The American Prospect #302

Big Energy and the Great Western Land Grab

BY CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

Can Janet Yellen Rein In Wall Street?

BY ROBERT KUTTNER

Get Smart:

How the U.S. Can Wise Up about Early Education

BY SHARON LERNER

J A N / F E B 2 014

THE MOST

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contents

VOLUME 25, NUMBER 1 JAN / FEB 2014

PAGE 7

PAGE 28

PAGE 40

NOTEBOOK 7 SHOOTING IN THE DARK BY JAIME FULLER 12 THE MYTHICAL MONOLITH BY GABRIEL ARANA 16 THE CONVERSATION ELIZABETH KOLBERT & BILL MCKIBBEN

FEATURES 18 JAMES MADISON’S WORST NIGHTMARE BY RICH YESELSON 28 THIS LAND WAS YOUR LAND BY CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM 40 THE FED TRANSFORMED BY ROBERT KUTTNER 48 DAN CANTOR’S MACHINE BY HAROLD MEYERSON 60 SPECIAL REPORT STARTING SMART BY SHARON LERNER THE UNDENIABLE BENEFITS OF PRE-K EDUCATION

CULTURE 77 JOHNNY WHO? BY TOM CARSON 80 THE URBAN POOR SHALL INHERIT POVERTY BY RICHARD ROTHSTEIN 86 GOODBYE SONG BY STEVE ERICKSON 89 THE MOMENT OF CREATION BY GERSHOM GORENBERG 93 THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE BY ROSA BROOKS

COLUMNS 5 PROSPECTS HEALTH REFORM’S NEXT TEST BY PAUL STARR 96 COMMENT FLIRTING WITH DISASTER BY ABBY RAPOPORT Cover art by Victor Juhasz; Art above by Jesse Lenz, Barry Blitt, Shelly Martin, and Victor Juhasz

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contributors

RICH YESELSON writes about politics, history, and labor. He examines the GOP’s extremism.

“Modern Republicans’ departure from the norms of the two-party system fascinates me. When Mandela died, Rick Santorum compared the struggle against apartheid with conservatives’ struggle against Obamacare. Rather than recapitulate this narrative, I tried to view the GOP through a Madisonian lens.”

SHARON LERNER, a senior fellow at Dēmos, conceived our special report on the need for pre-K education, for which she contributed most of the pieces. “Early education is having its moment,” she says. “It feels sudden, this recognition of preschool as a way of addressing both inequality and individual kids’ problems. But, really, it’s been long in coming.”

TIMOTHY DEVINE, an oyster farmer and the owner of Barren Island Oysters on Hoopers Island, Maryland, has been taking pictures professionally for 15 years.

He photographed Dan Cantor at the Working Families Party offices. “It’s exciting that photography takes me to places like Cantor’s headquarters in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, my old stomping grounds,” Devine says.

JAIME FULLER is an associate editor at the Prospect. She writes about the near absence of firearm-research funding over the past 20 years.

“It’s been a year since Obama announced his plan to curb gun violence, and I was curious about what’s happened since,” she says. “It turns out, not much, as a quick history lesson of gun policy since the mid1990s shows.”

CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM is a contributing editor at Harper’s.

He writes about the new wave of fossil-fuels extraction on Utah’s public lands. “I used to live in Moab, in the heart of the canyon­lands country,” he says.

“I grew to love the place, and I never expected in my lifetime to see its wild lands threatened as they are today.”

ROSA BROOKS is a law professor at Georgetown University and a columnist for Foreign Policy.

She reviews John Rizzo’s Company Man. “I’ve always been fascinated by the stories people tell to justify their own actions (or inaction),” she says. “As the CIA’s top lawyer, Rizzo could probably have prevented the post-9/11 use of torture by CIA interrogators but didn’t. I wanted to understand why.”

ROBERT KUTTNER is a founding coeditor of the Prospect and a senior fellow at Dēmos.

He has written for numerous magazines, teaches political economy at Brandeis, and is the author of ten books, most recently Debtors’ Prison. “I got my practical education in the financial system as an investigator for the Senate Banking Committee,” he says. “I never thought I’d see a radicalized Federal Reserve.”

GERSHOM GOREN­ BERG is the Prospect’s senior correspondent in Jerusalem and the author, most recently, of The Unmaking of Israel. He reviews John Judis’s Genesis. “Digging through diplomatic papers, I’ve seen how far the myths about U.S.–Israel relations are from the facts,” he says. “Naturally, I wanted to read about how the illusions were born in Harry Truman’s time.”

PUBLISHER JAY HARRIS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KIT RACHLIS FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR EXECUTIVE EDITOR BOB MOSER ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS CULTURE EDITOR SARAH KERR EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON SENIOR EDITORS CHRISTEN ARAGONI, GABRIEL ARANA WEB EDITOR CLARE MALONE SENIOR WRITER MONICA POTTS ASSOCIATE EDITOR JAIME FULLER STAFF REPORTER ABBY RAPOPORT RESEARCH EDITOR SUSAN O’BRIAN WRITING FELLOW AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX EDITORIAL INTERNS JONATHAN KIM, JORDAN LARSON, BRYCE STUCKI OFFICE MANAGER KATHLEEN MARGILLO CONTRIBUTING EDITORS SPENCER ACKERMAN, MARCIA ANGELL, ALAN BRINKLEY, TOM CARSON, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, RANDALL KENNEDY, JOSH KUN, SARAH POSNER, JOHN POWERS, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, DEBORAH A. STONE, NOY THRUPKAEW, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGY & DEVELOPMENT AMY CONROY DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATE SUSAN JED ADVERTISING MANAGER ED CONNORS, (202) 776-0730 X119, ECONNORS@PROSPECT.ORG BOARD OF DIRECTORS JANET SHENK (CHAIR), SARAH FITZRANDOLPH BROWN, LINDSEY FRANKLIN, JAY HARRIS, STEPHEN HEINTZ, ROBERT KUTTNER, MARIO LUGAY, ARNIE MILLER, KIT RACHLIS, MILES RAPOPORT, ADELE SIMMONS, PAUL STARR, BEN TAYLOR AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT ACME PUBLISHING SERVICES SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE 1-888-MUST-READ (687-8732) SUBSCRIPTION RATES $29.95 (U.S.), $39.95 (CANADA), AND $44.95 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PERMISSIONS@PROSPECT.ORG

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We’re All in This Together.

A Message from America’s Public Service Workers

Sometimes, it’s important to take a step back. Over the past few years, we have seen an unprecedented assault on the poor as well as working and middle class Americans.

This Koch-backed and tea party-led class war has claimed a number of casualties.

There is an ever-growing chasm between the very richest Americans and everyone else. Today, the top 1 percent of Americans control 35 percent of the wealth.

Yet, there are signs of progress. And they are rooted in our coming together as a progressive community and understanding that we’re all in this together. In New Jersey and SeaTac, Washington, voters approved a minimum wage increase. In Ohio, Cincinnati voters rejected a proposal to gut retirement security for workers. And this November, candidates who believe in shared prosperity won elections to city councils, county commissions and school boards across America.

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The 1.6 million members of AFSCME thank our brothers and sisters in the progressive community who continue to stand with us. We will continue to stand with you. Because we’re all in this together.

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Prospects

Health Reform’s Next Test

BY PAUL STARR

F

ailure, flop, fiasco— however you describe it, the Obama administration’s rollout of Healthcare.gov will go down as one of the most embarrassing episodes of public mismanagement in recent history. In principle, the defects of the website have nothing to do with the merits of the Affordable Care Act. As a practical matter, however, the two have become intertwined, and the big question is how much damage the flawed rollout will do to the political survival of the ACA as well as those in Congress who voted for it.

In the short run, Healthcare. gov’s problems have undermined trust in both the law and liberal government. They have created a general impression not just of incompetence but of failed promises, obliging the president to adopt an apologetic tone and shaping the media narrative about the ACA . Public approval of the law has dropped significantly as support has fallen among key Democratic constituencies such as the young, women, and Latinos.

But whether these judgments persist depends at least in part on objective performance. Some state exchanges worked well from the start, and Healthcare.gov improved by December, though it was far from perfect. The law’s fate may hinge on whether enrollment for 2014 falls so far below projections as to drive up premiums for 2015, convincing many people that the reforms are counterproductive.

Here’s the core problem: The more difficult it is to enroll, the

more likely people with high medical costs will predominate among those who sign up. After all, they have the motivation to persevere, while individuals with no immediate medical needs may not even try to enroll or may give up in frustration. But no insurance system can work well unless the healthy as well as the sick pay into it.

Signing up people was never going to be easy. According to a 2012 survey, three-quarters of the uninsured were unaware that the law would soon give them new opportunities for health coverage.

As a general rule, news about any product or program has its biggest effect on those who have little prior information about it. So the harsh glare of early publicity may have had an especially powerful impact on the very people who would benefit from the ACA .

The relentless attacks on “Obamacare” by right-wing organizations and conservative media have probably also affected enrollment, at least among their target audience. According to Gallup surveys conducted throughout the fall, while 25 percent of all un­insured Americans said they would remain uninsured in 2014, that proportion stood at 45 percent among Republicans without coverage and only 15 percent among uninsured Democrats.

In addition, states where Republicans hold power have erected significant obstacles to enrollment. Not only have most red states refused to expand Medicaid or set up their own exchanges; some have also barred public employees from helping

with enrollment and established stiff licensing requirements for “navigators,” designed to deter private groups from offering assistance. The ACA did not create any federal capacity to offer direct, in-person help with sign-up and payment arrangements to the many un­insured who have limited

Will low enrollment in 2014 drive premiums higher for 2015?

education and no bank accounts.

So, in the red states, ideological opposition and deliberate political sabotage, the incompetent rollout of Healthcare.gov, and the limits of the ACA may keep enrollment far below expected levels.

To be sure, the ACA was supposed to spur broad enrollment through the “individual mandate” —the penalties for failing to buy coverage. But the penalties for 2014 are relatively small, the government has little power to enforce them, and the administration never mentions them in publicizing the law for fear of intensifying the backlash against it.

Ever since 2010, Republicans have been promoting that backlash, often with outright

falsehoods; like gunmen firing wildly, they have finally scored some damaging hits. Just as Healthcare.gov was crashing, insurers announced cancellations of many individual policies that do not comply with the law’s minimum requirements, and Obama had to apologize for saying if you liked your plan you could keep it.

But for the law itself, no apology is necessary. For years, without a murmur from Republicans, millions of people with individually purchased policies have had their policies canceled because they got sick. Those policies were never insurance in the true meaning of that term. Under the ACA , insurers cannot price coverage or cancel it on the basis of an individual’s ill health. The gain in personal security will be enormous, even if the change in the market’s rules creates transitional problems and raises premiums for some healthy people because the insurance pool includes more of the sick. Next year, they may get sick too.

With a more competent rollout, the administration could have minimized these concerns; instead, it has magnified them. I’d be more confident about the future except for a little-noticed announcement just before Thanksgiving. The start of open enrollment in the exchanges for 2015 has been delayed until November 15, 2014, eleven days after the midterm elections. Apparently, when voters go to the polls, the administration doesn’t want them thinking about health insurance. And that tells me it’s worried that low enrollment in 2014 may raise premiums for next year. 

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Shooting in the Dark For nearly 20 years, the federal government has been frightened to study gun violence. President Obama has vowed to change this, but can he?

BY J A I M E F U L L E R

j es se l en z

W

e don’t know much about gun violence in America.

We don’t know how many firearms are in the United States.

We don’t know who owns them.

We don’t know why gun violence has been on the decline for the past two decades. We don’t know how many people are the victims of nonfatal gunshot wounds. We don’t know how many guns are purchased over the Internet or at gun shows. And, most important for our country’s constant

tug-of-war over the Second Amendment, we don’t know whether stringent gun policies work or whether it’s the more guns, the better. At a time when no topic seems too inane for scholarly inspection, it’s hard to come up with another aspect of American life about which we know so little.

For the past 17 years, the federal government, the crucial quotient in advancing scientific inquiry in fields from public health to space exploration to stem cells, has been

terrified to fund gun research.

The successful campaigns of the National Rifle Association, combined with just one sentence in a 1996 appropriations bill, have left our understanding of gun violence outdated and perforated.

After the litany of mass shootings in 2012, a spree that reached a new height of senselessness with the deaths of 20 students at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, the government looked ready to support research

on firearms once again. President Barack Obama announced 23 executive actions on January 16, 2013. One of those actions directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to find answers to our many questions about gun violence. “We don’t benefit from ignorance,” the president said. “We don’t benefit from not knowing the science of this epidemic of violence.”

A series of executive actions alone, however, can’t erase 17 years of ignorance.

ONE OF THE FEW STATISTICS we do

know is that annual firearm homicides in the United States peaked at 18,253 in 1993. Two years later, 27 percent of Americans said that crime and violence were the most pressing issues facing the country.

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

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1992 The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control is created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which increases funding for accident research— including gun injuries.

1993

Not coincidentally, the early 1990s were also “the golden days of gun-violence prevention research,” according to Stephen Teret, the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Congress appropriated funds for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control—under the auspices of the CDC—to undertake gun-violence research. The promise of grants encouraged academics to enter this new field. Centers studying guns and their effect on society sprang up; the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard, the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, and the Injury Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin were among the first. Scrupulously agnostic on whether the Second Amendment allowed restrictions on gun ownership, the centers tackled the issue as a publichealth problem. If American citizens were going to have guns, the researchers wanted to make owning them as safe as possible.

In the 1970s and 1980s, firearm violence was a problem best solved by criminologists, law enforcement, and tough punishments. When gun deaths kept rising, though, academics lifted a model that had proved successful in reducing motor-vehicle fatalities and tobacco use. “The public-health approach was getting a lot of traction,” says David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “Name any topic, and people were like, let’s try the public-health approach!”

When car accidents reached epidemic levels in the mid-20th century, government poured funding into figuring out why and how they could be prevented. Public-health researchers

8 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2014

1994

Gun homicides in the U.S. peak at 18,253. In November, Congress enacts the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.

Congress passes the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.

1996 In September, the 1997 federal budget is amended to keep guns out of the hands of people convicted of domestic v­ iolence.

The same month, Congress prohibits the CDC from using federal funds “to advocate or promote gun control.”

recommended mandatory seat belts, better-designed roads, and safer cars.

Public-awareness campaigns imparting the dangers of drunk driving became a familiar sight in the nation’s schools. Automobile deaths dropped.

In a similar fashion, the government advertised the dangers of smoking and passed laws limiting the places where people could use tobacco. Cigarette usage dropped. Firearm researchers wanted to duplicate this success, but almost immediately they ran into an obstacle: Unlike driving and smoking, gun ownership was granted protection by the Constitution.

The National Rifle Association saw all the new research as a front for anti-gun legislation—and worse, the government was sponsoring most of it. “The problem that I see with what the CDC is doing is that they are not

1999 On April 20, 12 students and a teacher are killed in a shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.

In May, Congress passes a law requiring background checks for gun-show purchases from licensed dealers.

In 1997, Representative Jay Dickey of Arkansas sponsored an amendment that effectively stopped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting gun-violence research.

2002 Congress appropriates funds to operate the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) in six states.

2003 The Tiahrt Amendment— which drastically curtails the ability of the ATF to collect and distribute data about crime guns, is inserted in a Justice Department appropriations bill.

doing medicine—they’re doing politics,” said the NRA’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre. “And they shouldn’t be doing politics.”

As Exhibit A, the NRA pointed to a study by Arthur Kellermann, the founding director of the Center for Injury Control at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.

Kellermann’s research, which the CDC funded, concluded that people who lived in a house with a gun were much more likely to be victims of firearm violence. The study generated an enormous amount of controversy, with pro-gun groups questioning Kellermann’s methodology and he, in turn, accusing them of their own bias.

Three years later, Representative Jay Dickey of Arkansas, a Republican, sponsored an amendment to the 1997 budget that cut $2.6 million from the

kenneth l ambert / l andov

1968 Congress passes the Gun Control Act, which prohibits convicted criminals and the mentally ill from buying firearms and requires that gun dealers and manufacturers obtain a license.

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2004 NVDRS expansion stalls in 18 states. In September, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expires.

2005 Congress passes the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents gun dealers and manufacturers from being held liable for gun crime.

2006 Michael Bloomberg starts Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

2007 Thirty-two people are killed in a mass shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute on April 16.

b lo o m b e r g p h o t o : d av i d s h a n k b o n e

CDC—the exact amount the center

spent on gun-violence research the previous year. (This wasn’t the first time Dickey had gone after science budgets.

He had inserted an appropriations rider into the 1995 budget that eliminated government funds for stem-cell research, a prohibition that remained until 2009.) The key sentence in Dickey’s amendment was this: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” That clause has been reauthorized in every Health and Human Services appropriations bill since.

Although the amendment did not ban federal gun-violence research, the threat was implicit, and the effect was immediate. “CDC, our most important funder, stopped the funding,” Hemenway says. “They were afraid to say the word ‘firearm’ for 17 years.”

Teret remembers a call he received from someone at the CDC after he gave a lecture on gun-violence prevention.

“He phoned to tell me, ‘I think it’s best if you don’t give those lectures anymore. Don’t talk about gun-violence prevention.’ When I’m giving a lecture, I’m not doing that on the CDC ’s dime. The person called again: ‘I don’t want you to give these lectures.’” Teret says he threatened to sue the CDC for violating his First Amendment rights.

The CDC left him alone after that, he says, but continued to “overreact.”

In those rare times when researchers secured federal funding for a firearm study, the CDC would send the results to the NRA before publication, according to Hemenway. (The CDC declined to comment on Hemenway’s and Teret’s allegations.)

By 2012, the CDC was spending

1.4

MILLION Number of civilian gun deaths since the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed

1.3

MILLION Number of American soldiers killed in battle since 1776 source: bureau of justice statistics

2008 In January, Congress passes a law improving the national backgroundcheck system.

In June, The Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller strikes down the capital city’s gun laws.

2011 Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona is shot at a constituent meeting at a Tucson supermarket on January 8.

$100,000 annually on gun-violence prevention. As funding from the federal government dried up, so did that of most foundations. Those that remained, most prominently the Chicago-­based Joyce Foundation, were asked to keep dozens of programs and researchers afloat with limited budgets. Many gun-violence academics drifted to other publichealth areas, worried that their grants would disappear. “The stalwarts who stayed in the field,” Teret says, “you can almost count on one hand.”

In 2003, Representative Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, a Republican, introduced an amendment to the bill funding the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that made it nearly impossible for researchers and law enforcement to access the agency’s data on gun markets. The most baffling part of the amendment, which remains law, was a prohibition on computerizing the ATF ’s data. The reason Tiahrt gave for keeping the agency in the dark ages? The need to protect the privacy of gun owners.

A 2004 study from the National Research Council summed up the effect of all the cuts and restrictions.

“The committee does not wish to paint an overly pessimistic picture of this research area … [but] in key data areas—the availability of firearms, the use of firearms, and the role of firearms in injuries and death—critical information is absent.”

When the Affordable Care Act was passed in March 2010, it included a provision that made it difficult for doctors to collect information about gun ownership and usage from patients.

In 2011, Representative Denny Rehberg of Montana, a Republican, added an appropriations rider to the

2013

2012 On July 20, 12 people die in a mass shooting in an Aurora, Colorado, theater.

On December 14, 20 children and 6 adults are killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

In January, Obama signs 23 executive orders on preventing gun violence, including a call for more federal research on the issue. In April, the Senate votes down a renewal of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. The Senate Budget Committee’s proposed 2014 budget includes millions in funding for the CDC and the NVDRS. It did not pass.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget, which mirrored the language Dickey used to inhibit the CDC. To the remaining researchers in the field, the rider was superfluous: From 1973 to 2012, the NIH had awarded only three grants for firearm-violence studies.

Without research, it has been impossible to evaluate existing firearm legislation or justify new bills.

Recently, Governor Jerry Brown of California, a Democrat, vetoed seven bills regulating guns because no evidence existed that validated their effectiveness. “We don’t know what works, and legislators and lawmakers don’t know what to propose,” says Mark Rosenberg, who was the director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control from 1994 to 1999. “You can’t blame people for being reticent to propose a policy if there’s no evidence that it will work. The assault-weapon ban, for example—we don’t know that it will work, because it hasn’t been evaluated. Universal background checks—we don’t know if they work, because they haven’t really been evaluated. We are really suffering because we don’t have this information.”

Even Dickey, who’s now retired from Congress, thinks more research is prudent. After the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012, he co-wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post with Rosenberg that called for federal funding: “We were on opposite sides of the heated battle 16 years ago, but we are in strong agreement now that scientific research should be conducted into preventing firearm injuries and that ways to prevent firearm deaths can be found without encroaching on the rights of legitimate gun owners.”

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

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IN JUNE 2013, THE NATIONAL Institute

of Medicine (IOM) and the National Research Council released a report listing the most pressing needs for gun research. In September, IOM’s annual meeting revolved around the science of violence “with an emphasis on firearms.” The National Institutes of Health has announced that it is issuing three grants for violence-­ prevention studies with a focus on guns. The National Institute of Justice has given grants for six projects.

The Senate’s proposed 2014 budget for the CDC included $10 million for firearm-violence research. A May 2013 survey from the Pew Research Center showed that 66 percent of Americans think there should be a federal database that tracks gun sales.

However, the main deterrent to researching gun-violence prevention still remains. The president may have authorized the CDC to restart research on firearms, but the 2014 budget that included funding for this task was never put to a vote. Not only is there little money but there are hardly any new researchers to accept the mostly nonexistent funding either. At the Institute of Medicine conference in October, a professor relayed a story about a student who came looking for advice on an NIH proposal about gun research she was writing. Her mentor told her that “getting involved in this discipline was a career killer and that she should have nothing to do with it.”

Then there’s the National Rifle Association. “I do not think the NRA has become more kitten-like in its opinion of gun researchers,” Teret says.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the attacks returned when the research resumes.”

Unlike gun researchers, the NRA is not having any difficulty raising money. After Newtown and President Obama’s call for greater gun control, the organization raised record sums.

When the new federal grants are matched with scholars, the studies will take years to complete. After the findings are released, there’s no certainty that they’ll lead to good policy. Despite all this, researchers are more hopeful than they’ve been in a long time. “I tend to be optimistic,” Teret says, “but I’d like to see proof of resuscitated work.”

Given the still-limited funding,

researchers say the first priority is examining the effect of gun regulation that has remained on the books.

States that place restrictions on ownership tend to have fewer gun murders and suicides, but researchers have not determined whether it’s correlation or causation. If, however, widespread ownership is the simplest means to curb firearm violence for good, well, we need definitive proof for that too. The gun industry has changed in myriad ways since the mid-1990s. The Internet is now an easy way to purchase a gun for those who don’t want to leave a paper trail, but the number of firearms being bought online is a mystery.

One of the few successes during the slow years of gun-violence research was the CDC ’s National Violent Death Reporting System, which the agency describes as a database “that pools information about the ‘who, when, where, and how’ from data on violent deaths to provide insights on ‘why’ they occur.” The system started operating in six states in 2002, with a mixture of private and public money,

The aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut

Without research, it has been impossible to evaluate existing firearm legislation or justify new bills.

and expanded to 18 states by 2006.

It’s been stalled since because of a lack of funding, but the information collected so far has been exceptionally useful. The Veterans Administration, for example, is mining the database to uncover which soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are most at risk for suicide. The initial Senate budget for 2014 appropriated $18.5 million to bring the reporting system to other states, but it has since been excised.

“The situation we’re in is kind of like chemotherapy,” Rosenberg says.

“I had a friend who had a horrible tumor. If all you want to do is get rid of the tumor, there are very good drugs.

We know how to do that. The problem is that these drugs are very toxic, and they would kill his kidneys and his liver and his heart as well as the tumor. So you have two objectives, one is to stop the tumor—like firearm injuries and death—and the other is to protect the patient’s vital organs. So the other goal is to protect the rights of gun owners.

To find the right drug that does both of them is hard. You need to do research— there’s no other way to find it.” 

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

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The Mythical Monolith Latinos have the power to revolutionize American politics. But first they have to vote.

BY G A BR I E L A R A N A

E

ver since a wave of mass migration from Latin America began to transform the country’s demographic landscape in the 1970s, political analysts have spoken about the “sleeping giant” of the Latino vote.

Every election season, like a spectator staring through binoculars on safari, someone jumps to exclaim that the beast is rousing, prompting others to claim that, yes, they spotted it, too.

“The giant is awake,” Harry Pachon, then-head of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, told The Miami Herald in 1988, the same year The New York Times made much ado about the fact that both Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush spoke Spanish. “The symbolism,” the Times wrote, “has not been lost on members of the long-neglected but fast-growing Latino population, who feel they have finally come of age politically.” That year, 3.7 million Latinos gave Dukakis, the Democrat, 69 percent of their votes.

To judge by media accounts, the sleeping giant has had quite a time since then. In 1992, he “lapsed into a coma.” Anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 was said to have revived him, though it was unclear whether he “got up on the same side of the bed” as Republicans or Democrats. By 2000, not only was the beast “fully awake” but he was “making a pot of coffee,” then “tying [his] shoes, getting ready to play, preparing ... to lead this nation.” He “flexed [his] muscles at the polls” in 2004. Perhaps annoyed by all the interruptions, by 2008 he was “in a foul mood.” Then, it seems, he lost his temper.

“The sleeping Latino giant is wide awake, cranky, and it’s taking names,” Eliseo Medina, who was then the secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union

12 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2014

(SEIU), said in November 2012 shortly after election results rolled in. By supporting “self-deportation”—basically, making life for the nearly 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country so miserable they choose to leave—Mitt Romney had embraced the anti-immigrant wing of his party.

In a year characterized by the rhetoric of Republicans like Congressman Steve King of Iowa—who told Newsmax that for every child of an undocumented immigrant who became a valedictorian, there were “another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and have got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert”—11.2 million Latino voters responded by flocking to the polls and going heavily for Democrats, awarding President Barack Obama 71 percent of their support. That’s triple their numbers in 1988 and approximately 1.5 million more than in 2008, accounting for 8.4 percent of the electorate.

But there’s a problem with the “awakening giant” story: Most Latinos who are eligible to vote still don’t. In the last election, fewer than half—48 percent—went to the polls.

That’s low compared with whites, who cast ballots at a rate of 64 percent in 2012. They also lag behind blacks, the nation’s second-largest minority group, a record 67 percent of whom went to the polls in the last election.

In fact, despite the hype, Latinos were less mobilized than in 2008, when 52 percent turned out. The number registered declined by 600,000 between 2008 and 2010 before rising again.

Only 59 percent of eligible Latinos are even registered.

In six of the seven states that contain the majority of the country’s Latinos, turnout in 2012 was dismal. On Election Day, eligible Latinos voted at a rate of only 39 percent in Texas, 40 percent in Arizona, 49 percent in

Between 2008 and 2012, the number of eligible Latino voters jumped from 19.5 million to

23.3

MILLION

Latinos made up 8.4 percent of the electorate in 2012:

11.2

MILLION VOTED

12.1

MILLION DID NOT

California, 52 percent in Colorado and Nevada, and 56 percent in New Mexico. The 2012 election did feature one genuine bright spot: Florida, where Latinos turned out at a rate of 62 percent, eclipsing white turnout for the first time and boosting Obama to an easier-than-expected victory.

The Latino demographic is getting bigger, but the proportion of those who vote has hardly budged in 20 years, remaining in the 45 percent to 50 percent range. “Any growth you see in voting patterns is largely attributable to the sheer numbers of growth in the population,” says Stephen Nuño, an assistant professor of political science at Northern Arizona University who studies Latino political participation and mobilization.

Even so, Latinos have the potential to radically remake American politics.

The 2010 census counted 50.5 million Latino Americans, making up 16 percent of the U.S. population, 42 percent of whom are eligible to vote. If Latino turnout were the same as it is for black or white voters, their share of the electorate would be 16 percent—double what it is today.

At different times, both Republicans and Democrats have hoped to cash in. Last decade, George W. Bush and his political Svengali, Karl Rove, dreamed of creating a “permanent Republican majority” bolstered by strong Latino backing. Rove helped George W. Bush capture 40 percent of Latino voters in 2004 by aggressively courting them and calling for immigration reform. But since 2006, when the immigration debate brought the xenophobes out of the GOP woodwork, the number of Latinos who identify or lean Democrat has jumped by 15 percent. Even Cuban Americans, a majority of whom were registered Republicans in 2006, are now more likely to check “Democrat” than “Republican” when they sign up to vote. These trends are apt to continue unless Republicans stop supporting racist laws in states like Arizona and Alabama, quell their anti-immigrant rhetoric, and quit blocking immigration reform before partisan alignment reaches a tipping point.

For the GOP, courting Latinos is a matter of survival: If current trends

ross d. fr anklin / ap images

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continue, Latinos will keep Florida blue and could eventually flip Texas, putting the six largest states in the Democratic column and giving the party a lock on the presidency for at least a generation. Democrats need a strong Latino vote for another reason: As manufacturing goes abroad and union density drops off in the Midwest, the white working class has realigned with Republicans, and Democrats are counting on Latinos to replace them. For progressives, Latino population growth offers a historic opportunity to shift American politics to the left. Despite high rates of religiosity, Latinos are more likely to describe themselves as “liberal,” have more progressive views on abortion and gay marriage, support state intervention in the economy, and favor investment in education. But none of that can happen until they enter the voting booth.

IN PART, THE STORY of Latino disen-

gagement is an immigrant story—and a story about the broken immigration system. In all, about 56 percent

of the country’s 53 million Latinos are ineligible to vote. Latinos are young, too, and young people are notoriously apathetic. According to calculations from the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos’ median age is 27, compared with 33 for blacks, 36 for Asian Americans, and 40 for whites. Among Latinos born in the U.S., the median age is 18—just barely eligible. But the problem goes deeper: Young Latino voters are even more disengaged than their black and white counterparts. Only 34 percent of Latinos between the ages of 18 and 24 cast ballots in 2012, compared with 42 percent of whites and 48 percent of blacks.

When young people vote, they tend to continue voting. What’s most striking is that, as opposed to any other immigrant group, Latino political participation declines from the first generation to the second.

Some of this is temporary. As immigrants’ roots grow, the population will age. The citizenship problem solves itself in 25-year ratchets of the turnstile, courtesy of the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to those born on U.S. soil. (Unsurprisingly,

Obama volunteers register voters in one of Phoenix’s heavily Latino neighborhoods.

Latino political participation declines from the first generation to the second.

Republicans in Congress have pushed, without success, to repeal it.) For Latinos, the biggest roadblock on the path to power is economic. Around 23 percent are poor, compared with 12 percent of Asians and 10 percent of whites. Fewer own homes. These economic factors provide a compelling, if intangible, reason to sit out Election Day. “They give people a sense of being stakeholders in our democracy,” says Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, which represents the nation’s 6,000-plus Latino officeholders. “You feel more intertwined into the fabric of American society, which eventually leads to more participation in the political process.”

Worse, increasing levels of inequality and a porous social safety net have made climbing into the middle class harder and falling out easy. Bringing Latinos into the electoral fold will require bringing them into the economic fold—a problem that will take broad government intervention to address.

But even if you factor out poverty, education, and age, Latino turnout is lower than it should be. Something else is amiss. If you start to look at the states with the largest Latino populations, it’s pretty easy to see why most stay home in November. Four of the five top states in terms of Latino voters—California, Texas, New York, and Illinois—go blue or red with near certainty. Only Florida, with the third-largest Latino population, is competitive, one reason turnout there is much higher. Competitive elections drive outreach. Plus, you’re more likely to feel your vote counts if you’re not stuck in a sea of blue or red.

Having a Latino candidate or elected representative also gets voters to the polls. “Latinos are mobilized by feeling empowered, so if they’re already represented, it has a mobilizing effect,” says Melissa Michelson, a

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

political scientist at Menlo College in California. The inverse is also true: The dearth of Latino faces among national politicians discourages participation, which further ensures Latinos remain underrepresented. If their representation in Congress matched up with their percentage of eligible voters, they would have 47 seats in the House instead of 31, and 11 instead of 4 in the Senate. According to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos identify the lack of Latino national leaders as a serious problem.

Asked to name “the most important Latino leader in the country today,” 62 percent said there wasn’t one.

“There’s an honest perception that ‘my vote doesn’t matter,’ that it won’t make a difference,” says Jimmy Hernández of Voto Latino, a national nonpartisan group that encourages participation among millennials.

“That’s something we have to consistently fight against.” It’s a view reinforced by the politics of immigration, which Latinos consistently list among their top concerns. Despite massive demonstrations in 2006 and 2007, and continuing pressure from advocacy groups, Congress has failed to reform

the 20-year-old system. The era of austerity, which disproportionately harms Latinos as it frays the social safety net, also justifies the view that their needs are being ignored in Washington and their votes are irrelevant.

IT IS A TRUTH ALMOST universally

unacknowledged: There is no “sleeping giant” of the Latino vote. At least not nationally. It’s true that, by dint of their numbers, Latinos will exert increasing influence on national elections. But there’s no monolith, partly because their ethnic composition— and political concerns—varies from region to region and state to state.

Democrats are hoping that broadbased attacks on immigrants from Republicans will lead the many nationalities with roots in Latin America to see their political fates as intertwined; the idea is that anti-immigration politics will forge a sense of pan-ethnic identity and cause Latinos to vote together in the same way that African Americans do. But immigration has neither the sticking power nor the mobilizing effect that slavery, Jim Crow, and persistent discrimination have had for African Americans. Even

Who made it to the polls?

2012 TURNOUT RATES AMONG ELIGIBLE LATINO VOTERS: COLLEGE GRADUATE

71%

CUBAN ORIGIN

67%

OVER AGE 65

60%

ARRIVED BEFORE1990

59%

SOME COLLEGE

54%

NATURALIZED U.S. CITIZEN

54%

PUERTO RICAN ORIGIN

53%

ALL LATINOS

48%

ARRIVED 1990–1999

47%

U.S.-BORN CITIZEN

46%

ARRIVED AFTER 2000

44%

MEXICAN ORIGIN

42%

HIGH SCHOOL GRAD LESS THAN HIGH SCHOOL

39% 36%

source: pew research center

A volunteer with Hispanics for Obama calls potential voters in Cooper City, Florida.

14 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2014

if immigration did have the same unifying effect, Latinos would need strong civic groups to mobilize them. “Latinos don’t yet have that great equalizer like the black church to harness that power politically,” Northern Arizona University’s Nuño says. “I don’t expect to see any noticeable growth in the rate of participation until we see a rise of these civic institutions.”

The effect of Latinos’ voting power will likely be realized only in certain places. For Democrats, the dream is California. Ronald Reagan carried the state in 1984 with 37 percent support from Latinos, who then made up a mere 16 percent of the electorate. But as the number of immigrants from Mexico surged, California Republicans embarked on an anti-immigrant agenda that permanently realigned partisan loyalties. In 1994, Governor Pete Wilson championed Proposition 187, which forbade undocumented immigrants from receiving social services like health care and barred their children from public schools. The law was ruled unconstitutional, but it enraged Latinos—and a strong labor movement was in place to turn that anger into participation. Voter-registration rates jumped from 53 percent to 60 percent; Latinos registered as Democratic over Republican by a 6-to-1 margin. Turnout in 1996 was only 47 percent, but by the force of their numbers and their emphatic rejection of Republicans, Latinos turned the state blue.

But anti-immigrant initiatives don’t always create a cohesive voting bloc. In Arizona, the unholy alliance of Governor Jan Brewer, a right-wing legislature, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio has laid siege to newly arrived Mexican immigrants. Latino advocacy and Democratic groups predicted these attacks would lead to an uprising at the polls, but it hasn’t panned out. In the first presidential election after SB 1070—the “papers, please” law—passed in 2010, only 40 percent of the state’s 824,000 eligible Latino voters cast ballots. One key reason: Unlike California, Arizona, a “right to work” state, does not have the labor infrastructure to capitalize on anger against Republicans.

Where civic and labor groups provide no vehicle for engaging Latinos,

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LITTLE GIANTS

The Latino population includes such diverse ethnic groups as Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans, who are concentrated in different states and exhibit distinct patterns of voting behavior.

NEW MEXICO: Latinos make up a larger

ILLINOIS: The number of Latinos has jumped

share of the electorate here than in any other state, which has helped put the state in reliably blue territory.

by a third since 2000, but most growth has been in rural areas like Scott County, where the Latino population shot up by more than 300 percent. Only 20 percent live in Chicago, making mobilization more difficult.

LATINO POPULATION: 960,000 ELIGIBLE VOTERS: 550,000 2012 TURNOUT: 56%

LATINO POPULATION: 2 million ELIGIBLE VOTERS: 773,000 2012 TURNOUT: 38%

NEW YORK: A whopping 45 percent of eligible

Latino voters here are Puerto Rican; 20 percent are Dominican. While Mexican Americans account for 65 percent of Latinos nationwide, in New York that number is 6 percent.

TEXAS: Making up 26 percent of eligible voters, Latinos could turn one of the reddest states in the country purple. If only someone would bother asking them to vote: In 2012, a mere 25 percent were contacted by one of the campaigns. While Republicans in Texas have steered clear of anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation, neither party tried to mobilize this bloc.

Latinos as a percentage of eligible voters in 2010:

LATINO POPULATION: 9.5 million ELIGIBLE VOTERS: 4.2 million 2012 TURNOUT: 39%

■ over 25% ■ 5–10% ■ 15–25% ■ under 5% ■ 10–15%

ARIZONA: Anti-immigrant legislation and deportation raids have failed to mobilize Latino voters here. The percentage of registered eligible voters budged a single point from 2010 to 2012.

LATINO POPULATION: 1.9 million ELIGIBLE VOTERS: 824,000 2012 TURNOUT: 40%

CALIFORNIA: Labor groups helped registration jump from 53 to 60 percent in

1996, two years after state voters passed anti-immigration measure Proposition 187. But turnout over the past two decades has remained low and only broke 50 percent in 2008. Latinos’ dominance of party politics is largely a factor of their sheer numbers and strong affiliation with the Democrats.

LATINO POPULATION: 14 million ELIGIBLE VOTERS: 5.9 million 2012 TURNOUT: 49%

LATINO POPULATION: 3.4 million ELIGIBLE VOTERS: 1.7 million 2012 TURNOUT: 54%

FLORIDA: Cubans and Puerto Ricans account

for half of the Latino population in the state.

Anti-immigrant attacks from Republicans are starting to break Cubans’ historical alliance with the GOP. In 2006, most newly registered Latino voters checked “Republican.”

The balance tipped over to the Democrats in 2008, and the realignment has accelerated since: In 2012, a paltry 29 percent of Latinos identified as Republican.

LATINO POPULATION: 4.3 million ELIGIBLE VOTERS: 2.1 million 2012 TURNOUT: 62%

k at h y w i l l e n s / a p i m a g e s

source: pew research center

it’s up to the political parties to do the outreach—and that happens only in swing states. In solid-red Texas, for instance, Latino voting rates have long been abysmal. One reason: In 2012, only 25 percent of Texas Latinos reported being asked for their votes, the lowest in the nation. By contrast, Nevada was a battleground in 2012; there, more than half of Latinos reported hearing from the Romney or Obama campaign, and 53 percent turned out. “One of the challenges we have is that campaigns and candidates identify likely voters,” says Arturo Vargas. “They don’t spend money on reaching unlikely voters, which means Latinos often get ignored by the candidates and campaigns.”

Geography also affects turnout.

In Nevada, for instance, it’s easier to mobilize because Latinos are concentrated around just two cities, Las Vegas and Reno. By contrast, the huge growth of the Latino population in Illinois—a state rarely mentioned in

The effect of Latinos’ voting power will likely be realized only in certain parts of the country.

this context—has come in rural areas, where the factory and farm jobs are, and turnout is dismal. The more diffuse their distribution, the harder Latinos are to mobilize. There is a counter to that, though, if parties and campaigns choose to use it: Advertising on television, in print, and online—which studies reveal no longer influences most American voters—has a dramatic effect on Latinos when it’s delivered through Spanish-language media.

“What happens with most mass-media ads, Latinos think, ‘Yeah, yeah, I hear what they’re saying but they really mean white people,’” Melissa Michelson says. “But if you’re going on Picolino in the Morning—a show on a station that rich white people don’t listen to—it says, ‘This is really about you guys.’”

As Latinos become more fully assimilated over the coming decades, the likelihood of building a national Democratic voting bloc will grow more remote. Those who study the Latino population point to one

additional reason, a well-known demographic quirk in the data. From the first to the second generation, Latin American immigrants follow a predictable pattern: They become wealthier and more educated. But in the third generation, something strange happens. College-graduation and high-school-completion rates drop and poverty and incarceration rates rise—factors that drive down political participation. It’s called the “third-generation slump.” The most prominent theory about why this occurs is that, as these immigrants become more affluent and intermarry, they stop identifying as Latino. It’s one final factor that demonstrates just how precarious the idea of a “Latino vote” is. In the short run, that vote will only exist to the extent it is created by Democratic outreach and Republican intransigence. In the long run, there will simply be no Latino vote as we currently, and sometimes fancifully, imagine it. 

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

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The Conversation E L I Z A BE T H K O L BE R T a n d B I L L M C K I BBE N

F

ive great extinctions have occurred in the history of Earth. Now, in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert eulogizes the decline of a handful of species and makes the case that a new mass die-off is under way. Industrial processes that pump carbon dioxide into the ocean are making life untenable for the thousands of plants and creatures that live in its depths, especially the vast but fragile coral reefs. Whole populations of bats in the northeastern United States have been decimated by a fungus brought to New England by an unsuspecting European traveler.

The great auk, an extinct bird, suffered its last stand on an Icelandic island after being relentlessly hunted for just a few decades.

By the end of the 21st century, scientists estimate that half of the world’s biodiversity will be gone. This extermination, which has the potential to be the most cataclysmic, is almost entirely driven by humans. The beginning of the sixth extinction coincided with the first traces of human life—we caused it, and we may fall victim to it as well.

Bill McKibben, a writer and the founder of 350.org, a global organizing effort to curb the advance of climate change, has argued for more than 20 years that we are approaching an environmental point of no return. In a series of best-selling books, McKibben has warned that if humanity is to survive, we must recognize that climate change is gradually making the planet uninhabitable.

In this installment of “The Conversation,” a new Prospect feature, Kolbert and McKibben discuss the scope of the sixth extinction and grapple with why raising awareness about environmental catastrophe is so difficult. Their exchange has been edited for concision and clarity. —AMELIA

out. Enormous turtles, octopuses, these giant clams that leer at you with lurid, vividly colored lips.

That’s such foreign fauna, especially for those of us who live in the mountains in the eastern United States.

Did you have a sort of Jacques Cousteau reaction— “I love everything around me”—or is your appreciation of this kind of biodiversity more intellectual?

I think the alienness of that underwater world prevents us from appreciating what we are doing to the oceans, which is in some ways even more serious than what we are doing to the land. By pouring carbon dioxide into the ocean, we are doing something that may never have happened before.

It has no analogue in the geological record because we are doing it so fast, acidifying the water at such an extreme rate. But we are very much land creatures, so we don’t appreciate this amazing underwater realm, and we’re not aware of what we’re doing to it.

THOMSON-DEVEAUX

Bill McKibben: Of all the things I found to be haunting in the book, the one that most stood out to me was your description of walking out along the Great Barrier Reef in the darkness. What did it feel like?

Elizabeth Kolbert: That was an amazing experience, which is ironic—in reporting a book that’s just chock-full of bad news about the world, I got to go to the most spectacular, unspoiled places on the planet. One of these, as

you mentioned, was a tiny island on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. I was on this island because a team was doing research there on ocean acidification.

They had a buoy out on the reef flat, where they’d collect samples. When you are out there at night and there is no horizon, there is nothing but blackness and amazing stars and your flashlight. There are animals lurking in these pools waiting for the tide to come back in so they can swim

16 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2014

You were one of the first people outside the world of science to understand the full implications of ocean acidification. Do you think of us as living on a kind of ocean planet now?

It’s difficult to exaggerate the significance of the oceans. If you have ever brought home a piece of coral from a trip to the Caribbean, you can imagine that if you put that in a jar of vinegar, it would dissolve. That’s an extreme example, because vinegar is very acidic, but you can imagine that long before you get to the point where coral dissolves, it becomes difficult for the coral to do its job. We are making it hard for these organisms to do what they are evolutionarily programmed to do and have been doing for hundreds of millions of years.

The hallmark of evolutionary biology is adaptability. Is the main thing that’s different in this era the speed with which we are forcing things to adapt? Is that the single biggest new variable in this new system?

I once got this question from a person who said, “Well, if things start going extinct, won’t new things just evolve?” It was like extinction and evolution were a one-for-one trade. But the answer is that you can drive things extinct quickly, but it is very difficult to speed up evolution. If we were driving these changes at a pace that’s hundreds, even a million times slower, then yes, maybe most things would adapt to that, and we would get a very different world but not necessarily a humongous wave of extinctions. But otherwise you can do the math yourself.

And in this case, we are talking about an equation where we’re not even close.

It’s not like we are going twice as fast as species can adapt—we are going tens of thousands of times faster.

There have been moments in the past where the earth has experienced very swift, extreme changes—in a geological sense. And right now, we are in one of those moments. We are causing changes so fast that in the span of a human lifetime or a couple of human lifetimes, you can watch them happening. So part of the question for who will survive and who won’t is how fast generations are produced. If you are a microbe, you might do a lot better than an insect, which may do a lot better than a mammal. Big mammals are in serious trouble.

In Vermont where I live, we are watching the moose, which are my favorites of all the northern mammals, being decimated.

Why is that?

The single biggest problem is temperature change.

Moose don’t like heat to begin with—any time it gets above 20 degrees, they’ll be looking for shade. But now ticks can live through the winter. So while any given moose generally would have 7,000 or 8,000 ticks on it, now they are finding them with 100,000 ticks. And they just can’t deal with it. The number of moose dropped by 50 percent in five years across much of the northern part of North America.

You also live near the epicenter of what’s happening to bats.

Someone—almost certainly inadvertently—brought over a fungus that is killing off the little brown bat. One of the most ubiquitous animals in the Northeast is now listed as an endangered species in Vermont.

I visited a cave that used to be the biggest bat hibernaculum in the Northeast, with hundreds of thousands

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of bats. It’s now almost completely empty. One year I visited, and there were dead bats all over the ground, you couldn’t walk without stepping on them, and now it’s just this black, rich muck, which is their decomposed bodies, and these tiny little toothpicklike bones everywhere, a carpet of these bones.

That’s what’s left of this incredible bat population.

It doesn’t sound like adaptation is going to happen in the time frame we have.

What’s happening with the little brown bat is a case where we accidentally brought together these evolutionary lineages that have been separated for a long time, with disastrous results. Often we bring new species together and they coexist, they muddle along, but if we keep doing it over and over again, then sometimes the consequences will be bad.

Another thing that is amazing to me is to watch things that we utterly depend on just stop working.

Corn won’t tassel. It won’t set seed if it’s 95 degrees outside. It’s even affecting us. There’s a new study that says the human ability to perform outdoor work has already dropped 10 percent due to an increase in heat and humidity. It’ll be 20 percent by midcentury.

Different organisms have different physiological heat tolerance. One scientist whom I talked with who’s studying climate change explains that all of these species near the equator are on the move—they’re going upslope, toward the poles.

But in the Amazon lowlands, where the temperatures are consistently among the highest on Earth, what’s going to move in there? We’re

A giant clam on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia

radically changing what is now the most biodiverse part of the world.

But on the other hand, there are things that do extraordinarily well in the simplified world that we’re creating.

Wherever you have sunlight and nutrients, something will be able to survive. There’s a lot of versatility, but it won’t be what was there before, and that will have an effect of its own. Some things will do really well and some things may surprise us. We’re in uncharted territory, but we seem hell-bent on finding out what a simplified world will look like. And that’s a question I’ve got for you— what does motivate us to take action, to reverse this process as best we can?

What gets people to make that step?

That’s an interesting question to think about in terms of evolutionary biology. One would think that if our big

brain were equipped to get us into this kind of trouble, it would come up with something to get us out of it.

But evolution is such a random process—it probably didn’t work that way.

OK, so the hope is not that the brain is going to get us out of this mess but that maybe the human heart can.

We have to hope that there is something in our culture that evolved, not biologically but culturally over time, that lets us have enough concern and compassion for the rest of creation, for things deep into the future, generations to come. But although there are lots of people engaged, there are also a very few fighting to maintain the current system as it is, who have so much money that their small numbers are offset by the size of their wallets. When you were reporting this, how did you manage to keep any sort of equanimity? You’re basically describing an impending apocalypse. What

is the proper state of mind in which to contemplate an apocalypse?

I get asked that question all the time, and my answer is always that I don’t have a good answer.

For the people involved in this research, in some ways this is a fascinating and exciting time. You’re watching natural phenomena that we should not be able to watch. But many of them are despairing. Someone told me about a party for a famous conservation biologist where they gave out party favors—things they use in the field like duct tape, rope, a bottle of rum—and someone suggested that they also give out a razor blade to slit their wrists because everything that’s happening in conservation biology is so depressing. People have already asked me what the hopeful part of my book will be, and my only answer is that it’s not there.

What I keep finding is that these twin problems— climate change and ocean acidification—are so huge that people feel a lack of agency. They think to themselves, it’s too big, there’s nothing I can do about it, which is certainly true in an individual sense. We have been getting unremittingly bad news for 25 years, and it keeps getting worse than the scientists thought it was going to be. Have you found that scientists in this realm—who have generally been quite conservative in their estimates and unwilling to speak out much—are so shocked by what they are seeing that they’re becoming more aggressive about letting people know?

If you read the scientific literature, there is relentless talk about the “current mass extinction.” We have sophisticated ways of looking back through geological history and trying to tease out what the planet was like hundreds of millions of years ago, and in that context, in that sweep of history, what we are doing is so unusual.

It becomes more unusual the further back you look.

And if we continue on our merry path, we are going to create a level of ocean acidification that probably has not been witnessed on this earth for hundreds of millions of years.

It’s a pretty remarkable thing to have done in a few dozen years and on a small portion of the globe.

It’s remarkable for having been unintentional.

But now we do know what the consequences of our literally earth-changing actions have been. That is the burden of our time, that burden of knowledge. So what do we do with that? 

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

James Madison’s Worst Nightmare Today’s Republicans have become the very kind of obstructionist faction—with apocalyptic politics— that the primary author of our Constitution warned us against.

T

BY RICH YESEL SO N ART BY VICTOR JUHASZ

o understand the vexed position the modern Republican Party backed itself into with its relentless opposition to the Affordable Care Act, we might listen to one of its most influential analysts. In mid-October, George Will was complaining in his syndicated Washington Post column that neither Barack Obama nor the Tea Party understood that “in Madisonian politics, all progress is incremental.” Our constitutional system is “compromise-forcing.” Will’s great mentor is the leading constitutional thinker among the founders, James Madison. To his regret, Will seemed to believe that both Obama and the base of the Republican Party misunderstood Madison’s intentions and his handiwork.

George Will often compares today’s politics to the strife just before the Civil War.

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was the law; “separate but equal” was the law. Lots of things were the law and then we changed them. And this is a part of the bruising, untidy, utterly democratic technique for changing laws.

In the months leading up to and immediately following the ACA’s start date, Will often drew parallels between the politics of today and those just before the Civil War. Another column compared tussles over immigration reform to the Compromise of 1850, and the one referred to above approvingly quoted the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone in comparing the health-care fight to the mid1850s struggle over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Big stakes. Echoing Will, Representative John Fleming of Louisiana called the ACA “the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Kathleen Parker, thought to be a moderate conservative frequently critical of the Republican Party, penned the following: Republicans oppose Obama’s policies, not the man, because they believe the president will so inexorably change the structure of our social and economic system by mandating and punishing human behavior that nothing less than individual freedom is at stake. Under present circumstances, this hardly seems delusional.

Columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that the Affordable Care Act plunged Americans into bondage.

Nine days earlier, though, in the midst of the government shutdown, Will was declaring in an interview with National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep that the possible default of America’s incurred debt, for the first time in history, was nothing but politics as usual—and a justified Republican response to dire circumstances. Incrementalism wasn’t needed; to carry on the fight was as American as the Civil War. With his trademark mandarin contempt, Will answered Inskeep’s question: Weren’t Republicans using the shutdown threat as an opportunity to “impose changes they could not get in other ways?”

How does this short-circuit the system? I mean I hear Democrats say the Affordable Care Act is the law, as though we’re supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act

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The allegedly levelheaded Parker thinks it’s reasonable to infer that under the Obama presidency, “nothing less than individual freedom is at stake.” If you believe what Will, Parker, Fleming, and many of Fleming’s congressional colleagues do, comparisons to resisting at gunpoint the return of slaves to their masters—or to take the Slave South’s side, sending pro-slavery militia into Kansas— might seem logical. Yet leaving aside controversies about the ACA—faulty computer access, angry insurance holders whose policies have been canceled, millions newly receiving and millions still being denied Medicaid—the law is modest. In every other First World nation, from Australia to Norway, Israel to Canada, France to Japan, the issue of affordable, universal access to comprehensive health care is as quaintly old-hat as black-and-white television.

Only in this country could the parallel between civil war and the opposition to a limited health-insurance law even be raised. The logic can be teased out, but it is a perverse one. For only one major party in American history has exceeded the procedural and policy radicalism of today’s GOP: the antebellum Southern Democrats on the eve of the Civil War. The development of a rearguard, obstructionist Republican Party—an entity so at odds with the party’s self-conception as the Constitution’s guardian—is not

a thunderstorm that has come upon us since the inauguration of Barack Obama. From its antecedents, first in McCarthyism and then in the Goldwater campaign of 1964, the decline accelerated in the last two decades. Since a first major government shutdown in 1995, Republicans have advocated for a trumped-up presidential impeachment and, via the tendentious decision of a partisan Supreme Court, a selected rather than elected president.

Until the filibuster was partially contained in November, the Republicans’ use of it to create an extra-constitutional, de facto supermajority requirement in the Senate—not only for legislation but for the routine delay and confirmation of presidential appointees and federal judges— dwarfed previous exercise of the gambit in all the years since its inception in 1806.

Partisanship and ideology are not the same thing. Today’s GOP has been extreme in both. As Jonathan Chait documented in his prescient 2007 book, The Big Con, the sum total of the GOP’s economic and fiscal program has been a desire to keep taxes on the rich as low as possible, cutting programs like food stamps that benefit the poor and boosting those like farm subsidies that benefit the wealthy.

Despite their earnest belief (expressed during Democratic presidential administrations) that deficits and debts are, along with the danger of health insurance, the most serious issue facing the country, Republicans grew used to insisting that a time-honored fiscal tool of government—the ability to raise revenue—be forsworn forever.

As evolved over the past two decades, the GOP is something we’ve not seen before: a Western European–style rightist splinter party trapped within the elephantine body of a conventional major American party. Its substantive goals are reactionary. The methods it uses to achieve these goals are at the end-reaches of prevailing political norms.

A few apostate conservatives, like David Frum, still consider themselves Republicans but no longer have influence in the party. Other conservative writers who wish to correct course have spent the past several years touting wonkish policy suggestions about, say, prison reform or education or child tax credits. But these earnest conservative policy scientists experimenting in their laboratory remained divorced from the political strategy of the actual Republican Party. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (2012) established that due to what political scientists call asymmetric polarization, congressional Republicans have moved far more to the right over the past several decades than congressional Democrats have moved to the left. Thus both parties, but especially the GOP, have gradually adopted a parliamentary-style approach to politics. In a presidential system with potentially divided poles of governmental

legitimation, this has been a recipe for dysfunction. The Republican speaker of the House is no less correct to say that the people have elected him—and legitimated his majority—than is the Democratic president. This structural conflict permits an irresponsible opposition party not only to oppose policy—as happens in the United Kingdom, for example—but to obstruct policy and obscure electoral accountability. Normal governance can be stalled at whim.

So, as many political scientists and constitutional scholars acknowledge, we don’t have a structural framework that properly enables a party like the modern Republican Party.

It is here, nevertheless.

Perhaps, though, following events of the past few months, we have reached a fateful moment: a pause in the march of 21st-­c entury radical Republicanism. Several crucial blows have recently been struck against this unusual party formation. First, the slow-but-steady implementation of the Affordable Care Act. No matter how flawed and controversial, the rollout has transformed continued efforts by Republicans to wreck the bill into an internal measure of radical opposition to all things Obama. Accusing other Republicans of insufficient hatred of the act is still a powerful enforcement mechanism for party discipline, in other words—a kind of “Obamacare McCarthyism” as Talking Points Memo reporter Sahil Kapur has called it. But opposition itself is no longer a practical policy strategy.

In October, Democrats, with a new solidarity led by the president and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, defeated Republican attempts to leverage U.S. debt payments as a means to change public policy. Canny Mitch McConnell, the Republicans’ leader in the Senate, felt the sting of public backlash and assured that going forward, “a government shutdown is off the table.” Following a reopening of the government on terms set by Obama and Reid, Ted Cruz, the purest expression of Tea Party politics, triumphantly returned to his home state of Texas like a winning Super Bowl quarterback. But it is now more doubtful that Cruz can run the same trick play twice.

In late November, Senate Democrats circumscribed the filibuster. In December—likely because of the overdue show of Democratic backbone—the House Republican leadership, led by Paul Ryan, pushed through a minimal budget deal with the Senate Democrats, led by Patty

THE GOP IS SOMETHING WE’VE NOT SEEN BEFORE: A EUROPEAN–STYLE RIGHTIST SPLINTER PARTY TRAPPED WITHIN THE ELEPHANTINE BODY OF A MAJOR AMERICAN PARTY.

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Murray. Frightened and ambitious Republican senators opposed the bargain. But it virtually ensures that government will remain open for the next couple of years.

It might further signal a return to the usual banality of American political culture that the same Newt Gingrich who in 2010 called Obama an exemplar of “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior” posted one of the most perceptive encomiums to Nelson Mandela—and even Ted Cruz flew with the American delegation for Mandela’s funeral. On the other hand, Gingrich and Cruz didn’t have the last Republican word on Mandela’s death, as party leaders had to cope with an outpouring of scurrilous Mandela attacks from a radicalized base.

There is no new normal quite yet. The year 2014 promises more budget fights, and at least a pantomime around not lifting the debt ceiling again, followed by the midterm elections. It is easy to imagine a scenario whereby the Republicans hold the House of Representatives, which will remain heavily gerrymandered in their favor for the rest of this decade, and take the Senate, or just miss doing so.

We would then expect two years of continued entrenched resistance to the Obama administration, but one without the blocking of presidential nominees and the routine threat of government closures. In 2016, we could see whether the Republican rank and file will nominate a shrewd moderate manqué like Chris Christie or ignore their elites altogether and nominate a flamboyant reactionary like Cruz or, in a slightly more placid register, Rand Paul.

If any Republican were elected president, we could test in real historical time whether the GOP is more ideologically extreme (opposing a Republican president’s efforts at moderation as much as it opposes every policy of Obama’s) or more extremely partisan (tolerating policies coming from a Republican administration that it would reflexively fight in a Democratic one).

Meanwhile, at this uncertain interregnum between the recent shutdown and the midterm elections, it is reasonable to take seriously George Will’s historical comparisons. For, small hints of moderation aside, it’s not well enough understood just how radical the contemporary GOP has become.

But first, let me clarify what I mean by radical. History is contextual, not anachronistic. Simplistic analogies are neither accurate nor illuminating. Even if they wished it—

CONSERVATIVES PICK AND CHOOSE WHAT PRECEPTS OF MADISON THEY WISH TO VENERATE, SIMPLIFYING ONE OF THE MOST COMPLICATED POLITICAL THINKERS IN MODERNITY.

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and they don’t—modern Republicans could not bring back the days of the Jim Crow South of the late 19th through much of the 20th century, let alone the horrors of slavery.

Nor could they put gays back in the closet, prevent married women from having their own credit cards, or even repeal the Clean Air Act. Nor will Medicare and Social Security ever be abolished, even if Republicans (and a few Democrats) might imagine that this is possible. The most extreme challenge to objectionable policies that Republicans could mount at this historical moment would be to permit the government to default unless they receive policy concessions—potentially catastrophic, but not another civil war. No, to be a radical party today does not mean a return to long-discredited and cruel policies. It does mean, however, adopting a logic of implacable resistance. In the early 21st century, “radical” means at the extant limits of today’s political discourse, not yesterday’s.

IT’S IMPORTANT TO POINT OUT that the original Unit-

ed States Constitution made no formal or even implicit acknowledgment of political parties. The Founders, of course, realized that political disagreement—factions— would appear in any polity. But they despised the idea of parties and, within the Constitution, did not anticipate or allow for their development. Alexander Hamilton, brilliant advocate of the most powerful conceivable national government, warned in Federalist No. 22 of the “poison” of a “pertinacious minority”—in this case, seeking the approval of a supermajority of states for national action, regardless of their population.

Madison, the Founders’ most influential political theorist, at first expected that the three branches of government, the legislative, executive, and judicial, would divide over their defense of their respective institutional prerogatives. This rational institutional self-interest would produce measured outcomes ultimately satisfactory to the majority yet protective of minorities—ranging from religious heretics to, yes, the white Southern regime of chattel slavery.

Madison the working politician, however, grew to have much less faith in his peers’ wisdom than he did in his own.

By 1792, it became clear that candidates were running as members of political parties. Madison joined Jefferson as an advocate for the Democratic-Republican Party. It was a development he would not have imagined less than a decade earlier. But parties turned out to be the only way elites could aggregate and exercise power—and prevent other elites from doing the same.

John Aldrich, a leading scholar of the American party system, has noted how early nationalists soon understood that without political parties, majority rule would become unstable. What Aldrich calls the “great principle”—“how

powerful and positive the new federal government was to be”—could only be structurally expressed by way of a functional party system that extolled majority rule: The problem then was how to ensure not just passage of individual bills but achievement of the entire stream of policy—to win on the great principle.

Parties, therefore, eventually formed as institutional solutions to the instability of majority rule so that policies chosen or denied would reflect, in the main, just how strong and active the new national government was to be.

As it turned out, the three branches of government today do not divide as Madison anticipated over their defense of their institutional prerogatives.

Instead, they divide over which party controls them.

Madison’s careful political architecture was to be challenged further in the years leading up to the Civil War. The relationship between the white antebellum South’s greatest thinker and politician, John C. Calhoun, and modern conservatism—particularly with regard to racism—has been argued by Sam Tanenhaus in The New Republic. I wish to make a different point: Modern conservatism continues to rely on certain antebellumera arguments on behalf of states’ rights and, also, the intrastate rights of state majorities versus state minorities.

In the decades before the Civil War, the increasingly dominant Southern wing of the Democratic Party agreed about the broad questions of political and economic power.

During the 1850s, the issue of slavery destroyed the Whig Party and brought forth the anti-slavery Republican Party (or, at the least, the party opposed to the expansion of slavery). These developments clarified the overwhelmingly pro-slavery position of the Southern Democrats, who

argued only over the smartest tactics—whether to stay within or leave the federal union—that would preserve the pervasive privileges and hierarchies of slavery.

Antebellum Southern intellectuals sought to promote and defend their vision of American society by lodging the maximum power possible within the states. Calhoun, as sitting vice president during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, had worked, during the 1820s and early 1830s, on refining the doctrine of “nullification” in connection with South Carolina’s opposition to congressionally passed tariff laws.

Calhoun disagreed that the federal government—whose power to trump the states is enshrined in the supremacy clause of the Constitution (strongly defended by Hamilton

James Madison designed a federal government with supreme powers over the individual states.

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John C. Calhoun believed the slaveholding South should have veto power over federal laws.

in Federalist No. 33)—subsumed, as the clause stated, “under the authority of the United States,” a state’s right to decide which federal laws (and treaties) are constitutional and which aren’t. Calhoun believed that the “mutual negative” of warring interests “forms the constitution.” Its essential purpose was to nullify, not ratify.

Nullification was a complex and fascinating doctrine.

Crucially, it rejected what many Americans are taught when we are young. It denied that the Supreme Court, via its power of judicial review, has the final say on what makes laws constitutional. “The right of the states … stands on clearer and stronger ground than that of the Court,” Calhoun wrote. Nullification also denies that laws duly passed

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by Congress and signed by the president must be obeyed and enforced by the states.

The larger concept within which Calhoun embedded nullification was the idea of a “concurrent majority.” Unlike the processes leading to a mere “numerical majority” of votes (which Calhoun mocked as the “beau ideal of a perfect government”), a concurrent majority held that all of society’s interests, majorities and minorities, be represented in rendering a decision. How precisely this would happen in practice was not spelled out.

Unlike the processes leading to a majority of votes in Congress, the Supreme Court, or even a supermajority of states approving a constitutional amendment, a “concurrent majority” required that a majority of states within both the South and North, respectively, approve of a federal law or else it would be voided (precisely contradicting Hamilton in Federalist No. 22). Calhoun carried the idea so far as to propose two presidents, one for the North and one for the South, each able to veto national legislation. In all cases, first a state, then a grouping of states within their respective region, was the unit of democratic will. As Calhoun wrote, each “part” of the whole Union would have “the right of self-protection.”

Calhoun’s genius was to imagine constitutional law as if the Constitution, like God in some formulations of agnosticism, had created the basis for sovereign government but then left the scene. In its wake, the ultimate right to obey or nullify laws was left to individual states. Thus the Constitution is somehow ancillary to the states that ratified it. A majority of states of the Slave South, regardless of number, population, or policy disputed, can always veto the states of the North.

Calhoun and Madison were both deeply concerned with protecting minority elites, but they disagreed about how

that should best be done. As America’s founding minorityrights defender, whose authority antebellum Democrats invoked in arguing against federal encroachment, James Madison had mostly been concerned with the protection of particular individuals and factions, not just religious dissidents but propertied men of wealth like himself. These, he feared, might be subject to redistributionist populist demagoguery; a majority coalition of urban laborers and poor farmers, for example, might choose to impose confiscatory taxes upon Madison and wealthy planter and merchant peers or forgive its own debt. Yet as the constitutional scholar Jack Rakove shrewdly argues, Madison also supported (in Federalist No. 10) a large Republic—“the greater number of citizens and extent of territory”—which would better restrain the potential for small, recurrent state majorities to “more easily … concert and execute their plans of oppression.”

In fact, while exceedingly careful to argue on behalf of a state-national amalgam, Madison, unlike Calhoun, wished ultimate sovereignty to reside in (we the) people rather than states. As he wrote in Federalist No. 39, “We may define a republic to be … a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people.” The people might sometimes exercise their power through the states, as when they were to ratify the Constitution. But the people are the foundation of the Republic.

Madison and Hamilton, arguing in The Federalist Papers, again unlike Calhoun, strongly supported judicial review. Madison, “the last Founder,” who lived until 1836 (and thus long enough to rebuke Calhoun’s theory of nullification during the tariff dispute), continued to insist until the end of his life, against the opposition of Jefferson and others, that the Supreme Court had the final word in adjudicating both federal and state law even when he disagreed with a given Court decision. Again, to quote from Federalist No. 39: “In controversies relating to the boundary between the two jurisdictions [the national government and those of the states] the tribunal which is ultimately to decide, is to be established under the general government [the tribunal being the Supreme Court].”

Madison’s insights leave “unanswered a residual question,” writes Rakove. How would the rights of minority groups and individuals within the states be protected from an overbearing state majority? Rakove declares the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause to be an egalitarian antidote for beleaguered state minorities—but conservatives today narrowly read this clause.

Whatever his zigzagging motivations, Madison distinguished between minorities and states. He fought hard but unsuccessfully for the Constitution to include the right of Congress to have a “negative” on any and all state laws,

then took the states’ side in arguing their right to oppose the Alien and Sedition Acts. He opposed the first national bank but changed his tune on the second one after realizing that having a bank made it easier to fund government, particularly during war. By then, the bank had become an accepted part of American life. Rakove writes, “Madison thus allowed precedents set since 1789 to revise his own original understanding of the Constitution.”

Despite the obsessive textualism of modern conservative Republicans—insisting, for example, upon reading the Constitution aloud as if it were holy writ before the beginning of each congressional session—they pick and choose what precepts of Madison, the most influential Founder, they wish to venerate.

They thus simplify one of the most complicated political thinkers in all of modernity.

IN ONE FAMOUS EARLY skir-

CALHOUN CARRIED THE NOTION OF NULLIFICATION SO FAR AS TO PROPOSE TWO PRESIDENTS, ONE FOR THE NORTH AND ONE FOR THE SOUTH, EACH ABLE TO VETO NATIONAL LEGISLATION.

mish over slavery, Calhoun and his remarkable protégé James Henry Hammond foreshadowed the frenzied determination of Southern Democrats, 25 years later, to defend and expand slavery into new states.

Abolitionists were trying to present petitions to Congress demanding the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. This tactic had been tried before; usually it was summarily ignored. Calhoun, then a senator from South Carolina, decided that quietly strangling this improbable initiative was insufficient. Even the mere acceptance of the petition (not the introduction of a bill to address the issue) would legitimate the abolitionists’ position. “Encroachments must be met at the beginning. … In this case … I hold concession or compromise to be fatal,” as Calhoun reportedly said in his 1837 speech challenging the petitions. Historian Michael Perman notes that this was not fighting until the “last ditch” but “unyielding resistance at the first ditch.”

By the mid-19th century, an insufficient level of agitation had become a major reason the Democrats sought to crush the remaining remnants of the Southern Whig Party. Southern Whigs were determined to defend slavery but could never match the zeal of Southern Democrats.

Determination—an affect of angry resistance—came to be seen as a measure of commitment to the cause.

A forerunner of the fearful, reactionary affect of today’s Republicans can be seen in this episode. Republican politics today embodies the brilliant axiom of the political

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scientist and student of American and European conservatism Corey Robin: “Conservatism is: a meditation on— and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” The furious reaction—not the initiative—is all.

The rights denied to a minority within a given state today are thankfully not at the world-historic levels absorbed by African American slaves. The logic, however, of a given state minority being denied the right to Medicaid or to marry someone of the same sex—rights available in other states—is not so different. As the mid-20th-century political theorist Louis Hartz observed regarding Calhoun’s arguments, there are always “minorities within minorities,” so defending the states’ minority rights only begs the question of what other minorities needed to be protected. It could, as Hartz mordantly wrote, “unravel itself into separate individuals executing the law of nature for themselves.”

So we see, in almost every heavily red state in America today, an expression of the spirit if not the essence of nullification. Rather than concede the direction of humane public policy, most Republicans continue to oppose same-sex marriage and to use majorities in state strongholds to resist the clear direction of the culture and the law on that issue. Republicans could never restore the poll tax or “literacy” tests as a way to deny African Americans the vote. But rather than compete hard for the votes of people of color (as they used to—Richard Nixon received 32 percent of the black presidential vote in 1960, when the GOP was still “the party of Lincoln”), Republicans seek to suppress the vote of Democratic-leaning demographic groups by cutting voting hours. For them, the franchise itself remains controversial. Unlike in other advanced nations, there is no consensus even that voting is an unambiguous democratic good.

Today’s Republicans fight from the first ditch. They are not always successful—but their intensity on many issues dwarfs that of Democrats. We have seen this in the gun lobby’s fight against the most minimal attempts to expand background checks. We are often told that we have a “war” between abortion and anti-abortion activists. If so, according to a 2013 Pew poll, there are many more antiabortion activists who fervently care about the issue than there are abortion-rights advocates who do: 38 percent

CONTEMPORARY REPUBLICANS FIGHT FROM THE FIRST DITCH. THEY ARE NOT ALWAYS SUCCESSFUL—BUT THEIR INTENSITY ON MANY ISSUES DWARFS THAT OF DEMOCRATS.

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of those surveyed who wish to overturn Roe v. Wade view abortion as a “critical” issue; only 9 percent of those who support Roe v. Wade believe abortion is critical. Political scientists call this “preference intensity,” and it is where the conservatives who control the Republican Party shine.

Many recent Republicans in Congress started as smallbusiness leaders in their local communities, big fish in small ponds. Critical to their political training has been resistance on the state level to national policy impositions regarding guns, immigration, same-sex marriage, health insurance, and reproductive rights. Local moral norms and local leadership must be defended against the interventions of an unsympathetic federal government. But it is important to stress that state minorities do not necessarily share those norms. Surely, for example, impoverished citizens without health insurance might dispute the local moral norms in the 23 Republican states that have rejected the expansion of Medicaid.

Ironically, despite the fears of Madison that wealthy elites would mostly be subject to the irresponsibility of a populist majority, it is these wealthy elites who support Republicans in red states today—while also seeking to maximize their leverage on the national level. As the “red versus blue America” trope has become more deeply embedded in American politics, Democrats and liberals have sought to use constitutional federalism for their own ends in blue states to create quasi-social democracies, respectful of post-1960s feminist and gay-rights movements and greater spending on social services. Republicans and conservatives have sought to use existing state majorities—their still-potent bulwark—to limit the possibilities of political minorities they disdain. In this, they owe more to Calhoun than to Madison.

For now, this is where the GOP remains perched: supported by a minority still numbering many millions, in political control of a number of states in the South, the Mountain West, and parts of the Midwest, and capable of obstructing federal policy—but with hardly any policies for which to advocate.

Regardless of narrow deals that might keep the lights on in Washington over the next couple of years, this particular Republican Party—coherent and reactionary, maximizing its minority leverage nationally and its majority leverage within a number of states—could hunker down for quite some time. The authors of the Constitution never imagined such a political vehicle. Even if the party rebrands in symbolic ways for the sake of the national presidential race, the Republican fight—not merely against the Affordable Care Act but against cosmopolitan modernity—may well go on for a while. It would be fascinating to know what George Will’s great teacher, James Madison, would make of it all.

Perhaps we already do. 

Ted Cruz led his wavering peers in storming the government and shutting it down.

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THIS LAND WAS In Utah and other Western states, the country’s most pristine wilderness faces new threats from Big Energy and its powerful allies.

B Y C HR I S T OPH E R KETCHAM

Book Cliffs-East Tavaputs Plateau Photo by Shelly Martin

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YOUR LAND

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O

ne spring morning a few years ago, while on horseback in the wilderness of southern Utah, I happened to meet a horse packer named A J Rogers, who was filling a stock tank with water he had trucked from his house in a village 15 miles away. Rogers, who is 60, had been riding the remote canyons and mountains of the Book Cliffs-East Tavaputs Plateau in Utah for most of his life, and the roadless part of the plateau, forbidden to mechanized traffic, was beloved country.

“Where else can you ride a horse daylight to dark and not cross a road?” he said.

When he was 16, Rogers had organized with two friends his first unparented horse pack into the Cliffs, a ten-day journey that was to culminate in “a big bear hunt.” Two of the horses escaped and fled home, others got mired in a bog, and Rogers ended up lost for days, turned about in the deep woods. There were gunshots in the dark, and bears roaring, and hungry times, and a 25-mile night hike, and a posse out looking for the errant teenagers. “It was my initiation into the back country and did a lot toward making me a grown-up man,” Rogers says. His son Orion also went solo into the Book Cliffs at the age of 16, riding for a week on a horse named Ranger, and Orion also got lost and into trouble and out of it. Rogers still kills an elk there for meat whenever he can, considering it the finest hunting grounds of his life—“big old wide country,” he told me, “that needs to stay just like it is.”

I was living in southern Utah at the time, in the town of Moab, 50 miles south of the border of the Cliffs country, and I ended up spending two days in the wilds with the horse. A few months later, in high summer, when the temperatures soared in Moab, I went alone backpacking into the 10,000-foot plateau, where the air was cool and sweet. I got lost briefly and felt the hair on my neck stand up when I thought I couldn’t find my way out to the road where I’d left my car.

Last May, I went into the Cliffs again, this time in a rustbucket Land Rover with a wilderness advocate named John Weisheit, a longtime white-water river guide who directs the Moab nonprofit Living Rivers. Weisheit had been warning that the Cliffs plateau, in an era of new drilling technologies and bipartisan calls for domestic energy independence, faces an unprecedented scheme for development of its oil shale and tar-sands deposits, which are estimated to contain three times the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. “Utah wants to be the Saudi Arabia of America and strip-mine every last barrel,” Weisheit said. Our intention was to get up on the plateau and find our way on ragged jeep roads to a tar-sands test site called PR Springs. An experimental foray into tar-sands mining on 200 acres of state-controlled land, PR Springs was meant to be the model for developing nonconventional oil on all three million acres of federal public land in the Book Cliffs-East Tavaputs.

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The old truck filled with dust, the heat was oppressive, the road snaked through canyons and up over cliffs, and Weisheit ground his clutch. At 8,000 feet, as a rainsquall spattered the windshield and the temperature plummeted, the view opened to the horizon across a rolling country of grasslands, sagebrush flats, Douglas fir, and aspens leafing out. A storm coiled in the west. The afternoon sun broke for a moment through the clouds, the slant light catching in the electric green of the trees. A golden eagle swooped near our truck, hunting a rabbit. We passed herds of elk and deer on the move, and we counted their numbers—17, 23, 30, more. Conservationists regard the Book Cliffs-East Tavaputs as the Serengeti of Utah. On the other hand, Weisheit told me as we drove, “the local county commissioners call this a wasteland.”

The vast majority of the acreage in the Book Cliffs-East Tavaputs, like most of Utah, is managed by the federal government, which controls roughly 60 percent of the state under the auspices of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Recently, in a revival of a long-standing feud with federal regulators over control of natural resources in the public domain—a fight as old as the settlement of the American West—the Utah Legislature has demanded a handover of all federal public lands within state borders. The Transfer of Public Lands Act (TPLA), passed in 2012 and signed by Governor Gary Herbert, an enthusiastic backer, mandates that the Forest Service, with 15 percent of Utah land, and the Bureau of Land Management, with about 42 percent, relinquish their domain to the statehouse no later than 2015.

The bill’s backers say they want to use federal public lands to generate revenue for the state. So far, the U.S. government has not ceded an acre. “If Utah is successful in its quest, the real losers will be the public,” says David Garbett, a staff lawyer with the nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “The only way the Utah Legislature can generate money from the public lands is to ramp up development and hold a fire sale to clear inventory. That means that the places the public has come to know and love will be sold to the highest bidder and barricaded with ‘No Trespassing’ signs.” Similar bills are proliferating in other Western states where most of the land is managed

j i m w i l s o n / t h e n e w yo r k t i m e s / r e d u x

by a federal agency. During 2012–2013, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico passed either bills or resolutions inspired by Utah’s TPLA . Proponents of publiclands transfer in the West believe they have a case based on arcane stipulations in the enabling acts that brought their states into the union. Under the acts, however, state governments agreed to “forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands” within their borders, ceding those lands to federal control. The legality of this disclaimer has never been successfully challenged.

When Weisheit and I arrived at the PR Springs tarsands site, it was late afternoon, and the workers had quit for the day. Sifters and chemical-treatment vats and storage dumpsters the size of houses lay in varying states of disarray. Bulldozers sat waiting to finish the widening of the dirt access road, soon to be paved to allow for bigger trucks and more efficient movement. At the center of the operation was a lifeless zone where the soil to the depth of 35 feet had been scoured off. The machines had lifted away the trees, the grasses, the forbs, and explosives had opened the last layers of earth to get beneath the limestone and reach the blackened tar-stinking ore band. “Denude the landscape, scrape off the topsoil—the rest gets blown

away by the weather,” Weisheit said. “It destroys watershed, wildlife, recreation.” We stood over the pit in the wind, and the word “wasteland” did come to mind.

THE FEDERAL PUBLIC LAND that Utah is claiming for

Near Vernal, Utah, employees of the Bill Barrett Corporation install a controversial oil pipeline approved by the Bureau of Land Management.

itself is owned by you and me and some 300 million other Americans. It is a peculiar property right we each have to this commons, as we acquire it simply by dint of citizenship, and what we own is spectacular. The BLM and Forest Service lands, which include almost 300 million acres in 11 Western states and Alaska, make up some of the nation’s wildest deserts, forests, rivers, mountains, and canyons: places not touted for tourism; places where big mammals and ferocious carnivores roam unhindered; where a citizen with an interest in such things can hike, bike, camp, fish, hunt, raft, ride horseback, carry a pistol, fire a Kalashnikov, sling an arrow, get as lost as a pioneer.

The marvel of the federal public-lands system is that it exists at all. When the 13 colonies as part of their founding compact gave up the rights to the unsettled soil that stretched from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, when the young United States completed the Louisiana Purchase, when it lay claim to the Southwest and California after

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the Mexican-American War, when it drew into the Union the vast territories of the intermountain West, the intention of the federal government had always been the disposal of this estate into the private sector. During the 19th century and into the early 20th, much of the land was leased and sold off in a frenzy of corrupt dealings. Railroads, corporations, land speculators, mining interests, and livestock barons gorged on the public domain, helped along by the spectacularly pliable General Land Office, which from 1812 until its closure in 1946 privatized more than one billion acres, roughly half the landmass of the nation. The corruption was such that by 1885, The New York Times’ editorial page had denounced the “land pirates” whose “fraud and force” had excluded the citizen settler—the farmer, the homesteader, the cowboy— from “enormous areas of public domain” and “robb[ed] him of the heritage to which he was entitled.”

We can thank the first generation of American conservationists—think John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt—for persuading Congress to set aside a portion of America’s forests in federal reserves, which led to the creation of the Forest Service in 1905. The USFS, taking charge of some of the most productive arable land and timberland in the West, was met with hatred by rural Western business interests that wanted no regulation. Forest reserves were considered

and mining magnates. With this model of decentralized, business-friendly management imported to the BLM—the grazing boards even at one time paid the salaries of BLM employees—the agency’s officers were recruited from the counties they were meant to regulate. Range enforcers tasked to restrict grazing were the sons of ranchers, and watchdogs of mining and drilling had brothers and uncles and cousins who ran oil and gas and hard-rock companies.

The BLM came to be mocked as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining, and by 1961 President John F. Kennedy would note that “much of this public domain suffers from uncontrolled use and a lack of proper management.” Kennedy that year, in a national address, directed his secretary of the interior to “develop a program of balanced usage designed to reconcile the conflicting uses—grazing, forestry, recreation, wildlife, urban development, and minerals.”

Kennedy’s notion of balanced use, which had a precedent in the management of the national forests, became law 15 years later, with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976, one of the capstones in the conservationist legislation of the 1970s. The act signaled a “massive shift of public policy,” says former BLM director Michael Dombeck, who headed the agency from 1994 to 1997. Until 1976, the BLM had continued to be charged

The feud over who controls natural resources in the public domain is as old as the settlement of the American West. “crackpot schemes of politicians in Washington,” “the dude design for an outdoor museum and menagerie,” “obnoxious measures of Eastern visionaries.” “On the forest reserve please bury me not,” went the doggerel in a 1907 farmers’ publication in Colorado. “For I never would then be free/A forest ranger would dig me up/In order to collect his fee.”

More than 400 million acres of less desirable public land remained, much of it remote and forbidding, with arid soils and grasses fit only for meager grazing, and almost all of it in the states west of Kansas. By 1946, most of this unwanted patrimony—some 264 million acres—fell under control of the newly formed Bureau of Land Management, run out of the Department of the Interior. While the Forest Service, an adjunct of the Department of Agriculture, had been managed with scientific efficiency, its policy and operations directed from the office in Washington—one of the reasons it was so hated—the BLM was from the start a creature of local interests. It was formed out of the U.S. Grazing Service, which traditionally had been run at the local and state level by “grazing advisory boards,” which largely consisted of ranchers, bankers, lawyers, real-estate dealers,

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with privatizing the public lands. FLPMA officially ended what had been de facto policy for decades: The era of land disposal was over, and the federal government would hold the public lands in perpetuity, as a grand American commons. The law also put into place a suite of unprecedented environmental regulations, mandating the protection of “scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archeological values.”

It brought the BLM domain into regulatory compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Its language borrowed from the 1964 Wilderness Act, which had warned of “expanding settlement and growing mechanization” that would leave “no lands designated for preservation [in] their natural condition.”

The Wilderness Act had defined a wilderness area by requiring, among other factors, that it consist of at least 5,000 contiguous roadless acres. The 1976 law mandated an inventory of unroaded BLM lands, which was also unprecedented. Representatives of extractive industry feared the obvious: More roadless areas indeed would be

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identified and wilderness protections inevitably expanded.

The law provoked an explosive reaction in conservative rural counties in the intermountain West, whose agitation took hold and spread in the form of the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a kind of Tea Party for ranchers, miners, loggers, and oilmen. The rebels correctly assessed the implications of the federal management act’s “multiple use” mandate: Cows could eat the grass, off-road vehicles could explore the backcountry, corporations could find profits from publicly owned minerals, but these activities would be heavily regulated, subject to environmental analysis and public hearings and the strictures of what the federal management act called “sustainable use.” Extraction would also have to be balanced against the interests of “outdoor recreation and human occupancy”—fishing, hunting, wood-gathering, hiking, camping. Even worse, in the rebels’ view, the law formalized roadless assessments.

The Sagebrush Rebellion counted among its champions scores of county officials and state and congressional legislators. In Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming— wherever the BLM had vast holdings—lawmakers passed Sagebrush Rebellion Acts demanding a “return” of federal land to state control. Sagebrush spokesmen, denouncing the 1976 FLPMA legislation as another insidious scheme from the devious Easterners, claimed to be riding a wave of citizen ire, but the rebellion mostly issued from business interests—grazing, oil, gas, mining, the consumers of public lands—with political connections in county commissions and state legislatures.

In a region forever dominated by big ranching, big mining, and big oil, the Sagebrush bills of the 1970s represented nothing new. The revolt accomplished little more than to communicate an old hatred of federal control.

In 1913, 1914, and 1919, Western governors, fearing the encroachments of the National Forest reserves, demanded the return to the states of what remained of the public lands. In 1930, a commission appointed by President Herbert Hoover, who had been urged on by ranchers furious at Forest Service grazing fees, called for the same. In 1946, Senator Edward Robertson of Wyoming floated a bill for the sale of public lands to ranchers. When the Sagebrush revolt reached its height at the end of the 1970s, Bruce Babbitt, the governor of Arizona who would later become Bill Clinton’s secretary of the interior, concluded that “behind the mask the Sagebrush crowd is really nothing but a special-interest group whose real goal is to get public lands into private ownership.” Land-grabbing, Babbitt said, was “the oldest con game in the West.”

THE LEGISLATION THAT WOULD become Utah’s Transfer

of Public Lands Act—the inaugural move in what The Salt Lake Tribune dubbed a “new Sagebrush Rebellion”—first

made an appearance in a 2011 meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which works with state lawmakers to draft “model legislation.” With more than 2,000 members, including legislators from every state and hundreds of corporate and private-sector lobbyists and funders, ALEC, though registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, churns out more than a thousand pieces of model legislation annually, 20 percent of which on average gets passed in state legislatures. ALEC’s model laws have circumscribed voting rights, established “stand your ground” laws, defunded public schools, reduced taxes on corporate wealth, and protected manufacturers from litigation if their product kills a child.

Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for

Media and Democracy, which runs an ALEC watchdog unit, describes the group as a “corporate and partisan lobby masquerading as a charity, allowing some of the most powerful corporations and richest CEOs to get their legislative wish lists in the hands of politicians eager to please special interests.” ALEC ’s agenda, befitting the concerns of its chief funders, the archconservative energy magnates Charles and David Koch, is to bolster corporations’ interests without publicly disclosing those corporations’ influence on the bills ALEC task forces produce. Graves describes this as “legislation laundering.”

According to the records of its 2011 meeting, which took place in Scottsdale, Arizona, Ken Ivory, a Republican state representative from Utah, sponsored the public-lands transfer bill—then titled the Disposal and Taxation of Public Lands Act—for a review and vote in ALEC ’s Energy,

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a law designating 1.7 million acres of Southern Utah’s red-rock cliffs as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. This land contains one of the nation’s richest coal beds.

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Oil pipelines have become a more frequent sight on federal land in Utah’s wilderness, thanks in part to regulators described by former employees as “totally compromised” by industry.

of approval from industry,” says Nick Surgey, director of research at the Center for Media and Democracy. Ivory’s version is different: “The bill originated with me and my colleagues in Utah. An ALEC meeting is an opportunity to brainstorm and modify legislation. We were refining it.” Either way, this is not uncommon practice in the state, which Media Matters for America has called “the closest thing to a poster child for ALEC ’s economic policies.” A 2012 report by the Center for Media and Democracy on ALEC ’s influence in Utah found that the state’s legislators “have acted as a pass-through for ALEC,” making “substantial direct use of ALEC model legislation and policy ideas,” with model language introduced word for word in at least 17 bills since 2001. When ALEC held its 2012 annual conference in Salt Lake City, Governor Herbert showed up to welcome the membership.

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The Utah Legislature proposed or passed a dozen bills during its 2012–2013 session that accord with ALEC’s vision for the expansion of state and local jurisdiction over federal lands. Utah has declared that Forest Service claims on streams and riparian zones violate state sovereignty, an issue that was considered settled with the creation of the service in 1905. It has sought to expand grazing in the restricted 1.7 million–acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It has demanded state jurisdiction over “mismanaged” national forest—mismanaged because it’s not opened freely to ranching and logging. It has called for state oversight of the federally listed Utah prairie dog, which became endangered only after local control resulted in the near extirpation of the species. Herbert’s office has filed tens of thousands of miles of road claims in areas that local BLM and Forest Service officers have found to be unroaded. Utah’s alleged “roads,” some 14,000 routes in total, mostly amount to hiking trails, cow paths, or old defunct mining tracks, some of which have been abandoned for more than a hundred years. Conservation groups opposing the road claims in state court, among them the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, say the purpose is nothing less than a preemption of future wilderness designations: A countryside bisected by officially designated “highways” kills the chances for protection under the Wilderness Act. Expecting to be challenged on the legality of these bills, along with the governor’s road claims, the legislature has budgeted several million dollars for their defense.

With the 2013 passage of HB155, the Federal Law Enforcement Amendments Act, Utah even attempted to prevent BLM officers from enforcing state criminal laws on public lands, including everything from speeding to murder. “HB155,” says Patrick Shea, who served as a director of the BLM under Clinton and is now an attorney in private practice in Salt Lake City, “was designed to sow chaos on public lands.” The Department of Justice sued in U.S. court to strike it down last May, and a federal judge within days found the bill unconstitutional. “ALEC, which had a hand in drafting that law, is particularly useful in making life difficult for local BLM managers,” Shea says. “ALEC is all about the free market, and the very notion of public lands is antithetical to the free market.”

The legislature’s own legal counsel has warned that the Transfer of Public Lands Act is probably unconstitutional and will not survive a lawsuit. Representative Ivory says the legislative counsel “got it wrong. For 200 years, from 1780 until FLPMA , Congress recognized that its duty was to dispose of public lands. Litigation”—suing the federal government to implement the land-transfer law—“is one avenue we’re considering.”

Sagebrush Rebel initiatives have routinely failed in the courts. In the case of Kleppe v. New Mexico, a Sagebrush

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Environment, and Agriculture Task Force, whose voting members at the time included representatives from Peabody Energy, the American Gas Association, and the American Chemistry Council. Ivory says he envisioned state control of public lands as a means for funding local schools, health care, and infrastructure. “We have to educate our kids, we have to take care of sick people, we have to take care of our roads,” Ivory told me. “More than 40 percent of our budget depends on the fiscal charade every year in D.C. The federal government has a $17 trillion debt.

Let’s responsibly unleash the energy resources in Utah.”

“Ken Ivory got the ALEC stamp of approval before introducing the bill in his own state, which is really a stamp

cause célèbre, Secretary of the Interior Thomas Kleppe sued the New Mexico Livestock Board in 1974 over its illegal roundup of wild burros on BLM land, which had been protected under the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. In 1976, the Supreme Court held in Kleppe that Congress has broader power than states when it comes to management of public lands. This has been the governing precedent for close to 40 years. ALEC ’s response is a bill called the Eminent Domain Authority for Federal Lands Act, whose purpose is to reverse Kleppe v. New Mexico. At least two Utah state legislators have introduced versions of the eminent domain bill, the latest of which “authorizes a political subdivision to exercise eminent domain authority on property possessed by the federal government.” The bill died in the 2012 session after the legislature’s general counsel concluded that political subdivisions in Utah— meaning, in practice, counties and municipalities—have “no standing to exercise eminent domain or assert any other state law” contrary to federal law on federal land.

EVEN WITHOUT UTAH ATTEMPTING to claim federal land,

administration by the Bureau of Land Management is not going the way that Kennedy and the 1976 law imagined.

“Forest Service employees typically get rotated on a regu-

billion Texas-based energy company with operations on five continents. His long beard and hair whipping about in the desert wind, Willis brandished a Bic lighter and joked that I should spark the flint to see if the site was leaking natural gas. The explosion, he said, would send us and the wellhead to hell and back.

The Utah BLM, according to Willis, has a habit of not monitoring leaks from wells. On some oil and gas fields, he told me, there was no monitoring for groundwater and surface-water contamination. The BLM, he said, had in many instances failed to probe for subsoil leakage from oil and gas drill sites; had failed to provide enough “sniffer trucks” to look for contamination of the air; and, in his view, hadn’t conducted the proper environmental assessments of roads that had fragmented the habitat for wildlife.

Where we stood amid the labyrinth of drill sites and earth pounded flat by Caterpillar trucks, the wind threw up dust from soil that had been disturbed. Few of the plants around the extraction sites on Wood Hill were native. Mostly we saw invasive cheatgrass and Russian thistle. Oil and gas drill pads were supposed to be managed by the agency in accordance with the environmental protection mandates of FLPMA , so that native vegetation could reclaim the soil, prevent erosion, and preserve the ecosystem against

During the 19th century, Railroads, land speculators, mining interests, and livestock barons gorged on public Land. lar basis, so there’s not much chance of going native,” says former bureau director Shea. “BLM people tend to stay put for decades. They are more greatly responsive to local and state pressures than they are to directives from the national office.” I talked with a half-dozen former bureau employees in Utah who told me their working environment was one of constant harassment and pressure from the legislature, county governments, and industry. One described BLM district managers—the BLM’s in-state bosses—as “totally compromised” by industry.

“There is pressure to not regulate, to not do your job,” Dennis Willis, a retired BLM range conservationist and recreation manager who worked for the agency for 34 years, told me when I met him at his home in Price, a hundred miles west of the Book Cliffs-East Tavaputs. He wanted to show me the result of the lack of regulation on bureau land around Price. We drove in his truck out of town and up a winding road onto a sun-crushed expanse of pygmy pines and sagebrush scrub known as Wood Hill.

We stopped at a well, one of dozens in a complex on BLM land leased to the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, a $52

invasives that profit from disturbed ground. “My big issue with oil and gas on public lands is that industry is like Vikings approaching a coastal village,” Willis said. “It’s rape and pillage.”

Stan Olmstead, who worked as an environmental scientist and natural resource specialist with the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service before joining the BLM, told me that the standard procedure in the state was to fasttrack energy development. “I never once saw an oil and gas well denied in Utah BLM,” Olmstead says. “BLM was always more interested in permitting the drilling than cleaning up afterward. The managers had no renewable resource background. The natural world, the bird life, the mammal life, the habitat, the air quality—they just didn’t have the understanding of these things as they did of oil from a well.”

When I called up retired BLM archaeologist Blaine Miller, who worked in the Price office as a specialist in Native American rock art, he told me that he had been punished for opposing energy development in the Price area. He had warned as early as 2002 about the probability of dust and vibration from oil and gas traffic ruining

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thousand-year-old petroglyphs in Nine Mile Canyon, a gorge near Price sometimes called the world’s longest art gallery. Miller told me that he had drafted “letters of consultation” to be added to the environmental assessments his bosses in Price required for the approval of energy leases in and around Nine Mile Canyon. “Those letters never left the office,” Miller says. “They were thrown away.

My boss called me in and said he was told that the state office is going to lease these parcels no matter what, and you’re going to rewrite your analysis so they can do that.

The environmental assessment had to reflect that decision.

I told him I can’t do that and I won’t do that.” Miller claims his Utah BLM managers engaged in “criminal fraud” when they falsely signed his name to a report showing no effects from energy development on the archaeological finds in Nine Mile Canyon. He says he was subsequently removed from commenting on any development project in the area.

Willis, Miller, and Olmstead told me they repeatedly heard Utah BLM bosses in agency meetings say that their sole task, in Willis’s words, was “to produce hydrocarbons.”

According to Willis, Kent Hoffman, the assistant state director for minerals, explained to the Price office staff, in a meeting Willis attended, that it is “not BLM’s job to protect resources—it is our job to lease these lands for oil and gas.”

of wilderness potential. I never saw this in print. In the team meetings while writing the management plan, we were told by the state office that certain areas were going to be leased. There was no other alternative.”

A 2006 memo from Utah energy industry lobbyist Robert Weidner made public by then-Congressman Maurice Hinchey of New York backs these allegations. Weidner wrote in his memo that then-BLM Utah director Henry Bisson, along with national BLM deputy director Jim Hughes, promised to “promote economic growth and reduce restrictions on access to the public lands” and that industry interests, represented by the local county governments, “owe it to each other to strike while the iron is hot in finalizing these RMPs. … Working with the new State BLM Director and the State to ‘fix’ these RMPs is an opportunity which may never come again!” In a letter to the inspector general’s office of the Interior Department, Hinchey charged that the arrangement had “compromised the integrity of the BLM’s resource management planning process and … eroded the protection of federal lands in the State of Utah.”

The New York Times last year looked into the compromised relationships between federal land managers and industry in Utah, focusing on a BLM district manager named Bill Stringer, who headed the bureau’s Vernal office, in north-

in 1976, federal law ofFIcially ended The era of land disposal and created a grand American commons in eleven western states.

Miller, who was also present at the meeting, confirmed this account. Hoffman calls it a “fabricated misquote.”

Asked to respond to the former staffers’ allegations, BLM’s director of communications, Celia Boddington, e-mailed the following: “The BLM is committed to providing comprehensive environmental review, including analysis of alternatives and public involvement opportunities required by NEPA for all land-use planning actions. The BLM adheres strictly to all legal, regulatory, and policy requirements when considering actions such as energy leasing on federal lands.”

Both Willis and Miller participated in the drafting of the resource management plan (RMP) for the Price region, completed in 2008 as part of a wider effort to produce a master plan for the federal public lands in Utah. They say that the plan for the Price region stated unofficially—a tacit agreement—that any area with a potential for oil and gas revenue would be off-limits to wilderness protection. “This was a rule created and used internally,” Willis says, though the rule was not in the administrative record.

According to Miller, “there wasn’t allowed any option for high potential oil and gas areas to be closed off because

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eastern Utah. According to the paper, Stringer had worked so closely with the energy industry that in 2007 he helped kill a proposed BLM study of the effect of the oil and gas boom on regional air quality. The study was instead conducted by an industry lobby group, the Western Energy Alliance, which found in its 2009 report no “unacceptable effects on human health.” In 2010, the EPA came to a different conclusion: Its own study showed that ozone levels around Vernal were regularly exceeding federal safety standards. Industry memos and meeting minutes dug up by the Times revealed a gloating assessment of the relationship between the bureau and the energy companies. “Achieved our goal of diverting the BLM,” said an internal memorandum, which reported lobbying efforts to “keep Stringer going to bat for industry.”

During Stringer’s tenure at Vernal, where he was appointed district manager in 2004, his BLM office became the busiest in the U.S., with the number of producing oil and gas wells more than doubling and the average number of wells approved each year roughly tripling over the previous decade.

Stan Olmstead, who served 38 years in public service, spent seven years working under Stringer before he retired.

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“Our elected, appointed, and agency administrators ask us to focus on commodities and economics as opposed to environmental health,” he wrote in a bureau-wide memo he issued when he left the BLM in 2012. “Protection of healthy soils, vegetation, clean air & water and a natural fauna are the true products.” The BLM, wrote Olmstead, was “breaking the land,” with “little thought for the future.”

Olmstead gave up on Utah and went back East to an old family farm in Tennessee. He told me the public lands around Vernal had been “sacrificed fully to industry. It’s a horrible mess.” He described constant industrial-scale truck traffic, dust, and noise. Native vegetation had been decimated, birds and mammals chased away or killed off, streams and rivers polluted. Fish were dying, the air was full of poisons, and the once-clear skies of the region had been dimmed with smog. He claimed that mismanagement at the Vernal district over the past decade had resulted in the loss of a candidate species for the endangered list called the mountain plover, which nests in the short-grass prairie and high desert. “That was the state’s only population,” he told me. “Whose task is it to say that a species is not important? Which ones do you want to throw away?

All species that are endemic are important. That’s part of

the agency’s mission. The approach to the natural world in the Utah BLM—and this, I think, is a Mormon approach—is that humans are superior to other species, God’s chosen, here to be overseers, not participants. Why preserve the mountain plover if it doesn’t do anything for you?”

Negro Bill Canyon, a hikers’ paradise near Moab, has been shut off to motorized traffic since the late 1970s. It is one of the BLM’s long-standing conservation successes.

THE WRITER EDWARD ABBEY, a radical conservation-

ist and probably the wittiest defender of Utah wilderness, went out of his way in his novels and essays to have fun characterizing the Sagebrush Rebels of the 1970s.

He described them as “operatives for the C. of C.”—the Chamber of Commerce—their “hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators,” who “look into red canyons and see only green, stand among flowers snorting at the smell of money, and hear, while thunderstorms rumble over mountains, the fall of a dollar bill on motel carpeting.”

I thought of Abbey’s words when one day not long ago I visited the home of an 81-year-old Moab resident named Ray Tibbetts, who described himself as a “big part of the original Sagebrush Rebellion” and who had recently formed the Sagebrush Coalition, made up of a dozen or so Moabites, to support the efforts of the legislature in Salt

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

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Lake. Tibbetts, who is tall and fit and wore blue jeans and a trucker cap and a knife in a sheath on his belt, had been a deputy sheriff, a uranium speculator, a clothing retailer with a storefront on Main Street, and a real-estate broker.

In 1979 and 1980, at the height of the first rebellion, he had helped organize illegal “roading” forays—complete with American flags, a bulldozer, and a county commissioner— into a series of BLM-managed areas around Negro Bill Canyon, which he still refers to by its unreformed name.

“I’ll admit we pulled a shitty there in Nigger Bill,” Tibbetts says with a note of regret. “But sometimes you got to make a statement. It was a symbolic place to put up a battlefront.” The BLM in 1979 and 1980, as a result of FLPMA , had shut down motorized traffic in Negro Bill and its tributaries. Tibbetts had refused to comply. A friend of Tibbetts from Moab—who happened to have undeveloped uranium mining claims in the canyon—powered up his bulldozer, lowered the blade, and mashed the canyon bottom into something drivable. The effort was indeed symbolic. The boulder-strewn jeep road to nowhere has since eroded almost to the point of erasure, and the canyon is still off-limits to vehicle traffic—one of the BLM’s longstanding conservation successes around Moab.

We talked in Tibbetts’s yard, under the gracious shade

areas from potential wilderness protections under the 1964 act. Bob Marshall, the founder of the Wilderness Society, who in his writings lamented “the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche,” inventoried the land and ecosystems in the Book Cliffs-East Tavaputs in 1936.

He concluded it was the fifth-largest desert wilderness in the United States, its roadless area estimated at 2.4 million acres. Seventy-seven years have passed since Marshall’s survey, and in that time more than 60 percent of the roadless domain disappeared as a result of minerals extraction and road building. “The BLM lands are some of the only remaining wild and vast and scenic stretches of hundreds of millions of acres that are left in the country,” says Michael Dombeck, the former BLM director. “Don’t we as a country care about keeping these places intact? Are we going to be happy only when everything is developed?”

I asked Tibbetts about wilderness. He talked about the Kaiparowits Plateau, one of the geologic uplifts in the vast remoteness of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The Kaiparowits, he said, was full of coal. “One of the richest coal beds in America. This earth is to be used,” he said. “God put coal in the Kaiparowits for a reason. We need it! We need energy now, and our future needs more energy. And we need the roads to get to that energy.”

Utah demands jurisdiction over “mismanaged” national forest— mismanaged because it’s not opened freely to ranching and logging. of mulberry trees. I asked him about the future of the Book Cliffs-East Tavaputs. He said we needed to develop it. I asked him his thoughts about the other proposals for the industrialization of the Utah desert. He was for it, all of it. The nuclear-power industry, invited by the governor’s office and the legislature, has floated plans to build a nuclear reactor along the I-70 corridor south of the Book Cliffs, with local county water rights to the drought-prone Green River ready for sale to supply the facility. Last June, the Utah Department of Air Quality, in expectation of full development of Utah’s Saudi Arabia, approved construction of a $230 million oil refinery near the Book Cliffs-East Tavaputs for the processing of oil shale and tar sands. The BLM has embraced preliminary plans for a new potash mine near Moab, and in September unveiled plans for oil and gas leasing on 144,000 acres in the remote canyon labyrinths of the San Rafael Swell west of Moab.

In the Book Cliffs, a paved county highway has been proposed to traverse the plateau, for the expediting of industrial traffic and, it is hoped, industrial tourism. It would also end up fragmenting fragile habitat and remove large

We drove in his pickup to the mouth of Negro Bill Canyon, a few miles outside of town. When I lived in Moab, I had gotten to know Negro Bill from its top to its bottom: hiked it by day and night, lolled in its pools and cascades, marveled at its lustrous amber walls, its natural bridges, its spangle-leafed cottonwoods, its whispering willows. I loved Negro Bill Canyon and was glad there was no road in it. Tibbetts and I parked at the lot near the mouth—today Negro Bill is a tourist draw—and marched under the high walls. I expected him to tell me about the joys of a D9 Caterpillar. Instead, he recalled how when he was 12 years old, as a Boy Scout, he camped on the sandstone ledges above the creek in Negro Bill; how he and his scout friends caught catfish with their hands and fought one another with barrages of pebbles in the water; how there was no thought of a road into Negro Bill, no reason for a road; how he and his father, a cowboy and small-time rancher and onetime outlaw, climbed to the top of the canyon wall—a terrifying deed, the wall rising 150 feet—and together they reached the rim of the canyon and the mesa top, where they found a glorious view of the Utah desert. 

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

The Fed Transformed Ben Bernanke rescued the economy.

Now Janet Yellen needs to remake the financial system.

BY RO BE RT KU T T NE R ART BY BARRY BLITT

I

t is a small miracle that on February 1, Janet Yellen will become chair of the Federal Reserve. She is not just the first woman to head America’s central bank but the first labor economist. While the Fed is ordinarily obsessed with inflation, Yellen has given equal or greater emphasis to unemployment. Yellen represents a break with the Wall Street–friendly senior Obama economic officials who promoted their former colleague Larry Summers for chair. Had Summers gotten the post, the Fed and Treasury would both have been in the hands of the same old boys’ club that coddled the big banks before and after the financial collapse of 2008. That the job went instead to Yellen means the Fed will be an independent power center, and somewhat to the left of the administration. With a four-year term as chair, Yellen will serve at least two years into the next presidency as well.

The transformation of the Fed since the economic collapse of 2008, however, is far broader than the person of Janet Yellen. The Fed is not only more radical than at any time in its history; as an engine of recovery, it is the only game in town. In the past, the Fed’s autonomy produced an institution protective of Wall Street. Never before in the Fed’s hundred-year history has its independence resulted in a central bank more committed to strict financial regulation and expansive monetary policy than the executive branch. Ironically, progressives who have long railed against the Fed’s insulation from politics are now cherishing it.

Despite fierce partisan battling over such particulars as the sequester and the government shutdown, the White House and the GOP

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have both embraced several trillion dollars in budget cuts over a decade as necessary medicine. The result is agonizingly slow growth and persistently high unemployment. Against this consensus, the Fed is the surprising dissenter, playing against type. In contrast to the previous chair, Alan Greenspan, both Yellen and the current chair, Ben Bernanke, have fairly begged the White House and Congress to pursue more budgetary expansion. “Fiscal policy, at both the federal and state and local levels, has become an important headwind [reducing] the pace of economic growth,” Bernanke warned in his speech at the Fed’s 2012 annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “Monetary policy cannot achieve by itself what a broader and more balanced set of economic policies might achieve.”

Yellen has been even more outspoken. “Instead of contributing to growth [after the initial 2009 stimulus],” she said in a February 2013 speech at the AFL-CIO, “discretionary fiscal policy this time has actually acted to restrain the recovery.”

Despite Bernanke’s repeated plea that a central bank cannot make up for fiscal contraction, the Fed has devised radically unorthodox monetary strategies to generate economic stimulus. After the crisis hit, the Fed used its usual tools of buying and selling Treasury bills to keep short-term interest rates close to zero. The problem, however, is that rates can’t turn negative. So the Fed, under the euphemism “quantitative easing,” has been purchasing massive quantities of long-term bonds. The result has been the lowest long-term interest rates since the tightly controlled command economy of World War II. Facing criticism that these policies could court both financial bubbles and

inflationary pressures as well as premature optimism about declining nominal unemployment rates, Yellen made clear at her confirmation hearing that she will continue monetary expansion until a durable recovery takes hold.

The arduous process of reforming America’s banking system, meanwhile, has only begun.

The Federal Reserve was given new authority under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, including the mandate to monitor all large, “systemically significant” financial institutions, but it’s not yet clear how the Yellen Fed will use it. Scandal after scandal continues to reveal Wall Street as a private club where conflicts of interests fatten executive bonus pools and pass the risk on to the public. The government has more powers to contain a future collapse, but the business model of the banks that crashed the economy in 2008 is essentially unchanged. The biggest five banks now have more market share than before the crash. So the task of returning the financial system to the role of servant of the economy rather than master lies ahead. Though the economy is slowly on the mend, Yellen’s work will be every bit as challenging as that of her predecessor.

YELLEN’S TENURE AS FED CHAIR will build

on the improbable odyssey of Ben Bernanke. During his years at Princeton, Bernanke was known as a close student of the Great Depression and an admirer of Milton Friedman, the laissez-faire eminence who counseled the Fed to run monetary policy by formula and trust the theory of self-correcting markets.

The crisis was Bernanke’s jarring lesson in the reality of catastrophic market failures and the need for bold intervention.

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

President George W. Bush first named Bernanke to a seat on the Fed in 2002. He moved to the Council of Economic Advisers in 2005 so that the Bush team could get a closer look at him as a possible successor to Greenspan.

With Greenspan’s blessing, he was appointed Fed chair in February 2006. Until the collapse, Bernanke, like Greenspan, showed little interest in the financial house of cards that banks had become. But once the crisis hit, Bernanke used all of the Fed’s legal powers, and then some, to avoid a repeat of the Depression. The collapse made him into an activist.

In the first phase of the crisis, however, Bernanke worked closely with the Bush team and then with the Obama Treasury to prop up rather than clean out the largest failed banks. Bernanke has testified that all but one of these banks was technically insolvent. The road not taken would have fired executives and shut down bankrupt institutions, with shareholders and bondholders taking the loss. Instead, the Fed advanced massive sums to Wall Street, making up program names and legal rationales as it went along. The team of Bernanke, Summers, and Tim Geithner crossed swords with critics such as FDIC Chair Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren, then the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, on whether the biggest banks should instead be broken

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up. When a fragile stability returned to Wall Street in 2010, Bernanke became a moderately tough regulator. He assigned the day-to-day franchise of banking reform to Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo, President Barack Obama’s first appointee to the central bank and one of the Fed’s few regulatory hawks.

On monetary policy, Bernanke and Yellen have been ingenious and politically courageous.

Under the quantitative-easing program, now in its third round of purchases (“QE3”), the Fed since September 2012 has had a pre-announced goal of buying $85 billion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities every month. Supporting these financial markets on a massive scale has resulted in rock-bottom interest rates. Low-interest mortgages, in turn, broke the fall in housing prices and put more money in the pockets of consumers by allowing refinancing on better terms. Cheap new car loans stimulated auto purchases. These interest rates also levitated the stock market by making stocks more attractive than bonds.

Besides keeping the financial collapse from becoming a full-blown depression and inventing new tools of monetary policy, Bernanke’s other legacies are institutional.

Unlike previous chairs, who arrogated most of the power to themselves, Bernanke’s style

YELLEN’S CAREER CAN BE READ as prepara-

tion for her post of Fed chair. After graduating summa cum laude in 1967 from Brown University, she pursued a doctorate at Yale, studying with James Tobin, the great Keynesian economist and later Nobel laureate. Another Yale mentor was Joseph Stiglitz, who termed her “one of the best students I have had in 47 years of teaching.” Yellen taught first at Harvard and then mostly at Berkeley. In 1994, President Bill Clinton named Yellen to her first term on the Federal Reserve along with Princeton economist Alan Blinder as counterweights to then-Chair Greenspan.

In 1993, Greenspan made an unprecedented deal with Clinton explicitly offering lower interest rates in exchange for cuts in the federal deficit. Subsequently, Greenspan began wondering how fast the economy might be allowed to grow without triggering inflation. He decided to stage a hawk-dove debate for his colleagues and asked Yellen to make the case for lower interest rates.

“He turned to Janet,” Blinder says, “because she was well prepared, smart, and could make arguments without getting the others angry.”

Yellen’s research helped to persuade Greenspan that the Fed could lighten up and allow higher growth without courting inflation.

pa b lo m a r t i n e z m o n s i va i s / a p i m a g e s

President Bush with Ben Bernanke at his 2006 swearing-in ceremony as outgoing Fed chair Alan Greenspan looks on

has been collegial. He ran the Fed more in the manner of a university department, delegating authority to other governors, listening as much as talking. The other governors have no professional staff; all of the staff traditionally report to the chair only. Under Bernanke, other governors have been given responsibility for particular policy areas, including in Tarullo’s case power to redeploy and supervise some staffers.

Bernanke has also supported increased disclosure of the Fed’s internal deliberations, a cause promoted even more emphatically by Yellen.

What Bernanke has not supported, however, is a drastic transformation of the financial system. That will fall to Yellen. “You can think of Bernanke as the firefighter who managed to put the fire out,” says Dennis Kelleher, who heads the reform group Better Markets, “and Yellen as the building engineer who needs to redesign the structure so that it never happens again.” In some ways, the harder job will be Yellen’s, because of the mistaken perception that the crisis is over.

Yellen was tapped to chair Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1997. She became president of the San Francisco regional Fed Bank in 2004 and then returned to the Board of Governors as vice chair in 2010. Yellen is the exceptional Fed chair with a prior career mainly as a university-based economic scholar.

The other two were Arthur Burns, who served as chair from 1970 to 1978, and Bernanke.

The current Fed regime represents the rare primacy of the intellectuals over the financiers.

Yellen’s professional passion has been researching labor markets and strategies for driving down the rate of unemployment. With her husband, George Akerlof, who won the Nobel (with Stiglitz) in 2001, she developed what became the efficiency wage hypothesis, which helps explain why free markets can’t solve the problem of unemployment. Yellen and Akerlof stumbled on the insight at Berkeley in 1981 while advertising for a baby sitter in the university newspaper. They offered to pay above the going rate, reasoning that they’d get a more reliable pool of applicants. They later published scholarly papers demonstrating that employers often pay more than the wage that will fetch minimally qualified workers. Consequently, labor markets do not “clear” like product markets but leave some people with premium pay and others without jobs—thus requiring fiscal and monetary intervention to maintain full employment.

Because of her intellectual care as a researcher, disarming candor, and calm temperament, Yellen is skilled at winning over critics. Her campaign for greater Fed transparency has won her the esteem of many Republicans. At her confirmation hearing, several of the senators encouraging Yellen to crack down on Wall Street were Republicans such as Bob Corker (Tennessee) and David Vitter (Louisiana). Corker went out of his way to defend Yellen against the charge of being a knee-jerk inflationist, noting that during her tenure on the Fed she had voted for rate hikes 27 times. When her appointment was announced, Richard Fisher, president of the Reserve Bank of Dallas and a monetary hawk, declared, “She’s wrong on policy, but she’s a darn good, decent, wonderful person.”

ONE OF THE TRICKIEST ISSUES facing Yellen

will be how to “taper” the Fed’s unprecedented program of bond purchases. As critics have

pointed out, a weak economy facing fiscal contraction has grown dependent on these infusions of cheap money. When they cease, markets may bid up interest rates. Higher rates, in turn, would slow what is still a feeble recovery. As Senator Corker warned at Yellen’s confirmation hearing, “It seemed to me that the Fed had become a prisoner to its own policy.” Financial markets are addicted to the Fed purchases, critics argue.

“To really try to step away from QE3,” Corker added, could “shatter … the markets.”

That view, however, is far from universal.

Economist Adam Posen, a former member of the Bank of England’s policy committee, points out that there is massive global demand for U.S. Treasury securities, and that the real economy

One of the trickiest issues facing Yellen will be when and how to “taper” the Fed’s unprecedented program of bond purchases. is soft. People forget, Posen says, that the Fed retains all of the ordinary tools of monetary policy and that it will use those to keep short-term rates low. As long as the tapering is gradual, he adds, it should not cause an increase in rates.

When the November jobs numbers were better than expected, financial markets momentarily flinched with apprehension that the Fed would pull back, but then the markets quickly rallied.

Critics of QE3 have also emphasized the risk that cheap money will create new bubbles. But the best anti-bubble medicine is strict regulation. Tough limits on speculation allow the Fed to create cheap money without fear that banks will abuse it—thus the connection between regulatory and monetary policy. By contrast, in the Greenspan years the Fed combined loose

money and lax regulation, virtually inviting the housing bubble.

Yellen has made clear that she intends to delay ending the bond purchases until a much stronger durable recovery is on track. Yellen, however, is only one member of the Board of Governors. Ironically, the Yellen Fed could prove more orthodox than Bernanke’s, because four and possibly six of the seven seats on the Board of Governors are or will soon be open. Since the same people who promoted Summers for chairman will be advising Obama on whom to name, it is unlikely that most new appointees will be as progressive as Yellen either on monetary or regulatory policy. Yellen will have to be an exceptional leader to be master in her own house.

Under Bernanke, the Fed had four governors who were advocates of both monetary easing and regulatory reform, though they differed on the degree—Bernanke, Yellen, Tarullo, and Sarah Bloom Raskin. A former banking commissioner of Maryland, Raskin emerged as the Fed’s most pro-consumer board member. Besides these four, the three other board members were more conservative, but only one, Jeremy Stein, an economist on leave from Harvard (and a close colleague of Summers), actively opposed Bernanke’s monetary policy.

When Yellen becomes chair, however, the board’s composition will be drastically different. Raskin is moving to the Treasury as the new deputy secretary. The White House has signaled that Obama plans to appoint the more orthodox Lael Brainard, former Treasury undersecretary, to the seat and to reappoint one of the Fed’s moderate conservatives, Jerome Powell.

In mid-December the White House leaked the name of the eminent MIT economist Stanley Fischer as a likely choice for Fed vice chair.

Fischer, at different points in his career, has been orthodox on both monetary and regulatory policy, though since the collapse of 2008 he has favored tighter regulation and more relaxed monetary expansion. However, he has also been close to Summers and Robert Rubin, who in 1994 named Fischer to the No. 2 job at the International Monetary Fund, where he promoted deregulated global capital flows.

Rubin then brought him to a senior job at Citigroup from 2003 to 2005. Rubin, who worked hard to get Summers installed as Fed chair, may yet get a senior friend at the Yellen Fed.

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

Fischer recently stepped down as governor of the Bank of Israel. At the Fed, he would be a force in his own right. Yellen is reportedly supportive of Fischer as vice chair.

Another of the Fed’s incumbents, Elizabeth Duke, retired last summer and has yet to be replaced. A Republican ally of small community banks, Duke challenged the primacy of Wall Street. Among those prominently mentioned for her seat are Thomas Hoenig, a former president of the Kansas City Fed Bank and current vice chair of the FDIC. Hoenig is a heartland Republican skeptical of easy money policy—but even more skeptical of Wall Street.

In a series of speeches going back a decade, he has been scathing on the subject of the big banks and supportive of breaking them up.

Hoenig, as a Republican, might get appointed as part of a package deal with a progressive Democrat, such as Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden’s former chief economist. The recent filibuster reform, letting confirmation proceed with 51 rather than 60 votes, allows President Obama to make more progressive Fed nominations if he chooses. As in the case of most past Fed chairs, the White House will run the names of potential nominees by Yellen and solicit her suggestions but will not give her a veto or allow her to dictate appointees.

Another complication involves the fraught relationship between Yellen and Daniel Tarullo. One of President Obama’s earliest senior economic advisers, Tarullo in 2009 had hoped for a senior White House post, such as chair of the National Economic Council. But when that post went to Summers, he became the administration’s key man at the Fed. He and Yellen are close ideological allies on financial regulation and monetary policy but have clashed personally. The bad feeling was amplified when word got back to Yellen that Tarullo had promoted Summers, an old friend, for Fed chair.

Tarullo, a formidable legal scholar with a large personality, had expected to have more influence under Summers. He let it be known that he would leave if the top job went to Yellen. At the same time, Tarullo is deeply committed to completing several financial reforms that he has begun, which will take well into 2014. Close observers expect Yellen to make peace with Tarullo, perhaps by naming him vice chair for supervision, a new post created by Dodd-Frank.

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“Both of them are grown-ups,” says one former regulatory official. “They need each other. Both have a history winning some battles and losing others—and moving on.” A former colleague says, “If Janet held a grudge for all the stupid things that have been said to her over the years, she’d be the most miserable woman in the world, but she is one of the most gracious.”

The seat of Jeremy Stein, the critic of easy money, could also come open. A Fed statement last June implying the early end of the QE3 bond purchases was composed mainly to appease Stein. However, the statement spooked money markets and the Fed quickly reversed course and reaffirmed its plan to continue QE3 as long as the economy was soft.

Despite passage of the DoddFrank Act in 2010, flagrant abuses keep unfolding.

Banks are larger and more concentrated than ever.

Harvard has a two-year limit on academic leaves, and Stein’s expires this academic year.

A further element complicating Yellen’s leadership on monetary policy is the rotation of seats on the Federal Open Market Committee. The committee is the Fed’s official policy-­setting body on interest rates. Its voting members include all seven Fed governors and a changing cast of five presidents of regional Fed banks. The presidents are a mixed lot. In 2014, the bank presidents coming onto the committee will be far more hawkish on money policy than those rotating off. One of them is Dallas Fed Bank President Richard Fisher, who warned in a recent speech of a “tipping point” where monetary policy becomes “an agent of financial recklessness. None of us really knows

where that tipping point is. But with each dollar of Treasury and MBS [bond] purchases … we inch closer to it.”

An important and still-unfolding Yellen relationship will be with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. The Fed and the Treasury have overlapping jurisdiction in several areas, and an assertive Fed will require Treasury cooperation. Although Lew enjoyed a lucrative shortterm job at Citigroup, courtesy of Rubin, before returning to government, he is not a career Wall Street man. His main expertise is budgetary. Lately, Lew has been talking like a bornagain regulator.

Lew startled admirers of Fed Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin when he recommended that the president name her to the No. 2 job at Treasury.

The greater surprise was that Raskin accepted the job. But allies of both maintain that Lew was serious about wanting to get someone expert in financial markets as his deputy to complement his own strengths and weaknesses. By naming a liberal like Raskin, Lew was also signaling a deepening commitment to financial reform. In a high-profile speech December 5 at the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he made sure to be introduced by regulatory ultra-hawk Sheila Bair, Lew went out of his way to call for tough regulatory reform including personal liability for bank CEOs. Raskin, presumably, has gotten commitments about the scope of her authority. She is close to both Yellen and to progressives on the Senate Banking Committee, which gives her independent political leverage. Traditionally, the deputy secretary at the Treasury is primarily in charge of operations, not policy. If Lew wants to, says one close observer, “it will be easy to box her in.” On the other hand, if Raskin’s appointment does signal a pro-regulation shift at Treasury, it bodes well for Yellen. A Treasury allied with a reformist Fed, rather than one more allied with Wall Street (as under former Secretary Tim Geithner), would be a potent combination.

YELLEN WILL NEED NOT ONLY to build a

working majority on the Fed’s board and its Open Market Committee but to control a powerful Fed bureaucracy that is traditionally protective of banks. “Historically, the Fed has shrouded bank supervision in secrecy,” Kelleher says. “They worried about bank runs, and the way to prevent runs is to keep the public

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in the dark while they fix things behind the scenes. That’s what they’ve always done, that’s how everybody got their job and got promoted. Now they have to shift from a closed-door supervisor who views banks as clients to a frontline regulator who views banks as potential threats. That is a cultural and bureaucratic change for which there is almost no precedent.”

An emblematic challenge for Yellen will be how to handle the Fed’s most influential senior staffer, general counsel Scott Alvarez, a career 32-year Fed veteran who manages to keep his name out of the press. He is well liked by the staff and respected and feared by Fed governors. Alvarez is also Wall Street–friendly and a back-channel ally of the big banks. In early 2013, Alvarez on behalf of the Fed signed off on a settlement of mortgage abuses widely considered by consumer groups to be a giveaway to the financial industry. He did not consult the Fed’s board of governors but insisted he could do so on his own authority.

A well-worn aphorism holds that there are two kinds of lawyers—those who tell you what you can do and those who tell you what you can’t do. At the Fed, if the chair asks the general counsel if a policy is legal and the counsel advises not, she is unlikely to go ahead, because of the risk that the legal staff will not back her up in litigation or congressional questioning. This gives Alvarez immense power, even more so in the post-collapse era, because the Dodd-Frank Act contains many ambiguities and many of the Fed’s interventions will necessarily be judgment calls.

One of the most important Dodd-Frank regulations is the Volcker Rule, which partly re-establishes the old Glass-Steagall wall between commercial and investment banking. Yellen and Lew have both supported a strong Volcker Rule. But in his confidential testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2010, Alvarez was blasé when asked about the impact of scrapping Glass-Steagall on the practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse. “I don’t think the repeal of GlassSteagall was the cause of the crisis,” Alvarez testified, “nor do I think repeal of the GlassSteagall Act actually exacerbated the crisis.”

This view puts him at odds with most regulators, most Fed governors, and with the mandate of the Dodd-Frank Act. Yellen supporters are

Fed general counsel Scott Alvarez at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in June 2012

divided on whether she should move to replace Alvarez with a general counsel more committed to reform, something she clearly has the power to do. Some say this would be an early test of her leadership. Others argue that Alvarez has so many allies and friends across the Fed senior bureaucracy that this is a fight she should not pick, certainly not at the outset of her term.

But the Alvarez case suggests just how astute and nimble Yellen will need to be if she is to transform the Fed. Alvarez is just one of a cadre of senior staff, both in Washington and at key regional Fed banks, that has historically been an appendage of the financial industry.

When Tarullo, with Bernanke’s consent, reassigned some staff to get more pro-regulation people into key positions, his critics were quick to say, “Dan doesn’t get along with staff”—code for Tarullo is shaking the place up.

DESPITE PASSAGE OF THE Dodd-Frank Act

in 2010, flagrant abuses keep unfolding. Banks are larger and more concentrated than ever.

The large Wall Street banks still rely on investment banking and insider trading of securities for most of their profits. Derivatives markets are only partly reformed, and the eight largest banks now control 92 percent of derivatives trades. Trillion-dollar banks treat even multi-

billion-dollar fines as costs of doing business.

There have been no criminal prosecutions of senior bank officials.

Newly revealed misdeeds have included the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) scandal, in which banks rigged markets on this key benchmark. LIBOR, the rate that underpins the $350 trillion derivatives market and other key bank rates, is supposed to be set by a free-­market bidding process. It’s now clear that major banks, including Barclays, UBS, JP­Morgan Chase, and Citi, ran LIBOR as if it were a price-fixing cartel for their own enrichment. Billions in fines have been paid, and criminal investigations are ongoing in several countries.

Then came the “London Whale” affair, in which JPMorgan Chase lost $6.2 billion in 2012 on a bet gone bad, putting at risk depositors’ money guaranteed by the FDIC. Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon initially dismissed the matter as a “tempest in a teapot.” Morgan has since paid a billion dollars in fines in the U.S. and the U.K., and criminal investigations continue.

The Justice Department has an open investigation of trade rigging in the largest market of all, the $5-trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market, which is a source of huge profits for the biggest banks. There have also been revelations of conflicts of interest in commodities

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

trades, in which large banks not only write derivatives contracts ostensibly to help clients hedge against price swings but buy and sell the underlying commodities (such as aluminum), creating opportunities to rig the banks’ own derivatives trades.

What these and other practices have in common is that the big banks, privy to inside information, capture windfall gains at the expense of the investing public. The profits drop directly to the banks’ bottom line. In the event that trading strategies go awry, the taxpayer is ultimately at risk. All this suggests that the banking system, five years after the crisis, is more about its own self-dealing than about efficiently allocating capital and credit to the real economy.

The Dodd-Frank Act doesn’t explicitly cover many of these new maneuvers, and much of the work of carrying out the act remains unfinished.

From the moment Dodd-Frank passed, lobbyists moved to weaken regulations, often outnumbering the officials charged with drafting the rules to carry out the law. Several hundred separate rulemaking actions, spread across six U.S. government agencies, with the Fed first among equals, are required to carry out DoddFrank. Of these actions, the most important are: The Volcker Rule. This ambiguous provision is intended to be a partial restoration of the

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Glass-Steagall wall. In principle, it prohibits “proprietary trading” (trading for the bank’s own account as opposed to executing orders for customers) by federally insured banks. The intent is to minimize speculative trading in credit derivatives and other securities by banks whose deposits are guaranteed by the government. But the banks have argued, disingenuously, that much of their trading is conducted for their customers or for legitimate hedging purposes. The final rule, issued December 10 after intense infighting, was stronger than its early drafts but depends on interpretation and enforcement by regulatory agencies. As Yellen noted at the meeting where the Fed governors formally voted to approve the rule, “Supervisors are going to bear a very important responsibility to make sure the rule really works as intended.” To the extent that loopholes remain, the Fed can address abuses through its banksupervisory powers, which give it broad authority to address threats to safety and soundness.

Capital Standards. The banks that nearly went under in 2008 turned out to be far too thinly capitalized. The international Basel III accords, recently completed, will raise capital mandates modestly. Yellen has said that she wants to raise capital standards beyond the Basel minimums, especially for the biggest

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Janet Yellen after the Fed Board of Governors on December 10, 2013, issued final regulations implementing the Volcker Rule

banks and perhaps to require more capital to the extent that big banks rely on speculative investment banking. This doesn’t go as far as many senators would like; several on both the left and right are pushing legislation for full restoration of Glass-Steagall as well as punitively high capital requirements for the largest banks. But Yellen could accomplish much of this reform through the Fed’s residual powers.

“The Fed,” says one insider, “has the power to look closely at a bank’s balance sheet and say, ‘We don’t like your mix of assets. Change it or reserve more capital against losses.’” Higher capital standards, argues Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute, accomplish several goals.

They make it much less likely that banks will fail; they make the end of “too big to fail” much more credible; simpler capital requirements move regulation away from “risk weighting” formulas that are too easy for banks to game; and they allow regulators to discriminate against the biggest banks to discourage concentration.

Too Big to Fail. The Dodd-Frank Act tries to prevent the need for future bailouts in two complementary ways. The Fed is given broad supervisory authority over bank holding companies, which include all of the largest banks, as well as over large non-banks deemed to present systemic risks if they should fail. The Fed is required to work with banks to devise “living will” plans in advance, so that a failing bank could be broken up without the need for taxpayer bailouts. This would be done through the normal bankruptcy process. As a fallback, the FDIC is given additional powers, to “resolve” (break up) failed banks under Dodd-Frank’s Title II. Those regulations have been written and have been praised by reformers, though there is concern that another systemic crisis would not be limited to a single bank and might overwhelm the FDIC ’s resources. The Fed’s living-will negotiations with the big banks are ongoing.

Derivatives Reform. The Dodd-Frank Act charged regulators with mandating that trades in derivatives be transparent and conducted either on exchanges or well-governed clearinghouses. Derivatives trading losses were heavily implicated in the 2008 collapse. The biggest banks have been on a massive lobbying campaign to water down as yet unfinalized derivatives rules. The point man for the government has been Gary Gensler, the chair

of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Gensler, once a senior trader for Goldman Sachs and a subcabinet official at the Treasury under Rubin and Summers, has become a surprisingly tough regulator. He has resisted the industry campaign to weaken derivatives regulation to the point where the big banks successfully lobbied the Obama administration not to reappoint him. The Obama Treasury unhelpfully exempted the huge, opaque, and lucrative market in foreign-exchange derivatives from Dodd-Frank entirely. As an illustration of the kind of games the big banks play, Gensler recently intervened to frustrate a ploy in which the big banks nominally book a trade as partly existing in the U.S. and partly “offshore,” even though both traders are physically in the U.S., to put the trade outside the regulatory framework. Gensler, in ruling that such a maneuver is a sham, declared, “A U.S. swap dealer on the 32nd floor of a New York building and a foreignbased swap dealer on the 31st floor of the same building, have to follow the same rules when arranging, negotiating, or executing a swap.” It remains to be seen how aggressive the CFTC will be under Gensler’s successor, Tim Massad, who once worked for Ralph Nader but who became a lawyer to bankers and helped run the bailout program at the Treasury.

A further source of tension in the Yellen era will be between a more assertive Fed and an SEC that has been notoriously lax at going after patterns of abuse. The two agencies overlap because the SEC has direct authority over broker-dealers, which are part of the bank conglomerates that the Fed regulates at the holding-company level. The Fed’s broad jurisdiction over safety and soundness issues trumps the jurisdiction of the SEC, but the Fed has to be willing to invoke it.

Dozens of other major areas of reform are far from complete. Some of the major ones include adequate regulation and oversight of credit-rating companies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, whose conflicts of interest were central to assigning triple-A ratings to sketchy mortgage-backed bonds; addressing risks in the huge money-market mutual industry, whose incipient crash in the fall of 2008 was prevented only because the Fed stepped in to guarantee all money-market mutual funds;

and the continued reliance of major segments of the financial industry on short-term (“repo”) loans that can dry up in the event of a panic.

Historically, regulators worried about runs by depositors. Federal deposit insurance solved that problem in 1933. But when the investment banks Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, the reason was that shortterm lenders, not depositors, suddenly aware of the high leverage and risk of failure of these firms, took their money and ran. No federal insurance can insure against that risk, nor should it. With most investment banking now the province of banking conglomerates that also do commercial banking, the only remedy is much closer supervision of their business

Yellen’s tenure may lack the high drama of the Bernanke years, but with the economy far from healed, the challenges are no less urgent. strategies, capital reserves, and the quality of their assets—or a full Glass-Steagall wall.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has long warned that the system’s regulatory premise has been that complex financial engineering is permitted unless expressly banned. Instead, she argues, products need to be prohibited unless explicitly permitted. This insight was behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as another sleeper provision of the DoddFrank Act, which created the Office of Financial Research, to identify threats in the form of incipient toxic products. But the Fed is a long way from prohibiting categories of financial products before they are offered. That shift will require the aggressive use of explicit rules and also of the Fed’s more elastic supervisory powers.

TO REVIEW THE CHALLENGES facing Janet

Yellen as she assumes the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve is to appreciate that her job is second in importance and difficulty only to the presidency. Yellen’s legacy will be judged on multiple dimensions. Did she succeed in stimulating a flattened economy without creating new bubbles, despite no help from the executive or legislative branches? Did she manage to taper bond purchases without aborting the recovery?

Did she build a working majority on a balky Fed open-market committee and gain control of an entrenched career staff? Did she convert the Fed from a central bank whose main constituency was other bankers to one committed to a reformed banking system? Did she produce greater harmony and resolve among other regulatory agencies? Did she devise even more inventive and unorthodox policy successes than her predecessor Ben Bernanke?

At the far fringes of debate within the Fed are measures to pump money directly into the economy beyond the current bond purchases.

Some critics have pointed out that the current cheap money, which goes initially to the banks, is not trickling out into productive lending but is underwriting mainly insider plays to increase bank profits. There have been discussions inside the Fed about more venturesome bondpurchase programs that would directly support small-business lending, student-loan refinancing, or public infrastructure. All of these would be even more heroic uses of the Fed’s latent power to overcome a stagnant economy.

Janet Yellen’s tenure may lack the high drama of the Bernanke years of acute crisis, when the financial system nearly collapsed. But with the economy far from healed, the challenges facing Yellen are no less urgent. A key challenge is preventive—to reshape a dysfunctional financial system into one that serves the economy and presents less risk to the system because it takes fewer risks onto itself. Though the Dodd-Frank Act gives the Fed new powers to rescue and restructure failed banks, the more important power is to assure that a new rescue on the scale of 2008 will never be necessary. The Yellen Fed, in many respects, is a more radical central bank than at any time in its hundred-year history. But to prevent the next collapse and to complete the work of repairing a warped financial system, it will need to become more radical still. 

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Dan Cantor at the WFP’s Brooklyn headquarters Photo by Timothy Devine

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Dan Cantor’s

MACHINE New York’s Working Families Party has built the most effective political operation the American left has seen in decades. Can it duplicate its success in other states?

B Y H A R OLD MEYER SON

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

E

lection night, New York City, November 5, 2013.

Mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, the candidate for both the Democratic and Working Families parties, is racking up a huge victory after running on a platform that calls for raising taxes on the rich and raising wages for workers. Shunning the usual Manhattanhotel bash, de Blasio has decided to celebrate in a Brooklyn armory, where his supporters have gathered to mark the end of the Michael Bloomberg era and, they hope, the birth of a national movement for a more egalitarian economy.

In one corner of the packed armory, Dan Cantor is talking with old friends and young activists who either work for him or used to— two groups that, combined, probably include about half the people in the hall. Cantor, who is 58 years old and of medium height, is wearing a black suit and tie but exhibits a touch of the willful schumpliness that comes naturally to certain New York Jewish males. His most prominent features are a white streak that bisects his wavy dark hair, and eyes that seem alert to everything going on around him.

The hall is filled with dealmakers and operators importuning and texting one another.

Cantor exhibits no such election-night mania, but his casual manner conceals an idealism, strategic acumen, and a record of political success that puts the dealmakers and operators to shame. Cantor is the national director of the Working Families Party (WFP), a social democratic political machine that in recent years has elected numerous progressives in New York and Connecticut. It has translated those victories into legislation that established paid sick days in New York City and Connecticut and abolished discriminatory drug laws and police “stop and frisk” practices in New York.

Founded 15 years ago by Cantor and a handful of like-minded union leaders and community organizers, the WFP has grown from a third party taking advantage of New York state’s “fusion” laws (which permit a candidate to run as the nominee of more than one party) into a full-service political operation, the likes of which are to be found nowhere else in progressive America—indeed, nowhere else in any wing of American politics.

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This election night marks a high point for the Working Families Party. Not only is the mayor-elect a longtime ally—the party managed his successful 2009 campaign for the post of public advocate—but both victorious candidates for the two other citywide offices, Letitia James and Scott Stringer, are WFP stalwarts as well. Ken Thompson, with the party’s backing, has ousted longtime Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes; his campaign focused on raising the age for incarceration in general-population prisons from 16 to 18.

More impressive still, 12 of the 13 candidates the WFP ran for city council have also swept to victory. In January, when the new council convenes, 20 of the city’s 51 councilmen and –women will be dues-paying members of the Progressive Caucus, which functions, roughly, as the party’s legislative bloc.

The night’s victories are not confined to New York City. Around the state, dozens of local candidates whom the party recruited, groomed, and ran for office are winning races for city council and county legislatures from Syracuse to Rosendale. In Connecticut, a slate of candidates in Bridgeport has won a hotly contested election to the school board. Across the Hudson River, a brigade of the party’s canvassers has helped turn out voters in support of a ballot measure that raised New Jersey’s minimum wage.

“We have a cornucopia of good ideas—debtfree college, paid sick days,” Cantor told me earlier that afternoon. “But nobody cares about your good ideas if you don’t have power.”

Starting from the most marginal position in American politics—that of a third party—the

WFP has amassed the power to turn those ideas

into law in New York and Connecticut. Recently, it persuaded the Oregon Legislature to enact a proposal that would drastically reduce student debt. Last month, the WFP began operations in the District of Columbia. In the next few months, it will move into Pennsylvania and Maryland and has plans for Illinois and Wisconsin later in 2014. With the national Democratic Party focusing more of its energy and attention on combating economic inequality, which has been the Working Families Party’s chief purpose since its formation, it’s a propitious time for the WFP to expand. The question is whether the model Cantor and company have created can succeed in other states.

“Is the de Blasio moment, the Elizabeth Warren moment, a real transition to a new period?” Cantor asks a couple of weeks after de Blasio’s election. “Not unless we make them that. This is not a short-term project. It’s taken the left a long time to get as weak as it is.”

A SMALL-BUSINESS MAN “By conviction, I’m of the left,” Cantor says. “By personality, I’m a moderate. I don’t like crowds or mobs.” He is seated behind a beat-up wooden desk in an office cluttered by the bicycle he rides to and from work and boxes overflowing with binders and newspaper clippings.

The headquarters of the Working Families Party sprawls across the third floor of a dingy office building in downtown Brooklyn. Cantor’s own office looks out over Flatbush Avenue, from which the steady honking of gridlocked cars punctuates his conversation. His office exits onto a vast, cubicled chamber where dozens of predominantly young staffers are calling potential donors, mapping precinct walks, writing press releases. In a separate room, canvassers have assembled for their daily orientation. These briefings are anything but pro forma. Jessica Carrano, who is the WFP ’s political director for Long Island, recalls the issues orientations that canvassers received when she was running the field campaign for a city council candidate in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood: “We were talking to highly educated voters. Everyone had to know everything at every door.”

Young progressives frequently turn to canvassing as their first job out of college and just

as frequently quit when the jobs prove to be both exhausting and uninteresting. Not so at the WFP. As the first organization (and still one of the few) to give its canvassers health insurance, the WFP has long recruited the canvassing crème de la crème and provided them with a postgraduate education in the theory and practice of progressive politics. The party places many of them in positions of responsibility on election campaigns or at allied organizations, and a number have been hired on as WFP staffers.

The party employs a full-time staff of 40 in New York, not counting its paid canvassers, who range in number from 35 in a non-election year to 500 as Election Day approaches (augmented by thousands of volunteers who turn out for party candidates in the final weekends of a campaign). The party’s permanent noncanvassing staff is larger by far than that of any other state’s Democratic Party (California’s, for example, employs 19). Outside of New York, the WFP employs about a half-dozen.

Ideologically, the party is akin to the New York third parties—the American Labor Party and the Liberal Party—established in the 1930s and 1940s by the social democratic leaders of the clothing and garment unions who backed Franklin Roosevelt but didn’t want to vote for him on the line of the Tammany-dominated Democratic Party. “We’re garden varieties of social democrats, trying to use the state to make people’s lives a little less hard,” Cantor says. “The crisis of social democracy is real. If the 20th century was the century of the working class, it’s not clear yet what the 21st century will be.

We are all Keynesians, but we need to be more than Keynesians. Our answer is to win massive investment in public goods, so you don’t have to be rich to have a decent life. Add in the climate crisis, and this grows still more complex.”

If the Working Families Party is the ideological heir to the American Labor Party, its status as a permanent electoral army makes it, however improbably, the operational heir to such classic Democratic machines as Tammany Hall (to be sure, a cleaned-up Tammany: no patronage, no kickbacks, no rigged elections).

On any given day, the WFP ’s tasks include cultivating progressive groups willing to join and fund the organization; convening meetings with its member groups to decide on strategies,

causes, and candidates; undertaking research; finding and training candidates; and running campaigns. Cantor worked on Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential bids and concluded that individual campaigns, no matter how groundbreaking, were too ephemeral to alter fundamental power relations. “I didn’t believe,” he says, “that the excitement of a presidential campaign was transferrable to the slow grind of building the kind of institutional trust and relations you need to contest for power.”

Maintaining a sizable and expert staff (“these are really talented people, not schleppers,” Cantor says) takes money. The WFP raised and spent $7.8 million in 2013. Most of the money came from foundations, unions, and small donors.

Only $600,000 came from large individual contributors. Cantor is always cognizant of the need to make payroll. “A big part of my job is being a small-business man,” he says. “I’m totally like my father, worrying about keeping the

which Cantor devoured. “I was amazed,” he says. “I remember reading a piece on the Vietnam War and militarism and realizing I basically knew nothing.”

Bob Master, the political director of the northeastern region of the Communications Workers of America and perhaps Cantor’s closest political compatriot, has been a friend since they both attended General Douglas MacArthur High School, where Cantor was elected student-body president and Master vice president. Cantor was “funny and ebullient,” Master says, “but only somewhat political.” (Friends say he’s still funny, recounting the song parodies he’s written for birthdays and kindred occasions. For one soirée saluting Master, Cantor wrote and sang a lyric to the tune of Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls.” For Loesser’s opening line—“When you see a guy/Reach for stars in the sky”—Cantor substituted, “When you see a Jew/Reading Monthly Review.”)

The WFP trains 1,000 prospective candidates in off years and selects the 75 most promising to run for local office. Once elected, they’re positioned to move up to the legislature. lights on at his store. I have the same fears he had, all the time. But the hunt for money is part of politics. I don’t mind it.” Colleagues describe Cantor as an unrelenting fundraiser. “He’s really had to push a lot of people,” says Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who represents Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “It’s not as if the party gets multimillion-dollar contributions.”

THE YOUNG ACTIVIST Cantor was born and raised in Levittown on Long Island, the youngest of three children.

His father owned and ran an auto-parts store.

“He hated his job, but it provided for his family,” Cantor says. His mother was a librarian who was active in civic affairs. Cantor describes his parents as liberals “but not of the left.”

When Cantor was a teenager, his uncle gave the family a gift subscription to The Progressive, the monthly magazine started in 1909

by Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin,

Cantor attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut but was not a happy student. “I was too young,” he says. In the middle of his sophomore year, he took time off to work on an Israeli kibbutz. “I essentially took the gap year I should have taken before college,” he says.

“I milked 400 cows twice a day. I very much liked it. It was good to be seen as competent at something new.”

Back at Wesleyan, Cantor read a piece in The Progressive by the influential left writer Andrew Kopkind, who made the case that community organizing was an appropriate place for a young leftist to get started. “I didn’t really know what community organizing was,” Cantor says, “but it sounded cool.” After graduation in 1977, Cantor moved south to work for ACORN, a group founded by New Leftists seeking to mobilize the rural and urban poor.

Cantor admired the writings of radical sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven,

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

who argued that the power of the poor was the power to disrupt, which would cause the state to respond with greater social provision.

Cantor spent a year in Stuttgart, Arkansas, building an organization of whites and blacks that sought to pressure the local government to pave more roads. “I can’t say I accomplished a lot,” Cantor says, “but I got a real education.” For the next five years, Cantor worked for ACORN in St. Louis and then Detroit, where he organized a union of fast-food workers that won a representation election at a McDonald’s. “Only young people would have deigned to try this,” he says. “It got a lot of buzz until it crashed.”

In 1983, Cantor left ACORN for the National Labor Committee on Central America, where he mobilized union opposition to the AFLCIO’s support for the Reagan administration’s efforts to destabilize the leftist government of Nicaragua and buttress the military regime in

Veatch Foundation, which funded a range of liberal organizations. Cantor remembers the time as one in which “the American left was made up of people desperately sending fundraising appeals to each other.” In 1989, Cantor married Laura Markham, the co-founder and -owner of the alternative weekly Detroit Metro Times. Markham and Cantor took their honeymoon in Europe, which coincided with several Green Party victories in Germany.

Markham asked Cantor why there were no successful third parties in America. Cantor answered that U.S. election rules didn’t permit third parties to get anywhere. Then he thought about that some more.

THE NEW PARTY When Cantor returned from Europe, the New York mayoral election was under way. Progressives were furious that the no-longer-liberal Liberal Party had endorsed Republican Rudy

Though the WFP is the ideological heir to New York’s labor-liberal third parties, its staff and permanent canvass make it the operational heir (a squeaky-clean one) to Tammany Hall.

El Salvador. A number of unions supported the committee’s work, but they were opposed by the hard-liners who dominated the AFL-CIO. Like many who came out of the 1960s left, Cantor came to realize that community organizing and movement building were both indispensable and insufficient to win lasting change. He still identifies with those movements, but his distinctive aptitude has been to find ways in which the electoral process can advance progressive goals. “I feel we’re in a long line of people going back to the abolitionists: the populists, the suffragists, the labor activists, the civil-rights workers,” he says. “These were all extra-parliamentary movements. We strive to be like them, and we recognize we have to contest for these values through the state, through elections. That’s what most people think politics is. That’s our role.”

At the end of the 1980s, Cantor took a job as a program officer at the Long Island–based

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Giuliani. “There was a lot of dismay with the Liberals,” Cantor says. “My old friend Bob Master, who was at the Communications Workers, floated the idea of taking over the party. Then he forgot it. I didn’t.”

Cantor got in touch with Joel Rogers, a professor of law and political science at the University of Wisconsin who’d done academic work on third parties. “Danny called me out of the blue,” Rogers says. He flew to New York to join Cantor in discussions with various liberal and union heavyweights about establishing a substitute for the Liberal Party. The heavyweights soon lost interest, but Cantor remained enthusiastic. “I was young enough and stupid enough to try something,” he says.

Many within the left—from socialist Michael Harrington to onetime Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden—had argued since the 1970s that given the absence of a parliamentary system or proportional representation

voting, progressives had no plausible alternative to going into the Democratic Party and using primary elections to move it to the left. By the time Cantor and Rogers got together, most 1960s leftists still active in politics had followed Harrington and Hayden’s advice.

But by the time Cantor and Rogers got together, the Democratic Party was moving in a more conservative direction, particularly on economic issues. Center-right groups, like the Democratic Leadership Council, urged Democrats to cast a cold eye on the welfare state and steer clear of the tax increases that could make that welfare state more secure. Some on the left, on the labor left particularly, demanded that liberals break with the Democrats and start something new. Because the only vehicle for defeating an invigorated Republican Party shifting rightward under the influence of Ronald Reagan, however, was the Democratic Party, that break never came. Trapped within a Democratic Party that was also shifting rightward, the left stewed in discontent.

In 1990, Rogers and Cantor came up with an idea they believed could revive the left while uniting both its in-the-party and out-of-theparty camps. They co-authored and circulated a paper titled “Party Time,” which laid out their strategic vision. Beginning by noting that there were “an almost bewildering number of progressive groups of one stripe or another out there doing things,” they observed that those efforts had amounted to little. “We propose,” they wrote, “a cross between the ‘party within the party’ strategy favored by some Democratic Party activists and the ‘plague on both your houses’ stance adopted by some critics of both major parties.” What was needed was a new party, but one that didn’t take votes away from Democrats and thereby elect Republicans.

Fusion, Cantor and Rogers argued, permitted just such an inside-outside hybrid. By winning explicitly progressive votes for Democrats on their new party’s ballot line, they could pressure Democratic elected officials to move left.

The problem was only six states in addition to New York permitted fusion voting, so Cantor and Rogers urged their fellow progressives to expand the number of states where it was legal.

When they’d finished writing the paper, Cantor says, “I did one thing that was really clever.

I wrote, ‘Do not circulate without permission’

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Recently elected New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Public Advocate Letitia James have long and deep connections to the Working Families Party.

on the front page, which guaranteed that people would pass it around.” Community organizers generally liked the proposal, he says, “but no one from labor did. They still thought they controlled the Democratic Party.” Cantor continued to mail out the paper, and when he’d received funding commitments totaling $300,000, he and Rogers founded the “New Party,” for which Cantor, leaving his post at Veatch, became executive director.

The party’s success hinged on challenging the constitutionality of the state laws banning fusion voting. For the next seven years, the New Party ran hundreds of left-leaning candidates for nonpartisan municipal offices, while laying the groundwork for the court challenge.

“We worked out a whole strategy in detail,” Rogers says. “We were positioning local elected officials for future New Party candidacies as we were moving to the Supreme Court for

our inevitable victory.” Rogers and Cantor’s optimism was bolstered when the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously for them in their suit against Minnesota. The case reached the Supreme Court in the spring of 1997. Although the Constitution establishes no special protections for the two-party system, the justices ruled 6-3 that states could bar fusion voting.

“That was the end of the New Party,” Rogers says. But Cantor believed fusion could still enable the left to build electoral power in the states that allowed it—at minimum, in New York.

FUSION IN ONE STATE Initially, Cantor says, the court’s decision left him dispirited. He was living in Ann Arbor, where he and his family had moved in 1996 when his wife had to rescue the floundering Detroit Metro Times. In New York, Governor

George Pataki, a Republican, looked to be cruising to re-election in 1998, much to the dismay of liberal union and community group leaders. Cantor encouraged Master and Jon Kest, the New York–based executive director of ACORN, to think about establishing a party that would cross-endorse Pataki’s Democratic opponent, whoever that might turn out to be.

Under New York law, if a gubernatorial candidate receives at least 50,000 votes on a party’s line, that party is ensured a place on future state ballots, as long as its nominees for governor continue to reach that threshold.

If this new venture succeeded, progressives would secure an electoral platform in New York politics, at a moment when neither the Democrats nor the Liberals had much to offer them. “It won’t fucking work,” Master recalls thinking, “but we’ll try it.”

Spending his weekdays in New York and

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have grievances,” he says. “We want to govern.”

ACORN precinct walkers explained to thousands of voters why it was important to vote for the Democrat on the Working Families line— no simple chore on someone’s doorstep—and an editorial in The Nation urged its New York readers to vote Working Families. On election night, though, it looked as if the party had come up short, with Vallone winning just 45,000 votes in the WFP ’s column.

Gathered in a pizza joint as the votes came in, Lewis recalls, “Danny and Bob and Jon were seated in a booth, weeping. Grown men,

Gathered around the party’s table, left to right: Nelini Stamp, WFP youth director; Cantor; Jonathan Westin, New York Communities for Change organizing director; Letitia James; Hector Figueroa, president, SEIU Local 32BJ

which they named—after much debate—the Working Families Party.

New York City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee the WFP cross-endorsed, was hardly a man of the liberal left. The decision drew considerable and predictable criticism from some progressives, but it set the course the party was to take in future years: Making an immediate pragmatic compromise when it enabled the left to make a long-term strategic advance.

Cantor has always understood that purity is not the path to power. “We don’t just want to

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weeping. Danny was the most crushed. His whole body crumbled. I said, ‘You punk-ass motherfuckers, stop crying and go out and check the voting machines!’” The trio heeded Lewis’s counsel. “We went to these dusty warehouses and oversaw recounts,” Cantor says. “‘That’s three for us. No, that’s 30!’” The party picked up 6,000 votes on the recanvass, ending up with 51,325.

The WFP ’s place on the ballot assured, Cantor officially became executive director, and the party began to expand. Some of New York’s giant private-sector unions affiliated,

including locals 32BJ (janitors, doormen, and security guards) and 1199 (hospital workers) of the Service Employees International Union.

Later, the Teamsters, the New York Hotel Trades Council, and Make the Road New York, which canvasses and provides social services in Latino communities, joined as well.

Cantor took pains to devise a structure and bylaws that made groups large and small feel they had fair representation in the party’s decision-­making. Initially, the party had sought to build neighborhood clubs, but the effort required so much staff time that it was abandoned. Instead, the party became a hybrid: a mix of county organizations (which individuals could join), unions, and community groups. The party set a maximum number of votes that an affiliate could cast in party deliberations, so an organization like 1199, with more than 200,000 New York members, couldn’t dominate the decision-making process. It levied dues for unions at a higher per capita rate than those for (invariably poorer) community groups. Meeting steadily over the years, the affiliates acquired a better understanding of one another’s concerns and their combined potential, which Cantor sees as critical in building an effective political coalition.

“People have to develop trust with one another,” he says, “so that even if we don’t win every time, they still won’t go away.”

Following the 1998 election, the party hired Bill Lipton as its organizing director. A native of upstate New York, Lipton attended Columbia University, where he studied under Eric Foner, the great historian of Reconstruction.

After graduation, he worked as a tenant organizer before moving on to ACORN and then the New Party. At the WFP, Lipton assembled the canvass operation and built a reputation as a stellar campaign manager. “Where Danny is a visionary, always thinking about how to win and export big ideas,” says one leading New York politico, “Bill is an unbelievable ground tactician.”

In 1999, Cantor’s wife, Laura Markham, sold the Detroit Metro Times, and the couple, with their two children, returned to New York. (Markham has since become a clinical psychologist and a noted parenting authority.

Her website, AhaParenting.com, Cantor says, has “a lot more hits than the party’s.”) In 2001,

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his weekends in Ann Arbor, Cantor, with Kest and Master, convened a series of meetings to persuade New York liberals to get on board.

“These three white boys had a fever dream of fusion,” says Bertha Lewis, then a leader of ACORN. “It was Danny who broke it down about why we needed a party to go to, why we needed some place where we could show our vote.” In time, Cantor convinced the leaders of the New York regions of the United Auto Workers and the community organization Citizens Action to join the Communications Workers and ACORN in backing the venture,

the WFP backed the mayoral bid of Democrat Mark Green, who signaled his awareness of the party’s electoral proficiency by making Lipton his field director in Queens. Confronted with the aftermath of September 11 and Michael Bloomberg’s limitless campaign spending, Green lost. In 2003, the party deviated from its usual practice and ran community activist Letitia James only on the WFP line against an unqualified Democratic nominee for a Brooklyn City Council seat. James won with 72 percent of the vote, becoming the first strictly third-party candidate elected to the council in nearly 50 years.

The campaign that made the WFP ’s reputation in New York state was its 2004 effort to elect a little-known lawyer named David Soares as Albany’s district attorney. Cantor conceived the campaign as a way to dismantle the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, which for decades had wreaked havoc in minority communities by imposing lengthy prison sentences on people apprehended with small amounts of drugs. Civil-rights groups had tried and failed repeatedly to get the law reformed or repealed. “Dan came up with the notion,” Master says, “that if we could win a D.A. race in which the candidate says the Rockefeller drug laws are terrible policy, it could break the legislative gridlock holding up their modification or repeal.”

In 2003, Cantor asked WFP interns to see which counties had district attorney’s races the following year. He concluded that the most tempting target—though with the steepest odds against success—was Albany, the state capital. The district attorney there, Paul Clyne, was seeking re-election with the backing of the city’s venerable Democratic machine. Cantor cold-called an Albany legal-aid attorney and asked if he’d like to run. The attorney declined but suggested Cantor call David Soares, an assistant district attorney who was promoting community policing and youth programs.

At first glance, Soares was not a promising candidate. His name had appeared in the local paper just twice in the preceding four years.

He was black in a county that was 95 percent white. And he had never heard of the Working Families Party. But he agreed to meet with Cantor, Lipton, and Karen Scharff, the head of Citizens Action in New York, which was the

biggest community-organizing group in the Albany area.

“I didn’t understand their strategy initially,” Soares says. “They placed huge emphasis on educating the electorate on reforming the Rockefeller drug laws. Most people don’t understand how a D.A.’s race could be a force for change, but the party did a great job on messaging.” Cantor raised money from sentencing-­reform advocates, Scharff turned out precinct walkers, and Lipton ran the campaign in perpetual overdrive. “After a day of knocking on doors in the rain, 30 volunteers and I come back to the campaign headquarters, wet and exhausted,” Soares says. “It’s nine o’clock. Lipton gets up on a desk to thank everybody and gets them to stuff envelopes for another two hours.”

Soares defeated Clyne by 25 percentage points. Six weeks later, the legislature pared back the Rockefeller laws, and when the Demo-

cutbacks in social services that other states enacted in the depths of the Great Recession.

AND ONE CITY In 2007, party organizer Emma Wolfe began to vet and recruit candidates for the New York City Council races two years hence. The unions and community organizations, meeting under the party’s auspices, settled on nine council candidates for which the WFP would campaign. The party referred to the gatherings as its “table.” Political directors of the party’s main affiliates convene regularly—weekly in election season—with WFP leaders to discuss, debate, decide on, and plan campaigns. “There’s not a city in the United States, and I’ve worked in 17 of them, with a table as sophisticated and effective as this,” says a veteran political consultant.

One of the candidates who received the party’s support in 2009 was Brad Lander, an affordable-housing advocate who lived in Park

Dan Cantor has always understood that purity is not the path to power for the American left. “We don’t just want to have grievances—we want to govern.,” he says. crats captured the state senate four years after that, the laws were repealed altogether.

Following Soares’s victory, the party’s newly won reputation as the state’s most effective campaign organization convinced many Democratic elected officials that they needed the WFP ’s endorsement and its operatives to run and staff their campaigns. Members of New York’s Democratic congressional delegation funded the WFP ’s successful efforts to flip historically Republican upstate districts in the 2006 and 2008 elections. At the insistence of Governor Eliot Spitzer, the state Democratic Party engaged the WFP to manage all the state senate races in swing districts in 2008.

The WFP–backed candidates won, putting the senate in Democratic hands for the first time since 1964. The consequence was immediate.

When the new legislature convened, it raised $4 billion in new taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers, enabling the state to avoid the huge

Slope. “I never would have been interested in running but for the party,” Lander says. “The progressive table that Working Families had created made it possible to wage campaigns both inside the government and outside for causes I cared about.” Lander and seven other WFP–recruited candidates won in 2009. The party then helped them set up their offices, hire chiefs-of-staff, and master the city’s arcane budgets. “New members elected only on the Democratic line are often dependent on the county Democratic bosses for these things,” says one union leader who attends the WFP’s weekly table. “The party does it better.”

At Lander’s suggestion, the incoming members formed the Progressive Caucus on the council and announced they were promoting three pieces of legislation: mandating paid sick days for employees; extending the living-wage ordinance to more workers on projects that received city funding; and enacting an inclusionary

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

zoning ordinance that would require developers of luxury apartments to build affordable housing as well. “For three years we had nothing to show for it,” Lander says. “People scoffed at the caucus. They thought it was silly. But the momentum for these issues grew.”

Led by Lipton, the WFP waged a media and canvassing campaign on behalf of paid sick days. The party and the caucus tried to persuade Council Speaker Christine Quinn to bring the measure to a vote six times, but she refused. The seventh effort—a discharge petition signed by a majority of council members— succeeded. With Quinn planning to run for mayor and fearing she had placed herself on the wrong side of an issue city voters thought was a moral necessity, she permitted a vote. The measure passed over Mayor Bloomberg’s veto.

As early as 2010, the party began looking at potential candidates for the 2013 city council races, eventually choosing and train-

to file any charges, but it took three years and nearly a million dollars in legal fees before the party was absolved. (The Republican district attorney of Staten Island still has an ongoing grand-jury investigation of the allegations.)

Conservative policy analysts contend that the party’s emphasis on raising wages will hurt small businesses without engendering any of the higher-skilled jobs the city needs to rebuild its middle class. “I don’t think Cantor knows much about how to revive the New York economy,” says the urban historian Fred Siegel. By advancing an agenda that helps city unions, Siegel says, the party will raise the cost of living and make New York increasingly unaffordable for the very workers the WFP claims to be helping.

Cantor counters that it’s the market that has rendered the city unaffordable. He singles out the real-estate market, where an infusion of the super-rich has sent building costs, housing prices, and rents soaring. Fixing the New York

The party and MoveOn.org are considering a closer collaboration. The combined forces of labor and the netroots, Cantor believes, can prevail in most any Democratic primary. ing candidates for 13 seats. The candidates waged their campaigns on the party’s signature issues: eliminating the police practice of targeting young minority men for “stop and frisk,” and increasing wages for fast-food workers. Some faced opponents backed by the city’s real-estate lobby, fearful that the new council and mayor might enact an inclusionary zoning ordinance. In all, the city’s real-estate industry spent $7 million on the council races, with virtually nothing to show for their effort. Twelve of the WFP ’s thirteen candidates won.

It was not the first time the party had come under establishment attack. Following the WFP’s victories in the 2009 city elections, the Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post ran more than 100 stories alleging that a company the party had created to provide campaign services gave illegal discounts to the candidates it favored.

Investigations by the U.S. attorney’s office and the state’s Election Commission found no basis

56 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2014

economy requires zoning policies that will create housing that’s within the reach of ordinary citizens. More broadly, he argues that what’s needed is “a much greater provision of public goods”: early childhood education, better schools, affordable college, parks and libraries in poor neighborhoods. Cantor’s vision hews closely to that of the city’s last great social democratic mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, and it is one, he hopes, de Blasio and the new city council will make real.

PIPELINE Even with a new council and mayor, New York City lacks the power to enact many of these changes. Greater public provision requires more tax revenues, and taxation is the prerogative of state government. New York may be a heavily Democratic state, but decades of legislative gerrymandering have often saddled it with a Republican senate

that has killed countless progressive reforms.

Moving New York state left, says one of the party’s allies, “is a bigger problem than moving the city. Unlike the city council, the state legislature has no term limits. Unlike the city, the state has no public financing for its elections.”

The absence of term limits for the legislature means that the transformation of state government must proceed slowly. To that end, the party has inaugurated what it calls the “Candidate Pipeline Project” to have credible aspirants ready when legislative seats come open. As town council and school board members are often the elected officials who advance to the state assembly and senate, the Pipeline focuses on running candidates for local offices. “We train 1,000 prospective candidates across the state in the off years,” Lipton says, “then we home in on the 75 most promising. We aim to send six to eight new progressives to the legislature in every election.

If we succeed, within eight years the legislature will be divided between progressives and Democrats, not Democrats and Republicans.”

The depth of the party’s commitment to the project becomes evident in a meeting of 55 of the party’s regional political directors and campaign workers who convene a few days after the November elections. Dressed in a green shirt that hangs outside his baggy jeans, WFP organizing director Mike Boland reviews the party’s campaigns across the state. While the Republicans had a good day, he begins, the candidates whom the Working Families Party prioritized won most of their races. The Hudson Valley regional coordinator reports on the campaign for a professor active in environmental causes who won a town council seat and her prospects for taking a state senate seat. The Long Island coordinator details the victory of a CWA activist in a Long Beach City Council contest. The party considers him a strong candidate with a bright future: Long Beach’s current state assemblyman is in his mid-eighties.

On Election Day, the party turned out 49 precinct walkers for him, although Long Beach has just 43 precincts.

“Experts will tell you this district is winnable, and that one isn’t,” Boland tells me after the meeting. “But facts on the ground change.

So instead of recruiting a candidate for where the action is this year, we find progressive activists everywhere and start running them

The Working Families Party has recruited the canvassing crème de la crème and provided them with a postgraduate education in the theory and practice of politics.

timothy devine

for local office. We see if they’re willing to work hard and build a good record in office. We can see if the person has real political potential.”

In conjunction with its canvass operation and its weekly table, the Pipeline is what sets the Working Families Party apart from almost any other political organization, left or right.

“It’s obvious,” Master says of the Pipeline, “but who else does it?”

The scope of the party’s New York activities has grown to the point where Cantor no longer can keep track of it all. On Election Day, Lipton mentioned to him that they had a slate of council candidates running in Plattsburgh, by the Canadian border. “We do?” Cantor asked.

OUT OF STATE How much of what the Working Families Party has accomplished in New York can be transferred to other states that don’t have fusion

voting? Quite a lot, Cantor says. It turns out that fusion—the sine qua non of his and Joel Rogers’s original manifesto—isn’t essential to building an electoral left after all. “The Tea Party proved we were wrong,” Cantor says.

“They yanked the Republican Party to the right without being a separate party. We realized that most of our power in New York comes from our work in Democratic primaries. We don’t have to be on the ballot.”

What the WFP has built in New York, in fact, is a left party within the Democratic Party—a coalition of unions and community groups that has come together and decided to fund and conduct joint electoral and issue campaigns.

Indeed, as the institutional Democratic Party has atrophied, the WFP looks less like a party within the Democratic Party than a party that has assumed the functions of the Democratic Party, only with progressive politics.

Buoyed by its own success and the rise of economic populism, the party is now expanding its operations into other states. “If you include the New Party, it took us 23 years to get operations in New York, Connecticut, and Oregon,” Cantor says. “In year 24, all of a sudden, we could have operations in seven states.”

In June, Cantor became the party’s national director, while Lipton succeeded him as director of the New York WFP. “I pulled away from New York work to go evangelizing across the country,” Cantor says, “persuading labor, environmentalists, and others to invest time and money in us.”

Just how much labor can invest is much on Cantor’s mind these days. “Our biggest problem is that the labor movement is too weak,” he says. In every state where the Working Families Party is active or becoming active, the progressive wing of the labor movement is

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57

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central to all the WFP ’s work. Cantor worries that the ongoing assaults on American unions will diminish them to the point where they can no longer provide the financial and human resources the party needs to survive.

While doing all they can to bolster unions’ strength, Cantor and other WFP leaders are looking to new sources of support. They’ve cultivated a close relationship with MoveOn. org, not only because of the groups’ ideological affinities but also because MoveOn’s members can sway elections and fund campaigns.

“As labor declines, the netroots become more important,” Cantor says. In 2010, the MoveOn PAC joined with the Oregon Working Families Party to unseat the state’s most conservative Democratic legislator, and Cantor hopes that can be a portent of partnerships to come.

“Add the netroots to labor, and you have more than you need to win any Democratic primary,” he says. “In blue states, progressives could govern.”

Ilya Sheyman, the director of the MoveOn. org political action committee, sounds favorably disposed to such an alliance. “We’re not a formal affiliate,” he says, “but we’re now talking about affiliating in several states.”

Cantor also admires MoveOn’s success in online fundraising. “We have 4,500 sustaining members who pay dues to us every month,” he says. “Can we turn that into 45,000? MoveOn has cracked the code on this.”

The WFP’s most successful online campaign has been the one it has waged against fracking in New York state. “Our e-mail list grew more from that one issue than anything else,” Cantor says. Party leaders have long sought to have the WFP focus as much on environmental concerns as on economic. Indeed, Cantor and Rogers’s “Party Time” manifesto called for their new party to have a “red/green coloration.” In New York, the party’s campaign against fracking played a role in convincing Governor Andrew Cuomo to declare a moratorium on the practice until further studies are conducted.

But just as an alliance with MoveOn, an expansion of the party’s digital presence, and an increased emphasis on environmental causes all promise to enlarge the party’s base, they also threaten to divide it. Workingand middle-class beliefs on issues like fracking are not always in accord. The weekend

before Thanksgiving, the WFP convened its initial event in Pennsylvania—a town hall at Philadelphia’s Temple University, attended by 750 members of the state’s largest progressive unions and community organizations and by five of the state’s leading Democratic candidates for governor in next year’s election. At one point, demonstrators briefly interrupted the proceedings by parading onstage with an anti-fracking banner.

The encounter wasn’t hostile, but they knew they had opponents in the hall. In Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican, has authorized a major expansion of fracking in the state’s Marcellus Shale fields while imposing few regulations and taxes on the extractors. What the Working Families coalition was demanding—which was echoed by the five gubernatorial candidates—was not an end to fracking. Rather, it called for tighter regulation and higher taxes on the industry

supports an ongoing campaign operation that elects liberals to office and promotes liberal causes, the party should be able to have success in other states—but by no means all of them. In red states, and most purple ones, unions are too weak, if not altogether absent, to support the creation of such a force. In a blue state, however, where progressive unions still have resources, a Working Families Party could become a social democratic force.

The WFP ’s growth could also forge new opportunities for working-class advances at a time when traditional collective bargaining has all but disappeared from the economic landscape. The paid sick days that the party has won and the minimum-wage hikes that are being enacted point to a shift in the way workers are seeking to promote their interests. The new arena for collective bargaining, imperfect though it be, is legislative. “Now more than ever, politics is in command, because we can no

At a time when unions have all but vanished, the party is winning higher minimum wages and paid sick days. It has become a de facto bargaining agent for American workers. to increase funding for the state’s strapped social services and schools.

This rift between the party’s different constituencies is hardly peculiar to the WFP. It looms over all of American liberalism. But, as Cantor acknowledges, the division is something that the party will have to grapple with in coming years as it expands. The WFP does not have the luxury of focusing solely on bread-and-butter issues. Cantor particularly wants to ensure that the party continues to take on racially discriminatory public policies, as it did in its campaign against the Rockefeller drug laws and “stop and frisk.”

“We will fail if the DNA of this work does not fully recognize the centrality of race and the enduring effects of America’s ‘original sin’ and its newer mutations,” he wrote in an essay he co-authored last year.

If the essence of the Working Families Party project is to put together a coalition that

longer solve our problems one workplace or one company at a time,” Cantor says. In this new world, the WFP becomes a bargaining agent for the vast majority of workers who do not have and are not likely to get union representation.

Still, how much an organization like the WFP can do ultimately depends on conditions beyond its control. “You don’t organize movements,” Cantor says. “You build organizations, and if movements emerge, you may catch their energy and grow. Occupy Wall Street moved the ball farther in three months than a lot of us did in three decades. But the Tea Party understood that you disrupt and then you electoralize. We will fail if there aren’t strong community and environmental and youth movements in America. But they will fail if they can’t figure out how their values and issues become part of the legislative and electoral process. That’s where a group like the Working Families Party has a role to play.” 

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

STARTING SMART Business leaders support it. Republican governors back it. The public is all for it.

Will the United States finally invest in the undeniable benefits of early education?

BY S H A RO N L E R N E R ART BY JASON SCHNEIDER

This special report was made possible through the generous support of the Irving Harris Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Pritzker Children’s Initiative. The views expressed in these articles are not necessarily those of the funders.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation generously supported the promotion and distribution of this special report.

60 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2014

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

A Second Chance for the Youngest Americans The case for universal pre-K

I

magine: What if the country could agree on a way to address the huge unmet needs of young children? What if our solution marked a shift in national priorities, directing substantial money toward high-quality child care and early learning?

And what if—and here’s the part that strains credulity—Congress approved such a plan?

Well, it already happened. In 1971, back when All in the Family was hitting the airwaves and Muhammad Ali was battling charges of draft dodging, the House and the Senate passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act. Although it was named for its child-care component, the legislation would have created a nationwide system for providing education to young children and was the product of years of debate and planning among childdevelopment experts, women’s rights groups, and the business community. But President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, giving a speech (written by Patrick Buchanan) that warned about the dangers that “communal child-­ rearing” posed to the traditional family. His goal, he explained, was to “enhance rather than diminish both parental authority and parental involvement with children.”

Until recently, the federal government has made no effort to address young children’s needs that rivals the breadth and ambition of the 1971 legislation. Though incremental improvements over the intervening decades

62 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2014

have been made, resources for young children have remained scarce. Nationally, less than 1 percent of public investments in education and development are spent on children ages four and younger, which, internationally, makes us an outlier. The U.S. ranks 24th of all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries in terms of per-child spending on early childhood education.

Meanwhile, the challenges children face have increased. Back when the Comprehensive Child Development Act was drafted, fewer than half of American mothers were in the workforce. Today, about 70 percent are, meaning that, in most families, there’s no parent home to nurture and teach young children.

Many of these kids wind up in child care that is inadequate, in large part because the workers are underpaid. The average wage for a childcare worker is $9.28 an hour, according to the most recent Department of Labor numbers, less than what manicurists and animal-care workers earn. More children than in 1971 are now identified as speaking a language other than English or having developmental delays upon entering school.

Perhaps the biggest change affecting young children since 1971 is the widening gulf between rich and poor. Economic inequality is most often defined in terms of adults—their income, diminished marriage prospects, professional status, and the like. But kids feel inequality

acutely. While wealthy children have access to good care if their parents work, poor children are far more likely to be left in unregulated environments or in child-care centers, most of which are either just “fair” or “poor,” according to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Meanwhile, the number of children in disadvantaged families has climbed over the past three decades and, since the recent recession, jumped. Today, almost 22 percent of children are officially poor—up from 18 percent in 2007. If you include low-income children, the percentage shoots up to 43.

As the wealthy have invested more time and resources in their young children and the number of children living in poverty has climbed, the gaps between the most and least advantaged kids have emerged more starkly and earlier. The latest research now shows cognitive differences between babies from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum as soon as nine months. By the start of kindergarten, average test scores of children in the highest socioeconomic group are 60 percent above those of children in the lowest socioeconomic group. This “income achievement gap” is growing quickly, with the gap between kids at the top and bottom tenth of the income spread now nearly twice as large as the racial achievement gap.

We know what happens to those left on the unluckier side of this chasm, however it’s measured: They are more likely to repeat grades, drop out of high school, abuse drugs, get pregnant as teens, and become unemployed and incarcerated. We know, too, how to stem these problems. Although decades of research has homed in on which specific methods are most effective, the best way to help low-income children was clear back in 1971: provide them with good care and education, as early as possible.

President Barack Obama has introduced his own early-childhood plan, which would do just that. If it passes, the first nationwide early-education initiative will direct $100 billion over ten years toward a range of programs that help low-income children from birth up to age five. Three-quarters of the money would be used to ensure that four-year-olds whose parents earn twice the poverty line (that is,

they live in households that earn no more than $47,100 for a family of four) can attend preschools, and the rest will go toward home visiting, child care, and other services for infants and toddlers.

Now the question is whether this second major early-education effort can succeed.

OBAMA’S PROPOSAL, WHICH he announced

in his State of the Union address last February, rests on decades of intensive research that clarifies both the potential—and vulnerability—of young children. We know now, for instance, that 85 percent of core brain structure forms by age four and that, by the time they reach kindergarten, children can acquire thousands of vocabulary words as well as many of the skills they’ll need to do calculations, write, and be productive members of a group.

The harm that inferior care poses to children during these first years has also become accepted scientific fact. A whole field has emerged around the effects of stressful situations— including poverty and inadequate child care—on young brains. Researchers have also documented that carefully designed efforts allow disadvantaged children to keep pace with their better-off peers in school and beyond.

Done properly and started early, such interventions can be life-changing. When Obama unveiled the details of his plan at a preschool in Decatur, Georgia, there was no question of his familiarity with that research. “Education has to start at the earliest possible age,” he said.

Though he had been goofing around with the kids beforehand, hugging and fist-bumping them, he was solemn when describing what went on in their classroom. “This is not babysitting,” he said. “This is teaching.”

The distinction can sound trivial. But to early-education advocate Joan Lombardi, the awareness projected by the president was “revolutionary.” “It was recognition that the people in that room were teachers and what they were doing was important,” Lombardi says. As the top early-childhood official in the Obama administration until 2011, Lombardi helped expand Early Head Start, launch a home-­ visiting program for new babies, and direct

More than 70 percent of American mothers are in the workforce, meaning that, in most families, there’s no parent home to nurture and educate young children.

stimulus funds to early-childhood efforts. She says the president’s plan marks a huge advance in the commitment to early education—and his articulation of it changes the country’s trajectory on the issue: “I don’t think you put big moments like that back in the box.”

SIX YEARS AGO, MARKETING and messag-

ing consultant Rich Neimand was looking over the public polling on early education, when he stumbled on a peculiar phenomenon. When surveys asked about the most effective means of teaching young children, the vast majority responded that the ideal was to have one parent at home. When Neimand dug deeper, though, he found that most of the people who said a parent

ought to stay at home were in families in which both parents worked outside of the home and had their children in other settings.

The apparent contradiction suggests that American parents were living with unrealistic—and potentially guilt-inducing— expectations of themselves. Most were in the workforce, but they harbored lingering hopes of conforming to the traditional vision of family Nixon laid out years ago. This was before the economic meltdown, when the idea of supporting a family on a single salary was still within hoping range. “Prior to the recession, everybody felt they could be more affluent at any moment, and therefore they wanted to take the risk of fewer social-support services,” Neimand says. “They were all looking up.”

Just a few years later, after a recession harsh enough to dash the dreams of even the most aspirational parents, much has changed. On the heels of President Obama’s announcement, a national advocacy group called the First Five Years Fund hired Neimand along with Democratic and Republican pollsters to gauge both the public’s support for the president’s proposal and citizens’ understanding of the issue the plan is meant to address. On both fronts, the survey indicated a level of comfort with and enthusiasm for early education that hadn’t existed six years earlier.

Given five national priorities, voters interviewed in July ranked preparing young children for school second only to jobs and economic growth. Seventy percent of the 800 people surveyed recognized that kids enter kindergarten without the skills required and felt that the country should do more “to ensure children start kindergarten with the proper knowledge and skills to succeed.” Perhaps most startling, when presented with a description of Obama’s plan, 70 percent—including 64 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans—said they were in favor of it.

“Support from everyone was higher than we thought,” says Kris Perry, executive director of the First Five Years Fund. Perry wasn’t the only one surprised by the results. “The Republican pollster told me, ‘If I hadn’t done this poll myself, I wouldn’t believe it.’”

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

While the economy’s downward turn was part of the reason for the shift in public opinion, another trend helped move the dial, too. The argument for intervening early in the lives of disadvantaged children had historically been made on behalf of the children. Head Start, the government’s first and still primary earlyintervention program, was launched in 1965 as part of the “war on poverty.” Preschool advocates have long made their case in terms of social justice: Helping needy children is the right thing to do.

Today, advocates still argue that spending on early-childhood programs is best for individual children and families. (In Decatur, Obama made the moral argument that “the size of your paycheck … shouldn’t determine your child’s future.”) But advocates also now stress that our failure to tend to disadvantaged kids’ needs is undercutting the economy and is bringing everyone down. Early education, proponents contend, benefits not just the kids being taught but also society at large.

Evidence for this argument has been around at least since the beginning of the 1990s, when studies of the Perry Preschool began to yield long-term results. Started in Michigan in the 1960s to improve the academic performance of low-income students, the Perry program enrolled poor three- and four-year-olds with low IQs. By age 5, the kids had a higher IQ. They also went on to benefit in unforeseen ways, including being more likely to graduate from high school, having higher incomes, drinking and smoking less, and being less likely to get arrested.

Those outcomes translate into high savings to taxpayers. But it wasn’t until an economist named James Heckman started looking into the Perry numbers that preschool began to be widely seen as a wise investment. According to Heckman, Perry yielded taxpayers more than $16 for every $1 spent. No one could accuse Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who won the Nobel Prize for his work applying statistics to economic relations, of being a softy. Rather than talking about right or wrong, he spoke of productivity and rates of return calculations. Specifically,

64 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2014

Research now shows cognitive differences between babies from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum as early as nine months.

By the time they are two, the distance has tripled.

business leaders who support early-childhood policies, has also embraced Heckman’s argument. As the former chairmen of the Walt Disney Company and Macy’s, both ReadyNation members, put it in a New York Times op-ed, “Capitalists for Preschool”: “Universally available prekindergarten is not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do.”

The economic approach to early education has held sway with lawmakers, too. Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan, a Republican, just doubled pre-K spending, calling it a “strategic investment.” In June, Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama, also a Republican, announced additional pre-K funding, a move first urged— and later cheered—by local business leaders.

Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, another Republican, launched a pre-K program last year. Over the summer, New Mexico’s Republican governor, Susana Martinez, received federal funding to expand her state’s small preschool program. And Mississippi, infamously ranked at the bottom of many measures of education, recently launched a preschool program, the last state in the South to do so. The bill provides $50 million for pre-K over the next 15 years.

EVEN THE COMBINED SUPPORT of Repub-

he estimated that early education has a 10 percent rate of return, better, in most cases, than the stock market and other government programs. Investing in early education, he said, would both increase economic productivity and save on such costs as incarceration, police, and convict rehabilitation programs.

The Committee for Economic Development, a group of executives affiliated with local chambers of commerce, has used Heckman’s research to explain the consequences of not providing preschool in terms their members understand: lost earnings and tax revenue, increased health-care costs, and decreased national productivity. ReadyNation, a group of

lican governors, the business community, and the public can’t guarantee the passage of the president’s proposal. Few on either side of the aisle seem enthusiastic about Obama’s plan to pay for early-childhood programs with a tobacco tax. Within some states that have launched their own preschool initiatives, there is resistance to federal involvement. Certain policymakers have voiced concerns that they won’t have the freedom to run their program as they’d like. Others worry about the possibility that matching funds from Washington will diminish—and perhaps, disappear—after ten years, leaving states with the burden of financing their early-childhood programs on their own. Then there are the daunting political hurdles in Washington: It’s hard to imagine any early-education initiative that originates with the White House making it through the current Congress.

Were Obama’s initiative able to overcome

The Robin Hood Plan New York’s Bill de Blasio takes on pre-K financing.

these obstacles, many problems and questions would remain. Because it would cover the costs of early education only for low-income children, many others would still not have access to programs. States and the feds would likely have different opinions over which level of government is responsible for what. Then there’s the matter of finding and training the 100,000 or so new teachers that would be necessary to staff new preschool programs. For infants and toddlers, even larger questions loom, including which services would be provided.

Yet early-education advocates are confident these concerns can be addressed and that they’ll get to this problem-solving stage—if not tomorrow, then sometime in the not-toodistant future. “It’s inevitable that preschool will be a reality,” Joan Lombardi says. Her optimism is understandable. After all, it took decades for the idea of requiring everyone to attend public elementary school to become, first, acceptable and, later, law. But it happened. Today, much of the job of explaining the importance of early education has already been done. Public support was widespread enough in 1971 to pass the child-care bill through Congress. Buttressed by scientific and economic research, enthusiasm is now even stronger.

Because it affects not just children but also the ability of mothers to work outside the home and thus the economics and dynamics of families, the question of what we as a nation do to support young children has long been vulnerable to political attack. Nixon played on anxieties around women in the workforce when he positioned child care as a threat to the traditional family. But, more than 40 years later, the idea of providing services to kids isn’t as threatening. It’s not just that we’ve seen the number of women in the workforce grow over the intervening years. It’s also that, having fallen victim to this tack before, children’s advocates have been careful to frame the services they’re pushing as education rather than child care.

“If you’re talking about child care, you’re talking about yourself,” Lombardi says. “But if you talk about preschool, you’re talking about your children. Preschool for all is something you can be for unambiguously.” 

B

ill de Blasio’s pre-K plan aims high.

The newly elected mayor of New York City wants to provide full-day, high-quality preschool for all four-yearolds. That means creating spots for nearly 50,000 children, more than twice the number already enrolled. “I have not offered a small Band-Aid solution,” De Blasio recently told a gathering of children’s advocates at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “I have offered a game-changing investment.”

Providing universal pre-K in New York City is a huge logistical undertaking. De Blasio will have to figure out how to expand the existing program, which, as he pointed out at Columbia, has lower acceptance rates in some schools than those of Ivy League colleges. He’ll have to find the space to accommodate all the new students, and he’ll have to recruit at least 5,000 qualified teachers and assistant teachers.

The most daunting and attention-­ grabbing aspect of his plan is how he proposes to pay for it: by increasing the income tax on New Yorkers who earn more than $500,000. No other city or state has proposed such a scheme to pay for pre-K, and it’s already posing political challenges even before de Blasio has assumed office.

More than the lottery proceeds used to pay for pre-K in Georgia or the increased sales tax San Antonio uses to generate revenue for preschool or even the property-tax hike with which San Francisco raised pre-K funds, de Blasio’s financing plan highlights the power of preschool to counter inequality.

De Blasio sees economic inequality as linked to academic inequality, and New York City has plenty of both. The city’s achievement gap is vast. Its four-year graduation rate, abysmal at 65 percent, is 28 percent for black and Latino males.

While 22 percent of the most recent class of graduates from public high school were college-­ready by the city’s standards, among black and Latino students that percentage was an appalling 13 percent.

Economically, the gap is even wider. New York has more billionaires than any other city on Earth, a level of ultra-wealth that has created preschools that cost upward of $40,000 a year. Yet New York also has more poor children than any other city in the country.

Almost a million are low-income, meaning

their family income is below twice the poverty level ($47,100 for a family of four). Poor children are less likely to attend preschool.

De Blasio sees an economic opportunity in these financial extremes. According to his math, increasing taxes on just the topearning 40,000 New Yorkers (roughly the “0.5 percent”) from 3.86 percent to 4.41 percent would generate $530 million. But the redistributive aspect of the tax isn’t sitting well with some prominent New Yorkers. Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, said the tax “shows lack of sensitivity to the city’s biggest revenue providers and job creators.” E.E. “Buzzy” Geduld, CEO of the Wall Street firm Cougar Trading and trustee of the elite private school Dalton, called the tax “the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.” Even former Mayor David Dinkins, a Democrat whom de Blasio worked for in the 1990s, has questioned the wisdom of taxing the wealthy.

To become law, de Blasio’s tax needs to clear the state legislature and receive the governor’s signature. Senate Republicans are expected to try to block it, a likelihood that has left a breakaway Democratic faction known as the Independent Democratic Conference in a powerful position.

Still, de Blasio may emerge victorious.

Jeff Klein of the Bronx and Diane Savino of Staten Island, both IDC members, have endorsed the plan. Although he hasn’t yet pledged his support, Governor Andrew Cuomo, a longtime friend and former boss of de Blasio’s, hasn’t opposed it either.

De Blasio shows no signs of backing away from his signature policy proposal.

His first public speech since the election focused on early education.

He’s put a veteran advocate for poor children, Jennifer Jones Austin, in charge of his transition team. And he’s told reporters he’s not considering a “plan B.” — S.L.

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China Goes Big Can the country provide school for every three-year-old? By Lisa Guernsey

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merican politicians reveal their nervousness about China whenever they bash the country’s investments around the world or mention Beijing’s smog. China’s efforts to expand preschool may make them even more anxious. The Ministry of Education aims for every child to have access to what the Chinese call “kindergarten”—three years of pre-primary school starting at age three—by 2020.

China’s efforts were the subject of a November event at the Brookings Institution that featured former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong. The two women discussed their conviction that childhood investments are critical to a country’s long-term success.

“Despite different national conditions,” Liu said, “China and the United States share the vision and goal of giving priority to children and promoting social fairness, and there is broad space for boosting our cooperation in this field.”

Despite the encouraging talk, neither country is looking especially good right now. In a recent 45-country survey published in 2012 by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the U.S. ranked 24th (tied with the United Arab Emirates), while China ranked 42nd, in preschool quality, availability, and affordability.

But China’s new preschool expansion could quickly move the country up. Unfettered by the messy democracy that has paralyzed the U.S. Congress, China isn’t wasting a moment. The 2020 plan, approved in fall 2012, calls for each of the country’s more than 2,800 counties to create a proposal for funding and implementing three years of preschool. By the end of 2013, every county had submitted a document on how they would achieve this goal.

These plans, says Liang Xiaoyan, senior education specialist at the World Bank, don’t offer free preschool. Instead they rely on a combination of parent fees, private donations, expansion of existing public programs, and public subsidies. The plans also don’t propose integrating preschool into China’s public-school system. But the actions by local officials have catalyzed a rise in enrollment in programs for three- to five-year-olds, according to Liu, with enrollment climbing to

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64.5 percent of all children, nearly 14 percentage points higher than three years ago.

One reason for the follow-through, Liang says, is that regional leaders know that Communist Party officials will hold them accountable. They may also receive assistance from the newly formed Center for Child Development, a national organization designed to work with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health to build effective programs in needy rural areas.

The most significant sign of China’s commitment appears in a series of documents produced by the Ministry of Education that lay out expectations for what Chinese children should know and be able to do by the time they are four, five, and six years old.

Called “early learning guidelines,” they are designed to prompt a re-envisioning of how teachers should be trained and what parents should expect of their children’s physical and emotional growth, language development, and understanding of the arts and sciences.

The ministry approved the guidelines in fall 2012 after six years of study, with researchers testing more than 3,600 children from cities and rural areas. The government also brought in American experts, including Sharon Lynn Kagan of Columbia University, a professor of early-childhood and family policy, who is the United States’ leading authority on early-childhood standards.

It’s not as if China never had any policies on preschool until now. In 2001, the government approved a set of guidelines, but according to Guo Liping, a professor of early childhood at East Normal China University, they were not specific. Because they contained few examples of how to incorporate playful learning into preschool activities, some child-development experts worried that the old standards encouraged teachers to become too didactic.

Consider the teaching of math in China.

Parents in urban areas are often characterized as being especially concerned about whether their children are learning mathematical concepts. One might assume, then, that China will expect little kids to become math robots. But the new guidelines are not about drill and practice. They don’t even emphasize counting to 10 or 20. “Mathematical learning” is in the science section, where the goal is to have children “begin to sense the usefulness and fun of everyday

mathematics.” For four-year-olds, the expectation is that children will “under guidance realize and discover that many objects in life can be described with numbers” and that children will show an interest in exploring the implications of numbers and measurements.

Early-learning guidelines exist in the United States, too. In fact, over the past several years, all 50 states have developed documents that set out expectations for children’s learning. Kagan has assisted with the creation of many, and they too emphasize exploration and discovery. But in the U.S., the guidelines do not necessarily lead to improvements in teaching or better communication with parents about how to help their children develop. On rare occasions when parents do hear about efforts to apply them to pre-K, the response is frequently unwelcoming. Some parents have written about a fear of “standardizing” childhood by laying out expectations for specific ages (though given the emphasis on self-discovery and social development that is present in many of the guidelines, one wonders if those protesting have read their states’ documents).

In China, the guidelines’ authors clearly want to avoid being overly prescriptive.

Words like “expression” and “creation,” for example, are subheads of the section on arts, a sign of how much China wants to dispel the notion that it is raising automatons. “To avoid to suppress young children’s imagination and creativity,” states the English version of the guidelines, “adults should not use their own standards to judge the work of young children, or even train them using a ‘one size fits all’ approach only for the sake of ‘perfect’ results.” Other sections lay out expectations for children to develop a love of learning and discovery. “We emphasize the importance of children to explore,” Guo says. This shift, he says, stems in part from what the Chinese have learned from U.S. experts.

“For the first time, the Education Ministry is recognizing that the curriculum needs to be more appropriate for younger children,” Liang says. She sees the guidelines as a sign that the ministry realizes that “you can’t teach three- and four-year-olds the same way you teach six- and seven-year-olds— that it should not be so much drilling of information as is common in those grades.”

Many thanks to Jenny Lu Mallamo for her help with Mandarin translation.

The Abbott Districts’ Fortunate Few New Jersey’s model program

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n a warm Wednesday afternoon this September, Joseph Castillo sat at a small desk in the Early Childhood Center in Orange, New Jersey, making a card for his father. Joseph’s letters, scrawled unevenly in black marker, could have been neater. He might have written out “you” instead of the letter “U.” But then again, Joseph is only four. Although his father, Jairo, a Peruvian immigrant, speaks to him in both Spanish and English, a situation that can delay when a child begins to read and write, Joseph has already begun to do both.

“Over the summer, he wrote 15 little books, the kind with superheroes,” Jairo says at pickup time. A separated father of two who works part-time as a carpenter, Jairo may be even prouder of the kindness Joseph displayed on his first day back at school. Having started at the center last year, at age three, Joseph knew how the day would likely unfold; that there would be playing, snack, circle time, and more playing. So when he saw a new student with teary eyes and a quivering chin, he put his arm around the boy’s shoulders and told him, “Don’t cry. School can be fun!”

Joseph’s teacher, Valencia Hutchinson, exudes a quiet calm. Bent over their block towers and plates of toy food, the small children barely seem to notice her as she wanders the room, narrating their activities. “Is that a bison?” she asks a boy holding a plastic animal.

“Where do you find a bison? In a tree? In a river?” To a girl who’s making pretend strawberry juice, Valencia says, “Are you a chef, a person who likes to cook?”

While she offers vocabulary and learning opportunities, Hutchinson is also gauging the progress of the 14 three- and four-year-olds in her class and devising new ways to challenge them. Today, because she noticed Joseph couldn’t tie his shoes, she sends him home with a toy sneaker on which he can practice.

She also lends him letter beads that spell out his name and asks him to use them to make as many other words as he can.

“I woke up this morning thinking about what I could do for Joseph,” says Hutchinson, who has a toddler and five-year-old of her own.

Joseph is one of her most advanced students.

Because she has a full-time assistant teacher as well as another teacher trained in special education who spends part of her morning in the classroom, Hutchinson can give all the children at least some individual attention.

While she’s answering Joseph’s questions about spelling, she’s also helping a little girl put on a smock over her butterfly-print dress so she can paint. When another little boy trips, she manages to help with both the painting and the card-making while holding an ice pack to the boy’s head.

JOSEPH AND THE OTHER children in Hutchin-

son’s classroom are among a lucky minority in the country. Only 28 percent of four-year-olds are enrolled in public preschool in New Jersey, the same percentage that attends preschool nationwide. (Among three-year-olds, the state does significantly better than the rest of the country, with 19 percent attending, compared to just 4 percent throughout the country.) The

evidence that good pre-K offers low-income children critical benefits is overwhelming— everything from increasing the amount of time they will stay in school to decreasing the likelihood of teen pregnancy. Yet enrollment remains low in the U.S. More than $548 million was cut from education for three- and fouryear-olds in the 2011–2012 school year—the largest reduction since records have been kept.

Last winter, President Barack Obama proposed a plan to remedy the situation. If it passes, the first nationwide early-education initiative will provide $100 billion over ten years for a range of programs that help prepare children from birth up to age five for school and beyond. Three-quarters of the money would be used to ensure that all poor and lowincome four-year-olds can attend high-quality preschools, like those in Orange.

The president rested the case for his preschool plan on evidence from New Jersey, Georgia, Oklahoma, and a few other states, where effective pre-K programs are in place and “studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, form more stable families of their own,” as he put it in his State of the Union message in February 2013. “We know this works,” Obama continued. “So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind.”

Obama’s plea might sound like the sort of platitude no one could argue with, the verbal equivalent of folding one’s body into a preschooler-size chair to commune with four-yearolds, as the president has done several times since announcing his pre-K push. Yet though the public is behind his proposal (60 percent of Republicans support it, as do 84 percent of Democrats, according to a recent poll of registered voters conducted by the First Five Years Fund), partisan politics may derail the effort.

Even within New Jersey, which has been building its preschool program in the state’s poorest school districts for more than a decade, the question remains whether the ambitious vision of providing preschool to all needy kids will take hold or recede.

Still, anyone who would like to see what

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 67

Obama’s vision of universal pre-K might look like would do well to come to Orange, one of 31 districts in the state known as “Abbotts.”

Because of a historic lawsuit, for almost a decade virtually all three- and four-year-olds in these low-income urban areas have been attending preschool. Already well acquainted with the benefits and unforeseen challenges of expanding pre-K, the Abbotts serve as a window into the future of early education.

A COMPACT NORTH JERSEY town just a

half-hour from Manhattan, Orange was once an industrial hub. Stetson hats were first stitched here in the 19th century, and Rhein­ gold beer was bottled in a brewery on Hill Street. Orange later became home to makers of pharmaceuticals, calculators, electrical supplies, and radium watch dials. But by the 1960s, manufacturing was in decline, a large highway bisected the town’s orderly blocks, and its more prosperous residents had begun to move away. Half a century after the peak of white flight, per capita income in Orange now hovers around $18,000 a year, and the student body in the public schools is more than 99 percent black and Latino.

Orange may be significantly poorer than neighboring districts in Essex County, but it has a far better early-education program— so much better that, last year, many families moved into the district to get their children into pre-K. In its slightly more than two square miles, the city has 57 classrooms where 98 percent of its three- and four-year-olds are enrolled in full-day district-run preschool. By law, every child is entitled to attend. So Jairo, who happens to live across the street from the Orange Early Childhood Center, was able to sign Joseph up on the spot after wandering into the center. Parents have their choice of setting, since the same top-notch curriculum— HighScope—is taught in board of education buildings, Head Start centers, and private community organizations.

These aren’t just places for parents to park their kids while they’re at work. “The Abbott program may be the best preschool program on the planet,” says Steven Barnett, the director

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Only 31 of New Jersey’s 600 districts offer full-day pre-K to every three- and fouryear-old. More than 100 of the state’s districts have no preschool program.

As is true in the country overall, well-­ functioning pre-K programs are the exception in New Jersey. Although 31 districts, including Orange, offer full-day pre-K to every threeand four-year-old, New Jersey has almost 600 districts, most of which don’t serve their preschoolers nearly as well. For instance, the next town, West Orange, has no public pre-K. Indeed, more than 100 of the state’s districts have no preschool program, and many more serve only a fraction of their kids. More than 100 districts have yet to even provide full-day kindergarten to all their five-year-olds.

RAYMOND ABBOTT WAS 12 YEARS old in

of the National Institute for Early Education Research. Indeed, while there is evidence that the gains made in some early-learning programs fade over time, Barnett has established that the benefit of Abbott preschool is significant and lasting. His study, released earlier this year, found that fourth- and fifth-graders who went through Abbott preschool did significantly better in language and math than their peers who didn’t attend Abbott. The differences for children who started the program at age four were large: The average gap in test scores between minority and white students was closed by 10 percent to 20 percent. The gains to students who started preschool at age three were roughly twice that size.

1981 when his mother joined 19 other families from Camden, East Orange, Irvington, and Jersey City that were suing the state of New Jersey over its school funding. Ray, as he was called, was attending Camden public schools, which seemed to epitomize the abysmal conditions in poor districts around the state. School buildings were crumbling and trash-strewn.

Gyms lacked showers and sports equipment.

Science labs had no microscopes or working sinks. Teachers were sometimes forced to hold classes in boiler rooms, basements, and storage closets. School budgets, which were largely determined by local real-estate taxes, were minuscule. As writer Jonathan Kozol noted in his 1991 exposé Savage Inequalities, which relied partly on Abbott v. Burke court filings, Camden High couldn’t even afford a lunchroom for its 2,000 students.

The contrast between these districts—which eventually numbered 31 and were named, after the lead plaintiff, “Abbott districts”—and New Jersey’s richer ones was striking. The wealthier suburban schools offered honors music programs with well-appointed practice suites, AP classes, golf programs, and, in the case of Cherry Hill, 18 different biology electives. Yet perhaps the most dramatic difference between the kids in New Jersey’s richest and poorest districts could be seen even before the children entered school.

As part of the fact-finding for the suit, a group of researchers from Rutgers University set out to evaluate children entering

The Fade-Out Debate Does pre-K pay off for students long-term?

kindergarten in Abbott districts and found that they were already 6 to 18 months behind the state average in tests of school readiness.

Interestingly, most of the children had been in some sort of day care or preschool, according to Barnett, who was involved in the investigation. Some of these settings were “terrible,” he says. Teachers yelled at children, misidentified shapes, and, in one case, tried and failed to explain the silent “E” rule. “Fortunately, the children had no idea what she was talking about,” Barnett says.

Such dismal settings weren’t unique to New Jersey, of course, and have contributed to the division of the country into educational haves and have-nots. The measurable distance between black and white and rich and poor students in New Jersey was yawning by the 1980s, though it wasn’t notably worse than it was anywhere else in the country. Vast wealth disparities divided American children, and, because school funding relies primarily on local realestate taxes, poor children, who faced more academic challenges, generally received fewer education dollars than rich children.

While much of the nation had come to accept the achievement gap as inevitable, advocates in New Jersey insisted that the state try to close it. Marilyn Moreheuser, a former nun who led the Newark-based Education Law Center, filed an unprecedented class-action suit on behalf of Raymond Abbott and other kids in these districts.

The Abbott case—or cases, since it ultimately involved 21 rulings that stretched over three decades—was unprecedented in its ambition: pinning responsibility for unequal student outcomes on unequal school funding. No one had before attempted to hold the state accountable for closing the vast educational chasm between rich and poor students. The suit, which was taken over by David Sciarra in 1996 after Moreheuser died, might not have had a chance if it hadn’t rested on actual children. “I was representing 300,000 poor black and Latino kids,” says Sciarra, now the executive director of the Education Law Center.

“That added a lot of heft.”

Ray Abbott made education history primarily

P

erhaps the hottest argument around early education centers on whether its benefits ultimately fade out, making it a foolhardy investment. The phenomenon of fade-out is real, according to Andres Hojman, an economist at the University of Chicago. Hojman has documented a loss of at least some of the skills gained in all of the ten early-childhood programs he’s studying. But he says that even though some of the gains disappear, the interventions are still valuable. “We shouldn’t be criticizing ‘fade-out’ as if it were deadly,” Hojman says.

That, though, is often what happens when the matter of fade-out comes up in discussions of early-childhood policy, as it did after a particularly dispiriting evaluation of Head Start was released in December 2012. The review, done by the Department of Health and Human Services, found that, by third grade, no demonstrable gains were evident among the students who had attended Head Start.

In some quarters, the study was proof that the program was a waste of public resources. The Heritage Foundation summarized the report as “Government Preschool Fails Completely,” while columnist Charles Krauthammer used it to slam President Barack Obama’s pre-K proposal as “useless.”

The truth, however, is more nuanced than either of those characterizations and hinges not just on the quality of the study measuring the effect of early education but also on what the intervention is aiming to achieve. Consider that Head Start, established as part of the War on Poverty in the 1960s, was never exclusively—or even primarily—conceived of as an early-education program. Among other things, Head Start has always been a means to combat malnutrition; the program serves meals to children and also connects them to health care and other social services. Whatever cognitive benefits are gained or lost have no bearing on these other functions.

Then there’s the matter of what happens after Head Start. “The question shouldn’t be what happened in Head Start but what happened after the children left the program,” says Amanda Moreno, an assistant professor of child cognitive development at the Erikson Institute in

Chicago. One phenomenon that typically occurs is that those who lag behind their peers in kindergarten get more attention from teachers trying to help them catch up. Indeed, some studies show schools working harder with—and thus spending more on—children who haven’t had early education.

The other important question about fade-out is which benefits diminish over time. In both the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian, or ABC, project, which have been the subject of extensive research, the improvement in IQ scores of students who have been through these programs tends to shrink over time. Yet the noncognitive gains by students who have attended these programs—such “soft” skills as persistence, self-discipline, dependability— tend to remain.

“Perry had fade-out. It had the IQ surge, and then it faded out at age ten,” says economist James Heckman. “But if you look at the measures of noncognitive skills, there was no fade-out. It suggests that we may be looking at the wrong set of traits.”

According to Heckman, a Nobel winner who has studied the economic benefits of early-childhood interventions to individuals and society at large, the noncognitive gains not only don’t diminish but often yield benefits that grow and expand over time. “In Perry,” he says, “the achievement test scores didn’t fade out. What’s a big component of achievement tests? It’s conscientiousness, self-control, motivation. So what you’re getting is that these kids, even though they’re no smarter at age ten in terms of an IQ test, they’re actually doing better on achievement tests because they’re learning more in school.”

Critically, Heckman says, these enduring skills are more closely tied to success in adulthood than the cognitive gains that tend to disappear. “People have been so fixated on these very narrow measures.

But they aren’t that predictive of life outcomes,” says Heckman. “It’s truly a fixation, and it misdirects a lot of social policy, including early-childhood policy. I think it’s also misdirecting things like No Child Left Behind, misdirecting a lot of other measurements of accountability systems and the whole idea of whether schools are working.” — S.L.

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 69

High Enrollment, Low Standards The bad, the ugly, and Texas pre-K. By Abby Rapoport

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or a state with an infamously threadbare social safety net, Texas is surprisingly good at getting kids into prekindergarten. With more than 227,000 children enrolled, Texas has the largest publicly funded pre-K system in the country. Families qualify if they’re economically disadvantaged or if a parent is in the military; children who have been in foster care, do not speak English, or are homeless are eligible as well. Any district with 15 eligible students must have a program. With 51 percent of four-year-olds covered, Texas appears to be doing well when it comes to providing pre-K. That is, until you consider what these programs look like.

By almost every measure, Texas has one of the lowest-quality pre-K programs in the country. The state offers funding for only three hours a day; it did away with the funding for full-day programs. In addition, Texas places no limits on class size for prekindergarteners. (By comparison, Head Start requires a teacher and an aide per 15 three- to four-year-olds, and the state mandates a 22-to-1 student-teacher ratio for kindergarten through fourth grade.) A recent survey of Central Austin school districts turned up one school that had a pre-K class of 26 children presided over by one teacher; most teachers are lucky if they have 22 students.

Anyone who has ever spent time with four-year-olds knows that the challenges teachers face under these circumstances are daunting. Rebecca Palacios, who taught pre-K in Texas for 24 years, says with only one teacher in a classroom of 20 or more, any issue—a tantrum, an illness—can uproot the entire class. “If one kid throws up, who’s going to stay with the other 21?” she says. “You have to find a floater teacher.

You only go to the restroom at lunchtime.”

According to the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), which surveys pre-K programs throughout the nation, Texas meets only two of ten benchmarks for quality. The state, for instance, does not require that teachers specialize in early childhood education or that programs provide auxiliary services for children, like vision or hearing exams. Spending per child in Texas ranks among the lowest in the country, which means there are few funds to go toward teacher professional development.

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But for advocates, the biggest concern is the lack of information about the state’s pre-K programs. Because of a series of budget cuts, the Texas Education Agency collects almost no data on pre-K. There’s only one staff person to oversee the nation’s largest program. The agency doesn’t track which districts found ways to fund full-day programs or which districts serve a population beyond those eligible under the state guidelines. Because the agency does almost no monitoring of student performance in pre-K, it can’t track differences between children who received pre-K and those who did not. “It’s hard to make a case for pre-K when you don’t know what’s going on,” says Caroline Neary, a data analyst with the Texas early-education advocacy group Children at Risk.

Texas isn’t the only state with a problem of quality. California and Florida have large pre-K programs that are considered below standard. NIEER has named 2011– 2012 as “the worst year” for pre-K quality standards; five programs eliminated key indicators of quality, like classroom monitoring and technical support. With the recession, there’s been a sharp decrease in monitoring and site visits as well as funding for both classrooms and professional development.

In Texas, a number of local districts have taken it upon themselves to improve their prekindergarten programs. The rural town of Levelland in West Texas offers full-day pre-K to everyone. The school district partners with Head Start and meets the 20-to-2 student-teacher ratio. Some big cities are also taking action. In 2012, Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio successfully championed a sales-tax increase to fund more high-quality pre-K programs. In Austin, the school district created a tuition-based system for those ineligible for free pre-K, with the additional funds helping to support a full-day program.

Thanks to grants from foundations, Children at Risk is preparing to survey every district in the state, to find out what kinds of pre-K classes they offer and how many kids have access to high-quality programs.

It will be released in September 2014, just months before the Texas Legislature goes back in session and decides whether this will be the year the state invests in pre-K.

because his name happened to top the alphabetically organized list of plaintiffs. But his story crystalizes why the lawsuit was both challenging and important. Abbott remembers struggling from the beginning throughout his time in the Camden public schools, skipping class and ignoring assignments. It was only when he moved with his family to a wealthy suburb that he was diagnosed with a learning disability. By then, it seems to have been too late. A “C” student, Abbott dropped out not long after his diagnosis and went on to years of drug problems and repeated arrests.

It’s easy to see how, in a more supportive and attentive educational environment, his life might have turned out differently. By his own recollection, Abbott’s educational failure set off his struggles. “I fell so far behind so early that I lost interest, and I didn’t listen to what was said to me,” says Abbott, who is now 45 and lives in South Jersey. “If I had understood my learning disability better, listened to my mom, I might not have gone to jail for 12 years.”

Abbott, who has been out of prison since 2000 and now works for a pest-control company, is reluctant to blame the schools for his troubles. But, ultimately, the Education Law Center did convince the state court that the schools in Camden and the other districts were failing the entire class of poor students.

Indeed, the education they provided was so crummy it was found to violate the New Jersey Constitution.

The court wound up devising several remedies, including what amounted to a massive redistribution of education dollars: Children in these poor districts in New Jersey would receive not only resources equal to those in richer districts but also additional support to help them contend with the consequences of poverty. Later, after legislators repeatedly resisted the idea of sharing money across district lines, the court wound up laying out the specific tools that each Abbott district would use to combat poverty, including, in 1998, universal preschool.

The lawyers at the Education Law Center hadn’t originally set out to ask for universal

preschool; they hadn’t dreamed it would be possible. “I thought we’d be able to get better operational funding for the schools, and that’s how far we’d go,” Sciarra says. “Early education is to me the most surprising and frankly the most gratifying of all the remedies that came out of Abbott.”

There was little room for interpretation in the court’s final preschool plan, issued in 2001, which was designed to reach every three- and four-year-old living in an Abbott district— a pool that now includes more than 43,000 children. This wasn’t to be day care, the court made clear. Classes would have to be capped at 15 students and follow one of a handful of approved curricula. Every teacher in the program would have at least a bachelor’s degree and certification in early childhood education and would be paid at the same rate as elementary-school teachers (preschool salaries currently start at around $47,000 per year), and every classroom would have an assistant teacher. To improve instruction, experienced master teachers would regularly provide feedback. Lest any legislators attempt to weaken or undermine this vision, the court insisted that the state continue to monitor districts.

Perhaps most important, Abbott’s high standards came with funding attached to them.

After years in which the court tried to have legislators figure out how to close the educational gaps with little success, it came up with its own plan laying out both what children should learn and how the state should pay for it.

The other insightful part of the court’s Abbott plan—and the one that may hold great significance for planners of a possible nationwide preschool system—was its use of the child-care and Head Start institutions that were already functioning in these districts. These were some of the same places where teachers had been ineffectually yelling and misidentifying shapes back in the 1980s. But rather than shutting down these programs—a decision that would have wasted much-­needed personnel and buildings and likely created political strife—educational experts trained staff to teach preschool as they thought it should be taught.

In the Abbott schools, classes are capped at 15 students, and every teacher must have at least a bachelor’s degree and certification in early childhood education.

Bringing the public-school system and private Head Start and child-care providers together to teach the new preschool curriculum wasn’t easy. “It was like a shotgun marriage. Neither side was so excited about it,” says Cynthia Rice, senior policy analyst at Advocates for Children of New Jersey. It took years to get many of the centers up to speed on the pre-K curricula. Some districts still struggle, admits Rice. “But the marriage took place.”

“This is the Abbott lesson,” Sciarra says. “You had all of these existing programs that get federal and state dollars, child-care and Head Start programs already in the community. It

made no sense to ignore that infrastructure and replace it with all new programs. What happened in Abbott that’s so revolutionary is that it unified child care, Head Start, and public-­ school classrooms in a coordinated system.”

NOT EVERYONE IS SOLD ON New Jersey’s

Abbott plan. Governor Chris Christie has been forthright about his disdain for the court ruling, which he sees as unfairly and ineffectually directing education dollars toward Abbott districts. In his 2012 State of the State address, he deemed the entire effort a waste, noting that, though 63 percent of state aid over the years has gone to the Abbotts, “the schools are still predominantly failing.”

Christie had already made his views about early education clear, having criticized his Democratic opponent during his first gubernatorial campaign for supporting universal pre-K, which he equated with believing “the government should baby-sit for children.”

Although he later backpedaled, saying his words were taken out of context, his official stance on pre-K has been that the state can’t afford an expansion, and he has waged a war with the state supreme court over funding for Abbott districts. After he cut more than $1 billion from the education budget in 2010, the court ordered him to restore nearly $500 million for Abbott districts. In response, Christie said, “This will just be another $500 million in taxpayer money that will be thrown at the Abbott districts and still ninth-graders in Newark still have a 23 percent chance of graduating.”

In the 2013–2014 budget, Christie increased Abbott funding to keep up with expanding student populations, showing either his awareness that the court would have likely restored the money or his grasp of the popular support for the program. After Republican legislators proposed taking $300 million from Abbott districts in 2011, parents, teachers, and advocates denounced the cuts; ten days later, the proposal was tabled.

Christie, though, has not funded the state’s pre-K programs at the level the law requires. In 2008, the legislature passed and Governor Jon

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 71

Corzine, a Democrat, signed the School Funding Reform Act, which gave New Jersey five years to expand preschool to all low-income children. The law should have resulted in a little more than 80 additional districts receiving Abbott-quality preschool—and technically done away with the Abbotts. But neither Christie (nor Corzine) allocated the money that would have expanded pre-K. “Had Christie followed the state funding formula, New Jersey would be the only state to have all poor kids in a full-day, full-year program starting at three,” Sciarra says. “Instead, he has basically walked away from one of the most successful educational programs ever.”

A HUGE NUMBER OF LOW-INCOME children

reach kindergarten age without having any schooling. In the U.S., there are some 1.3 million; in New Jersey, roughly 35,000. And in Randee Mandlebaum’s current kindergarten class, there are eight. Mandlebaum, who is in her 20th year of teaching kindergarten in Freehold, New Jersey, is able to pick them out immediately. “They’re more impulsive, they have trouble sharing crayons and markers, they can’t sit on the rug,” she says. Some, like a kid she calls “Nicky,” can’t even recognize their own names in writing.

With its wraparound porches and manicured lawns, the borough of Freehold may at first seem an odd place to glimpse what might happen if we forge ahead without a national pre-K program. Despite its quaint housing and proximity to wealthier suburbs, the South Jersey town is home to deep poverty. Bruce Springsteen sang about its tough times in the 1980s (“Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores/Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more”).

These days, Freehold is even worse off. More than 70 percent of its students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunch. More than three-quarters are Latino; many are first-­ generation Mexican immigrants.

In 2008, when it seemed that Freehold would qualify for preschool funding from the School Funding Reform Act, Ronnie Dougherty, a school principal and early-education

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specialist, planned to create a full-day program in Freehold. By the time she realized her money wasn’t coming because the law wasn’t being fully funded, Dougherty was so far along in the process that she decided to go ahead with the program anyway, using money from other pots.

Freehold was only able to afford full-day pre-K for two years, but in that time, Dougherty created a small research sample of her own. She’s kept tabs on the more than 100 students who were in the full-day classes. So far, she says, every child who was in the program has scored proficient on state tests. As a group, those who were in full-day pre-K scored 24 points higher on third-grade state math tests and 30 percent higher on language arts tests than their peers who didn’t go to fullday pre-K. In 2008, Freehold changed to half-day preK, which, despite its name, lasts two and a half hours. The four-year-old students begin getting their jackets on and lining up to leave at 10:25 A.M. While some might expect a half-day program to be about half as good as full-day, Dougherty thinks it’s even less useful, mainly because most parents work and can’t manage the logistics. Parents were so enthusiastic about the full-day program that Dougherty had to call the police to keep the peace at the lottery for slots. Now, a few of her half-day slots remain empty.

Parents who opt to schlep to school twice in three hours recognize that half-day pre-K is far less helpful than full-day. “It’s just so clear with my kids,” says Dena Levine, a mother of four girls. Her two older daughters attended the longer program. Since full-day wasn’t available for her younger two children, ages six and four, they received only the half-day version.

“They’re all equally smart,” Levine says of her kids. “But Hanna and Olivia started kindergarten reading. Amelia,” who completed the half-day program and is now in first grade, “is definitely behind where they were. It’s night and day.”

Still, Levine’s children got some preschool and, most significantly, come from a middleclass home with two well-educated parents.

Less fortunate kids, like Nicky in Randee Mandlebaum’s class, suffer more without any early schooling. Based on her previous experience, Mandlebaum estimates about half of these students will catch up and move on to first grade next year. The rest may wind up repeating kindergarten.

Since last year, such students in Freehold have had another option: a “Transitional One” classroom. Dougherty instituted this hybrid between kindergarten and first grade because about 20 percent of her students, most of whom hadn’t attended preschool, were trailing the rest of the class. The transitional year, which comes after kindergarten, reviews the basics. In the first week of school, the six-yearold students were finding and circling pictures of things that began with the letter “B” and going over how to sit nicely on the rug.

Transitional One solves some of Freehold’s problems. Because it exposes students to parts of the first-grade curriculum, it gives them confidence in their skills, which improves their chance of success in first grade. But, on the downside, by the time they are in first grade, Transitional One students are a year behind the others. The older children are, the more difficult it is for them to learn even the basics.

It’s expensive, too. Dougherty estimates that the first year of Transitional One for just those 18 students cost the district about $60,000 in staff time and supplies.

Queens College economist Clive Belfield estimates the medium-term costs averted by providing pre-K at somewhere between $2,591 and $9,547 per child. That figure, calculated in 2004, doesn’t include the long-term costs, such as a reduction in crime and delinquency, lower welfare dependence, and higher income taxes.

Nor does it—nor can it—quantify the true price of diminishing kids’ shot at academic success.

Dougherty looks stricken when she describes some of the kindergarten students who arrived on the first day of school. “They didn’t know how to hold a book. They didn’t understand there was a relationship between words and pictures. They didn’t know their colors or numbers, didn’t know their alphabets,” she says.

“Scaling back the pre-K program was heart-

wrenching for me and the superintendent at that time. But there was nothing we could do.”

Now she and the current district superintendent, Rocco Tomazic, are trying to decide whether to use their limited budget to continue providing part-day pre-K to a small number of children or go back to providing the full-day program to an even smaller group of students.

OVER IN ORANGE, AFTER MORE than a

decade of preschool for all, administrators are wrestling with a different, happier problem.

“A growing number of children are arriving at kindergarten already reading and writing and then spending a good part of that year sitting in a class being taught their letters,” says Candace Goldstein, director of special programs in Orange, who oversees early education. “We were used to kindergarteners having no vocabulary. Now they’re coming in with huge vocabularies.”

The Abbott program has received praise for aligning pre-K with the schooling that follows.

The New America Foundation commended it for doing “more than perhaps any other state in the country to link” early learning with K-12.

But, in Orange, it’s still a challenge to keep advanced students moving ahead, rather than going over material they’ve already learned.

Goldstein considers the problem serious enough that she hired a former kindergarten teacher, Adrianna Hernandez, to ease the way for these higher-level students. A big part of Hernandez’s new job is to raise the expectations of kindergarten teachers who aren’t used to well-prepared kids. Hernandez travels Orange’s kindergarten classrooms armed with stacks of five-year-olds’ creations: pictures, stories, and neatly lettered sentences proclaiming their love for reading, science, and social studies. She needs this evidence to convince her colleagues of the heights this new generation of five-year-olds can reach.

“At first they don’t believe me,” Hernandez says. “Older teachers in particular don’t realize how much smarter the kids are than when they first started teaching.”

Indeed, it’s taken a while for the idea of connecting preschool to elementary school

The Abbott plan gives poor districts resources equal to those in richer districts but also additional support to contend with the consequences of poverty.

to seep into the mainstream. Early education used to be thought of as targeting children under five, particularly toddlers. Now, the definition of “early” has expanded to age eight, or third grade. This is when students are expected to be proficient at reading. Yet two-thirds of all kids—and 87 percent of lowincome students—aren’t. Education experts have recently begun drawing a straight line between that failure and the high rates of high-school dropouts.

“You have to have a strong kindergarten through third grade,” says Carla Thompson of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which has been focusing on increasing the number of third-graders who are proficient at reading and math. As teachers in Orange are seeing, that means not just reaching preschoolers as early as possible but keeping pace with their

advancement as they enter elementary school.

For her part, back at the Orange Early Learning Center, Valencia Hutchinson is not surprised by the advances made by Joseph, whom she expects to finish the year ready for first grade. She has seen many of her students learn at a similar pace. In Freehold, Ronnie Dougherty is also keeping an eye on her cohort of full-day pre-K kids, now in the fourth and fifth grades, as they continue to do well in school.

Even Raymond Abbott, who once viewed the classroom as a prison to be escaped, is beginning to look at schools in a different way: how they might one day serve his now oneyear-old son. “I just hope and wish that the state, the country, whatever, will recognize that education is important to the kids today,” says Abbott, who is married to an elementaryschool teacher.

The bigger hope, of course, is that all the kids will get the help they need, beginning with good preschool. On this front, too, there is some promise. Although Democratic state Senator Barbara Buono, who authored New Jersey’s School Funding Reform Act and campaigned for governor in 2013 on the idea of expanding the state’s preschool program, lost her bid to replace Christie, the effort to provide more needy children with preschool has been recently renewed. Advocates for Children in New Jersey, a group that was involved in the creation of Abbott preschool, just relaunched a campaign to convince the governor and legislature to fully fund preschool for all lowincome children.

At the same time, the organization has been helping with the national pre-K plan.

Recently, it sent the Obama administration a list of lessons learned from New Jersey’s experience with Abbott preschool. Among them: that the pre-K curriculum should line up with kindergarten and beyond, so gains made during that year aren’t lost; that teachers need to be highly trained and well paid; that building a good preschool system can take a long time; and, perhaps most important, that, if it’s done well, preschool offers a great return on investment. 

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 73

The Genius of Early Intervention A conversation with economist James Heckman

JAMES HECKMAN is the pre-eminent scholar on the economics of early education. Heckman, who won the Nobel Prize in 2000, has focused on how early-­ childhood interventions affect society at large and the life skills and development of young children. The Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, he has devised ways to measure the economic benefit of preschool, focusing in particular on two programs that have served disadvantaged children: the Perry Preschool, which began in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in the 1960s and the Abecedarian, or ABC, Project in North Carolina. —SHARON LERNER

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Sharon Lerner: How early in a child’s life is too early to intervene?

Have you looked at that in homevisiting programs or other programs that are done in infancy?

I know people talk about the early years as the ideal time to intervene, but as kids get older, when does the return on investment begin to diminish?

I’ve heard you refer to this 6 percent to 10 percent yield before. Is that rate of return averaged over a lifetime? If so, aren’t the biggest savings at the end of the line?

James Heckman: We have a project that shows the long-term effects of interventions starting as early as two months in the life of the child on adult health and other outcomes. We followed them for 35 years, and now we’re seeing much lower, for example, blood-pressure rates.

Don’t forget there’s a dynamic synergism that’s going on here.

You build the skill base, then later investments become even more productive. That’s one of the reasons the rate of return is so high for early investments. It has a direct effect on producing a set of skills that are immediately useful and that are also useful in producing future sets of skills.

That’s why I’m hesitant to think that it’s like diminishing returns on a static technology or something.

Success breeds success, and if you get more highly able children who are given the opportunity and enthusiasm for learning, you’re going to get enormously high rates of return.

It does get increasingly harder to remediate the older the person is. If he or she doesn’t have the skill base, then the later investments do start falling off. For example, if you look at the rate of return on public job-training programs for 17- and 18-year-old disadvantaged kids with very low ability, they’re negative. Job Corps basically has a zero rate of return.

With Perry Preschool, we’re getting annual rates of return around 6 percent to 10 percent per year. If you think about putting money in a bank, it would double in a period of about seven or eight years. You’re going to get the force of compound interest, but it’s an investment in a person rather than in a bank.

You’re certainly right—it’s an average. I’ve forgotten which office of government says the effective horizon over which any investment program should be evaluated is ten years. That’s just myopic. It’s certainly not consistent with what we did with the interstate highway system, building dams, the Tennessee Valley Authority. But put that to the side—there really are substantial, short-term impacts.

There is a lot of exciting work looking at the payback in the reduction of things like special education. Robert Dugger [cofounder of ReadyNation, a business group that supports early education] is heading a group that’s looking into social-impact bonds for early-education programs. He’s trying to bring in the private sector to finance the returns on these investments.

So on a strict cash basis, local governments should be able to float bonds based on what their long-term savings and short-term costs would be.

What are the health benefits of early-­childhood education? And what is the mechanism by which early education might affect health?

We followed kids who got interventions, including doctor’s visits, starting at two months old for 35 years and found that metabolic syndrome, a precursor to diabetes, is substantially lowered. Among the treatment group, there’s none of the syndrome. In the control group, 25 percent of this population has this precursor condition for diabetes, if they don’t have diabetes already. So you see tremendous improvement.

ABC does provide pediatric visits, so they are getting checkups that disadvantaged children wouldn’t ordinarily have. But the intervention is also operating through other channels. By giving these kids both the cognitive and noncognitive skills, self-control, social and emotional skills, as well as screening for early health problems, you’re providing a powerful base for adult health. There’s a lot of evidence that these noncognitive traits are predictive of a whole range of behaviors. It’s far more important to be conscientious than to be smart if you want a long life. These persistence traits are very, very predictive, and they can be shaped.

You’ve consulted with the Obama administration on this issue. How have you advised it?

When Barack Obama ran for office in 2008, I gave him and his group some advice about what an effective strategy might be. I think the administration—at least the part of the administration I’ve dealt with, Secretary Arne Duncan, the people in Health and Human Services—have been very, very open.

They’ve asked me if they’re somehow misusing or misstating the evidence. They seem to be serious about making sure the case they’re putting forth is evidence-based.

What, if anything, might you do to improve upon Obama’s plan?

The administration seems fixed on this one year: age four. But the gap in test scores that’s there at high-school graduation between the children of affluent mothers and the children of poor mothers is more or less there at age three.

So we really should ask what’s going on from zero to three. I think the evidence is going to slowly push the administration this way.

Obama’s proposal is a toe in the water, and it’s probably a good start. The only danger would be spreading it too thin. I’m strongly opposed to this idea of making [preschool] universal, because quality is more important.

Do you have models from around the country that exemplify the kind of early education you think we ought to offer as a nation?

The Chicago Child-Parent Program was implemented in a very poor neighborhood, and it suggests the feasibility of a largescale program. It’s a model that is really seeming to have some longterm effects on the children in the program. In Chicago, we’ve had private philanthropists like Irving Harris and J.B. Pritzker and others, and that creates a community where you’re getting this interesting mix between public and private intervention.

You refer often to Perry and ABC in your work. These were pilot programs. Can you say why you think it makes sense to build national policy on these small examples?

There are papers saying these results don’t extrapolate to other nonpoor populations, and I completely agree with that. Those programs are effective for severely disadvantaged kids, the ones who are in the worst conditions, at least as measured by home environments when they’re young.

That’s where the evidence stops. I think the universal advocates are taking it too far.

Many people say that a sample with a million observations is better than one with a thousand and, for precision, there’s no question.

But you get these rare samples that come along that provide you with an insight that these programs can make big changes.

If it’s really a small sample, then all the cards should be stacked against finding any effects. In spite of the fact that the samples are so small, we still found strong evidence, and not because we picked a few statistically significant results. We corrected for that, and these results still hold.

I agree it would be nice to have bigger studies, but, in the case of Perry, we have 50 years of data.

We’re now about to launch in the field a 50-year follow-up on health and these long-term measures.

Is there another country you might point to that offers convincing evidence of the economic benefits of early-childhood education?

The countries that probably everybody’s looking to and trying to understand are the Nordic countries, including Finland, that seem to offer a rich support for early child care and strong support for what would be something like early child-care systems and for encouraging teachers in both preschool and in schools of high quality. That seems to be a prototype, but it’s understudied.

What do you make of the Head Start evaluation that came out in March?

I’ve looked at this study pretty closely. What you have is a problem that people who are in the so-called control group for Head Start are sometimes in an even better program than Head Start.

So you’ve got a flaw called “substitution bias.” [Some of the children who wound up in the control group were enrolled in] a comparable program somewhere else, so the study is comparing not just apples with apples but actually the same apple and finding no effect whatsoever. In fact, both treatment and control groups may be experiencing a strong effect.

In principle, it’s possible to correct this bias. The administration, the Institute of Education Sciences, and a group in the Department of Education are sitting on data that would allow analysts to essentially look at what the effects are of children in the control group participating in highquality alternative programs. But they’re not releasing the data.

It’s just bureaucracy at its worst.

Right now, it’s not possible for anybody to accurately analyze the Head Start studies.

I know you’ve done some consulting in China recently. What might we learn from that country?

The vice premier of China just announced that they’re launching a program I’ve been working on with the China Development Research Foundation that will give nutrition and cognitive and noncognitive supplements to somewhere between 15 million and 30 million left-behind children in rural China. These are children whose parents have migrated to the East, but who are still out in the West, in typically rural areas, and are being raised by their grandparents. It’s a bad situation in terms of their early-childhood environment and nutrition, too. We’re talking very low levels of iron. This is a much lower baseline than in the U.S. We’re talking about child poverty that’s extreme, deprivation that’s real, something we don’t find in many parts of the United States.

Is there something we can do for adolescents who don’t get the help? Is there any particularly successful form of remediation?

Successful interventions for adolescents primarily target these noncognitive skills. They’re teaching kids to show up on time, providing guidance. It’s really a form of attachment—but for adolescents. Some mentoring programs have been evaluated, and we have seen long-term benefits.

The rates of return are not as high as they are in the early-childhood programs. But I think it’s a mistake to think we can’t do anything at later ages.

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 75

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Johnny Who? Here’s Jimmy Fallon, the first late-night host too young to have worshipped Carson. BY TOM CARSON T

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he story goes that Johnny Carson, who hosted NBC ’s The Tonight Show for count’em 30 years—from 1962 to 1992— loved vacationing abroad because no one outside the United States knew who the hell he was. That certainly wasn’t the case here at home. In his heyday, basically the entire time he had the job, Carson wasn’t famous the way, for

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instance, Jane Fonda is famous.

He was famous like Bayer aspirin or, to the more troubled members of his audience, Jim Beam. Outdoing even that plummily narcissistic Polonius, CBS news anchorman Walter Cronkite, he was 20thcentury American life’s most reassuring constant.

Once he was done, he vanished from public view as if he’d been

television’s Lawrence of Arabia, just with fewer hang-ups about revolutionizing a vast wasteland.

Impervious to the latest fashion because he was so alert to it, Carson could always be counted on to deliver the goods. In his case, those were chiefly a reassurance that nothing could be too wrong with this loused-up world if Johnny could be puckish about it and an

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unerring reminder that you don’t need to be hip to have style. The first was a fib, and the second was true, and no one in TV history has ever merged them the way he did.

Because the art of talk-show hosting is as evanescent as ballet— DVDs of Carson’s reign won’t cut it; you have to have seen it on that night—his name is more or less meaningless to anyone under 40.

He’d have been OK with that, too.

Part of his appeal was how he managed to convey that he was a flinty realist about such things while letting us know that the world hadn’t quite gone all to hell yet.

Today, his legend only looms large to a select group. Any halfway compassionate human being

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 77

should feel sorry for them, because they’re Carson’s fellow talk-show hosts. Poor Dave, poor Jay, poor Conan O’Brien!

They grew up with Johnny and know they’re the Corleone sons after the Godfather’s shuffle off this mortal coil. Sonny (Jay Leno) is bluff and hearty, with a lurking penchant for thuggery; just ask O’Brien, who replaced him as The Tonight Show’s host for seven months in 2009 before Jay decided he wanted his old job back.

Even if he knows he’s the shrewdest of the three, Michael (David Letterman) will always be crotchety about whatever mysterious thing he forswore— earthly happiness, apparently—in order to make good. Fredo (O’Brien) is still fumbling for his gun.

They can all be some of Pop, but none of them can be all of Pop. Too bad that was what Pop raised them to aspire to.

WHEN LENO HANDS OFF The Tonight

Show to current Late Night host Jimmy Fallon in February, Fallon will be unique: the first big-league talk-show host who’s too young to be haunted by Carson’s example. Just 17 when the great man called it quits, he grew up watching Saturday Night Live, which was the making of him when he joined its cast. Seeing what a non-custodian of tradition will do with the job could be interesting, because The Tonight Show’s odd status as some sort of sacred vessel is almost entirely due to the fact that Johnny Carson once hosted it.

As full of himself as Leno can be, which is plenty, he’s always been conscious of being somebody’s replacement. (The news-anchor parallel is Dan Rather’s taking over for Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, and Rather’s jumpy look whenever something reminded him that he wasn’t Cronkite—like realizing he was on TV, for instance—will always be a strangely endearing memory to people who can remember both men’s handling of the job.) Leno was smart enough to know he couldn’t mimic Carson’s style, not least because his own style—such as it was and is—was well formed and familiar by then. Even so, it’s a cinch that Fallon won’t be haunted by Leno’s

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example, because Leno wasn’t hired to redefine the nature of the gig. He was hired to keep the damned thing going as Johnny’s ghost smirked and sighed.

What made Leno a good choice to replace Carson was that he’s the sort of dolt who thrives on official sanction and felt validated when the crown passed to him. (He may have loved the title of Tonight Show host more than he ever did the job.) The major surprise of Leno dicking Conan O’Brien over when he decided to recapture his former kingdom was that most observers would have guessed Jay had too much keep-on-truckling in him to assert himself in that way.

Yet O’Brien was subtly but fatally wrong for the job. His insecurity about his own image is intrinsic to how he presents it, and one way Johnny defined the Tonight Show gig was by knowing when reserve and a certain selfless calm were the right move.

Since the show’s role in American life isn’t to be simply “lulling” but to be cutting-edge lulling, one key to being right for the host’s job is that you’d better project self-sufficiency.

FALLON CERTAINLY HAS that, despite

being eager to please in a way foreign to Johnny Carson. At best, Carson was merely interested in pleasing. Both how to amuse people and why he was bothering to never stopped intriguing him. But Fallon doesn’t look as if people who don’t think he’s the best news since buttered toast will mess up his day. If he’s also got a streak of frat-boy callousness, virtually every white male under 40 on TV fits that description to some extent. Fallon’s distinctive twist is to peddle himself as a nice guy who’s only pretending to be a douche. Like most of his TV peers, he’s got a face almost alarmingly unmarred by harsh experience or discernible emotional depth; that smooth head of hair and those perfect choppers make him look like Pixar’s design for the Talk Show Doll in Toy Story 4.

He’s not much more than serviceable as an interviewer. But that matters a whole lot less than it did back when being a nimble one was more or less the point of the whole gig. Carson was a brilliant navigator of conversations, able to guess on a dime when it

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made sense to delve into some peekaboo fjord a guest had just revealed and when it was brighter to cruise on past to the next commercial. By contrast, the “talk” part of today’s talk shows is a hasty business of canned prattle, multiple tie-ins—when a host holds up a magazine featuring his guest on the cover, he’s also plugging the magazine, and so on—and sometimes fascinating jitters. I remember catching delectable-but-not-tooterribly-quick-on-the-uptake Scarlett Johansson on Late Night a while back, and the anxiety under her and Fallon’s good cheer was palpable. You had no doubt both these people were working, and pretty hard too.

Like most current talk hosts— magnets of jumpy industriousness, one and all—Fallon scarcely bothers to maintain the old illusion that everybody’s having a relaxed time shooting the breeze and an audience of millions just happens to be watching. The illusion’s decline is partly due to the fact that talk-show hosts aren’t mere enablers of celebrity blather anymore. They’re too conscious of being big names in their own right with a brand to push and protect, making for a certain confusion, sometimes genial and sometimes not, about who is playing along with—or sucking up to—whom. Letterman was probably the first host to make this shift in priorities self-evident; when guests go on his show, they’d better adjust to Dave’s sensibility if they know what’s good for them. That grumpy man isn’t one to budge much to accommodate theirs.

Another reason the “talk” part of talk shows has turned into gibberish is that everybody’s so available.

What’s the excitement of seeing Ben Affleck drop by Fallon’s set if Ben’s going to be on three other shows that same week—looking, as usual, as if it might take being thrown in the path of a moving train to wake him up?

Meanwhile, talk-show bookers are bent on serving up guests with guaranteed name recognition to an all but exclusively pop-­oriented audience. If Thomas Pynchon decided to wrap up the ball game by offering himself to The Tonight Show as a guest, not one in 50,000 viewers would care. That’s

why The Tonight Show would turn Pynchon down.

Fallon’s ace in the hole is that he’s an inspired sketch artist—why do you think SNL was so happy to have him?— and an unusually gifted musical parodist. That part of the job clearly energizes him in ways its increasingly vestigial main event doesn’t, and he does better with (and by) his guests when he can induce them to join the fun. Convincing Michelle Obama to shake some first-lady booty in a genuinely charming skit called “The Evolution of Mom Dancing”—not that she looked like she’d needed much convincing, which was part of the charm—is the standout example. As for Late Night’s send-ups of other TV shows, their elaborateness is a far cry from Carson’s proudly cheesy skits, and it’s not insignificant that they usually work by playing off Fallon’s career. His Breaking Bad parody had him turning louche joke peddler after learning he had only six months left on Late Night. His version of Game of Thrones renamed Rockefeller Center “Rockefell,” and so on.

He’s certain to be the first Tonight Show host whose YouTube highlights draw a bigger or anyhow hipper audience than the show itself. I get most of my Fallon via YouTube—who wants to sit through a whole episode of Late Night, for Pete’s sake?—and

Fallon’s

YOUTUBE HIGHLIGHTS will draw a bigger or anyhow hipper audience than the show itself.

Johnny Carson at the NBC-TV studios in New York in 1963

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I’m sure I’m a long way from alone.

That’s a post-Johnny and even postLeno system for maintaining and/or upgrading one’s visibility, and Fallon probably lives to go viral; it’s presumably one reason he takes such care with his comedy bits. He’s also got close to 11 million followers on Twitter, and he (or his writers) put some care into his tweets as well. Tweets from celebrities are a minor new art form—you don’t want to be anodyne, but you can’t vent either—and Fallon’s genial Twitter feed creates a greater sense of pseudo-intimacy with him than watching his damned show.

In other words, he’s really smart about new media, even as he parks his rump in the most tradition-­ cobwebbed chair on TV. On Late Night, he’s been best at blending old and new in his musical taste. What’s probably his most brilliant musical pastiche, the Tim Tebow-izing of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”—“This is Jesus Christ to Tim Tebow/Please leave me alone,” and so on—depends on a rock chestnut that’s more than 40 years old. Fallon’s impersonations of Neil Young and Jim Morrison (another gem, with the Doors performing the Reading Rainbow theme song) spoof musicians who were legends—and in Morrison’s case, in the grave—before his own birth. Yet Ahmir Khalib Thompson, a k a Questlove, who heads up Late Night’s house band, the Roots—and looks like Cornel West minus the pretensions—is the funkiest and most unmistakably contemporary bandleader on any late-night gabfest.

Fallon is bringing Questlove and the Roots with him to The Tonight Show, a novelty sure to disconcert any remaining viewers with fond memories of Doc Severinsen’s dapper nihilism back in Johnny’s day.

But Questlove may also be part of the 2014 definition of cutting-edge lulling. Setting aside that the tricky job Fallon is tackling is also unspeakably meaningless—really, who wouldn’t rather futz around online nowadays than zonk out to late-night TV?—I wish him well. In ways not under his control, Fallon’s Tonight Show debut will be a television landmark: the night Johnny Carson’s ghost is finally laid to rest. Adios, stranger. 

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The Urban Poor Shall Inherit Poverty Sociologist Patrick Sharkey proves a mother’s insecure upbringing harms her child as surely as a neighbor’s broken window. BY RICHARD ROTHSTEIN B

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n apparent conundrum bedevils our understanding of African American students’ inadequate school performance: Blacks from lowincome families have worse academic outcomes—test scores and graduation rates, for example—than similarly low-income whites. To some, this suggests that socioeconomic disadvantage cannot cause black student failure; instead, poorly motivated and trained teachers must be to blame for failing to elicit achievement from blacks as they do from whites. This was the theory motivating the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.

That flawed conclusion overlooks the fact that low-income blacks differ considerably from low-income whites in their social-class backgrounds.

Conventional analyses consider students similarly disadvantaged when their families have incomes below 185 percent of the poverty line, making them eligible for lunch subsidies.

Yet zero to 185 percent of poverty is a big span; it includes the destitute as well as stable, though lower-income, working-class households. Black lunch-eligible students are more concentrated at the bottom end of that span than whites, and their families have likely been poor for longer.

Lunch-eligible black students are also more likely than lunch-eligible whites to have unemployed, irregularly employed, teen, or single parents and to be affected by lead poisoning, inadequate housing, untreated asthma, and other conditions that demonstrably restrain academic achievement.

These characteristics handicap students individually. In 1987, however, William Julius Wilson transformed urban sociology with a now-classic book, The Truly Disadvantaged, showing that these social and economic handicaps are

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exacerbated when low-income black students are concentrated in urban ghettos. Wilson observed that when central cities deindustrialized, male unemployment soared. Simultaneously, civil-rights victories enabled middle-class African Americans to abandon distressed urban areas, leaving behind neighborhoods of concentrated poverty where women could find few marriageable males to support their families, and where there were few employed, stable, and academically successful adults to whom youths could look for inspiration.

Now Patrick Sharkey, a Wilson student and an associate professor of sociology at New York University, has performed an analysis potentially as important as his mentor’s. Wilson showed that we cannot explain young people’s behavior simply by understanding their individual disadvantage but must account for their neighborhood influences as well.

Sharkey’s book Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality shows that these neighborhood influences are even more destructive when exposure takes place over multiple generations. Mothers’ child-rearing practices are affected by their neighborhood environments—and by the environments in which the mothers themselves were raised.

Sharkey defines poor neighborhoods as those where at least 20 percent of families have incomes below the poverty line. African American neighborhoods fitting this definition are likely to house many families, even a majority, that are not poor but still qualify as low-income, with luncheligible children.

For academic performance, Sharkey uses a scale like the familiar IQ measure, where 100 is the mean and roughly 70 percent of children score about average, between 85 and 115.

STUCK IN PLACE: URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS AND THE END OF PROGRESS TOWARD RACIAL EQUALITY

BY PATRICK SHARKEY

University of Chicago Press

CLIMBING MOUNT LAUREL: THE STRUGGLE FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN AN AMERICAN SUBURB

BY DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, LEN ALBRIGHT, REBECCA CASCIANO, ELIZABETH DERICKSON, AND DAVID N. KINSEY

Princeton University Press

Using a survey that traces individuals and their offspring since 1968, Sharkey shows that children who come from middle-class (non-poor) neighborhoods and whose mothers grew up in middle-class neighborhoods score an average of 104 on problem-solving tests. Children from poor neighborhoods whose mothers also grew up in poor neighborhoods score lower, an average of 96. Thus, “living in poor neighborhoods over two consecutive generations reduces children’s cognitive skills by roughly eight or nine points … roughly equivalent to missing two to four years of schooling.”

Sharkey’s startling finding, however, is this: Children in poor neighborhoods whose mothers grew up in middle-class neighborhoods score an average of 102, only slightly below the average scores of children whose families lived in middle-class neighborhoods for two generations. But children who live in middle-class neighborhoods yet whose mothers grew up in poor neighborhoods score an average of only 98. Sharkey concludes that “the parent’s environment during [her own] childhood may be more important than the child’s own environment.”

Young African Americans (from 13 to 28 years old) are now ten times as likely to live in poor neighborhoods as young whites—66 percent of African Americans, compared to 6 percent of whites. Proceeding to describe neighborhood mobility from the previous generation to this one, Sharkey ranks all neighborhoods from richest to poorest based on average household income, then divides the list into quarters. He finds that 67 percent of African American families hailing from the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago continue to live in such neighborhoods today. But only 40 percent of white families who lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago still do so.

Considering all black families, 48 percent have lived in poor neighborhoods over at least two generations, compared to 7 percent of white families. If a child grows up in a poor neighborhood, moving up and out to a middle-class area is typical for whites but an aberration for blacks. Black

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neighborhood poverty is thus more multigenerational, while white neighborhood poverty is more episodic.

Sharkey describes the consequences of multigenerational exposure to poverty not only for academic performance but for family income, laborforce participation, adult occupational status, and wealth. He has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of how being “stuck in place” adds to persistent racial inequality.

Note that Sharkey has described not the consequences of multigenerational poverty but rather the consequences of multi­generational exposure to concentrated poverty in neighborhoods of considerable violence, unemployment, single parenthood, environmental degradation, and hopelessness, whether or not the exposed individuals themselves are poor.

Once Wilson had observed that concentrated neighborhood poverty compounded the harm of an individual’s own poverty, it seemed obvious. But it took The Truly Disadvantaged to awaken us. Likewise, Sharkey’s observation that multigenerational exposure to concentrated poverty is more dangerous than current exposure will also become a truism. Sharkey has made it suddenly intuitive to recognize that women raised in stressful, violent, and insecure environments will find it more difficult to develop in their own children the confidence and trust to explore the knowledge and experience necessary for healthy development. Indeed, the argument of this book forces us to acknowledge that the results of efforts to improve the environments of today’s children may not be fully understood or evaluated until we can observe the performance of these children’s children.

Sharkey’s book is magnificent scholarship. Yet he tries to do too much. After Stuck in Place plows exciting new ground in descriptive sociology, it examines policy proposals: What should be done about hypersegregated neighborhoods where African Americans languish, generation upon generation? Sharkey’s proposals reflect contemporary policy fads, are less original, and will be less enduring than his empirical work.

FOR 50 YEARS, PROPOSALS to reduce

racial inequality have veered between urging the integration of ghetto residents into white middle-class communities and attempting to improve the quality of life in disadvantaged neighborhoods without dispersing their residents. Advocates usually acknowledge that we should do both but reveal a preference for one. Sharkey is no exception: He says we should do both but dismisses integration’s

Two boys and a collapsing Baltimore row house, 2013

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feasibility and endorses improve-theghetto programs as examples of what he calls “durable urban policy.”

Dismissing integration as an ambition is understandable; every largescale effort to pursue it has been defeated. Yet every large-scale effort to revitalize distressed urban neighborhoods has also been defeated, and it’s puzzling that Sharkey is more discouraged by one failure than the other.

When integrationists have retreated in the face of racist resistance, the consequences have sometimes been unintended and perverse. Black multigenerational exposure to poverty stems, at least in part, from the compromises made following such retreats. The history of public housing, almost synonymous with truly disadvantaged neighborhoods, is an instructive example. When Congress first considered President Harry Truman’s public-housing program in 1949, conservative Republicans

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attached “poison pill” amendments to the bill that would prohibit racial discrimination in the location of projects or in the placement of tenants. The Republicans proposed these amendments knowing that Southern Democrats who otherwise supported public housing (because they needed it in their own cities) would rather defeat the program altogether than accept its integration amendments.

Liberals had to choose between segregated projects—public housing for blacks that would be sited in black neighborhoods—or none at all. A leading liberal and proponent of public housing, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, said, “I should like to point out to my Negro friends what a large amount of housing they will get under this act. … I am ready to appeal to history and to time that it is in the best interests of the Negro race that we carry through the housing program as planned, rather than put in the bill an amendment which will inevitably defeat it.”

Both Houses then voted down the integration amendments.

Whether what followed was in the best interests of the Negro race is questionable. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, public housing purposely concentrated African Americans in inner cities. What Douglas had called the “housing program as planned” became the core of many of the “truly disadvantaged” communities that William Julius Wilson and Patrick Sharkey properly bemoan.

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson proposed the Model Cities plan, offering funds to a few metropolitan areas for ghetto revitalization, provided that funding recipients also pursued desegregation—for example, by adopting anti-discrimination ordinances, repealing suburban zoning rules that banned apartment construction, and accepting low-income housing in white communities. But Congress again removed the desegregation language. Johnson’s appointees then promised they would refrain from leveraging revitalization grants to force metropolitan integration. Sharkey notes that Model Cities accomplished little, mostly because political realities converted intensive revitalization in a few cities into minimal

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What should be done about segregated neighborhoods?

Sharkey’s proposals reflect contemporary policy fads and will be less enduring.

grants to many, with none getting enough to make a serious difference.

But Model Cities also had principled opponents. Johnson adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for example, complained that while amelioration of ghetto conditions was necessary (nonetheless, he and his allies mocked it as “gilding the ghetto”), “efforts to improve the conditions of life in the present caste-created slums must never take precedence over efforts to enable the slum population to disperse throughout the metropolitan areas.”

As Mark Santow recounts in his forthcoming Saul Alinsky and the Dilemma of Race in the Postwar City, other liberals, most prominently Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, rebuffed Moynihan. Piven and Cloward had been best known for their advocacy of a guaranteed annual income to abolish poverty and for their recommendation that activists could force the enactment of such a guarantee with a campaign to recruit millions of poor families to overload the welfare system by applying for benefits they were entitled to but not receiving.

Piven and Cloward now insisted that “strategies must be found to improve ghetto housing without arousing the ire of powerful segments of the white community.” This argument was supported by segregationist Democrats and conservative Republicans and by black-power activists who, disillusioned with failed integration efforts, wanted to revive African American communities from within.

Moynihan thought he might do better with Johnson’s successor and joined the Nixon administration, finding an ally in Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) George Romney, who made a serious attempt to combat black ghettoization. Relying on language in the 1968 Fair Housing Act requiring communities that receive federal funds to “affirmatively further fair housing,” Romney began to withhold water, sewer, and parkland grants from suburbs that maintained exclusionary zoning ordinances or rejected housing projects with black residents.

But pressed by political advisers who were sensitive to the white suburban backlash aroused by integration,

Nixon reined him in, announcing that “forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest.”

Since then, we’ve had only poorly funded and scattershot urban compensatory programs. In education, schools serving poor children get some extra federal funds but not enough to overcome disadvantages that hobble the ability to learn. The George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations promoted “enterprise zones” that, as Sharkey observes, failed to bring significant employment to urban African Americans.

But Sharkey still believes that something along these lines could succeed. He favors three small urbaninvestment prototypes and would like to see them expanded, or at least more widely tested. One is Jobs-Plus, a Clinton-era effort to saturate housing projects with job training, child care, and income supplements for workforce entrants. Another is Milwaukee’s New Hope program with similar work incentives, covering unmarried and childless males as well as welfare mothers. Sharkey acknowledges, however, that the benefits of these programs would likely disappear in a weak economy when African American males in poor neighborhoods would be first fired and last rehired in a subsequent recovery.

The third program is the Harlem Children’s Zone, which unites a charter school, health services, and earlychildhood and parent education in efforts to send children from ghetto to college. The parent-education services could be particularly important in light of Sharkey’s multigenerational analysis, if support for mothers reduces the stress and insecurity of those damaged by having themselves been raised in truly disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The Zone has benefited participants. But founder Geoffrey Canada aims not only to benefit the few children who participate but to influence the entire neighborhood so it no longer produces multigenerational disadvantage. Sharkey acknowledges there is no evidence that the Zone has such a “contamination” effect (which is not the same as saying there is evidence that it has no such effect).

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The Obama administration has given small Promise Neighborhoods grants to a few school districts to imitate the Zone, and its Choice Neighborhoods initiative provides better services to displaced former residents of a few torn-down public-housing projects. Both are, at best, token efforts with unproven benefits, but Sharkey says they have “the potential, in theory, to transform some of the nation’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.”

He may be right. revitalization has been, sustained attempts to integrate low-income African Americans into middle-class communities have been rarer. One, documented by Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey and his colleagues in Climbing Mount Laurel, has shown at least as much promise as the ghetto-based efforts about which Sharkey enthuses.

Eight miles from the impoverished urban environments of Camden, Mount Laurel is an affluent, predominantly white New Jersey township.

In 1971, civil-rights groups filed suit over zoning there that prohibited low-income development, and four years later the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that every community statewide, not Mount Laurel alone, had to permit its “fair share” of such housing. Although the ruling spurred an increase in scattered low-income units in many New Jersey suburbs, affluent white towns across the state have schemed to evade or dilute the requirement. Governor Chris Christie wants to dilute it further.

In 2000, a low-income development was finally constructed in Mount Laurel, despite white residents’ predictions of increased crime, deteriorating school quality, and falling property values. The 140 units were 59 percent black and 29 percent Latino; Massey documents that the tenants improved their earnings, mental health, employment status, and children’s educational experiences while white neighbors’ fears were entirely unrealized. Crime and property value trends in Mount Laurel after 2001 were no different from those in nearby white suburbs that had not

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term and five years into his presidency, Barack Obama has, without much fanfare, revived George Romney’s politically explosive effort to promote integration. Relying upon the same, mostly ignored language in the 1968 Fair Housing Act that requires communities receiving federal funds to “affirmatively further fair housing,” HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan has initiated rulemaking that could again deny money for water projects, sewers, transportation, and parkland to lily-white suburbs that fail to accept subsidized or low-income housing and that maintain zoning ordinances that effectively ban apartment construction. As of this writing, the final rule has not yet been issued, but without having laid a political foundation for such a significant policy, the administration will likely fail if it attempts to take aggressive and controversial actions to integrate the suburbs.

Patrick Sharkey, like Piven and Cloward (and Paul Douglas) before him, is all too aware of the impossible political odds of Donovan’s (and Moynihan’s and Romney’s) plans to integrate the truly disadvantaged into our broader community. “It is time,” Sharkey says, “to discard the idea that moving large numbers of families out of the ghetto can be a primary solution to concentrated poverty.” But Sharkey fails to confront that it is as daunting to find the enormous investments needed to sufficiently gild the ghetto so its children are no longer raised in environments with such violence, stress, and lack of opportunity that they too frequently bequeath desperation to the next generation.

Stuck in Place is important, but an important book need not feel compelled to end on an upbeat note, with good news about how we can move forward. Trends in inequality are discouraging: For family incomes, within-race inequality has grown and between-race inequality is about where it was 45 years ago as jobs fled urban neighborhoods. Patrick Sharkey would have been safer to be more agnostic about how we can find a way out of the mess he so capably describes.  NOW IN HIS SECOND

RARE AS URBAN

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Affordable housing in New Jersey’s Mount Laurel Township: a program that worked

Black neighborhood poverty is more multigenerational, while white neighborhood poverty is more episodic.

constructed low-income housing developments at a similar time. The project seems to work.

We’ve now had a half-century of failed urban policy. Low-income African Americans are as isolated, probably more so, as when the Johnson and Nixon administrations feinted toward untying what they understood to be a “white noose” around African American neighborhoods.

In 1960, typical African Americans lived in neighborhoods that were 34 percent white. Today, despite the suburbanization of many middle-class African Americans, the average exposure of blacks to whites is virtually unchanged at 35 percent.

Sharkey says urban policy to revitalize ghettos hasn’t worked because it hasn’t really been tried—it’s been too inconsistent, too diffident, too unambitious. This is true. But our persistent unwillingness to spend big sums on improving life in urban ghettos suggests that political obstacles to durable urban policy might be just as great as those faced by integration.

In 1966, Piven and Cloward wrote in The New Republic that the reason we don’t invest more in ghetto revitalization is suburban whites’ fear that attention to urban African Americans’ problems will be an invitation to black “invasion.” If liberals unequivocally forswear integration, they argued, more urban investments might be forthcoming. In retrospect, this seems quite an implausible explanation of why we’ve allowed truly disadvantaged neighborhoods to fester.

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Goodbye Song Leave it to the Coen brothers to find folk music’s end in the early 1960s. BY STEVE ERICKSON F

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he year is 1961 in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, and the title character is a struggling New York City folk singer caught in one of life’s loops. The movie begins where it will end, with Davis onstage at the Gaslight, one of the West Village venues for a musical movement that, in the early ’60s, was caught in a loop of its own, believing it was the start of something rather than the finish. Before getting his butt kicked in a back alley by a mysterious stranger, Davis sings the song of a man condemned—if only in his miserable mind—to be hanged; we assume Davis must be a victim before we realize, over the next 100 minutes, he’s a fuckup. Homeless and broke and constantly relying on the kindness of strangers or near strangers or the newly estranged, the suddenly solo singer was once half of a duo whose fortunes were on the rise. Now haunted by the loss of his partner to suicide and raw to the doubts that go with being on his own, Davis believes he’s too good for the advice of people who try to give him some, and too good for the world, of which every setback seems to offer only further proof.

Davis is another of the self-saboteurs who have perennially fascinated the Coens over more than a quarter of a century of filmmaking. Confusing solipsism for principles and holding a vaguely romantic view of his disarray, Davis could be a distant nephew of the playwright-seduced-by-Hollywood Barton Fink a generation earlier, and an uncle several times removed of stoner-rebel Jeff Lebowski a generation later, both in Coen pictures that also bear their names. Inside Llewyn Davis is based in part on The Mayor of MacDougal Street, the memoir of blues singer Dave Van Ronk, a longtime fixture of the Village folk scene.

As played by Oscar Isaac, Davis shares Van Ronk’s storied indignation and some biographical details but not the

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interpretive growl or social garrulousness; Isaac’s charisma is more brooding and, in the manner of many performers, he only becomes personable, even charming, when he has an audience.

Nor does Davis have the survivor’s instincts—and the knack for what we now call personal branding—of a new kid just in from the Midwest with the name of Zimmerman (already shed for the flashier moniker of a Welsh poet) who’s only in the movie for a fleeting moment but hovers in the background. the election of a young new president and a rising conversation about social conflicts, American folk music had reason to trust in its relevance. More of its artists were gaining attention, and, to its credit, folk passionately accepted the job of expressing national anguish when no one else was willing to. But if the America of 1961 was less a new country than an old one still catching up with itself, that was reflected as well by an insular and occasionally elitist musical form that had little use for the contemporary; folk singers rejected the shallow teen dramas of the thencurrent pop even as they performed handed-down ballads of teen drama from a century or two before.

Supposing itself to be at the outset of what would become the pop ’60s, in fact the Village folk scene was a last gasp of the Beat ’50s, not unlike the bebop coming out of jazz clubs like the Vanguard. Meaning to be timeless, folk was outside of time: “If it was never new, and it never gets old, it’s a folk song,” Davis cracks to the Gaslight crowd that’s always conspicuously faceless, lost in the shadows of its reverence, maybe because—notwithstanding the formidable presences of Van Ronk and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and more often exemplified by the pallid likes of some of folk’s biggest stars including Eric Andersen, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, and Peter, Paul and Mary—folk was

BY THE 1960S, WITH

often as devoid of personality as the audience listening. The music aspired to be the voice of Everyone rather than the voice of Someone, so when the young Bob Dylan finally does show up in the Coens’ film, however briefly, we take notice: He sounds very much like someone, and not like anyone else.

More than Dylan or Van Ronk, Davis resembles the protest-troubadour Phil Ochs or, to be precise, the ghost that the doomed Ochs doesn’t yet know he’s given up.

The Texan Ochs called himself a “topical” singer and was emblematic

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of both folk’s commitment and its limits. Long on the sincerity of songs that challenged war and racism, he was shorter on the hallucinatory vision by which Dylan rendered classic complaints newly apocalyptic; Ochs might have written “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the Dylan song that first drew public attention to the music, but not “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” the song in Dylan’s oeuvre that crucially anticipated a future bigger than folk had the imagination for. Ochs made no secret of wanting to cross Elvis Presley with Che Guevara and

Joel and Ethan Coen during the filming of Inside Llewyn Davis

then never got over it when Dylan did just that, with Baudelaire tossed in for good measure. A decade and a half later, after trying on several different incarnations, he hanged himself, a particularly aggressive form of suicide that fulfilled the prophecy of “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” which Davis sings as the movie opens. For the rest of the film, as he hops from couch to couch for a night’s sleep when he isn’t insulting his hosts or losing their pets or hitting up his sister for money or getting other men’s girlfriends pregnant, Davis narrows various options out of

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his looping existence to last resorts: Short of killing himself, he would ship out to sea if he could manage even that. He’s folk’s ambassador to oblivion, realizing before his music does that he’s going nowhere.

ON THE BASIS OF THEIR initial films,

it’s not hard to imagine that the younger, snottier Coen brothers thought John Belushi had a point when, in 1978’s Animal House, he seized the guitar of that delicate young folk singer serenading the girls and smashed it against the staircase. The condescension of

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the Coens’ previous pictures could put you off even when their filmmaking craft was impressive, every scene so well made that the narrative pull was irresistible. For about a decade now, however, they’ve been outgrowing smug superiority as a modus operandi, and they’ve always been enamored of American musical tradition, sometimes to the point of non sequitur: The neo-noir The Big Lebowski opens with a 1934 song by the Sons of the Pioneers, and the bluegrass soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? may have been the only thing about that movie the Coens took seriously.

Now the brothers have moved into a phase of their work where a mood of elegy has crept up on them. Unlike Lebowski and Barton Fink, Inside Llewyn Davis is played straight with barely a satiric impulse; defiantly shorn of the bravura set pieces that have marked Coen films, it’s stylistically subdued and cedes the screen to Isaac, Carey Mulligan as another singer and lover, and John Goodman, who provides the movie’s few larger-thanlife moments as a jazzman crossing the country in a race with his addictions. As with the recent No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, and True

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Oscar Isaac and Justin Timberlake as 1961 folkies

When the young Bob Dylan shows up in the new Coen brothers’ film, he sounds like someone — and not like anyone else.

Grit, Llewyn Davis is infused with melancholy, signs of which, in retrospect, are now more evident in Coen movies going as far back as Miller’s Crossing more than two decades ago.

Including Fargo, Inside Llewyn Davis is the most gorgeously wintry (in all senses of the word) movie the Coens have made. In contrast with Brother’s livelier bluegrass, the soundtrack of folk standards such as “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” and “The Last Thing on My Mind” is wistful when it isn’t yearning or mournful. That the lament of Inside Llewyn Davis parallels other examinations like Mad Men of the same American history on the verge of disruption may be another indication of how acutely the Coens sometimes gauge the zeitgeist.

This melancholy is accompanied by a general compassion that was never associated with the Coens. In all his gloom, Davis embodies what appears to be a genuine affection that the writer-directors have for folk, both its music and scene, perhaps because the brothers know that a murder in Dallas and an avaricious culture led

by Europeanized rhythm and blues await. By the count of years, Davis is still at the other end of life from

where Jeff Bridges’s grizzled marshal Rooster Cogburn is in the Coens’ last feature, True Grit. But they’re both running out the string of their dreams to sad conclusions, with Cogburn simply having had more time to find some grace in it, and having had the chance to find, by virtue of being older, more of the wherewithal to go out on his own terms. Davis’s dream, which isn’t to be confused with his motives, remains innocent and may be the only thing about him that does.

Like Barton Fink, he wants to make something beautiful even as in every other way he’s a pain in the ass, even as in every other way he’s so possessed by the desire to make beauty that he can’t bring himself to compromise on his interactions with other people.

It’s one thing to become an anachronism in your winter—as a folk song might have it—and another to still be in your spring when you realize you’re obsolete. As Llewyn Davis is getting his butt kicked in the alley, a young rock-and-pop combo has just returned home from Germany to their seaport town in England where they’re now sensations; the band’s lead guitarist is still just 17, which is to say the Beatles are laying claim to a future that already leaves in the past not only brooding folk singers with too much integrity but, with them, their unyielding music. As Davis collapses in the alley, folk has one more surge of popularity left (though not for him), led by the Kingston Trio and the New Christy Minstrels, for whom purists like Van Ronk have no use. Dylan will rewrite the genre’s traditions and, for a year or two, make it the most pertinent sound on the radio.

But Dylan knows that the authenticity folk fetishizes is the enemy of audacity. Hearing the Beatles on the radio (who have been listening to him in return), he doesn’t look back—at Llewyn Davis or anyone else. At the end of Inside Llewyn Davis, on his way out the Gaslight’s back door, at the first sound of Dylan singing his set from the stage, Davis shoots the new young singer a look and shudders, almost imperceptibly, wondering what just blew in on a cold wind from Hibbing, Minnesota, barely 200 miles from where the Coens were born. 

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The Moment of Creation Do America’s current challenges in the Middle East trace back to Harry Truman’s 1948 missteps? BY GERSHOM GORENBERG B

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n May 12, 1948, President Harry Truman convened a tense Oval Office meeting. In less than three days, Britain would leave Palestine, where civil war already raged between Jews and Arabs. Clark Clifford, Truman’s special counsel, argued the position of American Zionist organizations and Democratic politicians: The president should announce that he would recognize a Jewish state even before it was established. Secretary of State George Marshall was incensed. “I don’t even know why Clifford is here,” Marshall said. “He is a domestic advisor, and this is a foreign policy matter.”

Marshall was asking for an impossible division. Foreign policy and domestic politics can’t be kept apart in a democracy, nor should they be. But this incident, described in John Judis’s Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, shows that the question of whether U.S. policy toward Israel is captive to a special-interest group has existed even longer than Israel has.

The densely researched core of the book follows Truman’s decisions at the moment of creation—of Israel and of U.S. involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Judis shows how American Zionist leaders and sympathetic officials swayed the president to support partition of Palestine and establishment of Israel, against his preference for a single political entity for Arabs and Jews.

The author thus proves his explicit thesis: The lobbying efforts of American Zionists tilted American policy, to the detriment of Palestine’s Arabs.

Yet the story also has additional, halfstated lessons about when a domestic pressure group can most influence foreign policy—when the president is indecisive; when none of the available policy options is attractive; when the best options require a greater investment than the president wants to make; and when the administration is

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distracted by challenges elsewhere. In this case, policy was further distorted

by Truman’s misunderstanding of Zionism, a misunderstanding that colors American discourse about Israel even today and tints this book as well.

Palestine was one more crisis facing America’s unready president. Britain had originally ruled Palestine based on the promise of the 1917 Balfour Declaration to turn it into a “national home for the Jewish people,” ignoring the national aspirations of the land’s Arab majority. In 1939, Britain switched direction, promising an independent Arab state and drastically limiting Jewish immigration just as European Jews were desperately seeking a refuge. At the war’s end, most of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. But tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors in DP (displaced persons) camps wanted to reach Palestine, and the Zionist movement demanded an independent Jewish state. By autumn, the British faced a full-scale Jewish rebellion.

Truman’s contradictory impulses were both personal and political, Judis writes. Identifying with the “little man,” the president sought to help Jewish DPs. But he opposed the idea of a state based on a religion, which is how he saw a Jewish state. Key White House officials were pro-Zionist, while the State Department measured Middle East policy in terms of oil and the Cold War. Wallace Murray, head of State’s Office of Near East and African Affairs under President Franklin Roosevelt, had warned that endorsing “Zionist objectives may well result in throwing the entire Arab world into the hands of the Soviet Union.” Loy Henderson, Murray’s successor under Truman, shared that fear.

Meanwhile, each report on the Holocaust rallied more American Jews to Zionism. The central figure in American Zionism, Abba Hillel Silver, IN THE SUMMER OF 1945,

GENESIS: TRUMAN, AMERICAN JEWS, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE ARAB / ISRAELI CONFLICT JOHN B. JUDIS

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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was a Cleveland-based Reform rabbi who’d become a supporter of Jewish statehood after the Nazis came to power in Germany. By 1945, he was the leader of both the American Zionist Emergency Council, created during the war, and the Zionist Organization of America. Besides organizing mass rallies and letter-writing campaigns, Silver skillfully played off the political parties, gaining Republican backing for pro-Zionist positions, then pushing Democrats to exceed their rivals.

Truman and the Democrats, with their political standing precarious, could not risk losing Jewish votes in key states.

So Truman oscillated. In the summer and fall of 1945—moved by the horrifying conditions in DP camps and by the upcoming New York mayoral race, seen by both political parties as nationally significant—he publicly called for letting “as many of the Jews into Palestine as possible.”

At the same time, he told the press that he didn’t want to send “500,000 American soldiers … to make peace.”

It wasn’t clear whether he thought that U.S. troops would be needed if a Jewish state were established or that even his own immigration proposal might be too explosive.

But Britain—bankrupt at home, reeling in Palestine—wanted U.S. involvement. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin convinced Truman to set up a joint Anglo-American committee to investigate the DP problem. The committee took testimony in Washington, London, Arab capitals, and Jerusalem and visited the camps in Europe. Its April 1946 report roughly fit Truman’s position: Allow the entry of 100,000 Jews and leave Palestine under British rule, recast as a U.N. trusteeship. Establishing an independent state in any form, the committee warned, “would result in civil strife” between Jews and Arabs “such as might threaten the peace of the world.”

That July, Truman’s emissary Henry Grady and British Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison drafted recommendations for implementing the committee report. They introduced a major new element: The trusteeship would be a federal regime, with Palestine divided into autonomous provinces. One would be

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Jewish, one Arab. Jerusalem and the Negev would be separate provinces.

The 100,000 DPs would enter the small Jewish district. But the central government—that is, the British— would have the last word on further immigration and would control defense and foreign affairs.

Silver labeled the proposed Jewish province a “ghetto” and the American Zionist Emergency Council launched a letter-writing campaign to the White House. Democratic politicians warned of electoral disasters. At a cabinet meeting, Truman looked at a four-inch stack of telegrams and complained, “Jesus Christ couldn’t please [the Jews] when he was here on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?” He then abandoned the Morrison-Grady plan.

The pattern was set. In 1947, a U.N. committee recommended dividing Palestine between a Jewish and Arab state and assigned the majority of the land to the Jewish minority. Truman, still preferring the federal plan, submitted to American Zionist pressure and voted for partition in the General Assembly. He continued to zigzag up to and after his recognition of Israel.

In public memory, he was a champion of Jewish statehood. In reality, Judis tells us, Truman let the pro-Zionist lobby shape a policy he disliked.

Yet there are clues in this story to circumstances that magnified the lobby’s influence. One was Truman’s character. In Judis’s depiction, the famous sign on Truman’s desk, “The Buck Stops Here,” described the president’s aspiration, not his behavior.

In Truman’s defense, his administration’s overwhelming foreign-policy challenge was the Cold War. There was little attention left for Palestine.

All of Truman’s options were bad. No historian can say what would have happened if America had stuck to the Morrison-Grady plan. Prima facie, though, none of the proposals for Palestine had a chance of being peacefully implemented without a large outside military force. America was demobilizing its wartime army. A critical concern was to avoid putting U.S. troops on the ground.

In theory, Truman could have separated his commitment to Holocaust

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survivors from the Palestine issue by opening America’s gates. Politically, that was impossible. Judis records a brief attempt to allow more refugees into the United States. The House of Representatives rewrote the bill to reduce drastically the number of Jews who qualified. Meanwhile, the number who needed refuge soared far beyond 100,000, as anti-Semitic violence met Eastern European Jews who tried returning to their former homes.

As Tony Judt wrote in his epic Postwar, this was part of the much larger ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe after World War II: Hungary expelled Slovaks to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria expelled Turks to Turkey, and so on.

With explicit American acquiescence, Czechoslovakia expelled nearly three million Germans to Germany. The Jews were unusual only in that they had nowhere to go. Eventually, Judt records, 332,000 settled in Israel; just half that were admitted to Western countries. In this sense, Palestinian Arabs did suffer for the West’s sins, including American nativism.

Truman continued to lament that Zionist pressure prevented implementation of the Anglo-American and Morrison-Grady proposals. This

May 1948: Truman with Chaim Weizmann, soon to be Israel’s first president

appears true—but also sounds like someone who chose one bad alternative, idealized the equally poor path he rejected, and passed the buck for the decision. Morrison and Grady designed a colonial protectorate on the eve of colonialism’s collapse. The first reason that the Anglo-­A merican Committee gave for overruling Arab and Jewish demands for self-­ determination was “the great interest of the Christian World in Palestine.”

This sounds suspiciously like imperialism for religious purposes.

There’s an irony here. As Judis regularly reminds us, Truman didn’t want religion mixed in politics and so opposed a Jewish state just as he would oppose a “Protestant or Catholic state.” If Truman had any objection to the ethnonational states established in Europe after World War I, such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (originally the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), we do not learn about it here. In their day, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points had called clearly for creating such states. For Zionists, a Jewish state would be a nation-state.

But Truman saw Jews as constituting a religion. In America, the word “Jew” belongs to the same category

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as “Catholic” or “Protestant.” This is a historically recent narrowing of the word’s meaning, as political scientist Charles Liebman explained in his essential 1973 work The Ambivalent American Jew. Before the 19th century, Liebman wrote, Jewishness melded what we would call “ethnicity, nationality, culture, and religion.” As Jews entered general society in Western Europe and America, they defined themselves as a religion, since it was still an acceptable way to sustain a separate identity. They squeezed themselves into the hegemonic categories of the majority society. Judis describes one particularly sharp example of this constriction of Jewish self-definition, the case of American Reform Judaism in the 19th century. The Reform movement’s 1885 declaration of principles, known as the Pittsburgh Platform, stated, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.” Take note of the words “no longer”: The Reform rabbis who wrote the platform knew that they were shedding what had previously been a basic element of Jewish self-definition.

Curiously, though, Judis describes the Jews throughout their previous history as constituting only a religion.

From the first millennium CE, he writes, Palestine was known to Jews, like Christians, as the “holy land.”

Their connection to it, in his depiction, was both purely religious and attenuated—“most Jews accepted the Diaspora as an enduring condition”—and if they expected to return, it was only by a “Messianic act of God.” When Judis does describe how Jews in late-19th-century Eastern Europe began to define themselves as a nation, he still portrays their assertion of a right of return to Palestine as only a religious claim.

This is a picture of the Jewish past squeezed into contemporary American concepts. Historically, Jews understood themselves not just as a religious community but also as a people. The Hebrew word poorly translated into English as “conversion” denoted adoption into a “kinship,” a family with a faith, as scholars Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar explain in their study of the subject, Transforming Identity. “Holy land” was a

medieval addition to Hebrew, infrequently used, almost certainly an import from Christian tongues. The common Hebrew term was “Land of Israel.” Since “Israel” was a synonym for Jews and Jewish, it meant Land of the Jews. The common term for where Jews actually lived was “Exile.” Yiddish used the same names. The sense of being a nation, disempowered and displaced from its physical home, was fundamental to Jewish culture. Exile was not an “enduring condition” but a condition to be endured. Jews indeed awaited God’s intervention to return to their homeland, because effecting such a radical change appeared beyond human ability.

Zionism began as another constriction of Jewishness to fit hegemonic categories—in this case, the accepted division of people into nationalities within Eastern Europe’s multinational empires. In contrast to Western Jews who declared that Jewish nationhood was obsolete, most of Zionism’s founders and leaders saw religion as the archaic element that must be discarded. Whatever the cost of downsizing Jewishness and pensioning off God, it did encourage Jews to get about the business of repatriation to their homeland on their own.

In the bracing spirit of modern revolutions, people could rise up and change their condition.

Fundamentally, then, the JewishPalestinian conflict is a classic dispute between two national communities.

Understanding the nature of the conflict does not mean excusing brutal actions that both sides have taken. It does not, for example, provide a moral basis for Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank. It does explain why a two-state arrangement is the best bad plan yet suggested for a resolution.

Denial of the other’s identity is basic to the dispute. At its start, Zionism ignored the existence of Palestinian Arabs. Long afterward, the standard Israeli narrative denied that Palestinians were a nation. The classic Palestinian narrative insists that Jews are only a religious community, not a national one. Genesis provides historical background that largely follows the Palestinian narrative, sometimes with an anger that detracts from

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analysis. Judis concludes with a plea “to redress [the] moral balance” in American policy toward the conflict.

This is certainly a pressing need. Neither balance nor justice and peace will be served by replacing one incomplete narrative with an equally incomplete narrative.

THAT SAID, JUDIS BUILDS a compel-

In theory, Truman could have separated his commitment to Holocaust survivors from the Palestine issue by opening America’s gates.

Politically, that was impossible.

ling account, based in large part on documents from the time, of Truman’s tortured and tortuous policy decisions and of the pressure successfully exerted by American Zionists. The story, Judis argues, is significant not only in itself but for what it foreshadowed.

From the time Truman dropped the Morrison-Grady plan, he had no solution of his own, but was buffeted between competing plans from the Zionist movement and his own State Department.

In the end Truman would accede to Zionist pressure. … A pattern had been established that would prevail for the rest of the century.

Indeed, Genesis asserts, that pattern continued at least through the first term of Barack Obama, as he abandoned Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and blocked the bid for U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state. Just as Silver rejected compromises endorsed by more pragmatic Zionist leaders in Palestine, latter-day “pro-Israel” lobbyists have at times been discomfited

by Israeli leaders who pursued peace agreements. With Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister, though, the vicarious hawks in Washington have faced no such dissonance.

The book’s afterword predicts that Obama’s second term will continue to follow the pattern and that the president is unlikely to exert American power to achieve an Israeli-­ Palestinian peace agreement. But the central story of Genesis is about how domestic politics changed foreign policy. The lesson should be to organize rather than to despair. When Obama, his secretary of state, and other advisers meet to discuss whether to press on with American peace efforts, a flood of e-mails demanding that the president do so would be valuable. 

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The Man Who Knew Too Little A CIA memoir whose emptiness is something to contemplate BY ROSA BROOKS B

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eaders seeking a vicarious adrenaline kick may be disappointed by former CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo’s memoir of his three decades at the agency. In thrillers, the CIA is swashbuckling and sinister, replete with cloaks, daggers, and Technicolor deeds of derring-do.

But Rizzo was the agency’s top lawyer, not its top spy, and Company Man— his meandering account of a life in the bureaucratic trenches—portrays not a glamorous world of espionage but a grayish realm of meetings and memos, committee reports and congressional hearings, presidential findings and memoranda of notification.

Yet if Rizzo’s memoir falls short of thrilling, it’s often distinctly chilling.

As the book’s title proudly proclaims, John Rizzo is the quintessential company man. For 34 years, he provides the agency with the legal assistance he feels its patriotic employees deserve, and he refrains from judgment when confronted with “vexing” issues such as CIA support for Guatemalan death squads or, more recently, the waterboarding of terrorist detainees.

Rizzo reserves his opprobrium for those who threaten, disrespect, or damage the interests of his beloved agency. Thus, when a young Pakistani man opens fire in the CIA’s parking lot in 1993, killing two employees, Rizzo seems unsure of what bothers him most: that members of the CIA “family” have been “randomly slaughtered, just for trying to get to work on a sunny Virginia morning” or that newly inaugurated President Bill Clinton, in a “hurtful … snub,” fails to show up to their memorial service. (Rizzo is too concerned with this “unforgivable slight” to note that the shootings, while appalling, were not entirely random: Mir Aimal Kansi, the perpetrator, later explained to CNN that his motivation was anger at “the policy of the U.S. government in the Middle East, particularly toward the Palestinian people.”)

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Aldrich Ames, convicted in 1994 of selling classified CIA information to the Russians, is condemned as an “irredeemable drunken lout” whose “boorish and brazen behavior” should have been recognized sooner as that of an “evil, destructive traitor.” James Risen, the New York Times reporter whose 2006 book State of War revealed a failed CIA effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program, is similarly censured by the upright Rizzo, who declares him “irresponsible and sneaky.”

Even alleged al-Qaeda mastermind Abu Zubaydah is criticized less for his role in the devastating September 11 attacks than for his irritating behavior toward his CIA jailers. Contemplating Zubaydah’s “ordinary and unprepossessing” appearance, Rizzo recalls “the famous title of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann: The Banality of Evil.” But Rizzo— presumably referring to the subtitle of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem— does not dwell on this troubling theme.

Instead, he moves on smoothly to recount Zubaydah’s capture after a 2002 gunfight in Pakistan. As soon as Zubaydah recovers from his wounds, complains the offended Rizzo, the “twisted, smug little creep” takes “to taunting our people.” Zubaydah feeds his CIA interrogators “little tidbits that were either old news or outright lies … all the while taking care to torment his questioners by making clear … that he knew far more about ongoing Al Qaeda plots than he was ever going to tell us.”

It is this “torment” that inspires Zubaydah’s interrogators to seek alternative ways to extract information from their prisoner. Thus, recalls Rizzo, was born the CIA’s program of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

IN SOME WAYS, Company Man is best

understood as the story of John Rizzo’s extended love affair with the CIA. Born in 1947 into an Italian-Irish family outside Boston, Rizzo, the only son,

COMPANY MAN: THIRTY YEARS OF CONTROVERSY AND CRISIS IN THE CIA

BY JOHN RIZZO

Scribner

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leaves behind his parents and sisters for Brown University. A self-described “naïve, immature kid,” he joins the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, where he meets “a group of guys that would become lifelong friends.” The “guys” give the grateful Rizzo “a lifelong taste for fine clothes and good cigars” and “a badly needed set of social skills.” At Brown, he also attends a lecture by Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA’s recently retired—but still patrician and “strikingly handsome”— former executive director. Rizzo is awed: “Kirkpatrick had the aura of someone older, wise, immortal, even.”

Who wouldn’t want to join the immortals? A few years later, Rizzo finds himself in a low-level legal position in the customs division of the Treasury Department. He yearns for something more and, arriving at the CIA in 1976, he is overjoyed to discover that everyone there “radiated a sense of pride and esprit de corps.”

The young attorney delights in the “camaraderie … the knowledge that we were all part of an exclusive, selective, secret club—that no one on the outside could really fully know or understand—created an unspoken but unique and unbreakable bond.”

Rizzo describes the denizens of his new fraternity in the simplistic language of schoolboy romance: Robert McNamara, who served as CIA general counsel from 1997 to 2001, is “a smart, honorable guy.” CIA inspector general John Helgerson is “honorable and fairminded.” Robert Gates, CIA director and later secretary of defense, is an “honorable, decent man.” Even Terry Ward and Fred Brugger, two operatives fired in 1995 after lying to Congress about their connections to Guatemalan death squads, are described as “honorable, self-effacing professionals.”

Indeed, Rizzo bears an occasional resemblance to Jerry Westerby, the title character in John le Carré’s 1977 spy classic The Honourable Schoolboy.

Like Westerby, Rizzo just wants to belong; he prefers to avoid grappling with underlying questions of ethics or strategy. “Point me and I’ll march,” Westerby tells spymaster George Smiley. “Tell me the shots, I’ll play them.

World’s chock-a-block with milkand-water intellectuals armed with fifteen conflicting arguments against

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blowing their blasted noses. We don’t need another.”

Rizzo displays a similar lack of moral curiosity as he walks readers through many of the CIA’s most controversial programs, from the IranContra scandal of the 1980s to the post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” programs. Despite an often-numbing level of detail—the book opens with a 30-page account of how the CIA came to destroy videotapes showing the 2003 waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed—Rizzo consistently misses the point. He’s anxious to convince readers that he would never have sanctioned the destruction of those videotapes (which were, after all, vital CIA records). But though he notes that CIA Inspector General John Helgerson had “misgivings about the wisdom and morality of the interrogation program from the outset,” Rizzo doesn’t take the trouble to describe, much less grapple with, the nature of Helgerson’s concerns.

Rizzo assumes the role of everhelpful lawyer and scribe. When President Jimmy Carter leaves office, CIA Director William Casey orders Rizzo to “write a new, broadly worded finding” for Reagan’s signature, one that will enable the CIA to step up its covert support for right-wing forces in Central America. Rizzo comes up with a finding “as expansive as I could make it.” Is increased CIA support for Guatemala’s death squads, Nicaragua’s Contras, and El Salvador’s brutal junta a good idea? Rizzo doesn’t ask.

His complaisance is duly rewarded; even Dewey Clarridge—the “swashbuckling” chief of covert CIA operations for Latin America, later indicted for lying to Congress about the IranContra affair—gladdens Rizzo’s heart by instructing his staff that “every proposed operation of any significance had to be run by me first. … [Clarridge and Latin America–based colleague Chuck Hogan] seemed to recognize … that a lawyer needed to be involved in everything they were now doing.” A cynic might suggest that Clarridge’s willingness to seek legal guidance was fueled by his confidence that Rizzo would never provide an answer he didn’t like. But Rizzo is no cynic. No matter that others view Clarridge as

Hannah Arendt would have had stern words for John Rizzo, but I find it difficult to condemn him.

a “Machiavellian schemer”—the loyal Rizzo finds him “honest and candid in all his dealings with me.”

Later, Rizzo tries his best to protect Clarridge and others implicated in Iran-Contra from having to testify in a hearing open to the press. To Rizzo, it’s a matter of agency honor. Were Clarridge and his fellows complicit in a secret program to sell weapons to Iran, an avowed U.S. enemy, and funnel the proceeds to Nicaragua’s Contra insurgents, in clear violation of an explicit congressional ban? Maybe, maybe not. But “these were active-duty, career veterans of the spy service. The thought of them being paraded and pummeled on national television just seemed unfair and unseemly.”

With the Iran-Contra affair, Rizzo recalls, “I truly came of age as a CIA lawyer.” By chance, Rizzo was himself able to remain untainted: In 1985, he had left the CIA’s Directorate of Operations to spend a year at the CIA inspector general’s office. “If I had still been the [Directorate of Operations] lawyer in 1985,” he reflects, “I have no doubt that I would have been brought into the loop” when the “disastrous” Iran-Contra scheme was developed.

But he was not, and his genuine ignorance protected him.

Contemplating this bit of moral luck brings Rizzo a rare flash of selfknowledge. “Perhaps,” he muses, “things might have turned out differently if I had been given a say—for a time I was pleased to believe that—but the truth is they probably wouldn’t have. The arms-for-hostages initiative was conceived and approved at the highest levels [and] in all likelihood I would have gone along, whatever my private misgivings might have been.”

We’re left in the dark, of course, about what Rizzo’s misgivings about Iran-Contra “might have been,” and any doubts he had about later CIA activities appear to have been rare and quickly overcome. Rizzo recalls that when briefed on the 1984 kidnapping and torture of CIA Beirut Station Chief William Buckley (“a wonderful fellow”), he found the account of Buckley’s ordeal “indescribably chilling and heartbreaking. … The memory of it … would stay with me.” But he never connects the dots between this

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memory and the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation of detainees.

In 2002, with Abu Zubaydah thumbing his nose at interrogators, Rizzo is inclined to facilitate the approval of a variety of “enhanced interrogation techniques” proposed by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. These range from waterboarding, “stress positions,” and prolonged sleep deprivation to “cramped confinement” in a small box into which “the interrogator would have the option to place a harmless insect.”

“I have to admit that I didn’t ask a lot of questions,” Rizzo says. Though some of the proposed “enhanced interrogation techniques” struck him as “sadistic and terrifying,” Rizzo is determined not to say no to his beloved band of brothers. He’s not quite willing to give an unqualified yes, however.

“What I can’t do is sit here and tell you … if [this] legally constitutes torture,” he informs CIA Director George Tenet and Counterterrorism Center Chief Jose Rodriguez.

“Our people won’t do anything that involves torture,” Rodriguez declares.

“You’re damn right,” Tenet adds. Thus reassured, but unwilling to be the final decision maker, Rizzo punts. It occurs to him that in the future some may think that the CIA’s proposed interrogation techniques “were not only barbaric but lapsed into criminality.” He wants “legal cover” before moving forward.

John Rizzo, George W. Bush’s nominee to become CIA general counsel, and Senator John Warner before the start of Rizzo’s 2007 confirmation hearing

Happily for Rizzo, cover is provided by an obliging John Yoo at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. In the end, nearly a hundred terrorism suspects were detained and subjected to interrogation at CIA “black sites.” Although Rizzo insists that the CIA never employed the “harmless insect” tactic, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded some 183 times before the “enhanced interrogation techniques” program ended. Other detainees were deprived of sleep for more than a week by having their arms elevated in chains anchored to the ceiling.

LATER THE MEMOS between Yoo,

Rizzo, and other Justice Department officials became public, and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) program came in for bipartisan condemnation. “It’s all torture,” a stonefaced Senator John McCain told CIA Director Porter Goss. To Rizzo’s dismay, the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld declared that the treatment of al-Qaeda detainees was governed by Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions, potentially bringing CIA interrogators deemed to have used cruel or humiliating techniques under the ambit of the federal War Crimes Act. Leon Panetta, appointed director of the CIA by newly inaugurated President Barack Obama,

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declared during his 2009 Senate confirmation hearings that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” program constituted “torture.” “Just like that, he publicly branded us as war criminals,” Rizzo observes sadly.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but Rizzo, to his credit, is willing to shoulder much of the responsibility. “If I had said the word” back in 2002, he admits, “much if not all of the EIT initiative would have quietly died before it was born. It would have been a relatively easy thing to do, actually.” But he feared being “too timid” and perhaps being held responsible for a future terrorist attack. His support for the program also “comes down to something pretty basic: Every, and I mean every career CIA employee who was involved in the program believed in it wholeheartedly and unswervingly.”

Congress is unimpressed by Rizzo’s loyalty, and the torture scandal ultimately sinks his chances of being confirmed as CIA general counsel in 2007. So he soldiers on as acting general counsel, never quite sure why the whole thing caused such a fuss.

(Indeed, he expresses sorrow that he never had the chance to share with Congress and the public his “perspective on the essential role that the rule of law plays in the intelligence world.”)

Hannah Arendt would have had stern words for John Rizzo, but in the end I find it oddly difficult to condemn him. Even after three decades at the CIA , Rizzo retains a peculiar innocence—a profound bewilderment about the strange world in which he finds himself. Visiting a “black site” for the first time in 2005, he dons his “casual attire”: a pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt, for which he is scornfully rebuked by his hard-bitten CIA security escorts.

Abashed by this sartorial error—and resolving henceforth to wear “earth tones”—Rizzo proceeds to the secret prison. There, for the first time, he sees the detainees “whose fates had consumed so much of my time for the previous three years.” They look, he notes in mild astonishment, “so … small.”

That’s John Rizzo, company man.

He yearned to do good, but far more than that, he yearned to belong—a yearning at once so vast, and so pitiably small. 

JAN/FEB 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 95

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Flirting with Disaster

BY ABBY RAPOPORT

J

ust days after the 2013 elections, former Congresswoman Mary Bono and I were on MSNBC discussing voter-ID laws. A moderate Republican, Bono tried hard to shift the focus to a universally hated aspect of American elections—the lines. “There should be no reason there should be long lines, ever,” she said. “Why [can’t they] orchestrate and engineer a solution that you get to the polls, and there’s 15 minutes, guaranteed in and out, and you vote?”

It’s a good question. Even if we forget about the disturbing rash of voting restrictions—the ID laws, the cutbacks to early voting, the efforts to make it harder to register—a basic problem remains: We don’t invest enough in our elections. Across the country, machines are old and breaking down, and we’re failing to use new technology that could clean up our voter rolls and make it easier to predict—and thus prevent—those long lines. The odds of Congress allocating the billions it would take to help localities buy new voting machines and solve other voting problems are slim to none. But there’s already an agency in place that can help jurisdictions run better elections. All Congress has to do is allow it to function. But for House Republicans, that’s asking too much.

It was only 12 years ago, in the aftermath of the 2000 election, that Democrats and Republicans together passed the Help America Vote Act. The law put $3.9 billion toward new machines and created

the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to oversee their distribution, approve standards and certifications, and study elections administration to find patterns of problems and models for solving them. The commission, with spots for two Democratic appointees and two Republicans, worked well for a while. But for the past two years, the EAC has operated—after a fashion—with zero commissioners.

President Barack Obama put forward two nominees in 2010 who fell victim to Republican gridlock; now, with the Senate’s filibuster rules scaled back, they may get a chance to take their positions. Even then, however, the “zombie commission,” as it’s sometimes called, will lack the voting quorum the law requires to get big things done; Republicans are not exactly itching to nominate their two commissioners.

This means that we’re relying on ever-more-outdated technology; the commission hasn’t updated its voting-machine standards since 2005. Compliance is voluntary under federal law, but the vast majority of states require election officials to follow the EAC standards. The only approved voting machines were built in 2005 or earlier; imagine being stuck using a laptop that old, and you’ll have an idea of what elections administrators are facing. The software is usually proprietary, meaning you can’t just go online and get an update. If a machine breaks down, there’s no easy fix; instead, it most likely has to be replaced—and voting machines are not sold at Best

Buy. The jurisdictions that need new equipment—and could afford it without federal help—are stuck choosing among machines that were designed a decade ago.

The only approved voting machines were built in 2005 or earlier; imagine being stuck using a laptop that old.

Without updated standards, companies have little incentive to come up with new technologies.

Even so, we’re missing out on some promising innovations. In Texas, for instance, Travis County is creating a system that would give voters the same technology that restaurants use to place orders. In drawings, these machines resemble tablets—equipment most voters already know how to use.

But without the EAC commissioners to approve this new technology, it’s unclear whether it can be implemented.

If lawmakers don’t make functional elections a priority between now and 2016—at a minimum, approving a full slate of commissioners—we could see

even longer lines than the ones that plagued the 2012 election in states like Florida and Wisconsin, and in counties such as Richland, South Carolina, where some waited a whopping seven hours. Why so long?

Because Richland County, like so many others, had a lot more voters than in 2010—28 percent—and 12 percent fewer working machines.

We need a fully functioning elections commission that can approve new machines, if not help pay for them. The commission doesn’t have to be a missed opportunity; already, despite the lack of leadership, it’s the national clearinghouse for elections data and information on voter registration. With congressional authorization, the EAC could do far more; for instance, it could help states coordinate—and tidy up—their voter rolls.

You might think this would be one issue ripe for bipartisanship; couldn’t we at least agree to let the commission do its job? But Republicans—the same folks who are constantly bemoaning the peril of voter fraud—are so hostile to the idea that they’ve voted multiple times in the House to dismantle the commission, arguing that it’s just another example of wasteful spending.

Both sides of the aisle continue to think of ways to run elections better. But until we get a quorum of commissioners, those bright ideas will languish, long lines will continue to discourage voters, and we’ll all have to cross our fingers that the problems don’t blow up into a crisis. 

VOLUME 25, NUMBER 1. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published bi-monthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1710 Rhode Island Ave., NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2014 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.

96 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2014

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A New Majority for Our Public Schools

Photo: Bruce Gilbert

I

t has the feel of Groundhog Day: Another international education comparison, another round of hand-wringing and finger-pointing, and then right back to the same policies. You know what they say about the definition of insanity.

The latest results come from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The United States, once again, landed in the middle of the pack on reading and science, and below average in math. However, students in more-affluent schools in the United States where the poverty rate is less than 10 percent actually surpassed many of the highest-rated countries.

Poverty is important, as we see from the data from the states that asked to have their PISA results broken out. Massachusetts, for example, whose child-poverty rate is well below the national average, ranked with the world’s best. Florida, where child poverty is above the national average, scored below the U.S. and OECD averages.

But other factors matter too. Massachusetts also has a long history of standards-based reform and investing in teacher quality, whereas Florida has disinvested in education and has fixated on test-based accountability.

This raises the question: Are the dominant strategies in U.S. education today— hyper-testing and competition—the best approaches to help all children succeed, particularly in light of profound austerity and inequity? This is especially important given that nearly half of public school students in America live in poverty—a crisis many officials in the United States choose to ignore. As Andreas Schleicher of the OECD explains: “The vast majority of OECD countries either invest equally into every student or disproportionately more into disadvantaged students. The U.S. is one of the few countries doing the opposite.”

If you look past the headlines to the lessons from PISA, there is a striking convergence between the strategies that

top-performing countries utilize and the approaches people closest to students and schools here in the United States are calling for.

Parents, students, educators, unions and community members share a desire for great neighborhood public schools that are safe, welcoming and collaborative.

Weingarten with students at Nyack Middle School in Nyack, N.Y.

They have banded together with our union to push for this, as well as for more voice and transparency in public education, and against inadequate and inequitable funding and resources and the relentless emphasis on testing over teaching and learning.

This emerging movement struck a chord with grass-roots activities that were part of the Dec. 9 National Day of Action to Reclaim the Promise of Public Education: Our Schools, Our Solutions. Diverse coalitions in more than 100 cities and towns called for a new direction for public education. This was the largest coordinated action in support of public education in recent memory.

In Corpus Christi, Texas, community and business partners joined AFT members and First Book to give a free book to every Head Start student.

Community partners in Cleveland pressed the Cleveland Clinic to pay its fair share of taxes to help fund schools and wraparound services for students.

A coalition in Newark, N.J., turned up the heat on Gov. Chris Christie and his handpicked superintendent, calling on them to do the right thing regarding a fair funding

formula, local control over decision-making, and racial and class equity.

In New York City, parents, students, educators, activists and elected officials packed a rally where they said “enough!” to agendas to defund and destabilize public education.

A broad community coalition in Nyack,

Photo: Bruce Gilbert

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

Are the dominant strategies in U.S. education today the best way to help all children succeed?

N.Y., decried excessive standardized testing and the botched implementation of the Common Core State Standards in the state.

What if, instead of using international rankings to bash our students, schools and teachers, we learned from top-performing countries and applied their lessons for the benefit of all children? What if we rejected policies that don’t move the needle in favor of community-supported solutions with proven track records, like early childhood education; safe and nurturing schools; supporting and valuing teachers; welcoming families; and providing students with engaging curriculum including art and music and with wraparound services to meet their social, emotional and health needs?

That’s what reclaiming the promise of public education is about. These are our schools and they need our solutions. This is more than one day and one moment in time. It’s a movement, and we are moving forward. We have a moral obligation to provide a great education to each and every child, and we must create a new majority to make this happen.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten