The Clinton Conundrum BY WALTER SHAPIRO
Taking Sides in a Class War BY HAROLD MEYERSON
Hillary: Cool Granny BY MONICA POTTS
Liberals Post-Obama BY PAUL WALDMAN
J U L / A U G 2 014
DOES THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAVE A FUTURE?
L A R E B I L
contents
VOLUME 25, NUMBER 4 JUL /AUG 2014
PAGE 7
PAGE 25
PAGE 42
PAGE 66
NOTEBOOK 7 THE SPIRIT AND THE LAW BY AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX 14 THE CONVERSATION CHARLES E. COBB JR. & DANIELLE L. MCGUIRE
FEATURES 16 SPECIAL ISSUE DOES THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAVE A LIBERAL FUTURE? 18 WHY DEMOCRATS NEED TO TAKE SIDES BY HAROLD MEYERSON 25 WHAT A LOT OF BLUE MONEY CAN DO: A BOARD GAME BY ABBY RAPOPORT 28 A BRIDGE IN GEORGIA BY BOB MOSER 32 MIDWESTERN MALADIES BY ANNA CLARK 38 DEMOCRATIC SUGAR-DADDY DOSSIER BY ANDY KROLL 42 HILLARY FOR LIBERALS A CONVERSATION WITH WALTER SHAPIRO 48 COOL GRANDMA BY MONICA POTTS 52 CAN LIBERALISM SURVIVE OBAMA? BY PAUL WALDMAN
CULTURE 59 WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH THE KOCHS? BY TOM CARSON 62 BOIES AND OLSON’S WEDDING MARCH BY JONATHAN CAPEHART 66 SALLY RIDE AND THE BURDENS OF “THE FIRST” BY ANN FRIEDMAN 70 THE COLORBLIND BIND BY RICHARD ROTHSTEIN 78 IN THE OUTSIDERS’ CLUB BY CLARE MALONE & AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX 83 ARE LITERARY PRIZES BEYOND PARODY? BY DEBORAH COHEN
COLUMNS 5 PROSPECTS CONSERVATIVES MUGGED BY REALITY BY ROBERT KUTTNER Cover art by Peter & Maria Hoey; art above by John Ritter, Peter & Maria Hoey, and Steve Brodner. Photo courtesy NASA.
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contributors
BOB MOSER, executive editor of the Prospect, reports from Georgia on why the state is trending Democratic. “I loved getting to meet the long-suffering progressive activists in the state who now have genuine hope,” he says. “One elderly civil-rights legend told me he’s ‘ready to knock on every door in Georgia if that’s what it takes.’ I don’t think he was exaggerating, either.”
ANNA CLARK is a freelance journalist who lives in Detroit. She examines the future of the Democratic Party in the Midwest. “Whether it is the ‘Rust Belt’ or ‘swing states’ or ‘flyover country,’” she says, “I’ve always felt that national narratives about the Midwest are lacking. This is a nuanced region. Politics is just one realm for the fascinating story to unfold.”
ANN FRIEDMAN is a columnist for New York magazine’s website and a freelance journalist. She reviews Lynn Sherr’s biography of Sally Ride. “I had a good laugh,” she says, “upon reading that male NASA engineers of the 1970s were so clueless about basic female biology they tried to send Ride into orbit—for just a week—with 100 tampons strung together like sausages.”
AMELIA THOMSON- DEVEAUX is a Prospect writing fellow. She writes about the history of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the little-known law firm leading the charge against the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. “We forget that lawyers are also storytellers,” she says. “The Becket Fund has helped shape a new narrative where religious freedom and secular values can rarely co-exist.”
ABBY RAPOPORT is a Prospect staff writer. She authored the game on turning states Democratic. “The progressive blueprint for winning states,” she says, “relies on innovations and loopholes in the campaignfinance system. Showcasing it as a board game helps illustrate the costs and benefits of such an approach, while, we hope, giving readers a bit of a laugh, too.”
TOM CARSON, GQ’s film reviewer and the author of Gilligan’s Wake (2003) and Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter (2011), reviews Daniel Schulman’s Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. “The big surprise was the backstory,” he says. “The whole family’s psychological thickets are so fascinating that I sometimes even forgot they’re evil. Mea culpa.”
JONATHAN CAPEHART is an opinion writer for The Washington Post and an MSNBC contributor. He reviews Redeeming the Dream by Ted Olson and David Boies. “They got half of what they wanted,” he says, “but their book is a triumphant look at the journey of the fight for marriage equality in the Proposition 8 challenge that went to the Supreme Court.”
KIT RACHLIS has been editor-inchief of the Prospect for the past three years. This is his last issue. He’s leaving to join a start-up based in San Francisco. “The role the Prospect plays,” he says, “is essential—to connect politics and policy to real people’s lives, to find stories that resonate emotionally as well as intellectually, to ask hard questions not just of society but of ourselves.”
PUBLISHER JAY HARRIS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KIT RACHLIS FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR EXECUTIVE EDITOR BOB MOSER ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS CULTURE EDITOR SARAH KERR EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON SENIOR EDITORS CHRISTEN ARAGONI, GABRIEL ARANA WEB EDITOR ADELE M. STAN SENIOR WRITER MONICA POTTS STAFF REPORTER ABBY RAPOPORT WRITING FELLOW AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX EDITORIAL INTERNS GAVIN BADE, NATHALIE BAPTISTE, JULIA CALAGIOVANNI, KRISTEN DOERER, MICAH ESCOBEDO, ELAINE TENG CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MARCIA ANGELL, JAMELLE BOUIE, ALAN BRINKLEY, TOM CARSON, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, KATHRYN JOYCE, RANDALL KENNEDY, SARAH POSNER, JOHN POWERS, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, DEBORAH A. STONE, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGY & DEVELOPMENT AMY CONROY PUBLISHING ASSOCIATE AMANDA TEUSCHER ADVERTISING MANAGER ED CONNORS, (202) 776-0730 X119, ECONNORS@PROSPECT.ORG BOARD OF DIRECTORS JANET SHENK (CHAIR), SARAH FITZRANDOLPH BROWN, LINDSEY FRANKLIN, JAY HARRIS, STEPHEN HEINTZ, ROBERT KUTTNER, MARIO LUGAY, ARNIE MILLER, KIT RACHLIS, MILES RAPOPORT, ADELE SIMMONS, PAUL STARR, BEN TAYLOR AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT ACME PUBLISHING SERVICES SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE 1-888-MUST-READ (687-8732) SUBSCRIPTION RATES $29.95 (U.S.), $39.95 (CANADA), AND $44.95 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PERMISSIONS@PROSPECT.ORG
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To Our Readers With the June 6 departure of editor-in-chief Kit Rachlis to take a new position in California, co-editors Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr, who founded The American Prospect in 1990, will again direct it, beginning with the fall issue. Adele M. Stan remains the digital editor, and Harold Meyerson remains editor-at-large. When we started The American Prospect with Robert Reich in 1990, our aim was to foster a “plausible and persuasive liberalism” by bringing together journalists and scholars into a public conversation about the future of American society and politics. In nearly 25 years, the Prospect has undergone numerous changes both in print and online, but as we return to a more direct role than we have had in recent years, the Prospect’s mission remains the same—cultivating the ideas and the reporting needed to help build a democratic politics and a decent society. We are committed to keeping the Prospect as a strong and vital voice in both print and digital forms. The magazine will continue its blend of analytical essays and deeply reported articles on politics, economics, and culture. The website will continue with fresh material to be updated daily. We will maintain our writing fellows program, which has helped to launch the careers of many of the best young progressive journalists in the country. The Prospect also has to adjust to some hard economic realities. As a result, we are reducing the number of issues per year from six to four and making other economies. Despite these changes, we will produce a first-rate magazine; financial retrenchment need not mean retrenchment of mission or quality. As a small magazine, the Prospect has always punched above its weight. In our view, the distinctive character of the Prospect comes from the combined contributions by journalists with a deep knowledge of their subject and by social scientists, historians, and other scholars able to write for a broad public. Digital publication is crucial to the future of the Prospect. New digital publications—some of them created by our own alumni— have changed the landscape of liberal media. We take pride in having helped give birth to our online competition! And we recognize that we need to re-establish our distinctive place amid the many alternatives available to our readers. The political moment today has one thing in common with the moment in 1990 when the magazine began. Liberalism is struggling to find an effective majority politics for changes that are in the interests of an overwhelming majority of the public. The changes today are needed, above all, to reverse trends toward economic inequality and insecurity, global warming, the erosion of American democracy, and the paralysis of the federal government. In the face of those problems, it’s easy to think that the urgent challenges are entirely those of practical politics: If we just win elections, all will be well. Liberalism in America, however, is not a settled philosophy or politics merely in need of being carried out. It requires a constant willingness to learn new things about the world and to rethink ideas, policies, and strategies. Our aim is to help that process of replenishment. Stay with us. Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr Co-Editors, The American Prospect
A Note from the Chair The American Prospect has a 25-year history of surviving challenges and surpassing past achievements. Under the leadership of Kit Rachlis, editor-in-chief, and Bob Moser, executive editor, the magazine reached new heights of journalistic excellence and innovative design. As publisher, Jay Harris helped us reach new and younger readers. Our columnists, writers, and writing fellows have produced award-winning stories, in print and on the Web, that serve as “brain food for activists,” in the words of one fan. We are deeply proud of what has been accomplished over the last three years. At the same time, it’s no secret that the challenge of sustaining a nonprofit magazine committed to ambitious reporting and serious analysis is greater than ever, and our finances simply haven’t been strong enough to continue as we were. When Kit decided to go back to California for a new venture, we had difficult choices to make. The board thanks Kit and Bob Moser for their leadership, and we are deeply sorry to see them go. But a new chapter is beginning for the Prospect, as we turn to two prolific writers and thinkers who dreamed it up and made it happen in the first place, Bob Kuttner and Paul Starr. They have been visionaries for the Prospect for a long time, and they are ready to take up the challenge once again. We are eager to support their efforts and committed to the ongoing success of The American Prospect. Janet Shenk Board Chair, The American Prospect
We Need Explorers When we send our children off to school, we want them to be explorers and critical thinkers who can make connections and interpretations all their own. That’s why nearly every state has chosen to adopt the Common Core State Standards, a set of consistent, gamechanging standards that will better equip students for college and careers in the global economy—no matter where they live. Join the educators of the National Education Association in supporting the Common Core State Standards and their common-sense implementation. So every student will have the chance to succeed.
nea.org/CommonCore Great Public Schools for Every Student
Prospects
Conservatives Mugged by Reality BY ROBERT KUTTNER
T
oday’s conservatives have a problem. The middle class is increasingly anxious about its economic prospects, and with good reason. Inflation-adjusted earnings have declined for most people since 2000, long before the collapse of 2008. Young adults face more than $1.2 trillion in college debt, declining entry-level salaries, high costs of housing and childrearing, and dwindling employer health and pension benefits. With new public attention being paid to inequality of income and wealth, these concerns don’t exactly play to conservative strengths. The era since 1981 has been one of turning away from public remediation, toward tax cuts, limited social spending, deregulation, and privatization. None of this worked well, except for the very top. For everyone else, the shift to conservative policies generated more economic insecurity. The remedies are those of liberals. So what’s a conservative to do? A good illustration of how the right is responding is a manifesto titled Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class. The document is a series of essays written by people who profess to be intellectually serious “reform conservatives,” as a credulous press calls them. Room to Grow is published by the YG Network, which stands for “Young Guns.” The manifesto acknowledges as Young Guns founders House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan, House
Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy, and former Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a trinity that suggests the limits of reform. The editors and writers include such middle-aged guns as Peter Wehner, former head of George W. Bush’s in-house White House think tank; Yuval Levin, founding editor of the journal National Affairs; Scott Winship of the Manhattan Institute; and National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. At least these conservatives admit Republicans have a problem. The document begins by candidly stating the plight of the middle class and the challenges facing the right. “Sixty-two percent of those in the middle class say the Republican Party favors the rich while 16 percent say the Democratic Party favors the rich,” Wehner writes. “Americans do not have a sense that conservatives offer them a better shot at success and security than liberals.” Well, yes. But the remedies the young guns offer are mostly the same old stuff—more tax cuts, tax credits for everything from health insurance to education, more deregulation, more vouchers, more cuts in social supports. To help the long-term unemployed, they propose a temporary reduced minimum wage. To read this manifesto, you would think liberals had been in charge since 1981 and that the woes of the middle class had not worsened during an era of conservative dominance. Where the document offers genuinely new stuff, it can be out of touch bordering on creepy.
For example, the authors, proposing cuts in social insurance, write that “Social Security and Medicare have ‘crowded out’ the traditional incentive to raise children as a protection against poverty in old age. Today, most workers can reasonably foresee getting enough support from the public retirement system to stay out of poverty when they get older,
has been so successful at blocking liberal initiatives to deliver tangible help that the middle class is not sure which party to trust. Second, compromises like the Affordable Care Act that do make it through Congress are hobbled by a costly and complex role for commercial middlemen—and seem to represent government inefficiency. And third, the details
The remedies “reform conservatives” propose to help the middle class are the very policies that have been killing the middle class. making it less likely that they will have to call on direct aid—either in cash or in kind—from their own children.” In other words, if only the government did not provide so much help, people would have more kids, who would support their parents in old age. So let’s go back to the 19th century. Are the authors aware that the median Social Security check is only about $14,000 a year, pretty bare subsistence? With young adults suffering downward mobility, are these young guns serious about adding burdens of supporting aging parents as well as raising young children? No wonder voters are skeptical. If conservatives offer little that’s credible to the anxious middle class, why aren’t liberals just trouncing them? First, the right
are wonky. This exercise is more about slogans and headlines. Only a tiny fraction of voters will notice the holes in the specifics. So despite such empty rhetoric, Republicans are poised to win the midterm elections. So what’s a liberal to do? As the party that considers itself responsible stewards of government, Democrats are reluctant to offer proposals that stand no immediate chance of passage. The liberal imagination has been stunted by decades of conservative obstruction and has lost its power to inspire. Most of what ails the middle class requires far more robust policies than are currently in mainstream debate. Liberals should say what they are really for. They might even win more followers.
JUL/AUG 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5
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The Spirit and the Law How the Becket Fund became the leading advocate for corporations’ religious rights BY A M E L I A T H O M S O N - D E V E A U X
jo hn r i t t e r
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n March, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, one of the most-followed cases of the year. The Oklahoma craft-store chain, alongside a much smaller Mennonite cabinetmaker, was fighting the provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires employers to provide no-cost birth control through their insurance plans. Hobby Lobby and its coplaintiff argued that providing contraception—specifically, four
hormonal contraceptives that many pro-life Christians insist cause abortion—is an unacceptable violation of their companies’ religious standards. It’s an unprecedented complaint. A for-profit company has never been granted a religious exemption, much less a corporation like Hobby Lobby, which has 23,000 employees. If Hobby Lobby is successful, religious business owners will have much broader leeway over their
employees’ health-care plans. But the case also raises a basic constitutional question: How should we weigh religious conscience against laws that apply to everyone? A ruling in Hobby Lobby’s favor would give believers wide latitude. Religious scruples could be invoked to duck all manner of laws—even anti-discrimination statutes. At the heart of the Hobby Lobby case are the craft store’s owners, the Greens, a multigenerational family of evangelical Christians.
On the plaintiffs’ website—a glossy scrolling page where supporters are encouraged to “donate a tweet” to the Greens’ cause— their story unfolds in a video. “In 1970, with only $600 and unwavering faith, David and Barbara Green began a small business out of their garage,” the voiceover begins. “What’s at stake here,” the video continues, “is whether you’re able to keep your religion when you open a family business.” The Greens are the public face for the case, but a little-known nonprofit law firm called the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is its driving force. Even Hobby Lobby’s detractors agree that the Becket Fund’s lawyers are among the country’s most capable defenders of religious rights. If the Supreme Court grants the company its
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exemption, it will be in large part because of the Becket Fund’s masterful telling of the Greens’ story. The fight over the Obama administration’s alleged infringement on religious freedom is Becket’s first extended turn in the national spotlight since it was founded in 1994. For more than two years, the fund—with a budget of less than $4 million and 11 lawyers on staff—has constructed the legal argument against requiring religious organizations to comply with the contraception mandate. Forcing any organization to subsidize healthcare plans that defy its faith is, the fund claims, a breach of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute passed in 1993 that allows believers to demand exemptions from laws that place a “substantial burden” on their religious rights. Late in 2011, Becket filed the first suit against the mandate on behalf of Belmont Abbey College, a school founded by Benedictine monks. Since then—perhaps encouraged by its success in lower courts— the fund has agreed to represent six more nonprofits. The Hobby Lobby case is more ambitious than these challenges. It’s one thing to argue that a Catholic college’s daily operations are imbued with a religious ethos. It’s another to contend that a corporation, competing in a secular marketplace, is so fundamentally guided by its owners’ faith that it should enjoy religiousliberty rights. Becket’s attorneys are applying a similar logic in other cases. Among their clients are religious business owners, almost always Christian, who face discrimination charges for refusing to provide services associated with same-sex weddings. These lawsuits are the cousins of the so-called conscience cases, in which a religious pharmacist who declines to sell emergency contraception runs afoul of state law. Becket is litigating a couple of those, too. The Becket Fund has always insisted that it is that rare type of religiousliberty advocate: an organization with no partisan allegiances, committed to defending faiths of all sizes with equal zeal. Kevin J. “Seamus” Hasson, the group’s founder, liked to boast that Becket defended the “religious rights
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of people from ‘A to Z,’ from Anglicans to Zoroastrians.” The phrase quickly became the group’s motto. Lately, it’s begun to serve as a kind of talisman to ward off the accusation that Becket is taking sides in the culture wars. To some, the decision to sponsor politically charged lawsuits like Hobby Lobby’s signals a shift in the fund’s strategy. By choosing cases that will undermine the Affordable Care Act and slow the progression of same-sex marriage, critics contend, the fund has become ideological. The money seems to point in that direction. Although its supporters were always conservative, right-wing activists began to fill Becket’s coffers just as the contraception- mandate litigation took off. The group’s contributions and grants rose by more than 60 percent in the year after the Belmont Abbey suit was filed. In 2012, it received almost a quarter of a million dollars from DonorsTrust, a shadowy middleman used to funnel money from benefactors like Charles and David Koch to conservative think tanks and advocacy groups. (The Becket Fund declined repeated requests for comment about its work and funding.) Not everyone agrees that the fund is tacking right. “It’s myopic to characterize Becket through the lens of the controversies that happen to be going on right now,” says Rick Garnett, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, who has co-written Supreme Court amicus briefs with Becket attorneys. “Their willingness to defend somebody’s religious freedom has never depended on whether or not they agreed with that person’s claim.” But Douglas Laycock, a professor of law at the University of Virginia who frequently partners with the fund, has noticed a troubling change. “They’ve bought into some of that culture-war, anti-Obama rhetoric from the right,” he says. “The legal work is still very good. The political statements are much more heavy-handed.” THE BECKET FUND WAS established at
the height of a bipartisan backlash to a Supreme Court decision written by, of all people, Antonin Scalia. In 1990, Scalia authored the majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith. The case revolved around whether two drug
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed in 1993 was a
BIPARTISAN
BACKLASH
to a Supreme Court decision written by, of all people, Antonin Scalia.
counselors, who were fired from their jobs at a private rehabilitation clinic in Oregon for using peyote as a sacrament during a Native American religious ritual, could claim unemployment insurance. The state of Oregon argued that because peyote was illegal, they had been fired for cause. Unemployment benefits were out of the question. Scalia agreed. Rejecting the drug counselors’ claim that their peyote use was protected under the First Amendment, he explained that because the drug statute was “neutral,” singling out no specific religious tradition or practice, the counselors couldn’t claim an exemption. After all, the court had ruled in the past that the constitutional right to freely exercise religious beliefs did not permit citizens to violate laws against polygamy or child labor. Why should illegal drugs be different? A ruling in favor of the counselors, Scalia wrote, “would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind.” The decision was radical because it overturned the Supreme Court’s old test for determining whether freeexercise claims held sway. Before, the government had to establish that it had a good reason for burdening religious liberty. Now, politicians would only need to prove that they hadn’t isolated one tradition for special treatment. “The identical principle will apply to a law that criminalizes killing an animal in any but a statutorily prescribed way, with no exception for the way prescribed by Jewish law,” wrote Theodore Mann, a prominent lawyer, in a letter to The New York Times. “Roman Catholics, Protestants and Jews may feel that their respective organizations have sufficient power to protect themselves at every legislative level. But the worm turns.” Months before Scalia handed down his decision in Smith, a Laotian Hmong couple was in the last stages of a religious-liberty lawsuit against the Rhode Island medical examiner, who had performed an autopsy on their son against their will. Hmong religious tradition forbids postmortem incisions; adherents believe that mutilation of the body keeps the soul from moving to the next world. Because
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there was no public-health reason for the autopsy—the young man had died unexpectedly of a seizure—the judge ruled that the medical examiner had erred. The burden on the family’s religious beliefs outweighed the government’s interest in determining why their son died. Before the judge could determine the damages, however, the Smith ruling was released. With great regret, the judge withdrew his verdict. Although the medical examiner had infringed on the Hmong family’s religious freedom, he explained, the new standard imposed by Smith meant that the autopsy was no longer a violation of their constitutional rights. Fearing similar outcomes in cases in which religious minorities would once have been protected, a coalition of religious and secular organizations banded together to restore the old standard. The bill that resulted—the provocatively named Religious Freedom Restoration Act—passed late in 1993. Only three senators voted against it. Acknowledging the abnormally bipartisan alliance at the signing ceremony, Bill Clinton joked, “I suppose the power of God is such that even in the legislative process, miracles can happen.” When the Becket Fund opened in 1994, it was entering a crowded field. Half a dozen law firms intent on preserving religion’s place in the public square had been founded in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many with close ties to the Christian right. Pat Robertson launched the American Center for Law and Justice in 1990; almost immediately, its lawyers began to urge students to initiate prayer at public-school graduation ceremonies. James Dobson created the Alliance Defense Fund (now the Alliance Defending Freedom) in 1994 as a safeguard against liberal attempts to “crush religious expression.” These firms were bankrolled by conservative donors and shared the bipartisan religious liberty coalition’s concerns only as they pertained to the freedom of Christian expression. Robertson and Dobson, disturbed by a series of lawsuits beginning in the 1960s that eroded the tradition of prayer in schools, were unabashedly ideological, promoting what Dobson’s
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
group called the “Body of Christ in America.” The Becket Fund’s founder, Kevin Hasson, insisted that his firm would be different. Hasson himself stood out as an intellectual force, a lawyer in his thirties with a philosopher’s heart. He had earned a master’s degree in theology from Notre Dame, his undergraduate alma mater, and toyed with the idea of a doctorate before enrolling in law school. After a brief stint in the Reagan administration tending the Justice Department’s religious-liberty portfolio under Samuel Alito, he went into private practice with a firm that represented the Catholic Church and its affiliates. Hasson feared that the creeping wave of secularism could wash religious expression out of American life. But like many Catholics, he was also keenly aware of the cost of imposing a state religion. In the 19th century, when Catholic immigrants began to land in cities like Boston and New York, Protestant leaders insisted that Catholics, by pledging loyalty to the pope, threatened democracy. Riots broke out in Philadelphia in 1844, fueled by rumors that Catholic teachers were trying to keep the Bible from being read aloud in schools. The Ku Klux Klan included Catholics among its targets well into the 20th century. In 1949, American Freedom and Catholic Power, a polemic that pointed to the Church as a fundamental threat to American democracy, shot to the top of the best-seller lists. From its inception, the Becket Fund was infused with a strong Catholic presence. Hasson named the organization after a saint: Thomas à Becket, a 12th-century English archbishop murdered by four of Henry II’s knights after refusing to allow the king to dictate the affairs of the Church. Leading conservative Catholic intellectuals like Mary Ann Glendon and Robert P. George joined the Becket Fund’s board. Unlike Dobson’s and Robertson’s groups, which sought to restore a version of Christian hegemony, Hasson’s view of religious liberty drew on a long tradition in Catholic thought, which positioned religious freedom as a natural right. Ordained by divine law,
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rather than human justice, it required special protection. It wasn’t enough to say that because the United States was a Christian country, religion should be central to public life. Instead, a robust conception of religious liberty needed to stress that faith was a natural part of culture. Confining religion to private spaces would muzzle a defining element of existence. If the Becket Fund initially had a bias, it was more legal than ideological. Hasson chose cases that he felt were infringements on the clause of the First Amendment that protects citizens’ rights to practice religion freely; he was less interested in its other provision, which forbids the establishment of a state religion. Association with one clause or the other tends to indicate a partisan divide—liberals want religion out of government and conservatives want government out of religion—but Becket’s ecumenical commitments set it apart. Dobson’s and Robertson’s law firms had little interest in defending anyone but Christians. The Becket Fund, by contrast, offered its services to aggrieved believers of all stripes. Hasson maintained from the beginning that his firm would be beholden to neither party. Rick Garnett was a young lawyer living in Washington, D.C., when he met Hasson in the mid-1990s. “I was impressed by his commitment to religious liberty as a human right,”
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David Green, the founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby, descends the steps of the Supreme Court with his wife Barbara and other members of their family on March 25, 2014, after the Court heard oral arguments in the contraceptive-mandate case.
Garnett says. “It couldn’t be reflected through a culture-wars lens if it was going to survive. It had to have universal and bipartisan appeal.” Without access to Christian-right donors, the Becket Fund operated on the force of Hasson’s personality. Witty and genial, Hasson sprinkled his briefs and press releases with jokes and asides. Much of its early funding, which allowed Hasson to rent a one-room office in Washington, D.C., and hire two lawyers, came from the Knights of Columbus, the right-leaning Catholic lay organization. Early on, Hasson took cases that gratified and vexed advocates on both sides of the political aisle. Becket defended a Knights of Columbus chapter in Trumbull, Connecticut, whose attempts to put a creche in the center of town were being stymied by churchstate separationists. In 1998, Hasson argued before the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals alongside attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), demanding that the Newark police department drop its prohibition on beards for the sake of its Muslim officers. The Becket Fund seemed well positioned to use the newly passed Religious Freedom Restoration Act to protect believers’ rights. But in 1997, the Supreme Court interrupted. In Boerne v. Flores, a Texas archbishop sued local zoning authorities who had denied his church a permit to expand,
using the statute to challenge their decision. The court responded by striking down the act as it applied to the states, limiting its authority to the federal government. Now, only federal prisons had to allow Muslim inmates to fast during Ramadan; school districts were free to bar religious head coverings in the classroom. Advocates responded with a twopronged strategy: urging states to pass their own version of the original religious-freedom law and re-establishing a federal religiousfreedom statute that explicitly covered states and localities. The landscape had changed in four years, though. In a handful of cases, landlords who refused to rent to unmarried couples had successfully obtained exemptions from housing-discrimination laws, using a religious-liberty defense. Civil-rights watchdogs voiced fears that seem prescient today: What if a landlord or employer, citing their religious principles, used the law to discriminate against gays? The bipartisan coalition that had pushed for the original religious- freedom law began to crumble. In 1999, the House passed a bill that would prohibit state and local governments from burdening religious exercise without a compelling reason, but it never came up for a vote in the Senate. The coalition instead proposed a narrowly tailored bill called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized
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Persons Act, which limited the “compelling interest” standard that Scalia had erased in Smith to zoning claims and complaints from state prisoners. With the passage of the new law, the Becket Fund came into its own. In 2003, it won a zoning permit for a nondenominational megachurch in Orange County, California, which wanted to build a larger worship space. Church leaders had set their sights on a former racetrack where county officials—unwilling to turn over prime real estate to an institution that wouldn’t pay property taxes—had hoped to attract Costco. In 2006, Becket’s attorneys advocated on behalf of a prisoner who wanted to keep an Odinist crystal in his cell; in the same year, the fund defended a large evangelical prison ministry’s right to receive money from the state. The organization also took on cases that aided a quintessentially conservative cause: school vouchers. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation—a right-wing foundation and one of the Becket Fund’s most consistent donors—poured millions of dollars into pro-voucher initiatives beginning in the 1990s. In the litigation that followed this experimentation with taxpayer subsidies to private (often religious) schools, the Becket Fund helped develop a powerful legal argument in support of vouchers. Dozens of states had dusty statutes called “Blaine amendments” attached to their constitutions, which forbade the use of public funding for sectarian schools and institutions. The amendments dated back to the 19th century, when Catholic families—angry about the prevailing norm in public schools that required children to read a Protestant version of the Bible and recite Protestant prayers—began to seek government funding for parochial schools. The Blaine amendments were an unapologetic attempt by Protestant politicians to prevent the “Catholicization” of American education. In several Supreme Court amicus briefs, the Becket Fund argued that the Blaine amendments, aberrant relics of a nativist past, could not be applied to contemporary schooling debates. The voucher cases fit into the fund’s larger narrative of protecting religious
minorities from discrimination. To them, Catholics’ persecution was still alive in the Blaine amendments. But the fund also defended conservative causes that had little to do with religious minorities’ rights. In these cases, believers’ traditional values were pitted against social change. In 1999, Becket lawyers mediated an employment dispute between the Air Force and Lieutenant Ryan Berry, a Catholic nuclear missileer who was reprimanded by his commanding officer because he refused to share an underground silo with a female colleague on the grounds that such close quarters would “occasion sin.” The following year, Becket filed an amicus brief in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, arguing that the New Jersey Supreme Court had overstepped when it ordered a local chapter to reinstate a scoutmaster who had been dismissed because he was gay. At first, these cases were only a fraction of the Becket Fund’s work, which was dominated by land-use struggles. But the balance was shifting. Three years after the first gay couples were married in Massachusetts in 2004, a Becket attorney argued in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy that the new “legal reality” of same-sex marriage would “erode traditional deference to religious sensibilities.” In other words, gay rights and religious liberty would become a zero-sum game. What gay couples gained in social acceptance, the faithful lost in freedom of conscience. By sanctioning nontraditional sexual relationships—epitomized by the legalization of gay marriage—the government was forcing believers to enable activities they viewed as immoral. If these changes were inevitable, politicians were duty-bound to carve out large exemptions for religious individuals and institutions. In 2005, the Becket Fund convened a conference on same-sex marriage and religious liberty, assembling scholars to engage in a thought experiment. They were told to begin with the assumption that the legal definition of marriage had been expanded to include same-sex couples. What disputes would emerge, and how could they be resolved? Douglas Laycock,
The Becket Fund has always insisted that it is that rare type of religiousliberty advocate: an organization with no political allegiances, committed to defending faiths of all sizes with
EQUAL ZEAL.
Kevin “Seamus” Hasson, founder of the Becket Fund
who attended the forum and later compiled essays from participants into a book, felt optimistic about the outcome. “I really hoped the issue could be resolved with some goodwill from both sides,” he says. At the time, Anthony Picarello, a Becket attorney who went on to serve as general counsel for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, was less sanguine. “Legal redefinition of marriage,” he said, “will be an engine of religious freedom litigation for years to come.” ON THE LAST DAY OF 2013, just hours
before the contraception mandate was scheduled to go into effect, the Supreme Court gave another one of the Becket Fund’s clients, an order of nuns called the Little Sisters of the Poor, a temporary stay. The Obama administration had offered a compromise for religiously affiliated nonprofits like the Little Sisters, which operates nursing homes for impoverished seniors. They could opt out of the mandate by filling out a form that declared their objection to providing no-cost contraception, which they would send to their insurer. In response, the insurer would pick up the cost of the birth control. Mark Rienzi, the Becket Fund lawyer representing the Little Sisters, argued that this accommodation was unacceptable. Even if the Little Sisters were not directly subsidizing their employees’ birth control, signing the form would trigger a process that would still result in no-cost contraception for their employees. The nuns could not sign the form in good conscience; it would make them complicit in the government’s program to make contraception free. Michael Sean Winters, the influential left-leaning Catholic journalist, was disturbed by this logic. In a blog post for the National Catholic Reporter, he accused Rienzi of lying. It was unlikely, to Winters’s mind, that the Little Sisters had instinctively felt that signing the document would stain their conscience. “There are varieties of mendacity,” Winters wrote. “When I say the permission slip language is a lie, it is a very specific type of lie. It is not like Bill Clinton saying, ‘I did not have sex with that woman,’ when, as we all subsequently learned, he did have sex with that woman. No, this lie is more
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like the lies of those who deny climate change. It is the lie of the zealous.” Others argue Becket’s emphasis on the rights of the Little Sisters or the owners of Hobby Lobby has elided the necessary corollary: If they win their exemption, their female employees will be penalized. To Frederick Gedicks, a professor of law at Brigham Young University Law School, this lack of empathy betrays an “entitled” mentality, where religious institutions are considered to have consciences at the expense of individuals. “I think that if you care about liberty, you have to care about everybody’s liberty and not just your own liberty regardless of the expense to others,” he says. “It’s a violation of those women and families’ religious liberty to have to absorb the cost of the exemption.” Today’s debates over religious liberty are, in many ways, a cipher for deeper anxieties about shifting sexual morality. In the conservative narrative of the conscience cases, the courts are asked to determine the extent to which religious people should be forced to bow to a secular liberal orthodoxy that sanctions immoral sexual behavior. In this story, Christians are an embattled minority, which helps explain why the Religious Freedom Restoration Act seems like a logical defense for people who believe that traditional sexual values are being crushed. It also helps explain why the Becket Fund— founded on the notion that “religious expression is natural to human culture”—is at the forefront of what has been cast as a last-ditch effort to preserve an elemental right. In 2011, Hasson’s advancing Parkinson’s disease forced him to step down as president; he was succeeded by William Mumma, a former hedgefund executive. Both see the fund as a bulwark against the tide of disaffiliation that has drawn nearly one in five Americans away from organized religion over the past two decades. In his book The Right to Be Wrong: Ending the Culture War over Religion in America, which was first published in 2005 and released in a new edition in 2012, Hasson contends that religion is the wellspring of morality. His argument is pluralistic—it’s your right to be wrong about the god you worship—but
Early on, Becket lawyers argued that
GAY RIGHTS
and religious liberty would become a zero-sum game. What gay couples gained in social acceptance, the faithful lost in freedom of conscience.
there’s little room for nonbelief. The spread of secularism isn’t just a demographic fact; the more people profess to have no religion, the further America drifts from its moral center. “The way that religious fights have played out over the centuries has been in terms of Christians against Muslims, Muslims against Christians, Catholics against Orthodox,” Hasson said in a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2012. “But never before have we had a situation where the fight is not between principled people fighting over their principles. The fight is now between people who believe in something and people who believe in precisely nothing. They are nihilists, and this is a threat that is simply unprecedented.” If religious liberty has become the latest flash point in the culture wars, groups like the Becket Fund are not wholly to blame. Earlier this year, when legislators in a handful of Republican-controlled states, including Kansas and Arizona, introduced modifications to their versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, LGBT-rights groups lambasted the changes as legal loopholes for discrimination against gay patrons. These bills ultimately failed, but Mississippi, which had no such law on the books, managed to pass its own version of the religious-freedom act. GLAAD, a gay-rights organization, condemned the law as a “thinly masked attempt to discriminate against LGBT people under the guise of ‘religious freedom.’” K. Hollyn Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a legal advocacy group that promotes both free exercise of religion and church-state separation, says that the highly publicized campaigns against these laws are feeding a wider perception that religious liberty and civil rights are diametrically opposed. “There is not a single case where this law has been used to deny someone services in a business environment,” she says. “The law and religious liberty more generally are not the enemies here.” But she believes that some of the Becket Fund’s aggressive rhetoric is equally unwarranted. “The government sometimes has interests that are going to conflict with
someone’s religious beliefs and practices, and that’s not alarming.” Even in the midst of its contraception-mandate litigation, the Becket Fund has maintained its old commitments. It is currently collaborating with the ACLU on behalf of a Jewish prisoner in Florida who was denied kosher food. In 2012, the fund took on a high-profile land-use case involving a mosque and Islamic community center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. “We didn’t make conservatives very happy when we took on that case,” says Robert P. George, a Princeton professor and longtime board member. “But we did it—even though we risked losing donors—because it aligned with our robust conception of religious liberty.” But Becket is also accepting edgier cases than it once did. Late last year, the fund announced that it would defend a Wisconsin priest who is endorsing candidates from the pulpit based on their stance on abortion. Churches, as nonprofit organizations, are forbidden from engaging in this kind of politicking, although the IRS’s enforcement is lax. In 2008, the Alliance Defending Freedom organized an annual “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” during which dozens of preachers across the country defied the ban, hoping to prompt a court challenge that would vindicate their actions. By frequently announcing his support of candidates, the Wisconsin priest is engaging in a more extreme version of that protest. “A few years ago, I would have said Becket wouldn’t go anywhere near that kind of case,” says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “It’s too fringe-y. This is a pastor who’s breaking the law to prove a point. I would have thought they’d leave that to the Alliance Defending Freedom.” Regardless of the outcome in the Hobby Lobby case, it’s hard to imagine that Becket could return to its role as the quiet arbiter of free-exercise disputes—nor is it likely that it would want to. “Becket didn’t use to be a place that was allergic to nuance,” Winters says. “But now they’re in an echo chamber, making arguments that diminish the issue rather than moving it forward. Nobody’s looking for a real solution anymore.”
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T HE C ON V ERS AT I ON
Charles E. Cobb and Danielle L. McGuire
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n his first visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, the journalist William Worthy began to sink into an armchair. He snapped up again when nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin yelled, “Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!” Worthy looked behind him and saw two loaded pistols nestled on the cushion. “Just for self-defense,” King said. In his new book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, explores what he sees as one of the movement’s forgotten contradictions: Guns made it possible. According to Cobb, civil-rights leaders recognized that armed resistance was sometimes necessary to preserve their peaceful mission. Guns kept people like King alive. Danielle L. McGuire, an assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, argues that armed self-defense was also far more common for black women in the South than has generally been acknowledged. In her 2010 book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, McGuire contends that the decision by women to combat sexual abuse and violence—sometimes with force—was one of the sparks that led to the modern civil-rights movement. On the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, McGuire and Cobb discuss the legacies of nonviolent resistance and community organizing—and how hidden histories complicate familiar narratives about the civil-rights movement. Cobb and McGuire’s exchange has been edited for concision and clarity. —AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX
Danielle McGuire: It seems clear that only love could have animated the civil-rights movement. Individuals’ willingness to give themselves completely over to a cause, for local people to open their homes and put themselves and their families at risk, to stay up all night guarding the homes so activists could sleep, to feed and house people they may have just met—is this what activists in the civil-rights movement meant when they talked about the beloved community?
Charles Cobb: When you look at the organizing tradition of the Southern civil-rights movement, what you see is love and commitment. They function on several different but related levels. First, we young people had to make a commitment. A lot of us left school to work in the Deep South, which was a violent and dangerous place—we had to be committed to struggle and committed to each other. So that’s a kind of community. But then there were the people
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we were working with, too—the community we were embedded in. They embraced us as allies for change, but they also loved us, like we were in their family. They were willing to protect us just the way they’d protect any of their children, with guns if necessary. Hartman Turnbow, a small farmer and activist in Mississippi, once said, “I had a wife and I had a daughter and I loved my wife just like the white man loved his’n and a white man will die for his’n and I say I’ll die for mine.” I think they thought of us, and were committed to us, in much the same way. I was in Birmingham a few years ago, speaking with some civil-rights-movement veterans there. One of them told me that whenever Martin Luther King Jr. was in town, he helped to protect him. That’s all he said, so I asked, “How did you protect him?” And he said, “With a nonviolent .38 police special.” Everyone laughed and nodded these knowing smiles. Protection was common, even if it wasn’t publicly acknowledged. You couldn’t live in any household in a rural Southern community without guns, and people weren’t afraid to use them. During the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, Reverend King had guns all over his house. Glenn Smiley, one of King’s advisers, called King’s home an “arsenal.” That’s a Southern thing. I’ve been in houses where guns have been in the nightstand, under the pillow, in the chair. One of the images in your book was especially powerful. It was a photo of men sitting up guarding one of the Freedom Schools, which were designed to promote
adult literacy and combat the poor education that could be found in public schools. Those schools gave students the space to think about how they could transform their community. In the picture, the men were protecting the space where that transformation could take place. One of the arguments I make in the book is that World War II was a crucial turning point. Black soldiers were coming home, after fighting Nazis or Japanese fascists or Italian fascists, to the South, and they started to register to vote and join the NAACP. I don’t think their leadership can be entirely ascribed to their experience with combat, but it was a tipping point. They were used to fighting, and they weren’t inclined to just go back to the old white-supremacist order. They weren’t coming home to pick cotton. No, they weren’t. That’s why when defiance started to emerge in the postwar period, activists who considered themselves part of a nonviolent movement were very committed to armed self-defense. There was a group called Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana that was dedicated to the idea of protecting nonviolent organizers but was formed around the notion of armed resistance to white supremacist terrorism. There was an unnamed group in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that protected Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference chapter with guns. They were all ex-soldiers. I studied a series of rape cases, which were another catalyst for black women— and also black men—to get involved in their community.
One of the first cases Rosa Parks worked on when she joined the NAACP in the 1940s was the case of Recy Taylor, a sharecropper in Abbeville, Alabama, who was walking home from a church revival one night when she was held up at gunpoint and kidnapped by a group of white men. They took her outside town and brutally assaulted her. She somehow found the strength and physical capability to come back into town after they abandoned her, and she told the sheriff what happened. Word filtered back to the Montgomery NAACP, and Rosa Parks came to investigate. She and other militant activists turned Recy Taylor’s case into a nationwide movement. It was all over black newspapers. People were organizing up in Harlem; labor unions were raising money for a case to bring her assailants to justice. The governor of Alabama was so nervous he ordered a private investigation to look into the case. It’s all part of this tradition of black women organizing to protect themselves from attack and passing down lessons to their daughters, nieces, sisters about how to protect themselves when they’re out alone, if they’re walking home, if they’re working in a white home. The Montgomery bus boycott was sparked by the action of one woman, Jo Ann Robinson. She was an English professor at Alabama State, a historically black college, and when she heard that Rosa Parks had been arrested, she gathered some of her students and mimeographed the leaflets that night, calling for a bus boycott. The preachers who get credit for organizing
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it were actually hemming and hawing and probably wouldn’t have come around to a boycott if Robinson hadn’t pushed for it. Many of the women who led the Montgomery bus boycott had been involved with the Recy Taylor case, actively seeking justice for her. The women who rode the buses weren’t just upset that they had to pay in the front and enter in the rear, or sit in the back. They were resisting a culture of widespread violence against black women. Bus drivers had police power, they kept pistols under their seats, and they could abuse black women with no consequences. One woman said the bus drivers “liked to talk under folks’ clothes.” Because black women made up the majority of the city ridership, they were the ones who were bearing the brunt of the violence on the buses. And then, of course, they were taking the buses to go to work mostly in white women’s kitchens where they were also susceptible to attack. But they had this tremendous economic power because if women refused to ride, the buses wouldn’t make money. It wasn’t the guys riding the bus. It was the maids and the cooks and the baby-sitters and housecleaners, who were overwhelmingly women. And when you look at the organization of the bus boycott, they really were the driving force. Which is pretty amazing, because black women were so vulnerable in the South. White men, especially police officers and cab drivers, could pick them up and assault them with impunity. But at the same time, there was also a culture
and a history of immense strength, going back before the modern civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s even began. There’s the story of Annie “Mama Dolly” Raines, in southwest Georgia, up in the window with her shotgun protecting Charles Sherrod, the nonviolent organizer who was staying with her. She was a midwife and she told him, “I brought a lot of these white folks into this world, and I’ll take ’em out of this world if I have to.” That’s what people overlook in discussions of this period. Yes, there was tremendous oppression, brutal oppression. But there was also strength, which is part of what oppression generates. There were good grounds for fear, but that fear created a kind of toughness that wasn’t limited to the men. I can certainly testify that without the women, I might be dead. One of the most profound stories from the Mississippi struggle is of Endesha Ida Mae Holland. She was raped by her white employer when she was 11 and then went on to become a prostitute, but when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee came to Greenwood, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, they didn’t see her as a street woman—they looked at her with some respect. When she met Bob Moses and other SNCC workers, they made her feel, as she put it, like somebody, and that sense of somebody-ness transformed her life. Well, you know, that’s what organizing was all about. You’re embedded in communities, you’re interacting with people. You know that they know more than you do about this place you’re in. After
all, I’m coming from Washington, D.C., to Sunflower County, Mississippi. What do I know? So if you come in with some idea about voter registration, they’re going to be evaluating you and the risks your presence brings. You have to earn their trust and earn their respect, and you do that by sitting at their kitchen tables and on their front porches or drinking beer with them at the juke joint or going to church with them. They’re curious about you as well. I mean, you’re from Washington, D.C. What’s that like? Who are your people anyway? This kind of interaction builds mutual respect and earns the right to organize.
Cobb
McGuire
You were all so young, too. I think it’s hard for college students today to imagine themselves in similar roles, and yet your experience and work have shown that they’re very capable of doing this on their own. That’s one of the legacies of the movement. It was a time when young people were being challenged by other young people and being pushed to effect real change. I mean, I wound up in Mississippi because I was on my way to a civil-rights workshop in Houston and I stopped
to talk to some students engaged in sit-in protests in Jackson. Lawrence Guyot, who was a student at Tougaloo College, asked me, “Why are you going to go talk about civil rights at a workshop in Texas when you’re standing right here in Mississippi?” You could do civil rights instead of just talking about it. Which is not often how the civil-rights movement is presented. It’s told as this epic battle between powerful men. You have a big march and a great speech, and then the walls of segregation come tumbling down. The federal government rises to the occasion and rights American wrongs. Right, and that’s not even Martin Luther King’s story. King emerged as a leader in Montgomery because of a similar kind of challenge. The bus boycott was just supposed to be for one day, but it was so successful that the ministers all met in King’s church to discuss extending the boycott until the city gave in and desegregated the buses. Well, most of the ministers didn’t want to do that, so E.D. Nixon, a member of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters stood up and accused them of being cowards. He said something like, “You preachers been eating these women’s fried chicken long enough, now it’s time to get up off your behinds and do something for them, because they’re the ones riding the bus.” It was then that Martin Luther King stood up. He was 26 years old, brand new to Montgomery as a minister, and he said, “I’m not a coward.” Everybody was embarrassed, and before they left the church
they formed a new organization and elected Martin Luther King as its leader. So, how do you understand that story? It’s by understanding that as much—or even more—than protests against white supremacy, the Southern movement was defined by challenges that black people made to one another within the black community. When young people ask how the civil-rights organizing tradition can be used today, what’s your reply? They need to identify their issues and then get rooted in a community. My criticism of Occupy Wall Street was that they were concentrated in downtown parks, mostly talking to each other. The trick to organizing is figuring out how to make your case even to people who disagree with what you’re trying to do or are afraid of your ideas and goals, or don’t understand them. I live in an inner-city neighborhood; no one from Occupy Wall Street ever knocked on my door. The only way you can build a movement is by talking to people. And that’s what the civil-rights movement in the South teaches. There is leadership in these communities who are open to new ideas about social change, but you have to figure out how to make the connection with them. The issues today are not going to be the issues we had in the 1960s, but people in communities know what they don’t like. They know what they want to change— schools come to mind. Just as we earned the right to organize in these communities, you have to learn how to take the steps that will earn you the right to organize in the 21st century.
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peter & maria hoey
DOES THE DEMOCRATIC
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PARTY HAVE A FUTURE? Young people and minorities are swelling the party’s ranks and pushing it to the left. The South is increasingly in play. But can Democrats—can Hillary Clinton—do what it takes to make Americans economically secure, even it means breaking with Wall Street?
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Why Democrats Need to Take Sides Straddling class divisions doesn’t work like it used to. By Harold Meyerson
T
his spring, a prominent Democratic pollster sent a memo to party leaders and Democratic elected officials advising them to speak and think differently. The nation’s economy had deteriorated so drastically, he cautioned, that they needed to abandon their references to the “middle class,” substituting for those hallowed words the phrase “working people.” “In today’s harsh economic reality,” he wrote, “many voters no longer identify as middle class.” How many voters? In 2008, a Pew poll had asked Americans to identify themselves by class. Fifty-three percent said they were middle-class; 25 percent said lower-class. When Pew asked the same question this January, it found that the number who’d called themselves middle-class had shrunk to 44 percent, while those who said they were of the lower class had grown from 25 percent to 40 percent. Americans’ assessment of their place in the nation’s new economic order is depressingly accurate. Though most of the jobs lost in the 2007–2009 recession were in middle-income industries, the lion’s share of the jobs created in the half-decade since have been in such lowpaying sectors as retail and restaurants. Median household income has declined in every year of the recovery. The share of the nation’s income going to wages and salaries, which for decades held steady at two-thirds, has in recent years descended to 58 percent—the lowest level since the government began its measurements. The waning of America’s middle class presents a huge challenge to the nation’s oldest political party. The Democrats’ ability to improve the economic lives of most Americans has been their primary calling card to the nation’s voters ever since Franklin Roosevelt became president. Since the 1940s, however,
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the Democrats’ preferred method of helping working- and middle-class Americans has tilted more toward spurring economic growth than aggressive redistribution. So long as the growth in the nation’s economy registered in the pocketbooks of most Americans, there was little need to adopt policies that put a high priority on, say, redirecting profits into wages. And that was fine with the Democrats. When John F. Kennedy observed that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” he was not only accurately describing how the highly unionized and notyet-globalized economy of the 1960s worked; he was also describing how the economy enabled the Democrats to establish a political framework in which they could seek and win support from both business and labor—from both Wall Street and Main Street. But the kind of economy that once allowed the Democrats to be the world’s leading crossclass party has almost completely disappeared. American economic growth today goes to a relative handful of its wealthiest citizens—indeed, since the recovery began in 2009, 95 percent of the income growth has accrued to the wealthiest 1 percent, as University of California, Berkeley, economist Emmanuel Saez has shown. While the economy has grown by 20 percent since 2000, the median income for households headed by working-age Americans has shrunk by 12 percent. And as wages have sunk to a record-low share of the nation’s economy, the share going to profits has reached a record high. The Democrats are hardly at death’s door. Abetted by the intransigence of a nativist, patriarchal, increasingly anti-science and fanatically anti-government Republican Party, they hold a commanding lead among the nation’s growing constituencies—Latinos, Asians, single mothers, millennials, and professionals. Demographics
give the Democrats a clear edge in high-turnout elections, presidential elections most particularly. But demographics devoid of economics will sustain the party’s advantage for only so long— especially absent a serious plan for improving the prospects of today’s downwardly mobile. Bettering the economic lot of their constituents—particularly since those constituents are represented disproportionately among those Americans who now call themselves lowerclass—will require the Democrats to do something they haven’t really contemplated, and have consistently avoided, since the 1930s: taking a side, with all that entails, in a class war. TAKING SIDES HAS NEVER come naturally to
the Democrats. Throughout its long history, the party has not merely contained multitudes but contradicted itself, frequently and ferociously. In 1860, confronted with the new Republican Party’s challenge to slavery, the Democratic Party split in two, nominating both a Northern and a Southern presidential candidate. In the early 20th century, its two centers of strength were the white, segregationist, nativist South and the urban political machines of such cities as New York and Boston, home to millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. The two groups clashed so irreconcilably on issues like Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan (which reached its apogee in the 1920s by adding antiCatholicism to its catalog of hatreds) that the party’s 1924 convention required two weeks and 103 ballots before it could settle on a presidential nominee—John W. Davis, an obscure Wall Street attorney—acceptable to both sides. It took the crisis of the Depression to compel the rival camps to call a truce and turn their attention to economic matters and to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt commanded substantial business
steve brodner
support during his 1932 campaign and in his first two years as president, though he kept Wall Street at arm’s length. When he was assembling his Treasury team prior to taking office, someone suggested he consider appointing Russell Leffingwell, a leading executive at the J.P. Morgan investment bank, which was headquartered at 23 Wall Street. Roosevelt thought about it for a moment and then shot down the idea. “No,” he said. “We can’t have anyone from 23.” As Roosevelt moved left in 1935, signing into law the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, and a substantially higher income tax for the wealthiest Americans, many of his former business backers, most prominently former Democratic National Chairman John J. Raskob, who’d been the financial vice president of both DuPont and General Motors, turned against him. They founded and funded the Liberty League, which throughout the 1936 presidential campaign relentlessly attacked Roosevelt as a socialist. On the election’s eve, secure in the knowledge that he was about to win an overwhelming victory, Roosevelt struck back. In an address, broadcast on national radio, to a screaming crowd at Madison Square Garden, FDR singled out “business and financial monopoly, speculation, [and] reckless banking” as enemies of social peace. “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” he continued. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”
The Democrats’ ability to improve the economic lives of most Americans has been their primary calling card to the nation’s voters ever since FDR became president.
Roosevelt’s speech remains the apogee of the Democrats’ taking up the cudgel of class war. No Democratic president or nominee has put it quite that way ever since. Nor, by the calculus of conventional politics, did Roosevelt’s successors need to. Economically, the New Deal reforms were a stunning success, setting in place the structures that ensured the 30-year boom that began with World War II would be felt across the economy. From 1947 through 1973, the nation’s productivity rose by 97 percent and its median compensation by 95 percent. Politically, the reforms fostered an era of Democratic dominance. An occasional Republican—Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon—would be elected president, but they did nothing to endanger the Democrats’ core economic programs. The Democrats’ hold on Congress during this period was almost unbroken. The New Deal coalition broke up in the decades that followed, as many white Democrats rejected what they saw as the party’s targeting of tax dollars to help minorities. Pollster Stan Greenberg’s study of Macomb County, Michigan—a white working-class suburb of Detroit that had given John Kennedy 63 percent of the vote in his 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon and had given Ronald Reagan 66 percent in his 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter—demonstrated that Macomb’s Democrats believed their party was taxing them to support Detroit’s African Americans. The movement of the white South and elements of the white working class into the Republican column—a journey that began during Nixon’s presidency and has continued to this day—initially spurred centrist Democrats to push their party rightward on such issues as lengthening prison sentences and curtailing welfare. Ultimately, however, the
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wholesale flight of the white South into Republican ranks had the effect of greatly diminishing the divisions on racial, gender, and cultural issues that had rent the Democrats for much of the 20th century. As a Southernized Republican Party moved right on those issues, it prompted a countermovement from socially liberal professionals, many of whom had previously identified as Rockefeller Republicans, into Democratic ranks. As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira reported in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, professionals—previously a solidly Republican constituency—backed the Democratic candidates in the elections of 1988 through 2000 by a margin of 52 percent to 40 percent. Henceforth, the issues that would divide the Democrats would be preponderantly economic. During the 12 years in which Reagan and George H.W. Bush were president, centrist Democrats sought not only to win back the Reagan Democrats with more-conservative social and economic policies but also to cultivate more business donors for party candidates. Tony Coelho, a California congressman who spearheaded House Democrats’ fundraising efforts for much of the 1980s, shifted the balance of funds coming into the party’s coffers more toward Wall Street and other business interests. When political journalist Thomas Edsall, in his 1984 book The New Politics of Inequality, tallied the funds received by all congressional Democrats from business and conservative interests and compared the total to the funds they received from labor and liberal interests, he found that they evened out. The Democrats’ right-left funding ratio was 1 to 1. Republicans, by contrast, received $33 from business and conservative interests to every $1 they received from labor and liberal groups. Not
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Rebuilding the middle-class majority requires Democrats to embrace ideas and find a voice as new to them as the cadences of the New Deal were to the Democrats of 1933. surprisingly, on such fundamental economic questions as taxation, trade, and worker rights, Reagan-era Republicans had a clear sense of direction. Democrats were all over the map. During Reagan’s presidency, and again during George W. Bush’s, centrist Democrats backed reductions in top tax rates that the Republican presidents had proposed. During the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, House Democrats passed bills amending labor law so that workers could join unions without fear of being fired, but centrist Democratic senators kept those bills from passing in the upper house, while Carter and Obama—and Bill Clinton as well—failed to make labor-law reform a legislative priority. The fiercest battles in the Democrats’ class war have come over trade. A majority of House Democrats, echoing labor’s argument that such deals only hastened offshoring and job loss, voted against both the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and establishing permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China in 2000. This year, three-quarters of party members have gone on record against fast-tracking the current proposed Trans-Pacific trade deal through Congress absent major modifications
intended to preserve American jobs. Senate Democrats, who receive a higher percentage of their campaign funding from Wall Street (ever the most avid promoter of free trade) than House Democrats, backed NAFTA and PNTR. It was Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, of course, who sent these trade deals to the Hill. Both had received major funding from the financial sector when they sought the presidency; both had selected as their chief financial advisers and policymakers a network of investment bankers and their protégés, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner most prominent among them. While backing many of their president’s more progressive social policies, this network also avidly promoted the trade deals, financial deregulation, and post-recession recovery measures that benefited Wall Street at the expense of the great majority of Americans. FDR’s reluctance to entrust the Treasury Department to Wall Street bankers did not get passed down to his more recent Democratic successors. To be sure, Republican opposition to workers’ concerns has been the biggest and most constant impediment to Democrats’ initiatives on working Americans’ behalf. Nor is this to gainsay the epochal advances in racial and gender equality and economic security that the post-Roosevelt Democratic Party has helped realize. Medicare and Obamacare affirmed the nation’s responsibility for the health care of its citizens. Medicaid and a raft of other programs targeted various forms of public assistance to the poor. But none of these programs—nor any of the party’s signature civil-rights legislation—specifically sought to advance workers’ interests against their employers’. That had been taken care of by the National Labor Relations Act and minimum-wage legislation. That was a fait accompli.
The party had been there and done that. Except, as American capitalism changed, what the Democrats had done had come undone. As corporations steadily weakened their workers’ bargaining power by shifting work abroad and breaking their unions at home, the link between productivity and workers’ income was severed. Since 1979, the nation’s productivity has risen by 65 percent and its workers’ compensation by just 8 percent. As well, businesses have changed the forms of employment they offer. Workers who formerly would have been full-time employees have been labeled as independent contractors or listed as working for temporary-employment agencies—changes that have stripped from them the right to unionize and the protections of wage-and-hour laws. The number of part-time employees has ballooned. The Democrats haven’t been insensible to working Americans’ concerns during these years. When they had the votes, they raised the minimum wage, increased the funding for college grants and loans, and initiated public-works programs during recessions. At the same time, however, they largely failed to grasp the full extent of the erosion of middle-income jobs, the decline in worker bargaining power, and the stagnation of Americans’ incomes (offset, until 2008, by the corresponding increase in Americans’ debt). The idea that the nation’s middle-class majority wasn’t a permanent axiom of American life, that it might one day cease to exist, simply didn’t occur to most party leaders, as it didn’t occur to most members of the country’s political and economic elites. Democrats now find themselves in an unfamiliar world—not of their making, exactly, but one whose creation they didn’t do much to retard. It’s a world where they can no lon-
ger deliver job-based prosperity—at least, not without radically altering their politics. Rebuilding that middle-class majority requires Democrats to embrace ideas and find a voice as new to them as the cadences of the New Deal were to the Democrats of 1933. THE NEW BASE OF THE Democratic Party
appears primed for such a change. The share of liberals in party ranks has swelled. In 2000, Gallup reports, 44 percent of Democrats identified as moderates, and 29 percent as liberals. Today, the share of moderates has dropped to 36 percent, while that of liberals has increased to 43 percent. This leftward movement at least partly reflects the growing weight of Latinos and millennials within Democratic ranks. Like African Americans, Latinos differ sharply from white Americans in their level of support for government. Asked in a 2012 Pew survey whether they preferred a smaller government with fewer services or a bigger government with more services, Latinos backed the bigger-government option by a 75 percent to 19 percent margin, even as the general population supported the smaller-government alternative by 48 percent to 41 percent. Since California Latinos began voting in large numbers in the mid-1990s, they have proved the state’s strongest supporters— even more than African Americans—of ballot measures protecting workers’ rights and authorizing more spending on schools. As with Latinos, so with millennials. A Pew survey of those young Americans from March of this year found them to be the only age group in which the number identifying as liberals (31 percent) exceeded the number calling themselves conservative (26 percent). Fifty-three percent of millennials preferred the bigger-
government-with-more-services option, and just 38 percent the smaller. One reason millennials lean left, of course, is that each successively younger cohort of Americans contains a larger share of Latinos (not to mention Asians and secularists). White millennials preferred the smaller government option by 52 percent to 39 percent, but millennials of color supported the bigger-government alternative by a hefty 71 percent to 21 percent margin. But millennials’ left-leaning politics is also the result of their having borne the brunt of the economy’s dysfunctions. It’s disproportionately the young who have been saddled with a trillion dollars in student-loan debt. It’s millennials who have experienced the highest levels of unemployment. Nor is their employment anything to boast about: In 2012, 44 percent of young college graduates were employed in jobs that didn’t require a college degree. Small wonder, then, that America’s young adults harbor the greatest skepticism toward the nation’s economic system. A 2009 Center for American Progress survey showed that their view toward unions was 9 percentage points more favorable than the overall population’s. And a 2011 Pew Poll revealed the somewhat astonishing fact that 49 percent of millennials had a positive view of socialism, while just 46 percent of them viewed capitalism positively. (Just 31 percent of all Americans viewed socialism positively; 50 percent of them felt that way about capitalism.) The rising number of left-leaning Latinos and millennials gives Democrats sound reason for believing that their future is bright—assuming elections can be reduced to demographics. With Republicans working overtime to estrange nearly every growing group in the political landscape, while Democrats have championed
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such policies as the legalization of undocumented immigrants and equal rights for gays and lesbians, the demographic tide is certainly running in the Democrats’ direction. Minorities and the liberal young have already pushed America’s cities decidedly leftward: 26 of the largest 30 now have Democratic mayors, the greatest partisan imbalance in history. They have turned such onetime Republican bastions as Florida and Virginia into proto-Democratic states. Georgia and North Carolina, and, within two or three presidential-election cycles, Texas and Arizona will likely fall prey to the same purpling. To be sure, the movement of young people and African Americans out of some longtime Democratic bastions in the industrial Midwest, and the understandable reluctance of immigrants to move into this economically embattled region, may turn such states as Michigan into Election Day toss-ups. Any Republican gains in the Midwest, however, could be more than offset by the Democrats’ pickups in the South and Southwest. As the South—the Republican Party’s chief electoral fortress—edges into the Democratic column, the Democrats may be able to contemplate a new era of political dominance. Provided they can figure out how to reinvent broadly shared prosperity. For despite their new adherents’ liberal leanings, the Democrats are sure to pay a price if they can’t arrest the downward spiral of Americans’ economic lives. The price isn’t likely to take the form of increased millennial or minority support for Republicans. More likely, many in these groups will just disengage from politics and cease showing up at the polls. Despite their liberalism and preference for a government that smooths out the economy’s increasingly jagged edges, young Americans don’t invest a lot of hope in the political pro-
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cess. Just 31 percent of millennials say they see a great deal of difference between the two parties—the lowest level of any age group in the Pew survey. Similarly, 50 percent of millennials identify as independents, while 27 percent call themselves Democrats and 17 percent say they’re Republicans. If the Democrats are to establish the enduring majority that many of them see in the offing, they will have to shift the rewards of economic growth from profits, dividends, and rents to the wages and salaries on which the majority of Americans depend. EVEN IN REGIONS WHERE Democrats domi-
nate, numerical majorities will not suffice. The left-leaning constituencies need to form durable alliances—almost invariably in opposition to the prevailing Democratic establishments— in order to secure pro-worker reforms. It’s in America’s cities, home to the largest influx of immigrants and millennials, where this strategy has had the most effect. In New York, Boston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, New Haven, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and a host of other municipalities, voters have elected progressive mayors and city council members whose candidacies were backed, and in many cases incubated, by these new alliances. The key players in these coalitions tend to be service-sector unions (representing janitors, hotel and health-care workers, supermarket clerks), immigrant-rights groups, working-class neighborhood organizations active in African American communities (many of them successors to ACORN), and affordable-housing and environmental-justice advocates. The ordinances enacted by these new governments run the gamut of causes important to the cities’ working classes: raising the minimum wage, setting living-wage standards for city contract workers, mandating paid sick
days, requiring developers to construct affordable housing in return for their building permits, reining in discriminatory police practices, and curtailing the police’s cooperation with federal officials seeking to deport noncriminal undocumented immigrants. Even though America’s demographic changes reach well beyond city lines, it’s only in these urban areas that the new Democratic and largely working-class constituencies have organized themselves sufficiently to attain power. The politics of California provides a case in point. No other state has seen its population so thoroughly transformed in the past three decades, with Latino and Asian immigrants not only pushing Los Angeles and the Bay Area further left but also moving many historically Republican regions—San Diego, northern Orange County, the Inland Empire, and parts of the San Joaquin Valley—solidly into the Democratic column. By the early 2000s, it was clear that the California Legislature would be under Democratic control for the foreseeable future. At which point, the state’s business community—oil companies, banks, apartment owners’ associations, chambers of commerce—began to cultivate candidates of their own in Democratic primaries. Since then, those primary contests frequently pit business-backed candidates against candidates supported by unions, environmentalists, and other progressives. In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the progressive candidates usually prevail. In other parts of the state, business-backed Democrats frequently win. In 2012, Democrats won more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses of the legislature, but while the legislature has enacted some significant progressive statutes, others have fallen victim to a coalition of the business Democrats and the Republicans. The
defeated bills included one that would have put a moratorium on fracking and another that would have allowed San Francisco to slow the flood of evictions in hopes of keeping developers from eliminating what remains of the city’s affordable housing stock. In late May, the senate approved a bill raising the state minimum wage to $13 an hour. Notwithstanding the Democrats’ supermajority, the bill narrowly squeaked through, with business-backed Democrats abstaining, despite representing such working-class cities as Fresno, Stockton, and Santa Ana, where wages are notoriously low. Those are cities, however, where the kind of labor-left alliances that have formed around San Francisco and Los Angeles are still too weak to prevail electorally. Nationally, New York’s Working Families Party is the most successful alliance to have achieved sufficient density across an entire state to affect state-level politics, but it is still far stronger in New York City—whose new mayor, Bill de Blasio, was one of the party’s founders—than it is upstate. In Minnesota, another such statewide alliance scored a surprising victory in 2012 when it persuaded voters to reject a ballot measure that would have required them to produce photo IDs at polling places, but like the Working Families Party, it is far stronger in its state’s urban center, the Twin Cities, than elsewhere. One impediment to the emergence and growth of these progressive alliances is the ability of centrist Democratic officials to pick off the support of these alliances’ constituent organizations by adopting policies that benefit those groups only. Even the strongest such alliance, New York’s Working Families Party, was pressured by many of the unions that have historically supported it to endorse Governor Andrew Cuomo’s re-election bid this
The idea that the middle-class majority wasn’t a permanent axiom of American life didn’t occur to most party leaders. spring without even winning Cuomo’s commitment to causes the unions supported. Cuomo had declined to campaign against continuing Republican control of the state senate, which had bottled up legislation to create public funding of election campaigns and to let cities raise their minimum-wage standards. However, Cuomo had also helped many unions win particular campaigns, and those unions feared his support for their efforts would prove fleeting if the WFP didn’t endorse him forthwith. Only an extraordinary campaign by Working Families Party leaders, who threatened to run a candidate against him, compelled Cuomo to reverse his stance on the state senate and the minimum wage in order to win the party’s backing. The appeal of transactional politics—in which a group supports a politician in return for his support for their cause, regardless of his positions on other issues—runs deep in America, where larger ideological or class concerns have never loomed as large for Democrats as they have for European social democrats. The appeal of transactional politics grows even stronger when organizations are so embattled they feel required to support anyone who will help them on a particular issue—a situation in which most unions have found themselves in recent decades. But the leftward movement of the Democratic base has undermined at least some of the
foundations of such transactional politics. The Working Families Party was able to pressure Cuomo to reverse field because polling showed that a generic WFP candidate on the November ballot would diminish Cuomo’s support from roughly 60 percent of the electorate to roughly 40 percent. New York’s unusual election laws, which permit third parties either to back major-party candidates or to run candidates of their own, gave the WFP more leverage than kindred alliances may have in other states and cities, but the entire episode (and the polling) demonstrated the depth of support from the Democrats’ new base for policies that advance working-class interests, and the disdain for Democratic pols unwilling to fight for them. Traditional pro-Democratic institutions that continue to play the transactional game may find themselves retarding the growth of a new Democratic electorate demanding the very policies that would most benefit working people’s organizations and prospects. WHAT MIGHT THOSE POLICIES BE? While
the new urban regimes are enacting a host of progressive ordinances, local governments lack the power to create the kind of economic transformations that the nation’s 99 percent need. Even at the state and federal level, raising the minimum wage, say, directly affects just a fraction of American workers. What else can government do to re-establish the link between economic growth and Americans’ incomes? The single most helpful reform would be to restore workers’ bargaining power. With the rate of unionization in the private sector falling beneath 7 percent, the ability of workers to bargain collectively for improvements in their pay, benefits, or hours is effectively nonexistent. Efforts to shore up their power
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by strengthening their capacity to form unions without fear of being fired, however, failed during each of the four most recent Democratic presidencies (Johnson’s, Carter’s, Clinton’s, and Obama’s). Progressives cannot abandon this fight, but it’s time to open other fronts as well—particularly since years of polling show stronger support for such labor-backed causes as greater tax equity, higher minimum wages, and restrictions on corporate offshoring than they do for unions themselves. One way to restore the link between the economy’s growth and most Americans’ incomes would be to enlist corporate tax reform in that battle. As William Galston, the onetime leading light of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, has argued, lowering taxes on employers who give their workers a wage increase commensurate with the nation’s annual productivity growth, while raising taxes on employers who don’t, would go some of the way to reconnecting growth to income. The scope of such a reform would increase by requiring employers who misclassify their workers as independent contractors or “temps”—a wage-suppressing dodge that’s long been the norm in such industries as trucking, cab-driving, and warehousing and is now spreading to manufacturing as well—to cease such mislabeling and acknowledge that the workers are in fact their employees. The conventional viewpoint within the economics and business establishments is that workers’ declining incomes are the inevitable result of globalization and the automation of work. This viewpoint neglects to consider how the structure of corporate decision-making affects workers’ experience in the face of these trends. In Germany, laws that require corporations to split their boards between
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If Democrats can’t arrest the decline in Americans’ economic lives, many of their voters will stop showing up at the polls. management and worker representatives have led to the preservation of the highest-skilled and -value-added jobs at home—a key reason that country has become an export giant and boasts a far more secure and prosperous working class than ours. A law greatly reducing taxes on corporations that adopt this worker-management balance on their boards, and increasing them on corporations that don’t, could have a profound effect on the way corporations look at such matters as offshoring and the proper division between profits and wages. These proposals would surely encounter massive opposition, but they have the virtue of appealing to Americans’ sense of equity and collegiality, as well as their skepticism about corporate managers, without raising the specter of big government. Democrats must also pursue policies with a more conventional pedigree: investing in public works both because we need to and because it’s impossible to foresee how we get close to full employment or environmental remediation without doing so; steeply raising the tax rates on the top income levels; raising taxes on capital gains and dividends (and perhaps devoting those revenues to a greatly increased Earned Income Tax Credit); regulating finance to the point that it can no longer dominate the economy; and diminishing the responsibility
of students and their families for covering the costs of public higher education. But the emphasis on increasing worker power and pay should be central to the Democrats’ concerns, both politically and economically. If the American economy is indeed descending into what economist Larry Summers terms a state of secular stagnation, the low pay of American workers, which has depressed their purchasing power and reduced the profits of all but the highest-end retailers, is largely to blame. LIKE THE OTHER DEMOCRATIC elected offi-
cials of her generation, Hillary Clinton came of age and (more than the others) thrived in an economic and political system in which Kennedy’s rising tide did lift all boats, cohabiting with both Wall Street and working people’s organizations was routine, and the pressure to take a side in a slowly emerging class war could barely be felt. Today, however, that pressure is palpable—and increasingly uncomfortable to a host of Democratic pols, Clinton most especially. How this conflict affects the 2016 presidential race, the more-likely-than-not Hillary Clinton presidency, and the larger future of the Democratic Party remains to be seen. Despite its demographic advantages, the party cannot indefinitely retain its electoral edge if it fails to address the falling power and income of ordinary Americans—even if such policies cost the party the backing of financial elites at a time when elections are more driven by money than ever before. It’s time for Democrats to disenthrall themselves from their routine conciliation of interests that have become profoundly opposed. It’s time for them to welcome more hatred from the successors to Roosevelt’s forces of selfishness. Harder choices than those Clinton chronicles in her new book await them.
What a Lot of Blue Money Can Do
The Colorado model for putting states in the Democratic column By Abby Rapoport
peter & maria hoey
F
rom voter identification and marriage equality to abortion rights and Medicaid expansion, state legislatures have been the battleground for the country’s biggest policy debates. Not coincidentally, they’re also the place where money now talks the loudest. In recent years, most observers have focused on how conservative donors have shaped political landscapes: Art Pope in North Carolina, Dick DeVos in Michigan, and the Koch brothers in Arkansas, Kansas, and Wisconsin. Currently, Republicans control the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature in 23 states— almost twice as many as Democrats control. But surprisingly, it’s those on the left who have spent a decade developing a big-money strategy for winning states like Colorado and Minnesota. The idea is relatively simple: A few wealthy donors, along with a few progressive independent organizations, coordinate both their strategy and resources, not just for one election cycle or two but for the long term. The coalition is divorced almost entirely from the candidate–political party structure that has historically defined politics in the country. Instead, the network, which often includes foundations and unions, helps fund an ecosystem of progressive organizations. The approach is data-centric and geared toward maximizing efficiency, with different organizations focusing on communications, voter outreach, and other elements. The model first developed in Colorado, where Republicans had ruled the legislature for years. Democrats briefly gained control of the senate in 2000 but lost it again by 2002. Determined to turn their state blue, a group of mega-donors known as the “Gang of Four”— Rutt Bridges, Tim Gill, Jared Polis, and Pat Stryker—started to develop a strategy. Their
efforts resulted in the Democrats’ controlling the governor’s office, house, and senate by 2006. “It’s the unification of donors in common purpose and coordinated effort” that makes the strategy unique, explains Robert Witwer, a former Republican legislator in Colorado and co-author of The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care). Witwer notes that in Colorado, the groups and donors in the coalition agreed to put their particular agendas on hold in the push toward unseating Republicans. With this approach, it’s difficult to follow donors, since together they may be funding dozens or hundreds of organizations. “If you wanted to see where the money starts and ends, you’d have to follow 30 organizations,” Witwer says. This also had the advantage of spreading the risk. “If one failed, had a scandal or legal problem, it would just drop away and the rest would keep on going,” he says. By 2008, Minnesota progressives started applying the Colorado blueprint, with funding from Rockefeller heir Alida Messinger. Within four years, the Democrats controlled the governor’s office, house, and senate and had started passing some of the country’s most progressive agendas, from legalizing gay marriage to cutting tax rates on the working poor and middle class while increasing them for those at the top. The model has proliferated. In Washington state, venture capitalist Nick Hanauer was one of the first to kick-start a donor network that has been working for several years to turn the state senate Democratic and give the party control of the legislature as well as the governorship. Arizona and Maine have networks, looking toward gubernatorial races and beyond. Even in states that appear deeply red, like Texas and
North Carolina, networks are beginning to lay groundwork for long-term comeback plans. The Democracy Alliance, which was founded in 2005, uses a similar model at the national level. It keeps most of its operations out of the public eye, while its affiliate, the Committee on States, is designed to coordinate efforts at the local level. State branches for America Votes, another umbrella group, help coordinate data and strategy as well as money. State versions of ProgressNow, which works on media and communications, are also integral to the effort. While winning a legislature is one thing, holding on to it is another. In Colorado, for instance, Democrats took back control of the house in 2005 after a 28-year GOP reign, only to lose their majority in 2011 and then regain it in 2013. “Colorado is a success story that requires a lot of continued investment,” says Gara LaMarche, Democracy Alliance president. In other words, this is a system that reaffirms the importance of wealthy donors. The tension for progressives is obvious—more money from the 1 percent is hardly at the top of a cleanelections agenda. Yet progressive policy can only get passed if Democrats win. LaMarche says he has no problem defending the use of big money to push laws that will decrease money’s role. “It involves a certain degree of irony,” he says, “but not necessarily hypocrisy.”
So You Want to Turn Your State Blue? Turn the page and play the game.
JUL/AUG 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25
HOW TO PLAY: Grab two game pieces, a pair of dice, and try your luck.
By Abby Rapoport Art by Peter & Maria Hoey
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JUL/AUG 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27
A Bridge in Georgia
Will Democrats nudge their state into the 21st century? By Bob Moser
O
n a Thursday evening in late April, more than 1,000 Georgia Democrats paid $250 a plate to gather in a vast, ugly Atlanta ballroom and toast their party’s unexpected resurrection at the annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. Just two years earlier, the Democratic Party of Georgia was careening toward insolvency, leaderless and rudderless after losing its 130-year grip on power in the early 2000s. Even as the state’s nonwhite population had grown past 40 percent, thanks to an influx of Latinos and a remigration of African Americans from up North, conservative Republicans had seized control of every state office and built untouchable legislative majorities. Georgia Dems were deader than a smushed possum on Route 92. Now here they were, with big-name candidates for governor and U.S. Senate who had a realistic shot to win, with national Democrats throwing serious cash into the state for the first time in decades, and with Georgia progressives building a voter-mobilizing infrastructure based on successful models in Colorado and Minnesota. More than joy, the black and white faces in the Georgia World Congress Center registered a kind of pinch-me surprise: How in hell did this happen? But beneath the relief and elation, old underlying tensions—the same uneasiness that has haunted Southern Democrats ever since blacks began voting en masse in the 1960s and whites began to flee to the GOP—still whispered their way around the room. Following a round of applause for those who’d participated (and been arrested in) the Moral Monday protests that commenced in the state this year, one of the more notable arrestees delivered the invocation. The young Reverend Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer
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Baptist Church, once pastored by Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr., has become a fiery symbol of the Georgia to come. While he hit the theme of the night—“light does overcome darkness”—he also pointedly warned the rising Democrats to beware “lest in our rush for power we crush the poor” and “exchange politics for principle.” Whether or not this message was aimed at them, two beacons of this sudden Democratic resurgence couldn’t escape the furtive gazes of bowed heads: state senator Jason Carter, grandson of Jimmy and gubernatorial hopeful, and Michelle Nunn, a first-time candidate who’s in a toss-up race for her father Sam’s old U.S. Senate seat. In a state whose political future looks not only blue but downright progressive, and in a party where almost all the promising political talent is African American, the standard-bearers of a Democratic renaissance were white legacy candidates running the kinds of old-school campaigns their forebears had used 40 years earlier to keep rural whites from going wholehog Republican. Just weeks before, as the state General Assembly wound up its yearly revels, Carter—a chipper 38-year-old who’s challenging 71-year-old Republican Governor Nathan Deal—had appalled many Democrats by voting for the so-called “Guns Everywhere” law, which made virtually every public space in Georgia, including bars and churches, a legal place to pack heat. He was, Carter had explained, just being himself: an “NRA Democrat” as opposed to a “national Democrat.” Nunn, who’s 47, was conducting a classic “Republican Lite” campaign straight out of her father’s old playbook, calling for cutting corporate taxes, military strikes in Syria, and “reforming” Obamacare. As she traveled the state, Nunn had begun to hear the same question repeated by voters,
journalists, and opponents alike: “Are you actually a Democrat?” Her practiced answer, which she delivered at a primary debate, was really no answer at all: “I think it is self-evident, since I’m standing here on this stage to win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate that I am a Democrat.” It sounded less like an affirmation of Democratic values than an admission of guilt. Now that Georgia Democrats are showing signs of life again, they find themselves navigating the same high wire as their compatriots in the other large Southern states—Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas—that are trending blue. The “viable” statewide candidates are whites whose politics typically smack more of the 1970s and ’80s than the 21st century. These candidates, meanwhile, can only win by inspiring record numbers of nonwhites to register and turn out in November. It is a delicate dance, one that Nunn and Carter had been performing with all of the clumsiness you might expect. It was lovely to have a future, the assembled Democrats could all agree—but why, some couldn’t help wondering, did it have to look so much like the past? For now, most progressives are practicing patience with their ticket-toppers. “You have to realize: Michelle and Jason stepped up almost in spite of the Democratic Party,” says Bryan Long, who runs the progressive propaganda group Better Georgia. A former CNN reporter and PR specialist who’s outspokenly queer and liberal, Long is sharply critical of Carter’s gun vote and Nunn’s conservative positions. But he’s been in Georgia long enough—he arrived in 2000, just before the Democrats started cracking up—to have some perspective on the baby steps the party will have to take as it edges toward the more progressive future that demographics promise to make possible.
GEORGIA DEMOCRATS TOOK a longer time
Jason Carter, grandson of Jimmy, and Michelle Nunn, daughter of Sam, are old-school beacons of the new Democratic surge.
to crash and burn than most of their Southern counterparts. As recently as 2002, they still controlled both houses of the General Assembly and had what looked like a lock on the governorship. But then Governor Roy Barnes was unseated by Republican state senator Sonny Perdue, despite boasting a six-to-one fundraising edge and a consistent lead in the polls. That same November, Democrat Max Cleland, the U.S. senator and war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, lost to Saxby Chambliss in a campaign that saw Cleland smeared as unpatriotic. After losing the governor’s office for the first time since 1871, the party swooned into a death spiral. “We’d never had to have an organized Democratic Party here,” says Krista Brewer, a longtime activist who started the civic mobilization group ProGeorgia—one of the 22 “state table” coalitions of progressive activists funded and advised by the national group State Voices. “The governor was always the titular head of the party. Without the governor’s office, they didn’t know how to move forward. Democrats were just sort of flailing around.” In 2004, with conservative turnout turbocharged by an anti-same-sex-marriage amendment on the ballot, Democrats lost their last hold on power as the GOP gained a majority in the legislature. The ranks of rural Democratic lawmakers were decimated. By 2010, when Barnes
lost a comeback bid by ten points—and Republicans locked down General Assembly majorities so powerful they could gerrymander to their hearts’ content—it looked like Democrats would be relegated for the rest of the decade to registering nonvoters and watching the demographics continue to swing in their favor. By 2018, with
steve brodner
“People might be disappointed,” Long says, “but we finally have a fair fight in Georgia. We can finally make the conversation about something other than how far right we can move the state.” For Georgia Democrats, whatever their qualms and questions about the future, that surprising fact still resonates as a kind of secular miracle.
some party-building and movement-building, they might be able to field a competitive candidate for governor—most thought it would be popular, savvy Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. By 2020, they’d hope to stir up enough new voters to win back the General Assembly and do some redistricting of their own. But only if everything went absolutely swimmingly. While Georgia Democrats looked long-term, however, national Democrats had noticed the narrowness of President Obama’s defeats in the state—it was the second-closest state he lost in both 2008 and 2012, despite the absence of any Democratic campaign. Meanwhile in Atlanta, young volunteers, most of them African American, were keeping the troubled party’s operations afloat and devising new get-out-the-vote strategies. “Young Democrats did the work when the party was in trouble,” says T.J. Copeland, president of the Young Democrats of Atlanta. Old and (mostly) new groups—Better Georgia, ProGeorgia, Moral Monday, the NAACP, the New Georgia Project—were building the scaffolding for a statewide progressive network. Then time sped up. Chambliss announced his retirement, leaving a vacant U.S. Senate seat that was too tempting for Michelle Nunn to pass up. Jason Carter took a flying leap into the governor’s race—partly, speculation has it, to get the jump on Reed for 2018. “I think we were all surprised to have two candidates of this caliber in 2014,” Copeland says. A former college-football player who lost a primary runoff for the state house in 2012, Copeland has been a party volunteer since things went bad in 2002. He smiles recalling one awful election night—was it 2006?—when he and Nikema Williams, now the state party’s vice chair, got sick of being around their mournful comrades.
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Democrats and Citizens United : An Unlikely Embrace
THE RE ACTION
t started with a hackish documentary—Hillary: The Movie, made by a conservative advocacy group named Citizens United—and ended with a momentous decision. On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court freed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in American elections. So long as they didn’t coordinate with candidates or the parties, corporations could throw open their treasuries and deploy campaign cash like it was going out of style. Democrats far and wide, chief among them President Barack Obama, condemned the decision. But as this retrospective shows, the president and his party have come to accept, if not embrace, what Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has wrought in our politics. — ANDY KROLL
President Obama: “The Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special-interest money in our politics.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “With today’s ruling, the voices of average Americans could be drowned out by Wall Street banks, big oil, health- insurance companies, and other special interests.”
I
“We crashed a Republican victory party,” Copeland says. “We wanted to know what that was like. Maybe this year we’ll have one.” But can Georgia Democrats reverse their fortunes so quickly—especially in a midterm election, which many of their voters tend to sit out? The numbers needed for a Democratic surge are certainly there: Statewide, an estimated one million nonwhites are nonvoters— five times the number that Obama would have needed to carry the state in 2008. If Georgians of color registered and turned out in equivalent numbers to whites, they’d put the Democrats over the top. But they’re nowhere close. “In Texas, they say we don’t have a registration problem, we have a turnout problem,” Brewer says. “In Georgia, we have both.” Some of that trouble stems from the very formula that gave Democrats staying power in Georgia from the ’70s to the ’00s. Jimmy Carter, elected governor on his second try in 1970, and Sam Nunn, who shoe-leathered his way to a surprising U.S. Senate victory two years later, were early practitioners of the fusion politics that would later be derided as Republican Lite—or, to use Bill Clinton’s preferred term of art, “New Democrat.” This involved incessant, almost obsessive, courting of white conservatives and Chamber of Commerce types. Democrats took black voters’ loyalties largely for granted while campaigning on fiscal discipline, military hawkishness, and across-theaisle “problem-solving.” Add generous doses of culture-war pandering to the white right, and you were ready to keep Georgia, or Arkansas, or South Carolina, safely Democratic. For a while. These Democrats left economic populism— always the heart of Southern liberalism—out of the equation. Nonwhites had ample reason to raise a middle finger to the whole useless process.
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JANUARY 21, 2010
If Georgians of color registered and turned out in equivalent numbers to whites, they’d put the Democrats over the top. The Democrats weren’t courting them, and to judge by their TV ads, they didn’t seem to care about anybody except white dudes in suburbia. It’s long past the time when Democrats in states like Georgia can win by pandering to rural whites while merely grinning and waving to their base. There’s no question what Georgia’s rising electorate looks like: 54 percent of the state’s public-school kids are already nonwhite. In the ’00s, the number of black Georgians rose 26 percent—with more than 500,000 moving from Northern cities like Cleveland and Detroit—against just 6-percent growth among whites. The Latino population doubled to 9 percent. With these new demographics, the formula that Jimmy Carter and Sam Nunn helped to concoct no longer looks like a winning one. But it’s the one that Carter’s grandson and Nunn’s daughter are trusting to carry them to victory. TEN SECONDS INTO MICHELLE Nunn’s first
TV ad, Georgians knew exactly what kind of campaign to expect. In the gauzy spot, one
of several designed to introduce the younger, female version of Sam Nunn to her potential constituents, Nunn displays a photo of herself with George H.W. Bush and boasts, “While leading President Bush’s Points of Light Foundation, we grew it into the world’s largest organization dedicated to volunteer service.” In case that doesn’t scream “Republican Lite” loudly enough, Nunn’s second commercial echoes the rhetoric and reform ideas—and the populist visual trappings—used by Republican “outsider” candidates from time immemorial. “What’s going on in Washington has to stop,” Nunn says, striding across her family’s farm. “Politicians fighting and bickering and too often forgetting about the people they’re supposed to represent.” (Why, I declare: Who ever heard of such a thing?) “That’s why I’m for banning members of Congress from ever becoming lobbyists. I don’t think congressmen should get paid unless they pass a budget. And no one in Congress should get a subsidy to pay for their own health care.” Neither ad tips off viewers to the fact that Nunn is a (hush your mouth!) Democrat. When Nunn comes across as super-serious, super-sober, and super-centrist, she’s apparently not acting. Earlier this year, Ed Kilgore— Democratic strategist, blogger, and former Sam Nunn aide—told MSNBC about a time he went with the family to a conference in New Orleans when Michelle was in her twenties. Kilgore asked her mother what Michelle might want to do while in the Crescent City. “Michelle?” Colleen Nunn said. “She doesn’t like to have fun.” Despite her dubious claim to being a Washington outsider, Nunn’s campaign could hardly be more establishmentarian. Her money comes from the likes of Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, and former Republican Senators
t i m e l i n e b a c kg r o u n d s b y p e t e r & m a r i a h o e y
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MARCH 14, 2010
Obama in his State of the Union address: “With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.”
Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts: “I think we need a constitutional amendment to make it clear, once and for all, that corporations do not have the same freespeech rights as individuals.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York: “The Supreme Court shattered nearly a century of U.S. law curbing the influence of corporations in our election process. With this bill, we are beginning to pick up the pieces.”
Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana: “The threat of unlimited amounts of negative advertising from special- interest groups will only make members more beholden to their natural constituencies and more afraid of violating party orthodoxies.”
Obama adviser David Axelrod: “Under the ruling of the Supreme Court, any lobbyist could go [to] any legislator and say, ‘If you don’t vote our way on this bill, we’re going to run a milliondollar campaign against you in your district.’” >>>
Richard Lugar and John Warner. Her campaign, chaired by former Ambassador Gordon Giffin, has a senior vice president of Coca-Cola as treasurer and Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot and Atlanta Falcons owner, as an honorary chair. Though she’s pro-choice and tepidly supports marriage equality, she doesn’t want to talk about any of that. She’s running as a deficit hawk who thinks Democrats should be more flexible when it comes to “entitlement” reforms. When an MSNBC reporter demanded to know whether she’d have voted for Obama care, Nunn attempted an awkward dodge: “I think it’s impossible to look back retrospectively and say, ‘What would you have done when you were there?’” Nunn’s mush of a message is what her campaign is built around. With five Republicans, including three hardcore Tea Partiers, mixing it up in the GOP Senate primary, the Democrat’s strategy hinged partly on the chance that she could draw a Todd Akin-style extremist as an opponent. But the two contenders who emerged from the GOP fisticuffs in May were the two more traditional conservatives, former Dollar General CEO (and cousin of former Governor Sonny Perdue) David Perdue and Jack Kingston, a “bring home the bacon” congressman. Particularly if she squares off against Perdue— the GOP runoff is on July 22—Nunn’s message is going to sound like a virtual doppleganger of her opponent’s in the fall: Perdue, whom Kilgore dubs “the Mitt Romney of Georgia,” has assailed his Republican opponents for failing to work across the aisle, selling himself as more of a problem-solver than an ideologue. Nunn’s campaign has given Georgia’s African Americans and Latinos little, if anything, to get fired up about. “I’ve told the campaign that the old Blue Dog model doesn’t work
anymore,” Kilgore says. “The people you’re appealing to aren’t going to vote for any Democrat anymore. You just don’t go to the right on every conceivable issue.” Kilgore sees a shred of hope in Georgia Democrats’ hope itself. “Down the stretch, with the national importance of the race, you may see people come alive.” It’s doubtful, he says, that Nunn will throw progressives any bones to make that happen. “The weird thing about her,” he says, “is even though she’s a woman, younger, and on social issues more liberal, she’s so much like the old man. She has his innate caution in abundance.” WHILE NOBODY CAN DOUBT what Geor-
gians would get from a second Senator Nunn, Jason Carter could prove more of a wild card as governor. Despite his pro-NRA voting record and his support for capital punishment (contradicting his grandfather), Carter backs gay marriage and abortion rights. He opposed the other controversial bill in this year’s General Assembly—a “religious liberties” measure that would have permitted businesses to deny services to LGBT Georgians. His lone term in the state senate has established Carter as a canny champion of public education—always a fruitful theme for a Southern Democrat. (There’s plenty to talk about in Georgia, with $7 billion in education cuts and 9,000 teachers fired since Republicans took control of the state.) This summer, Carter began to find his voice on health care as well. While GOP ads were targeting his (formerly wishy-washy) support for Medicaid expansion, Carter journeyed to a shut-down medical center in the middle Georgia town of Montezuma and decried Republican lawmakers’ rejection of federal funds that could have kept it open. “It’s incredibly
important for us to look at the fact that the federal government has $9 million of our tax money they keep every day,” Carter said. “There’s $30 billion in expansion funds that we’ve paid—it’s our money and Nathan Deal wants Washington to keep it. That doesn’t make sense to anyone, certainly not here.” But Carter faces a steeper uphill battle than Nunn. Despite Deal’s ethical foibles—the state has reached settlements totalling $3 million with four whistleblowers from the state ethics commission—the governor has charted a fairly steady and unremarkable course. Reasonably popular incumbents are next-to-impossible to uproot, especially in a place where Republicans who vote still outnumber Democrats who do. Lengthening Carter’s odds is the fact that the culture-war issues he’s chosen to triangulate on—especially “Guns Everywhere,” which was excoriated by the national NAACP—are turnoffs for a lot of minority voters. “The gun law is just stupid,” says legendary Atlanta civilrights organizer Lonnie King. “But Carter is a Democrat. People will probably swallow their pride to vote for him. He’s head and shoulders better than Deal.” Pride-swallowing does not usually translate into a stampede to the polls. Fortunately for Carter and the rest of us, the ideological gymnastics of Republican Lite-ism won’t be necessary much longer in Georgia—if, in fact, they’re necessary now. Whether or not they prevail in November, Carter and Michelle Nunn will not likely become symbols of Georgia’s political future, or the South’s. Instead, they’ll be seen as bridges to that future: the necessary, “acceptable” white candidates who helped break the Republican spell and pave the way for nonwhite Democrats’ rise to dominance—and, at long last, for a new definition of the term “Southern Democrat.”
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Midwestern Maladies
The Democrats’ hold on the Rust Belt grows shaky. By Anna Clark
I
t was just one more embarrassment for Healthcare.gov. When the White House unveiled a map of the country last November that detailed Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, something was missing: half the state of Michigan. The Upper Peninsula—the richly forested swath of land north of the “mitten”—was shorn clean off. Dan Benishek, the region’s Republican congressman, posted the faulty map on his Facebook page and wrote: “It makes you wonder if the president’s omission of the entire U.P. from his maps is reflective of his views of us Yoopers?” That’s the nickname for U.P. residents: Yoopers. An idiosyncratic name for an idiosyncratic place. While it contains nearly 30 percent of the state’s land, the U.P. has only 3 percent of the state’s population. Most residents are white descendants of Scandinavian, German, and Italian immigrants who came here to mine. In the mid-19th century, the U.P. produced more mineral wealth than California did in the Gold Rush. The Keweenaw Peninsula, the rocky land that juts like a finger into Lake Superior, once boasted the purest copper ever found in the world, which locals celebrate by naming everything from their schools (Copper Country Intermediate School District) to private driving services (Copper Country Limo) after the metal. But between slowing industry and the outmigration of young people, the U.P. is growing older: In most of the counties here, deaths outnumber births. With its aging population, its extraction industries, its culture of hunting and fishing, its white homogeneity, and its strong religious ties, the U.P. has a distinct conservative streak.
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Yet, for generations, this was one of the most reliably Democratic congressional districts in the country. People here were won over by New Deal–era public-works projects that transformed a region that, with relatively few voters, had been easy for Washington to neglect. In 1935, with the mines shut down and the peninsula not yet connected to Michigan’s mainland by bridge, nearly one-third of the population was on relief, and in Keweenaw County, capital of copper country, 70 percent were. But the Civilian Conservation Corps employed more than 100,000 people to reforest land in northern Michigan ravaged by logging. They also built trails and bridges. The New Deal funded scenic mountain highways, a federal courthouse, and Post Office murals. In 1933, shopkeepers pasted up National Recovery Administration posters on their store windows, featuring its blue-eagle icon and the words “We Do Our Part.” They left them there for years. Democratic loyalty was strong in the U.P. each time it voted for Congress—until the resignation of U.S. Representative Bart Stupak, who officially vacated the office in 2011 after serving for nine terms. He was the last in a long string of Democrats that Michigan’s First District sent to Washington. (The enormous First District includes more than 30 counties in the U.P. and Northern Lower Peninsula.) Stupak is from Menominee, an especially conservative part of the peninsula, but his brand of brass-tacks populism won the support of Republican voters in both state and national elections. In his final race in 2008, Stupak won nearly twice as many votes as his opponent. Barack Obama barely squeaked through the same district, carrying 50 percent to John McCain’s 48 percent. Even in the U.P. it didn’t hurt Stupak that
he’d voted with the Democrats 95 percent of the time. An Eagle Scout and former state trooper, the congressman had a bring-home-the-bacon philosophy that resulted in tangible benefits for the community. He agitated for disasterrelief funds for a region forced to spend $10 million just on snow removal one winter. He helped bring an Olympic Education Center to Marquette, where athletes in lower-profile sports, like Greco-Roman wrestling, train for the games while earning a college degree. (“People take great pride in that,” Stupak says. “They’re very patriotic up there.”) He also supported policies that protected the Great Lakes, creating a federal ban on oil and gas drilling (and pressing Canada on a similar ban). But then came President Barack Obama and his Affordable Care Act, which pushed the low-key Stupak into an unwelcome spotlight. In the midst of a firestorm that Stupak has described as a “living hell,” the pro-life congressman’s “yes” vote on health-care reform came only after the president issued an executive order affirming the ban on federal funding for abortions. Stupak—who first ran for Congress in 1992 with a pamphlet that read “Health care is a right”—affirmed his ACA support in a speech on the House floor, only to be interrupted by Congressman Randy Neugebauer of Texas shouting “baby killer” at him. Outside the Capitol, death threats led to the involvement of the FBI and police. A man who vowed to paint the Mackinac Bridge with the blood of Stupak and his family was sentenced in 2012 to house arrest and fined $47,000. Two days after Stupak’s vote, Obama signed the ACA into law. Seventeen days after that, the earnest congressman from the north country announced he wouldn’t seek re-election. It
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THE REFORM In response to Citizens United, Democrats propose the Disclose Act, a bill that would require donors funding shadowy political nonprofit groups to be identified.
APRIL 23, 2010 Democratic talking points on the Disclose Act: “We can’t flood our democracy with millions of dollars in political expenditures and then keep people in the dark about who is trying to influence them.”
APRIL 29, 2010 Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland: “This legislation will let the sun shine in at a time when so many Americans are already concerned about the influence of powerful special interests on our democracy.”
was just in time for the Tea Party–inspired backlash that upended Midwestern politics. Dan Benishek won Stupak’s seat the following November, ending more than eight decades of Democratic representation from the First District. Benishek is a surgeon who never before held office. His victory came on a statewide wave of conservative fervor: Republicans won the races for governor, both chambers of the legislature, secretary of state, supreme court, and attorney general. Another conservative Republican took over a Democrat’s House seat in Michigan’s Seventh District. In the state legislature, Democrats dropped from 63 to 47 seats, out of 110 total, and 21 of those seats were in Wayne County, home to Detroit. With meager remaining representation in other corners of the state, the party verges on being overwhelmingly of and from Detroit. The Republicans’ 2010 legislative victories allowed them to amplify their margin even further, redistricting the political maps to benefit their party. This isn’t just a Michigan story. Two years after a resident of the Midwest’s largest city swept into the White House, Republicans Scott Walker, John Kasich, Rick Snyder, and Terry Branstad won the governorships of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Iowa, respectively, each of them replacing Democrats and two of them unseating Democratic incumbents. State legislatures controlled by Democrats in at least one chamber flipped to two-house GOP control in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and even Minnesota. Although Minnesota elected liberal Mark Dayton as governor (barely; he beat Tea Party candidate Tom Emmer by only 0.4 percent), voters simultaneously turned over both legislative chambers to Republicans for the first time since the state
MAY 1, 2010 President Obama in his weekly video address: “The American people … have the right to know when some group like ‘Citizens for a Better Future’ is actually funded entirely by ‘Corporations for Weaker Oversight.’ What we are facing is no less than a potential corporate takeover of our elections.”
As young people and African Americans leave, immigrants stay away, and unions grow smaller, all the Midwest’s demographic indices are moving in directions that help Republicans. instituted party designation in 1975. In that other Democratic stronghold of the Midwest, Illinois, embattled Governor Pat Quinn came within a hair’s breadth of losing his seat. In the U.S. House, Democrats lost five seats in Ohio, two in Indiana, and three in Illinois. Republicans also gained in the U.S. Senate when Democrats lost in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois. Democrats also failed to take an open Senate seat in Ohio. The rightward swing in state-level politics continued two years later, even though Obama carried all the Rust Belt states except historically Republican Indiana. (The federal loans to the auto industry were not forgotten here.) While a Democratic gerrymander helped the party pick up seats in Illinois, Republican gerrymanders in other states protected the party
JUNE 16, 2010
JUNE 17, 2010
Representative Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York: “I have a concern more so with the NRA putting their fingerprint on too much of our legislation. If people want to change that, they’ve got to start standing up, too.”
Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts: “It is not the bill I would have written, but it is better than nothing. If we are going to be Swift-boated, we should be able to know who is doing it.”
against the higher presidential-year turnout. Republicans gained a seat in the Wisconsin Assembly, as well as two in the state’s senate. In Ohio, the GOP won a state house seat while holding its senate supermajority. Tea Party–favored Steve King kept his house seat in Iowa. Minnesota was the major exception to the rightward trend: Democrats recaptured both houses of the legislature, though Michele Bachmann retained her congressional seat. In Michigan, Dan Benishek won a second term in Washington, while Mitt Romney carried 13 of the U.P.’s 15 counties. (McCain carried only seven of them in 2008.) In the first election following the GOP’s redistricting, Democrats won only 5 of Michigan’s 14 U.S. congressional seats, and, in a barely noticeable uptick, just 51 of 110 state House seats—even as Obama carried the state with 54 percent of the vote. In Washington, Benishek’s right-wing bona fides make even the staunchest liberals feel nostalgic for the moderate Stupak. Benishek has voted to gut the food-stamp program, though 17.7 percent of households in his district depend on it. While Stupak backed numerous bills addressing climate change, Benishek denies that climate change even exists. “Baloney,” he calls it. “Rural voters are now much more monolithic,” says Gene Ulm, a partner with the right-leaning Public Opinion Strategies. “You had a couple of these outposts of old farming Democrats in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in western Wisconsin, in large portions of Minnesota, where they were part of the FDR coalition … but it seems like they’re becoming just like all rural voters, which is Tea Party–ish Republican.” The Republicanization of the rural areas is just one of the problems that Midwestern
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THE FLIP-FLOP JULY 26, 2010 Obama: “You’d think that reducing corporate and even foreign influence over our elections would not be a partisan issue. But of course, this is Washington in 2010.”
JULY 27, 2010 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada: “It wasn’t too long ago that greater disclosure in election spending was a bipartisan concept. But just as quickly as they ran to the side of big business and the insurance companies and big banks and the oil companies, Senate Republicans are now running away from transparency and accountability in our elections.”
Democrats face. The decline of industrial unions, the aging of the population, the relative lack of immigrants, and the out- migration of African Americans and young people all portend challenging times for the region’s Democrats. If Republicans claim more of the region’s 117 electoral votes, the national consequences could be bracing: A lasting conservative shift in the industrial Midwest would nullify Democratic gains in the Sun Belt. Swinging states like Michigan and Wisconsin (which together have 26 electoral votes) into the Republican column would offset Democratic gains in Arizona and Georgia (which together have 27 electoral votes). With a total of 44 electoral votes, a red triptych of Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin would best a blue Texas (38 electoral votes). Absent some leftist intervention, the Party of Lincoln might well come home to the region where it was born 160 years ago. THERE IS THE VIBRANT BUSTLE of Chicago,
there is postindustrial Flint, and then there are thousands of tiny, depopulating prairie towns. An expansive region of 12 states—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin—the Midwest contains distinct textures. The American West begins on one edge, while Southern culture bleeds over another. Still, there are threads that stitch the region together. Midwesterners are more likely to be married, and they are growing old, ahead of national trends on both counts. Among U.S. regions, the Midwest has the highest percentage of counties where the share of seniors exceeds the national average. The Minnesota State Demographic Center predicts that the
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Democrats, deciding that competitiveness trumps hypocrisy, begin forming their own super PACs while continuing to criticize Citizens United and its impact.
SEPTEMBER 29, 2010 Craig Varoga, founder of the left-leaning Patriot Majority super PAC: “You can complain about the rules, or you can respond to them and fight back against the people who welcome those rule changes.”
number of people aged 65 and older will more than double by 2040, while the population younger than 65 will grow by just 6.34 percent. The boom in the elderly population is paired with an out-migration of young people. In the last census, Michigan was the only state in the nation that saw a population loss. Chicago and Detroit were two of the five cities that saw the biggest population losses in the country. In Illinois, a recent Gallup poll revealed that half of the state’s residents would move if they could. The region’s loss of population has already diminished its clout in Washington: Michigan has lost five congressional representatives in the past 34 years. Young people aren’t the only ones exiting the Midwest. For most of the 20th century, African Americans traveled north in search of manufacturing jobs. With fewer jobs nowadays, there is a reverse migration. According to a Brookings Institution analysis, African Americans are packing up and moving to the Sun Belt. Illinois and Michigan showed, for the first time, absolute losses in their black population in the 2010 census. Today, the Midwest is alongside New England as one of the whitest regions in the country. “This is not because whites are moving (to the Midwest) in large numbers, but because minorities are not,” according to the Urban Land Institute. Immigration has not disrupted the trend. While foreign-born populations have risen, they’re still a small presence: less than 5 percent in eight states. While 10.8 percent of the U.S. population is foreign born, only 5.6 percent of the Midwest’s residents are. All the Midwest’s demographics—age, marriage status, ethnicity, race—correlate with more conservative politics, making a Republican future feel all but certain.
OCTOBER 4, 2010 MoveOn.org executive director Justin Ruben: “We can’t possibly match this spending dollar for dollar. Turnout is big in a midterm, and the best way to affect turnout is person-to-person contact. These groups have a few millionaires, but they can’t talk to that many people.”
OCTOBER 7, 2010 Obama on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: “Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations. So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”
LON JOHNSON GREW UP IN a Republican
family in working-class Rockwood, Michigan, but his affinity for Democrats was ignited on a day in 1987 when his ride back from a factory reopening he was photographing mysteriously disappeared. Stranded in the plant’s parking lot with nothing but his camera, he saw an unfamiliar car pull up beside him. The window rolled down, and a man leaned out. “Young man, do you need a ride?” he asked. It was John Dingell—Michigan’s longestserving and most powerful congressman. “And we were in the car, and he just talked to me,” Johnson says. “I was really moved by that. Here I am, Lon Johnson—nobody, basically, and he’s, you know, Congressman Dingell, and he’s talking to me. It just left an impression on me that maybe politics was a little more open than I thought.” The impression endured. Johnson is in his early forties now, but with his close-cut brown hair and wide eyes, he looks ten years younger. After failing (barely) in an attempt to unseat a Republican incumbent in Michigan’s legislature, he’s working on his first election as chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. He exudes a fierce enthusiasm about creating a blue Michigan, and he believes better use of technology and data is the key to making it happen. Johnson is convinced that Michigan Democrats still have the advantage when they turn out voters. “About 995,000 identified Democrats did not vote in 2010,” Johnson says. “Let that sink in for a moment.” While he has labor’s backing, unions have lost members and don’t have the same get-out-the-vote capacity they once did. In lieu of that, Johnson is turning to digital tools. While Johnson won’t reveal his plans on the record, he is clearly trying to turn the Democratic Party into the political
THE RESOLVE OCTOBER 27, 2010 Spokesperson Ramona Oliver for America’s Families First, one of the earliest Democratic super PACs: “We always know we’re David to the right-wing Goliath, but we’re trying to balance the scales.”
Late to embrace super PACs and political nonprofits, the Democrats get crushed in the 2010 midterm elections and vow not to fall behind again.
machine that labor used to be—a powerful system for drumming up support for liberal candidates and policies in the Midwest. In 1964, the same year Michigan sent Representative John Conyers to Congress, union membership in the state was among the highest in the nation: 44.8 percent of all workers. As manufacturing industries declined, and as unionizing service-sector workers proved difficult, the unionization rate plummeted to 16.4 percent in 2013. The decline of unions led to Democratic declines in donations, endorsements, precinct walkers, and phone bankers who knew how to make a pitch. Working-class white people—a large proportion of Midwest voters—are more likely to vote Democratic if they belong to a union, at a rate of 20 percent to 30 percent higher than their nonunion counterparts. Historically, Midwestern labor leaders provided crucial support for core Democratic legislation. Legendary United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther worked with President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s not just on bills affecting labor but also on the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and War on Poverty programs. The Detroit-based United Auto Workers backed New Deal policies, donated money and buses for the 1963 March on Washington, and provided start-up funds for the Students for a Democratic Society (which wrote its founding statement at the UAW ’s camp in Port Huron, Michigan), the National Organization for Women, and the first Earth Day. Unions were the Democratic Party in states like Michigan, the engine that powered it for decades. Now, they’re not. The nationwide fall in union membership has been particularly steep
NOVEMBER 20, 2010 David Axelrod: “I don’t think we can put the genie back in the bottle.”
APRIL 5, 2011 Spokesperson Chris Harris for American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC devoted to researching and tracking GOP candidates: “In 2010, progressives were very slow to react to Citizens United, and we got pummeled. There’s a recognition among operatives and donors that we can’t do that again.”
MAY 11, 2011
JUNE 17, 2011
Bill Burton, co-founder of Priorities USA Action, a super PAC committed to re-electing Obama: “A lot of Democrats are committed to reform, including us. But we’ve got to operate under the rules that exist, not the rules we wish existed.”
House Majority super PAC founder Alixandria Lapp: “We can’t allow ourselves to be outspent again 3 to 1 in the outsidemoney game.”
Bart Stupak is from an especially conservative part of the Upper Peninsula, but his brass-tacks populism won him the support of Republican voters for nearly two decades. That ended when he backed Obamacare. in Michigan, where unions had more members to lose than just about anyplace else. Membership dropped by nearly 30 percent over the past five decades in the state—even before the Republican legislature enacted a right-to-work law in 2013. Much of that decline is due to the decimation of manufacturing. Between 2000 and 2010, Michigan lost 17 percent of overall employment, but the number of manufacturing jobs was halved. The sector has rebounded somewhat in the last four years, but it’s still well below 2000 levels, and growing jobs haven’t translated into growing union membership. Deunionization isn’t limited to Michigan, of course. In Indiana, nearly 41 percent of workers were union members in 1965, but that fell to 11 percent in 2011. After Indiana’s right-
to-work legislation was signed into law that year, union membership fell further, down to 9 percent after one year. Ohio saw the unionized share of its workforce fall from 38 percent to 14 percent between 1964 and 2011. Republicans have deftly capitalized on this growing display of political impotency by gutting what remained of the Democrats’ labor machine. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker put severe restrictions on public employees’ collective bargaining. (In Ohio, Kasich also seriously restricted collective-bargaining rights, but voters overturned this.) The subsequent union-led campaign to recall Walker failed decisively: The governor defeated his Democratic challenger by 7 percentage points. Wisconsin’s union membership abruptly dropped after Walker’s curtailment of collective bargaining. Exit polls in 2012 revealed that the union-household vote made up the smallest share of Wisconsin votes in at least 20 years, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis. Walker himself acknowledged how this directly affected the Democrats’ support system: “Their power before was the power of numbers, both in terms of turning people out and more important how much money they could draw from that,” he told the paper. In Michigan, the unions’ attempt to persuade voters to back an initiative enshrining collective bargaining in the state constitution failed by a humiliating 15 percentage points. The gambit led to a backlash, with the legislature passing and the governor signing a right-to-work law less than two months later. This year, Michigan unions rallied around a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour for all (including tipped) workers—but Republican lawmakers cleverly undercut them. They opted to raise
JUL/AUG 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35
THE EMBR ACE FEBRUARY 6, 2012 Obama flip-flops and urges donors to give to the Priorities USA Action super PAC. Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina: “Our campaign has to face the reality of the law as it stands. We can’t allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm.”
MAY 7, 2012 Democratic fundraiser and operative Rob Stein: “Super PACs are critically important.”
the minimum wage by a smaller amount, but instead of amending the existing law to do this, they repealed it and wrote a new law. That meant that the law the ballot initiative would have amended no longer existed, leaving organizers to chase a ghost. The campaign for $10.10 per hour was moot by May. ACROSS THE STREET FROM the City Hall of
Marquette, Michigan—a port city from which the U.P.’s copper mines once shipped their product to a waiting world—stands St. Peter Cathedral. A stately structure of elaborate marble, the church holds the earthly remains of Bishop Frederic Baraga. The bishop was a Catholic missionary to the region who worked with First Nations people; he was also a grammarian of Native American languages. Bill Vajda, a thirdgeneration Marquette resident who serves as city manager, says that by the 1970s, the city was the most Catholic in the country. The Midwest is still heavily Catholic—30 percent of Illinois residents belong to the Church, 32 percent of Wisconsin’s. For much of the 20th century, Catholics—many of them immigrants to the United States and overwhelmingly white—held working-class perspectives that gave the Democrats an edge in winning their vote. (The coolness of the largely Protestant Republican Party to Irish and Italian immigrants helped Democrats, too.) Al Smith, the first Catholic to run for president, was a progressive Democrat who, in 1928, made racial equality a key part of his platform. In the 1950s, only one in five Catholics identified as Republican. Catholics’ Democratic affinities peaked with the election of President John F. Kennedy, the first and only Catholic to sit in the Oval Office: 70 percent of Catholics voted for him, nearly all of whom
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JUNE 29, 2012 Obama: “The special interests that are financing my opponent’s campaign are just going to consolidate themselves. They’re gonna run Congress and the White House.”
As the polls tighten in the presidential race, the flow of Democratic donations to super PACs, once a trickle, becomes a flood of sixand seven-figure checks.
SEPTEMBER 7, 2012
OCTOBER 19, 2012
Democratic operative Peter Fenn: “With 60 days out, the rubber is hitting the road. If anybody can squeeze money from these folks, it’s Rahm Emanuel.”
Bill Burton: “Democrats know that this race is even closer than we thought it would be, and if we’re going to close this deal, everybody has to get involved.”
identified as Democrats. Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and (somewhat controversially) Illinois gave Kennedy 71 electoral votes. But party loyalty slipped in the 1970s. Today, only 33 percent of Catholics nationally identify as Democrats. The biggest gain has been among independents: 37 percent of Catholics today claim no party affiliation (though most voted for Romney in 2012). The rightward drift of the faith has been tempered by the rise of left-leaning Latino Catholics, who constitute just over one-third of the Church’s membership. In Michigan, however, where Latino immigration is sparse, 84 percent of Catholics are white. While the state’s Catholics are not offthe-charts conservative—they supported Mitt Romney over Rick Santorum in the 2012 GOP primary, though only by a 44 percent to 37 percent margin—they still vote Republican far more than their forebears. The rise of social issues as a political priority for devotees is one reason. Catholics are more conservative on abortion in the Midwest than anywhere else in the country, even the South. Fifty-seven percent of Midwestern Catholics believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. The rightward swing of Midwestern Catholics, and white working-class voters generally, has also been prompted by the Democratic Party’s embrace of minority rights as central to its identity. In the 1980s, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg surveyed voters in the white working-class Detroit suburb of Macomb County, which had voted heavily for Kennedy in 1960 and just as heavily for Ronald Reagan in 1980. He found that Macomb’s voters believed the Democrats were interested in spending public funds—their tax dollars—on African Americans only.
NOVEMBER 11, 2012 Representative Van Hollen: “I don’t think it’s good for the process for people to have to spend even more time raising money to have an insurance policy against super PACs.”
While many white Catholics have grown disenchanted with the Democrats, relatively few of them have become Republicans. Just 24 percent in Michigan belong to the GOP, while 36 percent are independents—numbers that suggest there’s political space to make a populist appeal. Thirty-three percent still identify as Democrats. In a Public Religion Research Institute survey, Catholics were asked whether they thought free-market capitalism was consistent or at odds with Christian values. While Latino Catholics tend to be much more liberal on economic issues, the survey revealed that white Catholics were evenly divided on the question. This ambivalence toward unfettered markets is significant. If Democrats embrace economic populism, they may yet find a way to hold the Midwest. NOTHING MATTERS IN MICHIGAN more than
jobs, and everyone here knows it, whatever their political colors may be. As of mid-May, Michigan ranked 44th in national unemployment numbers at 7.4 percent; only six states (one of them Illinois) have it worse. About 300,000 fewer people are employed in Michigan today than in 2007. While the Rust Belt is growing whiter and older than the rest of the nation, a Democratic emphasis on economic fairness could be the one thing that attracts Midwestern voters to the party, even as it grows more diverse nationally. What white Midwesterners have in common with California’s Latinos and Georgia’s African Americans is their understanding that the economic system is rigged against them. Economic populism doesn’t necessarily translate into support for unions, as the recent political battles in Michigan and Wisconsin make clear. Populist policies, however,
THE RESULTS Post-election, Obama’s 2012 campaign morphs into a nonprofit called Organizing for Action, and the Democratic big-money machine moves to Hillary Clinton.
JANUARY 30, 2013
FEBRUARY 20, 2013
Common Cause president Bob Edgar: “I think labor is going to give to them. Corporations are going to give to them. Huge wealthy donors are going to give to them. They have no problem with that being known and will want to call up the White House for access.”
David Axelrod: “Too much money in politics. But if it’s inevitable, let it flow directly to candidates and demand full disclosure, with stiff penalties. And end the super PAC and faux super PAC game that too often allows donors to elude detection and candidates to deny responsibility.”
command considerable support. In Michigan, Republicans hurried to undercut the ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 because it had enormous appeal. A March poll showed that 65 percent of voters would support it. The Democrats’ one clear success story in today’s Midwest is in Minnesota. Following the election of Democrat Mark Dayton as governor in 2010, and of a Democratic legislature in 2012, the state raised taxes by $2.1 billion— the largest increase in recent state history, making Minnesota’s top income tax rate the fourth-highest in the nation. The increase was steeply progressive: The wealthiest 1 percent of earners pay 62 percent of these new taxes. Most of the new revenue was invested in K-12 schools and higher education. Next door in Wisconsin, Scott Walker promised to create 250,000 new jobs while slashing state services and cutting education spending by 15 percent. However, the state gained just 113,500 jobs over Walker’s first term, and Wisconsin trails other Midwestern states in job creation. Minnesota boasts the fifth-fastest-growing economy in the country. Dayton’s progressive tax agenda was hardly kept secret from voters. “The number-one topic of his campaign was increasing taxes on affluent people,” says Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political studies professor at the University of Minnesota. “There was no hedging. He said they need to pay more so we can adequately fund our education system.” For all his tax-hike talk, and despite Republicans taking control of the legislature (which they lost in 2012), Dayton prevailed. An anti-gay-marriage amendment on Minnesota’s ballot that year failed to pass but likely drew Catholics to the polls. Even if Catholics voted for the amendment,
JANUARY 23, 2014
FEBRUARY 28, 2014
Obama campaign manager Jim Messina on joining Priorities USA Action super PAC, which turns into a pro–Hillary Clinton organization: “I think the numbers clearly show that she’s the strongest presidential candidate on the Democratic side. And Priorities is going to be there for her if she decides to run.”
Minnesota offers a populist blueprint for Democrats throughout the region. Fighting to raise the minimum wage would be a good beginning. Jacobs says, that didn’t necessarily lead them to vote for Dayton’s Republican opponent. Four years later, Dayton’s popularity numbers outpace his Republican counterparts from the class of 2010: Walker, Kasich, Snyder, and Branstad. One February poll showed Dayton with an approval rating of nearly 90 percent among Democrats, more than 50 percent among independents, and 25 percent among Republicans. Minnesota offers a populist blueprint for Democrats throughout the region. “They need to speak clearly about why they support taxes, why special programs are worth supporting,” Jacobs says. It is ultimately Dayton’s ability to make this straightforward case that enabled him to win credibility across the political spectrum. This is what Midwestern populist politics look like. While some variation is to be expected, the future ideal of the successful
Organizing for Action spokesperson Katie Hogan, after director Jon Carson introduced a potential donor in legal trouble with the federal government to a White House aide: “We hold ourselves to the highest standards. In this case, we fell short.”
Midwestern Democrat might resemble a cross between Bart Stupak and Senator Elizabeth Warren—a pragmatist focused on fairness for consumers and workers. “When you take a look at my record, maybe you’d see me as a conservative on social issues but pretty liberal on fiscal issues,” Stupak says. “That’s the old FDR-Truman Democrat.” The FDR days are over. But a fight to raise the minimum wage would be a good basis for building an alliance of the disparate elements of today’s working class—workers in the service sectors and in manufacturing, those laboring under contract or with freelance gigs, the unemployed. Farming, a massive regional industry, is another sector in which Democrats can connect. Policies supporting migrant workers and immigration rights are a natural for the Democratic Party, but in the Midwest, they should be discussed more as a practical way to stabilize the agriculture industry than as an abstract issue of human rights. The Midwest isn’t the only place where an emphasis on economic populism would open more doors for Democrats than cultural liberalism. In both the swing regions of the future—the South as well as the Midwest—policies promoting economic equity, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, would resonate. “What concerns most voters is: Do I have a job? Is it paid well? Do I have a safe place to work and for my kids to go to school?” Jacobs says. “But how many Democrats are talking about these issues?” Bart Stupak sees the Midwest as part of a grand narrative, where economic and political forces are still writing the plot. “I’m just looking into the future here,” he says. “There’s a story that Michigan can tell. People will look to us and say no one was more down-and-out than Michigan. What did they do to rebound?
JUL/AUG 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37
DEMOCRATIC SUGAR-DADDY DOSSIER Lights, Camera, ion Political Act
Jeffrey Katzenberg AGE: 63 HOME : Los Angeles mWorks OCCUPATION: CEO, Drea Animation n NET WORTH: $957 millio nberg hosted WHY HE MATTERS: Katze 07 fundraiser a crucial February 20 naling Holfor Barack Obama, sig support lywood’s overwhelming llary Clinton. for the senator over Hi raised tens Katzenberg ultimately Obama’s of millions of dollars for ns as well 2008 and 2012 campaig Jerry Brown, as funds for Governor ren, and othSenator Elizabeth War $3.15 million ers. He also ponied up PACs in the for Democratic super $2 million of 2012 election cycle — uential Priwhich launched the infl w, with Priorities USA Action. No Katzenberg orities as his vehicle, lf as a leadhas positioned himse Hillary 2016 ing financier behind a presidential bid.
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BY ANDY KROLL ART BY STEVE BRODNER
The Black Sheep
The Son Also Rises
Laura Ricketts
Jonathan Soros AGE: 45 HOME: New York City OCCUPATION: Investor, political activist NET WORTH : Unknown WHY HE MATTERS: Jonathan Soros has emerged in recent years as a savvy donor and operative, much more hands-on than his father, George, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor. In particular, the younger Soros has pumped millions into the cause of campaign-finance reform, mostly through Friends of Democracy, an anti–super PAC super PAC that seeks to elect state and federal lawmakers who support public financing of elections. In 2012, seven of the eight lawmakers backed by Soros’s PAC won. Soros wants to pass public financing in New York state while injecting Friends of Democracy into more state and congressional races.
AGE : 46
HOME: Chicago OCCUPATION : Co-owner, Chicago Cubs; activist NET WORTH: Unknown WHY SHE MAT TERS: Ricketts is the black sheep of her rightleaning family, which owns the Chicago Cubs. Her father, Joe, the founder of TD Ameritrade, and her brother Todd are the brains and money behind Ending Spending, a conservative political operation that during the 2012 election considered attacking Obama as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln” but later abandoned that plan. By contrast, Laura, who is a lesbian, bundled at least $793,000 for Obama since 2007 and started her own super PAC to elect “pro-lesbian, pro-women” candidates.
The Green Billionaire
Tom Steyer AGE: 57 HOME: San Francisco OCCUPATION: Retired hedge-fund investor, environmental activist NET WORTH : $1.6 billion WHY HE MATTERS: Steyer has been a reliable Democratic donor since the 1990s and a major spender on California ballot initiatives—in 2012, he dropped $30 million on a measure to close corporate tax loopholes and invest the money in schools and the environment. Believing that global warming is the generational cause of our time, Steyer has opened his own political shop, NextGen Climate, to influence elections. In 2013, NextGen spent $8 million to defeat Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli. This year, Steyer aims to spend $100 million (or more) to elect environmentally conscious candidates and pressure state and federal lawmakers to take action fighting climate change.
The Texans
Steve Mostyn and A mber A nderson Mostyn
AGE: 43, 43
NET WORTH: Unknown
Tim Gill AGE: 60 HOME: Denver OCCUPATION: Former software developer, LGBT activist
HOME : Houston OCCUPATION: Trial law
The LGBT ATM
yers
WHY THEY MATTER : The long-term effort under way to turn Te xas blue, largely by registering millions of Latino voters and implementing an Obama-style get-out-the-vote mach ine, wouldn’t exist if not for the Mo styns. They’ve emerged as the anchor donors of Texas Democratic po litics, giving $250,000 to Battlegrou nd Texas and leading Annie’s List, a state-level version of EMILY’s List, which identifies, trains, and funds pro-c hoice Democratic women candida tes for office. The Mostyns donated $5.2 million to Democratic super PACs in the 2012 cycle, and they’re poise d to provide much more in 2016. Th ey’re founding members of Ready for Hillary, the super PAC-cum-campaign-i n-waiting for Clinton’s 2016 run.
NET WORTH: Unknown WHY HE MATTERS: No donor has done more to promote marriage equality in the country than Gill. But you probably haven’t heard of him. He prefers it that way. Over his lifetime, Gill has given $300 million to the gayrights cause—electing local and state politicians who support same-sex marriage and expanding rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people—including a new campaign targeting southern and western states. Much of Gill’s giving is done through 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofits, which is why his profile is lower than those of his fellow progressive donors.
JUL/AUG 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39
The Tech Bro
Sean Parker AGE: 34 HOME : New York City tor OCCUPATION: Tech inves n NET WORTH: $2.6 billio
of the Facebook WHY HE MATTERS: One ramping up his billionaires, Parker is d, like some of political activities—an an unorthoing his tech brethren, tak candidates g tin dox approach by cour trum. He’s ec sp across the ideological ts so far— cra mo donated mostly to De Virginhim de his $500,000 check ma largest e’s liff Au ia Governor Terry Mc also ile wh — 13 individual donor in 20 tor na Se of es meeting with the lik GOP lawmakRand Paul and hosting $250,000 s Hi ers in Silicon Valley. mocracy, De of donation to Friends PAC r pe su the anti–super PAC , sigros So founded by Jonathan ing uc red naled Parker’s goal of s. His res ng Co money’s influence in uld co s ec ex h network of young tec sh ca tic cra mo be a wellspring of De in future elections.
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The Reclusive Rockefeller
The Hawk
Alida Messinger AGE: 64 HOME: Afton, Minnesota OCCUPATION: Philanthropist, conservationist NET WORTH : Unknown WHY SHE MATTERS: Messinger, the youngest daughter of John D. Rockefeller III, has invested more than $10 million in progressive politics in Minnesota, where Democrats control both U.S. Senate seats, five of the state’s eight congressional seats, and every constitutional office— governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and state auditor. Messinger, who was once married to Governor Mark Dayton, has also spread the gospel of Minnesota progressives to donors in other regions who hope to turn their states blue.
Haim Saban
AGE : 69
HOME: Beverly Hills OCCUPATION : Entertainment execut
NET WORTH: $3.4 billion
ive
WHY HE MAT TERS: Saban, who bro ught the Mighty Morphin Power Ran gers to U.S. audiences, is a close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s and has donated millions to their founda tion and the Clinton Presidentia l Library. He can raise millions for a Hillary presidential bid. A hawk on issues regarding Israel, Saban fun ds a highly regarded annual confere nce on U.S.–Israeli relations that has featured both Clintons as speakers. Bill has stayed at Saban’s home, wit h his host once telling a friend,“The pre sident of the United States, wearing his boxers, is coming down the stairs, and I am going to have to stop talk ing and go have breakfast with him .”
Rocky Mountain High Roller
The Renegade 1-Percenter
Citizen Maine
Pat Stryker
S. Donald Sussman
AGE: 58
AGE: 68
HOME: Fort Collins, Colorado OCCUPATION: Philanthropist NET WORTH : $1.9 billion WHY SHE MATTERS: An heiress to the founder of the Stryker medical- device company, Pat Stryker was one of the “Gang of Four” donors who invested heavily in turning Colorado blue starting in the early 2000s. The political machine her money helped create in Colorado has served as the template for progressive takeovers in Maine, Minnesota, and Washington state. As Democrats fight to keep Colorado in their column by defending their majorities in the legislature and re-electing Governor John Hickenlooper, Stryker’s donations will play a crucial role.
Nick Hanauer
AGE: 54
HOME : Seattle OCCUPATION: Venture-c apital investor, activist, phila nthropist NET WORTH: $1 billion WHY HE MATTERS: Hana uer has helped build a coalitio n of nonprofits intended to nudge Washington state to th e left. He co-founded the League of Education Voters while giv ing $5 million to Democratic candidates and efforts supporting ballot measures to mandate background checks for gu n purchases and raise the state inc ome tax. Hanauer, who caused a ruckus with a 2012 TED talk about inequality, also sits on the board of the Democracy Allia nce, the national liberal donor club.
HOME: North Haven, Maine OCCUPATION: Hedge-fund investor, newspaper owner NET WORTH: Unknown WHY HE MATTERS: Maine’s most powerful 1-percenter, a hedge-fund manager married to Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, Sussman runs various funds that control $2 billion. He owns several Maine newspapers, including the Portland Press Herald, and he has given more than $12 million to political committees, ballot initiatives, and political nonprofits since the 1990s, including $1.15 million in 2012 to a super PAC backing House Democrats. In 2011, Sussman funded a ballot measure to reinstate same-day voter registration, and his money is crucial in the Democrats’ campaign to preserve their majority in the legislature and defeat Governor Paul LePage this year.
JUL/AUG 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41
Hillary for Liberals
A conversation with Walter Shapiro
A
s a reporter and columnist for Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, USA Today, Esquire, Salon, and other publications, Walter Shapiro has covered nine presidential elections and the nation’s politics for four decades. He is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a lecturer in political science at Yale while he finishes a book about his great-uncle, a vaudevillian and con man who once swindled Hitler. Shapiro is also an accomplished Hillary- ologist, having first interviewed Hillary Clinton in the Arkansas governor’s mansion for Time in September 1992. In early May, Shapiro sat down with Prospect editor-at-large Harold Meyerson to talk about a question he’s internally debated for years: On balance, would a Hillary Clinton candidacy and presidency be a good or bad thing for the liberal cause? The following discussion has been edited for concision and clarity. HAROLD MEYERSON: Walter, when liberals look at Hillary Clinton, what should they see? The Democratic Party and the country have certainly changed since she was first lady, and even since she was a senator and secretary of state. WALTER SHAPIRO: I’ve always thought that Bill Clinton was never really a person of the ’60s. Bill Clinton started in 1960 as a 14-yearold who wanted to be governor of Arkansas. He came out of the ’60s as a 24-year-old who wanted to be governor of Arkansas without going to Vietnam. But Hillary did the full, life-changing conversion from the obedient Goldwater Girl to delivering an ethereal but genuinely anti-war address at Wellesley in ’69. So in a sense, as far as the culture of the
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time washing over someone, it washed over her more than it ever washed over Bill. HM: Still, she spent so many years in Arkansas, and Arkansas’s political culture is not one with which most liberals are comfortable. Both Clintons were clearly supportive of the civil-rights revolution. But the other part of that culture is the Stephens investment firm and Wal-Mart, and to get somewhere in Arkansas politics, you eventually have relations with them. Hillary famously was on the WalMart board for a while. WS: What stayed with me, and I still think it’s really important for understanding Hillary, happened in March of 1992, at a debate before the Illinois primary. Jerry Brown (Bill Clinton’s primary opponent) went after Bill Clinton in part for the legal work that Hillary did at Rose Law Firm on behalf of banks. And Hillary at some point said, in effect, “Of course I work for banks; who do you expect me to work for if I’m a lawyer?” Well, there were, believe it or not, other clients in the state of Arkansas in the 1980s while her husband was governor. HM: That’s no small part of what gives liberals pause about Hillary—who is, of course, still going around giving talks to the Goldman Sachses of the world. Is she too inextricably linked to that world? One of the major issues liberals had with Obama is that his economic team has been, like Bill Clinton’s, primarily Robert Rubin protégés. That’s two straight Democratic presidencies with a Wall Street pedigree. WS: As a campaigner, Hillary can do a shot and a beer better than Barack Obama can. She was an exceedingly good candidate when it was too late in the ’08 primaries with white
working-class voters in Pennsylvania, in Indiana, in states like that. That said, everything in the ledger says she’s not a policy populist. Remember that the Bill Clinton administration at its most successful was the Democratic answer to Reaganism. It was what the French call “the spirit of the staircase”—coming up with everything you should have said at the party just after you’ve left it. The administration said, let’s get off the table everything Reagan criticized about the Democrats. It was welfare, so they ended it; it was crime, so they came up with funding for 100,000 more cops; it was economic deficits, so they came up with a balanced budget. To some extent, electing Hillary Clinton in 2016 could continue a debate with Ronald Reagan that no one else in American life is still having. The Democrats have mostly forgotten Reagan, and the Republicans have turned him into this sainted soul of political constancy. But a Hillary presidency would be still framed by the Democratic memory of those horrible years in the wilderness in the 1980s, when the Democrats got wiped out in three successive elections. HM : But the political landscape, the demographic profile of voters has changed so much since then. More political space has opened up on the left; the nation has plainly moved in a liberal direction on social issues; there are very few Blue Dogs remaining. Is this defensive crouch against the Republicans a politically viable stance? WS: I’m talking about what makes her tick. Of course, she won two elections in a very diverse state since Bill’s presidency, and she won an awful lot of presidential primaries in ’08. She understands the diversity of America in 2017—except in the economic sense.
Faces of the Democratic Future Young leaders on the future of their party
s i d e b a r b a c kg r o u n d s b y p e t e r & m a r i a h o e y
Atima Omara, age 33 President, Young Democrats of America Washington, D.C.
That said, I don’t think she’s the candidate of Archie Bunker’s America. But the worst thing that could have happened to her in terms of framing any economic populist message was to run for the Senate from New York rather than, say, Arkansas. Not only do the Clintons have a certain psychological need for money—that would probably be a separate course in the department of Hillary Studies— but her constituents were Wall Street, and they were also the people who were funding all the Clinton initiatives and giving speaking fees to Bill. Ultimately she has an orthodox, mainstream, centrist, Eisenhower Republican view of the economy. It is much to the left of today’s Republican Party since there are no Eisenhower Republicans left, but it is also much less in keeping with large segments of the Democratic Party. I can see her being very involved in raising the minimum wage, because it’s not as if hedge-fund billionaires are on the barricades against it. But trying to do a better, tougher version of Dodd-Frank? Let’s merely say that the polls would have to get very dismal for Hillary leading up to the 2020 election for that to even be on her agenda. HM: Let’s go to foreign policy. WS: If you wanted me to state my own personal reservations about Hillary, I would have started with foreign policy. HM: What would those reservations be? WS : First of all, other than the anti-war feeling, which is more generational than an elaborate, nuanced foreign-policy view, I don’t think she had terribly developed foreign-policy views during Bill’s presidency. OK, there was the general, and to my mind, admirable tilt toward humanitarian intervention in both Haiti and, much more important, in Bosnia. I
The Democrats’ success in the next couple of cycles depends on whether they commit to a strong message of economic justice. It’s an issue that can bring together a lot of different communities. Working-class families, millennials, people of color—they’re all hurting in this economy. You can make a case that women’s issues, like reproductive health care, are issues of economic fairness; women shouldn’t have to pay more for health care than men because they need to buy birth control. Climate change is becoming a bigger and bigger economic issue. But it also depends on how serious we’re going to be—if we’re going to actually enact policies that affect income inequality, like paycheck fairness and raising the minimum wage and making sure workers have parental leave. We can’t just talk about it. We have to do it. The Democrats need to think about how we situate ourselves, knowing that we’re going into the next couple of elections without Obama on the ticket. The Obama campaign is what turned Virginia blue. African Americans were inspired to move to the polls in a way that they haven’t been in a while. The same goes for Latinos. Young people were really engaged in the past two presidential cycles, but they’re not midterm voters. The challenge is to keep that momentum going. We need to grow and thrive as a party post-Obama. The way to do that is to tackle economic inequality, inside the party and out. We also have to make sure that our commitment to diversity, whether it’s racial or economic, isn’t something we just talk about. Right now, many people who want to get their start in politics have to intern for free. If you want to work on Capitol Hill or get some experience on a campaign, you have to start with an unpaid job so you can get connections. The only people I know who were able to get jobs from unpaid internships are from wealthy families. Their
parents could float them while they waited for an opportunity. That means that a huge swath of white, working-class people and people of color can’t even get in the door. If you’re committed to diversity and bringing people from all walks of life into the party, don’t ask them to work for nothing.
Svante Myrick, age 26 Mayor of Ithaca, New York Ithaca, New York I’d like to see the party elect a woman president. When Barack Obama was elected, I was a young mixedrace kid with a strange name, being raised by a white mother. It changed what I thought was possible for my life. After I was elected mayor here at 24, I remember a mother telling me the following story. She and her adopted son, who is black and around 15 years old, were coming to city hall. In the elevator, an elderly white woman looked at him and said, “Are you the mayor?” When the mother told me this story, I said, “Well, come on, I don’t look 15 years old.” She said, “You don’t understand. He’s gotten on elevators before and had older women jump off—he’s had people cross the street when they see him coming because he’s black. He’s been confused for a lot of things, but this is the first time he’s been confused for a figure of authority.” That’s powerful. Obama has changed the life outcomes, through his example, for millions of black men. His family has done the same for black families. He’s changed the way we think about a black family in this country. I think that our first female president is going to do the same thing for young women. Another thing I’d like to see the party do: I think the war on drugs is the new Jim Crow, and it’s failed. It’s cost us a trillion dollars to fight it. It’s cost people their lives. Jails have swollen with people who have been put away for years for nonviolent offenses. The overall result is that drug use is still rampant in this country. The Democratic Party should approach the drug (continued on page 44)
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Faces of the Democratic Future (continued from page 43)
problem at the root, which means treating it as a public-health issue, getting people who are addicted to drugs off drugs, getting young people to never start using drugs in the first place, and regulating the drug market and taxing it so we can spend the revenue on things like schools and infrastructure. We should decriminalize marijuana. The usage rate is incredibly high, but the enforcement is uneven: You’re four times more likely to get arrested for marijuana use if you’re black than if you’re white, even though white folks use the drug at the same rate as black folks.
Joe Neguse, age 30 Democratic nominee for Colorado secretary of state Broomfield, Colorado We, as a party, have a vision that appeals to a broad spectrum of people, and that vision is a government that works for them. One way to do that is through higher-education reform. We need to make education much more affordable through a more robust system of public financing. It’s about showing that we care about opportunity for everyone, and making sure that everyone’s voice is heard. We have so many people coming to this country looking for opportunity, and we know that higher education is the ticket to upward mobility. We have this amazing system of state-funded universities and community colleges, but students are still struggling to afford them. We need to look for more ways to make that education affordable for students. If they have to take out massive student loans, when these students graduate, they won’t be able to contribute as fully to the economy and buy a home. There are solutions, and Democrats need to embrace them. There was recently some discussion in the Senate of legislation to lower the student-loan interest rate. That’s an example of doing what we can to make sure that higher education remains affordable and accessible to everybody. That’s a message that will resonate with young people regardless of party, and it may help draw in some of the young voters who aren’t affiliated with either party.
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The right to vote—the right to shape the future of our communities—is under attack all across the country. I think we all agree that we’ve never solved a problem with less democracy. It cannot be a partisan issue. Prior to law school, I helped create a nonprofit foundation called New Era Colorado, which has registered tens of thousands of young folks and championed efforts to make voting easier in Colorado—for example, online voter registration, which has been immensely successful in our state. People want to be able to vote; they want that power. We need to be the party that gives them their rights back, not just because it might help us win but because providing equal opportunity has always been the central pillar of the Democratic Party.
Stephanie Chang, age 30 Candidate, Michigan House District 6 Detroit, Michigan It would be great to have the Democratic Party do a better job of recruiting young progressive candidates, especially women of color. Studies show that women need to be asked several times before they run for office, which was certainly the case for me—because so many of us don’t think about it as an option to begin with, it takes several people encouraging us before we seriously consider it. It’s doubly hard for women of color, because we don’t necessarily see ourselves represented. I only decided to run after my friend Rashida Tlaib, who currently represents Michigan’s Sixth District, asked me to. Initially, I said no, but eventually I said I would do it because I realized what an amazing opportunity it was to make a difference for my community. It would say a lot for the Democratic Party to reach out to people and help build a pipeline of young people and women running for elected office. One thing that I want to do, starting with high school and middle school, is to get young women of color in my district to (continued on page 46)
do not think she would have dithered the way Obama has on Syria. That said, I’ve seen no evidence that she had too much anguish over her vote to authorize Bush to go to war in Iraq. John Kerry turned himself into elaborate pretzel positions to try to justify that vote. Hillary may have anguished about many things, but that does not seem to be in the Top 10 Hillary Anguish moments. HM: What do you think her hawkishness on Iraq would portend for foreign policy if Hillary were president? WS: While she is not a Dick Cheney groupie, in a situation where there is a range of military actions on the table and there’s a responsible, mainstream opinion within the administration toward using the military—and the foreign-policy community says military action is called for—she would probably go with it and cheerlead it on. I don’t think she’s going to invent a war with Mongolia out of some crazed geopolitical effort to encircle China. But hers would probably be a more hawkish administration than we have now with Obama and John Kerry. I’m much less worried about her starting a war with Denmark, though, than I am by the fact that she is probably the Democratic presidential candidate who would do the least to rein in the National Security Agency and all the leftover aspects of the “war on terror.” Sadly, both Hillary and Bill know that civil liberties is that which closes on Saturday night. HM: Bill Clinton was not famed for his managerial prowess and neither is Barack Obama. That’s certainly part of the president’s job. Is Hillary a better manager than Bill? WS: I think she is much more than just that.
steve brodner
If you have been through a disaster like the first two years of the Clinton administration, you know what to do now. Flash forward to a White House in 2017. First, Bill and Hillary will have worked out their marriage, with her 69 and him 70, as well as any couple is likely to. If ever there’s a marriage that by 2017 has few surprises, it’s probably that one. Second, Hillary has been through two disastrous, disorganized White Houses under Bill Clinton and Obama. The way Obamacare was handled, in that the entire story of health care got lost, also the failure to put enough emphasis on the economy after the stimulus passed—all these things Hillary saw. She would come into the White House with a greater understanding of White House dysfunction than anyone in Democratic Party history. To have been in the Obama cabinet would also steel you against creating a White House where people believe they’ve invented the wheel, that they’re geniuses—the problems that have afflicted this White House. HM : Bill is clearly going to be her chief adviser. How does this factor into everything? WS: It will cause certain lines-of-authority confusion in the White House. But ultimately, I think it’s more good than bad. Every president, from what I’ve read and seen, communes with the ghosts of presidents past. It’s sort of nice to have a ghost of presidents past available on call. There will come a point if Hillary is president in, say, 2019, that something happens that already happened somewhere, sometime during Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House. It would be really good to have the lessons from that analogue on tap. HM: Right now, there’s no one else in the Democratic Party who’s within 40 or 50 points of Hillary in presidential polling.
“Hillary is probably the Democratic presidential candidate who would do the least to rein in the NSA and all the leftover aspects of the ‘war on terror.’”
How do you assess her strengths and weaknesses as a candidate? A lot of what you’re describing is not necessarily the stuff that resonates with younger voters, except possibly that her election would be historic. WS: There is an iron law of campaign journalism: Never assume anything with absolute certainty in presidential politics, because there are always surprises. President Muskie would be the first to remind us. That said, I had drinks last night with two prominent Republican consultants. What they told me is that they believe that Hillary—running as a centrist, not a populist, and moderately hawkish—would just sweep the field. There is no Republican who could possibly beat her except in exceptional circumstances. Part of it is the history-making nature of the race. But it is also this: All the things that make liberals a little uneasy about a Hillary presidency are the things that are perfect for a general election against a fill-in-the-blank Republican. Of course, in the remote chance that Rand Paul got the nomination, it would be interesting to see a Republican running against a Democrat with the Republican running to the left on national security. But the larger point—and it’s one of the reasons, after going back and forth within myself, I am more in favor of her running than not—is that American politics since the 2000 election has been balanced on a knife’s edge. While there are moments when one party surges ahead, pretty much the country has been in equal balance. Beyond 2000, had just 130,000 votes been different in Ohio in 2004, John Kerry would have been president even though he would have lost the popular vote. Mitt Romney, not exactly someone who is
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think about what the problems in their community are and how they can be involved in addressing them. Learning how to write a bill, learning how policy affects us, shadowing days—things like that. We need to start earlier instilling the idea that this is something that is possible for young women.
Val Vilott, age 28 Feminist activist and board president of the DC Abortion Fund Washington, D.C. I am a Democrat, and I vote for Democrats, and I volunteer for Democrats. I’ve been engaged in campaigns for Democratic candidates for my entire young-adult life. But although I have faith in the party, I think it could be doing much better work. There’s been a lack of proactive national legislation on reproductive issues and issues that have to do with women and families. And I’m not just talking about abortion here. In general, remedies for women and families like paycheck fairness and child care have been fantastically unsuccessful. I think a lot of the unwillingness to dig in on these issues has to do with diversity. Some Democrats are worried about being targeted by anti-choice activists and organizations. But many Democratic politicians are white men who aren’t comfortable talking about abortion, so they shy away from it. It’s become ingrained in some of their minds that reproductive issues aren’t winning issues. They may believe it’s too controversial to talk about on the campaign trail. And when they don’t talk about it on the campaign trail, they don’t have to do anything about it once they get into office. That does the party a great disservice. Reproductive issues like abortion and family planning matter to people— it’s not cerebral or ethereal for them. I reject the notion that abortion is an unwinnable issue. Just look at the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial race. The Democrats made reproductive choice a huge part of their strategy. Of course, they embraced
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abortion during that campaign because they couldn’t avoid it. Bob McDonnell, the previous governor, made no bones about supporting incredibly aggressive anti-choice policies. My argument is, why do we wait for a radical anti-choice politician to take office for a few years and do serious damage in the state? It’s pretty despicable if we only start to act because we can see people suffering as a result of bad policy. I worry that in some ways the Democratic Party is becoming—well, I’m trying to think of a nicer way to say a “cult of personality.” You look back to 2007 and 2008, when Barack Obama had just emerged onto the scene and had this pitched battle in the primaries against Hillary Clinton. The party’s future felt invested in these individual people and their ability to lead. I don’t really think that’s the party’s job. Often, when candidates get into office, the issues they campaigned on fall by the wayside. It’s the party’s responsibility to push for those issues. What’s happening now with reproductive choice in the states where conservatives are pushing for extreme anti-choice legislation is a great example of how the Democrats could take the wheel. They need to introduce proactive legislation. Occasionally make them fight on your terms. If we can get into a situation where the Republicans or the anti-choice activists are as distracted by our good legislation as we are by their bad legislation, then we’ll bring things onto more equal ground. Bringing more diversity into the party will help spur that change. But Democratic Party leaders have to commit to it. There’s not a lack of people or options out there. There are potential candidates for office who are incredibly talented—people of color, women, people with different backgrounds and experiences who would make fantastic legislators. But the party isn’t good at identifying people who need more resources to get off the ground. Bringing more diversity into the party will require a long-game attitude, because who do you look at for national office? You look at people who are doing well at the state level. (continued on page 49)
going down in the Candidate Hall of Fame, still got, what, 47 percent of the vote? HM: That was the appropriate percentage for him. WS: The point is that Hillary could win a resounding victory that could bring in a Democratic majority to govern. And I would much rather have a president with a majority to govern, even if the decisions she made were not always decisions I agreed with, than another eight years, or four years, of a Democrat hamstrung by a divided Congress. HM: Why don’t we hear more of an outcry from the left of the party for an alternative to Hillary? WS: Three reasons come to mind. For some, it’s that electing a woman president would be historic. For others, there is the depressed sense of dashed expectations after five years of Obama. But the biggest reason, I suspect, is the political truism: “You can’t beat somebody with nobody.” And despite Elizabeth Warren fantasies, the Democratic left doesn’t have anyone who looks like a plausible president now willing to run. That doesn’t mean that Hillary will run unopposed. Maybe it will be former Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana. Maybe it’ll be Howard Dean—or Senator Bernie Sanders, to keep coming up with Vermonters. I went back and checked since World War II. Aside from incumbent presidents, no one has ever been handed a presidential nomination unopposed other than Richard Nixon in 1960. And even Nixon had to kiss the hem of Nelson Rockefeller’s garment with something called the Compact of Fifth Avenue. HM: Can Hillary turn out young people like Obama did—a key to both his victories? Can she engender a remotely comparable excitement factor?
WS: No. But probably neither can any other Democrat. Obama leached the sense of political excitement out of an entire generation with the gap between his campaign style and his governing style. Also, remember that young voters in 2016 will have different life experiences than young voters in 2008. A 21-year-old in 2016 will have been in first grade on 9/11 and was too young at the time to understand the lies that sent us to war with Iraq. That means that these 2016 voters—no matter the candidates—will react to different stimuli than young voters in 2008. So how can Hillary win in 2016? Maybe by sparking greater enthusiasm from women— especially single women. Maybe a 54-year-old waitress in Waterloo, Iowa, will vote for the first time. Hillary might also change the political map by running competitively in states like Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, and Arkansas. HM : How would a primary challenge from someone like Warren affect Hillary’s campaign? In terms of constituencies, I can see the party establishment—unions, electeds, blacks, traditional donors— sticking with her. But could that “Mondale-ize” her? And could Warren muster the kind of support that Gary Hart did in his 1984 challenge to Mondale? WS: My heart goes pitter-patter whenever I get a Walter Mondale question. Which, oddly enough, happens less and less these days. But Mondale-Hart in ’84 is one of those races that explains the Democratic Party, along with Carter-Kennedy in 1980 and Bobby Kennedy versus Gene McCarthy in 1968. I’d be stunned beyond belief if Elizabeth Warren ran against Hillary. Of course, I never expected Spiro Agnew, Dan Quayle, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to be vice presidents of the Unit-
“A Hillary victory could bring in a Democratic majority. I’d rather have a president with a governing majority than another Democrat hamstrung by Congress.” ed States. The Hart challenge to Mondale, which was based on amorphous “new ideas,” was in hindsight a generational battle. Elizabeth Warren is only two years younger than Hillary. There has to be an issue with a passionate following to sustain a major primary challenge to Hillary. Right now, the Democrats don’t have one. For a project at Brookings, I’ve been watching what’s being stressed in Democratic House primaries around the country. At this point, NSA spying and drone attacks are just not voting issues for liberals. Getting tough with Wall Street—like single-payer health insurance—was something much more likely to trigger an adrenaline rush for the left in 2009 than in 2016. HM: But Walter, a lot of recent polling done for Democrats shows that there is a sizable constituency that believes the economy is rigged; that the rich get away with low taxes while the middle class can’t; that free trade with other nations has damaged our economy; that when a candidate says he or she sides against Wall Street
and with workers, they have more of a claim on this constituency’s support. Don’t you think there’s real political space for a candidate who positions herself or himself to Hillary’s left on these issues? WS : Polls, schmolls. Which should be a Yiddish word meaning “enough with the cross-tabs.” I agree that there’s space on the left. But that’s a lot different than having a charismatic candidate capable of exploiting it. What’s needed to run against Hillary is more than just the ability to play to the choir by mouthing off on MSNBC. That’s the campaign of Dennis Kucinich redux. The more that we talk about this, the more I wish that Paul Wellstone were still alive. I don’t see anyone of his liberal stature—anyone with his sense of fun—willing to take on Hillary. It would take an exceptional candidate to harvest that underlying unease with a Clinton restoration. But it’s 18 months until Iowa and, boy, have I been wrong before. For Hillary, a challenge from the left—as long as it didn’t catch fire—would actually help set her up for the general election since it would send the message that she was more of a centrist than a Karl Rove caricature. I also suspect it would be easier for Hillary to co-opt a primary challenge by making the right dovish noises on foreign policy or NSA eavesdropping than by attacking Wall Street, which would be for her an Olympic-level gymnastic trick. But, then, we’ve already seen Bill Clinton’s Dick Morris–inspired triangulation for the 1996 campaign. So maybe I shouldn’t dismiss Hillary’s malleability on economic issues if that was what was needed to win the nomination. But I wouldn’t count on follow-through if she got to the White House.
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Cool Grandma
Can Hillary Clinton maintain her new cred?
W
hen did Hillary Clinton become cool? Was it during her globetrotting as secretary of state in caftans or with her hair pulled back in an ironically hip scrunchie? Was it when she traded funny letters with the actor Jason Segel? Or when she starred in her own Tumblr meme? Whenever her ascent began, it reached a peak in March, when GQ published an interview with musician Pharrell Williams. In one of the most convoluted sentences ever recorded in the English language, he not only endorsed Clinton for president in 2016 but also predicted her win, one that would usher in purple-tinted national unity and a worldwide pro-choice matriarchy: “When we are a country and we are a species that has had a Martian Rover traveling up and down the crevices of this planet looking for water and ice, okay, and we’ve had a space station that’s been orbiting our planet for sixteen years—but we still got legislation trying to tell women what to do with their bodies? Hillary’s gonna win. Listen, I’m reaching out to her right now. She’s gonna win.” Williams was coming off an awards season in which he’d won four Grammys and been nominated for an Academy Award for his global hit “Happy.” Which is to say: He was at the height of his cool and, now with his imprimatur, so was HRC. Six years ago, when Clinton ran to be the Democratic nominee for president, she had been anything but. “I’m not backing Hillary Clinton,” declared the feminist writer Courtney Martin in a Glamour blog, “and that’s at least in part because she reminds me of being scolded by my mother.” That’s how young voters, especially women, thought of Clinton in 2008. But now, she’s the grandmother they want to hang out
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with, the kind of maturing hippie who might smoke pot with them on the back porch (probably while calling it grass). More than anything, the transition from nightmare mom to fun granny could signal that she will inherit President Barack Obama’s diverse, urban, young coalition if she chooses to run. That is, if she can keep it up. IN 1960, WHEN JOHN F. Kennedy was busy
becoming the youngest president elected to office, youth culture was moving into prominence. Here was a man of medication-enhanced vigor with an impossibly stylish wife, literally and figuratively cooler than his opponent, Richard Nixon, during the first televised presidential debate. Possessing a certain élan hasn’t proved to be a requirement for the Oval Office—see Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and, of course, Nixon—but it can be helpful. Bill
Clinton played his saxophone on late-night television, George W. starred as a class-clown kind of cowboy, and now we have Obama, another young president with a glamorous and popular wife. It served Obama, and may now serve Clinton, that what it means to be cool changes over time. Kennedy—a preppy bad boy with matinee-idol looks—might not have made it to the top spot today, when American culture has elevated the nerd. In this era of gingham shirts and Buddy Holly glasses, the center of power has shifted to the geeks of Silicon Valley, and our president reflects that. Obama is skinny and bookish and flashed a Vulcan salute to Leonard Nimoy when they crossed paths on the 2008 campaign trail. What’s cool now is the opposite of what was cool 50 years ago. There’s an opportunity for the A-student, earnest, feminist firebrand version of Hillary Clinton in this environment. (The generation Y’ers and millennials paying attention during the 2008 election used to joke that the Hillary Rodham who’d gone to Wellesley, frizzy-haired and adorkable, would have voted for Obama.) In 2008, Clinton was so stifled and baldly political that she rarely seemed human. The one time she leaked emotion—at a diner in New Hampshire, when she teared up after being asked about the stresses of campaigning— she won that state’s primary, becoming the first woman to do so. That she rarely talked about potentially being the first female president alienated young women, who had grown up in an era of liberalism in which the rights of women and minorities went hand in hand with all other aspects of a progressive agenda. Her history-making run should have been an important part of her message, but in its absence the annoying-mom stereotypes filled the vacuum. It didn’t help that she seemed
steve brodner
By Monica Potts
Faces of the Democratic Future (continued from page 46)
aggressively tone-deaf when wooing younger voters—after all, she chose a Celine Dion song for her campaign anthem. Meanwhile, Obama was reaching out to the YouTube set, casting his image all over social media, serving as a muse to musicians who set his stump speech to song, inviting everyone to help him make history. Clinton’s persona began to shift when Obama named her secretary of state. Not only did it align her with him, but it also meant she would stay in the public eye while keeping a distance from Washington politics. Losing freed her. As one of the most powerful women in the world, she wielded a carefree sense of authority. When a picture of her wearing little makeup was posted on the Drudge Report, she responded: “If I want to wear my glasses, I’m wearing my glasses. If I want to pull my hair back, I’m pulling my hair back. At some point, it’s just not something that deserves a whole lot of time and attention. If others want to worry about it, I’ll let them do the worrying for a change.” The new persona may have been just as much of a mask as the one she wore in 2008, but it felt more genuine, not least because it had shades of her character pre–Monica Lewinsky. During Bill’s first presidential campaign, she famously responded to those who criticized her for maintaining her career while her husband was governor of Arkansas: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.” The line yielded widespread derision. More than 20 years later, she’s Sheryl Sandberg’s ideal for leaning in. HER ATTITUDE—UNABASHEDLY feminist,
casually in charge—was captured most effectively toward the end of her stint as secretary of
Who do you look at for the state level? You look at people who are doing well at the county level or the local level. And how do you get those people into office? You search for folks who are active in their community. That’s where the Democrats should be focusing their resources, and when the party does become more diverse, it will be easier for Democrats to talk about issues like abortion and family planning and paycheck fairness. They’ll have the broad range of experience necessary to take a stand on these issues and not just tackle them when it’s absolutely necessary.
Cristina Tzintzún, age 32 Executive director, Workers Defense Project Austin, Texas Right now, there’s a real interest within the Democratic Party about the Latino vote and what it could mean, which is great. But there doesn’t seem to be an in-depth understanding of all the issues and complexities in the Latino community, which isn’t monolithic. You can see this happening in Texas. There have been recent efforts to try to build good Latino Democratic candidates. But it doesn’t go beyond the candidate or the election. There’s no grassroots investment, no lasting infrastructure. In Texas, the focus on the Latino vote also means that we forget the African American vote. I was at a meeting recently where people were talking about turning the state blue. There were 60 to 80 people, mostly Latino and white, and there was only one African American in the room. I said, “I have a problem with this,” and they said, “Well, it’s not really a problem because black people vote, so we don’t really have to worry about that.” Well, that in itself is a problem because they’re taking a core constituency for granted. It means they’re not serious about investing in leadership or an agenda that means something to the people who voted for them. Folks who want to see Texas turn blue or at least purple are investing millions of
dollars in elections. But most of the money that comes into Texas goes to the statewide races. There’s less investment in the local races. But that’s not only where we can elect candidates but also where we can run real policies where people can see what makes a difference in their lives. If you look at a state like Texas, every major city, for the most part, is blue—Houston, Austin, San Antonio. In Austin, we recently won a living wage for construction workers who are working for companies that get tax incentives from the state. We’re still not winning statewide races, but rather than focusing on those races and putting all our money in those races, you can use the cities, those pockets of blue, to experiment and develop good Democratic candidates and good, innovative policy. There is a huge amount of support for economic-justice issues. What the Democrats have done recently about the minimum wage has been great and has struck a chord with a lot of people. But there are other issues they could be pushing more: The student-debt crisis, talking about the retirement crisis in this country and the fact that the Republican Party has no plan besides keeping millions of people in debt. In the last six months, the Democratic Party, nationally, has been more progressive. If we were to focus on that in a smarter way, we could actually pull some of the libertarians. If you look at what a lot of people are upset about in the Tea Party and what issues are resonating with them, it was race-baiting a lot of the time, but it was race-baiting about economics. We didn’t really have an alternative narrative. We weren’t even trying to talk about it on the left, except for Occupy Wall Street. If the Democratic Party could get in front of those issues, it would not only be able to bring along the progressive base that it’s already supporting but it could bring along the entire country to enact that kind of legislation. But there’s still a long way to go. It’s a great campaign strategy, but we need to be building the community groups and the labor support to enact the legislation that will make a difference in people’s lives. (continued on page 50)
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Brian Sims, age 35 Representative for Pennsylvania’s 182nd District Philadelphia, Pennsylvania I would like to see the Democratic Party get back to promoting thoughtful gun registration. Maybe we’re having to pick and choose the battles we think we can win, given the Republican Party’s hard-line opposition. But it’s unfortunate that the Democrats have backed off on guns. We’ve seen more movement on thoughtful gun regulations from past Republican presidents than we have from President Obama. In light of all the mass shootings in the last halfdecade, I would like to see the Democratic Party step up and say, “Hey, listen, where America is on the Second Amendment is costing us lives.” I’m the son of two retired lieutenant colonels in the Army. I did not grow up in this pristine, granola background unexposed to guns and weapons. For the vast majority of Americans, gun use is a familial thing—it’s heritage. It’s not about what you kill or how you kill it or the size of the bullet; it’s something you did with your grandfather and father, something you do with your family. I recognize that. If we’re not going to address actual gun violence because of the culture and heritage that people have with guns, we’re not doing ourselves any justice. Every couple of weeks and months, we see instances in which background checks could have prevented violence. We see that allowing cities and urban environments to tailor their gun laws based on data could reduce violence. Yet we don’t do those things. We could also pass more laws to prevent something called “straw purchases.” We see this all the time where guns that are involved in crimes are traced back to a purchaser who wasn’t the person who committed the crime, but frankly, they purchased that gun knowing it would be given or sold to somebody who would commit a crime. States need to have stronger strawpurchase laws.
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Any legislator who introduces a law that is seen as either anti-gun or anti–Second Amendment knows it’s going to go nowhere, so I don’t see many legislators introduce them. I’m proud to be in a state where we’re trying very hard, but I don’t see a legitimate effort either to control guns or even require background checks. We know that around 90 percent of Americans support background checks, yet legislation isn’t going anywhere at the federal level.
Jane Kim, age 36 San Francisco Board of Supervisors, District 6 San Francisco, California One of my greatest hopes for the Obama administration was not necessarily about the policy changes it could bring but that Obama would inspire organizing at the local level. I think that’s where you’re going to see long-term change and progress for the Democratic Party’s agenda. Funding and investing in organizing is so important, and it’s something that the Republican Party has been very effective at. If you are not winning the local discussion, it’s hard to move forward nationally. I’m biased, of course, because I am a legislator at a local level, but localities can be tremendously effective in challenging the status quo and winning progressive reforms. There are a couple of things I’m really proud of here in San Francisco. We’re pushing forward with a $15-per-hour minimum wage. We’ve declared that we’re a sanctuary city, which means we don’t allow local law enforcement to harass or identify immigrants. California state and national funding for public education is terrible—California ranks 49th in the country for spending on education per student. But San Francisco has stepped up and said, if the state and the national government are not going to fully fund our public schools, localities will. This year, the city gave $77 million to our public-education system on top of what (continued on page 51)
state. On a military plane bound for Tripoli, Libya, two photographers, Diana Walker for Time and Kevin Lamarque of Reuters, took similar photographs of Clinton. She was wearing sunglasses and checking her smartphone. “This picture of her just pops up on my Facebook feed, and it’s like, ‘What is this picture?’” says Adam Smith, a 31-year-old, Washington, D.C.–based communications director. “It just stuck with me that it was this great picture of her. It made her seem so strong and powerful.” Over happy-hour drinks in April 2012, Smith and a friend, Stacy Lambe, an associate editor at Out, came up with an idea to start a Tumblr called “Texts from Hillary,” featuring the pictures. The idea was simple. The photos of Clinton would be paired with those of other famous people holding their smartphones; Smith and Lambe then imposed fake messages over the snapshots. Pictures of President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are juxtaposed with the photo of Clinton, who’s sending the text “Back to work boys.” In another, she arranges brunch with Meryl Streep. She rejects a friend request from Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow asks, “Who Run the World?” and Clinton finishes the Beyoncé lyric for her: “Girls.” Beyoncé and husband Jay-Z make an appearance, as does actor Ryan Gosling, hero of his own Internet meme, cooing “Hey Girl,” to which Clinton responds, “… It’s Madam Secretary.” Within a week, Smith and Lambe attracted 45,000 followers on Tumblr, were mentioned on NPR’s Morning Edition, and were retweeted by Roots drummer ?uestlove, arguably millennials’ favorite American. Soon after, they received an invitation to meet Clinton at the State Department. A picture of them with the secretary, donning sunglasses, appeared on
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Tumblr, and she and her office made their own submission, with the textspeak “ROFL @ ur tumblr! g2g—scrunchie time. ttyl?” Smith and Lambe showed the great sense to go out on top: They said goodbye the next day. “The decision by her and her staff to engage with us on the website seemed to me something different, something that they had not really done before,” Smith says. He pointed out that Clinton kept it up a few weeks later, when the actor Jason Segel said he’d love to make a movie with her, and she sent a letter saying she was busy, “but perhaps someday I can help you forget Sarah Marshall … again,” referring to a recent movie of his. “All of this is saying,” Smith says, “‘We get it, we understand the joke, we understand what y’all are talking about.’” Clinton was suddenly willing to poke fun at herself. That was a huge shift. She acknowledged in a way she didn’t in 2008 that her image had a life of its own, one she could play with. She was clearly aided, or at least schooled, in social media and textspeak by younger staffers—no one who’s ever witnessed the horror of a parent following them on Twitter would doubt that— which meant she was willing to admit some things were beyond her expertise, providing more evidence she was at her chillest. It’s such a change from her naked, off-putting ambition in 2008 that it’s difficult to imagine her going back to the pantsuit-wearing candidate. It’s a sad fact of Clinton’s life that we seem to love her most when she’s not quite top dog. If she enters the 2016 race, she’ll be the front-runner on the Democratic side, and that was a tough role for her to play before. Part of what lent Obama a sense of cool detachment was that even he seemed to believe he was unlikely to get the nomination. Clinton has always really, really wanted to win, which is definitely not cool.
it’s gotten from the state and federal governments. Whether it is ensuring that we have affordable health care for all or that we’re able to pass something like comprehensive immigration reform, Democrats have an opportunity to show that we can pass progressive measures locally that can then spread nationally. It’s also important to support Democrats in purple or red states because those are the ones that are going to make more of a difference. Take, for example, campaigns like “Turning Texas Blue.” The demographics in Texas are changing; the population is becoming younger and more Latino. The hope is to register young and Latino citizens to be regular voters. If we can get more Democrats elected that represent our perspective, then we can pass things like comprehensive immigration reform. The key is, again, organizing. What works in Texas might not work elsewhere, but every state has to organize. Nothing ever replaces good old-fashioned door-to-door, pavementpounding community organizing.
Crisanta Duran, age 33 Representative, Colorado House District 5 Denver, Colorado It is scary, quite frankly, to see the disparity between the rich and the poor and to see the gap widen every year. I hope ensuring Americans’ basic economic security will be the Democratic Party’s top issue going forward. The solution, I think, lies in job training and higher education. That can be anything from a vocational program to a twoyear degree to a four-year degree on up. Then we have to ensure that when we do invest in education, we’re able to produce results, that students graduating from institutions of higher ed are able to get well-paying jobs. We need to make sure we meet the needs of businesses and ensure that people have access to tools that will allow them to succeed and get good-paying jobs.
Another important area the Democratic Party could work on is making sure that people are able to balance their family and professional life. One of the areas I’ve focused on is trying to ensure that child care is more affordable for more Colorado families. Right now, the state is ranked sixth in terms of the cost of child care, according to a recent study. It’s a problem particularly for women, who are more likely to leave the workforce or limit their time in the workforce due to child-raising. We put a lot of money in when someone is part of our corrections system, in prison. If we could start investing in people’s lives at the front end, in the long run we will be better. It would be incredible to get to a point where every family could afford quality child care.
Joe Dinkin, age 30 Communications director, Working Families New York, New York People call the Democratic Party a big tent. I worry sometimes that the tent is too big, that it has room for some views that progressives find distasteful. There are plenty of elected Democrats who think it’s enough to call yourself progressive if you support marriage equality or something like that. But it’s not enough to support marriage equality—you also have to be against economic inequality. You have to challenge the power of the 1 percent. If Democrats want to capture young people’s votes and enthusiasm going forward, they’re going to have to show that they’re willing to take on student debt, willing to raise taxes on the rich, willing to lift up standards for working people. Young people are more likely to be economically insecure. They’re more likely to work in minimumwage jobs, more likely to work in the service industry, more likely not to have paid sick days, more likely to live in cities. They need to feel like the Democrats are out there fighting against political and economic inequality. And the Democrats need (continued on page 53)
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Can Liberalism Survive Obama? Yes, it can.
By Paul Waldman
I
t isn’t hard to find discontent with Barack Obama on the left, so long as you know where to look. The list of particulars is both specific (National Security Agency spying, drone assassinations, toothless Wall Street reforms, flirtations with a “grand bargain” to reduce entitlements, huge numbers of deportations) and general (not enough fighting spirit). The promise of 2008 was left behind long ago on a trail of compromises and policy reversals. Adolph Reed Jr. wrote a cover story for Harper’s earlier this year excoriating the president and the milquetoasts who still support him, arguing that Obama’s election was “fundamentally an expression of the limits of the left in the United States—its decline, demoralization, and collapse.” Given the political roller coaster of the last decade and a half, liberals would be forgiven for feeling worn-out, even cynical. The 2000 Florida debacle was followed by the aftermath of 9/11, when liberals who questioned George W. Bush’s policies were bludgeoned for alleged lack of patriotism. Then came the madness of the Bush administration’s campaign for the Iraq War, the war itself, and Bush’s re-election, with yet another awkward Democratic nominee steamrolled by the Republican machine. During those years, liberals felt beaten down and sidelined. “We’re history’s actors,” a senior Bush aide (widely believed to be Karl Rove) told journalist Ron Suskind in 2004. “And you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’’ The idea that a Democratic candidate could lead a liberal renaissance seemed absurd. “There are those who say that John Kerry isn’t liberal enough,” firebrand Jim Hightower said at the 2004 Take Back America Conference. “I don’t care if John Kerry is a sack of cement,
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we’re going to carry him to victory!” It was not a stirring endorsement. At the same time, signs of a renaissance could be seen. In Washington, wealthy liberals began funding enterprises to rebuild progressive infrastructure, with organizations like the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America growing rapidly. Outside the Beltway, the “netroots” took hold while Howard Dean’s presidential campaign hinted at the potential of digital organizing. It seemed like a rebirth, spurred on not just by loathing for Bush but by a common desire to create a new left. In 2006, Democrats took back both houses of Congress. Then came 2008, the most extraordinary election anyone could remember. Millions of liberals were enraptured by a candidate who embodied the way they wanted to see themselves. Here was a liberal for a new century: young, multiracial, urban and urbane, cosmopolitan and erudite and cool. He made liberals feel things they hadn’t felt in a long time, and perhaps most important, convinced them that they were no longer the victims of American politics. They could be actors, steering the country into a new age. The idea of liberals shaping history through a common enterprise did not just run through Obama’s rhetoric; it was woven into his campaign and drew unprecedented numbers of volunteers. For a while, it seemed like that liberal promise would be fulfilled in his presidency. Obama had a spectacular string of legislative successes, starting with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (the first bill he signed) and continuing through the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. But then came the disastrous 2010 election, the rise of the Tea Party, the transformation of the GOP into a machine of obstruction heretofore unseen in
American history, and a descent into a particularly nasty kind of gridlock. THIS PERIOD IN THE HISTORY of American
liberalism—covering the Bush and Obama presidencies—looks like one of extended misery, followed by an explosion of hope, followed by disappointment and dismay. As for Obama, we now understand that he was never quite the liberal many believed him to be. He kept his promise to get the U.S. out of Iraq and set a schedule for leaving Afghanistan, but he also expanded the use of drones for targeted assassinations. Had Edward Snowden not revealed the shocking extent of National Security Agency spying, there is little reason to believe Obama would have reined it in. While he has advocated comprehensive immigration reform and allowed young “dreamers” to stay in the U.S., his administration has also deported many more immigrants than George W. Bush’s did. He has spoken pointedly about economic inequality but has done little about it. While he has taken potentially significant regulatory actions on climate change, they are not likely to catch up with the increasing urgency of the problem. If Obama is a transformative figure, it isn’t in the ideological way he seemed after his election, when Time put him on its cover, photoshopped to look like Franklin D. Roosevelt, over the headline “The New New Deal.” Again and again, liberal hopes have run up against Obama’s pragmatism, his tendency to fight when victory seemed a better-than-even proposition but to retreat—abandoning the public option in the Affordable Care Act, keeping the prison at Guantánamo in business—when the costs seemed too high. “There’s a realization,” says Adam Green of the Progressive Change
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Campaign Committee, an organization that works to promote and assist progressive candidates, “that this is not a bold, progressive president. He’s ultimately not going to be a game-changer when it comes to taking on the powers that be.” Green doesn’t deny the reality of unprecedented Republican obstructionism, but he doesn’t see it as an excuse, either. “Some traditional Democrats, low-information people, are willing to give him a pass and say, ‘Oh, the Tea Party got in the way,’” he says. “But those who are more of the progressive movement and look at this through a more sophisticated lens see that there was a fundamental lack of willingness to fight in the beginning of his presidency that had ripple effects throughout.” The White House has from time to time made it clear that it dislikes liberal activists as much as the activists dislike it. As former press secretary Robert Gibbs put it, the “professional left … wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.” But that mutual suspicion (and even contempt), intensely though it may be felt in some quarters, is largely invisible to the broader Democratic electorate. Obama’s approval ratings among Democrats haven’t moved much over the entire course of his presidency, from the highs of the “honeymoon” to the lows of the last couple of years. Obama’s overall decline in approval, from the 60s in early 2009 to the mid-40s now, has occurred almost entirely among Republicans and independents. Gallup, which tests presidential approval constantly, showed Obama with an average approval of 88 percent among Democrats in 2009, his best year. In his worst year, 2011, he was at 80 percent, hardly a dramatic plunge. As a point of comparison, Bill Clinton’s average yearly approval among Democrats ranged from 75
to make a connection between political and economic inequality—the outsize role big money plays in our economy and our democracy. Dark money is increasingly making politicians chase big donors. They may see some short-term advantage—they might have enough money to run this election campaign—but it’s going to alienate voters in the long term. The closer we get to a situation where we have two parties controlled by different factions of the 1 percent, the less appealing the Democrats will be, especially for young people. Elected Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to embrace big ideas. The Tea Party is the dominant ideology within the Republican Party, and progressives don’t have that kind of control in the Democratic Party right now. But they should. The $15 minimum wage seemed fringe until the fast-food workers started working on it, and now it’s helping move up the minimum wage across the country. We need to be giving more attention to state legislatures and city councils. Those are the bodies that make some of the laws that affect people’s lives the most. That’s where you can prove that progressive models of governance work.
Andrew Gillum, age 34 Tallahassee city commissioner Tallahassee, Florida The Democratic Party has a bad habit of reaching back in order to go forward. We haven’t demonstrated a lot of willingness to bring new people into the party—fresher faces don’t always get an opportunity to lead. If we are trying to become a party of the future, we’ve got to do a better job at building a pipeline of candidates who look like the people they are seeking to represent. In Florida, by and large we are a party that looks like the people of the state. I’m not sure our leadership reflects the same diversity. When I decided to run for city council, I didn’t have any party leadership come to
me and say, “Go for it.” I took the initiative. I was never contacted by a U.S. senator or representative who said, “We think you have a bright future. What can we do to put you in a place to be successful?” We almost need a sort of Karl Rove of the Democratic Party, someone who looks at a state and maps out where our greatest moments of opportunity are and who the folks we should be building a fundraising venture for are. What sort of skills do we need to make sure this individual has so that when we’re ready to run them for high state office they are successful? We don’t always have the luxury of five- and ten-year planning. Maybe it is that as we approach election cycles, we survey where the talent is, and we put it up and out and give it a shot. Marco Rubio is one example of how the right was able to do it on their side. The state Republican Party was more than ready to give him that shot. I think Democrats around the state would be ready to do the same for new talent. We just have to embrace it, not eat our young or lay them out to pasture after one or two unsuccessful bids.
Kesha Ram, age 27 Vermont state representative, Chittenden 3-4 District Burlington, Vermont We’re not doing enough to address income inequality and climate change. They are intractable issues, but we’re not even having the conversations to begin to address them. I find that concerning. I think part of the problem stems from campaign finance, which is an issue the Democratic Party—both parties, in fact— have failed to lead on. We’re beholden in a lot of ways to funders. We need to have a broader conversation about how to increase revenue. At the very least, I’d like to see the national party hold the line on important social programs like income assistance, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. These programs are deteriorating, and our generation feels less and (continued on page 54)
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less as though we can count on them. They shouldn’t be crumbling before us; we should be bolstering them. There’s a lot more we could do to create a fair tax system: limiting the number of deductions people can take, stopping people from taking advantage of loopholes. We have to figure out how to tax a 21stcentury economy in a fair way. We’re now a service-based economy and an online economy. That leads to a lot of lost revenue and puts our brick-and-mortar stores at a real disadvantage. I would like to see the Main Street Fairness Act, which requires out-of-state retailers to collect taxes on products shipped in state, passed. Access to higher education is another area where we can address inequality. I think we’re seeing a form of educational apartheid in this country right now. It’s becoming more and more unaffordable for the average American family to send their kids to college. Kids graduate with so much debt, and it affects choices they have to make when they graduate. We need new dedicated revenue sources to pay for higher education. In Vermont, we allow high-school students to take college courses while still in school, which increases access. We need to increase savings programs. Overall, we really need to address the imbalance of money being put in corrections that we could be investing in early-childhood education and college affordability.
Eric Lesser, age 29 Former White House aide running for State Senate in Massachusetts Wilbraham, Massachusetts Starting in your home is the most fulfilling way, I think, to find good in the political process. It’s sometimes hard to pierce through the cynicism that’s bred by Washington and the culture there. There are a lot of complicated reasons there’s so much polarization in Washington now, but generally, the more that people work locally and the more that people are oriented toward concretely doing things rather than talking
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about them, the less strident the discussion becomes. Once you leave Washington, you talk to people who are in their communities trying to make a difference. Your hope is reignited. When the issues are your school systems and your roads and your senior center and your parks and recreation department, politics isn’t an abstraction. Politics is directly touching you and impacting your life, and the noise and the cynicism and the negativity evaporate, because there’s no time and the stakes are too high. You’ve got to work together and create some solutions. Understanding the real-life consequences of decisions that are made in Washington is essential for policymakers. If your entire prism is just working in Washington, it’s easy to lose track of how that work connects to people’s lives. When people work locally, there’s a deep appreciation for when Congress fails to pass a budget—what that actually means for people in the school system, or for the water and sewer authority that needs a grant, or for a police department that needs help hiring officers. I think the Obama campaign was an example of a time when people did believe things could change and that our political system could improve. I worked on the campaign, and in all those states, everywhere we went, we were greeted by young people just like me who were deeply inspired by Barack Obama’s message and who viewed the political process as a way to solve our country’s problems. One of the jobs I used to have was unloading all the suitcases off the plane and getting them to the hotel room each night. Sometimes we would get in very late, and you’d be on a tarmac in Wisconsin or Minnesota or Ohio, and it’d be freezing cold in the middle of the night, and we were always greeted by large groups of enthusiastic volunteers who couldn’t have been happier to be there to help. It showed that with all the pessimism about politics now, and all the cynicism about public life now, there is still a well of people who remain optimistic, and ultimately optimism is a more powerful tool than pessimism. Being involved is always going to be more impactful than not.
percent in 1993 to 88 percent in the impeachment year of 1998, when partisan wagon- circling was at its height. Liberals and Democrats are not the same thing, of course, though the former is largely a subset of the latter. Obama’s approval among self-identified liberals has always trailed his approval among Democrats by a few points, but that figure hasn’t fallen precipitously either. In 2009, it averaged 85 percent; in 2013, it averaged 75 percent. There are many reasons someone might answer that poll question in the positive or negative, but in general, the number of people on the left side of the spectrum who express dissatisfaction with Obama has always been relatively small, and it still is. But what about those eager volunteers swept away by the poetry and promise of the 2008 campaign? Are they bitter and disillusioned by what’s happened since? Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Wellesley who has a forthcoming book about the organizing efforts of the 2008 and 2012 campaigns for which she and a colleague interviewed dozens of Obama volunteers, says that even in 2008, the 2.2 million people drawn in to volunteer didn’t necessarily have stars in their eyes. “A lot of what we find is that even if people may have initially come to the campaign because they were attracted by Obama and his policy positions or his biography or some aspect of him, they stayed because of the commitments that they built to other people within the campaign,” Han says. The up-and-down of the Obama experience—a magical campaign followed by a hard slog of governing—hasn’t necessarily produced dismay. Han says the most committed 2008 volunteers, the 30,000 who devoted serious time and attained some kind of leadership role, are
anything but disillusioned now. That’s true even though turning the Obama campaign into a permanent organization able to mobilize volunteers on policy issues proved more difficult than motivating people for an election campaign. Obama for America became Organizing for Action, and despite periodically touting its supposed organizing achievements, the group announced in May 2014 that it was cutting its 200-person staff in half. Nevertheless, Han says, the campaign volunteers “have a different perspective on how to deal with setbacks in the policy goals they wanted. ... Because they were able to develop a newfound sense of their own agency, their response when politics doesn’t go the way they want or when Obama doesn’t do what they want isn’t necessarily to step back and say, ‘Gee, that stinks,’ but instead to say, ‘Hey, what can I do about it?’” Nor does she think future Democrats will have trouble organizing those volunteers. “If another candidate comes along that gets them engaged along a variety of social and relational dimensions, I think these people are probably just as likely to get involved as they were before.” Part of the reason may be that both liberals and Democrats see compromise as an unavoidable part of governing. The Pew Research Center regularly asks respondents whether they prefer politicians who make compromises or who stick to their positions; at the start of Obama’s second term, 59 percent of Democrats said they preferred the compromisers, compared to only 36 percent of Republicans. They’ve asked the question in various forms going back to 1987, and the numbers change little over time. Not only do Democrats rate compromise higher than Republicans, they were nearly as likely to do so when George W. Bush was president as they
Democratic voters don’t view their policy positions as composing a tight ideological system with borders that must not be crossed. are now. Perhaps most important, conservative Republicans are more likely than moderate Republicans to prefer position-stickers, while liberal Democrats are more likely than moderates to prefer compromisers. The more committed Democrats are precisely the ones willing to accept compromise. Which is why, though there is majority support for most items on the liberal agenda, even reliable Democratic voters don’t view their policy positions as composing a tight ideological system with borders that must not be crossed. WHEN LIBERALS LOOK AT the problems in
Congress and the shortcomings of the Obama administration, they don’t necessarily see an ideological failure, let alone a betrayal. They’re more likely to attribute the problem to Republican obstructionism, the power of moneyed interests, or a failure of competence. Leftist writers may see Barack Obama as someone who fooled supporters into thinking he was more liberal than he actually was, then showed his nature immediately by appointing a team of Wall Street stalwarts to steer his economic policy; in contrast, ordinary liberals’ disappointment stems
more from the anemic economic recovery and from all the problems not yet solved. Why the difference? Consider what regular people hear from the people they trust to explain the political world to them. When Republican leaders in Congress make an ideological compromise or accept half a loaf to get a bill passed, they come in for heavy criticism from the ideological border guards of the right. Those border guards have huge audiences, and thus power. Rush Limbaugh, who regularly criticizes Republicans for being insufficiently ideological, has an estimated total audience of 14 million (though the number listening to his show at any one time is probably closer to 2 million), and there are a half-dozen other conservative radio hosts with a similar perspective whose audiences number in the millions. Republican fecklessness will come in for criticism on Fox News, and members of the conservative political elite with the ability to command media attention, like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin, will also have their complaints heard. But when a Democratic president makes a similar ideological compromise, where will the backlash come from? Some lefty bloggers and writers, certainly, and radio hosts with dramatically smaller audiences than their right-wing peers. The members of Congress who will be critical are those usually ignored by the media. In these two parallel situations, when their party’s leaders stray off the reservation, Republican voters hear a chorus of condemnation from sources they trust. Democratic voters hear mostly defenses of their president when he fails to hold the ideological line. “I don’t know that [Democrats] have an indepth understanding of where the party is on their ideological concerns and whether they’re being let down,” says Democratic pollster Anna
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Greenberg. The Democratic voters she talks to are certainly unhappy with Washington, but it isn’t because they feel Obama hasn’t been true to liberal ideals; it’s because of continued economic difficulty. Among them, she says, “there also is a disappointment around government effectiveness. So you have all this money that was spent, starting with TARP, the stimulus, and cash for clunkers, and then health-care reform, and it just doesn’t feel to a lot of people that it made a huge difference in their lives. And they’re the ones who believe in this stuff.” That’s why the biggest blow Obama delivered to the liberal project may have been the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov, which did more than cause delays and headaches for people trying to get their health coverage arranged. Months of terrible news showed the public a Democratic administration failing at governing, the thing it was supposed to be good at. The fact that the problems were eventually worked out only slightly mitigates the effect of a Democratic administration plainly incompetent in implementing a decades-old liberal goal. Of course, Republicans can freely sabotage the law, then use the fruits of their sabotage as proof that it never should have passed in the first place. The same is true of their obstructionism: When government grinds to a halt, it’s only the party that believes in government whose goals go unfulfilled. Without a doubt, Republicans have made governing somewhere between difficult and impossible. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of effective liberal activism going on, particularly when you look beyond the national level to focus on states and cities. There are drives to raise the minimum wage all over the country, and protests aimed at fast-food companies. Grassroots efforts are cropping up in
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unusually challenging circumstances, like the “Moral Mondays” movement in North Carolina that formed to take on the blizzard of retrograde actions by a GOP that took total control of the state’s government in 2012. Candidates will tell you that Capitol Hill gridlock has shifted the focus down to the state and local levels. Liberal Democrat Shenna Bellows, who is challenging Senator Susan Collins in Maine this year, says that as frustrated as people may be with the federal government, state initiatives on issues like same-day voter registration and marriage equality have brought liberals into political activism in ways that can be sustained. “Progressives in Maine have built an amazing infrastructure which has really endured,” Bellows says. She does allow that the spirit of the 2008 Obama campaign was exceptional. “I think the grassroots are still very much engaged,” she says. “What people are more wary of is trusting that one person can effect positive social change alone.” “THE STATES ARE REALLY where the hot pro-
gressive action is,” says Heather Mizeur, the most liberal of the Democratic contenders for Maryland governor this year. In just the last few years, Maryland has seen marriage equality, marijuana decriminalization, an increased minimum wage, a state version of the DREAM Act, and new gun-safety measures signed into law. The death penalty has been eliminated. As Mizeur and I talked about voters’ perceptions of Obama, she rattled off a list of his accomplishments. But when I asked whether Democratic voters found that litany persuasive, she replied, “I haven’t actually had this conversation much other than with you. … It just doesn’t even come up on the campaign trail.” Every now and then, President Obama will
give a speech offering an eloquent defense of liberalism and the power of government to secure liberty and prosperity. Many on the left hear the oratory and ask, “Why can’t he do that more often?” But though it might stir some hearts if he did, it doesn’t result in much political benefit. Researchers have known for decades that a majority of the public are “operational liberals” but “symbolic conservatives.” In other words, they dislike the idea of “big government” in the abstract but love all the things government does. Which is why Democrats talk about programs while Republicans talk about principles—both playing to their strengths. What’s most surprising about the state of American liberals today, whether or not they’re getting the speeches they want, is how little dissension there is. It wasn’t long ago that people like me were writing books telling liberals to learn from conservatives’ pragmatism and unity. Without a powerful enemy on whom to focus our discontent, fissures within the notoriously fractious liberal coalition should by all rights be exploding into full-fledged civil war. Yet today, it’s not the left but the right that is in upheaval. Obama’s presidency, instead of providing a focus for conservative energies, has driven his opponents mad. As the Republican Party has moved further to the right, trailing the madness, its demands have grown increasingly difficult to satisfy. If your goal is not just to slow government growth but to dramatically scale it back—and you inevitably fail—the guns begin to turn on your compatriots. A movement where ideology always mattered more than politics has become almost obsessed with purity. This may go some way toward explaining why no serious challenge from the left has emerged to Hillary Clinton’s potential
steve brodner
presidential candidacy. While Republicans are sharpening their weapons in preparation for a blood-soaked ideological thunderdome in 2016, only a few Democrats are seriously considering running against Clinton. The most obvious choice for a populist challenge, Elizabeth Warren, has said repeatedly that she won’t be running. Given who Clinton is—as establishment a figure as can be, and no less a pragmatist than the president she served as secretary of state—one might expect liberals to be rising up to find a standard-bearer to oppose her. But they seem to be resigned to her nomination. No anti-Clinton Democratic organizations have formed (though there are already a number of Republican ones), and only Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has suggested the possibility of a run to Clinton’s left (though former Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana, who is to Clinton’s left in some ways and to her right in other ways, is also considering a run). Polls taken this early may not tell you who will win the nomination, but they don’t demonstrate much anti-Clinton feeling; a recent CNN poll found only 13 percent of Democrats saying they would prefer a candidate more liberal than Clinton, and a Bloomberg poll showed 78 percent of Democrats wanted her to run. Clinton’s appeal isn’t that she’ll be the most reliably liberal president (her husband certainly wasn’t, and she has yet to detail any differences the two have on policy issues). Instead, she’ll be offering primary voters an updated version of what she presented them in 2008. Back then, she argued that she was smart, informed, experienced, and hardheaded enough to power through Republican opposition to liberal goals. It wasn’t so much that Democrats didn’t believe that she
Ordinary liberals’ disappointment in the Obama administration stems more from the anemic economic recovery and from all the problems not yet solved.
was those things; rather, a majority of them were attracted to the newer, more compelling candidate who promised something romantic and transformative. Democratic voters (and volunteers) whose idealism has been tempered by reality may be just what Clinton needs. If one effect of the last five years has been to diminish liberals’ expectations of what the president can accomplish, then the rest of what Clinton has to offer may look like more than enough. After witnessing the ferocity of the Obama-haters, no one can argue any longer, as some did in 2008, that a Clinton presidency would generate a unique amount of Republican opposition. Perhaps Clinton’s seemingly unassailable position atop the 2016 field (granting that it could change; she looked just as formidable eight years ago) points to a sobered Democratic electorate. This may also help explain the striking lack of intraparty infighting on the left at this moment in history. If progressive activism on the state and local level isn’t focused on internal Democratic battles, that’s a good thing. Progress on the issues that touch citizens’ lives becomes more likely as infrastructure is built and grassroots activists are pulled into effecting change in their communities—an urgent task, given the decline of labor unions. If Republicans want to tear themselves apart in internecine war, they should have at it. Liberal intellectuals, for whom slights are long remembered and compromises loom large, will continue to debate the ideological character of Barack Obama’s presidency for years to come. That debate is worth having for any number of reasons. But the millions of liberal Americans who put Obama into office and returned him there think they have more important things to worry about.
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What’s the Matter with the Kochs? Lawsuits are the billionaire brothers’ psychodrama of choice, says a new bio. But buying our democracy—and maybe killing it—is pure self-interest. BY TOM CARSON B
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ot long ago, a pal of mine asked whether I’d heard the latest scoop about Charles and David Koch, the right-wing billionaires currently overseeing capitalism’s final solution to the democracy problem. Did I know— did I know!?—their grandmother
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had been none other than Ilse Koch, the human-lampshade-loving wife of Buchenwald’s commandant? Cazart, as Hunter S. Thompson used to say. Overseeing final solutions just runs in the family. My friend looked distinctly chagrined when I told her it wasn’t
so. Like many liberal Americans, she hates the Kochs so much that no calumny strikes her as too farfetched. But as it happened, I was midway through Daniel Schulman’s first-rate Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and
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Private Dynasty, and I felt reasonably sure that Schulman wasn’t saving Ilse and her apocryphal lampshades for a Harry Potter gotcha toward the end. Considering that Charles and David are worth more than $100 billion between them—and that there’s no real limit on how much of that they might spend advancing their political agenda—being scared witless by the Kochs’ rise makes perfect sense. But I do wonder at times whether turning them into the left’s ultimate boogeymen involves some unconscious sentimentality. Not, mind
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you, that they aren’t ideally cast for the role, from their ruthlessness to their legendary secretiveness. Most likely, not 1 in 10,000 Americans had heard of them until the Tea Party’s rise outed Americans for Prosperity—the 501(c) (4) hydra Charles and David founded in 2004—as the movement’s ATM. Where the sentimentality comes in is that perceiving the Kochs as uniquely monstrous makes it easy to forget that they’re only the energetic catalysts of the 1 percent’s newly de-fig-leafed agenda. In Los Bros’ income bracket, their beliefs about how the country ought to be run—for their benefit, and the rest of us can go hang—aren’t outlandish. It’s just that putting those beliefs into practice used to seem like an impossible dream, but no more. All that distinguishes the Kochs from less enterprising oligarchs is their resourcefulness and industry in reconfiguring the American political landscape to create a regime that suits their priorities. By now, that landscape wouldn’t change back if Charles and David vanished tomorrow. Yet whenever Harry Reid—not the world’s most convincing Capra hero, as we can all presumably agree—excoriates them on the Senate floor, he ends up implying that everything would be hunky-dory if these bad apples would just, y’know, buzz off. Oh, really? Tell it to John Roberts, pal. Or Amway creep Dick DeVos. Or casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the clownish would-be Caligula—“Make my horse a consul, or else”—to Charles and David’s imperturbable, implacable Romulus and Remus. In any case, imploring the Kochs to restrain themselves—which is all that Reid’s hectoring amounts to—is pure bathos. They’ve got the bucks, they understand better than Adelson ever will how the big casino we call American politics works, and don’t forget they’re acting on their most devoutly held principles. (Well, Charles is; so far as I can tell from Sons of Wichita, David doesn’t count for much except as Charles’s satrap, albeit a shrewd one.) When we’re talking about fat cats this ideologically driven, not to mention Cheshire-brainy, to ask them to forswear a mission they were brought up to hold dear—namely, a quest for
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SONS OF WICHITA: HOW THE KOCH BROTHERS BECAME AMERICA’S MOST POWERFUL AND PRIVATE DYNASTY BY DANIEL SCHULMAN
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supremacy, one whose methodology makes no distinction between the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas—for the sake of a bunch of fuzzywuzzy ideals they’ve never even pretended to subscribe to is a nonstarter. True, neither Charles nor David has ever let the cat out of the bag as bluntly as Club for Growth founder Stephen Moore did back in 2009: “Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy.” But it’s not as if anyone in their crowd denounced Moore as an unAmerican lunatic, now did they? Once upon a time, we had a dandy word for people willing to write off democracy as collateral damage in the name of the greater American dream—“kooks,” not Kochs. Yet from their perspective, the Koch brothers are perfectly reasonable men. One of Sons of Wichita’s achievements is to keep that fact disquietingly front and center; despite Schulman’s oftensuperb eye for the revealing and/or juicy detail, not to mention his lefty credentials as a writer for Mother Jones, he never stoops to caricaturing his subjects as the Koch Ness Monsters of popular lore. Revealingly, that’s an image the brothers are said to be confounded by. Nonetheless, in all sorts of bleak or gaudy ways, living up to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that “the rich are different” turns out to be a trait that does run in the family, starting with— doesn’t it always?—Dad. DAD WAS FRED C. KOCH, a boot-
strapping MIT–trained chemical engineer and oilman who married up after meeting his genteel, majored-inFrench better half at a Kansas City polo match in 1932. Fred’s idea of parenting was hard-nosed: “He was the type of father,” one relative says, “who taught his children to swim by throwing them into a pool and walking away.” It must have mortified him when his oldest son turned out to be a pantywaist. The most elusive of the Koch brothers, Frederick still denies he’s gay. At his age, that’s downright endearing, but you could wish he’d been robustly het enough to suit Fred. His unsuitability for a dynastic role was what made second son Charles the logical heir with twins David and Bill Koch jockeying
for position in Charles’s wake. Yahoos they definitely weren’t. Frederick attended Yale, the other three followed Fred Sr. to MIT, and one big squabble among the brothers in adulthood was over how to divvy up Dad’s art collection. Mom, nicknamed “Mighty Mary”—not that she was mighty enough to put a stop to more serious feuds later on—was the aesthetic enabler. Of the four, only Charles didn’t manifest much interest in culture, steeping himself instead in political and economic theory—the real stuff, not Ayn Rand, with Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek among his early Obi-Wan Kenobis. Say what you will about the decisive Koch brother, his free-market fanaticism rests on firmer (albeit unappealing) intellectual bedrock than, say, Ross Perot’s improvised gobbledygook. Fred Sr.’s ferocious anti-Communism hadn’t stopped him from making a bundle in the 1930s building oil facilities for Stalin’s Russia. That let him claim he knew collectivism’s horrors firsthand. In 1958, the elder Koch was one of the John Birch Society’s founding members, and Charles either fell or hewed close enough to the tree to open a Bircher bookstore. But his passion was a brand of libertarianism hard-core enough to be called “anarcho-capitalist” by one dazed ideological confrere. In the 1970s, by which time Dad was long gone, Charles and David put the family fortune to work to make libertarianism both respectable (hence the Cato Institute’s founding) and more than a flyspeck at the polls (hence David’s vice-presidential candidacy on the Libertarian Party’s 1980 ticket, with deep pockets being the self-acknowledged reason he got the nod). Even then, Los Bros couldn’t invest in a cause without wanting to customize it in their image, just as Koch Industries has never acquired a company without imposing its ethos. A dismayed libertarian purist coined the term “Kochtopus” to describe Charles’s takeover of a movement he wanted “to run … as other plutocrats run all the other political parties.” Thanks to Charles’s rapacity and acumen, Koch Industries never stopped expanding. Today, outdone
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only by Cargill, it’s the second-largest privately owned company in the United States—and it’ll go public, as Charles has vowed, “literally over my dead body.” One tantalizingly unamplified explanation Schulman provides is an indiscreet assessment by Koch Industries’ top lawyer: “If this were a public company, all the officers and directors would be in jail.” says the guy said, anyhow. But Bill, the zaniest Koch brother—he’s the id to Charles’s eyes-on-the-prize superego—spent two decades as the biggest thorn in his elder sibling’s side, launching lawsuit after messy lawsuit to disrupt his brothers’ control of the company. That’s when he wasn’t spending his millions on other forms of eccentricity, like deciding out of the blue to compete in the America’s Cup. Improbably, he won. The family dynamic in play would tax the dramatic skills of a Kansan Eugene O’Neill: Frederick retreating into an aestheticism so quaint it seems lit by gas lamps, Charles emerging as pure, wintry will to power, and Bill’s twin David thriving on playing Charles’s Mini-Me while Bill hungers for a disapproval that would prove he’s gotten big brother’s attention. If anything, they come off as four compulsively overdeveloped facets of a single personality, and the key word is “compulsively.” Kochs don’t do things by halves. So entertaining that he threatens to run away with the book—he was once saluted in Vanity Fair as a “man whose closet is free of skeletons in large part because they all seem to be turning somersaults in his living room”—Bill is the only one you’re at all tempted to like, not least because he’s devoted so much of his life to tearing Charles’s sangfroid into shreds. (Even when Bill, Charles, and David “reconciled” in 2001, lawyers were present, and a detailed peace treaty was drawn up for the brothers to sign.) Yet precisely because
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THAT’S WHAT BILL KOCH
The brothers come off as four compulsively overdeveloped facets of a single personality. Kochs don’t do things by halves. Frederick, the mystery Koch brother
Bill is as uninhibited as his brothers are reserved, his shenanigans end up exposing the brutal sense of prerogative that Charles and David are at pains to keep muted. The most bizarre episode in Sons of Wichita describes Bill’s flying a trio of executives from Oxbow, his own energy company, a couple of years ago to a reconstructed Wild West town he maintains as a private resort in Colorado. They were wined and dined, given a helicopter tour of the premises—and then detained against their will into the wee hours, with no communication with the outside world, to be interrogated about their suspected malfeasances. Because a Koch is a Koch is a Koch, Bill—a litigation addict himself—was “surprised and outraged” when one of the three filed suit for kidnapping and false imprisonment. The case is due to go to trial in November of this year—right around election time, funnily enough. THAT COINCIDENCE IS A reminder
that Bill’s antics, however piquant, are a sideshow. Americans for Prosperity may not have gotten much return on the more than $400 million it sank into swaying the 2012 election—“the mother of all wars,” as Charles called it—but 2014 will likely be a different story. That’s not only because the lower and, on the GOP side, more ideologically driven turnout for midterm elections benefits Los Bros’ agenda; it’s because practice makes perfect. As one former Koch exec says, “They are smart people. They learn from their mistakes.” Indeed they do. Much as we might wish that Charles had stayed dreamer enough to keep throwing away money on the Libertarian Party forever, for him and David to remain thirdparty outsiders was no way to get a seat at the big table—let alone dictate the menu. While the Kochs can’t control the GOP the way they once aspired to control the libertarian movement, their millions—however deleterious in effect—would
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count for less if winning elections was all Charles cared about. But it isn’t. He thinks in corporate terms, and that means he’s all about investing in structures—interlocking ones, preferably. If Americans for Prosperity is the brothers’ instrument for influencing elections, once-sleepy George Mason University’s Institute for Humane Studies—among other Koch-funded R&D organs—is designed, or so Charles hopes, to turn out free-market theorists as relentlessly, as Schulman puts it, “as if manufacturing libertarian ideologues and widgets were one and the same.” Meanwhile, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)— which the Kochs also help bankroll—churns out bills for state legislatures to adopt. Ideally, the upshot is a government of Koch-backed politicians passing Koch-approved bills based on Kochgenerated intellectual premises. The top-to-bottom comprehensiveness of the scheme may be unprecedented. Then again, Charles Koch is 78 years old. How much of this edifice will outlive him is anyone’s guess. Given his druthers, David would rather be remembered for other kinds of philanthropy; he’s spent a fortune on funding the arts in New York, which didn’t stop the lesser of the two evil brothers from getting booed at a 2010 performance of The Nutcracker he’d put up $2.5 million to fund. (Yeah, I feel bad for him too.) Though Charles’s son Chase is apparently being groomed to take over Koch Industries, whether he’ll also carry on his father and uncle’s political jihad is less clear. Does it matter? In so many ways, the damage has been done—and the Kochs, as I’ve already suggested, are just the all-too-conveniently appalling poster boys for our transformation into an oligarchy in democratic disguise. That makes it naïve to demonize the Kochs exclusively. So long as we keep singling them out for perverting the system, pretty much every other member of their class with a hankering to do so can go on more or less undisturbed. As one of Bill Koch’s lawyers told a juror during one of the family’s interminable courtroom brawls, “There’s no poor people in this case. Everybody’s rich. That’s just the way it is.”
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Boies and Olson’s Wedding March
ruling that upheld the constitutionality of state sodomy bans, extending a criminalization of gay sex that would not be overturned until the landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003. The team got half of what it wanted. The Court eschewed the push for a blanket constitutional right to marry in favor of allowing same-sex marriage to resume only in California; the proponents of Proposition 8, it said, lacked standing to argue the case before the Supreme Court. Still, Redeeming the Dream is the story of Boies and Olson’s righting a wrong, albeit one told through a subjective lens where their arguments are always sound and their clients and witnesses are beyond reproach.
What the limelight-loving legal team did and didn’t win for gay marriage BY JONATHAN CAPEHART B
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he history of civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans took a dramatic turn on June 26, 2013. On that date, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which since 1996 had defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. The Court also let stand a lower ruling that declared Proposition 8—the 2008 voter referendum outlawing same-sex marriage in California—unconstitutional. The two legal victories rode momentum that had revved and sputtered ever since the early hours of June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village ushered in the modern gay civil-rights movement by resisting a police raid. Hopes rose with the 1977 election of openly gay Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but his murder a year later dealt a psychological blow. In the 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS crisis brought urgency to the task of seeking equality, while bold tactics by groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation forced the country to listen to a community fighting for its life, and the courage of coming out to gain wider acceptance became a matter of survival. The 2009 decision by legal titans David Boies and Ted Olson to lead a federal lawsuit, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, to overturn Proposition 8 may be looked back on as a moment when the LGBT civil-rights movement—and the quest for marriage equality in particular—found renewed energy. With Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Boies and Olson pursued a strategy most established LGBT organizations, such as Lambda Legal and Freedom to Marry and the wealthy donors to OutGiving, the biannual conference that counsels rich gay men and lesbians on their political philanthropy, viewed with suspicion and actively resisted. They
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preferred to stick with the gradual, state-by-state approach they adopted since a 1993 ruling by the Hawaii Supreme Court declared that it was discriminatory to prohibit marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Intense backlash against the Hawaii decision was what had led to the passage of DOMA and to 31 states banning legal recognition of gay and lesbian couples. Instead of picking off DOMA state by state, Olson and Boies pursued a national media strategy that placed them and their palpable sense of selfregard at its center as a political odd couple. Odd because the two were best known for their historic Supreme Court clash in Bush v. Gore, which put George W. Bush, Olson’s client, in the White House after the contested 2000 presidential election against Boies’s client, Vice President Al Gore. That Olson is a conservative Republican was viewed as essential to the duo’s effort to change minds on samesex marriage not just in law but in the court of public opinion. The enterprise was as bold as it was risky. Boies and Olson wanted the Supreme Court to rule on a constitutional right for same-sex marriage. In Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality, Boies and Olson express no doubt in their strategy and their ability to get the job done. The perfect illustration of their faith comes early in the book from Boies. “It was essential that the case that was decided first be prepared, tried, and presented on appeal as perfectly as possible,” he writes. “With our experience, and with the unparalleled resources our two firms offered, we were confident that we could prepare, try, and appeal the case as well as, and probably better than, any alternative team.” The LGBT establishment’s fear of adopting such a distant goal was understandable: Failure at the high court could be a setback akin to Bowers v. Hardwick, the devastating 1986
opens with a recounting of how Boies and Olson went from strangers battling each other in court to close friends whose families vacation together. They had a lot in common. Both were born in Illinois. Both moved to California with their parents at an early age, and both “felt deeply that Proposition 8 was wrong and fundamentally at odds with our vision of America, and of our understanding of California and Californians,” Boies and Olson write. In separate chapters, each explains why he felt compelled to sign on to the case. Olson was brought in by director Rob Reiner, one of Hollywood’s most politically active figures. Proposition 8’s passage at the same time as President Barack Obama’s history-making election had deeply depressed Reiner. Over lunch at the Beverly Hilton a few days later, Reiner and his wife dined with Chad Griffin and Kristina Schake, partners in a public-relations firm who had been part of the failed effort to defeat the anti-gay proposition. It was during this lunch that they hatched the plan to mount a constitutional challenge to Proposition 8. At first rejecting a friend’s suggestion that they reach out to the conservative Olson, Reiner sent Griffin—a former Clinton administration staffer who worked for Reiner after leaving the White House (Griffin has since become head of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay-rights REDEEMING THE DREAM
REDEEMING THE DREAM: THE CASE FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY BY DAVID BOIES & THEODORE B. OLSON
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advocacy organization)—to Washington to take Olson’s measure. The meeting between a lion of the Republican Party and the young, openly gay Democrat was surreal for both. Olson’s and Boies’s respective explanations for taking the case are earnest. Olson, firm in his conservative belief that marriage brings stability to family and communities, writes that he “did not think that the right to marriage should or could constitutionally be withheld from homosexuals. And I could only begin to imagine the hurt, pain, anguish, isolation, and alienation that is created when that relationship is denied
to two loving individuals.” For Boies, “It was the easiest decision of my professional life. … The movement to end antigay discrimination is the defining civil rights issue of the first half of the twenty-first century.” In his chapter, Boies takes the reader on a brisk journey through the history of the LGBT-rights movement. He starts with the formation in 1950s Los Angeles of the Mattachine Society, one of the nation’s first gay-rights groups, moves through Stonewall, Milk’s election, DOMA’s passage, and the revolutionary moment in February 2004 when then-Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco ordered
David Boies and Ted Olson outside the Supreme Court in March 2013
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county clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Boies also covers legal cases that awakened his support for marriage equality, and Supreme Court cases that informed his and Olson’s strategy to ensure that a federal challenge get quickly to the high court. By paying homage to people and events that shaped the LGBT movement, Boies and Olson might inoculate their book against the criticism from writers Andrew Sullivan, Noah Feldman, and others that dogged the April release of Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality by reporter Jo Becker of The New
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York Times. Becker’s book chronicles the same events, stars the same cast of characters, and features criticism similar to Boies and Olson’s of the LGBT establishment’s incrementalist strategy. But Sullivan, the former editor of the New Republic who made a pioneering call for marriage equality in a 1989 piece for that magazine, and Feldman, a Harvard law professor, criticized Becker for what they view as her complicity in an effort by Boies, Olson, and Griffin not only to marginalize those who have been in the movement for decades but to take credit for their work. They accused Becker of rewriting the entire history of the decades-long quest for marriage equality. But this is not the book she wrote. Rather, because Becker was embedded with Boies, Olson, Griffin, and the plaintiffs throughout the litigation, hers is an insider’s view of a key case in the movement. The skepticism and harsh reaction to Becker’s book is no different than that showered on Olson and Boies by the LGBT establishment when they began their push for a Supreme Court showdown. The accusation of hogging the limelight leveled against Olson and Boies, on the other hand, is tough to counter. Where the skepticism of gradualism is expressed in Becker’s account by people like Academy Award– winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, activist Cleve Jones, and Griffin, in Redeeming the Dream Olson and Boies speak for themselves. They wanted to move quickly: A second California Supreme Court case (Strauss v. Horton) challenging Proposition 8 was about to be decided. The decision in that suit, which argued that the change to California’s constitution banning same-sex marriage was done improperly, was expected to uphold Proposition 8. Olson and Boies believed such a ruling would give them the opportunity to challenge the state law in federal court and argue for a right to marriage for same-sex couples under the U.S. Constitution. They wanted to be first because they were concerned “other lawsuits would only confuse matters without contributing any meaningful benefits.” Despite opposition to their
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lawsuit from “many in the gay community, including most of those who had long led the fight for equality,” Boies laid out four reasons the team decided to proceed. They believed they would win. They believed this was the time to push for a constitutional right to marry. They believed the case “would advance the cause of equality and public support for it.” They believed “there was no way that a federal constitutional challenge could be avoided.” What follows is Olson and Boies’s triumphant version of the events that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling in their case. They explain the creation of the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), an organization that supplied fundraising and communications support behind the case. They recall the quest for two perfect clients, “mature adults with a strong and deep desire to be married” who would be able to “remain together for the three to five years the process would require.” Kris Perry and Sandy Stier
(married in 2004 and raising four boys) along with Jeff Zarrillo and Paul Katami (a Burbank couple who came to AFER’s attention after their memorable YouTube response to the pernicious pro-Proposition 8 commercial “Gathering Storm”) fit the bill. Olson and Boies revisit the secretive, suspenseful launch of the suit in San Francisco in 2009 by Enrique Monagas, one of many lawyers on the team. When the clerk commented that “it must be an important filing” since it was coming in so late on the Friday before Memorial Day, “Enrique surreptitiously crossed his fingers and said, ‘I haven’t even read it.’” Monagas was able to sneak a peek at the clerk’s screen to see which judge was picked to take the case: “VRW.” Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker, a 1987 appointee of President Ronald Reagan whose nomination was initially opposed by Democrats (renominated by George H.W. Bush, he was confirmed in 1989) because of his membership in an allmale athletic club and his work on a
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case that blocked the use of the word “Olympics” by the Gay Games. Walker would come out publicly after the case’s resolution. Rather than go for summary judgment, Walker insisted on conducting a trial and asked both sides’ lawyers to submit evidence on 19 specific questions about homosexuality, discrimination, the impact of marriage on gay and straight couples, and raising children. Boies and Olson make it clear that this was a great development for their case. The evidence and testimony compiled during trial in answer to those questions, and the legal record they created, would prove vital to subsequent courts and to the public’s understanding of marriage equality. They liken the benefits of Walker’s move to the famous Scopes trial of 1925 that educated the public on evolution, creationism, and the role of science in public education. Each played a distinct role as the drama unfolded. Where Boies was the grand inquisitor who tore witnesses apart on cross-examination, Olson was the closer, shaping testimony into a potent argument. Olson and Boies heap praise on the skill and credentials of their opposing counsel Charles Cooper, a conservative luminary and a longtime friend of Olson’s. They then gleefully recount Cooper’s team’s every misstep: how its witnesses fell apart either during pretrial hearings or on the stand and how they succeeded in turning its expert on marriage and children into their best witness on the state ban’s harm to same-sex couples and their families. (They got him to admit that “adopting same-sex marriage would be likely to improve the well-being of gay and lesbian households and their children.”) But it would be an answer from Cooper that, as Boies and Olson write, would “produce one of the most memorable and decisive moments in the case.” When pressed by Judge Walker on what impact same-sex marriage would have on the procreative purpose of opposite-sex marriages, Cooper replied, “Your Honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.” That response, which got to the heart of the case for both sides, would haunt Cooper all the way to the Supreme Court.
a favor when reading Redeeming the Dream. Have Becker’s Forcing the Spring close by. Reading Boies and Olson, I was struck by how breezy it is compared to the detailed, in-the-room nature of Becker’s recounting. The legal odd couple present events from their victorious point of view, while Becker gives you a wider spectrum of opinions and recollections and a more complete picture of what happened. For instance, Boies and Olson present the selection of Perry and Stier and Katami and Zarrillo as the lead plaintiffs as a flawless operation. Instead, Becker describes in detail the “mad dash” to find the perfect clients as the clock ticked toward a ruling in Strauss v. Horton. In fact, the “dream couple—a Latina lesbian and her white partner who had been together forever”—backed out of the case. Of Perry and Stier, Becker reveals that Griffin “knew that the couple wasn’t perfect” because Olson didn’t want couples with children and because of concern that Stier’s previous marriage to a man would complicate their argument that being gay was not a choice. “At this late date, they would do,” Becker writes of Griffin’s initial decision to see if Perry wanted to join the federal suit. In another instance (which I pointed out at PostPartisan on washingtonpost.com), in which Boies and Olson write how happy they were that Walker wanted a trial, Becker writes that Olson “was not initially keen on the idea of a trial.” His goal was to get the case to the Supreme Court. So eager was he to circumvent a trial that, Cooper told Becker, Olson suggested they jointly oppose Walker’s push for one. “We don’t want to have some Scopes Monkey trial here, do we?” Cooper recalled Olson saying. When Boies and Olson filed their case in May 2009, marriage equality was legal in only Massachusetts, Iowa, and Connecticut. As of this writing, it is legal in 19 states and the District of Columbia, while statutory and state constitutional bans on samesex marriage have been overturned in Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, among others. That there are so many cases on the docket is testament to the state-by-state BUT DO YOURSELF
The testimony compiled in Perry v. Schwarzenegger would prove vital to subsequent courts and to the public’s understanding of marriage equality.
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strategy credited to advocates such as Evan Wolfson, the founder of Freedom to Marry. The number of cases speaks to the DOMA ruling’s power as well. Essentially, that decision, in United States v. Windsor, came down to a tax case: Plaintiff Edith Windsor was legally married to her spouse Thea Spyer. When Spyer died in 2009, Windsor was hit with a $363,053 estate tax because the couple’s marriage was not recognized by the federal government. The nine federal and state judges who have declared state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional all cited the Windsor case argued by attorney Roberta Kaplan in her first appearance before the justices. Olson and Boies failed to secure a constitutional right to marry for same-sex couples. Instead, they won because the justices ruled that the proponents of Proposition 8 lacked the legal standing to defend the initiative. Still, it was a historic ruling. As a result of their case, marriage for samesex couples resumed in California, the nation’s most populous state. Since the June 2013 rulings on Proposition 8 and on DOMA , the LGBT-rights movement seems to have revved into overdrive. Public support for marriage equality, which inched over 50 percent for the first time two years before the Supreme Court’s hearing of the Proposition 8 case, has jumped to 59 percent, according to the latest Washington Post–ABC News poll. That same poll showed that 50 percent of those surveyed believe that equal protection under the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution extends to the right to marry for same-sex couples. Last September, Boies and Olson joined the Virginia case, known as Bostic v. Rainey, which overturned that state’s same-sex marriage ban in February. This tells me two things. One, after reading Redeeming the Dream, I have no doubt that the case will go to the Supreme Court. Two, the justices will not be able to dodge the question the two men asked them in Perry v. Schwarzenegger: Is there a constitutional right to marry for samesex couples? Olson and Boies have made the case in court and in their book. All that’s left is for the Supreme Court to rule in the affirmative.
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Sally Ride and the Burdens of “The First” The price paid back on Earth by space’s woman pioneer BY ANN FRIEDMAN B
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hen one of Sally Ride’s college friends inquired about her astrophysics major, Ride replied simply, “It’s about space.” Yet she claimed she didn’t always aspire to be an astronaut. The space program was still a closed-door club—inaccessible to her—when she went through school in the early 1970s. Ride was content to pursue an academic career until NASA undertook a nationwide effort to recruit women and let them know the club had room for more than white male fighter pilots. Then and only then did she start itching for orbit. Many biographers are tempted to characterize history-making Americans as born rebels who knew from the beginning that they wanted to storm the gates. What’s refreshing about Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space is that Lynn Sherr paints an evenhanded portrait of Ride as an iconic American whose accomplishments are inseparable from the second-wave feminist moment in which she reached them. The two women became friends when Sherr covered the space program for ABC News, and Sherr is clearly proud of having rubbed elbows with her. (Sherr, who has some name-dropping tendencies, also mentions introducing Ride to Betty Friedan.) Ride was unapologetically feminist, but she didn’t make career choices with politics in mind. She followed her interests. “I think she was twenty years ahead of her time in her absolutely unstated demand to be treated as an equal,” an early college boyfriend tells Sherr. “She just asserted herself in a way that said, ‘I’m here and I’m capable and I’m doing it.’” RIDE’S FIRST WORD was “No.” As a
young child growing up in Southern California, she called herself “Sassy.” Playing shortstop for the Dodgers was, her mother told her, the only
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thing she couldn’t do as a girl. Ride was a high-school and college tennis champ years before Title IX mandated that those programs be fairly funded and that schools dole out sports scholarships to women in equal measure to men, and she was the only woman in her first undergraduate physics classes. In 1970—the year she transferred to Stanford, where she would go on to complete her bachelor’s degree and earn a master’s and a Ph.D.—only about 3 percent of doctoral candidates in physics nationwide were women. (This hasn’t changed dramatically. The New York Times reported last year that “one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American.”) Ride’s research was in astrophysics, and she had paid attention to headlines about the men of Apollo 11 training for America’s first space missions in the 1960s—a bravado-heavy group mythologized by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. At the same time the “Right Stuff” guys were training in the California desert, a group of female pilots—the so-called Mercury 13—were also going through rounds of testing to determine their fitness for space. When the program was abruptly canceled, the women would not go quietly. In 1962, they lobbied Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a champion of the space program, urging him to sign a letter declaring that “sex should not be a reason for disqualifying a candidate for orbital flight.” Johnson answered that the matter was out of his hands, adding to the bottom of a draft letter, “Let’s stop this now!”— “this” being the conversation about women in space, not sexism at NASA. It wasn’t until ten years later, after the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, that NASA , forced to consider women, created a diversity hiring initiative. At around the
Biographer Lynn Sherr writes that Ride was a
“SUPERB COMPARTMENTALIZER.” She had to be.
same time, the agency created a new category of astronaut to join pilots on space flights. This shift meant everything for women. Where astronauts had previously been culled from the ranks of male fighter pilots, a “mission specialist” could be any highly trained individual with relevant expertise. NASA put out an open call, encouraging women and minorities to apply with ads in Ebony and appeals to the Society of Women Engineers. This effort resulted in the Stanford Daily headline that caught Sally Ride’s eye: “NASA to Recruit Women.” At a time when we’re still trying to figure out how to diversify math and sciences, and the tech industry is known for sexism as much as innovation, this is an important lesson. Ride was not a woman who decided she wanted to be an astronaut, ignored the fact that the program only appealed to men, and broke through by her willpower. She was an incredibly smart woman, well suited to a career in the space program, who never considered applying until a NASA effort convinced her—and women like her—that it was a possibility. “Now,” Sherr writes of the weeks after Ride submitted her application, “it was all she wanted to do.” At the time, some NASA administrators failed to see how their effort to broaden recruiting led to a surge in diverse applicants. It used to be “difficult to choose women because of their lack of qualification,” NASA’s first flight director, Christopher Kraft, told ABC News after the agency announced its new astronaut class would contain six women and four minority men. “I think that in the last few years, because of the women’s movement frankly, women are much more qualified.” While the women’s movement was indeed having an effect on politics and culture, Gloria Steinem didn’t spend time in physics labs or test-flight cockpits helping women improve their qualifications for space work. The feminist movement changed the perception of women’s potential. So would Ride. NASA had to make some adjustments to accommodate the women in Ride’s astronaut class and later as it prepared to send her to space. It added
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Ride floats alongside the air-lock hatch on Challenger’s mid-deck.
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a women’s locker room, which astronaut Judy Resnik, who later died in the Challenger explosion, festooned with a Tom Selleck poster. Rather than force astronauts to use urine-catching devices that resembled condoms, NASA added commodes to space vessels. Tampons were packed with their strings connecting them, like a strip of sausages, so they wouldn’t float away. Engineers asked Ride, “Is 100 the right number?” She would be in space for a week. “That would not be the right number,” she told them. At every turn, her difference was made clear to her. When it was announced Ride had been named to a space flight mission, her shuttle commander, Bob Crippen, who became a lifelong friend and colleague, introduced her as “undoubtedly the prettiest member of the crew.” At another press event, a reporter asked Ride how she would react to a problem on the shuttle: “Do you weep?” Though she met Ride at the frenzied peak of her popularity, Sherr writes, “I did not realize the psychic price she paid for being the first American woman in space.” To be first is to relinquish the complicated specifics of your story and become a caricature, a stand-in for the ideals of a movement or for the hope and pain of a moment in history. When NASA recruited Ride’s class, it was wise enough to select six women rather than one token. “Everyone was watching them,” said Carolyn Huntoon, a biochemist and NASA middle manager who became the female recruits’ unofficial den mother. The women of Ride’s class forged strong bonds. On the night before Ride’s first space flight, astronaut Anna Fisher, then eight months pregnant, kept watch in the darkened cockpit of the shuttle. Only one could be first. For Ride, already a private person, the feeling of being under the microscope was ever present. She became adept at giving cheerful nonanswers to prying questions. At various points in her life, she did have something to hide. Ride was married to fellow astronaut Steve Hawley at the time of her two flights but also had serious relationships with women. When a college friendship turned into something more, “we pretty much kept to ourselves,” says
JUL/AUG 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 67
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her then-girlfriend Molly Tyson. This was a few years after Stonewall, but the gay-rights movement had yet to go national. Ride attended an antiwar march in Washington and was interested in the nascent women’s movement. But coming out doesn’t seem to have occurred to her and certainly would have jeopardized her chance to go to space if not killed it outright. Around 1990—seven years after Ride’s historic flight—NASA management quietly ordered a working group of physicians to declare homosexuality a “psychiatrically disqualifying condition.” (The rule didn’t end up going through, and although no astronaut has ever come out, NASA says it doesn’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.) Some old friends like Sherr found out about Ride’s sexuality for the first time in her obituary, which revealed that she had spent her last 27 years in a committed relationship with a woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy. “Of course,”
Ride and three crewmates at the Johnson Space Center
SALLY RIDE: AMERICA’S FIRST WOMAN IN SPACE BY LYNN SHERR
Simon & Schuster
Sherr writes, Ride “was also a superb compartmentalizer.” She had to be. Ride understood that she was a role model. “I saw it in the eyes of the girls and the women and the grandmothers that I met, what it meant to them,” she said in 2008. While she accepted the role of astronaut as public servant, playing nice with a Reagan administration whose politics she opposed, she did draw the line sometimes. She refused to appear on an NBC tribute to NASA hosted by comedian Bob Hope, because “I don’t like the way he exploits women.” After two flights and a few stints as ground commander of mission control through the mid-1980s, the 1986 Challenger explosion made Ride decide she wouldn’t go to space again. Ride played a critical role in the blue-ribbon commission appointed to investigate the disaster, which killed seven people due to a preventable equipment failure. She then spent a year working to develop a strategic plan for NASA . The Ride
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Report outlined four bold initiatives, including a push to launch satellites to monitor and record climate change on planet Earth—a remarkably farsighted idea for an agency previously focused on exploring new territory rather than monitoring our own. Ride retired from NASA in 1987 and never returned, though both the Clinton and Obama administrations sought to make her NASA administrator. She did, however, play a critical role on the commission that investigated the Columbia explosion in 2003, making her the only person on both inquiries. The rest of her career was focused on educating new scientists, in academia at the University of California, San Diego, and later as the founder of Sally Ride Science, a for-profit company that seeks to stoke and sustain girls’ (and boys’) interest in science. This, she hoped, would be her legacy. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2011, she died 16 months later. “Being first was fine,” Sherr writes, “but she didn’t want to be the only one.”
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The Colorblind Bind Focusing college-student recruitment on poor neighborhoods can overlook middle-class African Americans entitled to affirmative action. BY RICHARD ROTHSTEIN B
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hief Justice John Roberts says that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” In university admissions, this means becoming “colorblind,” taking no affirmative action to favor African Americans. Apparently intimidated by Roberts’s Supreme Court plurality, many university officials, liberals, and civil-rights advocates have exchanged their former support of affirmative action for policies that appear closer to Roberts’s. In effect, these newer plans say that the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to pretend colorblindness but devise subterfuges to favor African Americans. One approach is to favor low-income students regardless of race. Another adopts the Supreme Court’s embrace of diversity as educationally beneficial, prompting universities to enroll disadvantaged minority students for this purpose while making no obvious attempt to remedy historic wrongs. Some persuade themselves that these are the best possible policies. In recent years, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been one of the few leading public figures, on or off the Court, unabashedly willing to challenge Roberts’s colorblindness. In a case decided in April, she gained a new ally in Justice Sonia Sotomayor for an uncompromising defense of affirmative action. Instead of “winks, nods, and disguises,” Ginsburg has called for race-conscious policy to offset the still-enduring effects of slavery and the subsequent unconstitutional exploitation of its descendants under Jim Crow. “Only an ostrich could regard the supposedly neutral alternatives as race unconscious,” Ginsburg has said, and only a contorted legal mind “could conclude that an admissions plan designed to produce
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racial diversity is not race conscious.” Sotomayor recently added (mocking Roberts’s aphorism) that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” Of the books by African American law professors here under review, Randall Kennedy’s For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law explains why race-conscious college admissions policies are a reasonable and modest remedy for these unfortunate effects. Sheryll Cashin’s Place, Not Race is a well-argued plea for ostrich-like plans. In contrast to this plea, Cashin’s previous book, The Failures of Integration, was an impassioned call for housing policy that would finally incorporate black families into American society. It was anything but colorblind. “Indirect approaches are no substitute for a frontal attack on what is ailing us as a nation,” she wrote, concluding that “the rest of society should stop fearing us [blacks] and ordering themselves in a way that is designed to avoid us where we exist in numbers. America created slavery, Jim Crow, and the black ghetto. America has shaped stereotypes grounded in fear of black people. … America has to get beyond fear of black people and fear of difference to begin to order itself in a way that is consistent with its ideals.” Now, however, writing about affirmative action in college admissions— an issue considerably less contentious than desegregation of the suburbs— Cashin has become convinced that race-conscious policy isn’t such a good idea after all. It incites resistance to black progress that she believes might not otherwise exist. Failing to speak openly and candidly on the subject of
PLACE, NOT RACE: A NEW VISION OF OPPORTUNITY IN AMERICA BY SHERYLL CASHIN
Beacon Press
FOR DISCRIMINATION: RACE, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND THE LAW BY RANDALL KENNEDY
Pantheon
race leads Cashin to pander to white hostility: “Social psychologists link much opposition to health care expansion to high levels of racial resentment. Again, I am not saying that opponents are racist.” What else could she be saying? Convinced that race-based affirmative action is politically dead, Cashin seeks an alternative more palatable to white opponents. She concludes that race-based affirmative action gives unfair advantage to middle-class African Americans who don’t need it, while low-income youth of all races do. Cashin certainly has cause for concern, as elite colleges fulfill goals for black enrollment with children of well-educated African and AfroCaribbean immigrants rather than descendants of American slaves— too many Barack Obamas and not enough Michelles. Cashin illustrates with her own family—though with origins in American slavery, it is a well-established member of a multi generational black elite—and concludes with a letter to her six-year-old twin sons, students at a Mandarin immersion school. She tells them that her proposal will deny them undeserved privileges they can manage without: “I would trade the benefit to you of affirmative action for a country that does not fear and demonize people who look like you,” she writes, as though such a deal were on offer. Cashin, an “integration pioneer” from childhood—she attended predominantly white schools—is now a Georgetown University professor, having graduated summa cum laude in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt, studied law at Oxford, and clerked for Thurgood Marshall at the Supreme Court. Her husband, like her, is a “professional parent of color.” Her sons’ paternal great- grandparents built a profitable corporation (it continues to this day with family leadership) and had five children, of whom four became doctors and the fifth a lawyer. On Cashin’s side, the boys’ great-grandparents went to Fisk University, as did their grandfather, who went on to medical school; their great-grandmother was a high-school principal.
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It’s fair to say that giving Cashin’s sons admission advantages to elite colleges would be unjust. They don’t need it. Cashin is also right to point to a gulf between their inherited advantages and the handicaps suffered by the lowest-income African Americans living in high-poverty neighborhoods where the “undertow” of gangs, violence, profiling police, racially skewed criminal justice, parents with little literacy, and widespread unemployment stack the odds against youth who may try to escape. Cashin wants to extend university preferences to such youth and to those of all races and ethnicities in similar circumstances. Her ground here is shakier. While other groups experience hardship and discrimination, few nonblack young people suffer handicaps of similar intensity—as her previous book made clear. What’s more, Cashin’s understanding of the country’s, and African Americans’, social-class distribution is without nuance; she focuses only on the poor and the affluent, insisting that African Americans in the latter group can compete without special favors. Yet her college admissions recommendations mostly overlook a substantial, nonaffluent African American middle class, sitting between the very poor and the rich. These are children not of inherited wealth and status but of ordinary lawyers, engineers, administrative workers, civil servants, paraprofessionals, police, firemen, bus drivers, or blue-collar workers—children of men like Michelle Obama’s father, who worked in Chicago’s water plant, or Randall Kennedy’s father, a postal clerk who completed only two years of college. This working and middle class of African Americans both needs and deserves affirmative action to level the playing field after centuries of discrimination. TO COMPREHEND WHAT is missed by
recruiting residents of poor neighborhoods while ignoring the middle class, consider the University of Texas’s “Ten Percent Plan,” Cashin’s favored placebased program. In 1996, after a federal appeals court banned considering race in admissions, the university replaced affirmative action with an ingenious
scheme that exploited pervasive racial segregation of Texas high schools. Admission was offered to the tenth of each school’s graduating class with the best grades. Because so many Texas African Americans attend predominantly black schools (in predominantly low-income neighborhoods), the plan generated a 2003 freshman class that was 4.5 percent black. The following year, however, the Supreme Court permitted including race in a more holistic evaluation of applicants, to create diversity. Texas preserved its Ten Percent Plan but supplemented it with race-conscious affirmative action that enrolled additional black applicants. In 2013, 3.4 percent of entering students were African American Ten Percenters, while an additional 1.2 percent were African Americans admitted for diversity purposes. The diversity admittees were more likely to hail from middle-class families and less likely to hail from extremely low-income families than the Ten Percenters. When the university was challenged in the Supreme Court, its lawyers acknowledged that one goal of the diversity plan was to recruit more middle-class blacks. Justice Samuel Alito was contemptuous: “I thought the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students who come from underprivileged backgrounds,” Alito chided the university’s lawyers, “[but now you say] it’s faulty because it doesn’t admit enough … who come from privileged backgrounds.” Cashin sides with Alito. She calls preferences for middle-class blacks “unseemly.” Yet if middle-class blacks need no affirmative action, why are their numbers still uncomfortably low? While more than 8 percent of all Texas families are African American with incomes above the Texas median, only 1.2 percent of entering students were African Americans admitted for diversity purposes. Is this because middle-class blacks are unqualified for selective institutions like the University of Texas? Perhaps Cashin downplays affirmative action for blacks who are neither affluent nor trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods because she has been distracted by the attention we now
It is remarkable that Justice Ginsburg is the only prominent white figure still making a consistent case for
AFFIRMATIVE
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pay to the struggling middle class in this age of growing inequality. It is certainly the case that middle-class incomes have not grown as they should with rising productivity. Many working families have been forced to downsize their housing in the postbubble recession, and many middleclass workers have taken lower-paying jobs as the workforce has deindustrialized. Yet not all but the super-rich have become poor. The median family income remains about $55,000, and 60 percent of families earn between about $30,000 and $120,000 annually. Contrasting only the affluent with those in poor neighborhoods ignores most American families. Even for low-income families, other groups’ disadvantages—though serious—are not similar to those faced by African Americans. Although the number of high-poverty white communities is growing (many are rural; solicitude for these prompted Texas Republicans to support the Ten Percent Plan), poor whites are less likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods than poor blacks. Nationwide, 7 percent of poor whites live in high-poverty neighborhoods, while 23 percent of poor blacks do so. Patrick Sharkey’s Stuck in Place showed that multigenerational concentrated poverty remains an almost uniquely black phenomenon; white children in poor neighborhoods are likely to live in middle-class neighborhoods as adults, whereas black children in poor neighborhoods are likely to remain in such surroundings as adults. In other words, poor whites are more likely to be temporarily poor, while poor blacks are more likely to be permanently so. The “place-based” preferences Cashin supports will therefore recruit low-income African Americans and some immigrant or even secondgeneration Hispanics but few other low-income students. They will also recruit some middle-class African Americans, who are more likely to live in disadvantaged neighborhoods than nonblack middle-class families. In this sense, by primarily benefiting African Americans, they are indeed the kind of policy-by-disguise that Ginsburg denounced. But most middle-class African
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Americans no longer live in predominantly black neighborhoods. They will not benefit from place-based plans that Cashin supports—and they will be underrepresented without race-conscious affirmative action. That is because African American families with middle-class incomes are quite different from white families with similar incomes. Colorblind policies giving a boost to low-income students falsely assume that family income differences can distinguish social class. They cannot. Median black family income was 61 percent of the white median in 2010. Yet black median family wealth (net worth, or assets minus debts) was an astonishingly low 5 percent of the white median. I recently asked Thomas Shapiro, co-author of Black Wealth/White Wealth (1995), to estimate relative wealth by race for middle-class families. Calculating relative wealth for black and white families with annual incomes of $60,000—slightly above the national median—from his most recent data in 2007, he found that black middleclass wealth was only 22 percent of whites’. This gap has undoubtedly widened since 2007 because the housing collapse harmed blacks—who were targeted disproportionately for exploitative subprime loans and exposed to foreclosure—more than whites. In short, middle-class African Americans and whites are in different financial straits. Total family wealth (including the ability to borrow from home equity) has more impact than income on high-school graduates’ ability to afford college. Wealth also influences children’s early expectations that they will attend and complete college. White middle-class children are more likely to prepare for, apply to, and graduate from college than black children with similar family incomes. Sheryll Cashin’s sixyear-olds may know they will attend elite schools. Typical middle-class
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Texas’s Ten Percent Plan helped to generate a 2013 class that was 3.4 percent black with an additional 1.2 percent of African Americans admitted for diversity purposes at the University of Texas, Austin.
African American children do not. Cashin agrees that admissions officers should take a special look at applicants (of all races) whose families have low wealth but makes clear she considers this of lesser importance than residence in a high-poverty neighborhood. Nor does she explain how low wealth should be to entitle an applicant who does not live in such a neighborhood to consideration. Although typical middle-class black families have far less wealth than typical middle-class white families, they are not always without wealth at all. Black middle-class children are more likely to be first in their families to aim for college—again, more Michelle Obama than Sheryll Cashin. When colorblind affirmative-action proponents seek first-generation college applicants in high-poverty neighborhoods, they risk skipping over this important pool of middleclass African Americans. Moreover, while most middle-class African Americans now live in non–majority black neighborhoods, they are more
likely to live adjacent to low-income neighborhoods. In new research, Patrick Sharkey finds that 32 percent of middle- and upper-income black families live in neighborhoods bordering severely disadvantaged neighborhoods, while only 6 percent of income-similar white families do so. The undertow that Cashin appropriately fears for low-income African Americans—the lure of drugs, gangs, oppositional behavior—pulls as well on middle-class black youth living nearby. Those who successfully resist may have strength of character surpassing that of white youth from families with similar incomes whose adolescence was better protected. ONE WONDERS, TOO, if the attraction
for many liberals of extending colorblind preferences to disadvantaged youth of all races and ethnicities is due, in part, to a misunderstanding of demographic trends. With enormous immigration flows to the U.S. in recent decades—particularly from Mexico and Central America—many
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jump too quickly to conclude that a growing share of Americans will be so socioeconomically disadvantaged that the nation will not be able to fulfill its needs for educated labor by relying primarily on middle-class students. Cashin’s book enacts this fallacy. From a prediction that the United States will soon become “majorityminority,” she asserts that future college-educated leaders must increasingly be drawn from lowincome communities. The majority-minority forecast typically adds projected numbers of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and a few others, finding that soon these will make up a majority of American schoolchildren and thereafter of the nation’s citizens. Yet what defines “minority”? Early in the 20th century, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, and others were deemed nonwhite. By the third generation, these groups had assimilated and joined the “white” majority. The “majority-minority” claim assumes that few new immigrants will follow suit. Although we can’t be certain what will occur, some data belie this assumption. For example, Latino immigrants who had resided in California for at least 30 years had a 65 percent homeownership rate prior to the burst of the housing bubble. That rate is undoubtedly lower after the bubble burst, but it is still an extraordinary illustration of Latinos’ assimilation to the middle-class majority. Like many earlier European immigrant groups, new immigrants are also assimilating in later generations by intermarriage. In 2010, 26 percent of all Hispanic newlyweds married non-Hispanics; for those born here, the rate was 36 percent and for the third generation, the rate rises still higher. Calling offspring of such unions “minorities” is misleading. Over time, nativists may see assimilated Hispanics as part of the “white” majority, as they came to accept swarthy Italians, Poles, Greeks, and Jews. We will be a majority-majority country for some time to come. Certainly, Hispanics suffer discrimination, some of it severe—police harassment of black and brown adolescents, accompanied by high
incarceration rates, and the nativistdriven rollback of bilingual education programs come to mind—but the undeniable hardship faced by recent, non–English speaking, unskilled, lowwage immigrants is not equivalent to blacks’ centuries of lower-caste status. The problems are different, and the remedies must also be different, including in some, but not all cases, affirmative action. It is also appropriate for universities seeking diversity to make special efforts to recruit and accept Hispanic students, but these efforts should not be confused with the proper constitutional requirement that universities extend preferences to African Americans to repair centuries of state-sponsored exploitation. WE CANNOT REASONABLY aspire to a
meritocracy where all children—poor, middle-class, and affluent—have equal chances of landing in adulthood at every point in the social-class distribution. Higher social-class status will always confer advantages on children; we can only hope to mitigate them. A more realistic aspiration would be to assist children of African Americans who have climbed a few steps up the ladder in climbing a bit further, and in so doing providing leadership to the black community as a whole. Yet knowing merely that middle- class African Americans have accumulated less wealth, live in lessadvantaged neighborhoods, or more recently joined the middle class does not itself justify granting them preferences. Many opponents of affirmative action believe these disparities are either blacks’ fault or the result of illdefined, unfortunate historical experiences for which blame can no longer be assigned. Affirmative action’s defense requires showing how these disparities result from clear constitutional violations—what Justice Ginsburg calls an “overtly discriminatory past, the legacy of centuries of law-sanctioned inequality” (emphasis added). The defense also requires showing that these violations’ effects have not so dissipated over time that a victim class is no longer identifiable or a remedy practical. An 1883 Supreme Court opinion pontificated that “when a man has emerged from
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that give a boost to low-income students falsely assume that differences in family income can distinguish social class. They cannot.
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slavery … there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.” Two decades after emancipation, the Court’s view that the stage had already arrived was ridiculously premature. Is it still? It is a question neither Cashin nor Kennedy addresses: Why are there too few middle-class African Americans in selective universities, and what is the moral, legal, and historical justification for putting a thumb on the scale to compensate? Are direct effects of past discrimination still so pervasive that the 14th Amendment requires affirmative action? Answers cannot duck the need to review the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and state-sponsored exploitation of African Americans, and how effects of these policies persist. Consider the example of most relevance to middle-class African American enrollment in selective universities— the family wealth disparities by race described above. Discussions of affirmative action are empty without the background of how these wealth disparities arose. In the last century, federal agencies subsidized white suburban development by guaranteeing loans to massproduction builders who created places like Levittown on Long Island, Lakewood in California, and similar uncounted suburbs in metropolitan areas nationwide. Homes were inexpensive and theoretically affordable to black and white workers alike, especially to returning World War II veterans. But the Federal Housing and Veterans administrations encouraged and usually required these builders to refuse sales to African Americans. Whites who were permitted to buy benefited from ensuing decades of equity appreciation; this wealth helped finance college for their children and was later bequeathed to them. Black families, prohibited by federal policy from buying into these initially low-priced suburbs, lost out. Levittown is a nationally representative example. The federal government guaranteed construction loans for Levitt & Sons with a whites-only proviso. William Levitt
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sold his houses to whites beginning in 1947 for $7,000, about two and a half times the national median family income. White veterans could get VA or FHA loans with no down payments. Today, these homes typically sell for $400,000, about seven times the median income, and mortgages typically require down payments of up to 20 percent. Although African Americans are now permitted to purchase in Levittown, it’s become unaffordable. By 2010 Levittown, in a metropolitan region with a large black population, was still less than 1 percent black. White Levittowners can today easily save for college. Blacks denied access to the community are much less likely to be able to do so. Government policy also impeded African Americans’ ability to accumulate wealth from saved income. As documented last year in Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself, the New Deal, from undisguised racism and compromise with Southern Democrats, prevented African Americans from realizing the benefits of labor-market reforms like the minimum wage, Social Security, and the National Labor Relations Act by excluding occupations (such as agriculture and domestic service) in which African Americans predominated. The government certified unions for exclusive bargaining even when unions barred African Americans from membership or restricted them to the lowest-paid jobs. These policies further contributed to differences in white and black workers’ wealth accumulation, and their ability to share that wealth with their college-going heirs. KENNEDY, A PROFESSOR at Harvard
Law School, also clerked for Thurgood Marshall at the Supreme Court—like Cashin. Kennedy’s For Discrimination does little to explain why the playing field needs leveling— it assumes familiarity with the enduring effects of centuries of discrimination—but does a superb job of defending affirmative action against its commonplace criticisms, while acknowledging that the criticisms are not wholly without foundation. Kennedy is, for example, ambivalent about “diversity” alternatives. He likes that they cause colleges to embrace black students; for the first
Is putting up with a bit of
STIGMA
a small price for opportunities opened to African Americans? Yes, Randall Kennedy concludes.
time, he writes, being black is “seen as a valuable credential.” He acknowledges that diverse classrooms improve learning but also embraces the complaint of Professor Lino Graglia that diversity is “little more than an invitation to fraud by nearly all colleges and universities” that are prohibited from employing race-conscious methods to increase African American enrollments. Kennedy shares Professor Sanford Levinson’s worries about “costs to intellectual honesty of the felt need to shoehorn one’s arguments [for racial justice] into the language of ‘diversity.’” The book’s flaw is its assumption that contemporary readers understand the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination. For most Americans who deny that these effects remain powerful, Kennedy’s arguments will be unpersuasive. Fortunately, other prominent voices are, for the first time in a long time, making the historical case. Sotomayor is one. Another is reporter Nikole HannahJones, who has published a series over the past two years at the independent investigative journalism site ProPublica, focusing on official responsibility for ongoing residential segregation in New York’s Westchester County. Yet another is Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose widely heralded recent article (and accompanying video) demonstrated how federally sponsored housing discrimination in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago in the 1960s limited all sorts of opportunities for African Americans, their children, and their grandchildren. Coates calls for consideration of “reparations” as a remedy; affirmative action is a perfectly reasonable expression of such a remedy, and Kennedy’s For Discrimination well explains why it is so reasonable. We cannot calculate specific debts owed to African Americans (in almost all cases, now impossible to identify) whose government denied them the opportunity, in violation of constitutional rights, to purchase suburban homes and then benefit from equity appreciation. But in principle, we can calculate some consequences of our racial history. Kennedy quotes Martin Luther King Jr.’s assertion that unpaid wages due slaves, had they been free
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plantation laborers, are calculable. Wage losses stemming from exclusion of identifiable African Americans from federal minimum wage or collective-bargaining protection might also be determined. But repayment to these workers (or their heirs) of such losses is politically if not practically inconceivable. In this context, extending small college-admission preferences to otherwise qualified slave and Jim Crow descendants is a modest step. The most prominent academic challenge to affirmative action nowadays comes from Richard Sander, a University of California, Los Angeles, professor who claims that when affirmative-action beneficiaries are admitted to law schools for which they were not qualified by test scores and grade point averages, they can’t keep up academically, and fewer pass bar exams than if they had attended lower-ranked schools to which they would have been admitted without preferences. Sander concludes that affirmative action perversely reduces the supply of black lawyers. Although the claim has been unpersuasive to most social scientists, Kennedy is willing to concede Sander’s point for argument’s sake but says, so what? Assume there would be more black lawyers overall if more attended lower-ranked schools and fewer were plucked by elite institutions. Which are more needed—a greater number of black lawyers doing wills, divorces, and criminal defense or, even with a lesser total of black lawyers, more judges, corporate executives, and cabinet members who can lead and inspire others to follow? It’s an old argument, recalling century-old debates between followers of Booker T. Washington and of W.E.B. DuBois. The former urged African Americans to prove themselves to whites by competence in lower-middle-class trades where they were unthreatening. The latter called for nurturing the “talented tenth” to advance the black community’s fight for liberation. Randall Kennedy unequivocally sits in DuBois’s camp. It’s refreshing that Kennedy confronts not only ostrich-like pronouncements that affirmative action
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isn’t really about race but also facile assurances of some proponents that affirmative action has only benefits, no costs. Actually, costs are borne both by beneficiaries and others. Do successful African Americans, even those who would have gained admission solely by regular criteria, feel stigmatized because whites suspect they owe their positions to special preferences and are unqualified for positions they hold? Kennedy acknowledges they do and acknowledges that he suffers himself from such stigma. Is putting up with a bit of stigma a small price for opportunities opened to African Americans with nonstandard qualifications to lead? Yes, he concludes. As for costs to others, Kennedy ridicules Barack Obama’s claim in The Audacity of Hope that affirmative action “can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing opportunities for white students.” Kennedy retorts, “How can that be?” If college places are limited and affirmative action admits a handful of African Americans who wouldn’t otherwise attend, an equal number of non-favored applicants must be rejected. However small that number might be relative to the thousands of qualified applicants denied admission because of space limitations, arguments for affirmative action should acknowledge this cost. Kennedy notes that affirmative action’s opponents assert that many if not most beneficiaries have not themselves suffered discrimination. This is less true than most people think, because inherited wealth plays a large role in financing college. But as elsewhere, Kennedy acknowledges complexity. Some beneficiaries of affirmative action may not “deserve” it. But why, he asks (citing Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah), are we so much more worried that we might overcompensate than undercompensate victims? Then there is Kennedy’s defense, which is so obvious it barely merits mention—except it remains obvious to too few. Non-merit-based preferences are pervasive in American life. At universities, they include football and violin players, alumni children, and students from regions producing few
applicants. Affirmative-action opponents effectively claim that the 14th Amendment permits deviation from academic merit for all discriminatory preferences—except race. Just as there are small costs to whites for race-based affirmative action, there are small costs to Massachusetts students when Harvard seeks out farmers’ sons from Idaho. Applicants in non-favored categories can dispute the wisdom of preferences, whether for race or other characteristics, but cannot claim they suffered unfair discrimination if institutions are transparent about their missions and how particular student characteristics advance them. As Kennedy wryly observes, nobody seems worried about the stigma attached to Idaho students by those who suspect they didn’t really “deserve” to be admitted. IT’S APPARENT THAT I am tempted to
judge Kennedy’s the more persuasive book, despite its failure to explain the justice of the affirmative action he defends. But I should not dismiss Cashin’s work too easily. She could be right that affirmative action is so politically toxic that defending it helps perpetuate white resistance to racial progress. If so, and if we seek policy to advance African Americans’ interests indirectly or deceptively, she makes strong arguments. For example, she describes successful efforts (Amherst College’s is the most notable) to recruit hidden talent in low-income communities and to transform these colleges’ cultures and financial structures to make more economically diverse student bodies work. Cashin’s book is worth reading for this presentation alone. If we grant Cashin’s premise that race-based affirmative action is politically inconceivable, now and forever, the alternative to granting preferences only to low-income students may be no racial diversity at all at selective institutions. Given that choice, her proposals are wise, even if they ignore middleclass African Americans for whom preferences really should be designed. But perhaps we should not reflexively grant the premise. “Things change,” Kennedy reminds us. “The composition of the Supreme Court evolves.” Certainly the Court now leads the
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country rightward on matters of racial justice, but the tide has turned so many times that not inconceivably it may again. Although voters in Michigan, California, and other states have adopted constitutional amendments prohibiting race-based affirmative action, opinion polls continue to find a majority, even of whites, supporting it. When policy dissembles, it invites perverse results. One is that liberals make a change in the Court less likely if they accommodate too easily to its present prejudices and provide no leadership for a different future.
Although voters in several states have adopted constitutional amendments
PROHIBITING
race-based affirmative action, opinion polls continue to find a majority, even of whites, supporting it.
IN HER AWARD-WINNING novel
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie assumes the role of a Nigerian blogger telling American blacks what their white friends should have a responsibility to say: Many whites with the same qualifications but Negro skin would not have the jobs they have. But don’t ever say this publicly. Let your white friend say it. If you make the mistake of saying this, you will be accused of a curiosity called “playing the race card.” Nobody quite knows what this means. … If the “slavery was so long ago” thing comes up, have your white friend say that lots of white folks are still inheriting money that their families made a hundred years ago. So if that legacy lives, why not the legacy of slavery? It is remarkable, indeed depressing, that Justice Ginsburg is the only prominent white leader still making a consistent case for race-conscious policy. This vacuum may be what propels Sheryll Cashin to seek a colorblind, second-best alternative as she foresees, as she puts it, the “inevitable demise of race-based affirmative action” because opposition to it is “widely held and not going away,” while its advocates “stymie possibilities for transformative change.” It should not fall upon Randall Kennedy, Sonia Sotomayor, or Ta-Nehisi Coates to be our most vocal advocates of remedies for racial injustice. Only if white policymakers, not Ginsburg alone, step up will Cashin’s predictions be unfulfilled.
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In the Outsiders’ Club The Fault in Our Stars writer John Green has built an avid Internet following with pep talks on how to be good. BY CLARE MALONE & AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX B
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he young-adult novelist John Green rose to fame in 2012, following the publication of his breakout hit The Fault in Our Stars, but for years he has channeled an outsider’s empathizing ethos to fans called “Nerdfighters.” YouTube hosts Vlogbrothers, the popular video diary Green keeps with his younger brother Hank, and Green’s personal website hums with reader feedback. The arrival of The Fault in Our Stars, now a movie starring Shailene Woodley as Hazel, a sardonic teenager with terminal cancer, has only served to energize Green’s wholesome itgets-better brand. In anticipation of TFIOS–mania (the clunky acronym and hashtag fans are using), Prospect writing fellow Amelia ThomsonDeVeaux and Prospect contributor Clare Malone decided to explore the Nerdfighters’ universe and compare notes. The following is an edited version of their conversation. CLARE MALONE : I was skeptical of a
book about teenagers and cancer, so I avoided reading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars for three days after it arrived. The opening pages, in which the two young protagonists, Hazel and Augustus (Gus), meet at a cancerpatient support group—their eyes lock across a crowded room—are a bit overwrought. There’s talk about hotness. Jaded quips are traded. The dialogue is written like Gilmore Girls, the WB show of the early aughts, with quick, syncopated banter. It’s exhausting. Green’s writing is highly stylized. No matter which character speaks, there’s a tone, a surface cynicism pricked by bone-deep ruminations on life, death, and what it all means. But I softened up once I realized why the book is a best-seller: It’s an absorbing little story of guileless love, easy intimacy—talking about the existential things that hit you blind while
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clipping your toenails, or getting pheromone-drunk every time you see the person. Teenagers are often portrayed as living in the moment, but Hazel and Gus’s story is a meditation on how we become adults, sorting out the frenzy inside our minds while trying to show the outside world it’s all sunshine and summer shandies. So, I’m inclined to forgive the book for its pretentious moments on that account. AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX: I
remember a high-school sick day I spent watching Sweet November, a movie starring Charlize Theron as Sara, a soulful woman who dates troubled men for a month, offering sexual favors and promising to change their lives. Halfway through, Keanu Reeves’s character discovers that Sara is dying. The trope of heroic cancer sufferer is icky because it makes dying without suffering seem romantic and beautiful. Theron remains lovely, in body and spirit, until the bitter end, which is simply not possible for someone dying of a terminal illness. I put off reading The Fault in Our Stars for almost a year, ever since posts about how heartrending it was began to drift into my Facebook feed. I finally read it in one sitting a couple of weeks ago. Green’s style is unsentimental, and he doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of the disease. But the book is unusual because Green realizes that as teen cancer patients who have to squeeze their lives into less than two decades, Hazel and Gus get to ask big questions with conviction. There’s a scene where they’re in Amsterdam, eating a fancy dinner. “The oblivion I fear is that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life,” Gus tells Hazel. “If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get
The Vlogbrothers, Hank and John Green, at VidCon 2012 in Anaheim, California
either a life or death that means anything.” Most of us take decades to come to terms with the fact that we won’t get that hero’s journey. At one point, Green was slated to attend divinity school, although he didn’t go. He got the idea for The Fault in Our Stars while working as a hospital chaplain. I don’t think he was ever interested in pulpit ministry, but is it overstating it to say he’s kind of a preacher for the Internet? There is something undeniably charismatic about Green’s demeanor, and his message—if not explicitly religious—inspires devotion. CM : He’s the magic ingredient in this
THE FAULT IN OUR STARS BY JOHN GREEN
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whole stew of Young Adult phenom-ism —a publisher’s dream author for today’s young reader. @realjohngreen has nearly 2.5 million followers. For literary(ish) world comparison, Jennifer Weiner, the author of popular breezy books like In Her Shoes and Good in Bed has nearly 89,000. Both authors are savvy about using Twitter to connect with fans, but Green has been living online since the early days of YouTube—around 2007, the Mesozoic era of social media. He’s vintage Internet—confident enough about his thoughts to have sent them out into the world but insecure enough to care what people thought about them. He has parlayed that shtick nicely; I would like to know his current net worth. Watching the videos, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Green considered divinity school. He and Hank are just oatmeal-wholesome blond guys. Their haircuts alone make you think they might ask if you’ve been saved. In a 2008 blog entry, Green explains why he’s voting for Obama. He goes on to discuss health care and all that, but his intro is most telling: “I don’t talk about it very often, but I’m a religious person. In fact, before I became a writer, I wanted to be a minister. There is a certain branch
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of Christianity that has so effectively hijacked the word ‘Christian’ that I feel uncomfortable sometimes using it to describe myself. But I am a Christian.” I do want to take a moment to mention Green’s video “presence,” which is … frenetic. Like a peppy young high-school teacher, before he’s had his spirit crushed. He gets wide-eyed, gesticulates, and runs both hands through his hair as a physical exclamation point. He seems genuinely upbeat, but I also think that people who focus on being happy—who make being happy their thing—are sometimes people for whom it doesn’t come easily. Green has a video about his life when he was 24 and had broken up with a girlfriend; he was depressed. Therapy, medicine, and watching the Jimmy Stewart classic Harvey brought about a sort of epiphany. He cites this line from the loopy but lovable Elwood P. Dowd: “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’—she always called me Elwood—‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.” In a way, Green’s aim is to mainstream the concept of the examined life. He specializes in being quotable. His aphorisms seem ready-made for the Pinterest age. They can be taken out of context and shared with a friend who’s down or posted to a virtual inspiration bulletin board. BuzzFeed, in fact, has a list of John Green quotes: praise from Caesar. ATD: I wonder how much of John
Green’s Internet savvy comes from his younger brother, Hank, a self- proclaimed “Internet Guy.” We haven’t talked about Hank much, but he’s an essential part of the Vlogbrothers’ energy. Hank is well versed in the craft of “going viral,” as one of his
TFIOS’s Hazel and Gus, who meet in a support group for teens with cancer
recent projects, the Web series “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries,” proves. Imagine video blogs in the vein of the Vlogbrothers. But instead of two clean-cut young men discussing climate change and the joys of optimism, a trim young woman with radiant skin tells the rollicking tale of being set up with rich men in the neighborhood by her gold-digging mother. You will not be shocked to learn that people loved a version of Pride and Prejudice where “Bing Lee” and Darcy tweet. Hank does not believe in God, and he does not seem to relish discussing theology, theodicy, or the other big questions that clutter his brother’s books. His background is biochemistry, and today he’s the proprietor of a website called EcoGeek, where one can discuss the finer points of tractortrailer fuel efficiency. John’s theologian side pervades another book I just read by him, Looking for Alaska (2005). To give you a quick sense of what the book is about, a high-school guy from Florida (like John Green) goes to a boarding school in Alabama (like John Green) in search of a life-changing adventure—what the dying Francois Rabelais referred to as “The Great Perhaps.” There he finds friends and a dazzling girl named Alaska, acquires the incongruous nickname “Pudge,” explores a wide range of illicit substances, and learns firsthand about the depths of human grief. The book is now taught in many high schools, though because of a brief and awkward sex scene, it’s been banned and un-banned in a couple of states, inspiring John Green to make the perennial Vlogbrothers favorite “I Am Not a Pornographer.” Despite its lack of nuance, the book is often poignant. A religion teacher makes some cameos to reassert the message: The only way out of the “labyrinth of suffering” is to forgive. Green has even referred to Alaska as “Christian fiction.” He writes on his website:
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It has always seemed odd to me that all the people who want to ban Looking for Alaska from schools claim it is offensive to their Christian values, when the core Christian values—radical hope, universal forgiveness— are the core values of the book’s final chapter. (For the record, I think the people who argue the opposite—that the end of the book is a bit didactic and heavyhanded—are not wrong. I just don’t really care that it’s a bit heavy-handed. I wanted Pudge to be able to write that essay. I wanted him to be able to give and receive the forgiveness he so desperately needs, and I wanted him to be able to imagine a beautiful somewhere for Alaska.) Of course, Green doesn’t care about being heavy-handed. He wants that beautiful somewhere for all of his readers or watchers or followers. But he understands that it comes as much from asking big questions as patiently embracing the quotidian, alternating a video about the nature of mass incarceration in the United States with the occasional cute video about velociraptors (made with his fouryear-old son). CM : We haven’t spent a whole lot of
time talking about the audience that the Brothers Green are sending their video missives out to. But they’re the people whose clicks make this world go ’round. This Vlogbrothers movement is a sort of “revenge of the nerds” type of thing—except the movie based on it would probably be called “the civil disobedience of the nerds,” because John and Hank are about encouraging people to channel outsiderness into something productive, like living well through small acts of kindness. I can imagine a person getting into the habit of watching these daily and thinking about their meaning (maybe not actively, more by osmosis), almost in the way a monk goes to vespers or a devout Muslim prays five times a day. I’m not even being theological; I’m just thinking about the importance of habit. Prayers involve repetition to get a person into
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a meditative state. To a certain extent it’s Pavlovian, but we need that push into a different headspace to think about things outside necessities of the flesh (and as someone staring down the barrel of a long day, I am currently doing all I can to not think about a couch and a bowl of noodles).
White House to legally recognize “nonbinary genders.” One post did catch my eye. It was a Nerdfighter airing grievances: “so i’ve noticed that gatherings planned by people who are not wizard cops tend to have low attendance.” (I have no idea what a wizard cop is—a person who is in charge of Nerdfighter activities on Facebook?) The aggrieved party goes on to vent insider frustrations over the low attendance of events she and her friends had planned and ended with this:
ATD: There’s something
immersive about John Green’s universe—the books you can swallow in one gulp, more videos than I could ever watch because the jump cuts make me a little nauseated, Internet forum upon forum, conference upon conference—that makes me wish we had gotten to go to that princess event. We were, I’m sure you recall, going to dress up as princesses with other Nerdfighters on a Saturday morning and hand out books to kids on the National Mall. Truth be told, I was dreading it a little, and at the time I was relieved when it got canceled because the organizer was sick. But now I’m sad we didn’t get to meet the people who try to take Green’s philosophizing into the world. What does that modern, contemplative—yet active— life look like? CM : I’ll admit that I was not looking
forward to going to the Mall, either. The idea of riding public transportation in a party dress and tiara on a Saturday morning was not appealing, if only because spring tourists visiting Washington might get the idea that I was walk-of-shaming home from a very odd night out. Of course, the larger idea of handing out books to children was nice. I’ve been scrolling through the Nerdfighters of D.C. Facebook feed, and I have to say, it’s fascinating. People seem to be pretty interested in stereotypically nerdy hobbies like gaming/fantasy (sample post: “If you got a button that could teleport you to one [keyword: one] fandom world, where would you go??”). But there are also general crowdsourcing “asks” about what to do in certain cities when you visit, calls to sign a petition for the
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Fans have started to look up to Green as this
INSPIRATIONAL FIGURE, so he can’t have an off day.
“dont know if it’s a popularity thing, or if people just dont trust gatherings that arent planned by wiz cops, or what. i just know that it doesnt seem fair. it’s frustrating and even hurtful to have put a lot of energy and enthusiasm into planning a gathering and then have extremely low attendance. this is a problem that needs to be solved. i welcome any ideas or suggestions on how to solve it. thank you.” So, an uncomfortable display of hurt feelings. But the comments are interesting. Other group members respond to the original poster in as soothing a manner as possible. They give her constructive criticism about her socially inept way of handling conflict. It’s the sort of banal “crisis” that happens every day to people. The idea that your character is tested by how you deal with these moments came to mind; so did that famous David Foster Wallace graduation speech about how you have to choose how to feel about life while you’re living it. I think about it almost every time I’m in a crowded grocery store after work. ATD: Funny that you mention David
Foster Wallace. His graduation speech took place at Green’s alma mater, Kenyon, so there’s that. But Green, like so many earnest and angsty men of our generation, also loves Wallace’s Infinite Jest obsessively.
It’s the inspiration for An Imperial Affliction, the book within a book that drives much of the plot of The Fault in Our Stars and ends midsentence. Since I only managed to get 200 pages into Infinite Jest before surrendering to a particularly long footnote, I can’t speak to the references that apparently litter The Fault in Our Stars. But I did find an essay Green wrote for a DFW fan site back in 2009, where he explains that Wallace helped shape his understanding of what it means to be “smart and talented and scared and 17.” What makes Nerdfighteria so potent does seem to be the moral imperative that the Brothers Green throw at their bajillion viewers’ feet: to take their weirdness and anxiety and turn it into empathy. It’s become kind of a culture. Away from Facebook and into the wilds of Pinterest and Tumblr and beyond, I discovered that people get Nerdfighter tattoos. There are Nerdfighter samplers and onesies, and videos “executive produced” by the Green brothers about sex education and doing your taxes. There are also lots of forums—some feel like LiveJournal in its heyday— with fan fiction and youthful poetry. Which brings me to a subject I have been avoiding up until now: how I feel about John Green and the cult of Nerdfighting. We’ve been approaching this whole phenomenon with a sociological eye, but your comment about the Facebook page reminded me that I’ve been subduing some of my discomfort with this project. The books are one thing; I don’t love them with anywhere near enough evangelical zeal to qualify as a Nerdfighter, but they are witty and moving, if occasionally maudlin. The videos, on the other hand, are too slick and zingy to keep me coming back. Maybe it’s John Green’s genius for branding. The trailer and production schedule for The Fault in Our Stars is a frequent subject among the Vlogbrothers these days. When Green’s not talking about life on the set of TFIOS, too many of the videos feel like they’re trying to deliver a bite-size moral. Sometimes, I want the Green brothers to admit they’re having a bad
james bridges / t wentie th century fox
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day. Which is not to say that I want the mean-spiritedness that often coats the Internet like an oil slick to seep into Nerdfighteria. But John and Hank’s bouncing boyish pratfalls can get tiring.
sight to behold. I don’t blame Green from shying away from being raw and unscripted in his videos, but I don’t think I’ll be coming back to them. I prefer his earnestness manifested in prose. It seems more natural.
CM : So often discussion of Internet
ATD: If the Green brothers are like
phenomena comes back to a discussion of realness, whatever that means. I don’t say that to be flip. What’s real and what’s not about people has been distorted by the onset of the “personal brand.” I’ve heard on more than one occasion people discussing their “Internet persona,” which they proclaim to be different from how they “are” in “real life.” But aren’t those thoughts you express or personas you take on always lurking inside your mind? Aren’t they you? For those who live some significant portion of their life on the Internet, as John Green does, whom they project to be online, all day long, is how most of the world knows them. For Green, perhaps that affects the choices he makes in his presentation. People have started to look up to him as this inspirational figure, so he can’t have an off day. I agree with you that some of those videos would be more powerful if he were just palpably down in the dumps. But as with fashion magazines and car ads, the Green brothers’ videos are aspirational, not real life. Which is funny, because we expect writers to be a bit above the fray of all this, don’t we? You can be more “real” in writing. You don’t have to stare someone in the face while you say difficult things and watch their lips quiver. It’s easier to parse your thoughts artfully if you do it on a page or input cold letters into a Word doc. It’s bloodless, even when the words are bloody. Expressing thoughts and emotions off the cuff is messier—which is why, no matter what we think of their politics, a virtuoso retail politician is such a
fashion magazines and car ads, how can they also be lonely and awkward and scared? I get that they’re selling something to people. But to return this conversation to where it began, the thing I liked about The Fault in Our Stars was that it did not try to whitewash the minutiae of what it’s like to die from cancer or what it’s like to watch your child die. There’s a moment in the novel when Hazel is lying in her hospital bed, struggling to stay alive. She hears her mother tell her father, “I won’t be a mom anymore.” Hazel doesn’t die then, but she carries her mother’s words around with her, knowing that when she does die, she’s going to take a part of her parents with her. I mean, that’s it, right? That’s the punch-to-thestomach, unflinching empathy that makes the book worth reading. More than the love story, Hazel’s relationship with her parents is the tragedy that animates The Fault in Our Stars. Where’s that vulnerability in the Vlogbrothers? What we see in the best parts of TFIOS—and on the Nerdfighters of D.C.’s Facebook wall—is raw emotion on display, unafraid to be embarrassing or schmaltzy. John Green just got named one of Time’s 100 most influential people. There’s a sense, I think, that when you get to that point—especially as a youngadult writer, not the most lucrative or powerful of trades—you must have it all figured out. What if John Green talked about the moments when he doesn’t? I’m about to be schmaltzy here myself, but how compelling would that be?
Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty T RANSLATED
BY
Arthur Goldhammer
N EW Y ORK T IMES B EST S ELLER W ASHINGTON P OST B EST S ELLER “This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics.” — Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books “An intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history.” —Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post “Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.” —John Cassidy, New Yorker “A monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come.” —Branko Milanovic, American Prospect Belknap Press | $39.95 cloth
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St. Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2006.
Are Literary Prizes Beyond Parody? British novelist Edward St. Aubyn sends up short lists and judges who don’t bother to read. BY DEBORAH COHEN B
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either chapel nor cricket shows any meaningful sign of resurgence, but prize-giving—that other great hallmark of English boarding-school life—has in the past few decades zipped across the globe. As James English notes in The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, the number of literary awards has more than doubled in the United Kingdom since 1988 and tripled in the United States between 1976 and 2000. More than 1,100 honors are distributed to American writers each year. Not only have prizes proliferated; the prestigious ones have grown more important as the midrange book market drops away.
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Our National Book Awards or Britain’s Man Booker might not make a bestseller. But they can transform a book that’s sold sluggishly into a popular and financial success. As in the famous sausage-making paradigm, we are generally better off not knowing what went into the manufacture of a literary prize. But there is one major difference. Where sausage kings are unlikely to disparage the meat-grinding process, book people—the short-listed authors, the judges, even those who bag the big trophies—are the most likely to launch public critiques of the prize mill that serves them. In Lost for Words, the British
LOST FOR WORDS BY EDWARD ST. AUBYN
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novelist Edward St. Aubyn takes his turn. The book is a romp about four authors vying for the Elysian Prize for literature and five judges deciding— though this is too purposeful a verb— who will win. The novel satirizes the Man Booker prize and the prize’s much-condemned 2011 jury, chaired by the retired spymaster (and spy novelist) Dame Stella Rimington, in particular. The debates that Rimington’s jury kicked up about the purpose of the Booker (is it to promote “readable” literary fiction? identify new talent? reward novels that “zip along,” as one judge, the Labour politician Chris Mullin, proclaimed? or thwart the London literati?) are all there. But they are borne along by a farcical plot that turns on swapped manuscripts, celebrity judges who don’t bother to read the entries, and an overriding concern for rewarding diversity. An Indian cookbook submitted for the prize by accident inexorably advances to the winner’s circle. Lost for Words is an unexpected work for an author known for his mordantly dark, semiautobiographical series of five Patrick Melrose novels, a tour d’horizon through debauched precincts of the British aristocracy that begins with Never Mind (1992) and ends with At Last (2012). The Melrose novels encompass the rape of children, heroin addiction, disinheritance, and lots of sex, none of it marital. They brilliantly dissect families, intergenerational damage, and consciousness. Strange as it seems, they are also very funny. Now St. Aubyn reverses the trick. Reaching for the broadest humor, satire bordering on slapstick, he ends up sour and predictable. In contention for the Elysian is an assemblage of cutout characters, led by the meritorious if somewhat metaphysically constipated Sam Black and his nymphomaniac fellow novelist and ladylove, Katherine Burns. Their supporting cast includes a French intellectual and a delusional Indian maharaja. When you hear French intellectual, do you think pomposity and tedious overtheorizing? Must St. Aubyn’s princely Indian novelist be beached on a silk pillow, peevishly nursing a grudge against Anglo-Saxons? And why does
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every St. Aubyn femme fatale have long limbs and a tragic family history? What’s wrong with promiscuity unprompted by trauma? Sam Black’s plaintive hope is that his “bildungsroman of impeccable anguish and undisguised autobiographical origin” will carry off the Elysian Prize, liberating him from the “tyranny of pain-based art.” But if Lost for Words is St. Aubyn’s paradise of the afterlife, it is a weirdly insubstantial deliverance. It’s as if he’s taken a big breath of helium and squeaked out an attempt at Monty Python. St. Aubyn still whistles up some crystalline phrases. About the anorexic daughter of one Elysian judge: “A principled hunger strike, like Gandhi’s, which was aimed at achieving something in the outside world, looked very impure and compromised compared to a hunger strike whose sole object was to stop eating: this was the white on white of the hunger strike, the moment when it became abstract and transcended the clumsy literalness of merely representing one thing or another.” Or: “‘Lots of love’ between former lovers was of course less love than ‘love’ alone.” But there are plenty of thuds, too, like Katherine’s postcoital reveries: “Complacencies of the peignoir, or power shower: which word cluster would get her?” St. Aubyn excels at depicting corrupt, dysfunctional families, so the corrupt, dysfunctional terrain of literary prize-making might not have seemed such a stretch. But the humor works differently. The feat in the Melrose novels, especially in the luminous Mother’s Milk (short-listed for the 2006 Man Booker) was to turn comedy into sympathy, even with some of the saga’s most distasteful characters. Shot through the Melrose novels was the humor, as Freud put it, “that smiles through tears.” In Lost for Words, St. Aubyn is having a hearty schoolboy chuckle. TAKING A JAUNDICED VIEW of awards
is nothing new. In the 1820s, Sir Walter Scott objected to the Royal Society of Literature’s proposed gold medal because he feared it would pervert the
Book people are the most likely to launch critiques of the
PRIZE MILL
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purity of the literary enterprise. Cultural prizes notoriously reward the wrong works for the wrong reasons: On the long list of worthies deprived of the Nobel for literature are Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce. Every season is now the occasion for a slew of articles denouncing prizes as blessings for mediocrity or influence-peddling. Still, prizes and their detractors need each other, as James English points out. For if prizes do the market’s bidding, their critics right the scales by extolling the nobility of art. John Updike confessed in 1964 that he felt “sort of uneasy” about literary prizes because the “wrong people tend to get them.” But his Who’s Who entry and book jackets cataloged a long list of honors. Attacking prizes, then, isn’t a refusenik strategy but part of the cycle that feeds the phenomenon. St. Aubyn’s target—the Man Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, 60-plus years after the Nobel and the Goncourt— exploited just this sort of scandal to blast past its competitors. When the Christian controversialist journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge resigned from his role as Booker judge in 1971 on the grounds that most of the entries were “mere pornography in the worst sense of the word,” the prize’s administrators sought to publicize the accusation. John Berger’s denunciation the following year of the prize’s sponsor, the agriconglomerate Booker McConnell, as colonial exploiter similarly ensured headlines. Intrigued by the Booker’s quick rise, the director of the National Book Awards traveled to London to see what she could learn. Imitating the Booker, the Americans decided to announce a short list, a move that heightened suspense and helped to spark more hullabaloo. Because the Booker is the most shamelessly splashy of prizes, it’s been the focus for much hand-wringing over the state of the literary market. Starting in the early 1980s, hundreds of thousands tuned in to watch live TV broadcasts of the ceremony, but were they seeking out new titles or
waiting for a Salman Rushdie temper tantrum (the judges knew “fuck all” about literature)? The appointment of celebrity judges (in 2012, the actor Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey fame), the aura of compromised multiculturalism (as of this year, the prize is now open to novels written anywhere in the world in English, including the United States), the corruption of corporate sponsorship, the horsetrading behind the selection of judges and winners: If the Booker is now the world’s most glamorous literary prize, that’s because it has best ridden the waves of controversy. St. Aubyn’s quarry is already quartered and dried, then. But while other novelists who have written about prizes (Martin Amis in The Information and Malcolm Bradbury—who twice judged the Booker—in Doctor Criminale) accept competition as a necessary evil, St. Aubyn ends on an idealistic note. He puts the moral of his story into the mouth of Mr. Wo, the Chinese businessman whose company has bought the Elysian Group. From his perch at the dark heart of capitalism, Mr. Wo understands the senselessness of competition in art, as opposed to sports or politics. So: Sam Black gets the honeypot Katherine but not the prize. Where Henry James advised the young writer to inscribe one word—“Loneliness”—upon his banner, Katherine chirps, “Let’s just make love and be happy.” Without defending the invidiousness of competition, one is tempted to question whether novelists merit St. Aubyn’s special pleading. So long as artists put their work forward in search of praise (and the rewards that go with it), it’s perverse to exempt them from the competition that every other striver (whether plumber or software engineer) must endure. As for St. Aubyn, he well deserves the honors he’s already garnered. I wish, though, that he’d direct his talent once again to subjects for which discernment, not dismemberment, is the critical value. St. Aubyn’s a sword-juggler, but in Lost for Words, he’s making do with table knives.
VOLUME 25, NUMBER 4. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published bi-monthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1710 Rhode Island Ave., NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2014 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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The Real Retirement Crisis America has a retirement crisis, but it’s not what some people want you to believe it is. It’s not the defined benefit pension plans that public employees pay into over a lifetime of work, which provide retirees an average of $23,400 annually (although some public officials fail to make their required contributions to these and then claim they are unaffordable). It’s not the cost of such plans, which may ultimately cost taxpayers far less than risky, inadequate and increasingly prevalent 401(k) plans. It’s not Social Security, which is the healthiest part of our retirement system, keeps tens of millions of seniors out of poverty and could help even more if it were expanded.
We must meet a just and civilized standard for retirement. The crisis is that most Americans lack the essential elements of a secure retirement—pensions and adequate savings. They’ll depend on Social Security to stave off poverty once they stop working, and it will not be enough. The crisis is that the economic collapse that started in 2007, triggered by fraudulent and risky financial schemes, wiped out many Americans’ personal savings and decimated many state and city pension investments. And while the stock market and many pension investments have rebounded, for numerous Americans the lingering economic downturn, soaring student debt, diminished home values, the responsibility of caring for aging parents and other financial demands have made it hard, if not impossible, to save for retirement. The crisis is that the median retirement savings for all working-age households—according to the Federal Reserve—is $3,000, and only $12,000 for those near retirement. And that retirement insecurity is made worse by state-sponsored pension theft in places
like Illinois, where public employees are being robbed of pension funds they earned and contributed to over decades of public service. This very real retirement crisis has gone shamefully underreported, with two notable exceptions—investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and David Sirota. Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, blew the cover off the “scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops—not bankers—as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America’s states and cities.” Both reporters have written about the vast sums spent to undermine the retirement security of ordinary Americans. John Arnold, for example, a former Enron executive who walked away with a fortune from the bankrupt company, has spent tens of millions in his crusade to deny public employees guaranteed benefits at retirement. This, after public pensions reportedly lost more than $1.5 billion as a result of their investments in Enron. Their investigations have exposed the hypocrisy of some Wall Street hedge fund managers like Dan Loeb, who seek to profit from public employee pension funds at the same time they support abolishing such benefits. The problem is the hypocrisy—not hedge funds or Wall Street per se. And it’s their disconnectedness from the economic pressures regular people face every day just to meet their basic needs, pressures that only grow once their working years are over. The people who press for “others” to convert defined benefit pensions to 401(k) plans never talk about the benefits retirees would get under these new plans—because it’s likely to be a lot less than retirees need to get by. Defined benefit plans not only help keep retirees out of poverty; every $1 in pension benefits generates $2.37 in economic activity in communities. And they’re a good deal for taxpayers, because employee contributions and investment earnings account for more than two-thirds of pension revenues.
Todd Rosenberg/Clinton Global Initiative
Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers
Weingarten, right, speaks to moderator Fareed Zakaria at a Clinton Global Initiative forum on economic recovery held in Chicago on June 7, 2012.
America must confront our retirement insecurity crisis. This requires going well beyond maintaining the modest, hard-won retirement benefits that too few workers currently have. The AFT is engaged in a broad-based effort with a bipartisan group of state treasurers, other unions, asset managers and even some large Wall Street firms to vastly expand retirement security through pooled professional asset management. Together, we are exploring this and other innovative ways to help workers prepare for retirement so that we can reclaim the promise of retirement security. In partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, the AFT is also working with our members’ pension funds to promote a virtuous circle—responsibly investing retirement funds to help meet crucial infrastructure needs, generate new tax revenue, create tens of thousands of good jobs and deliver a sound rate of return. America’s retirement crisis is as consequential as our healthcare crisis. We mustered the will to do the hard work of extending access to healthcare to all Americans. We must also meet a just and civilized standard for retirement, so that retirement is a time of security, not poverty. FOLLOW RANDI WEINGARTEN: twitter.com/rweingarten
#ReclaimIt
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