The American Prospect #311

HOW AMERICA CREATED PUTIN ROBERT KUTTNER

MEDICARE FOR ALL ...

IN CANADA CAITLIN KELLY

CONGRESS’S BIGGEST OBSTACLE DAVID DAYEN

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

The Campaign Cash Race

ALEXANDER SAMMON

JAN/FEB 2020

Progressives can’t afford to abandon the working class.

For decades, progressives led the way in fighting for policies to protect, strengthen and grow the working class.

From fighting against offshoring to rallying for better wages and working conditions, progressives stood up for America’s blue collar workers when nobody else would.

Progressives can’t quit the fight now. In 2020 and beyond, we must continue to fight for America’s workers.

americanmanufacturing.org

contents

VOLUME 31, NUMBER 1 JAN / FEB 2020

PAGE 28

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COLUMNS 4 PROSPECTS HOW MONEY NOW TRIES TO BURY THE TRUTH BY PAUL STARR

NOTEBOOK 7 TRUMP’S ASYLUM CRUELTY ON TRIAL BY MARCIA BROWN 10 FROM IVORY TOWER TO EGYPTIAN DUNGEON BY JONATHAN GUYER 12 RIDING FOR FREE IN KANSAS CITY BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

FEATURES 14 COVER STORY TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN BY ALEXANDER SAMMON THE 2020 PRIMARY HAS BEEN AS MUCH ABOUT HOW THE CANDIDATES RAISE MONEY AS WHAT THEY WANT TO DO IN OFFICE. 21 CONGRESS’S BIGGEST OBSTACLE BY DAVID DAYEN POLITICIANS HAVE ALLOWED THE CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE TO STAND IN THE WAY OF PROGRESSIVE AMBITIONS. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY. 28 WHAT MEDICARE FOR ALL REALLY LOOKS LIKE BY CAITLIN KELLY A TOUR OF THE CANADIAN SYSTEM, ALSO CALLED MEDICARE 35 WAS PUTIN INEVITABLE? BY ROBERT KUTTNER AMERICAN POLICY BLUNDERS HELPED BRING ABOUT A POST-COMMUNIST RUSSIA HOSTILE TO DEMOCRACY, FREE MARKETS, AND THE WEST. 45 SHOCK & ROLL BY ALEX DZIADOSZ A NEO-NAZI MUSIC EMPIRE, A GERMAN MINISTER, AND THE FIGHT FOR A COUNTRY’S SOUL

CULTURE 53 WHAT DID HOFFA WANT? BY HAROLD MEYERSON 57 HOW THE SUPREME COURT CONTRIBUTED TO GROWING INEQUALITY BY MARK JOSEPH STERN 59 THE ART OF ORGANIZING BY BEIGE LUCIANO-ADAMS 62 (UN)FORGIVEABLE BY NANCY GERTNER 64 PARTING SHOT TARGETS OF THE GROYPER ARMY BY ELI VALLEY Cover art by Victor Juhasz

1

PAGE 53

from the Editor

P

ractically every news outlet these days is focused on 2020: the events that are happening now that will affect our world. For this issue of the Prospect, we’re more interested in looking to the future.

For example, if a progressive reaches the White House in 2021, and they want to re-engineer the health care system, where can they look for examples, to draw lessons? They can look in the pages of this magazine. CAITLIN KELLY, a longtime features reporter for newspapers and a Canada native, spent several weeks north of the border interviewing patients, doctors, and experts about the country’s single-payer system. I learned a ton from this piece, and I think progressive policymakers will too.

What about the traditional obstacle to activist governance, the ever-present refrain “but how will you pay for that?” I’ve written about the ultimate source material for this question: the Congressional Budget Office. This Congress-created, Congress-empowered entity merely creates cost estimates for legislation and economic modeling for the budget outlook. But its rigid assumptions, frequent missteps, and most important, its impossible task that nevertheless is given monumental significance by lawmakers has turned CBO into an obstacle to the progressive agenda. The battle in 2021 and beyond will be waged right here.

The future of campaign finance, ten years after the passage of Citizens United, can be seen in staff writer ALEXANDER SAMMON ’s cover story on how Democratic candidates are playing the money game in this primary. Who succeeds—the low-dollar revolutionaries, the traditional fundraisers, or the self-funded billionaires—will go a long way to determining the course of the Democratic Party, not just on money-raising process but on policy as well.

Internationally, we are beset with two looming threats: the rise of far-right nativism, and the concurrent rise of Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a destabilizing geopolitical force.

This issue dives into both of these phenomena. ALEX DZIADOSZ has a knockout of a piece about neo-Nazi organizing at music festivals in Germany, and the flailing attempts of liberal democratic public servants to stop it. You enter an entirely new world with this story. And our co-founder BOB KUTTNER , as only Bob Kuttner can, explains how Putin’s rise came about thanks to the twin failures of neoconservatism and neoliberalism after the fall of communism. Every step of the wrongheaded policies on Russia over 20 years just gnaws at you, especially given what they eventually yielded.

You might notice that this edition of the Prospect is a little lighter and a little smaller than normal. This is our new format, which will come out six times a year as opposed to four. But while we’ve tightened up the page count, we have sacrificed nothing in terms of quality and breadth of coverage. In addition to everything above, you’ll learn in these pages about new Trump immigration cruelties, the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the challenges of investigative journalism, the rise of free public transit, the tensions between liberal arts education abroad and autocracy, labor organizing at museums, equality and the law, the fiction of The Irishman and the cold facts of Jimmy Hoffa’s life and influence, and more.

So much of modern journalism exists at Twitter speed, giving you only what you need to get through the next minute, the next twist in the story. But eventually, the calendar turns and you’re launched into the future. What do we need to know to understand what’s coming around the corner? How do we contextualize the present from the actions—and often the sins—of the past? Can we do more than just collect data points?

Can we understand our world, understand who has power in it and why. I’m proud to lead a news organization that’s committed to doing this work, with our eyes on the horizon rather than our news feed. Thanks for being part of this with us. —david dayen

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EXECUTIVE EDITOR DAVID DAYEN FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH EDITOR AT LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON DEPUTY EDITOR GABRIELLE GURLEY ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS MANAGING EDITOR JONATHAN GUYER ASSOCIATE EDITOR SUSANNA BEISER STAFF WRITER ALEXANDER SAMMON WRITING FELLOWS MARCIA BROWN, BRITTANY GIBSON EDITORIAL INTERNS TACY CRESSON, ISAAC SCHER, CLAIRE WANG CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MARCIA ANGELL, GABRIEL ARANA, DAVID BACON, JAMELLE BOUIE, HEATHER BOUSHEY, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, JOHN B. JUDIS, RANDALL KENNEDY, BOB MOSER, KAREN PAGET, SARAH POSNER, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, ADELE M. STAN, DEBORAH A. STONE, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, SAM WANG, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS, JULIAN ZELIZER PUBLISHER ELLEN J. MEANY COMPTROLLER ANNE BEECH COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST STEPHEN WHITESIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEHRSA BARADARAN, DAAIYAH BILAL-THREATS, CHUCK COLLINS, DAVID DAYEN, SHANTI FRY, STANLEY B. GREENBERG, JACOB S. HACKER, AMY HANAUER, DERRICK JACKSON, ROBERT KUTTNER, ELLEN J. MEANY, MILES RAPOPORT, JANET SHENK, ADELE SIMMONS, GANESH SITARAMAN, WILLIAM SPRIGGS, PAUL STARR, MICHAEL STERN SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE 202-753-0937 SUBSCRIPTION RATES $36 (U.S.), $42 (CANADA), AND $48 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS INFO@PROSPECT.ORG

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How Money Now Tries to Bury the Truth

BY PAUL STARR

T

he truth will out, we like to believe, and the revelations in recent years about predatory sexual behavior by men in positions of power may seem to confirm that comforting cliché.

But the obstacles encountered by the investigative journalists who unearthed those revelations highlight a more uncomfortable reality: When people with money and power want to keep the truth from getting out, they have an ample arsenal of weapons to ensure silence, and they usually get their way.

The exceptional moments when journalists overcome that arsenal to root out exploitation and corruption are exhilarating. But those moments also ought to be occasions for examining the weapons themselves, and trying to limit their use.

Two new books about the Harvey Weinstein scandal raise these issues in a particularly graphic way. Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill, which reads like a thriller, takes us inside the reporting on Weinstein that Farrow undertook, first for NBC News and then, when NBC decided to kill the story, for The New Yorker. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s She Said recounts their parallel investigation of the Hollywood producer for The New York Times. While not as likely to be made into a movie as Farrow’s book, She Said provides more context about the #MeToo movement. The three journalists and the organizations that stood behind them deservedly won the 2018 Pulitzer

4 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN /FEB 2020

Prize for public service for bringing Weinstein and others “to account for long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women.”

Weinstein himself had long been able to quash efforts by journalists to publish stories about his sexual abuses.

Although more than 80 women have now come forward to make charges against him, nearly all of them were originally unwilling to talk on the record or, indeed, say anything at all.

Those who had signed nondisclosure agreements (NDA s) with Weinstein as part of settlements feared being sued, and journalists who sought information from them could be accused of “tortious interference” (illegal meddling) with the women’s contractual obligations—a baseless charge that NBC lawyers nonetheless used to stop Farrow’s reporting. Weinstein, with all his connections in media and politics, was also able to intervene directly with news executives.

Faced with new investigations by Farrow and the New York Times reporters, Weinstein had one of his lawyers, longtime liberal hero David Boies, contract with an Israeli company called Black Cube, established by former Mossad agents, to take steps to block publication of their articles. Farrow describes being tailed by detectives and contacted by people offering help on his story who turned out to be agents of Black Cube or,

in one case, part of Weinstein’s defense team. It is not clear that these efforts to spy on and intimidate the reporters were illegal, though they raise ethical questions. (The Times, which had retained Boies in connection with other cases, fired him when it learned of his role in the Black Cube contract.)

The NDA and its cousins, non-disparagement and mandatory-arbitration clauses, lie at the center not just of the sexual assault scandal but of many other news-suppression efforts today.

The spread of NDA s is a comparatively recent development.

Tech firms began using them in the 1970s for the legitimate purpose of protecting trade secrets, but by the 1980s were inserting them into routine employment contracts and then into other kinds of contracts and legal settlements. Today, as an article in Fortune observes, NDAs have “morphed into an all-purpose cudgel to control employees and suppress criticism.” The giant tech firms impose them on every low-level employee, contractor, vendor, and visitor. According to The Washington Post, Google has even demanded NDAs of public officials while negotiating land purchases and tax breaks; city officials in Midlothian, Texas, gave out more than $10 million in tax breaks to Google before the public knew anything about it. Amazon too required NDAs from officials in cities applying to be the site for its second headquarters.

Although the tech firms have been particularly aggressive in

using NDA s to shroud themselves in secrecy, other companies have not been far behind.

Even when a court might find NDA s to be overbroad or unconscionable and therefore invalid, they have been a means of intimidating employees and others from disclosing facts the public has a right to know, including facts about misconduct and in some cases crimes.

The NDA s in the sexual harassment settlements have not just been “contracts for silence.” They have been contracts for the surrender of evidence and non-cooperation with other victims. The settlement cases against Bill O’Reilly, according to Kantor and Twohey, required the women “to turn over all their evidence—audio recordings, diaries, emails, backup files, any other shred of proof—to O’Reilly and his lawyers.” The victims (and in one case their lawyers) could not cooperate with anyone else who might have similar claims, and if they received subpoenas, “they were required to notify O’Reilly and his team, who could fight their being called to testify.”

Both Catch and Kill and She Said describe similar restrictions in NDA s that were part of legal settlements with Weinstein. While such settlements have provided financial compensation to the individual women, they have enabled predators to find new victims. The United States, as Kantor and Twohey point out, developed a “system for muting sexual

Prospects

harassment claims.” Not only did the system allow misconduct to continue; the settlements and NDA s “were almost never examined in law school classrooms or open court. This was why the public had never really understood that this was happening.”

“Catch and kill,” the practice that provides the title for Farrow’s book, involves a particularly egregious use of confidentiality. As Farrow’s reporting helped show, American Media, Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer (until April of last year), had long paid for exclusive rights to damaging stories about Donald Trump, required confidentiality clauses as part of the agreements, and then filed the stories away.

Farrow makes a persuasive case in his book that NBC executives killed his story about Weinstein not because he lacked on-the-record sources, but because they were worried that Today host Matt Lauer’s history of abusive behavior might come out. When Farrow then turned to The New Yorker, Weinstein’s lawyers threatened to sue, claiming among other things that Farrow was unable to use the material he originally obtained as an NBC reporter.

His investigation of Weinstein might have been killed entirely if The New Yorker hadn’t been willing to ignore those threats and proceed with publication.

PUBLIC CONCERNS ABOUT the dan-

gers of confidentiality provisions in private contracts and legal settlements have arisen before, but the response has been piecemeal. Through “sunshine in litigation” laws and court rulings, states have generally prohibited confidential settlements that conceal public environmental hazards, such as toxic leaks into public waterways.

Those laws haven’t applied to sexual harassment cases, so there has been a new round of legislative efforts to limit NDA s. In one of his last acts as

governor of California, Jerry Brown signed legislation prohibiting confidentiality agreements in settlements of cases involving sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination after a victim has publicly filed a lawsuit or administrative complaint. The law, however, does not affect the use of NDA s in settlements agreed to before any claim is filed with a public agency. The effect, therefore, may be to discourage public filings and to preserve the status quo.

The battle over NDA s is genuinely complicated. Broader legislation sought by some consumer lawyers in California would have banned NDA s altogether in sexual-abuse cases, but it was killed, according to Kantor and Twohey, by attorney Gloria Allred, who has repre-

explicitly disclose” the rights a victim retains to report the perpetrator’s behavior to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Second, NDA s would also include a provision voiding the agreement if the perpetrator ever misrepresents interactions with the victim. And third, the victim and perpetrator would each deposit their versions of what happened in an “information escrow,” to be released for investigation by the EEOC or another agency if there is a second complaint against the perpetrator.

As helpful as these reforms would be in sexual-abuse cases, they would still leave us with the general problem created by the expanding use of NDAs to control subordinates and suppress criticism, as well as the other methods that Weinstein and others rely

Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudis before they murdered Khashoggi.

When spyware and other methods are used to surveil journalists, they don’t just violate personal privacy; they threaten the basic functions of a free press. Together with the spread of NDA s, the proliferation of surveillance tools shifts power toward institutions and individuals that want protection against being held accountable for malfeasance. It’s not hard to imagine how investigative journalism could be shut down entirely if public authorities do nothing to punish the use of spyware and the courts were to enforce charges of “tortious interference” with obligations under NDA s that NBC ’s lawyers raised as a reason to stop Farrow’s reporting.

One lesson of the Harvey Weinstein case:Limiting nondisclosure agreements and other means of concealment ought to be a priority for reform. sented many victims and argues they should be able to choose whether to go public or seek a confidential settlement. “Many victims want the opportunity to enter a confidential settlement,” Allred writes, “because they are unwilling to have what happened to them made known to their family members, their coworkers, their future employers or the general public. That is their right and they have no obligation to anyone to sacrifice their privacy.”

The trouble with that view is that it does nothing to help subsequent victims of a serial predator. It allows each individual victim the right to bargain away the safety of others. Writing in the Stanford Law Review, Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, offers an interesting, three-part response to this problem. First, NDA s should be enforceable only “if they

on to intimidate the media and keep incriminating facts secret.

The use of Black Cube’s agents in the Weinstein case illustrates the broader danger of surveillance over journalists as a means of controlling the press. Spyware from another Israeli company, NSO, has been implicated in a series of cases of espionage on journalists and dissidents. The spyware, which targeted individuals unwittingly download on their smartphones when they click on a seemingly innocent text message, enables NSO’s customers to listen to calls, read messages, and turn on a device’s microphone and camera. Lawsuits against NSO allege that the software was used in surveillance of a London-based Arab journalist by the United Arab Emirates, of Mexican journalists by the Mexican government, and of a colleague of the Washington

As things are, it’s hard to beat money and power without money and power. The books about the investigative reporting that brought down Weinstein are not David-andGoliath stories. As Farrow acknowledges, he could not have assumed the risks of a legal battle with Weinstein on his own. He was lucky to be able to turn to The New Yorker after NBC abandoned him, while Kantor and Twohey had The New York Times behind them. The economic decline of the news industry has reduced the number of news organizations that have not only the resources but the courageous leadership willing to support this kind of work. The more troubled the news industry becomes, the more likely investigative journalism is to end up on democracy’s endangeredspecies list.

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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Two Sudanese women seeking asylum are informed they will be taken into custody by Canadian police just before they enter the country from the U.S.

Trump’s Asylum Cruelty on Trial A case in Canadian federal court attacks the administration’s model for stopping the flow of migrants seeking assistance: a refugee law ‘loophole.’

BY MA R C I A B R O WN

craig rut tle / ap images

F

or two days in March 1911, Canadian border officials held up a train headed north from the U.S., carrying 194 black American passengers.

Officials unsuccessfully searched for any reason to block their entry. In the early 20th century, “there was a policy put in place to stop African Americans from moving north during the Great Migration,” explained Jacob Remes, a historian of the U.S.Canada relationship. “The thing to understand about Canada is that their entire immigration

and refugee regime, which is famously very welcoming with some exceptions, is premised on the idea that it’s hard to get to Canada, therefore Canada gets to choose who comes.”

That past shows through in a 2004 agreement Canada signed with the United States.

Known as a “safe third country agreement,” it requires asylum seekers to apply in the first safe country they reach—and given the usual journey of asylum seekers, that country is invariably the U.S.

Now, the agreement is at the center of a lawsuit in Canadian federal court, as well as the Trump administration’s strategy to upend asylum policy.

At noon on a Monday in November, inside Toronto’s federal court building, Andrew Brouwer, a lawyer for asylum seekers and affiliated groups, painted a nightmarish picture of immigration in the U.S. He detailed the conditions in detention centers known as “hieleras,” or iceboxes. He noted abuses like solitary confinement, sexual

assault, and rape: “Conditions are so poor people are dying.”

He bemoaned the thousands of immigrant children separated from their parents—some too young to know their own name and, untracked by American government, unlikely to ever be reunited. He cited the long wait times for asylum hearings, and how, under the whims of a politicized Department of Justice, “habeas corpus is practically illusory.” He addressed the near 57,000 immigrants—many of them asylum seekers—forced to wait in dangerous Mexican border towns at risk of extortion, trafficking, and kidnapping.

And he deplored the one-year bar, which disproportionately harms women by preventing people from applying for asylum after being in the U.S. for more than a year.

JAN/FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

The effect was to see America’s immigration system on trial in Canada. The challengers wanted to show just how different asylum is in the U.S., and subsequently, to prove that upholding the safe third country agreement means violating asylum seekers’ rights.

“The point that we are trying to make is that the situation in [Canada] just is not comparable to the level of human rights abuses that we are seeing in the United States,” said Justin Mohammed, human rights law and policy campaigner at Amnesty International Canada.

The group joined the Canadian Council of Churches and the Canadian Council for Refugees, the lead plaintiff on the suit.

The Canadian Council for Refugees first challenged the agreement after its adoption in 2004, eventually losing on a technicality in federal appeals court. That court ruled that the challengers didn’t have standing without people who were directly harmed by the

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agreement in the lawsuit. That’s changed, according to Mohammed: Several asylum seekers are involved this time around. And perhaps most important, the plaintiffs have the policies of Trump’s America as evidence.

The results of the lawsuit may be a long time coming. Advocates hope the case makes it to Canada’s Supreme Court. But the effects of safe third country agreements are spreading south.

AUDREY MACKLIN HAS bright eyes

and distinctive gray hair. She knows more about the safe third country agreement between the U.S. and Canada than most, but slows down to explain it to anyone who asks. A professor of human rights law at the University of Toronto, she’s written extensively about the agreement and about how we talk—unhelpfully—about migration using words like “flow,” “inundation,” and “surge.”

At a coffee shop housed between

The Migrant Protection Protocols, implemented in early 2019, require asylum seekers like these in Tijuana to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings.

the exterior stone wall of one building and the modernist facade of another, Macklin and I discussed the loophole in the 2004 agreement that has caused a relatively new trend in migration. If asylum seekers cross into Canada between ports of entry, the agreement doesn’t apply and they’re eligible for asylum. For years, this hardly mattered. But when Trump was elected and transformed U.S. immigration policy, irregular crossing increased dramatically.

Since 2017, more than 50,000 people have crossed this way, and the numbers spurred electoral spats in Canada.

Macklin has a compelling response to this: The safe third country agreement itself is the more important loophole. “The convention says you can’t send people back to their country of origin. It doesn’t say you can’t send them to a third country,” she said.

Macklin suspects that this was accidental because the framers of

elliot spagat / ap images

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the Refugee Convention in 1951 didn’t think it was a likely scenario that some European countries and Canada would do this.

“It’s true we can’t send the Guatemalan refugee who arrives at our frontier back to Guatemala if they’re refugees, but it doesn’t say anything in the convention about sending them somewhere else,” Macklin continued. “So we will send them to the country they passed through en route. That’s a loophole. That’s exploiting a loophole. So the safe third country agreement is Canada’s exploitation of a loophole in the international refugee law.”

What about the loophole in the loophole? Why doesn’t the agreement apply between ports of entry—the root of the so-called surge in irregular border-crossing?

This, Macklin explains, was done intentionally. The Canadian-U.S. border is 5,525 miles long—much too big for effective monitoring.

Europe has a similar agreement called the Dublin regulation, and found it extraordinarily expensive and wholly impractical to enforce.

Countries often try to “responsibility share” refugees or disburse some of their refugee responsibilities on others. But responsibility sharing—which is ostensibly the point of safe third country agreements—isn’t happening. Instead, separate from the Canadian legal fight, the U.S. is dumping its responsibilities on countries with no viable asylum systems.

SAFE THIRD COUNTRY agreements

were largely an obscure piece of international refugee law that few understood until last summer. In July 2019, the Trump administration made clear the tenets of this provision in international refugee law would be its tool of choice for keeping migrants and asylum seekers out.

The administration attempted to intimidate Central American countries with large numbers of asylum seekers (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) into signing safe third country agreements.

It also strong-armed Mexico into

Separate from the Canadian legal fight, the U.S. is dumping its responsibilities on countries with no viable asylum systems.

something similar—the Migrant Protection Protocols implemented in the early months of 2019. MPP, known more commonly as Remain in Mexico, requires asylum seekers at the southern border to wait for weeks and months in Mexican territory for their asylum hearings.

They languish in dangerous Mexican border cities—homeless, unemployed, and without formal aid.

In short, Remain in Mexico prevents asylum seekers from reaching American territory—which offers certain protections—and requires that they wait in a third country with which they have no ties. That’s functionally identical to core aspects of the safe third country agreement. In other words, even the administration’s unilateral policy choices reflect the precepts of these agreements.

Administration officials initially said that the pacts with Central American countries, officially known as “Asylum Cooperative Agreements,” only applied to people who had transited through a particular country. That meant they would also work like safe third country agreements: If you traveled from El Salvador or Honduras to reach the southern border, you passed through Guatemala en route and, under this agreement, the U.S. could deport you to Guatemala.

But the text of the agreement said otherwise. Aaron ReichlinMelnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, explained that these agreements don’t “contain any transit requirement,” unlike the agreement with Canada. “No such provision exists in the Guatemalan deal, meaning that it can be applied far more broadly than [the Department of Homeland Security] ever said,” ReichlinMelnick wrote in an email.

The U.S. can’t send Guatemalan asylum seekers back to Guatemala, but it can send Honduran and Salvadoran asylum seekers there—at least according to the agreement.

As of this writing, it has done just that: The U.S. has sent more than 100 asylum seekers to Guatemala

City. Just six decided to pursue asylum in Guatemala, and of this group, all but one abandoned their claims.

Guatemala, better known as a refugee producer than refugee resettler, has objected to this action, and in January the ACLU filed a lawsuit to block it. Guatemala’s president continues to deny that his government signed anything, and the country erupted in protests last summer. Guatemala’s highest court objected to the agreement, stalling its implementation, but only temporarily. Guatemala’s asylum office has just a dozen officers and little additional infrastructure to help resettle and protect vulnerable asylum seekers.

In January, the Trump administration announced that it would begin to send Mexican asylum seekers back to Guatemala—even though those migrants had never passed through that country.

There’s some precedent for this: Australia has sent asylum seekers to remote islands for processing where many have languished for years.

The moves have dubious legality— and it stretches the already-thin argument that Trump’s safe third country agreements were ever legal in the first place. For now, it seems that Guatemala has objected to accepting various groups of asylum seekers, a veto power embedded in the deals. But Honduras may be picking up the slack. The country agreed to begin accepting Mexicans, Brazilians, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans, Reichlin-Melnick wrote.

The so-called safe third country agreements with Central American countries were never truly what they seemed. The text of the agreements made no specific claims about transit, and so the U.S. is abiding by the lawless regime Trump created—contrary to international refugee law.

The agreements are achieving at least some of Trump’s policy objectives: Border apprehensions have dropped each of the last seven months. But the consequences leave asylum seekers increasingly unsafe.

JAN/FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

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From Ivory Tower to Egyptian Dungeon Liberal arts are under pressure from neoliberalism and the commodification of education.

The bigger threat might be autocracy.

BY J O N AT H A N G U Y E R

T

he undergrads had done their homework. It was three weeks into the fall semester at the American University in Cairo (AUC), and adjunct professor Khaled Dawoud had asked his Mass Media Writing students to come prepared for a quiz on the day’s events. “The classroom will be like a newsroom in a newspaper,” he had written in the syllabus, “and I’m the editor-in-chief.” The deputy editor of the long-running newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly and spokesperson of a liberal political party, Dawoud has been a regular commentator in American outlets as well as an interpreter of U.S. politics to Arab audiences. But on that late-September day, Dawoud was absent and his students were growing agitated. They were tapping on their phones, something the professor forbade during class. The teaching assistant wasn’t sure why Dawoud was late. He never turned up to his 8:30 a.m. or his 10 a.m.

The students had made it to class on time, despite Cairo being heavily patrolled as authorities impeded budding protests against President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi. They were shocked to learn that Dawoud was among the 3,635 Egyptians arrested in the September crackdown. He would spend the rest of the semester at Tora, Egypt’s notorious lockup known as Scorpion Prison, sleeping on the floor, sharing a cell with two others, and reading only occasional copies of the official state-run newspapers. Egypt’s National Security prosecutor would bring charges against Dawoud of “disseminating fake news,” “participating in a banned group,” and “misusing social media.” Dawoud’s lawyer, Mohamed Eissa, told me, “There is no proof of any of these charges till now.” The case highlights the

10 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2020

challenges of teaching liberal arts, let alone journalism, in a country that bars free expression.

“The question is,” said Lisa Anderson, who served as the American University in Cairo’s president from 2011 to 2015, “do you want to use AUC to help in matters of academic freedom in Egypt and the region, or is AUC exceptional?”

In many ways, AUC is exceptional, a U.S.-style college with a long local history and a legacy of bold scholarship and influential alumni, from columnists Thomas L. Friedman and Nicholas Kristof (who received Arabic diplomas), to Egyptian ministers and senior officials. At the same time, AUC is contending with the very trends that are testing universities worldwide, notably a corporate culture of education and the pressure to produce students with “hard skills” rather than the more intangible qualities of the humanities. This has occurred alongside the dismantling of faculty governance and the erosion of tenure lines and thus of academic freedom (it’s tough to be outspoken if your job is term-limited).

Yet an American education is a commodity sought by international students and an important indicator in many careers. It’s no surprise then that myriad brandname schools have opened up satellite branches in wealthy enclaves in the Persian Gulf, East Asia, and elsewhere, where freedoms are not as guaranteed as in their home institutions. Predictably, tensions between the culture of critical inquiry and dissent at highereducation outlets and suppression by despotic rulers have broken into the open, threatening the durability of these satellite campuses and the reputation of the institutions placing them around the world.

Tensions between the culture of critical inquiry and dissent at highereducation outlets and suppression by despotic rulers have broken into the open.

AUC also faces difficulties unique to Egypt. The pressure to expand and compete with the STEM labs of NYU Abu Dhabi and Georgetown University in Qatar is one reason that AUC left its quaint, century-old campus in downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2009 for a $400 million suburban estate out in the Cairo desert; USAID provided funding. Since the move, Egypt has endured a clampdown on political rights after former General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi overthrew Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in the summer of 2013. For researchers and pupils, the risks are everevolving, and I experienced them from 2012 to 2017 as an editor at the university’s policy journal, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs.

Certain freedoms are only protected within the armored gates of the university. The perception of AUCians being upper-crust, out of touch with much of the country, is a common punch line, one that auteur Ahmed Abdallah foregrounds in his 2019 film Ext. Night, where the protagonist is often derided on the street as an AUC guy.

But state repression nonetheless plagues the elites who study and teach there. Political scientist Emad Shahin, now a fellow at Georgetown, fled the country in 2015 when he faced a death sentence. Amr Hamzawy, also a political scientist who was elected to the Egyptian parliament in 2011, was forced to escape, too. That two distinguished faculty members were blacklisted by the government shows that the attack on free inquiry is causing a significant brain drain.

The disappearance of 28-yearold Giulio Regeni, an Italian graduate student and AUC visiting fellow, was particularly harrowing.

He had last been seen on the fifth anniversary of the Arab Spring revolt, on January 25, 2016, en route to interview labor organizers. Days later, his brutalized body, with cigarette burns up and down, was found on a highway outside of Cairo. At the time, I was a visiting scholar in the same institute as Regeni, and—though the details

mohamed el raai / picture alliance / dpa via ap images

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were not yet fully reported—I was dismayed by the sluggishness of the university administration, and their incompetence in addressing security concerns. This callousness was captured in a tweet from the official @AUC account, remembering “Giulio Regeni, a visiting scholar at AUC, who passed away recently,” which was roundly condemned by faculty members, angry at how the administration was whitewashing the Egyptian government’s crime. (To this day, the government has yet to be held to account, and Italian authorities have asserted that Egyptian authorities tortured and murdered Regeni.) A month after his body was discovered, the interim university president at last issued a statement: “The death of Giulio will be long remembered by us and I sincerely hope that from this tragedy we, as an institution, can emerge even stronger and better.”

Had it? When I learned that Dawoud was in prison, I was determined to find out what AUC was doing to help him—and why he was incarcerated in the first place.

Francis J. Ricciardone, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Turkey, became president of the university in 2016. Though he hasn’t made any public statements about Dawoud and wasn’t immediately aware that Dawoud had been teaching two courses in the fall semester, Ricciardone assured me that he was following the case.

“That’s the kind of thing where we make, let’s just say, we make quiet inquiries,” he told me. “We make quiet inquiries, and let our concerns be known, and we either get somewhere or we don’t.” He said neither he nor administration officials had attempted to visit Dawoud in prison, and declined to discuss specifics. (Dawoud’s attorney told me that the university provided the National Security prosecutor an affidavit attesting that he was a faculty member in good standing.)

Ricciardone emphasized the importance of keeping close relations with the Egyptian government, detailing a number of academic and research

partnerships. It seemed to me, however, that a former ambassador could pick up the phone and express his concern to counterparts in the Egyptian government.

But Ricciardone pushed back. “If you have any inclination to what the government of Egypt would consider political activism, we cannot protect you,” he said. “You just need to know that.”

Is there simply no place for a journalism department in the context of such unfettered repression?

Dawoud had offered undergrads a potential career path—and inadvertently presented the hazards of the job. A highly quotable analyst, he told The New York Times in April, as protests spread in Sudan and Algeria, “The power of the people has proved to be alive, and the desire to have a president who does not stay for life … The model we set in 2011 remains alive despite the tremendous efforts to crush and distort it.” But experts told me that the reason for his arrest was not his media hits but rather related to his participation in the Constitution Party, a liberal political grouping.

The Sisi government sees any political organization as a threat.

For a time it was thought that the louder a critic’s voice was in Washington, the more protection they might have from arrest in their home country. “There’s no clear logic to who’s at risk and who’s not,”

Khaled Dawoud, journalist, political operative, and adjunct professor at the American University in Cairo, speaks at a press conference.

Dawoud was arrested by Egyptian authorities in September for charges that included “disseminating fake news.” He has yet to be released from Egypt’s notorious Scorpion Prison.

said Gasser Abdel-Razek of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and a longtime friend of Dawoud’s. “We’re all scared … No matter how high-profile or lowprofile you are, it really doesn’t matter. We’re all possible prisoners in this country at the moment.”

Dawoud has been a regular contributor to the blogs of Washington think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Middle East Institute. But since he was a contributor, not a staffer of these organizations, petitioning on Dawoud’s behalf from those quarters has been lacking. And there are so many Egyptians in prison on political charges—tens of thousands according to watchdog groups—that high-level U.S. government advocacy on behalf of even a prominent and well-connected figure like Dawoud is rare.

As an undergraduate in the 1980s, Dawoud had been an editor of the Caravan, AUC ’s student newspaper. In those pages, he featured opposition voices who wouldn’t appear elsewhere in the media. But this fall, the Caravan did not cover his arrest. There was only a brief statement from the dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Nabil Fahmy, who served as interim foreign minister after the 2013 coup, in which he “expressed his deep concerns at the continued detention of colleague and adjunct professor Khaled Dawoud, and called on the authorities to work toward his release that he may resume his teaching duties and be reunited with his family as soon as possible.”

The university leadership, rather than publicly criticizing the government, has prioritized working within the confines of Sisi’s Egypt.

Ricciardone described the choice as follows: “If you want to operate in a foreign country, you gotta understand what the rules are … and do the best you can within the challenging context you’re in, or don’t do it. Stay outside and write about a place from outside. I choose to be inside.” So did Dawoud, and now he’s truly on the inside.

JAN/FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

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Riding for Free in Kansas City

Big cities have shunned free public transit.

Now, KC’s free-fares push may provide transit systems across the country with a ‘how-to’ guide.

BY G A BR I E L L E G U R L E Y

M

edicare for All has devolved into Democratic mortal combat. Free college requires federal and state governments to enact complementary reforms. Yet unlike the policy proposals that Washington has masticated for decades, free public transit is possible in communities where local leaders and motivated residents still make transformative decisions.

At a time when public-transit systems cope with reductions in federal funding and other fiscal limitations that threaten to degrade everything from capital improvements to daily service, however, going free may seem highly counterintuitive. Why abandon one source of steady, guaranteed revenues? And why make pronouncements that get riders’ hopes up about free rides if they may not materialize?

That’s why Kansas City Area Transportation Authority’s (KCATA) push to eliminate most city bus fares has jolted urban transit systems nationwide. To date, only a small number of small cities have opted to make bus travel free. If Kansas City moves to adopt this policy later this spring, it will be the largest city to have done so.

Income inequality, congestion, and the climate crisis (the transportation sector is the largest greenhouse gas producer in the United States) may not command the same level of attention from transit riders that service delays and aging buses do. But for most local officials, these issues increasingly dominate conversations about the future of transportation.

The free public-transit model that Kansas City may ultimately create will be central to those debates.

The authority served about 43,000 riders on an average weekday in 2018 and nearly 13 million

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passengers overall in the two-state metropolitan region. The city’s low- and middle-income residents would reap considerable savings if fares were eliminated. Currently, bus fares are $1.50 per ride.

A monthly local pass costs $50, or $600 a year. A monthly suburban express bus pass costs $95, or $1140 a year. Seniors and people with disabilities pay reduced fares.

Kansas City officials have divulged few details about how they plan to replace $8 million in yearly fare revenues. (The authority’s current fiscal-year budget is $105 million; with the exception of a couple of lines, the free-fare plan would apply to all bus routes.) The “zero-fare transit” plan is just one line item in a 2020-2021 budget that could approach $2 billion. In November, Mayor Quinton Lucas suggested that one possible source could be a portion of funds now allocated to parking garage subsidies for national companies, along with current fare collection savings of about $1.5 million.

The city manager will transmit a draft budget proposal to the KC city council, which voted unanimously in December to move forward with free fares. They will conduct a month of deliberations beginning in mid-February before deciding whether to go through with the plan, though its adoption is widely expected. The new fiscal year begins on May 1.

Missouri’s largest city didn’t suddenly commandeer the freetransit debate to display how woke its local officials are. The citywide conversation about eliminating bus fares heated up after the 2016 debut of the fare-free downtown KC Streetcar, a two-mile-long light-rail route. The streetcar serves gentrified white downtown neighborhoods, while buses serve largely black areas.

MOBILITY For poor and low-income people, not having to pay for a bus ride can make a difference in getting to job-training classes, job interviews, doctor visits, and other health care appointments.

To determine how eliminating fares would affect the bus routes, KCATA implemented free-fare test runs over a span of several years. In 2017, KCATA CEO Robbie Makinen championed free fares for veterans in tandem with local veterans groups. One year later, the authority eliminated fares for high school students. Beginning last summer, a dozen service agencies whose clients include returning citizens and domestic-violence survivors distributed “Opportunity Passes” that provide access to most bus routes.

These three groups comprise roughly 25 percent of KC’s ridership.

“Whether you have a $300 million budget or a $1 billion budget or a $105 million budget like me, if your fare revenue is less than 10 percent of your budget, I don’t know why you aren’t looking at something like this,” Makinen says.

A former social worker whose zeal for free transit is on constant display, Makinen discovered firsthand how hard it is for riders to navigate regional transit systems, each with their own byzantine fare regulations, when he lost his sight nearly a decade ago. He quickly discovered that he was ineligible for certain reduced fares because he did not live in the right Zip code or because he’d crossed a state line.

A revamping of the Kansas City bus network is also in progress with changes that are likely to debut at the same time as free fares. One major complaint about KC bus service is that most buses run sporadically and there are lines that have no Sunday service. The authority will also take a hard look at routes with low ridership. While the busiest 15 routes transport 70 percent of riders, the bottom 15 serve less than 2 percent. “You got a 40-foot bus with two to three people at $125 per head,” says Makinen with a chuckle. “Hell, I could send a limo to your house for that.”

Overall, eliminating fares speeds up travel. People board faster minus the delays that occur as some passengers fumble for transit passes or cash. Correspondingly, buses become safer since drivers no longer dispute fares with people

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orlin wagner / ap images

who refuse to pay, incidents that comprise the majority of altercations with disruptive passengers.

As to the social benefits of going free, 16.5 percent of KC residents live below the poverty line. For them, not having to pay for a bus ride can make it less challenging to get to job-training classes, job interviews, and doctor visits.

Nationwide, there has been a

long-standing interest in eliminating transit fares among transit systems that serve smaller urban areas, resort regions, and college towns, according to a 2012 National Academy of Sciences study. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Commerce, California, and East Chicago, Indiana, became the first municipalities to go fare-free (they still are). Some midsize cities like Salt Lake City, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh offer limited free-fare zones on certain bus and rail lines. But Austin’s ill-fated 15-month trial in 1989 showed that critical decisions must be made before implementation. The system was unprepared for popularity: Capacity crowds, rowdiness, vandalism, and increased security costs doomed the move.

Interest in free fares tends to be “cyclical,” says Michael Walk of Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s Transit Mobility Program, and concerns about congestion and equity have fueled the recent uptick in interest. Citing congestion as a

The zero-fare model holds the most promise for smaller transit systems, like Kansas City’s, that can make the finances work.

factor, the Intercity Transit Authority that serves Washington state’s Thurston County, which includes the state capital of Olympia, eliminated fares in a five-year pilot program. Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the poorest cities in a wealthy state—many of its residents cannot afford to ride MBTA commuter rail into Boston—made three Merrimack Valley Regional Transit Authority bus routes free using a $225,000 operating surplus to fund its two-year plan. Rider demand may determine whether the service continues. To fund its zero-fare streetcar line, Kansas City draws on property tax revenues and a special sales tax in a local transportation development district.

“The financing, it becomes the core,” says Jeannette Orsino, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Regional Transit Authorities. “The one thing you don’t want to do is put something on and then have to take it off.”

The zero-fare model holds the most promise for smaller transit systems that can make the finances work. Fare revenue made up just 2 percent of Intercity Transit’s net revenues. Like KCATA, officials found that money allocated for fare collection could be better spent. Taking time to experiment is critical, as Kansas City did over the three-year period when the authority reduced fares for groups of riders. (What is clear, according to Michael Walk, is that if a system is already experiencing chronic problems with unruly passengers, those problems will likely increase if transit is free.)

Large transit systems won’t embrace free fares anytime soon.

They would be forced to come up with new, permanent revenue sources to replace fare revenues that make up more significant slices of their budgets. Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Metro Transit, where fares generate about $100 million or 22 percent of its budget, has already expressed some skepticism about launching a free-fare program.

Boston fares bring in nearly $700 million, or about one-third of the MBTA’s annual budget. But years of poor MBTA service and growing

traffic congestion fuel insistent demands for fare-free buses. For the New York MTA , where only the Staten Island Ferry is free, fare revenues make up 50 percent of its operating budget. In the largest metros like New York and Boston, a special fare for low-income residents is more likely to be the route to a more equitable system than free fares for everyone.

In Los Angeles, another hotbed of free-fare activism, congestion pricing has been floated as a way to fund eliminating fares. In L.A., fares bring in only $284 million on a $7.2 billion 2020 operating budget. But establishing a congestion charge would be a difficult proposition in car-centric California. For most Angelenos, car travel across their far-flung city is a right, not an option, and paying to access freeways would provoke furious debate, even if a toll contributes to saving the planet or puts more money in the pockets of bus-riding, low-income Angelenos.

Drivers in epicenters of congestion like Los Angeles or Boston might be persuaded if faster and more reliable options ever appeared. But for Walk, the evidence is mixed on whether free fares will entice car drivers to give up their vehicles. “If it is still perceived as inconvenient or perceived as unsafe from the get-go, the change in fares might not move the needle that much,” says Walk.

The Kansas City zero-fare model demonstrates that free transit could make the difference between being able to move about a region independently or not at all. As the fiscal impact of the plan becomes clearer, other transit systems could be motivated to get creative about extending those benefits to their own riders. As last year drew to a close, KCATA unveiled another new project; the agency swapped out one local bus line for a new bus rapid-transit line—with 90 days of zero fares—that runs from downtown KC through predominantly black neighborhoods on the East Side of the city. This being Kansas City, the Wi-Fi is already free and the buses could be free for all very soon.

JAN/FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN The 2020 Democratic primary has been as much about how candidates raise money as what they want to do once in office.

I

t took almost 23 hours of Democratic debates, across six months and 20-plus candidates, for the first real punch to land.

“Most of the people on this stage run a traditional campaign. And that means going back and forth from coast to coast to rich people,” began Elizabeth Warren in Los Angeles in late December. “So the mayor [Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Indiana] just recently had a fundraiser that was held in a wine cave full of crystals and served $900-a-bottle wine … We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke-filled rooms would not pick the next president of the United States.

Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.”

The audience burst into applause. The debate circuit, which has been such a maddening display of shadowboxing and mutual non-engagement that it’s been hard to differentiate the candidates, had finally stumbled upon a substantive disagreement.

Buttigieg responded to Warren. “We need the support from everybody who is committed to helping us defeat Donald Trump. So to denounce the same kind of fundraising guidelines that President Obama went by, that Speaker Pelosi goes by, that you yourself went by until not long ago, in order

14 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN /FEB 2020

to build the Democratic Party and build a campaign ready for the fight of our lives, these purity tests shrink the stakes of the most important election.”

Then Bernie Sanders interceded, pointing out that former Vice President Joe Biden “received contributions from 44 billionaires” during the campaign, while Buttigieg “only got 39 billionaires.” Biden demurred, insisting that said billionaires only provided the maximum $2,800 donation. The billionaire flanking Sanders at stage left, Tom Steyer, tried to deflect: “There’s someone who is loving this conversation, and his name is Donald Trump.” The absentee mega-billionaire floating over the exchange, Mike Bloomberg, was unavailable for comment.

Many believed the 2020 campaign would be dominated by health care, climate change, or corporate plutocracy. And all of those topics have had their moments. But ten years into the Citizens United era, where money has seeped into every pore of the democratic process, previously unheralded questions about campaign finance have become predominant. The process of raising money has historically been perfunctory, arousing little interest. Now, it serves as a way to express frustrations with a rigged economic system, a substitute for policy content and ideology, a

proxy for who candidates are and what they stand for. As the primary enters its final leg, campaign finance has become a chief distinguishing marker by which we can understand Democratic politics.

Three distinct camps, articulated clearly on that December debate stage, have emerged: the traditionalists, the reformers, and the super-rich. Sanders and Warren have funded their campaigns entirely on the might of an unprecedented swell of online contributors. On the far opposite end, a similarly radical insurgency of self-funded billionaires, Steyer and Bloomberg, have committed their functionally infinite funds to buying the infrastructure needed to win votes. And left in the once-thick middle is an increasingly strained crowd, repped by surviving members Biden and Buttigieg, subsisting off high-dollar fundraisers, bundlers, super PACs, and access politics.

That’s set the stage for a profound reckoning. The Democratic presidential primary, of course, is also a contest for control of the party’s identity, a mantle that will be assumed de facto by its winner. And the emergence of these three warring factions has elicited a battle over not only how to fund elections, but the future of the Democratic Party’s relationship to big money.

ansonsaw / istock by get ty

BY ALE X ANDE R S AM M O N

THE MOST STRUCTURALLY important

development of the primary cycle has been the small-dollar fundraising of Senators Sanders and Warren. Individual contributions, primarily brought in over the internet, have long played a vital role in Democratic politics. Indeed, Sanders drew upon a fervid army of supporters to great effect in his 2016 presidential run, as have several others in the online era.

But this time around, Sanders and Warren have sloughed off traditional fundraising sources entirely: no schmoozing with rich donors, no high-priced events, no dialing for dollars into wealthy enclaves. These actions have been the backbone of campaign sponsorship since time immemorial. Sanders and Warren have both committed to continuing this approach, if nominated, in the general election. Such a strategy has never been seen before in presidential politics—even Sanders did a handful of paid events in 2016.

And yet their fundraising hauls have been astounding. In 2019, Bernie Sanders reaped more than $96 million from a record-setting 1.2 million donors (that’s $18 a contribution), including $34.5 million in the final quarter. Warren, meanwhile, raised $70.9 million last year, at roughly $26 a pop. Accounting for transfers from other accounts, Sanders and Warren have lapped the non-billionaire Democratic field.

Their success has upended all conventional wisdom about big-money fundraising; for this presidential cycle, at least, there may be more money in refusing large checks.

It’s easy to forget how risky this approach was considered to be even recently. “The biggest problem that we as Democrats have to face is that this is a war—and I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” was how Bakari Sellers, Democratic commentator and surrogate for California Senator Kamala Harris, put it in October. “Trying to beat Donald Trump with small dollar donations? That’s about as good as an ashtray on a motorcycle.”

The sentiment was shared even among some Sanders supporters in the wake of his 2016 run. As former staffers subsequently launched the outside electoral organization Our Revolution, 2016 campaign manager Jeff Weaver wanted to fund it via traditional

big-money sources. That led to internal dissension, which Politico gleefully reported as the revolution “already tearing itself apart.”

(Our Revolution has taken a handful of sixfigure donations, and its 2020 role organizing volunteers and canvassing in Iowa has led to charges of Sanders receiving support from a super PAC–like entity.)

Meanwhile, Warren’s commitment to small-dollar fundraising came out of even greater uncertainty. She had routinely

Sanders and Warren have sworn off the usual sources: no schmoozing with rich donors, no high-priced events, no dialing for dollars into wealthy enclaves.

raised money by shaking the money tree; in fact, a share of that bounty was dumped from her Senate account into her presidential run. But she decided to scorn big money for the campaign, a move that caused her finance director to quit in protest, convinced it would never work.

“Elizabeth’s campaign started out with that horrible incident with the DNA stuff; she had a good email list from her Senate race but it wasn’t performing well at all,” Mike Lux, the co-founder of progressive consulting group Democracy Partners and a Warren supporter, told me. “She made that decision at a time her list was basically dead. It was one of the gutsiest moves I’ve ever seen. I was surprised by it, and I didn’t agree with it at the time.” But on the strength of a campaign that’s invigorated its base, the gamble paid off.

The embrace of small-dollar funding has afforded Warren and Sanders not only larger war chests than their competitors, but also credibility on the issues. On health care, financial reform, and climate change, the campaigns’ refusal of elite funding has spoken as much to their convictions as the plans themselves. They could credibly promise to break up Amazon and Facebook, or dismantle the health insurance and fossil fuel industries, because they held no stake in protecting those corporate giants.

It’s also freed up time for campaigning. While rivals have courted donors at patrician events, Sanders and Warren have hosted innumerable rallies, town halls, and selfie lines, which in turn increase engagement and harvest more money. They’ve done this, unlike Biden, as sitting senators, with the obligations of full-time jobs.

Their success has made believers of some of the most recalcitrant: “Bernie Sanders has sort of equaled the financial strength of Mike Bloomberg in this race,” notorious quasi-Democrat Joe Lieberman told The Hill in January.

AS UNPRECEDENTED AS the Sanders/

Warren strategy has been, the emergence of self-funded billionaires has been just as radical. Tom Steyer, the hedge fund prodigy whose net worth Forbes pegs at $1.6 billion (though some think it’s much higher), is

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

perhaps the richest person to ever run for president, if not for the inclusion of Mike Bloomberg, and his $60.1 billion bankroll.

Bloomberg and Steyer are hardly the first self-funders to seek elected office. As recently as 2018, billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker ran for and won the governor’s mansion in Illinois. Colleagues like hedge funder Jon Corzine (senator and then governor of New Jersey), business executive Tom Wolf (governor of Pennsylvania), and Total Wine impresario David Trone (a freshman congressman from Maryland who was the largest selffunder in the history of the House of Representatives) have found success.

But that list is also littered with ignominious and pricey defeats. Tech executive Meg Whitman spent $144 million of her own money in a doomed bid for the California governor’s mansion in 2010; Michael Huffington, then-husband of Arianna, spent $28 million on a doomed Senate race in 1994. For the presidency, libertarian billionaire Ross Perot shelled out $72 million in races in 1992 and 1996, helping secure the presidency for Bill Clinton. Even Trone blew $13 million on a House primary in 2016 before winning a different district in 2018.

We remember the winners, but self-funders actually tend to lose, and often lose big.

But wealth inequality has exploded in the United States, minting a new class of billionaires with financial resources unparalleled since the first Gilded Age. That’s manifested itself in a politically emboldened upper crust, who used to content themselves with sitting on the sidelines and buying off politicians. When the Supreme Court torpedoed the already weakened defenses keeping at least some money out of politics with its 2010 Citizens United decision, all such temperance went out the window.

“Because of super PAC s and unlimited contributions, it softened and legitimized billionaires becoming part of the process,” said Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator from Wisconsin and co-author of the last major campaign finance reform law. “Now, people have a softer attitude and less concern about people who spend a lot of their own money like Steyer and Bloomberg.” Compounded by the Trump tax cut, which may well prove to be the signature

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campaign finance legislation of the decade, money has poured in from all angles.

The campaigns being run by Steyer and Bloomberg are nothing short of stupefying. As of early January, Bloomberg had spent over $200 million on ad buys alone, after only announcing in late November.

The entire rest of the field had spent a total of $222 million combined, with Steyer accounting for at least $106 million of that.

At one point this winter, Steyer was respon-

Bloomberg and Steyer are not the first self-funders to seek elected office.

Some before them have succeeded, but there have also been ignominious and pricey defeats.

sible for nine out of every ten dollars spent on advertising in South Carolina. Bloomberg purchased a 60-second Super Bowl ad costing over $10 million to run one time (fellow billionaire—or “billionaire”—Donald Trump snapped up two 30-second Super Bowl ads of his own). Meanwhile, an average week sees Bloomberg drop roughly 20 percent more on advertising than Sanders raised in his record-setting fourth quarter of 2019.

While it may be easy to write off these efforts as insane vanity projects, they’re getting results. A recent South Carolina Fox News poll placed Steyer in second place, surging ahead of both Sanders and Warren. Another Fox poll showed him tied for third with Warren in Nevada. Bloomberg already has over 1,000 staffers nationwide, many of whom he’s guaranteed employment through November. Bloomberg’s unthinkable financial resources allow him to call in support from across the country, as a kind of return on investment. His philanthropic wing has funneled money to mayors across the country, and they’ve folded into his support base. He recently appeared at an event with Stacey Abrams after giving $5 million to her group Fair Fight Action.

“At the current pace, Bloomberg could end up spending four or five times as much money as Bernie, who has raised as much money as any candidate ever,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project. “A rich guy making contributions to buy influence while running for office, continuing to be a mega-donor while running, I don’t believe has any precedent.”

If that weren’t disorienting enough, Steyer and Bloomberg have cloaked their big-money conquest in the same rhetoric that’s become native to Sanders and Warren. When Bloomberg, who has refused all donations to his campaign, play-acted at chastising the Democratic Party for not letting him join the debates, because he lacks any donors to meet the qualification threshold, he did so sounding the call of a wounded idealist: “I don’t take money from anybody else … I listen to people but I don’t let people buy me.” Similarly, in an interview with the Prospect, Steyer channeled Sanders in saying, “When you talk about people’s teams, my team is the

chris carlson / ap images

Elizabeth Warren took Pete Buttigieg to task for a fancy wine cave fundraiser at the primary debate in December.

American people, I have no conf licts.”

All the money in the world seems to come with all the world’s cynicism. It will surprise no one to hear that Bloomberg’s campaign is staffed with the same lobbyists and corporate hacks that would have to pay for access in any other campaign. Take his campaign co-chair, Steve Benjamin, who used to be a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, the fossil fuel front group. And Bloomberg’s goals in particular are relatively more modest than Sanders’s and Warren’s, particularly as they relate to taxing rich people like him; the progressives support a wealth tax, which Bloomberg said in November “just doesn’t work.”

So the Democratic Party is now playing host to a battery of candidates pledging to take on the country’s oligarchy, and, simultaneously, those very oligarchs, all of whom are using the same messaging to justify their cause. If successful, it could sketch a troubling blueprint for billionaires to come. Imagine Jeff Bezos, who’s twice as rich as Bloomberg, setting his sights on public office, a political rival, or an unfavorable piece of legislation. “I think it’s an existential crisis for the historic Democratic Party,” said Lux. “It’s actually very dangerous. If Bloomberg were to pull this off it could destroy the party over time.”

THE TWO INSURGENCIES, pulling the

party in opposite directions, have left behind a coterie of candidates—Biden and Buttigieg, but also current and former hopefuls Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, and Beto O’Rourke. All of them have played the traditional game of high-dollar fundraising and money-for-access events.

That haul has been surprisingly meager, exposing a weakness in the traditional fundraising approach. Big-money fundraisers and bundlers can recoup thousands of bucks at a time, but they require lots of feeding and caring. Wealthy benefactors like to be attended to by their political investments, evinced most notably by the fracas over Pete Buttigieg’s wine cave fundraiser. Bill Wehrle, an attendee, took to the pages of The Washington Post to defend the event’s propriety, arguing he only paid $11 to attend. But that was only because he’d already donated $2,789 to Buttigieg, maxing out at the wine cave at the $2,800 limit.

Buttigieg had to spend valuable time securing those rewards, then eating dinner and soothing egos to pull down the extra money.

The hourly return on that $11 would make his friends at McKinsey shudder.

Despite Buttigieg’s justif ication of big money as an actively populist social

good (He’s insisted on the “importance of building a campaign that can draw together and include as many people as possible”), he got blown out in 2019’s final quarter by Bernie Sanders by a whopping $10 million.

Joe Biden, despite decades in the public eye as a senator and vice president, and a career providing favorable service for the financial industry while representing Delaware, the country’s in-house tax haven, has also struggled to wrangle big bucks. Biden’s best fundraising quarter of the year also came in Q4, at $22.7 million. That number just barely beat out Warren, who many considered to have posted a disappointing haul.

Nearly all of the major dropouts in the race have occurred in this class of fundraiser. After kicking off with huge excitement, Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris, both armed with lengthy email lists, national profiles, and promising poll numbers, failed to make it to Iowa, despite leaning on traditional fundraising support. Ditto Julián Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker. With too many candidates chasing too few rich donors, none of them were popular enough to secure more funds, and none of them had enough funds to become more popular. (The fact that candidates of color couldn’t pull off a small-dollar bonanza also suggests that the digital divide continues to play a troubling role in America.)

Alarmed by the circumstance, numerous candidates, current and former, have reneged on long-held pledges to discourage support from super PACs. There was simply no other way to keep up with the Sanderses and Bloombergs. Booker got super PAC help and disavowed it; Deval Patrick got $2 million for New Hampshire ads and didn’t.

Before dropping out, Harris was about to benefit from a super PAC buy in Iowa; the ads were already cut when she quit. Buttigieg has support from a veterans PAC waiting to be deployed. And Biden’s Unite the Country PAC spent $2.3 million on TV ads in Iowa in early January. This backslide has undone years of activist work to make super PACs unwelcome.

The justifications for accepting big money have contorted into pretzel logic. Buttigieg’s contention that money doesn’t corrupt flies in the face of core Democratic Party convic-

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

THE POTENCY OF THE small-dollar

approach and its throwing of the traditional fundraising model into upheaval has surprised political onlookers. But the transformation has been building for 20 years, an innovation as much technological as political.

In late 1998, preparing to mount a longshot challenge against Vice President Al Gore, the Bill Bradley campaign looked about for any untapped advantage. Bradley lacked institutional support, but he had name recognition as a former shooting guard for the New York Knicks, and a decent-sized (in those days) email list. But soliciting donations over the internet was forbidden by the FEC. So the Bradley team petitioned to have internet contributions treated like any other,

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Bill Bradley (left) pioneered the use of online fundraising during his 2000 presidential campaign. Four years later, Howard Dean took internet donations to a new level, raising $50 million in mostly online contributions.

and won, a decision that coincided with the beginning of e-commerce. “The holiday season of 1998 was the very first time Americans got comfortable using credit cards online.

There was a huge surge in purchasing,” Lynn Reed, who helped oversee the Bradley campaign’s digital fundraising, told me. “People started to feel like ‘I can use my credit card and not get scammed most of the time.’ If that hadn’t changed we wouldn’t have been able to push it so hard.”

Not only was blasting the email list effective at unearthing money and volunteers, the opportunity cost of doing so was effectively nil. Until that point, seeking nonrich support entailed phone calls and direct mail, both expensive undertakings. “Asking for money online became weightless,” said Reed. “Now that we’re this far into online fundraising we forget how it used to be and how much money it used to cost an organization to raise those small dollars.” Bradley would ultimately fall to Gore, but not before a spirited challenge, buoyed by the first $1 million ever raised online.

The trend was quickly embraced, not by fellow Democrats, but by Republican John McCain. After McCain scored a shock victory in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, his campaign seized on the momentum with an online fundraising ask that

brought in $1 million in just 24 hours, big money for that time. He ended up raising some $6 million online before ultimately falling to George W. Bush.

Four years later, anti-war candidate of “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” Howard Dean took online donations to a new level. All told, Dean raised some $50 million, most of it online, with multiple multimillion-dollar quarters. Dean’s campaign would “put up the bat”—a cartoon image of a baseball player—whenever making a fundraising challenge. The bat would fill up as the goal neared, bringing unusual interest into the drudgery of raising money.

Though his campaign ultimately sputtered out, Dean’s prowess endured with the launch of the website ActBlue. Created in 2004 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist Matt DeBergalis and Harvard-trained physicist Ben Rahn, ActBlue, once referred to as the “bundler of the unbundled,” quickly became a game changer. Part blog, part PAC, part fundraising platform, the site conceived a smooth pathway for online donations. Right away it helped secure funds for progressive politicians up and down the ballot.

Barack Obama took the Dean approach to new heights, with 6.5 million donations from 3 million supporters, good for a half

charles dharapak / ap images

tions. Why did 24 candidates, including Buttigieg, sign a pledge swearing off corporate PAC money if it doesn’t matter? Why did 19 others, including Buttigieg, forswear fossil fuel money? Why did Buttigieg reject banking industry donations when he ran for Indiana Treasurer in 2010? The hoopjumping reached its apex when reporters informed Buttigieg’s team that the wine cave owner, Craig Hall, is heavily invested in oil and gas wells in Arkansas. Hall, the campaign said, is merely a real-estate executive who dabbles in hydrocarbons.

Wealthy donors also become a way to fill out the executive branch, as functionaries and ambassadors. They swarm presidential transitions and create silent barriers to action that cannot be breached. They occupy the mindshare of candidates, who must pay attention at a high level to a certain set of concerns. The policy impact of traditional fundraising is evidenced in the neoliberal turn of the Democratic Party since the 1970s.

If big money is nothing to be ashamed of, one wonders why the remaining candidates are so cagey. Buttigieg refused to disclose the bundlers raising at least $25,000 for his campaign until succumbing to public pressure, and even then only produced a partial list, omitting his most objectionable backers. Biden, meanwhile, dumped his bundlers list at 11 p.m. the Friday after Christmas Day. Amy Klobuchar quietly followed suit in January.

billion dollars in total. He didn’t forsake traditional fundraising altogether—his largest individual donor was Goldman Sachs, a troubling portent of what was to come.

But his approach showed that small-dollar fundraising wasn’t just reserved for protest campaigns. Small bucks could win big.

In 2010, the Supreme Court struck back with the Citizens United decision, unleashing a powerful counterrevolutionary force.

The Court took corporate cash off its leash, gutting the soft-money provisions in the bipartisan 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, and opening the door for dark money. “The corporate and powerful interests realized that the progressive base is going to overwhelm us if we don’t open the spigot,” Feingold told me. Citizens United “was a response to our success; the development of electronic democracy was very threatening to the power structure.”

Yet the low-dollar revolution was here to stay. While there were concerns that the model could only work in a high-profile national race like the presidency, in 2012 a Harvard law professor deployed it in a Senate election. Elizabeth Warren faced a well-heeled, well-funded Wall Street darling with high approval ratings in Massachusetts named Scott Brown. Despite the big money stuffing Brown’s pockets, she pulled it out. “She raised $20 million online, which was unheard of,” said Lux. “People other than those running for president were like, ‘Oh my god.’ If you’re able to project yourself on a national level you might have the ability to raise that kind of money.”

Still, skeptics held onto the idea that the small-dollar approach was viable only in exceptional circumstances. Playing ball with big money and following the dictates of the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC were necessary wages, especially as Republicans reaped astonishing electoral windfalls while the Koch brothers staked an entire political empire in-house.

There’s some validity to that argument.

Republicans have overwhelmed Democrats way down the ballot with big money in school board, judicial, and state legislative races. A $30 million investment from a project called REDMAP flipped state legislatures in 2010 and locked in a decade of

power after redistricting. It’s legitimate to suggest that, until the campaign finance system changes, some Democrats will need to legally raise money however they choose.

But obeisance to big money crept back up the ballot in 2016, as Hillary Clinton embraced super PAC s and big donors, to disastrous effect. Donald Trump, previewing some of the hackneyed logic now being elevated by Bloomberg and Steyer, claimed to be morally unimpeachable because he was

Biden and Buttigieg are playing the traditional game of high-dollar fundraising. But it does require the time-consuming care and feeding of wealthy donors.

self-funding (of course, he didn’t self-fund— he actually made money off his campaign by booking his hotels for events). He hammered Hillary for perceived corruption, which no doubt hurt her already rickety image.

In 2018, Democrats rededicated to leaving behind big money, proving that small dollars could win further down the ticket than previously thought. Dozens of House members obtained and flipped seats while rejecting corporate PAC dollars. And two progressive challengers, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California’s Katie Porter, managed to win first terms without doing any big-money fundraisers.

While AOC won in a true-blue district, Porter swung a traditionally Republican seat, edging her conservative opponent by four points. AOC has quickly become one of the best fundraisers in the House, with Porter close behind. In both quarters 2 and 3 of 2019, Porter broke $1 million in donations, approaching that of impeachment figurehead Adam Schiff and money maven Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Meanwhile, in November, Ocasio-Cortez announced a pace-setting $1.4 million quarterly haul; in one day alone in January, she raised $100,000 in campaign donations and another $69,000 for her new political action committee.

The approach hasn’t only been good tactically; it’s allowed them to be more effective legislators. Instead of spending time pressing the flesh, they’ve been writing bills, intensely questioning in hearings, and leading rallies for causes and candidates. “I haven’t picked up a phone once this year to dial for dollars, & I don’t meet w/corp lobbyists,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in November. “Instead, your support allows me to spend hours each day studying issues & exposing abuse of power.”

There’s another reason to believe that small-dollar politics represents the best path forward for the Democratic Party. The embrace of big money comes with strings, as progressives have seen since Tony Coelho’s corporate fundraising efforts in the 1980s. It damages the party brand to incessantly endure compromises because of the alleged necessity of tapping campaign cash.

It forces Democrats to cede legitimacy on campaign finance, and muddies the party’s message on taking on powerful interests.

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The erosion of campaign finance standards by a conservative judiciary nudged by monied interests has been a disaster for small-d democracy, allowing big money to overtake the political system. It’s also put big-d Democrats at an inordinate disadvantage; they’ve been forced to fight not just Republicans but a massive headwind of corporate donors. We’ve seen how the language of “corruption” resonates, and that ties directly back to how candidates raise money. Democrats running the high-dollar fundraiser gauntlet may not provide the best path to victory; in fact, there’s reason to believe it can be a formidable enemy.

The politics of corruption sit comfortably with the fight against inequality. The Trump tax cuts ceded more wealth to the rich, and that financial power habitually converts into political power, mostly through the channel of campaign contributions. It’s certainly possible to wage war on the rich while taking their money; many candidates in the Democratic field have vowed to do so.

But the broken faith in democratic institutions makes this a harder sell. In a cynical age, there’s simply an expectation that big money tilts the political system (because often it does). The only ways out of this vice grip are the incorruptible-billionaire model or the small-dollar one, and only one of them is achievable at scale.

even more compelling: Over three million of those donors were first-time contributors, as many as in 2017 and 2018 combined.

Forty percent of first-time donors gave multiple times in 2019. This happened in an off year—exceedingly few federal offices were up for election in 2019.

Summing together the money raised

by Democratic primary candidates also yields good news. Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Biden, Andrew Yang, and Klobuchar teamed up to raise $412.1 million in 2019, almost three times what Trump pocketed during that time period. And Warren and Sanders raised $55 million in Q4, dwarfing Trump on small dollars alone.

Upon closer examination, Trump’s numbers look surprisingly ramshackle. Sit-

SMALL DOLLARS MAY RULE the primary, but the battle that really counts is against the Trump money machine. And the prospect of heading into it without corporate air cover has even some small-dollar evangelists uncertain.

Trump’s fundraising is formidable. The re-election campaign raised $46 million in the final three months of 2019, and $143 million throughout the year. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, called the numbers indicative of “an unstoppable juggernaut.” And there are enough rich conservatives willing to reload Trump’s coffers and associated super PACs, perhaps endlessly.

And yet, according to a year-end report from ActBlue, the small-dollar donor community raised more than $1 billion for over 13,000 candidates and organizations in 2019. Individual contribution statistics are

ting first-term presidents almost always enjoy strong fundraising for re-election.

Barack Obama raised about $40 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, even after the Democratic Party suffered a colossal wipeout in the House and Senate. Former President George W. Bush raised $47.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2003, significantly more than Trump when accounting for inflation, in a pre–Citizens United era with far less money in politics. The Trump money machine is going to be well-oiled, but it’s not unsurpassable. For comparison, the Sanders campaign has staked out a general-election fundraising goal that previously would’ve seemed impossible: “Against Trump … we will have 50 million individual contributions, at least. And at $27 a piece, that would be more than $1 billion,” they announced in a press release.

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The small-dollar revolution provides an alternative to the hors d’oeuvres circuit. But the long-term strategy for Democrats must include campaign finance reform.

If 2016 taught us anything, it’s that you don’t actually need more money, you just have to stay in the neighborhood. Donald Trump was outraised by Hillary Clinton 2 to 1 and still managed to win. “Grassroots folks are so energized to beat Trump, and will be so energized by either of [Warren or Sanders] winning, the contributions will come in like a tsunami. And labor and many other organizations will still be spending all their organizational resources, so that will help as well,” predicted Lux. If the small-dollar revolution does indeed win out, it could provide the spark to transform the electoral process forever, by providing an alternative path to the hors d’oeuvres circuit. The only route to truly democratizing our elections, however, lies with campaign finance reform. Political donors are disproportionately wealthier and whiter than the general population, and the fact that it can be easier to get approved for a credit card than a voter ID is hardly a democratic triumph. And unless and until every Democrat running for office has the star power of an AOC—an unlikely scenario—forgotten Democrats who can contribute to a governing majority will be left adrift in a sea of big money, and tempted to tap it themselves.

Any long-term strategy for Democrats, therefore, must include campaign finance reform. The inability to do so is an existential threat to the rest of the agenda: Medicare for All, Green New Deal, you name it. That’s why H.R. 1, the first bill introduced by the newly Democratic House in 2019, which included provisions for publicly funded elections and other reforms, was rightfully high on the to-do list. It’s also why Mitch McConnell has spent his entire career opposing these things.

Even the avatar of the modern small-dollar revolution, the best hope of a future that doesn’t rely on big money, understands the ultimate solution. “I think it’s fair to say we have a political system which is corrupt, and at the very top of my administration’s agenda will be to deal with that,” said Sanders on the stump in Iowa in January. “We have got to overturn this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, and in my view move to public funding of elections.”

Congress’s Biggest Obstacle prospect illustration using image by thomas-soellner / istock by getty

Though the Congressional Budget Office is obscure to most Americans, politicians have enabled it to stand in the way of progressive ambitions. They don’t have to.

S

hortly after becoming chief economist to Bernie Sanders on the Senate Budget Committee, Stephanie Kelton struck up a friendship with a colleague who had previously worked at the Congressional Budget Office. “We would sit and chat,” Kelton told me. “I remember the first conversation, he was telling me about CBO. He said, ‘When I started with them, the first thing they said is that they stop stupid shit from happening.’

That is how they described their purpose.”

Nothing in the duties and responsibilities of CBO would anticipate such lofty authority. Its mission is mostly mathematical. CBO “scores” proposed legislation, mostly for its cost to the government’s bottom line. It also issues broader forecasts about expected government deficits, household incomes,

B Y DAV ID DAYE N and economic growth. It’s mostly a factory for producing charts and graphs, hardly a domineering aggrandizer of political power.

And yet CBO plays an outsized role in U.S. politics, a circumstance not wholly of its own making. In Washington, which likes to distill complex issues down to simple numbers, the CBO score can define whether legislation lives or dies, even though the score doesn’t characterize a bill’s goals, just the budgetary impact. As Philip Joyce, senior associate dean and professor of public policy at the University of Maryland and author of a history of the Congressional Budget Office, explains, “Someone at CBO said to me, ‘If you ask us how much it costs, we’ll tell you how much it costs; if you ask us if it’s a good idea, we’ll tell you how much it costs.’”

Yet our political dysfunction, and the

entrenchment of a neoliberal ideology that prefers markets to government intervention, has conflated fiscal cost with overall worthiness. The 2020 Democratic primary’s signature question—“But how will you pay for that?”—reveals this fallacious, unbalanced foregrounding of deficits. If America turns blue in 2020, the next president will harbor either ambitions well to the left of Barack Obama, or the most progressive agenda since Franklin Roosevelt. But at the heart of the plot to stop that president in their tracks will be the opposition’s skillful employment of CBO numbers, to “prove” that America cannot have nice things.

“There are times that bad budget policy is excellent policy,” says Scott Lilly, who worked for 31 years in Congress, mostly for Congressman Dave Obey (D-WI), a longtime

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

House appropriator. “If you look at World War II, we ended up at a public debt that was 108 percent of GDP in 1946. So we shouldn’t have engaged in WWII, we should have let Hitler take over Europe and sat back? That would have been good policy because we would have been more fiscally sound?”

Even CBO will tell you that they deliver a range of options that should not be taken as gospel, but instead viewed as baseline information to weigh against other costs and benefits. “We have to do a number and we do our best,” says Phillip Swagel, who took over as CBO director in June.

Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and humans preternaturally demand some structure, some standard of judgment, some scoreboard. In the absence of a Congressional Social Benefits Office or a Congressional Quality of Life Office, we solely have a Congressional Budget Office, and this can debilitate reasoned policy decision-making.

rent political framework, CBO dates back to the disruptions of the 1970s.

For the previous half-century, the executive branch handled federal budget planning.

Since 1921, presidents were required to send an annual budget proposal to Congress, and appropriations committees worked off their baseline to divvy up the money. Practically all budgetary expertise resided in the White House Bureau of the Budget, renamed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 1970, and lawmakers seeking to understand how their ideas might translate in practice had to go through them. It was a chaotic process, but it worked decently until a power-mad Richard Nixon won re-election in a cakewalk in 1972.

Flush from his victory, Nixon decided to withhold congressionally appropriated funds for social and environmental programs he didn’t like. Despite prefiguring actions that triggered Donald Trump’s

With the CBO, Washington has allowed itself to be governed by an unelected collection of well-meaning economists given a fundamentally impossible task.

It’s not that CBO governs Washington, it’s that Washington has allowed itself to be governed, by an unelected collection of wellmeaning economists given a fundamentally impossible task. Even CBO’s critics praise it for being a relatively honest broker that can provide valuable insight into the fiscal consequences of legislation. But that’s not the sum total of policy, and scorekeeping tends to create a logic of its own. It unconsciously assigns merit to legislation based on thin and at times inaccurate criteria. And even if it stops stupid shit from happening, who decides what qualifies as stupid?

DESPITE BEING A FIXTURE in modern

legislative life, the Congressional Budget Office is a relatively new institution. All of the New Deal and Great Society programs passed into law without a CBO score, from Social Security to Medicare and Medicaid.

Like so many dominant elements of our cur-

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impeachment, at the time it was perfectly legal, or at least not illegal. Thomas Jefferson first used this procedure, known as impoundment, by refusing to pay $50,000 for 15 Navy gunboats in 1803.

Historically, impoundment was reserved for when policymakers agreed that programs were no longer necessary (the gunboat funding, for example, was appropriated under the expectation of war along the Mississippi River, and then peace broke out).

But Nixon impounded funds for municipal sewers and water treatment plants, appropriated through a law he vetoed but Congress overrode.

While cities sued for their share of the funding (and eventually got it when the Supreme Court ruled in Train v. City of New York), Congress took action to take back the purse strings. The result would become the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Nixon might have

vetoed it as well, but with Watergate at its peak, his administration feared angering Congress further.

The Budget Act forced future presidents to seek congressional approval to impound funds. But Congress also recognized that presidential budget dominance stemmed from legislative deficiency. So the law created budget committees in the House and Senate, and required Congress to formally pass an annual budget resolution. Instead of having the total federal budget be the sum of whatever the appropriations committees approved, the new budget progress would agree on the bottom line first, and then argue about who got to appropriate what.

To reclaim some power from OMB and the executive branch, the act created the Congressional Budget Office to provide technical expertise and objectively estimate costs.

The details were scant. “The law simply said there’s going to be this agency,” Joyce explains. It was left to CBO’s first director to set prerogatives. The House preferred Sam Hughes, an OMB official; the Senate wanted Alice Rivlin of the Brookings Institution.

Neither side would budge; House Budget Committee Chair Al Ullman bluntly refused to nominate a woman. Then in October 1974, Wilbur Mills, the powerful chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, was caught in the Tidal Basin with a stripper named Fanne Foxe. Mills eventually resigned and Ullman took his chairmanship, and new Budget Committee Chair Brock Adams wasn’t as nakedly chauvinist. So Rivlin got the job.

Rivlin, who died last year at the age of 88, would become one of Washington’s greatest deficit hawks, blaming shortfalls for restraining economic growth. She was the architect of Clinton-era surpluses when she ran OMB from 1994 to 1996. The RivlinDomenici deficit reduction plan, a stepsister to the later Bowles-Simpson scheme, called for substantial health care cuts and changing Medicare to a voucher program.

In other words, Rivlin wasn’t just a neutral scorekeeper; she had a perspective, and as the tone-setter for CBO’s work for its first 45 years, it’s hard to argue that her viewpoint didn’t seep into the bones of the agency.

At CBO, where she served from 1975 to 1983, Rivlin primarily sought to expand the

tom williams / cq roll call via ap images

Stephanie Kelton worked for the Senate Budget Committee in 2015. “The goal is to get a permission slip out of CBO and it’s just a game” she says. “Whatever I have to do, play with the numbers, make calls, lean on them.”

agency’s purpose and profile, anticipating economic issues as well as reacting to individual pieces of legislation. Its long-range policy forecasts were an early harbinger of the minefields such predictions walk into. “I remember one report I objected to strenuously,” says Lilly, who is now with the Center for American Progress. “Around the time that the D.C. Metro was funded, they did a report saying that the energy required to build the Metro more than offset the energy savings. That was true in one sense but it ignored the reality that one of the major benefits of Metro was a radical change in land use, which ultimately was where the energy savings was coming from.”

The policy reports eventually got scaled back, but CBO established credibility through its unvarnished assessments. At the time, OMB was known to look favorably upon things presidents preferred, and assume high costs for things they opposed. CBO questioned the numbers in President Ford’s first budget in 1975, and Republicans assumed it was because Rivlin, a Democrat, ran the agency. But CBO analyzed President Carter’s energy policy in similarly negative fashion.

CBO’s forecasts owed much to advances in computer simulations. If a senator devised legislation to spend $1 billion on roads and bridges, CBO would run it through models that estimated how many jobs such spending might create, or how much economic activity

and tax revenue it might generate over a set time frame known as the “budget window” (initially only five years, but since the late 1990s typically ten). If a congressman wanted to raise eligibility standards for Medicare, models might look at how many uninsured that would create and what the government would need to pay in uncompensated care at emergency rooms, relative to savings from fewer numbers on the Medicare rolls.

A free-college proposal would have to estimate the ten-year cost of covering tuition at public colleges and universities. A change to bank regulations might approximate the increased likelihood of financial crisis and government bailouts.

An omnibus appropriations bill might have hundreds of tiny changes requiring scoring. And factors like long-term inflation, interest rates, demographic shifts, expected economic and employment growth all have to get factored in. Multiple models, simulations, and analysis go into every score.

On top of that, there are the pressures of dealing with politicians who demand favorable scores for their bills and are accustomed to getting what they want. This is where the “stop stupid shit” mentality kicks in. “There’s a natural skepticism, which is deserved, people coming to CBO and saying, ‘I’ve got this great idea and it doesn’t cost any money and will not lead to bad things happening,’” says Joyce, who spent five years working at CBO.

Typically, CBO and other federal agencies with expertise provide technical assistance to members seeking a score. “A member says here’s what we have in mind,” says Swagel, the CBO director. “We can’t do the projection until there’s legislative language. We say, ‘Here’s how we see this happening,’ and give a preliminary view. And then we’ll go back and forth.”

This inevitably intersects CBO’s desire for unbiased forecasting with raw politics. In his book The Economist’s Hour, Binyamin Appelbaum explains how Rivlin got caught up in the supply-side economics debate in the 1970s, by refusing to show in her scores that tax cuts pay for themselves. Conservatives pestered her with questions, called for hearings on CBO’s models, and read into the record a memo from Rivlin arguing that supply-siders were an “extreme rightwing claque who should not be given an audience.” Conservative Democrat Russell Long, a senator from Louisiana, remarked that his allies had to “find somebody who knows more how to put the answer in the computer so that it comes out the right way.”

It can look like a type of lobbying from the outside, and some members with clout are fiercer than others. “The goal is to get a permission slip out of CBO and it’s just a game,” says Kelton. “Whatever I have to do, play with the numbers, make calls, lean on them.”

To its credit, CBO has often resisted acquiescing to ideological requests, thanks in part to Rivlin and her immediate successors. “When Robert Reischauer left,” says Joyce, referring to a Rivlin aide who served as CBO’s third director, “there were a series of op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, calling out staff people by name and saying the new director needed to get rid of all these Keynesians and bring in right-thinking Americans. There was a push to get Republicans to remake CBO in its image, and it didn’t happen.” More recently, Republican CBO directors have defied desires for robust “dynamic scoring,” an attempt to show large economic boosts from tax cuts. In 2017, director Keith Hall, a Republican, responded to attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act by predicting it would cause 27 million Americans to lose health insurance, which even CBO critics like Kelton praised.

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But extrapolating from these incidents to conclude that CBO builds in no assumptions and makes no choices in its economic modeling would be wrong. Because if it did not, CBO simply could not perform its job.

KELTON DESCRIBES CBO’S posture as

short-run Keynesian and long-run classical. Under this modeling, spending will create a short-term economic boost, while over time it will crowd out private investment. The long-term economic benefits of public investments are subsequently minimized. When Kelton worked for the Budget Committee, she met with CBO’s top macroeconomist about a $1 trillion infrastructure bill Sanders had proposed. “I said, ‘Walk me through the crowding out thing,’” she recalls. “Her argument was, if the deficit increases then interest rates go up, and people know that future tax rates will be higher so they draw out of the labor force.”

You’d have to ignore more than a decade of fairly large deficits with no correspondent interest rate rise to still believe this. Kelton, for her part, has a different conception of fiscal policy, known as Modern Monetary Theory. She believes that leaving money in the economy through more government spending or tax cuts would reduce interest rates as the deficit increases, in effect “crowding in” more private investment.

At the meeting, Kelton asked about this.

“I said, ‘How do you allow for crowding-in effects from investment?’ She looked at me like I had three horns. That’s what they do, they let their assumptions drive the analysis.”

This resistance to theories that are out of step with conventional wisdom reflects the studiously middle-ground nature of CBO. Its analysts are recruited from mainstream economics departments, and the models reflect those choices. Opposition to supplyside economics is a choice, as is opposition to nonstandard thinking about fiscal-policy effects. “For better or worse, it largely reflects the mainstream in the economic profession,” says Dean Baker, economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Several economists and CBO officials explained to me that the agency strives to be consistent as much as it strives to be accurate. “If you have a bunch of bills in Con-

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gress about health care, CBO cares that it’s not disadvantaging some bills relative to others because it’s using different assumptions,” says Joyce. “So a particular bill doesn’t become law because it’s analyzed one way and not another way.” Those assumptions evolve when new information reveals them to be incorrect, but by that time they’ve already been employed many times over.

For example, CBO does not predict recessions. While the standard CBO forecasts assume full employment, in its ten-year projections it assumes a somewhat higher average unemployment rate, on the assumption that there will be a recession somewhere in that time period. That works for consistency but not necessarily for accuracy.

Other assumptions are more controversial.

CBO scores so-called “automatic stabilizers,” benefits that kick in when the economy is in a downturn, like unemployment benefits or food stamps, as if they will be fully utilized.

This tends to exaggerate the costs of such policies. CBO also assumes a benchmark that only 6 percent of funds appropriated for road construction will spend out in the first year.

“If you put money into highways as a way to get people back to work, say you put an extra $10 billion in, their estimate is only $600 million in the first year,” says Lilly. “We would try to force a more rapid buildup in the program, and they wouldn’t agree.”

CBO does not factor in the benefits of carbon emissions reductions when estimating environmental policy. “There’s a social cost of carbon that the government uses,” says Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute. “That should go in and be reflected.” Bivens adds that CBO’s estimated job loss in the Affordable Care Act was based on assumptions that people with more secure insurance coverage would voluntarily give up work. “If people are voluntarily moving out of the labor force, it’s hard to say it’s a big crisis,” he notes.

A more consequential assumption CBO makes is that Social Security and Medicare will eat up general-fund revenues once they deplete their respective trust funds. This is actually prohibited by U.S. law, though new laws could always alter that. But Congress, perniciously, added a rider in 1985 that effectively forces CBO to make this assumption.

It rapidly kicks up projections for the debtto- GDP ratio, by adding previously prohibited Social Security and Medicare spending to the federal bottom line. The subsequent scary-sounding debt projections give politicians a tool to resist a progressive agenda.

Other problems are more structural. In general, “the models always converge to a long-term equilibrium,” says James Galbraith, economist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “It makes competing pieces of legislation comparable, and standardizes economic forecasts. Then people reify the forecasts as if something was real. It’s not.”

In other words, CBO quite often gets things incredibly wrong. That’s not a knock on CBO, it’s an honest description of the impossibility of their mission. At the heart of macroeconomic forecasting are millions of daily decisions made by fallible and unpredictable humans. All the computing power in the world cannot fully account for these sundry variables that affect economic performance.

“The notion that we make budget decisions today on the basis of forecasts that are inherently unstable is not a logical way of doing things,” says J.W. Mason, an economics professor at John Jay College and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. “You’re driving down a road you don’t know and trying to drive based on where the car will be in two miles, you can’t do that. We can solve immediate pressing problems, and when debt seems like a problem, cut spending and raise taxes.”

Mason noticed recently that CBO reduced its long-term interest rate forecast from 3.7 percent to 2.9 percent. That means that the interest payments on the national debt will wind up a whopping $2.2 trillion lower than previously thought. The newly calculated debt-to- GDP ratio also fell by about onethird, relative to the previous prediction.

Mason also assembled CBO’s forecast for interest rates every year since 2011, showing it to be consistently higher than reality.

That’s the danger of a long-term equilibrium assumption.

“The reality is that everybody’s forecasts have been systematically off for the last decade,” Mason says. “Everybody predicted a return to normality. Macro variables are not very predictable.” Galbraith, whose 2014 book was entitled The End of Normal,

tions and revenue projections going back to the 1980s show what are often large errors, due mostly to recessions that overestimated revenues by as much as 25 percent. CBO also missed the surpluses during the late Clinton years, then forecast enough surpluses to retire the national debt until George W. Bush slashed taxes and flipped the budget back into the red; it missed the financial crisis, and over-optimistically predicted an immediate bounce-back from it. “The recovery was always two years away for four straight years,” says Bivens.

It’s healthy for an agency to engage in continual self-assessment to refine its

Predictions Are Hard

CBO FORECASTS FOR THE 10-YEAR TREASURY BOND 6% P R O J E C T E D I N T E R E S T R AT E ( I N C O LO R S )

calls it a form of Confucianism. “The world has these harmonies and we will revert to them,” he says. “No other science operates on that principle.”

It’s to CBO’s credit that they made a big downward adjustment. But the previous expectation that the government can’t “afford” certain policies goes back to the assumption of mounting debt, and how interest on that debt will take up larger and larger shares of fiscal space. If that was calculated inaccurately, we wrote off potentially useful legislation for years, for no good reason.

And if current deficits aren’t pushing interest rates higher, it calls into question much of the hysteria around debt burdens being thrown on the backs of children and grandchildren.

Another example is the Trump tax cuts.

As the law was being rushed through Congress at the end of 2017, CBO’s initial forecast was that it would cost $1.438 trillion over the next ten years. By April 2018, just a few months later, that estimate had ballooned to $1.889 trillion, a 31 percent increase. This came mostly from changed assumptions about revenue losses from the corporate tax changes, and that was even before the business lobby went to work to extract further gifts from regulatory interpretations.

To comply with budget reconciliation instructions, Republicans were required to hold the ten-year cost of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act under $1.5 trillion. By April 2018, it was clear to CBO that this would not happen. But there’s no way to rerun the process and invalidate the law because CBO changed its interpretation. Republicans could have passed the bill anyway, but only with reconciliation (a procedure that requires a simple majority) could they avoid a Senate filibuster and pass solely with GOP votes. The inherent difficulty of forecasting enabled a giant tax cut for the wealthy.

You don’t have to dig deep to find these CBO adjustments and errors: They’re all on the agency’s website. CBO continually updates, reviews, and assesses its predictions. It offers a budget outlook and then reruns it midyear.

It annually checks federal revenues, outlays, and deficits to see how reality matched its theory; the fiscal year 2019 review revealed that it overestimated revenues by 0.8 percent. Other papers looking at deficit projec-

WITHIN CONGRESS, CBO is revered. An 2011 2012 2013 2014

5%

2015 4%

2017

2018 2016 2019

3%

2%

ACTUAL INTEREST RATE

1%

2010

done, people shoved it in their face,” says Dean Baker. “I was going after them on interest rate projections. I said you’ve been consistently too high. And they called me, said they looked at it, and changed it.”

Swagel stressed the transparency of CBO’s actions, that they explain how they develop their numbers and emphasize the inherent uncertainty. The “score” for legislation is more like a middle point in a range of scenarios, as CBO has acknowledged for years. “It’s something I think about, how can we convey both what matters in terms of our estimate, and the uncertainty, and what are the drivers of that,” he says. But in the end, often all that the media reports, and all that lawmakers pay attention to, is that one number, that one score.

2015

2020

2025

The chart shows that CBO has consistently forecast higher long-term interest rates than reality for the past decade.

“Macro variables are not very predictable,” says John Jay College professor J.W. Mason, who assembled the chart.

accuracy. It’s also good to adjust assumptions based on new information and data.

“When we evaluate the financial status of Social Security, we look at the view of what happens over 75 years,” says CBO director Phillip Swagel. “Fertility is down, younger people are having fewer babies. You might think that’s a good thing societally but that’s negative for Social Security. We don’t use dials to smooth that out. It’s change, when the facts change our opinion changes.”

Initially, CBO projected significant job loss from a progressively higher minimum wage; as new studies have come in and cities and states have moved toward $15 an hour with minimal effects, CBO has altered that stance.

“That was a response, the research had been

unending stream of press releases weaponizes CBO, touting a good score or condemning a bad one. “It’s really like the word of God,” says Kelton. “If you propose anything, the first question is, ‘What would CBO say?’”

Barack Obama’s advisers legendarily kept options for the stimulus package limited to $800 billion, smaller than the economic hole it needed to fill, because they didn’t want to seek a high number, which would consequently produce a high CBO score.

Similarly, the cost of the Affordable Care Act was kept under an artificial threshold of $800 billion, fearing the CBO headline.

Both cases yielded consequences: smaller spending to reduce unemployment, fewer subsidies to purchase individual insurance coverage, and more economic pain, all to avoid a headline number.

In recent legislation the House passed allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs, for example, it was known that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took all her cues from CBO. She relentlessly touted the initial favorable score as the reason to pass the bill, almost to the exclusion of the stated goal, saving money for drug patients. Costs to the budget count in the CBO score; benefits to the public do not. Sources close to the process told me that CBO held down the number of drugs Medicare could negotiate per year, due to questions about feasibility. More drugs

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

26 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN /FEB 2020

led to soaring interest rates in the last decade.

But the political class hasn’t caught up.

Perhaps a greater issue is that, while CBO acknowledges its estimates as a middle ground among an assortment of possibilities, the score is statutorily important. “CBO is phasing these numbers into the congressional budget process, which does not operate on ranges, but on numbers,” says Joyce.

“When a member raises a point of order because a bill violates some provision of the Budget Act, they need a number.”

Federal law and House rules dictate that any new spending must be offset by corresponding revenue increases or spending

Phillip Swagel became CBO director in June 2019. “CBO is not deciding what Congress should do, Congress is deciding.”

cuts; this is known as the “paygo” (pay as you go) rule. Nancy Pelosi has made this a standing rule of the House each time she became Speaker, and Barack Obama signed a statutory paygo law, both to howls from progressives. The rule puts an artificial handcuff on ambitions of activist government, and leashes legislative action to CBO estimates. Any new legislation that costs money, according to CBO, faces a difficult climb to become law, regardless of its other benefits. CBO estimates the cost of new spending and offsets; the estimates of each must line up. If CBO’s wrong about one or the other, we may be spending less or taxing more than statutorily necessary. This isn’t CBO’s fault, of course;

Congress has put these clamps on itself.

“Ultimately, CBO is not deciding what Congress should do, Congress is deciding,” says Swagel. “CBO is here to support Congress.”

When Congress tries to force itself into budget cuts, CBO is often implicated in the process. For example, legislation that recently passed the Senate Budget Committee, authored by Republican Mike Enzi and Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, commits CBO to comparing the debt-to- GDP ratio projection in the most recent budget resolution to a new projection incorporating a year’s worth of evidence. If the new projection shows higher debt, the Senate Budget Committee would report a plan for deficit reduction to hit the old debt number, under a special process with limited debate.

“It sets up a presumption which will be portrayed by deficit hawks as saying you will need to reduce the deficit,” says Richard Kogan of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Kogan ran the numbers, which show that the last three budget resolutions would have triggered a staggering $9.5 trillion in deficit reduction. That’s a function of shaky CBO forecasts that get refined over the years. “That’s the fairest way to put it, they are inherently uncertain,” Kogan says.

But because CBO is taken as gospel, these forecasts take on unwarranted weight under this proposal, with dramatic consequences.

Members of Congress being who they are, they have also schemed their way around the strictures of CBO. Moving the timing of payments around, making tax changes that bring forward payments that look like a short-term revenue boost, sunsetting tax cuts so they don’t cost anything in certain years, and other gimmicks have predominated in the CBO era, making the worthiness of the enterprise suspect.

For example, when former Speaker Paul Ryan briefly served as chair of the House Budget Committee, his proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher program was initially scored as costing much more than he wanted. So Ryan came up with a solution: He told CBO that he would implement reform proposals that would generate a fixed amount of money. It was a pre-cooked figure without any detail, but CBO had nothing to score, and simply gave Ryan his

congressional budget office

negotiated would save more for patients, but would cost more administratively. So Pelosi kept drug negotiations to a minimum.

The source accused CBO of imposing their own political calculus on legislative content, when they are supposed to be a mere referee.

House leadership resisted an amendment authored by Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) that would grant rebates for excessive drug prices to Americans with employer-sponsored coverage, adding to a provision in the bill giving rebates to Medicare. The reason was perverse: If rebates were extended to a larger group, drug companies would be likely to forgo excessive prices. That would lower the money going to Medicare, and therefore worsen the CBO score.

The savings were earmarked for Medicare improvements. House leadership, then, wanted to keep drug costs higher outside of Medicare, in a bill called the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, to improve Medicare essentially on the backs of other drug patients.

Eventually this deviancy couldn’t hold, and leadership allowed the Jayapal amendment into the final bill.

Part of the CBO obsession stems from the credibility the agency built up through the Rivlin years as a nonpartisan actor willing to challenge perceived “extreme” economic beliefs. Nothing gives the Washington media/consultant class a bigger thrill than being able to display their righteous centrism, and far too many on Capitol Hill want some of those plaudits too. Add to that a well-funded complex of deficit fearmongers that amplifies budgetary questions so they become standard subjects for political debate, regardless of their relatively low salience among the public.

Particularly within a Democratic establishment desperate to be seen as responsible—Republicans only wield austerity politics when out of office, content to expand the deficit when in power—the CBO score has taken on totemic significance. Even the most left-leaning Democrats bend over backwards to make sure their plans are fully paid for, while criticizing conservatives for putting wars and tax cuts on the national credit card.

Economists have come around to the idea that the deficit is just not much of a problem, especially given that high debt levels have not

numbers. “I’m confident Ryan didn’t figure that out on his own,” says Scott Lilly.

“CBO probably said, ‘You look bad, we’re really uncomfortable, try it like this.’”

Again, that’s not necessarily a failing of CBO. Despite the nonpartisan pose, they fulfill a role in a legally mandated political process. As an instrument of Congress, CBO is at its mercy. There’s no CBO modeling fix for political dishonesty.

BERNIE SANDERS AND Elizabeth Warren

favor bold, expensive, and to their minds necessary ideas that would establish a single-payer Medicare for All system, invest heavily in a Green New Deal, make public colleges free of tuition, and much more.

They add to these ambitions with higher taxes on corporations and the rich, including a novel federal tax on wealth. Even Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and other candidates with more moderate agendas envision a significant amount of spending.

More mainstream liberal economists have come around to letting some of those policies exist without offsets elsewhere in the budget. Paul Krugman has called for deficit financing for much of the Green New Deal’s investments; “Debt is just not a serious problem for the United States currently,” he told Vox’s Ezra Klein.

Looking at the Trump era in a vacuum, you could argue that Republicans have come around to that view as well. While Trump has tightened eligibility rules on spending for the poor like food stamps, he’s spent like mad in other areas, ringing up annual deficits of $1 trillion in a lowunemployment environment. The budgetbusting tax cuts are a primary cause, but Trump has also pursued more Keynesianstyle spending: an expensive farm bailout to make up for his trade wars; spending deals that raised the overall discretionary spending caps in a bargain to get more military funds; and paid family leave for federal employees, a policy that got tucked into a defense authorization bill.

However, anyone believing that this has permanently healed the Republican allergy to deficits didn’t pay attention the last time a Democrat took the White House. The minute that happens again, conservatives will

surely shriek about the deficit and debt as if it were an invasion on American soil, blaming profligate liberal “tax and spend” policies before a single bill has been passed. Charges of hypocrisy are so well-worn by now, and context so lacking among the media, that Republicans might even get away with this, if past experience is any guide.

In the process, Republicans will position CBO as an ally. They will trade on CBO’s credibility and use their projections to paint a picture of out-of-control government. The fact that CBO forecasts often fail to capture reality, build in questionable assumptions, discount benefits, and offer only a possible range of outcomes won’t come up in the conversation. The phrase “CBO says” will be employed a lot.

We’ve already seen how these forces coalesce to frustrate hopes of progressive interventions in the economy. The fullspectrum demand on Elizabeth Warren

what CBO says and here’s why it’s wrong.’”

There is actually good information buried in CBO forecasts, about other aspects of policy like job creation or the impact on the uninsured, as well as elucidation of the limitations of the numbers. Those caveats all melt away as reporting focuses on the headline. “The blame for how their results get boiled down to thumbs-up, thumbsdown is mostly not on them,” says EPI’s Josh Bivens. “The job is to train the Hill and journalists to not just go to the ten-year budget number.”

But the office is called the Congressional Budget Office, and that consciously or unconsciously directs people toward the numbers. A “Congressional Policy Office” that gives a balanced analysis of legislation that focuses on a host of factors, including effects on jobs, income, poverty rates, and more could remove that bias. One congressional agency that used to offer that

Particularly within a Democratic establishment desperate to be seen as responsible, the CBO score has taken on totemic significance. to release details of her Medicare for All financing, and her struggles to fend off critics who distrusted her arithmetic, is a good example. CBO will generate a massive number for putting health care on the federal books, and even if it comes in lower than current national health expenditures, that number will get thrown around as proof that moving to single-payer is impossible.

What should be done in the face of this?

Some have wondered whether reducing the budget window would improve CBO’s accuracy by limiting the variables. Federal law only requires a five-year estimate of the budget and legislative proposals.

Others have suggested a broader communications strategy to make sure CBO’s budgetary bottom line isn’t the playing field for the debate. The next Democratic president “needs to line up the economists and engage CBO,” says Dean Baker. “I would trust they would be prepared to say, ‘Here’s

broader perspective, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), was shut down by Newt Gingrich after the Republican Revolution of 1994. The House proposed funding to restart OTA last year, but Republicans killed it in the final appropriations package. Bringing back OTA would get us closer to balanced analysis of legislative effects.

Ultimately, what needs to be understood is that CBO scores are just data points, not obstacles. They serve as a reasonable baseline to discuss the budget, and that’s about it. If you explain the budgetary cost of a policy that will cover everyone’s health care or eliminate their student debt, policymakers should weigh that against the attendant benefits to society. Republicans like to talk about “cost-benefit analysis,” but Congress has created a structure to simply run the costs without the benefits. That mentality must change if we’re to have a decent conversation about the role of government.

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

What MEDICARE FOR ALL Really Looks Like

The Canadian system, also called Medicare, guarantees coverage to every resident north of the border.

BY CAITL IN KE LLY P H O TO S B Y J O S E R . L O P EZ

H

e spends long days navigating Toronto’s miserable traffic, finding whatever’s needed for his work as a freelance production designer for film and commercials. It’s demanding physical labor, with injury a daily possibility.

Like so many these days, David Dennis, 28, is an independent worker. But he pays nothing for his health insurance. Simply being a tax-paying Canadian is enough. As an Ontario resident, Dennis’s OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) card entitles him to see a physician, visit an urgent-care clinic or any hospital, and receive whatever services—including multiple surgeries and weeks or months of inpatient care—are deemed medically necessary, with no fear of ever paying for these out of pocket.

Government-funded health care, from cradle to grave, is Dennis’s Canadian birthright. It’s something he takes for granted, as do all Canadians, comforted by knowing that whatever their age, health, or employment status, they’re entitled to comprehensive medical care, most of it at no additional cost beyond their taxes.

Canadian health care is publicly funded and privately delivered, approximately the same vision that single-payer enthusiasts have for the American system. It even shares the same name as our largest government-run insurance provider: Medicare. But contrary to persistent American partisan mythmaking, no government offi-

28 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2020

cials sit in doctors’ offices or haunt hospital hallways with a checklist of all the services they’ll question and deny. They don’t dictate hands-on care. Canadians face little government interference or oversight of their health care, although, for historical reasons, their doctors retain much more power than patients.

The familiar and dreaded words “co-pay,” “deductible,” “pre-existing condition,” and “out of network” are meaningless here, in English or French, Canada’s two official languages. Patients don’t waste time chasing pre-authorizations or fighting medical bills, while physicians save thousands of administrative hours.

As Americans’ life expectancy is dropping and maternal mortality is ranked shockingly high among other wealthy nations, Canadian health outcomes fare better; Canadian women live two more years than their American counterparts, men three.

But the system is far from perfect. Outpatient care, like physical and occupational therapy or prescription medicine, is paid for out of pocket. In some places, there’s no mandate to use electronic records, so patient information can be difficult to access. And medical care of impoverished and remote First Nation and Inuit communities is openly acknowledged as abysmal.

Like Americans, many Canadians with full-time jobs receive supplemental coverage as a benefit through their employers,

while independent workers like David Dennis can buy a policy on their own.

Canada provides coverage for about 35 million, one-tenth the population of the United States. But how they’ve set up their health care system, and how it evolved over the decades, is instructive, especially given the robust debate during the presidential primary about overhauling our current system. It can inform how U.S. policymakers— and Canadians, for that matter—approach cost control, physician payment, and services for vulnerable communities. Rather than scaring Americans with well-structured narratives about the alleged horrors of Canadian Medicare, we could take the opportunity to learn from it.

HOW IT’S FUNDED

The health care Canadians receive flows through a hybrid federal and provincial system. The federal government supplies about $36 billion (Canadian) in health care funding annually, distributed among each province and territory’s Ministry of Health (MOH). Federal dollars cover roughly 20 percent of total health care costs, with each province and territory responsible for the remaining 80 percent.

Poorer provinces, and those with smaller populations—like Newfoundland and Labrador (528,817), Prince Edward Island (153,244), and the Northwest Territories (44,541)—receive higher federal amounts in compensation.

David Dennis, a freelance designer who lives in Toronto, pays nothing for his health insurance. Government-funded health care, from cradle to grave, is his Canadian birthright.

The provincial ministries make decisions about how best to apply that funding, further decentralized in some provinces through regional agencies. If a Canadian needs care while out of their home province, most reciprocal inter-provincial and territorial agreements ensure that they won’t receive bills for it.

At no point do government bureaucrats direct patient care—aka “death panels.”

Canadian physicians essentially run their own businesses, and enjoy tremendous autonomy. Their fees are negotiated annually with each provincial or territorial MOH through a provincial medical association, setting specific fees for each service and specialty. The Canadian government operates mostly as insurance payers, while doctors focus on serving patients.

Each doctor bills the MOH , paid in Ontario twice a month by direct deposit.

Many physicians are paid well, even for part-time work. Some easily earn $300,000 or more a year, while paying much less for malpractice insurance than their American counterparts. And without multiple insurers to wrangle, Canadian doctors need fewer employees. “I have a pal in Sausalito,”

says John Hickie, a former family physician in Calgary, Alberta, “who has more billing staff than medical staff. In contrast, I could do my billing in one hour on a Sunday evening at the computer.”

Nor do Canadians and their employers fear annual double-digit increases in the cost of their health insurance, which is paid for through a broad mix of taxes. So David Dennis lives free of daily financial anxiety over potential injury, a personal and professional freedom many Americans only dream of. He plays baseball several times a week and, when he slid into second base and banged himself up badly, went to an urgent-care clinic, also covered through OHIP. Throughout his teen years, skateboarding (broken left elbow), hockey (broken right collarbone, separated shoulder), and baseball (broken left hand) sent Dennis to the local emergency room so frequently he jokes he had an E-ZPass.

He’s never needed an ambulance; in Ontario they cost $240, with OHIP paying $195 of that. (Contrary to the vision of Senator Bernie Sanders [I-VT] and many U.S. single-payer supporters, some Canadian provinces require varying levels of cost-

sharing.) If an Ontario resident is hurt far away from a hospital, there’s Ornge, with 12 bases across Ontario, eight staffed helicopters, four staffed airplanes, and four critical-care land ambulance crews. More than 60 percent of its work takes place in Northern Ontario, including service to many fly-in only communities. All of this at no extra cost to patients.

Broke and desperate Americans increasingly are choosing to call an Uber over an ambulance, as an ambulance ride can add the potential shock of an unaffordable four-figure bill, even with health insurance. Dennis works in the gig economy, but he never has to fear the potential cost of an ambulance.

WAIT TIMES FOR LESS-URGENT CASES MEAN FRUSTRATION

When they need to see a doctor, Canadians must first visit their family physician.

The family physician decides if the matter requires a referral to a specialist and how quickly to ask for one. This gatekeeper role is one way that Canada controls health care spending. Currently, Canadian health care costs 10.4 percent of GDP, versus 17.2 percent for the United States.

JAN/FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

Ann Douglas of Bancroft, Ontario, waited eight months to see a specialist who finally diagnosed her Ménière’s disease.

There are downsides to this approach— waiting for diagnosis, treatment, and relief from pain and anxiety can be frustrating.

“The Canadian system is characterized by waiting,” says André Picard, health reporter since 1987 for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. “We wait to see a GP, wait for a referral to a specialist, for elective surgery, for home care and longer for long-term care. There is little to no accountability and little incentive for solving these problems.”

The Canadian Institute for Health Information offers detailed data on wait times for some specific procedures, including hip and knee replacement. Access to specialty services can vary widely, even in major cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.

For Ontario parenting author Ann Douglas, it meant waiting eight months to see an ear, nose, and throat specialist to finally diagnose and treat her repeated spells of vertigo.

She quickly saw her GP and had an MRI, but only a specialist diagnosed Ménière’s disease; eight months of weekly physiotherapy ended her symptoms.

Waiting for diagnosis and treatment can feel neglectful and frightening. But sur-

30 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2020

veys show repeatedly that the system still remains a source of deep national pride and shared identity. Canadians like knowing that, under federal law, everyone is entitled to equal access. Unlike in the U.S., the wealthy and powerful can’t pay extra or pull strings to jump to the front of the line. This lessens the sting of waiting and contributes to a sense of solidarity.

No one wants to wait, but Canadians also live without fear of medical bankruptcy, a trade-off they deeply value. Inundated by American media reports, some having lived and studied in the U.S., Canadians know how bad it can get.

“Canada makes you wait because everybody’s included,” says Dr. Tom Noseworthy, a professor of health policy and management at the University of Calgary, and a former hospital CEO, ICU specialist, and rural GP. “But every nation rations its health care. No one can get everything, everywhere, all the time. One system is explicit in its rationing, Canada, where we howl at our wait times— and the other is implicit, because Americans can only get it if they can afford it.”

Alberta researcher Tamara McCarron has just finished her Ph.D. examining how

Canadian patients experience health care, including prostate cancer patients. “When I asked them if they were happy with wait times, they said: ‘Hell, no!’” she tells me.

“The common theme I heard was ‘I had to wait a completely unacceptable amount of time to get the diagnosis from my urologist. This was ridiculous!’ But the positives I heard were: ‘I’m healthy. I’m good. The surgeon was amazing, pre-op was amazing. I can be really critical of the system, but I’m still here.’”

“It’s not that Canadians don’t want stuff now,” she adds,” but knowing they may have to wait three or six months to see a physician is the worst of it. Never seeing a bill is a huge comfort, so people are more forgiving of the challenges and inconsistencies because of that.”

For Ann Douglas, wait times also meant frustration when seeking mental health care for her four children. “The wait time to see a psychiatrist can be zero days to 18 months,” she says. “There has always been a shortage of child psychiatrists, leading to the hashtag #kidscantwait. They have been underfunded for years. Long waits for care exacerbate a minor issue to a major issue, so a kid with mental health issues becomes suicidal or a drug-using teen.”

Paying for outpatient medical services presents another major challenge for Canadians. Any service offered outside of a hospital or doctor’s office must be paid for out of pocket. Luckily for Douglas, her husband had a good benefit plan through his job, saving her $100 per week until the final few weeks for her physical therapy. At one point, Douglas needed $900 worth of medication each month, also covered through her husband’s plan. But those without such benefits, like David Dennis, face the same financial anxiety as Americans if they can’t afford such services.

Canada is also the world’s only country offering government-paid hospital and physician care that doesn’t pay for medication.

This has led to a growing push for national pharmacare, as even some Canadians can’t afford their insulin, invented by Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best and celebrated on the Canadian $100 bill. Americans pay the world’s highest drug costs, but Cana-

dians, with a small population and strong drug lobby, pay the world’s second-highest.

RACISM AND CANADIAN HEALTH CARE

The Canadians most frustrated with their health care are the nation’s 1,637,785 Inuit, Métis (mixed European and indigenous descent), and indigenous peoples. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised a radical overhaul and improvements by 2030. But he now leads a minority government, giving him less power.

Improvements can’t come quickly enough for physicians like Dr. Mike Kirlew, practicing medicine in northern Ontario for ten years. Born and raised in Ottawa, he’s an outspoken critic of First Nations’ health care, which he calls “unbelievable systematic oppression.”

Kirlew is based in Sioux Lookout, 1,090 miles northwest of Toronto, at its 100-bed hospital. From there, he flies in or drives up to 18 hours by ice road to one of 30 remote nursing stations to see patients from 32 communities, in an area the size of Germany and France combined. The nursing stations have no X-ray machine, MRI, or ambulance service. Even the Sioux Lookout hospital has no MRI, which means patients must fly south or west to neighboring Manitoba.

In October 2018, addressing fellow family physicians at his alma mater, the University of Ottawa, Kirlew gave a searing indictment of this system, describing a patient screaming in pain for 9.5 hours while awaiting a helicopter to fly him to an orthopedic surgeon—as the station had no painkillers on hand.

“We need 54 to 60 full-time physicians,” he said. “We have 18. We have very limited access to specialists of any type. We have very high rates of MRSA , strep, and rheumatic fever,” he told colleagues.

“When you contrast that with what’s in the provincial system it’s night and day,” he told a CBC reporter in March 2018. “It’s far inferior. We have a system that triages people, based on their race, to inferior care.

That’s the height of un-Canadian-ness.” It’s even worse for the Inuit, indigenous peoples who live in the Arctic. Suicide rates in Nunavut, a territory in this region, are ten times that of the rest of Canada.

Canadians expect their health care system to offer everyone—rich or poor, employed or not, of every race and ethnic background—fair and equal treatment.

And Canadians are proud of their nation’s openness to refugees and immigrants, with many fewer illegal entrants than the United States to foster resentment of those abusing the system in a country already more welcoming to immigrants than the U.S. Yet in health care, there is definitely racism and bias. “The status quo is perpetuating inequities, misery and associated higher health care costs,” wrote Josée Lavoie, professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of

Canadian health care is publicly funded and privately delivered, approximately the same vision that single-payer enthusiasts have for the U.S. system.

Manitoba, and director of Ongomiizwin Research, in a 2018 paper on First Nations health disparities.

A SERIES OF DIFFERENT SYSTEMS, WITH PATIENT EXPERIENCES MADE SECONDARY

The national expectation of fairness and equity lessens the sting of paying taxes for health care. “I don’t resent paying one cent of our taxes,” says Vancouver-based patient advocate and author Sue Robins. “This is a very Canadian thing that health is a collective responsibility because any one of us can be hit by a car at any moment. We should pay into a common system so that everyone can get care. We do get value over the years, especially as we get older.”

However, that expectation of equity breaks down across provincial lines. Robins worked in Alberta for nine years, enjoy-

ing excellent services for her son, Aaron, 16, who has Down syndrome. When the family moved to British Columbia, none were offered. “Care is not consistent between the provinces, even though the Canada Health Act says it’s portable,” she says. “A broken leg is a broken leg, but there are no consistent standards. There’s no national plan or strategy.”

As Vik Adhopia, national health television reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, explains, “The Canadian system is a series of systems and they are all different. There are significant disparities from province to province.” Adhopia has lived in Toronto, northern British Columbia, Alberta, and St. John’s, Newfoundland.

“CPAPs (a device used to relieve obstructive sleep apnea) are covered in Ontario, but not in Manitoba,” he says. “You hear of people who move from one province to another for coverage.”

Another fragmented element of the system is electronic medical records. Canadian hospitals and physicians use them, but the data is often siloed in multiple separate systems, and less immediately shared or accessible.

Residents who complain about these issues find little sympathy. “Canada does not have a patient-centered health care system,” wrote The Globe and Mail’s André Picard in May 2018. “Communication with patients is abysmal, customer care is virtually non-existent and the opportunities for feedback are minimal.”

Robins agrees with this assessment. “I found my treatment very impersonal,” she says. “They could do so much better when it comes to patient care, kindness, respect, and dignity. People don’t collect data on patient experience as they do in the U.S.,” she adds. “What about the waiting room experience? Is the care patient-centered?

Are they making decisions together? They don’t see patients as experts.”

When Ontario psychiatrist Dr. Javeed Sukhera needed emergency care at a local hospital, he, too, was deeply disappointed.

“From my own health care experiences, I would say patients are often treated like problems and not like people. I felt like I was treated like a piece of trash. I was dis-

JAN/FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

charged into the cold without any concern for whether I had a ride or not, wearing an undershirt in the winter. I had expected more compassion than I received. My experience as a patient in the U.S. system [where Sukhera did his residency] was vastly different than how I was treated in Canada.”

One key reason for this frustration is that hospitals in Canada receive global budgets annually from the MOH. They must figure out how to serve patients within that budget. This can create efficiency and limit unnecessary treatments. But in addition, patients in Canada are not seen as sources of revenue but as costs, explains Sukhera, who is president of the Ontario Psychiatric Association and an activist for health care improvement. “That transforms how we treat patients and provide care. The way we organize payments makes it hard to improve quality,” he says.

“The patient is not just a consumer, but also a citizen, taxpayer, and user all wrapped into one,” says Gregory Marchildon, a faculty member at the University of Toronto and an expert on health care policy. “Patients don’t have much power and they accept this, and they shouldn’t. Canadian patients need to become much more demanding. The systems are weak, and Canadians are quite passive, which has not been a good thing. There needs to be a lot more effort made to hold doctors accountable.” To create much greater accountabil-

A Personal View

A

s a Canadian who was born in Vancouver, was treated medically in Toronto and Montreal, and reported on medical issues while living in Canada until age 30, Canada’s is a system whose fairness I know and admire.

I’ve watched my mother—at no additional expense—treated for bipolar disorder, COPD, and multiple cancers,

ity, Marchildon suggests creating a written agreement between each patient and their physician, “and if the patient exits [that practice] is penalized financially, which creates a hard landing for the physicians.”

The flip side to this is that doctors don’t see Canadian patients (with a few miscreant outliers) as a source of personal profit.

Rounds of tests that fatten a doctor’s wallet mostly don’t exist in Canada. The way the nation finances medical education also eases the financial pressures on doctors.

While public and private American medical schools charge a median tuition of more than $200,000 for a four-year program, “when I went to medical school, tuition was $6,000 a year,” says Dr. John Hickie.

“Now it’s $16,000 to $20,000 a year. It’s still hugely subsidized and that’s the same everywhere in Canada. Compared to the States, it’s nothing.”

A DIFFERENCE IN BEDROCK PHILOSOPHIES

A fundamental conceptual difference also divides how Canadians and Americans view their relationship to using governmentfinanced or -run services. Classic American insistence on the bedrock values of individualism, self-reliance, and shunning government aid as a sign of moral failure differs radically from that of Canadians, who are more committed politically and economically to health care equity as a collective

including a six-hour neurosurgery and months of hospitalization. When it came time for delicate neurosurgery, the head of a major hospital’s department sat with me to carefully explain it.

We brought no social or financial capital, just medical need.

I grew up taking all of this for granted.

Even after decades in the U.S., I still retain some cultural differences. Physicians here

32 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2020

routinely offer what Americans expect, the fastest and most powerful forms of medication and treatment, some of which offer nasty side effects. I routinely choose the least, slowest, safest options.

When needing the results of breast and skin cancer biopsies, I’ve waited less than 24 hours in some cases—while my American friends fume. Canadians are used to waiting!

Today, I and my hus-

good. Consistently receiving free health care and heavily subsidized university and college tuition fees means that Canadians of all ages and income levels experience firsthand a consistent, quantifiable return on their tax dollars.

“One thing I wish Americans would understand is that ‘who’s going to pay?’ is actually a distraction,” says Dr. Danielle Martin, executive vice president and chief medical executive of Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. “It’s ‘how will you organize delivery of it?’ Payment is just the first step on a worthy and interesting journey. The conflation of single-payer and wait times is false. We have wait times because of a million other issues, like we can’t get physicians to work in rural areas.”

Canadian taxpayers put up with a lot to maintain their health care system, but so do Americans, such as the tremendous cost of gun violence. A comprehensive state-by-state report released in September 2019 by the Joint Economic Committee found that in 2017, 40,000 Americans were killed by guns. The health care costs for California alone were $348 million, borne by both individuals and taxpayers through uncompensated care. By contrast, 311 Canadians were hospitalized for firearm injuries in 2017–2018, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information; 249 died in 2018 as a result, according to Statistics Canada.

band pay $1,700 a month for our health insurance.

He is an insulin-dependent Type 2 diabetic. Both of us are self-employed. We’re trapped between the Scylla of costly insurance and the Charybdis of potential medical bankruptcy.

We do benefit from what Physicians for a National Health Plan calls a “medical palace”— a community hospital 20 minutes’ drive away where I’ve had four orthopedic surgeries, many

MRIs, breast surgery, and radiation. Every day for 20 days, as I lay facedown in the radiation cradle, a heated blanket was gently placed on my bare back and a sachet of lavender placed beneath my nose, soothing and familiar.

Canadians don’t get— or expect—lavender. Like Americans, some are treated medically with more dignity and kindness than others.

They just never see a bill. —CK

HOW DID THESE SYSTEMS EVOLVE?

It became nationally obvious that health care improvements were badly needed in Canada when residents signed up to fight World War I and World War II, many of them in poor physical condition thanks to unaffordable medical care. An astounding 56 percent of WWII volunteers failed their initial physical examination. The Depression also hit hard; broke patients needed care, and doctors and hospitals had to get paid promptly for it.

Tommy Douglas, grandfather of actor Kiefer Sutherland, is considered the father of Canadian health care, as revered and well known as Martin Luther King to Americans. Born in Scotland, Douglas grew up in Glasgow and Winnipeg, Manitoba. He attended theology school and became an ordained Baptist minister. While studying sociology in 1931 at the University of Chicago, he also witnessed the desperation of Americans in the Depression. He became leader of the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation, a democratic socialist party. In 1961, it was renamed the New Democratic Party, and is currently headed by Jagmeet Singh.

Douglas led the party to five successive wins in Saskatchewan, pushing to create a provincial medical insurance program. The province’s doctors fought the effort hard, even going on strike in 1962, but the plan went through that year anyway. Throughout the 1960s, successive provincial and territorial governments adopted the “Saskatchewan model,” and in 1972, Yukon Territory was the last subnational jurisdiction to adopt it.

In 1966, the Liberal minority government of Lester B. Pearson committed the federal government to paying 50 percent of health care costs, with the provinces paying the other half. The federal burden has shrunk over time.

The memories of crippling medical costs are still very real for some Canadians, like labor economist Armine Yalnizyan, the inaugural Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers. Her father, Puzant Yalnizyan, an electrical and mechanical engineer and inventor, started suffering several medical conditions within months of moving to Canada in 1951, until his death in 1964.

Dr. Emily Queenan, an American doctor, opted to move her family and her family medicine practice to Canada in 2014.

“I have kept some of the bills,” she says.

“It was a lot of money as a share of income,” even for a salaried professional with a fulltime job. “We did not get public health insurance in Ontario until 1966, after his death.” Yalnizyan’s mother, with little formal education, had to scrape together whatever work she could find to help support the family, like tutoring French, and the family took in a boarder. “Being Armenian, and the child of children who lost their parents to the Turkish massacre and were treated as easily exploitable and a lowertier citizen informed my understanding of the importance of societies that value and support equality,” she adds. “Health care is one of the most material ways of expressing that commitment to equality.”

The Canadian system evolved through decades of political debate, battles, and negotiations with physicians and insurance companies. The debate continues even today, says Yalnizyan. “It’s the zombie conversation. We have the same conversation every 25 years. Health care is both a market failure and a market magnet because there’s money to be made. That conflict of public and private interests will never go away!”

VOTING WITH THEIR FEET: “I COULDN’T WORK THERE”

Many of Canada’s most senior physicians and policymakers simply consider health care a human right. Dr. Bob Bell, a former deputy minister of health for Ontario from 2014 to 2019, then responsible for a $50 billion budget, half of all provincial spending, is an orthopedic surgeon specializing in bone cancer who trained at Harvard, and at Massachusetts General Hospital, before running several Toronto hospitals.

“I was going to work in the U.S. but what concerned me was the kids we saw with osteosarcoma,” he says, “a horrific disease that demands intense chemotherapy, inpatient treatment for months, and really aggressive surgery.” Bell ultimately had a reckoning. “I couldn’t work there,” he explains. “There was such a differential with patients with good insurance and those that didn’t have it. I could not imagine working in that environment. People who present with disease need to be treated with equity and equality. It is a human right.”

Dr. Emily Queenan, who is American, also voted with her feet; after studying biology at Williams College, working for Ameri-

JAN/FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

corps in Peekskill, New York, in community health, and attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, she did her residency in Rochester, New York. She opened a family medicine practice there in June 2009, closing it in May 2014—and moving to Canada.

After being recruited by an agency of the MOH, Queenan visited four cities selected from a list of rural communities needing a doctor, She chose Penetanguishene, a middle-class town of 8,962 in northern Ontario on Georgian Bay, a beautiful area that welcomes many summer-home visitors.

“It was a wrought decision to close my practice,” Queenan says, sitting in the 1920s-era red-brick house in small-town Ontario whose main floor is now her office.

“I envisioned having my [U.S.] practice for decades. But I was really burned out by the burden of being someone’s family doctor and the moral injury of denying care versus the lack of payment versus dealing with your own medical bills. This is not asked of other professions.”

Still in New York, Queenan attended a local meeting of Physicians for a National Health Plan, an American advocacy group founded in 1985 by Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein, “trying to decide what was next. I was on the cusp of turning 40 and saw a career of fighting stupid fights. Doctors across the country were going through exactly what I was going through. I am not unique.”

Her children, then 5, 7, and 9, were “easily transportable,” and her husband left a corporate job with Nabisco to become a stay-at-home father. Yet as much as Queenan loves her life, Canadian rural medical practice—chronically and woefully short of doctors—offers its own challenges. She has 1,000 patients, seeing 20 to 25 a day.

She’s the only obstetrician for many miles and hates the “obscene” waits her patients endure to see a specialist.

COULD THIS WORK IN THE U.S.?

Will Americans ever choose Medicare for All? Will they agree to a facsimile of the Canadian system? Experts in Canada have varying opinions.

“I don’t think Americans will ever do

34 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2020

it,” says Dr. Margaret Tromp, president of the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada.

“America is much more right-wing and based on the American dream—if you’re not getting ahead, you’re not working hard enough.”

“You have to believe it’s possible, and it’s iterative,” says Dr. Jane Philpott, former federal minister of health. “It’s something that took half a century here, and extraordinary leadership. And medical educators have to be on board.”

“Americans need the choice to also go private, so you would have to regulate that,” says Colleen Flood, a health policy analyst at the University of Ottawa.

“The bigger the population, the more

Consistently receiving free health care means that Canadians of all income levels experience a consistent, quantifiable return on their tax dollars. healthy people you have to offset the sickest.

Scale is a bonus,” says Dr. Danielle Martin, author of a 2017 book suggesting six ways to improve Canadian health care.

“Yes, because there are so many people being hurt by the current system and if those folks can be mobilized because this system will forever do it to them,” says health policy analyst Greg Marchildon. “It’s a huge battle,” he adds, “and will polarize the American public, but it was the same here in Canada at first. But within four or five years Canadians came around. This will always polarize people and there will always be interest groups fighting it. But if you don’t make radical change, you’re just fiddling.”

Tom Noseworthy is less optimistic, especially in a time of such deep political division. “On paper, economists and sociologists can do this, but will it get done?

I’m not sure there’s any single force to get

it done. It would take another world war to create that same sense of solidarity.” But the matter is urgent, he adds. “The U.S. economy will fail if this isn’t fixed. No one knows how to control the costs. It’s going to break the bank.”

“Americans don’t want to be told what to do,” says Bob Bell. “The U.S. should have a public and a private option. But Americans are so smart with market innovation. This is just market innovation. In the States, you’re already way above us because Medicare is run federally. That’s perfect.”

“The Canadian system is good, but underfunded,” says Steffie Woolhandler. “The American system is shitty but over-funded.”

And what of all those health insurance employees who’d lose their jobs? “Sixty million Americans a year are separated from their jobs, of which 20 million is involuntary,” she replies. “So it’s not a huge issue if you put aside billions of dollars to deal with this. Within a medical practice or hospital, you could retrain them on the spot.”

When serving as executive director of the Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, delivered in 2002 with 47 recommendations, Marchildon and Roy Romanow, former premier of Saskatchewan, sought out Hillary Clinton, then a senator, to hear her thoughts.

“She tried to get us to think about the possibility of a ‘release valve’ (i.e., a private option), even though it does create an inequity. We found her far more expert on the Canadian system than I could ever have expected,” Marchildon says.

The constant fight with those insisting on a private option, which some argue is inherently elitist and unfair, means constant vigilance to retain a fair and equitable system.

Clinton predicted “that a very wealthy and powerful minority would make our system unworkable,” says Marchildon. “She warned us: ‘Don’t let them destroy your system. You got it right.’”

Caitlin Kelly, an author and former reporter for three major dailies in Canada and the U.S., has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, Marie Claire, and many others.

Was Putin Inevitable?

How policy blunders under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush helped bring about a post-communist Russia hostile to democracy, free markets, and the West

BY ROB ERT K UTT NER

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

—KONR AD ADENAUER

pavel golovkin / ap images

V

ladimir Putin is at least as serious a menace to the United States and Western democracy as Soviet communism ever was. Soviet leaders mixed the promotion of a global ideology with the advancement of Russian national interests. They failed—ideologically, geopolitically, and economically. Putinism is far more insidious, and more successful.

Putin combines authoritarian rule with corrupt klepto-capitalism and hybrid warfare, functioning as a role model to autocrats and a lethal destabilizer of liberal democracy.

The 40-year Cold War was a well-ritualized dance of armed restraint based on the logic of mutually assured nuclear destruction and spy-versus-spy tradecraft, with clear norms of conduct. The West, in line with George Kennan’s theory of containment, merely needed to limit peripheral conflicts like Korea and Vietnam, resist launching a nuclear war, and patiently wait for the USSR to collapse

of its own weight. The old Cold War offered a brand of stability that played to America’s advantage. But Putin has devised new forms of covert warfare with few rules, in which an open society is the weaker party. The new cold war is both more volatile and more tilted toward Russian strengths.

Putin has adroitly worked to undermine American democracy, a goal that pathetically eluded his communist predecessors. The recent best-seller The Spy and the Traitor tells the true story of the most damaging anti-Soviet mole of the Cold War era. Oleg Gordievsky, the London station chief of the KGB, turned out to be an asset of Britain’s MI6. Putin went the MI6 one better. His personal asset is the president of the United States.

Today, liberal democracy is under siege almost everywhere.

Contrary to the hopes of 1989 that liberal capitalism linked to democracy would triumph with the U.S. as exemplar, capitalism is increasingly tied to autocracy and corruption. The U.S. is becoming more like Russia rather than vice versa. Much of this outcome could have been avoided.

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

The Politics

MARCH 1985:

Gorbachev becomes Soviet leader, proposes Glasnost (opening).

OCTOBER 1986:

JUNE 1988:

Reykjavik Summit with Reagan.

Agreement to reduce nuclear weapons

Gorbachev speech on economic reforms and political freedoms

DECEMBER 1988:

Gorbachev speech to U.N. announcing troop withdrawals and signaling autonomy for Eastern Europe

JANUARY 1989:

George H.W. Bush is inaugurated.

TIMELINE

The Economics

OCTOBER 1987: Gorbachev speech on Perestroika (economic restructuring)

I. From Polanyi to Putin Last October, I found myself at a conference on Karl Polanyi, the economic historian who had warned that when markets overwhelm society, the workers of the world don’t unite, but turn to hypernationalism and fascism. One of the sessions discussed the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, an emblematic Polanyian moment. The settlement imposed on a defeated Germany was the most disastrous policy mistake of the early 20th century.

At the Versailles Peace Conference, the victorious Allies not only dismembered the German empire. They demanded crippling war reparations, which in turn led to hyperinflation and wiped out the savings of the German middle class. Guided by the folly of what today would be called neoliberalism, they imposed impossible budgetary austerity and debt repayment burdens on the fledgling Weimar Republic, rejecting the idea that debt relief was key to German reconstruction.

John Maynard Keynes, then 35, who had been a dissenting adviser to the British Treasury at the Versailles Peace Conference, first came to global attention with his prophetic diatribe against the Versailles terms, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, warning of economic penury seeding a second world war. A decade later, the consequence was Adolf Hitler.

Revisiting this history set off a small lightbulb: A great power is disgraced and humiliated, its empire is broken up, its economy is ruined, its legitimate security needs are disrespected, and its weak democracy disdained. An ultranationalist reaction ensues.

Remind you of anything?

The Western officials who inflicted raw, uncushioned shock therapy on Russia’s economy and needlessly treated Russia as a defeated enemy rather than a new security partner virtually invited a nationalist reaction likely to produce a Vladimir Putin or someone like him. This observation doesn’t make Putin a good guy. Quite the contrary: He is a thug, an autocrat, and an ally of kleptocrats.

But the history shows that the twin conceits of America as sole superpower and abrupt marketization as the cure for communism interacted to create a needless catastrophe that ranks with

MAY 1988:

Supreme Soviet legalizes private enterprises in USSR.

NOVEMBER 1988: Foreign

Investment Act opens Hungary to private Western investment.

DECEMBER 1989: Price of crude oil at $21.82 per barrel

the Treaty of Versailles. The fact that an American president has been enlisted as Putin’s agent only deepens the disaster. The rise of Hitler, at least, paralleled the ascent of Roosevelt.

As the Russia scholar Michael Mandelbaum observes, looking back at two centuries of great wars, there were two postwar settlements that basically got it right and two that got it disastrously wrong. After the Napoleonic Wars crushed the French, the 1815 Congress of Vienna nonetheless recognized France as a great power with legitimate interests. There was no such treatment of Germany after World War I. After a second world war, the victorious Allies made sure to help promote German economic recovery and bring Germany into both the Western alliance and the Western economic system. But after the Cold War, the triumphalist Americans repeated the folly of Versailles, with similar results.

This winter happens to be the 100th anniversary of the publication of the book that launched Keynes as the world’s leading critic of dumb geopolitics and misguided economics. It’s also the 30th anniversary of the collapse of communism and the bungled effort to help Russia rebuild as a democratic market economy, as well as the 20th anniversary of Putin’s rule. At 67, he is now the longest-tenured leader of any major nation, having served longer than any Russian ruler since Stalin. This is a good moment for a sorting-out. In an effort to assess whether U.S. policy and Russian history might have been different, I reviewed dozens of memoirs, books, documents, and articles from the period, and interviewed more than a score of former senior officials. The record shows there was a better road not taken.

The United States might have treated post-Soviet Russia as a security partner rather than a vanquished foe; and softened the market transition with serious economic aid.

36 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN /FEB 2020

II. Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and the Path to Neofascism To some extent, the rise of Putinism was the consequence of dynamics peculiar to Russia in the chaotic eras of Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–1991) and then Boris Yeltsin (1991–1999). But the United States was a major player in Russian affairs during that period, and its meddling largely backfired.

Neoliberalism holds that if we just allow markets to price all

NOVEMBER 1989: Berlin Wall falls.

JUNE 1990:

West and East Germany reunify.

JANUARY 1990: First

missile photo: mikhail metzel / ap images

McDonald’s opens in Moscow.

JUNE 1990: h tsc d e ul a n d

-

Russia under Yeltsin declares sovereignty from USSR.

JANUARY 1990: Balcerowicz plan imposes “shock therapy” on Polish economy.

AUGUST 1990: Gorbachev joins Bush in condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

SEPTEMBER 1990:

Price of crude oil peaks at $39.51 per barrel.

JULY 1991:

Gorbachev and Bush sign START arms control treaty.

JANUARY 1991: Czech government removes price controls on 85 percent of goods.

goods and services and get the state out of the way (except to enforce the rules of the market), the economy and by extension the society and democracy will spontaneously thrive. For three decades, the practical expression of neoliberal power politics has been something called the Washington Consensus—a basket of policies imposed on countries that get overly in debt and seek aid from the IMF, the World Bank, the U.S., and the EU. These policies include budget austerity, deregulation, privatization, tax and welfare cuts, wage restraint, currency liberalization, and open capital markets. The premise is that this package will restore confidence for investors and economic growth.

On balance, these policies as applied to Third World nations and European debtors such as Greece have done far more economic and political harm than good. Austerity often led to downward economic spiral and popular backlash. But the policies of the Washington Consensus were particularly ill-suited to Russia, which was not just floundering economically but attempting a transition from dictatorship to democracy and the rule of law, as well as from communism to capitalism—goals that are by no means synonymous.

The abrupt imposition of marketization, full price decontrol, and crony privatization on an unprepared Russia, as a condition of desperately needed goodwill and aid from the West (little of which materialized), drove Russia in the 1990s into two cycles of hyperinflation, austerity, depression, unemployment, corruption, and then ultranationalist reaction. Those in both Moscow and Washington who counseled a more gradualist approach as well as more Western aid were drowned out. On both fronts, what might have been gratitude turned to resentment and then to hyper-nationalism.

Approval of the U.S. in Russian opinion polls peaked at 80 percent in 1990. By 1999, it was around 32 percent.

The other policy premise—that the U.S. should maximize its advantage over a weakened USSR rather than treating Russia as a great nation with legitimate security interests—evolved over time, as hard-liners gained more influence. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl sought to annex the former DDR , he needed and obtained the USSR’s formal approval. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev was a full party to the agreement. Secretary of State James Baker personally assured Gorbachev that no NATO troops would be stationed in eastern Germany, and promised no further expansion of NATO eastward (“not one inch” according to the official transcript). There was

AUGUST 1991: Yelt-

sin helps foil attempted coup against Gorbachev.

MARCH 1991: Western governments forgive half of Poland’s $33 billion debt to the West.

Nothing comparable is offered Russia.

DECEMBER 1991: Gorbachev resigns.

Yeltsin succeeds him.

OCTOBER 1991:

Yeltsin announces radical marketization.

NOVEMBER 1991: Liberalizer

Gaidar appointed minister of economics and finance.

DECEMBER 1991: Yeltsin

and leaders of Belarus and Ukraine dissolve USSR.

DECEMBER 1991:

Annual Russian GDP declines 17 percent.

even serious talk of inviting Russia to become a NATO member.

But the backpedaling from Baker’s pledge began almost immediately, and the NATO expansionists prevailed. By the late 1990s, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were in NATO, with the three Baltic nations soon to follow. After Putin succeeded an ailing and politically discredited Yeltsin in 2000, the George W. Bush administration added insult to injury by proposing NATO membership not just for all of Eastern Europe but for the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine, prompting a much more bellicose policy by Putin with respect to both. Bush’s fraudulent Iraq War to topple Russia’s ally Saddam Hussein was taken as further proof of American expansionist designs on Russia’s doorstep.

Just to pile on further, Bush, prompted by his neocon colleagues, soon withdrew from the 1972 ABM treaty, stoking long-standing Russian fears that the U.S. would contemplate a first strike.

In a reciprocal feedback loop, American hawks and Russian hawks energized and vindicated each other. This is not to say that Vladimir Putin was ever destined to be a Russian Thomas Jefferson, only that he might have been less of a geopolitical foe; and that Russia might not have turned to Putinism at all.

III. America’s Contradictory Goals for Post-Soviet Russia What’s evident now is that American leaders in the 1990s had several different goals for the post–Cold War era. It was assumed that these distinct goals facilitated one another. In fact they often collided.

One goal was to neutralize post-Soviet Russia as a security threat, and to protect newly liberated nations. But a contradictory goal was to enlist the new Russia as a security partner and coguarantor of the new order. Clinton’s advisers were split on which goal to pursue, and the result was muddled policy that managed to antagonize the Russians while weakening Yeltsin at home as a tool of the wily Americans.

A separate goal was to bring capitalism to former communist countries. But advisers disagreed on the pace, the mechanisms, the needed cushions, and the likely popular tolerance of the inevitable upheaval. Another goal was to promote democracy. Yet the resistance in the Russian Duma to the dislocations of marketization led many Western advisers to encourage Yeltsin to proceed by decree, and democracy be damned. A further goal was to weaken local communist parties, but the calamitous impact of abrupt privatization

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

APRIL 1992:

NOVEMBER 1992:

Milosevic launches ethniccleansing war in Serbia.

JANUARY 1992: Government lifts all price controls.

Bill Clinton elected

FEBRUARY 1992: Central

bank inflates money supply, mass price rises follow.

APRIL 1992:

Bush announces $24 billion U.S./IMF aid package; little materializes.

OCTOBER 1993:

Partnership for Peace proposed

by U.S.

AUGUST 1992: IMF

approves loan to Russia of $1 billion.

JANUARY 1994:

Clinton calls for NATO expansion.

NOVEMBER 1992: Vouch-

er privatization begins; 15,000 enterprises privatized.

produced popular outrage, and brought “reformed” communists and nationalists to power in the Duma, undercutting the liberal Yeltsin.

American foreign-policy goals were likewise the subject of crosscurrents. At first, the administrations of both George H.W. Bush and then Bill Clinton treated Gorbachev and Yeltsin with great respect, recognizing both the audacity and fragility of what these Russian democrats were attempting. Gorbachev not only permitted free expression and multiparty competition for office in the USSR. He allowed the Warsaw Pact nations to go their own way. Yeltsin, who considered himself not a reform communist but an anti-communist, went Gorbachev one better by dismantling the Soviet Union.

Bush and Baker saw Gorbachev as a potential ally. Yet Bush was baited by neocons who viewed the moment as a chance to cripple Russia as a global power once and for all. In August 1991, hoping to shore up a beleaguered Gorbachev, Bush went to Ukraine, where there was growing pressure for outright secession. He gave a high-profile address urging the leadership to find a way to federate with Russia.

The reaction from American hawks was withering. New York Times columnist William Safire termed it Bush’s “Chicken Kiev speech.”

When Gorbachev fell from power to be succeeded by the anticommunist Yeltsin in late 1991, on the eve of the U.S. 1992 presidential campaign, Bush and Clinton were dueling over who was Yeltsin’s better friend. In April 1992, Clinton demanded more aid for Yeltsin, prompting Bush to rush out a preemptive announcement that the G-7 nations were assembling a $24 billion aid package. But nothing close to that magnitude ever materialized.

Paltry U.S. aid and self-defeating economic advice interacted with the affront of NATO expansion to discredit Russian liberals, both economically and politically. When Clinton succeeded Bush, he encountered the same pressures that led to the seemingly inexorable expansion of NATO. Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America called for NATO expansion. Robert Dole, Clinton’s 1996 opponent, attacked Clinton for his “Yeltsin first” policy. With the 1996 election expected to be close, Clinton needed the votes of Polish and Hungarian Americans in the Midwest.

Clinton’s short-run strategy was to delay having his hand forced

by Congress, while sweet-talking Yeltsin. The administration came up with a device called the Partnership for Peace, which was sold to Yeltsin as a structure parallel to NATO, with Russia as a full member, that would be the real guarantor of the post–Cold War peace. Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s coordinator of Russia policy, argued that the Rus-

38 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN /FEB 2020

MARCH– JUNE 1995:

U.S./NATO military intervention in Bosnian war

DECEMBER 1992: Annual budget deficit is 20 percent of GDP. Inflation rate exceeds 2,000 percent.

DECEMBER 1995:

Communists and farright party place first and second in Russian parliamentary elections, outpolling liberals 3 to 1.

MARCH 1995: Loans for Shares corrupt privatization scheme launched.

JULY 1996:

Yeltsin narrowly wins re-election as Russian president backed by oligarchs.

NOVEMBER 1996: Clinton wins reelection.

JULY 1997: IMF

offers Russia $11.2 billion credits to prop up the ruble; fails to deliver most of it.

sians could accept a modest NATO expansion if it were combined with a Partnership for Peace that had real power. But as NATO expanded, the Partnership withered into window dressing. The Russians felt they had been played for suckers. “Clinton practiced duplicitous diplomacy,” says Jack Matlock, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1987 to 1991 under Reagan and Bush I. “He was telling the Russians that the Partnership for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, and the Poles that it was a step toward NATO expansion.”

By the mid-1990s, the administration was divided into two camps. Senior Pentagon officials, who knew military needs firsthand, opposed NATO expansion. The opponents included Clinton’s two defense secretaries, Les Aspin and Bill Perry; the assistant secretary in charge of post-Soviet affairs, Graham Allison; and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili. According to Allison, “the entire Defense Department was against it.” Clinton’s national-security adviser Tony Lake supported it. Clinton’s Czech-born U.N. ambassador and later secretary of state Madeleine Albright was a passionate advocate. Some U.S. ambassadors in the region, such as Peter Galbraith, ambassador to Croatia, proposed an enlarged NATO with Russia in it. Lawrence Taylor, U.S. ambassador to Estonia in the mid-1990s, recalls urging the Estonians not to seek NATO membership. The “soft security” of involvement in Western economic institutions such as the EU, he felt, would be more than sufficient. These splits were echoed in Congress, where Sam Nunn, chair of the Armed Services Committee, strongly opposed enlarging NATO, while Joe Biden, then chair of Foreign Relations, fervently supported it.

Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were admitted in 1999. And on December 19, 2000, when Clinton met with the new president-elect, Clinton asked Bush what his priorities would be in his relations with Russia. Bush singled out two objectives: further expansion of NATO, and withdrawal from the ABM treaty. After Bush took office, NATO in 2004 added Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

But with post-Soviet Russia no longer threatening Western or Central Europe, the rationale for NATO had vanished. Who was NATO an alliance against? Some of the wisest old Russia hands warned that NATO expansion, right into what Russia calls its “near abroad,” would be a catastrophe. “It was totally predictable that NATO expansion would cause the most vigorous reaction on Russia’s part,” Matlock told me. “For those of us who ended the Cold War,

MARCH 1999:

Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic join NATO.

AUGUST 1998:

MARCH– APRIL 1999: U.S. and NATO bomb Kosovo.

Ruble collapses, Russia suspends payments on foreign and domestic debt.

DECEMBER 1999: Yeltsin

announces resignation, names Putin acting president.

JANUARY 1999: Crude oil prices bottom out at $10.41, begin long recovery.

MARCH 2000: Putin elected president with 53.4 percent of the vote.

George W. Bush is inaugurated.

JANUARY 2000:

SEPTEMBER 2001: Terrorist attacks of 9/11. Putin offers help.

OCTOBER 2003:

Russian GDP growth begins long rise, averaging 7 percent annually between 1999 and 2007.

this ruined the possibility of further collaboration.” George Kennan, still active in his nineties, called NATO expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–Cold War era.”

IV. Too Much Shock, Not Enough Therapy

JANUARY 2001:

JUNE 2002: Bush withdraws U.S. from 1972 ABM treaty.

Putin begins process of confiscating and re-nationalizing large natural-resource companies.

SEPTEMBER 2004:

Putin reelected with 72 percent of the vote

JANUARY 2004:

Putin establishes a massive Stabilization Fund to insulate the ruble from market shocks.

Key Russian leaders were lobbying Clinton to allow Russia to join the G-7, as a way of taking some of the sting out of the NATO decision. Summers blocked that as long as he could, to keep up the economic pressure.

Vice President Gore, according to Talbott, warned Summers that “the strict conditions the International Monetary Fund attached to its loans to Russia put economic reform on a collision course with the political realities of a fledgling democracy.” Nonetheless, Summers and the IMF prevailed. Functioning as loyal opposition was Joseph Stiglitz, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and leading apostle of gradualism. The marketizers, he warned, “tried to take a shortcut to capitalism, creating a market economy without the underlying institutions.” Stiglitz later advised the Chinese, cautioning them against flinging open their capital markets. Stiglitz today has the satisfactions of Cassandra; but at the time, Summers and Treasury, not Stiglitz, controlled policy.

Meanwhile in Russia, the economy was collapsing. In 1991, Russia ran out of hard currency reserves. As abrupt price decontrol led to inflation, Russia’s central bank resorted to printing rubles to finance subsidies and wages. This worsened inflation, now running at over 100 percent a year, which in turn led to budget austerity and higher interest rates as a condition of IMF aid.

Partly in desperation and partly in the hope of currying favor with the West, Yeltsin appointed a new cabinet and brought in two advocates of abrupt marketization, Yegor Gaidar as deputy prime minister, and Anatoly Chubais as minister of privatization. These appointments were applauded in Washington. But the execution of a dubious strategy was badly bungled. In a major speech to the Russian Duma on October 28, 1991, Yeltsin announced that all prices would be decontrolled on January 1, 1992. This virtually guaranteed hoarding before the fact and massive price inflation afterward. (“How dumb can you be?” says Sergei Plekhanov, one of Gorbachev’s senior economic advisers.) Russia almost overnight went from an economy of widespread shortages to one where the shops were full of goods that nobody but the rich could afford. By

Vice President Gore warned that the IMF’s strict conditions on its Russia loans “put economic reform on a collision course with the political realities of a fledgling democracy.”

The phrase “shock therapy” has been used to describe demands by Western advisers, American officials, and the International Monetary Fund that Russia abruptly end price controls, cease subsidizing goods and inflating its currency, balance its budget, and privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises. But the phrase confuses more than it clarifies, because different Western advisers (and different Russians) proposed very different routes to reform of the post-Soviet economy. In the event, the actual policy path could hardly have been worse.

As in the case of NATO expansion, the Americans did not speak with one voice.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, who had advised the Poles in 1990–1991 and the Russians in 1991–1993, counseled cushioning shock therapy with massive economic assistance. Sachs called for a $30 billion Marshall-scale aid plan for Russia, as well as a cancellation of Russia’s debts to the West. He was told flatly by Bush’s deputy secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger that large-scale aid to Russia was inconceivable in an election year.

The U.S., which saved an estimated $1.3 trillion in military costs thanks to the end of the Cold War, was stunningly stingy and shortsighted when it came to lubricating Russia’s transition to capitalism.

Between 1993 and 1997, real financial aid from the U.S. to Russia averaged under $2 billion a year. Once again, the contrast with the postwar Marshall Plan era and the similarity to the treatment of Weimar Germany could hardly be clearer or more depressing.

Under Clinton, economic policy toward Russia was largely the province of the Treasury, specifically Lawrence Summers, undersecretary for international affairs and later secretary. Summers, who worked closely with the IMF, sought to use the leverage of IMF loans, granted or withheld, to push Russia more in the direction of shock therapy and to condition U.S. policy on Russia’s progress.

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

2008: Bush

proposes NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

SEPTEMBER 2008: Financial system collapse in U.S. and Europe.

MARCH 2008:

Dmitry Medvedev, Putin ally, elected president with 71 percent. Putin becomes prime minister.

JUNE 2008: The price of oil peaks at $140 per barrel.

MARCH 2012: Putin returns to presidency, winning 64 percent.

DECEMBER 2011:

Russia joins the World Trade Organization.

FEBRUARY 2014: Russian

proxy troops invade Ukraine; Russia annexes Crimea.

APRIL 2015: Iran, U.S., Russia, and others agree to nuclear deal.

JANUARY 2013: Russia now supplies 39 percent of Europe’s natural gas.

the end of 1992, inflation peaked at an annual rate of 2,333.30 percent. During this period, the IMF repeatedly extended credits in principle, then withheld disbursing the money because Russian austerity measures were not sufficiently draconian.

The execution of privatization was even worse. Chubais’s approach was called voucher privatization. Each Russian citizen would be given vouchers, which could be used to purchase shares of state-owned industries.

But the vouchers could also be sold on the open market, and a great many people chose to take the money and run. In 1993–1994, vouchers were selling for about $20, the price of a few bottles of vodka. Through the voucher scheme, many of Russia’s crown jewels ended up in the hands of oligarchs via closed auctions run by insiders. When Gazprom was privatized via vouchers in 1994, managers gained control at a cost of about $250 million.

By 1997, the Moscow stock exchange valued the company at $40.5 billion. This scale of privatization, before regulatory institutions were in place, was a disastrous error.

The first wave of privatization, which led to the creation of Russia’s billionaire oligarchy, was positively benign compared to the second wave in 1995–1996. Yeltsin was up for re-election in 1996 and his chances looked bleak. In the parliamentary elections of December 1995, the Communists won 157 seats compared to just 55 for Yeltsin’s party. The government was also close to broke.

Chubais came up with a scheme known as “loans for shares,” in which private businessmen would lend the government money, collateralized by shares in state-owned companies. The loans were never intended to be repaid. It was a way of getting cash to the government and windfall wealth to oligarchs, who in turn would spend an estimated $1 billion to $2 billion on Yeltsin’s re-election campaign. In 1996, Yeltsin was narrowly re-elected, and more of Russia’s largest state companies had been transferred to oligarchs.

Some U.S. neoliberal advisers to Russia in that era even served as role models for the corruption. A personal adviser to Chubais was Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born émigré and tenured Harvard professor, who ran the Moscow office of the Harvard Institute for

Russian front groups hack U.S. election.

JANUARY 2017: Donald Trump inaugurated

APRIL 2017: Russia

reported to be world’s most unequal economy, with richest 10 percent owning 87 percent of the wealth, surpassing U.S. and China.

MARCH 2018: Putin elected to a fourth term with 77 percent

DECEMBER 2019:

Trump signs legislation sanctioning companies involved with Russia’s latest gas pipeline to Europe.

International Development, which had the main Russia contract from USAID. Shleifer was prosecuted in 1997, after it was revealed his wife operated a hedge fund that speculated in privileged information based on Shleifer’s official work. Harvard paid fines totaling $26.5 million to settle the case, and Shleifer paid $2 million.

Ironically, when Putin became president, he expropriated several privatized companies and returned them to state control.

One of the most powerful oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had committed the sin of financing opposition parties, was arrested and prosecuted in 2003 on trumped-up charges of fraud and tax evasion. His Yukos oil company, worth about $15 billion, was confiscated and returned to state control. By 2007, state-owned enterprises accounted for about 40 percent of the capitalization of the Russian stock market, including 64 percent of banking and 47 percent of oil and gas.

Some 39 percent of Russians worked either for the state or for enterprises that are wholly or partly state-owned.

So the claim that rapid privatization was a necessary element of market efficiency was misguided in several respects. The state is evidently competent to run extractive industries and banks. Had these industries simply stayed in state hands during the first phase of the transition, rather than being sold off in two fire sales, Russia might have been spared the corrupt regime of autocracy backed by friendly oligarchs, and liberals might have been less discredited.

Looking back on the 1990s, Sachs recalls that market transition done properly should have included not only massive aid from the West and debt forgiveness, but also the conversion of state enterprises into public corporations that could acquire private shareholders only gradually with safeguards against corruption. Real gradualism, Sachs told me, should have included an extensive welfare state to cushion shocks, with no abrupt privatization of state companies in the commodities sectors such as oil, gas, minerals, and metals.

Russia managed a feeble recovery in the mid-1990s, but then suffered an even more dire economic catastrophe in the late 1990s, also the indirect gift of neoliberal ideology and policy. The IMF,

The voucher privatization scheme corruptly delivered many of Russia’s crown economic jewels to oligarchs via closed auctions run by insiders.

Putin later renationalized some.

40 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN /FEB 2020

2016:

doug mills / ap images

George W. Bush first met Vladimir Putin on June 16, 2001, in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

the U.S. government, and the other institutional proponents of the Washington Consensus had pressured East Asian nations to open up their capital markets. When inflows of hot money produced financial and property bubbles, the money flowed out just as fast, and several Asian currencies crashed. The crash in turn spread to speculative attacks against other currencies perceived to be weak, including the ruble, which had been liberalized to float freely in money markets as recommended by the IMF. In late 1997 and 1998, Russia descended into a full-blown economic collapse, leaving the liberalizers like Yeltsin, Gaidar, and Chubais thoroughly disgraced—along with the premise that the U.S. could be trusted as an ally or source of advice. The central bank raised interest rates to 150 percent to defend the currency.

But the overvalued ruble, propped up by the conservative monetary and budget policy demanded by the IMF, soon crashed, losing 75 percent of its value. Russia suspended domestic interest payments on its bonds, devastating the new middle class, then suspended international debt payments as well. While the West was providing Russia with modest official credits, Russian oligarchs were spiriting money out of the country, as large net outflows made clear.

Poverty and inequality dramatically rose, while life expectancy fell.

For men, it declined from 64 years at birth in 1989 to 59 in 2000 (it has since rebounded to over 67).

By 1999, Yeltsin was a spent force. His heart condition was worsening, and he continued to drink to excess. He reversed policy

with regularity, and went through five prime ministers in his last 15 months. When the game of musical chairs came to a halt in mid-1999, a relative unknown, Vladimir Putin, found himself in the prime minister’s seat. Putin, it was widely reported, ascended to the presidency upon Yeltsin’s resignation based on a deal in which Putin promised that neither Yeltsin nor his family would be prosecuted for corrupt gains.

Yet the Putin who became acting president in January 2000 was not yet the Putin who invaded Crimea with “little green men” in 2014 and schemed to help Donald Trump. Putin, despite his KGB background, had been a relative liberal in his role as a deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg in the 1990s under that city’s liberal mayor Anatoly Sobchak. He organized the local chapter of the liberal party affiliated with Yeltsin, Our Home—Russia.

After taking office, Putin looked for areas of common ground with the U.S. At his first summit with Putin in June 2001, the new American president embarrassed himself by declaring that he had looked Putin in the eye, “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy … and was able to get a sense of his soul.” Putin, still dealing with a very rocky economy, asked Bush for relief of the debt that Russia had inherited from the old Soviet Union. Although Bush seemed to want a constructive relationship, he failed to respond to Putin’s plea.

As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes write in a new book, The Light That Failed, “In the first years after 1989, liberalism was

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

generally associated with the ideals of individual opportunity, freedom to move and to travel, unpunished dissent, access to justice, and government responsiveness to public demands. By 2010, the Central and Eastern European versions of liberalism had been indelibly tainted by two decades of rising social inequality, pervasive corruption, and the morally arbitrary redistribution of public property into the hands of a few.”

V. The Road Not Taken Despite conflicts, Russia and the U.S. did manage to find several areas of collaboration under Clinton, then Bush, and then Obama.

Washington and Moscow worked creatively over more than a decade to bring thousands of nuclear warheads strewn across the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan back under Moscow’s control. The stunning success of this joint U.S.-Russian effort, which required the sharing of highly sensitive nuclear secrets, demonstrated the promise of deeper security collaboration. Other joint efforts at nuclear nonproliferation continued. The two nations concluded four new arms-control treaties that reduced missiles and warheads to 1,550 warheads on 700 delivery vehicles for each nation (down from 6,000 warheads in the Start I treaty of 1991) as well as joint diplomatic efforts that ultimately produced the agreement with Iran to limit development of nuclear weapons, a goal sought as eagerly by Putin as by Obama.

Russia and the U.S. also had a common interest in suppressing Islamist terrorism.

After the attacks of 9/11, Putin was the first world leader to phone President Bush, offering help. Overriding the objections of his defense minister and senior generals, Putin offered Bush access to Russian bases in Central Asia, the first time U.S. troops had ever been on Russian soil. Russia also shared extensive intelligence about Afghanistan.

In return, Bush kept Putin informed of details of the U.S. attack.

Even the two U.S.-led wars of the 1990s against fellow Slavs, in Serbia and Kosovo, which might have been flashpoints in U.S.Russian relations, were ended with the full participation of Russia as joint guarantor of the peace. Yet both U.S. military interventions, via NATO rather than the U.N., left the Russians wary of U.S. intentions.

Certainly, while U.S. and Russian interests sometimes overlapped, they were not identical. Russia’s conception of fighting terror included its often brutal repression of independence movements in contested spaces in and near Georgia and Chechnya. Even so, the potential for cooperation was notable. But it was later blown away by the Iraq War, the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, and then by the threat to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine. America also took a harder line against Russia under Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

Looking back on the past three decades, it’s evident that the U.S.-Russia relationship might have been dramatically different.

The U.S. did not have to expand NATO right up to Russia’s borders,

much less inside parts of the old Russian Empire. Bringing the former satellites into the EU, and devising a post–Cold War package of joint security guarantees by Washington, Moscow, and major NATO members, could have been more than sufficient.

On the economic front, the West might have provided more aid and fewer demands for compliance with the recipe of the Washington Consensus. The demands on Russia were similar to the conditions for aid imposed on Greece, with similarly calamitous results and much higher stakes. Had, say, Joseph Stiglitz rather than Lawrence Summers been in charge of U.S. economic policy toward Russia, we might have seen the U.S. using its influence to give Russia more debt relief and more transitional assistance, and withholding demands for abrupt (and corrupt) privatization.

Had that course been followed, there would have been more gratitude toward the West on the part of ordinary Russians and less resentment. Westernization has a long history in Russia as a fraught concept and loaded word, going back to the era of Peter the Great. The idea of their nation at last joining the West as a liberal democracy enjoyed a peak of prestige among Russians around 1990.

By 2000, westernization was again in bad odor.

Putin epitomizes that backlash.

None of this is Monday-morning quarterbacking. Many of the people who knew Russia best were making these very arguments at the time.

In fairness, not all of these outcomes were the result of bad decisions in Washington. To navigate this transition, Russia needed leaders with the wisdom, political savvy, and high principle of a Vaclav Havel or a Nelson Mandela. That, sadly, did not describe either Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Gorbachev at first looked like just such a leader, but while his principles were admirable, his political instincts were dismal. Failing to lock in a Western guarantee against NATO expansion was an inexplicable blunder. (Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs that such a guarantee was unnecessary because at the time NATO expansion was unthinkable.) Gorbachev also failed to legitimatize his rule by calling a popular presidential election in the period 1988–1990, which he surely would have won and thus strengthened his hand. By 1991, when the economy faltered, Gorbachev’s political capital faltered with it. Yeltsin, though a willing ally of the West, was a mercurial drunk, who careened from policy to policy and cabinet to cabinet and ended up creating and then relying on corrupt billionaire oligarchs. Even so, all leaders have flaws and U.S. policies served to fatally undermine the prospects of these imperfect Russian liberals.

Russia has increasingly become the kind of autocracy, geopolitical adversary, and corrupt statist economy that U.S. policy in the 1990s ineptly sought to avoid.

42 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN /FEB 2020

VI. Russia Today In this century, Russia has increasingly become the kind of autocracy, geopolitical adversary, and corrupt statist economy that American policy in the 1990s dearly sought to avoid. Under Putin,

Neoliberalism in Eastern Europe

greg gibson / ap images

A

merican advisers hoped Russia could navigate the shift to a market economy because of relatively successful transitions in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. There, with different national variations, post-communist governments in the early 1990s followed the recipe of ending price controls, making currencies freely convertible, getting rid of subsidies, opening economies to trade, and privatizing state enterprises.

But circumstances were far more propitious in Central Europe than in Russia. In the early 1990s, these nations were blessed with leaders who were competent and principled, and who enjoyed broad popular backing. Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia combined benign nationalism with political liberalism.

Both appointed skilled economics ministers, and their transitions were relatively free from corruption. Hungary’s communist-era reforms had given its economy the beginning of a market sector. Further, currency reform was less arduous because these Central European nations, as exemplars of marketization, enjoyed the financial support of the IMF. Moreover, Central Europe was not so far removed from democracy, capitalism, and civil society, geographically or in time. Older people remembered a market economy and there were legal institutions to resurrect. Russia historian Richard Pipes argued persuasively that these institutions

had never thrived in Russia, even before 1917. Czechoslovakia, by contrast, had been a vibrant democracy between the wars. The Czechs had a long legacy of industrial excellence.

The Poles were shipbuilders to the entire Eastern Bloc. In Central Europe, parallel institutions of civil society had begun to emerge well before communism formally collapsed, a strategy famously pursued and underwritten by George Soros.

Also, against the advice of some Western advisers who had counseled very rapid privatization, the Poles dragged their feet. Privatization of the big shipyards and steel mills simply would have been too disruptive. By the end of 1993, just 130,000 jobs had been shifted from state to private enterprises via privatization; and even so unemployment was still over 16 percent in 1994. Most of the economic growth came from new enterprises or Western transplants, not privatized ones. As the subsequent experience in Russia was to show, this Polish heresy against the Washington Consensus was a blessing in disguise. Contrary to the premise that the entire economy needed to be marketized as rapidly as possible, a mixed economy is capable of having a large sector of stateowned enterprises. What it sacrifices in (arguable) efficiency, it gains in stability.

But most important in the relatively easier transitions of Central Europe was a secret weapon—Germany. As these nations opened their economies, German capital poured

Presidents Michal Kovac, Slovak Republic, Lech Walesa, Poland, Vaclav Havel, Czech Republic, and Arpad Goencz, Hungary, and Bill Clinton in Prague, January 1994

in. Major German corporations began opening plants in these nearby countries, where skilled workers could be paid lower wages than German ones.

By 2012, German investment in Poland and the Czech Republic exceeded 30 billion euros each, greater than in the much larger Russian economy.

Today, direct foreign investment in Russia is only slightly larger than in Poland, though Russia’s GDP is more than three times Poland’s and its population four times larger.

Even so, the transition in Central Europe was far from a cakewalk. In the first three years of the transition (1990– 1992), GDP contracted by 17.6 percent in Poland, 15.6 percent in Hungary, and 15.4 percent in Czechoslovakia. (Jeffrey Sachs, one of the architects of marketization, points out that this statistical shrinkage overstates the contraction because the nominal economy of 1990 was beset with severe shortages.)

Yet industrial production fell in these three countries by over 30 percent in the same three years, and unemployment remained in double digits. Such was the popular distress that in the elections of 1995, the Poles tossed out their beloved Solidarnosc government and returned to power the party of

reformed communists. Yet the pull of the EU was so powerful that the former communists did not alter marketization policy all that much, though they did slow down the pace of privatization.

The EU, as a condition of membership, pushed for ultraliberal economic policies. And these former Soviet satellites, for their own reasons, pursued an economic model that stressed their value as tax havens and venues of low wages and low social insurance costs.

Those policies in turn increased pressure on Western Europe to lower its own taxes, wages, and social benefits. By the 2000s, the entire EU had gone from being a social-democratic island to an increasingly neoliberal one. Nationalist reaction followed. In nation after nation, politics oscillated between center right and far right.

After the Wall Street financial collapse of 2008, one more result of neoliberal policies, the damage spilled over into Europe. Unemployment rose, and the EU, following the neoliberal playbook, worsened matters by promoting an austerity cure. Support for the far right burgeoned, and neofascist parties became the party of government in Poland and Hungary. —RK

JAN /FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

For Further Reading …

Hilary Appel and Mitchell A. Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Two Russia scholars examine how neoliberal policies in Eastern Europe had reverberating and often perverse effects.

Anders Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path From Market Economy to Kleptocracy (Yale University Press, 2019). A leading advocate of shock therapy and expert on the Russian economy gives an authoritative account of how klepto-capitalism works.

William J. Burns, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (Random House, 2019). The president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former ambassador to Russia draws lessons from a distinguished career on missed opportunities.

Peter Conradi, Who Lost Russia?

How the World Entered a New Cold War (Oneworld, 2018). The former London Sunday Times Moscow correspondent provides a play-by-play account of how the West’s Russia policy went wrong.

44 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN /FEB 2020

Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy (Pegasus Books, 2020). Two leading democratic theorists connect America’s Russia policy with other failures to export democratic liberalism.

Michael Mandelbaum, The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford University Press, 2019). A distinguished Russia scholar and leading critic of U.S. policy toward Russia explores how we lost the post–Cold War peace.

Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War (Broadway Books, 2018). How a KGB double agent working for Britain’s MI6 not only provided the West with priceless intelligence on a collapsing Soviet Union, but helped head off World War III. Jeffrey D. Sachs, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018).

A leading adviser to postcommunist Poland and Russia reviews what went wrong, and explores opportunities for a different U.S. policy for Russia, China, and elsewhere.

the chaotic rudimentary democracy of the early Yeltsin period was snuffed out. As we were going to press, Putin fired his cabinet and proposed altering the constitution to strengthen a currently ceremonial State Council, which he could head and thus remain de facto leader even if he left the presidency in 2024.

Events in both China and to a lesser extent Russia have shown that a nation can indeed combine autocratic state capitalism with a tolerably successful economy. Putin also benefited from a dose of luck, in that oil prices, which collapsed in the middle and late 1990s, rebounded nicely after 2000, just in time for Putin to take credit. In his first two terms, from 2000 to 2008, Russian GDP grew by 72 percent. Inflation subsided, unemployment stabilized at about 6 percent, and in three decades the purchasing power of wages rose about sixfold relative to 1990. Inequality soared, however, and much of the money made by oligarchs was stashed in the West, rather than reinvested in Russia. Klepto-capitalism suffers from multiple inefficiencies, but to ordinary Russians it is a definite improvement over both communism and the chaotic market messes of the 1990s. It works well enough to be a political success.

Putin, in a backhanded compliment, did take one piece of advice from the Washington Consensus. He has run a tight fiscal and monetary policy, and used Russia’s oil reserves to bolster the ruble, leaving Russia fairly impervious both to currency speculation and to IMF conditions. Like the East Asians after 1998, the Russian leadership resolved to stockpile massive reserves, so as never again to be at the mercy of the IMF. In a new and mostly critical book, Russia’s Crony Capitalism, the Swedish economist Anders Åslund, one of the architects of shock therapy, credits Russia with having a very low public debt of under 20 percent of GDP, low inflation of around 2 percent, and impressive gold and foreign currency reserves in the range of $500 billion. Though Russia is to some extent a petro-state—its top exports are oil, gas, coal, and other primary products—its economy has weathered the vagaries of oil prices better than many Western observers expected.

In sum, it was probably never in the cards for Russia to become a Western-style democracy. But it might have been less of a kleptocracy and geopolitical enemy, if only the U.S. had not been so relentless both in trying to impose neoliberalism and assuming that Russia was now a third-rate power and could be treated as such.

Oddly, American foreign-policy pragmatists have been willing to make alliances with nations such as Saudi Arabia, which are even nastier than Putin’s Russia was in the early 2000s.

Collaboration breeds trust and more collaboration. Deception engenders distrust and defection. Had the U.S. invited more partnership with Russia, pursuing valued common interests on such fronts as joint security guarantees for Central Europe, arms control, economic conversion aid, and efforts to limit Islamist terrorism, it’s hard to imagine Moscow making the kind of frontal assault on American democracy that Putin did in 2016.

Indeed, with different policies over the past three decades, we might have been spared both Putin and Trump. Alas, you can’t rerun history. We will never know for sure; we will only suffer the consequences.

A neo-Nazi commercial empire, a German minister, and the fight for a country’s soul

BY ALE X DZ IADO S Z

bodo schackow / picture alliance / dpa via ap images

I

t’s early July in central Germany and I’m heading up the highway in the back of a black BMW sedan with Georg Maier, interior minister for the state of Thuringia. White cumulus clouds hover above golden-lit wheat fields; pine trees spread across rolling hills and windmills swing their mechanical arms in the breeze. It is almost impossible to imagine an area this idyllic incubating a resentment so deep that it birthed one of the continent’s most expansive neo-Nazi commercial ecosystems, comprising music festivals, guesthouses, and online retailers, netting hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of euros a year.

Over the past several years, sleepy, provincial Thuringia—with a population of just around two million—had become a neoNazi hotbed, supplying steady funds and publicity for Europe’s resurgent far right.

Two years ago, Themar, the town where we were headed, had drawn around 6,000 far-right music fans—roughly double the town’s population—to the “Rock gegen Überfremdung,” or, roughly, the “Rock against Over-foreignization.” Images of hundreds of men and women flashing “Sieg Heil” salutes, illegal in Germany, had circulated on social media, shocking polite society. This was just the most dramatic manifestation of a much broader phenomenon: Thuringia hosts more than one neoNazi concert a week, ranging from a few dozen people to international barn burners like the one I was headed to. Maier came to power just after the Themar concert, bent on stomping out such events—known collectively as Rechtsrock—which he saw as

part of a broader far-right effort to accumulate capital, bolster infrastructure, and, ultimately, seize power.

Today, he was going to see up close how that process, and the results of his efforts to disrupt it, were working. “This is my first personal issue—to fight against racism, nationalism, and, yes, the far right, and therefore I have to be there,” Maier told me. “That’s my way of doing politics. I cannot do it from a distance. I have to see it. I have to hear it.”

His antagonist was a young, savvy farright entrepreneur and organizer called Tommy Frenck, who runs a guesthouse in a neighboring village and had gotten him-

self elected to local office. Young, goateed, heavily tattooed, and with the short, stocky build of the competitive weightlifter he was in his school days, Frenck had proven a formidable organizing talent, quickly earning a name for himself in the far-right scene.

Even Maier, who described Frenck as a kind of “national capitalist,” had to admit that, in a way, Frenck had been able to revive the area’s moribund tourism industry.

Frenck had also gained a reputation for an often prankish social media presence.

When, inspired by a similar effort in neighboring Saxony, Maier teamed up with local authorities to get an alcohol ban in place for the weekend, Frenck had posted a picture of himself on Twitter sitting and grinning on a stack of beer crates, tagging Maier. If the interior minister’s efforts failed, Frenck wrote, “I’ll find myself forced to sell all this beer to the nasty ‘Nazis.’”

For Maier, the stakes were existential.

About a month earlier, someone had shot dead a local official from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on his terrace in the neighboring state of Hesse. The official, Walter Lübcke, had been a vocal proponent of accepting refugees, and had become the target of far-right ire and frequent death threats after he’d told local members of the anti-refugee movement Pegida: “You have to stand up for your values. If you don’t share those values, then anyone is free to leave this country if they don’t agree.”

The suspect in the killing had been a farright sympathizer. The assassination raised memories of the National Socialist Underground—a clandestine neo-Nazi group, as its name suggests—which murdered ten people

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46 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JAN/FEB 2020

bodo schackow / picture alliance / dpa via ap images

The German village of Themar was the site of a neo-Nazi concert last July. Georg Maier (bottom), interior minister for the state of Thuringia, has created a task force devoted to disrupting these far-right events, putting severe limits on alcohol sales and consumption, enforcing inconvenient parking restrictions, and maintaining a heavy police presence.

with migrant origins from 2000 to 2006 and whose founding members came from Thuringia. “That a person in public life, a politician, would be killed by Nazis?” Maier said of Lübcke. “We knew that some Nazis have weapons. We knew it. But that they would use it? This is really a new quality.”

Far-right violence has surged since Merkel’s 2015 decision to let nearly a million asylum seekers into Germany. Acts such as Lübcke’s killing have been accompanied—in many eyes, encouraged—by the ascendance of Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country’s most successful far-right party since the Second World War. Starting off as euroskeptics, the AfD later pivoted to anti-immigration and had ridden the wave to become Germany’s third-largest party in 2017 federal elections. They held about a tenth of the seats in Thuringia’s state parliament and were expected to gain more in an October vote.

The existence of ties between AfD activists and neo-Nazi groups is hotly debated. But seeing a simpatico ideology catch hold in the mainstream was undeniably giving Frenck and his fellow travelers a boost.

Maier—a slim, serious man with graying hair and a penchant for open-collar suits— had watched all this with alarm. His own parents had belonged to Nazi youth organizations, his father to the Hitler Youth and his mother to the League of German Girls, and this history had helped convince him that complacency was a “poison” for societies. More and more, “normal-looking” Germans had been joining far-right demonstrations. “Families, elderly people, walking together on the street—and not hundreds, but thousands,” he told me. Roughly half of Themar, Maier guessed, believed the concerts should be left alone.

We turned down a street lined by flower gardens and red-roofed half-timbered houses. In happier times, Themar was known mostly as a scenic stop on cycling or river-paddling trips; Maier himself had once toured the area, and suggested I do so sometime as well. Near the end of a medieval wall, we stopped at a police checkpoint, where several portly, black-shirted men stood waiting to be frisked. “Here you can see the first Nazis,” Maier said, slipping into uncharacteristic sarcasm. “Really, really nice people.”

Police wagons packed a nearby field.

Troops had been brought in from the states of Hesse, Bavaria, Saxony, and Saxony-Anhalt, Maier told me. A gas station had been converted into operational headquarters. A little way away stood a large white concert tent, festooned with antiimmigrant banners. The scene was set. The ceremonies would soon begin.

sebastian haak / picture alliance / dpa via ap images

HOW DID THE STATE of Thuringia, of all

places, become home to such a prominent neo-Nazi music scene? Like everywhere else in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the state boasts higher support for far-right and neo-Nazi movements than Germany at large. But that alone does not explain the troubling phenomenon.

Watchdog groups and Interior Ministry employees offer several causes. First, Thuringia is centrally located, in the heart of Germany and Europe, linked to neighboring states by efficient road and rail.

Second, cheap property prices meant neoNazis could buy up houses with relative ease, building a real-estate network to hold smaller concerts in private, with almost no risk of police interference—perfect for

We stopped at a police checkpoint.

“Here you can see the first Nazis,” Maier said, slipping into uncharacteristic sarcasm. “Really, really nice people.” recruiting young people curious about the scene. MOBIT, a group tracking far-right movements in Thuringia, had counted about 20 of these houses. Most are concentrated in small towns, but some are also in the more left-leaning state capital, Erfurt.

These two factors dovetail with a third: The previous state government had been relatively lax in policing the concerts, activists told me. “I think it’s correct to say that the government ignored it over many years,” Christoph Lammert, a MOBIT consultant, said. “Often it was completely ignored, or the problem was rather the protests against the concert, rather than the concerts themselves.” Thuringia soon earned a reputation for reliable far-right events, a rarity in the neo-Nazi music scene.

Sometimes, he said, a concert would be blocked by police in the neighboring state of Saxony-Anhalt on one day only for the

same bands and same concertgoers to gather the next night in Thuringia without a problem. “Most of the time, people traveling to Thuringia, they know, ‘Okay, the concert will really happen,’” he said.

In Thuringia, neo-Nazism was soon a going concern. Ticket, drink, and merchandise sales were plowed into more real estate, which meant more concerts, which meant more money, and so on. Far-right organizers were setting up fight clubs and street festivals, spreading their message to young, bored villagers who might otherwise remain apolitical. Large concerts like the one in Themar drew adherents from across Europe, helping cement international networks. When Maier was appointed interior minister in September 2017, he knew he had a dangerous phenomenon on his hands. “On the one hand, there is this kind of business model, and on the other, the political move-

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The trouble for Maier was how to fight this threat without undermining the rights and freedoms he wanted to protect. “The Nazis abuse the right of freedom of assembly, and this right of freedom of assembly would be the first right they would abolish if they came into power,” he told me.

“So this is the main problem. You want to defend democracy, but you also want … to save the basic rights of democracy. It’s not right for me to forbid these concerts, because then I demolish the right of freedom of assembly.”

Whether he could succeed was an open question. There had been grumbling after the Apolda debacle, one Interior Ministry employee told me. Some officers felt Maier’s tactics had provoked an unnecessary confrontation. It was hard to say how deep such sentiments ran, but there were hints of far-right sympathies in the ranks. One

Booths hawk merchandise with popular alt-right themes. The bigger the taboo, the greater the thrill. And what bigger taboo than to be a Nazi in Germany?

October outside a village called Magdala within sight of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial. That weekend, Maier assembled his “war room,” poring over maps and running through strategies.

“It was really like a battle on the field,” he said. In the end, they discovered the concert site was reachable by just one road, owned by the village. Local authorities blocked access, forcing the concert to the nearby town of Apolda. Roughly 800 neoNazis packed the main square on the first night, but on the second night things got messy. After the first band took the stage, a concertgoer—apparently frustrated by security barriers and searches—chucked a bottle toward the police lines. The police raised their shields and pressed in, fixing the crowd with pole-mounted cameras as helicopter searchlights flashed. The concertgoers dispersed. “Later, you’ll wish we only made music,” one organizer said as he left. Maier tweeted that the event was “an open attack on our democracy.”

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young policeman had recently shown up at a training session wearing a T-shirt by a far-right brand with the message “Save the white continent.”

Then there were the elections. What would happen if the AfD won? What would become of Maier’s efforts? And what lessons would neo-Nazi organizers draw? “If my strategy fails, then I indirectly supported them, because they can say, ‘We’ve won over the minister. We are powerful,’” Maier told me. “I have to win.”

BY EARLY EVENING, black-shirted, heav-

ily tattooed men and women were trickling into the concert site in Themar, the town where I’d driven with Maier. As they passed through a labyrinth of metal barriers and police trucks, journalists clustered nearby, snapping photos. One concertgoer flipped a middle finger, sparking more shutter-clicks.

I left Maier behind and went inside, where booths hawked T-shirts, sausages, and lowalcohol beer (the next day, the taps would

be cut off entirely). Men milled around in brimmed, soft-fabric hats in red, white, and black, the colors of the German imperial flag favored by ultranationalists. Ear expanders and close-cropped haircuts were very much in vogue. The place had a perverse county-fair feel, with hay underfoot and air smelling of energy drinks, sweat, and cigarette smoke. In the main tent, a series of banners advertised a far-right label called PC-Records (“Political correctness—nein, Danke”), a digital TV channel, clothing labels, and the National Democratic Party (NPD)—an ultranationalist party that, unlike the AfD, has never made it to federal parliament. “Deport Islamists, for all of our security,” one banner read.

The shirts—nearly all black—reflected the rich symbology developed to skirt Germany’s ban on displays of Nazi support.

Some conveyed legally problematic sentiments by removing vowels: “HACKENKREUZ ,” German for “swastika,” became “HCKNKRZ”; “I HEART HITLER” became “I HEART HTLR .” Others kept their references just vague enough to be legal. “Twelve Golden Years,” the name of a band from Apolda, referred presumably, but not explicitly, to 1933–1945. Matching “Adolf” and “Eva” shirts were available, perfectly legal without last names, while another shirt featuring an image of a man in a steel helmet read, “Not all cops are bastards,” above the words “Est. 1933,” the year the Gestapo was founded. New Balance shoes, which feature a prominent “N,” were the clear sneaker of choice; when I stopped to count, nearly half the crowd was wearing them.

In this sense, Germany’s ban on Nazi symbols dovetails tidily with far-right trolling culture. Excluded from polite society, the subculture delights in mocking its sensibilities and violating its taboos while maintaining a plausible deniability that the whole thing is just a joke. The bigger the taboo, the greater the thrill. And what bigger taboo than to be a Nazi in Germany?

I stopped to examine one booth where photos showed what appeared to be a pagan ritual attended by torch-wielding men in white button-ups. The man running the booth introduced himself as Christian Häger, head of the Junge Nationalisten

bodo schackow (top); sebastian haak (bot tom) / picture alliance / dpa via ap images

ment,” Maier told me in his Erfurt offices in April. “That’s new—that both come together and fit together.”

Maier, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), saw it as his duty as a German official to ensure that the mistakes of that era were not repeated and that the liberal values that had taken root since then were protected. “We experienced in Germany, more than any nation in the world, what it means, with the concentration camps, with the destroyed cities—the outcomes of the Second World War, the outcomes of nationalism, and so on,” he told me. “This is deep in my heart. I am so convinced that I have to do this.”

Once in office, Maier established a task force of police, intelligence, and legal experts devoted to disrupting farright events. Last year’s neo-Nazi rock fest had been scheduled to take place in

though of course, like all their slogans, not quite apparent enough to violate the law.

THE NEXT MORNING, a counterdemonstra-

Concert attendees browse the Ansgar Aryan booth (top). Neo-Nazism has become a going concern, both a business model and a political movement. But counterdemonstrations are common (bottom). The banner these Themar locals carry states they are “For a unified society! Against Nazis and racists in our midst.”

(“Young Patriots”), which is affiliated with the NPD. He explained that the images were of a solstice celebration, just one of their many activities, which included education and political outreach. One ad for an antidrug campaign aimed at children featured a cheerful-looking elk mascot waving to the camera. “He’s a mascot. He should be fun,” Häger explained.

He told me that the parking ban had been burdensome—police were making people leave their cars some 15 kilometers from the site. “The parking places should be here, in the field there, 200 meters away,” Häger said, gesturing across the way. Two years ago, he said, “there was no police in the field,

no fights, no problems. It was all good.”

Indeed, Maier’s efforts appeared to be having their intended effect. The music was as loud and abrasive as you’d expect neoNazi rock to be, but the crowd seemed fairly docile. After an Italian band called Acciaio Vincente took the stage, four men near me started up a mosh pit, which soon petered out. By the set’s end, the crowd was singing, “Olé, olé, olé,” the Spanish soccer chant.

Around midnight from my hotel room, I heard chants echoing down Themar’s medieval-walled streets: Frei, sozial, und national. Free, social, and national. It was a phrase chanted often at neo-Nazi rallies, an apparent twist on “national socialism”—

tion took place across from the neo-Nazi site, featuring a brass band, face-painting, and two-euro tractor rides for kids. A priest delivered a sermon, including a reading in Hebrew. Die Linke, the SPD, the Greens, and other left-leaning, liberal, or antifascist organizations in the area had booths. Apart from a few tattooed antifa members, the attendees were almost parodies of wholesome German townsfolk, chomping on baked goods and sausages in flower-print blouses, sun hats, and short-sleeved button-ups.

Thomas Jakob, who headed the local community group that had been staging demonstrations against Frenck’s concerts, moved through the crowd. Tall, bespectacled, with a round face and button nose, he looked more like the village grocer than the man standing between Themar and a rising neo-Nazi tide. Many people, he said, had told him not to make such a big deal out of the concerts, that if you ignored them, they would go away.

“That is one of the reasons in the past few years why these things have become so big,” he told me. “Because they ignored it.”

The parking and alcohol bans were working. Even Frenck’s guesthouse, the Golden Lion, would have to stop serving beer at 3 p.m. “These belong together, Rechtsrock and alcohol. It is a must for them,” Maier said. Police were also better trained to identify banned lyrics than before. Last night they’d pulled a band, Sturmwehr, from the stage, explaining the chants I’d heard the previous night.

A little later, on the neo-Nazi side, a dreadlocked antifa man perched on a fence, dangling an empty beer can from a string on a pole. “Last beer before Themar!” he shouted.

“And it’s an Austrian one!” Inside, a few hundred concertgoers stood around, drinking soda and water as stagehands performed sound checks and tested pyrotechnic fire shooters, sending up periodic spurts of flame.

Two young men running a T-shirt booth, Daniel and Patrick, were unusually talkative. Their brand, Ansgar Aryan (“Ansgar” is an old Germanic name combining the roots for “god” and “spear,” while “Aryan” is

JAN/FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

a historical race concept that became closely associated with Nazi ideology) was established in 2008 and was based in the Bavarian town of Mantel, Daniel told me, handing me their “Summer 2019 Catalogue.” Flipping through, I pointed out the Gestapothemed shirt I’d noticed earlier. Daniel said it was meant as a counterpoint to anti-police sentiments on the left. “We say, ‘Not all cops are bastards,’ because we know a lot of police guys who are on our side,” he said. I asked him about the year, 1933. “I’m not good in history. It’s a random year,” he laughed.

Daniel told me that sales had declined in recent years, not because of low demand, but because more competitors had entered the market. Still, the xenophobic brand maintained customers as far away as Japan.

Daniel declined to tell me how much they made, but said that their tax bill had come to around 40,000 euros last year.

When I asked to see the best-sellers, Daniel grew unexpectedly sheepish. He flipped to one page showing a phalanx of white-robed and hooded men. “I don’t like the Ku Klux Klan. This is only for selling,” he said.

Didn’t like them? Why not?

“It’s racist,” he said. “I think they only

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hate black people because they are black.

That’s not my opinion. It’s stupid.”

It was a strange line to hear at a neo-Nazi rock concert.

“You don’t have to hate any people,” he said. “From all colors and all religions, there are evil guys and good guys. But this is Germany, and I hope that in Germany in 50 years, most people are still Germans and the religion is Christian.”

He flipped to another best-seller, which showed a tank set against the Eiffel Tower, and the phrase “To France, we only travel on treads.”

“It’s not a good shirt. I don’t like it,” Daniel said. “I like the French guys.”

Daniel was much more animated on the subject of jobs. He’d lost four of them, he said, after getting doxxed for attending right-wing events. “It’s bullshit. You think you live in a democracy, and then you lose your job,” he told me. “You lose your job only for your opinion. You did nothing against the law or something. That doesn’t lead to ‘Oh I like the state now.’ It leads to ‘The state is really broken.’”

I asked about the police crackdown. Like Häger, the parking ban had Daniel concerned. “If Putin did this, you guys would

be really reporting about it, but in Germany we are right-wing guys and we have no lobby, and so they can do anything with us.” Previous efforts to stifle the concerts had been easier to counter, he said, as when authorities had pressured portable-toilet companies not to rent to them, and they’d been able to cart in more from Bavaria. “If this is the new strategy, I don’t know what we can do,” he said. “It’s really cheating.”

I left Ansgar Aryan after about half an hour, but had less luck with other vendors. Two men at a far-right radio channel offered a few stiff sentences, and the editor of a magazine called N.S. Heute (“N.S. Today”) showed me a feature about Wewelsburg Castle, controlled by Heinrich Himm­ ler and long a subject of speculation about Nazi occult activities. One couple I mistook for normies until I saw the Iron Cross dangling from the man’s chest said they’d come from Bavaria, where such a concert would never have been allowed. Apart from that, I was mostly rebuffed. Even the Italian band, sipping nonalcoholic beer in the back, only broke into nationalist chants when I approached, and then told me, in halting English, to buzz off.

steffen it tig / picture alliance / dpa viaap images

The Golden Lion, a guesthouse owned by entrepreneur and concert organizer (and local officeholder) Tommy Frenck, serves as an unofficial headquarters for the far right.

FRENCK, THE ORGANIZER who’d so antag-

onized Maier, was based in the village of Kloster Vessra, about a mile and a half up the road from Themar. I’d seen him interviewed in various German media before, and so that afternoon, I decided to walk up and try my luck. The path led past wheat fields and hills of pines, crickets in the grass and butterflies on little purple flowers, disturbed only by the occasional cluster of neo-Nazis, swigging their last beers as they made their way to the concert grounds.

Just outside town, I spotted two concertgoers leaning over a garden fence, chatting with a middle-aged woman. After a moment, the woman smiled, handed the men two bottles of beer, took a five-euro note in exchange, and went back to tending her garden. She had technically violated the ordinance, and refused to discuss why.

A few minutes later, we arrived at the Golden Lion, a half-timbered cottage-style building with a wooden patio and a sandwich board offering “patriots” a hearty welcome. A booth sold T-shirts while vans ferried concertgoers up to the first police checkpoint, where they had to start walking.

Black-shirted customers hovered around, including a pipe fitter from Las Vegas. Inside the guesthouse was a colorful mishmash of images from Nordic mythology and a painting of a First World War sailor. Sentimental guitar music played. Beside a jumble of high chairs and children’s toys, a glass case displayed Nazi military paraphernalia, including model tanks, commemorative glasses, and a clock with an Iron Cross and a man in steel helmet reading, “They were the best soldiers in the world.”

Frenck stood in the driveway. He wore camouflage shorts and a black T-shirt revealing tattoos running up his arms and neck.

Frenck cuts a colorful figure, and has spent considerable time cultivating his image in the media. He tends to get plenty of coverage, due partly to his idiosyncrasies—he travels often, and has a world map in the bar with colorful pins marking places he’s been—but also because he is one of the few far-right organizers to speak freely to the media. Call him a Nazi, call him a monster, and get your outraged clicks. To Frenck, it’s just publicity.

Frenck was annoyed by Maier’s tactics.

He said he planned to sue the Interior Ministry. At the concert last year in Magdala, he said, courts had actually found the road blockage illegal after the fact. “It’s just a pity that Georg Maier doesn’t have to pay his own money,” he said. “It’s the taxpayer who has to come up with it.” He made pointed reference to the fact that Maier was originally from Frankfurt, a West German city.

In addition to his guesthouse, Frenck runs an online retailer, which he described as a kind of Amazon for right-wing products. The site offers over 8,000 articles, including clothes, CDs, pillows, and shoes, and regularly receives orders from Australia, South Africa, and the Americas.

Like the T-shirt vendors I had spoken to, Frenck declined to say how much he made.

“Enough to do new projects and to pay all the people and then have some stuff for me.

I’m pretty happy,” he said. Then he held out

“That’s what we must do. That’s the way.

You have to be independent from the others,” he said.

His ambitions extended into politics as well. Frenck and his allies had formed a small list and had won 16 seats at different local levels. In the upcoming state elections, they planned to back the AfD. Eventually, Frenck said, grassroots pressure was going to force the CDU to at least consider a coalition with the AfD. In any case, he said, the October vote was sure to deliver a blow to Maier. “After the vote, he’s gone,” Frenck told me. “I know that he will lose.”

FOR EVERY FAR-RIGHT demonstration,

there was a counterdemonstration; for every sign of impending collapse, a countervailing bulwark. On a drizzly spring day in Apolda, in the same square where Maier’s police forces broke up the neo-Nazi concert

Far-right organizers were setting up fight clubs and street festivals, spreading their message to young, bored villagers who might otherwise remain apolitical. his hand at an upward angle. “What I can tell you is that we are growing up like this.”

In any case, the idea was not just profit.

“My mission is, with all my clothes and all this stuff, I will bring back the patriotic feeling—the symbols, the mythology—to the German people,” he told me. By putting their message on shirts, shoes, and stickers, they might help it spread. “If you read the message 10, 20 times a day, they will have it in their brains.”

Frenck’s business model could also provide jobs for far-right supporters who’d been fired from mainstream jobs, while allowing consumers to buy products without worrying the money would go toward liberal causes—a sort of inverse correlate of woke capitalism. For instance, Frenck said, maybe I’d noticed that New Balance was popular. But who knew what they’d do with the money? So Frenck offered a similarly designed shoe stamped with an Iron Cross.

I told him it seemed like he wanted to build an alternative economy.

last year, the AfD state leader Björn Höcke addressed a tiny crowd. “Islam is not a part of Germany,” he said. A few months later, at a Yiddish music festival in Weimar, just over ten miles away, interwar Jewish cabaret numbers and orchestral compositions urged solidarity with refugees.

Two vastly different visions were competing for Germany’s political oxygen, a contest over not just where the country ought to go, but what it should be. On the centennial of the Weimar Republic, history itself had been put up for debate. Höcke shocked many with a call for a “180-degree turnaround in our policy of memory,” while Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s co-leader, has called Hitler and the Nazis “a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”

Germany’s principles of liberalism and multicultural tolerance were being put to a greater test than at any other time since the Second World War. Today, nearly one in five people living in Germany has an immigrant background. Yet in large part the national

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dialogue has not caught up with this fact.

Well into the 1990s, German officials were able to say that theirs was “not an immigration country.” That is the same basic assumption of many Rechtsrock attendees.

Take, for instance, the concept of over-foreignization so common at these rallies: The basic idea is that at a certain point immigration ceases to benefit a society and instead begins to erode a native culture’s essence.

Maier’s campaign—with its police deployments, its parking bans, and its task force— was an incredible challenge, fraught with pitfalls, from voter rebellion, to dissension in police ranks, to the moral hazard of using state tools against a particular political ideology. Even then, it was not enough on its own to achieve its aims. What seemed clear to me after Themar was that Maier could do no more than slow the spread. The money might be disrupted, but no matter

in Thuringia; it was just a question of how bad it would be.

A back room was set up with a large projector and a stage. Local news teams crammed into the room alongside candidates. Jakob, who was running for the seat that represented Themar, was there, as was Maier. For both, the night would be a moment to reflect on their own campaigns against the far right as well as the general political mood.

Chatter died down as the polls closed and a tidily coiffed local broadcaster came onto the screen. The exit polls were not precise, but they tended to reflect the final tally, with grumbles and moans.

Merkel’s CDU was announced first: 22.5 percent, its worst result in state history. A groan ran through the room, as if someone had just taken a nasty tumble.

Next, the SPD: “Eight point five percent,” the announcer read, “Also its worst per-

Two vastly different visions were competing for Germany’s political oxygen, a contest over not just where the country ought to go, but what it should be. how many concerts he broke up, the movement and its ideas remained, circulating in private residences and on encrypted messengers like Telegram. Increasingly, they were on the lips of elected officials, with democratic mandates to be where they were, saying what they said.

ON A DREARY rain-swept night in late

October, functionaries and candidates of the Social Democrats, Maier’s party, crowded into a timbered medieval hall in central Erfurt, drinking beer and eating pretzels as they waited for the election results. The atmosphere was congenial, but far from festive. The party had been suffering from a national-level leadership crisis, combined with the fallout of years of coalition partnership with the CDU. In vote after vote, it became clear people wanted a change. The AfD had surged into second place in Saxony and Brandenburg the previous month, netting around a quarter of votes in both states. Everyone expected similar results

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formance in state history.” The news was mostly met with silence.

And many couldn’t hold in their reaction to the next result. Die Linke came in first, with 29.5 percent—a formidable result, owing largely to its popular local party leader Bodo Ramelow. The AfD had come in second, with 24 percent. The audible cringe was followed quickly by a gasp of true shock as the Greens were announced at just 5.5 percent, killing any hopes of stitching their old coalition back together.

Maier stood stone-faced, and then dismounted the stage to take questions. It was tough to see how the coalition that had put him in power could mount the numbers it needed. Back in April, he’d told me that the polarization of modern politics reminded him of the Weimar days. Tonight’s results had only bolstered this impression, with the parties furthest to the left and right posting the biggest wins.

The AfD, he said, had been offering simple solutions to big problems. “It’s populism,

let’s put it that way. We are not a party of this kind. The Social Democrats are always interested in solutions that are possible. This is the difference. On one hand, the populist party, and on the other, the realistic one.”

The detailed election results would show that Maier had lost his district to an AfD candidate by roughly 800 votes, although the double-tiered voting system would allow him to keep his seat. A week later, he told me that the most likely way forward would be an unwieldy coalition including parties with highly divergent views—for instance, the market-liberal Free Democratic Party and socialist Die Linke.

Assuming the AfD did not take the ministry, for the moment an unlikely outcome, Maier said he believed his own legacy was secure. The task force, the alcohol and parking bans—these seemed likely to remain.

“We stopped the cash machine for these farright movements,” Maier told me. “In the past, they could earn a lot of money through these big events, and we stopped this.”

But the broader rise of far-right politics in Thuringia had showed no sign of slowing. Hints of previously unthinkable scenarios had already emerged: In an apparent fulfillment of Frenck’s prediction, 17 local CDU politicians wrote a letter shortly after the vote calling for the party to be ready for coalition talks with “all democratically elected parties,” widely seen as a call to lift the party’s ban on talks with the AfD, although it did not mention the party by name. In one form or another, the fight would grind on.

I asked Maier whether he was worried about the future—whether he thought the AfD’s rise would continue. “It’s difficult to describe,” he told me. “I am an optimistic person. I always think that things will develop in a positive way.” The AfD, he said, was gaining no more or less than any other nationalist far-right party in Europe, and in this sense, their development was not cause for alarm. “But due to our history, in Germany,” he said, “things are always different.”

Alex Dziadosz, a journalist based in Berlin, has written for Harper’s, The Economist, Businessweek, The Financial Times, and Slate.

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Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as Jimmy Hoffa and Frank Sheeran in The Irishman

What Did Hoffa Want?

SHEERAN

Martin Scorsese’s new movie and a Harvard professor’s new book provide a picture, but only partial explanations, of the Teamster leader’s ultimately suicidal rage. BY HAROLD MEYERSON F

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or both better and worse, Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa was one of the most consequential union leaders of the 20th century. Unlike his very few peers (the Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther and the Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis could both claim comparable historic impact), he also has become the subject of three Hollywood pictures—1978’s F.I.S.T., with Sylvester Stallone ineptly playing a character modeled on Hoffa; 1992’s Hoffa, with Jack Nicholson in the title role; and now Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, with Al Pacino as the Teamster president.

The source of Hollywood’s

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recurring fascination isn’t merely Hoffa’s disappearance and apparent execution by the Mafia. It’s also Hoffa himself, whose ego, brilliance, rage, and willingness to employ violent and corrupt means transformed an entire sector of once marginal workers into a blue-collar middle class for several decades, while simultaneously casting unions into a public opprobrium from which it has taken labor decades to recover.

The UAW’s Reuther improved the lives of even more Americans than Hoffa did, but Reuther led a largely puritanical existence that could never provide material for one of Scorsese’s

fables of moral descent. Conversely, the mobbed-up thugs who once ran the East Coast longshoremen’s union were so completely indifferent to the lives and fortunes of their members that they’ve made it to the screen only as out-and-out heavies—Lee J. Cobb chewed a lot of scenery playing one in On the Waterfront—but never as protagonists.

With Hoffa, however, you’re plunged into a moral stew where egalitarian initiatives and goonish brutality bubble simultaneously to the surface.

What Robert Penn Warren once saw in Huey Long, Scorsese doubtless saw in Jimmy Hoffa.

The Irishman is the tale of a thug who worked on Hoffa’s dark side: Frank Sheeran, a Philadelphia Teamster official who was also a Mafia hit man, and although and because he was close to Hoffa, was presumably the hit man the Mafia chose to end Hoffa’s life. I say “presumably” because Sheeran’s story, which in his old age he related to an attorney who published it after Sheeran’s death, has slim—in some instances, wafer-thin—basis in fact. In his new book In Hoffa’s Shadow, Jack Goldsmith writes that the FBI now believes Hoffa’s killer was a Detroit-based young mobster who died just last year. But whatever Sheeran’s tenuous claims to veracity, his is a tale that Scorsese couldn’t easily resist.

As Scorsese tells it, Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro, navigated by two stars that eventually fell out of alignment—the Teamsters and the mob, personified by his two mentors,

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Hoffa and Russell Bufalino, the boss of a Pennsylvania Mafia family. Whether working for one or the other or both, Sheeran comes off as a man with catatonic emotions, broken only by outbursts of anger that occasionally peek through his otherwise unruffled acts of violence, decimating his relationship to his family and leaving him alone and unremembered by the film’s denouement.

Sheeran’s delicate balance between unions and the Mafia was shattered when Hoffa was released from prison in 1971 and sought to regain control of the Teamsters, which he’d entrusted when imprisoned four years earlier to a pliable stooge named Frank Fitzsimmons.

In Hoffa’s absence, the mob—to whom Hoffa had loaned millions from a Teamster pension fund at usurious interest rates that were lucrative for the union—had taken to looting that fund, to which Fitzsimmons responded with benign neglect and untroubled golf.

Fitzsimmons’s one initiative had been to transform the Teamsters into a leading political and financial supporter of Richard Nixon.

To reward such patriotism, Nixon put one condition on Hoffa’s pardon: He couldn’t have anything to do with the Teamsters until 1980, ensuring Fitzsimmons’s continued control of the union and its obeisance to Nixon for the duration of his presidency and beyond.

Hoffa, who was born in a rage, responded to this new exile with towering fury, hatching all manner of schemes to recapture the Teamsters, even threatening to bring down Fitzsimmons by revealing the union’s subservience to the mob. Bufalino and Sheeran made very clear to Hoffa that the Mafia wouldn’t let him do that, lest this Samson pull down the Temple on them all. On a leisurely car trip to Detroit, Bufalino told Sheeran there’d be a plane waiting to take him on a quick trip to the Motor City, with a gun inside for dispatching his friend. The implication was unstated but clear that Sheeran’s own life depended on this—so Sheeran did the deed.

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Were this all that Sheeran confessed to, he might have more credibility. In both the attorney’s book and Scorsese’s film, however, he pads his résumé by recounting how he also transported guns for the Bay of Pigs invasion and the weapon used for the JFK assassination, not to mention how he whacked mob renegade Joey Gallo in a Greenwich Village clam house.

To the suitably skeptical, Sheeran comes off less as a one-man death squad and more like Zelig with a gun. To believe he participated in all these epochal ventures, you’d have to believe the Mafia had a very small talent pool.

CHUCKIE

THE IRISHMAN DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE SCREENPLAY BY STEVEN ZAILLIAN

Netflix

IN HOFFA’S SHADOW: A STEPFATHER, A DISAPPEARANCE IN DETROIT, AND MY SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH

BY JACK GOLDSMITH

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A minor character in Scorsese’s film is Chuckie O’Brien, whom it depicts as a sometime Hoffa gofer. Following what has been one of the few aspects of the Hoffa murder mystery that is common to most narratives, Chuckie is shown picking up Hoffa in a restaurant parking lot and unknowingly transporting him to the house where Sheeran sends Hoffa to his end.

Anticipating that Scorsese would film this scene as Sheeran recounted it, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith has risen to Chuckie’s defense with In Hoffa’s Shadow, timed as a counternarrative to Scorsese’s picture. No mystery attends Goldsmith’s choice of topics: He is Chuckie’s stepson. And in penning his stepdad’s apologia, he has added considerably to our knowledge of the byzantine interactions between Hoffa and the Mafia.

Goldsmith chronicles a life at once more tragic and comic than Sheeran’s—more tragic because Chuckie’s ties to both Hoffa and the Cosa Nostra were deeper and more emotionally overwhelming than Sheeran’s; more comic because as an “associate” of the mob rather than a member (he wasn’t Sicilian on his father’s side), and an inveterate screw-up, his tasks were entirely nonviolent.

And three times out of four, he botched those, too.

On January 3, The New York Times ran an op-ed by Goldsmith

pointing out two features of the Scorsese film he deemed flat-out wrong. First, he wrote, Chuckie did not drive Hoffa to his murderers, nor did he have any awareness that day that Hoffa—the closest thing Chuckie ever had to a father—was about to be killed. Second, the film showed Sheeran playing the role in Hoffa’s life that Chuckie had actually played. As Goldsmith wrote, “It was Chuckie, not Mr. Sheeran, who for decades served as Mr. Hoffa’s ‘intimate companion, driver, bodyguard and special troubleshooter’” (that characterization is from New York Times labor reporter A.H. Raskin).

Chuckie’s actual father ran out on his family in the 1930s, when he was a small child. His mother, Sylvia, soon moved the family to Detroit and went to work for Hoffa’s Teamster local, and later as a bookkeeper for the Detroit mob’s numbers racket. If ever a boy’s worst friend was his mother, it was Sylvia.

When Chuckie was nine, she introduced him to Hoffa. Jimmy took a shine to the boy, had him summer with his family at a lakeside cabin, taught him to drive, called him his stepson, and treated him as he would his own child. A year or two later, Sylvia also introduced Chuckie to Anthony Giacalone (Uncle Tony), her numbers racket boss, who became Chuckie’s other, sterner mentor. By age 12, Chuckie was collecting numbers picks from autoworkers at the gates to Ford’s River Rouge factory.

At age 19, he took a job at Hoffa’s Detroit local and became his body man; in the same year, at Uncle Tony’s prompting, he also took an oath to the Detroit mob: “On my honor, I will never betray any relationship I have with any of you.”

Did I mention that Sylvia became the primary liaison between Hoffa and the Mafia, and Chuckie the courier between the two? In the early 1940s, Uncle Tony was providing muscle for a lumberyard that was resisting Hoffa’s efforts to unionize it. After Sylvia introduced them, Hoffa cut a deal with Tony to give his boys stolen lumber trucks if he’d switch sides,

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which Tony did—the first such deal between Hoffa and the mob. FBI phone taps decades later revealed mafiosi crediting Sylvia with persuading Hoffa to make the loans that enabled the mob to build more than half the hotels on the old Vegas Strip.

After years of service to the Teamsters and the Mafia, the two halves of Chuckie’s world came into violent collision on a hot July afternoon in 1975.

Chuckie spent the final day of Jimmy Hoffa’s traceable life bumming rides and driving around Detroit in borrowed cars (including one from Giacalone’s son) on a host of errands. Goldsmith argues persuasively that the fact that Chuckie was carless that day makes it highly improbable that he served as Hoffa’s final chauffeur. You don’t assign the role of get-there (as opposed to getaway) driver to a guy without a car, using a vehicle registered to the son of the city’s ranking mafioso.

In classic hapless Chuckie manner, he’d had a falling out with Hoffa some months before and actually spent part of the day of Hoffa’s abduction waiting for a ride in the very parking lot from which Hoffa was taken. He was a logical suspect for something, and retained that ambiguous status for decades. However, the fact that he voluntarily met with the FBI within days of the abduction, and that the mob didn’t thereupon whack him because they knew he knew nothing specific about the killing, suggests his innocence, in which Goldsmith notes that FBI agents on the case eventually came to believe.

When Chuckie discovered that Hoffa had been abducted, he paid an immediate call to his Uncle Tony, who had been meeting for months with Hoffa to tell him, in effect, what Joe Pesci’s Russell Bufalino character tells Hoffa in The Irishman: that if Hoffa didn’t shut up about Mafia corruption of the Teamsters, the mob would dispose of him. With Chuckie terribly

Jimmy Hoffa leaves the Federal Building in Nashville following his arraignment on one of the multiple charges the feds would bring against him (June 7, 1962).

upset and with Hoffa missing, Good Uncle Tony told him, “Life is very funny, Chuck. Things happen, and you don’t have control over it.”

That was Tony-speak for the Bufalino line to Sheeran in The Irishman: “It is what it is.”

HOFFA

Hoffa’s identification with the Teamsters was so intense he may have determined he’d either retake the union or die trying.

Both The Irishman and In Hoffa’s Shadow show a desperate Jimmy Hoffa engaging in inexplicable behavior. In the face of the government’s prohibition of his return to Teamsters leadership, and intensifying threats—actually, guarantees— that if he continued in his quest the Mafia would have him killed, Hoffa persisted. Goldsmith speculates that by the end of his life, Hoffa may have become suicidal—that he’d determined he would either retake the Teamsters or die trying.

That Hoffa’s identity was so wrapped up in leading the Teamsters requires us to understand the nature of both his leadership and his union. The key, I think, is that the Teamsters were peculiarly Hoffa’s—more than the Mine Workers were Lewis’s or the UAW Reuther’s.

Unlike other unions, the Teamsters grew as, and partly because, Hoffa—a rare charismatic leader with a clear strategic vision—centralized power: first to the city body, then the regional, then the national, which is to say, Hoffa.

In the early years of the 20th century, the Teamsters were a collection of small, autonomous locals, grappling with an industry

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composed of small, autonomous employers. The need for a powerful national organization wasn’t apparent to local leaders, who had no desire to surrender their clout to some higher-up performing no discernible task. Dan Tobin, who headed the union from 1907 until 1947, never even persuaded convention delegates to establish a nationwide death benefit for members.

During the upheavals of the early 1930s, however, Teamster locals in Minneapolis, under the leadership of Farrell Dobbs, started to work together to refuse to unload goods shipped across jurisdictions and across town unless the trucking company agreed to unionize. Their actions culminated in a general strike that won them a citywide contract with a multiplicity of employers, and Dobbs schooled the young Hoffa in how to organize by using the Teamsters’ regional power to bring employers to heel.

What had worked in Minneapolis, Hoffa reasoned, could work in Detroit. And throughout the ’40s and early ’50s, as trucking slowly began to eclipse rail, Hoffa intervened to interdict shipments to grow his union across broader and broader terrains, crafting contracts that covered all of Michigan, and then all the Midwest. Local leaders sometimes resented the loss of autonomy that accompanied such regionalization, but Hoffa had developed into a dynamic speaker who convinced rank-andfile members that he was their champion, and produced the contracts that backed that up—salving local leaders’ egos and pocketbooks with financial rewards.

Labor academics like Harvard’s John Dunlop viewed Hoffa’s “area contracts” as an innovation in labor relations. They bore some resemblance to Germany’s regionwide contracts in a number of industries, which in recent decades have provided many German workers with higher pay and benefits than their American counterparts. They also heralded the sectorwide bargaining that other European nations have embraced.

In 1957, Hoffa was elected

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Teamster president, and began campaigning for a single nationwide truckers’ contract. Over the next seven years, constantly traversing the country, he schooled his members in the logic of sweeping, multi-employer contracts: telling Los Angeles workers in 1961 how he’d won higher wages all across Arkansas, telling New York workers in 1962 how he’d won higher wages across Los Angeles, telling Philadelphia workers in 1963 how he’d won higher wages across New York. In late 1963, seeing the handwriting on the wall, more than 800 trucking companies agreed to sit down with Hoffa to bargain a single nationwide contract.

In January 1964, the two sides came to terms—Hoffa’s terms. The National Master Freight Agreement set wage, pension, and health insurance standards which every employer was required to meet. Every one of the approximately 450,000 Teamster truckers (close to half of all truckers in America) was covered by the contract. The New York Times termed the agreement “one of the most significant developments of the postwar period.”

The deal led to an immediate jump in incomes in parts of the country where pay standards were low, particularly the South. To get that deal, Hoffa had had to win support from locals in parts of the country where work paid more handsomely than the standard. He included riders to the contract that allowed locals to bargain for pay and benefits above, but never below, the national floor. Goldsmith writes that the mob-controlled unions in places like New York also helped by squelching any dissent.

In building support among members for the contract, Hoffa established a rapport with the rank and file that no other union leader appeared to possess. His appeal wasn’t just in the merits of his arguments, but in his manner of speaking—abusive to critics, the establishment, the federal officials trying to put him in jail for jury tampering. Hoffa was the drivers’ guy, spewing bile at authority. Think Donald Trump, if

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Many Teamsters not only forgave Hoffa for his excesses; they positively reveled in his transgressions.

Trump directed his attacks solely at wealthy elites, not minorities or immigrants, and solely for the benefit of workers. Like Trump’s legions, Hoffa’s not merely forgave him his excesses; they reveled in his transgressions.

The same posture, however, took its toll in public opinion. In early 1957, during his campaign for the Teamster presidency, Hoffa was made to testify before a senatorial committee probing corruption in the labor movement. Headed by longtime Southern reactionaries, the committee was determined to use the hearings as a basis for new, anti-union legislation. They were abetted by their young general counsel, Robert Kennedy, who took every opportunity to demean and ridicule the witnesses in general and Hoffa in particular. Throughout the nationally televised hearings, Hoffa responded with belligerent indifference to the charges of violence and corruption, displaying a hatred of government duplicity and bourgeois morality that his members relished but that the television audience found appalling.

In January, before the hearings began, Gallup found unions’ approval rating was at an all-time high of 75 percent. By the time the hearings had concluded in September, that rating had fallen to 65 percent, beginning a decades-long slide. The hearings, labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein has written, “had a devastating impact on the moral standing of the entire trade-union world.” For decades thereafter, companies would invoke the Teamsters’ reputation for violence and corruption in their campaigns to dissuade their workers from unionizing.

Hoffa went to prison for jury tampering in 1967, effectively ending his very personal reign over what then was the nation’s largest union. His North Star, wrote two academics who’d followed his campaign for the National Master Freight Agreement, had always been “power aggrandizement for himself and the union, the building of an industry-wide contractual structure under a single unified command—his own.”

No wonder he raged at his inability to take it back.

AFTER THE FALL

Thirteen years after Hoffa disappeared, the great edifice of economic advancement he’d constructed began to crumble. In 1980, in a bipartisan act of Congress demanded by President Carter, the trucking industry was deregulated. In short order, new entrants not bound by the National Master Freight Agreement flooded the industry, while established employers refused to renew its terms.

Where once more than a thousand trucking companies adhered to its provisions, by 2008, only five companies remained in the national employers’ organization Hoffa had compelled the industry to assemble. Today’s truckers still drive the roads, but the middle-class wages and benefits their forebears once received have been largely relegated to the history books.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the Teamsters grew steadily more mobbed up, until 1990, when the government finally ousted its leaders and began monitoring and restructuring the union. In 2015—with the union cleaned up and the mob decimated—the government lifted its oversight. Today, like its peers, the Teamsters are a union embattled by corporate and Republican existential hostility to labor, but at the same time are engaged in numerous organizing campaigns and generally progressive political initiatives.

In 1980, as deregulation was about to descend on American truckers’ livelihoods, the Teamster old guard tried one more oldschool tactic. Teamster President Roy Williams sought to persuade Senator Howard Cannon, Democrat of Nevada, to kill the bill in committee. His method of persuasion, which Cannon rejected and for which Williams subsequently did time, was an attempted bribe.

Those of us who mourn the disappearance of a large and thriving middle class might wish that for one last time, this Hoffa-esque ploy had succeeded.

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How the Supreme Court Contributed to Growing Inequality Two new histories show how the egalitarian advances under Earl Warren were reversed. BY MARK JOSEPH STERN B

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rom 1953 to 1969, the Supreme Court undertook a sustained assault on America’s racial apartheid, dismantling Jim Crow and transforming the federal judiciary into a bulwark of individual liberty. Then Richard Nixon assumed the presidency—and the Court’s crusade screeched to a halt.

Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the Court’s “rights revolution,” stepped down, followed by three more justices, allowing Nixon to reshape the Court into a body that not only tolerated oppression but actively thwarted democracy. The Supreme Court is best known for its expansion of personal freedom in cases like Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and Obergefell v. Hodges. But these highlights can obscure the Court’s role as a dangerously reactionary institution in the half-century since Warren retired.

As Adam Cohen shows in Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, the beginning of this retreat from Warren’s grand vision can be largely attributed to Nixon himself. In 1968, Nixon ran as a law-and-order candidate, criticizing the Warren Court’s criminal justice decisions, which dramatically expanded the rights of the accused. When he took office, Nixon wasn’t content to replace Warren, who announced his plans to retire before the election. He also wanted to take down Justice Abe Fortas, a liberal Lyndon B. Johnson appointee. Like most justices today, Fortas made money on the side: He taught a summer seminar at American University Law School and provided advice to a civil rights foundation, earning a handsome paycheck for both gigs. There was nothing remotely illegal about Fortas’s

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work, but Nixon instructed his attorney general, John Mitchell, to investigate Fortas anyway.

Mitchell turned up no incriminating evidence, but he leaked the investigation to stir up bad press for Fortas. He also visited Warren at the Supreme Court, an astonishing breach of protocol, and convinced the chief justice that his colleague behaved unethically. Warren pressured Fortas to resign, which he did. The chief justice then stepped down—followed in 1971 by the ailing Justices Hugo Black (a liberal) and John Marshall Harlan (a moderate conservative). Nixon appointed four justices in a single term.

To Cohen, Nixon’s Fortas squeeze is the original sin of the modern Supreme Court. Had Fortas remained on the bench, a slew of 5-4 decisions over the next decade would likely have come out differently. Those include some of the most devastating rulings of the 1970s. In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the Court allowed states to underfund schools in poorer districts, damning lower-income children to inferior education. In Milliken v. Bradley, the Court kneecapped school integration, tolerating the resegregation of urban schools through white flight. And in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Court granted corporations a First Amendment right to spend money influencing elections, a decision that laid the groundwork for Citizens United.

Nixon’s Supreme Court appointees also renounced a major project that the Warren Court had launched in its waning months: establishing constitutional protections for the poor. In April 1969, the justices handed down Shapiro v. Thompson, which prohibited

SUPREME INEQUALITY: THE SUPREME COURT’S FIFTY-YEAR BATTLE FOR A MORE UNJUST AMERICA

BY ADAM COHEN

Penguin

DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY: THE ENDURING CONSTITUTIONAL VISION OF THE WARREN COURT

BY GEOFFREY R. STONE AND DAVID A. STRAUSS

Oxford University Press

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states from denying welfare to new residents. On the surface, Shapiro was a case about the right to travel.

But Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion went beyond that issue, suggesting that the Equal Protection Clause also safeguards individuals’ right to access “the very means to subsist—food, shelter, and other necessities of life.”

These words raised the possibility that the Constitution affirmatively required states to provide these “necessities” to their residents.

Shapiro, Cohen notes, augured an earthquake in welfare law that never arrived. Had Fortas stayed on the Court, Brennan might have had a five-justice majority to declare a fullthroated right to welfare, forcing states to provide impoverished residents with adequate food, housing, and cash. Instead, the court promptly abandoned poor people.

Nixon’s appointees upheld vicious assaults on low-income communities, allowing states to starve needy families by denying them meaningful assistance. These justices also blessed state schemes that denied destitute individuals access to the justice system by coercing them to pay court fees they could not afford. And they stripped these people of procedural rights, making it easier for states to arbitrarily kick them off welfare.

Cohen persuasively argues that this reconstituted Supreme Court helped to create the income inequality that has become a defining (and grotesque) feature of contemporary America. His trenchant, gripping, and surprisingly accessible account guides readers through a slew of ruinous rulings that warped the Constitution. In decisions like Milliken and Rodriguez, the conservative majority broke Brown’s great promise of educational equality, condemning poor children to subpar, often segregated schooling.

(Cohen acknowledges that, in 25 states, courts have ordered fairer school financing, and yet these states’ educational systems remain unequal. He blames the Supreme Court for failing to “put its power and prestige behind equal school

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funding,” arguably overestimating state legislators’ respect for federal court orders.) In decisions like Bellotti, the justices allowed wealthy people to capture the political system, spending millions to rig the government in favor of corporate interests. And in the welfare cases, the court doomed countless Americans, including children, to poverty, homelessness, and starvation.

It is a cycle that continues to this day, and one that Donald Trump appears eager to accelerate. His judicial nominees are, if anything, more reactionary than Nixon’s, hungry to tighten the richest Americans’ stranglehold on democracy while permitting the oppression of women, minorities, and poor people. Many of Trump’s nominees are members of the Federalist Society, a conservative network of lawyers keen to roll back the perceived excesses of the Warren Court. These judges espouse the theory of originalism, insisting that the Constitution must be given the meaning it had when it was first written.

The rise of originalism has cast doubt on the Warren Court’s most famous decisions. Federalist Society judges often malign these rulings as borderline illegitimate, nothing more than policy-driven legislating in the guise of judicial interpretation. In Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court, Geoffrey R. Stone and David A. Strauss seek to rescue Warren’s reputation, defending his legacy against his influential detractors.

Their book is engaging and enlightening, and much less depressing than Cohen’s—even though it winds up in roughly the same place.

Stone and Strauss’s mission is not particularly fashionable today, even in liberal circles. Progressive groups such as the Constitutional Accountability Center have claimed originalism for the left, accusing conservatives of manipulating the theory to smuggle Republican aims into the law. Few prominent jurists or scholars now espouse “living constitutionalism,” the theory that constitutional commands must be

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interpreted in light of present-day circumstances, so thoroughly has the Federalist Society trashed its reputation. When Democrats convened a panel of experts to defend the legal basis of Trump’s impeachment, each panelist sought to channel the intent of the Founders; each laid claim to an originalist understanding of how the framers of the Constitution understood impeachment. It is telling that none even attempted to argue that we should adjust our conception of “high crimes and misdemeanors” to modern forms of corruption.

But many of the Warren Court’s most revered decisions are impossible to square with originalism, even the forward-looking kind espoused by many progressives.

That fact, Stone and Strauss argue, should be celebrated, not ignored or concealed. To them, the Warren Court articulated a kind of living constitutionalism that is not only legitimate but necessary to safeguard the nation’s core beliefs.

Hardcore originalism, Stone and Strauss make clear, is a recipe for the rampant discrimination that Warren fought to eradicate.

The best examples of this problem are the Warren Court’s two best-known race cases: Brown v.

Board of Education, forbidding school segregation, and Loving v.

Virginia, invalidating interracial marriage bans. Neither opinion is remotely defensible on the basis of originalist theory as espoused by conservatives, though some right-leaning scholars have made feeble attempts. The Congress that passed the 14th Amendment, the basis of both rulings, approved of segregated schools in the District of Columbia. Moreover, as Eric Foner, the preeminent scholar of Reconstruction, has shown, whites’ opposition to “miscegenation” was nearly universal in the 1860s, even among Radical Republicans. The men who drafted the 14th Amendment, as well as their constituents, understood “social rights” like marriage to fall outside the scope of its equality guarantee. Virtually every citizen who supported the amendment at the time of its passage

Neither Brown v. Board of Education nor Loving v. Virginia is remotely defensible on the basis of originalist theory as espoused by conservatives.

would have been appalled and disgusted by Loving.

Does that mean Loving was an illegitimate decision? To the contrary, Stone and Strauss write: Loving, like other Warren Court landmarks, was “principled, lawful, and consistent with the spirit and fundamental values of our Constitution.” Stone and Strauss cite Justice Harlan Fiske Stone’s famous Footnote Four in U.S. v. Carolene Products as the basis for Warren’s approach to the Constitution.

Courts, Justice Stone wrote, should generally defer to the democratic branches by upholding duly enacted laws. But when legislation “restricts … political processes” or discriminates against “discrete and insular minorities,” it must be subject to “more searching judicial inquiry.”

This principle animates the Warren Court’s best decisions. That includes Brown and Loving, which involved laws that ostensibly applied equally to whites and blacks but, in reality, degraded racial minorities.

It justifies the Court’s redistricting rulings, which enshrined “one person, one vote” into the Constitution, despite a tradition of malapportionment stretching back to the founding. And it lies behind the Court’s criminal procedure cases, like Mapp v. Ohio (demanding the suppression of illegally obtained evidence at trial), Gideon v. Wainwright (ordering states to provide counsel to indigent defendants), and Miranda v.

Arizona (requiring police to inform suspects of their rights). Stone and Strauss illustrate how Southern states maintained Jim Crow through the criminal justice system, subjecting impoverished blacks to illegal searches and violent interrogations, convicting them at sham trials, then stripping them of their liberty. Obviously, the Court did not eliminate racism among police and prosecutors. But it did curtail these officials’ most extreme and brutal constitutional violations.

Like Cohen, Stone and Strauss bemoan the post-Warren cases that disavowed the judiciary’s duty to enforce broad conceptions of liberty and equality. They also point out a few cases, like Roe

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(recognizing a right to abortion access) and Obergefell (protecting same-sex couples’ right to marry) that follow in the Warren Court’s footsteps. But these rulings were anomalies when they came down.

And they are under serious threat today, as Trump has replaced the sometimes-liberal Justice Anthony Kennedy with the arch-conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

A great deal of opposition to Kavanaugh’s confirmation—before Christine Blasey Ford’s explosive allegations of sexual assault, at least—centered around his hostility to abortion rights. Kavanaugh, however, will do more than erode or overturn Roe. He is also poised to further dismantle campaignfinance regulations, allowing plutocrats and corporations to buy elections, while tolerating flagrant voter suppression that tends to benefit Republicans. In 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause, Kavanaugh cast the fifth vote barring voters from challenging partisan gerrymandering in federal court. That decision went directly against the spirit of the Warren Court’s “one person, one vote” rulings, allowing lawmakers to dilute votes cast for their opponents. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh may soon strike down limits on contributions to candidates, letting the ultra-rich purchase politicians, as well as disclosure rules, allowing them to do so in secret.

The conservative majority that took shape after Warren retired set in motion a stratification of rights, giving the wealthy more control over governance while locking everybody else out of the political process. Kavanaugh may usher in a new, even more radical phase of that slow-burning revolution.

Cohen, Stone, and Strauss urge us to reject conservatives’ partisan originalism and fight for a return to Warren’s equality-based Constitution. But their books are less a rallying cry than a eulogy for the egalitarian democracy envisioned by the Warren Court and betrayed by its successors.

Mark Joseph Stern covers courts and the law for Slate.

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The Art of Organizing Union drives in cultural institutions like museums are exposing hypocrisy—and perhaps, expanding the popular image of labor rights. BY BEIGE LUCIANO-ADAMS M U

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s a promising wave of organizing helps shift the narrative around labor unions in the U.S., recent polls suggest public support is at its highest rates in decades. This follows a record year of strikes, in which teachers, hotel employees, and health care workers have turned local struggles into national movements. Meanwhile, toxic work environments, exploitation, and substandard conditions— both expression and incitement of the obscene inequality that defines our era—continue to drive workers in tech, service industries, and various pockets of the gig economy to seek representation. More diverse memberships, including in sectors historically peripheral to the labor movement, are redefining what it means to be a unionist.

As part of this trend, organizing in art museums, nonprofits, and cultural institutions is having a moment. Workers are drawing attention to the gulf between institutional mandates and internal labor practices, and challenging assumptions about what kind of workers deserve protection. In spaces long insulated by prestige, they are questioning the normalization of uneven labor rights.

Taking inspiration from newly formed unions at the Guggenheim, the Tenement Museum, and the New Museum in New York, employees at the Marciano Art Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Los Angeles, recently submitted union cards to the National Labor Relations Board. Marciano, an outgrowth of the Guess fashion empire that remains a caricature of anti-union animus two decades after moving its sweatshops from downtown L.A. to Mexico, immediately laid off the museum’s entire staff and folded, citing

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low attendance. MOCA initially issued a dismissive statement. But bruised from a series of controversies, and striving to establish itself as a relevant civic beacon on downtown L.A.’s re-emergent Grand Avenue, it quickly pivoted and voluntarily recognized the union in early December.

Before Marciano and MOCA , there was the Museum of Tolerance, which in 2018 became the first major museum in L.A. to unionize. The process illuminated familiar cracks in the facade of mission-driven organizations, and offers an example of how people with no union background or even familiarity are turning to organizing.

Josie Cha, a former docent at the Museum of Tolerance who led efforts there, described frustration with permanent part-time status, insecurity, and low wages; in short, a working environment that contradicted the values she expected to share with an organization dedicated to human rights.

“I assumed we would start with minimum wage, get raises regularly, and be paid comparably. But no,” says Cha, who recently left the museum after six years. “I didn’t know anything about unions. But I figure we need some kind of representation, some kind of outside intervention.” She first went to SEIU, but found a better fit with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which now also represents MOCA .

Cha and her colleagues had a growing sense that employees should be compensated fairly and have a voice. But a decision by the museum’s founder- CEO, Rabbi Marvin Hier, to pray at President Trump’s inauguration in 2017 was a turning point. “This is the work

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we’re doing—anti-bigotry, antiracism. And what does Trump stand for? So, of course we don’t like it. They keep telling us we’re apolitical,” Cha says.

Hier, who has praised Trump for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and proclaiming the occupied Golan Heights “now Israeli territory forever,” is no stranger to controversy, like that surrounding a Jerusalem MOT branch built on the site of a historic Muslim cemetery. And it was not lost on Cha and her colleagues, as they fought for better pay, that Hier’s salary has routinely been outsize among nonprofit

explains. “They brought in consultants to intimidate us and lie to us, to talk us into not voting ‘yes.’”

(The Museum of Tolerance did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ling Esangga, organizing director for AFSCME District Council 36 in Los Angeles, described encountering similar pushback at two leading nonprofit legalaid organizations: Public Counsel—the nation’s largest pro bono firm, specializing in sex trafficking, immigration, and social justice work—and Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Contracts were negotiated at both organizations last year.

leaders, at more than $800,000 in 2018. “The reason we unionized was for representation,” she says.

“But these things made us madder. I came here to learn and grow and to do things I thought would be good for the world. Not to be intimidated and exploited.”

When Cha began to organize, management responded swiftly, bringing in anti-union consultants for mandatory meetings with staff.

“It was so difficult for staff to go against the authority figures,” Cha

“Surprisingly enough, these organizations that believe in the social justice movement, there’s been a lot of pushback about having a union in their workplace.

There’s a lot of discomfort and employers discouraging employees from unionizing,” Esangga says.

Maybe it’s not so surprising, suggests Nelson Lichtenstein, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the school’s Center for the Study of Work,

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AFSCME, which assisted the Marciano Art Foundation’s employee organizing effort and protest (shown above), is also working with MOCA employees to unionize.

Labor, and Democracy. He points out that owners, patrons, or philanthropists at mission-driven organizations may feel a sense of self-righteousness, and that labor rights can get relatively short shrift. “They feel they’re doing the Lord’s work. That’s true whether it’s a health clinic, a nonprofit, or environmental group … [As if] the workers are just grubbing around for an extra dollar when ‘we’re saving the planet.’”

Material conditions are driving workers in sectors we don’t readily associate with unions to take action. The days of getting by on minimum wage now seem quaint, certainly in a coastal city, and even with half of states raising the floor in 2020. And particularly in urban centers hit by an affordable-housing crisis, the prestige of working for a cause, being around art—or for that matter, unpaid internships—is of increasingly suspect value. Psychic income doesn’t pay the rent the way tangible dollars do.

“Unionism and collective action, the left, the socialists have said for a century, this is a good thing in itself no matter what the character of the leadership,” Lichtenstein says. “That’s why I think this is an important struggle, beyond just the material conditions. It’s an ideological and cultural struggle of great importance, for the whole society.”

In the case of museums, lowwage and part-time or temporary workers, many of whom have advanced degrees and are expected to have the depth of knowledge required of public-facing roles, are pointing out an obvious and entrenched hypocrisy. “I think there’s this cultural thing … this idea you’re lucky to work there,” says Olivia Leiter, an MFA student and employee with MOCA’s education department.

Kit Lamb, a 30-year-old worker in the A/V department at MOCA and a former gallery attendant at Marciano, describes an intersection of the art world’s exceptionalism and the economic insecurity his generation has grown up with.

“It’s created this kind of precarity

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… you have to be an underling, cut your teeth, be recognized within the community. So it can create a lot of situations for coercion or abuse,” Lamb says.

Kent Wong, director of UCLA’s Labor Center, points to a “major shift” in the modern workplace, where a living wage, solid and consistent benefits, and extended job security are now hard MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles to come by, particularly for a new generation of workers. Wong highlights the cultural shaming. They can just delay, climate—the women’s marches delay, and fire a few people.” and other spasms of dissent that The experience of the Marciano continue to reverberate, perhaps Art Foundation simply closing with a cumulative effect. “[Young its doors when workers sought to people] see growing economic collectively bargain is instrucinequality, massive tax breaks tive. Breaking a union, Lichtenfor the one percent spearheaded stein notes, “just doesn’t have the by this administration. They’re same shaming character, the bad struggling to pay rent, buy clothes.

PR that either racial discriminaThese contradictions are heighttion or sexism has.” The mix of ened at the workplace,” he says. younger, more diverse, and more That’s especially true in the museeducated workers at cultural um world, which is dominated institutions facing the same supat the top by the ultra-rich, while pression of labor rights could, workers barely eke out a living. over time, create a broader sense Conservative efforts to reify the of popular discontent with these 20th-century archetype of a union- practices. But for now, Lichtenist as a white male factory worker stein says, “the heads of museums assembling cars in the Midwest can do this and still get invited to distract from the reality that the the good parties.” modern labor movement includes Amid the drive for transparwomen and people of color and ency and accountability in cultural service industries, from janitors to institutions, employees may find home health care specialists to the ways to leverage the formidable fast-food workers leading the Fight PR machines they’re up against. for $15. But the renewed interest, For MOCA employees, the timing fresh blood, and progressive gains was important. Things came to are hamstrung both by the law and a head when new director Klaus by social climate.

Biesenbach took the helm in 2018, “This is the big conundrum,” explains Brenda Escobar, a fullLichtenstein explains. “Yes, time floor lead who, along with undoubtedly today there is a great Lamb and Leiter, is part of her interest in collective action … union’s organizing committee. BieBut the labor law is terrible … So senbach instituted several changes bad that any management that at MOCA , including a free-admiswants to can prevent the union if sion policy. “It was all happening at they’re willing to put up with a ceronce, but the museum was still the tain expense, a little bit of public same,” Escobar notes. “Everyone

In the case of museums, workers are pointing out an obvious and entrenched hypocrisy.

“I think there’s this cultural thing ... this idea you’re lucky to work there.”

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felt like, ‘Wow, there’s a lot going on but we’re still not getting paid well, still no benefits …’ I felt like workers were not being thought about in that process.”

Biesenbach’s press tour included a targeted message of “civic responsibility.” Speaking of the drive to organize, Escobar mirrors this language: “We’re trying to give access and education to people, and trying to create this community, and that matters a lot for people. We care about the institution.”

Lamb pointed to a spreadsheet that went viral last year, in which more than 3,000 museum employees anonymously disclosed their salaries, as a “galvanizing” moment.

“Throughout both Marciano and MOCA , the spirit has been very much treating this as a movement within museum labor. And taking inspiration from East Coast museums that have done this, to see how we could make this more the standard,” he says.

Despite leaving the Museum of Tolerance, Cha has been brought in to speak at other L.A. nonprofits where workers are facing hardships and abusive behavior. Esangga acknowledged that AFSCME is in the early stages of developing organizing committees at several other Southern California institutions in 2020, though she declined to give details.

Mike Sukal, AFSCME’s national organizing director, reports an uptick in inquiries from culturalinstitution employees across the country, signaling the union’s intent to expand its presence in that sector. “This is definitely a coordinated national effort,” he said.

Cha balances the enthusiasm.

“You don’t know how exhausting it is to unionize. It took me years … And I think unions have a lot of work to do themselves … Hopefully organizations will take that feedback.

“But every worker needs representation. We need representation.”

Beige Luciano-Adams is a journalist and performing artist based in Los Angeles, where she writes about arts, culture, and social issues.

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were often references to scars from a stabbing, a bullet wound, an assault, and in one case, a bullet still lodged in the man’s brain. How then to deal with these young men?

The questions Minow asks are perhaps the ones that judges, legislators, and prosecutors should examine today:

(Un)forgiveable Why do some offenders get a fresh start while others receive harsh, one-size-fits-all sentencing? BY NANCY GERTNER B

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artha Minow is no stranger to tackling the most complex moral, legal, and political issues of our time, from dealing with post-conflict societies in Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence, to addressing the consequences of the Supreme Court decision in her study In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark. In the encyclopedic When Should Law Forgive? she does it again—by considering forgiveness across contexts, from child soldiers in Africa and American gang members; to the process of forgiving the debt of individuals, businesses, even countries; and finally, to granting amnesties and pardons to avoid the legal consequences of a criminal violation. She explores “why a fresh start is permitted in some cases but not others.” Her unique approach connects otherwise unlinked areas and, in so doing, exposes inequities, misperceptions, and biases.

Of course, as I read When Should Law Forgive? I wanted answers, concrete and specific ones. I had been a United States district court judge for 17 years. In each case, as I told my clerks, I had to “land” somewhere, to resolve the case and come up with an answer. Minow doesn’t “land,” but what she does is extraordinarily valuable. First, she provides us with the questions regarding how to think about issues of forgiveness on the theory that unless we do, the answers we come to in a host of areas are bound to be wrong. Second, by looking across all of these settings—bankruptcy, war crimes, criminal justice—she makes clear that forgiveness is neither aberrant nor some touchyfeely exercise on the margins of a proper, formal, rule-bound justice

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system; rather, it is integral to it.

Minow pairs a discussion of child soldiers during the civil war in Sierra Leone in West Africa with an account of young American gang members, in the chapter “Forgiving Youth.” She describes the child soldiers who committed incontestably horrific crimes but were themselves the victims of horrific abuse. The young gang members she writes about, too, faced harm and trauma, threats from their peers and from older gang members, in circumstances where they believed they had no options.

This is a topic with special resonance for me. I am writing a book entitled Incomplete Sentences about some of the young men I sentenced over 17 years—what I knew about them when I imposed sentences which were disproportionate, what I have learned in interviewing them since I left the bench, and how they should have been treated in a humane system. These young men were not juveniles, but as neuroscience suggests, neither were they adults; they were between 18 and 27, their brains still developing. And while the conditions they faced were surely not as extreme as those of the child soldiers, there are painful similarities. I interviewed one man I sentenced who said that he would rather live in jail than die on the street; he had no confidence in the ability or willingness of the police in his neighborhood to protect him.

Minow’s observations also echo the work of sociologist Bruce Western, who writes in Homeward, his book about the Boston Reentry project, that the men he studied were both victims or witnesses of violence and perpetrators. In fact, in the “physical condition” section of the presentence reports that were written by probation officers to guide federal sentencing, there

Should [these young men] be forgiven because others are also to blame? Should they be forgiven because of their youth and vulnerabilities? … Should these individuals be viewed solely as victims? Should evidence of their own agency or autonomy in part or entirely cancel out their status as victims? Should choice entail culpability even when available choices are remaining in terrorized poverty or leaving home …?

Should victimhood be treated as irrebuttable, simply based on the age of the individual, or should evidence that the individual exercised choice … when performing violent acts matter in considering whether to hold the individual accountable? And should the conditions under which an individual entered the combat— often conditions of coercion— determine assessments of their conduct for years that follow?

WHEN SHOULD LAW FORGIVE?

BY MARTHA MINOW

Norton

The question she doesn’t answer relates to “how,” one which occupied my time as a judge: how to make distinctions about the degree of agency of these young gang members when almost all of their backgrounds were characterized by abuse and neglect. This is what Minow describes as the spectrum of agency, exercising degrees of choice under constrained circumstance.

There were those who chose not to be in a gang even when everyone around them was in one. There were those who chose to be in a gang but not to carry a gun. There were those who carried a gun and used it but, as the child soldiers did, “aim[ed] incorrectly, otherwise permitting potential victims to elude harm,” and those who executed their rivals.

Does the fact that some find it possible to do so raise questions about

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culpability for others who do not?

Minow lays out the general approaches to evaluating these young men, whether to treat any minor in the role of a soldier or gang member, or a youthful offender, as categorically beyond blame, or to engage in case-bycase assessment, or to “devise a special approach combining blame and forgiveness.” The categorical approach would put child soldiers or gang members into the box of either perfectly autonomous actors, facing the full brunt of the criminal law regardless of their background, or the opposite, treating them as people completely impaired by their backgrounds, without independent will and responsibility.

American sentencing over the past 30 years has, especially in the federal courts, chosen the categorical. With mandatory minimum sentencing and mandatory federal guidelines, there has been a onesize-fits-all approach. We treated the man who started to deal drugs for school supplies the same way as we treated the man who dealt drugs to supplement his lifestyle.

We ignored meaningful differences in background, mental health, addiction, and role in the offense.

It created a false uniformity.

The case-by-case approach would enable discretion, allowing the judge to make distinctions among those in the group. But unless we can provide real guidance to inform that discretion— fleshing out in more detail answers to Minow’s questions—discretion has its own risks. There is the risk of unequal treatment between races, men and women, and individuals of different economic backgrounds.

Minow is clear in this chapter that she is not counseling forgiveness for everyone or every crime, if that means there is no accountability for a criminal act. She believes that accountability is critical in criminal law, to deter other wrongdoers, to lay down the norms defining acceptable and unacceptable conduct. And accountability

Forgiveness is neither aberrant nor some touchy-feely exercise on the margins of a proper, formal, rule-bound justice system; rather, it is integral to it.

is critical to the wrongdoers themselves. She cites the work of psychologist Cecilia Wainryb, who argues that engaging in violence disrupts the offender’s basic neurological regulatory processes; the failure to hold them accountable in any way may well exacerbate that impact.

Still, while Minow believes that the state has to say that the conduct is wrong, that can’t be all that the state says or, more importantly, all that the state does. Here Minow refers—again, generally— to punishment and its alternatives: conviction without punishment; noncriminal proceedings; specialized juvenile programs; support for economic, social, and psychological programs offered to promote reintegration; and especially, restorative justice. Danielle Sered, in Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, provides the details that Minow does not in this book. She links restorative-justice approaches to creating the opportunity for an offender to be really accountable to his victim and his community. Sered writes that the criminal justice system is “like kryptonite to accountability,” which is critical both to survivors of violence and for offenders. At no point in the current system, except for the defendant’s perfunctory expression of remorse when he is about to be sentenced, is the offender asked to really reckon with what he has done or repair the harm he has caused. Sered has created a program called Common Justice that focuses on what she describes as the five steps of accountability: (1) acknowledging responsibility for one’s actions; (2) acknowledging the impact of one’s actions on others; (3) expressing genuine remorse; (4) taking actions to repair the harm to the degree possible, and guided when feasible by the people harmed, or ‘doing sorry’; and (5) no longer committing similar harm.

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Once the party responsible for the harm has fulfilled all their obligations to the harmed party, the felony is taken off their record and they do not go to prison. While there are limitations in who participates and the sample is still relatively small, the program has been successful; “fewer than 6 percent of Common Justice participants had been terminated from the program for being convicted of a new crime,” a far better record than prison.

One of the more interesting juxtapositions is Minow’s discussion in the chapter following “Forgiving Youth” entitled “Forgiving Debt.” She contrasts the way our legal system deals with criminal punishment—in which “the supply of forgiveness is deficient”—to the way we address debt. We are, she notes, generally forgiving about debt, especially business debt, but not necessarily so about the fees and fines heaped upon criminal defendants. Likewise, the Supreme Court has been scrupulous in evaluating excessive monetary punitive-damage awards from juries, less so with cases permitting life imprisonment and outrageous imprisonment for minor offenses.

Minow’s next chapter, “Amnesties and Pardons,” continues the theme of the limits of forgiveness, when forgiveness is an indefensible assertion of power, not an appropriate act of empathy. She cites President Trump’s 2017 pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been found guilty of criminal contempt for his “flagrant disregard” of a court order. The court order required that he stop harassing and arresting Latinos without any grounds for believing that they had committed a crime. This, to Minow, was a bridge too far. It was an invitation to disobey the law, a complete denial of Arpaio’s wrongdoing, eschewing any accountability for it at all.

Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge, is a professor at Harvard Law School.

VOL . 31, NO. 1. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published bimonthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Ste. 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2020 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

JAN/FEB 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

Parting shot

“The ‘groyper army’—‘groyper’ being a reference to a meme of Pepe the Frog, itself a meme overtaken by the alt-right—purports to be supporting ‘traditional values’ within conservatism, like immigration restrictionism ... This ‘groyper army’ targets what it has termed ‘Conservative Inc,’ a collective epitomized by conservative speakers like pundit Ben Shapiro, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk ... Over the weekend, the ‘groyper army’ targeted Turning Point USA events, one featuring Donald Trump Jr. at UCLA and another featuring Rep. Dan Crenshaw.” —VOX, November 11, 2019

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Listen to the truth-tellers

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

s we embark on a new year and a new decade, I am so grateful to the educators, healthcare professionals and public employees we represent for the extraordinary work they do every day to make a difference in our lives. I’ve always encouraged others to thank them, but this year, I’m asking that we go further: Let’s also listen to the teachers and nurses in our lives. They are truth-tellers who can reveal things we need to know about our country.

Let’s listen to teachers about how they stretch themselves to fill the void left when schools lack counselors, nurses and librarians. And, as some politicians brag about “the best economy ever,” educators can tell us about the other side of an inequitable America: the more than 1.3 million homeless students in our public schools, and the 40 percent of Americans who can’t put together $400 in an emergency.

Let’s listen to teachers about childhood hunger, which makes it difficult to concentrate and learn. Educators know that, for children who experience food insecurity, school meals should be as standard a school supply as paper and pencils, and the inability to afford school lunch should never be used to shame a child. Educators are outraged that, two years after the GOP gave away $2.3 trillion in tax cuts, mostly to the wealthiest Americans and corporations, the Trump administration is cutting SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits for more than 700,000 people and free school meals for nearly 1 million children living in poverty.

experience trauma, that the high cost of healthcare forces many to delay care until they are severely ill, and that many families can’t afford the prescription drugs they need.

Let’s listen to educators who are speaking up against privatization cloaked as “reform.” In Houston, for example, the state’s Republican leadership wants to take over the school district, wresting democratic control from parents and the community. Houston’s public schools have close to an A rating from the state’s accountability system, but state officials have pointed to a single struggling school in their subterfuge to charterize and privatize the district’s public schools. Their ruse defies logic—when your house has a leaky faucet, you don’t put your home up for sale; you fix the things that need repair. Let’s listen to the educators, parents and community leaders who are fighting back and calling for the state to support public education, not sell it off.

Teachers have always had enormous responsibilities—to teach and nurture their students so they have the opportunity to live fulfilling

lives; to help them develop judgment to be engaged citizens; and to make our classrooms and schools safe havens for students, especially now, as students fear mass shootings, and hate and bigotry are on the rise.

Today, when many people believe we are in a war on truth, teachers are helping students to think independently and critically, to distinguish facts from falsehoods, and to make arguments in respectful ways. And as the very foundations of America are being undermined, our teachers are also called to be defenders of decency and guardians of democracy. That is why it is so crucial that teachers and all working people have voice at work, in our democracy and in our elections.

It often feels like we are living in an Alice in Wonderland moment. As some people claim that up is down and down is up, teachers are working to set things straight. Let’s listen to them, because they are educating America’s young people, who all deserve bright futures and on whom our hopes and aspirations rest. Teachers want what children need, and that is good for all of us.

Teachers want what children need, and that is good for all of us.

Many people marveled at the unprecedented “Red for Ed” movement—and then moved on. We should listen closely to the message that sparked this activism: that budget and policy choices like austerity and syphoning money from public schools fail our students and make teaching an even more draining and financially untenable profession. Educators are telling us what children need to thrive. In Los Angeles, striking teachers won class size limits, more librarians and a full-time nurse in every school. And in Chicago, educators secured a pledge that the district will hire more special education teachers and ensure every public school has a nurse and a social worker.

These activist educators know how essential nurses, therapists and other healthcare professionals are. Let’s listen to them, as well. They know that nearly half of America’s children

Photo: Bruce Gilbert

Weingarten, right, with educators at Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx, N.Y. Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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