turmoil, the left and the mainstream of the Democratic Party, while antagonists, remain bound in their fear of Republican nihilism. But a more potent fusion of economic nationalism and traditionalism could radically reshape our politics, depriving the warring factions of the center and left of a sound way forward. While fossil fuel industries and Wall Street would still profit handsomely under a future President Josh Hawley, “America First” would become an entrenched creed among anyone who felt Republican policies had rescued them. The dangers for society and the climate should be explicit, and yet the Democratic Party remains dangerously unprepared, fearing more its own metamorphosis than that of its opposition. n Justin H. Vassallo is a writer and researcher who specializes in party systems and ideology, political economy, American political development, and modern Europe.

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Industrial Revolutionar To understand how to revitalize our economy, you only have to look back to the founders.

he COVID-19 pandemic has forced policymakers to revisit whether supply chains for essential health materials should be reshored to the United States. Joe Biden has called for a WWII-style War Production Board to produce COVID-19 tests and coordinate their distribution. Foreign policymakers increasingly worry that China’s rising economic power and America’s dependence on China for essential materials pose serious national-security risks. Proposals to address the existential danger of climate change through a Green New Deal involve historic investments in clean-energy research and development, green manufacturing, and the export of cleaner energy technologies. Advocates for bold efforts in each of these areas do not believe the United States should be beholden to the market’s choices. They want policymakers to encourage domestic production in specific sectors, a practice known as industrial policy. This has been urged by an increasingly loud and bipartisan chorus, from Marco Rubio on

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the right to Elizabeth Warren on the left. For the last four decades, the dominant mood among economists and policymakers has been to hurl assault after assault at industrial policy. Government shouldn’t pick winners and losers, they have said. Government can’t know what sectors to prioritize. Free markets will allocate resources better the government ever can. Any government interference will cripple economic growth. Over time, industrial policy ultimately became the Lord Voldemort of economics, so evil and dangerous that it must not be named. Central to this critique is the assumption that industrial policy is an inherently bad fit with the character of this country. “America doesn’t ‘do’ industrial policy,” economists Brad DeLong and Stephen Cohen have lamented. The conventional story is that industrial policy in America started with Alexander Hamilton, and that the Hamiltonian tradition was passed down to Clay and Lincoln and Roosevelt—both Theodore and Franklin—and then largely left for dead, with a prominent exception in the Defense Department.

But the conventional story misunderstands both what industrial policy is, and the American approach to pursuing it. Critics of industrial policy usually frame the field as government subsidies, protectionism, or favoritism toward specific firms or sectors, and then levy predictable criticisms against such policy. But the reality is that industrial policy is not limited to active planning or strategy along these lines. Tax breaks for specific industries, sectoral deregulation, tariff reductions, and global standards-setting can all have precisely the same effects. This is why political scientist Aaron Wildavsky observed in a 1986 paper that “regulation and its absence constitute industrial policy.” Despite all the protests and fearmongering around industrial policy, the United States has always had one. American industrial policy falls into one of four traditions: Franklinian, Hamiltonian, Madisonian, and Jacksonian. Each of these traditions draws on characteristics of the individuals for whom they are named, even if their namesakes didn’t explicitly work out a particular theory of industrial policy, or even if

JANDOS ROTHSTEIN

By Ganesh Sitaraman

ies

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they embraced multiple theories. There is danger, of course, in naming traditions after famous leaders who contain multitudes and didn’t offer up systematic theories. But these monikers help give contours to the frameworks, fitting them into both a historical context and a set of ongoing policy debates. The four traditions in American industrial policy are also not necessarily incompatible. More often than not, they have coexisted, and all of them exist today to different degrees in different sectors. In other words, the traditions are just that, traditions. Understanding them helps clarify the possibilities and perils of industrial policy—past, present, and future.

Knowledge and Infrastructure: The Franklinian Tradition

Before there was a United States of America, there was Ben Franklin. Scientist, inventor, diplomat, aphorist, journalist, government official, Franklin was one of the few men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Throughout his life, this polymath believed deeply in the advancement of knowledge. He invented bifocals, conducted research into electricity, and helped organize the University of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, and America’s first lending library. Franklin was also a longtime postmaster during the Colonial period, and upon independence, he became the first postmaster general of the United States. For the founding generation and those who came after, the post office was a critical piece of basic infrastructure, an essential communications network enabling commerce by linking far-flung cities and towns. The post office also ensured the functioning of democracy through the distribution of newspapers and political information. Just as Franklin predates America, the Franklinian tradition in industrial policy emphasizes what comes before industrial production: knowledge and infrastructure. In this tradition, the public directs industrial-policy priorities in these arenas and the government provides them, either directly or through a regulated monopoly. Looking back, the Franklinian commitment to knowledge appears over and over

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again in American public policy. The Constitution grants power to Congress to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” through copyright and patent laws. Programs from the Land Grant Colleges Acts in the 19th century to the GI Bill and National Security Education Act in the 20th encouraged an educated population. The Manhattan Project, research to win the space race, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) all involved federal funding for science. These programs helped America reach critical national goals while also developing a pipeline of inventions, innovations, and ideas that fostered commerce for generations afterward. Like knowledge, infrastructure—particularly network infrastructure and utilities— is foundational for industrial production. What made the Franklinian-style post office so valuable throughout American history

was its commitment to universal service and regulated pricing. Of course, it is more expensive for the Postal Service to deliver letters from New Orleans to rural Alaska than it is to send them down the street. The post office uses a system of cross-subsidies, regulated rates, and a legally enforced monopoly to ensure consistent and affordable pricing. As a result, commerce and communication is possible throughout the vast American continent, not just in major cities on the coasts or along waterways. This common carrier approach to network infrastructure—be it railroads, telegraph, telephone, trucking, buses, airlines, electricity, water, or highways—also enabled investment and fostered innovation. Industrialists of any stripe can invest in a factory if it is connected to roads and communication, and will settle in a city that has power and water. These basic inputs for industrial growth and development

thus offer direct benefits and also catalyze private-sector investment across sectors. Regulated monopolies were also innovators. The famed Bell Labs, for example, was able to operate because its sponsoring parent, AT&T, was a monopolist. But in the Franklinian tradition, the telecom giant wasn’t free to roam the economy, crushing others; it was heavily regulated as a condition of its concentrated economic power. In fact, in the 1950s AT&T was required to license the knowledge from Bell Labs to anyone who paid a reasonable fee. This compulsory licensing regime created the predominant American high-tech industry.

Public Ends, Private Means: The Hamiltonian Tradition

Like Franklin, Alexander Hamilton was present at the creation. And because of a series of reports he authored as the first secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton is widely (and rightly) considered the founder of American industrial policy. In his Report on Manufactures, Hamilton outlined a system that included tariffs, subsidies, and investments. First, imposing tariffs, bans on some foreign goods, and prohibitions on exporting certain materials would protect and promote the development of infant industry in America. Subsidies, prizes, and exemptions from duties would encourage private investment in particular sectors. And nurturing discovery and investing in infrastructure would bring innovation and growth. In his report advocating for the creation of a national bank, Hamilton also hoped to expand the national debt, extend more legal tender, and develop America’s fledgling financial system. The combination of finance and manufacturing, he hoped, would be a more stable and more dynamic commercial sector. Hamiltonians want government to have a coherent economic strategy, and as a result, they tend to design systems rather than leave policy to ad hoc decision-making. Substantively, even though Hamilton himself emphasized innovation and infrastructure, the thrust of the Hamiltonian system involved achieving public ends through private means. The report on manufactures involved tariffs to protect private industry and subsidies to encourage private manu-

he t f o t s u r h t e Th em t s y s n a i n o t l Hami ic l b u p g n i v e i involved ach rivate means. p ends through facturing; the national bank was explicitly designed as a union of finance and government. Both sets of policies, Hamilton thought, would help bind the merchant and financial classes together with the new national government. The Hamiltonian tradition was prominent in the 19th century, finding expression in Henry Clay’s American System, the national bank, and in Civil War–era and Gilded Age economic concerns like tariffs. In the 20th century, the Hamiltonian tradition was taken to its furthest extent in the World War I War Industries Board, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) during the first New Deal, and the War Production Board during World War II. Each involved government-sponsored, industrywide boards that coordinated production, prices, and distribution of goods and services. During wartime, these boards guaranteed production of essential war materials; the peacetime NRA tried to address the economic challenges of the Great Depression. After World War II, government-industry planning and production boards were replaced by a looser system of collaboration. The oft-decried “military-industrial complex” was the Cold War heir to the Hamiltonian tradition. Big business, with the collaboration of big labor and big government, could provide economic stability and long-term (private-sector) planning for production. John Kenneth Galbraith celebrated this model as “the new industrial state.” Even today, the Pentagon is the primary location in the federal government of strategic industrial-policy thinking. The Department of Defense regularly issues reports discussing the resilience of the defense industrial base, problems with consolidation and offshoring, and the weeds of supply chains.

Despite notable successes, Americans have always had misgivings about the cozy relationship between corporations and government that characterizes the Hamiltonian tradition. Hamilton’s plans for manufactures and the national bank were attacked from the start as giving power and privileges to the wealthy, with potentially disastrous consequences for democracy. The war over the second national bank featured charges of corruption, and ended in defeat for the Hamiltonians, as populists decried the plutocratic alliance of finance and government. And throughout the 19th century, the Hamiltonian approach was largely associated with Northern commercial, industrial, and financial interests, with skepticism frequently coming from populist Westerners and Southerners. The 20th-century variants on the Hamiltonian approach were likewise subject to serious criticism. Oversight commissions warned of corruption, fraud, and profiteering. A tight partnership between business and government could be a license for the former to exploit American taxpayers for its own benefit and in the process entrench its economic power. The military contracting sector has been particularly vulnerable to this. Government capture and corruption are the inescapable fellow travelers of the Hamiltonian tradition.

Regulated Competition: The Madisonian Tradition

James Madison had two solutions to the Hamiltonian problem of the powerful capturing government: fragmentation of interests and separation of powers. In Federalist 10, Madison explained why no particular interest group would dominate in America. In a small republic, a single faction can become so powerful as to gain dominance;

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but in a large republic, there would be so many factions that none would prevail. One of Madison’s other great contributions in the Federalist Papers was arguing that the Constitution rightly separated the different functions of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—in order to prevent the concentration of power. Separation also created a framework for regulated competition between the branches for power and influence; each would aim to gain more power, and be checked and balanced by the others. “Ambition,” he said, would counter ambition. Today, regulated competition is perhaps best associated with anti-monopolist and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, but it has its roots in Madisonian political economy. The Madisonian tradition sees the route to economic success as requiring competitive markets, but it holds that there must be an active government regulating and channeling market activity to ensure a fragmented and separated industrial ecosystem. In other words, regulated competition is the route to productivity and prosperity. In the agrarian economy of the founding, Madisonians supported breaking up large property holdings by abolishing land inheritance rules like the entail and primogeniture. As industrialization proceeded swiftly in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Madisonian tradition found expression in the anti-monopoly movement and in regulatory policies based on the principle of separating functions. Antitrust advocates from John Sherman to Louis Brandeis and Robert Jackson argued that a concentrated economy was dangerous both economically and politically. The Sherman Antitrust Act, Clayton Antitrust Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, and a variety of pre- and post-Depression general competition laws sought to prevent monopolies and oligopolies. Other laws were sector-specific, tailored to the characteristics of particular industries. The 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, for example, was designed to ensure competition and fair prices in livestock, meat, and poultry. Competitive banking required rules prohibiting interstate branching and a government-backed system of federal deposit insurance.

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Adherents to this tradition also pushed for structurally separating industrial functions, by splitting the utility, exchange, or platform function from the commercial activity that trafficked across it. The 1906 Hepburn Act, for example, prevented railroads from carrying any commodities that they had mined or manufactured. As basic infrastructure, railroads would then be regulated under the Franklinian principles to ensure network access. Preventing ownership of production and manufacturing firms ensured a competitive marketplace across all sectors of commerce. Any industrialist (or investor) could rely on the rails to transport their goods—without fear of higher prices because a monopolist railroad gave special preference to its own goods. In the mid-20th century, a similar structural separation regime prohibited banks from owning non-bank companies, and under the Glass-Steagall Act, insurance, depository, and investment banking functions were separated. The Federal Communications Commission’s “fin-syn” rules likewise separated production and distribution of television programming. The Madisonian tradition emphasizes the benefits of pluralism, competition, and checks and balances. In an ecosystem with many competitors, supply chains are less likely to be fragile. A single monopoly supplier can be snuffed out, with disastrous consequences; but the loss of one among many, in contrast, poses little danger. Competition also enables innovation, as rivals continually seek to improve and disrupt in order to make gains. That struggle ultimately yields new products, processes, and businesses—keeping America on the cutting edge.

Privatization Without Strategy: The Jacksonian Tradition

Where the Madisonian tradition tries to prevent the Hamiltonian problem, the Jacksonian tradition rejected an industrial strategy entirely. In the early 19th century, fears that the wealthy and government were far too entangled contributed to the rise of Andrew Jackson and his populist movement. State legislatures granted individual charters to corporations, leading to charges of favoritism and “special privileges.” The national bank was attacked for robbing workers and farmers to pay financiers. The Jacksonian response was to abandon the field. The rise of general incorporation laws allowed any business that existed for a lawful purpose to incorporate without specific legislative sanction. Jackson himself vetoed the reauthorization of the national bank, leaving banking law and policy to the states. In spite of its intentions, Jacksonian political economy backfired. Over time, general incorporation laws didn’t curtail corporate power, they unleashed more corporations into the American economy. The failure to replace the national-bank system with an alternative led to the creation of “pet banks” run by Jackson administration cronies, fraudulent “wildcat” banking, speculative bubbles, and the swift return of the boom-and-bust economic cycle with the panic and depression of 1837. The Jacksonian tradition in industrial policy differs from the other three traditions in that it opposes the development of a coherent federal strategy or system of industrial policy in favor of decentralization to the states and privately directed activities. In its aspirations, it shares some

ion t i d a r t nian o s i f o d s a t fi M e e n Th be e h t s e z i emphas , competition, . m s pluralis ks and balance c and che

similarities with the Madisonian commitment to competition. But because it largely eschews an active government policy to regulate sectors of the economy, it ends up with some of the same problems that afflict the Hamiltonian tradition. The consequences of a Jacksonian approach are that industrial-policy decisions are made by private corporations, with few governmental guardrails. Unsurprisingly, those decisions often end up benefitting the shortterm interests of the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected. For the last 40 years, American industrial policy has largely followed the Jacksonian approach. The neoliberal economic policies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman

are, in great measure, a modernized version of the Jacksonian model. Deregulation, privatization, trade liberalization, and austerity all caution against government action. As a result, the Franklinian approach of public spending on R&D has withered under cries for austerity, and regulated sectors like airlines, buses, and telecom were deregulated starting in the late 1970s. Outside of a small number of institutions like the Pentagon and the Fed, policymakers do not usually think in Hamiltonian terms. Even those arenas have been affected by the Jacksonian mood: Deregulation in banking and finance and offshoring and consolidation in defense production have taken the place of sectoral regulation and

supply chain resilience. Robert Borkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s antitrust vision placed efficiency above all other aims, abandoning Madisonian competition and creating the most concentrated economy since the Gilded Age. The consequence of this decentralized, deregulated neo-Jacksonian approach has not been the absence of industrial policy. Instead of democratically elected officials and public-policy structures, the economically powerful determine national priorities and pursue them through outsourcing, offshoring, and, of course, lobbying Congress for tax breaks and regulatory changes. Rather than a national strategy, we have the privatization of industrial policy. It is also essential to remember the relationship between Jacksonian industrial policy and racial and geographic inequality. The original Jacksonians objected to many federal government actions in part because they feared that a strong, wellstitched union would threaten slavery in the Southern states. Racial politics thus restrained industrial policy in America. In the early neoliberal era, conservative political tacticians like Lee Atwater likewise recognized that economic policies had racial consequences, that neoliberal policies would harm Black people more than whites, and that they would prove an effective dog whistle for conservative political gain. At the same time, whether economic growth is concentrated in a few superstar cities or dispersed across the country depends on policy choices. Deregulating network infrastructure or failing to invest in new network infrastructure like broadband, for example, means rural areas and smaller cities and towns have less potential for growth. To be sure, center-left neoliberals did not share their conservative counterpartsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; racial politics or seek to widen inequality, but the structure of the economy shapes who has wealth and power. Deregulation, liberalization, privatization, and austerity meant redistributing both upward.

The Four Traditions and the Return of Industrial Policy

As policymakers discuss what industrial policy should look like today, the four traditions in American industrial policy offer impor-

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tant lessons. First and foremost, any public policy that shapes or structures a sector of the economy is an industrial policy, even the Jacksonian approach, which rejects strategic planning in any coherent sense. The choice to let powerful individuals and corporations pursue the industries they want, structure them how they want, and lobby government for ad hoc policy changes is just as much of an industrial policy as anything else, albeit not a very good one. Indeed, the “return” of industrial policy is better described as a rejection of the Jacksonian tradition. For those who advocate for a new industrial policy, the Hamiltonian tradition offers a natural starting point. But the risks inherent in the Hamiltonian approach should be particularly concerning at this moment. There is already a pervasive view that the system is rigged, captured and corrupted by the powerful. Industry concentration in sector after sector is at an apex, bringing economic and geographic inequality with it. Applying the Hamiltonian approach in narrow areas, like determining supply chain needs or the production of public-health materials in a crisis, is both inevitable and desirable. But the agenda for contemporary Hamiltonians must be more than advocating for industrial policy; it must also be designing policies to prevent regulatory capture, whether as a function of lobbying, the revolving door, or personal friendships and elite culture. Failure to do so threatens greater inequality of wealth and power, and with it, the possibility of oligarchy or another populist backlash. The Madisonian and Franklinian traditions, meanwhile, are in serious need of revival. Massive public spending in research and development, a public option for broadband and postal banking, and network infrastructure regulation, from tech platform rules to net neutrality, could provide a new foundation for discoveries and commerce. At the same time, antitrust enforcement and the revival of separationof-function regimes in tech, telecom, banking, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and other sectors will revitalize competition, enhance innovation, reduce the power of rent-seeking lobbyists, and ensure a more equitable economy through all regions

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of the country. These two traditions also work together as a system: Governmentfunded research and regulated network infrastructure provide the foundation and keep the country investing in a longer-term future; a competitive ecosystem sits atop that base, pursuing innovation in a manner that doesn’t concentrate wealth or power. The challenge for Madisonians and Franklinians is that their traditions have been deliberately attacked for decades by Jacksonians, so much so that they are largely forgotten, and if remembered, much maligned. The neo-Brandeisian movement has started to revive principles and policies in antitrust. But both separation rules and regulated monopoly in the network infrastructure sector are still misunderstood, if they are known at all. The agenda for those interested in competition, public investment, and infrastructure must be to

resurrect systems of regulated competition and regulated monopoly. Only then will the Madisonian and Franklinian traditions reemerge in full force. All four of these traditions—Franklinian, Hamiltonian, Madisonian, and Jacksonian— have been with us since the start of the country. The style of American industrial policy has taken on different forms and flavors, ebbing and flowing over the centuries, coexisting to different degrees at different times. As the debate over industrial policy begins anew, the question is not whether America need an industrial policy. It is how to revive three traditions that have been allowed to languish over the last generation. n Ganesh Sitaraman, a Prospect board member, is a professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School and author of The Great Democracy.

C U

T U R

St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, is the site of the brutal rape of 15-year-old student Lacy Crawford.

The Unbearable Deafness of Power A story of rape in a world of privilege B

O O

BY S H A M U S K H A N “Basically,” my father said, his administrators at the school. voice rasping, “they’re promising Together these men lied to to destroy you.” silence young Ms. Crawford and to protect the power of the instiacy Crawford’s father was tution to which they’d dedicated not wrong. In 1991, St. Paul’s their lives. School, along with the law Notes on a Silencing is a firm of Orr & Reno, threatened to story of the slander of a young destroy his daughter, a 15-yearwoman. It is a story of rape and old student who had been raped power, of predation, of masby two 18-year-old students. In culine domination—and it is her new memoir, Lacy Crawford a story of shame. For a long names the educators who, she time, that shame was Crawsays, knowingly hid her rape from ford’s. With this book, she seeks, the police and engaged in witinstead, to make it about the ness tampering: Bill Matthews, shame of these powerful men. I John Buxton, Cliff Gillespie, hope she is successful. and Kelly Clark, teachers and Crawford enrolled at St.

Paul’s School in the fall of 1989, graduating in 1992. She was from a well-to-do Chicago family, her father an executive and her mother an Episcopal priest. St. Paul’s is one of the great WASP New England boarding schools. J.P. Morgan Jr. attended in the 1880s, alongside William Randolph Hearst, who didn’t graduate. In the 1960s, John Kerry played hockey alongside Robert Mueller, who was the second St. Paul’s alumnus to serve as a prosecutor investigating a sitting president. Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, also attended the school. So did I, arriving shortly after Crawford graduated. Later, I went back to teach at St. Paul’s for a year, 2004-2005, and wrote a book about it (Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School). Fabulously wealthy, with an endowment

of about $625 million and only about 500 students, on grounds with over 100 buildings and nearly 2,000 acres, the school exudes privilege. Part of making elites, as I argued in my book, is defending status and power. Crawford’s book tells this story far more brutally and convincingly than I was able to. In her 11th-grade year, Crawford was raped by two seniors. One called her and convinced her to come to his room after “check in” because, he told her, he needed to talk about his mother. He made it sound like a personal crisis. Crawford was still very much a girl—she tells us of how crushed she was, around that time, when she lost her childhood blanket. Risking significant discipline but imagining she could somehow help this young man, Crawford went to his room. She found him there, mostly naked, and

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with another man. They took turns orally raping her. They held her down. They reminded her that a faculty member lived on the other side of the wall of their room. You might think this was an opportunity for her to escape by drawing attention to what was happening. But young Lacy Crawford instead thought of how much trouble she would get in if she screamed for help. There she was, with two naked boys, out of her room after she had signed her name to check in for the night. Crawford had yet to have sex. The most she could muster in response to these men was, “Just don’t have sex with me.” You might think how ill-conceived this was. Screaming out for help would have brought this horrific ordeal to an end. But as the story unfolds, we realize something different: that men like Bill Matthews, Kelly Clark, John Buxton, and Cliff Gillespie, who had dedicated their lives to education and to their faith, were not there for her. The terrified 15-year-old Lacy Crawford knew well what many of us are still unwilling to admit to ourselves. Salvation was not on the other side of that wall, only further violation. No one was going to help. There is something almost banal about this story. Which is not to say Notes on a Silencing is banal. Crawford’s telling is beautifully rendered. Her narrative lacks all sentimentality, yet somehow isn’t cold. She manages to convey, simultaneously, her own childhood self-recrimination and empathy for her childhood self. Hers is not a story of triumph over adversity, nor does she provide a reflection on how she achieved peace. This is a different kind of telling. Crawford is a martyr. I evoke here a different meaning of the word than usually comes to mind, one based in its Greek etymology, μάρτυς, or “witness.” I probably thought of this secondary meaning because Bill Matthews, one of the primary men who brutally silenced Crawford, was one of my classics teachers (he taught me Latin in tenth grade). Lacy told her parents about what happened months after her first rape. They contacted the school, which

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had an obligation to inform the police. School officials had known about the sexual contact—Crawford was given herpes by one of her rapists—and had known that legally this was statutory rape. They chose not to inform the police. The school officials illegally accessed her medical information and failed to inform her of her own sexually transmitted illness. They would, much later, inform other boys on campus about that condition of hers—but they never informed her. No one asked the 15-year-old Crawford for her full testimony. Not the school. Not her parents. No court of law. Two women created space for her to tell it: a queer priest on campus and, later, an African American woman from a sexual assault crisis center. It’s no mistake these two women were the furthest people in Crawford’s life from white masculine power structures. Crawford was not yet prepared to bear witness to these relative strangers; the adults in her life were more comfortable with or interested in her silence than her words. Notes on a Silencing is testimony that institutions of power insisted, for decades, that no one hear. Years later, in 2015-2016, the local police in Concord, New Hampshire, began investigating a new rape case at St. Paul’s that led them back to the rape of Lacy Crawford in 1991. Under the glare of public attention, St. Paul’s retained the law firm of Casner & Edwards to investigate those two cases and nearly 100 other claims of sexual abuse and assault at the school. The former attorney general of Massachusetts, Scott Harshbarger, led Casner & Edwards’s team. By Crawford’s account, his work was a success—for the school. The police detective working her case conveyed that after uncovering information about potential witness tampering and reporting that to the attorney general’s office, she’d been taken off the case. “We’re all in agreement,” the detective told her, “that there seems to be some collusion or incestuous relations between attorneys here … It’s attorneys tipping off attorneys.” The attorney general of New Hampshire settled all charges against St.

NOTES ON A SILENCING: A MEMOIR BY LACY CRAWFORD

Little, Brown

Paul’s. This ended the investigation into decades of destroying lives, Crawford’s and others. The narrative in Crawford’s memoir isn’t linear. Chapters loop backward and forward in time. We know of her rape from the opening few pages. We later hear of other assaults that followed—not all of which Crawford describes as such. A 20-something ski instructor gets her drunk and has sex with her as she lies there, paralyzed and numb. The boys who first raped her talk about their “threesome” to others, spreading word of her sexual availability, and upon hearing the story, a recent graduate from St. Paul’s drives down from college, walks into her room at night without her permission, and rapes her as she cries into her pillow. In her own home, a friend of her father stands before her drunk in his boxers and harasses her. She tries to run by him, and he sticks his tongue down her throat. His own daughter was sleeping in Crawford’s room at the time. This broader context doesn’t make the assault at St. Paul’s somehow more understandable. Nothing really changes about the story of that first rape, presented in the opening pages of the book. There is a powerful lesson in this: We don’t need to know more to understand what happened. We must respect her witnessing. It’s actually not that complicated. This isn’t to say there’s nothing more to be learned. And some of those lessons are ones that Crawford herself never teaches. Reading Crawford’s book, I realized three things about her time in high school. She was brilliant. She was athletic. She was beautiful. Which also made me realize a fourth thing that she, perhaps, did not. The men wanted to destroy her for it. Boys and men noticed her. She was the top pupil in the school. She was an outstanding tennis player. Crawford tells of her depression and her lack of selfawareness. But reading through the book, I saw her potential power. She was an extraordinary young woman. And nothing short of an organized program by men sought to make sure she could never exercise that power. They were successful, for a time. Their triumph has now faltered.

COURTESY OF LIT TLE, BROWN

But there are no heroes in this story. Crawford certainly does not present herself as one. Shunned for a time by her friends and the school, one young man, Alex Ault, as she calls him, helped bring her back from her pariah status, and even to herself. He was powerful and popular. He knew what had been done to her. He didn’t care; he wasn’t like the other guys, he told her. Dating him made Crawford a member of the community again. Bill Matthews’s ire at this redemption of Crawford led him to treat Ault brutally. Nearly 30 years later, we might believe that we have finally come to a point where girls like Crawford can stand before us as witnesses and that we will hear them, and act. But we should not fool ourselves. As recently as 2017, the Office of the Attorney General of New Hampshire effectively joined the school in an attempt to bury Crawford’s testimony. In the end, Notes on a Silencing is about men’s care for power, and their brutalization of everything else. These were “good men.” Kelly Clark, now deceased, was a minister and a former dean of the Berkeley Divinity School, the Episcopal seminary at Yale Divinity School. Those still surviving, no doubt, continue to maintain their goodness. But these good men knowingly stood by when I was a student, year after year, as the senior men of the school used the handle of a cricket bat to sodomize young boys. Everyone knew. These men in power, however, worked not to protect the young, but to protect the rights that came with power and status. They may not have personally plunged the paddle deep into those young boys, but they certainly helped. They stood by as students ran to their offices, having been assaulted by teachers. They still lead educational institutions to this day. This makes it hard for us to argue that things are different than they once were. Midway through the book, Crawford’s best friend, Elise, leaves the school because of mental-health struggles. Elise had quotes posted all about her room, and Crawford writes one of them down for herself, a passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

The author, Lacy Crawford, at age 14

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. But there is no wisdom for us in these lines of Eliot. Believing in them is only a toxic embrace of self-protection. The argument of Notes on a Silencing is not that with exploration came truth. That young

15-year-old knew, all along, what was happening. And she knew what would happen if she’d served as a witness to her violation. Help would not be there for her, it was there for power. Her first rendering was as true as her last. n Shamus Khan is professor of sociology at Columbia University and author, with Jennifer S. Hirsch, of Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (W.W. Norton).

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Prophet of a Lost World John Dunlop specialized in labor/management conflict resolution, but his deal making grew more perilous as corporate anti-unionism grew. B

O O

BY N E L S O N L I C H T E N S T E I N

ver since the pandemic gripped the nation, the mobilization experience during World War II has been celebrated as the model we need to fight this brutally disruptive invader. Prioritize and channel essential medical supplies and personnel, mobilize production, sustain worker incomes, and safeguard working conditions with a gigantic burst of federal spending and a new era of economic and social regulation; then wind it all down— “reconversion” was the wartime word—with careful planning and much government supervision. But one idea from that era has been conspicuously absent: the idea that all this governmental activity and economic regulation should be coordinated through corporatist institutions involving labor, management, and the state. “Tripartite” was the wartime

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word for a collaborative structure to harmoniously ameliorate social and economic conflict and command popular legitimacy in a world demanding sacrifice, compromise, and substantial governmental regulation. John Dunlop, the noted labor economist and mediator, was a product of that world, a scholar/practitioner who came of academic age in the Great Depression and formed his views about labor, management, and the state during his three years on the War Labor Board. That tripartite institution was crucial to a 50 percent increase in the size of the labor movement during World War II, but also to the containment of the economic and political demands of industrial unions made powerful and aggressive by a working class bursting with vitality and self-confidence. This was a delicate balancing act,

especially given managerial hostility to the growth of labor power and government regulation. So, Dunlop’s generation of mediators and arbitrators were in high demand—young, practically minded economists and lawyers, dedicated to amelioration and routinization of class antagonism in the midst of a titanic world conflict. Journalist Jennifer Berkshire does not dwell on Dunlop’s wartime career in her admirable and wellsourced study of how Dunlop sought to resolve a whole series of conflicts, ranging from the police bust of Harvard student radicals in 1969 to the Clinton-era effort to reconstruct industrial relations in the 1990s. But it’s clear that the template devised in the late New Deal and World War II proved an enduring influence on Dunlop-style problem solving. Dunlop, who spent his entire postwar career at Harvard, remained intensely hostile to any overt ideological schema, preferring a grounded pragmatism. Thus, when Dunlop faced a problem in policy formulation or at the workplace, he first sought to construct what he called a “mechanism,” echoing the tripartite arrangements of the war years, and would

AP IMAGES

John Dunlop (right), Gerald Ford’s secretary of labor from 1975 to 1976, is seen here resigning, after Ford withdrew support from a construction site picketing bill.

then bring the key figures to the table, find their true bottom line, and hammer out a compromise, lubricated perhaps with a few late-night drinks at one of Dunlop’s favorite Cambridge or D.C. bars. “The important thing is to express and channel conflict in ways that get the problems dealt with in a constructive manner,” Dunlop told an interviewer shortly before his death in 2003. Unfortunately, Dunlop and others from the War Labor Board generation came to fetishize this supposedly anti-ideological operational practicality; and above all the idea that trade unionism was actually functional to modern capitalism. This premise was derived from both the sociology of Talcott Parsons and the temporary reality of a powerful labor movement. This mindset was a key element Dunlop put forward in his most important scholarly work, Industrial Relations Systems, published in 1958, and it reappears in the 1960 book he co-authored with Clark Kerr, Frederick Harbison, and Charles A. Myers—all WLB veterans— Industrialism and Industrial Man. In both works, Dunlop avoided use of the word “capitalism,” a concept then heavily freighted with a leftist meaning, substituting instead “industrialism.” The net result was to give the industrial-relations scholarship of that era a static, technocratic quality, which would increasingly blind Dunlop to the transformations taking place in American economic and political life. Thus in 1982, when it was apparent that American politics had lurched to the right, that the U.S. version of capitalism was undergoing a radical transformation, and that President Ronald Reagan’s destruction of PATCO had opened the door to a far more intransigent era of corporate anti-unionism, Dunlop told a Business Week reporter, “It is not a new era and I’ll put my name on it.” One did not have to wait until the 1980s to recognize the limitations of that kind of thinking. Thirty-five years before, when Dunlop came up for tenure at Harvard, the Economics Department was, with one exception, entirely behind him. In 1945, after all, the need for industrial-relations scholars seemed obvious. But Joseph

Schumpeter, of all people, favored another candidate, Paul Sweezy, an untenured Harvard Marxist who had already published a couple of books charting monopolistic trends in capitalist development. Schumpeter was a social and political conservative, but he famously recognized that capitalism was a system that was, well, creative and destructive, and all too capable of adapting to resist even the most powerful trade union movement. Sweezy’s life work would probe that trajectory; Dunlop’s did not. Berkshire is well aware of these Dunlopian blinders. At one point, she calls his dispute resolution method “almost quaint,” and Dunlop the “creature of a bygone era.” Nevertheless she writes that “Dunlop’s approach to helping workers remains an inspiration and a model.” And Dunlop did accomplish a lot. He was a resourceful mediator, genuinely at ease with plumbers, farmworkers, and clerical workers as well as CEOs and senators. His method was “tireless behind-the-scenes maneuvering,” reports Berkshire; he bridled at the insistence that everything in government needed to be done “under the full blast of publicity and in public.” This Dunlop method worked best when applied to conflicts that took place in one well-understood institution or industry; it proved a failure when launched upon the national scene, especially as labor’s adversaries became relentless in the politically polarized era from the 1970s onward. At Harvard, Dunlop’s influence was organically powerful. Although he grew alienated from the Economics Department, he cherished the larger institution, rising to Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the early 1970s. That promotion was surely helped along by his deft handling of the 1969 occupation of University Hall, when the police rousted some 170 protesting students. Although Dunlop had no sympathy with student radicalism, he assembled a carefully balanced committee that marginalized neoconservative hawks like James Q. Wilson and sidelined Harvard’s insular president, Nathan Pusey. Discussions dragged on, tempers cooled,

MORE WORLDS TO NEGOTIATE: JOHN DUNLOP AND THE ART OF PROBLEM SOLVING BY JENNIFER C. BERKSHIRE

Hamilton Books

and once a Cambridge municipal court had its disciplinary say, Dunlop orchestrated a set of university penalties that avoided outright expulsion of any of the students. Two decades later, Dunlop proved an equally adept interlocutor when the university faced a unionizing drive among technical and clerical workers led by Kris Rondeau, a tireless, charismatic organizer spawned by the New Left and the new feminism. By this time, Derek Bok, a close Dunlop friend and an industrial-relations scholar in his own right, was Harvard’s president. But neither Bok’s position nor his pedigree tempered Harvard’s hostility to the union, even after the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers had won a narrow majority of eligible votes in a 1988 certification election. This was the Reagan era, and Harvard had hired an anti-union law firm that specialized in obfuscation, delay, and grinding resistance. During HUCTW’s nearly decade-long organizing effort, Dunlop had offered no recorded support. But recalling the bitter conflict that had long engulfed Yale University’s relationship with its employees, he remembered Rondeau, who developed with him a warm friendship. He put Rondeau in direct contact with Bok and helped persuade the university president to ignore his lawyers and recognize the union. Bok then made Dunlop Harvard’s chief negotiator. A long and complex negotiating process, reflecting the feminist and participatory character of the union, culminated in a progressive, innovative contract ratified by 94 percent of the HUCTW membership. “He was a modern man,” concluded Rondeau. “The bowtie was deceiving.” Dunlop was equally adept at resolving conflicts well beyond Harvard Square. In northwest Ohio, Dunlop created a negotiating mechanism that helped the farmworkers who picked the tomatoes and cucumbers that large firms like Campbell Soup purchased from independent growers. The latter were the farmworkers’ legally recognized employers, so the trick was to make the deep-pocket firm at the top of the

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COURTESY OF LIT TLE, BROWN

agricultural supply chain actually negotiate with those workers. Dunlop got involved in 1985 after Baldemar Velásquez and his Farm Labor Organizing Committee had spent nearly a decade shaming and boycotting the big food-processing company. When a Campbell executive asked Dunlop how much he charged, the Harvard professor tartly replied, “I’m not a consultant.” True enough, but Campbell was willing to entertain Dunlop’s mediation efforts only because it faced a public-relations disaster. Although farmworkers were not covered by the Wagner Act, Dunlop helped Velásquez and Campbell agree to establish a mechanism, soon dubbed the Dunlop Commission, under whose tutelage a three-way contract between the FLOC, the farmers, and the soup company was negotiated. The commission lasted for decades and in 2004 even extended its reach to North Carolina, where it brokered another three-way contract between FLOC, the Mt. Olive Pickle company, and a grower’s association. Dunlop knew all the players in Washington—he’d headed President Richard Nixon’s Cost of Living Council in the early 1970s—but there his deal making proved a telling failure. President Jerry Ford appointed him labor secretary in 1975, for one major reason: to push through Congress the common situs picketing bill that Dunlop had painstakingly worked out among the construction trades, the AFL-CIO, big contractors, and congressional Democrats, who now commanded post-Watergate majorities in Congress. Ford saw the law as a partial solution to stagflation, as well as an electoral stratagem by which the Republicans could consolidate support among hard-hat tradesmen whose cultural conservatism made them potential GOP voters. The new law would enable a union to picket an entire construction site, heretofore illegal under Taft-Hartley, but essential to union bargaining power and institutional security on the giant construction projects that were still being built with union labor. In return, power within the building trades would be centralized, thus enabling top union leaders and industry executives to work

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Dunlop “refused to see the decline in labor’s fortunes as indicative of some tectonic shift.” out a wage-restraint policy for an entire trade. Strikes would be less frequent and wage advances moderate but more predictable. This was tripartism par excellence. This neat corporatist deal came a cropper when employers and an increasingly conservative faction within the GOP took a good look at it. Both the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce were opposed, likewise the growing cohort of construction firms that were building with nonunion labor. Even more important, the GOP was shifting to the right, with Ronald Reagan challenging Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination. Both houses of Congress passed the common situs bill, but Arizona’s Paul Fannin spoke for an aggrieved conservatism when he charged that if Ford signed it, “Millions of dollars more will pour into the union treasuries, money that will be spent to defeat any free enterprise candidate who dares to stand up against union bosses’ demands.” Ford knew his nomination as the GOP standard-bearer was on the line. After he told Dunlop he would veto the bill, the labor secretary felt “double-crossed” by a president whose “internal moral quality” could not be trusted. Dunlop soon resigned, just ten months into his tenure. Such a principled resignation is both rare and admirable, but the experience did not shake Dunlop’s core beliefs. “He refused to see the decline in labor’s fortunes as indicative of some tectonic shift,” writes Berkshire. Again in the Carter administration, he chaired a semiofficial Labor-Management Group that imploded after its corporate members, many heading firms that had long operated with a unionized workforce, opposed yet another Democratic effort at incremental

labor law reform. That prompted Douglas Fraser, a former UAW president, to charge capital with waging a “one-sided class war” in his letter of resignation. A decade and a half later, Labor Secretary Robert Reich persuaded President Bill Clinton to set up a new committee to consider how labor law reform might encourage more “high performance” workplaces. Once again, Dunlop was the indispensable man, in spite of—well, perhaps because of—his continuing illusion that some legislative accommodation could yet be worked out between labor and capital. This new Dunlop Commission uncovered a hidden world of workplace dysfunction. There were 21 public hearings at which 411 witnesses had their say. The key issue was revision of the Wagner Act’s Section 8(a)(2) that banned company-dominated unions, in return for which the unions hoped some corporate anti-union practices might be ended and organizing made easier. Dunlop wanted to permit non-union companies to set up employee involvement schemes. He told AFL leaders, “This is the way we rebuild the labor movement.” It was true that in the 1930s some company unions, in the steel and electrical industries especially, did provide a launching pad for authentic trade unions, when militants exerted sufficient influence. But in the late 20th century, this sort of transformation seemed unlikely given the rise of corporate anti-unionism and an aggressive union avoidance bar. The management members of the Dunlop Commission were unwilling to make any concessions when it came to changing the law to facilitate union organizing. As Tom Kochan, a commission member and MIT industrial-relations scholar, told Berkshire of the last big labor-management accommodation Dunlop sought to arrange: “There was no deal, and there still is no deal.” n Nelson Lichtenstein teaches history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is writing a history of the Clinton administration’s trade, labor, and economic policies.

The Afflictions of the Comfortable How high-profile writers drop their masks in the pandemic }}}}} essay

BILL KOEB

BY M I C H A E L M A S S I N G

OVID-19 has brought a number of journalistic innovations—the coronavirus tracker, the epidemiology beat, the emergency room confidential, and, alas, the pandemic journal. This last one consists of firstperson accounts by successful writers for top-shelf publications. They are highly informative, though less about

the pandemic and its impact than about journalism, class, and privilege. The journals fall into several categories. One is family and kids. In “Stuck at Home With My 20-YearOld Daughter,” for instance, Todd Purdum described in The Atlantic the pandemic’s “achingly uncertain implications” for the future of his

daughter Kate. A sophomore at Barnard College, she has led a charmed life. “Because of my career as a journalist and her mother’s as a former White House press secretary, political consultant, and Hollywood studio executive, we have the luxury of working from home, and the financial resources to help weather this storm.” That, however, does not mask “the reality that Kate’s world has shrunk to the size of her bedroom. In a flash, the daily life of the confident, privileged young woman who’d thrived at school, haunted Broadway stage doors, mastered the New York

SEP/OCT 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

subway, and, yes, discreetly flashed a fake ID in the bars of Morningside Heights was upended indefinitely.” “I love you guys,” Kate says, “but sometimes I’ll be writing a paper and one of you barges in to ask for help with so-and-so, and I don’t have a space like the library to go and sit and work, just have a little more privacy. I have my own bedroom, which is really great and lucky, but if I come out of my bedroom, then suddenly it’s like I’m fair game to be engaged in conversation.” If Barnard classes don’t resume in the fall, Kate “will have some big decisions to make about whether she should take a gap year … That uncertainty rattles us all.” According to The New York Times, “tens of thousands of New Yorkers live at close quarters in cramped spaces, physically unable to quarantine from any sick household members.” The paper quoted a doctor as saying that those getting sick are “people who are stuck at home, immigrants who are living 10 people in one apartment.” In a mental-health survey of 2,000 college students, nearly all said the virus had caused stress or depression, with nearly half saying a major source was the virus’s financial impact on them or their families. Another category is personal grooming. In “FaceTime, With Lipstick,” Daphne Merkin observed in The New York Review of Books that while at home she has worn “a nightgown with a sweatshirt thrown over it.” Though she has abandoned most attempts at upkeep, “there have been exceptions—like the other week, when I was getting ready to teach via Zoom my Columbia MFA class on the art of literary criticism.” The women in the class “appear on screen in assorted levels of togetherness,” and on this occasion she decided to take greater pains, applying “blusher, eyeliner, and mascara, topped off by a dusting of face powder and a slick of berry lipstick”; then, in a sudden impulse, “I finished by spraying on an unseasonably summery fragrance by Tom Ford called Neroli Portofino Acqua.” In May, the Associated Press reported on the challenge of preventing the spread of the coronavirus “in slums, camps and other crowded settlements around the world where

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clean water is scarce and survival is a daily struggle.” Some three billion people, “from indigenous communities in Brazil to war-shattered villages in northern Yemen, have nowhere to wash their hands with soap and clean water at home,” hindering prevention efforts. In Africa, where virus cases at the time were closing in on 100,000, more than half of the continent’s 1.3 billion people must leave their homes to get water. Food is another journal staple. In The Washington Post, Susan Shapiro described how fights over it during the lockdown almost torpedoed her “perfect marriage.” During nearly 25 years of happy conjugal living, she had managed to keep at bay her “Pavlovian sense for any sweets in the vicinity.” She and her husband were both workaholics and ate most of their meals separately, but they marked “special occasions at Nobu (light seafood, no bread basket).” The shelter-in-place order, however, forced them “into co-consuming three squares daily,” and her husband became a “food hoarder,” bringing home “enough to feed a family of 12 in a bunker for months.” Shapiro tried to keep at bay “the deluge of delicacies into our kitchen,” but on one occasion she found a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels in his closet and polished it off, and she accused him of “flagrant insensitivity.” In the end, however, as she watched the grim news on TV, “I felt grateful that we could feed each other.” The pandemic, the Times reported, has created a hunger crisis, with child hunger “soar[ing] to levels without modern precedent.” According to the Census Bureau, 36.3 percent of households with children lack the necessary amount or quality of food to eat because they “couldn’t afford to buy more.” An article in Vox described how “America’s food banks have been completely overwhelmed by demand.” Many pandemic journals describe the effects of monotony and routines for coping with it. The May 24 issue of The New York Times Magazine, in which 20 writers dilated on “What We’ve Learned in Quarantine,” abounded in examples: • “Lately, I have found myself wondering—as I sit here hunched inside

my dark house, for infinity weeks, hardly moving, wearing the same green sweatshirt while eating the same four snacks—about cocoons.” • “I spent a day working from the floor, squatting before and around my computer as though it were a campfire … I wandered around naked and stayed up all night. I paced thousands of laps around the kitchen table. I slept in places that were not my bed … I spent hours sitting on the carpet against a wall, doing nothing except considering.” • “Self-quarantine has me thinking and acting in all kinds of backward ways … As I sit and write, a new layer of dust accumulates. Later on this evening, I’ll make another round … I am so, so tired of endlessness: the unrelenting boredom, the cycles of self-pity, the constant systemic breakdown, the eternity of death.” These accounts make almost no mention of any personal financial hardship incurred as a result of the virus—even as 58 million Americans have filed for unemployment from mid-March to late August. Pandemic journals are, in fact, filled with markers of material comfort and professional status. Some examples, culled from The New York Review and The New York Times: • “My son had returned from his semester abroad in Europe, and so we were all hunkered down in our Brooklyn house, cooking, eating, working together and listening to music.” • “By the time our housekeeper Daisy Nyathi (not her real name) walked into my home at 8:45 on Tuesday morning, she had been in close personal contact with a hundred people already.” • “We stayed in our university flat in Greenwich Village until yesterday, when I rented a car and we came upstate to our friends Jay and Jackie’s place.” • “We live in Geneva in a pretty small apartment” and so “we left the city for the mountains … We arrived at the farmhouse two days after my birthday, which is on March 11. We’ve been here now for more than two months.” As these entries show, many pandemic journalists filed their

dispatches from country homes to which they had repaired. Almost none expressed qualms about their choice or wrestled with its moral implications. Thomas Chatterton Williams, in pieces for both Harper’s and the Times Magazine, cast his departure from Paris as part of a storied tradition dating back to the exodus from the city in 1940 as the Germans advanced. He recounted how on March 15, as the coronavirus was ravaging Spain and Italy but not yet France, he strapped his infant son into his stroller, “grabbed a bottle of wine from my nascent stockpile, and walked unworriedly with my wife and daughter across the plaza to our friends’ home to share a meal.” The friends were planning to leave that same afternoon for their family home in a village south of Brittany. They invited Williams and his family to join them, and he quickly accepted. While waiting for the train the next morning at Gare Montparnasse, he writes, “I was aware that we were all of us reenacting a scene that has played out over and over again throughout this city’s dramatic history.” As a “parisien d’adoption”—Williams is an American expat—he was now “an exile twice over.” Yet, “in exercising this authentically Parisian need to escape,” he wrote, “it feels as though, suddenly, I’ve had my position here solidified.” The coronavirus has “instilled a certain edifying simplicity into our lives that amounts to a form of discipline. We wake up, exercise, feed ourselves, divide between us the sundry chores required to maintain a household, shop for groceries, prepare our lunches, wash up, read and play, prepare our dinners.” This “is the discipline of the exile, of the person who cannot quite take her home for granted.” He and his wife “take turns scouring the internet for houses in the country to rent—a thoroughly Parisian activity these days.” Most Parisians, however, had no country houses to decamp to. Among those who remained was Pamela Druckerman. Her “Pandemic Marriage, Ménage, & Me,” appearing in The New York Review, masterfully blends all the essential ingredients

of the pandemic journal. As the lockdown began, she anxiously read about all the divorces taking place in China during its own shutdown: “What would happen when we were cooped up for weeks or months with what the French government was ominously calling our cellule familiale? Would being socially distant from everyone else make us feel closer to our spouses,” or “were we each about to star in our own hell-isother-people existentialist drama?” At first, the confinement seemed calming. Her husband had seen the crisis coming, and she admired him for it. A week in, however, she grows frustrated over his lack of practical skills: “He could foresee a pandemic, but he can’t operate a can-opener or unblock a sink. Like many middleclass dual earners, we used to solve this problem by paying a weekly cleaner and summoning a neverending rotation of plumbers, electricians, and handymen (here, they call these workers hommes à tout faire). In lockdown, however, we suddenly have to do all of this ourselves.” She draws up a chore chart for her family, and the higher the death toll, “the more I ask my husband questions like: ‘Does a frying pan really need to soak for three days?’” Her husband’s work (he’s writing a book about soccer) “seems to require an enormous amount of meat. Prequarantine we’d cut down, to save the planet. Now, before I leave for the supermarket, he hands me a scrap of paper on which he has scribbled ‘chicken, lamb, hamburgers.’” For most, “the big shock of quarantine isn’t that their partners are terrible, but that—in the absence of schools, shrinks, business trips, drinks with friends, and the occasional flirtation with strangers—their shortcomings feel more consequential. Now, if there’s no one in your house who can do something like operate a power drill, cut hair, or teach math, it won’t happen.” But then, after five weeks of quarantine, something shifts: “We cease thinking about our absent housecleaner and cancelled vacations.” The kids start doing their schoolwork, and her husband takes on the lion’s share of the housework. While her

These accounts make almost no mention of any personal financial hardship incurred as a result of the virus—even as 58 million Americans have filed for unemployment from mid-March to late August. pre-lockdown life was privileged, she can now see that her ceaseless work deadlines “were their own kind of quarantine,” forcing her to spend weeks tethered unhappily to her desk. She’s now pleased with her growing list of skills and the daily workout she gets from her household duties. As the rules relax, she takes her kids to the orthodontist, and soon her cleaner will return. Her cellule familiale, Druckerman realizes, “is really not so bad. When life goes back to normal one day, I’m going to miss all this.” The dramatic arc of the story is thus complete: The lockdown, far from causing fracture, brings everyone closer together. The plague itself, then rampaging through Paris and its suburbs, remains almost entirely offstage. One is left wondering about the impact of the virus and the lockdown on Druckerman’s housekeeper and plumber and all the other hommes à tout faire who service her family, and whether for them the big shock of quarantine was finding the shortcomings of their partners growing more consequential. Taken as a whole, these journals show the extent to which today’s top writers live apart from, and sealed off against, the struggles of ordinary working people. In late May, the Times, reporting on growing public dissatisfaction with the federal government’s response to the pandemic, quoted an angry nurse in Hershey, Pennsylvania: “Every time I see a commercial on TV that says we are all in this together, my blood boils. We are not in this together!” The pandemic journals make that clear. Michael Massing is the author of Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind.

SEP/OCT 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

PETER KUPER

Parting shot

64 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2020

Trump’s COVID-19 School Crisis By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

hen a Georgia student posted a photo of her packed school hallway with virtually no one wearing masks, it went viral. Officials reacted by suspending her rather than figuring out how to keep kids and educators safe during a pandemic. Later, of course, they had to take the coronavirus seriously when 35 people at the school tested positive. That behavior has been the norm in far too many places, and nobody has modeled it more than President Donald Trump. He has spent the entirety of the COVID-19 crisis downplaying the virus and distorting reality, jeopardizing the physical and economic health of Americans. The facts are clear: We’re in the midst of a public health crisis the likes of which we’ve never experienced in our lifetimes. In the last two weeks of August, there were 70,000 new child cases of COVID-19 and today the United States has more than 6 million confirmed cases amid a continuing surge. But Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and other leaders continue to push fiction over facts. Trump has dismissed the report of growing cases among children, saying only a “tiny fraction” result in deaths. He and DeVos finally, begrudgingly, acknowledged that safeguards were needed, yet they still won’t find the resources needed to put them in place.

pretending COVID-19 doesn’t matter rather than fighting it. At every turn, Trump chooses himself, his politics and the rich, at everyone else’s expense. With record unemployment and 1.5 million more hungry children since the start of the pandemic, U.S. billionaires added $584 billion to their own wealth. Trump’s rhetoric on reopening schools echoes the kind of recklessness we saw earlier this year, when he accused nurses of stealing PPE rather than getting them the equipment they desperately needed. And now, ironically, when everyone would have wanted to start the school year in person if it were safe, we are barreling toward the most chaotic and confusing back-to-school in modern history. Educators, parents and children are angry and scared about schools being forced to reopen without adequate resources for safety protocols. They’ve seen what happened in another Georgia district, where more than 1,000 students and educators are now quarantined days after reopening. Or in places like Florida, where the governor demanded schools reopen despite the state having one of the biggest COVID-19 surges—and where our state affiliate successfully sued to protect the health and safety of students and educators. At one Florida school, an entire class had to be quarantined the day after reopening, yet the teacher is being required to lead remote learning from that same classroom. Educators, students and parents alike feel abandoned by their government,

whose leaders, for the most part, have had months to come up with plans and resources and have failed. There are some bright spots, where science and safety are the standards, not politics. In New York City, the start of in-person classes has been pushed back, after the teachers union raised concerns about safety. In Los Angeles, educators and school officials developed a plan to make distance learning work. But in most of the country, virtually everywhere you look there is chaos and confusion, which is why polls show 59 percent of Americans now oppose fully reopening schools. When it comes to the health and safety of our children, we must spare no expense, put politics aside and act immediately. In-school instruction is important, but safety is more important. Educators and kids should not be bargaining chips or have their health jeopardized. Reopening schools should be based on science, not on spin, which is what we tried to do with the reopening plan the AFT developed in April. That’s why we’ve been mobilizing to get the Senate to act to fund schools. And why, at our convention, we supported educators employing safety strikes as a last resort if the health and safety needs of their students and themselves are not being met. As educators and health professionals, we are guided by facts and helping those we serve. It would be nice if the president of the United States were guided by the same moral compass.

Educators and kids should not be bargaining chips.

Trump turned the wearing of masks into a partisan fight. His administration forced states to compete against each other for personal protective equipment. And with record numbers of people still unemployed, and essential services threatened because of the toll the virus has taken on state and local budgets, Trump bypassed Congress by issuing several executive orders he hoped would play well but that do little to help people. DeVos has refused to testify before Congress on reopening schools; she has been working remotely from her Michigan mansion while saying we should go back to school in person. The New York Times recently reported that the White House’s plan all along was to pass blame and responsibility on to the states, instead of helping people. Trump and his administration have viewed this entire crisis as a political issue, not a human or a moral one. Their focus remains on

Photo: AFT

Weingarten delivers her keynote address at the AFT’s 2020 convention. Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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