The American Prospect

How Hillary Lost Devious DeVos An End to Gerrymandering?

Stanley Greenberg

Katherine Stewart

Sam Wang and Brian Remlinger

liberal intelligence

The American Heartbreak

Despair Is Not an Option Randall Kennedy When Will Black Lives Matter? Todd Gitlin White Nationalism and Economic Nationalism Robert Kuttner Where Schools Integrate Rachel M. Cohen Counter-protesters tear a Confederate flag during the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville on August 12

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contents

volume 28, number 4 Fall 2017

Page 20

Columns 4 prospects An American Way for America Now by Paul Starr

notebook 7 When Soft Power Salutes Despots by Mark Leon Goldberg 11 Low Unemployment Doesn’t Increase Wages Like it Used To by Harold Meyerson 13 It Will Take More than Single-Payer to Make Baltimore Healthy by Jim Grossfeld 17 Weakening Medicaid from Within by Sara Rosenbaum

Features 20 Cover Package The American Heartbreak 21 Despair Is Not an Option by Randall Kennedy 23 What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter? by Todd Gitlin 30 White Nationalism and Economic Nationalism by Robert Kuttner 34 Unfriendly Skies by David Dayen 42 Slaying the Partisan Gerrymander by Sam Wang and Brian Remlinger 48 Francis Revives the Workers’ Church by John Gehring 52 Real Tax Reform: What It Is and What It Isn’t by Jared Bernstein 58 The Freedom Caucus’s Man on the Inside by Justin Miller 64 Not Britain’s Finest Hour by Denis MacShane 70 France and Germany: An Aging Couple Carries On by Arthur Goldhammer 74 The Proselytizers and the Privatizers by Katherine Stewart 80 Fossil-Free Finance by Manuel Madrid 86 Desegregated, Differently by Rachel M. Cohen

culture 91 How She Lost by Stanley B. Greenberg 96 Where the Republican Party Began by Ronald Brownstein 99 Can Love Conquer Hate? by Jabari Asim Cover photo by Shaban Athuman / Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP Images

1

from the Editors

co-editors Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr co-founder Robert B. Reich Executive editor Harold Meyerson Deputy Editor Gabrielle Gurley art director Mary Parsons managing editor Amanda Teuscher

Bannon

E

very August, my wife Joan and I spend a working vacation in the Berkshires. I edit articles, Joan prepares fall classes, and we listen to a lot of music. On Tuesday, August 15, an email came across my screen. Someone claiming to be an assistant to Steve Bannon was writing to say that Mr. Bannon wanted to meet with me. I called the White House extension. Amazingly, this was legit.

I explained that I was on vacation, but I’d be happy to talk with Mr. Bannon by phone.

An hour later he called.

Bannon had read a column of mine on China. He wanted to talk about trade policy, China policy, North Korea, and white supremacy. He said some wildly incautious things about his boss, his colleagues, and his strategy linking white nationalism to economic nationalism. Weirdly, he was trying to enlist me as a soulmate.

About five minutes into the call, it dawned on me that Bannon hadn’t bothered to put the conversation off the record. So I just kept giving him plenty of rope. The rest, as they say, is history. The Prospect published my interview, the reporter became the story, this episode was the last straw, and Bannon lost his job.

My article, “Steve Bannon, Unrepentant,” crashed our website. More than a million people read it. And more people got to know about The American Prospect. Breitbart News (Bannon’s home base), chastised the White House for not reading the Prospect more closely. The Prospect, according to Breitbart, “is where liberals go to test out ideas before their politicians adopt them.” Well, yes. We blush.

So why did Steve Bannon speak so incautiously to me? I think he called because he was looking for allies on his view of economic nationalism. We will never know whether he made a rookie error and forgot to put the conversation off the record, or whether he wanted to send his unappreciative White House allies one last farewell message. But it sure is affirming that he picked the Prospect to call. —R.K. Our cover package of articles is all about the ugly fruits of Bannon’s white nationalist

strategy. The cover line is from Langston Hughes. Here is the entire poem: I am the American heartbreak— The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe— The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago.

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associate Editor Sam Ross-Brown Writing Fellows Rachel M. Cohen, Manuel Madrid, Justin Miller, Kalena Thomhave proofreader susanna Beiser editorial interns Jordan Ecker, Lia Russell Digital Engagement intern Victoria Sheridan contributing editors Marcia Angell, Gabriel Arana, Jamelle Bouie, Heather Boushey, Alan Brinkley, Jonathan Cohn, Ann Crittenden, David Dayen, Garrett Epps, Jeff Faux, Michelle Goldberg, Gershom Gorenberg, E.J. Graff, Bob Herbert, Arlie Hochschild, Christopher Jencks, 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 Amy Marshall Lambrecht Director of Business Operations Ed Connors Development Manager Justin Spees Publishing assistant Stephen Whiteside board of directors Michael Stern (Chair), Shanti Fry, Jacob Hacker, Stephen Heintz, Robert Kuttner, Ronald B. Mincy, Miles Rapoport, Janet Shenk, Adele Simmons, William Spriggs, Paul Starr Fulfillment Palm Coast Data subscription customer service 1-888-MUST-READ (1-888-687-8732) subscription rates $19.95 (U.S.), $29.95 (Canada), and $34.95 (other International) reprints permissions@prospect.org

b a n n o n p h o t o : r e x f e at u r e s v i a a p i m a g e s

Kuttner

Prospects

An American Way for America Now

by Paul Starr

A

mericans often look back to the mid-20th century as a time when the country was cohesive and unified, unlike today’s bitterly divided society. That image of mid-century America was always incomplete, but insofar as there was a culture of consensus, it was not a wholly spontaneous development. Much of the country’s leadership and national media from the 1930s through World War II and the early postwar years made concerted efforts to foster unity across social and religious lines in the face of threats from abroad and at home to America’s stability and survival.

The United States is surely different today—the lines of cleavage have shifted, the media have fractured into separate worlds, and we have a president who acquired power with explicitly anti-immigrant and racist appeals. But the mid-20th century experience nonetheless offers instructive lessons for confronting the divisions that endanger America now.

National unity in the mid-20th century, as the historian Wendy L. Wall argues in her book Inventing the “American Way,” was a political project that came in several different varieties. While Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal promoted a pluralistic and economically inclusive vision, corporate leaders championed free enterprise and class harmony as “the American way,” a phrase introduced into the political lexicon through an advertising campaign by the U.S. Chamber

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of Commerce in the late 1930s.

Rather than question whether there was an American way, other groups sought to appropriate the idea. In a world with anti-Semitism and other hatreds on the rise, interfaith groups promoted the American way as the ability of people with different religious beliefs to live together. The fall of France to the Nazis in 1940 was widely interpreted as evidence of the danger of a divided society, and when the United States entered the war, it became a national imperative to encourage mutual tolerance and cooperation. A month after Pearl Harbor, FDR warned: “Remember the Nazi technique. ‘Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice.’”

Wall points out a key difference between the elites who promoted civility and tolerance and others, including those on the left, who put equality at the center of their vision. The former ignored power imbalances, while the latter “tried to use the language of consensus to correct them.” As Wall says, the efforts to define a national consensus “gave religious, ethnic, and racial ‘outsiders’ a powerful lever with which to pry open some doors of America’s mainstream culture.”

White ethnics made considerable progress in getting through those doors; African Americans, not so much, at least not in the New Deal, which to its great shame perpetuated black exclusion and disenfranchisement.

Overcoming that failure became the concern of the civil rights movement and liberal

reforms of the 1960s, which in turn gave rise to the politics of white backlash that we have been living with ever since. The pattern isn’t new; every advance African Americans have made since slavery and Reconstruction has generated a backlash. America seems forever caught in a racial loop, in which efforts to escape from racism repeatedly expose how deep it runs and set off new bursts of hatred. Other groups also face prejudice, but the situation of African Americans is historically distinct. Racial slavery was a singular evil lasting more than two centuries, and overcoming its long aftereffects poses singular demands for tenacity in the struggle for justice. As frustrating as the reversals in that struggle have been, we have surely come too long a way to make Donald Trump’s election a final verdict on America’s possibilities.

The renewed growth and tremendous diversity of America’s immigrant population, another development dating to the 1960s, add to the challenge of America’s racial legacy. While the new immigrants have enlarged the nonwhite base of Democratic support, they have also intensified the politics of white grievance and backlash.

Faced with right-wing xenophobic attacks on immigrants, many of us are drawn to a general defense of all the foreign-born in the country.

But distinctions are necessary. The young Dreamers who grew up here and know no other country ought not to be confused with those who may have come recently as adults

and overstayed their visas. To be in favor of protecting Dreamers and providing a path to citizenship for the long-resident undocumented does not imply an indiscriminate forgiveness, much less support for “open borders.” America owes all people within its jurisdiction certain fundamental human rights, including due process of law, but its primary obligations are to its citizens. No political party can expect to win majority support if it fails to make clear the primacy of those obligations.

Since Trump’s victory, Democrats have been arguing about how to win back a majority, a discussion that has focused on attracting white voters, especially workingclass whites. The attention to whites makes some progressives and African Americans uneasy, as it suggests deemphasizing racism and such issues as police accountability. Their concern is understandable. From the Constitutional Convention to the end of both Reconstruction and the civil rights era, black interests were sacrificed in the name of national unity and political expediency. So this much must be clear: The cause of racial equality is too central to liberal values to be sacrificed again.

But neither can progressives ignore the need to win white voters in the belief that a growing nonwhite population will eventually make lost white support irrelevant. If that day ever comes, it is a long way off, and in the meantime Republicans will use every means at their disposal to stop it from coming at all. Nonwhite voters are also so geographically

Prospects

to building support among working-class voters, white as well as nonwhite. And since African Americans benefit when Democrats are able to enact economically progressive policies like universal health coverage, they have a big stake in the success of that kind of coalitional politics.

The success of that politics is

Many of the efforts promoting national unity in the World War II era left out blacks—but not this poster from 1942, which encouraged racial tolerance among factory workers.

concentrated that winning more of them will not be sufficient to achieve majorities in state legislatures and Congress anytime soon.

So regaining more white support is not optional either for Democrats or for African Americans and other minorities who depend on Democrats for a voice, unless they want to resign themselves to indefinite rule by an increasingly right-wing Republican Party.

Since Republicans have been winning white majorities for some time—Trump only extended the pattern—the challenge may look impossibly difficult. But Democrats don’t have to win a majority of whites, only enough whites to win majorities overall. In that case, some suggest, why not just focus Democratic efforts on more affluent and highly educated

whites, many of them in suburban districts that have been trending Democratic? Isn’t the preoccupation with working-class whites just an outdated impulse?

To be sure, Democrats need to win more votes wherever they can get them, but where and how they win those votes will affect the kind of policies they can carry out. Focusing attention on affluent whites will increase internal strains in a Democratic Party that generally supports progressive taxation and other redistributive policies and continues to enjoy more support from lower-income minority voters and unions. If Democrats are going not just to maintain their tradition of economic progressivism but to advocate it more forcefully, they need to devote energy and resources

vital to future possibilities for the country, not just the Democrats. Bringing America together is as important now as it was in the mid-20th century, but the real question is on what terms.

Trump’s terms are clear. The implicit reference in his slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is the America that fully incorporated white, working-class ethnics but not blacks or more recent immigrants. It’s a vision of unity that not only fails to anticipate the future—it doesn’t account for the America that already exists today.

As in the mid-20th century, however, there is more than one alternative for a broadened vision.

We can try to bring Americans together on the basis of civility and tolerance, or go further and pursue a more ambitious ideal of equality. Don’t get me wrong: Civility and tolerance are essential in their own right. Without them a good society is impossible. But the unity we need in America ought to be based on more than tolerance; it ought to reflect a commitment to equality, and those who believe in that ideal ought to promote a politics that can sustain it.

To be sure, the old New Deal coalition, with its base in industrial unions, can’t be resurrected.

The post-industrial economy, however, breeds its own deep dissatisfactions, and the remedies Trump offers don’t respond to them at all. The growing problems of precarious employment, the hyperconcentration of new businesses and job growth in the largest metropolitan areas, the excessive power of platform monopolies in the new online economy, disparities in income

that Republican tax and budget changes will only exacerbate, outof-control health-care prices— these are some of the items that ought to be on a new agenda for economic fairness and inclusion that the Democrats alone are in a position to take up.

With Trump as president, the Republicans are now fully invested in an aging, almost entirely white electoral base and the politics of white grievance. In what turned out to be a fateful call to the Prospect’s co-editor Bob Kuttner on August 15, Steve Bannon said he would be happy to have Democrats “talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Of course, Bannon himself has his own identity politics—white identity politics. And his version of economic nationalism would leave displaced coal miners and industrial workers no better off.

But Democrats should take Bannon’s words as a challenge to show that they can continue to address racial injustice and still win enough votes from whites by framing a vision of national prosperity and a decent society that all Americans will see as the country they want to live in.

Even at their best, the mid-20th century versions of the American way weren’t fully inclusive, and they couldn’t possibly anticipate the economic and social changes that the next half-century would bring. But they did have one thing right. They encouraged Americans to see themselves as sharing a common culture and common fate. They promoted solidarity.

That solidarity now has to reflect a multiracial and egalitarian vision, not a backward-looking exclusive one. A crucial feature of the American way is that it hasn’t been static and unchanging. We have an elastic, living tradition, and we need to make sure it continues expanding to keep up with all the people who make America their home and who must work together for the country to work at all.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 5

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President Trump in Krasinski Square

When Soft Power Salutes Despots American diplomacy once leaned against aspiring dictators. Trump eggs them on.

How much global influence does the U.S. really have—for good or evil?

by Ma r k l e on Gol dberg

e va n v u c c i / a p i m a g e s

W

hen Donald Trump addressed an adoring crowd in central Warsaw last July 6, he had nothing but praise for the Polish government.

The location was all too fitting.

Krasinski Square faces Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, the country’s highest court.

Since sweeping into office in 2015 with an outright majority (a feat that no party had accomplished since the fall of

communism), the right-wing Law and Justice party sought to subsume all of Poland’s institutions of government to the will of the party and its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Under a key regime proposal, all of the high court’s justices who were not party-approved would be removed from office, and any new appointments would have to be made through parliament.

The government had held off on pulling the trigger, in part over

concern for how this would affect the country’s relationship with the United States. Nearly one year to the day before Trump spoke, then-President Barack Obama was in Poland for a NATO summit.

Delivering remarks while standing next to Polish President Andrzej Duda, Obama directly expressed his “concerns over certain actions and the impasse around Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal.”

“That’s what make us dem­oc-

racies—not just by the words written in constitutions, or in the fact that we vote in elections—but the institutions we depend upon every day, such as rule of law, independent judiciaries, and a free press,” Obama said.

One year later, President Trump delivered a rabble-rousing speech to throngs of supporters of Poland’s right-wing government, bused in from the countryside. In the speech, he railed against the perceived threats to Western civilization by “radical Islamic terrorism” and “the creep of government bureaucracy.” He touted Poland as an outpost of liberty. But unlike his predecessor, he never once mentioned the Law and Justice party’s assault on democratic institutions.

“Any other president would

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 7

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have not gone to Poland,” says John Shattuck, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, who served as ambassador to the Czech Republic. “Or if he’d gone, would have raised the issue in public in a way that Trump did not do.”

What Trump did not say in Poland was heard loud and clear. Twelve days after Trump left Poland, Parliament passed the sweeping constitutional court “reforms.” The measure swiftly passed the lower and upper houses, awaiting signing by President Duda.

The outcry in the Polish public was immediate, and under intense public pressure and massive street demonstrations, the Polish president vetoed the measure, bucking his own party and its leader, Kaczynski. Modified “reforms” are promised in the near future.

It was a near miss—and one enabled by the lack of the kinds of routine endorsements of democracy and rule of law that generally accompany high-profile speeches by American presidents—coupled with diplomatic pressure behind the scenes.

“The absence of an American voice encouraging them not to do this, and not having to worry about the impact on their relationship with the United States—that matters,” Shattuck says.

Poland is one of many countries

that have experienced what some scholars have called “democratic backsliding” in recent years, as the institutions that sustain a democracy, like an independent judiciary and free press, are deliberately debilitated by the country’s regime. The result is societies that are less free, and nominal democracies that are less liberal.

The Obama administration could not stop this trend, but may well have slowed it down. Without American leadership, the process of democratic backsliding could well accelerate, with more regimes becoming explicitly authoritarian.

“It’s almost as if we are running a controlled experiment to learn what the world looks like without U.S. moral influence,” says Tom Malinowski, who served as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor from 2014 to 2017. “What is happening now is that an American

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voice that served as a constraint on some governments is now gone.”

In its latest annual report on the state of democracy around the world, the watchdog group Freedom House found that 2016 marked the 11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. This is compared with nearly 30 years of uninterrupted constant gains from 1975 to 2005.

The causes of this decade-long trend are manifold. George W. Bush’s use of democracy promotion as a justification for U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq undermined America’s reputation and credibility as a force for liberal internationalism; the successful “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine encouraged Vladimir Putin and strongmen in central Asia and the Caucasus to crack down on political dissent; and the upheavals of the Arab Spring resulted in widespread democratic backslides in the Middle East.

These declines in political freedoms are reflected in shrinking political space for civil society, free press, and rule of law. This is in sharp contrast to trends in the 1990s and early 2000s, which saw ever-expanding political freedom around the world. “Dozens of countries that had previously allowed or even welcomed democracy and rights-support activities inside their borders are now working to stop it,” wrote Thomas Carothers and Saskia Brechenmacher in a 2014 report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “In other words, pushback today often represents the loss of access that had already been achieved, rather than the ongoing struggle over access that has traditionally been denied.”

Around the world, crackdowns on NGOs, universities, and the media are serving to protect entrenched political interests and undermine liberal values. From Turkey to Rwanda, from Egypt to Hungary, governments have been cracking down not just on opposition parties but on civic institutions that provide checks on state power.

President Trump has not only been silent in the face of the restrictions on political freedoms imposed by allies, but his actions domestically often mirror those of illiberal leaders abroad. “What President Trump has unfortunately done is that for

2016 marked the eleventh consecutive year of decline in global freedom, compared with

30

years of steady gains from 1975 to 2005.

the first time you have the leader of a major Western democracy himself openly attack the legitimacy of independent civic institutions,” says Carothers. “When he attacks the press as ‘fake news,’ it’s not just an attack on a specific article, but highlighting the whole sector as illegitimate. It is exactly the playbook of the strongman leaders you see around the world.”

Trends that were already negative are poised to deteriorate even further, and at an accelerated pace. An American foreign policy that eschews in both word and deed traditional commitments to promoting human rights, democracy, and the rule of law cannot serve as a useful check against evertightening restrictions on political freedom around the world.

“How can America persuade others that the United States is the leader of the free world when Trump praises autocrats like Putin and al-Sisi, belittles democratic institutions, and wavers between denouncing racial nationalists and embracing them as ‘good people’?” asks Archibald Puddington of Freedom House.

The impact is most acute in countries that have longstanding security arrangements with the United States, but over which Europe and other democracies hold little sway. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte is carrying out his “war on drugs” with impunity—and with little public rebuke from the Trump administration. In the seven months in which the presidencies of Obama and Duterte overlapped, the Obama administration routinely chastised Duterte over these kinds of extrajudicial killings. Duterte became so incensed over the criticism he famously called Obama a “son of a whore.”

Obama later canceled a long-planned bilateral meeting with Duterte at the ASEAN summit, though the two men did “exchange pleasantries” in a brief meeting. Meanwhile, in October, the Obama administration canceled the sale of 26,000 rifles to the Philippines.

The contrast in approaches from the Obama administration to the Trump administration were apparent even before Trump took office.

When asked multiple times during

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his Senate confirmation hearing (by Democrats and Republicans alike), then–Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson refused to say whether the extrajudicial killings that have accompanied Duterte’s “war on drugs” even constituted human rights violations worthy of condemnation.

Then, in August, during his first official visit to the Philippines as secretary of state, Tillerson met with Duterte and offered only the most indirect of criticisms. “Mr. President, we are all aware of the American people’s criticism of you and your handling of drug cartels,” he said, according to a State Department aide in the room who relayed this comment to the press.

A little more than one week after Tillerson’s meeting with Duterte, 32 people were killed in a series of raids near Manila—the most ever in a single night. The next day, Duterte directly threatened human rights groups.

“One of these days, you human rights groups, I will also investigate you.

That’s the truth. For conspiracy,” he said. “If they are obstructing justice, you shoot them,” he said.

Meanwhile, the government of Bahrain has stepped up its campaign against human rights activist Nabeel Rajab, charging him with terrorism and sentencing him to years in prison.

Bahrain’s crackdown against democracy and human rights activists began in earnest in 2011 during an Arab Spring uprising there. The Obama administration came under criticism from human rights groups for sending mixed messages to the Bahraini government, criticizing them on human

rights but nevertheless maintaining a major naval base in the country.

The Obama administration, however, did seek to condition the sale of 19 new American fighter planes, at $2.8 billion, on improvements in human rights in Bahrain. In March, the Trump administration unilaterally lifted those restrictions, allowing the deal to proceed.

“What I think is being demonstrated right now is that even when you are not making positive breakthroughs, sometimes the steady application of that kind of pressure keeps things from getting worse,” Malinowski says. “Sometimes the knowledge that we are in their heads was not enough to stay their hands, but sometimes it would be.”

Wash That Hand: U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte

On May 3, Secretary of State Tillerson stood in the Dean Acheson Auditorium of the State Department building in Washington, D.C., to explain to several hundred staff how exactly they are to implement a foreign policy vision guided by Donald Trump’s “America First” slogan.

“I think it is really important that all of us understand the difference between policy and values,” he said.

“If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.”

With these remarks, Tillerson declared a formal separation from key pillars that guided American foreign policy since Dean Acheson was secretary of state and helped devise the postwar international order in the Truman administration. To be sure, every American administration acted in ways that contravened human rights and supported dictators when it suited its interests. But no administration has abandoned the very pretense of standing for democracy and human rights around the world in the way that the Trump administration has in its short tenure.

“In one speech, Tillerson tossed out over four decades of bipartisan consensus that human rights and democracy are: 1) essential components of U.S. national security and economic prosperity, and 2) not just American values

but universal values that the United States, through its long and troubled history, has adopted as the north star of national prestige and international legitimacy,” wrote Ted Piccone of the Brookings Institute and a former State Department official.

As if to drive the message home, a draft State Department mission statement leaked to The Washington Post scrubbed the very mention of “democracy promotion” as a stated goal of U.S. foreign policy. Meanwhile, Tillerson is pushing through bureaucratic restructuring in Foggy Bottom that would result in the downgrading or shuttering of some key bureaus that deal with human rights.

Tillerson is hollowing out the State Department, pushing for a nearly 30 percent cut in the department’s budget as demanded by the White House.

Offices that deal in human rights and democracy promotion are being gutted, but so too are the regional bureaus and embassies around the world. At time of publication, there have been very few Senate-confirmed assistant secretary positions filled, and most embassies around the world are without Senate-confirmed ambassadors.

This is leaving a leadership vacuum in which embassy officials around the world are working without much formal guidance, and so they revert to the longstanding traditions—meaning human rights and democracy issues are raised in meetings with local officials. For example, when Hungary’s right-wing government tried to shut down Central European University, which was founded by George Soros, a figure often vilified by Hungary’s leadership, U.S. embassy officials pressed the government to relent. “There was a strong defense of CEU from the embassy in Budapest,” says Shattuck, who served as the university’s founding rector until 2015.

At some point, though, senior political positions will be filled in the State Department and the autopilot on which diplomats have been operating will be turned off. They will be given clearer directions on how, exactly, to implement an “America First” foreign policy in which American values are assumed to be in inherent conflict with maximizing American interests.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 9

On April 3, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi visited the White House. This was a remarkable turn of events for Sisi, a former military leader who led a coup against the democratically elected Mohamed Morsi four years earlier. Despite being the leader of a key regional and strategic ally of the United States, Sisi was kept at arm’s length by the Obama administration. His brutal crackdown on political opponents, including liberals and members of the Muslim Brotherhood from which Morsi drew support, led the United States to suspend hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to the country for a period. At the time of Sisi’s White House visit, tens of thousands of political prisoners languished in jail, torture was routine, and extrajudicial killings by state security forces were becoming increasingly frequent—all in the name of fighting terrorism.

But for Trump, none of these concerns apparently registered as he lavished praise upon the dictator. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sisi. He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation,” Trump said, making no mention of the deteriorating human rights conditions in the country. He concluded: “And I just want to say to you, Mr. President, that you have a great friend and ally in the United States and in me.”

The two men met again a month later in Saudi Arabia, during Trump’s first overseas trip as president. Again, the praise was fulsome. Sisi has “done a tremendous job under trying circumstance,” Trump said. (Sisi returned the compliment, calling Trump “a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.”)

The message was clearly received.

The week he returned to Egypt after meeting Trump in Saudi Arabia, Sisi moved to shut down several news organizations, including Al-Jazeera and the Arabic version of Huffington Post. He jailed prominent activist and political rival Khaled Ali on a spurious charge of “violating public morals.” Then, days later, Sisi moved to even further consolidate control over politics by enacting a sweeping

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Mutual Admiration: President Trump with Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at the White House

law that could force NGOs operating in the country, which are among the last remaining watchdogs to his evercreeping authoritarianism, to effectively shut down.

“The law ushers in unprecedented levels of repression and will criminalize the work of many NGOs, making it impossible for them to function independently,” said Human Rights Watch and seven other NGOs in a joint statement released at the time.

The law was actually passed in November, but Sisi held off on enacting it, in part due to concerns over how the U.S. government would react. But after meeting with Trump twice in two months, those concerns were very clearly assuaged. “He might have gone ahead and done this under Obama.

But he definitely anticipated [that] if he enacted this law, there would be total public silence from the White House,” says Amy Hawthorne of the Project on Middle East Democracy.

For a while, there was total silence.

Then, on August 22, the Trump administration stunned human rights groups by announcing that $95.7 million in aid would be withheld and a further $195 million delayed over human rights concerns, in particular the NGO law. Several analysts quickly noted that the move could also have been inspired by Egypt’s continuing

business dealings with North Korea in violation of United Nations sanctions.

It is also possible that the Trump administration felt betrayed by Sisi—that the Egyptian government had previously assured the Trump administration it would not enact the law. But after meeting with Trump in Saudi Arabia, Sisi could have thought he was given a green light, only to have later learned that he overstepped.

Under this scenario, Trump’s public embrace of Sisi could have undermined private assurances on the NGO law. Sometimes, even under Trump, American self-interest aligns with promoting human rights.

In any case, the withholding of these funds suggests that the Trump administration’s willingness and ability to blindly support authoritarians can be constrained. The extent to which it can be will shape the future of democracies around the world. If not, the result could be something unprecedented in recent history: an American government that barely pays lip service to the promotion of democracy and defense of human rights around the world, signaling approval to the world’s despots.

Mark Leon Goldberg is the executive editor of UN Dispatch and host of the “Global Dispatches” podcast.

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Low Unemployment Doesn’t Increase Wages Like It Used To

decline in U.S. labor costs between 2006 and 2016 was the result of the lower costs of labor abroad. Between 1995 and 2005—during the first six years of which we had yet to open our doors to Chinese manufacturing—the low cost of labor abroad accounted for just 2 percent of lower domestic labor costs.

Full employment is still necessary, but rebuilding the middle class also requires dethroning shareholders and boosting worker power.

by H a r o l d Me ye r s o n

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n the first Friday of every month, the Labor Department releases the latest numbers on employment and wages. Here’s a sampling of recent headlines from the mornings after, which have remained remarkably unchanged month after month: “The Job Market Is Strong, but Wages for Americans Have Barely Rebounded” (The Washington Post, May), “Jobs Aplenty, but Wages Stagnate” (The Wall Street Journal, June), “Payrolls Expand, Even as Pay Lags” (The New York Times, July), “US Jobs Growth Rebounds but Wages Disappoint” (Financial Times, July).

Those “buts” (and the one “even as”) are a shorthand expression of both common sense and the consensus among virtually every school of economic thought: In a market economy, as unemployment falls and unoccupied workers grow scarce, workers should be able to bid up their wage rates. Under conditions of full employment, generally considered to be around 4.5 percent, wages should rise.

And yet, they don’t. Today’s wage increases, which have averaged a little above 2 percent a year throughout the current prolonged recovery, barely keep track with increases in the cost of living, and are roughly half of wage increases in previous recoveries.

To be sure, new census data show that household incomes are rising now, having finally surpassed their pre-recession peak in 2007, which itself only matched the pre-recession peak of 2000. (See: Sisyphus, Myth of.) This gap between rising incomes and stagnating wages, however, isn’t all that mysterious: Household income can increase when workers get more hours of work, and that seems to be exactly what’s happened. According to the census data, Americans already working full-time, whose

hours didn’t increase, didn’t see any growth in income. That would have required higher wages.

Therein lies a key distinction. Adding to a worker’s hours is commonly the prerogative of management. Winning a pay increase, on the other hand, usually involves, and often requires, some initiative from the workers themselves, which in turn requires some bargaining power. No worker initiative, no bargaining power, no raise.

The factors that diminish worker power, even as low unemployment augments it, have been amply documented. Indeed, the very thought that the Federal Reserve may still consider a low unemployment rate to be decisive evidence of looming inflation should instill doubt that the Fed understands the actual 21st-century economy. In that economy, here are some of the factors that, low unemployment notwithstanding, undercut workers’ bargaining power: Globalization. In 2006, economist Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chair, estimated that the number of service-sector jobs that could be offshored was two to three times the number of workers then employed in manufacturing. Adding up all those offshorable positions, both in services and manufacturing, produced a grim total of between 42 million and 56 million vulnerable jobs (a number that surely has grown in the ensuing 11 years). That didn’t mean, Blinder hastened to explain, that anything near those numbers would actually be offshored, but it did mean that the wages of those millions of workers would likely be constrained by the threat of offshoring or by low-wage offshore competition. Confirming Blinder’s presentiments, this June the Bank for International Settlements reported that 10 percent of the

The Rise of Non-Standard Employment. Over the past couple

CEOs no longer have to bargain with their workers, but they must bargain with and throw money at major shareholders.

of decades, the number of Americans employed on a contingent basis—through staffing or temporary employment agencies (whether their work is temporary or not), in the gig economy, as independent contractors (whether they’re genuinely independent or not), or by subcontractors or sub-subcontractors—has increased significantly. Economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger have calculated that the share of such workers in the overall workforce rose from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015—and that of the net increase in 9.1 million jobs, the number of contingent jobs rose by 9.4 million, while the number of standard jobs actually declined by more than 300,000.

Workers in the contingent economy are generally paid at lower rates than their “standard” counterparts, don’t receive benefits, and can’t bargain with their actual employers for raises.

Indeed, they’re not covered under the National Labor Relations Act. The Rise of Non-Compete Agreements. These agreements, which

employees sign as a condition of going to work for their employer, were initially confined to professionals with knowledge of their employer’s proprietary technology. In the absence of any organized employee opposition to such agreements, however (itself a byproduct of the absence of organized employees, i.e., unions), they have spread to encompass 18 percent of the entire U.S. workforce—roughly 30 million workers—according to a Treasury Department report from last year. One could wish that the American economy were so innovative that there really were 30 million workers with knowledge of crucial technological breakthroughs, but that’s sadly not the case. Instead, such agreements have spread to fast-food franchises

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and throughout the retail and service sectors, where they serve to deter workers from moving to a rival enterprise for higher pay.

The Rise of the Robots. To date, there are no hard estimates of jobs lost to the new wave of automated technology (nor the number of jobs that it has created), much less the number of workers who’ve had their wages held in check by that rise. Absent credible numbers, though, a long-term threat to wages looms on the horizon. And even when workers’ incomes rise as a consequence of an increase in productivity due to new technology and new skills, the accompanying reduction in the size of the workforce can more than offset the raises of those who remain on the job. The unionized longshoremen who operate the cranes at America’s ports may be the highest-paid blue-collar workers in the country, but today’s workforce comes to a bare 10 percent of the number of workers who loaded and unloaded ships before containerization.

To arrive at the total number of workers who face these structural

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Globalization, Contingent Employment, NonCompete Clauses, And Now This: A robot works alongside a human, Virginia Beach, 2017.

impediments to wage increases, we can’t just add the workers whose ability to win raises is inhibited by globalization to those hampered by non-standard work arrangements and those handicapped by non-compete clauses. For one thing, some of these workers—we don’t know how many—fall into more than one of these categories and face more than one of these obstacles. Even allowing for this overlap, however, a plausible minimum estimate of the number of workers whose pay is held in check by at least one of these factors would likely be close to 65 million. And that’s not counting: De-Unionization. The preceding structural factors don’t even take into account the most explicit source of decline in worker power: de-unionization. With the share of unionized private-sector workers down to a blink-and-you-miss-it 6.4 percent, collective bargaining—the only kind of bargaining that most American workers could ever enter into—trembles on the brink of extinction.

No raises? Well, employers don’t

bargain with their workers anymore.

Even when those workers aren’t contingent and don’t suffer from noncompete clauses or the lower wages in China, in the vast majority of American workplaces there’s no process by which non-union workers can bargain for a raise. Conversely, even in unionized workplaces, the specter of China or temps or robots may loom over the bargaining table.

It’s not that corporate CEOs have forsaken bargaining altogether. Virtually all of them have been in perpetual tacit bargaining with their shareholders since the 1980s, when the doctrine of maximizing shareholder value began to take hold, at the same time, not coincidentally, that employers’ war on unions intensified. In the 1990s, as more and more CEO pay was granted in the form of stock options, CEOs also began bargaining with themselves: Buying back shares and issuing higher dividends and a range of other shareholder benefits worked to benefit those selfsame CEOs as well.

Nice work if you could get it.

But the CEOs’ bargaining has become increasingly adversarial in this century, as “activist investors” have come forward, purchasing some small percentage of a company’s stock, demanding ever-higher payouts to shareholders, winning institutional investor allies in their quest, and using that clout to threaten CEOs with the prospect of being ousted if they didn’t comply. The activists have been able to back up their threats. This July, The Wall Street Journal reported that the CEOs of major corporations were being toppled by investor pressure at a record rate, twice that of last year.

The economic consequences of American capitalism’s shareholderüber-alles ethos have clearly taken a toll on wages. University of Chicago Booth Business School economist Simcha Barkai has calculated that over the past 30 years, the share of revenues in U.S. nonfinancial corporations going to profits has risen by 13.5 percent, while the share going to labor has declined by 6.7 percent and the share going to investment (in research, expansion, new or improved facilities, and the like) has also declined by 7.2 percent.

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Getting American wages to rise, then, will take more than just reducing unemployment, or even moving close to a full-employment economy, important and necessary though that may be. It will require reversing the spread of non-compete clauses (several states have already banned them save in exceptional circumstances).

It will take trade policies that counter the mercantilism of lower-wage nations. It will require tax reform that raises the rates on capital income to at least the level of taxes on labor income, and raises the top rates much closer to the levels that prevailed in the 1940s and 1950s—levels so high that millionaires were effectively blocked from becoming billionaires.

It will take a wholesale rewriting of labor law so that it applies to workers in all manner of employment arrangements, that gives those workers the power to bargain for all the workers in entire sectors of the economy, and that provides some kind of tangible governmental incentive for workers to join unions.

In sum, it will require the Democrats to morph into something they’ve never been: a labor party. That doesn’t mean abandoning any of their emphasis on racial and gender equity. It does mean that at a time when the normal workings of American capitalism have become largely inimical to the interests of the vast majority of the American people, Democrats need to consciously craft a massive redistribution of power and wealth from capital to labor. Such a transformation, of course, would require a complete reformation of the American way of financing campaigns. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign demonstrates that an anti–Wall Street politics can generate substantial anti– Wall Street funding.

Radical though such a transformation may be, it’s also required if we are to realize such distinctly non-utopian goals as restarting the upward march of wages. For the key to boosting worker income has always been, and remains, boosting worker power.

Regenerating the American middle class absent greatly enhanced worker power is simply magical thinking.

And there’s no “buts” about it.

It Will Take More Than Single-Payer to Make Baltimore Healthy More than lack of access to health care, the ongoing legacies of Jim Crow diminish African Americans’ health.

by Jim Grossfel d

‘‘S

ee that over there?” I pull over to the curb and Glenn Ross points to a half-acre patch of weeds and tall grass wedged between a railroad bridge and a new East Baltimore elementary school, the first to be built in the neighborhood in more than 30 years.

“You’ve got the playground there and over there’s a brownfield”—the term for the sites where factories, refineries, and other businesses closed after poisoning the land and water beneath them.

“Trains used to leave coal there,” Ross says. “Then a truck repair shop opened up. The ground there is hard and black with oil. Why would you ever build a school next to a contaminated site?”

A burly Vietnam vet and one of Baltimore’s most seasoned activists, Ross has been on the front lines of dozens of the battles facing the city’s African American community, which today makes up two-thirds of Baltimore’s 620,000 residents. Now his priority is cleaning up the brownfields and dumps that pockmark the city’s black neighborhoods, exposing the families living in them to a laundry list of toxins that have been linked to cancer and other diseases.

On the drive back to his house, we pass some of the city’s 17,000 boardedup houses, a storefront with whitewashed windows that was once the neighborhood’s supermarket, and a building peppered with bullet holes— no particular reason why, just a calling card left by one of the city’s drug gangs.

Images like these have long made Baltimore a poster child for the urban poverty that results from institutional racism—even more so after the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray and the protests that followed. By the latest estimates, more than 28 percent of African Americans in the city live below the poverty line. The poverty rate for Baltimore households headed by women—the vast

majority of whom are African American—is far higher, 41 percent.

These numbers provide as much insight into the health crisis facing African American neighborhoods as MRIs or CT scans of the individuals living within them. Maybe more.

Because poverty—and the racism that gave rise to it—is the overarching reason why the life expectancy in 14 of Baltimore’s predominantly African American neighborhoods is now lower than North Korea’s.

One of those neighborhoods is the one where Glenn Ross lives, Madison/ Eastend, which is 90 percent African American and where the average life expectancy is not quite 69 years. Life expectancy in the nearby Baltimore neighborhood of Medfield/Hampden/ Woodberry/Remington, which is 78 percent white, is 76.5 years.

The reasons for this disparity aren’t hard to find. Compared with Medfield/Hampden/Woodberry/Remington, Ross’s neighborhood of Madison/ Eastend has a homicide rate nearly 12 times higher, a cancer mortality rate 66 percent higher, and an AIDS mortality rate more than 12 times higher.

The term used to describe the factors that are responsible for such disparities is “determinants of health.”

Some are the ones Ross talked about: toxins, housing, access to food, violence, and drugs. But there are others, too: education, unemployment, the number and quality of neighborhood parks, the rat population, and anything else that impacts the health of the community as a whole. And, of course, there’s the availability of health insurance and access to care.

The most important of all, right? Well, no. It’s complicated.

“There’s a difference between

health care, which is critically important, and the array of social, economic,

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and environmental determinants of health,” says Dr. Brian Smedley, co-founder and executive director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity. “In fact, the health of populations is only minimally affected by health care. Some estimates are that only 20 percent [of a population’s health] can be explained by access and the quality of care.”

The Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD) estimate is less generous. In its report “Healthy Baltimore 2020: A Blueprint for Health,” BCHD points out that although 97 percent of health-care dollars are spent on the health-care system, only 10 percent of what determines life expectancy actually happens “within the four walls of a clinic.” The other 90 percent is decided upstream, where people live, work, go to school, and spend their free time.

All of this says something about having a single-payer or a Medicarefor-all system (slogans aside, they’re really not the same thing). It’s that while either would be a vast improvement over the insurance system we have now, neither would have a profound impact on the health crisis facing African Americans.

Some who “argue that we need to expand access to health insurance tend to also believe that if we achieve universal coverage, then racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic health care and status gaps will close,” Smedley says. “That’s simply not the case.”

What’s sending black people in Baltimore to an early grave isn’t that America lacks a Canadian-style health-care system. It’s the legacy of Jim Crow.

“Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.” They

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could be words in South Africa’s Pass Laws, but they come from the text of a 1911 Baltimore city ordinance.

The ordinance was eventually overturned, but for all the difference that made, it may as well have stayed on the books. Baltimore whites had long believed segregation was fundamental to protecting themselves from the crime, “loose morals,” and illness that were presumably endemic to African Americans. City ordinance or not, Baltimore lenders, mortgage bankers, and real-estate interests conspired in plain view to keep black families from moving into white neighborhoods.

There was never any ambiguity about whether African Americans could get loans to buy houses in the city’s white neighborhoods, or any doubt that anyone who attempted to sell or rent to blacks would be penalized for it. In 1934, Baltimore’s homegrown segregationists gained a powerful new ally with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), one of the crown jewels of the New Deal, which, as a matter of policy, denied mortgage insurance to black people. The feds also established the

The Neighborhood Vista: Industry and fuel storage bins abut a Baltimore residential street.

practice of redlining, literally marking off African American neighborhoods on maps and designating those who lived within them, regardless of their income, as credit risks. At the same time, the FHA was backing loans for whites—essentially underwriting their exodus from the city.

In his 2009 book, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation, Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr., director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies, provides a chilling account of how housing discrimination hastened the spread of tuberculosis in Baltimore’s African American community beginning in the early 1900s.

Roberts points out that even though African Americans made up one-fifth of Baltimore’s population, they lived on only 2 percent of its residential property and often paid rents that averaged three times higher than what whites paid for similar homes.

How could they afford it? Most couldn’t. Given the poverty wages earned by most black workers, the only way many could make the rent

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was to take in tenants of their own.

For their part, landlords had little compunction about failing to provide even rudimentary maintenance, leaving homes damp, stifling, and reeking of decay and rot. City officials provided only mediocre public services, if any. The impact on black families was devastating. In his book Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, longtime Baltimore journalist Antero Pietila points out that when Baltimore’s citywide TB rate climbed to 132 cases per 100,000 people, in one black neighborhood it had surged to 958 cases per 100,000 people. The sight of fatigued black men, women, and children suffering from chills, fever, and coughing up blood or sputum wasn’t uncommon.

While redlining didn’t create TB, it was responsible for its phenomenal spread in Baltimore’s African American community, and the illness and death that followed. A century later, redlining continues to determine the health of the city’s black neighborhoods.

Today, according to a survey by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED, known today as Prosperity Now), 32 percent of black Baltimore households have no household net worth at all, and 67 percent have so meager a level of liquid savings that they could meet their basic expenses for no more than three months if they had a medical emergency or suffered a job loss.

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and CFED report that if current trends continue, the average black household in the United States will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts have now. Wealth inequality, rooted in segregation, has made poverty an enduring fact of life in Baltimore.

It’s the common thread to the social determinants that are robbing African Americans of their health.

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When CNN covers the health impact

of the criminal justice system on the African American community, it usually begins and ends with an account of the police killing a black person. If there’s video, all the better. But police violence is a piece of a much bigger

“Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums,” a 1911 Baltimore city ordinance proclaimed.

On the Front Lines: Glenn Ross is campaigning to raise awareness and clean up the brownfields that abound in black Baltimore.

story: how the justice system undermines the health of the entire African American community.

Ralikh Hayes has been an organizer since his teens in campaigns to change the city’s criminal justice system. Ask him about the health of Black Baltimoreans and he’ll tell you that the issue he’s concerned with isn’t whether something he’s exposed to now will kill him in 20 years. It’s simply not getting shot.

“It’s a public health issue that young black people don’t think they’re going to make it to 21, 23, 25. The fact that I turned 23 is considered a milestone in the community,” he says.

“People don’t think their life expectancy is that long.”

The experience of violence and degradation in black America, of course, has all too commonly come under the color of law. Police violence and abuse are a fundamental cause of the stress and trauma suffered by black people. Two-thirds of young African Americans say that they or someone they know has experienced violence or

harassment at the hands of the police, according to a 2016 GenForward poll.

Thirty percent of black men say they experienced it themselves. And hearing, reading, or seeing news coverage of police violence and harassment of black people can activate what psychologists call “racial trauma,” triggering memories of police harassment

and other instances of racism that they and the people they know have experienced. Almost one in ten black Americans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. “I’d go there if I had an accident, but not if I had a choice,” he says. “He” is a retired Baltimore steelworker who’s shy about being quoted by name. “There” is Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital. Together with the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, Hopkins is part of the trinity of topranked U.S. hospitals—a latter-day Lourdes to which sick people from around the world beat a path, hoping to find cures they’ll find nowhere else.

But in Baltimore’s African American community, the hospital has a different reputation.

“They treat black people with disrespect,” he adds. “Whites get much better care.”

It’s a view shared by many African Americans. Many grew up having heard the story that if they played too close to Hopkins they might get snatched off the street for medical experiments. In their 2013 book Lead Wars, historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz revealed that as late as the 1990s researchers affiliated with Hopkins conducted a study that exposed children, most of them African American, to dangerously high amounts of lead.

One institution better able to address some health determinants than a hospital is the community health center. Today, there are 9,800 such centers (their number augmented over the past decade by the $11 billion included in the Affordable Care Act for that purpose), which provide care to 24 million low-income Americans, two-thirds of them minority. Because they’re small, located near their patients, culturally compatible, and often work with community leaders to address some of their patients’ nonclinical problems—access to healthy food, for example—they fill needs that most hospitals either don’t or can’t.

To what extent, though, does racism still affect the medical system at large? In 2015, The Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics reported on the findings of

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American students was 7.4 percent, but by 2011 it dropped to 7 percent.

The reasons why have been talked over (and over) for years: Throughout K–12, schools aren’t identifying and encouraging African American students who may have an interest in medicine; schools attended by black children don’t have the same resources to teach science that predominantly white schools do; the shortage of black physicians means there are few role models; many black college graduates are unprepared to apply to medical school; and, of course, black students and their families can’t afford the staggering price of studying medicine.

For generations, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Meharry Medical College in Nashville trained the lion’s share of America’s black physicians. They’ve also struggled to survive financially.

Now, with Donald Trump suggesting that federal support for them may be unconstitutional, HBCUs could be facing their toughest times ever.

One group working to counteract these trends is White Coats 4 Black Lives, or WC4BL , a national organization of medical students whose mission is “to eliminate racial bias in the practice of medicine and recognize racism as a threat to the health and well-being of people of color.” With 54 active chapters at medical schools

Mustafa Santiago Ali: The chronic disinvestment in black communities has created literally toxic environments.

across the nation, WC4BL says its primary goal, in the spirit of Black Lives Matter, is to put medicine’s racial disparities on the front burner.

Indeed, Black Lives Matter may be providing a template for dealing with all the systemic issues that threaten and thwart black lives. Earlier this year, Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former EPA senior advisor for environmental justice and community revitalization, became the senior vice president of climate, environmental justice and community revitalization at the Hip Hop Caucus. He sees a comingtogether of discrete movements to improve African Americans’ lives.

“The environmental justice side, the public health side, and Black Lives Matter, all these various organizations are engaged in Flint [Michigan] and understand that what’s happening there and other communities is a sign of the disinvestment that’s been happening there for decades—even longer than decades,” he says.

“There’s the Band-Aid approach, which has its relevancy, which is just focusing on the pipes and the water,” he says. “And then there’s the broader construct of making sure there’s green housing, making sure that transportation routes are beneficial to the community, utilizing job training programs, creating small anchor institutions.”

And health insurance? While it’s important, it’s no substitute for creating new clinics that provide easy access to care. Pointing to the success of community health centers that today meet the needs of more than 24 million patients in poor communities, Ali says, “We could turn brownfields into health fields by cleaning up contaminated sites and placing healthcare facilities there.”

Since it had taken a couple of weeks to arrange the interview, I was thrilled to finally have him on the phone. He was one of the country’s strongest advocates for single-payer— he wished to remain anonymous—but what I wanted to talk about with him that afternoon was racial health disparities. The responses I got from him didn’t say as much about the implications of, say, food deserts or the

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a study led by Dr. Monika Goyal of Children’s National Health System and Dr. Nathan Kuppermann and Sean Cleary of George Washington University. They found that “[b]lack children are less likely [than white children] to receive any pain medication for moderate pain and less likely to receive opioids for severe pain, suggesting a different threshold for treatment.”

An older study—but one that nonetheless came 36 years after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act—was published in 2000 in Social Science and Medicine. In it, Michelle van Ryn of the Mayo Clinic and Jane Burke of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine examined 842 post-angiogram encounters between physicians and their patients. They found that “lower [socioeconomic status] African Americans consulting a cardiologist are more likely than affluent Whites to be perceived as: lacking intelligence; lacking selfcontrol; irrational; unlikely to have significant career demands; at risk for inadequate social support; unlikely to desire a physically active lifestyle; at risk for substance abuse; and likely to be noncompliant with cardiac rehabilitation.”

One change that would likely have a positive impact on the quality of health care provided to African Americans would be an increase in the number of black doctors. It’s not only a matter of African Americans feeling more comfortable having a black doctor; it’s that African American doctors may be more willing to see low-income—disproportionately minority—patients. In a 2015 New England Journal of Medicine article, Dr. David Ansell and Dr. Edwin McDonald wrote, “Black medical students are more than twice as likely as white students to express a desire to care for underserved communities of color. Our inability to recruit black men into medicine is alarming, given the urgency of racial health care disparities in the United States.”

By some measures, only about 5 percent of practicing physicians are black, and there’s little evidence that number is going to grow. In 2004, medical school enrollment for African

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shortage of African American doctors as they did about the current politics of much of the left. The answer to all of my questions was single-payer.

It took a lot of prodding but eventually he explained why.

“The conversation always has to be broader than [racial] disparities,” he said. “When you look at America’s will to end poverty, it was highest during the Great Depression, when the images of most poor people were white.”

Despite the fact that the health crisis facing African Americans has less to do with access to insurance than with those other social determinants, the idea that health is rationed not only by class but by race hasn’t commonly been part of the current argument for universal coverage. That’s partly the result of political calculation. Talking about black people suffering poor health more and dying sooner isn’t likely the most persuasive argument for many white voters.

When Republicans sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act, one reason they failed is that Medicaid had acquired so many white recipients (by virtue of both the ACA’s raising the income eligibility threshold and the downward mobility of the white working class) that it had become impossible for Republicans to get away with deriding it as a giveaway to blacks.

But progressives should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

They can advocate universal coverage and speak out about the health crisis that’s engulfed black America.

It really isn’t that heavy a lift—unless they’ve bought the argument that talking about issues that have a unique impact on minorities is “playing identity politics.”

Winning universal access to health care, as challenging as it is worthwhile, will not in itself create health equity across the country’s racial lines. That’s the more fundamental challenge—and it’s every bit as urgent as winning universal health care. By the metric of lives cut short, it’s a good deal more urgent—and high time that progressives treat it that way.

Jim Grossfeld is a writer and past member of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Commission on Health.

Weakening Medicaid from Within The Trump administration is poised to misuse its legal authority in an effort to cull people from the Medicaid rolls.

by Sara Rosen baum

F

rom its modest beginning in 1965, when it was passed as a little-noticed companion to Medicare, Medicaid has evolved into an indispensable public health program with broad bipartisan support. Today, as the centerpiece of the health-care safety net, the program serves nearly 75 million people, all either poor or medically impoverished. Medicaid pays for half of all births, enrolls 40 percent of all U.S. children, covers two-thirds of all nursing home residents, and insures one in three Americans with disabilities.

This year’s Republican bills to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act sought to impose severe longterm cuts in federal Medicaid funding; those threats to Medicaid are not over yet. Yet even without any congressional action, the Trump administration has considerable power under existing law to modify Medicaid as long as its actions are consistent with Medicaid’s statutory objectives. From all indications, however, the administration intends to bypass the basic requirement that it use its power to promote Medicaid’s purposes, not destroy them, by withdrawing Medicaid coverage from many who depend on it.

The source of the administration’s power is its authority to waive elements of the federal Medicaid statute to demonstrate alternative ways of delivering services. About one-third of federal Medicaid expenditures flow to the states through payment arrangements that allow waiver of normal federal program requirements as part of demonstrations undertaken at the discretion of the secretary of health and human services. The amount of money at stake is enormous; in fiscal year 2015, about $100 billion out of a total of $330 billion in federal Medicaid funds went to states through demonstration spending. Although Medicaid waivers are subject to time limits, some approved demonstrations

have lasted for decades. But no law compels the current HHS Secretary Tom Price to continue those waivers.

Consequently, the decisions made by Price and Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, have tremendous consequences for the fiscal future of state governments.

Moreover, the Trump administration has made it unequivocally clear that it intends to use its discretionary authority over demonstrations to cull eligible people from the Medicaid rolls, even though that goal has no support in federal law. In a jaw-dropping letter to the nation’s governors in March 2017, Price and Verma stated that the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act in 2010 represented “a clear departure from the core, historical mission of the program” and constituted an “incentive to deprioritize the most vulnerable populations.” In other words, they declared an act of Congress to be contrary to federal policy.

Price and Verma proceeded to encourage Medicaid demonstrations that would “empower” adults and promote “human dignity” by imposing work as a condition of eligibility. Their letter offered no explanation as to how introducing roadblocks to coverage would further Medicaid’s objectives and ignored the administrative complexity that work requirements would add to the determination of eligibility and the unreasonableness of such requirements in areas where jobs are scarce, especially for people with the disabilities and other health problems confronting so many of Medicaid’s beneficiaries.

Price and Verma also invited proposals that would end Medicaid as a healthcare safety net program by subjecting it to the principles and restrictions of commercial health insurance. These include the use of defined open enrollment periods and the disqualification

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of beneficiaries who fail to renew in a timely fashion. Medicaid was set up as a health-care safety net open to people who qualify for coverage when they need care. Unlike commercial insurance, which must avoid risk to survive, Medicaid has been built to embrace risk. Medicaid’s irreplaceable value as a safety net that is accessible when help is needed most becomes clear when catastrophic events strike or when health threats such as the Zika virus suddenly wash over entire populations. In their letter, Price and Verma made no effort to explain how abandoning Medicaid’s basic principles would further its objectives.

Since the establishment of Medicaid, the nation has relied on the program as a way to deal with health challenges that lie beyond the limits of commercial insurance markets: long-term care services and supports; coverage of uninsured women diagnosed with breast or cervical cancer; developmental health services for the poorest children; and flexible healthcare funding that can respond to population health needs in the wake of large-scale disasters—both natural and man-made. Price and Verma seem neither to understand nor to value these critical functions.

Experimentation and Medicaid Policy

As a program of unusually large size, complexity, and scope, Medicaid presents substantial management challenges. As a result, the authority to conduct demonstrations—carried out under a provision of the Social Security Act, known as Section 1115—has played an invaluable part in improving and extending the program. But it is just this authority that the Trump administration may now be poised to use for entirely different purposes.

Over the years, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have used the authority for experiments to lay the groundwork for Medicaid’s transformation. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush pursued pilot programs to cover impoverished working-age adults excluded from Medicaid under traditional program rules, laying the groundwork for the watershed Medicaid expansion of

18 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2017

2010. Section 1115 paved the way for Medicaid’s development of integrated coverage and managed care, and it enabled Medicaid to transform itself from a payer of nursing homes and become the nation’s central source of funding for community-based longterm services and supports.

Despite their many disparate variations, 1115 demonstrations are bound together by the common purpose of testing and evaluating new approaches to achieving Medicaid’s objectives. The law itself states those objectives as furnishing “medical assistance on behalf of [people] whose income and resources are insufficient to meet the costs of necessary medical services” and promoting “rehabilitation and other services to help … [people] attain or retain capability for independence or self-care.” Fundamental principles of constitutional law prevent Congress from simply delegating to the executive branch the power to unilaterally alter the terms of federal law. But Congress can grant research authority, and 1115 is part of this tradition of searching for better ways to design and operate major federal programs.

That 1115 now accounts for such a substantial portion of federal Medicaid spending reflects a desire on the part of government to develop more effective ways to accomplish Medicaid’s multiple missions. Historically, 1115 demonstrations have been built on a common value of improving care for the most vulnerable and the goal of making the program stronger and more effective.

These values and goals shaped Medicaid eligibility expansion demonstrations, as well as demonstrations to strengthen health care. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 decision that effectively made the Affordable Care Act’s adult Medicaid expansion a state option, these values and goals led the Obama administration to partner with recalcitrant states to expand coverage, even if under terms that may be substantially less generous than those that are part of the law.

How Waivers Work

Section 1115 permits the HHS secretary to do two basic things. First, in order to carry out demonstrations that further Medicaid’s objectives, 1115 gives

The administration seems neither to understand nor to value Medicaid’s role in dealing with health challenges that lie beyond the limits of commercial insurance.

the secretary the power to alter many provisions of the law itself. Eligibility standards can be altered. Benefits can be modified. Demonstrations can test approaches to health-care organization, delivery, and payment other than those formally sanctioned under law, such as tying coverage to enrollment in organized systems of care.

Second, 1115 allows the secretary to spend federal funds on program activities that, owing to their departure from normal legal requirements, would not otherwise qualify for federal money. This special federal spending power means that tens of billions of dollars can flow to state Medicaid programs operating in an alternative fashion to normal legal requirements.

Rules established under the Carter administration require that 1115 Medicaid demonstrations must be budget neutral, that is, that they not cost the federal government more than would normally be spent under law. But budget neutrality nonetheless offers broad flexibility to experiment.

Demonstrations established and renewed under 1115 usually involve lengthy and complex negotiations between the federal and state governments regarding what the experiment will test, the conditions under which it will be allowed to proceed, and the extent of modifications to federal rules. Furthermore, because 1115 confers sweeping administrative powers, federal law also requires the secretary to act in accordance with basic principles of administrative law, including an evidentiary record supporting the experiment, opportunity for public comment, evaluation of results, and publication of findings.

Like other government experiments, 1115 demonstration evaluations must be built on established research principles—testable hypotheses, research questions designed to shed light on the impact of the demonstration, and a research approach that will enable evaluators to fairly and impartially measure implementation of the demonstration and its effects.

The 1115 authorization and evaluation process can be contentious, as one party seeks to test ideas to which the other party objects. For this reason, the Obama administration

alex br andon / ap images

notebook

consistently rejected proposals to add work requirements to Medicaid, concluding that withholding access to health care serves no legitimate program objectives, especially since the overwhelming majority of Medicaid beneficiaries are working, looking for work, in school, too sick to work, or are caring for family.

Whether and how the Trump administration intends to test work requirements and other proposals remains to be seen. Seven states (Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Montana, and New Hampshire) currently operate their adult Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act as 1115 demonstrations and presumably will continue to do so. Kentucky, which originally adopted the expansion as written by Congress, now proposes to convert to demonstration status. Several of these states, including Kentucky, Indiana, and Arkansas, have proposed work requirements. Furthermore, several states that have not expanded Medicaid—Wisconsin, Utah, and Maine—have proposed to test work requirements on groups who were eligible for Medicaid before the ACA . Kentucky’s demonstration proposal also indicates a desire to recast Medicaid as commercial insurance through the use of annual open enrollment periods.

The administration is expected to permit states wishing to do so to move forward. How federal officials will justify their approval in light of administrative records replete with evidence regarding the damaging nature of such program modifications is unclear. Furthermore, it is unknown whether the evaluations—a basic element of any 1115 demonstration—will fully examine the human effects of work requirements or restricted enrollment rules, whether the results will be made public, or whether other states will be permitted to move forward while the jury is out on the first wave of Medicaid restriction demonstrations.

Equally as worrisome is the problem of leverage. With states so massively reliant on 1115 as a basic element of ongoing Medicaid operations, the federal government effectively gains additional powers of persuasion regarding the conditions under which

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, is encouraging states to seek waivers that would undermine Medicaid’s role as a safety net.

a large-scale demonstration should be allowed to continue. For example, certain states that embraced the ACA adult Medicaid expansion also have in place ambitious efforts to test comprehensive delivery system reforms aimed at improving health-care quality and efficiency. Because delivery reform is such an intensive, lengthy, and complex undertaking, these states depend on being able to continue their demonstrations with access to ongoing federal financial demonstration support. Will these states be told that their continued demonstration authority depends on the extent to which they agree to test “dignity” models or introduce commercial insurance restrictions into Medicaid enrollment? The Trump administration already has shown its willingness to use its federal grantmaking powers to pressure senators to vote to eliminate coverage for millions of people; why not use a similar strategy to force states to eliminate coverage on a piecemeal basis?

To be sure, federal law gives states the option of limiting the scope of their Medicaid programs, and Congress can give the states even more “flexibility” to make cutbacks. But the administration cannot legitimately use a grant of congressional power intended to test ways of improving the services of a program to roll that program back. The courts have the power to review 1115 project approvals, and if the administration tries to use its waiver authority to cull people

from eligibility, the courts are sure to be faced with claims that the administration is abusing its power.

One other point merits consideration: There was a time when, as a matter of law, 1115 demonstrations were recognized for what they were—research involving human subjects that had to undergo review by institutional review boards (IRBs).

In 1983, the Reagan administration exempted 1115 demonstrations from federal IRB protections, even though in 1982, Congress embedded human subject research protections directly in federal Medicaid law as a condition of approving Medicaid cost-sharing demonstrations. Yet even as it moved to exclude 1115 demonstrations from human subject safeguards, the Reagan administration acknowledged its obligation “to ensure that research activity not present a danger to the physical, mental, or emotional wellbeing of participants.”

Given the Trump administration’s stated intention—to eliminate congressionally authorized Medicaid coverage for millions of poor adults on the grounds that such coverage is contrary to federal policy—it is highly improbable that it will give even the slightest consideration to the risks that its research design presents. Were it to do so, such inherently damaging research obviously could not go forward.

Research aimed at making an enormously complex program work better is essential to its proper operation. Opinions can differ about how far states should be able to go in combining program improvements with operational constraints; this type of balancing is an inherent element of many social-welfare demonstrations.

But when high-government officials state from the outset that their goal is to overturn an act of Congress, the question is not whether they are making the right trade-offs but whether they can be held accountable for violating the law.

Sara Rosenbaum is the Harold and Jane Hirsh Professor of Health Law and Policy at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University and founding chair of its department of health policy.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 19

The American Heartbreak

Counter-protesters at the “Unite the Right� rally in downtown Charlottesville, August 12, 2017

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Despair Is Not an Option B y R a n dal l Ken n edy

jamelle bouie

D

evotees of racial justice continue to be appalled by the Trump administration. Heather Heyer, the anti-racist demonstrator murdered in Charlottesville, was right: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

A great many Americans, especially African Americans, are in a mood of despair upon witnessing a president of the United States winking at neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klansmen, and doing everything in his power to expunge the achievements of his predecessor, a man who came to be known less for his race than for his decency, dignity, and honor.

Yet despair is not an option. And in fact, good people of all races are putting their anger to good use through activism on the ground. Sometimes, though, their efforts are taken for granted and receive too little praise even within their own camp.

Far too little notice, for example, was given to the remarkable May 19 speech by Mayor Mitch Landrieu explaining the decision of the New Orleans municipal government to remove from places of public honor three monuments celebrating Confederate generals and one celebrating the violent overthrow of the state’s multiracial Reconstruction government. To prevail, Landrieu and his allies had to overcome a fervent and well-organized opposition. But prevail they did with a campaign that was punctuated by a speech that belongs in anthologies of great American oratory.

I know of no speech on racial conflict and reconciliation by an elected official that is more candid, more inspiring, more soulful. New Orleans, he observed, “was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold, and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor, of misery, of rape, of torture.”

Answering oft-heard apologies for Confederate “heroes,” Landrieu observed that “these men did not fight for the United States of America. They fought against it. They may have been warriors but in this cause they were not patriots.” The monuments, Landrieu declared, “purpose-

fully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement and the terror that it actually stood for.”

Landrieu praised black leaders and colleagues for prompting him to see a problem he had previously unwittingly ignored, confessing, “I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought.”

He also acknowledged the educative power of trying to see things from another’s viewpoint, recalling that a friend asked him to consider the monuments from “the perspec-

Truth-Teller: New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu

tive of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth-grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop our beautiful city. Can you do it? Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? … Do these monuments help her to see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too?”

Answering charges of racial pandering, Landrieu maintained that reformers were simply engaged in “righting the wrong images these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations.” Contrasting the movement to

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 21

remove the iconography against that which established it, Landrieu declared: “Unlike when those Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people. In our blessed land, we all come to the table of democracy as equals.”

The spirit of Landrieu’s speech is, thankfully, more widespread than is often recognized by observers whose understandable disgust with Trumpism misleads them into underestimating the growing anti-racist opposition. Folks numbering in the millions and of all complexions are self-consciously engaging in countless acts of protest: marching, organizing study groups, volunteering legal expertise, donating money to institutions dedicated to the preservation of threatened values—the NAACP, the ACLU, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice—and resolving in numberless diverse ways to become more active, informed, influential.

This outpouring of indignation, alarm, and affirmation should not be taken for granted. It should be recognized and encouraged. It reflects underestimated stores of idealism and compassion. These sorts of grassroots interventions alone are insufficient to turn the tide. That will require ongoing, organized political mobilizations that can win elections at every level—local, statewide, and national. But even modest, episodic acts of protest are worth heralding. They provide essential sustenance in this harsh season in which meanness and chauvinism are riding all too high.

Liberals ought to be realists. They should eschew spurious sentimentality. They should certainly avoid denying the presence of bigotry and indifference to suffering—ugly features of our political culture that are all too evident.

Realism, however, entails attentiveness to strengths as well as weaknesses, an appreciation of progress as well as stagnation or retrogression.

I had thought that sufficient racial progress had been made in the United States to preclude the successful candidacy of someone like Trump who openly—openly!— traffics in racial and other sorts of prejudice. I was obviously wrong. The country has not progressed as much as I thought that it had.

That does not mean, however, that there has been no progress. To the contrary, in many spheres—not all, but many—there has been dramatic change for the better.

This is what makes Trump’s victory so disappointing. But disappointment—the hurt experienced upon witnessing a failure to meet expectations—is better than the sulky,

The Trump presidency is an appalling disgrace. It will be destructive.

But it does not constitute the end of the American story.

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despairing “What do you expect from white folks?” attitude that one encounters in some quarters.

After all, the American electorate did twice elect a liberal black man to the presidency. That should provide a source of encouragement and a basis for believing that progressive change, albeit fragmentary and difficult to hold, can nonetheless be attained through continued struggle. I am well aware that Obama never won a majority of white voters. I am aware, too, that his elections clearly unleashed a whirlwind of racist derangement. But twice, a sufficient number of whites joined an aroused electorate of people of color to carry Obama into the White House.

The Trump camp wants to vilify or obliterate the memory of those exhilarating events. Liberals should cherish those victories and the intelligent, dignified, compassionate, presidential stewardship that followed. I am not urging anyone to forgo criticizing the Obama presidency or the ruthless opposition to it. I am urging observers to acknowledge that, viewed against the backdrop of American history, the Obama ascendancy was a major step forward on a path that has been and will continue to be strewn with impediments which, to be overcome, will require all sorts of fancy footwork, including steps sideways.

Liberals must, of course, avoid underestimating the popularity and resourcefulness of the Trump forces (as was done so negligently in 2016). But it is also important to avoid overestimating their support and thus their mandate. Trump won the White House but with only a minority of the electorate.

Do not forget that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by at least two million ballots. This is clearly a sore point with Trump, which is why he persists in making the laughable claim that he won the majority of legitimate ballots cast.

Not only did he come into office with barely a razor-thin victory, but since taking power he has been losing support.

The prestige of the presidency usually attracts voters.

Trump has been alienating them with, among other things, his abhorrent racial sallies. In the urge to curse out the army of voters that continues to back Trump, liberals ought to avoid exaggerating its number or giving up on its susceptibility, over time, to persuasion.

The Trump presidency is an alarming, appalling disgrace. It will be destructive, sometimes in ways that will be irremediable. But it does not constitute the end of the story.

Racial liberalism can overcome racial reaction. Progress is by no means inevitable. But under the sway of intelligent, brave, ethical, and persistent collective struggle, continued racial progress is surely possible.

Randall Kennedy is a contributing editor to the Prospect and professor at Harvard Law School. His several books include The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency.

the American Heartbreak

What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter?

By Todd G itlin

F

or more than four centuries, African Americans have been subjected to “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” in the words of an incendiary 18thcentury document more often cited than read, the Declaration of Independence. From this long train have followed myriad efforts not only to cry Stop! but to slow and derail it. At various junctures in American history, the cries vary, but the spirit of the protest is constant: Equal rights. But the train rolls on.

After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of young Trayvon Martin in Florida, the hashtag erupted in 2013: #BlackLivesMatter. After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” mushroomed—a name for the rolling current of feeling that can be called a movement, focused on a specific “abuse and usurpation”: the killing of unarmed black men by police.

Partisans and detractors agreed that there was a movement called “Black Lives Matter.” The phrase rapidly migrated off-screen. “It helped transfer a longing into a movement,” in the words of Dēmos President Heather McGhee. “It opened up an entirely new level of discourse. It was more than anything an extraordinary call to consciousness-raising.” The slogan was chanted at rallies, imprinted on T-shirts, applauded, denounced. It’s a thing, as we say nowadays. But it’s a blurred thing. Movements are hard to put one’s finger on, especially in the internet age, when offices and meetings are virtual, websites come and go, and imprinting T-shirts is easy. Journalists sometimes throw up their hands in confusion.

Like all movements, BLM is imprecisely defined. It’s messy. Movements are like clouds; they have rough edges and uncertain boundaries. Their floating terms mean one thing to some people and something else to others. They move. They exist not as legal entities or organizations but in people’s moods and vocabulary, and it’s hard to sort out who speaks for whom and what’s real on the ground. People act in the name of the movement and in the process make it—for a time, in a place—real. Many actions are constructive; some are not. In the public mind, they tend to blend together.

Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the three women who put out the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, speak of an “organization” and credit it with 40 chapters, though officers are unnamed. They maintain a website that lists sweeping “principles” (“We are working to (re)build the Black liberation movement”). They also call their website a forum.

After the killing of Michael Brown, another BLM activist, DeRay Mckesson, swept into the spotlight, ran for mayor of Baltimore (garnering only 2.6 percent of the Democratic primary vote), and in 2015 helped form Campaign Zero, which lists ten proposals intended to reduce police violence: ending broken windows policing, encouraging community oversight, limiting the use of force, independent investigation and prosecution, community representation, filming the police, training, ending for-profit policing, demilitarization, and fair police union contracts.

There’s a penumbra of such associated projects. “One place the movement is now going is recognizing the importance of electoral power,” McGhee says. For example, Blackpac.com supports candidates and registers voters, declaring: “We don’t just show up in communities a few weeks before an election to ask for their votes. We listen and learn year-round, and we lift up the voices of Black voters and demonstrate their power.”

Meanwhile, the website for the Movement for Black Lives claims support from more than 50 organizations, and devotes many thousands of words to demands in the areas of criminal justice, reparations, investment, community control, and political power—and along the way, condemns Israel for “genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”

What is happening on the ground is hard to pinpoint; movements are written in water. Who, after all, “belongs” to a “network”? But essentially, BLM is a spirit with a logic, as self-contradictory as that may sound. Movements are not only logical—sometimes what they affirm is left deliberately ambiguous in order to enfold allies—but their logic deserves to be made explicit. Contrary to what white racists and police like to say, the spirit of “Black Lives Matter” does not mean “Only Black Lives Matter.” (When women

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 23

Achievements and Limits

Black Lives Matter: Do enough whites agree?

Despite the crude racism inflamed by Trump and many of his supporters, can we point to progress elsewhere?

According to the Campaign Zero website, “at least 100 laws have been enacted in the past three years to address police violence,” “new legislation has been enacted in 40 states since 2014,” and “ten states (CA, CO, CT, IL, LA, MD, OR, UT, TX, WA) have enacted legislation addressing three or more Campaign Zero policy categories.” For one thing, bail reform has become a live issue. In NBC News’ Jon Schuppe’s summary, “Across the country, reformers are chipping away at money bail, arguing that it discriminates against the poor, ruins innocent people’s lives, fuels mass incarceration and contributes to wrongful convictions.”

This much in three years is a solid beginning.

So is the widespread distribution of police body cameras. According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, as of August 2016, 43 of 68 major city police departments had the equipment. But when

24 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2017

a cop fatally killed a tourist in Minneapolis in July, the camera wasn’t turned on. Equipment is something but it isn’t everything. Footage is not always made public. Still, the age of the viral video shot by passersby is upon us and will not be rolled back. There is clearly vastly more media coverage of racist incidents.

From 2009 on, the Obama-Holder Justice Department Civil Rights Division opened 25 investigations and enforced 14 reform agreements (“consent decrees”), improving police practices. One success is Los Angeles, where a consent decree had to be kept in place for 12 years. The federal judge who finally lifted it in 2013 wrote in 2009: “When the decree was entered [2001], LAPD was a troubled department whose reputation had been severely damaged by a series of crises. In 2008, as noted by the monitor, ‘LAPD has become the national and international policing standard for activities that range from audits to handling of the mentally ill to many aspects of training to risk assessment of police officers and more.’” The L.A. reforms would have been unimaginable without the widespread video of the merciless beating of Rodney King in 1992. In a cell-phone culture, brutality is out in the open.

That’s some of the good news. Among the bad news is that, in April, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions put up roadblocks. He delayed the Baltimore decree, brought on at the behest of the police commissioner himself after the death of Freddie Gray in a police van, and ordered more than a dozen other orders reviewed, including those in Ferguson, Newark, and New Orleans.

Even without Sessions’s help, Chicago still drags its feet.

Police forces everywhere circle their wagons to protect a toxic culture.

The right not to be wrongfully killed by a policeman’s bullet is, of course, only one in a huge bundle of rights. The overall theme—to use an old term— is equal life-chances.

These include, but are not limited to, the right to equal job opportunities; equal access to education, housing, and health care; equal treatment in the criminal justice system; and the right not to be humiliated by public agencies. The role of government policy in establishing and reinforcing unequal housing (and therefore unequal wealth) has recently been painfully, painstakingly, and irrefutably underscored by Richard Rothstein in his much-lauded book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Here I will concentrate on criminal justice matters.

Capital punishment looms large in any picture of unequal justice. Bryan Stevenson writes: African-Americans make up less than 13 percent of the national population, but nearly 42 percent of

c h a r l e s k r u pa / a p i m a g e s

got the right to vote, did men lose it?) Nor should BLM be understood as “identity politics,” although there may be some supporters—black nationalists—who intend or halfintend it that way, to mean “Only Black Lives Matter.” To affirm that black lives matter is to affirm that they matter because they are lives. Implicitly, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, the message is: If you didn’t think black lives also matter, you were wrong. The idea is the defense of human rights, equal rights for all people, some of whom happen to be black. It’s the third term in a syllogism that goes like this: 1. All lives matter.

2. Black lives are lives.

3. Black lives matter.

In other words, the spirit of “Black Lives Matter” begins with a human universal (1), from which a specific deduction is made with an eye to the fact (2) that those who are black have been subjected, over a long span of history, to deprivation, exploitation, and persecution. I don’t have to be black to think that black lives matter, any more than I need to be Jewish to think that Jewish lives matter, or Palestinian to think that Palestinian lives matter. “Black Lives Matter” does not herald or affirm the virtues or vices of any particular social identity.

It is an outcry of anguish and outrage, in pursuit of equality.

the American Heartbreak those currently on death row and 34 percent of those executed since 1976. In 96 percent of states where researchers have examined the relationship between race and the death penalty, results reveal a pattern of discrimination based on the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, or both.

False imprisonments, as in the notorious case of the Central Park 5, spotlight some of the dreadful inequities.

But criminal injustice isn’t just a matter of life-and-death statistics. It entails the systematic humiliation of an entire community. Inequities in the criminal justice system are legion, including incarceration rates (both before and after trial), rates of murders prosecuted and unprosecuted, bail requirements, the availability of competent lawyers, the requirement imposed on the arrested to miss work to show up for court appearances, and so on ad nauseam. An openeyed visit to Riker’s Island—I had the displeasure twice in 2014—demonstrates in ways too many to be itemized here how the entire system of scrutiny inflicted on visitors, let alone prisoners, amounts to a gauntlet of humiliations directed not just at relations and friends but at an entire community—not just the prisoners but their families, and the families of those on parole or probation.

The reform campaign furthered by Michelle Alexander’s bestselling book The New Jim Crow, accelerated by DNAbased findings showing that many innocents have been put to death and imprisoned for long terms—funded by the libertarian-right Koch brothers as well as by liberals—has brought many wrongs to light. Momentum toward reform may be stalled momentarily under the Trump regime, but the campaign has, as the saying goes, changed the discourse. Again, Campaign Zero’s roster of legislative reforms is impressive.

But to take one measure of what has not changed in the recent reform wave, consider the important question of marijuana possession. Between 2002 and 2015, whites ages 18 to 25 used marijuana at higher rates than blacks, who in turn used marijuana at higher rates than Latinos.

But even in relatively liberal New York City, even as the number of marijuana arrests fluctuated wildly between 1987 and 2016, under five different mayors the percentage of marijuana arrests among those 16 and older has run four to six times as high for blacks and Latinos combined (averaging over 80 percent) as for whites (averaging 15 percent). Marijuana possession is obviously a minor crime, or violation, but a major opening for criminal injustice, accounting for the largest numbers of arrests, prosecutions, and incarcerations in the city.

Between 1997 and 2012, as Loren Siegel and Queens College sociologist Harry Levine have written, 77 percent of those arrests were “made in the NYPD districts where

the majority of the residents are Black and Latino (half the city’s neighborhood precincts). … In the last 10 years, Blacks constituted about 25% of New York’s residents, but 54% of the people arrested for marijuana possession. …

[Non-Hispanic Whites] made up about 35% of the city’s population but about 11% of the people arrested.” Finally, Levine and Siegel note, “most people arrested were not smoking marijuana. Usually they just carried a bit of it in a pocket.” Suspicion of marijuana possession was a pretext for a search. It was this that led to the scandal of “stop and frisk.” But even after stop-and-frisk ended in New York under federal court order, racial discrepancies remained.

From 2014 to 2016, the 51 percent of New Yorkers who were black and Latino accounted for 86 percent of all marijuana arrests (a total of 52,730).

There are areas of improvement, and they are not to be trivialized. Some police and courts today are color-blind. Outright brutality is under greater scrutiny than before the 1960s, and is probably less common. In many cities, and likely because of the Black Lives Matter movement, not only are body cameras issued but there are cameras in police cars and video cameras in interrogation. But the growth of police forces since the early 1990s, as felonies declined, enabled police commanders to deploy more cops in neighborhoods of color in search of petty offenses to beef up their reputations.

Even touted improvements cannot be taken at face value. Take New York City’s district attorneys’ recent announcement that they plan to “scrap” 644,000 at least ten-year-old warrants for offenses like public drinking and sitting on a park bench in a housing project playground just after sundown.

Unnoted in the fanfare, as Harry Levine points out, were the nearly one million arrest warrants still outstanding—an average of about one for every eight New Yorkers—which are surely not racially neutral, though this cannot be known for sure because the police don’t release statistics on warrants, including their geographical distribution. Moreover, many dismissed warrants likely applied to people who moved, died, or were incarcerated. It’s not even possible to know just how many arrests are made on the basis of warrants. The opacity of the criminal justice system cannot be overstated. The varieties of unequal justice are many, intricate, and meshed together in obscurity. Measures of success and failure for the reform movement are accordingly blurred.

Given the haze of results, many people turn to public opinion for clues as to how the movement is doing and where it might go from here.

Criminal injustice isn’t just a matter of dreadful statistics of racial inequality.

It entails the systematic humiliation of an entire community.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 25

The Bogey of Public Opinion

Does Black Lives Matter matter, and to whom, and in what way? Blacks number about one-eighth of Americans, and all anti-racist campaigns rest on the participation of sympathetic whites and others. At this moment, BLM is the best-known of the many anti-racist currents. It’s for this reason that the opposition is so fervid and rancid—why, for example, right-wing Facebook pages went viral with the fraudulent claim that BLM activists blocked Hurricane Harvey relief, and why the president of Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police denounced BLM activists as “a pack of rabid animals” and “racist hate groups determined to instigate violence.” (The same gentleman last year condoned the Nazi insignia on the arm of one of his officers— “not a big deal,” he said.) All sides fight for public opinion in their own ways.

One complication is that Black Lives Matter, the entity or entities, is not identical to black lives matter, the sentiment. Not everything done in the name of Black Lives Matter serves the larger goal of increasing the share and influence of Americans, of all races, who believe that black lives do matter. Black Lives Matter organizations have every right to define their own commitments, but everyone who cares about black lives has the right to an opinion as to how the goal can be realized.

Amid the swirl of public opinion, polls are commissioned and publicized. But polling “beliefs” is a slippery business, and numbers cannot be taken at face value. In what sense do people “believe” what they tell pollsters they “believe”? What if they’ve never thought about the question before the pollster asked? What if slight changes in wording elicit different results? Moreover, surveys are snapshots at a given moment in time.

So it is not altogether astonishing that two surveys this summer produced diametrically opposed answers to the question of what Americans think of Black Lives Matter and the larger issue of respect for the lives of blacks. Not everyone who dislikes BLM disrespects blacks. But the discrepancy between the two polls is astonishing enough to cause us to wonder what’s going on.

In July, the Harvard-Harris survey asked registered voters, “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Black Lives Matter protests and protesters?” Forty-three percent, three out of seven, said “favorable”; 57 percent, “unfavorable.” Of whites, 35 percent had a favorable opinion; of blacks, 83 percent.

Unsurprisingly, the cleavage of attitudes was not only racial but partisan. Of Republicans, 21 percent had a favor-

Just as events in Charlottesville laid bare the fact that the Civil War never ended, so did it show that the civil rights movement never ends.

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able view of BLM; of those who voted for Donald Trump, 18 percent; of Democrats, 65 percent (and 66 percent of those who voted for Hillary Clinton). Of blacks, 85 percent said that police are “too quick to shoot African-Americans”; of whites, only 45 percent. Of blacks, 84 percent thought the police are, “in general,” “too quick to use force,” as opposed to “typically only use force when necessary”; of whites, 49 percent. The differences were stark.

They were equally stark with respect to criminal justice in general. Among blacks, 85 percent said the criminal justice system was “biased against African Americans and other minorities,” while 60 percent of white voters thought it “basically treats people of all races and ethnicities about the same.”

But another poll, taken by Pew a month later—sampling adults, not just registered voters—found something dramatically different. According to Pew, 55 percent “say they either strongly support or somewhat support the Black Lives Matter movement, while 34% oppose the movement.”

Pew’s BLM opponents number 34 percent compared with Harvard-Harris’s 57 percent. Pew’s figures for Democrats and Republicans are similar to Harvard-Harris’s. So are their figures for race—black support at 82 percent compared with white support at 52 percent. But strangely, the aggregate numbers are well-nigh reversed. Intuitively, it would seem highly unlikely that the differences in the sample—registered voters versus all adults—could account for the difference, especially when it shows up in the aggregate numbers but not the party and racial breakdowns.

Meanwhile, at a time when Trump supporters tell us that America is sick and tired of being lectured about racism, either because it’s no longer a problem, or because whites are the true victims, Pew finds evidence to the contrary.

The share of Americans who say racism is a “big problem” in society has increased 8 percentage points in the past two years—and has roughly doubled since 2011. Since 2015, the increase in perceptions of racism as a big problem has been almost entirely among Democrats, making an already wide partisan gap in these attitudes even larger. Overall, 58% of Americans say racism is a “big problem in our society,” while 29% say it is “somewhat of a problem.” Just 12% say racism in the U.S. is a small problem or not a problem. …

Two years ago, 50% of the public viewed racism as a major problem for society, and in 2011 just 28% did so.

Pew notes that these numbers fluctuate. The 58 percent who today say racism is a “big problem” is close to the percentage that said so in 1996 (53–54 percent). Yet the percentage who said it was a “big problem” fell dramatically in 2009, 2010, and 2011—i.e., during the presidency of Barack Obama—which suggests the slipperiness of what

the American Heartbreak people mean by “racism,” since the fact that Obama was twice elected president suggests something about the falling of one racial barrier but nothing about others.

Without digging deep into the weeds of the surveys’ respective methods, it’s impossible to say any more about the discrepancy. But it should temper any tendency we might have to think that opposition to BLM is either firm or unchangeable. Public opinion changes, often radically, over time. Changes in law often precede changes in public opinion, also radically.

Opposition does not by itself annihilate reform efforts.

All the intangibles of politics play their parts in determining which laws are passed and how, if at all, they are executed. So all the efforts to pursue racial equality are interwoven, and the fate of Black Lives Matter is the fate of the whole effort to continue the civil rights movement into the 21st century.

m i c h a e l n i g r o / s i pa v i a a p i m a g e s

The Unending Civil Rights Movement

Just as Charlottesville laid bare the fact that the Civil War never ended, so did it show that the civil rights movement never ends.

Many today do not understand—or refuse to understand—how unpopular the movement was in its heyday.

The history has been rewritten to serve the popular lore that the nation as a whole, or almost a whole, swerved toward justice in the 1960s. Heroes overcame. Dreams would no longer be deferred. Redemption rose up in the land. But then it becomes interesting to see just how popular the movement was. And the answer, pretty uniformly, is that it wasn’t. During the height of the movement, America as a whole was not clamoring for its triumph.

In September 1960, for example, on the eve of the Kennedy-Nixon election, a national poll asked, “In which direction do you believe the next administration should go on the question of civil rights for Negroes?” Fifty-eight percent of the public chose the middle option: “Proceed slowly until we have worked out the problems resulting from laws already passed.” Only 14 percent answered, “Keep on pressing for further civil rights legislation.” This poll of the entire nation was conducted four years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act and five years before the Voting Rights Act. In 1960, only one in seven Americans thought either of those necessary.

In May 1961, Gallup asked a national sample, “Do you approve or disapprove of what the Freedom Riders are doing?” (What they were doing was having interracial groups take interstate buses through the South. Many were dragged off and beaten. One bus was incinerated.) Sixty-one percent disapproved, to 22 percent who approved. Gallup also asked, “Do you think ‘sit-ins’ at lunch counters, ‘freedom buses’ [a term of Gallup’s own coinage, but never mind] and other demonstrations by Negroes [they weren’t only

by Negroes, but never mind] will hurt or help the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the south?” “Hurt” outnumbered “help” a bit more than 2 to 1 (57 percent to 28 percent).

Was Martin Luther King Jr. always a secular saint? In August 1963, Gallup asked a national sample of Americans if they had heard of the impending August 28 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Remarkably, 71 percent said they had heard of it. How did they view it? Only 23 percent said favorably. Sixty percent were unfavorable, either for general reasons, or because they thought it would lead to violence or that it wouldn’t accomplish anything. A year later, almost three-quarters said that having made progress, blacks should stop demonstrating.

In 1966, when the Harris Poll asked whites whether King was helping or hurting the civil rights cause, 36 percent said he was helping; half said he was hurting. Neither in 1963 nor in 1966 would many Americans have supposed that someday sound bites from his “I Have a Dream” speech would become canonical—or deserve to. White attitudes changed—not as a precondition to the reform process but in no small part as a consequence. As institutions changed, they accelerated changes in public opinion. A feedback loop ensued. Institutional changes changed attitudes—and at the same time generated backlash. Politicians moved accordingly. The process was not easy and it was not costless. The martyrs were many. Attitudes changed because the nonviolent, defiantly interracial civil rights movement produced morally compelling theater. From the Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville sit-ins of 1960, to the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963 and the Selma march of 1965, they took, and held, the moral high ground. King and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality performed their ingenious melodramas, casting white supremacists as the villains, engraving deep into the national mind a stark, essentially biblical watershed.

In 1969, 74 percent of Americans thought that marching, picketing, and demonstrations were bad for the civil rights cause. Nonetheless, even if the means were unpopular, the ends were eventually affirmed—not only in principle, but often in practice. Laws changed, practices changed, and attitudes changed. Rearguard resistance did not cease, but for

Bloody Charlottesville: A counter-protester after an encounter with white nationalists

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 27

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summon up gaudy talk about international revolution.

Whereas in the Deep South the movement had long been protected by quiet deployments of defensive weaponry by groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Black Panther Party moved armed self-defense front and center.

Like many groups, it had a boilerplate program, but the program was not what distinguished it. Its chants were to “pick up the gun” and “Free Huey, or the sky’s the limit,” not to win fair housing and jobs. Armed self-defense was its calling card—its brand. Sometimes, indeed, offense masqueraded as self-defense. The Panthers were lionized on the white left, but they were crushed.

Contrary to folk beliefs that thrive on many campuses today, the relative improvements in the lives of African Americans were not the product of the Black Power tendencies that followed the high era of civil rights. Neither black nationalists nor the Black Panther Party accomplished them. Neither did black rebellions, more widely known as riots, in hundreds of cities. (In fact, according to research by economists William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo, black-owned property values declined after the riots, in proportion to the severity of the riots, and still had not recovered by 1980.)

The important transformations were produced by crossracial coalitions that began in defiance of public opinion and ended up changing not only life but opinion. That history teaches contemporary lessons about how to respect the outrage black Americans feel while redoubling the quest for broad and viable coalitions. The contrast between the era of civil rights and the era of Black Power has been strikingly made by Randall Kennedy: After magnificently challenging racism in the most dangerous precincts of the Deep South, Stokely Carmichael and his colleagues in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) succumbed to the impatience, stupidity, and hubris that gave rise to the Black Power slogan, which mischievously vexed the movement from 1966 onward. Nothing in the history of the civil rights era is more doleful than SNCC’s descent. It began as an organization open to anyone committed to challenging racism through defiant, dignified, peaceful protest. It ended as a clique of narrow-minded, blacker-than-thou ideologues who, having gotten rid of all the white members, proceeded to turn on one another.

Many of today’s militants, including antifa activists, hold to a mystique of the Black Panther Party’s achievements.

But what Kennedy writes of the Panthers is true: Its founders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, rightly perceived police misconduct to be a major problem in

ap images

Integration Or Separatism?

Martin Luther King with Stokely Carmichael (upper right) marching in Mississippi, June 1966

more than a decade it did not prevail. Changing white attitudes did not throw open the gates to paradise, but in many dimensions, the lives of African Americans became more livable. This is no small thing, even amid backlash. Most dramatic of all, consider this: In 1958, 4 percent of Americans told Gallup that they approved of marriage between blacks and whites. In 2013, that number was 87 percent.

It’s crucial to understand that the great achievements for African American rights took place during the civil rights era—1955–1966. That is when the legal benchmarks were laid down, when public accommodations and labor markets were desegregated, and voting rights enshrined and accomplished. Racist terrorism declined dramatically. The payoff was symbolic and substantive all at once. It transformed American politics—and also incomes. As Randall Kennedy wrote in the Prospect, “The legislation that arose from the Civil Rights Movement made a huge economic difference.” And it gradually shifted public opinion.

Where did the civil rights model of institutional change break down? In 1966, on the heels of the Voting Rights Act and the Watts riot-rebellion, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference tried to move the movement northward by targeting housing discrimination in Chicago. In white, workingclass southwest side Marquette Park, they were met with bricks, bottles, and rocks. “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South,” King told reporters, “but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago.” Bringing hate into the open had worked in Birmingham (1963) and Selma (1965), but in Chicago it accomplished next to nothing. A “summit meeting” with Chicago housing officials and bankers announced an agreement, but a year later King announced that the authorities had reneged.

The civil rights movement stumbled on, weakened and demoralized, sometimes victorious in local politics, but increasingly the energies of young activists were devoted to black nationalism and the insinuating ambiguities of Black Power. The new icons were Stokely Carmichael (in his no longer integrationist phase), H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver. Nonviolence waned. The cutting-edge goal was now revolution of one sort or another. As backlash gained in America, so did the movement

the American Heartbreak black neighborhoods and aggressively sought to address mistreatment, by policing the police. Unfortunately, the Panthers discredited themselves with obnoxious rhetoric (“Off the pigs!”) and a hankering for association with third-world dictatorships (Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro). The Panthers also naïvely underestimated their enemies, dabbling with provocative gestures that gave police—local, state, and federal—all of the cover needed to rationalize a brutal campaign of repression.

About the civil rights movement proper, the nonviolent movement that prevailed through coalitions, Kennedy is also right: The Civil Rights Movement is one of the most inspiring examples of mass dissent in world history. … The limitations of its achievements are evident. … [A] substantial gap continues to separate blacks and whites. Narrowing [the] gaps is a daunting enterprise. We can, however, take heart from what our forebears were able to achieve.

The Continuing Struggle to Respect Black Lives

Today, inspired by the Trump regime, white racists strut their assault rifles, their Confederate and swastika flags.

Rollbacks mount. During this past summer alone, Trump inflamed the most retrograde elements among the police, urging them not to be “too nice” to suspects, and reversed an Obama executive order to again open the spigots through which surplus military equipment pours into the hands of police. Police departments can now acquire Army surplus bayonets as well as tanks free of charge. Black lives continue not to matter. And so it is not surprising that black activists and their allies are perplexed about how to proceed, and that some black writers go full-acerbity, exercising their bitterness talents to answer the question “How to Respond to White Folks Who Ask How They Can ‘Help.’” Meanwhile, right-wingers blame Black Lives Matter for “fostering the white identity movement.” In their jaundiced view, “white identity” is not backlash against the Obama presidency, it is imitative nationalism. At The Daily Caller, David Benkof considers whether “white identity is the result not of rejecting the worldview of Black Lives Matter, but of embracing it—and extending it to its logical conclusion?”

The fact remains that the black proportion of the American population changed relatively little between 1950 (10 percent) and 2010 (12.6 percent). A Black Lives Matter movement in a majority-black nation, like South Africa, would have different problems.

The states and cities are the main places where American institutions decide whether black lives matter. There are 17 American cities with populations of at least 200,000 where the black population numbers more than half, and

an additional six where the black population runs between 40 percent and 50 percent. Of the ten largest, five (as of 2010) had black populations of at least 25 percent. In none of the ten largest is the black population a majority, nor—at current turnout rates—is the electorate. But these are also the cities to which immigrants and anti-racist millennials have flocked, making it possible to assemble progressive, multiracial coalitions. In such cities, black nationalism is not only unnecessary for reform, it would be counterproductive. Also, as Heather McGhee points out, BLM lacks infrastructure in the black church. The only way to win electoral majorities is with coalition politics. The same goes for implementing laws and regulations against the vast, opaque, irresponsible fortresses of power that run the criminal justice system with impunity.

There is no guarantee, no straightforward map for making black lives matter in practice—for changing institutions, practices, laws, regulations. Police are adroit with stalls and workarounds. They practice the dark arts of circumventing democratic controls. When the demonstrations stop and the headlines swerve away, crowd-pleasing reform gestures and formalities of public regulation cave in the face of police departments’ inertia. If any sections of government deserve the title “deep state” in America, they are the police.

Yet for all the grotesquerie that rises up under the banner “Make America Great Again,” we may someday surprise ourselves to discover that we have been launched into a revived Reconstruction. Perhaps we will discover that the new Jim Crow is a prologue not to a font of notional healing but to new civil rights advances; that the recrudescence of murderous racism is a passing—even a perversely necessary—phase in the movement toward Langston Hughes’s America, “the land that never has been yet—and yet must be.“ Perhaps, when we try to grasp where we stand in the long arc of the moral universe, we will find we stand at the beginning of the middle; that the civil rights era of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., CORE , and SNCC was not a high-water mark; that the road they traveled, the road of supple, nonviolent, cross-racial coalitions, is not easy but it is the only road in town.

For all the grotesquerie that rises up under the banner “Make America Great Again,” we may have begun a second Reconstruction.

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the PhD program at Columbia University. He is a frequent writer on media for BillMoyers.com, and his forthcoming book is a novel called The Opposition. He offers profound thanks to Harry Levine not only for statistics but for his observations on the opacity and resilience of unequal justice.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 29

White Nationalism and Economic Nationalism

By Ro bert Ku ttn er

I

n August, when Stephen Bannon called me out of the blue, I came away from that bizarre conversation impressed with the coherence of his grand strategy, and relieved that Donald Trump has embraced only part of it. As Bannon explained with surprising candor driven by braggadocio, the idea is first to racialize politics— to remind white people, especially those who feel beleaguered, of their whiteness. If race becomes a prime identity for downwardly mobile white people, well, there still are a lot more whites than other colors in the rainbow. And if Democrats can get baited into defining their prime mission and identity as defending the rainbow, the right wins.

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Bannon told me. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.” The press coverage focused on the race part of that quote, but the economic nationalism aspect of the strategy is at least as interesting.

Combining white nationalism with economic nationalism was and is Bannon’s plan. The racist part would rev up a latent sense of white grievance and identify the Trump administration with it. The economic nationalist part would deliver tangible benefits. Damned clever.

Concretely, cracking down on China’s predatory industrial and trade policies would return jobs and industries to America. Likewise renegotiating trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement that have accelerated the outflow of jobs. A big public infrastructure program would produce blue-collar jobs directly and modernize made-in-America technologies. Bannon initially contacted me because I’ve long criticized our indulgence of China’s mercantilism and have advocated a progressive version of industrial policy, a more symmetrical trade system, and lots of public investment—of course, minus the racism.

Bannon thought he detected a kindred soul.

But Trump wasn’t buying the economic part of what Bannon was selling. Why not? Because the pocketbook part of Trump’s economic populism was empty rhetoric.

His top economic hires, Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin,

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are from Goldman Sachs. His commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, is a private-equity guy. Trump’s version of infrastructure investment is privatization, in which Wall Street sells the bonds, and private corporations take over the services and profit by increasing charges to ratepayers and future generations of taxpayers. Trump even floated the idea of selling off FDR’s crown jewels, the great dams and public power systems of the Northwest, which produce America’s lowest-cost and greenest electricity for eight states.

As for China, you’d think that there would be a large corporate constituency for getting tough with Beijing’s strong-arm trade policies. But think again. The essence of the deal you can’t refuse is that China offers American corporations billions in subsidies for them to build stateof-the-art factories in China. Beijing also provides very cheap and docile labor. No worry about unions or strikes.

In return, the American corporation agrees to transfer proprietary technology to China, take on a Chinese “partner,” and produce in China only for export, leaving the immense Chinese domestic market to the local firm.

And guess what—most American companies take the deal. That includes our biggest players in both tech and manufacturing—Intel, G.E., Boeing, and many more. They take the deal because there is so much money to be made.

They take it because U.S. government trade policy fails to take a hard line on China’s combination of extortion and bribery, so the best corporate option is to make a separate peace with Beijing. And Wall Street gets to finance a lot of these deals. When startups in emerging U.S. industries like solar cells go broke because they are underpriced by subsidized Chinese competitors, they either declare bankruptcy or move their factories to China where production costs are lower.

So while you might think there’s a corporate constituency for getting tough with China, for the most part there isn’t. A few niche industries complain. But many big companies that don’t like the terms China has extracted are still reluctant to file complaints, because they don’t want to offend the Chinese.

the American Heartbreak “We’re at economic war with China,” Bannon told me.

Bannon may have been exaggerating when he told a New York Times interviewer, “China right now is Germany in 1930,” but China is indeed a prime economic and geopolitical threat—not because China is so productive but because China defies the rules. Even Donald Trump, the ultra-nationalist pseudo-populist, won’t take on China— because most of Trump’s corporate allies are basically fine with the status quo.

Bannon got canned partly for upstaging his boss, partly for making some over-the-top comments in an interview that he forgot to put off the record, and partly for being totally at odds with the rest of the administration on economic policy. Now that he is free to speak even more loudly, he has doubled down on his critique.

Trump is so in bed with corporate America and Wall Street that even when two hurricanes were heaven-sent to allow him to redefine himself as the Infrastructure President, Trump demurred. Irma and Harvey will cost Florida and Texas upwards of $300 billion, and that doesn’t include long-deferred costs of protecting coasts against storm surges and rebuilding antiquated basic infrastructure.

George W. Bush found a purpose for his feckless presidency after the attacks of September 11. America ended up spending over $3 trillion on self-defeating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You can bet that if a terrorist attack by ISIS rather than retribution by nature had devastated Houston and several cities in Florida, Trump would be maximizing his advantage. Fortunately, he is too compromised and confused to maximize the infrastructure opportunity.

Once you appreciate that the white nationalism was

a deliberate grand design and not just casual racism, a lot of seemingly dumb and random stuff falls into place. In Trump, Bannon had the perfect pupil. Though Trump’s racism did not begin with Bannon—Trump was on his birther kick long before his alliance with Bannon and Breitbart—it was Bannon who fused white nationalism into a deliberate strategy.

Consider the several elements that leave many white people of modest income in the American heartland so aggrieved. First, their economic lives and prospects have gone straight to hell, and it’s even worse for their kids. Thus the populist rhetoric. Second, the Latino influx does produce lots of eager workers, willing to take jobs for low wages.

Thus the hateful slogans about Mexicans as rapists and the wall. When Trump devised the diabolically brilliant slogan “Make America Great Again,” he was evoking a time that middle-America whites remembered, either from their own lives or from memories of their parents or grandparents.

It was a time when blacks knew their place. It was a time

when the only Mexicans were tightly regulated braceros imported as cheap labor for the harvests, who then went home and didn’t come back with their extended families.

It was a time of all-white public schools and neighborhoods, and a time of plentiful blue-collar jobs sufficient for one (white, male) wage-earner to enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The little wife was home raising the kids and putting a hot supper on the table, not juggling jobs, not hectoring her man to find a way to bring in more income and to share housekeeping duties as well. Those days were great—and America was great—at least compared with the lives of much of the working class and downwardly mobile middle class today.

The gender piece is a key part of this, and insufficiently remarked upon. When Trump made outrageous remarks about women, when he loomed over Hillary Clinton like the Incredible Hulk, the dog-whistle message was not the coarseness. It was that he knew how to put women in their place. Like when America was great.

This message is why Trump’s popularity among his base stubbornly refuses to fall, despite his sheer weirdness, his blunders, his failure to deliver. He taps the rage. Though Trump can sometimes seem an incoherent mess, all of this was deliberate and strategic.

Obviously, Democrats are not going

Once you realize that white nationalism was a deliberate grand design to racialize grievances and not just random bigotry, a lot falls into place.

to match Trump’s appeal when it comes to white nationalism, anti-immigrant policies, and sexism. Indeed, Democrats are at severe risk of falling into Bannon’s trap on the politics of identity. The events at Charlottesville widened the potential schisms in the progressive coalition. It left many black Americans feeling that too few whites had done enough to maintain even the partial gains of the civil rights era; that too few whites have joined blacks in combating racism; that working-class whites may have some grievances, but whites remain privileged compared with blacks; that whites still have a lot to do in confronting a racial privilege of which most are unaware.

All sadly true. But try telling a white worker who faces declining wages and job security, lousy health coverage, rising housing costs, and unaffordable college for the kids to “Check your privilege.” Are you kidding? As the Prospect keeps writing in different ways, we need a politics of class uplift and solidarity to overcome the schisms of race, even as we continue to battle racism. There is, of course, a group that is supremely privileged, and it should be the object of common ire—corporations and the wealthy.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 31

This brings me back to economic nationalism. One of

the indicators of the absolute hegemony of the Wall Street view of the world is the standard account of a straw man called “protectionism.” You know the liturgy. You can’t work for a mainstream newspaper or most academic economics departments without internalizing and regurgitating it: Free trade promotes economic efficiency. If we are concerned about income inequality, the remedy is to improve skills, not to seal up our borders. (Who exactly is proposing to seal up our borders?)

Here, for example, is the estimable Eduardo Porter, a senior economics writer for The New York Times, and one of the best. His July 4 piece had the title “Trump’s Trade Choice: Follow the Postwar Order or Blow It Up.” Porter begins, “It seems President Trump is ready to start rolling back globalization.

Let’s hope he doesn’t blow up the postwar economic order.”

According to Porter, Trump might turn his back on the World Trade Organization, as “he retreats from prior American commitments to global trade.” Porter asks, rhetorically, “Will he eschew the multilateral framework in pursuit of a set of bilateral deals, turning his back on a long history of trade diplomacy?”

In fact, the postwar economic order was all about a form of managed capitalism that combined economic dynamism with broad prosperity—but it was blown up about four decades ago. We are now in a whole other global order that serves mainly elites.

The postwar order was destroyed when the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and limits on speculative global capital flows was killed in the early 1970s, in favor of a more classically liberal global system, followed by trade deals crafted by and for corporate and financial elites. Bretton Woods was the work of John Maynard Keynes and thoroughly anomalous radicals temporarily in charge at the U.S. Treasury, led by Harry Dexter White. Keynes intended Bretton Woods to be the international counterpart to his design for a fullemployment domestic economy. It would have a built-in bias toward expansion rather than austerity. With limits on international financial speculation, each country could pursue high growth and full employment without worrying about the bond market destroying them.

In 1945, when Britain came out of the war with a staggering national debt equal to 240 percent of British GDP, the newly elected Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, did not pursue a program of austerity to reassure international creditors. He increased public outlays and built

A progressive form of economic nationalism would spend trillions to rebuild infrastructure and create good jobs.

Let Trump try to trump that.

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a welfare state. Full employment in Britain ensued for three decades. But in 1981, when the newly elected French Socialist President François Mitterrand tried similar policies, the franc was crushed by the newly liberated global bond market, and Mitterrand had to reverse course.

By 2009, when the financial collapse punished innocent bystanders like the Greeks, austerity became axiomatic.

Funnily enough, during the postwar boom there was no far-right backlash. No Trump, no Brexit, no neo-fascist parties as the second-largest in longtime social democracies like Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Austria.

It was the carefully contained brand of globalism that allowed progressive politics to housebreak capitalism in each of the democracies; and the neoliberal brand of globalism that hamstrings the ability of nations to manage a just economy—seeding ugly nationalist reaction.

It is neither coincidence nor contagion that this is occurring throughout the West. The post-1980 brand of globalization destroys the security and the livelihoods of the common people. The fact that so-called center-left leaders in the 1990s—Bill Clinton in the United States, Tony Blair in Britain, and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany—were complicit in the slide to global deregulation has deprived the Democrats, the British Labour Party, and the German Social Democrats of credibility as opposition parties, opening the door to the far right.

The point is that there is more than one brand of globalization. The architecture of globalization that was created after World War II deliberately left plenty of room for each nation to pursue a form of managed capitalism and full employment. If you wanted to specify “buy American,” that was legit. If you wanted to have an industrial policy, no problem. Trade deals were not used as a form of deregulation, as they were beginning with the creation of the World Trade Organization in the 1990s.

Nations were free to run economies pretty much the way they liked. There was no international competition to cut taxes, to liberate speculative finance, or to weaken labor standards. In that era, the economy turned in history’s highest sustained rate of economic growth, and the economy also became more equal. With finance well regulated, there were no financial crises.

This economy was not protectionist in the sense of discouraging trade, which steadily increased throughout the postwar boom, but leaders were serious about protecting worker rights and living standards. And government, deservedly, had a lot more prestige and support than it does today.

The economist Dani Rodrik, a well-mannered critic of the current brand of globalization, has written: “Democracies have the right to protect their social arrangements.

And when this right clashes with the requirements of the global economy, it is the latter that should give way.” Amen!

the American Heartbreak Government needs to explicitly assert its right to prevent global laissez-faire forces from undermining its capacity to devise and broker a decent social compact.

The economists and economics writers who deliver simplistic canned lectures should be given remedial reading to do, starting with Rodrik and Joseph Stiglitz. The debate is not something called “protectionism” versus something called “free trade.” All commerce is predicated on rules, and laissez-faire is not a state of nature. The issue is whether to have a form of global commerce that makes room for a decent brand of economy, as we did in the three decades after World War II. For a century, domestic politics has been about insisting that capitalism treat workers with minimal decency, accord them some bargaining power, make room for needed social investments that markets won’t provide, limit the toll on the environment, and prevent speculative finance from destroying the rest of the economy. The current brand of globalization, quite deliberately, hoses all of that away.

Progressives can never compete with the right in supporting white nationalism. But progressives can and should put forth a program of economic nationalism in the spirit of the postwar boom. Republicans, given their close alliance with global capital, are never going to support the kind of domestic prosperity program that the country needs—one that would be exceptionally popular.

m at t r o u r k e / a p i m a g e s

What would such a program include? For starters, it

needs to deliver tangible benefits in the form of good jobs.

The back-to-back hurricanes were a serious wake-up call.

The damage repair from Harvey and Irma doesn’t count the cost of providing communities with more storm-resistant infrastructure, including surge barriers. In addition to shifting to renewable energy, America needs a massive infrastructure program, in three parts: modernizing basic infrastructure; converting to an economy based on renewable energy; and making communities more resilient to nature’s retribution.

This will cost well into the trillions of dollars. As a program of constructive nationalism, it has multiple benefits.

It produces lots of good jobs directly, all of them domestic.

These include not just construction jobs, but engineering and design jobs, as well as jobs in entire new industries. If these projects are underwritten by American taxation or American public-sector borrowing, it is totally legitimate to demand that the elements be made in America.

Let Trump try to trump that. He can’t and he won’t because his brand of infrastructure spending is a fake, and he and his corporate cronies are more interested in cutting taxes on the wealthy than in using public resources to put Americans back to work at good jobs. And if the WTO doesn’t like it, too bad.

A massive public investment would have an ideological benefit as well as partisan and economic ones. It would demonstrate the value of the public sector and restore some faith in it. It would signal, to coin a phrase, that we are putting American workers first.

On the trade front, the United States needs to become a lot more assertive with China and other nations that practice neo-mercantilism at our expense. China currently benefits from a double standard. It is a developed country in its export sectors but it is given an exemption from trade rules that require open markets, on the premise that it is a developing country. Sorry, but China is sufficiently developed to steal much of America’s industry.

Deals that require transfer of proprietary technology and prohibit U.S. companies from selling in China’s domestic market need to be illegal under U.S. law. The exports back to the United States that result from such deals should be subject to substantial tariffs.

Regarding other trade deals, we should simply cease promoting agreements like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which are not about trade at all. These are about deregulating capitalism, to undermine labor, consumer, environmental, and financial protections, for the benefit of large multinational banks and corporations.

We should also include labor, social, and environmental standards in trade deals. If we have domestic laws against child labor, or against pollution, it makes no sense to pretend that those standards are waived just because products are imported. When we take foreign products made with what is effectively slave labor, or with dirty processes that poison the planet, we import the lower standards along with the products. “Free trade” has never been either axiomatic or even efficient. If we need to regulate capitalism domestically, to compensate for its tendencies to boom and bust and its failure to accurately price both positive and negative externalities (education, research, pollution, financial crashes), markets do not become magically efficient just because products and financial transactions cross borders.

These are the elements of salutary economic nationalism. Trump will never offer them. And purely racist nationalism, unable to remedy the economic problems it exploits, will lose—if progressives offer compelling alternatives.

The Best Cure: lots of good jobs, for the entire rainbow

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 33

Unfriendly Skies It’s time to admit that airline deregulation has failed passengers, workers— and economic efficiency. By David Dayen

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o p p o s i t e : r o b e r t o a . s a n c h e z / i s t o c k b y g e t t y ; t h i s pa g e : a p i m a g e s

W

hen Dr. David Dao was forcibly economic vitality of U.S. cities today as rail ity and reasonable service for every American.

It’s strange to see CAB so derided in retroremoved from United Airlines access was in the 19th century. If manufacturers or farmers could use railroads to get Flight 3411 on April 9, with cell spect, since it presided over tremendous growth phone cameras documenting goods to market, they could thrive. Rail bar- in commercial aviation. New jets like the 747 the display, the uproar was ons used this inherent power to fix prices and (initially a military cargo plane) and the DC-10, immediate. People were infuriated by United’s gouge customers dependent on their services. which could transport hundreds more passenresort to brutality, by the use of law enforce- Eventually government stepped in to regulate gers per flight, made air travel available to the ment to solve an overbooking problem, by the railroads as public utilities, ensuring broad masses. There’s a myth that, before deregulabloodied face of the doctor, and by United CEO access throughout the country while allowing tion, flights were restricted to the privileged Oscar Munoz’s ham-handed apology for “re- a reasonable profit for the private companies few. In actuality, while only 33 percent of that managed them.

Americans over 18 had taken a plane trip in accommodating” customers.

The United States adapted the public utility 1962, by 1977 (when airlines were still reguBut the real outrage should be directed at the model to air travel in 1938, putting control of lated) that number had climbed to 63 percent. fact that abuse of passengers is the logical endBut aviation is incredibly sensitive to the point of a 40-year trend since the government the fledgling industry under the auspices of the business cycle. Fuel price spikes liberated the airline industry.

Until 1978, air travel was heavily and recessions (which lead to cutregulated. In that year, some of backs in lucrative corporate travthe nation’s most celebrated liberel) hit hard. The 1973 oil embargo als joined conservatives in trustand subsequent malaise led to ing free markets. A brief rush of CAB -approved fare increases and a moratorium on new route competition in the 1980s gave way licenses. “It was a rational move to consolidation and monopoly by regulators and the industry, power, at the expense of workers but it appeared to consumers as and passengers alike. Today, four anti-consumer,” says Paul Stecarriers control 80 percent of all phen Dempsey, a law professor U.S. routes. at McGill University.

The industry’s recipe for record profitability has been to ratchet up misery on travelers bit by bit. You The drive to kill CAB came cannot opt out of the suffering; from a surprising source: liberyou cannot vote with your wallet als. Ralph Nader, for example, to find another flight—if you want attacked the board for being capDeregulation Dupe: Alfred Kahn, President Carter’s head of the CAB, favored dismantling it. to get from Chicago to Louisville, tured by an industry it protected you have to sit back (not very far back) and take new Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). Officials from competition. But the real ringleader was it. And if the airlines want to violently pull you recognized that, similar to railroads, a reliable Ted Kennedy. Future Supreme Court Justice off the plane? What are you going to do, drive? aviation network was a potent economic devel- Stephen Breyer, a staff aide who ran Kennedy’s Today, democracy ends at the gate entrance. opment tool. You can’t be a major-league city Senate Judiciary subcommittee on adminisThe government relinquished control of the and attract business investment without an air- trative practices and procedures, convinced airline industry to a handful of CEO s—and port with national reach. The Roosevelt admin- his boss that taking on CAB would make him more important, to a handful of shareholders istration believed air travel, like rails, was a a hero to the consumer, amid spiking inflation on Wall Street. We merely converted regula- “public convenience and necessity,” instead of and unemployment. Labor unions objected, tion by and for the public into regulation by hoping the free market would provide it. but market-oriented liberal economists longed plutocrats, who now rule the friendly skies in CAB guaranteed airlines a 12 percent profit to ditch central planners like CAB. Alfred Kahn, then a professor at Cornell, their own interest. The airline industry’s spiral on a flight that was 55 percent full. If fuel or other fixed costs rose, fares could go up; if they was a leading voice, promising that dereguepitomizes the shifts in our economy since the Reagan era—deregulation, financialization, fell, prices had to drop. In addition, airlines had lation, then a new concept, would make airwage stagnation, and abuse of market power. to serve the entire nation, with more popular lines more efficient, and benefit consumers, “It’s the perfect example, too perfect in some routes effectively subsidizing the flights to the employees, and stockholders. Airline routes, ways,” says Northeastern University economics outskirts. CAB’s control was rather strict; air- Kahn said, were “contestable,” no matter the professor John Kwoka. “And since we all spend lines had to get permission to alter routes and huge startup costs. Dismantling CAB would fares, or even change uniform colors. But the force even a monopoly carrier to lower prices our lives in the air, it hits home.”

Access to air travel is as important to the idea was to maintain a standard of accessibil- because of the mere threat of competition.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 35

As Paul Stephen Dempsey wrote in a 1990 chronicle of deregulation for the Economic Policy Institute called “Flying Blind,” economists believed entry and pricing restrictions led to “excessive service” for passengers who were paying for more frills than they really wanted, while airlines were denied “adequate profits.”

In other words, the fliers were too comfortable and the corporations too poor. Making flying less relaxing to the passenger and more profitable to the corporation was the real premise of deregulation, regardless of hype about open competition and lower prices.

Kennedy’s subcommittee held hearings and issued reports throughout the mid-1970s, winning support from Democratic Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada, who had jurisdiction over the matter. (Cannon also got pushed by casino owners in his state who desired cheaper tourist flights.) And when Jimmy Carter became president, he appointed Kahn to run CAB. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 passed almost unanimously; liberals and conservatives united in anti-government sentiment.

When Carter signed it in October of that year, he said: “When I announced my own support of airline deregulation soon after taking office, this bill had few friends. I’m happy to say that today it appears to have few enemies.”

But there was at least one opponent. At one of the hearings, a man Tom Petzinger Jr. described in the book Hard Landing as a “mean-looking fellow with pointed teeth and slicked-back hair” approached a Kennedy staffer and told him, “You [bleeping] academic eggheads! You’re going to wreck this industry!” That man was Bob Crandall, then American Airlines’ head of marketing and later its CEO. “And I think they have wrecked it,” Crandall said to me in an interview, 40 years later. “They didn’t take into account the need for a universal system. And there’s simply no competition. Trading all that off against cheap fares is a crock of shit.”

In the immediate aftermath, deregula-

tion appeared to work as predicted. A rush of low-cost brands like People Express and Air Florida took on the majors. Prices did go down— although some important context, conveniently forgotten by boosters of the policy, needs to be included. Deregulation fortuitously coincided

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with a crash in oil markets; prices dropped from $37 a barrel in 1980 to around $14 by 1986. This accounts for much of the airfare plunge.

Plus, fares were plummeting by 1978, even amid an oil spike. At the time of deregulation, America already had the world’s lowest airfares.

In Dempsey’s paper “Flying Blind,” he used the industry’s own data to determine that, once adjusted for fuel costs, airfares fell about 2.7 percent annually in the decade prior to deregulation, and 2 percent annually in the subsequent decade. In other words, the price drops just

It’s a myth that consumers benefited from the change.

Adjusting for fuel costs, average airline fares fell at a faster rate before deregulation than after it. continued a trend—decelerated it, in fact—seen well before Alfred Kahn and friends came on the scene. Most of the post-deregulation price benefits came in 1978 and 1979—decreases slowed to a crawl after that. “The case for a gain to consumers from deregulation,” Dempsey wrote, “is entirely vacuous, to put it charitably.”

This is a critical point. If airfares fell at a slower rate after deregulation than they did before, it blows up the primary case for the entire change. Yet Dempsey and David B. Richards, another researcher who reached the same conclusions, were practically the only economists to make this connection. The official story typically only boasts about the post-deregulation period. “Go online and try to find the pre1980 prices,” says David Morris, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a critic of the impact of deregulation on smaller cities.

“You won’t—it’s like the world started in 1980.”

After deregulation, the system of delivering air travel also changed, from nonstop point-topoint service to a hub-and-spoke setup, with more connections from airports dominated by a single carrier. “It’s an efficient way to market their product because it allowed a larger array of destinations,” said Dempsey. “But it’s an inefficient way to provide the product.”

Centralizing activity in hubs maximized pricing power and added airport congestion. The environment suffered from extra takeoffs and landings and out-of-the-way detours to hub cities. Startup airlines gradually found open slots at hub airports hard to come by. Even the hub cities did not benefit greatly from becoming hubs; passengers just changed planes at the airport rather than experiencing the city.

As the old CAB guarantee of a national network ended, airlines dropped unprofitable routes and smaller cities became virtually frozen out of air service. A hundred cities fell off the commercial aviation map in just the first two years of deregulation. By the 1980s, the only way to fly into state capitals like Dover, Delaware, or Salem, Oregon, was by private plane. Inaccessibility made these outposts less attractive to business, with jarring effects to local economies.

Before long, the burst of competition led to a washout. Just in the 1980s, 200 airlines went bankrupt, including majors like Eastern and Braniff. Competition turned destructive, as price wars quickly crippled businesses with large fixed costs like airplanes. CAB had denied additional city routes; critics liked to bring up the horror story of Continental waiting eight years to get approval to fly from Denver to San Diego. But CAB based its determinations on customer demand. Without bureaucrats holding the reins, competitors rushed into unprofitable routes and imploded.

Bankruptcies led inexorably to concentration. After CAB dissolved, the Department of Transportation took jurisdiction for airline mergers, and they never denied one, finally losing the authority to the Department of Justice in 1990. Between 1979 and 1988, 51 airlines merged. Even Alfred Kahn, architect of deregulation, admitted in 1990 that the industry was a “tight oligopoly.”

Incredibly, the Airline Deregulation Act specifically directed the government to guard

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against “unreasonable industry concentration” and “excessive market domination.” But somehow Kahn never saw it coming. “Alfred Kahn was one of my teachers at Cornell,” said David Morris. He described writing a letter to Kahn showing no difference in pricing trends before and after deregulation. “His response was he overlooked the possibility of monopoly.”

largest flight attendant union. “The pay is not for a middle-class income anymore,” she says.

Crews made up for it by flying more; a cap on time in the air was lifted to increase workloads.

Starting salaries for pilots, particularly at the regional airlines, can be as low as $20,000 a year. Reduced options due to industry consolidation left most employees with no choice.

A lesser-known consequence of worker restructuring was the outsourcing of repair work overseas, to low-cost operations in El Salvador, Mexico, and China. While U.S. maintenance jobs fell nearly one-third since 2000, planes now routinely get serviced abroad, away

report in 2011 found that the PBGC cut United pensions too deeply, and US Airways pilots fought for higher payouts for over a decade. “It really affects workers close to retirement, five to ten years away, who are not able to retire,” says Sara Nelson.

According to Paul Stephen Dempsey, Ted Kennedy never recognized at the time how deregulation might impact labor, especially as the industry bust shook out. “This never came out,” Dempsey said, “but Kennedy subsequently said to his staff, you never told me this would be the result.”

Today we’re down to three legacy carriers: United, American, and Delta. Southwest maintains its reputation as a “low-cost” disruptor but has begun to control certain airports as well.

“When they dominate, they don’t leave money on the table either,” says economics After bankruptcy shed costs, professor John Kwoka. Four out of four key mergers represented the every five passengers in America final consolidation of the industry flies with one of these four comafter the 2008 meltdown. Earlier, panies. And in 93 of the top 100 the Bush Department of Justice airports, either one or two airhad blocked a proposed US Airways/United deal in 2001. But lines control a majority of all seats. when Northwest and Delta petiThere is a tacit understanding to tioned to merge in 2008, Bush’s stay out of each other’s turf, to protect everyone’s pricing power; DOJ waved it through, without competing airlines only schedule any conditions. That encouraged the rest of the industry to follow a handful of flights into a competisuit. “D.C. finally threw its hands tor’s hub. “You don’t find Delta tryup and said, ‘Let the airlines coning to get into Chicago, you don’t solidate,’” says Dempsey. find United getting into MinneapUnder President Obama, the olis or Atlanta,” says Morris. “You United/Continental and Southhave these little fiefdoms.” west/AirTran deals followed, the This dominance flowed from “We’re Number 14”: Big hubs maximize airlines’ pricing power but add to congestion. latter notable because it removed two critical bend points, each coinciding with economic catastrophe. First from Federal Aviation Administration inspec- a low-cost carrier that was aggressively forcing there was September 11, which fundamentally tors and in ways that local mechanics have crit- prices downward and just starting to expand. transformed air travel and the companies that icized as slipshod. Most of the overseas repair Finally, American and US Airways announced provide it. The financial crisis of 2008, which hit workers don’t speak English even though the their intentions to combine in 2013. Obama’s Justice Department initially filed suit to block just as airlines had clawed back to profitability, technical manuals are written in English.

The main targets for airline bankruptcies the merger, arguing that “increasing consolidahad a similar crushing effect. Every major airline declared bankruptcy in the 2000s, primar- were pensions. US Airways terminated its pilot tion among large airlines has hurt passengers”— ily employing it to shed “legacy costs,” or what pensions and shifted to 401(k) plans in 2003; even though they played a major role in that by workers call wages and benefits.

Delta did the same in 2006. United used a gru- allowing the United and Southwest deals.

But within three months, DOJ changed About one-fifth of full-time airline jobs were eling, 30-month bankruptcy to terminate pencourse, after significant lobbying from former eliminated between 2001 and 2005. Mainline sion obligations for four plans affecting 134,000 Obama administration officials, including ex– jobs evaporated as airlines contracted with workers in 2005. Attorney James Sprayrethe equivalent of low-cost temps, regional jet gen, who handled the bankruptcy for United, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who signed a letcompanies who wear the same colors as United admitted to PBS’s Frontline that the company ter written by an airline lobbyist encouraging or American but actually work for a differ- deliberately dragged out the process, adding the deal. DOJ merely forced the divestiture of ent carrier. Those left at the majors suffered concessions gradually to prevent labor unrest. some gate slots at airports in Washington and Existing pensions shifted to the Pension New York. “If you have smaller entrants that across-the-board wage cuts of 30 percent to 40 Benefit Guaranty Corporation, where payouts can step up, that’s good to inject competitive percent, according to Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, the dropped significantly. An inspector general’s discipline,” says Diana Moss of the American

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 37

and particular routes, a sort of non-aggression policy can emerge, where one airline agrees to not go after another’s main sources of revenue.

(The Justice Department sued the airline industry over ATPCo in 1992; the case was settled with few restrictions and ATPCo’s use went on.)

Capacity cutbacks, the focus of DOJ’s collusion investigation, are practically celebrated inside the airlines as one of the major legacies of deregulation and consolidation. From 55 percent targets in the 1970s, planes are now nearly 85 percent full on average, and that doesn’t count crew members shuttling to catch their

Delta Blues: Travelers endured hundreds of canceled and delayed flights during Delta’s global computer outage in August 2016.

flight schedules, crowd cabins, and raise fares.

“This was in their own complaint!” Kwoka notes, pointing to the Justice Department’s initial lawsuit, which detailed numerous examples of airline coordination. The investigation quietly closed this year with no action taken.

The notion that airlines coordinate is comically self-evident. Airlines have their own internal price-tracking tool called the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCo). Owned by the airlines, ATPC o delivers real-time information on every published fare across the United States. Large teams of number-crunchers at every airline monitor ATPCo daily for fare changes, and copy the competition’s movements. With large carriers entrenched in hubs

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next flight. Supply and demand dictates that fewer seats lead to higher fares, while maximizing revenue from every takeoff. Airline executives want to keep it that way; in industry conferences, they’ve explicitly talked of maintaining “capacity discipline” on flight schedules.

Though prices increased after mergers began, the industry claims that fares have fallen for the past three years. This statistic is incredibly misleading, because it doesn’t count ancillary fees, a growing profit center. In essence, practically everything you used to get for free on a plane now costs you: a hot meal, a comfortable seat, an in-flight movie, checked baggage, the flexibility to change flights. Airlines added fuel surcharges and kept them on even after

oil prices dropped; in 2011 they raised base fares when FAA authorization lapsed and federal taxes could not be collected temporarily, pocketing the difference without the consumer realizing it. Fees and other charges represented a little over one-tenth of all revenue in 1995; today the figure is over one-quarter. Last year, U.S. airlines made $20.2 billion in ancillary revenue, according to research firm IdeaWorks; that’s more than two times industry profits.

The ancillary fees play off other innovations to maximize the revenue potential of travelers’ behavioral responses. For instance, checked-bag fees give passengers incentives to bring their roller-bags on board. That makes getting on first to find space in the overhead bin a priority. So airlines started charging for pre-boarding. Plus, moving baggage onto the plane allowed airlines to cut costs on baggage handlers. Eliminating meals in the main cabin enabled airlines to reduce the size of the galley, opening more space for seats. The personal entertainment device on the seat-back seems like a new amenity, until you realize it allows airlines to isolate and charge for viewing in ways they couldn’t with a communal screen.

Airlines have also shrunk what is called “seat pitch,” the measurement from one seat to the one behind it. Every inch removed between rows equals another row of seats that can be added to the back of the plane, and at least six more paying customers. The cramped quarters lead many to cry uncle and pay for “preferred” seating, which mostly have the same seat pitch that was standard in coach 10 or 20 years ago.

Fee structures like this can only work if there’s no competition on quality to lure passengers away from being nickeled and dimed.

Virtually all airlines have added the same charges; if anything, the low-cost carriers like Spirit Airlines are worse, charging for seat assignments, online booking, a soda, and any carry-on larger than a purse. While most carriers derive about 26 percent of their revenue from ancillary fees, for Spirit it’s a whopping 46 percent. The ticket fares simply bear no resemblance to how much you’ll pay.

United and its legacy colleagues have taken cues from Spirit with “Basic Economy” fares, which entitle you to little more than a seat and a seat belt. According to industry consultant Mark Gerchick’s book Full Upright

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Antitrust Institute. “I worry that with so few low-cost carriers, we don’t have that dynamic.”

Crandall, the former American CEO, supported the merger, but only because the industry was too far gone. “You already let consolidation, you can’t say to US Airways and American, you can’t do it,” he says. “If I was king of Spain, I wouldn’t allow any mergers of any kind anywhere in the business world. I’d rather have millions of CEOs making decisions than three.”

Just 18 months after the American deal closed, the Justice Department opened an investigation into airlines colluding to reduce

and Locked Position, the ancillary fee gurus at IdeaWorks ran a weekend “ancillary revenue training camp” in 2012 to brainstorm additional revenue streams. Airline lobbyists call it “giving customers more choice,” but for passengers it comes down to how much they’re willing to pay for a modicum of comfort.

This gouging and cramping and inconveniencing was bound to manifest in cabin rage, with underpaid, understaffed flight crews on the front lines. “Airlines are staffing at the minimums in the domestic market,” says union leader Sara Nelson. “In some cases, there’s a 50 percent reduction, with more seats and more people filling seats.” Flight attendants are taught to de-escalate and keep problems off the plane, but frustrations have boiled over.

In April, a worker at American appeared to hit a woman with a baby stroller; she was suspended. Another video showed a Delta pilot smacking a woman to break up a fight between passengers. A woman flying United in May said she was forced to urinate in a plastic cup mid-flight because the seat belt sign was illuminated. A Frontier crewmember kicked off a father and daughter in August (after the flight was delayed eight hours) after overhearing them criticizing the flight attendants; the crewmember said she felt threatened. United gave a 2-year-old’s seat away accidentally in July and made his mother hold him the entire three-hour flight from Houston to Boston. The woman said she didn’t make a scene because “I started remembering all those incidents with United on the news.”

The consequences for passengers can be grave. Disobeying a flight crew constitutes a federal felony under the Patriot Act. Paul Hudson of Flyers Rights, a consumer organization, estimates between 400 and 500 prosecutions on that statute since 2002, none of them terrorism-related. “This has essentially been a license to crack the whip on passengers,” Hudson says. And there’s a severe power imbalance at work, he adds. “People don’t realize, as a practical matter passengers are exempted from all legal remedies except for injury or death.”

Hudson explains that deregulation prevented states from instituting rules based on “service,” which industry attorneys have interpreted to mean anything the airline does in terms of operations. The Department of

Transportation takes complaints—they have jumped 70 percent since the Dr. Dao incident in April—but mostly they’re filed away for statistical purposes. “If an airline violates a rule they can be fined, however the individuals involved, they don’t get a thing,” says Hudson.

And typically the fines are reduced or even waived if the airline cooperates and promises to improve. For dragging Dr. Dao off Flight 3411, United won’t even face a fine.

But blaming passengers or crewmembers for flare-ups in the cabin, as an anonymous Delta

Blaming harassed crew members or stressed passengers for increasing cabin flare-ups misses the point. Both are victims of a perverse system. employee pointed out, misses the point. They are both exploited by unforgiving corporate behemoths. The raised tension inside the plane draws attention away from the elephant in the aisle. Deregulation was supposed to increase competition. Mainly, it increased concentration and market power. That’s why airlines keep getting away with the relentless degradation of service.

The problems on the airplane are magnified by the problems getting off the ground, which monopolization has significantly worsened. Hub-and-spoke setups inevitably lead to delays if one of the hubs experiences bad weather or some other tie-up. The vast majority of all flight delays can be traced back to a handful of large airports—such as New York and Chicago—where giant amounts of air traf-

fic flow through on a given day. (Hurricane Harvey could cost United as much as $265 million because its hub in Houston controls 17 percent of its flight capacity.)

The smaller competitors don’t value getting their planes off the ground and to destinations on time. “We don’t necessarily believe that it’s cost-effective to end up in the top quartile for on-time performance,” senior vice president at Frontier Airlines Daniel Shurz said to Bloomberg. They simply don’t want to spend the money honoring the arrival time stamped on your ticket.

For the major carriers, scarcely a few months go by without hearing about a computer glitch grounding thousands of flights. American suffered a system-wide crash in 2013; United in 2015 and 2017; Southwest in 2016; and Delta both last year and this year. With so few carriers, individual airlines service a higher percentage of flights, so these glitches cascade through the system, causing planes stranded at gates, missed connections, and inability for crews to keep on schedule. And with pricing algorithms making sure planes fly nearly full, the system has little if any spare capacity to deal with cancellations.

One glitch can snarl traffic for a week.

In the regulatory era, passengers were able to take a ticket for a delayed flight to another airline and have it automatically honored.

Now the “reciprocity rule” is voluntary. And because airlines have gotten so big and have so few empty seats, they’ve refused to re-book customers from competitors. Ironically, Delta, the most troubled airline recently in terms of computer meltdowns, kicked this off by denying re-booking for United and American passengers without more compensation.

As Delta’s CEO has admitted, airlines do not typically upgrade IT after mergers, instead piling one legacy system of reservations and flight departures and crew schedules on top of another. With multiple mergers going back decades, this means that computer networks have elements lurking in them dating back to the 1990s. A report from Diana Moss of the American Antitrust Institute has demonstrated how computer meltdowns become more prevalent after mergers.

These mergers were actually sold on the basis of creating “efficiencies,” specifically from integrating computer systems. But the efficien-

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 39

cies seldom work out, and the integration costs always end up higher than the initial estimate.

“Few of these cost savings are being realized,” Moss said. “The behemoth airline with a behemoth IT system is not working well.” But since passengers have nowhere else to go, airlines aren’t terribly interested in making the investments to remedy the situation. It’s not really about efficiency; it’s about market power.

The greatest booster of airline industry concentration is Wall Street. There was a time when investors steered clear of airline stocks.

But in a 2014 research note, Goldman Sachs highlighted airlines as part of its “dreams of oligopoly,” counseling investors to “look for opportunities created by disruptive consolidation” that generates “greater … pricing power with customers due to reduced choice, … stronger leverage over suppliers, and higher barriers to new entrants all at once.”

After rumors of the American/US Airways deal arose in late 2012, the four major airline stocks jumped more than 135 percent within a year. This May, Brad Gerstner, chief executive of Altimeter Capital Management, told the prestigious Sohn investment conference that the sketchy past performance of the sector is dead and buried: Industry consolidation is “making all the difference.” By July, stocks were at a 16-year high, though they have fallen since then due to pilot disputes and rising fuel costs (fuel is so central to airline fortunes that Delta bought an oil refinery in 2012). And the beneficiaries of this monopoly-infused rally are so few, you could probably fit them all in United’s executive suite.

A growing body of research looks at the trend of “common ownership,” in which large institutional investors own nominal competitors in a particular industry. In March, Martin Schmalz, José Azar, and Isabel Tecu wrote a research paper showing that asset management firms BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, hedge fund PAR Capital Management, and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (a recent convert to airline stocks) are all among the top ten investors in the four major airlines. BlackRock, Vanguard, and PAR also hold large shares in the next two, JetBlue and Alaska. There was a day in April, in the midst of United’s Dr. Dao fiasco, where Warren Buffett made $104 million on his airline holdings in just one trading session.

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The researchers found that ticket prices on the average airline route are 3 percent to 7 percent higher under this brand of collective Wall Street ownership than they would be under separate ownership. In other words, common ownership was a surprisingly damaging manifestation of market power, according to the data. Schmalz, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, sees the lack of competition from common ownership as mostly unconscious.

“Investors say, we don’t tell firms to compete

The winner in a system that rewards congestion, cramped seating, overbooking and overcrowding, falling wages, and hidden charges?

Wall Street, of course! less. I ask, do you ever call up two firms and tell them to compete aggressively? They say that’s absurd. I say, if you weren’t the largest owner, somebody else would call them up!” In other words, the very fact a common owner in airline stocks may not specifically call executives allows those executives to have a “quiet life,” unburdened by pressure from above to secure additional market share, whether through price wars or expanding route capacity.

That’s not to say that Wall Street hasn’t made their intentions for the industry known. Public earnings calls are filled with minute discussions of specific routes. Schmalz’s paper cites one portfolio manager criticizing “growth initiatives out of L.A., Seattle,” and warning that “adding capacity into other airlines’ hubs diminishes your shareholders’ confidence and jeopardizes [your stock price].” Another invest-

ment manager is quoted as saying, “I’d like to see [Southwest Airlines] boost their fares but also cut capacity.” Stock analysts write reports longing for airlines to “rein in supply growth.”

In 2014, JetBlue CEO David Barger decided to compete on quality. The company’s sparkling planes offered 34 inches of seat pitch in the main cabin, the best in the industry. Checked bags and WiFi service were free. And stock analysts hated it. They beat up Barger for being “overly concerned” with customers rather than shareholder returns. And they essentially ran him out of town. Two months after Barger stepped down, JetBlue rolled back the legroom and raised fees on baggage and Internet. “You’ve got to conform to the model,” said John Kwoka.

“Deviations from the norm get punished.”

More recently, in late April, American Airlines CEO Doug Parker announced modest pay increases for pilots and flight attendants, who previously were making below the industry average. Wall Street again went ballistic.

“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers,” scribbled Citi analyst Kevin Crissey. J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Baker said the action “establishes a worrying precedent, in our view, both for American and the industry.” Not only did American’s stock price tank, so did every major airline stock, as investors punished the whole industry because one of its leaders dared to side with employees.

“The boards of directors and management of the airlines have got to be mature and tough enough to say to Wall Street, I’m running it, you’re not,” says Bob Crandall, American’s former CEO. But the line between executive and shareholder isn’t so clear-cut. Bonus packages for top executives in the industry are now almost entirely tied to short-term stock performance; awards linked to customer satisfaction or on-time arrivals have been jettisoned. The executives want to ditch the old days of fare wars and comfortable passengers as much as the investors.

In sum, airline deregulation has been disastrous for workers, frustrating for travelers, and devastating for communities. When hubs pulled up stakes in cities like Cincinnati, Memphis, and St. Louis, their link to the global economy withered, as business travel became difficult and exceedingly expensive. “It’s like

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Walmart came into town and then Walmart fic control, which critics charge would hand see clearly its negative consequences. People no left town,” says David Morris. As Washington over primary oversight of air safety to a board longer want to accept the mental and physical Monthly detailed in 2012, major businesses comprised disproportionately of representa- toll just to get from point A to point B. Even and convention-goers have abandoned heart- tives of airlines and major airports. This could the Democratic Party’s “Better Deal” campaign land cities because of the inability to easily block competition even further, by preventing specifically goes after the airline industry as too travel across the country. traffic over certain prized territories. Sully concentrated and too powerful.

Delta has touted how it takes advantage of Sullenberger, perhaps the most popular avia“The passenger is basically expected to the paucity of regional air service by raising tion figure in America, narrated ads warn- sit down and shut up,” says Paul Stephen fares and profit margins. Leaving communities ing against allowing “a corporate monopoly to Dempsey. “If you don’t like it, what are you behind like this would have been impossible make decisions that put profits ahead of safety going to do about it?” under CAB. This aerial divide fosters regional and would devastate rural communities.” The Changing the mindset is the first step to inequality, with societal gains going dispropor- Senate rejected the Trump plan, though it’s changing the policy. If we agree that regulation tionately to a handful of cities lucky enough to still lurking in a House version of an FAA reau- by CEOs and investors doesn’t serve Americans, have a functioning airport and reasonable prices. thorization bill that must pass in September. we can return to rule by the people. We can “It’s also what helped put Donald restore federal authority to impose Trump in the White House,” says quality-of-service standards. We Crandall, reasoning that the large can mandate universal access, givclusters of regions not benefiting ing every citizen, regardless of his from economic growth rebelled or her location, the opportunity of against the regime in Washingair travel. That includes cross-subton that presided over their plight. sidizing less-profitable routes and So what can be done today? reinstituting some form of reasonConsumer advocates like Flyers able price regulation. We can talk Rights have begun to fight back, about building new airports— against large odds. In July, the there hasn’t been a single major group scored a major victory in one built in America since 1995, federal court, forcing the FAA to in Denver, which bulldozed their old one the same day—or at least issue rules it requested in 2015 mandating minimum seat sizes opening up slots in existing termiand legroom on planes. “We did nals through forced divestment. it on safety and health grounds, We could mandate reasonable serbecause they claimed no jurisdicvice throughout the country as an Cramped And Gouged: Underpaid and understaffed crews suffer along with the passengers. tion for comfort,” Paul Hudson of economic engine for smaller cities Flyers Rights says. “We said confining on longThis is not to say that Washington has neu- and regions. We could use the antitrust powers haul flights increases chances of blood clots.” tered the airlines meaningfully. The main for what they were meant for, to eliminate antiIn advance of the ruling, American tossed out industry trade group, Airlines for America, competitive behavior. If that means breaking up a plan to drop seat pitch to 29 inches on its 737 and individual corporations in the aviation the big airlines, so be it. planes, perhaps running into its customers’ sector spend over $85 million a year in lobbyMore broadly, we need to see the airline breaking point. ing. They’ve personally asked Trump to pre- industry as a microcosm of the way the U.S. The Dr. Dao incident (which was settled vent foreign competition from Middle Eastern economy now works: for the benefit of small out of court) has at least temporarily led to airlines on domestic routes. The last serious groups of shareholders and executives rather a slowing down of the standard practice of legislative win for consumers, a regulation pre- than the mass public. The freedom of movement overbooking flights. Southwest pledged to stop venting airlines from stranding passengers on is too important to leave its governance to such overbooking, and United vowed to use data the tarmac for more than three hours, took a tiny sliver of the population. The problem with analytics to reduce the need to bump passen- eleven years to complete. airlines reflects the problem with democracy in gers. In August, the Transportation DepartBut importantly, advocates and even ordinary America. And we don’t have to stand for it, or sit ment found that passengers were bumped in people are thinking and speaking about the air- with our seat belt securely fastened. the first half of the year at the lowest rate since lines in a new way. People understood the violent 1995, with the biggest drop coming after Dr. ejection of Dr. Dao as a byproduct of an oligopoly David Dayen is a contributing writer to The Dao’s removal in April. that doesn’t have to care about consumer com- Nation and author of Chain of Title: How Pilot and labor groups activated when Presi- fort. People no longer look at deregulation with Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall dent Trump floated a plan to privatize air traf- reverence; they’re skeptical of its benefits and Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 41

Slaying the

Partisan Gerrymander With extreme gerrymanders on the rise, it is time for the Supreme Court— and the states—to curb a practice that has gotten out of control.

Two North Carolina Republican state senators, Dan Soucek, left, and Brent Jackson, right, review historical maps of legislative districts, February 16, 2016. Republican-controlled redistricting in that state exemplifies the rise of extreme partisan gerrymanders.

G

errymandering is an old phenomenon with new dimensions and heightened significance for American democracy. Thanks to technology and political polarization, the effects of partisan gerrymandering since 2012 have been more pronounced than at any point in the previous 50 years.

Close to a hundred congressional seats and thousands of state legislative seats have been strategically drawn to be noncompetitive at the expense of all other interests. As a consequence, tens of millions of voters have had no meaningful say in who represents them.

In this year’s Supreme Court term, the justices have taken up the constitutionality of partisan gerrymander-

42 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2017

ing in a case involving state legislative districts drawn by Republicans in Wisconsin. A key question for the Court will be whether neutral statistical tools can reliably detect partisan gerrymanders. We believe that such tools are available, and it is time for the courts to apply them.

Any party in power, if left unchecked, is likely to abuse the redistricting process. But the recent abuses come almost entirely from one party in particular. In the last redistricting cycle after the 2010 census, Republicans dramatically increased their representation through creative map-drawing in many states at once. Their efforts led to nationwide gains in representation larger than any in recent history.

While legal scholars tend to approach gerrymanders on

c o r e y lo w e n s t e i n / t h e n e w s & observer via ap images

By S am Wang and Brian R e m ling e r

sion, the most loyal partisan voters have great influence over who is nominated and therefore elected in November.

This is true in any district that is dominated by one party, and gerrymandering increases the number of such districts.

Motive, Means, and Opportunity

What led to this sea change in partisan gerrymandering?

Recent Republican maneuvers required the convergence of multiple factors, several of which were unavailable to Democrats. Like a crime procedural, the causes of modern partisan gerrymandering can be sorted into three parts: motive, means, and opportunity.

Motive: Partisan polarization. Extreme partisan redistricting is part of a general pattern since the mid-1990s that the legal scholar Mark Tushnet calls “constitutional hardball.” When politicians and parties play hardball, they change government in fundamental ways and in violation

Number of Extreme Partisan Gerrymanders ■ democratic ■ republican

1

20

7

4

1

Number of Seats Gained from Extreme Partisan Gerrymanders

1

1

1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s R e d i st ri ct i ng Cycle

Se ats gai ne d

a case-by-case basis, we have developed statistical tests to measure the extent of partisan bias whenever districts are redrawn. By applying those tests to all cases of congressional redistricting over the past half-century, we have been able to paint a unified picture of the trends in partisan gerrymandering. Available at gerrymander.princeton.edu, our data show that only since 2000 has extreme partisan distortion in congressional districting occurred in more than one state at a time. Those extreme distortions culminated in the Great Republican Gerrymander of 2012, encompassing seven states at once.

We define an extreme partisan gerrymander as a redistricting plan that simultaneously violates two or more statistical tests (see sidebar, “Can Math Assist in Saving Democracy?”). The use of multiple tests can help ensure the robustness of a judgment that a redistricting map is indeed a partisan gerrymander.

Although Democrats also gerrymander, Democratic gerrymanders that distort representation by more than one seat have been rare in the past half-century. The most prominent case occurred in California after the 1980 census, when a plan concocted by Representative Phil Burton netted Democrats three to five seats. Democrats devised similar schemes on a smaller scale in Texas in the 1990s and North Carolina in the 2000s. But at a national level, the total effect of these schemes was small.

Gerrymandering increased in frequency in 2002, with five state gerrymanders—four Republican, one Democratic—and again in 2012 to seven, this time all Republican (see figure). According to our analysis as well as that of the Brennan Center, Republicans have gained between 15 and 20 congressional seats above what partisan-neutral maps would have yielded.

Some analysts claim that Democrats have been at a disadvantage not because of redistricting but because their voters are more clustered geographically. But that geographic pattern does not fully explain Democrats’ recent electoral disadvantage. On the basis of clustering alone, Democrats need to win the national popular vote for the House of Representatives by two percentage points to have an even chance of winning a majority of the seats. But since 2012, gerrymandering has increased the necessary national margin for Democrats to about eight percentage points. In individual gerrymandered states such as North Carolina or Pennsylvania, Democrats need to win by 15 percentage points or more to have a shot at taking a majority.

Perhaps counterintuitively, individual legislators in gerrymandered districts appear not to be more polarized than others in their party. But gerrymandering still contributes to the partisan divide, simply by creating more districts in which the only election that matters is the primary. In places where the general election’s outcome is a foregone conclu-

15 10 5 0 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s R e distr ictin g Cyc l e

of customary norms, but without transgressing the letter of legal rules. Recent examples include the blockade of judicial nominees like Merrick Garland on party-line votes, abuse of Senate procedures to slow down business, and mid-cycle redistricting for partisan gain. In all these cases, partisans have overridden longstanding traditions of governance that were not mandated by law.

Traditionally, gerrymandering mostly protected individual incumbents of both parties, but in recent years it has increasingly been driven by partisanship. Since the Watergate era, the major parties have become ever more divided by ideology and policy preferences, and party loyalty has increased among both voters and legislators. Consequently, it makes more sense than ever for parties to invest in redistricting efforts to give themselves as many reliable seats as possible. In addition, control of the House of Representatives since 1994 has often hinged on very small seat margins.

Under such circumstances it pays to draw districts not just to protect individual incumbents, but to enlarge the team.

Means: Voter clustering and redistricting technology.

With the benefit of new technology, gerrymanders have

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 43

become considerably more sophisticated and durable. Voters today increasingly cluster in residential communities that lean politically to the left or the right, as described in Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort and supported by later studies. The resulting ideological enclaves provide the raw material that redistricters use to draw predictably partisan districts. The basic strategy is to pack the opposing party’s voters into a few districts while distributing one’s own voters across many districts to win more seats by smaller but still secure margins. Modern computing technology and data science have made it possible to calibrate the size of these wins with great precision.

Partisan gerrymandering packs some communities into single districts …

1000 800 600 400

… while cracking others among multiple districts Blue lines indicate congressional district boundaries.

Redistricters in North Carolina lassoed some densely populated communities to “pack” a few districts while dividing others across districts to render voters in those communities ineffective.

200

population per square km

0

Redistricting can magnify the effects of natural population clustering enormously. The results are especially clear in cases where the party in control of redistricting changes from one redistricting cycle to the next. The congressional map in North Carolina, for example, went from a Democratic advantage in 2010 to an even larger Republican advantage in 2012. In 2010, a Republican wave year, Democrats won only 46 percent of the statewide vote yet took seven out of thirteen congressional seats. In 2012, after Republicans redrew the map, Democrats increased their vote share to 51 percent, yet won only four congressional seats.

New technology has helped partisan redistricters maximize the seats they can win without winning more votes.

Although computerized redistricting software has been in use since the 1990s, it truly came into its own after 2000. New software makes it feasible to draw complex maps and to check instantly the effect of moving a handful of precincts between districts. Thousands, millions, and even billions of possibilities can be explored with ease.

Combined with analytics capable of predicting how most citizens will vote, the power of technology will enable even more sophisticated gerrymanders in 2020 and beyond.

Opportunity: The rise of single-party control. Compared with lawmakers in most other established democracies, state legislators in the United States have an unusual

44 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2017

amount of control over electoral maps. In many of the 50 states, redistricting maps are enacted by the legislature and signed by the governor, just like any other legislation. If a party controls both legislative chambers as well as the governor’s mansion, there’s little to stop a determined majority from drawing the most advantageous maps possible.

In 2010, Republicans achieved unified control of 18 state governments. Those victories did not simply reflect the general gains the party made that year. In the REDMAP project, Republicans had directed money at state-level races in an attempt to ensure Republican majorities in closely contested legislatures. The net effect was one-party control over redistricting of 213 congressional seats and hundreds of legislative seats in large purple states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Democrats have played the gerrymandering game too, but in recent redistricting cycles they have not been in a position to achieve significant gains. In Maryland, they redrew the congressional district lines to unseat one of the state’s two Republican representatives. A formerly Republican district that extends to Pennsylvania and West Virginia was engineered to extend tendrils to the outskirts of suburban Washington, D.C., pulling in enough Democratic voters to flip the district. While undesirable, this partisan maneuvering is within the bounds of pre-2000 partisanship and does not qualify as the extreme multiseat distortion of the vote detected by our tests.

The Remedy: Courts and Reforms

As the 2020 redistricting cycle approaches, technology will only improve and partisanship shows little sign of abating.

Now that the Republican Party has let the gerrymandering genie out of the bottle, who’s going to put it back in?

Reform can take two routes. Federal courts could set a national standard that places guardrails to limit the most extreme offenses. And individual states may adopt new laws, either through voter initiatives or legislation, to limit or eliminate the ability of legislators of one party to create unfair maps. In this way, national standards and reformed state districting methods together may limit partisan gerrymanders.

The Supreme Court has an opportunity to act this October when it hears Gill v. Whitford, concerning legislative districts in Wisconsin. Of all the 2012 congressional and state gerrymanders, the Wisconsin Assembly map may be the worst. The trial court ruled the state’s districting scheme unconstitutional and ordered the map redrawn on the basis of extensive evidence of intent to create partisan advantage and overwhelming statistical evidence that the districting map did exactly that. Now the Supreme Court will decide whether the ruling will stand, with Justice Anthony Ken-

nedy likely to be the key vote determining the outcome.

The questions in Whitford are rooted in three decades of indecision by the Supreme Court. Since 1986, the Court has struggled to develop a doctrine to limit partisan gerrymandering. In the 2004 case of Vieth v. Jubelirer, the Court splintered, with justices writing five separate opinions. Four justices voted to disallow partisan gerrymandering claims altogether on the ground that the cases raise a “political question” that the courts should not attempt to adjudicate. Four justices thought that courts could properly intervene but were divided as to the appropriate test for partisan gerrymandering. Justice Kennedy took a different tack. While agreeing that a suitable standard for judgment had not yet been developed, he left the door open for “clear, manageable, and politically neutral standards” to be developed that the Court could adopt in the future.

This time, academics and reform-minded lawyers have unified around a concept of fairness known as partisan symmetry. Partisan symmetry is the idea that parties should be treated equally and should have roughly the same opportunity to translate votes into seats. For instance, a map would be perfectly symmetrical if a party that wins 60 percent of the average district vote receives 80 percent of the seats so long as the opposing party would also have won 80 percent of the seats if it had earned 60 percent of the vote. Several simple standards to examine the fairness of maps have been floated, including Student’s t-test for lopsided wins and the efficiency gap (see sidebar).

If the Court settles on a partisan symmetry standard and allows challenges to other maps to proceed, lower courts will do what they always do in the wake of a Supreme Court decision: identify and develop appropriate tests through the course of litigation. The first opportunities are already in the pipeline, and their outcome depends on Whitford. Common Cause and the League of Women Voters are challenging congressional maps in North Carolina, while Republican voters are challenging the Maryland gerrymander. Depending on the outcome of Whitford, gerrymanderers may survive or be brought to heel with a new, manageable standard.

The Next Front in the Battle

Even if the Court upholds Whitford and strikes down the Wisconsin gerrymander, its decision alone will not resolve the problem of partisan gerrymandering. The courts often enter the fray only after an election, and the litigation can take years. For example, the North Carolina state legislative map enacted for 2012 was ruled an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in 2016, a decision that the Supreme Court affirmed in May of this year. There is still no guarantee that the new maps will be fair when they are eventually drawn: The North Carolina legislature has made

moves to replace its racial gerrymander with a partisan gerrymander ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Real protection against partisan gerrymanders can come only from preventive measures, enacted on a state-by-state basis. Such reforms can ensure statewide partisan symmetry and constrain how individual districts are drawn.

All reforms, however, are not created equal. For example, while reformers often seek to pass laws governing how the lines are drawn, those guidelines fail to constrain partisan malfeasance. A prime example of how such guidelines go awry is the battle over district shape. Critics sometimes hold up a rogue’s gallery of maps, showcasing the most twisted districts drawn for partisan gain, as intuitive proof of bias.

Compactness-based complaints, however, often fail in court.

Weird district shapes are good for a laugh, but they distract from real harms and can lead activists down the wrong path. A tortuous boundary does not always imply a partisan offense. Sometimes ugly, noncompact districts are the only way to satisfy more stringent criteria concerning

Partisan symmetry is the idea that parties should be treated equally and should have roughly the same opportunity to translate votes into seats. equal population and race. Conversely, relatively straight and pretty boundaries can conceal a partisan offense. A straight boundary can cabin off a politically homogenous community, effectively packing it, or it can split the community in two, diluting the community’s influence. Michigan is classified as a gerrymander by many metrics, yet its districts are reasonably compact. In 2016, when a court ordered Republicans in North Carolina to redraw the state’s congressional map on racial grounds, the GOP came up with a visually less-offensive districting scheme that maintained its 10-3 advantage in the state congressional delegation. Judging the goodness of a district purely by the compactness of its shape is a legal dead end.

Other guidelines on districting lines face similar challenges. Some states already mandate that mapmakers keep counties together, join “communities of interest,” and prohibit undue consideration of partisanship. But what is a community of interest? Maryland is attempting to perpetuate its 2012 gerrymander by calling the I-270 corridor a community of interest. And what happens when criteria conflict? Legislatures can easily choose between maintaining a county line or keeping a community of interest together, depending on which option suits partisan needs. With such a confused set

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 45

Commissioner Dr. Gabino Aguirre, of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, right, responds to questions about draft redistricting maps in 2011.

Independent redistricting commissions like California’s provide one way to address the problems created by legislators choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their legislators.

After screening for conflicts of interest (for example, being married to a state legislator), five Democrats, five Republicans, and four independents are drawn from the pool of qualified applicants. These 14 citizens are responsible for drawing the maps, and in order for the final map to be adopted, three commissioners from each of the three voting blocs must approve it.

Independent commissions can achieve reforms well beyond the avoidance of partisanship. For example, they are often prohibited from drawing lines to protect incumbents, and commission-drawn maps typically have multiple competitive swing districts. Commissions have usually been established by ballot initiative, since parties with legislative majorities rarely vote to give up their power.

But since only 26 of the 50 states allow ballot initiatives, what about the remaining 24 states? There is now some bipartisan support to curb gerrymandering. In addition to many Democrats who take that position, the Republicans in favor of reform include Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain, Richard Lugar, John Danforth, Alan Simpson,

46 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2017

John Kasich, Bob Dole, and other current and former congresspersons and state legislators who have filed proreform amicus briefs in the Wisconsin case. This kind of support at least opens the possibility that public pressure may induce legislators to establish independent redistricting commissions.

The Erosion of Governance

Partisan gerrymandering is part of a larger pattern of decades of political disruption on the national stage—the whole pattern of constitutional hardball we referred to earlier. Of all the hardball tactics, partisan gerrymandering is unusually powerful because it leverages state-level victories into national structural legislative advantage.

Operatives employed by the Republican national party spent tens of millions of dollars on previously sleepy state legislative races in 2010, and the national branches of both parties are expected to spend much more in 2020. Gerrymandering represents part of a concerted effort for a highly organized faction to obtain a set of policy outcomes no matter what, without even needing to win a majority of votes at the ballot box.

Gerrymandering also separates politicians from their voters. Politicians are naturally interested in political survival, whether it be the next primary or general election.

Safe districts make things easy. But in close districts, lawmakers are at perpetual risk of being caught on the wrong side of a divisive ideological issue. As swing districts are drawn out of existence, ever-larger numbers of representatives do not have to worry about electoral consequences when they cast a legislative vote, no matter how unpopular.

Gerrymandering is not just a federal problem. Thousands of American communities use districting for a variety of purposes such as public schools, city council elections, and utility districts. No matter how the Court rules in Whitford, some of the next battles in partisan gerrymandering will be fought at the local level.

American democracy relies on the faith of the American people. When legislators choose their voters and not the other way around, that faith erodes. Despite being a hardto-understand offense, gerrymandering is nonetheless a major threat to representative democracy. Gerrymandering contributes to many voters’ sense that government doesn’t represent them. Until we limit the ability of incumbent parties to use gerrymanders to keep themselves in power, those voters will be right.

Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience and molecular biology and faculty associate in law and public affairs at Princeton University, founded the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. Brian Remlinger is a statistical research analyst at that project.

rich pedroncelli / ap images

of instructions, the addition of a partisan-symmetry standard would be more direct, logical, and reliable.

A more effective reform would remove legislators from redistricting. The independent commissions in California, Arizona, and other states have removed the fox from the henhouse, putting the map-drawing process into the hands of the general public. In California, anyone who wishes to join the commission may sign up on a website.

Can Math Assist in Saving Democracy?

Statistics to the rescue

W

hen it comes to creating a test for detecting gerrymanders, getting stuck on the details of maps hinders an efficient evaluation. Courts need simple and straightforward tools for detecting gerrymanders.

Partisan gerrymandering is perpetrated using two complementary methods: cracking and packing. “Packing” occurs when as many supporters of one party as possible are crammed into a small number of districts, creating a few overwhelming wins for the victim party. The remaining members of the victim party are then “cracked,” or spread evenly across a large number of districts that the gerrymandering party can dominate. Fortunately, cracking and packing create a distinctive statistical pattern that can be detected with the help of a little math.

Two tests, Student’s t-test and the mean-median difference, probe whether a districting scheme is likely to have arisen deliberately.

Student’s t-test. The simplest way of detecting many partisan gerrymanders is to ask whether one side’s average wins are more lopsided than the other’s. Student’s t-test—the simplest statistical test in all the sciences—asks whether two averages differ more than would be expected by innocuous or chance events. In the case of redistricting, the t-test can identify when one side’s wins are unusually lopsided compared with the other’s, a sign that their voters have been packed.

The mean-median difference. An equally simple test is the difference between the average (or mean) and median vote share for all the districts in the state. In a closely divided state, gerrymandering creates an artificially high number of narrow wins by one party, thus lowering the party’s median vote share compared with its statewide vote share. A large difference between the mean and median (which is unlikely to arise by chance) is indicative of a partisan gerrymander. The mean-median difference can

be calculated easily on pencil and paper by a judge or clerk in the margin of a brief.

Nearly all the partisan gerrymanders in this article fail either t-test or the meanmedian difference test. The exception is Maryland, which is dominated by one party and has only one remaining Republican district, conditions that make statistical testing harder. In this case, a better approach is careful examination of what was done to convert the eliminated Republican district to a newly made Democratic district.

Two other tools — Monte Carlo simula-

tion and the efficiency gap—are available to measure the distortions in representation that arise as a consequence of partisan gerrymandering.

Monte Carlo simulation: A common tool in statistical inference, the Monte Carlo method is a sophisticated version of pulling numbers out of a hat. The question is simple: Given the statewide vote earned by one party, how many congressional seats would that party win given nationwide trends? The deviation in seats can be calculated by comparing the actual numThe Student’s T-Test as Applied to North Carolina ber of seats the party wins in that state to North Carolina winning percentages, House races 2010–2016 comparable elections across the United 2010 2012 2014 2016 States. A large deviation suggests mischief may have been at work.

80% 80 ■ zone of chance The efficiency gap: The efficiency gap 75% was proposed in 2013 by Eric McGhee as a measure of the degree of a gerrymander70% 70 offense by measuring “wasted votes.” zones ofingchance 65% To win a district, a party needs just over 50 percent of the vote. Any votes beyond the 60% 60 winning threshold are “wasted” because they don’t help the party win the seat.

55% Similarly, every vote cast by the losing 50% 50 party is also “wasted.” To create a partisan D R D RR D R D RR D RR gerrymander, a party seeks to distribute its votes efficiently and force its opponent to In North Carolina, average winning margins for Democrats and Republicans differ systemwaste large numbers of votes. The differatically, consistent with a Democratic gerrymander until 2010 and a Republican gerryence, or gap, in votes wasted by each party mander starting in 2012. For the averages to have arisen incidentally from a party-neutral can then be compared, with large gaps process, they would have to both fall within the zone of chance (gray shaded region). indicating possible gerrymanders.

North Carolina winning percentages, House races 2010-2016

Winning vote share (%)

2012

2014

2016

w in n in g vote s h ar e

2010

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 47

Francis Revives the Workers’ Church

The Catholic Church in America—once an ally of workers and their unions— grew deferential to big money in recent decades. Now, prompted by the Pope, a new generation of labor priests and bishops is trying to change that.

By J o hn G e hring

J

orge Ramirez still remembers his Mexican immigrant father coming home with a bloody face after trying to organize his fellow workers in the Back of the Yards, a storied industrial area in Chicago. “My mom would stitch him up in the kitchen,” says Ramirez, 46, now the president of the Chicago Federation of Labor. “It was brutal, but we always had the Catholic Church.

There was always a Catholic priest around.”

As unions face an increasingly hostile political climate and grapple with fresh approaches to becoming relevant to a new generation, there are signs that an old ally is once again stepping up. The Catholic Church, which has an imperfect but long history of using its institutional muscle and moral voice to defend workers’ rights, is getting a serious pep talk from a pope who has put labor rights back at the forefront of the Church’s public agenda.

Unions are “prophetic” institutions that “unmask the powerful who trample the rights of the most vulnerable workers,” Pope Francis said in a June speech to the Confederation of Trade Unions, Italy’s equivalent of the AFLCIO. While conservative politicians, corporate leaders, and well-funded organizations on the right have spent decades trying to dismantle the labor movement, Francis recognizes that what he calls the “dictatorship of an impersonal economy” is the result of an ideology that demonizes unions, worships individualism, and champions unfettered markets. “The capitalism of our time does not understand the value of the trade union because it has forgotten the social nature of the economy,” he said.

“This is one of the greatest sins.”

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American union leaders have been energized by this unexpected boost from one of the world’s most popular and influential religious leaders. The shout-outs from a pope with a global bully pulpit are not only symbolically potent.

There are tangible signs of a “Francis effect” on the Church’s relationship with the American labor movement. When Ramirez of the Chicago Federation of Labor first met the new archbishop whom Pope Francis appointed to the Chicago archdiocese in 2014, it didn’t take long for Cardinal Blase Cupich to express his commitment to workers. In a major address at Plumbers Union Hall on the city’s west side two years ago, Cupich delivered a clear message. “I have come today to tell Chicago workers: The Catholic Church is with you. Pope Francis is with you. I am with you,” Cupich said.

Nor did the cardinal stop there. He specifically took aim at “right to work” laws, arguing that the Church is “duty-bound to challenge such efforts.” He also made clear that the Church has “never made a distinction between private and public sectors,” a critical point as public-sector unions are frequently targeted by conservative opponents both inside and outside the Church.

For Ramirez, with his childhood memories of Catholic clergy standing up for his father, the speech struck a nerve. “Workers are so hungry for this message,” he says. “It resonates because it shows the Church is in touch with workers, and that the Church hears them and has the courage to speak out.” Ramirez notes that the Chicago Federation of Labor, which represents 300 unions and has more than 500,000 members, is reaffirming a project

labor agreement with the Chicago archdiocese that ensures union labor is used on construction projects. The Chicago archdiocese, which employs 15,000 full- and part-time workers, also honors picket lines and encourages priests to support the labor movement.

Union leaders beyond Chicago are also buzzing about the new climate. Damon Silvers, policy director at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, admits he was surprised when Catholic scholars and advocates began reaching out to the federation after the Pope’s election in 2013. Silvers knew about the Church’s role in labor history, including Pope John Paul II’s support for the solidarity movement in Poland, but he wasn’t used to Catholic leaders beating down his door. The election of the first pope from Latin America was a game-changer.

“Pope Francis set the tone,” Silvers says. “The dignity of work really matters to him. Both the labor movement and the Church are remembering again that Catholic social teaching is one of the fundamental principles of the American labor movement.” Catholic immigrants from Europe found a refuge and an advocate in the Church and unions a century ago. Today Latino immigrants, a large percentage of them Catholic, make up a significant share of workers trying to climb up from the lowest rung of the economic ladder.

Silvers recognizes not only the historical parallel, but a potential template for the future.

“The labor movement needs a larger ecosystem to grow and thrive,” he says. “A critical part of that ecosystem is the Catholic Church. We have to be embedded in the lives of working people in a multidimensional way and have a connection

l’o s s e r vat o r e r o m a n o / p o o l p h o t o v i a a p i m a g e s

The White Hat And The Hard Hats: Pope Francis meets with workers in Genoa.

to the spiritual life of its members. There is a deeper thing here we’re trying to do as a movement. People are not simply the sum of their economic parts. Workers are not a commodity.

The Church at its best is trying to help people live as something more than a thing. In that sense, the Church and labor need each other because we’re engaged in a common project.”

Behind-the-scenes conversations between the AFL-CIO and Catholic leaders led to a highprofile conference at the union’s headquarters a few months before Pope Francis’s 2015 visit to the United States. More than a dozen Catholic bishops and cardinals—several of them close advisers to Pope Francis—took part in public dialogues around the theme “Erroneous Autonomy: A Conversation on Solidarity and Faith.” It was the first time in recent years that a number of Catholic heavyweights, including a cardinal, spoke at the federation’s headquarters. In a keynote speech, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington cited a “renewal of appreciation” for the “Catholic idea of solidarity.” He told labor leaders in the audience that the church cannot be “bystanders” in the fight for workers’ rights and referred to AFLCIO President Richard Trumka as “our president.” A Catholic and the son of a coal miner from southwestern Pennsylvania, Trumka spoke in glowing terms about the Pope. “Part

of the greatness of Pope Francis is that he sees everyone,” Trumka said. “And in seeing those who are excluded and suffering, he lifts all of us up so we can see and hear each other.”

Stephen Schneck, the recently retired director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, played a leading role in bringing AFL-CIO officials and the Catholic hierarchy together in recent years. “The picture of all those bishops standing with union leaders was amazing,” he said. “The optics sent a powerful message.”

Mary Kay Henry grew up immersed in an environment where the priests, nuns, and lay Catholics in the pews at Holy Name parish in the suburbs of Detroit viewed the dignity of work as central to their faith. The president of the Service Employees International Union, Henry made her way through an eclectic gathering of faith-based organizers, union leaders, and Catholic bishops during a February meeting of “Popular Movements” in Modesto, California.

Pope Francis had inspired the meeting as part of the World Meeting of Popular Movements, which he launched in 2014. Held in Rome, the first event brought together activists from five continents: migrants, landless peasants, indigenous leaders, and representatives from trade unions. The themes of tierra, trabajo, and techo

(land, labor, and housing) structured the original gathering and have remained the guiding focus during subsequent events. When Pope Francis addressed the second Popular Movements event in Bolivia in 2015, he almost sounded like a fiery union agitator. “The future of humanity does not lie solely in the hands of great leaders, the great powers, and the elites,” he said. “It is fundamentally in the hands of people and in their ability to organize.”

In Modesto, Henry chatted up a Vatican cardinal close to Pope Francis, briefing him about the Fight for 15 movement to raise wages of low-income workers, and told Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez she wanted to bring the union’s home health-care workers and janitors into closer dialogue with the church.

More than half of SEIU members are Catholics, union officials estimate. “I’ve always felt the power of faith is key to any breakthrough that working people have made,” Henry told me. “I’m a Catholic, and my first experiences with solidarity came from the church and my family.” Several SEIU organizers and workers in the union visited the Vatican in 2015 for a round of meetings with church officials. Topics included the Fight for 15 movement, immigration reform, and mass incarceration.

“Pope Francis is really opening a space for those toiling in the vineyard to rise up,”

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Henry says. “The way he talks about economic inequality and links that to racism and care for the common home of our environment really affirms so much of what we’ve been fighting for over the years.”

One of the most significant ways a pope can steer the massive ocean liner that is the Catholic Church in a direction that reflects his priorities is through the bishops he appoints. In the United States, several Francis picks are emerging as strong allies of the labor movement.

Cardinal Joe Tobin in Newark can bench-press more than 200 pounds, has the sturdy frame of a dock worker, and is at home at union events.

This summer, he celebrated mass on the waterfront with members of the International Longshoremen’s Association who work for the Port of New York and New Jersey. The cardinal was also one of the keynote speakers at the New Jersey state AFL-CIO meeting in June held at Harrah’s casino in Atlantic City. He’s also been a vocal critic of President Trump’s aggressive immigration orders, calling them “the opposite of what it means to be an American.”

In Kentucky, Lexington Bishop John Stowe blasted his state’s right-to-work push in January. Strong labor unions, the bishop wrote in an open letter, “lead to more fair negotiations which benefit all workers in the state.

The weakening of unions by so-called ‘right to work’ laws has been shown to reduce wages and benefits overall in the states where such laws have been enacted. This cannot be seen as contributing to the common good.”

Another sign that Catholic leaders are redoubling their efforts on worker justice issues is a project to create a new generation of “labor priests.” From the 1920s through the 1960s, clergy who stood with and advocated for workers were a central part of the labor movement.

Priests ran labor training schools, often in parish halls, where workers learned about the minutiae of collective bargaining and the principles of Catholic social teaching. Reverend Clete Kiley, a Chicago priest and director for immigration policy at UNITE HERE , which represents more than 270,000 workers in the hotel, gaming, food service, laundry, and airport industries, is determined to revive that tradition. He launched a labor priest initiative in 2012, a loose network of more than 100 priests across the country who are trained to

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On The Waterfront: Longshoremen’s union official Michael Vigneron with Cardinal Joseph Tobin, Archbishop of Newark

support workers through the framework of Catholic social justice. About half of the priests are immigrants. Most are under 40 years old.

“Priests who work in immigrant communities are asking themselves what is happening to my parishioners when they go to work,” says Kiley, who is also chaplain for the Chicago Federation of Labor. “They hear about wage theft and unsafe working conditions. Some of the most egregious violations are against immigrants.”

Clergy receive training and opportunities to network at workshops hosted in different cities. Along with learning about Catholic teaching on labor, the clergy often hear directly from workers attempting to unionize. At one gathering last year, workers from several Las Vegas casinos shared their experiences about efforts to form a union.

During a recent visit to Owensboro, Kentucky, Kiley heard from priests who have watched well-paying factory jobs with solid benefits vanish from their communities, to be replaced by low-wage work with little security.

Some clergy who are new to labor issues, especially in the South, can be skittish about speaking out. Kiley doesn’t force things. “I don’t start off talking about unions,” he says. “I talk about workers and their rights.”

The golden era between the Church and labor in the United States lasted roughly from the end of World War I to the late 1950s. Inspired

by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on labor and capital, Reverend John Ryan, a priest from Minnesota, became a nationally prominent social reformer whose writing and advocacy on behalf of living wages for workers later helped mold

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Ryan drafted a bold 1919 statement, the Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction, that put moral weight behind what were then radical social reforms: a minimum wage, public housing for workers, and unemployment insurance. During the Great Depression, a generation of priests who had firsthand experiences with injustice and poverty came of age in an immigrant church that reflected a working-class ethic.

In the postwar decades, this sensibility began to shift as American Catholics grew wealthier, moved out of urban enclaves, and the church came to reflect the upwardly mobile aspirations of its parishioners, according to Joseph McCartin, a Georgetown University history professor and director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. To be sure, caught up in the social activism of the 1960s and the spirit of Vatican II, Catholic leaders marched with Cesar Chavez behind banners of Our Lady of Guadalupe during grape boycotts organized by the United Farm Workers—and the U.S. Bishops’ Conference called efforts to bust unions “an intolerable attack on social solidarity” in a major 1986 economic justice national letter.

But McCartin points to well-funded efforts on the right in more recent years that have created a formidable counterweight to traditional church teaching on the economy and unions.

“There have always been elements in the church that have not looked fondly on labor, but what is different now is the vast wealth pushing those points of view,” he says. The business school at Catholic University of America, McCartin

notes, has accepted nearly $13 million from the Charles Koch Foundation over the last several years, despite the Koch brothers’ abysmal track record of labor violations, toxic chemical spills, and funding of anti-union campaigns. In October, Catholic University’s business school is hosting a $2,500-per-person conference called “Good Profit,” featuring Charles Koch. Another well-funded foe of the labor movement is the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, led by a Catholic priest, Reverend Robert Sirico.

Acton has benefited from the Koch Foundation and the Christian conservative DeVos family, the billionaire heirs to the Amway fortune who have bankrolled anti-union efforts in Michigan.

The boards of trustees at Catholic universities are also often populated by wealthy CEOs and business leaders who made their fortunes in private equity. “Many of these people are in the top 1 percent and they profited from and helped lead the transformation in our economy that benefited the wealthiest few,” McCartin says. “Many college presidents have boards who say, ‘Why should we deal with unions?’ In their own businesses, they don’t deal with unions.”

While some Catholic universities such as Georgetown have unionized janitors, food service workers, and adjunct professors, a number have aggressively resisted organizing drives by citing religious freedom arguments. Gerald Beyer, a Christian ethicist at Villanova University and Donald Carroll, an adjunct professor of law at the University of San Francisco, challenge that posture as blatant hypocrisy. “By deterring unionization efforts, universities violate adjuncts’ ability to live out Catholic teaching,” they wrote in the National Catholic Reporter.

Beyond his vocal support for the role

of unions, the Pope is striking at the heart of neoliberal economics and market fundamentalism in ways that make some well-heeled donors in Catholic circles jittery. After Francis wrote an encyclical that blasted trickle-down economics, questioned “the absolute autonomy of markets,” and said that poverty would never be addressed without “attacking the structural causes of inequality,” the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot complained to New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan (not one of Pope Francis’s appointees). Ken Langone, who spearheaded a $180 million restoration of St. Patrick’s

Cathedral, confided to the cardinal that one of his wealthy friends was so upset by the Pope’s words that he was considering pocketing his contribution to the renovation. Cardinal Dolan told CNBC that he would assure the reluctant donor that he was “misunderstanding” Francis.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “The Pope’s Case for Virtuous Capitalism,” Dolan offered a much sunnier assessment of 21stcentury capitalism than the pope has. The free market, the cardinal wrote, “has undoubtedly led to a tremendous increase in overall wealth and well-being around the world.” He argued it was a mistake to “reject economic liberty in favor of government control.” When Larry Kudlow, a CNBC commentator who had questioned the Pope’s understanding of capitalism, tweeted that he helped Dolan with the op-ed, the optics were awkward, to say the least.

Some wealthy Catholics seem content to blatantly co-opt and deliberately misconstrue the Pope’s words. John and Carol Saeman, who are active in a network of Catholic business leaders called Legatus, started by Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, wrote a headscratching Washington Post op-ed in 2014 in which they strained to align themselves with Francis. “For us, promoting limited government alongside the Kochs is an important part of heeding Pope Francis’s call to love and serve the poor,” wrote the couple, who are financial contributors to the Koch-backed Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce. Every summer, wealthy Catholics active in Legatus and a cadre of the U.S. hierarchy’s more conservative bishops gather at the Meritage Resort and Spa in Napa Valley, owned by Catholic philanthropist Timothy Busch. The business school at Catholic University is named after Busch, who gave the university $15 million, its largest-ever donation.

Busch has called the minimum wage “an antimarket regulation,” cites the Koch brothers as an inspiration, and hosted a conference at the Trump International Hotel in Washington earlier this year where he praised the president for being a staunch “pro-life” leader.

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, a leading conservative voice in the hierarchy, acknowledged in a 2014 speech at the Napa retreat that the Pope’s views on economics are likely not in line with many of the Catholic CEO s gathered at the resort. “What Francis

says about economic justice may be hard for some of us to hear,” the archbishop said. “So we need to read the Holy Father’s writings for ourselves, without the filter of the mass media.

Then we need to open our hearts to what God is telling us through his words.”

Far from Napa Valley, a union leader in Atlantic City often found himself wondering why it was so hard to find Catholic clergy ready to stand with workers fighting against casino bosses who squeezed their employees.

Bob McDevitt, the president of UNITE HERE Local 54, started in the union as a 19-year-old bartender’s assistant in the Playboy casino. He now leads a union that has lost 40 percent of its members over the last decade. Five casinos have closed since 2013. He recalls one civil disobedience action with workers at the now shuttered Taj Majal casino. Only one priest showed up, and he came from outside the city.

“From a practical standpoint, if so many people in your pews are in organized labor it doesn’t make sense for the church to be tonedeaf to this experience,” McDevitt says. “I’m not the best Catholic, but I know the church talks all the time about social justice. It’s just a matter of doing what you said should be done.”

Things started to change when a new young pastor, Reverend Jon Thomas, was assigned to McDevitt’s church, the Parish of St. Monica, in 2015. Thomas is part of the labor priest network. The pastor teamed up with McDevitt to plan a special mass dedicated to solidarity with workers. The local bishop fully supported the idea, and while he couldn’t attend because of an illness, his letter was read to the congregation.

After the service, Thomas and his parishioners marched down Atlantic Avenue in a procession behind a banner of St. Joseph, the patron saint of workers. It was the kind of visual, public support that showed the church and labor walking side by side. “So many of my parishioners are union members, and they bring their fears of downsizing or losing their jobs to church,” Thomas says. “I need to be involved. I’m trying to make the church relevant to their lives.”

John Gehring is Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, and author of The Francis Effect: A Radical Pope’s Challenge to the American Catholic Church.

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Real Tax Reform: What It Is and What It Isn’t

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n the night of President Trump’s upset victory, one of my first forlorn thoughts was “There goes health care.” So far, I’ve been wrong about that. My second thought, however, was “Rich people are going to get a big tax cut.” Given the dysfunction of the congressional majority and the rudderless, chaotic White House, that too may be proven wrong. Still, even more than destroying government-aided health care, cutting taxes is encoded in Republicans’ DNA .

In fact, the conservative commentator Robert Novak famously said: “God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes.

If they don’t do that, they have no useful function.” A very dejected Ross Douthat, conservative columnist for The New York Times, argued in a recent column titled “Just. Cut. Taxes.” that “a party that offers nothing, whose ideological sclerosis and internal contradictions allow it to offer nothing, might as well just go pass a tax cut and call it a day.” A murderers’ row of diehard supply-side trickledowners, including Art Laffer and Larry Kudlow, made the same point in a Times op-ed, asking the musical question “Why Are Republicans Making Tax Reform So Hard?”

To understand the answer to that question, you need to appreciate the distinction between tax cuts and tax reform. Believe me—that’s not just semantics. And part of the story is a big, portentous hole in the Democrats’ agenda: Progressives do not have a good, crisp, resonant answer to the question “What’s your great idea for reforming the tax system?”

Tax Reform Doesn’t Mean What You Think

In D.C. tax-debate parlance, “tax reform” means something specific: cutting tax rates and broadening the tax base. Rate reductions lose revenue, but you make it up by closing loopholes, exemptions, and favorable treatments of one type of income over another, thus broadening the income upon which taxes are levied. I personally don’t think this describes true tax reform (I’ve got a better definition below), but that’s what the term has come to mean.

Given that “reform” has a positive connotation, what’s so great about a lower rate and

Trump’s proposed tax cuts, mostly on corporations and the wealthy, will do nothing to help the people who elected him president.

By Jared Bernstein

broader base? Both theory and evidence suggest that people with significant tax liabilities will lobby for and take advantage of favorable tweaks in the tax code. These tweaks are seldom there to serve some greater economic purpose. They exist because some industry had a good lobbyist with deep pockets, the latter of which helps members of Congress “understand” just how important the loophole they seek is to the greater public good. So tax loopholes are often economically inefficient as well as inequitable. So far, so good, but then comes the supply-side mischief.

Supposedly, lower rates will generate more growth and thus help to pay for themselves.

But there’s little support for this claim, either in theory or in evidence. Public-finance theory maintains that people respond to tax changes at the margin; as their top marginal tax rate changes, they’ll supply a bit more or less labor and entrepreneurship.

Conservative trickle-downers incorrectly take this theory to mean that if you cut taxes, people will work and invest more. In fact, such behavioral impacts are ambiguous: Some people will work a little less after a tax cut because they can hold their income constant with less work, a larger share (according to evidence) will work a little more to take advantage of the higher after-tax wage, and the vast majority won’t change their labor supply (or amount they invest) at all.

In the current tax debate—no surprise— the Trump administration and the Republican Congress are predicting that their tax cuts will return large growth effects.

They claim their plan—and to be clear, there is, as of yet, no plan—will increase the real GDP growth rate by at least half, from around 2 percent to 3 percent or 4 percent, and that this increase will offset much of the costs of the cuts.

This was the same story told by Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, and in every case the results belied the claims. The most recent example, from the state of Kansas, is particularly germane to this discussion, because it reveals flaws in the same ideas being bandied about by the current Congress.

Nudged on by some of the very same people currently advising the Trump administration on taxes (for instance, the authors of the Times op-ed cited above), Kansas sharply lowered their tax rates and totally eliminated income taxes on business “passthrough” income back in 2012. The geniuses behind these ideas predicted that they would provide an “immediate and lasting boost” to the state’s economy. They were, of course, wrong. The same thing happened in Kansas as has happened whenever we cut taxes: revenue losses. Their bond rating was downgraded twice and the state burned through its reserves.

Moreover, economic and job growth actually faltered there relative to neighboring states and the rest of the country. Oh, and 100,000 businesses changed their tax status to “passthroughs” so they could tap the new loophole.

The Kansas story has a—“happy” isn’t the right word—partial-return-to-sanity ending, as a new (still-Republican) legislature recently overrode the governor’s veto and reversed most of the tax cuts, including the pass-through loophole.

Interestingly, and I give them some credit for this, not all Republicans in the current debate have fully drunk the trickle-down Kool-Aid. There is talk about closing various loopholes, including the business interest deduction, which significantly lowers the after-tax cost of debt versus equity financing, leading to excessive reliance on debt. They’re also considering capping the mortgage interest deduction, a classic upside-down tax break

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The Likely Cost of Republican “Reform”

Together, these measures would lose about $6.5 trillion in revenues over ten years, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The vast majority of the benefits of these measures accrue to the wealthiest households: Almost 50 percent of the cuts go to the top 1 percent, while 6 percent go to the middle fifth. About 27 percent of the gains go to the 120,000 families in the top tenth of the top 1 percent, whose average pretax income is $11 million.

The TPC, working off a pretty rough sketch of the Trump plan, even giving them credit for pay-fors that I suspect will get whacked by lobbyists, still come up with a net ten-year cost of $3.5 trillion. Again, that’s a tax cut, and especially if I’m right about the sad fate of loophole closures, it’s a far cry from tax reform.

So far, under the category of fiscal B.S., we’ve got tax cuts posing as tax reform, goosed by phony growth assumptions. Here’s another one for that growing file: the idea that Republicans really care about budget deficits and debt.

Throughout the Obama presidency, Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan endlessly assailed the president for his alleged fiscal recklessness. As the figure below shows, their attacks were substance-free: During Obama’s tenure, the budget deficit went from a historically large, recession-induced 10 percent of GDP back to around its historical average (since 1967, the deficit-to- GDP ratio has averaged 2.8 percent). In fact, those of us worried about the impact of austere fiscal policy on the weak recovery advocated for much less deficit reduction over these years.

Deficit as a Percent of GDP During the Obama years

10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

But to this day, conservatives natter on about crippling mountains of debt left to our children and grandchildren. Of course, taking lead out of the water or investing in a preschool education—both of which would deliver both immediate and long-lasting benefits to actual children in the actual world—are off the table. But assuming the Tax Policy Center numbers ($3.5 trillion added to the deficit) are in the ballpark, how can the tax-cutters square the deficit impacts with their rhetoric?

They can’t and they don’t. Their deficit hysteria is just a tactic to prevent Democrats from increasing spending. The fact that tax cuts raise the deficit doesn’t bother them. In fact, it doesn’t even compute.

Once, after a hearing in which I testified before the House Budget Committee, I had a chance for a quick chat with the committee’s chairman, Tom Price (currently Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services). He and his fellow Republicans had just railed for two hours about the perils of deficits and debt, but when I got a chance to ask them, “Then why are you proposing to eliminate the estate tax?” (which loses $240 billion over ten years while providing tax relief to the richest 0.2 percent—!!—of estates), they had nothing to say.

So, I pressed Price on this point. His response was “Look, my guys just don’t believe that tax cuts increase the deficit.”

“Then you must convince them they’re wrong!” I cried. He shrugged, smiled, shook my hand, and walked away. And another great day in D.C. fiscal policy came to an end.

The punch line is, if you were thinking Republican fiscal hawks were going to block deficit-increasing tax cuts, you’re almost surely wrong. When it comes to the deficit, they’re chicken hawks.

You may well, however, ask, “What’s wrong with budget deficits? Didn’t I just say they needed to be larger back when the current expansion was getting under way?” Let me answer that question in the context of what I believe to be real tax reform.

But before I do that, one last note on the politics. There is a line of thinking, one to which I do not subscribe, that Trumpian chaos and attacks on his fellow Republicans will tank their tax-cut plans. That is a misreading of his role in this policy process, one in which he

c h a r t d ata s o u r c e : o m b h i s t o r i c a l ta b l e 1 . 2

which, combined with a deduction for property taxes, returns 70 percent of its benefits to the top 20 percent of homeowners.

These offsets are known as “pay-fors”: You pay for a revenue loss either by finding a different revenue source or by cutting spending.

Another possible pay-for is more overtly political: eliminating taxpayers’ ability to deduct state and local taxes, a swipe at blue states like New York and California that have relatively progressive state income taxes and lots of wealthy Democrats.

Whether these pay-fors will stick as the debate proceeds is another question. Given that it’s at the core of the business model for private equity firms and hedge funds, I’d frankly be amazed to see the demise of the business interest deduction. And Trump’s realestate pals are going to be all over him if he tries to cap the mortgage interest deduction.

However, even if the lobbyists vaporize these pay-fors, the Republicans can still pass their tax cuts. They’ll just load them on the budget deficit, using a combination of budget process tricks and phony economic growth assumptions (a.k.a. “dynamic scoring”). A budget process called “reconciliation” allows them to avoid the filibuster, since you can pass a budget with a simple majority. But reconciliation rules insist that the cuts not raise the budget deficit outside of the ten-year budget window. Thus, like the George W. Bush tax cuts, the Trump cuts too would likely sunset after ten years, at which point Republicans would surely go ballistic over the tax increase that they built into their plan.

So the Republicans are talking about tax cuts, not tax reform. We don’t know the details yet, but here are some of the big-ticket items that have already been floated and that we’re likely to see as part of any eventual plan: ■ a large cut in the corporate tax rate; ■ lower individual rates, including a special low rate on “pass-through” income (remember, these are the same architects of the benighted Kansas plan); ■ elimination of the alternative minimum tax (rich people whose credits, deductions, and exemptions zero out their liability can face a marginal rate of 35 percent under this tax; Trump himself has been dinged by this); and ■ a repeal of what’s left of the estate tax

has no interest or insights (beyond perhaps recognizing that eliminating the estate tax and alternative minimum tax will boost his and his kids’ bottom lines). This process is being run by tax-cutters who are being paid to deliver. If it turns out that there’s a win in here, rest assured that Trump will sniff it out and tie himself tightly to the cause.

Real Tax Reform

If you’re still with me, you agree that real tax reform is not tax cuts. But neither is it the D.C. version of revenue-neutral rate cuts, paid for through base-broadeners (though such loophole closures are definitely part of real reform). Real tax reform implies tax changes responsive to the needs of the majority of the American people now and in the future. It must offset, not exacerbate, market-driven inequalities, and it must raise the necessary

will need to meet these needs, all of which fit neatly under the rubric of public goods, social insurance, and risks that will not be met by market forces. The raising of ample revenues, done in a way that balances efficiency and equity considerations—i.e., that minimizes the kinds of distortions you get by favoring one income type over another, while maintaining tax progressivity—that’s real tax reform.

Why shouldn’t Democrats just finance these public needs with deficits? Why do we always have to be the fiscal grown-ups? The traditional reason is fear that public debt will crowd out private borrowing and drive up interest rates.

That correlation, however, has been absent from the data for a good while, in part because the Federal Reserve has kept rates so low for so long and in part because of increased international capital flows into safe assets like U.S. Treasury bills. I’d thus largely discount “crowd-out” con-

massive tax cuts to the wealthy. And they were stopped, at least for now, by one measly vote!

For too long, Democrats have been reluctant to tie this cynical play to the tenets of real tax reform. Instead, they’ve argued at best that we can raise the revenues we need solely from the top 1 percent (we can’t, though that’s the right place to start, including raising individual top rates), and at worst that, while Republicans will cut taxes for the rich, the Democrats will cut taxes for the middle class. This is a losing game. Instead, Democrats should explain what true tax reform is, why it is so necessary, and how it must support a robust role for a government that is amply and fairly funded to meet the steep challenges we face.

So, What’s the Plan?

As far as I can tell, and I’ve checked, Democrats don’t have a tax plan. It’s not like Repub-

In contrast with fake reform that cuts taxes on the wealthy and pretends that GDP growth will make up the loss, here’s what real tax reform looks like. revenue to meet the many challenges we face.

Between now and 2040, the share of our population over 65 is expected to rise by more than a third (from 15 percent to 20 percent), generating pressure on both the spending and revenue sides of the budget. Health costs are rising more slowly, thanks in part to the costsaving architecture of the Affordable Care Act. But given demographic and health cost pressures, the Congressional Budget Office points out that just maintaining Social Security and our public health programs will require another 2.5 percent of GDP over the next decade.

Then there’s global warming, rising sea levels, and weather changes that will require near-term disaster relief and longer-term investments in infrastructure and science.

There’s increased inequality, which leads to “stickier” (less responsive to growth) poverty rates, diminished mobility, and the need for increased investment in children’s education and their parents’ well-being.

Real tax reform would begin from a cleareyed assessment of the resources government

cerns, though I would not wholly dismiss them.

But the main reason Democrats must be fiscal grown-ups is that they are the party that recognizes the role for government in meeting the challenges articulated above, and that recognition requires them to raise the revenue to pay for government we need. Democrats also recognize the Republicans’ long game to undermine that role, to shrink government and give the proceeds to the rich. The Republican play here is as simple and transparent as it is shortsighted: cut taxes and tell people growth effects will offset their costs. When that fails to happen, throw up your hands with a big “Who knew?” and argue that the only option is to cut spending.

The recent health-care debate was truly remarkable in this regard, even for an ancient D.C. hand like myself: Despite the fact that no one, not even their own constituents, liked what they were proposing, the Republicans simply were unable to stop themselves from introducing bill after bill that took health care away from poor and moderate-income families to give

licans are asking for their input, so perhaps this isn’t surprising. And no question, the distance between now and real tax reform is great. Still, good politics, good policy, and common sense suggest that the Democrats (and to be clear, I’m referring to the progressive wing of the party) should have, if not a fully f leshed-out and scored tax proposal, some concrete, big ideas to start shaping into something more granular.

In fact, 45 Senate Democrats recently sent a letter to their Republican colleagues agreeing with the need I mentioned above regarding ample revenue collection, which is a fine, reality-based start. But we can get more specific.

Here are a number of bullet points to start the conversation about real tax reform.

■ Reduce wasteful tax expenditures. There are two ways to do this. One is to try to cherrypick the worst offenders and eliminate them.

As noted—and, if they try to stick to their list of pay-fors, Republicans will shortly be reminded—this route invokes strong resistance from the targeted lobbies. (In fact, one of Repub-

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 55

licans’ main pay-for proposals, the border adjustment tax, has already died at the hands of opponents from the business community.)

Real estate will fight to preserve the mortgage interest deduction, financial firms will go to the mat on the proposed elimination of the interest deduction, and so on.

A better idea is to raise rates on everyone in the top 5 percent or 10 percent of the income scale, allowing them to keep their itemized deductions but at a lower rate. Instead of taking deductions at their top income tax rate, which is now about 40 percent, they’d take them at, for example, 25 percent. Not only does this reform raise serious revenues, but since a lot of these tax breaks subsidize things that wealthy households would do anyway (retirement savings, home-buying, sending kids to college), reducing the subsidies boosts efficiency in the tax code. To be clear, I’m not

shifts individuals use to take advantage of forthcoming changes).

Practically, this research suggests we should stop providing (or, at least, provide less) special treatment for capital income. In addition to raising marginal tax rates on capital gains, we should keep the estate tax (and make it more progressive); end “step-up” basis, a provision that means heirs don’t have to pay capital gains on inherited wealth; and keep the Kansan loophole for pass-through business income closed at the federal level.

■ Fix our multinational problem. Though we don’t need to cut our corporate tax rate in half, as Trump has suggested, that part of the code really is a hot mess. The conservative mantra that our high statutory corporate rate of 35 percent is making our companies uncompetitive in global markets, however, is belied by the fact that the corporate sector has been

repatriation tax holiday, which loses revenue and incentivizes ever more deferrals). The Obama administration penciled in a 19 percent minimum tax, which raised $350 billion over ten years.

■ Two (not so) new ideas: Along with a few other progressives (and the late Nobel laureate James Tobin), I’ve long advocated for a tiny tax of a few hundredths of a percent on financial transactions. I consider such a tax to be great policy and great politics. Even a tiny financial transaction tax (FTT) would likely raise $100 billion to $200 billion over ten years.

Traders claim that higher transaction costs will dampen market liquidity. That’s probably true, though a dime on a $1,000 trade is unlikely to have much impact. But today’s financial markets are afflicted by too many high-frequency trades that have nothing to do with efficient capital allocation and every-

Real reform is not tax cuts. But neither is it “revenueneutral” base-broadening and rate reductions.

Our starved public household needs more revenue. suggesting the lobbyists will roll over; perhaps this idea unites them against a common cause. But few good things come without a fight, and with this proposal, we can at least argue that no one’s getting singled out for better or worse treatment.

■ “Stop coddling the super-rich.” That’s not me speaking. It’s Warren Buffett, from a 2011 op-ed in The New York Times by that name. Therein he debunks many of the same phony arguments I bemoan above, especially those arguing that to optimize investments, the tax code must privilege the income types held by the wealthy, like realized gains from sales of appreciated capital. His main point— and the man is on the front lines of financial investing—is that investors don’t “shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off.” Much statistical work underscores his experience, showing little economic response to changes in taxes on investments (other than short-term timing

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more profitable in recent years than ever. Our multinationals consistently face an effective tax rate way below that statutory rate. Boeing, for example, a company Paul Ryan cited recently while attempting to sell corporate rate cuts, paid an average of only 3 percent between 2002 and 2016.

There are two reasons for multinationals’ low effective tax rates: transfer pricing and income deferral. The former is the age-old play of booking profits in tax havens while booking deductible expenses in countries with high rates. “Deferral” means that as long as you keep your foreign earnings outside the United States, you don’t have to pay corporate taxes on them.

There’s a simple fix for both problems that progressives should get behind: a minimum tax on foreign earnings. Whenever and wherever foreign affiliates of U.S. companies earn income, they pay the minimum tax, after which they can do whatever they want with the rest, including repatriate it back here, tax-free (note that a minimum tax is very different from a

thing to do with nanosecond price arbitrage.

Unregulated financial markets have consistently inflated bubbles that whack the rest of us. The last time they did so, post–housing bubble, they got bailed out at taxpayer expense, then they recovered well before the middle class did, and now they’re lobbying for more deregulation. (And no, the stock market has not become democratized; 80 percent of its wealth is held by the top 10 percent, 40 percent by the top 1 percent.)

Thus, I believe there’s attractive symmetry here: Tax those responsible for the damage to help those hurt by it.

Why haven’t Democrats embraced and run on an FTT as part of a progressive package?

I’ve scratched my aging noggin about that question and don’t have a great answer, other than “follow the money”: Surely, their own funding connections to Wall Street are part of the problem.

A tax on carbon, which could take the form of a higher federal gas tax (it’s been stuck at 18 cents since 1993 and it’s not indexed to infla-

c h a r t d ata s o u r c e : ta x p o l i c y c e n t e r

tion), is the second idea, and it’s more of a bipartisan one than what’s in the rest of this agenda (though we’re generally talking establishment Republicans, not the Tea Partiers and others who have signed no-tax pledges).

These two ideas share a thread: They’re socalled Pigouvian taxes, designed to put a higher price on some activity that’s underpriced from the perspective of the broader society.

Financial transactions and climate pollution certainly fit that bill.

■ One new idea: I noted this above but let me drill down slightly more here. One tax credit that should not only remain in the code, but should be increased, is the earned income tax credit, a wage subsidy for low-wage workers in low-income families. It’s a strong anti-poverty program—in 2015, the EITC lifted about 6.5 million people out of poverty, including about 3.3 million children—that both encourages and rewards work.

My colleagues at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently asked, “What would it take for the earned-income tax credit to offset the damage done to low- and moderate-wage earners by the wage and income stagnation that has beset them in recent decades?” The answer is a $1 trillion expansion in the refundable credit over the next decade. A family of four making $40,000 would get a tax credit of about $6,000 instead of its current benefit of about $2,000. Yes, $1 trillion is real money. But I like the way my colleague, Chuck Marr, put it: “For less than one-fifth of the cost of the Trump tax plan, we could improve the lives of millions of working-class people.”

■ Fully fund the IRS. This idea is even more of a no-brainer than the FTT, and it too hangs out at the intersection of good, progressive politics and good policy. In real terms, IRS funding is down 18 percent since 2010, forcing the agency to cut 13,000 employees (14 percent of its workforce). Trump’s budget proposes further sharp cuts, which links to his team’s tax proposal in a particularly toxic way.

Defunding the agency is a stealth way to cut taxes, as it diminishes their auditing capacity and implicitly encourages tax evasion (audits are down from 1.1 percent of returns in 2010 to 0.7 percent in 2016). For example, the Tax Policy Center predicts that 30 percent of the cost of Team Trump’s pass-through proposal

will be due to phony reclassifications of salary income as business income; that’s $650 billion over ten years in revenue lost in part because of an under-resourced IRS. As Nina Olson, the IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate, recently put it: “No business would fail to fund a unit that, on average, brought in $7 for every dollar spent. Shareholders would rebel and bring lawsuits, or at least oust the management or board of directors, yet this is precisely what we are doing with the IRS budget.”

Like I said, that’s far from a fully fleshed-out plan, but the ideas share a progressive theme that can be crisply and, I’d wager, compellingly developed: True tax reform calls for a system that fairly raises the revenues we need to meet the challenges we face. And it does so while pushing back on, not increasing, economic inequality.

What’s the Endgame?

Yes, Democrats need a tax plan, but as long as Trump and the Republicans maintain their control over the White House and Congress, the threat of wasteful, regressive tax cuts will loom large. Vigilance against their phony, “dynamic” growth effects, the way they would exacerbate inequality, and deficit chickenhawkery will be required, as will stressing the need for ample revenues.

But will Republicans succeed? Given reconciliation and their ability to avoid a Senate filibuster, there is, of course, a distinct possibility of a Bush II–type tax cut that, to meet the budget rules, sunsets at the end of the budget window (there’s even been some talk of extending the window, but I don’t think they’ll go there). However, I can see an opening here not just for progressives, but for a united group of Americans to stand firmly against the Republicans’ plan.

These tax cuts won’t do anything to help the working-class people that helped elect Trump.

Their benefits, as I’ve pointed out, largely accrue to those at the top of the scale. But there’s another dimension of this tax-reformversus-tax-cut problem that I believe is critical to our pushback. It’s not enough to identify the winners and losers from tax cuts by just looking at the initial distribution of who gets the cuts. Again, we must recognize that the goal

here is to starve government of revenues so it can’t help anybody.

Unlike the more pragmatic Kansan conservatives, congressional Republicans will not raise future taxes to pay for the revenue shortfalls that will surely materialize when their phony growth projections peter out. They’ll advocate for spending cuts. And since federal taxes and federal spending are both progressive, cutting both is doubly regressive.

The figure below shows the impact of the Trump cuts on low-, middle-, and high-income households both before and after they’re ultimately paid for with spending cuts. Low- and middle-income households get nothing or little from the first round of cuts. But if conservatives then argue down the road, as I’m certain they will, that paying for their tax cuts requires spending cuts of the type they’ve proposed in their budgets or in their health-care plans— cuts that disproportionately hurt poor and moderate-income families—then you really get a sense of the damage these cuts can do.

Change in After-Tax Income From Trump Tax Cuts Lowest Quintile

Middle Quintile

Top 1 Percent

11.5% 11.3%

1.3%

0.3%

-2.7% ■ before pay-fors ■ after pay-fors

(equal per-household financing of tax cut)

-16.1%

It may well be true that Republicans were “put here on earth to cut taxes,” but that just means the rest of us were put here to try to stop them. I can’t predict whether their tax cut efforts will go the same way as their repeal-and-replace efforts have gone thus far. But I can assure you that I’ll be trying to ensure they do, and I could use all the help I can get.

Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 57

The Freedom Caucus’s Man on the Inside

O

n the morning of Friday, September 8, Mick Mulvaney found himself in a farcical situation. As President Donald Trump’s budget director, he stood, along with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, before the House Republican Conference meeting trying to sell a deal that combined $15 billion in federal aid for Hurricane Harvey with a three-month increase in the debt ceiling—a deal his boss had just struck with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

Not only had Mulvaney tried (and clearly failed) to convince Trump to hold the debt ceiling hostage to secure spending cuts, but he had vehemently opposed such bipartisan budget deals when he was an agitating member of the House Freedom Caucus, an amalgamation of Tea Party radicals he helped organize after losing a bid to lead the Republican Study

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Mick Mulvaney has his dream job as director of OMB. Given the general chaos in Trumpworld, what can he make of it?

B y Justin Mil ler Committee. As a South Carolina congressman, Mulvaney spearheaded the far right’s tactics of threatening to shut down the government to secure steep spending cuts during Obama’s presidency. In 2013, he nearly killed a $50.7 billion Hurricane Sandy relief package by put-

ting forward a poison-pill amendment that would offset the cost dollar for dollar with across-the-board spending cuts.

At the conference meeting, he was ridiculed by his former colleagues, who reminded him that Representative Mulvaney would have been the one yelling the loudest about such a deal. “I remember him during Sandy. I don’t forget,” Peter King, a conservative from New York, said.

The room let out a chorus of boos when Mulvaney wouldn’t commit to spending reductions when the debt ceiling would need to be increased again three months later. Hisses and groans persisted as Trump’s lieutenants made their pitch.

The meeting sums up Mulvaney’s tenure so far as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was, in part, brought on to serve as Trump’s liaison to the House’s troublemaking far-right fringe, so as to ease the path to repealing Obamacare, securing tax

andrew hamik / ap images

Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and his proposed fiscal 2018 federal budget

cuts, building a border wall, and advancing an infrastructure plan. But even for someone like Mulvaney, with his unimpeachable conservative credentials, the task has proved to be akin to herding cats. As the debt-ceiling debacle (and efforts on the American Health Care Act, the budget, and tax reform) has shown, he’s struggled to wield influence over his former colleagues. While recognizing that Mulvaney is loyally playing a role for Trump, they see no reason to roll over.

So you may wonder why one of the most radical small-government ideologues went to work in an administration that is pitching big-ticket items like a border wall that costs up to $24.5 million per mile and a $1 trillion infrastructure plan while refusing entitlement cuts. But for Mulvaney, it’s a small price to pay for what he says is his dream job—though one he’s admitted would make him “the most hated man in Washington.” The president has no interest in budgetary matters or the inner workings of bureaucracy, and all the other top advisers are otherwise engaged. In that vacuum, Mulvaney has quietly taken the keys to the federal government, opened up the hood, and begun loosening bolts and cutting wires.

The OMB director is a generally broad role

with tentacles reaching across and deep within the administration. Duties include crafting the president’s budget and negotiating with Congress, orchestrating presidential initiatives across the federal agencies, and overseeing the regulatory process and management of the federal bureaucracy.

Mulvaney had his hand in the administration’s efforts to repeal Obamacare and, now, to cut taxes; he’s taken the reins in the crusade to dismantle the regulatory state and shrink the federal workforce, and he single-handedly devised one of the most draconian presidential budgets since Reagan. All of this promises 3 percent economic growth allegedly stimulated by steep corporate tax cuts, aggressive deregulation, and welfare rollbacks. “It’s our version of Reaganomics,” he told Fox News.

With a president who has no experience with budgets or government, the OMB director’s job is even more important. Mulvaney sees his position and influence with the president, though, as a means to provide Trump with the

right-wing movement conservative perspective in a White House that is filled with disparate ideologies and competing power players.

Mulvaney is a stark departure from past OMB directors—generally established technocrats with high profiles in budgetary circles who deal in cold calculations and number crunching. He’s far more ideological and is working to advance a political agenda of his own. Even if he’s no longer an official member, Mulvaney has brought the extremist tendencies of the Freedom Caucus to their highest level of power yet.

He has embarked on a combative campaign to undermine the institutions and political consensus that might get in the way of his ambitious agenda to finally shrink down the size of the federal government enough to drown it in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist famously put it.

Recently ousted White House strategist Steve Bannon called him “the unsung hero of this administration, because he’s doing yeoman’s work on just about every front. He’s a rock star.”

Mulvaney’s Budget

After being narrowly confirmed by just one vote in the Senate in February, Mulvaney got to work. He staffed up his team largely with GOP congressional aides and staffers from the Heritage Foundation. Russell Vought, Heritage Action’s vice president, manned the beachhead team and was eventually appointed as deputy director, where he helped Mulvaney compose Trump’s budget for Fiscal Year 2018.

Trump’s involvement in formulating the budget was, unsurprisingly, extremely limited.

As Mulvaney explained in press interviews, he pored over Trump’s campaign speeches and statements in order to parse out what his priorities might be. Beyond that, Mulvaney had extraordinary leeway to fill out the budget’s details. “When it comes to program by program, or line item by line item, Mulvaney is a power center unto himself,” says Stan Collender, an expert in federal budgeting.

He lobbied Trump hard to retreat on a core campaign promise and cut Social Security and Medicare, but Trump resisted. However, as Michael Grunwald reported for Politico, Mulvaney apparently pulled one over on Trump, convincing him to support cuts to Social Security Disability Insurance by pitching it as welfare reform.

Mulvaney didn’t unveil the full 2018 budget until late May, months later than a typical incoming administration. But when it dropped, it did so with a bang. It was a radically harsh document—a love letter to the Heritage Foundation—that proposed to balance the budget in ten years while taking a wrecking ball to the federal government. It called for a $3.6 trillion decrease in non-defense discretionary spending, slashing funding for nearly every federal agency and hitting the EPA , Labor, and State particularly hard. Defense, meanwhile, got a big increase in funding. To facilitate belt-tightening for nearly everyone else, Mulvaney included a substantial increase in the OMB’s budget.

He also called for rollbacks to a whole host of critical federal programs, including $70 billion in cuts to disability insurance. Booting people off disability and limiting food assistance programs like SNAP and TANF, he says, will incentivize people who are able to work to get back into the labor market—which would in turn drive economic growth. Three-fifths of the cuts targeted programs that help lowand middle-income Americans. He called to eliminate the Community Development Block Grants, which states and cities use to fund everything from affordable housing development to Meals on Wheels. “Meals on Wheels sounds great,” he said, but “we’re not going to spend [money] on programs that cannot show that they actually deliver promises that we’ve made to people.” Further, Mulvaney contended the federal government shouldn’t be subsidizing free breakfasts for low-income schoolkids because there’s no evidence that it leads to improved outcomes.

“When you start looking at the places that will reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was, can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs? The answer was no,” he said on MSNBC ’s Morning Joe. “We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

His approach was ruthless. “We’re no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs,” he pronounced at a White House press briefing, “but by the number of people we help get off of those programs. We’re not

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 59

going to measure compassion by the amount of money that we spend, but by the number of people that we help.”

The gargantuan spending cuts still only accounted for a fraction of his budget-balancing scheme. The driving force is an unabashed faith in the growth-sparking power of trickledown economics. The details of his budget are a fiscal house of cards.

Typically, the OMB relies on the Congressional Budget Office’s economic growth projections for its own budget forecasting. The CBO forecasted an average growth rate of 1.9 percent over ten years. Mulvaney completely ignored that and projected that the economy would reach a 3 percent growth rate by 2021, not only creating an unprecedented gap between the CBO and the administration, but also basing his entire budget on assumptions that the vast majority of economic experts consider preposterous. He projected that the increased economic growth from Trump’s tax cuts would cover its $6.3 trillion in lost revenue (with some minor assistance from unspecified revenue-raisers) while also erasing $2.1 trillion in budget deficits over ten years.

In fact, if you take away Mulvaney’s starryeyed growth projections, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities did, you find that the Trump budget actually increases deficits by $2.5 trillion over ten years, not the $5.6 trillion reduction Mulvaney claims.

Even Reagan had fiscally serious advisers.

Reagan’s first OMB director, David Stockman, also orchestrated a budget that featured steep spending cuts to politically popular programs.

But Stockman was recognized as a thoughtful budget wonk and had good relationships on the Hill. He took pains to lay an extensive groundwork, constantly back-channeling with key members of Congress and department heads so as to prepare them for the impending pain.

And even he had to dramatically scale back his ambitions.

Mulvaney’s rabble-rousing past hadn’t earned him many allies, even on the Republican side. With Trump embroiled in neverending political scandals and uninterested in budget politics, Republicans in Congress felt emboldened to turn a cold shoulder on Mulvaney’s budget. Conservatives criticized it for not going after entitlements; foreign-

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policy Republicans complained about cuts to the country’s soft power—namely the State Department and international aid funds.

Democrats clobbered him for double counting and out-of-this-world fiscal assumptions.

“Mulvaney’s extreme conservative reputation lives on and I think he proposed the elimination of things and the cutting back on things that are important to Republicans,” Jim Dyer, a Republican lobbyist on budget and appropriations, told me. “He comes to this process at a time when austerity is not in vogue.” In March, in response to Mulvaney’s so-called skinny budget, providing only broad outlines, Rodney Frelinghuysen, chair of the House Appro-

The House Budget committee voted out a budget resolution, extremely conservative in its own right, that ignored Mulvaney’s proposed budget entirely. priations Committee, said, “ I think Mulvaney, quite honestly … he has no idea of the facts.”

It also doesn’t help that there’s a perception in Washington that Mulvaney was perhaps named budget director not because of his budgetary bona fides or even a close relationship with Trump (Mulvaney backed Rand Paul), but as a political favor for now– South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, who was the first elected official to publicly endorse Trump when he was lieutenant governor. Mulvaney had been mulling a run for the governorship in 2018.

Months after Mulvaney unveiled his budget, the House Budget Committee voted out a budget resolution of their own that, while extremely conservative in its own right, with cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, ignored Mulvaney’s budget outright. House appropriations bills also brushed off Mulvaney’s line items.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” says

Scott Lilly, a former Democratic staff director for the House Appropriations Committee.

“We’ve never had a presidential budget that made such dramatic changes before and never had a budget that was as thoroughly and completely disregarded as Mulvaney’s has been.”

To make matters more complicated, Trump has indicated that he might veto Congress’s spending bill if they don’t include money to build his border wall. And a series of legislative must-dos are prime hostage targets for the Freedom Caucus.

On top of all this, the Senate parliamentarian also ruled that the budget reconciliation instructions that Congress passed earlier this year, and which Republicans were relying on to unilaterally repeal Obamacare, expire at the end of September. That’s led at least a couple of Republican senators to begin pushing to restart repeal efforts. It also means Republicans will need to pass a new budget resolution for 2018 in order to pass their tax cuts through reconciliation. And the politics of that are, of course, highly fraught, too.

Likewise the politics of the debt ceiling, even assuming Congress buys the three-month extension deal that Trump cut with Schumer and Pelosi. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that despite Trump’s wishes, that deal might not pass.

Moreover, the House Freedom Caucus and many other conservatives don’t want to vote for a budget resolution until they have a clear sense of the GOP tax plan details, which the lead architects have kept locked away. Providing precise details would likely spark outrage from some faction and could undermine its rollout. (See “Real Tax Reform: What It Is and What It Isn’t,” by Jared Bernstein, page 52.)

Other Republicans think they need to just pass a budget resolution to build momentum for tax reform. But as the Budget Committee’s plan shows, House conservatives are demanding massive entitlement cuts, which, again, will create political problems with House moderates, senators, and Trump. Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, meanwhile, want the tax bill to be clean, not bogged down with messy political fights over Medicare and Medicaid.

One alternative could be for Republicans to just pass an empty budget resolution—one that doesn’t balance the budget or include any

scot t applewhite / ap images

Budget Buster: Mulvaney, back in his days as a congressman from South Carolina

typical conservative budget bromides—that is simply used as a vehicle to obtain reconciliation instructions. This is what they did with the resolution they passed in January to repeal Obamacare. But that tactic rankled a lot of conservatives in both the House and Senate, with some vowing to never support a similar vehicle again.

To put it simply, there are no good options.

This is a time when an inexperienced president might rely on a budget director who has worked through tense budget battles on the Hill before and who has political capital and goodwill to spare. Instead, Trump has Mulvaney, a former backbench member of the House Budget Committee who made his name using these types of situations for political extortion. And as his presentation with Mnuchin to the House Republican Conference showed, he doesn’t have much in the way of political capital right now.

“It shows you the price that can be paid by making such a foolish appointment,” Lilly says. “Government, in fact, does things that are important to people, and if you put any idiot that comes down the street in an important position, it’s likely to have consequences beyond what Trump might expect.”

Attacking Honest Numbers In the late spring, the CBO released report after report showing that each iteration of the GOP ’s

plan to repeal and replace Obamacare would boot millions of Americans off their current coverage. Republicans were furious. The Trump administration’s strategy to repeal Obamacare first was backfiring. And with their eyes on securing massive tax cuts next, the CBO was becoming a political obstacle, even with a Republican appointee heading it, by publishing honest numbers debunking Mulvaney’s heroic growth assumptions. In July, the CBO calculated that his budget would reduce the deficit over ten years by $2.3 trillion less than Mulvaney projected.

From day one, Mulvaney’s strategy has been to undermine the nonpartisan integrity of the CBO. In an interview with the Washington Examiner in late May, Mulvaney lashed out, calling the scoring methods of the American Health Care Act “absurd.” He claimed that the office was assuming people would voluntarily give up their Medicaid coverage, which was a fundamental misreading of the analysis. The CBO assumed people would lose Medicaid coverage non-voluntarily through eligibility lapses, pay raises, and other changes in the AHCA that would change the dynamics of the program.

“At some point, you’ve got to ask yourself, has the day of the CBO come and gone?” Mulvaney said in the interview. “How much power do we give to the CBO under the 1974 Budget Act?” He alleged that the CBO official charged with scoring the AHCA , Holly Harvey, was politically biased because she helped score the original Obamacare legislation and was a former health-care analyst in the Clinton administration. “We always talk about it as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Given the authority that that has, is it really feasible to think of that as a nonpartisan organization?”

In July, Mulvaney ramped up the attack, claiming that the CBO was relying on the methodology of Jonathan Gruber, who helped design Obamacare, to score the repeal and replacement of it. Eight former CBO directors, appointed by both parties, wrote a letter to congressional leadership strongly condemning Mulvaney’s attacks on the office and defending its role as a nonpartisan arbiter of policy.

Mulvaney’s allies in the Freedom Caucus doubled down, introducing an amendment to a minibus appropriations package that would eliminate the 89 employees of the CBO’s Budget Analysis Division, which is charged with scoring legislation. Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows said the scoring process ought to be outsourced to think tanks like Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution, and then aggregated.

Mulvaney himself preferred that his OMB take over all legislative analysis.

The amendment ran into strong resistance— Democrats in the capital area called it “part of a strategic assault on objectivity and expertise in the civil service.” But it also drew swift criticism from top Republicans, including House Ways and Means Committee Chair Kevin Brady and Budget Committee Chair Diane Black, who urged their colleagues to vote against the amendment. The House ultimately voted by a nearly 3-to-1 margin against the amendment.

This survival of the CBO is nothing short of extraordinary. In an era characterized by fake news and accusations of fake news, denial of climate science, preposterous claims of tax cuts and deregulation producing magical GDP growth, even many Republicans still value accurate budget numbers. That can’t be good news for Mulvaney and Trump.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 61

Regulations and Government Reorganization

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Team Trump: The president with Mulvaney and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin

pension benefits and cracking down on current employee performance.

The deregulation so far has happened through inaction rather than action. The administration has ground its approval and review of new regulations to a halt while withdrawing a large proportion of Obama-era rules that had not yet been approved. In its first six months, Trump’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which operates within OMB as a reviewer of regulations, has reviewed a paltry 41 new rules, only 16 of which are deemed economically significant, meaning the estimated economic impact is greater than $100 million. That’s a record low, according to the conservative American Action Forum.

Obama’s OIRA reviewed 80 economically significant rules in his final year. “That’s a strong indication that [Trump] is letting the oil and gas industry and big business across the country regulate themselves,” says Amit Narang, a regulations expert with Public Citizen.

OIRA has also delayed several Obama rules that were set to go into effect, including an 18-month delay of the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which requires retirement advisers to act in their clients’ best interest. The delay alone could cost retirement savers nearly $11 bil-

lion over the next 30 years because of conflicted investment advice, according to one estimate.

However, they’ve been very sloppy and halfbaked with their legal rationales for delays, says Lisa Heinzerling, who served as an associate administrator in the EPA’s policy office under Obama. “If they continue doing that, I think they are in real legal trouble.” Indeed, they already are. The U.S. Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., rebuked EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt for unilaterally delaying a rule that required oil and gas companies to decrease methane emissions, saying the agency failed to cite statutory authority to do so. The court, which deals with most regulatory matters, was sending a clear message to the Trump administration that it had better have clear justifications and legal standing in its deregulatory efforts. Trump’s agencies are facing many other legal challenges to its rule delays, including a coordinated effort by state attorneys general suing the Education Department for its delay of a rule that protects student loan recipients at for-profit colleges. Environmental advocates sued the EPA , prompting the agency to abandon its delay of an ozone pollution requirement.

If the administration does ever get around

e va n v u c c i / a p i m a g e s

If the Trump administration does deliver on Bannon’s goal of deconstructing the administrative state, that will also be Mulvaney’s doing.

Within two months of taking office, Trump signed several executive orders aimed at deregulation and limiting the size of the government. The one that drew the biggest headlines was his order that instituted a regulatory freeze and required that federal agencies do away with two regulations for every new one proposed. Trump also ordered each agency to come up with a plan to “reorganize” its structure with an eye on eliminating entire agencies where possible. As OMB director, Mulvaney is leading the implementation of those executive orders and has a great deal of power in how deregulation and shrinking of the federal workforce will happen. “Government is using muscles it hasn’t used in a really long time, exposing and removing redundant and unnecessary regulation,” Mulvaney said in a July statement.

Each agency has been ordered to create a regulatory reform taskforce and come up with a list identifying regulations to do away with. Each agency is also required to develop a plan to reform its organizational structure and downsize its workforce to achieve vague standards of “efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability.” Those plans are supposed to be submitted by early September to Mulvaney, who will review them and then develop a detailed plan to overhaul the executive branch, to be included in the 2019 federal budget. Mulvaney, who has long held hostile views on the federal bureaucracy, has an extraordinary amount of latitude to reshape the agencies.

The executive orders grant the OMB director vast new oversight powers to dictate agency rulemaking priorities.

During his time in Congress, Mulvaney consistently targeted the federal workforce. He introduced the Federal Workforce Reduction Through Attrition Act, which would require agencies to hire only one new employee for every three employees who retire or quit. He’s also indicated support for allowing private contractors to bid for work currently done by the federal government. As OMB director, he’s proposed reducing retired federal workers’

to actually undoing existing regulations, it will have to go through a whole new rulemaking process. One of the greatest ironies of Trump’s two-out-one-in deregulatory order is that it actually creates three new rules—two pertaining to the outgoing regulations, one for the incoming regulation. It’s a years-long process that requires a period of open comment, meetings with stakeholders, a painstaking cost-benefit analysis, and a final review before it can be finalized. The biggest challenge for deregulation is that it must provide evidence-based justification for why the rule is no longer necessary. For instance, the EPA would have to show that coalfired power plants are not a significant source of greenhouse gases as part of its rationale for undoing Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

One way to do that is to show that the costs of a regulation are greater than the benefits.

Mulvaney accused Obama’s OIRA of “fudging the analysis when it came to the cost side of the equation,” essentially greasing the tracks of its cost-benefit analysis for top White House priorities. That’s a laughable notion to many progressives who criticized Obama’s OIRA as giving too much consideration to industry costs, and not nearly enough to its benefits.

Not to mention, Mulvaney was just plain wrong. A review of OMB reports on cost-benefit analysis show that the office considered only the costs in its analysis (for 54 rules) far more than it only considered benefits (16 rules). In making the attacks, though, he is not only criticizing his own career staff, but appears to be laying the groundwork to rewrite regulations’ cost-benefit analyses in a way that juices up the economic costs and gives legal cover for repeal. Under deregulation, the costs and benefits of a rule flip. The benefits that would be lost become the costs; the costs that would be removed become the benefits. So it’s in Mulvaney’s interest to say regulations’ costs are as high as possible.

With radical deregulators like Scott Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, and Betsy DeVos at the helm of key federal agencies, there’s a real concern among regulatory advocates that they will cook the books when removing regulations, going through the motions of the formal rulemaking process while contorting the data and analysis to get a desired result. All agencies do that to some extent, but there’s a concern

that the Trump administration will take it to a dangerous new level.

The appointment of Neomi Rao as the OIRA administrator hasn’t given advocates much hope. Rao, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a law professor at George Mason University, where she founded the school’s Center for the Study of the Administrative State, which has received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation. Her scholarly work suggests an aversion to administrative agencies as policymaking vehicles, argues that independent agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are unconstitutional, and questions whether human dignity

Mulvaney has repeatedly tried to weaken the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which keeps contradicting his numbers, but CBO keeps surviving. should be considered when analyzing the costs and benefits of government regulations.

For instance, when Obama’s Department of Justice was developing its national prison rape prevention standards, which were eventually issued in 2012, it was required to develop a thorough cost-benefit analysis that attempted to measure a monetary value of preventing various types of sexual assault that can happen in prisons. Preventing rape in a juvenile facility, for example, was worth $674,316; rape in an adult facility, $480,595. Of course, these numbers fail to grasp the unquantifiable human cost of sexual assault. So the Obama administration directed its regulatory agencies to identify regulatory benefits such as dignity, equity, and fairness—all of which fall outside the traditional cost-benefit scope of quantification and monetization—and to include a qualitative assessment of those benefits in its cost-benefit analysis.

Rao’s aversion to factoring in those types of benefits has advocates concerned that she is already abandoning qualitative measurements. In late August, she sent a memo to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announcing that the OMB was halting an Obama-era rule that required large companies to disclose how much they pay employees by race and gender as an effort to close wage gaps.

“OMB is concerned that some aspects of the revised collection of information lack practical utility, are unnecessarily burdensome, and do not adequately address privacy and confidentiality issues,” Rao wrote.

The regulatory freeze on implementing significant regulations ends at the end of September, at which point the order gives Mulvaney the power to then set each agency’s budget for the amount of regulatory costs it can impose. In theory, Mulvaney could set a completely arbitrary cost budget—say, $1 million—for agencies, which would ostensibly block the promulgation of any new rules. But the legality of Trump’s deregulation order is under question. Public Citizen has filed a lawsuit charging that the executive order is illegal because it forces federal agencies to violate statutory law and that the OMB director does not have the authority to unilaterally set regulatory cost budgets.

“The real question is whether an administration that is impervious to fact will be able to muster the fact-based analysis required to repeal rules,” Heinzerling says. That will be decided in the courts when eventual deregulations are challenged.

In principle, Mulvaney is one of the most

potent members of Trump’s cabinet. The scope of power for the OMB director is nearly limitless, especially in an administration dead set on breaking the government from within. He’s already given the Freedom Caucus ideology its most powerful platform yet. But on budget politics, the GOP remains a fragmented mess.

It remains to be seen whether Mulvaney can convince Trump to go after entitlements while also orchestrating a full-throated deregulatory crusade and scaling down of the federal government, tasks that will likely take several years.

Mulvaney, despite the extensive power of his office, personifies the multiple contradictions that are the Trump administration.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 63

Not Britain’s Finest Hour

If Brexit actually happens, those most harmed will be the people who voted for it. How did Britain get into such a mess, and how might she yet muddle out of it?

B y D enis Ma cSh a ne

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liament over the state and the nation. Yet it is hard to see Brexit as anything other than a revolutionary moment. It has destroyed one prime minister, and could destroy another.

It has transferred power from representative elected institutions to a populist plebiscite. It entails the biggest reduction in geopolitical influence ever seen in Britain. Together with Trump, the Brexit neo-isolationism implies that the long 19th- and 20th-century hegemony of English-speaking power—the United Kingdom and then the United States—could be over.

With Brexit, paradoxically, Britain has had a massive impact on continental European politics—but not the one that the “Leave” voters wanted—as the rest of Europe has recoiled in horror. European leaders are now more united on the need to stay together and not let Britain have a special status in which it has all the economic benefits of EU membership but none of the political burdens, such as the sharing of sovereignty or paying a share of the EU’s running costs.

The 27 EU member states have found new virtues in the much-criticized European Union, and a new unity on Brexit. That’s good for the EU, bad for Britain.

Britain needs the European Union far

more than the EU needs Britain. EU growth was stronger in 2016 than American or British growth. Overall, EU unemployment in mid2017 was 7.7 percent, which includes the 22 percent jobless rate in Greece. Today, unemployment is falling in France, Spain, and Portugal, and the two Iberian peninsular nations are posting growth rates in 2017 of 3 percent or more. The U.K. growth rate was just 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2017 and estimated at 0.3 percent in the second quarter, which projects to an annualized growth rate of 1 percent. Such growth as there is according to the U.K. Office of National Statistics is due to government spending. Business investment is flat and productivity is falling. Growth would only fall further with Brexit.

In a July 2017 report, IMF economists identified the United Kingdom as having the largest trade deficit of 28 of the world’s biggest economies, running at 4.4 percent of GDP, in contrast to a surplus for Eurozone countries.

U.K. government debt is 89 percent of GDP, more than double the level in 2007, the year when Tony Blair left office and the Tories took over. The British middle classes have not had

l ance b / istock by get t y

I

t is not often that a great, historic nation decides the game is over and relegates itself out of the top rank of economic and geopolitical players. But future historians may decide that is exactly what Britain has done in its convulsions over Brexit.

A personal confession. I coined the term Brexit in 2012 when modish headlines were full of Grexit—Greece exiting the euro single currency and possibly even the European Union itself. Today, Greece under its left-populist Syriza government is the EU’s poster boy as the Greeks swallow every dose of bitter medicine the EU and the International Monetary Fund prescribe.

No one talks of Grexit anymore—but Brexit is the biggest thing to hit Europe since the collapse of Soviet communism. In the Queen’s tenth decade, she does not know if her successor will reign over a truly united kingdom, as Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are coldly bitter at the triumph of an English nationalism that won the Brexit vote.

Britain does not do revolutions, or at least not since the 1640s, when a king’s head was chopped off at the end of a civil war that helped create the supremacy of the Westminster Par-

m at t d u n h a m / a p i m a g e s

a real wage rise in more than a decade and tive MPs put the Tories just barely over the while the better-off get richer by the second. have only been able to maintain consumption threshold of 325 seats—the number needed for Never in British political history has the country seen 12 months—June 2016 to June by going massively into debt. The slightest rise a working majority in the 650-member House 2017—as dramatic as this. Prime Minister of Commons.

The in interest rates or the loss of a job will cause DUP are creationists who David Cameron thought he was sailing to an real problems. believe that God created the world 4,004 years For the United Kingdom, the economics before Christ was born. The party is riddled easy win in his referendum on the European of Brexit are almost entirely negative. Today, with incestuous financial and sexual histories. Union. On the referendum day itself, his pollany firm based in Britain—British or foreign, The London political class likes to look sters were telling him it would be a 55–45 win down its nose at the erratic and financial- in favor of Europe. By the end of the count, from modern media creative firms to banks, to ly dubious political practices elsewhere in Cameron was finished. If Lord North in Britauto firms like Nissan, Honda, and Toyota, to universities or management consultants—can Europe. But Britain has been plunged into ish history books is the prime minister who produce in Britain and sell into every corner five major national elections in three years (the lost America in the 1780s, David Cameron of the world’s biggest market, the European 2014 European Parliament elections and the is the prime minister who lost Europe 230 Union. Britain runs an enduring trade deficit Scottish independence referendum, the 2015 years later.

The Brexit vote divided Britain in a way in goods but a surplus in services—notably the general election, the 2016 EU referendum, and never seen before. London, Scotgiant network of financial-sector land, Northern Ireland, and the services based in the City of London, the Wall Street of Europe. But young all voted in favor of Europe.

EU leaders have made clear that But an English nationalist vote automatic access to selling bonds, outside London, consisting of the or pension, or trading euros is conwhite middle and working classes ditional on being in the Europewho had been told for years that an Union, or at least agreeing to there were too many immigrants abide by EU laws and regulations, in Britain, carried the day. much as a foreign bank or firm in It was assumed that one of the United States has to abide by the Tories who campaigned for American laws as well as federal Brexit, notably Boris Johnson, and state ordinances. Prime Minwould inherit Downing Street. ister Theresa May insists that on But revolutions devour their chilMarch 29, 2019, Britain will walk dren, and the pro-Brexit Tories out of all these economic arrangestabbed each other in the front, back, and all sides and lost the ments to become what in trade parprize. As the sea of blood rose in lance is called a “third” country, like front of 10 Downing Street, there Mexico or South Korea or Nigeria, The P.M. Who Lost Europe: David Cameron is right up there with Neville Chamberlain. appeared a small dinghy with a seeking to export to the 27 nations large woman in it floating gently into the cabiin the EU. Each product’s access will have to be the 2017 general election). It has a ruling party net room on the left of the Downing Street separately negotiated. Britain will be the loser. without a majority, a prime minister cordially loathed by her own MPs, and a cabinet openly ground floor. Theresa May became Britain’s at war with itself, making the Trump White second woman prime minister.

Brexit has already altered British poliBut Margaret Thatcher she isn’t. The only tics. The ruling Conservative Party suffered a House look like an oasis of Eisenhower calm child of a vicar, she has spent every waking by comparison. major defeat in the June 2017 election, one that minute since graduating in geography from The opposition Labour Party has a leadwas abruptly and opportunistically called by Theresa May. In the first months of the year, er who is a big fan of Fidel Castro and Hugo Oxford working her way up the ranks of the she was credited with a 20-point lead over a Chavez, supported Slobodan Milosevic, and Conservative Party. When she went as prime Labour Party led by a scion of the 1968 gen- is unwilling to purge his party of rank anti- minister to the G20, it was the first time she eration of committed leftists—Jeremy Corbyn. Semites. Ignored or marginalized for most had set foot in China. She doesn’t do America, But May lost her majority and has had to pay 1 of his time in the Commons since 1983 as a unlike many of the Brexit Tories who dream billion pounds to an extreme, homophobic, and home to endless lost causes, Corbyn, now 68, of creating an Anglosphere and bringing back sectarian ultra-Protestant party in Northern found that there was finally an audience for to life their imagined 1980s dream ReaganIreland to obtain the support of their ten mem- his reasoned denunciations of the shameful Thatcher axis. Her favorite reading is cookery bers of parliament. The Democratic Unionist inequality and cruelty of austerity cuts on pub- books, and she holidays walking in the Swiss Party (DUP) combining with 316 Conserva- lic services and indirect tax rises for the poor Alps where everyone speaks English.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 65

The Brexit vote was a narrow 52–48. Just

37 percent of the total electorate voted to leave Europe. In previous constitutional referendums, it was necessary to win at least 40 percent of all eligible votes for a decision to stand.

The referendum was advisory, not binding, under law. Hundreds of thousands of 18- to 24-year-old voters were not listed to vote as David Cameron changed the electoral registration system to make it harder for younger voters—thought to be anti-Tory—to vote. In addition, large numbers of Brits who live on the continent did not vote because of the complexities in voting registration for British ex-pats.

Nonetheless, May interpreted the referendum vote as a mandate for an extreme Brexit. Since the late 1990s, when the Tories decided the only way they could attack Tony Blair was by branding him as a quasi-traitor ready to dissolve Britain into a European minestrone run by foreigners in Brussels, the Conservative

politics in Britain. He himself however created the monster he now hoped a referendum might slay. He won the Tory leadership in 2005 as the most anti-European candidate. He and his shadow cabinet team never missed a chance to denigrate the European Union. They constantly presented the Labour prime ministers, Tony Blair until 2007 and Gordon Brown until 2010, as puppets of Brussels who were selling out British interests by supporting the enlargement of the EU to accept ex-communist countries and by allowing workers from those countries to come and work in Britain at jobs the sturdy British worker turned his nose up at.

Cameron refused to directly confront U.K. Independence Party’s (UKIP) xenophobia and anti-European hate language. Most mass-circulation papers, notably those owned offshore by men like Rupert Murdoch, who is not even a British citizen, and other anti-European financiers, denounced the European Union and the

Brexit has been like a political Ebola virus eating into the innards of traditional British politics and making both Labour and the Tories lose coherence and shape.

Party has steadily become more Europhobic.

William Hague, the Tory leader after 1997, kept demanding referendums on minor, longforgotten EU treaties agreed upon in Amsterdam and Nice. The demand for a plebiscite of the anti-European Tories like Hague grew in intensity in the Labour years. This denied the supremacy of representative parliamentary democratic tradition, which had been a bedrock of Tory political philosophy for centuries. Margaret Thatcher called referendums “a device of dictators and demagogues.” But Conservatives found themselves locked out of power for 13 years, 1997 to 2010, the longest period without the spoils of office in peacetime since the 19th century. Even when Labour was defeated in 2010, the Tories could govern only in coalition with Liberal Democrats, a party they despised.

Finally, Cameron won a majority in 2015.

His first big decision was to hold the referendum on Europe the following year. His justification was that he needed to lance the anti-European boil that dominated right-wing

66 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2017

presence of Europeans in England. The Federation of Poles in Great Britain produced in 2008 a dossier of 50 hate headlines from one paper, the Daily Mail. Cameron even took the Conservative Party out of the Europe-wide federation of center-right parties such as those led

by Germany’s Angela Merkel, Poland’s Donald Tusk, or Spain’s Mariano Rajoy. The federation, known as the European People’s Party, allows all the mainstream conservative parties to connect, debate, and network. It does not require allegiance to any line, but Cameron chose to leave it and set up a new political grouping with hardline nationalist parties, like Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) and more obscure populist-right parties, some with historic negatives on anti-Semitism.

Over decades, Britain has accepted millions of Irish immigrant workers and Asian immigrants from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and East Africa. Moreover, British banks, businesses, and football clubs were stuffed full of European “immigrants.” The father of the

2003–2005 Tory leader, Michael Howard, was a Romanian immigrant, and to his credit, Cameron promoted black and Asian Tory MPs to government positions. But on Europe, the Conservatives whipped up anti-immigrant populism so that when the referendum was called, it was largely a vote on whether or not Brits liked the level of immigrants in their country.

The anti-Semitic, neo-fascist British National Party (BNP) won two seats in the European Parliament, and UKIP under its populist demagogue anti-immigrant leader, Nigel Farage, was also winning votes. Neither the BNP nor UKIP were ever able to win a seat in the House of Commons. Yet the BBC and the press treated Farage as a major mainstream political figure. In the manner of Senator Joe McCarthy, claiming communists were taking over America in the 1950s, or Donald Trump insisting the United States was swamped by Mexican and Muslim immigrants, Farage won a major profile with his claims that the European Union was taking over Britain and a tsunami of European “immigrants”—Polish, Italian, Spanish—were overwhelming English towns and public services. He claimed it was possible to travel through London without hearing English spoken and said, “This country, in a short space of time, has frankly become unrecognizable.” Trump invited Farage to visit him in Trump Tower soon after winning in November 2016 and tweeted: “Many people would like to see @Nigel_Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job!” This ultimate fusion of Brexit and Trump has not come to pass, but in their appeal to xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim nationalism, the two men have much in common.

Brexit has been like a political Ebola virus

eating into the innards of traditional British politics and making parties lose coherence and shape. In conceding the main UKIP demand for a referendum, Cameron calculated that the pro-EU vote would easily win, UKIP would be finished, and anti-European Tory MPs would be marginalized. Rarely has a British prime minister gotten the internal politics of his own country so wrong.

But then May compounded the error. She treated the 48 percent pro-EU vote with contempt, and at her party conference in October

p r e s s a s s o c i at i o n v i a a p i m a g e s

2016 and in subsequent speeches she spoke of Kingdom and, like any 1970s internationalthe European Union using language that might ist, he believes in open borders. He does like have been written by Nigel Farage. She dispar- the European Union of free markets, rulesaged pro-Europeans in Britain, declaring, “If enforced competition, and bans on state subyou believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re sidies to prop up money-losing industries. At a citizen of nowhere,” evidently not knowing it times, he can use UKIP-sounding language was Socrates who said, “I am not a citizen of about European workers driving down wages.

Athens or of Greece but a citizen of the world.”

Labour had a golden opportunity to tear In forming her cabinet, she promoted rabid into May and pour salt on the open wounds anti-Europeans, including Boris Johnson into of senior Tory politicians who disagreed on the prestigious post as foreign secretary. John- how to handle Brexit. Instead, Labour turned son had a long record of falsifying news stories in on itself. Corbyn fired three shadow minand indeed was fired from his first job at The isters who voted to support the United KingTimes for making up quotes. His reporting in dom staying in the single market, even though the 1990s for The Daily Telegraph about Brus- leaving the single market was UKIP and hardsels was often sheer invention. In the Brexit referendum campaign, Johnson made outlandish claims that if voters backed Brexit there would be an extra 350 million pounds a week to spend on Britain’s National Health Service. Johnson also said Turkey was about to join the European Union so that 75 million Turks could come to live and work in Britain. Again, untrue, but for 25 years Johnson had been making Tory audiences laugh and jeer with his inventions about the EU. In his biography of Winston Churchill, Johnson wrote that a “Nazi European Union” was proposed in 1942 with “a single currency, a central bank, a common Snake Pit: Theresa May and her foreign secretary Boris Johnson (lower left) agricultural policy and other familiar ideas.” This is the man Theresa May made line-Tory Brexit policy. Labour spokespersons contradicted each other. Finally, late in Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State.

Opinion polls have turned steadily against August, Corbyn decided that being bracketed Brexit since the referendum, with most show- with May as favoring a hard Brexit was not ing a desire to stay in the European Union free- smart, and Labour softened its position. The trade single market and customs union. The Party now argues there should be a long transiJune 2017 election was a major repudiation tion period after the United Kingdom formally of May’s handling of Brexit. But Labour has leaves the European Union in spring 2019, and not known what to do with this victory. Cor- in that transition Britain would stay in the byn himself is no enthusiast for the European single market and customs union and accept Union, though never a committed Brexiter. all EU rules. In effect, Britain would stay an I have examined all his interventions on EU member, but with no voice over any EU Europe in the Commons since 2005, and while decisions or policies. Labour is now the party he urged the European Commission to take of so-called “soft” Brexit, and there is at least a more action in support for his favored causes, clear divide between Labour and the hardline he never called for withdrawal. He supports anti-Europeans in May’s cabinet and the prime the rights of Europeans to live in the United minister herself.

Brexit is just as bad for British capital-

ism. The City is seeing a slow hemorrhage of financial jobs to Frankfurt, Dublin, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, and even Paris as France’s new President Emmanuel Macron insists he wants to make Paris a European and global finance hub. As a former Rothschild banker, he knows of what he speaks. The City’s rise to preeminence on a par with Wall Street is entirely due to Europe. The Single European Act of 1986 provided that if a firm or bank is licensed to do business in one European country, it could do business in all EU member states. Nearly 350,000 so-called banking and financial-service “EU passports” have been issued to traders, dealers, and salespersons in the City.

The British financial industry employs 7.3 percent of the U.K.’s working population, totaling more than 2.2 million people. U.K. financial services constitute the country’s largest tax-paying sector, contributing 11.5 percent of the total. The industry is also the U.K.’s largest exporter, running a trade surplus of around 72 billion pounds. All of this has come about because Margaret Thatcher forced through a massive European-wide banking and financial-services liberalization revolution in the 1980s. Every bank and finance house in the United States, Japan, Switzerland, China, Russia, all of Asia, Latin America, and Africa came and opened up in London to get automatic, unfettered access to the European single market of 500 million middle-class consumers. The British specialty of trading and clearing euros is a $120 trillion–volume business which will now leave London as EU finance ministers and central bank governors have made clear that legal supervision for trading in the world’s second-biggest currency would have to take place under EU supervision.

British businesses, health-care services, tourism, catering, and many niche skilled jobs depend on European citizens—described routinely by the BBC and politicians using the value-loaded word “immigrants”—including half a million Irish citizens, the second-biggest

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 67

category of EU workers in Britain after Poles.

Immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka far outnumber all the EU citizens in Britain, but do not face the same xenophobic political and media hate attacks from the right that Europeans encounter. If Britain starts to discriminate against European citizens by imposing immigration controls like travel, work, or residence visas on Europeans, then it will be impossible for Britain to stay in the single market.

Leaving the EU customs union would have a dramatic impact in Ireland. The Northern Ireland peace agreement has written into it the obligation to accept common EU rules.

Today, an Irish nationalist Catholic can live in Derry or anywhere in the six counties of British Ulster and feel as if they are living in one Ireland. They will have an Irish passport, watch the Irish broadcaster RTE , use euros, work or own property in Ireland, drive across

the 300-mile-long frontier. Once again, uniformed officers of the British state will have their buildings supervising what the Irish are up to. Since the 1920s, the favorite targets for any angry Irish nationalist have been border outposts representing the control of the British state in the northeast corner of Ireland.

If the Tories insist on leaving the EU customs union, then trouble in Northern Ireland is guaranteed, without looking at the endless queues of lorries, vans, and cars to be checked as they go from England to French ports and other harbors on the continental mainland.

Brexit also clearly threatens Britain’s standing as a geopolitical player. For centuries, Britain expended blood and treasure to ensure Europe was open for British commerce, that no dominant continental power, ideology, or faith took over, and that liberal, democratic, rule-of-law values dear to Britain spread across the continent.

Could Parliament reverse Brexit? This would require higher levels of confident political leadership in Britain than so far have been on display by party leaders. the border as if driving from Virginia to Maryland, and no longer feel, like so many Irish felt living under Protestant Loyalist domination between 1920 and 1990, as if they were still colonized by the English.

All the milk in Bailey’s Irish Cream or in the hard cheddar cheese of British supermarkets comes from Ulster cows, but is shipped across the Northern Irish border to the efficient dairy multinationals in Ireland. In the European Union, there is just one Irish economy. Guinness is brewed in St. James, Dublin, and shipped in tankers to Belfast, then bottled or put in barrels and sent back to Dublin for export to anywhere a pint of the “dark stuff” is popular—without having to bother with customs or border formalities.

Outside the EU customs union, the border between the United Kingdom province in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic becomes a crossing point between two sets of tariffs and duties, and will require border posts along the 200 or so roads that cross

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In recent decades, Britain has had a seat, a vote, and a voice in all the big-ticket decisions on Europe’s direction of travel. British diplomats, other officials, stellar leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair magnified their influence by cajoling, persuading, nudging the rest of Europe in a desired direction for Britain. This meant building alliances and accepting some pushbacks, but Britain has had more power and influence in Europe in the last few decades than at any previous time in history.

All this comes to a dead shuddering stop upon Brexit, irrespective of whether it is hard or soft. Under May’s proposal, in the spring of 2019, when the next European Parliament is elected, the next European Commission is chosen, and the new Council of Ministers meets, no Brit will be present. The United Kingdom reverts to bilateral diplomacy. Britain overnight becomes an international policy player that has to cool its heels in the waiting rooms of EU deciders from the Council of Ministers to the European Commission.

But Brexit has caught Britain as a small uncertain, confused animal in the headlight glare of nationalist xenophobic populism. The political class has never been so weak or badly led.

Can this situation really stand? There is a passionate intensity among the ideologues in the Brexit camp who have invested political belief for two decades or more that the European Union was a monster to be slayed and island Britain should stand alone, as in 1940.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the international business editor of the hardline pro-Brexit Daily Telegraph wrote in an exchange with Stephan Richter, the editor of The Globalist, there would be a “civil war” if any effort were made to reverse Brexit.

This is sheer hyperbole. The evidence suggests that there would be just a huge sigh of relief if politicians could rise to the challenge of avoiding a massive crisis over trade, investment, jobs, and the rights of the British to live, retire, or work across the Channel. There will be die-in-the-ditchers on the right, but the BNP has disappeared as a political force and UKIP got just 1.8 percent of the general election vote.

Business is the dog that is not barking on Brexit. Very few business leaders want to go out front and say with style and punch that Brexit is a disaster. They depend on May and her Brexit ministers for contracts or to become Sir or Lord Someone. Most are Tories who do not want to undermine the Conservative government and risk a hard left-wing Corbyn arriving in 10 Downing Street to create Venezuela on the Thames, as his rightist critics put it.

But Labour does not want to be seen as totally repudiating the decision of the people in the referendum. Labour lost many white working-class pro-Brexit votes in the June general election, and needs to get them back to have any hope of winning power.

There are three basic routes out of the Brexit trap. A prime minister would have to muster the courage to call a second referendum. Or the House of Commons could vote to overturn Brexit. Alternatively, Britain could negotiate an arrangement of affiliated status, much like that enjoyed by Norway or Switzerland. The problem is that neither May nor Corbyn is close to calling a second referendum. It’s not at all clear that even in a free vote, a majority of MPs

tinue as an EEA member. Government ministers are talking about a transition period as they desperately try to buy time and avoid a major economic and social crisis in March 2019. At that date, trade, flights, and the right to live and retire in Europe suddenly will be impaired, and many foreign firms will feel obliged to relocate out of the U.K. into the bigger EU market.

Not many politicians know how to admit

r e x f e at u r e s v i a a p i m a g e s

The Future? Brexit could bring back checkpoints at the Irish border (this one was staged by anti-Brexit activists).

would vote to reverse Brexit. And other EU leaders have no good reason to give Britain a Norway-style deal.

In Denmark in 1993 and Ireland in 2009, a second referendum was held to reverse an initial rejection of two EU treaties that expanded the powers of the European Union. But the Brexit referendum is rather more fundamental in saying no to the very idea of EU membership. The risk is that voters may feel patronized and decide to confirm their initial vote. What is certain is that in most of the recent national polls in Britain, whatever was assumed would happen did not.

Is it possible for Parliament to take charge and modify or reverse the referendum result, as the Swiss parliament did when it sidelined the 2014 referendum against immigration by EU citizens? This requires higher levels of confident political leadership in Britain than so far have been on display by party leaders.

Conservative MPs have a decidedly antiEuropean rank and file. They also have a prime minister who decided in August 2016 that she could only be secure if she interpreted and defined a vote to leave the European Union as a full amputational rupture.

Yet Brexit—full British exit from the EU—has not happened. The vote to leave has. But Brits are doubting Thomases. They don’t believe any-

thing has happened or will happen until they can touch, feel it.

In principle, it is possible for Britain to stay in the EU customs union or indeed the single market, but outside the European Union.

When the European Economic Community was set up in 1957 by France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, Britain formed a rival European Free Trade Association (EFTA) to include Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and other countries. But EFTA members insisted on retaining national sovereign control on trade and people flows and rejected a common arbitration court like the European Court of Justice. When Britain and Ireland joined the European Community in 1973, EFTA withered on the vine. It survives as a small club. Its members, other than Switzerland, signed a treaty with the European Union in 1993 and with all EU member states.

The combined EU/EFTA nations formed what is called the European Economic Area (EEA).

EEA non-EU members like Norway accept EU laws and directives, accept the principle of the four freedoms of movement of capital, goods, services, and people across borders, pay contributions as if an EU member state, and abide

by European Court of Justice rulings.

There is an intense legal debate going on about whether the United Kingdom could con-

that a catastrophic mistake has been made.

As Friedrich Schiller wrote, “Against stupidity even the Gods contend in vain.”

There is also cold fury in Europe that Britain allowed the hate politics of xenophobic antiEuropeanism to become official policy of David Cameron and his predecessors, with Theresa May as Britain’s Bourbon prime minister who has learned nothing and forgotten nothing about Brexit. So even if the British wake up to their mistake and seek to stay partly in the European Union, there may be no appetite in the EU to allow this to happen on terms the British would want or could accept.

Today I am not sure if Britain can rise to the challenge of avoiding Brexit or at least mitigating its worst impact. Brexit is lose-lose for both Britain and Europe. If it is consummated, the long era of Euro-Atlantic economic integration, promotion of liberal values, and social development between 1945 and Donald Trump’s election will be over. Putin and Trump celebrated Brexit, as did Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland. The aftershock of Brexit has already humiliated Prime Minister Theresa May. The chief Brexit minister, David Davis, when attacking the Labour government in opposition, declared, “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.”

Can British democracy change its mind? Or, like Venice, the Habsburg Empire, and other once-mighty commercial and political powers in Europe, is Brexit the moment when Britain begins to exit world history?

Denis MacShane was the United Kingdom’s Minister of Europe under Tony Blair and was a Labour MP for 18 years. His latest book is Brexit, No Exit: Why (in the End) Britain Won’t Leave Europe.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 69

France and Germany: An Aging Couple Carries On Merkel and Macron need each other, as emblems of a still vital European center. But can Macron deliver more than symbols, and will Merkel take her foot off Europe’s oxygen hose?

By Art hu r G o ldha m m e r

I

t has been a torpid summer in Europe.

Five hundred eighty people died in France in a freakish June heat wave, and Corsica recorded historic high temperatures in August. Yet the political climate has cooled noticeably since the previous winter of discontent.

Last winter, it seemed possible that the far right could sweep to power in France, while Germany’s hitherto invincible chancellor Angela Merkel appeared to be facing a serious challenge from a resurgent Social Democratic Party (SPD) led by Martin Schulz.

The Brexit vote of June 2016 had also put Europeans on edge. With Britain on the way out of the European Union, the election of a vociferously anti-EU party like France’s Front National might well spell the end of the European project.

And then there was the stunning news from across the pond. The United States had elected Donald Trump, from whose incorrigibly loose lips fell the assertions that NATO was obsolete, that Europeans weren’t paying their fair share of defense costs, and that the American commitment to defend the Baltic States against Russia might not be ironclad. To add insult to injury, the new leader of the Free World noted that his “friend Jim, a very, very substantial guy,” had ended his annual junkets to the City of Light because “Paris is no longer Paris.”

In this morbid environment, Europe came down with a fever, which endured throughout the winter of 2016–2017. But this past spring in Paris

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the fever broke: On the eve of the 72nd anniversary of VE Day, the French elected 39-yearold Emmanuel Macron as their new president.

Macron received 66 percent of the votes cast—a victory decisive enough to turn back the seemingly inexorable tide of populist nationalism that brought the world both Brexit and Trump.

The fever broke, but the chronic underlying illness remains. The Macron cure is illusory. He has put a fresh and youthful face on old ideas, which have proven ineffective in the past. The prospect of quick relief won him a handsome majority (on historically low turnout), but his support has proved soft. Over the course of the summer, his approval rating fell below 40 percent, and the drop was faster than for either of his two immediate predecessors. If he is lucky and scores a quick win on his reform of the labor code, he may stop his slide in the polls—people are still rooting for him to succeed, lest the fever return. But his ultimate success will depend more on improving economic conditions—more luck, in other words—than on enactment of his agenda, which is essentially a series of timid reforms in the spirit of the Hollande-era measure that bears his name, the Loi Macron.

The French are fond of observing that the more things change, the more they remain the same. In one respect, the change was revolutionary. The dominant parties of the centerleft and the center-right were demolished.

In another respect, little changed at all. The policy menu is the same.

If France handed Macron’s upstart En Marche party a commanding majority in the National Assembly, Germany ended its brief flirtation with novelty and opted firmly for continuity. The Schulz boomlet collapsed as abruptly as it had arisen in January, when Schulz took over as party leader from Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel.

Eight months ago, polls put the Social Democrats almost equal to Merkel’s Christian Democrats. But in May, just a week after Macron’s victory in France, the CDU scored a stunning upset in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, normally an SPD stronghold. Schulz’s party fell a full seven points below its result in the previous state elections, popping the Schulz bubble.

From a high of 32 percent in the spring, the SPD fell into the low 20s, while Merkel’s CDU/ CSU climbed back up to near 40.

Angela Merkel thus seems poised to win a fourth four-year term as Germany’s chancellor.

Meanwhile, Macron, backed by a solid majority in the National Assembly, has proposed a major overhaul of the French labor code, which, if successful, will make France look more like Germany. What the French call “the Franco-German” couple (the Germans prefer the term “partnership”) thus enters late middle age, 60 years after the Treaty of Rome, with its deepest fears temporarily allayed but with the tensions that have defined the marriage since the beginning still nagging at both partners.

The near certainty of Merkel’s re-election in

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In Sickness And In Health: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron share a moment at the start of the Franco-German Council of Ministers last July.

Germany limits Macron’s room for maneuver.

The young French president ran as a staunch European and, like his two predecessors, flew to Berlin immediately after his election for consultations with the chancellor. Merkel indicated that she was receptive to Macron’s proposals for Eurozone reform and followed up in late August by announcing that she favored his proposal to appoint a single finance minister for the zone and adopt a centralized budget.

The August announcement was particularly well timed to signal German support for Macron just as he prepared to disclose the details of his signature labor-code reform.

But there is little enthusiasm in Germany for anything that might smack of a “transfer union,” that is, an arrangement under which German taxpayers would finance investments abroad or accept responsibility for economic stabilization. Any Eurozone budget approved

by Germany will therefore be too small to off-

set downturns elsewhere, much less stimulate new employment in France. The promised cooperation is largely symbolic. Its purpose will be mainly to solidify the united front that both Merkel and Macron want to present to the United Kingdom in negotiations over Brexit. The chancellor wishes the president of the republic the best, for her sake as well as his, but she prefers the term “partnership” for good reason: Any romantic illusions about the nature of the couple lie on the French side.

Europe’s problem thus remains what it has been since the onset of the Great Recession: Germany has been spared most of the suffering experienced elsewhere on the continent, and German voters see no reason to tamper with success or to coddle the less fortunate.

They believe that they owe their good fortune to the austerity they imposed on themselves after reunification.

Many give credit for their present prosperity to the harsh Hartz reforms of the mid-2000s, which weakened longstanding labor protections, as well as to Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s insistence on strict budgetary discipline throughout the recession. Hence they are reluctant to change course, especially now that the rest of the Eurozone has detected the first green shoots of long-awaited revival: Growth of 1.7 percent is forecast for this year, unemployment is lower than at any time since the crisis, and business optimism, as measured by the purchasing managers’ index, hit a six-year high in May. The change in the political climate accounts for much of the recent surge of animal spirits.

Once the threat that a populist, nationalist, anti-EU, anti-globalization wave might submerge the continent receded, the investment outlook improved dramatically. So did consumer sentiment, especially among those with money to spend: Macron drew his strongest

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support from the more affluent third of the electorate, and consumer spending in France increased as Macron’s prospects improved.

The euro also rose sharply against the dollar, abetted by growing doubts in Europe about the stability of the United States under Trump.

There are reasons for worry, however. Will an increasingly unpopular chief be able to pull off the miracle he has promised, a reform that will please both right and left? Assessing a series of recent political fumbles, veteran French political commentator Alain Duhamel described the rookie president’s summer as “calamitous.”

Macron himself has expressed doubts that he will be able to walk on water much longer.

“The French detest reforms,” he said in Bucharest on August 24. But he quickly shifted his ground, suggesting that what he was actually proposing was not “reform” but a new “destiny” that would “show Europe the way to new horizons” and “promote universalism.”

Such lyrical flights may be an essential part of the politician’s toolkit in France. De Gaulle once said that if you want to build superhighways for the French, you have to give them poetry. But Macron’s immediate challenge is not to promote universalism but to pass his promised reform of the labor code—the kind of prosaic, pragmatic effort that Germans find more reassuring than poetry. Throughout the summer, Labor Minister Muriel Pénicaud and Prime Minister Édouard Philippe have been negotiating with unions and business. The goal of the reform is to nudge France toward what Macron likes to describe as a Gallic version of Scandinavian “flexicurity.”

On August 31, the details of the reform

proposal were finally released. A key provision was a reduction of the maximum indemnity available to employees deemed by a review panel to have been fired without cause.

In return, labor received a sweetener: an increase of 25 percent in the compensation due to employees judged to have been laid off for legitimate economic reasons. But, to the unions’ displeasure, employers can now claim to be in economic difficulty if a plant in France is unprofitable, notwithstanding profitable operations outside France. The unions are also unhappy with a provision allowing small firms more room to negotiate with workers directly,

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without the presence of a union representative.

On the other hand, the government offered a number of new benefits designed to win union support, including a training allowance for union members who wish to expand their skills and a new office to ensure that companies do not violate rules governing collective bargaining.

The olive branch extended to the unions may prove effective. Force Ouvrière, the third-largest union in France, has announced that it will not participate in the general strike called by the second-largest union, the CGT, for September 12. The FO had been one of the most vociferous opponents of a previous labor code reform, so this may be a sign that the government has found a way to allay workers’ concerns.

Not all the signs are positive, however. The country’s largest union, the CFDT, has long been more receptive to liberalization of the labor laws than its two rivals and had already refused to join the CGT. But CFDT leader Laurent Berger said that he was disappointed by the provision narrowing the definition of economic difficulty to operations within French borders.

Berger nevertheless characterized other provisions of the reform as “productive” and “intelligent.” He also indicated that the government had withdrawn certain proposals in response to union objections and said that the final result was not “the destruction of the labor code that some critics have proclaimed.”

As is often the case in French politics, the symbolism of the reform has come to overshadow the substance. The measure is widely seen as a test of Macron’s strength and resolve.

Proponents make the exaggerated claim that persistent high unemployment in France is due primarily to labor-market rigidity, which the reform will fix once and for all.

Opponents, led by the fiery orator Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Insoumise and the mustachioed CGT leader Philippe Martinez, hope to gin up the fervor of their troops by presenting the measure as an all-out assault on the antineoliberal resistance. (Although Martinez did not refrain from participating in negotiations to obtain a better deal for his members, he did not back down from his call for a general strike after the results were announced.) Although the clash will be dramatized for maximum political effect on both sides, the outcome looks more like an incremental shift toward lighter labor-market

regulation rather than a wholesale jettisoning of France’s byzantine labor code.

Although the French reform takes its inspiration in part from the Hartz reforms, which reduced long-term unemployment compensation and increased incentives to re-enter the work force, Macron did not choose this course simply to please his German partner or demonstrate his neoliberal bona fides. He—along with much of the French government and business elite of which he is a pure product—believes in the virtues of deregulation and competition.

Although the French gaze across the Rhine and ogle German success, they recognize that essential ingredients of the German formula are missing in France: For instance, Germans have built trust between employers and unions through decades of what they call Mitbestimmung, or co-determination, whereas France is betterknown for “boss-nappings” and wildcat strikes than for boardroom confabs between workers and supervisors. But hope springs eternal.

Meanwhile, Macron has sought to mitigate his pro-business image by jawboning against the practice of hiring so-called posted workers from abroad. These are workers recruited by multinational corporations or staffing agencies from low-wage countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, to work in the West. Under existing EU directives, such employees must be paid the prevailing wage in the country in which they are employed, but taxes and social benefits are charged at the lower rates prevailing in their home countries. Posted workers tend to be at the mercy of the posting agencies, and not protected by local collective bargaining.

The practice creates downward pressure on wages in industries such as construction, where the use of posted workers is widespread. Allegations of unfair competition were a major issue in the 2005 constitutional treaty referendum, on which France voted no. Macron’s stance has raised the salience of this long-smoldering issue and provoked an open breach with Poland, which sends many posted workers abroad.

Critics charge him with hypocrisy, because as an enthusiastic proponent of globalization he seems quite willing to expose French workers to indirect competition from low-wage workers in China and Bangladesh while vociferously denouncing the milder direct competition from workers crossing Europe’s internal borders.

This issue is just one of several that have driven a wedge between the countries of Eastern Europe and those of the West. The drift toward authoritarian rule in Hungary and Poland has raised hackles in the West. Brussels has denounced Poland’s move to bring the judiciary under the control of the executive. Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban has accused Merkel of “moral imperialism” on the refugee issue and rejected what he deems to be Germany’s “gruff, rude, and aggressive” tone.

While the refugee issue has heightened tensions between East and West, it has played a surprisingly small role in the German election campaign. A year ago, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party (AfD) was on the rise. In a regional election last September in the northeast German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the AfD finished ahead of Merkel’s CDU with more than 21 percent of the vote.

Since then, however, the party’s fortunes have been in steady decline. Björn Höcke, a rival of party leader Frauke Petry, shocked many Germans by calling for an end to German atonement for the sins of World War II. Petry herself preferred to emulate Marine Le Pen’s efforts to put distance between her brand of extreme nationalism and sulfurous memories of war and occupation. But the anti-immigrant sentiment that fueled the AfD’s rise seemed to abate as Germany’s efforts to integrate the newcomers proved more successful than anyone had dared hope. As Doug Saunders has written, neither crime nor unemployment increased, and the skill level of the immigrant population proved higher than expected. The example of Germany shows that refugee crises can be handled humanely when a national leader takes a strong and morally principled stand, as Merkel did. As a result, the threat of populist reaction in Germany has subsided, and the AfD is currently polling under 10 percent.

If immigrants are not the issue in the German election that they were in France, what is driving the campaign? The answer: not much.

Germany’s politics can seem soporific, even though the country is not without problems.

Despite the introduction of a minimum wage in 2015, the poverty rate rose that same year to a record high of 15.7 percent. But Germany is now an export powerhouse, with a current account surplus last year over 8 percent of GDP.

Germany’s remarkable economic comeback in the two decades since it was “the sick man of Europe” is the primary reason why French elites are eager to embrace Macron’s reform efforts. But France is unlikely to attain anything like Germany’s export surplus, and if results are slow to appear, current supporters may be as quick to abandon him as he was to abandon his patron François Hollande.

The Grand Coalition of Christian and Social Democrats that has governed Germany for the past four years yokes the two major parties together, so criticism on most matters is muted.

Germany’s attention is currently focused on a scandal involving the private sector rather than the government: The major automobile companies are alleged to have conspired to circumvent diesel emissions limits. Anguished discussions of the carmakers’ willful neglect of the environment and public health have replaced debate about the country’s ability

uncritical of Trump. Regarding differences between Germany and the United States, she noted that “the discord is obvious and it would be dishonest to paper over the conflict.”

Indeed, it is Merkel’s good friend in Paris, Emmanuel Macron, who is more vulnerable to the charge of being soft on Trump. Although Macron delivered a good tongue-lashing after the United States repudiated the Paris climate agreement, he subsequently invited Trump to sit with him on Bastille Day to review the troops.

If Macron’s grandstanding rankled Merkel, she did not show it. She rarely displays emotion, preferring to move quietly and unobtrusively toward her goal, the true nature of which is best known to herself alone. In this, the final term of her unprecedented chancellorship, she will define her place in history. The last thing she wants is to preside over the demise of the European Union, which has been fundamental to her success. Merkel knows that if Macron fails, the

Despite labor reforms, France is unlikely to attain anything like neighboring Germany’s export surplus. Without results, Macron’s popularity will continue to sink. to absorb immigrants in the German media.

The parties are caught in a dilemma. Many Germans have laid out good money for diesel cars and would be hit directly in the pocketbook if the offending vehicles were taken off the road.

So both parties have promised that there will be no Fahrverbot (order to ban the use of tainted cars) and are pretending to believe that the problem can be remedied by a simple software update. Thus as German politicians seek to persuade the rest of Europe that public virtue is its own reward, the national soul is racked by the revelation of pervasive vice among the private sector’s most respected champions.

Unable to make use of the auto scandal and desperate for a cleaving issue that might animate the final weeks of a lackluster campaign (the election takes place on September 24), Martin Schulz has tried to capitalize on deep German antipathy toward both Donald Trump and American militarism by calling for all American nuclear weapons to be removed from German soil. Yet Merkel has hardly been

Front National, now riven by factional rivalries in the wake of Marine Le Pen’s loss, is waiting in the wings. Hence she will do what she judges she can to help Macron vanquish his opposition.

Her imagination lacks a tragic dimension, however. She thinks that virtue is perforce rewarded and that all Macron needs to succeed is to stick to the path of righteousness, keep the books balanced, and do a better job of concealing his arrogance. In all three respects he will probably disappoint her. The couple may nevertheless succeed in navigating this turbulent passage, because old couples are loath to change. They muddle through, if not for the sake of the children then out of sheer habit.

With the threat of populist upheaval damped down for the moment, the grown-ups’ sense of urgency has dissipated. They think they have all the time in the world. They could be wrong.

Arthur Goldhammer is a writer, translator, and affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 73

The ProselyTizers and the PrivaTizers How religious sectarian school voucher extremists made useful idiots of the charter movement B y K at h e r i n e S t e wa rt

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And the American Heritage Academy, a two-campus charter school also located in Arizona, describes itself as a “unique educational experience with old-fashioned principles that have worked for hundreds of years.” The school boasts a list of “Principles of Liberty” that include “The role of religion is foundational,” “To protect rights God revealed certain divine laws,” and “Free market and minimal government best support prosperity.”

You might think that these egregious examples of church-school fusion are anomalies in the emerging charter school universe. But they are not. The charter school movement has provided shelter for religious and ideological activists who have specific theological and political goals for public education. Many of them are opposed to the very idea of public schools in the first place.

To be clear, the charter movement in the United States is large, fragmented, and complex, and includes many individuals and groups that sincerely wish to promote and improve public education. Many charter advocates respect the separation of church and school.

But a wing of the charter movement that is ideologically or religiously opposed to “government schools” was present at the charter movement’s creation, and has grown to comprise a sizable segment of the charter universe. With the election of Donald Trump and the appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, it is presently empowered as never before.

In the decades before her appointment, DeVos was one of the primary architects of a

First Amendment anomaly—the public funding of religious academies. In the months since she took the helm at the Department of Education, that still seems her first priority. Her meetings with educators have been populated with leaders and teachers from private, religious, and charter schools, as well as homeschooling advocates. Trump’s first budget allots $1.4 billion to bolster the school choice movement—enough funding to enable DeVos to ramp up her campaign for taxpayer-supported sectarian schools.

While charter schools are supposed to be nonsectarian, many are run by operators with a distinctly religious or partisan political agenda. In order to understand the impact of this particular segment of the charter movement, one must begin with the history of the pro-voucher movement.

Vouchers first came to prominence as a way to funnel state money to racially segregated religious academies. In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, white Americans in the South organized massive resistance against federal orders to desegregate schools. While some districts shut down public schools altogether, others promoted “segregation academies” for white students, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Today, vouchers remain popular with supporters of religious schools, many of whom see public education as inherently secular and corrupt.

Vouchers are also favored among disciples

ao n 168 / is to ck by g e t t y

A

t the Heritage Academy, a publicly funded charter school network in Arizona, according to a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, high school students are required to learn that the Anglo-Saxon population of the United States is descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. They are asked to memorize a list of 28 “Principles” of “sound government,” among which are that “to protect man’s rights, God has revealed certain Principles of divine law” (the ninth Principle) and that “the husband and wife each have their specific rights appropriate to their role in life” (the 26th Principle).

To complete the course, students are further required to teach these principles to at least five individuals outside of school and family.

Over in Detroit, the Marvin L. Winans Academy of Performing Arts charter school—also taxpayer-funded—is a subsidiary of the Perfecting Church, a religious organization headed

by Marvin L. Winans himself. Until recently, the board of WAPA consisted almost entirely of clergy, “prophets,” or prominent members of the Perfecting Church, and it appears that the views of the board are expressed directly in the practices of the school; students are required to recite a “ WAPA Creed” that invokes “a superintelligent God.” In Texas, Allen Beck, the founder of Advantage Academy, a four-campus charter school funded by taxpayers, has said he established the schools in order to bring “the Bible, prayer, and patriotism back into the public school system, legally.”

e m i ly zo l a dz / g r a n d r a p i d s p r e s s / a p i m a g e s

of the free-market advocate Milton Friedman, who see them as a step on the road to getting government out of the education business altogether. Speaking to an audience at a convention of the American Legislative Exchange Council in 2006, Friedman said, “The ideal would be to have parents control and pay for their school’s education, just as they pay for their food, their clothing, and their housing.” Acknowledging that indigent parents might be unable to afford their children’s education in the same way that they might suffer food or housing insecurity, Friedman added, “Those should be handled as charity problems, not educational problems.”

Up in western Michigan, the combination of religious conservatism and economic libertarianism in the voucher movement found a natural home. A century and a half ago, members of the Christian Reformed Church, a strict sect of Dutch Calvinists, settled the area around Holland, Michigan, where the conservative nature of the religion is still felt. Until several years ago, it was forbidden to serve alcohol at restaurants on Sundays. The area has also produced more than its share of ultra-conservative billionaires, among them Richard DeVos Sr., the co-founder of Amway; Jay Van Andel, his business partner; and Edgar Prince, an auto-parts magnate. In 1979, Prince’s daughter Betsy married Richard’s son, Dick Jr., making her Holland’s version of a crown princess.

Since the 1970s, Richard DeVos and his wife and children, including Dick and Betsy, have been major funders of the leading national groups on the religious right. Amway cofounder Van Andel, meanwhile, endowed and served as a trustee of Hillsdale College, which the religious right likes to cast as “the conservative Harvard.” In 1983, Betsy’s father, Edgar Prince, substantially contributed to the creation of the Family Research Council. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation is a key backer to groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal juggernaut of the religious right; and right-wing ministries and policy groups such as Focus on the Family.

The initiatives that Betsy DeVos and her husband have funded are not of the “social gospel” variety. Through their foundation, they donate money to the Foundation for Traditional Values, a nonprofit with a mission “to restore and affirm the Judeo-Christian values upon

which America was established.” Shortly after its inception, the FTV distributed a book, America’s Providential History, which asserted, “A civil government built on Biblical principles provides the road on which the wheel of economic progress can turn with great efficiency.”

A chapter titled “Principles of Christian Economics” posed the question “Why Are Some Nations in Poverty?” It goes on to explain that “[t]he primary reason that nations are in poverty is lack of spiritual growth. … Today, India has widespread problems, yet these are not due to a lack of food, but are a result of people’s spiritual beliefs. The majority of Indians are Hindus.”

Heirs Who Err: Dick and Betsy DeVos

In the mid-1990s, the FTV founded the Student Statesmanship Institute, which describes itself as “Michigan’s premier Biblical Worldview & Leadership Training for High School Students.” Betsy DeVos was listed on the SSI advisory board as recently as 2015, and has been featured as an active SSI program participant nearly as far back as the program had a functional website. SSI functions as a pipeline for Christian teens, many of whom are homeschooled or attend religious schools, seeking to engage in far-right politics. According to the SSI website, SSI “Legislative Experiences” instruct students in topics such as “Laying a Biblical Foundation, Ambassadors for Christ, Christian Citizenship, Worldviews in Action, Science and the Bible, and Debate and Communication.”

James Muffett, who heads FTV and is also the founder and head of SSI, appears from time to time on the Christian homeschooling circuit, where public schools—or “government schools” as they are frequently called—are routinely maligned. He spoke at one homeschooling convention where attendees were invited to watch the anti–public education film IndoctriNation.

The film casts public schools as “a masterful design that sought to replace God’s recipe for training up the next generation with a humanistic, man-centered program that fragmented the family and undermined the influence of the Church and its Great Commission.”

If you want to better understand why the pious elite of Holland, Michigan, think of public education the way they do, a good place to start might be the 2003 report from the Synod, or general assembly, of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. The church warns that “government schools” have “become aggressively and increasingly secular in the last forty years,” and claims they are engaged in “a deliberate program of deChristianization” that is at odds with Christian morality. “Not only does there exist a climate of hostility toward the Christian faith,” the report continues, “the legitimate and laudable educational goal of multi-culturalism is often used as a cover to introduce pagan and New Age spiritualities such as the deification of mother earth (Gaia) to promote social causes such as environmentalism.” The report goes on to decry efforts, by “powerful lobbying groups” to resist “alternatives to public education such as charter schools and vouchers.”

By the late 1990s, Betsy and Dick DeVos

had thrown their weight behind the voucher movement. They helped build and lead national organizations that funded pro-voucher organizations in states across the country. These initiatives took the form of both nonprofit work and campaign-finance work that helped elect pro-voucher politicians. As these efforts expanded, the DeVoses and their allies partnered with such existing conservative and “free market” think tanks as the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Acton Institute in Michigan, both heavily funded by the DeVoses.

The DeVoses’ efforts suffered a serious setback in 2000 when a voucher referendum on

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the Michigan ballot failed. Voters in Michigan rejected the initiative by a two-to-one margin, despite millions of dollars in funding by the DeVos and Prince families. As part of that voucher effort, the DeVoses and their allies had backed charter organizations; even after the ballot failure, the conflation of vouchers and charters would become a common feature of their tactics. In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2002, Dick DeVos outlined new strategies for the movement, emphasizing the need to spend available funding on a system of rewards and “consequences” for state legislators.

One of the DeVoses’ initiatives, a network of PACs under the name All Children Matter, came under fire for violations of campaignfinance law, which included funneling contributions from its Virginia PAC to its affiliate in Ohio. When the group was issued a fine of over $5 million—as yet unpaid—it was effectively shuttered. These PACs were quickly replaced with new ones under different names, however, including American Federation for Children, which disseminated millions of dollars in several states in the 2010 midterm elections.

As the campaign-financing arm of the movement grew, so did the nonprofit arm. By 2009, Betsy DeVos had become chair of the major sister organizations of national pro-voucher nonprofits, Alliance for School Choice and Advocates for School Choice. As recently as July 2016, DeVos chaired the board of directors of the American Federation for Children, a group her family organized and funded, which works alongside the American Legislative Exchange Council to craft and support model “school choice” legislation.

Pro-voucher forces were nothing if not expert in devising inventive solutions to their failures. When the Florida Supreme Court ended a voucher program in 2006, advocates turned to an extensive and growing corporate tax credit scheme as a backdoor approach to voucher approval. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that national groups that protested the scheme lacked standing to sue. Still, the question of effectiveness persisted. A 2007 study of Milwaukee schools by professors from three universities showed poor to mixed results for vouchers there. A study of Indiana’s voucher program (hugely expanded by former Governor Mike Pence) found no change among

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student reading scores, and achievement losses in mathematics. A 2016 study funded by the pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation, and conducted by David Figlio and Krzysztof Karbownik for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, asserted students who use vouchers tend to fare worse academically than closely matched peers who attend public schools.

Vouchers also failed to live up to advocates’ claims of effectiveness in dealing with racial and economic segregation issues. A Century Foundation report earlier this year concluded that vouchers intensify racial and religious segregation at schools. Another report, from the Economic Policy Institute, asserted that the loss of community-based schools compounds the problem by undermining programs in early education, summer school, and student health and nutrition. “All of these yield much higher returns than the minor, if any, gains that have been estimated for voucher students,” wrote Martin Carnoy, a professor of education and economics at Stanford University, who authored the report.

But public confusion about vouchers and

charters continued to create opportunities. A lightly regulated charter school industry could achieve many of the same goals as voucher programs. They could drain funding from traditional public schools, deregulate the education sector, and promote ideological or religious curricula—all without provoking the kind of resistance that vouchers received. Democrats, centrists, and secular education reformers who opposed voucher schemes were often favorably disposed to charters, which they saw as one of many tools available to public school systems.

DeVos and her allies decided to go all in for the charter movement. Many of the policy groups she and her allies funded followed suit.

They became evangelists for “school choice,” a label that conveniently blurs the distinction between charter schools and voucher programs.

Some disguise would be necessary, of course.

Dick DeVos advised a Heritage Foundation audience in 2002 that “we need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities.”

Some of DeVos’s allies in the voucher movement—including longtime political allies and mega-funders from western Michigan—rapidly joined the upper ranks of the new charter

industry. J.C. Huizenga’s National Heritage Academies now has 48 schools in Michigan and 86 nationwide, making it the third-largest public charter operator in the country, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Clark Durant opened his own chain of charters under the name of Cornerstone Education Group. Hillsdale College created a subsidiary, Barney Charter School Initiative, to move into the charter business. And Foster Friess (the chief financial backer for former Senator Rick Santorum’s presidential campaigns) joined the effort in promoting “charter schools, school choice, and innovative private sector solutions” in education.

While many charter operators appreciate that sensible regulation and oversight are essential to a healthy charter sector, DeVos and her allies consistently undermined efforts to check the activities of charters. Through the Great Lakes Education Project, DeVos lobbied the Republicans in the Michigan Legislature not just to expand charters but also to gut any meaningful regulation of the sector.

Michigan soon became a paradise for forprofit charter operators, most of them concentrated in urban areas. Half of Detroit’s children now attend charters—second in the nation only to New Orleans—and 80 percent of these are for-profit. The charter lobby not only secured the rights to massive expansion, but also scored some lucrative tax breaks. Charter operators who own the property that they lease to their own schools demanded—and received—a tax exemption on that property, an arrangement that has become increasingly common around the country.

The bonanza for the charter operators, however, has proved to be a bust for both the children of Michigan and the state’s taxpayers. A 2017 NAACP taskforce report on the efficacy and impact of charters quoted a teacher in Detroit: “It’s sad when you walk in a classroom here and you don’t even know it’s a biology classroom. We don’t have the materials, we don’t have the resources.” Speaking to The New York Times, Scott Romney, a board member of the civic and social justice organization New Detroit, said that the “point was to raise all schools,” but instead “we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”

A yearlong investigation into two decades

of Detroit charters by the Detroit Free Press uncovered grotesque levels of financial mismanagement. At some schools, operators were putting family and friends on the payrolls. A record number of for-profit charters refused to declare how they spend taxpayer money.

“Michigan’s laws are either nonexistent or so lenient that there are often no consequences for abuses or poor academics,” the article concluded. “Taxpayers and parents are left clueless about how charter schools spend the public’s money, and lawmakers have resisted measures to close schools down for poor academic performance year after year.”

For DeVos and her allies in the voucher-cumcharter movement, the disastrous deregulation of Michigan education provided something more important than a way of lining pockets.

It was, as DeVos once said, part of a project to “advance God’s kingdom.”

When Clark Durant founded Cornerstone in 1991, he intended to create private, religious schools with a clear dedicated mission of “lifting up a Christ-centered culture.” As recently as last summer, Durant described his education initiative as “trying to do the great prophet’s work, if you will … to help these children have fulfilling lives,” which he defined as “following the things Jesus would teach.”

But four of Cornerstone’s five schools are now publicly funded charters. When Allie Gross of Chalkbeat Detroit toured one of the newly “deconverted” schools, she found religious posters on the wall and other markers of sectarianism.

“Pinpointing where the religious school ended and the charter school began was difficult,” Gross wrote. “The school is also in the process of re-thinking how they can make sure influential texts, such as the Bible, are still, legally, underscoring lessons.”

Meanwhile, over at Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Initiative, one doesn’t have to peel back many layers to arrive at the religious and ideological agenda. At the top of their web page is a link to Imprimis, a publication promoting a conservative political and religious agenda, with articles on “The Left’s War on Free Speech,” “A More American Conservatism,” and a piece titled “How to Think about Vladimir Putin,” defending the Russian dictator and assuring readers that he “is not the president of a feminist NGO,” “a transgender-

DeVos realizeD that lightly regulateD charter schools coulD accomplish the same goals as Voucher programs. rights activist,” or “an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy.” The Barney Charter Initiative’s former mission statement, which has since been taken down, declared that its goal was to “redeem” American public education and “recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism.”

Reporter Marianne Goodland of The Colorado Independent alleged that the school curriculum of Golden View Classical Academy, a charter school in Golden, Colorado, that is part of the Barney network, was offering students a religion-based curriculum. Such schools, she wrote, “have found a legal workaround, and many Democratic and Republican lawmakers are looking the other way.”

What goes for Michigan, it is now becoming clear, increasingly goes for charter schools across the nation. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Charter Schools USA , a Florida-based network of 73 charter schools presently operating in seven states, is the fourth-largest charter operator in the country, right after Huizenga’s National Heritage Academies. Charter Schools USA founder Jonathan Hage is a former staffer at the Heritage Foundation, and has a pattern of political giving to Republican politicians. He

was rewarded by Florida Governor Rick Scott with a seat on Scott’s education transition team; from his perch, Hage reportedly influenced changes to state law intended to make it easier for charter chains to open new schools.

Charter Schools USA is presently expanding into North Carolina, aided by such pro-charter politicians as the state’s two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr, both of whom have been recipients of DeVos’s political donations.

The sixth-largest network, Responsive Education Solutions, has included creationism and nationalist history materials in its schools’ curricula. According to the journalist Zack Kopplin, writing for Slate, biology workbooks used by Responsive Education Solutions “overtly and underhandedly discredit evidence-based science and allow creationism into public school classrooms.” RES co-founder and CEO Chuck Cook issued a statement in defense of the practice, asserting, “There is much research to be done in this area of origins. Until more concrete answers are found, questions on how life originated will continue.”

Imagine Schools, seventh on the list, was co-founded by Dennis and Eileen Bakke, prominent funders of Christian evangelism worldwide. The Imagine charter network has drawn scrutiny for lease arrangements that absorb large amounts of taxpayer funding. One Imagine School charter in Land O’ Lakes, Florida, signed a lease from its landlord agreeing to a base rent of $757,989 per year; the landlord, Schoolhouse Finance, is a company that is also owned by Imagine Schools. Through their faithbased nonprofit Mustard Seed Foundation, the Bakkes give millions of dollars annually to a variety of overseas missionary operations.

They are also generous donors to ministry projects, including a “Theology of Work” program promoting “biblically based theology” with an emphasis on the “Creation Mandate of Genesis 1.2 to subdue or rule the earth with God.” The ninth-largest network in the country, Harmony Public Schools, is affiliated with the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, leader of the transnational Islamic social and religious movement called the Gulenist movement. Harmony schools have been accused of giving preference to Turkish teachers and vendors who are attached to the Gülen movement, and have

in the fut a smal number Very wea inDiViDu coulD contro large pa of ameri public eDucati system

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 77

been accused of abusing the visa program. The FBI has opened an investigation into whether Gülen followers are diverting money from their charters into the Gülen movement; several former teachers alleged they were forced to hand over part of their taxpayer-funded salaries to fund the Gülen movment in Turkey. A senior State Department official said Gülen-affiliated educational institutions and charities in the United States seem “a lot like the ways in which organized crime sets itself up … to hide money for money laundering.” In addition to Harmony, Gülen-affiliated groups operate other charter networks in the United States, giving Gülen-affiliated schools strong representation within the charter sector.

In sum, some of the largest charter operators in the country are in the hands of groups with clear religious or ideological agendas.

The proliferation of religious charters has spurred complaints to civil liberties organizations that defend the separation of church and state. Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney and the director of strategic response for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, says the organization has seen an uptick in complaints— about 40 in the past five years—involving charter schools. They have included accounts of teachers leading students in prayer or running religious student clubs; charters imposing a religious creed on students; and charters forming unconstitutional partnerships with churches.

Frequently, cases stall because plaintiffs are afraid of being ostracized in their communities. Many are unwilling to expose their children to retaliation from school teachers, administrators, and classmates. In the case of Heritage Academy in Arizona, the federal judge barred the plaintiffs from proceeding as “John Doe” and has required them to use their initials; the plaintiffs contend that even their initials will give away their identities.

“Most of the time, you don’t know what goes on in the school unless you have kids there,” says Richard Katskee, chief legal counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case. “If you’ve chosen to send your kids there, you usually don’t complain.”

Americans United also reports an uptick in cases brought to its doors. “Prior to 2007, we saw basically no complaints about char-

DeVos ealizeD lightly gulateD harter ols coulD complish e same oals as oucher ograms.

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in the future, a small number of Very wealthy inDiViDuals coulD control large parts of america's public eDucation system. ter schools,” says Ian Smith, staff attorney for Americans United. “After 2007, the number of complaints related to charter schools steadily increased to the point where we regularly review charter school–related submissions and write letters to charter schools about constitutional violations.”

So far, one complaint has resulted in the closure of a school. In 2009, the ACLU of Minnesota filed a federal lawsuit against the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), alleging that TIZA , the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, and TIZA’s landlords were linked by a complex set of overlapping relationships, and that the school was endorsing Islam in connection with school activities. The school was shut down by the Minnesota Department of Education in 2011.

Attempts to insert religion directly into the curriculum, in any case, are really only the most egregious examples of advancing the religious and ideological agendas of these charter operators. Other more-subtle methods are often used to convey such messages. One favored tactic is for charter schools to describe themselves as “classical academies,” aiming to teach “virtue,” our “national heritage,” and “the principles of the Founders.” It requires further investigation to reveal that the heritage in question is politicized and sectarian.

A former teacher with a Florida charter school, who declines to be named citing job concerns, says a right-wing religious viewpoint seeps into the school in multiple ways. The school is part of the Barney Charter Network.

“They conduct orientations for parents, telling them how public education is ruining kids and we need to get back to how things used to be,” says the teacher. “A ‘nondenominational’ chaplain comes around and says stuff like ‘America is a Judeo-Christian nation’ founded on ‘Biblical principles.’” And, she adds, “everything is ‘American exceptionalism,’ Ayn Randian. If you’re screwed, it’s your fault.”

Given the decentralized nature of the

American school system, the question inevitably arises whether Betsy DeVos will be able to enact a substantial “ed reform” agenda while serving as Trump’s education secretary. Some of her critics take comfort in the thought that DeVos’s programs are small drops in the education ocean, and are unlikely to survive passage through the political and bureaucratic channels of America’s hyper-complex education system. But this would be to underestimate both the legitimizing effect of her ceremonial actions and the disruptive effect of the kinds of initiatives she is proposing.

DeVos has hardly disguised her contempt for the principal constituencies for public schools.

She appears to have minimized contact with traditional public school parents, teachers, and students. But she has more than enough time to spend with individuals and groups in the charter industry and for those associated with religious groups. And that has framed the federal government’s conversation around education in specific ways.

In February 2017, at one of her first high-profile gatherings as education secretary, DeVos invited a number of participants to join her and President Trump at the White House. “I’m really excited to be here today with parents and educators, representing traditional public schools, charter public schools, home schools, private schools—a range of choices,” DeVos said. Of the nine invitees at the table, seven were homeschoolers, representatives from religious schools, and education reform advocates. Only two were representatives of public schools, both working in special education.

alex br andon / ap images

More recently, in August 2017, DeVos to add new priorities that applications have to appointed by the mayor. The state of Ohio has attended and led an “education roundtable” of address. So the secretary does have the power hundreds of authorizers. “Those questions are education leaders in Tallahassee, Florida. The to shape grant competition in specific ways. being dealt with on a state and local level, not leaders in question included six members of A greater concern, perhaps, is DeVos’s 2018 nationally,” Hyslop says. the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, which fiscal-year budget, which calls for an additionEven if charter schools succeed in satisfying convened the meeting, and several clergy from al $1.4 billion for expanding “school choice,” the criteria of church-state separation, a broadother Baptist ministries. A dozen representa- including a $250 million voucher increase and er problem remains unaddressed: It isn’t hard tives of Florida universities, prominent school an additional $167 million in a Charter Schools to imagine a future in which a small number choice advocates, leaders of religious schools, Grant program. The amounts of money in the of extremely wealthy individuals control large five public school superintendents, elected budget, to be sure, are still a wish list, and parts of America’s system of public education.

Republican officials, and an office manager remain subject to congressional approval. Is it wise for any society to entrust the educawere also included. Not a single public school But given DeVos’s generous campaign con- tion of its children to such an unrepresentative teacher or student was present. tributions to the right-wing politicians who group with such distinct interests and beliefs?

Afterward, Leon County Superintendent tend to advocate for “small government” in To be sure, charter operators have a right Rocky Hanna, who attended to their religious and political the meeting, expressed his disbeliefs and opinions, and the appointment with DeVos. “It’s presence of such viewpoints obvious that the secretary and does not necessarily mean that our federal government have their schools will be infused with very little respect for our tradithose beliefs. There are many tional public school system,” he charter advocates who have no ideological agenda beyond said. “And it’s insulting that she’s going to visit the capital of the delivering a quality education to state of Florida to visit a charter America’s children, and who are school, a private school, and a dedicated to equity and transvoucher school”—but no tradiparency. Many argue passiontional public schools. ately and persuasively about the The Bethel Missionary Bapimportance of creating a diverse tist Church, on the other hand, education ecosystem. stands to benefit directly from From the perspective of the DeVos agenda. The churchDeVos and her allies, however, run school, the Bethel Christian these earnest charter supporters must surely look like useful Academy, already a voucher benState Meets Church: President Donald Trump with Betsy DeVos and principal Latrina Petersidiots. Which brings us to the eficiary, utilizes curricula from Gipson, during a tour of Saint Andrew Catholic School in Orlando, Florida the Christian publisher Abeka, deceptive nature of DeVos’s docwhich is popular in the Christian homeschool- every other area, and the lip-service to char- trine of “choice.” Public education came into ing community. Abeka curricula is rooted in ters and “choice” by right-wing Republicans, existence to serve the common good. It is open themes that fuse fundamentalist Christian it seems probable that her education budget to all and held to meaningful standards; that identity with right-wing economic ideology. will receive a favorable hearing, and perhaps is why taxpayers support it. Choice can have a Science textbooks promote creationism, and a greater likelihood of approval. useful role to play. But reducing public educa“I think the question comes down to the tion to a consumer experience for parents, and others denigrate non-Christian faiths.

As education secretary, DeVos present- curriculum being taught,” says Anne Hyslop, allowing them to “choose” to funnel taxpayer ly controls the over–$340 million Charter an education consultant and former adviser at money into schools that discriminate, teach Schools Program Grants for Replication and the U.S. Department of Education under the pseudoscience and fake history, and promote Expansion of High-Quality Charter Schools. Obama administration, considering the issue contempt for those who are different, isn’t a The amounts of money don’t seem that large of ideological bias. “What is the instructional way to advance our system of education. It is in the context of America’s education system. program? I think that is often a question best really just a way to destroy public schools.

Furthermore, the program, which is in the new dealt with by state charter authorizers who are Every Student Succeeds Act, is highly competi- responsible for holding those charters account- Katherine Stewart is the author of The Good tive, requiring that grantees meet certain qual- able.” But the charter authorizer system is a News Club: The Religious Right’s Stealth ity standards to obtain one of the grants. But chaotic patchwork, and varies state by state. Assault on America’s Children. The updated the Department of Education has the authority Washington, D.C., has a single authorizer, paperback was released in August 2017.

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Fossil-Free Finance The surprising successes of the divestment movement as an anti-carbon organizing strategy

By Manue l Ma d r id

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opposite: vl adimir timofeev / istock by get t y; t h i s pa g e : m at t e a m r k u s i c / d i v e s t h a r va r d

itting shoulder to shoulder, holding signs that read “#Divest” and “Climate Justice Now!,” hundreds of student activists lined the halls of the third floor of the administration building at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in April of 2016. Outside, crowds gathered in solidarity. Pizza was brought in for the protesters. Fully aware of their imminent arrest—15 students had been arrested the day before— many still refused to leave. They were escorted out in handcuffs. One protester being led to a squad car had a cardboard sign hanging around her neck: “Arrested for protecting my future.”

Elsewhere, Harvard students were arrested after hosting a sit-in inside the Boston Federal Reserve building. Some 3,000 miles away and two weeks later, Stanford students gathered outside Memorial Church protesting the school’s refusal to sell off fossil fuel investments, holding a banner that read “Temperatures Are Rising, So Are We.” While Harvard held out against the protests, Stanford and UMass trustees did agree to begin the process of getting their funds out of fossil fuels.

So did more than a dozen other colleges and universities, including Yale, Oxford, Syracuse, Columbia, and the University of California.

To date, hundreds of institutions, ranging from philanthropic foundations to public pension funds, representing nearly $5.5 trillion in assets, have committed to some degree of divestment from fossil fuels. In pushing nonprofit institutions to sell off their carbon investments, the divestment movement hopes to delegitimize fossil fuel companies, rather in the same way tobacco companies have been increasingly shunned. The goal is both political and economic—to turn public opinion against these companies and the politicians who support them, and maybe to give ordinary investors second thoughts about their portfolios.

The divestment movement combines a political insight about the growing concern over global warming with an economic insight that fossil fuels in the ground (“stranded assets”) may stay there as the economy turns to renewables. If so, giant oil companies are not worth as much as the stock market thinks.

The divestment movement hopes to turn that idea into a self-fulfilling prophecy. At a time when the Trump administration has reversed course to embrace carbon, the divestment movement aims to show that citizens can go around government policy, to make a difference directly. Even if the movement does not

bring down Big Oil, it hopes to raise awareness and heighten activism.

The first students to organize for divest-

ment, in 2010, were a group at Swarthmore College, a small private liberal arts school outside Philadelphia. Until then, climate activism at Swarthmore had primarily consisted

Park Your (Gas-Guzzling) Car In Harvard Yard. The university has stonewalled student protesters.

of weekend trips to West Virginia to combat mountaintop removal in Appalachia, hence the name of the university climate group, Swarthmore Mountain Justice. Emulating the successful South African antiapartheid divestment campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s, Mountain Justice targeted their university’s endowment.

“It occurred to us that divestment as a demand could be a useful way for us to get a toehold on the issue in our little corner of the world,” says William Lawrence, one of five

founding members of the Mountain Justice divestment campaign. “Although we didn’t have mountaintop removal in our backyard, we did have these investments.”

Unbeknownst to Mountain Justice, various environmental groups and foundations, convened by philanthropic foundation Wallace Global Fund, had been mulling over the same idea. Mountain Justice’s role as trailblazers earned them an invitation to one of these meetings at Wallace Global’s D.C. offices in 2011, where the conveners decided to work with eight new campuses that coming school year. That turned into 40 in 2012, and grew to around 400 in 2013, spurred on by a crosscountry campus tour spearheaded by environmentalist Bill McKibben of 350.org.

Meanwhile, Wallace Global began to fund the expansion of the campaign to nonprofits and pension funds. By 2014, $50 billion in assets had been pledged to not be invested in fossil fuels. In September of that year, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) announced it would completely divest from fossil fuels, drawing dozens of headlines and ire from the fossil fuel industry.

But many of the primary targets back then, including Ivy League universities like Harvard and major foundations like Ford, remain primary targets today. Ben Franta, one of the Divest Harvard protesters arrested last year in Boston, says that Harvard’s governing board, known as the Harvard Corporation, opposed divestment as a slippery slope. “They said if they divest here, tomorrow there will be somebody asking for something else,” says Franta.

Franta recalls being in a meeting where Harvard President Drew Faust asked: “What are we going to divest from next, sugar?”

Swarthmore used the same argument in 1991. After divesting from apartheid, the college banned future uses of the endowment

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 81

for social purposes. Swarthmore continues to resist divestment. “It’s a cynical argument,” says Lawrence. “It suggests that trustees don’t have agency or power. What they mean is, ‘We don’t want to do something because you told us to do it.’”

Then there’s the technical challenge of divestment itself. Divesting from fossil fuels can be difficult even if you really want to, as RBF can attest. Despite its commitment to completely divest by the end of 2017, RBF still has 2 percent of its endowment invested in fossil fuels, according to its president, Stephen Heintz, and probably won’t be hitting zero for another few years. Many of the fund’s investments are tied up in “lock-ups,” contracts requiring that money be kept with a particular fund manager for a minimum period of time.

Depending on the type of lock-up, investors may not be able to withdraw their money without paying a penalty.

the more responsiveness there is within the marketplace,” says Heintz, who sits on The American Prospect’s board of directors. “When we got started, fewer investment firms were really looking at this demand in a systematic way. Now, there are many more.”

Of the many arguments trustees of non-

profits make against divestment, three are the most common. One is the slippery slope— today fossil fuels, tomorrow Israel, the next day who knows what. The second is a technical one, which financial experts say is mostly bogus— the problem of commingled investments. But as the RBF experience shows and as Lawson of Goldman Sachs attests, it’s possible for an institution to extricate itself from fossil fuels if it really wants to; it may just take a little time.

The third argument is fiduciary responsibility.

Along with a duty to follow their organization’s charitable mission, trustees and finance com-

Activists promote the financial benefit of divestment. Yale’s endowment last year dumped $10 million of fossil-fuel assets, citing climate change as an investment risk.

“As a practical matter, most institutions of size have enough flexibility that they can find a way to own segments of the economy and avoid others,” says Hugh Lawson, head of ESG Investing at Goldman Sachs Asset Management Global. “The investment technology is certainly there.” Lawson, who is a trustee of RBF, says divestment hasn’t hurt the bottom line of the foundation’s $894 million endowment. With a glut of oil, stocks of fossil fuel companies are down relative to the broad market. “We’ve actually outperformed, though that wasn’t the primary motivation for divestment.”

Wall Street has responded to the divestment movement and the increasing demand from institutions for sustainable investing strategies. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have all launched their own sustainable investing product lines. “The more clients tasking their fund managers with reducing fossil fuel exposure,

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mittees have a legal responsibility to produce the greatest possible income from investments for their beneficiaries consistent with financial prudence. Philanthropic foundations have typically handled this duality by setting up a wall between the social aspect of investments and endowment management. The very idea of adding a social purpose to a fiduciary duty runs counter to the entire investment culture.

Divestment campaigns have amplified this tension within different institutions, pitting fiduciary responsibility against social mission. “Typically the way the world works is that, whether you’re a university endowment or foundation board with an endowment that it’s managing, those that have a Wall Street–type background are put on the board’s investment committee,” says John Fullerton, president of the Capital Institute and former managing director at JP Morgan. “For a long time, the conventional wisdom on Wall Street has been

very cynical about confusing purpose with investment,” says Fullerton.

In a board meeting at UMass Amherst in 2015, the chair of the investment committee responded to the concerns of student activists by saying, “I just like to make money,” according to former Divest UMass member Varshini Prakash. “I can still see his face so clearly in my mind—laughing,” says Prakash.

Of the ten largest American charitable foundations, more than half have at least one board member with ties to or a previous job on Wall Street. Some foundations, such as Ford, have responded to this left-brain/ right-brain investment dilemma by ramping up socially responsible investing while not ruling out future investments in fossil fuels. After years of being pressured by other foundations to divest, Ford Foundation President Darren Walker and board member Peter Nadosy, who spent 27 years at Morgan Stanley and opposes divestment, unveiled a plan to have the foundation invest $1 billion of its $12 billion endowment in mission-related investments over the next ten years.

Others have opted for partial divestment.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private foundation, sold off its $187 million stake in British Petroleum in 2015. The decision came in the midst of a concerted campaign by The Guardian, calling for the Gates Foundation to divest its entire holdings in fossil fuels. The foundation had previously dumped a $824 million holding in ExxonMobil. Bill Gates, for his part, has publicly spoken out against divestment, calling it a “false solution” to climate change.

According to its public investment policy, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, worth approximately $9 billion, is “not attracted to either positive or negative screening” when it comes to investments because the reasons for screening can be “highly subjective” and “subject to significant differences of opinion among reasonable observers.” Such differences of opinion have been on full display at Hewlett, where its board of trustees, usually unanimous in its votes, and its investment committee have been torn on the question of screening investments for years. Hewlett committed in 2015 to refraining from future investments in private partnerships primarily involved in oil and gas

drilling, but has stopped short of selling currently held fossil fuel assets.

The tension caused in foundations and universities and the shaking up of the traditional conversation on investment goals has perhaps been one of the most tangible contributions of the movement thus far. Making grants to fund environmental causes is undermined by investment in fossil fuels. “The divestment campaign has raised the question of how institutions ought to think about the intersection of their mission and portfolios,” says John Goldstein, a managing

agers who offer returns well above benchmark, and they sometimes seem captive to those managers. Asking them to change an entire investment strategy for the sake of one organization trying to divest could mean them walking out the door. “Some of these perennial, top-performing fund managers are not about to change their investment strategy because an endowment wants to divest,” says Fullerton. “It’s kind of ‘Take it or leave it—this is what we do.’”

In the case of Hewlett, their investment approach allows them to “work with the world’s

f o s s i l f r e e s ta n f o r d

Containing Carbon: Stanford students won a partial victory when the university agreed to divest from coal.

director at Goldman Sachs Asset Management who has worked with various institutions looking to align their missions and portfolios.

Members of the Rockefeller family had long tried engaging with ExxonMobil on its practices but got little in the form of meaningful response. “Every institution needs to grapple with this question,” says Heintz. “We thought it was hypocritical [to invest in fossil fuels]. It would be as if we were a foundation that was funding a lot of research on lung cancer and still investing in the tobacco industry.”

Major institutions have sufficiently large endowments to attract top-flight fund man-

best money managers,” and those increased returns “translate directly into significant increases in our grantmaking budget,” according to spokesperson Vidya Krishnamurthy. “But remember, endowments do have the ability to pick their own fund managers,” says Fullerton.

Even so, the rare financial officer supportive of divesting takes a career risk. “CFOs don’t have tenure. If they make a financial mistake, they get the axe pretty quick,” says Oberlin College environmental professor David Orr. If portfolios take a hit from being invested in fossil fuels, as they did after the plunge in petroleum prices in the second half of 2014, it’s

unlikely that anyone gets fired, so long as every other major investment portfolio dropped too.

But divesting from fossil fuels without a guarantee of immediate returns means sticking your neck out. This environment produces cautious, incremental change.

Another obstacle to divestment is a web of direct links between some universities and the fossil fuel industry that includes both alumni pressure and research funding. In response to public comments made by the Notre Dame president, Reverend John Jenkins, on eliminating coal use for power generation and seeking greater use of renewable energy, Robert Schleckser, ExxonMobil vice president and treasurer and Notre Dame alumnus, wrote to the university administration that he would be “very interested” in “any substantive discussion within the campus administration toward things like fossil fuel divestment from the endowment portfolio.” Schleckser pointed toward recent successful engagements with Harvard and MIT and added that “this would have implications on the ND/ExxonMobil relationship in the future.”

Notre Dame’s $10.4 billion endowment remains invested in fossil fuels.

MIT President Rafael Reif rejected divestment in a 2015 statement, saying that it would “entangle MIT in a movement whose core tactic is large-scale public shaming” and that it “would retard rather than encourage the open collaboration and ability to hear new ideas that are central to our research relationships. …

Fossil fuel companies have consistently been among our most productive research partners.”

In 2014, Stanford became the first major

university to commit to some form of fossil fuel divestment. After 18 months of hosting rallies, going door to door with petitions, and trying to navigate the university’s labyrinthine bureaucratic process, Fossil Free Stanford activists got their breakthrough. The school’s decision to divest its $18 billion endowment from coal was part of its “responsibility as a global citizen,” said John Hennessy, Stanford’s president at the time. But it could also turn out to be a shrewd financial decision. Coal divestment, however, was low-hanging fruit.

Others have exited coal investment on purely financial grounds.

Last year, Yale dumped $10 million of

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alone on new fossil fuel projects, vary. Royal Dutch Shell and Norway’s Statoil, both of which have begun to diversify away from crude oil, predict that oil demand will peak by 2030, while companies like Exxon and Chevron are far more bullish—at least, that’s their public stance. Behind closed doors, things might look different. Campanale says he has been called in to present his research to the trustees of “one of the world’s largest oil companies” (he wouldn’t mention the company’s name) regarding the future of their pension fund. “They were worried how the

The Congressman From Carbon: Lamar Smith got more campaign money from oil and gas than any other industry.

fallout would work,” Campanale says. “This has been mainstreamed internally in a way that isn’t perceived on the outside.”

Accepting the stranded assets argument supports the purely financial argument for divestment. But belief in stranded assets is not ubiquitous among members of large institutions. Despite being funders of Carbon Tracker, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Foundation, the largest of the Rockefeller foundations with an approximate value of $3.7 billion, have not divested from fossil fuels or publicly limited themselves to legacy projects. Hewlett, also a funder, has not figured the concept of stranded assets into its public statements or investment strategies. That

these foundations are making contributions to promote such research, while still simultaneously investing in fossil fuels, provides a stark example of the disconnect between endowments and foundation grant-making.

“The divestment message has a simplicity to it that is very powerful,” Campanale says. This simplicity can be both an asset and a limitation. “There are places to use moral arguments, such as churches, universities, and foundation endowments. For these other institutions, however, the arguments that have to succeed are principally financial ones.” Even in the case of universities and foundations, particularly large ones, the moral argument can fail and has failed. In these cases, divestment advocates will have to refine their approach even more, opting to focus on partial victories and compromise.

“There are ways that the conversation around divestment can be an on-ramp to a constructive process or it can lead to a cul-de-sac,” Goldstein says. “We see this where the dialogue breaks down. … You can have advocates on one side who may not be as deeply contextualized in how an organization is managing their portfolio. People can talk past each other. In some ways it actually builds resistance rather than engagement.”

A chief goal of the divestment movement has been to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry.

That doesn’t seem to be working with the broad public, though the movement has made some inroads with foundations and universities.

Paradoxically, oil and gas industry approval ratings are surging, because the same low prices that give credibility to the strandedassets argument are popular with consumers.

According to Gallup, this year the industry hit 38 percent approval, topping a previous 15-year high of 35 percent from 2003.

Divestment also has a complex relationship to shareholder activism. Some see the two as prongs of the same broad movement. After years of little progress, ExxonMobil shareholders led a rebellion against company management in May, instructing them to provide a report on the effect that global measures designed to keep climate change to 2 degrees might have on the value of the company’s oil and gas reserves. The resolutions were buoyed by votes from financial firms BlackRock and Vanguard, both major stakeholders.

bill cl ark / cq roll c all via ap images

investments in coal and oil. After months of speaking with external investment managers, Yale Chief Investment Officer David Swensen announced the divestment, saying that his office “believes the risks of climate change, like any risks, should be incorporated in the evaluation of investment opportunities.”

“The act of divesting can be rational,” Mark Moody-Stuart, former chair of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, observes. “Look at the fossil fuel industry itself. In the 1990s, all major oil and gas companies divested from coal— some because they thought oil and gas was a better business, and some with an eye on climate change.”

Former Goldman Sachs risk management officer Robert Litterman suggests that making an economic argument for forms of divestment, rather than making an ethical one, will prove more successful in the long run. “I don’t view fossil fuels as immoral. I don’t think investors should divest from fossil fuels on a moral basis,” says Litterman. “The externality created by CO2 needs to be priced and will be priced in the future. As investors recognize this, certain assets like coal and tar sands are not going to be competitive.”

Mark Campanale, founder of independent think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative, has conducted studies on the valuation of fossil fuels, pioneering the concept of a “carbon bubble” inflated by stranded fossil fuel assets. According to Carbon Tracker reports, $2 trillion worth of fossil fuel investments could become redundant if action on global warming limits allowed emissions to 2 degrees Celsius, as pledged by the world’s governments. Carbon Tracker Initiative has received funding from various foundations, including both Wallace Global and RBF. One of the key variables in the stranded assets argument, and therefore the argument for divestment, is whether a 2-degree limit is realistic (a point of contention among scientists, many of whom have labeled 2 degrees as unlikely or a best-case scenario). The other is defining when exactly oil demand will begin to decline. According to a report by Carbon Tracker and the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, that date could arrive as soon as 2020. The estimates of fossil fuel companies, which spent $670 billion in 2013

The developments at ExxonMobil seem to vindicate those who claim that having a seat at that table can change fossil fuel companies.

Divestment advocates don’t necessarily disagree, but add that teeth are needed to back it up. “Shareholder activism is a tool and can be very effective,” says Wallace Global president Ellen Dorsey of the shareholder resolutions.

“The test is in the next year. Shareholders must demand a 2-degree Celsius model with a clear business plan attached. If companies refuse, they must divest.”

Others question the limits of the approach, unconvinced that engagement will cause fossil fuel companies to go against their own interests. “What are they [shareholders] going to do at the table? The business plan for fossil fuels is all the same: Play it out to the end. What are you going to tell them to do?” says Orr. The industry has not exactly been a passive bystander as divestment, shareholder resolutions, and foundation-funded investigations have gathered strength. When the Rockefeller Family Fund (a separate entity from RBF) announced it was divesting its fossil fuel holdings, it singled out ExxonMobil for immediate divestment because of the company’s “morally reprehensible conduct.” With the help of RBF and other foundations, Rockefeller Family had funded two journalistic investigations into the history of ExxonMobil’s disinformation campaign, which would eventually be published in the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News in 2015. Internal documents showed that the company had accepted the reality of climate change by the late 1970s and early 1980s. These reports were the impetus for a new investigation by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and other attorneys general into whether ExxonMobil had committed fraud by intentionally failing to reveal the risks that climate change could portend for shareholders.

Exxon has called the journalistic investigations “inaccurate and deliberately misleading stories.” In July 2016, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, subpoenaed Rockefeller Family and seven other organizations, including RBF and Wallace Global, along with Schneiderman for refusing to provide

private correspondence in relation to any possible investigation into ExxonMobil and climate change. The month before, 13 Republican attorneys general published an open letter to their colleagues in defense of Exxon and the oil and gas industry. The subpoena has since expired and Smith, who has received more campaign contributions from oil and gas companies than from any other industry during his congressional career, has yet to issue a new one under the new Congress.

“It was a testing of the water to see how they could undercut or weaken pressure on the fossil fuel industry,” says Dorsey. Dorsey remains unsure whether Smith will renew the probe.

“What did Monty Python say? ‘No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.’”

In July 2016, the Republican Attorneys General Association hosted a summit in Colorado, holding a panel titled “Climate Change Debate: How Speech Is Being Stifled.” The investiga-

of a national social media campaign against divestment that had begun in 2015 with the creation of DivestmentFacts.com, a website run by the IPAA , and had been complemented

by Energy In Depth, another IPAA communications initiative.

Because of the movement’s rapid growth and ties to 350.org, which also receives funding from Wallace Global and RBF, opponents have described the divestment effort as an “Astroturf” campaign coordinated by “green megadonors,” charges that Dorsey rejects. “This has never been a well-funded movement,” Dorsey says. “It’s not a campaign intricately coordinated by NGOs—it’s a full-blown social movement.” McKibben, for his part, says that the movement has grown so large that it has a life of its own. “On we roll.”

The legacy of the fossil fuel divestment movement is hard to determine, filled with partial victories and loose ends. Divestment

The fossil fuel industry has not been a passive bystander. Big oil and its political allies have harassed pro-divestment foundations and activists. tion into Exxon was the center of discussion, with speakers thanking the Republican attorneys general for standing by the industry and deriding their Democratic counterparts. One of the speakers, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers President Chet Thompson, labeled “the politics of climate change” as one of the most imminent threats to the fossil fuel industry. He implored the attorneys general in attendance to “start paying attention” to the divestment movement, which he later described as “part of a broader campaign.”

Weeks before an expected decision by University of Denver trustees, the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), an industry trade group, held a forum in the Mile High City in late 2016 as a counterattack to the growing Fossil Free DU movement on campus. The university’s board rejected the calls to divest the next month. The forum celebrated the launch of the latest iteration

is neither a panacea nor a bumper sticker. It won’t bankrupt fossil fuel giants, as studies have shown, and it won’t magically usher in the green economy of the future. But if that’s all true, then what makes divestment any different from a hashtag or a customizable profile picture on Facebook?

Social movements define generations, all believing in the power of symbolism and each finding new symbols to make their own. For a movement in progress, divestment has already accomplished quite a bit. It has held the spotlight on climate change; challenged institutions on their investment goals; pushed the envelope on the limits of impact investing; and helped to activate politically a segment of a generation that might have otherwise remained on the sidelines. Divestment as a question has proven far more potent than divestment as an answer. For that very reason, it must continue to be asked.

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 85

Desegregated, Differently

Half of Hartford’s schoolkids attend integrated schools, thanks to a legal strategy that might work elsewhere.

By Rac he l M . C o he n

H

artford, Connecticut, is struggling.

Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the state’s tiny capital wrestles with many of the same economic challenges as other predominantly poor post-industrial cities along the East Coast. Yet Hartford boasts one remarkably unique feature: Nearly half of its public school students attend desegregated schools.

In most places, desegregation was a 20thcentury phenomenon that was pulled apart by a skeptical Supreme Court and political backlash from white families. But in Hartford, it’s still happening, thanks to Sheff v. O’Neill, a 1996 state Supreme Court decision in which the court ruled that the region’s racially segregated schools denied Hartford children their constitutional right to an equal education. By suing the state rather than the federal government, the plaintiffs did not need to prove the state’s intent to discriminate (a high legal bar to reach), and instead focused on Connecticut’s obligation to provide all students with equal opportunity. It was a novel legal strategy at the time, and remains so today.

Over the past two decades, Connecticut has slowly but surely funded the creation of integrated magnet schools both within Hartford and in the surrounding suburbs, and paid for Hartford students to attend predominately white schools outside their city’s borders. The magnets—which have proved popular and academically distinguished—come with some rules: No more than 75 percent of a school’s student body can be black or Latino, and, correspondingly, no less than 25 percent can be white or Asian.

But some Hartford leaders have tired of Sheff, which reduces their authority over

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city schools, and encourages students to look beyond Hartford for public education. A number of Hartford parents have also grown frustrated that their children who can’t land spots in the coveted magnets are falling behind (52 percent of Hartford students are still enrolled in segregated neighborhood schools). Connecticut’s worsening fiscal crisis has also ramped up Sheff resistance from state officials, who have signaled—implicitly and explicitly—their desire to scale back the legal remedy.

So nearly three decades after they first filed suit, the plaintiffs are headed back to court— and longtime observers say they’ve never seen the two parties so far from an agreement. The state wants not only to be freed from court oversight, but also to reduce the number of white students the existing magnet schools must accept, a proposal supporters say will open up more opportunities for marginalized students, and critics say will cripple the goal of integration. The fight is being closely watched by civil rights advocates across the country, who want to know if Hartford and Sheff are a viable new model for school integration—or a dead end.

“I figured this would be a long-haul effort,” says Elizabeth Horton Sheff, an African American community activist, and the lead plaintiff for Sheff since the late 1980s. “But I did not expect this kind of resistance to a constitutional question that’s been asked and answered.”

Connecticut is affluent, predominantly

white, and largely suburban. Like other New England states, Connecticut largely missed the migration of African Americans from the South, and Latinos from Mexico and the Caribbean.

For decades, the state’s relatively few African

Americans mostly clustered in Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven—a pattern born out of the state’s racist housing laws, which had barred black residents from owning land, forcing them into ghettos where renting was cheaper.

The Sheff lawsuit began with John Brittain, an African American civil rights attorney who arrived to teach at the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1977. Before then, Brittain had litigated school desegregation cases in Mississippi, and soon after his arrival he began studying the demographics of Connecticut’s schools and neighborhoods, to see if similar legal action might be necessary.

By 1983, Brittain had plans to move forward with a federal school desegregation case. Yet one challenge was a rapidly changing legal landscape following a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which said that unless it could be shown that a district deliberately sought to discriminate by race, it could not be held responsible for school segregation. Still, Brittain and his team felt they could prove intent.

At the last minute however, they pulled the plug. “Like a NASA shuttle launching, we aborted,” he tells me. One factor motivating the decision, Brittain says, was a sense that the community was not ready, that Northerners viewed desegregation as something only necessary for Southerners reckoning with Jim Crow.

But five years later, in 1988, everything changed. The state’s then-education commissioner, Gerald Tirozzi, published a report concluding that school segregation was a growing trend in Connecticut, with 80 percent of the state’s minority students concentrated within 14 of its 165 school districts. Following the release of the explosive report, the education

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commissioner emphasized the state’s collective responsibility for the problem and proposed financial incentives for school districts to voluntarily reduce segregation, but stressed that if this proved ineffectual, the state education board should consider a mandatory desegregation plan. It was—and still is—very unusual to have state officials propose strong desegregation initiatives rather than have those initiatives designed by courts.

Leaked to the Hartford Courant, the Tirozzi Report was featured as the paper’s front-page scoop just before Christmas in 1987. It generated massive amounts of community and political attention, and within four months of its release, Brittain and his colleagues drafted their school segregation complaint against the state.

“We strategically solicited just about every social, educational, religious, and community organization to sign on to a pledge to support our case,” Brittain says. “The enthusiasm was overwhelming.” Unlike the ditched federal suit from a few years earlier, this time Brittain felt community members were ready.

Filed in 1989, the suit was tried in the early 1990s. At the time, minority students comprised more than 92 percent of Hartford’s public school enrollment, and of the 21 surrounding suburban towns, only seven had school districts with minority enrollments that exceeded 10 percent.

Sheff was named for Milo Sheff, a black fourth-grade student in Hartford, and his mother, Elizabeth. Sixteen other children were named as plaintiffs—four more black children, six Latino, and six white. It was brought not only for Hartford students stuck in impoverished schools, but also for suburban students “deprived of the opportunity to associate with, and learn from, the minority children” in Hartford, as the complaint read. Sheff lawyers argued that inequality by both race and poverty denied the plaintiffs their constitutional right to an equal education.

Connecticut’s Supreme Court issued its landmark 5–4 ruling in the spring of 1996, holding that “racial and ethnic segregation has a pervasive and invidious impact on schools”— and violated the state’s constitution. (The court ignored the plaintiffs’ poverty argument.)

Instead of outlining a remedy, however, the court ordered the governor and the legislature to develop a solution.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state’s initial response to Sheff was feeble. In 1997, Connecticut’s legislature authorized new investments in early childhood education, a state takeover of Hartford’s schools, and the creation of integrated magnets coupled with an expanded interdistrict school choice program. But the amount of money allocated to the remedies was insufficient, and weak financial incentives led to minimal suburban school participation in interdistrict choice. (The amount of money the state offered receiving districts to take in students was generally not enough to offset the cost of educating them.) The voluntary nature of

Milo Sheff speaks to reporters in Hartford, July 9, 1996.

the Sheff remedy helped it avoid political backlash, but also severely watered down its impact.

Many blamed the court for not ordering its own, stronger remedy. “One of my signature criticisms is that after the courts find liability against an educational authority for violating the Constitution … they remand the remedy phase back to the perpetrators of the wrongdoing,” says Brittain. “I call this asking the fox to guard the hen’s coop.”

But the plaintiffs kept up pressure, and by 2003, the state finally negotiated its first settlement agreement, committing to have 30 percent of Hartford students enrolled in integrated schools by 2007. Though progress felt sluggish at times—not enough suburban schools were reserving seats for Hartford students, magnet construction was slow, and by 2006 still fewer than one in ten Hartford stu-

dents were enrolled in integrated schools— observers remained optimistic, saying things were at least plugging along in the right direction. Even when leaders may have grumbled behind closed doors about costs or the strategy, publicly they embraced their legal obligations.

But over time, some Hartford leaders began openly criticizing Sheff and questioning its value. As the four-year settlement agreement neared its end in 2007, Hartford’s new school superintendent went before the state legislature to testify that magnets were not achieving their goals and “there is no research to suggest that minority students will do better by sitting next to a white student.”

Elizabeth Horton Sheff, the lead plaintiff, and Eugene Leach, another plaintiff, wrote an op-ed condemning the superintendent’s remarks, noting that he cherry-picked struggling magnets, misrepresented the social science research, and tried to relitigate a matter the Supreme Court had already settled. “The question for Connecticut officials is how, not whether, to achieve desegregation,” they wrote.

Though state officials do not need Hartford’s approval to allocate funds for the Sheff remedy, Connecticut’s legislature was ambivalent about distributing more money without Hartford’s explicit support. Some also waffled on committing more funds, given the slow progress made since 2003. So, faced with a political impasse, the plaintiffs again went to court, demanding better and faster compliance with Sheff.

They were successful, and the new settlement negotiated in 2008 was one both parties agreed was far more likely to facilitate desegregation than its predecessor. “Under the first stipulated agreement, everyone saw their roles differently. … Now we expect there to be better coordination,” said a state Department of Education spokesperson at the time. The agreement called for expanding magnets and interdistrict choice, and for the first time, Connecticut committed to a detailed road map to end racial segregation faced by all Hartford’s children.

By April 2009, two decades after the suit was initially filed, a state official who worked on Sheff remarked that there had been more progress toward integration in the preceding year than in the past decade. The University of Connecticut also released a report in 2009 finding that attending an interdistrict mag-

Fall 2017 The American Prospect 87

net school had positive effects for students in reading and math, and that magnet students reported more positive intergroup relations than non-magnet students in the region.

Between 2008 and 2013, the number of Hartford students enrolled in integrated schools jumped from 19 percent to 41 percent.

For a while, the state supported integration efforts not only in Hartford but also in the highly segregated metropolitan areas of Bridgeport and New Haven. The magnet schools were extremely popular everywhere, yet at the same time, state legislators were growing wary about all the money they were spending. By September 2009, lawmakers issued a moratorium on constructing new magnets outside the Hartford region, which they said they were obligated to continue building because of Sheff.

Even as state leaders ostensibly kept up their commitment to Hartford desegregation, some city officials were proposing to move in a different direction by doubling down on efforts to elevate the so-called education reform movement. Since 2006, Hartford’s then-superintendent, Steve Adamowski, had pushed a plan to transform Hartford Public Schools into an allchoice “portfolio” district, a national strategy backed by the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education. In 2011, Hartford school officials launched a campaign to dissuade families from choosing suburban magnets. One press release said parents should “avoid the temptation to gamble with their children’s future” and enroll their student in a Hartford public school instead. Another district-sponsored TV ad featured a Hartford teacher saying, “Your child’s education is a right and not a game. Why risk their future on a [Sheff ] lottery and then a waiting list?” When the plaintiffs criticized the district’s “Choose Hartford” campaign, Adamowski defended it, saying the dragged-out Sheff remedy was harming Hartford schools.

Hartford’s school board has also had an uneasy relationship with Sheff. (It’s not a formal party to the case, yet is generally expected to greenlight plans the plaintiffs and state negotiate.) “Sheff is an abrogation of democratic governance because it transfers [decisions] to confidential negotiations that many, if not most, people don’t know exist, decisions

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that are the responsibility of state and local government,” says Richard Wareing, an elected Hartford school board member who recently served a three-year stint as board chair. “There is no transparency. There is no accountability.”

One problem dogging Hartford desegre-

gation has been a lack of clear regional coordination. When federal judges ordered school districts to desegregate in the South, many formed new city-countywide school districts, such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee. Yet Connecticut, a state with 169 small towns, has an entrenched culture of parochialism that is unlikely to change without pressure from a court. While the Hartford metropolitan area has been willing to agree to some regional cooperation for services like hazardous waste collection and firefighting, on most everything else the small towns remain fiercely autonomous.

Accommodating this tradition of “local control” has led to disjointed, kludgy efforts to desegregate the region, especially since the most serious segregation exists among districts, not within them.

Between 1998 and 2016, Bruce Douglas led the Capitol Region Education Council, or CREC, a quasi-public agency that manages the interdistrict program and 17 Sheff magnet schools.

When I asked him to reflect on Sheff, he praised Connecticut’s Supreme Court for pushing a voluntary plan, and thereby avoiding the problems of so-called “forced busing.” That said, Douglas, who also believes there needs to be more regional cooperation, admits that the court could have played a larger role pushing that along.

Absent such court mandates, he says, “you would need legislators who have the courage to say, ‘I’m willing to lose my job by voting in favor of regionalizing school districts,’ because there is no doubt they’d be voted out the next cycle.”

Sheff plaintiffs have pushed for more regional coordination at the negotiating table, though they too have stopped short of calling to revamp district lines.

“We’ve never pushed for redrawing school district lines for political reasons, but short of that we’ve pushed for regional solutions ad nauseam, and they’ve never gone anywhere,” says Martha Stone, the lead attorney for the

Sheff plaintiffs. “We’ve pushed for regional preschool, for more mandatory participation from the suburban districts [in interdistrict choice], for more carrots for suburban districts that participate at greater rates, for housing mobility certifications that are tied to education options.”

The state, wary of costs and of political blowback, has consistently rejected these proposals, resulting in a series of year-to-year goals, with the prospect of long-term, regional planning feeling at times more elusive than ever.

Andy Fleischmann, a Democratic state legislator from the affluent suburb of West Hartford who chairs the Education Committee, is quick to note that many people have strongly differing views on the lawsuit. “Where you stand, depends on where you sit,” he says. In his community, he admits no one has seriously pushed for redrawing district boundaries. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in my town who would say, ‘Oh sure, let’s erase the school district’s boundaries,’” he says. “My town has worked hard to make sure that we’ve maintained great schools and there’s just a huge number of people who wouldn’t want to go ahead and take our great school system, change its boundaries, and potentially throw off what’s been working well for as long as it has. That’s true of folks who are sitting in Wethersfield, or East Hartford, or Windsor and Bloomsfield.

That’s just not something that’s been discussed very seriously by many parties.”

Rather than redrawing district lines, Fleischmann supports expanding financial incentives to induce more suburban schools to voluntarily participate in the interdistrict program. When I asked about empowering the education commissioner to mandate greater suburban participation, he quickly dismissed the idea. “That’s been brought up a few times over the years, but that’s never gotten far.

Superintendents and school boards of local districts say, ‘Wait a minute, why would that be a good thing from where we sit?’”

Still, calls for greater regional cooperation have grown more pronounced in recent years, in part because the state’s fiscal crisis has ramped up pressure on leaders to identify economic inefficiencies. And longtime observers say there’s a greater recognition now that Hartford Public Schools and CREC must work together to desegregate the region, rather than

position themselves as competitors for students, as has been the case at times in the past.

What’s needed now, CREC ’s new executive director, Greg Florio, told me, is a comprehensive plan. When asked what’s stopping that from becoming a reality he cited the continual leadership turnover within Hartford and a lack of clear direction from the state.

But it’s not just Sheff ’s implementation that’s in flux. The demographic patterns within the state of Connecticut have also been changing over the past 15 years, with suburbs growing more diverse, and in some cases, more poor.

Twenty-four percent of school-age children in the towns surrounding Hartford this past school year were black or Hispanic. The population shifts have prompted some to wonder if the Sheff remedy should be revised to reflect these not-so-black-and-white realities.

Sheff political tensions have come to a

head over the past two years.

One key factor is Connecticut’s worsening fiscal crisis, which threatens a $5 billion budget deficit. Despite the state’s affluence and Democratic control, lawmakers have been resistant to hiking taxes on its wealthiest residents.

Connecticut’s population is also shrinking. Since 1994, the state’s 35- to 44-year-old demographic has declined by 20 percent, and fewer prime-age adults means fewer schoolage children. All of these issues combine to make school funding particularly contentious, especially since Connecticut relies heavily on local property tax to fund public education.

Although Connecticut has poured in funds to construct new magnets, it has not increased the per-pupil spending for those magnet students since 2010—despite increasing per-pupil spending at traditional schools every year. As a result, suburban districts have had to pick up a greater portion of the tab to send students to magnet schools, and some are growing increasingly unhappy about it. “I think the state tried very hard to do right, especially at the beginning, but people got tired,” says Sandra Cruz-Serrano, CREC ’s deputy executive director. “The political environment started to change, especially as CREC was building these beautiful new schools while suburban schools from the 1950s struggle to renovate.”

Many leaders, families, and educators have concrete ideas of how to improve Sheff—to make it more user-friendly, more cost-effective, and more equitable—but it’s nearly impossible to make headway on these adjustments without leadership from the state, and many state officials remain cool to the program. “The state has never seen Sheff as a real benefit to them; they’ve only treated it as something that was onerous,” Douglas says.

Not all Hartford leaders believe Sheff can be sufficiently improved. Craig Stallings, the Hartford school board chair, doesn’t think there can be any real tweaks to the remedy,

For the first time, attorneys in another state —Minnesota— have sued state government to compel desegregation, following the model of Sheff. and even if adjustments were possible, the city would still be unfairly deprived of local control.

Stallings, an African American man born and raised in Hartford before Sheff was litigated, speaks highly of his education, which he says was rigorous and culturally responsive, despite being segregated. “Quality is more paramount than integration,” he tells me. “I’m the anti-Sheff guy around here.” Another vocal Sheff critic is Thirman Milner, an 83-year-old Hartford resident and the city’s first African American mayor, elected in 1981. Milner, who originally supported Sheff, now says it would be better if the lawsuit were abandoned, and the state just gave money to the city to do what it sees fit. “I think the Hartford board would have a much better idea of how to spend the money, and I think we need to get rid of Sheff if we really want to stabilize the schools,” Milner says.

John Brittain laughs hard when I ask him if he thinks the state would distribute the same

kinds of resources to Hartford without Sheff mandates. “No, and I believe that’s just a smokescreen for opposition to school integration, just like ‘busing’ was always a smokescreen,” he says. “‘It’s not the bus,’ as we used to say. ‘It’s us.’”

Brittain’s skepticism seems justified: The state funds other segregated regions of the state far less, and is already attempting to shift more Sheff costs onto local suburban districts. In 2015, the state signed a one-year agreement to expand seats in existing magnet schools, but Connecticut officials said they would refuse to open new magnets in the future, and refused to increase magnet per-pupil funding. Even today, the existing magnet schools are operating only at 93 percent capacity, in part because the state has capped the number of seats it will fund.

Julie Goldstein, the principal of Breakthrough, an award-winning magnet run by Hartford Public Schools, says the last few years of budget cuts have been very painful. “One of the misconceptions of magnet schools is that because we have nice buildings we must be oozing with funds,” she tells me as we sit together in her office. Breakthrough recently had to shorten its school day and eliminate two certified positions, including its assistant principal. Continually reducing their resources, supplies, and field trips, Goldstein says, makes recruiting students much harder.

Desegregation efforts came under even more fire this year, as the Hartford Courant ran a series of articles highlighting problems with the school-choice lottery and frustrated Hartford students who struggle to land spots in magnet schools. The fact that some magnets have to leave seats empty in cases where they aren’t able to attract enough white or Asian children has added insult to injury to those who already feel like they are being left behind.

“One lesson we’ve learned from all this is that stopping midway, and not meeting the full public demand, creates serious political blowback,” says Phil Tegeler, the executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, and a former Sheff attorney.

In response to Hartford residents’ palpable frustration, this year the state announced plans to revamp the Sheff legal mandates, saying the current 75 percent cap on black or Latino students is ultimately harmful. The state proposed changing the ratio to 80 to 20.

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Many I spoke with, however, say they felt this state action amounted to Sheff sabotage, even if it came from a well-intentioned place.

Plus, they say, it’s a slippery slope to allow the state to change desegregation standards when it’s politically convenient to do so.

“It was an embarrassing idea to drop the percentage down; the 75 percent standard is bad enough, and 80 percent is even worse,” says Bruce Douglas, CREC ’s former executive director. “That’s not desegregation—and this came from a Democratic administration!”

Sheff critics correctly note that there is no real social science justification behind the 75-to-25 standard, but practically speaking, ensuring there are enough white students in a school matters for integration. And for better or for worse, magnet operators have to attract white parents.

“Our schools are in the suburbs, and one of our charges is to bring white children into those schools,” says Florio, CREC’s executive director. “There’s a tipping point, and once it gets below the 25 percent mark, it becomes a much greater struggle to make it a racially diverse school.”

“I’m not saying the state was consciously trying to make Sheff fail, but anyone who would come up with this [80-to-20 ratio] would have to realize this would make the magnet schools fail,” adds Douglas.

A representative from the Connecticut Department of Education declined to comment for this story, citing pending litigation.

This past June, following a three-day hearing, a Connecticut Superior Court judge blocked the state’s efforts to change the Sheff desegregation standards to 80 to 20. But with the latest Sheff settlement agreement now expired, plaintiffs are expected to head back to court, and the debate will surely be revived again soon.

The Sheff Movement, a coalition of parents, teachers, students, and local residents in Greater Hartford, know the politics of desegregation remain daunting, but they are committed and insist the law is on their side. They have been working to organize and educate community members around integration, but raising money for their efforts has been difficult.

As time passes, the degree to which parents

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and community members can even speak to the history of the Sheff lawsuit is also quickly fading. When perusing the various magnet school websites, one can find little to no mention of the consequential civil rights lawsuit, including why the Sheff ruling has made these schools a reality. The magnets operated by Hartford Public Schools and CREC aren’t even referred to as “Sheff schools,” but rather as “Hartford magnets” and “CREC magnets.” Some magnet school leaders may also prefer de-emphasizing their school’s connection to Sheff, finding it can be helpful when convincing skeptical white parents who otherwise might be deterred by the desegregation element.

“I understand that schools may not want to be racially identifiable, but it’s important to understand the history,” says Robert Cotto Jr., a pro-Sheff Hartford school board member.

“If you’re talking about branding, and this is a school that is created as a result of maybe the most important civil rights case in Connecticut, why isn’t that being demonstrated?

If people have no idea, then that right there undermines the case in the long run. Maybe it’s intentional.”

Elizabeth Horton Sheff doesn’t care if the magnets are named for the lawsuit so long as the desegregation initiative moves forward.

But she does think there is a deliberate effort to obfuscate the history, so people “won’t have to worry about things like constitutional rights” and can frame the conversation solely around school choice.

And indeed, though integration advocates think the basic framework of Sheff can still work—involving a voluntary, choice-based model—there is a genuine concern about what would happen if the state abandoned Sheff in favor of a more free-market-based choice system.

In 2014, Cotto published “Choice Watch,” a report that found Connecticut charters and technical schools to be highly racially segregated, despite both having statutory requirements to reduce racial and ethnic isolation.

Connecticut Sheff magnet schools were the only choice-based option Cotto found that significantly reduced segregation. The state’s limited resources and enforcement with regard to charter and technical schools, Cotto says, clearly suggest how the state would treat magnets if Sheff were to end.

In 2015, for the first time since Sheff v. O’Neill, lawyers in a different state filed a state-level school desegregation lawsuit. Twin Cities attorneys filed a case against the state of Minnesota, saying that the state’s segregated schools violate Minnesota’s constitutional obligation to provide all students with an adequate education. The suit will be heard by the state Supreme Court later this fall, but regardless of what happens, desegregation advocates are saying we should expect to see more affirmative, state-level litigation in the years to come.

In 2016, President Obama’s Education Secretary John King traveled to Hartford and proclaimed that the region’s desegregation work could serve as a model for the country. He touted the state’s hefty investments in magnet schools that attract suburban kids, and praised Hartford’s voluntary busing and interdistrict school choice program.

With conservatives now controlling the federal government, liberal organizations have been focusing much more heavily on how school choice policies, specifically private school vouchers, can exacerbate segregation.

But Hartford’s magnet and interdistrict program demonstrates how choice can be used (sometimes awkwardly and imperfectly) to promote school desegregation. Sheff proves that with clear desegregationist goals, ample resources, and dedicated enforcement, a choice-based system need not lack high-quality, integrated options.

The challenge, it turns out, isn’t finding a system that works. Sheff is working: 48 percent of Hartford students are already in integrated schools, a massive improvement without parallel almost anyplace else in the nation. Instead, the challenge has been securing the long-term political commitment to sustain that system— and the financial support to ensure it runs well, which is often the same thing. Integration is possible, but no one would deny it’s been a long, hard road, with more yet to go.

Still, the original activists who stood up to segregated schools decades ago never thought otherwise. They just believed it would be worth it in the end. “I knew this lawsuit would never directly benefit my son,” Elizabeth Horton Sheff told me this past summer. “I didn’t do it for my child. I do it for our children.”

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The Jacob Javits Center in New York on Election Night 2016

How She Lost Malpractice cost Clinton the election, but her ambivalence on big issues was produced by big structural factors that affect all Democrats. By Stanley B. Greenberg

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illary Clinton’s tragic 2016 campaign faced withering criticism in the press, social media, and now, in Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s inside account, Shattered. From my vantage point as lead pollster for the Democratic nominees in 1992 and 2000, part of the closing clutch of pollsters in 2004, and invited noodge in 2016, I have little quarrel with the harshest of these criticisms. Malpractice and arrogance contributed

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mightily to the election of Donald Trump and its profound threat to our democracy. So did the handling of the email server, paid Wall Street speeches, and the “deplorables” comment. And her unwillingness to challenge the excesses of big money and corporate influence left her exposed to attacks first by Bernie Sanders and then by Donald Trump and unable to offer credible promise of change.

Yet the accounts of Hillary

Clinton are very incomplete, miss the reasons for her ambivalence, and miss most of the big structural forces at work that made it hard for her to commit to a different path.

That is where we learn the most about the progressive debate ahead.

The Malpractice

The Trump presidency concentrates the mind on the malpractice that helped put him in office. For me, the most glaring examples

include the Clinton campaign’s over-dependence on technical analytics; its failure to run campaigns to win the battleground states; the decision to focus on the rainbow base and identity politics at the expense of the working class; and the failure to address the candidate’s growing “trust problem” or to learn from events and reposition.

Clinton’s own campaign memoir, What Happened, came out the day I was finalizing this article.

She acknowledged possible errors in her handling of the economy, but not these areas of malpractice.

The campaign relied far too heavily on something that campaign technicians call “data analytics.” This refers to the use of models built from a database

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of the country’s 200 million voters, including turnout history and demographic and consumer information, updated daily by an automated poll asking for vote preference to project the election result. But when campaign developments overtake the model’s assumptions, you get surprised by the voters—and this happened repeatedly.

Astonishingly, the 2016 Clinton campaign conducted no state polls in the final three weeks of the general election and relied primarily on data analytics to project turnout and the state vote.

They paid little attention to qualitative focus groups or feedback from the field, and their brief daily poll didn’t measure which candidate was defining the election or getting people engaged.

The models from the data analytics team led by Elan Kriegel got the Iowa and Michigan primaries badly wrong, with huge consequences for the race.

Why were they not then fired?

Campaign manager Robby Mook and the analytics team argued, according to Shattered, that the Sanders vote grew “organically”—turnout was unexpectedly high and new registrants broke against Clinton. Why was that a surprise?

Campaign chair John Podesta wanted to fire Mook, but Clinton stood by him. She rightly admired previous campaigns in which big data and technology were big winners, yet in 2008 it was the candidate and his appeal more than the technical wizardry that pushed Obama over the top. David Axelrod told me that analytics adds a “great field-goal kicker”—no substitute for a strategy and compelling message.

For Clinton, however, giving up the analytics team was like giving up consultant Dick Morris at earlier tough moments—a man who was thought to bring unconventional powers to play. That Mook didn’t share his results with others in the campaign reinforced his mystique as a data wizard. But that lack of transparency was malpractice. Standard practice is immediately sharing national, battleground, and state polls, as well as automated canvassing and other metrics with the senior campaign team at the very least, usually with the war

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room, and sometimes the whole headquarters. That is how a nimble campaign operates.

The malpractice grows exponentially with their failure to focus like a laser on winning each target primary or battleground state. Rather than shifting resources and media buys across states based on the analytics’ projection of cost per delegate or voter, they needed to focus on how to win each must-win, winner-take-all state.

That meant more distinct state strategies, focus groups, and state tracking polls right to the end.

The campaign’s approach senselessly and increasingly drove up Trump’s margin in white workingclass communities, tipping Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The analytics model built around these assumptions was so simpleminded it portended disaster. Despite overwhelming evidence that the Democratic base wasn’t consolidated or excited, the campaign believed Trump’s tasteless attacks and Clinton’s identification with every group in the rainbow coalition would produce near universal support. Thus, they stopped trying to persuade voters and measured only the probability of support for Hillary. The campaign’s task was turning out those Clinton voters, and they fell frustratingly short.

Base and Identity at the Expense of Class

Clinton and the campaign acted as if “demographics is destiny” and a “rainbow coalition” was bound to govern. Yes, there is a growing “Rising American Electorate,” but as Page Gardner and I wrote at the outset of this election, you must give people a compelling reason to vote. I have demonstrated for my entire career that a candidate must target white workingclass voters, too.

Not surprisingly, Clinton took her biggest hit in Michigan, where she failed to campaign in Macomb County, the archetypal white working-class county. That was the opposite of her husband’s approach. Bill Clinton visibly campaigned in Macomb, the black community in Detroit, and elsewhere.

The fatal conclusion the Clinton team made after the Michigan

primary debacle was that she could not win white working-class voters, and that the “rising electorate” would make up the difference. She finished her campaign with rallies in inner cities and university towns. Macomb got the message. “When you leave the twothirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice,” Joan Williams writes sharply in White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.

Additionally, Sanders campaigned against bad trade deals like NAFTA and the TPP to show he’d battle for working people. NAFTA was the work of Bill Clinton and the TPP was a signature initiative of Obama. Hillary Clinton needed some distance. My wife, Representative Rosa DeLauro, headed up the anti-TPP forces in Congress, but despite her incessant lobbying of Podesta, Clinton offered only a muddled opposition.

Not Addressing the “Trust Problem”

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Crown Publishing Group

What Happened

By Hillary Rodham Clinton

Simon & Schuster

Clinton’s “trust problem” grew as the campaign progressed. Large numbers of voters didn’t trust her. But her campaign was reluctant or frozen in addressing it. Why? Bill Clinton, after all, faced cascading controversies in 1992 around Gennifer Flowers, his draft avoidance, and marijuana, with large majorities thinking he didn’t have the character to be president.

The right had marshalled attack squads, and other Democratic candidates were pummeling him for telling voters whatever they wanted to hear in the primaries.

Shattered suggests that Obama advisers inside and outside the campaign, including David Axelrod and David Plouffe, believed Hillary Clinton herself was the principal obstacle and doubted the campaign could coursecorrect. Mook and team believed that identity politics, demographic trends, and Trump’s temperament would be enough to win, so they could avoid confronting the “trust problem.”

What might have happened if Clinton had attended a focus group herself, as Nelson Mandela did in 1993 when our research showed that his African National Congress was seen as “out of touch” and taking too long

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address, and in the debates. But when the campaign got rocked, she reverted to the Obama narrative.

And in her book What Happened, she acknowledges “Stan’s” argument that “heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites” while the working class struggled financially alienated the working class from Democrats. She says, “That’s another reminder that, despite the heroic work” of Obama, many “didn’t feel the recovery in their own lives.”

Change Requires Calling Out Big-Money Special Interests

to bring change? What might have happened if she had watched people expressing their exasperation and desperation with the economy and politicians—and talking about her ties to Wall Street, her perceived lack of truthfulness, or their knowing nothing of her economic ideas? But the Clinton campaign never facilitated that kind of redirection.

andrew harnick / ap images

America’s Progress and Pain

Hillary Clinton fully identified with President Obama’s vision on identity, opportunity, honest government, inequality, the economy, and America’s upward direction, viewing his campaign and governance as successful. She stocked her campaign with his consultants and those who had worked in his White House.

She believed, and still believes, that America is dynamic, growing, and progressing, and now needs an economy that truly leaves no one behind. Inequality has worsened, but the answer is “building ladders of opportunity,” as Obama described in his State of the Union before his reelection, in his campaign speeches for Clinton, and in his private handwritten letter to President Trump.

Obama’s America was not a country in pain, but one where those left behind were looking for a seasoned leader to

Malpractice Man: Campaign Manager Robby Mook, with the candidate

make progress. Obama and Clinton lived in a cosmopolitan and professional America that wasn’t very angry about the state of the country, even if many of the groups in the Clinton coalition were struggling and angry. Clinton decided only reluctantly to qualify that narrative in favor of one more sensitive to those who were left behind.

Obama’s refrain was severely out of touch with what was happening to most Americans and the working class more broadly. In our research, “ladders of opportunity” fell far short of what real people were looking for. Incomes sagged after the financial crisis, pensions lost value, and many lost their housing wealth, while people faced dramatically rising costs for things that mattered—health care, education, housing, and child care. People faced vanishing geographic, economic, and social mobility, as Edward Luce writes so forcefully. At the same time, billionaires spent massively to influence politicians and parked their money in the big cities whose dynamism drew in the best talent from the smaller towns and rural areas.

Clinton’s default position was Obama’s refrain about America, but she did invite real discussion of these issues and got close to embracing a change posture during some economic speeches and her convention

My comments draw on my takeaways after reading Shattered, but they also draw on my personal experience with the campaign, which included regular meetings and exchanges with John Podesta. Early on, he pressed me for help on pushing back against Sanders’s Wall Street attack and asked for my reactions to Clinton’s emerging stump speech. After I worked directly with Clinton on how to close the primary, I was asked to react to the economic and convention speeches as well. Podesta asked me to email Robby Mook directly when he could not get Mook to change course at the campaign’s close.

From 2015 on, when Sanders was gaining on Clinton, I pushed Podesta, the other principals, and Clinton directly to show discontent with the state of the economy and politics and to put forward bold economic policies, like those proposed by Joseph Stiglitz and the Roosevelt Institute. On that, she often accepted that advice, though her default strategy was to “build on the progress.” And from the beginning, I called on her to decry the special-interest and big-money influence that was keeping government from working for the middle class. But on that, I got nowhere.

Early on, I chided the campaign privately for starting every economic talk with dutiful praise for Obama’s handling of the economy, and later told them not to keep saying, “America is already great.” The new American majority, I wrote, “is looking for a president who will address the building problems”— and “not a third term of Obama.”

Podesta invited me to critique her comments at an Iowa town hall that

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he thought was “getting there,” but I was dumbfounded. “What is your core message?” I asked in an email. Clinton had said during a primary debate that Republicans will “rip away the progress and turn us backwards,” but, as I said in my email, “I think the overall message is tone [deaf] on what is happening in the country,” and that Clinton “has left the change voters to Sanders.”

I warned that Sanders was gaining by embracing our “level the playing field” message, which said that “families and small businesses are struggling, yet CEOs and billionaires are using their lobbyists to rewrite the rules so government works for them, not you.” Sanders gained on economic change by committing to “stop any new trade deals that undermine American jobs and income.”

Sanders’s surprising strength and the damage to Clinton from his attacks on big money and Wall Street led Podesta to confer with me on how she could find her footing on reform.

Clinton’s instinctive response was to go silent on the issue and attack Sanders on guns and health care. I warned in my note to Podesta, reporting a survey for Every Voice, that “billionaires, corporations and special interests buying their government is a voting issue.”

Right before the Connecticut primary, I watched Clinton and my wife, Representative DeLauro, host a café discussion with working women.

Beforehand, she greeted me warmly, and afterward Rosa and I hung back in the holding area to let Clinton and me speak alone and frankly. She was really moved and disturbed by what she had heard on the campaign trail, recounting the similar stories from women in suburban Philadelphia, Tampa, and Brooklyn. “They’re in such pain. People are at their wits’ end. They feel hopeless.”

I said, yes, that is exactly what’s happening in the country, which she acknowledged, but then said, “How do I talk about their pain without sounding like I’m criticizing President Obama and his economy? I just can’t do that.”

I said, I think you can manage a different balance, and said, “Why not use your own learning from listening to these folks as a way to talk about the economy? You are about to lock up

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an unassailable number of delegates, why not make that learning about the economy central to this new chapter?”

I promised her a note, and worked feverishly to write it overnight.

Later, when I congratulated her on her Pennsylvania primary victory speech, via Huma Abedin, she wrote back, “Well you better. You inspired it!”

Mooked: Campaign Chair John Podesta

Embracing Pocketbook Pain— But Not Enough

After that, I was asked to look at drafts of Clinton’s economic speeches before and after the convention, as well as drafts of her convention acceptance speech. Podesta had me share my emails with Jake Sullivan and Dan Schwerin and later asked me to write a short text in her voice that uses “stronger together” but also hit my “level the playing field” points. I was asked to brief Mandy Grunwald, who was managing the debate prep.

I proposed a first point where “stronger together” means “everyone who works hard has an equal shot at America’s promise, an equal shot at joining the middle class and a better life.” But then I took my best populist shot: We are stronger together, yet so many of our corporate and political leaders seem content to pursue their own goals, while so many hardworking people are struggling and don’t have an equal shot at a better life.

The campaign’s response was completely schizophrenic. After Clinton

delivered her economic speech in Columbus, I wrote to Podesta: “President Obama could have delivered this speech. It is still a build on the progress speech with some cheerleading for America,” and did not have “much populism or critique of how things went wrong or any culprits to be vanished.”

The next day, I prepared for the worst when the warm-up speakers in North Carolina delivered the same cheerleading message. But then she delivered a speech, full of reforms, that I rushed to embrace. I wrote to Clinton, “Madame Secretary, I loved the North Carolina speech.”

The Roosevelt Institute had me test these two very different economic speeches, and the results were unsurprising. I met with Podesta in New York and emailed Clinton: “Your economic message that you delivered in North Carolina flat out defeats” Trump’s economic nationalist message. “But when you are speaking about build[ing] on the progress, none of that happens.”

I was then asked to react to a working draft of Clinton’s convention speech, and it included a lot of cheerleading of the economy, though progressive drafts got much better. I also wrote on July 23: “The missing piece is any frustration with politicians, special interests, corporate influence that distorts government and any desire to change the role of money in politics. I think that is dangerous and allows Trump to look like the guy who wants to [get] rid of crony capitalism.”

On July 29, I wrote to the campaign team: “I think the economic speech was done deftly—acknowledging Obama’s progress, but not good enough. A lot of story telling about people’s pain. There is a lot about corporate responsibility and paying their fair share.” But I then added, “What’s missing is any critique or discomfort with politicians too moved by special interest money to work for change.”

After Clinton and Senator Tim Kaine headed out on their post-convention economic tour, I wrote to Podesta: “Yesterday, I’m sorry, could not have been worse on the economy. I just can’t understand why you feel the need to run on progress. You are the past and Trump is change and a better life. You

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sound clueless in blue collar America.”

But then they made a big turn that impacted the election. The draft economic speech, unveiled August 10, included this core choice: “We have a vision for an economy and country that works for everyone, not just those at the top. Donald Trump has a vision for America that works for him and his family at the expense of everyone else.” That hit a chord. Clinton could not have been more on-message during the three debates, and she made her biggest gains in the first and third debates on who would be better for the middle class and who would do a better job handling the economy, reaching parity with Trump on that critical last point. I shared the dial-meter findings that we had conducted for Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, and wrote her an email October 6, more than a month before the election: “I want to congratulate you on the debate, the campaign and economic message!”

But that was the last America heard from Hillary Clinton on the economy.

Complications, Distractions, and the Campaign Off-Message

The Russian-hacked emails and FBI Director James Comey’s re-opened investigation put the Democrats at growing risk, particularly with Clinton largely silent on the economy. Bill Clinton told Carville that the campaign, maddeningly, believed Hillary “couldn’t win the economy,” and Podesta told me, “Mook believes we got nothing for all that time on the economy.” When I told him that Clinton was performing relatively well with white working-class women well into October, he said their data didn’t support that. I now realize this conclusion was based on Mook’s flawed analytics, not real polling. At Podesta’s urging, I wrote to Mook on November 1: Comey has … raised the stakes in our turnout [of] our broad base. Trump will now consolidate more Republicans, and our consolidation of Democrats will stall. And that is our biggest, measurable problem: millennials … are weak in the early vote, as you know, and our national polls

show us getting only 79 percent of Sanders voters.

But I think there is an effective solution available to you.

The tough economic message that HRC delivered in the 1st and 3rd debate produced big gains on the economy, middle class, fighting special interests and trust. …

They are desperate to know you can bring change.

Obama and Clinton lived in a cosmopolitan and professional America that wasn’t angry about the state of the country, while many voters were struggling and angry.

On November 3, I wrote to Mook, “Disqualifying not enough.” I got no response.

President Obama campaigned for Clinton in the closing weekends, and with a big megaphone said the country could elect a president “who will build on our progress. Who will finish the job.” She is “as well-prepared as anyone who ever ran” to solve the problems we have. For those “still in need of a good job or a raise” or the child who needs “a sturdier ladder out of poverty,” she was their choice.

That view of the world would put many voters out of reach.

In her book, Clinton recalls she “had planned to close with aggressive advertising reminding working families of my plans to change our country and their lives for the better.”

She gave that up, but now asks, “Was that a mistake?” She concludes with what I believe to be a major rethinking: “Maybe.”

The Structural Forces : The Politics of Identity

Hillary Clinton devoted a lifetime to battling and winning rights for groups that are at the heart of the liberal project, and she speaks for herself and a lot of progressives when she says that this is America’s unfinished work. So when she got slaughtered in New Hampshire by Sanders, who hammered economic inequality and political corruption, she won strong applause when she declared: I believe so strongly that we have to keep up with every fiber of our being the argument for … human rights. Human rights as women’s rights, human rights as gay rights, human rights as worker rights, human rights as voting

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rights, human rights across the board for every single American.

Now that is who I am.

She spoke explicitly about her campaign to “shatter the glass ceiling” for women and the unacceptability of the gender pay gap. And she un-self-consciously shouted out in all her speeches the different groups that would benefit from her policies.

Her campaign website and that of the Democratic National Committee, Mark Lilla points out, identified distinct groups and policies that would benefit them.

The campaign settled on “breaking barriers” as her authentic history and what she would do, and prioritized women and people of color over all other groups. They were explicitly privileging race and gender over class. And they championed policies that expanded opportunity in the way advanced by Obama.

I don’t know whether they tested this strategy in research, but they put it to a quick test with voters. She flew to Flint, Michigan, to affirm these priorities in the most powerful way. She aired her breakthrough ad in Nevada in which she hugged a Dreamer. She had no ad with an autoworker’s daughter.

She went there out of a liberal conviction, not out of malice or malpractice—and came up short.

Had Hillary Clinton won the presidency, the debate around these stark questions would probably have been put off, but they can’t be put off now.

The progressive debate must now address: What is the role of the working class and white working class?

How do you build off of anger toward an economy that fails the middle class, but still align with professionals, innovators, and metropolitan areas?

How do you credibly battle corporate influence and corrupted politics? Can you simultaneously advance identity and class politics?

Stanley B. Greenberg is a founding partner of Democracy Corps and Greenberg Research and author of America Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation’s Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems and Leading the 21st Century.

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Where the Republican Party Began Sidney Blumenthal’s new volume in his biography of Lincoln explores the role of leadership in the remaking of American politics in the 1850s. By Ronald Brownstein b

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efore Sidney Blumenthal was a sharp-elbowed political operative for Bill and Hillary Clinton, he was a sharp-eyed political journalist. In Wrestling with His Angel, his new book on Abraham Lincoln, Blumenthal returns to those roots.

He applies to the 1850s, with rewarding effect, the analytical insight and stylistic elegance that made him an indispensable writer in the 1980s on the rise of Ronald Reagan–era conservatism and the Democratic struggle to formulate a winning response. And although Blumenthal never steps out of the historical frame to compare Lincoln’s time with our own, his story of how the pounding pressure of unrelenting partisan and regional conflict tore apart and reconfigured a seemingly immutable party system in the 1850s offers important insights into the ways today’s deep fissures might forge a new political alignment.

Wrestling with His Angel, which covers the years 1849 through 1856, is the second volume in a projected four-book series that amounts to a political life and times for Lincoln.

Here Blumenthal very much stresses “the times.” Lincoln vanishes for long stretches; Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s lifelong rival, dominates most of the narrative. That emphasis reflects the contrasting trajectories of the two men. The book captures Lincoln at low ebb, returning to a middling (at best) law practice in Illinois after serving a single term as a Whig in the House of Representatives.

Meanwhile, Douglas was at high tide. In these years, he was a dynamic (if coarse and sometimes boozeaddled) young Democratic senator who seized the baton from the tiring Henry Clay to drive the Compromise of 1850 into law. Just four years later, Douglas passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the seemingly

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impregnable Missouri Compromise and opened new states to slavery if their residents voted to allow it. After that triumph, Blumenthal writes, “Douglas had risen so far that Lincoln disappeared from his view. Five years gone from Washington, Lincoln was left to observe the tail of the comet.”

Yet Douglas’s seeming triumph precipitated the reversal of the two men’s fortunes. The cause of rallying opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska law, among the most misguided legislation ever passed by Congress, roused Lincoln “from his dormancy,” as Blumenthal writes, and returned him to center stage in Illinois politics. Just six years after Douglas’s great legislative victory, Lincoln soundly defeated him for the presidency, as the nominee of a new party that emerged precisely from the ferocious Northern backlash against the Kansas-Nebraska law and the attempt to impose a proslavery constitution on Kansas.

Many excellent books have recounted the destabilization of American politics and the march toward the Civil War in the 1850s, and many others have tracked Lincoln’s own journey toward greatness. Blumenthal inevitably operates in the shadow of the finest of these (such as David Potter’s magisterial The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 or Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men on the rise of the Republican Party). Blumenthal makes his contribution to this bulging literature by employing his skills as a political reporter to focus on politicians and their maneuvering. He provides captivating miniature portraits of the era’s dominant political figures, from a spidery, syphilitic Jefferson Davis scheming to strengthen the South as President Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war, to Missouri’s titanic Thomas Hart Benton thundering maledictions against his many enemies. (Benton,

Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, 1849–1856

By Sidney Blumenthal

Simon & Schuster

in floor debate, described Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act as “a silent, secret, limping, halting, creeping, squinting, impish motion.”) Blumenthal applies a surprisingly bright coat of paint to the truncated presidency of Zachary Taylor, whom he portrays as a tough-minded unionist who stared down Southern threats before dying of cholera in office.

At times, Blumenthal gets lost in the weeds (literally, when recounting the battles of Thurlow Weed and William Seward with an array of rivals for control of the Whig Party in New York). His lengthy account of the political struggles between pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kentucky is vibrant but overwhelming in its dense detail. And while reviewers must always be careful about criticizing authors for not writing a different book, I believe Blumenthal would have benefited from a greater discussion of the economic forces that were also dividing a rapidly industrializing North from the agrarian South (and advantaging the former over the latter in the war to come).

Yet Blumenthal’s focus on the era’s political leadership offers its own rewards. It allows him to show how the sectional divide subsumed all other political issues and disputes.

In the 1850s, slavery was the rock on which every institution in American life shattered. Churches, civic groups, even the two major national political parties, all sundered across the North/South boundary.

Much like Potter, Blumenthal shows how the intensifying conflict over slavery—or more precisely over whether slavery would be allowed to spread into new states—disrupted the alignment that had shaped U.S. politics for decades. Since the 1830s, American politics had revolved around the competition between Whigs and Democrats. The Whigs generally represented the merchant class and supported an activist role for government in creating the conditions for economic growth through initiatives such as building roads and canals, while Democrats rallied behind Andrew Jackson’s banner of smaller government, territorial expansion, and championing of the

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common (white) man. But those differences became secondary—first to leaders and then to voters—to the all-consuming question of whether to limit the expansion of slavery (especially after the Mexican-American War of 1848 forced Washington to decide whether slavery would be allowed in the vast new territories acquired in the conflict, including New Mexico and California).

With both parties divided between Northern and Southern wings, neither could meet the demands of many voters in the North for a party unambiguously opposed to the spread of slavery (if not its abolition in the states where it already existed).

The Compromise of 1850 had heightened the sectional tensions in each party, particularly by including the Fugitive Slave Act, which morally outraged many in the North. But the traditional partisan loyalties still survived that shock. Both parties

Lincoln during his U.S. Senate campaign, October 1854, and Stephen A. Douglas in the late 1850s. It was in refuting Douglas that Lincoln awakened his own greatness.

stumbled through the presidential election of 1852 clinging to their old differences and hoping to sublimate the mounting tension over slavery’s future. That year, as Blumenthal pointedly notes, both the Democrat and Whig platforms endorsed the Fugitive Slave Act, effectively disenfranchising the many Northerners opposed to it.

For Lincoln, the 1852 election may have been the personal low point as he sought to promote the lackluster Whig nominee Winfield Scott while abiding his party’s silence on the issues that consumed him. “He argued for no principles, upheld no cause and offered no serious discussion of any issue,” Blumenthal writes of Lincoln’s limp electioneering that year. “He permitted not a glimmer to show of his inner turmoil over the problem of slavery, the conflict of North and South, and the country’s future.”

The breaking point for this fraying

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party system came just two years later when Douglas pushed through his Kansas-Nebraska Act. His aim was not specifically to expand slavery, but he was willing to allow its spread to advance his deeper goal: to organize those vast territories so they could become the route for a transcontinental railroad that he anticipated would both enrich him (he had a habit of commingling his legislation and investments) and propel him to the presidency. Douglas believed that shifting the debate over slavery’s extension to the individual states would suppress the North-South conflict and allow him to emerge along a different axis as the champion of an expanding and modernizing America.

As Blumenthal vigorously writes, Douglas “advertised himself as the herald of the future, the maker of the new age and front-runner of his generation—the political engine of the piston-driven forces of modernization.”

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In fact, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had the opposite effect. Rather than suppressing the regional conflict, the act furiously inflamed it. Its mandate for popular sovereignty was virtually an invitation to civil war, as anti- and pro-slavery forces descended on Kansas to control the writing of its constitution. By Douglas’s own count, more than 1,500 sermons were preached against him in New England churches after the law’s passage. In the election of 1854, 84 percent of all Northern House Democrats who voted for the law were defeated. That rout tilted the party’s balance of power decisively toward the South and pushed it even more toward a pro-slavery stance that, in a reinforcing cycle, further undermined its standing in the North.

Meanwhile, with its Southern elements supporting the KansasNebraska Act while its Northern leaders recoiled, the Whig Party “shattered into pieces under the stress,” as Blumenthal writes. An array of anti-Nebraska, fusion, temperance, and nativist parties initially filled the void while Whig stalwarts like Seward and Lincoln tried to hold their party together. But by 1856, the Whigs were effectively defunct and the Republican Party had emerged as a Northern party clearly opposed to slavery’s expansion. Lincoln formally joined the party in May 1856, just days after a pro-slavery militia sacked the town of Lawrence, Kansas, and John Brown retaliated with a massacre of five proslavery men in Pottawatomie Creek.

“Each and every one of Douglas’s clever maneuvers would bring slavery to the forefront again,” Blumenthal concludes, “but on a basis more contentious than ever.”

In this rising conflict, Lincoln rediscovered his purpose. In a preview of their epic confrontations during the 1858 Senate race, Lincoln trailed Douglas around Illinois during the 1854 election. Though the two never directly debated, Lincoln’s speeches offered the first rough drafts of the piercing arguments he would deploy in 1858 against Douglas’s morally agnostic approach to slavery. (Lincoln’s core argument in 1854 was that Douglas’s claim to support popular sovereignty required listeners to deny

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Lincoln was a singular figure who combined moral courage with shrewd tactical insight, bottomless perseverance, and unmatched literary gifts.

the humanity of the slaves: “[I]f the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself?”) It was in refuting Douglas that Lincoln awakened his own greatness—a metamorphosis sure to dominate Blumenthal’s next volume.

Lincoln was a singular figure who combined moral courage with shrewd tactical insight, bottomless perseverance, and unmatched literary gifts. His personal story offers limited guidance to succeeding generations because the hyperactive modern political system is not likely to produce such a transcendent figure again—and probably would not recognize him or her if it did.

Yet the crisis of the 1850s that Blumenthal recreates so vividly here remains worthy of study because it represents the last time a major new party emerged in the United States.

The Republican Party took root in the space between the anachronistic terms of political debate between Whigs and Democrats and the evolving nature of the nation’s most pressing political conflict. As the sectional struggle washed over the old political boundaries, the Republican Party coalesced the forces opposed to slavery that had been submerged in both of the existing parties. Sweeping away older issues and alignments, the GOP’s rise refocused the political debate onto the central issue of the time (the fate of slavery) and reset the partisan configuration around society’s most important division (the North/South regional split).

The mismatch isn’t as great today, but once again the nature of the party competition no longer fully reflects the country’s actual divisions. Democrats and Republicans mostly think of themselves in a mold stamped during the New Deal, with Democrats as the party of working people and Republicans as the party of the economic elite.

In fact, the parties now separate less along class lines than in their attitudes toward the fundamental demographic, cultural, and economic changes remaking American society. Democrats mobilize what I’ve called a “coalition of transformation” that revolves primarily around millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites who are generally the most comfortable

with increasing diversity, greater social inclusion, and the transition to a post-industrial, globalized (and lowcarbon) economy. Republicans rely on a competing “coalition of restoration” centered on older, blue-collar, nonurban, and evangelical whites most resistant to these same changes.

By appealing more explicitly to white racial identity than any national figure since George Wallace, Donald Trump has both exploited and intensified the separation of the parties along these cultural and racial lines. In 2016, Trump won a higher share of non-college white voters than any candidate in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984, while facing huge deficits among minorities and millennials and nearly becoming the first Republican nominee in the history of polling to lose most college-educated whites. Trump’s unflinchingly polarizing and racially divisive agenda is increasing the pressure on the outliers in each coalition: the remaining culturally conservative blue-collar white Democrats drawn toward aspects of Trump’s insular nationalism, and the white-collar Republicans who like the party’s antitax, anti-regulation agenda but are uneasy with Trump’s repeated gestures to white racial resentment.

Amid his daily chaos, Trump is now losing support on all sides. But if Trump can stabilize his presidency he may well lure more blue-collar whites (though probably not working-class minorities) from the Democrats at the price of driving more white-collar whites toward them. The end result might be two parties contrasted even more clearly than they are today by their attitudes toward social and economic change, and perhaps a serious third-party contender in 2020 filling the space between them. As Blumenthal demonstrates in his compelling history of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Cold War between North and South through the 1850s, once such a process of partisan recombination begins, no one can be entirely sure where it will end.

Ronald Brownstein is a senior editor at The Atlantic and senior political analyst for CNN.

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Mildred and Richard Loving with their children at their Central Point home, 1967

Can Love Conquer Hate?

Will the increasing prevalence of intermarriage lead to broader empathy and understanding? By Jabari Asim b

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ean Toomer, one of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance, the unprecedented outpouring of African American creativity during the 1920s, was also one of its most conflicted personalities. Racially ambiguous in appearance, he eventually distanced himself from the black culture he had evoked so movingly in Cane, his masterpiece hybrid of poetry and fiction. Resisting simplistic binary classification, he embraced the idea of mixed-heritage people as harbingers of a new, progressive kind of American. As he was in his art, Toomer proved himself somewhat ahead of the curve. Today, more Americans are staking a claim to their full racial selves while exploring their various ethnic strains in art and literature. A timely new entrant

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to this conversation is Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy, in which Sheryll Cashin examines the impact of racial mixture on our nation’s politics and society.

“This book does not purport to offer a comprehensive social or legal history of attempts to thwart race mixing,” she writes early on. Still, what background she does provide takes up nearly a third of this slender book. That’s probably more than we need as an introduction to her premise, which suggests that in the future whites may get awakened in sufficient numbers to join their fellow citizens in enabling the United States to reach its glorious promise.

Cashin asserts, “I believe that rising interracial intimacy, combined with immigration and demographic and

Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy

By Sheryll Cashin

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generational change, will contribute to the rise of what I call the culturally dexterous class.” She sprinkles in that buzzworthy phrase and others that could just as easily be found in the latest Malcolm Gladwell bestseller, terms like “social epidemic,” “ardent integrators,” and “coalitions of the ascendant.”

Cashin envisions these newly evolved citizens emerging specifically from white America; if any group already embodies the adroitness that she describes, it’s African Americans.

One could argue (and Cashin doesn’t resist this notion) that cultural dexterity is precisely what has enabled them to endure and thrive in a country built on and dependent upon white supremacy. To her credit, Cashin, like Toomer, avoids binary discussions of race, which were perhaps outdated as soon as they began. She includes Latinos and indigenous peoples in her examinations, while taking care to distinguish Portuguese, French, Dutch, Scots, Irish, and English peoples when tracking the creation of whiteness. Her attempts to describe ethnic divisions that were often based on visual difference result in images that depend very much on each reader’s perspective.

What should one make, for example, of “pale-faced people”? “Dark and light people”? “Milky mulattoes”?

Cashin aims to show that our country’s predatory capitalists manipulated the notion of white racial purity to control the white menial class and prevent the kind of interracial coalitions that would foment their downfall. Her best observations point out that the desire for power, land, free labor, and cash usually outweighed simple racial animus. In colonial Virginia, she writes, “restrictions on love or lust between pale and dark people originated not from any innate antipathy to interracial sex but from a capitalist desire to promote black chattel slavery.”

Similarly, 19th-century “miscegenation laws and the racial hierarchy they supported were designed to enable asset accumulation.”

In Cashin’s view, Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, passed in 1924, was a pivotal document in the ongoing quest

volume 28, number 4. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published quarterly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2017 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, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. printed in the u.s.a.

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to discourage interracial connections.

It was, she contends, “the most rigid antimiscegenation law in the United States” and an attempt to “build a wall around whiteness.” This legislation brought the law down on Mildred and Richard Loving, the interracial couple whose battle to be legally married resulted in a historic 1967 Supreme Court victory, celebrated on June 12 across the country as Loving Day. In addition to the parties and commemorations, the Lovings’ story has twice been given cinematic treatment, most recently in 2016. Since their saga remains very much of the moment, Cashin recalls more of it than is necessary, including facts and details her readers are likely to already know.

This is also true of some of the observations she offers throughout, such as the idea that intimate friendships can promote racial understanding, that white people are apt to claim a colorblind identity, and that people of color are more apt to be conscious of how race operates in society. Near her conclusion, she writes that “culturally dexterous people may be our only hope for disrupting hoary scripts.”

Because Cashin is recognized as a first-rate legal scholar and author of several acclaimed books, I wasn’t surprised to also encounter information that I didn’t know. This included the fact that descendants of the famed union of Pocahontas and John Rolfe were exempted from the one-drop rule of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, a loophole that became known as “the Pocahontas exception.” I also learned that while all antimiscegenation laws prohibited white-black marriages, “no U.S. antimiscegenation laws ever barred whites from marrying Chicanos or any other Hispanic group. Similarly, only a small minority of states banned marriages between whites and indigenous people, as a ban would have interfered with white men’s ability to marry native women and thereby claim any attendant land.”

Cashin’s account of Richard Mentor Johnson’s misadventures and predations were especially fascinating.

The ninth vice president of the United States, he lived openly in common-law marriage with Julia Chinn, a mixedrace slave. Johnson’s story has more

Cashin predicts that attitudes about race will improve drastically, partly through continued race-mixing of the romantic and platonic varieties.

twists and turns than can fit into the space provided here, and Cashin’s attention to them is one of her book’s more satisfying digressions.

She devotes the final portion of her book to an audaciously hopeful vision of the American future.

Cashin predicts that attitudes about race will improve drastically, partly through continued race-mixing of the romantic and platonic varieties, improved cultural dexterity on the part of whites, and a marked decline in the centrality of whiteness. She offers this bright forecast even while noting that anti-black racism in particular is not solely the province of whites. Black people are “the group that all nonblacks have the most reluctance to integrate with,” she reports, and “in the adoption market, like the dating market, black Americans sit at the bottom of a still-extant racial hierarchy.” Cashin anticipates that some readers will consider such factors and dismiss her views as too rose-colored to take seriously. “Many a cynic will believe that we cannot overcome supremacy constructed and reified for centuries or the plutocracy that results,” she writes. She seems to suggest an either/or proposition when in reality plenty of people continue to fight white supremacy even amid their cynicism—not because they are especially hopeful but because there is no plausible alternative to constant struggle. Some readers, cynical or not, will also believe it’s possible to be culturally dexterous without loving across racial lines. Is love, as nebulous and ephemeral as it often is, any more effective in this conflict than common sense, political astuteness, or enlightened self-interest?

While I don’t share Cashin’s bright outlook, I recognize that her optimism is a radical stance, and I don’t begrudge her effort to encourage others to join her. “Those willing to step out on faith in a greater idea can rewrite this script,” she urges. That would be one giant step indeed, and an epic stride for all humanity.

Jabari Asim is the director of the MFA program in creative writing at Emerson College and the author of several books.

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A Moment of Moral Clarity

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS he United States increasingly seems to have two economies—one in which many Americans struggle and the other in which the fortunate few soar. The booming stock market and nearly seven straight years of job growth sometimes mask the loss of jobs to automation, globalization and a rise in part-time and gig work. This economic slide for so many Americans is exacerbated by their plummeting bargaining power as unions have declined in numbers and power.

review the case right after the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has a record of siding with corporate interests against working people.

Amid these challenges, the AFT has grown to represent 1.7 million members, adding more than a quarter-million members over the past decade (during which 364,000 school employees were laid off as a result of the Great Recession). Nurses and healthcare professionals, adjunct faculty, teachers in charter and neighborhood public schools, and many others have responded to the AFT’s guiding values: to give working people voice, create economic fairness, reclaim the promise of public education and of democracy, and resist hate.

The AFT, like other unions, has always lent our strength to the struggle for civil rights and a just society that honors everyone’s freedoms, opportunities and safety.

This struggle has reached a disturbing turning point in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, Va.,

The American economy is rigged in favor of the wealthy and corporations. The average family in the top 1 percent of earners makes 40 times more than the average family in the bottom 90 percent of households, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Nearly 8 out of 10 American workers live paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet.

and President Donald Trump’s refusal to unequivocally condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups.

This is a moment of moral clarity: You either stand against racism, anti-Semitism and other hateful bigotry, or you don’t. The president’s failure to denounce hate in a clear and convincing way emboldens the forces of hate. Thankfully, the vast majority of Americans get this instinctively, and many are standing up against hate and violence, including many AFT members, 50,000 of whom joined a telephone town hall recently to discuss our next steps as a union. As children are returning to school, educators will once again play a key role in this continuing struggle.

The late German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “Not to speak is to speak.

Not to act is to act.” Who will speak against attacks on civil rights and human decency? Who will act to strengthen pillars of civil society, such as labor unions and public schools? Who will demand opportunity for all, over privilege for the few? Speak and act we must.

Belonging to a union helps working people gain the freedom to prosper.

Individually, working people are virtually powerless to change this. Forming strong unions is the most effective way workers can level the playing field and gain the freedom to prosper. This freedom comes not only from making a good living, but also from work-life balance, the ability to take a loved one to the doctor or attend a parent-teacher conference without fear of losing your job, and the ability— after a lifetime of work—to retire with dignity.

Many corporations, wealthy interests and the politicians in their corner want those freedoms for themselves but not for their employees or people in public service, like teachers. They have rewritten the economic and political rules to amass more wealth and influence for themselves. They know that there is power in numbers, so they have plotted ways to gut union membership.

Dishonestly named “right-to-work” laws are in place in 28 states, tilting the power balance toward employers and weakening workers’ freedom to join together to secure better wages, working conditions and benefits.

For years, wealthy interests have sought to make such legislation the law of the land. And this fall, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to agree to hear the case of Janus v. AFSCME, which seeks to overrule decades of precedent enabling public sector unions to charge a fair-share fee to nonmembers for the representation they provide. The goal is to cripple labor unions, weaken workers’ rights, and further exacerbate the imbalance of power in our economic, political and social systems. That is why those behind Janus requested the Supreme Court

Photo courtesy of Montserrat Garibay

Weingarten (holding poster) with students, staff and Education Austin leaders at International High School in Austin, Texas, Aug. 24.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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