The American Prospect #306

Patty Murray’s Unlikely Rise BY JAMELLE BOUIE AND PATRICK CALDWELL

Bringing Up the (Border) Bodies BY BRENDAN BORRELL

The Dead Zone:

Fix the Mississippi and Save the Gulf

BY PAUL GREENBERG

M AY / J U N 2 013

THE END OF THE

SOLID If the GOP loses its national stronghold, American politics will change profoundly— for the better.

SOUTH

contents

VOLUME 24, NUMBER 3 MAY/JUN 2013

PAGE 48

PAGE 40

PAGE 98

PAGE 88

NOTEBOOK 7 THE NEW NEW HAVEN BY HAROLD MEYERSON 10 MAD MEN OF CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIAL BY STEVE BRODNER

FEATURES 12 COVER STORY THE END OF THE SOLID SOUTH THANKS TO RADICAL DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES IN THE REGION’S BIGGEST STATES, REPUBLICANS ARE LOSING THEIR NATIONAL STRONGHOLD. 28 A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT BY PAUL GREENBERG 40 PATTY MURRAY IN 19 TAKES BY JAMELLE BOUIE AND PATRICK CALDWELL 48 GHOSTS OF THE RIO GRANDE BY BRENDAN BORRELL 56 SPECIAL REPORT WHAT ABOUT THE KIDS? THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN MEANS DIMINISHED OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE NEXT GENERATION—WITH NO END IN SIGHT.

CULTURE 79 DANCING WITH HERSELF BY JESSICA WEISBERG 83 THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD BY RICHARD YESELSON 88 REDISCOVERING ALBERT HIRSCHMAN BY ROBERT KUTTNER 95 SHERYL SANDBERG’S CAN-DO FEMINISM BY IRIN CARMON 98 UNLINKED BY ANNE TRUBEK

COLUMNS 5 PROSPECTS BAD FAITH AND BUDGET POLITICS BY PAUL STARR 100 COMMENT TED TALK BY ABBY RAPOPORT Art above by Brendan Borrell, Steve Moors, Harry Campbell, and Herman Landshoff

1

contributors

PAUL GREENBERG is the author of the James Beard Award–winning Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food and a New York Times contributor. He reports on the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. “I’ve done a lot of research into overfishing,” Greenberg says, “but I hadn’t explored the effects our ordinary land-based lives have on fish and other sea creatures.”

JESSICA WEISBERG has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker.

She looks at the career of Greta Gerwig, the actress and cowriter behind the film Francis Ha. “Gerwig has this very natural, timeless quality,” she says, “but there’s something uniquely contemporary about the way she’s built her career.”

BRENDAN BORRELL is an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow whose writing has appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, Smithsonian, and The Washington Post. His story investigates migrant deaths in Texas.

“I didn’t go to the border with plans to hang out with gravediggers and funeral directors,” Borrell says.

“But I quickly learned that they were the ones who knew where the bodies were.”

ANNE TRUBEK is the author of A Skeptic’s Guide To Writers’ Houses.

She explores social reading and technology’s effect on how we engage with books. “Since I bought an e-­reader six months ago— I was no early adopter—I’ve developed a healthy addiction to my machine,” she says. “I’ve been reading twice as many books as I did previously.”

SUE STURGIS is the editorial director of the Institute for Southern Studies.

She and Chris Kromm, executive director of the institute, report on North Carolina’s dramatic rightward shift.

“One newspaper columnist in the state recently challenged people to pick out bizarre made-up bills from ones actually introduced by GOP lawmakers,” Sturgis says.

“Most couldn’t.”

RICHARD YESELSON has written for various publications about politics, history, labor, and culture. He reviews Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself.

“Popular and high culture often depict scholars as desiccated pedants,” he says, “but reading Ira Katznelson, who has immersed himself in the great hinge period of 20th-­ century American history, is moving and exciting.”

IRIN CARMON is a staff writer at Salon.com. She reviews Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. “Writing about it, I tried to separate the critical reception that began before many had read the book from the book itself,” she says.

“But I also found myself bringing up Sandberg’s lessons in conversations with friends.”

JOHN CUNEO is an illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times, among other publications. “My job is to provide an image that humorously refers to something in the writer’s piece,” he says.

“But above all, I fret about making a good drawing, of meeting an instinctive aesthetic standard.”

PUBLISHER JAY HARRIS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KIT RACHLIS FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR EXECUTIVE EDITOR BOB MOSER ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS CULTURE EDITOR SARAH KERR EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON SENIOR EDITORS CHRISTEN ARAGONI, GABRIEL ARANA WEB EDITOR CLARE MALONE SENIOR WRITER MONICA POTTS ASSOCIATE EDITOR JAIME FULLER STAFF REPORTERS JAMELLE BOUIE, ABBY RAPOPORT RESEARCH EDITOR SUSAN O’BRIAN WRITING FELLOW PATRICK CALDWELL EDITORIAL INTERNS JON COUMES, JEFF SAGINOR, BRYCE STUCKI OFFICE MANAGER KATHLEEN MARGILLO CONTRIBUTING EDITORS SPENCER ACKERMAN, MARCIA ANGELL, ALAN BRINKLEY, TOM CARSON, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, RANDALL KENNEDY, JOSH KUN, SARAH POSNER, JOHN POWERS, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, DEBORAH A. STONE, NOY THRUPKAEW, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGY & DEVELOPMENT AMY CONROY DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATE SUSAN JED ADVERTISING MANAGER ED CONNORS, (202) 776-0730 X119, ECONNORS@PROSPECT.ORG BOARD OF DIRECTORS JANET SHENK (CHAIR), JACOB S. HACKER, JAY HARRIS, STEPHEN HEINTZ, ROBERT KUTTNER, ARNIE MILLER, KIT RACHLIS, MILES RAPOPORT, ADELE SIMMONS, PAUL STARR, BEN TAYLOR, AMELIA WARREN TYAGI AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT O’BRIEN MEDIA GROUP NEWSSTAND DISTRIBUTION KABLE (212) 705-4642 SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE 1-888-MUST-READ (687-8732) SUBSCRIPTION RATES $29.95 (U.S.), $39.95 (CANADA), AND $44.95 (FOREIGN) REPRINTS PERMISSIONS@PROSPECT.ORG

2 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

A“Must Read” Read”

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Let’s taLk What’s the future going to be for working people?

How can we build a real movement for broadly shared prosperity?

What should unions look like tomorrow?

We’re asking the tough questions—and we’d like to hear what you have to say.

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aflcio2013.org

Prospects

Bad Faith and Budget Politics

BY PAUL STARR

C

ompromise is often an unhappily revealing art.

“Ideals may tell us something important about what we would like to be.

But compromises tell us who we are,” the philosopher Avishai Margalit writes. In finding compromises with Republicans on the federal budget, Democrats need to remember not only who they are but who the voters depend on them to be.

From that standpoint, the start of the budget battle in early April did not go well. Acceding to Republican demands for cuts in Social Security and Medicare, the president’s budget left his party open to a cynical but predictable response. Without the least acknowledgment of a contradiction, the chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, Representative Greg Walden, immediately went on television to denounce Barack Obama’s “shocking attack on seniors.”

We’ve seen it before. Many of the House Republicans who voted in 2008 for the bank bailouts called for by the Bush administration denounced the bailouts in the 2010 election as if they had nothing to do with them. In 2012, Paul Ryan and other Republicans campaigned against the $700 billion in Medicare cuts in “Obamacare” as if the Ryan budget adopted by House Republicans did not include the same cuts— and without acknowledging that the Affordable Care Act included compensating measures that improved seniors’ Medicare benefits.

The two major parties today don’t just have ideological differences; they don’t observe the same rules of public accountability. The

Democrats have no choice but to accept responsibility; they hold the presidency, and they believe in making government work. The Republicans do not share that commitment, and they are now unrestrained by executive obligations or by moderates in their own ranks. So they put politics before governing and have made bad faith in negotiations standard practice.

Yet anticipating bad faith from the Republicans does not free Obama from the need to advance compromises. The GOP will likely control the House throughout the president’s term; Obama has to do business with people who cannot be trusted to own up to their side of a deal. He has to identify budgetary savings and make political concessions that nonetheless demonstrate fidelity to long-standing commitments and principles.

For both substantive and political reasons, I believe that means drawing a sharp line between Social Security and Medicare. Social Security should never have been part of the budget negotiations; its benefits are not excessive, they are crucial to the living standards of both poor and middle-income seniors, and they are not a factor in the federal deficit. The “chained” consumer price index (CPI) endorsed by Obama is a real cut even with the bump in benefits proposed for low-income seniors at age 76 and after; indeed, the bump effectively concedes that the chained CPI is not, in fact, a more accurate costof-living adjustment—it’s a diet COLA . Like Bill Clinton, Obama should have sworn to “protect Social Security first.”

Medicare, in contrast, is not just

a program for seniors. It is also a program for the health-care industry, and as a result it can be cut by eliminating past giveaways to the industry. For example, in 2003 Republicans provided a windfall to pharmaceutical companies by

Obama has to do business with people who cannot be trusted to own up to their side of a deal. shifting low-income seniors’ drug coverage from the lower rates paid

by Medicaid to higher rates paid by Medicare. Undoing that deal will save more than $100 billion.

In addition, the financing of Medicare already relies on income-related premiums paid by more affluent seniors. Obama proposes raising those premiums and increasing the percentage of better-off seniors who pay them.

The president also calls for some increases in cost-sharing for beneficiaries, and although I would have preferred another approach, most of these proposals are reasonable.

To be sure, even if a final deal incorporates these changes, Republicans will use them against Democrats in 2014. But after two elections when they cried wolf

over Medicare, Republicans face a credibility problem. So such measures are far less dangerous politically for Democrats than changes in Social Security.

Beyond the specifics of a budget deal, though, there is a larger issue about how the national debate frames changes in policy.

Obama’s inclusion of Social Security appears to concede the idea that the program needs to be cut when it’s the healthiest part of the retirement security system. While Medicare has some features that can be trimmed, it’s more efficient than private insurance, and its costs are growing more slowly.

The focus on cutting the programs seems to validate the conservative premise that our biggest problem is the deficit rather than persistently high unemployment.

Although Obama ought to be doing more to reframe the budget debate, he cannot simply huff and puff and blow the House down. I don’t believe that the chained CPI proposal was politically smart, but I am also hesitant to say that Obama has been politically stupid; after all, he did get elected president twice, which ought to inspire commentators with a little humility. When liberals express their outrage, they are playing a role that is useful to the president, proving his moderation. Moreover, as Ted Kennedy used to say in congressional negotiations, “Nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

If the final budget agreement includes financing for some important new priorities like pre-K education that Obama has asked for, his strategy may ultimately look better than it does now. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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notebook itself, UNITE HERE has done just that. In 2011, union-backed candidates won a veto-proof majority on the city’s Board of Aldermen.

Within months, the board adopted policies that reintegrated the police department into the city’s communities and persuaded large employers to begin hiring New Haven residents when jobs fall open. At the very moment when organized labor has come under relentless attack in cities and states across the nation, New Haven has chosen a coalition of union and neighborhood activists to try to rebuild its government and economy. There’s a lot of rebuilding to be done.

LONG BEFORE THE industrial

The New New Haven How a union of Yale employees aligned itself with community activists and won control of a beleaguered city

BY H A R O L D M E Y E R S O N

j es se l enz

M

ajor Ruth became a civic leader because he made a promise to his neighbor, Brian Wingate. Both had moved to the Beaver Hills section of New Haven, Connecticut, in 2003. A neighborhood of aging single-­family homes that had seen better days, Beaver Hills had been targeted by the city for a housing-­rehabilitation program, and, with the zeal of new arrivals, Ruth, a manager at the local utility company, and Wingate, a custodian and union steward at nearby

Yale University, sought to involve themselves in neighborhood-­ improvement ventures. That proved harder than they had anticipated.

Although New Haven aldermanic districts are tiny, encompassing no more than 4,300 residents, Ruth and Wingate couldn’t find anyone who could identify, much less locate, their alderman. “We joked that one of us would run for alderman and the other would have to run his campaign,” Ruth says. In 2010, Wingate told Ruth he was running and a deal was a deal.

“It started out as a simple promise,” Ruth says, “but it became part of a citywide initiative.” As Win­gate was deciding to run, his union at Yale, UNITE HERE , was deciding to support not just him but an entire slate of labor and community activists. New Haven was in crisis—its murder rate spiking, its jobless rates chronically high—and UNITE HERE concluded that saving its city required nothing short of taking it over.

To a degree that has astounded both New Haven and the union

Midwest became the post-­ industrial Midwest, before Detroit and Cleveland were hollowed out, industrial New England began to implode. The place where America had industrialized first became the first place in America to deindustrialize, and nowhere more completely than New Haven.

At the turn of the 20th century, the city was home to the main factories of Winchester firearms, Stanley Hardware, and hundreds of other manufacturing firms, big and small, that employed tens of thousands of workers, many of whom were Italian immigrants and their children. By midcentury, just as African Americans were arriving to take those jobs, the factories began to close and middle-­class employment declined precipitously. Although Connecticut has long ranked at or near the top of the nation’s most prosperous states, New Haven is one of the country’s poorest cities, with 30 percent of its population living beneath the poverty line, according to 2011 census data.

As the manufacturing firms closed their doors, only one major New Haven employer kept growing: Yale. The university and the Yale–New Haven Hospital are now the city’s largest

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

private-sector employers. During the 1970s, John Wilhelm, a recent Yale graduate who had gone to work for the hotel and restaurant employees union, concluded that the only way to re-create a sizable New Haven middle class would be to unionize Yale—to turn the university’s clerical, technical, and blue-collar jobs into the well-paying positions that the city’s unionized manufacturing firms had once provided. A decade later, the hotel and restaurant workers union, today called UNITE HERE , won its first contract after a bitter strike.

Over the next quarter-century, through a series of equally bitter strikes, Yale employees won successively improved contracts, restoring the middle class that Wilhelm had envisioned. (Wilhelm went on to become the national president of UNITE HERE , a post from which he recently retired.) But building a middle class in Greater New Haven didn’t mean building a middle class in New Haven proper. The two UNITE HERE locals—34, which represents Yale clerical and technical workers, and 35, which represents blue-collar employees—are by far the largest unions in the New Haven area, but many of their members live in the towns and suburbs beyond the city line. This isn’t simply flight from urban decay. Because Yale and the Yale–New Haven Hospital are both exempt from standard property taxes, the burden of paying for city services falls disproportionately on homeowners, who face some of the highest property tax rates in the country.

Over the years, the two Yale unions had enlisted the city’s clergy as well as community and civil-rights groups to support their job actions when their contracts were up for renegotiation.

In the mid-1990s, a number of ministers and community leaders asked the unions to reciprocate by helping them grapple with their own cascading problems of inner-city poverty.

The unions responded by establishing the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, modeled loosely after the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which had pioneered the concept of a community benefits agreement: A deal in which an employer, in return

8 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

for assistance from a local government, is required to undertake some project—hiring local residents, building neighborhood parks, offering job training—that benefits city residents.

Since it was established in 2000, the center has conducted multiple votermobilization drives and persuaded the Yale–New Haven Hospital to forgive the debts of 18,000 low-income New Havenites whom it was dunning and pursuing in court. Separately, under the guidance of political organizer Gwen Mills, UNITE HERE produced high voter turnouts in working-class and minority neighborhoods in the 2010 election, helping liberal Democrat Dannel Malloy win the governorship.

With the union’s electoral clout on the rise, and with the gap between Yale employees and much of the rest of New Haven growing, UNITE HERE decided to take a political leap. “We’d come to a consensus,” says Laurie Kennington, the president of Local 34, “that if we were an island of prosperity in a sea of struggle, that wouldn’t be sustainable. We had to bring the other folks along with us.” Abandoning its long-standing custom of endorsing a handful of candidates in city elections, the union waged an all-out effort to place both its own members and community activists on New Haven’s aldermanic board in the 2011 election, backing 17 newcomers for seats on the 30-member body. Surpassing anyone’s expectation, 16 candidates— including a janitor, a cook, and a Yale undergraduate—won. The union ousted the board’s president and a host of incumbents supported by longtime Mayor John DeStefano.

A POLITICAL SCIENTIST looking at

New Haven’s government might conclude that any group seeking to transform the city should run a candidate for mayor, not for the aldermanic slots. Historically, New Haven has had a strong mayor and a weak board of aldermen, and by 2011, DeStefano, who’d been in office for 18 years, had overstayed his welcome. He had upset the union and other progressives by his failure to press the union’s case more strongly in its unsuccessful attempt to organize Yale–New Haven Hospital in 2005. Moreover, New

Gwen Mills, the union strategist and mastermind of the 2011 sweep

Haven was beset by a crime wave, in part because the mayor had reduced the number of officers and discontinued the city’s community-policing program. New Haven experienced 34 murders in 2011, a sharp increase over previous years and a startlingly high number for a city of 130,000.

Although DeStefano was vulnerable as he stood for re-election, the unions opted to let him run without serious opposition. Focusing instead on the board followed logically from the union’s approach to power. For years, UNITE HERE had “wanted to build organizations that could hold elected officials accountable,” in the words of one staffer. Initially, the union planned to back candidates in just a handful of races, but Jorge Perez, the leading progressive on the aldermanic board, argued to the union leaders that most incumbents could be unseated.

The union set up a training academy for the novice candidates, who campaigned on a platform of restoring community policing, delivering city services on the basis of need (rather than a calculus favoring neighborhoods controlled by the mayor’s allies), and bringing jobs to beleaguered neighborhoods through community benefits agreements. The decisive elections in New Haven politics are the Democratic primaries in September. “The last time there was a real Republican presence on the board was the late ’40s,” says Yale political scientist and former New Haven Chief Administrative Officer Douglas Rae. UNITE HERE spent several hundred thousand dollars on its mail and get-out-the-vote campaigns, and on primary day, 600 volunteers walked precincts for the union-backed slate.

What followed the sweeping victory was even more surprising. In the months since it won a majority of the board of aldermen—a veto-proof supermajority, as the new members joined four veteran members who had long championed labor and community causes—the coalition has managed to set the agenda for New Haven.

“They have transformed the whole politics of the city,” says New Haven journalist Paul Bass, “without even running a candidate for mayor.”

l a u r e l l e f f / n e w h av e n i n d e p e n d e n t

notebook

notebook

t h o m a s m a c m i l l a n / n e w h av e n i n d e p e n d e n t

THE NEW MAJORITY’S first victory came

even before it took office. Two weeks after the primary, the city’s police chief resigned and DeStefano replaced him with Dean Esserman, a highly regarded former deputy chief, who had helped institute the city’s community-policing program in the 1990s. Community policing, DeStefano declared, was back. Its restoration has been a work in progress, but in 2012, the number of New Haven murders—17—was half that of the total in 2011.

One month after taking office in January 2012, the new majority preempted the mayor’s agenda by presenting its own. In addition to restoring community policing, the board promised to create a “jobs pipeline” to “expand access to good jobs in the public and private sector to all New Haven residents.” It set up a task force to see how to persuade Yale, the city’s hospitals, its power company, and other major employers to hire from New Haven. The board had a stick—the possibility of passing a local hiring ordinance—but dangled a carrot—the creation of an organization that trained prospective workers to meet major employers’ needs.

“You can mandate local hiring,” says Perez, the board president and the leader of the aldermanic coalition. “But it won’t work if employers say the workers aren’t qualified.”

Perez, a community banker who, with UNITE HERE’s Mills, is the closest thing the coalition has to a master strategist, succeeded in persuading Yale, the local Chamber of Commerce, and other major businesses to sit on the task force along with union and community representatives, elected officials, an unemployed worker, and an inner-city 20-year-old. In a series of hearings, the task force found hundreds of New Haven residents who’d applied for work at the city’s largest private-sector employers and never heard back from them.

Last year, the task force created a program called New Haven Works, funded by private contributions (the bulk of which initially came from Yale). New Haven Works will train local job applicants for positions that member employers say are coming open, and those employers are obliged

to give those applicants first consideration. The program will be formally rolled out on June 1, but Yale has already hired a few people who have gone through the pilot program.

New Haven Works is a small-scale version of the successful employerfunded job-training and certification program that UNITE HERE runs for prospective hotel employees in Las Vegas. The Board of Aldermen is also promoting the kind of community benefit agreements that LAANE pioneered in Los Angeles. Late last year, the board approved the application of a charter school to take over a shuttered public school but conditioned its approval on the charter’s agreeing to let its clerical and blue-collar employees unionize and to admit students from inner-city public schools as well as from its established feeder schools.

Surprising its conservative critics, the board has also taken a tough line on taxes and spending. With the city’s revenue base largely made up of its overtaxed homeowners, the board has made clear it won’t raise levies. In the face of pension obligations that any city with such high rates of poverty would have difficulty meeting, the board has approved contracts with city workers that have included modest cuts to future hires’ retirement and health benefits. The board, which includes members from public-sector unions AFSCME and SEIU, ratified the contracts unanimously.

One reason the New Haven situation is so unusual is that a private-sector

George Perez, the board president and a coalition leader

Two weeks after the primary, the POLICE CHIEF RESIGNED, and the mayor restored community policing—a key coalition demand.

union dominates city government.

With unions now reduced to representing just 6.6 percent of the nation’s private-sector workforce, the unions with the clout to influence city and state government tend to be the larger public-employee unions. The role of UNITE HERE in New Haven is more like the role the United Auto Workers once attempted to play in Detroit.

With just a fraction of the members and resources that the autoworkers once commanded, however, UNITE HERE is a good deal more successful.

While the auto workers had no trouble delivering majorities for the Democrats in state and national elections, they seldom succeeded in electing their own candidates in Detroit city contests, in which their members voted more along racial lines than class lines. In New Haven, a city that’s close to being one-third white, onethird black, and one-third Latino, UNITE HERE’s painstaking work with a wide range of communities has created a coalition that has cohered across racial divides.

By declining to run a candidate for mayor in 2011, the coalition sidestepped whatever tensions, racial or otherwise, that selecting a single candidate might have caused. In this year’s mayoral election—DeStefano has announced he will step down after 20 years in office—the coalition may decline to endorse, with different elements backing different candidates.

“The importance of keeping the group together is key,” Perez says.

UNITE HERE’s success in New Haven, however provisional, may offer a model for a union movement that has been all but eliminated from the private sector. Many labor leaders have concluded that unions, if they are to survive and perhaps even flourish again, must find ways to represent workers whether they’re members or not—if not through collective bargaining, then through political coalitions.

The challenge for labor is figuring out how to foster the dedication and unity that UNITE HERE worked for nearly two decades to cultivate in New Haven, where a coalition of custodians, cooks, administrative assistants, and students dispatched the ancien régime and has set about building a better one. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

JAMES TAYLOR Heartland Institute senior fellow

FRED SINGER

Heartland Institute senior fellow; Science and Environmental Policy Project director

JOE BASTARDI

WeatherBELL Analytics chief forecaster

ROBERT BRYCE Manhattan Institute senior fellow, author of Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future

MAD MEN OF CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIAL

Persuading the nation that climate change is nothing but alarmism requires a multimillion-dollar public-relations campaign replete with “experts” like the front men pictured here. Often featured as cable-news pundits or opinion columnists, most lack climate expertise and all are connected to conservative organizations funded by fossil-fuel interests like Koch Industries and the American Petroleum Institute. ART BY STEVE BRODNER

10 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

LARRY BELL

University of Houston professor of space architecture, author of Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax

PATRICK MICHAELS

director of the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science

CHRIS HORNER

MARC MORANO

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow director of communications; runs ClimateDepot.com

American Tradition Institute director of litigation; Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow

STEVE MILLOY

American Tradition Institute senior fellow; produces JunkScience.com

ANTHONY WATTS produces the blog Watts Up With That?

MYRON EBELL

Competitive Enterprise Institute director of energy and global warming policy

JOHN DROZ

American Tradition Institute senior fellow

THE END OF THE

SOLID

SOUTH The region’s emerging majority is progressive.

Its capitols are more conservative than ever.

Something’s got to give.

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

BY BOB MOSER ART BY VICTOR JUHASZ

T

he final rally of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign took place on symbolically charged ground: the rolling fields of Manassas, site of the first major battle of the Civil War. It was the last stop on an election eve spent entirely in the South: Jacksonville, Charlotte, and finally Northern Virginia.

In the autumn chill, an estimated 90,000 people spread out across the county fairgrounds and waited for hours to cheer a new president—and a new South.

By this point, Virginians knew Obama well. In February, he had beaten Hillary Clinton 2 to 1 in the state’s Democratic primary, a blow to her floundering bid. After clinching the nomination, he’d kicked off his general-election campaign in rural Virginia and been a frequent visitor since. Bucking conventional wisdom, Obama’s team had invested heavily in three Southern states: not just perennial battleground Florida but also Virginia and North Carolina, which had not voted Democratic for president since 1964 and 1976, respectively. No Democrat—not even Bill Clinton—had made a serious attempt to win North Carolina or Virginia since Ronald Reagan claimed it in 1980.

But Obama was gambling on an emerging South—one that is younger than the rest of the country, far more ethnically diverse than the old black-and-white paradigm, and more liberal-leaning than any Southern generation to precede it.

That emerging South was arrayed in the dark hills around

Obama as he flashed into the spotlight. On soil where whites once fought to the death for the right to enslave blacks, this throng had gathered to hail the soon-to-be first black man to be elected president. The next day, Obama carried all three of his Southern targets—55 electoral votes for the party. For Southerners, the message was unmistakable: The future has arrived. The Solid South is dead.

WHEN AMERICANS TALK ABOUT THE SOUTH, they tend to be talking about the past. When they talk about Southern politics, they tend to be talking about the old, stereotyped “Solid South”—that uniformly conservative, racist, anti-union, snake-handling cluster of former Confederate states that voted en masse for Democrats from the pre–Civil War through civil rights, then switched their allegiance to the former “party of Lincoln” beginning in the 1970s. Once LBJ and the Democrats betrayed the cause of white supremacy and Richard Nixon cooked up the “Southern Strategy,” the region became as solidly Republican as it once was Democratic. End of story.

Southern politics has never been quite so uncomplicated as that. It took decades for Republicans to outnumber Democrats, and Republican control of the region has never matched the Democrats’ former hegemony. The South has been contested ground for 40 years, with the GOP dominating federal elections and gradually cutting into the Democrats’ hold on state

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

Meet The New South: In Manassas, Virginia, a crowd of 90,000 cheers Barack Obama on election eve 2008.

By the 2020s, more than two-thirds of the South’s electoral votes could be up for grabs. (The South is defined here as the 11 states of the former Confederacy.) If all five big states went blue, with their 111 electoral votes, only 49 votes would be left for Republicans. (That’s based on the current electoral-vote count; after the next census, the fastgrowing states will have more.) Win or lose, simply making Southern states competitive is a boon to Democrats.

If Republicans are forced to spend time and resources to defend Texas and Georgia, they’ll have less for traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even if Democrats aren’t competitive in those states for another decade, they will benefit from connecting with millions of nonvoters who haven’t heard their message. They are building for a demographic future that Republicans dread: the

14 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

time when overwhelming white support will no longer be enough to win a statewide election in Texas and Georgia.

Republicans will not give up easily. Their counter­ insurgency began soon after Obama’s three Southern victories. It was propitious timing. The Tea Party, a mostly Southern phenomenon, was turning Obamaphobia into a political movement. Big conservative donors, their money freed up by Citizens United and other court decisions, were ready to spend unprecedented amounts on obscure state assembly races and judgeships (to elect those fired-up Tea Partiers, in many cases). Republicans recognized that 2010 might be their last great chance to expand their gains in the South. They made the most of it.

In a bad year for Democrats nationwide, it was a disaster in the South. Two years after North Carolina voted for Obama, both chambers of the general assembly went Republican for the first time in 120 years. In Florida, the Tea Party launched Marco Rubio into the U.S. Senate. The year before, in Virginia’s off-year elections, right-wing Republicans had been elected governor and attorney general.

Republicans now controlled all but four legislative chambers in the region.

With those statehouse majorities, the GOP had won the larger prize it sought: control of legislative and congressional redistricting. The party redrew the maps with gusto, giving it favorable districts for the next decade. The trick is watering down the impact of minority voters by moving them from competitive districts into those that are already minority-held. That way, the blacker and browner districts get blacker and browner, and 60 percent Democratic districts become 70 percent Democratic. The white districts, in turn, get whiter—and more Republican. In North Carolina, which ended up with the South’s most egregiously misshapen map, half of the state’s black population of 2.2 million was drawn into one-fifth of its legislative and congressional districts.

Civil-rights and civil-liberties groups argued that Republicans were using race illegally as the primary basis of redistricting. But the courts mostly upheld the maps, and the results were startling. In 2012, Republicans won legislative majorities in every former Confederate state for the first time. (In Virginia, the Senate is evenly split by party, 20-20.) Overall, the South had now elected 222 more Republican legislators than it had in 2008. Georgia’s Democrats made up 47 percent of the statewide vote in 2008 and 2010, but after redistricting they could only elect a maximum of 31 percent of statehouse members.

The gerrymandering was just as effective in congressional elections. In Virginia, Obama won by 4 percent statewide,

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and local offices—culminating in 2012, when Arkansas’s legislature became the last to go Republican. (Virginia’s Senate has a partisan split.)

Over the next two decades, it will become clear to even the most clueless Yankee that the Solid South is long gone.

The politics of the region’s five most populous states— Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas— will be defined by the emerging majority that gave Obama his winning margins. The under-30 voters in these states are ethnically diverse, they lean heavily Democratic, and they are just beginning to vote. The white population percentage is steadily declining; in Georgia, just 52 percent of those under 18 are white, a number so low it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

but Republicans captured 10 of 13 seats in the U.S. House.

Southern politics is more fractured than it’s ever been.

Obama threw down the gauntlet in 2008, and Republicans answered in 2010 and 2012. The voters are moving left, while the state governments are lurching right. The only safe prediction is that after 150 years of being largely ignored in national elections, the South is about to become the most fiercely contested, and unpredictable, political battleground in America.

IT’S BEEN ALMOST FOUR DECADES since journalist and historian John Egerton famously declared the South “just about over as a separate and distinct place.” He was writing about a newly integrated 1970s South that was suddenly teeming with suburban tracts and office parks, urbanizing so rapidly that it could hardly be recognized.

To this day, Americans still think “rural” when they think “Southern.” But there’s nothing very rural about the South anymore. Florida is 91 percent urban, Georgia and Virginia 75 percent, and in probably the biggest surprise, Texas is 85 percent urban.

With the suburbs and office parks came new Southerners. At first it was mostly Northern professionals, who began moving down in the 1950s and 1960s for low taxes, affordable homes, and jobs in banking (Charlotte), energy (Houston and Dallas), technology (the Research Triangle Park and Austin), and government-contract work (Northern Virginia). Many of the “relocated Yankees,” as they were sometimes fondly called, were registered Republicans— but they were more moderate than their Southern partymates, especially on culture-war issues. Those transplants became swing votes, and they haven’t stopped coming.

The demographic big bang didn’t begin in earnest, however, until the 1990s. Large numbers of African Americans had begun moving South in what would become known as the “great remigration.” From the early 20th century until the 1960s, more than seven million blacks fled the Jim Crow South in the Great Migration to pursue a better life, mostly in the industrial North. It was the largest domestic migration in American history. Now hundreds of thousands are returning. Last decade, 75 percent of the growth in America’s black population was in the South. Atlanta and its endless suburbs gained 491,000 African Americans in the past decade, more than any other city. Some are middleclass blacks whose families once relied on government jobs up North that are now disappearing. Some are caring for older relatives left behind in the Great Migration. Some are simply coming home to reunite with their families, finding a region that has undergone seismic changes since the South’s segregated “way of life” finally came to a merciful end.

While blacks were remigrating, Latino populations were expanding rapidly. Birth statistics tell the story: By 2010,

49 percent of newborns in Texas were Latino. Among the big five Southern states, Virginia has the lowest rate at 12 percent. Hundreds of thousands of young Latinos become eligible to vote in the South every year, and that number will be climbing for decades. At least for now, this strongly favors Democrats, who win Latino votes by large margins. Florida used to be the exception, because first-generation (and often second-generation) Cuban Americans were staunch, anticommunist Republicans. But younger Cuban Americans have joined a new immigrant population in Central Florida to help flip the state in the Democrats’ favor.

The key is getting Latinos to the polls—and it’s been a challenge in most Southern states. In 2010, for instance, Latinos were 38 percent of Texas’s population. But just 16 percent of eligible Latinos voted as Republicans won historically big margins in both legislative chambers. The poor turnout is partly a factor of youth. Latinos are, on average, a decade younger than Anglos. Most are not in the habit of voting. If they live in a state like Texas or Georgia, it’s likely that nobody has ever courted their vote.

Once Latinos begin to vote in proportion to their population, the change that they will bring to Southern (and American) politics won’t be limited to a shift in party loyalties. It will be manifested in a new progressivism as well.

Republicans like to talk about how Latinos are “hardworking, religious, family-oriented,” as if those qualities automatically made people conservative. In fact, an exit poll from 2012 showed the opposite: Latino voters are not only more liberal than Republicans; they’re sometimes more liberal than Democrats. On same-sex marriage, 59 percent said yes, against 48 percent of all voters. Should abortion be legal? Sixty-six percent said yes, against 59 percent overall. On economic issues, Latinos’ liberalism tends to be even more pronounced (the same is true for African Americans). Fifty-five percent said last year that they have a negative view of capitalism. They want more spending on public schools. They want universal, public-run health care. They want government to take a strong hand in the economy. Taxes? Raise them, if it means better social services. The same goes for every part of the South’s emerging majority—African Americans, Asian Americans, and under-30 whites who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Given the progressive tilt of the South’s coming majority, it’s no wonder that Scott Keeter, head pollster at the Pew Research Center, calls the region “a ticking time bomb for Republicans.” The Southern GOP is 88 percent white, and the white population is aging. Republicans will buy some time with their friendly legislative districts buffering any losses. They’ll continue to try to make it harder for minorities and young people to vote—and if the Supreme Court strikes down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act this year, it will be easier to suppress votes in the South.

BY THE 2020S, MORE THAN

TWO

THIRDS OF THE SOUTH’S

ELECTORAL VOTES COULD BE UP FOR GRABS.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

IN THE SOUTH’S NEW battlegrounds, 2020 shapes up as a pivotal year. If Democrats have gathered enough strength by then to send majorities to Richmond, Raleigh, Atlanta, Tallahassee, and/or Austin, they can tear up the Republican maps from 2011 and make it dauntingly difficult for the GOP to regain its majorities. That’s likeliest to happen in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina; Democratic majorities could take longer in Texas and Georgia, where Republicans are more deeply entrenched.

But the politics of the big Southern states are all betwixt and between, as natives like to say. If Republicans can find a way to hold on to their majorities through 2020, they will stay competitive, on the state level at least, for another decade. Ultimately, they won’t be able to keep winning unless they can convince Latinos and African Americans to vote Republican. If they do, Southern Republicans could become a model for the national GOP—the states that figured out how to persuade Latinos to vote Republican.

But it will be no quick or easy matter for the Southern Republican Party—built on a Chamber of Commerce foundation and lifted to victory by evangelical Christians—to find a message that can appeal to the South’s new electorate. How do you build bridges to voters whose views would sound, to your average Southern Republican, socialistic and downright un-American?

More likely, destiny will follow demography. The South’s big states could soon be undergirding a durable national Democratic majority that’s capable of lasting as long as the New Deal consensus. Liberalism would have a chance to flourish anew—not just in state capitols but in Washington, D.C., as well. This would be an emphatic break from history. From Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Barack Obama’s stimulus and heath-care overhaul, the biggest obstacle has always been Congress’s solid white wall of Southern conservatism. That wall is crumbling. In the future, if you can be progressive and win Texas or Georgia, the American political order will transform in ways we can barely comprehend. 

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TEXA

There’s a cost to the time Republicans are buying. The Tea Party legislators who brought Republicans to power in 2010 are moving the party further right on practically every issue—at the same time that voters are tilting back toward the center. That’s creating the kind of situation that unfolded last year in Virginia. Republican lawmakers pushed a bill requiring every woman who requests an abortion to have an invasive sonogram procedure. In an election year, in a battleground state that is trending Democratic, what sense does such sure-to-be-divisive legislation make?

None at all, unless you’re in a state—or a region—that is smack in the middle of a demographic revolution that is fueling a political one. It is a confusing business.



BY ABBY RAPOPORT

TEXAS TOUGH: CAN THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN’S WHIZ KIDS LEAD A DEMOCRATIC REVIVAL IN THE ULTIMATE RED STATE?

S

hortly before the Battleground Texas tour stopped in Austin’s old AFL-CIO building in early April, the sky opened up. Thunder and lightning raged, parts of the city flooded, and traffic came to a standstill. But Democrats kept arriving, some dripping wet, others clutching umbrellas rarely used in the city, and the meeting room soon filled with about 100 folks, some no doubt drawn by curiosity. Launched in February by two of Team Obama’s hotshot organizers, Battleground Texas was promising to inject into the nation’s biggest Republican stronghold the grassroots field tactics—the volunteer-organizing, the phone-banking and door-knocking, the digital savvy—that won the 2012 presidential election. After years of national Democrats seeing Texas as hopelessly red, what made this fledgling group think it could turn the state blue?

Jenn Brown, Battleground Texas’s executive director, was pleasantly surprised by the turnout. But the 31-year-old California native, who projects the energy and enthusiasm of a camp counselor, knew she had some convincing to do. As one attendee put it, “We’re suffering from battered-spouse syndrome. We believe it is impossible to win.” The situation for Texas Democrats has been as gloomy as the day’s weather.

The party hasn’t won a single statewide race since 1996—a 100-campaign losing streak. Republicans dominate the state legislature. Mitt Romney carried the state by more than 1.2 million votes. For nearly two decades, the Texas Democratic Party has been the political equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters’ perennial patsies, the Washington Generals.

But the people leading Battleground Texas are proven winners. Brown headed up Barack Obama’s field operation in Ohio, which turned out 100,000 more African American voters in 2012 than in 2008. Field director Jeremy Bird,

a 34-year-old Missouri native, is the wonky wunderkind who, as Obama’s national field director, oversaw the campaign’s state-of-the-art turnout operation. They’ve been joined by young, native Texan organizers such as Christina Gomez, formerly with the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, and Cliff Walker, who ran the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee. Bird and Brown got interested in Texas, they say, during the 2012 campaign.

Bird was wowed by the enthusiasm of Texas volunteers, who made 400,000 calls to Florida voters in the last three days before the election. Brown says that wherever she went during the campaign, Obama staffers from Texas would talk excitedly about the potential for organizing the state, given its rapidly changing demographics.

Since their effort launched in February, they’ve seen more encouraging signs. Attendance was strong on Battleground Texas’s 14-city getting-to-know-you tour, which stopped in

both Democrat-friendly places like Austin and San Antonio and Republican strongholds like Waco and Lubbock. By mid-April, Battleground Texas already had more Facebook friends—23,000—than the Texas GOP. Its organizers refuse to comment on the group’s funding sources, but the state’s biggest Democratic donor, Steve Mostyn, has agreed to help the group raise its estimated $10 million annual budget.

There are ten paid staffers, more than the state Democratic Party employs, with additional hires on the way.

While Governor Rick Perry laughed off the effort to turn Texas blue as “the biggest pipe dream I have ever heard,” other Republican leaders are giving Battleground Texas free publicity by decrying it as a coven of dangerous outside agitators—“masters of the slimy dark arts of campaigning,” state Republican Party Chair Steve Munisteri wrote in a fundraising letter. Speaking at a lunch in Waco, Attorney General Greg Abbott called the arrival of Team Obama

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

Field Test: In Austin, a local get-out-the-vote effort greatly increased black and Latino turnout in 2012.

cans would find it virtually impossible to win presidential elections with the current national map. Even the threat of losing Texas would influence a presidential contest. If the GOP has to start fighting for votes in such an enormous state—with 20 media markets—it will drain resources the party could devote to other battlegrounds.

No state has greater potential for Democrats. Texas is already “majority-minority,” with Latinos making up 38 percent of the population and African Americans 12 percent. According to the state demographer, the number of Latinos will surpass the number of whites in the next decade; by 2040, 52 percent of the state will be Latino, and 27 percent will be white. Between just 2012 and 2016, about a million additional Latinos in Texas will become eligible to vote. But that’s been the trouble for Democrats: Latinos

18 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

aren’t voting. Forty-seven percent of eligible Latinos have not even registered. In 2010, when Perry won re-election, the Latino turnout rate was an anemic 16 percent, about half the typical Latino turnout in New Mexico. An analysis by the Houston Chronicle shows that if Latinos voted at the same rate as whites, the state would already be a toss-up.

So while Battleground Texas aims to make inroads with other groups—including white women, who are overwhelmingly Republican in Texas, counter to national trends—driving up the Latino vote is the key to a Democratic turnaround. On paper, it looks straightforward, which is one reason Democrats outside of Texas tend to be more sanguine about a partisan flip than Democrats in the state.

They don’t know what the folks in Austin know all too well: that Republicans have continued to gain congressional and legislative seats over the past decade, even as Texas’s Latino population has swelled.

One challenge is scale. Bird and Brown cite Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada as models for turning out Latinos. But none of those states has more than 516,000 Latino citizens total—which is fewer than the number of Latino citizens in Houston’s Harris County alone. “In those little states, you can just throw money and get all kinds of stuff done,” says Antonio Gonzalez, head of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. Not in Texas, where size is only one of the complicating factors.

Another wrinkle: Battleground Texas will have to tangle with a state Republican Party that has been far smarter about connecting with Latinos than the national Republican Party. The tone was set by Karl Rove and George W. Bush, who actively courted Latinos in the 1990s as they set about building the Texas GOP into a dominant force. Battleground Texas will also have to overcome deeply entrenched political disengagement among Latinos and other nonwhites, born in part from years of Democratic neglect.

Even given the rosiest of scenarios, Texas Democrats aren’t likely to elect a governor in 2014 or help to elevate a Democrat into the White House in 2016. But Battleground Texas’s leaders swear they’re committed for the long haul.

As Brown said in Austin, “If 2020 is the year we turn this state around, that is OK with me.”

REPUBLICAN SUPREMACY in Texas is a relatively recent phenomenon. From Reconstruction until the 1960s, Democrats—mostly conservative, exclusively white—ran the state. The party always had a vocal progressive wing, and in the wake of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Latino leaders began to emerge. Most came from San Antonio, which had both a large Latino population and a strong

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members “a new assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons. The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration and his political machine.”

For a fledgling effort, Battleground Texas has already become a national media darling, prominently featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Bloomberg News. In February, Bird even had a guest turn on The Colbert Report, where the host described him as “the man behind Obama’s minority outreach-around.” It’s easy to see why there’s so much interest. If Texas were to become a competitive state, the impact on national politics would be enormous. Without the state’s 38 electoral votes, Republi-

activist tradition. Community organizer Willie C. Velasquez founded the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, which registered thousands of Latinos and filed more than 80 lawsuits to ensure their access to the ballot.

In 1974, Ernie Cortés started San Antonio’s Communities Organized for Public Service, which helped Latino neighborhoods push their policy agendas. In 1981, Henry Cisneros was elected mayor, making him only the second Latino mayor in U.S. history.

While other Southern states were trending Republican, Democrats still looked like the party of the future in Texas.

Houston, fast becoming one of the nation’s largest and most diverse cities, had elected Democrat Barbara Jordan, the state’s first African American legislator and, later, first African American member of Congress. In 1990, Dan Morales, a state legislator, became the first Latino elected statewide, as attorney general. A year later, Governor Ann Richards appointed Lena Guerrero to the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas industries, making her the first woman and person of color on the commission.

But white conservatives still made up most of the state’s electorate, and they backed Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984—the first time a Republican had carried the state since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. In 1978, Republicans elected their first Texas governor since Reconstruction, Bill Clements, after a bitterly contested Democratic primary divided the party. Suddenly, the GOP didn’t look completely hopeless in Texas, and conservative Anglos began to get accustomed to voting Republican after generations as yellow-dog Democrats. Karl Rove laid out a strategy for taking control of the state, systematically targeting vulnerable Democrats he could either unseat or convince to switch sides. “When there was a straggler in the pack, he would take them in the bushes and cut their throat,” says Cal Jillson, a political scientist and author of Texas Politics: Governing the Lone Star State.

The tipping point came in 1994, when Richards lost her re-election bid to Rove’s candidate, George W. Bush.

Democrats still carried most statewide offices that year and maintained a sizable edge in the legislature. But the Republican tide was rising fast. In 1998, against weak opposition, Bush won re-election with 69 percent of the vote—including nearly 40 percent of the Latino vote—and Republicans swept statewide offices. Meanwhile, Democrats lost their most promising Latino candidate for higher office when Cisneros, who’d gone to Washington as President Bill Clinton’s housing secretary, was felled by a scandal involving hush money given to a former mistress. By then, Velasquez and Cortés had left the state as well.

In 2002, Democrats ran what they thought was a “dream team”—wealthy businessman Tony Sanchez for governor and Ron Kirk, an African American who’d been elected

mayor in Dallas, for U.S. senator. “We had a really wellfunded and sophisticated outreach to Hispanic voters,” says longtime Democratic consultant Glenn Smith, who ran the Sanchez campaign. “The problem was we were doing it all of a sudden in one campaign cycle. That’s just not enough time.” The dream team lost badly, and Republicans took control of the state legislature.

Texas Democrats went into a death spiral. Their bench of potential statewide candidates was empty. National leaders saw no upside to investing in the state and began using it as a cash machine for campaigns outside the state.

As the Latino population continued to swell, Democrats failed to launch the type of sustained outreach needed to bring new voters into the system. Latinos still voted for Democrats, usually by about a 2-to-1 margin. But far too few were voting.

Texas Republican leaders wisely avoided the mistakes of their counterparts in California and Arizona, where anti-immigration laws turned Latinos into avid Democrats. As governor and president, Bush spoke Spanish at campaign events, appointed Latinos to key positions, and broke with most Republicans by championing comprehensive immigration reform. His successor as governor, Rick Perry, signed a state version of the DREAM Act into law and spoke out against measures like Arizona’s “papers, please” law. When Republican lawmakers tried to float such bills, Perry and other party leaders quashed their efforts before they became an embarrassment.

“Democrats think that if they just wait and the state becomes more Hispanic, they win,” says the current GOP chair, Munisteri. “That ignores the fact that we are doing Hispanic outreach.” Even as the Tea Party wave of 2010 drove the state legislature further to the right, Texas Republicans launched new efforts to attract nonwhite voters. The party used data analytics and cross-checks to identify conservative Latinos and get them involved; as a result, last year’s state GOP convention had 600 new Latino delegates. At that same convention, delegates changed the party platform to eliminate calls for mass deportation of undocumented Texans. (However, it still advocates rescinding citizenship for those born in the country to noncitizens.) A full-time Republican outreach coordinator now goes on Telemundo and Univision, the two major Spanish-language networks, as a regular commentator.

The party’s efforts have been bolstered by Hispanic Republicans of Texas, a political action committee cofounded by George P. Bush (son of Jeb) and two Republican consultants with strong national connections. Hispanic Republicans recruits, trains, and backs candidates for local, state, and federal offices. The group built a lot of buzz in 2010, when seven Hispanic Republicans were elected to the state legislature and Congress. But in 2012, the results

BY 2040,

52%

OF THE TEXAS POPULATION WILL BE LATINO, AND 27% WILL BE WHITE.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19

were decidedly mixed. Though Ted Cruz was elected to the U.S. Senate and two new Latinos won state House seats, only two of the winners from 2012 were re-elected, and a coveted congressional race was lost. Bush, who’s 37 and whose mother is Mexican-born, has announced that he will be running statewide in 2014 for Texas land commissioner—a launching pad to bigger things.

The party’s strategy is based on the belief that Latinos in Texas are more conservative than their counterparts in other states—and thus “persuadable” for Republicans without a wholesale change in policies. There’s a large bloc who are swing voters, says George Antuna Jr., who co-founded Hispanic Republicans of Texas with Bush.

“Those voters are up for grabs.”

“They’re dreaming,” Jillson counters. With rare exceptions, Latinos have been voting 2 to 1 Democratic in Texas since the days of LBJ. In 2012, an election-eve poll by Latino Decisions found 53 percent of Texas Latinos identifying as Democrats; only 15 percent said they were Republicans.

Polling data show why. Particularly on economic issues, Latino voters in Texas line up overwhelmingly with Demo-

20 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

cratic positions. Young Latinos, who will dominate Texas politics in the near future, are more liberal than their elders. Latino voters’ top priorities, aside from immigration reform, are improving education and health care—two issues that are not exactly strengths for Texas Republicans. In 2011, GOP lawmakers, cheered on by Perry, made the largest cuts in modern Texas history to public schools. Republicans are also responsible for policies that have left one-quarter of Texans—and a far larger slice of Latinos—without health insurance.

For a couple more election cycles, Republicans can continue to win Texas with overwhelming white support—it often reaches 70 percent in statewide races—combined with one-third of the Latino vote. But if enough Latinos start voting, the GOP will have to recalibrate its message while holding on to a right-wing base that has shown little taste for moderation. If anything, the party has moved rightward in recent years. Its most visible Latino champion, Senator Cruz, is a Tea Party stalwart. If Republicans were expecting Cruz, whose ancestry is Cuban American, to boost their Latino vote, it didn’t happen in 2012; he received about 35 percent, one point less than Senator John Cornyn received in 2008. “Republicans like Ted Cruz talk about how Republicans are different in Texas because they have a few Hispanic candidates,” Bird says. “But the first speech Cruz gave in the Senate was about his opposition to Obamacare, which an overwhelming majority of Hispanics support.”

Still, Republicans profess confidence that they’ll keep Texas red—and conservative—for decades to come. If Battleground Texas begins to pose a threat, Munisteri says, national Republicans will pour limitless money and resources into the state to keep from losing the party’s crown jewel.

Battleground Texas, he claims, “may end up doing me a favor. We’ll have more resources than they would if they left it alone.” Since the group announced itself, Munisteri says he’s already raised $300,000 by sounding the alarm about a potential takeover by Team Obama. “When Texas begins to look competitive, there’s going to be an avalanche of Republican money coming home to protect the state,” Jillson says. But that would come with a cost: fewer resources for Republicans everywhere else.

HOW WILL BATTLEGROUND TEXAS mount a challenge to Republican hegemony in the ultimate red state?

Slowly but surely, as Jenn Brown told the Austin Democrats. “We know this is a long-term effort,” she said. “We know it will take time.” The initial focus will be to create a

massive network of Democratic organizers and volunteers across the state. Imagine, Brown said, what could happen with 250 paid field organizers in Texas, each with five teams of volunteers; they could reach 500,000 potential voters if everyone just knocked on 50 doors.

At this point, the details are hypothetical: A full-scale plan for “getting that started” won’t be rolled out until this summer. But Jeremy Bird offers a few more details. In the next couple of election cycles, Battleground Texas will target “battleground zones”—races that organizers believe could either be winnable or could help Democrats build infrastructure by training new candidates and registering voters. A battleground zone could be a city council race with a promising young Latino candidate in Waco or a state House race in a heavily minority district in Houston. The idea is to seize every viable opportunity to build new Democratic networks around the state, creating new voters along the way.

For the time being, that’ll be done without backing candidates for statewide offices. Texas has a few rising Democratic stars—most notably San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and his twin, Congressman Joaquin Castro—but running them for major offices too soon and losing risks diminishing their appeal. Democratic strategist James Aldrete says the Battleground Texas approach—build the base rather than expecting miracle results right away—is refreshing. For too long, Aldrete says, Texas Democrats tried the opposite approach: “waiting for the amazing candidate that’s gonna inspire everyone and solve all our problems.” Finally, Texas Democrats are attempting to replicate what has worked elsewhere. “The way I look at it,” Bird says, “Texas is our candidate.”

But Obama-style grassroots politics is brand-new for most Texas Democrats. While the national party was putting an increasing emphasis on door-knocking and turnout over the past decade, the party in Texas was falling behind.

Battleground Texas will have to change fundamentally the way Texas Democrats think about politics, reorienting them from a campaign-to-campaign mentality to one of year-round organizing.

The leaders of Battleground Texas say there’s reason for optimism—partly because there is some recent history of grassroots politics working in Texas. During the 2010 midterm elections, Austin Democratic Party Chair Andy Brown selected 21 largely black and Latino precincts where turnout had traditionally been low and pledged to run the type of hardcore turnout campaigns usually reserved for the wealthier, whiter parts of town. With a paid field staff organizing volunteers, the Travis County Democrats knocked on every registered voter’s door in those precincts two or three times and called each one at least twice. The effort paid off: Although 2010 was the worst year in history for Texas Democrats, 18 percent more ballots were cast in Tra-

vis County and the number of straight-ticket Democratic voters went up 54 percent. “There was nothing fancy about it,” Brown says. “It was a really well-run field program.”

A similar strategy has also worked wonders in Dallas. In 2006, Democrats in Texas’s oldest Republican stronghold bucked convention by spending as much on phone-banking and door-to-door campaigning as on media ads and mailers. The results were stunning: Democrats swept all 47 local offices, including 40 judgeships that had previously belonged to Republicans.

But elsewhere, Texas Democrats have been slow to learn from Dallas’s example. The party’s most glaring failure has been in Harris County, home to Houston and the nation’s fourth-largest population. Harris County already looks like the Texas of the future; only 33 percent of its residents are white, while 41 percent are Latino, 19 percent are black, and 6 percent are Asian. Houston voters elected the first lesbian mayor of a major city, Democrat Annise Parker, in 2009. But in 2012, President Obama carried the county by a measly 971 votes, and Republicans remain competitive in local races. How is that possible? Because there’s a staggering number of voters who are eligible but unregistered—estimates run between 600,000 and 800,000.

Democrats can’t simply start knocking on doors in neighborhoods that have long been shunned, asking for votes and expecting results. The Latino Decisions election-eve poll showed the depths of Texas Democrats’ dysfunction: Only 25 percent of Texas Latinos had been contacted by a campaign, a political party, or a community organization of any kind—compared with 59 percent in Colorado, 51 percent in Nevada, and 48 percent in New Mexico.

Harris County Democrats and Battleground Texas volunteers will have to start making calls and venturing into minority neighborhoods for the first time in decades. The effort has, at least, belatedly begun. Houston elected a new Democratic chair in 2011, Lane Lewis, who is focusing the party for the first time on Dallas-style field organizing. Lewis estimates that if the party registers 120,000 new nonwhite voters, it will result in 80,000 more people going to the polls. “We’re already block-walking,” Lewis says. “We’ve already had phone banks this year.” But his field team is not just trying to woo new voters; Democratic staffers and volunteers are participating year-round in projects like building a community garden in the tough Independence Heights neighborhood, an effort to show that the party cares about more than winning votes.

If Democrats can galvanize Houston’s nonvoters, they will be well on their way to turning Texas blue. But all those years of ignoring minorities will make it a formidable task. “You’ve got to commit at least ten years,” Antonio Gonzalez says. “It takes at least ten years to undo twenty years of neglect.” 

IN 2012, ONLY

15% OF TEXAS LATINOS IDENTIFIED AS REPUBLICAN.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

NORTH CAROLIN 

BY CHRIS KROMM AND SUE STURGIS

TUG-OF-WAR: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A STATE BECOMES MORE PROGRESSIVE AND MORE CONSERVATIVE AT THE SAME TIME?

B

ill Cook may be a relative newcomer to North Carolina politics—he won his 2012 state senate race by 21 votes, after two recounts—but he has big plans for the state.

By this spring’s filing deadline, Cook, a power-­company retiree from the coastal town of Beaufort, had sponsored no fewer than seven measures aimed at rewriting the state’s election rules—largely in ways that would benefit Republicans. Over the past decade, North Carolina has become a national model for clean elections and expanded turnout, thanks to reforms like early voting, same-day registration, and public financing of some races. New voters—mostly people of color and college students—helped Democrats turn the state into a presidential battleground, which Barack Obama won by a hair in 2008 and lost narrowly in 2012.

This new electorate doesn’t sit well with Cook. So the senator introduced a strict measure to require government-­issued photo ID at the polls, slash the number of early-voting days, eliminate same-day registration during early voting, and delay by five years the time it takes for former felons to regain their voting rights.

None of these proposals is original; they’re the same voter-suppression measures floated in recent years by Republican legislators from Wisconsin to Georgia. But then Cook got creative. He co-sponsored Senate Bills 666 and 667, both of which would ban parents from claiming their college children as dependents on their state taxes if those children vote on campus (as most students do).

Then he filed Senate Bill 668, prohibiting the “mentally incompetent” from voting. Why? Because, as Cook told The Charlotte Observer, he had once seen such a person be “manipulated” at the polls.

Unfortunately for Cook, North Carolinians were growing weary of bills like SB 666, which voting-rights advocates immediately dubbed “the Bill of the Beast.” The state had already suffered national ridicule for GOP-­sponsored measures to create a state religion and hand out jail sentences to women who expose their nipples in public.

Republican leaders hastily distanced themselves from Cook’s measure. House Speaker Thom Tillis, a Republican, said, “It’s not gonna move.”

Still, several Republican voting measures may become law. For the first time since Reconstruction, the GOP controls both North Carolina’s governor’s mansion and its general assembly. These are not the moderate, businessminded Republicans that North Carolinians have long been accustomed to. They are pushing a hard-right agenda on a broad range of issues, from taxes to social services to schools and election laws. They are scrambling to turn back the clock before demographic changes push their brand of right-wing politics to the margins.

How did this happen in a state that so recently voted for Obama? One key factor was big money. Art Pope, a discount-retail mogul from Raleigh and close ally of national Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch, has long been North Carolina’s most influential conservative donor. In 2010, taking advantage of the post–Citizens United free-for-all in campaign donations, Pope spent freely on groups that invested in state house and senate races, helping bankroll a Republican legislative majority.

In 2012, Pope helped elect a Republican governor and a supermajority in the general assembly.

Because they took control of the legislature in 2010, Republicans were in charge of redistricting. (Pope served as a pro bono adviser.) The new maps diluted the impact of minority voters by stuffing African American, Latino, and other Democratic voters into a handful of state and congressional districts that are already minority-controlled.

The whiter districts, in turn, got even whiter and more difficult for Democrats to win. The purpose was clear: to ensure that the GOP could continue to be strong on the state level for years to come, even if North Carolinians continue to lean Democratic. The effectiveness of the GOP ’s new district lines can be measured in members of Congress. In 2012, nearly 51 percent of North Carolina voters picked a Democrat for U.S. House. But thanks to where those voters had been placed, Republicans won 9 of the state’s 13 House seats.

In 2016 and beyond, North Carolina will be fertile ground for Democratic presidential campaigns. Republicans, though, will maintain their advantage in most of the state’s legislative and congressional seats for a few more election cycles. After that, they will have to moderate their message—and policies. Conservative Republicans know

ART POPE, AN ALLY OF NATIONAL TEA PARTY FUNDER DAVID KOCH, HAS SPENT MORE THAN

$40 MILLION

TO TURN NORTH CAROLINA RED. that they’re working on borrowed time. That knowledge is spurring them to push public policy further and faster to the right while they still can. What happens when a state becomes more progressive and more conservative at the same time? North Carolinians are finding out.

NORTH CAROLINA’S HARD SHIFT to the right is a jarring change for a state with a long moderate—and at times, progressive—tradition. In 1949, political scientist V.O. Key famously argued that, partly because it had a smaller plantation economy than its Southern neighbors, North Carolina had developed a tolerant and forwardlooking political culture—what he called a “progressive plutocracy.” Even during the early 1960s, at the height of

the white South’s resistance to civil rights, North Carolina was electing moderates like Governor Terry Sanford, who called for racial reconciliation and championed economicdevelopment policies that built, among other things, the Research Triangle Park. Sanford’s pragmatic progressivism set the Democratic Party’s tone for the next half-­ century. While Old South politicians like Senator Jesse Helms grabbed national headlines, moderate Democrats back home cemented an enduring alliance around an agenda of investing in schools, accommodating business, and making slow but steady improvements in race relations.

Democratic control of the state created openings for change, which the state’s dense network of progressive advocacy groups seized on to win landmark reforms.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

Let Us Vote: Student members of the NAACP protest during a house debate on voter-ID legislation in April.

North Carolina has one of the nation’s most generous— and popular—early-voting periods. More than six million citizens, disproportionately African American, have taken advantage of early voting. In 2012, more than 155,000 registered at the polls while voting early, an option popular with students and those in the military. These measures have propelled North Carolina into the top 15 states in voter participation.

The nation got its first glimpse of North Carolina’s emerging electorate in 2008. John Kerry had lost the state by 14 percentage points in 2004, but Democrats drew on the excitement of the Obama campaign—and took advantage of liberalized voting laws—to turn out hundreds of thousands of new voters and carry the state for the first time since 1976.

Those new voters were part of the state’s emerging

24 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

majority—a more racially diverse, urban, and Democratic-­ leaning electorate. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the state had a historic influx of nonnative white professionals, who were drawn to high-tech and university jobs in the Research Triangle and to the booming banking center of Charlotte. In recent decades, African Americans have been moving back to the state, part of a “remigration” from North to South. Charlotte saw a 120,000-person jump among African Americans, the sixth highest of any U.S. city. While still relatively small at 8.4 percent, the state’s Latino population doubled in size from 2000 to 2010, while an 85 percent rise in its Asian American population was the third highest in the country. Today, nearly half of North Carolinians 18 or younger are people of color. Voters of all races under 30 lean left on both economic and social issues, and they’ve voted heavily Democratic in recent elections. The path to a new progressive coalition is clear.

“Over the last dozen years, we’ve gradually changed the structure of our election system to make it more accessible, to make people feel like their voices are welcome and make a difference,” says Bob Hall, whose group Democracy North Carolina has been a leading force behind the voting reforms.

“Now, all those structural changes, including the public-financing options for various state offices, are under attack by modernday Red Shirts and elitists who prefer to see elections decided by the boss man and his money.”

ART POPE HAS BEEN THE big-money boss man of North Carolina conservatives since the 1990s. Drawing on a family fortune amassed through Variety Wholesalers, the discount retail chain launched by his father, Pope has spent more than $40 million to promote a libertarian agenda, along with voter-suppression measures like voter ID. He represents a sharp departure from the business moderates who used to run the North Carolina GOP, and has, in fact, spent heavily in replacing those moderates with right-wing Republicans more to his liking. Through his advocacy network and political machine—he funds five conservative think tanks, publications, and legal groups— Pope has launched an assault not only on decades of reform but also on the very idea of government as a positive agent for change.

Pope’s family foundation supplies well over 80 percent of total funding for the state’s leading conservative groups.

His right-wing philanthropy has been complemented by

gerry broome / ap images

Over the past decade, a series of pro-democracy measures expanded voting rights and curbed the influence of big money. In 2004, North Carolina became the first state to implement—with bipartisan support—a “clean elections” program that offers public grants to judicial candidates who raise a certain number of small donations and agree to take no more. More than 80 percent of eligible judges have used the public-financing plan, which has helped elect record numbers of African Americans and women.

The public-finance option was later extended to other state races, including those for auditor and insurance commissioner, elections in which big checks from campaign donors can create clear conflicts of interest.

generous election contributions. Pope and his family have given almost $4 million to state Republican candidates and the North Carolina GOP. But it wasn’t until 2010 that Pope’s roles as conservative benefactor and Republican donor fully meshed to alter the course of state politics.

After Obama’s victory, it was now or never for North Carolina Republicans. Fortunately for Pope and the GOP, the stars aligned in 2010. The Tea Party had galvanized white conservatives in North Carolina. At the same time, the state Democratic Party found itself in crisis. Governor Beverly Perdue was dogged by accusations of campaignfinance violations, and a sexual-harassment scandal at party headquarters forced the executive director to resign after bitter infighting. Many first-time voters from 2008— the ones who’d turned out for Obama more than for the Democrats—were unlikely to return to the polls for the midterm elections.

Pope pounced on the opportunity. Three outside spending groups he helped fund—Americans for Prosperity, Civitas Action, and Real Jobs NC—accounted for 75 percent of the outside money that flooded into North Carolina’s legislative races. That unprecedented level of spending fueled the historic Republican takeover. Among the right-wing newcomers Pope helped to elect was Bill Cook, who now champions changes to election rules that Pope has long advocated. In 2012, Pope’s largesse helped Republicans win a supermajority in the general assembly, while taking back the governor’s office for the first time in 20 years.

For a private citizen, Pope has amassed an extraordinary amount of political power, perhaps unmatched by a nonelected official in any other state. The Republican governor he helped elect, former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, named Pope state budget director, the most powerful appointed position in North Carolina. Rob Schofield, director of research and policy development of the progressive group NC Policy Watch, has likened it to “a President Romney appointing the Koch brothers as his directors of the EPA and IRS.” McCrory also picked key members of Pope’s network to serve as his chief of staff and to lead the state department of transportation. Perched in the executive branch, surrounded by lawmakers who owe him their jobs, and backed by an advocacy network he created, Pope can push North Carolina hard to the right.

Recognizing that this conservative moment might not last long, Republican legislators are moving swiftly.

Despite the headlines, the most notorious bills—like the resolution to establish a state religion or the measure to outlaw public nipple displays—have been nonstarters. But the core of Pope’s agenda is going ahead. Every lawmaker in North Carolina knows that agenda: Scale back taxes, especially for businesses and the wealthy; slice away at the social safety net; and reverse the state’s focus on public

schools as an engine for social and economic progress.

In February, lawmakers decreased maximum weekly unemployment benefits from $535 to $350 and shortened the period in which workers can receive them—an especially harsh measure given that unemployment in North Carolina is the nation’s fifth highest at 9.2 percent. North Carolina is one of 15 states that refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a move that would have covered about 500,000 uninsured North Carolinians with the federal government picking up the tab. Now Governor McCrory is pushing to privatize management of the state Medicaid program, which would funnel North Carolina tax dollars to out-of-state managed-care companies while raising costs and reducing access to care.

Taxes became more regressive when lawmakers voted to end the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, which was claimed in 2011 by more than 900,000 low-income, working North Carolinians. Senate Republicans are now considering a bill to cut the state’s corporate income tax from the highest to the lowest in the Southeast, which would be low indeed. It could have been worse. An earlier Senate plan, promoted by Pope’s Civitas Institute, would have abolished corporate and personal income taxes altogether, replacing them with a higher sales tax—the most regressive form of taxation. Even Pope shot down that idea, saying sales-tax increases would “hurt the economy.” (They would definitely have affected sales in his retail chain.)

Republicans have also set their sights on gutting environmental laws, proposing to repeal the state’s renewableenergy standard, speed the way for fracking, and allow offshore drilling for oil and gas. The party is also taking aim at the historic centerpiece of North Carolina progressivism: public education, which has long been a target of Pope’s network. Last session, cuts to schools eliminated more than 4,300 teaching jobs. This time, one Republican bill would shift $90 million of public-school funding to private schools through vouchers. Another would eliminate teacher tenure. A proposal to shutter at least one UNC campus is on hold, following a public outcry.

Even if Democrats retake control of the legislature and begin to reverse some of the GOP policies over the next decade, it will take time to rebuild public schools, restore voting rights, tilt the tax code back toward fairness, and clean up polluted air and water. Though this Republicanright era won’t likely last long, North Carolinians will be living with its consequences for decades, if not generations.

CHARLOTTE’S BLACK POPULATION ROSE BY

120

THOUSAND

IN THE PAST DECADE, PART OF A “REMIGRATION” TO THE SOUTH.

IT’S A CURIOUS TIME IN North Carolina, as in much of the South. The state is experiencing a generational, partisan, and ideological tug-of-war. Voters are increasingly young and liberal and diverse, but lawmakers are older and whiter and far more conservative.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

26 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

VIRGINI

How long can such a disconnect persist? Longer than you might imagine. North Carolina’s demographics are steadily changing in ways that benefit Democrats. But the party has some rebuilding to do after the scandals and defeats of 2010 and 2012. If they can heal themselves, Democrats will then have to overcome the locked-in advantage Republicans gained when they redrew the state’s political maps in 2011. Until 2020, when the next round of redistricting begins, Democrats will have to win considerably more than 50 percent of voters to control the general assembly or send more members to Congress.

The Democrats’ task will be tougher if the Republicans’ voter-­suppression bills—any of them—become law. Republican lawmakers already passed voter-ID laws in 2011 and 2012, only to have them vetoed by the then-Democratic governor. What if voter-ID passes again and is signed, as expected, by the Republican governor? The North Carolina State Board of Elections finds that more than 300,000 already-registered voters—disproportionately African American and low-income—lack the kind of photo ID that would be required. That’s just one bill. Republicans are still looking to shorten early voting, eliminate Sunday voting that African Americans call “soul to the polls,” and end same-day registration.

North Carolina Democrats say they aren’t looking for a miracle recovery. “We are not going to get it all back in 2014,” newly elected party chair Randy Voller recently told a breakfast meeting of party activists. The plan, according to Voller, is to recapture the state legislature over three election cycles. A key barometer of the party’s ability to rebuild—and garner national support—will be next year’s re-election campaign for U.S. Senator Kay Hagan. A centrist elected amid North Carolina’s Democratic wave in 2008, Hagan faces middling approval numbers and what promises to be a well-funded Republican opponent (who is still to be determined). If the party can drum up enthusiasm for re-electing Hagan, even in a non-presidential election year, it would be a sure sign of life.

If Republicans move too far, too fast, they will risk leaving moderates and independents behind—and further alienating the voters of the future. Two polls this spring showed growing discontent over legislative excesses, with North Carolinians disapproving of the GOP-led assembly.

Even some Republican leaders understand that the party’s far-right turn is jeopardizing its grasp on power. Republican House Speaker Thom Tillis, in a series of Facebook posts in early May, bemoaned fellow conservatives who “insist on a fast and wide approach,” saying they didn’t appreciate the challenge Republicans face in more moderate districts. “Our lack of discipline will lay the groundwork for [Democrats’] ascendancy,” he wrote. “And if they succeed we will have only ourselves to blame.” 



BY JAMELLE BOUIE

NEW DOMINION: HOW SOON WILL CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS SWAMP OLD VIRGINIA’S REPUBLICANS?

B

y the summer of 1864, Confederate armies were hitting the limits of their strength: short on men, short on supplies, and losing ground in key theaters of the war. A reinvigorated Army of the Potomac, led by Ulysses S. Grant, had inflicted heavy casualties throughout the spring, pushing closer to the Confederate capital of Richmond. To regain the initiative, Robert E. Lee directed Lieutenant General Jubal Early to assault the Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia, clear it of Union troops, then move on to Maryland and force Grant to defend Washington, D.C. The plan worked, but the fundamentals of the war hadn’t changed. The Confederacy was still weak, and Grant still had more men, more supplies, and a talented corps of experienced generals. At most, Lee had managed to delay the inevitable.

Today’s political situation in Virginia resembles those Civil War dynamics from 1864. Barack Obama’s landmark victory in 2008 made him the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, establishing Virginia as one of the South’s new battlegrounds. Democrats’ long-term prospects in the state are bright, with population trends pointing to a lasting progressive majority, but Virginia Republicans won’t cede their turf without a determined fight. The GOP countered Obama’s 2008 win by dominating the state’s off-year elections in 2009, electing conservative Bob McDonnell as governor and picking up seats in the assembly. This year, on the heels of another decisive Obama victory in 2012, Republicans hope to again signal that Democrats have not yet won the war.

Virginia’s governor’s race is the South’s only marquee election in 2013, pitting Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a champion of “old Virginia,” against former Democratic National Committee Chair Terry McAuliffe, a New York native and Washington

insider who symbolizes “new Virginia.” In his three years as attorney general, Cuccinelli has made himself the face of right-wing revanchism. He’s opposed to abortion in all cases including rape and incest, gun control, new taxes (even to pay for road improvements), and environmental regulations. His office has filed suit against climate scientists for allegedly falsifying data, and his lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act was one of the first in the nation to attack the law. Virginia’s business community wants little to do with Cuccinelli; he personifies the far-right wing of the Republican Party.

McAuliffe counters Cuccinelli’s boundless extremism with boundless opportunism. Virginia has been his home base for a long career as a mega-fundraiser for the Democratic Party—the Clintons in particular. He ran for the gubernatorial nomination four years ago but came in a poor third despite spending a small fortune. McAuliffe would have struggled to win the nomination this time if anyone had contested it. Aside from his perpetually sunny salesman’s personality, his primary virtue as a candidate, if you can consider it a virtue, is his vast network of moneyed Democratic elites.

If McAuliffe wins, it will show that the Democrats’ demographic advantages have become so entrenched that they can overcome even a weak candidate. Virginia’s growing diversity made Obama’s four-point victories in 2008 and 2012 possible; he carried only 39 percent and 37 percent of whites. Since 2000, the state’s Latino population has nearly doubled to 8 percent; the Asian American population has grown from 4 percent to 6 percent; the African American population has held steady at 20 percent, while whites have declined from 74 percent to 65 percent of Virginians.

The political character of the white population has also changed. The huge expansion of military spending under President George H.W. Bush turned vast areas of the state into hubs for service members and defense contractors.

This attracted Northern transplants, most of them whites with moderate or liberal views, to the seven cities of Hampton Roads and the sprawling suburbs of Northern Virginia.

The Obama campaign recognized those trends in the run-up to 2008 and acted accordingly, pumping millions into the state. By Election Day, the Obama campaign had 70 field offices and thousands of volunteers in the commonwealth, a tremendous number given the state’s size and relative importance on the electoral map. The campaign’s success in registering and turning out new voters and galvanizing volunteers gave the Democrats high hopes of taking control of state politics in 2009. But the party ran smack into one of the state’s more unusual political traditions—contrarianism.

Since the late 1960s, both parties have had reason to

believe they were taking command of Virginia politics, only to have their expectations repeatedly dashed. When Richard Nixon carried Virginia, it looked like the state would become the South’s first GOP stronghold. Republicans elected governors in 1969, 1973, and 1977 and expected to keep winning after Ronald Reagan swept the state in 1980. But Democrats took the governor’s office back in 1981 and 1985, at the height of the GOP ’s Southern surge. In every governor’s race since 1977, in fact, Virginians have voted against the party controlling the White House—even if they had just voted for that party one year earlier.

Can Democrats break the pattern in November and translate their presidential gains into statewide influence? Yes, if they can mobilize the young voters, African Americans, and new immigrant communities that delivered Obama’s wins. That’s difficult to do in a non-presidential year.

In 2008, 39 percent of Virginia’s voters were Democratic; in 2009, that figure fell to 33 percent, while Republican turnout was steady.

McAuliffe’s campaign will have the money to run an aggressive turnout operation. Whether an insidethe-Beltway party operative can fire up Virginia’s new voters is an open question, however.

If Cuccinelli pulls off a victory, on the other hand, he’ll be the Jubal Early of 2013—a hard-charging, guns-a-blazing, far-right Republican repelling the Democratic invasion that is fundamentally altering the South. But, just as in 1864, their victory would almost surely be short-lived. Republicans will eventually have to overhaul both their image and their platform to fit the more cosmopolitan Virginia of the future. A Cuccinelli victory could prove a mixed blessing for his party.

If Republicans can still elect an ultra-conservative governor, GOP leaders might conclude, why should they bother to change? Meanwhile, Virginia will keep growing younger and browner, and Democrats will be ever closer to ultimately winning the war. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

A RIVER RUNS

This article was developed in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit news organization producing investigative reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health.

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THROUGH IT Everyone agrees that the only way to fix the Gulf of Mexico dead zone —the largest off the United States— is to fix the Mississippi, but not everyone agrees how.

B Y PAUL GR EENB ER G PHOTOGRAPHS BY DENNIS CHAMBERLIN

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

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o get an idea of how American coastal waters might look just before they succumb to all the degradations they have suffered these past five centuries, it would be worth taking a July trip to Mobile Bay, an Alabama inlet that feeds into the Gulf of Mexico. If the air is still and hot, an event may occur that Gulf Coast residents call a “jubilee.” The bottom-dwelling flounder will be among its first victims, growing agitated as each successive gulp of water brings less and less oxygen across their gills. In a panic, the fish will head shoreward toward the only breathable water they can find—the tiny oxygenated riffle the sea makes as it bumps lazily against the beach. At the shoreline, they will find humans waiting for them armed with “gigs,” crude sticks with nails protruding. With an easy stab, each gigger will impale a suffocating fish, sometimes two at a time. Wading out farther, the fishermen will find sluggish pods of blue crab and brown shrimp. As the bay slowly asphyxiates and the free-for-all reaches its climax, the human whoops coming from the darkness will give the impression of a happy time—a celebration of the ocean’s seemingly endless gifts.

But make no mistake. The Mobile Bay jubilee, while generally accepted as a naturally occurring phenomenon, is no cause for celebration. It is, in fact, a harbinger of a much larger unnatural jubilee occurring next door in the Gulf of Mexico. At least since the 1970s, an oxygen-­ depleted “dead zone,” orders of magnitude larger than the Mobile event, has been forming and growing in the Gulf to the point where it now averages 5,700 square miles, bigger than the state of Connecticut. Nancy Rabalais, the executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and the dead zone’s leading researcher, likens the phenomenon to the equivalent of “stretching a sheet of plastic wrap from the mouth of the Mississippi River west to Galveston, Texas, and sucking out all the air.”

That this suffocation is taking place atop one of the most important commercial fishing grounds off the United States is alarming.

Yet, as environmental issues go, the Gulf dead zone, indeed all dead zones around the world, remains persistently below the public’s perception. Unlike strip-mining or deforestation,

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the Gulf dead zone is hard to observe. It forms miles from shore in an area only fishermen and oil prospectors frequent. And unlike other ocean problems, such as overfishing and offshore oil drilling, no immediate culprit can be identified at the scene of the crime.

But the more one examines dead zones (or “eutrophication-induced hypoxic areas,” as they are scientifically termed), the more one comes to understand they are critical to the future relationship between land and sea. Yes, dead zones are only now becoming a serious global problem. As they spread and worsen, they begin to reveal a terrible truth: That around the world humans are sacrificing seafood for land food.

Let me explain: Dead zones begin when rivers carry nitrogen and phosphorus-based nutrients—primarily agricultural fertilizers— into the ocean. In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, it is the Mississippi River that delivers nitrates, nitrites, and phosphates from the American heartland into the Gulf at a rate of 1.7 million tons per year. Once this stew of nutrients reaches the ocean, algae bloom in prodigious amounts.

When those algae die and settle to the bottom, bacteria consume them, sucking life-giving oxygen from the water. Compounding the problem: The freshwater that brings in these nutrients is less dense than the hypoxic saltwater and acts as something of a lid on the crypt below.

As industrial agriculture and animal feedlots have spread around the globe, dead zones have been spreading exponentially along with them. According to a 2008 study published in the journal Science, dead zones now affect 95,000 square miles of water in 400 different systems. They can be as small as the one in Mobile Bay or as large as the nearshore of

Europe’s Black Sea. They are as far away from the United States as the dozens of dead zones off the coast of the booming economies of Asia or as close to home as the ones in the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound.

But there is something about dead zones that makes them different from many other seemingly intractable environmental crises: Dead zones can be fixed. As the international dead-zone researcher Laurence Mee points out, the Black Sea dead zone—then the world’s largest—vanished in the 1990s when the Iron Curtain countries bordering the Danube River collapsed and fertilizer subsidies fell. Indeed, as the Danube/Black Sea system showed, the equation is simple: Turn off the flow of nutrients into rivers, and dead zones go away.

The question for Americans is, can we save our coastal waters before they choke to death?

The collapse of the Iron Curtain countries, not choice, salvaged what remained of the Danube/ Black Sea ecosystem. Americans, though, will have to choose to eliminate their dead zone.

In an effort to figure out whether we have the wherewithal to make this choice, I decided to travel the American equivalent of the Danube: that epic muddy python of a river called the Mississippi, which drains a 1,200-mile-wide swath of fertilized farmland stretching from the Rockies to the Appalachians. The more time I spent with the river, the more I realized it held the answer to the dead-zone question.

THE MISSISSIPPI BEGINS clear and cold at

Minnesota’s lovely Lake Itasca, a place where wild rice flutters in the shallows and remnant stands of old-growth oak and maple hint at what things looked like two centuries ago, a time when millions of acres of riverside forest and hundreds of millions of acres of native prairie covered the Mississippi Valley. But not long after the Mississippi exits Itasca State Park, the forest is replaced by agriculture and the river begins picking up tributaries from the modern world. Along one of these tributaries lives the corn and soybean farmer Brian Hicks of Tracy, Minnesota, who exemplifies the complex relationship between American farming and the Gulf dead zone.

It’s apparent when you begin talking with Hicks that he feels deeply about environmental issues, but he is also the father of ten children

Plant Food: Nitrogen-based fertilizer, used for commodity crops hundreds of miles north of the Gulf, is a primary cause of the dead zone. It takes 195 pounds of fertilizer to grow an acre of corn.

and uppermost in his thinking is the agricultural machine that maintains his family. “I tell lots of people that this farm is my factory,” he said to me as we drove through the snowbound expanse of his 1,500 acres that straddle the Cottonwood River, which feeds the Minnesota River, which, in turn, feeds the Mississippi. “Some factories make shoes. Mine makes corn and soybeans.”

Hicks’s Nettiewyynnt Farm, which is more than 120 years old, lies only a few miles from the Little House on the Prairie hamlet of Walnut Grove and the Laura Ingalls Wilder homestead. Over the past four generations, the farm has transitioned from a pioneer venture enriched by natural manure and tilled with human and animal labor into a mechanized operation that focuses exclusively on chemically fertilized, genetically modified corn and soy (“commodity crops” in ag parlance). According to the U.S. Geological Survey, commodity-crop production contributes 52 percent of the total nitrogen and 25 percent of the phosphorus load

that goes into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico every year. This share appears to be growing. “The production of commodity crops like corn has just exploded,” says Alex Echols of the land conservation and management organization Sand County Foundation. “A lot of new land has been put into cultivation—land that had never been in cultivation, range lands, marginal lands—and the conversion to grains accelerates nutrient loss.”

Two things have happened that have caused this acceleration. First has been the rise of the economies of the Far East. With so many more Asians entering the middle class and eating meat, farmers in China and elsewhere in Asia have begun importing American corn and soy to feed their growing herds.

Second has been the Unites States’ push to produce corn ethanol fuel. In the past ten years ethanol production has risen by a factor of six.

“Do we produce a product that is good?” Brian Kletscher, CEO of Highwater Ethanol, asked

me and Brian Hicks in his office, as a line of freight trucks loaded down with corn rumbled past the window into his ethanol facility. “We do. I think we’ve got it right. The U.S. farmer has been able to make some dollars this year.”

Corn prices are now 300 percent higher than they were a decade ago. With these kinds of prices, corn begets more corn; because it is so valuable, corn has become just about the easiest crop to insure, something that makes planting anything else a considerable risk. Add to this costs that have spiraled along with corn prices, and many farmers are caught in a bind. Nevertheless, whether you find yourself outside the Highwater plant in Lamberton, Minnesota, or a few miles up the road in Walnut Grove at one of the county’s railroad corn-­transportation hubs, you have the impression that the Mississippi has faded from the consciousness of a region that once depended upon it. A riveroblivious industrial infrastructure has been overlaid on the American heartland, where a

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A Win-Win: Jeff Strock, from the University of Minnesota, and farmer Brian Hicks are collaborating on experiments to keep nutrients in the soil and out of waterways. This station measures surface runoff and provides data for reforming farm practices.

golden torrent of corn flows east and west by rail or truck, servicing alternately the movement of hydrocarbons in and out of refineries or the transfer of goods to and from China.

This redirected flow of money has dramatically affected how farmers treat their land and correspondingly, how they treat the Mississippi. Up until corn prices’ recent surge, a government initiative called the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) did a lot to keep dead zone–forming fertilizers from entering rivers. The CRP pays farmers not to farm highly erodible lands. Another government initiative, called the Wetlands Reserve Program, fosters the restoration of wetlands that have previously been farmed. Wetlands sequester and process fertilizers by giving wild vegetation a chance to process runoff and transform those nutrients back into gaseous nitrogen; if kept in forest or prairie, steep slopes prevent nutrients from flowing into watersheds. The price farmers were paid to refrain from farming these marginal lands usually bested what farmers could earn from planting corn in them. Throughout the postwar years, nutrient runoff was kept somewhat in check. But today with Asian and ethanol buyers competing for corn, crop prices are now higher than any government conservation program can pay. Much of the land that was key to preventing nutrients from entering the Mississippi is now getting planted.

Brian Hicks, though, is trying to find a

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compromise. As we cruised his fields in his 4≈4, we came to a three-foot-high metal box that offers a window into the heart of the problem as well as perhaps a solution. Few of us are aware when we fly over the grid of farmland in the Mississippi Valley that beneath that grid lies another grid—a human-created reworking of the Mississippi’s natural drainage system known as “tiling.” “In Minnesota before settlers arrived, we had 18 million acres of wetlands,” says Jeff Strock, a professor at the University of Minnesota, who works with Hicks on several nutrient-­retention experiments. “But when people moved here, water was seen as the common enemy.” Starting in the 19th century, pioneer towns were tiled in an attempt to drain off standing water that was associated with diseases and mosquitos. The practice soon spread to agriculture. Farmers began laying clay pipe beneath wetland to make land suitably dry for planting. Today, something like 80 percent of Midwest cropland has been tiled with evenmore-efficient plastic pipe, routing water off the land and fertilizers into drainage ditches.

These empty into tributaries of the Mississippi.

Hicks is trying to fix his tiling system. The three-foot-high box he showed me was, in essence, a switch that had the capability to shut off the flow of nutrients into the river. Whereas many other farmers let their tiling flow continuously, Hicks can time the opening and closing of his outflow, allowing water and fertilizers to be

strategically retained in the soil. This also allows his crops to prosper even during drought conditions. “It’s a win-win situation,” Strock says.

Hicks has other fixes. As I sat with his family eating a Tater Tot casserole, the combination of good intentions and determination was evident. In one room, I looked through Hicks’s daughter’s scrapbook of prairie flowers that she’d plucked from her family’s wild prairie hay field—a field the Hicks maintain in its natural state to further sequester nutrients.

In another room, I took in Hicks’s PowerPoint presentation with all of its stewardship ideas.

Whether through GPS -based monitoring that allows him to pinpoint portions of his land that require less fertilizer or through better tiling, it is in Hicks’s interest to keep nutrients on his land because it makes his crops grow better.

“My feeling is that most farmers,” he says, “they realize the dead zone is there, but I think they all feel like, ‘You know, I’m one little farmer. … What I do can’t really affect the Gulf of Mexico.’ But what I’m reading and what I’m feeling and seeing is I know what we are doing as far as managing outflow is positively impacting the environment.”

This kind of can-do, voluntary effort is echoed and encouraged at the highest level of U.S. agriculture. When I talked to Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, he was eager to point out that the administration was working to get the agricultural Midwest to address the problem of the dead zone. The Upper Mississippi Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative, a program that has spent $341 million on various watershedprotection projects since 2010, encourages many of the practices that Hicks is pursuing: “low till” and “no till” cultivation methods that limit the annual turnover of soil; GPS monitoring of fertilizer application; installation of untilled buffer strips along streams; use of cover crops in winter. The incentive for farmers is that by employing these best practices, they may protect themselves against future water-quality regulations. But it’s important to note that none of these efforts is directed at the core of American agricultural activity—the production of corn and soy. Rather, what the department seems concerned with is a complicated dance with other regulatory bodies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency, to avoid telling the politically important constituency of

swing-state Midwestern farmers what to do.

“If you have a voluntary operation and you are able to measure and quantify the benefits from that voluntary effort,” Vilsack told me, “then it may not be necessary that you establish requirements or mandates. This is an incentive-driven system, which is designed to provide a reason for people to do something as opposed to force them to do something.”

THERE ARE SOME WHO believe that every-

thing Vilsack is proposing and that farmers like Hicks are executing is nothing more than a Band-Aid on a gaping hemorrhage that started the moment settlers began their free-for-all on the prairie and sliced into the Midwest’s native sod. In other words, the problem of nutrient loading into the Mississippi isn’t the methods of commodity-crop farming but commoditycrop farming itself: a system that destroys how water should naturally move from the plains to the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Chief among those critics is Wes Jackson, director of the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, and an oft-quoted spokesperson for the ending of farming as we know it.

“The essential problem is this,” Jackson told me. “Humans went from perennial polyculture to annual monocultures. This in my view was the biblical fall.”

Jackson’s goal is to create, through plant breeding, a set of crops that function like the plant communities of the native prairie. His research has shown that the root structure of the perennial and diverse prairie grasses of the primeval Midwest extended their roots as much as three feet down into the soil. When nutrients flowed toward the Mississippi and its tributaries, they were intercepted by these root structures, processed, and dissipated. Indeed, Jackson’s monitoring of a plot of prairie left in its native state on the Land Institute’s grounds reveals that almost zero nutrients leave a system planted in native grasses.

Once the native prairie was destroyed, artificially produced nitrogen fertilizers had to be created, something that occurred as a result of innovations in the early 20th century. Today, more than a third of a corn farmer’s annual budget is spent on fertilizer. Jackson wants to get away from all of this. After 20 years of plant breeding, the Land Institute has developed its

Brian Hicks

AS INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE AND ANIMAL FEEDLOTS HAVE SPREAD AROUND THE GLOBE, DEAD ZONES HAVE BEEN SPREADING EXPONENTIALLY ALONG WITH THEM. first perennial grain crop, Thinopyrum intermedium, or kernza, a grain resembling wheat, which can be used to make flour, beer, and even whiskey. Whereas annual crops like corn and wheat are planted and torn up every year, Jackson’s perennial crops stay in place, allowing humans to harvest again and again without disturbing the soil. In such a system, soils would be stabilized and artificial fertilizer would be greatly diminished. The loading of nutrients into the Mississippi would be greatly reduced.

Of course, the kinds of grains that would be produced from a Jacksonian agricultural system would be of a different nature than the ones currently grown in the Midwest. Unlike corn and soy crops, which feed into industrial products like ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup, and cattle feed, Jackson crops would

primarily feed people. Instead of a commoditybased agriculture system, which sacrifices the health of the Mississippi and by extension, the Gulf of Mexico, Jackson has proposed a “FiftyYear Farm Bill,” which would serve as a blueprint for this redirection and reprogramming of the heartland. “If you take our 328 million acres of cropland, right now it’s 80 percent in annuals and 20 percent in perennials,” Jackson told me. “My proposal is that at the end of 50 years, we would have 20 percent annuals and 80 percent perennials. We just reverse it.”

Some doubt such a system of agriculture could work in its primary task: feeding us.

Alex Echols of the Sand County Foundation sees the agriculture–dead zone relationship as immensely more complex that no “silver bullet” can solve. “Projections are that we will have to produce more food in the next generation than we have in the combined history of 8,000 years of agriculture,” he says.

Jackson, though, is insistent that his concept can work. “We can do it,” he told me, “but it will take a commitment from our society to get that done. This is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture should be working on instead of accommodating the cattle and pig welfare program and the biofuels industry.”

THE MISSISSIPPI HAS suffered many ills

requiring solutions that go beyond agriculture.

A thousand miles downriver from the corngrowing heartland, I tried to get a sense of what those other options might be—what else

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Paul Hartfield

we could do to get out of our dead-zone predicament. I found part of the answer in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where I met up with Paul Hartfield, a spry 63-year-old biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Hartfield has been working on the river this past quarter-­century, doing everything from tracking the endangered pallid sturgeon to cataloging freshwater mussels to mapping the migrations of shrimp that once traveled from the Gulf of Mexico all the way north to Ohio.

As we set out in a battered skiff, he explained how the degraded condition of the lower river got that way. “Once upon a time,” Hartfield said, “we had a floodplain that was over 100 miles wide. Now along most of the river it’s probably not more than five.” In the past, the river regularly overflowed its banks, allowing nitrogen and phosphorus to spread out into a vast floodplain. When it did this, the current slowed, sediment settled, and the water became clear enough for sunlight to penetrate. This would allow photosynthetic algae to bloom and process nutrients. As a result, a significant part of the nutrient load was consumed before it could reach the Gulf of Mexico.

Decisions made 150 years ago, though, have largely destroyed all that.

The Mississippi has been called “the most engineered river on the planet,” and the reason it was engineered to such an extent was so that farmers could gain access to the tremendous fertility the river deposited in the meandering floodplain. As early as 1857, a geologist

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LOUISIANA IS CURRENTLY LOSING DELTA LAND AT A RATE OF ONE-THIRD OF MANHATTAN A YEAR, LAND THAT WAS ONCE CRITICAL TO PREVENTING THE GULF DEAD ZONE. predicted that if the river could be contained and the floodplain secured, the Mississippi Valley would become “the central point—the garden spot of the North American continent— where wealth and prosperity culminate.”

As John Barry relates in his Mississippi River history, Rising Tide, James Buchanan Eads was one of the first to figure out how to control the river and claim the rich floodplains. In 1833, Eads arrived in the frontier town of St. Louis at the age of 13, penniless; he soon launched a lucrative salvage business, rescuing everything from steamboats to blocks of lead from the river. Inventing a primitive diving bell, Eads walked the river bottom.

He intimately “felt” the river and understood the nature of its power. Eventually he would imagine a river-long system of levees and

diversions that would start in Cairo, Illinois, and extend to the eponymously named Port Eads, Louisiana, pinching the river and draining the floodplain.

Eads’s most devastating idea was even more radical: Turn the river from a lazy wandering affair into a straight line. Although this did not occur in Eads’s lifetime, his proposal was taken up after the record flood of 1927. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Army Corps of Engineers systematically lopped off what had been called “The Greenville Bends” and a dozen other large river bends, shortening the river by 150 miles. Floods were indeed reduced, but afterward the lower Mississippi transitioned from being a complex marshy wetland into a fire hose that blasted nitrogen and phosphorus straight into the Gulf. It is this fire hose that Hartfield is hoping to adjust.

Heading upstream across the broad muddy river, Hartfield spoke about his long-standing negotiations with the Army Corps of Engineers.

“The Corps are focused on what’s out here,” he said, indicating the main part of the river where government engineers try to maintain a safe and efficient navigable channel. Up ahead, we came to a turnoff, and he veered his skiff off to the left. “Me, I’m focused on what’s in here.”

In a little while, we turned into a different habitat called a “backswamp.” Carefully he guided the boat through an eerie forest of halfsubmerged trees. A pair of green and red navigation buoys and other random refuse, which had been flushed from upstream, bobbed by.

“This is a peaceful spot to contemplate the dissolution of the elements,” Hartfield mused.

What Hartfield envisions is a series of little fixes on the model of this quiet little patch of backswamp. He has been trying to persuade the Army Corps to create modest redirections of current that do not affect navigation but at the same time move more water into floodplain channels and swamps. “These small local modifications,” he said, “can be constructed during routine maintenance and construction activities, at no extra cost to the taxpayer.”

The swamp’s impact on water quality is immediately visible. On the upstream side of the backswamp, several miles away, the water entering the floodplain was a milk-chocolaty brown, rife with all the sediments and nutrients the river holds. As we emerged on the

In The Backswamp: Paul Hartfield, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, inspects a natural levee formed in the Mississippi River north of Vicksburg.

downstream side, water flowed out of the vegetation almost translucent with the deep green color of living algae luxuriating in a liquid feast.

“All the leaves and stems of the vegetation growing in the swamp slow that water down, and the sediment drops out,” Hartfield said.

“When the water clears and sunlight gets in, the algae bloom and consume the nitrogen and phosphorus in the water. Really, when you think about it, a floodplain is a river’s kidney.”

All the work Hartfield is doing makes an intrinsic sense. The river is not being allowed to do what it is supposed to do. Its wetlands, its kidneys, are failing, and it needs some kind of dialysis to set things straight. This is one of those points that naturalists like Hartfield contemplate their entire careers. But unlike many who have moved through the ranks of government bureaucracy, Hartfield allows himself to imagine the river of the future—a river where backswamps abound. When I prepared to leave Hartfield for southern Louisiana, I

asked him what he would do if by some miracle he could have all the money in the world.

“If I had all the money in the world? Hmm—” he said, smiling in his cheerful way and peering downstream. “I’d move the levees back five miles, then turn it all into a park from Cairo, Illinois, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Then I’d leave it alone and let the river fix itself.”

ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, though, is

not at Hartfield’s disposal. But tens of billions of dollars could be there for him and other river-delta dreamers. That is, if BP will ever settle the Clean Water Act lawsuit it faces in the wake of its 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But as I stepped into the Federal Court building on Poydras Street in New Orleans, a few blocks west of the Mississippi, it seemed clear that BP, having paid out $10.7 billion to environmental groups, fishermen, and other private and public entities, had no great desire to spend money on the river or improved agricultural

techniques or any other thing besides its own legal defense. BP had recently balked at a $16 billion settlement offer from the Environmental Protection Agency. In the grand balconied federal court building, thousands of dollars in legal fees were pouring through the floorboards as 20-odd lawyers and other suited professionals listened to mind-numbingly boring testimony by Transocean’s chief electronics technician aboard the Deepwater Horizon on an “integrated automatic control system” and how it may have allegedly been disabled.

This felt surreal given the much more urgent alarm system blaring from the failing Mississippi Delta. For thanks to a combination of a half-century of bad behavior by the oil industry and the changes to the Mississippi’s course, the land where the Poydras Street courthouse sits is in danger of disappearing. The state of Louisiana is currently losing delta land at a rate of one-third of Manhattan a year, land that was once critical to preventing the Gulf dead zone.

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Earth Makers : The Lake Hermitage project will eventually build 650 acres of marshland in the Mississippi Delta, but whether man-made wetlands will last or reduce the Gulf dead zone remains a much-debated question.

Just as the Mississippi floodplain upstream has been radically altered by engineering, the boot of Louisiana in the far south, once the largest chunk of marshland in the continental United States, has been markedly changed by engineering. The wild, pre-20th-century Mississippi, with its constantly shifting watercourse and wide floodplain, built much of Louisiana. But now that the river has been leveed, sediment shoots out into the Gulf’s deeper water and builds nowhere near the amount of land it used to. Added to this are the incursions by the oil companies that some scientists believe are even more devastating than the river’s containment. As Rowan Jacobsen notes in his book Shadows on the Gulf, throughout the 1950s, oil companies built pipelines and shipping channels to facilitate the delivery of petroleum offshore to inshore refineries. Once channels were dug, water flows were altered. Natural winding shallow channels were replaced by man-made straight deep canals; the levees of the dredged materials were built in an unbroken line parallel to the canals. These “spoil banks” interrupted what’s known as sheet flow across the wetlands, rotting them from the inside out. The Louisiana marsh, that great nutrient filter at the end of the river, is falling apart.

The BP oil spill, of course, is not directly responsible for land loss or, for that matter, the Gulf dead zone. But the money that comes out of the BP suit could do a lot toward fixing

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both. The state has drawn up a “Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast,” a 50-year, $50 billion effort that seeks to stop Louisiana from sinking into the sea and by extension decrease the dead zone. A major part of the plan is the granddaddy of all dead-zone mitigators: the rebuilding of the Louisiana marsh, an area so degraded that it requires not just a nutrient dialysis machine but a multibillion-­dollar kidney transplant.

A day after my visit to the BP trial, I went on a road trip to one of these transplant operations with a group of officials and contractors working with the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA). In the community of West Pointe à la Hache, I saw a cluster of enormous white tubes rising up over the Mississippi’s levee and extending into the sea. Hopping onto a boat, we followed this expensive piece of plumbing called a “sediment diversion” to its end. There, at the outflow, sat some of the newest land on earth, land that state officials hope will save the Poydras Street courthouse and all the settled territory upstream, while at the same time helping to fix the dead zone.

“There’s been some work on nutrient-­ assimilation capacity of coastal wetlands,” Richard Raynie, senior scientist with the authority, told me as we tromped around the brand-new mud. “The numbers we’ve seen show that when you divert river water through wetlands, as much as 45 percent of

nitrogen can be removed and assimilated.”

While Raynie can’t say how much of the Mississippi’s total nitrogen load could be removed by a fully restored marsh, the hope is that it will be considerable. That hope is fueled by a recent study Raynie mentioned that found that nutrient assimilation within vegetated wetland soils may be as much as ten times higher than that within degraded open-water soils, which result from marshes falling apart.

It is hard to say if all of this is futility. Given that sea levels may rise as much as seven feet before the end of the century, the project can have the feel of expensive sand-castle building.

Still, the vision of marshland with all its potential for filtration being created before my eyes was powerful. After West Pointe à la Hache, the CPRA van took me to a second reconstruction project a few miles up the river near the town of Myrtle Grove. This older human-made mudflat was home to grasses and even some low-lying bushes. It looked like marshland. It felt like marshland. At least in theory, it should filter some of whatever the river was bringing down to the Gulf. Would it last? Was it “real” marsh?

Or was it just a mirage created to mask the bad agricultural practices upstream? As I paced along the new land, I heard a loud “hsssssssss” and looked down to see a venomous cottonmouth snake, fangs bared, ready to strike. As if nature and the state government were saying with one mouth, “Watch out. This might be fake land, but it’s our land now.”

WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT is mirage? What

will fix the Gulf dead zone and what will just seem like it’s fixing it? These questions dogged me as I skirted the edges of the Mississippi and wandered into the bureaucracy that attends it.

At the end of my research, I sat down in Baton Rouge with MacArthur Foundation “genius” grantee Nancy Rabalais and her husband, R. Eugene Turner, two scientists who perhaps more than any others have awakened the public to dead zones. In talking to them, it is easy to get the impression that no matter what we did in the delta, nothing could accommodate the growing flood of nutrients being unleashed in the upper valley. To them, even something as nice-­ sounding as “Louisiana marsh creation” carries within it the biblical fall Wes Jackson had mentioned: the moment when we turned to the

Floodgates: Natural marshlands like Bayou Bienvenue, a few miles from New Orleans, filter the nutrients coming down the Mississippi.

industrialization of our agricultural heartland.

“Those sediment diversions bringing in inorganic matter,” Turner told me, referring to all that expensive plumbing and land building at West Pointe à la Hache, “are filled with the effluent of nitrogen-rich fertilizers of industrial agriculture. In the end, the diversions don’t help the marsh but harm it. The plants that grow in these new marshes will have shallower roots, because they don’t have to go looking for nutrients, and the organic soils decompose faster.” Pointing to the 55 square miles of marsh lost during Hurricane Katrina, he and Rabalais doubt that the rebuilt marshes will last, and they are not optimistic about their capacity to assimilate nutrients.

What it comes down to, they assert, is our agricultural policy: a policy that overwhelmingly encourages corn. Like Jackson, with whom Turner collaborated in forming the organization Green Lands Blue Waters, they believe the Department of Agriculture itself needs to be

reformed to fix the dead zone. “I’d like to have a social system that has healthy farms imbedded in healthy communities,” Turner says. “We are trying to get demonstration watersheds where the whole community is involved in the watershed. I’d like to use agricultural subsidies to help transition to an alternative system.” Turner applied to the state of Louisiana for a portion of the BP settlement money to be directed to this kind of model community. That application has gone, as he puts it, “nowhere.”

What will happen to the Gulf dead zone?

Rabalais shakes her head at this question and recalls what occurred 20 years ago in that other dead zone, the one caused when nutrients flowed in abundance from the heart of Europe into the Black Sea and, for a time, maimed it.

“It’s exactly like the Danube,” she says.

Later, as my homeward-bound plane rose above New Orleans and arced low over the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf beyond, I thought of the life they contain. All the shrimp, oysters,

flounder, crab, snapper, tuna, swordfish—a cornucopia, an expression of the very hope of the New World, full of wild food that satisfies millions of stomachs and could satisfy many more if the waters were treated better.

And I thought of the Black Sea, a sea of the Old World, which was once as rich, a sea that humans pushed to its breaking point before their societies collapsed. The dead zone in the Black Sea has indeed been fixed. The sea has come back to life, but only to a point. According to scientists who studied the Black Sea’s transition, the communities that once lived there will never fully recover. Invasive jellyfish have taken up residence since its waters were reoxygenated, and its once-rich mussel beds no longer pave the sea’s floor. Yes, fish, mostly little ones, still swim in the Black Sea. An important anchovy fishery persists. But the big fish are mostly gone, the food chains are broken, and the great seafood economy, famous since the time of Byzantium, is now a matter of history. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

PATTY MURRAY in 19 Takes How the senator from Washington quietly became one of Capitol Hill’s most influential players

BY JAMELLE BOUIE AND PATRICK CALDWELL IL L U ST R AT ION B Y ST E VE MOOR S

No. 1: The Fixer atty Murray may be the dullest, most unremarkable member of the United States Senate. Two decades in, she lacks any major legislation to her name, isn’t associated with an issue, rarely appears on television, almost always speaks in gray generalities, and seems to have spent the bulk of her time focused on sending earmarks back to Washington state. As one staffer puts it, the most interesting thing about Murray is how uninteresting she is. She’s also the most important politician you’ve never heard of.

As conference secretary, she’s the fourthranking Democrat in the Senate, which makes her the highest-ranking woman in the chamber. Last year, she chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), spearheading the party’s surprising string of victories in the November elections. Thanks to

40 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

her efforts, the Senate now has 20 women, the most ever. And as chair of the powerful Budget Committee, she is going up against Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman whose budget has shaped the political conversation for two years and counting. Without many noticing, she’s become the party’s fixer.

No. 2: A Children’s Story One afternoon in late March, a few days after she had remained on the Senate floor until 5 A.M. marshaling Democratic colleagues to pass her budget, Murray perched on a preschoolersize chair at the Denise Louie Education Center in Seattle’s International District. A picture book, King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub, lay in her lap, and more than a dozen well-behaved Head Start students sat cross-legged before her. Reading to kids is not unusual for a U.S. senator—like eating a pastrami sandwich at a Jewish deli, it’s a classic photo op—but for

Murray, this was also a throwback. Before she first ran for elected office, Murray worked as a preschool teacher.

King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub tells the story of a king who refuses to leave his beloved bathtub. Courtiers and flatterers from across the realm come with schemes to lure the king from the tub—a fishing trip, a masquerade ball—but nothing dislodges him. All hope is lost until an ordinary court page, who has been lingering in the background, offers an impossibly simple solution: Why doesn’t someone pull the drain plug? “Glug, glug, glug,” Murray read. “That’s how he got him out,” she ad-libbed.

Straightforward. Unglamorous. Practical.

It’s almost as if Murray wrote herself into the story. The purpose of the event was to show how the sequester—the series of indiscriminate cuts that remove $1.2 trillion from the government over the next decade—will force schools like Denise Louie to slash their budget.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

But the event, like almost any event involving an elected figure, had another function. It reminded the folks back home that the former preschool teacher is now one of the power centers in the U.S. Senate.

Adopts it as her rallying cry. Member of Shoreline School District Board of Directors (1985– 1989), Washington state senator (1989–1992), and U.S. senator (1993–Present).

No. 3: Bio

Democrats have not even tried to present a budget for the past three years—and for good reason. To craft their 2014 budget, Murray had to satisfy competing segments of the party, each with its own interests, concerns, and priorities. Mark Warner of Virginia needs to show his constituents he’s worried about the deficit, while Jeff Merkley of Oregon needs to show that he is protecting retirement programs. If the budget were just an accounting of positions and programs, it would be less of a challenge.

Lawmakers are often happy to split the difference behind closed doors. But a budget is more political than programmatic, and every Democrat will have to defend its whole even if he or she disagrees with some of its parts.

With 20 Democratic seats up for re-election, Murray has to assuage the fears of vulnerable senators. On top of all this, Murray must draw

Personal history: Born in 1950 to Beverly and David Johns. Raised in Bothell, Washington.

Twin sister of Peggy. Father a World War II vet who ran a five-and-dime store, disabled by multiple sclerosis when Murray was 15. Family turns to government assistance. Marries Rob Murray in 1972. Currently maintains a home on Whidbey Island. Two children. Two grandchildren.

Degrees: Bachelor of arts in physical education from Washington State University.

Work experience: Preschool teacher (1977– 1984). Parenting instructor at Shoreline Community College (1984–1987).

Political experience: Activist for environmental and educational issues (1983–1988). Told by a state senator that she was “just a mom in tennis shoes. Go home. You can’t make a difference.”

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No. 4: The Murray Budget

john durick a / ap images

Year Of The Woman: Murray appears with Hillary Clinton, Barbara Mikulski, and Dianne Feinstein at a 1993 press conference.

a sharp contrast between her budget and the ones produced by the Republicans and the White House.

That Murray had to negotiate among different factions and ideologies means that her budget isn’t the most liberal on the table. This distinction goes to the budget proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which calls for trillions in new investment for infrastructure, health care, and education and for lower defense spending. Murray’s budget is less a difference in kind than a difference of degree. She offers a modest increase in stimulus and restores funding to social programs. In a nod to centrist Democrats, she includes steps toward long-term deficit reduction, achieved by overhauling the tax code, cutting military spending, and saving on interest. Unlike the White House budget, which trims Social Security benefits, there are no cuts to retirement programs, save those found in the Affordable Care Act. It was Murray’s decision to hold the line on entitlements that earned her the most praise from liberal activists and observers.

Murray’s budget comes close to representing the Democratic consensus on spending and the size of government. It achieves nearly $2 trillion in deficit reduction by evenly splitting new revenue and spending cuts. But, according to Senator Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, this was no foregone conclusion. “The basic structure was set,” he says, “but not the proportions and not the details of the numbers. It evolved through the deliberations.”

The ten Democrats and two independents on the Budget Committee met five times behind closed doors to air grievances. Liberal members argued that new revenues should provide around 80 percent of the deficit reduction. After all, they contended, the vast bulk of debt reduction since 2010 has come from spending cuts. Rather than putting divisions up for a vote and letting the negotiations devolve into an intra-party squabble, Murray allowed each side to have its say while pushing toward consensus. When rifts couldn’t be bridged, Murray would reserve the final decision for herself, always keeping to her low-key tenor and avoiding crushing any egos. “She got where she wanted through inclusion and persuasion, not intimidation and threats,” King

says. “She explicitly said at the latter stages of the committee process: ‘I know that everybody here isn’t going to like the result, but we’re going to have to hang together if we’re going to get to a place where we can ultimately negotiate a successful budget at the end.’” The Democrats voted unanimously to move the budget out of committee.

On March 23, the Senate passed Murray’s budget, 50 to 49. Only four Democrats opposed it, all representing red states and facing re-election in 2014: Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. (Baucus has since announced he will not be seeking another term.) To corral almost all of her Democratic colleagues was a triumph of Murray’s pragmatic style. That style, though, was about to run up against Republican intransigence.

No. 5: The Accidental Winner In late 1991, three years after she beat a Republican incumbent to win a state senate seat, Murray announced that she was challenging Democratic incumbent Brock Adams for the U.S. Senate. She was jumping to one of the highest levels of American politics and, by her own admission, wasn’t prepared. “Patty told me she had never slept away from home by herself since she had been married,” says Elizabeth Sullivan, who worked on the campaign. “Whenever she was away, she had been with Rob.” Murray hadn’t mastered public speaking, had no name recognition, and was terrible at fundraising. “She didn’t like to talk about money, she didn’t like to think about money, she didn’t want to ask for money,” Sullivan says.

“We always had to pair her with someone who could actually make the ask for a check.”

Murray entered the race mostly to make a statement. “Patty didn’t feel like kitchen-table issues were being addressed,” Sullivan says. “So she said, ‘I know I probably can’t win, but I have to run since you can’t just have a bunch of old white guys sitting around deciding things for American families.’”

Murray’s determination was rewarded with good luck. In March 1992, The Seattle Times published an exposé detailing accusations of sexual harassment and assault against Adams.

He dropped his re-election campaign the same

day. “Suddenly,” Sullivan says, “this went from something that probably wasn’t going to happen to something that really could.”

Murray was not the first choice of the party establishment. Support from EMILY ’s List, which had been founded seven years earlier to elect Democratic women to the Senate, proved key. “We were very serious about doing a lot of investigation into whether our women candidates could win,” says founder Ellen Malcolm.

“When we got into a race, we were kind of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for women candidates. It gave her huge credibility.” In a Seattle Times poll after the primary, one out of three voters cited Murray’s gender as an important factor.

In the general election, Murray faced Representative Rod Chandler, a five-term moderate Republican. He outspent Murray 2 to 1, though that gap would have been even wider had it not been for EMILY’s List. Chandler mocked Murray’s lack of experience, citing his years in Congress to bolster his bona fides. The tactic backfired. Murray tapped into the national swell of anti-incumbent fever. She stuck with her mom-in-­tennis-shoes persona. Like the primary, the general election showcased an ability that Murray has applied throughout her career: a talent for turning a perceived weakness—her gender, her inexperience, her lack of charisma—into an advantage.

Pundits’ predictions of a close contest proved unfounded. National networks called the race at 8:02 P.M. as Murray sailed to an eight-point victory. “We keep hearing it’s the year of the outsider,” Murray said at her Seattle victory party. “But that’s really a strange message. I am part of a middle-class American family.

We’re typical people. They call us outsiders.

But what this election is all about is making us insiders. We’re the insiders.”

No. 6: The Description Used in Nearly Every Interview about Patty Murray “There is no better workhorse than Senator Murray.” —Matt Canter, deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee “She’s a workhorse and not a show horse.”

—Mazie Hirono, senator from Hawaii “There’s nothing about Patty Murray that

says ‘show horse.’” —Ed Zuckerman, 1992 campaign consultant “She’s just a workhorse.” —Anonymous congressional staffer “There’s a tradition of Senate insiders who wield enormous influence who don’t get a lot of public notice. There have probably always been a lot of senators who are more show horses than workhorses. Some are both. And then there are fewer who are workhorses and not looking for the spotlight.” —Bill Samuel, director of Government Affairs at the AFL-CIO

No. 7: Mentors Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. When Murray arrived in the Senate in 1993, she sought out the loquacious chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, who viewed himself as the last defender of the chamber’s arcane traditions. Murray once described her decision as going to “the master’s knee to learn the rules of the Senate.” It was a smart choice, one that demonstrated her keen strategic sense.

Byrd was so impressed Murray cared about the institution that he rewarded her with a spot on Appropriations, the ATM that allocates congressional spending. “I knew that a lot of policy comes when you write the checkbook,” Murray says. “At home, when you decide where your money is going to go, you decide what the policy is going to be.”

Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland.

Murray’s 1992 class increased the number of women in the Senate from two to six. She was heading to a workplace hostile to women. A Washington Post poll released just as Murray arrived found rampant sexual harassment on the Hill; one out of nine women surveyed said she had been harassed by a member of Congress, and nearly half said they feared retaliation if they reported an incident of sexual harassment. Mikulski, who had been elected six years earlier, organized the female caucus into a series of bipartisan monthly dinners.

“There’s no manual on how to be a senator, right?” Murray says. “There is no manual on how you help your state. Barbara Mikulski brought us together for a conversation and has done it for every election since for all the women coming in, to help them get past the ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ stage to the ‘How do you pass legislation?’ stage.”

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

No. 8: The Pragmatist There’s something peculiarly undefined about Murray’s ideology. She’s a liberal, a West Coast liberal to be precise: strong on social issues, the environment, workers’ rights, and the government’s role in society. She hews closely to the Democratic talking points of the day. But it’s hard to discern a coherent vision or theory behind her views. She is as far left as you can go without alienating the centrists in the party.

More than anything, she’s a pragmatist. Success trumps belief in the “right” things. At the same time, Murray doesn’t venerate moderation for its own sake—she’s no Rahm Emanuel.

“She’s a strong progressive,” says a former Budget Committee staff member, “but she won’t tilt at windmills, she won’t force a vote on something she knows she’s not going to win.”

No. 9: Senator Earmark Earmarks, or “pork,” are legislative provisions that direct funds toward specific projects in the lawmaker’s home state. Their main purpose is to grease the wheels of lawmaking. Don’t support a particular bill? No worries. If you vote for it, we’ll give you $10 million to build a new maritime museum in your state. Earmarks also serve a secondary purpose. By providing money to build libraries, bridges, and jobtraining centers, they are tangible evidence of government. They allow lawmakers to go back to their districts and states and say, “Look, this is what I did for you.” If democracy is about representing the people’s interests, then there is a lot to be said for earmarks.

For clean-government advocates, however, earmarks embody much of what’s wrong with politics. In their view, earmarks often go to projects that interest groups demand, not to what a community needs. They waste money.

Worse, they smack of bribery. John McCain devoted a disproportionate amount of his 2008 presidential campaign to railing against earmarks. President Barack Obama pledged to veto any earmark-laden bill in his 2011 State of the Union: “The American people deserve to know that special interests aren’t larding up legislation with pet projects.” The Senate banned them in 2011.

Murray was a master at obtaining earmarks.

Between 2008 and 2010, for example, she sponsored 596 earmarks and directed nearly

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$1 billion in federal funds back to Washington state, placing her in the top ten of Senate earmarkers. This is why Mikulski, another superb generator of earmarks, refers to Murray as a “bread-and-butter Democrat.” For years, Murray’s press office churned out press releases touting the money she had brought to Washington. How was Murray able to direct so many federal dollars to her state? Sitting on the Appropriations Committee, which she has done for her entire time in the Senate, is the best possible position from which to sponsor projects.

No. 10: A Sampling of Earmarks, 2008–2010  Peer-reviewed breast-cancer research program, $138,000,000  Columbia R iver f ish mitigation, $83,256,000  Construction for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, $15,000,000  Lake Washington ship canal, $7,012,000  National Guard Youth Challenge Program, $12,000,000  Mud Mountain Dam, $3,830,000  2010 Olympics Coordination Center, $4,500,000  High-speed aluminum towable boat lifts, $4,000,000  Portable launch-and-recover y system for unmanned aerial-vehicle operation, $3,200,000  Skokomish Tribe Reservation road improvements, $1,330,000  National Methamphetamine Training and Technical Assistance Center, $1,300,000  Dawson’s Place Child Advocacy Center, for the acquisition and renovation of a new facility, $974,000  Boys & Girls Clubs of Southwest Washington, for expansion of the existing youth facility, $974,000  Y WCA , Yakima, for infrastructure improvements to domestic-violence facility, $960,000  Aerospace Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee, for skills training for the aerospace industry, $470,000  Organic cropping, Washington State University, $264,000  Northwest Center, King County, for providing and expanding academic and vocational

resources to developmentally delayed or disabled persons, $195,000

No. 11: Climbing the Ladder No one chairs a Senate campaign committee out of goodwill. For two years, you do almost nothing but campaign. You recruit candidates, raise money, and subject yourself to fierce second-­g uessing. If you succeed and win seats for your party, you receive a pat on the back. If you fail and lose seats, you’re blamed.

Why, then, would anyone take the job?

Because it’s a path to leadership. The list of former chairs for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee includes Lloyd Bentsen (future vice-presidential candidate), George Mitchell (future majority leader), John Kerry (future presidential candidate), Jon Corzine (future governor), and Charles Schumer (eager to be majority leader).

Which is why it came as a surprise when Murray agreed to chair the DSCC for the 2002 cycle. In her years in office, she had avoided the spotlight and had never expressed any ambitions to be a national figure. Was it because it was a chance to be the first woman to lead the committee? “No, not at all,” she says. “I thought it was important, and I thought it was an important part of me helping others be successful and to give back to what other people did for me.”

In which case, her tenure was a mixed bag.

Her team raised more than $143 million, beating the previous record by $40 million, but Democrats lost two seats. For the first time since 1914 a president’s party had taken control of the Senate in a midterm election. Most observers, though, attributed the outcome to George W. Bush’s post-9/11 popularity and the death of Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who had been favored to win.

Murray’s reputation at the end of her tenure was unscathed. In fact, it probably was enhanced. She had proved that she could manage large egos and oversee an organization with myriad moving parts. “She put together a strong staff. They raised a lot of money.

Their recruiting was strong,” The Cook Political Report wrote at the time.

After she stepped down as chair, Minority Leader Tom Daschle offered Murray an informal spot with the leadership. Two years later,

after the 2004 election, Harry Reid appointed her assistant floor leader—a nominal position she used to expand her presence behind the scenes. When Democrats retook the Senate majority in 2006, Reid encouraged her to run for secretary of the conference. She was elected without opposition.

No. 12: Political Savvy (D.C. Edition) During leadership press conferences, Murray tends to stand in the rear, only stepping forward when it’s her turn to speak, quickly retreating when reporters toss questions.

Whether she avoids the spotlight as a conscious strategy (it allows her to be the consummate inside player), as a leadership style (“People are most familiar with the loud, more male type of leadership,” says Mazie Hirono), or as a reflection of her temperament (that’s not how her ego expresses itself), or all three, Murray is one of the most camera-shy members of the Senate. By jetting home to Whidbey Island almost every weekend, she rarely makes the Sunday TV circuit.

“There are many senators with sharp elbows when it comes to press conferences and microphones,” says Dick Durbin, senator from Illinois, Democratic majority whip, and one of Murray’s closest friends. “Patty is not one of them. She’s sensitive to other members and their political and personal needs. Over time that really creates a positive impression.”

No. 13: A Typical Interview with Patty Murray

j. scot t applewhite / ap images

MARCH 25, 2013

Why did you take a second stint as DSCC chair in 2012?

“I really care about my country and about its future. I think it’s really important to have really good people in elected office writing policy, passing policy, and managing our country. You don’t just hope it happens. You go out and work to make it happen.”

You’re not on TV as often as many of your colleagues. Is that a conscious decision?

“My job is to help move our country forward, in whatever way. Whether it’s working with veterans, whether it’s writing a budget, whether it’s environmental policy, and I try and do my job as best as I can. To me, what’s

Workhorse: For the past 18 months, Murray has been the Democrats’ point person in the budget battles.

important is the work and getting people to do it, to help people understand it and to come home and remember who I am and why I go to work every day.”

MARCH 27, 2013

What do you read?

“I’m an eclectic reader and an eclectic listener.”

What do you listen to?

“Again, I’m very eclectic when it comes to all types of things. I just like to learn and hear different things.”

No. 14: The Toughest Campaign The question in 2010 wasn’t whether the Democratic Party was going to lose seats in Congress but how many. The economy remained in critical condition, the Affordable Care Act was unpopular, and the public saw little value in the stimulus. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) targeted Murray.

Defeating her would send a message to liberals that even a well-liked three-term veteran was vulnerable.

The committee enlisted Dino Rossi, a former state senator in Washington who had run for governor in 2004 and 2008, to run against Murray. But what Rossi and the NRSC didn’t realize was that Murray had been anticipating a year like 2010. According to her campaign manager Jeff Bjornstad, she understood early on that she might be facing her most difficult re-election. “It was probably in ’09,” Bjornstad says. “She was smart enough to go, ‘Hey, this might be a little bit different than previous elections.’”

Murray amassed more than $17 million, including more than $3.5 million from political action committees and other outside groups.

It was the most she had ever raised, and the total bested Rossi by more than $7 million. The funds came from Murray’s traditional donors: EMILY ’s List was the top individual contributor, followed by Microsoft, the University of Washington, and Boeing. She received one of her largest chunks from software engineers, exactly the kind of group that would cultivate a longtime senator from Washington state.

The Republicans’ most inspired television

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

ad went after Murray’s trademark image. It featured a Murray look-alike, wearing tennis shoes, walking across prostrate members of a family, who are grimacing in pain. On the screen appeared the words “Patty Murray: 18 Years on Our Backs.” But it wasn’t enough to give Rossi an edge over Murray’s long-standing popularity and her war chest. When election night came, she finished with a 14,000-vote advantage that, over the next several days, expanded by tens of thousands, giving her a final margin of 52.3 percent to Rossi’s 47.6 percent. With a five-point spread, it was the closest election of her career.

No. 15: The Underestimated “She doesn’t mind being underestimated because, I think, people are surprised when she out-hustles them.” —Rick Desimone, chief of staff, 1999–2006 “Patty is the kind of person who, if you tell her she can’t do something, that just fires her up. That was just the worst thing you could say to her.” —Ed Zuckerman, 1992 campaign consultant

46 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

“The political establishment, as often happens with women candidates, underestimated Patty.” —Ellen Malcolm, founder of EMILY’s List “You underestimate Patty Murray at your own peril.” —Teresa Purcell, 1992 campaign manager

No. 16: The Campaigner No one wanted to chair the DSCC in 2012. The 2010 midterms had been a bloodbath in which the party lost a near-record number of seats in the House and saw its Senate advantage slip to a bare majority. Because Democrats were defending almost half their seats, bouncing back in the Senate would be a difficult, grinding task.

Soon after the midterms, Harry Reid was scrambling, offering the chair to anyone within earshot. Charles Schumer, Mark Warner, Al Franken, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mark Udall, and Michael Bennet all turned him down.

Murray also rebuffed Reid. “A lot of people come to the committee as a sort of steppingstone to leadership,” says Matt Canter of the DSCC . “She was already in leadership!” But

j. scot t applewhite / ap images

Power Quartet: Murray, Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, and Dick Durbin make up the Democratic leadership in the Senate.

Reid circled back, enlisting White House Deputy Chief of Staff and soon-to-be Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina, and this time Murray assented once more to direct the Democrats’ senatorial campaigns.

“Pretty much no one thought we would win,” Murray says. Part of her early reluctance had been exhaustion from her tough 2010 re-­election, but that also gave her a better grasp of the political climate than many of her colleagues. Her message to the incumbents: Waiting until the summer before Election Day would be too late. “This is no longer a fourthquarter game,” Canter says.

Of the 23 seats Murray would have to defend, eight were competitive: Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. She knew early on that she wanted to identify strong women candidates. “Patty reached out to me long before I thought seriously about running for the Senate,” says Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. “She was gently encouraging, willing to offer candid advice and to talk about both the good and the bad of running for office.”

In the years since Murray first ran for the Senate, the conventional wisdom about women candidates had been turned on its head. Many political scientists now argue that having a woman on the ballot might be an advantage. “I open the door for women rather than closing it,” Murray says, “and I think that makes a big difference in talking to people about running for the Senate.”

Recognizing that the election cycle began earlier than ever, Murray and the DSCC waded into the Democratic primaries. In December 2011, the committee endorsed then-­C ongresswoman Hirono over former Congressman Ed Case in the Hawaii primary. Murray’s preference for female candidates, though, didn’t prevent the DSCC from supporting Congressman Chris Murphy over former Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz in the Connecticut primary. The committee had concluded he was the stronger candidate. The committee also exploited the Tea Party insurgency. In Missouri, where Claire McCaskill faced defeat, it spent hundreds of thousands during the GOP primary to bolster the rightwing credentials of Congressman Todd Akin, the weakest candidate in the field. The gambit

paid off when Akin told an interviewer that rape exceptions in abortion laws were unnecessary, because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that down.”

He quickly became a national embarrassment.

Unlike her Republican counterparts, Murray let candidates build their own brands, independent of the national party. If Richard Carmona, who was running in Arizona, needed to shy away from his party affiliation to win, he would still receive all the help he needed.

Murray may have refrained from micromanaging the campaigns, but she remained in constant touch. “I just remember the moment at which the worst of the attack ads had appeared on television,” Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin says, “she was sort of following everything really closely. Just getting this voicemail message going, ‘I know what this is like right now and carry on, you’re going to get through this,’ it was lovely.”

The committee raised $146 million, surpassing Murray’s 2002 record by more than $2 million and outpacing the Republicans by almost $29 million. The slate of female candidates proved essential for gaining that haul. The DSCC set up independent fundraising committees that focused on boosting the women running for office. “We did cross-country road shows where all the women got on a plane to speak for the others,” Mikulski says.

“It was phenomenal. One weekend, we went to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, back to Washington state, over to Missouri to help Claire McCaskill.”

On Election Day, the Democrats successfully defended all of their Senate seats, except for Nebraska, expanded their majority with pickups in Massachusetts, Indiana, and Maine, increased the number of avowed liberals, and brought in more women to the chamber than any time in history. “When I came to the Senate, senators were named Tom, Dick, and Harry,” Mikulski says. “Now they’re named Tammy, Heidi, and Mazie.”

No. 17: Political Savvy (Back-Home Edition) It’s been more than three decades since Murray first visited the Washington state capitol to protest education cuts only to be told that she was “just a mom in tennis shoes. Go home.” Rather

than recoiling from the put-down, Murray took ownership of it. She embraced the persona during her first campaigns and holds on to it today.

“I am a mom in tennis shoes—there’s no doubt,” she says. “If I could have them on right now, I just would.” She hosts an annual Golden Tennis Shoes luncheon back home, and her D.C. office is littered with tennis shoes—some actual footwear, others art pieces.

Both genuine and manufactured, the momin-tennis-shoes is a humble guise, one that demystifies the grandeur of the Senate office.

It’s a facade Murray has used throughout her career, a means to disarm voters and colleagues who might otherwise be threatened by a powerful woman in politics.

No. 18: The Budget in Theory Here’s how the budget process is supposed to work, what members of Congress refer to as “regular order.”

At the beginning of the calendar year, the president submits a budget request to Congress, a comprehensive package of the administration’s intended spending and revenue plans for the next fiscal year.

The House and Senate budget committees then draft their own resolutions, which are submitted to their respective chambers by early April. In the Senate, the resolution cannot be filibustered. Debate is left open, which allows members from both parties to offer amendments. In the House, debate is closed off and amendments prohibited. Once each chamber has approved a budget resolution, selected senators and representatives sit down in a conference committee, where they work through their differences and produce a joint budget. The House and Senate then approve the resolution.

This, it turns out, is incredibly difficult. Not only is it hard to get 51 senators or 218 representatives to agree on a budget resolution, but when each party controls a chamber and has diametrically opposed visions of the federal government—Republicans want to shrink it, Democrats don’t—reconciling two budgets is all but impossible. The last time both chambers agreed on a budget was in 2009, when Democrats had overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate.

Everyone in Washington likes to talk about

the 2014 budget, but the fact of the matter is there’s almost no chance the two sides will reach an agreement.

No. 19: The Budget in Practice Once Murray’s budget cleared the Senate on March 23, it should have headed toward conference committee where it would be reconciled with the House plan. But Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, chair of the House Committee on the Budget, refused to select anyone to the committee.

After last year’s election, Murray reached out to Ryan, and on December 13 they had breakfast in the Senate dining room. The two had never met. Both agree that it was a cordial conversation.

“We talked more personally about his family, my family, what brought us into politics, kind of what drives you,” Murray says, “which is really important to know about somebody if you want to negotiate.”

“I like her,” Ryan says. “She’s easy to talk to.

We very clearly have different perspectives, different philosophies. But her personality makes her easy to deal with, easy to talk to.”

“I understand that I will have to give up on some things I care about,” says Murray. “But the only way we get there is if everyone compromises. I have that capability. The question is whether Paul Ryan does.”

What Murray is not saying publicly: It’s not in the GOP’s interest to end the budget impasse.

Crisis governance—debt-ceiling threats, shutdowns—allows Republicans to claim a new scalp every few months. Ryan acknowledges as much. “I think a lot of members think that we have very few leverage devices in the minority and must use the ones we’ve got for good policy,” he says. “It’s simple, I think.”

Ryan and Murray continued to meet throughout April. Ryan resisted every overture, noting the cavernous gap between their two plans. Murray and her Senate colleagues grew increasingly frustrated, and on April 23 Harry Reid took to the Senate floor, asking for unanimous consent to appoint conferees to a budget committee. Standing for the Republican Party, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania objected and, at least for the time being, Murray’s budget—her first substantial legislative achievement—lay dormant. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

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Grave markers of unidentified people who died crossing the border are scattered throughout South Texas. These pictures were taken in Carrizo Springs and Laredo cemeteries.

Every year hundreds of immigrants die along the U.S.–Mexico border.

Too many are never identified.

BY BRENDAN BORRELL

all photos by brendan borrell

T

he path across the border is littered with bodies. Bodies old and bodies young. Bodies known and bodies unknown. Bodies hidden, bodies buried, bodies lost, and bodies found. The stories of the dead haunt the frontier towns from Nuevo Laredo to Nogales, and even deep within the interior of Mexico down to Honduras, someone always knows someone who has vanished—one of los desaparecidos—during their journey north.

Many of those missing end up in the South Texas soil. Out on the Glass Ranch, a man named Wayne Johnson stumbles upon a skull, some bones, and a pair of dentures scattered near a dry pond. During a bass fishing tournament at La Amistad Lake, anglers come upon a decomposing corpse near the water’s edge.

Late one summer night, a train rumbles down the Union Pacific Line, but it fails to rouse a father and son slumbering on the tracks. For 2012, Brooks County, with a population of just 7,223, reported 129 deaths from immigrants trying to evade the Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias, double the previous year. The county judge told the San Antonio ExpressNews that Brooks had run out of space for John Does in its Sacred Heart Cemetery.

The dead appear in springtime, when temperatures hit the triple digits, their fading T-shirts and tennis shoes strewn about the land like wilted wildflowers. Whether they tried to cross for money, love, or security, they did so knowing they might not make it alive.

Their families keep hoping and hunting for answers—if they can. Last May, 22-year-old Aldo collapsed on a South Texas ranch and made one last, desperate cell-phone call to his older brother Alejandro in Houston. But Alejandro can’t drive there to conduct a search because he, too, is here illegally. “More than anything, I would like to know what happened to my brother,” he says, “because if I could retrieve some part of his body to bring down to Mexico, we could give him a proper burial.”

Compared to Arizona, which identifies most of its unknown remains, Texas lets the corpses pile up. Autopsies are rarely conducted, DNA samples are not taken, and bodies are buried in poorly marked graves. Shortly after medical examiner Corinne Stern started working in Laredo, she found a 12-year-old skull from an unknown Hispanic man sitting on a shelf in the evidence room of the sheriff’s office. It was devoid of any information about where it came from or how it ended up there. Mercedes Doretti of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which is working to identify the remains of missing migrants, calls the region from Houston to San Antonio and south to McAllen the “Bermuda Triangle” for bodies.

South Texas is a huge swath of ranch and farmland larger than New York state and with the population of New Mexico—about two million—most of it concentrated on the border.

Urban centers have sprouted up around the international crossing points at Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville, where

residents are twice as likely to speak Spanish than English. Outside of these areas, the vast, vacant properties date back to Spanish land grants and have passed from their original owners to wealthy white families from Dallas or Houston, giving them a chance to play John Wayne for a weekend or shoot white-tail bucks sporting 18-point antlers. Development once amounted to hunting blinds poking out above the monotonous scrub, but the natural-gas boom has brought in trains of tractor-trailers, oil-field equipment, and scores of temporary houses with air-conditioners roaring full blast.

About half of the nation’s migrant deaths occur out here in the zone between the frontier towns and the U.S. Border Patrol’s immigration checkpoints situated up to some 60 miles away. It’s about a three-day hike through the hot, thorny scrub to evade the checkpoints.

Although Texas law has mandated the collection of DNA from unidentified remains for the past decade and a federal grant pays for gene sequencing for any body found on U.S. soil, these programs have provided little relief for families of the missing. Just one of 28 South Texas counties has a full-fledged medical examiner’s office, and that office is only a few years old. Justices of the peace, or JPs, who are elected to two-year terms, are often the highest-­ ranking legal officials. They may issue search and arrest warrants, decide small legal matters, and act as the coroner even if they only have a passing familiarity with law or medicine. Many JPs are first- or second-generation immigrants

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

themselves, but they are still loath to pay $2,000 out of the county budget for an autopsy of a presumed migrant who died with no signs of foul play. Many don’t even take a genetic sample, which only costs a few hundred dollars. Some JPs may be unaware of the law; others ignore it.

You often hear locals talk about the sound of a mesquite branch breaking in the night, the murmur of a foreign tongue over the hill, or a shadow dancing across their headlights.

There are tales of men with sunken-in eyes, stumbling into town so parched they look like skeletons. To live in South Texas is to live among these spirits.

ON A QUIET STREET OF one-story homes in

Carrizo Springs, a small town that lies between Eagle Pass and Laredo, Rito Valdez tucks his

a skinny, unlit cigar as Valdez whips out his smartphone. Just yesterday, Leonard was opining to me on the good luck he’d been having as far as illegals were concerned. “Knock on wood that there haven’t been any this year,” he’d said.

So much for that. Valdez leans over and photographs the dead man’s round face, his hands, and even the logo on his blue jeans. The man had glued carpet to the soles of his sneakers to obscure his tracks in the sand, but evidently he had run out of water, or food, or energy. Border Patrol spotted his body on the Briscoe Ranch, and by the look and smell of him, he had probably been baking there for several days.

The sheriff’s department would write up a brief incident report, and a JP would sign the death certificate, but no one in the county had plans to take a DNA sample. Valdez’s job

burials. “Arm or leg or whatever, they put it in like a bucket and come and bury it.”

Leonard hands Valdez a Ziploc bag containing a wad of Mexican pesos and a photocopy of a birth certificate, which may or may not be authentic. Some migrants use fake documents to avoid being marked as two-time offenders or to avoid being deported to home countries other than Mexico, which makes an attempted return that much harder. The certificate says the man was 35. The dead are often found less than a mile from the river, Valdez says, their fatal path tracing a broad circle in the featureless terrain.

After we climb into the hearse for the 45-minute ride back to Eagle Pass, Valdez gives me some advice: “Don’t breathe with your nose, just your mouth.” He rolls down the windows and talks about his job. “We’re not

Whether they tried to cross for money, love, or security, they did so knowing they might not make it alive.

Their families keep hoping and hunting for answers. red tie into the front of his dress shirt and doubles up on blue Tyvek gloves. Climbing into the bed of a pickup truck, he peels open a green body bag to examine the man’s corpse inside: sun-blackened, swollen, and pulsing with puscolored maggots that emerge from the mouth and eye sockets in rivulets. Flies dance in the June sun like quicksilver. The stench of rot blows over to me in short, hot blasts.

Valdez is a soft-spoken 32-year-old with a few extra pounds on his frame and a shiny pate as sparsely covered as the Texas chaparral. He is the third-generation director for the Memorial Funeral Chapels, a company that operates both in Eagle Pass and across the river in Piedras Negras, where his grandfather once served as mayor. Valdez has the Maverick County contract to pick up John Does for $135 apiece. He will ship bodies by road as far as Chiapas, 1,200 miles south. He also gets called out to Carrizo Springs, in the neighboring county of Dimmit, because of his Mexican connections and his walk-in freezer, a rare commodity that allows him to hold cadavers for two weeks.

Bruce Leonard, the white-haired funeral director in Carrizo Springs, is chomping on

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is to figure out who this man is and what to do with him. If he can find the family within two weeks, usually with the help of the Mexican Consulate, he can make as much as a couple of thousand dollars. If not, he’ll bury the body at a loss. “I’m not going to lie to you,” Valdez says. “This is a business.”

By his count, 19 of 45 bodies collected in Maverick in the last three years remain unidentified. In the local graveyard in Eagle Pass, some have white wooden crosses to mark their final resting spots. In Carrizo Springs, unknowns end up in an overgrown row at the Guadalupe #4 cemetery north of town. Their cheap aluminum markers are hidden in the tall grass, sometimes lying on their sides, bent, faded, and missing letters. One simply says: “San Pedro Ranch September 17 2011.” Another reads: “Unknown Faith Ranch July 16 2010.” Another: “Unidentified In Case.” In Brackett­v ille, about an hour north of Eagle Pass, unknown bodies are marked with printed slips of paper under a protective sheath of plastic. Some are now unreadable. “If they find a skull, they just bury it,” says Diana Gonzalez of the Kinney County Treasurer’s Office, which pays for pauper

doctors,” he says, “but it’s almost the same. We are 24-7. People don’t ask you when they can die.” One moment he’ll be clad in a suit jacket expressing his condolences to a family, and the next moment, he’ll be hurrying through the coffin showroom and out the back door to haul home another corpse. It’s been that way his whole life. He grew up on the second story of the funeral home. He started working at age 6 and has been picking up the bodies of migrants since he was 16.

Many Mexicans, he says, don’t like to cremate the dead, and their families will go to great lengths to bring the body back home. In part, this stems from Catholicism—the Vatican had banned cremation until 1963—but it also speaks to the importance of funeral rites among Mexicans, who celebrate the Day of the Dead every November 2 with parades and visits to cemeteries. Valdez can’t fulfill the families’ wishes if the body has been outside for too long. “Sometimes they are so decomposed that it’s impossible to hold the body for their family to see them,” he says. “That’s the worst, for people to know that they are there, but they can’t see them.”

Criminal gangs in Mexico have made his

Funeral director Rito Valdez, shown here examining a corpse before it’s loaded into a hearse, is paid $135 apiece to collect dead bodies. If he can find a family back home, he can make more.

work more complicated. He used to make eight trips a day across the border to increasingly violent Piedras Negras, but now he goes just once a week. His drivers used to travel all night to deliver bodies to the Yucatán, but now the Zetas gang has imposed a curfew and a surcharge.

When his chapel there unwittingly held the funeral for a cartel member, it was swarmed by federal agents who sequestered the mourners for questions. Once, someone called claiming he was the captain of the Zetas and had taken all Valdez’s employees in Piedras hostage. If Valdez didn’t start wiring him $2,000 per month, he was going to kill them one at a time. “Do it,” Valdez said, hanging up his cell.

He had heard about scams being orchestrated by inmates in Mexico City and secretly phoned Piedras on his second line. A funeral, he was assured, was proceeding without a hitch.

We pull up to the back of Valdez’s Eagle Pass chapel, a blocky stucco building surrounded by empty lots, and I watch him load the body into his freezer and douse it with a pink formaldehyde solution. He points out two other unidentified cadavers in their late teens or early 20s.

Several days earlier, they were shot in the head and left floating in their underwear in a putrid irrigation canal on the outskirts of town. They haven’t been identified.

AS MIGRANTS CROSS INTO South Texas, the

first obstacle they encounter is the river. The Rio Grande, known as the Rio Bravo in Mexico,

has its headwaters in the mountains of southern Colorado and then flows for about 1,200 miles through the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas, the savannah-covered limestone of the Edwards Plateau, and, finally, the grapefruit groves and cotton fields of the South Texas plains. When it passes under the international bridges in Laredo, it’s no wider than 50 feet across, and the emerald waters are sometimes shallow enough to wade through. At its mouth on the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, it is deep and meandering and cloudy with brown sediment.

The river became a place of death after World War II, when demand for workers outpaced the laws meant to regulate immigration. In 1942, Mexico signed a pact with the U.S., creating the first guest-worker program. But Texas was excluded because the state had not agreed to terms that established minimum wages and decent housing. Texas farmers and ranchers were happy, however, to hire those who swam across the Rio Grande illegally. An estimated 300,000 Mexicans were soon entering the U.S. each year by legal and illegal means. During the harvest season of 1949, at least one “wetback”— as the newspapers then called them—drowned each day in the Rio Grande.

Operation Wetback, the first major crackdown on illegal immigration, came in July 1954, in response to concerns about the growing immigrant population. Over several months, one million Mexicans outstaying their welcome were rounded up in neighborhoods

from California to Texas and sent home by rail, bus, and ferry. Deportations by sea ended two years later after dozens of Mexicans jumped off the crowded “hell ship” Mercurio to protest its unsanitary conditions and seven drowned.

In recent decades, illegal immigration to the U.S. again soared and, with it, fatalities rose along the border. In the 1990s, the Border Patrol was catching well over a million border crossers each year. Even as arrests in the Southwest have declined in the last seven years—to just 356,873 in 2012—deaths reported by the Border Patrol have mostly remained steady at about 300 to 400 each year. With a beefed-up enforcement presence along more accessible parts of the frontier, immigrants are following riskier, more isolated trails to evade capture. Last year, the dead in Texas numbered 272, according to the Border Patrol, pushing it above Arizona’s total, 186, for the first time in almost a decade.

Those counts are bound to be underestimates.

Some corpses are picked up by local law enforcement, others are discovered on the Mexican side of the river, and many are never found. The best estimates for the border region as a whole come from a 2009 report by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican National Commission of Human Rights, which put the dead at 600 to 700 annually. That means that every day about one body will turn up—or be lost forever—somewhere in South Texas.

It’s easy to understand how so many people who cross the river run into trouble. They have

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

In the Eagle Pass Cemetery, white crosses mark the unknown dead. Across the border in Ciudad Acuña, Aurora Valdez points to a picture of her son, José-Luis, who died crossing the Rio Grande.

enough food for a day or two but are stranded for a week. The weather is hotter or colder than they were expecting, and the water they were promised never materializes. They are unlikely to have any survival or first-aid skills. They may have come up from Guatemala or southern Mexico, and by the time they finally set out on foot in the arid Brush Country, they are out of cash, out of food, and out of good sense.

Edgar Lara can tell you what happens out there, though he’d rather not. The 30-year-old is seeing a therapist in Monterrey, Mexico, now, but he remains traumatized from the night a year ago when his 20-year-old cousin died in his arms out near El Indio, about 20 miles southeast of Eagle Pass. “Aw, man, it’s hard,” he tells me. He tries to speak but the words tumble out in the wrong order. “I don’t talk about that to nobody,” he sighs. Then, he starts again, racing through the story so that the sadness won’t catch up to him.

His cousin, Yaressi Morales, had been living in Austin since she was six, when her mother took her there illegally. When Yaressi was arrested and deported, Edgar told her father he would help bring her back home. But on their first day on Texas soil, Yaressi grew so exhausted from the heat that Edgar laid her down under the shade of an elm tree. Their fellow travelers had already moved on. He tried to give her water and food, but she chewed her lips and tongue bloody as she went into convulsions from heatstroke.

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Edgar was too frightened to leave her behind so he made a signal fire, sent text messages to his family for help, and yelled into the moonless sky. At half past midnight, Yaressi opened her eyes and looked up at him one last time before falling limp. He gave her CPR until sweat was burning his eyes. It was useless. He slumped back in the dirt. He cried. Then he wrapped his sweater and an old jacket tightly around her.

He covered her corpse with sticks and rocks to keep wild hogs or raccoons from gnawing at it.

THE VILEST CARCASSES are the floaters. They

turn green, swell up like a balloon, and stink to high heaven. In October 2010, at about ten in the morning, three Border Patrol agents in a boat found one—a man with a red plaid shirt around his waist, face down in a shallow eddy on the edge of the river. They called in the body to the sheriff’s deputy in Comstock, 30 miles up the river from Del Rio, but it was in such a sorry state that it had to be buried without a name in the Sacred Heart Cemetery. Three days later, the man’s brother, who works in the U.S., found out about it. The cemetery dug up the wood coffin, and the brother drove over to identify him.

The woman who owns that cemetery, Judy Cox, has Elvira eyelashes, a necklace with grape-size pearls, and a jewel-encrusted pendant ornamented with her first initial. When I meet her at the G.W. Cox funeral home one afternoon, she tells me she took over the business seven years ago when her husband died.

She systematically goes through unknown plots, phoning the sheriff’s department, the Mexican Consulate, and local businesses. “We don’t just let it rest,” she says, pulling out a typed list of a dozen names she’s tracked down, both Mexicans and Americans. “I can’t stand the idea of burying someone and their family not knowing what happened to them.”

“There was a JP here for years,” she says. “I’m not giving names, but when he was called out to a scene at a ranch on the river, he would not go any closer to the body than that doorway right there”—a distance of about 15 feet. “He would ask my husband, ‘Well, what do you think happened, George?’ ‘Yeah, he’s dead.’ That’s it. He didn’t order any type of follow-up whatsoever.”

After the dead man on the river was identified, Judy says she left him in the ground next to George. “I didn’t have the nerve to tell my mother-in-law, who just turned 94, that I buried a Hispanic on our plot,” she says. She even had a matching tombstone engraved for him: “José-Luis Castañeda Valdez Nov. 18, 1957– Oct. 2 2010.”

Before I leave, Judy gives me a copy of José’s death certificate so that I can find his mother, Aurora, just across the border in Ciudad Acuña.

The next day, I park my car on the U.S. side of the crossing and take a minivan taxi over the border into the hilly streets of this relatively peaceful desert town. A group of women selling fruit juice points me to the metal gate leading to Aurora’s place. Clothes are air-drying in her

modest but well-tended garden. An old tree keeps the whole place shaded, and green plants sprout up from car tires and paint buckets.

Aurora slowly climbs the steps. She is not even five feet tall, solid but weathered, with deep frown lines etched into her loose, earthy skin.

I explain in broken Spanish that I am here to talk about her son.

“Which one?” she asks.

“The one who was lost in the—” I begin inelegantly.

“El que muríó,” she replies. The one who died. Her face scrunches up and her lower lip juts out. “I have suffered so much for him,” she wails. “He was so good to me.”

In the guest room, she shows me the last picture of her eldest son, 52-year-old José. It’s almost a mirage, a framed photo of the screen

A few days later, José told Aurora he was done with crossing. He had an offer to take care of some goats in Mexico. But his friends needed him. They had never crossed themselves and begged for his help. They returned to the bluffs, but the river was higher than before. It had been four and a half feet and now it was eight. The current was swift. The three were swept downstream, and they struggled to cling to the green bamboo and reeds that line the northern shore. By the time Alfredo pulled himself to safety, José was gone. “The day that these eyes close,” Aurora tells me, “is the day that I am going to rest.”

THERE ARE FEW HAPPY endings when some-

one goes missing on the border, but answers of any sort become harder to find when that

investigating. She hired a guide to take her into Mexico. He taught her how to talk like a Mexican and avoid drawing attention to herself, but she left without an answer. “I want to find him alive,” she says. “Whether alive or dead, an end to the uncertainty of hoping that one day he will appear, is going to calm my … my … my … my anguish, my desperation. That is what keeps us fighting. Not only to find my boy, but all of those that have vanished, right?”

Until recently, there was little hope that DNA from a body found on U.S. or Mexican soil would ever be linked to a family in El Salvador. The Federal Bureau of Investigation might work with foreign authorities on high-profile criminal cases, but most of the time it was left to migrant advocacy groups to perform low-tech detective work by going door-to-door

He cried. Then he wrapped his sweater and an old jacket tightly around her. He covered her corpse with sticks and rocks to keep wild hogs or raccoons from gnawing at it. of a cheap cell phone. The words “Sprint” and “Menú” overlay the lower half of the image.

Blurry and blown up beyond recognition, he stands there with a blue baseball cap and a mustache, his broad, pixelated smile stretching from cheek to cheek. José was a restless wanderer who loved the Bee Gees, spoke English like a native, and refused to settle down with any of his girlfriends. He had lived with his mother off and on over his adult life. Other times, he’d worked on ranches in Texas and at a hotel in Los Angeles where the Indian owners loved him so much, Aurora says, they joked about adopting him.

Whenever José crossed the Rio Grande, he’d call his mother promptly to let her know he was safe. When he decided in September 2010 to make the trip with his friend Alfredo and another man, he had a compass and knew a rancher who hid a key to his house and stocked it with food. It would be relatively safe. But as they neared the bluffs at the river’s edge, a rattlesnake struck Alfredo. José gave him a shot of hard liquor and applied lemons and garlic to the wound—a folk treatment—so that they could make it back to Acuña to recover.

person has come from southern Mexico or Central America. Fewer of these long-distance travelers have close ties to the people they are making the trek with. They use false names and false documents, and they’re less likely to remain with stricken companions or to inform officials of their whereabouts. Migration has also become big business for drug cartels such as the Zetas, which control crossing points and safe houses in northeastern Mexico and have distinguished themselves through gaudy displays of cruelty, a fact that renders families fearful of making inquiries. Thousands of migrants have been kidnapped, enslaved, extorted, or killed before they even reach the border, sometimes in collusion with Mexican authorities.

The last time Anita Zelaya, an El Salvadorian, heard from her son Rafael was on May 2, 2002. “Look, Mom, we’re leaving tomorrow,” he told her on his final call from Frontera Hidalgo in the Mexican state of Chiapas. He was nabbed by Mexican immigration, separated from his companions, and had to hire a new coyote to give it another shot. From there, the trail ran cold. Anita spent a week

or posting photos of the missing on bulletin boards and hoping someone recognized the person from their own journey. But a few years ago, Mercedes “Mimi” Doretti, co-founder of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which investigated human-rights abuses in the aftermath of Argentina’s “Dirty War,” began developing a network of forensic banks in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Chiapas to improve the sharing of data related to missing migrants.

Doretti, now in her mid-fifties, makes frequent trips to South Texas and Central America, but since 1992 she has been based in Brooklyn, where she has a one-room office in the DUMBO neighborhood. She has a headset on over her long brown hair and is in the middle of a Skype conversation with a family in Honduras. When was the last time you spoke to him? Was he left-handed or right-handed?

Does he have any dental fillings or crowns?

Doretti finished university during the twilight of Argentina’s right-wing dictatorship, which was responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 people, including political opponents and human-rights activists, in the late

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

1970s and early 1980s. After the country transitioned to democracy in 1983, she exhumed the mass graves of los desaparecidos and identified them, primarily using dental records, X-rays, and fingerprints. She has since achieved world recognition for her work, receiving a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and serving as chair of the board of trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture. Over the past 25 years, she has worked in dozens of former war zones, including Iraqi Kurdistan, East Timor, and Bosnia, where the first large-scale effort to use DNA to identify the dead was launched. “They were making 100 identifications a month,” Doretti says. “It was unbelievable.”

As DNA sequencing became cheaper and more accessible in the early 2000s, the Argen-

pending confirmation. Some remains have dated back to 2000; most have been found after that. Doretti shows me the forensic file of one recent identification from South Texas.

In that case, a family had reported their missing relative around the same time a badly decomposed body turned up. The DNA results revealed that all 15 gene alleles sequenced could be traced to either the mother or father.

When a match is made, Doretti notifies the family that their relative has died and shares the evidence she has compiled in a meeting that can last several hours. She is often on the verge of tears, she says, but does her best to hold them back. “It’s very clear that it’s their time to cry,” she says. “I should deal with my emotions on my own time.”

When it comes to Texas, Doretti has no easy

made a DNA match, but the body from which the DNA sample came could no longer be located in the cemetery. She is now asking Valley Forensics, a private firm that performs autopsies for Hidalgo County, to send samples from presumed migrants’ bodies found in South Texas to Bode Technology for sequencing at her expense. For those long dead, however, she has little hope. “An unknown number of remains have been buried without taking any samples,” she says. “It’s a mess.”

THIS SPRING, A TINY organization called Los

Angeles del Desierto raised the alarm about the handling of bodies in Brooks County, which has unusually high numbers of deaths.

The organization, based in San Diego, is run

by Rafael Larraenza Hernandez, a 58-year-

Exhuming a corpse is a different business than entombing one.

After a dozen or more years, little may be left except for metal latches, a plastic-wrapped Bible, and fragments of bones. tineans established a nongovernmental genetic bank for relatives of the disappeared with hopes of identifying more than 600 skeletons that remained nameless. Doretti recognized that the forensic problems faced by the families of Central American migrants were not so different from those in Argentina, and she officially launched the Missing Migrants Program in August 2011. Typically, families of the missing will learn about the program through local organizations such as El Salvador’s Committee of Families of Dead and Missing Migrants.

Doretti’s team may interview them in person in the home countries, at foreign consulates in the U.S., or over Skype. Then the team reviews medical records and takes a blood sample, which is sent for sequencing at Bode Technology in Lorton, Virginia, the company that processed remains from both Bosnia and the World Trade Center.

The Missing Migrants database now has 468 open files, each of which is linked to DNA profiles from several family members, including Anita Zelaya from El Salvador. Since 2011, Doretti has put names on 30 remains, including 12 from Texas, and has 30 promising leads

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way to compare the DNA from families with the DNA from unidentified remains there. The National Institute of Justice awarded grants to several centers to sequence all remains found on U.S. soil, and those centers control the data.

The Pima County Medical Examiner’s office in Arizona is using its grant funds to perform a massive comparison of all its genetic profiles. It’s a labor-intensive process, but it has been successful. By contrast, the center with grant funding in Texas, the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, will only use the funds to evaluate a genetic match when requested by the FBI or another government agency. “It takes a lot of time to review the data,” says Arthur Eisenberg, the center’s director, adding that he’s not sure if he’s contractually allowed to devote time to reviewing the genetic profiles of foreign families. “If I do anything inappropriate, then the money may stop.”

Doretti is now sequencing some Texas remains herself. With a fresh body, she has a limited amount of time to find a match before the county, which has to pay for cold storage, buries it in a pauper grave. In one case, she

old Mexican native who has lived in the U.S. for 30 years. In 1996, he was moved by news stories of migrants perishing in the desert and began conducting search-and-rescue missions on the border in Arizona and California in an extended-­cab pickup stocked with water, food, and first-aid supplies. Larraenza estimates that he has recovered about 35 corpses over the years.

Two years ago, he noticed an uptick in calls he was getting from families about relatives lost or in trouble in Texas. He began making the 20-hour drive out there at least once every other month, funding his trips through donations from families and the sale of homemade candles. When he visited Falfurrias, a Brooks County town 60 miles due north of McAllen, ranchers there wouldn’t let him onto their properties to conduct searches. He was infuriated that of the 129 recorded deaths in 2012, 47 had been put in the ground at the Sacred Heart Cemetery without being identified by friends or relatives. “More than 50 people have asked me for help,” Larraenza says. “I am pretty sure some of the missing will be in that cemetery or on those ranches.”

Mercedes Doretti, who’s identified the dead in Argentina and Bosnia, is now helping families of missing migrants in South Texas. At right, Baylor students excavate bodies for DNA sequencing.

He soon joined forces with migrant advocacy groups including the South Texas Civil Rights Project. On February 20, during a march on the county courthouse, they hand-delivered a letter to the justice of the peace, the county judge, and the county attorney, demanding that DNA samples be collected from all human remains and sent for sequencing. “Falfurrias, TX, is becoming the center of a humanitarian crisis,” they wrote. “If we do not work to address this issue immediately, all indicators point to a growing trend of remains going unidentified.”

Officials agreed to exhume the unknown bodies and send samples for DNA testing, as long as the funds for it didn’t eat into the meager county budget. Lori Baker, a forensic archaeologist from Baylor University, a Baptist college in Waco, agreed to help. One spring day, I join Baker as she leads a dig at a Del Rio cemetery to uncover six bodies. It’s almost a practice run for what she’ll be doing in Falfurrias, and it’s the first excavation of its kind that has ever been done in Texas.

A small woman who pulls her dirty-blond hair back into a high ponytail, she is fighting to maintain her chipper demeanor—and her energy—in the face of scorching temperatures.

Helping her out are two dozen students and a former Texas Ranger everyone calls “Sarge.”

Two days ago, Baker was waylaid by an afternoon in the emergency room on an IV drip, coping with heat exhaustion. This morning, she nearly fainted in the shower, but now she’s

hunched over on black kneepads scooping up soil with a plastic dustpan.

Last decade, while working with the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Arizona, Baker became one of the first investigators to identify a missing migrant based on DNA from bones. It was part of a project she called Reuniting Families. “The woman I ID’d was my age and had two daughters,” Baker says. “After her husband had left her, she felt the only way she could give them a better life was to go to the U.S.” The woman had sold some of her land to pay for a coyote, but she twisted her ankle during the journey and was left behind by her companions.

“I felt really devastated at the time,” Baker says.

“I was working on something that there is no good answer to.” But the gratitude expressed by families when their loved ones are sent home and buried keeps her going. “The mothers say the same thing: ‘Now, I have a place to pray.’”

Exhuming a corpse is a different business than entombing one. If it’s fresh, then the soil is soft, the casket—if there is one—is intact, and it takes little more than a solid spade and an eager worker. As the soil compresses, the casket rots and the lid collapses.

After a dozen or more years, little may be left except for metal latches, a plastic-wrapped Bible, and fragments of bones. The very stuff that once gave these bones life, the genes that allowed these people to grow and thrive, become, upon death, an eternal connection to the living. For an undocumented immi-

grant, it is an irrevocable identification card.

The students painstakingly map out the plots, some as old as 40 years, others as recent as 8. They sift through the debris, careful not to let a single shard escape their sieves. However admirable this excavation is, there is no shaking the sense of breaking a taboo by lifting the dead piece by piece and placing them into numbered brown paper bags. Until the gene sequencing is complete, it’s impossible to know how many of the remains are actually immigrants. But it’s a start.

One of the more enthusiastic students has embroidered the phrase “Them bones, them bones, them dry bones” on her blue-jean shirt for the occasion. It’s a reference to an African American spiritual that has been riffed on by everyone from Fats Waller to The Kinks.

The lyrics are based on the Book of Ezekiel, in which the Hebrew prophet has a vision of meeting God in the Valley of Dry Bones. “Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost,” he tells God. And God responds: “When I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, and shall put my Spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land.”

I lean over an open grave and see the knobby head of a femur jutting out from the dirt wall.

The leg bone has been that way for days as the students work around it. One student on her knees cuts into the wall with a flat trowel, and I see the sandy soil crumble away. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

WHAT ABOUT THE KIDS? The legacy of prolonged recession is widened inequality, increased poverty, and diminished opportunity for the next generation.

We know the solutions—but they aren’t on the agenda.

57 Children of the Great Collapse

BY JARED BERNSTEIN

61 A Shredded Safety Net

BY ELIZABETH LOWER-BASCH

62 Child Poverty by the Numbers

BY CURTIS SKINNER

64 The Politics of Inherited Advantage

BY CHUCK COLLINS

69 Cascading Effects of Parental Stress

BY CARLY TUBBS AND LAWRENCE ABER

71 Children of Color in the Persistent Downturn This report was made possible through the generous support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The views in these articles are not necessarily those of the donor.

56 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

BY ALGERNON AUSTIN

73 Intergenerational Injustice

BY TAMARA DRAUT

Children of the Great Collapse

The stimulus was great for poor kids while it lasted.

Now even bare-bones aid is at risk.

By Jared Bernstein

photo opposite: sergiyn / fotolia c h a r t d ata : u . s . c e n s u s b u r e a u

H

ere’s a piece of good news of which you might not be aware: The U.S. safety net performed a lot better than you thought during the recent downturn, which was the deepest since the Depression. Thanks to expansions to the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and unemployment insurance—all beefed up by the $840 billion Recovery Act—the safety net almost wholly mitigated the rise in child poverty. Even middle-income households saw most of their income losses substantially offset by tax and transfer policies that sharply ramped up to help them.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that most of the Recovery Act’s outlays have now been spent, and pressure to reduce deficits leaves other spending on children and families under assault.

While the safety net performed well during the worst phase of the downturn, other trends have been troubling. Families lost trillions of dollars in home equity, the largest source of wealth for working- and middle-class households. Long-term structural inequality persists, so the modest economic growth that has returned since 2010 is eluding most families. Budget battles are threatening both the basic anti-poverty outlays and the investments in children and families that could help push back on inequality and its impact on opportunity.

Progressives did well, at least during President Barack Obama’s first two years, at expanding the safety net during a serious economic emergency, using taxes and income transfers.

But they have not done well in addressing the long-term trend of an erosion of “primary” income, namely wages and salaries. This leads

to a paradox: A lot of people get help in a deep recession, but their incomes and life prospects stagnate during relatively good times. Looking forward, both the safety net and measures that might improve the primary income distribution will be under increasing attack from pressures to cut the budget deficit. In fact, there are plenty of strategies that could help reconnect families and children to restored economic growth, but policy is pushing in the opposite direction.

moved 7.9 million people—of which nearly 4.1 million were children—out of poverty in 2011. Expansions of these credits kept another 1.5 million out of poverty, including 800,000 children. Unemployment-insurance benefits, boosted by expansions in their duration and level, kept 3.5 million people above the poverty line, including nearly 1 million children.

Food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), kept 4.7 million Americans, including 2.1 million children, out of poverty in 2011 and The Safety Net Grows, Then Shrinks are particularly effective at keeping children As officially measured, from 2007 to 2010, out of severe poverty—that is, below half of child poverty went up four percentage points, the poverty line. In 2011, SNAP lifted more from 18 percent to 22 perchildren—1.5 million—above cent. But the official measure half of the poverty line than CHILD-POVERTY RATES is incomplete, as it leaves any other program.

25% out many income (or nearCBO data also shed interestincome) benefits that ramp up ing light on how the safety net OFFICIAL 20% when the economy goes south. worked in tandem with the tax In the chart on the right, the system. Federal tax liabilities, 15% ALTERNATIVE flat red line is an alternative which are progressive, fall in (INCLUDES TAX CREDITS measure that includes tax recessions. Income transfers, AND NON-CASH BENEFITS 10% THAT OFFSET POVERTY) credits and non-cash benefits meanwhile, didn’t just help that largely offset the increase the poor but reached into the 5% in child poverty. middle class. Wage and salary Specifically, these benefits income for households in the 0 ’07 ’08 ’09 ’10 ’11 include food stamps, refundmiddle fifth fell $6,000 in just able tax credits, and healthtwo years, from 2007 to 2009 care assistance, all of which were expanded (in 2009 dollars). But federal tax payments fell temporarily by Recovery Act provisions $2,300 (a reminder that progressive taxation (unemployment insurance was also extend- has an automatic stimulative function), and ed, but that income is counted in the official transfers, mostly unemployment insurance, rate). Analysis by my colleagues at the Center went up $2,800, offsetting about $5,000 of on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that the the $6,000 loss. safety net, including the Recovery Act expanIn other words, the data make a solid case sions, “lifted 40 million people out of poverty that the policies we’ve put in place over the in 2011, including almost 9 million children.” years, in tandem with Keynesian expansions Together, the EITC and Child Tax Credit to meet the deep recession, worked well. But

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57

Sacrificed in the budget deal are things like Head Start, nutrition aid, housing subsidies.

And the Ryan plan would leave aid to children and families in tatters.

What’s Next?

Now that the official recession is in the rearview mirror and the Recovery Act has faded, the policy agenda coming out of D.C. has been uniquely horrible. Fiscal policy has focused largely on spending decreases targeted at the budget deficit, to the detriment of the jobs deficit. An interesting exception to the austerity consensus is the Federal Reserve, which has been doing its part to stimulate job creation and bring down unemployment. But the Fed is fighting fiscal headwinds caused by the expiration of the payroll tax cut and the sequester, which together could shave as much as 1.5 percent off the growth of gross

58 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

domestic product this year, costing us hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Moreover, the budget reductions that have been made already strike not at the factor placing the most pressure on the long-term budget deficit—the growth of health-care costs—but at so-called discretionary spending—a part of government spending that targets inequality and promotes opportunity.

Republicans and many Democrats agree that spending must be cut. While the president’s new budget offers a grand bargain that reduces Medicare and Social Security outlays in exchange for new tax revenues, thus far almost all the reductions have come from the discretionary parts of the budget. That includes programs like Head Start, WIC (the nutritional program for low-income pregnant mothers), child care, and housing subsidies. State and local support for education and related services that help children and families have been on the chopping block, and worse is ahead.

How did we get here? The Budget Control Act—the deal that grew out of the debt-­ ceiling standoff of 2011—took $1.5 trillion over ten years from the discretionary part of the federal budget. The $1.2 trillion sequester, of which $85 billion hit in fiscal year 2013, reduces mostly the same part of the budget, about half in defense and half in discretionary domestic spending.

The threat to domestic discretionary spending is acute, because it has almost no defenders and lots of defunders. Even the White House brags that President Obama’s budget will reduce such spending as a share of GDP to its lowest level “since Eisenhower”—and that’s before Republicans work their will on the final compromise.

Though the caps imposed by the Budget Control Act are already too binding, the president

offered House Speaker John Boehner yet another $100 billion in domestic-­discretionary cuts during their fiscal-cliff negotiations, a cut that’s now part of the president’s budget.

Two other factors place even more pressure on the anti-poverty, pro-opportunity parts of the budget. First, the spending cuts mandated by sequestration are now built into the budget baseline for the rest of the year (through the end of September). Second, Representative Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget lays out a draconian vision of the future from the perspective of low-income programs.

The Consequences for Children and Families Head Start: The sequester is just now beginning to reduce Head Start slots. The National Education Association estimates that about 50,000 preschool students will ultimately lose out on the program, and recent anecdotes are downright scary. News reports from Indiana tell of random drawings “to determine which three-dozen preschool students will be removed from [Head Start], a move officials said was necessary to limit the impact of mandatory across-the-board federal spending cuts.”

Pell Grants: This tuition-assistance program, expanded under the Recovery Act, is exempted from the sequester, but the Ryan budget goes after it big-time, freezing the maximum award for ten years with no adjustment for cost inflation.

Local Education: About a third of nondefense discretionary funding is grants to states and localities, and a quarter of those funds support local education, ending up at elementary and high schools and targeting kids from lower-income families and kids with learning disorders. Some of these resources

p e t e pa h h a m / f o t o l i a

when you combine this perhaps underappreciated information with the well-known longterm stagnation of middle- and low-income working families’ incomes, we end up with the anomaly: A lot of folks get some insulation from the downturn but stagnate in the upturn.

It’s as if a bunch of us live on little boats, trying to make our way on a river. It used to be that if you spent some time caring for your vessel, making sure the sails were strong, and putting some muscle into the oars, you could gain some distance. In fact, the current helped move you and your crew in the right direction. The occasional storm would send you off course, but you could get back in the current once the storm passed.

Nowadays, the current seems to flow in the other direction, and the little boats don’t get far even in calm weather. Yet when a storm hits, you might not get pushed back as far as you used to. You just kind of stay where you are, in good times and bad. Except for the yachts, which keep getting bigger, rocking the rest of us in their wake as they rumble ahead.

The Stimulus Peters Out but the Downturn Continues

$58

$62

Pell grants, Head Start, and unemployment insurance is still in place, those programs are Meanwhile, federal support through the stim- all facing cuts, either from the act’s expiration, ulus for states and localities, an important the sequester, or generalized budget austerity. lifeline during the downturn, had largely faded Of course, stimulus spending is, by definiout by late 2011, and the pressure on state bud- tion, temporary. But despite the widely heard gets has led to hundreds of thousands of laid- critique that the problem with the Recovery off public-sector workers. Even while state Act was that it was too small, a more precise revenues have begun to grow again, they still criticism is that it didn’t last long enough. face a budget shortfall of around $55 billion Given the depth and length of the downturn, this year, down from about the definition of “temporary” twice that amount last year. needed to be extended.

STATE RECOVERY ACT FUNDS COLLAPSED AFTER 2011 The figure to the right proThese shortfalls have been IN BILLIONS vides one clear example of this acutely felt in classrooms at $70 trend. The Recovery Act’s aid all levels. According to recent $60 to states offset as much as 40 work by my CBPP colleagues, percent of state budget shortK-12 school funding has not $50 falls, through both a State yet recovered its pre-recession $40 Stabilization Fund (mostly level and 35 states are provid$30 for educational assistance) ing less funding per student $20 and through Medicaid assisthan they were in 2008. In $10 $7 tance (and since those dollars 17 states, those cuts surpass $0.2 are fungible, states used them 10 percent in real dollars.

0 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 to support not just health but Higher-education spending other services too). But as is down almost 30 percent the figure shows, after peaking in 2010, they per student, about $2,300 in 2013 compared are essentially gone now. As far as children to 2008. When public colleges and universiare concerned, outside of Pell grants and the ties lose funding at these magnitudes, tuitions extensions to refundable credits and unem- rise sharply (up 27 percent at four-year public ployment insurance, most other Recovery Act colleges over this period) and services get cut, programs (or bump-ups to existing programs) including faculty positions, course offerings, are fading or expired as well. The act’s increase campus access, and library services. in SNAP benefits will expire at the end of this year, costing families of three around $250 per What Should We Be Doing? year. The jobs program subsidized by Tempo- Too many policymakers on both sides of the rary Assistance for Needy Families was a great aisle, unfortunately, have bought into the bang-for-the-buck employment program that premise that deficit control is a symbol of seriled to employment for hundreds of thousands ous governing. That may be so during normal of low-income parents, but it is now long gone. times, but not in a prolonged downturn. Since And while extra Recovery Act spending on Republicans have been somewhat successful in $29

c h a r t d ata : c b b p a n a ly s i s u s i n g d ata f r o m u . s . d e p t. o f h e a lt h a n d h u m a n s e r v i c e s , u . s . d e p t. o f e d u c at i o n , a n d c o n g r e s s i o n a l b u d g e t o f f i c e

also support Head Start teacher training and smaller class sizes.

Nutrition Programs: The WIC program provides food, counseling, and health-care referrals to low-income pregnant women, new moms, their infants, and kids under five. According to CBPP estimates, sequestration could result in 575,000 to 750,000 women and children losing WIC eligibility this year.

While food stamps were exempt from sequestration, the Ryan budget cuts $135 billion from the program—almost 18 percent—and converts it to a block grant, meaning it won’t be able to expand in recession (as noted above, SNAP helped immensely in the recent downturn). If these cuts were implemented solely by decreasing eligibility, about 12 million people would have to be removed from the food-stamp rolls.

Sequestration is likely to lead to the loss of housing vouchers for 100,000 low-income families. Close to four million long-term unemployed workers will lose about $130 per month—about 11 percent—from their unemployment insurance benefit. Under Ryan’s budget, Medicaid would suffer the same blockgranting fate as SNAP, with funding cut by onethird and coverage lost for tens of millions, and that’s not counting the low-income people who would lose Medicaid coverage due to Ryan’s repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But you get the point: Between tight-andgetting-tighter caps on non-defense discretionary spending, sequestration, and the threat that the Ryan budget will become a touchstone in this debate, not only will our highly functioning safety net be compromised but less advantaged families will lose the services that can give them the lift they need in good times—the preschool, the training, the college access that can help them claim a bit more of the growth.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

60 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

later in life. Moreover, increments to income are uniquely beneficial to kids in poor families: “For families with average early childhood incomes below $25,000, a $3,000 annual boost to family income is associated with a 17 percent increase in adult earnings [and] 135 additional work hours per year after age 25.”

The Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit can combine to add considerably more than $3,000 for working parents with a couple of kids. One problem, however, is that the unemployed suffer a double loss—of their jobs and of supplemental income, such as the EITC, that is tied to work. We need income supports for the families of unemployed parents as well. The fiscal-cliff tax deal somehow managed to permanently lock in 80 percent of the Bush tax cuts, but these refundable tax credits for the working poor were only locked in for five years (though the president’s

budget proposes to make them permanent).

Protecting them is a critical progressive goal.

President Obama’s universal preschool proposal is smart and overdue, though one is hardpressed to see how it grows out of the highly constrained budget debate we are having. A large body of research shows both how important quality preschool is for later outcomes and how its returns over a lifetime far surpass its costs. In his State of the Union address, the president cited the well-documented finding that $1 of investment in good preschool returns $7 of benefits. These results are particularly strong for kids from less advantaged backgrounds. While the president’s proposal is nominally universal, it is intended to be free only for kids from families with modest incomes, below two times the poverty line—about $45,000 for a family of four with two kids.

One can—and should—argue the case for quality preschool for all on equity grounds. The outlays of affluent parents on high-quality preschool show that they know how important this is. A program of the type the president appears to have in mind could cost $5 billion to $10 billion a year, which is a bargain given the net benefits. But under the budget rules, you can’t “score” prospective benefits that are years down the road. And of course, in the spirit of the times, the president asserted that his proposal wouldn’t add “one dime” to the budget deficit.

That means he needs what Beltway budget mavens call a “payfor”—some tax increase or spending cut elsewhere that will cover the cost of the new program. His new budget proposes to pay the cost with higher tobacco taxes, likely as heavy a lift as any other conceivable offset.

But in an economy in which so much inequality is sapping so much opportunity from so many kids, it’s hard to think of a better cause.

k i e r a n w e lc h / f o t o l i a

fighting back against tax increases (the deficit savings achieved thus far have been $2.30 in spending cuts for every $1 in new tax revenue), most of the pressure comes on the spending side of the equation.

I can tell you from my own stint in the Obama White House that one powerful interpretation of the 2010 losses for Democrats was that the people wanted their government to turn from stimulus to deficit reduction, regardless of the wrongheaded economics of that premature pivot. The president, to his credit, often says forcefully that deficit reduction alone is not a growth plan and that reducing debt won’t bring down the unemployment rate. But he is stuck in the cramped budget politics of Washington, and the implications of his rhetoric are awfully hard to see in his budgets. As noted, in his new 2014 budget proposal, he offered to go even deeper into domestic discretionary cuts.

Leaving aside the limits of current politics, it’s important to emphasize the policies that we should be pursuing, not just in the downturn but also in the expansion. What types of measures might help give families and kids a fighting chance at claiming more of the economy’s growth? Just being bold enough to call for such policies can alter the dynamics of debate.

On the issue of child poverty, research points to two promising ideas targeting economically disadvantaged families with young kids, one of which is in place and another that’s in the president’s new budget: income support and quality preschool.

Poverty researchers Greg Duncan and Katherine Magnuson tracked poor children into adulthood and found that income supports to their families when they were younger than five were associated with both better school performance and better job and earnings outcomes

President Obama’s universal preschool proposal is smart and overdue, but it is hard to reconcile with a budget debate in which both parties support a decade of program cuts.

A Shredded Safety Net

BY ELIZABETH LOWER-BASCH “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.” —mitt romney, february 1, 2012

c h a r t d ata : u . s . d e pa r t m e n t o f h e a lt h a n d h u m a n s e r v i c e s , u . s . c e n s u s b u r e a u

I Finally, there’s macroeconomic policy. In the current context, we might as well be bold and call it full-employment policy. In decades of carefully watching poverty and income trends, the only time I saw middle and lower-income families get ahead, in the sense of their income growing apace with productivity, was in the latter 1990s, when the unemployment rate was so low that employers had to increase compensation to attract and keep the workers they needed.

Thanks in part to the austerity movement sweeping across advanced economies, we’re far away from full employment. But as the economy finally works through the excesses that brought us the deep recession, will the private labor market create the quantity and quality of jobs that we need? For reasons that go beyond my scope here, having to do with advances in laborsaving capital technology, I fear not.

Yet, there’s a lot to be done in America. Our lagging social investments have the potential to provide jobs for people of varying skill levels, while boosting the nation’s productivity. At some point, we’ll get to these investments. The current expansion—if we don’t strangle it with austerity economics—is an opportune moment for productivity-enhancing social investment to help move the economy closer to full employment. We must protect the safety net so it can perform as well in the next downturn as it did in the last. But we can’t stop there. We must build an economy not only in which working families don’t fall behind in bad times but also in which they get ahead in good times.  Jared Bernstein is an economist and senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He was formerly chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden and a member of President Barack Obama’s economics team.

n 1996, the year that Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed welfare reform, fulfilling his campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it,” there were 14.5 million poor children in the United States; 8.5 million children were in families that received cash assistance from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), or welfare. Even then, nearly half of poor children were not in families that received welfare.

Following welfare reform, the number of families receiving assistance declined dramatically. Buoyed by the strong economy and the expansion of other key work supports, including child-care subsidies, public health insurance under Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, the number of single mothers in the workforce increased and child poverty declined. However, starting in the early 2000s, progress stalled and poverty rates began to climb again.

Ten years after welfare reform, in 2006, just before the recession, there were still 12.8 million poor children in the U.S., and just 3.4 million children were in families that received cash assistance in an average month from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the program that replaced AFDC . Stringent income limits continued to disqualify many families, but

millions more, with incomes low enough to qualify, did not receive cash assistance. The Government Accountability Office estimates that 87 percent of the decline in caseloads from 1995 to 2005 was caused by eligible families failing to receive help, not by decreased need.

Five years later, in 2011, as a result of the worst recession in generations, the number of poor children in the U.S. had climbed to 16.1 million, but still just 3.4 million children were in families receiving cash assistance under TANF. The number of families receiving help grew in some states, but never as much as need rose. Other states shortened time limits on benefit receipt despite continued high unemployment and need. If caseloads were low because families had no need for help, we would have reason to celebrate. But this is not the case. In too many states, TANF is simply failing in its mission of protecting children from hardships caused by deep poverty.

Fortunately, poor families were not left completely without support. Many continue to receive food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In fact, in 2011, 1.2 million households with children that received SNAP reported having no income at all. However, SNAP was never designed to be a family’s only source of income, and SNAP benefits cannot be used to pay rent or buy such necessities as toothpaste, diapers, clothing, or gas.

One of the key reasons TANF was not a more robust safety

net during the recession is its fiscal structure. States receive a fixed amount of funding—in the form of a block grant—that does not increase when times are tough, and the value of those funds has decreased over time due to Congress’s failure to adjust it for inflation. Moreover, states have the flexibility to use these funds for a wide range of programs and services. Given the dependence of state revenues on the economic cycle, and their obligation to achieve a balanced budget each year, states have strong incentives not to serve additional families, regardless of the need. This provides a cautionary reason to oppose block granting other programs, such as SNAP and Medicaid, as proposed by Representative Paul Ryan.

THE DECLINE IN ASSISTANCE AFTER WELFARE REFORM NUMBER OF CHILDREN IN MILLIONS 18 16 14 12 10 8

CHILDREN IN POVERTY

6 4 2

CHILDREN RECEIVING CASH AID

0 1996 2011

While Mitt Romney’s opinions are not as important as they would have been if things had gone differently in November, Ryan still has significant influence as chair of the House Budget Committee.

Congress should find ways to strengthen the tattered safety net so it can catch those children and families who need it—not shrink the net while claiming to be helping.  Elizabeth Lower-Basch is the policy coordinator at the Center for Law and Social Policy.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

Child Poverty by the Numbers

BY CURTIS SKINNER

T

he recession and its lingering aftermath helped drive an estimated 2.8 million additional American children into poverty, raising the nation’s share of poor children to one of the highest recorded in nearly 50 years. The increase in the child-poverty rate of four percentage points between 2007 and 2011 to 22 percent was the second largest four-year increase since modern recordkeeping began in 1959. The percentage of children living in low-income families—with incomes less than twice the federal poverty line— increased even more rapidly, from 39 percent to 45 percent. Strikingly, almost half of all children are poor or near poor in a nation boasting one of the world’s highest per-capita incomes.

The child-poverty rate was unchanged in 2011, the latest year for which data are available, despite the fact that the recession nominally ended in 2009. In numbers, 16.1 million American children live in poor CHILDREN LIVING IN LOWINCOME AND POOR FAMILIES 45% 40% 35%

NEAR POOR

30%

(100%–199% FEDERAL POVERTY LINE)

25% 20% 15%

POOR

10%

(LESS THAN 100% FEDERAL POVERTY LINE)

5% 0

’07

’08

’09

’10

’11

62 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

families, and 32.4 million live in low-income families.

Child-poverty rates rose for children in all major ethnic groups—white, black, Latino, and Asian—with the Latino rate rising the fastest at nearly six percentage points.

CHILD-POVERTY RATES

BY RACE /ETHNICITY BLACK

40% 35%

LATINO

30% 25%

ALL RACES

20% ASIAN

15% 10%

WHITE

5% 0

’07

’08

’09

’10

’11

The stubbornly high child-poverty rate is partly explained by persistently high unemployment during the weak and protracted economic recovery. Childpoverty rates closely track unemployment rates, and similar peaks in poverty occurred during the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s. Conversely, following periods of strong economic growth and historically low unemployment rates, child poverty in the United States fell to historically low rates of 14 percent to 15 percent during the late 1960s and early 1970s and again to 16 percent in 2000.

The close association between child poverty and unemployment is also observed in recent trends in state-level poverty rates.

States whose economies were among the hardest hit during the recession

experienced some of the largest increases in child poverty during the 2007– 2011 period. In Florida, the child-poverty rate jumped a staggering 7.8 percentage points to 25 percent— the largest increase in the nation. Thirteen additional states—including Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, and Ohio—and the District of Columbia saw child-­poverty rates rise by five percentage points or higher. Overall, child-poverty rates rose by statistically significant margins in 39 states and fell in no state during the course of the recession. As has long been the case, states with the highest child-­ poverty rates tend to be in the South and West.

Poverty Reached into the Middle Class Many Americans, including policymakers, remain unaware of the scale and scope of child poverty in the United States and are apt to think of it as a marginal phenomenon: a problem confined to inner cities and isolated rural communities.

This inaccurate perception is further belied by evidence from the recession.

These years reveal a striking increase in the probability of living in poverty or near poverty among children in families with characteristics traditionally associated with the middle-class mainstream: suburban residence, married parents, and at least one parent with some post-

secondary education. The trends indicate that the high unemployment and housing foreclosures of the prolonged downturn drove significant numbers of formerly middleclass families into the ranks of the poor or near poor.

While child-poverty rates remain higher in central cities and non-metropolitan areas, the economic and housing crises appear to have accelerated a longerterm trend toward the suburbanization of American poverty. Indeed, the number of poor people in families with related children under 18 living in suburbs rose by 33 percent between 2007 and 2011 and by 66 percent between 2000 and 2011, much faster rates of growth than those for people living in central cities and those living outside metropolitan areas. More than 13 percent of suburban residents in families with related children are poor, up more than three percentage points since 2007 and more than five percentage points since 2000. The number of people in low-income families living in the suburbs also grew rapidly during the recent recession.

Families headed by a single parent are at high risk of being poor or near poor.

Indeed, 70 percent of all children living with a single parent are in low-income families. During the course of the recession, however, the share of all children with married parents who live in low-income families rose by four percentage points to 32 percent in 2011—a phenomenon consistent with one or more parents losing a job or having work hours cut back.

Notably, the share of all children with at least one parent working part-time or partyear who live in low-income families also rose four percentage points to 75 percent, suggesting that part-time/ part-year employment became less remunerative, perhaps due to employers cutting work hours.

The value of a college education also eroded in the course of the recession.

Child-poverty rates in the United States strongly correlate with parental education: The higher her parents’ education, the less likely a child will grow up in a poor or low-income family. But the mass unemployment wrought by the prolonged downturn struck workers with all levels of education. In 2011, 31 percent of children with at least one parent who had some postsecondary education lived in low-income families and 13 percent lived in poor LOW-INCOME CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS 80% 70%

PARENTS WORK PART-TIME OR PART-YEAR

60% 50%

PARENTS MARRIED

40% 30%

PARENTS ATTENDED SOME COLLEGE OR MORE

20% 10% 0

’08

’09

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families. These shares rose from 25 percent and 9 percent, respectively, in 2008.

Indeed, although parental college education greatly reduces the likelihood that a family will be poor or near poor, the rapid growth in the share of the adult population with postsecondary education in recent

BLACK

15%

LATINO

10%

ALL RACES

ASIAN

5%

WHITE

c h a r t d ata : n at i o n a l c e n t e r f o r c h i l d r e n i n p o v e r t y, m a i l m a n s c h o o l o f p u b l i c h e a lt h , c o lu m b i a u n i v e r s i t y

More Children Experienced Severe Deprivation Taken together, these trends show that the recession made more middleclass children poor. At the same time, the economic crisis also took a harsh toll on children already living under severe deprivation.

The share of all children living in extreme poverty— with family incomes under 50 percent of the federal poverty line—rose by two percentage points to 9.4 percent between 2007 and 2011. This represents almost 1.5 million children.

The share of black children living in these families also rose by almost two percentage points to an astonishing 18.9 percent, representing about 800,000 children. The proportion of children living in extreme poverty also rose among whites, Latinos, and Asians.

Income at half the poverty line amounted to $9,265 for a family of three in 2011.

Living under conditions of extreme poverty is associated with a host of negative consequences for children,

0

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’08

’09

’10

’11

ing from the limited data available. A neighborhood of concentrated poverty is defined as one in which 20 percent or more of the residents are poor. In 1999, 17.5 percent of all children lived in neighborhoods (census tracts) with poverty rates between 20 percent and 40 percent, and 3.3 percent lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40 percent or higher. These rates rose to 20.2 percent and 4 percent, respectively, during the 2006–2010 period (multiple years of data were required to achieve adequate sample size).

Concentrated poverty has also grown dramatically in a number of large cities, many of them former industrial hubs in long decline accelerated by the economic downturn. While only one city with a population of 200,000 or more—New Orleans—had a childpoverty rate as high as 40 percent in 1999, eight cities surpassed this rate in 2010:

CHILDREN LIVING IN HIGHPOVERTY NEIGHBORHOODS 25% 20% 15% 10% 5%

40% OR HIGHER

20%

NEIGHBORHOODS OF 20%–39.99% POVERTY

CHILDREN LIVING IN EXTREMELY POOR FAMILIES

BY RACE /ETHNICITY

Birmingham, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Richmond, Rochester, and St. Louis. Detroit’s poverty rate reached an astounding 50 percent—the highest in the nation among large cities—closely followed by Cleveland at 49 percent.

Research shows that living in a neighborhood of concentrated poverty is harmful to children, apart from whether their own family is poor. Children living in areas of concentrated poverty are more likely to experience high levels of stress, poor physical and mental health, food and housing insecurity, a

40% OR HIGHER

including poor mental and physical health and underperformance in school.

The share of children living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty also appears to have risen during the recession, judg-

NEIGHBORHOODS OF 20%–39.99% POVERTY

decades has contributed to larger shares of poor and near-poor children having a parent with some college education. This trend continued through the course of the recession and its aftermath: In 2011, 47 percent of low-income children and 39 percent of poor children lived with a parent with at least some college education, up from 40 percent and 35 percent, respectively, in 2008. In the United States today, a postsecondary education is no longer a ticket to the middle class.

0

1999 2006–2010

lack of health insurance, and limited educational opportunities compared to children who live in less poor neighborhoods.

The Face of American Child Poverty Today The share of American children living in poor families is extraordinarily high—far higher than that of any other high-income country, irrespective of the metric used for comparison. Moreover, the burden of child poverty is unevenly distributed, borne disproportionately by black, Latino, and Native American families. A child from one of these racial/

CHILDREN LIVING IN LOW-INCOME AND POOR FAMILIES BY RACE/ETHNICITY 65%

60% 50%

45%

40% 30%

65%

63% LOW-INCOME POOR

39% 32%

31%

36% 23%

20% 10% 0

34%

13% White

13% Black

Asian

ethnic groups is 2.6 to 3 times as likely as a white child to live in a poor family.

Nevertheless, because of the large size of the white population, almost one-third of all poor children are white, while onefourth are black and 36 percent are Latino.

Increasingly, to be young in America is to be a child of immigrants. First- and second-­generation immigrant children make up more than one-fourth of all children in the United States and are the fastestgrowing segment of the under-18 population. Children of immigrant parents are much more likely than children of native-born parents to live in a low-income or poor family.

These disparities must inform public policy to reduce American child poverty. Our brief review of poverty trends suggests that policies encouraging strong job creation are likely to be effective in lowering the overall childpoverty rate relatively quickly. Developing effective policies to address the severe deprivation that more intensely harms communities of color is more complex and difficult. Children growing up in families

Native American

Other

Latino

experiencing extreme or persistent poverty, or living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, confront much more daunting obstacles to healthy development compared to children experiencing shorter poverty spells resulting from a temporary economic shock, such as parental job loss.

POVERTY BY RACE BLACK 14%

All Families LATINO 23%

WHITE 53%

OTHER 5% ASIAN 5%

Poor Families

BLACK 24%

WHITE 32%

LATINO 36%

ASIAN 3% OTHER 5%

Public policy—notably, the Earned Income Tax Credit— has kept millions of children in working families out of poverty. But the nation must do much more to break the intergenerational cycle of entrenched poverty.  Curtis Skinner directs the Family Economic Security program at the National Center for Children in Poverty, at Columbia University.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

The Politics of Inherited Advantage In a tough economy with dwindling social supports, children of privilege have a bigger head start than ever.

By Chuck Collins

T

wo 21-year-old college students sit down in a coffee shop to study for an upcoming test. Behind the counter, a barista whips up their double-shot lattes. In the back kitchen, another young adult washes the dishes and empties the trash.

These four young adults have a lot in common. They are the same age and race, each has two parents, and all grew up in the same metropolitan area. They were all strong students in their respective high schools. But as they enter their third decade, their work futures and life trajectories are radically different—and largely determined at this point.

The culprit is the growing role of inherited advantage, as affluent families make investments that give their children a leg up. Combined with the 2008 economic meltdown and budget cuts in public investments that foster opportunity, we are witnessing accelerating advantages for the wealthy and compounding disadvantages for everyone else.

One of the college students, Miranda, will graduate without any student-loan debt and will have completed three summers of unpaid internships at businesses that will advance her career path. Her parents stand ready to subsidize her lodging with a security deposit and co-signed apartment lease and will give her a no-interest loan to buy a car. They also have a network of family and professional contacts that can help her. While she waits for a job with benefits, she will remain on her parents’ health insurance.

Ten years later, Miranda will have a highpaying job, be engaged to another professional, and will buy a home in a neighborhood with other college-educated professionals, a property that will steadily appreciate over time

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because of its location. The “parental downpayment assistance program” will subsidize the purchase.

The other collegiate, Marcus, will graduate with more than $55,000 in college debt, a maxed-out credit card, and an extensive résumé of part-time food-service jobs that he has taken to pay for school, both during summers and while in college, reducing the hours he can study. Though he will obtain a degree, he will graduate with almost no work experience in his field of study, lose his health insurance, and begin working two part-time jobs to pay back his student loans and to afford rent in a shared apartment.

Ten years later, Marcus will still be working in low-paying jobs and renting an apartment. He will feel occupationally stuck and frustrated in his attempts to network in the area of his degree. He will take on additional debt—to deal with various health and financial problems—and watch his hope of buying a home slip away, in large part because of a credit history damaged during his early twenties.

Tony, the barista, has the benefit of not taking on mega-debt from college. He will eventually enroll in some classes at a local public university. But his income and employment opportunities will be constrained by not having a college degree. He will make several attempts to learn a building trade and start his own business, eventually landing a job with a steady but low income.

The good news for Tony is that his parents, while not college educated or wealthy, are stable middle-class with modest retirement pensions and a debt-free house, acquired by Tony’s grandfather with a low-interest Veterans Administration mortgage. They are able to provide a bedroom to their son. That home

will prove to be a significant factor in Tony’s future economic stability, as he will eventually inherit it.

Cordelia, working in the kitchen, has even less opportunity than Tony for mobility and advancement. Neither of her parents went to college nor have significant assets, as they rent their housing. Though she was academically in the top of her urban high-school class, she did not consider applying to a selective college. The costs seemed daunting, and she didn’t know anyone who went away to college. There were no adults or guidance professionals to help her explore other options, including financial aid available at private colleges, some of which would have paid her full tuition and expenses to attend. Instead, she takes courses at the local community college where she sees many familiar faces. Cordelia will struggle with health issues, as lack of adequate health care and insurance means she will delay treatment of several problems.

Over time, she will have a steady and lowwage job, but she will also begin to take more responsibility for supporting members of her family who are less fortunate.

The Born-on-Third-Base Factor These four coming-of-age adults in no way represent the entire spectrum of young adult experience, which also includes ex-­offenders, mediocre students, and people with disabilities. Young adults in rural communities and small towns, for example, face their own education and economic challenges, such as limited employment options. They will disproportionately populate our volunteer military, fill the growing ranks of disability-pension recipients, or migrate to communities where they have few social supports.

yuri arcurs / fotolia

A key determinant in these diverging prospects is the role of family wealth, a factor that plays an oversize role in sorting today’s coming-­ of-age generation onto different opportunity trajectories. The initial sort begins much earlier. A growing mountain of research chronicles what sociologists call the “intergenerational transmission of advantage,” including the myriad mechanisms by which affluent families boost their children’s prospects starting at birth. The mechanisms include financial investments in their children’s enrichment, school readiness, formal schooling, college access, and aiding the transition to work.

Meanwhile, the children in families unable to make these investments fall further behind.

Imagine a ten-mile race in which contestants have different starting lines based on parental education, income, and wealth. The economically privileged athletes start several hundred yards ahead of the disadvantaged runners. Each contestant begins with ten onepound leg weights. The race begins, and the advantaged competitors pull ahead quickly.

At each half-mile mark, according to the rules, the first twenty runners shed two pounds of weights while those in the last half of the field take on two additional pounds. After several miles, lead racers have no weights, while the slower runners carry twenty additional pounds. By midrace, an alarming gap has opened up in the field, and by the finish line, the last half of the field finishes more than two miles behind the winners.

This race of accelerating advantages and compounding disadvantages is a disturbingly accurate metaphor for inherited privilege.

As in life, there are well-publicized stories of exceptional runners starting far back in the pack and breaking to the front of the field,

A Growing Family Welfare State and a Shrinking Public One

therefore able to shed weights and remain competitive. There are also front-runners who perform poorly, squandering their initial advantages and falling back. But the overall picture is one of steadily growing class-based inequality. Consistent with emerging sociological research about children and opportunity, once inequalities open up, they rarely decrease over time.

A healthy democratic society could rise to this challenge, resolving to make robust public investments in time-tested interventions that equalize the conditions of the race. But in our increasingly plutocratic political system, the very wealthy have less stake in the opportunity-­building mechanisms in our communities, as their own children and grandchildren advance through privatized systems.

These same wealthy families maintain disproportionate influence in shaping our national priorities, such as whether to cut taxes on the wealthy or maintain investments in public education. We are snagged in a cycle of declining opportunity driven by the new politics of inherited advantage.

The United States prides itself on being a socially mobile society where what one does is more important than the racial and class circumstances of one’s birth. Indeed, in the three decades after World War II, between 1947 and 1977, social mobility increased, particularly for the white working class. This imprinted a national self-identity as a meritocratic society, especially juxtaposed with the old “caste societies” of Europe, with their static class systems and calcified social mobility.

That story of European versus U.S. social mobility has now been turned on its head.

European nations and Canada, with their social safety nets and investments in early childhood education, are experiencing greater social mobility. Canada now has three times the social mobility of the U.S. Budget cuts at all levels of government have dismantled post–World War II public investments that had begun to create greater opportunities for economically and racially disadvantaged families. Higher education has taken one of the biggest hits. Meanwhile, the relative advantage of wealthy families, in terms of social capital and civic engagement, has accelerated over the past 30 years.

The idea that people’s futures might be economically determined deeply offends U.S. sensibilities. We want to believe that individual moxie matters, that a person’s creativity, effort, and intelligence will lead to economic success.

Stories of exceptional strivers, heroically overcoming a stacked deck of obstacles, divert our attention from the data. But the large megatrends are now indisputable. If you fail to pick wealthy parents and want to experience the American dream today, move to Canada.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 65

Long before our four 21-year-olds considered college, they were on different glide paths.

Debt-free Miranda was the beneficiary of parental investments that prepared her for school and high achievement. She grew up in a book-filled and conversation-rich home environment with college-educated parents that had more leisure and vacation time to spend with her. She spent more time in ecologically pristine environments and had access to recreation, health care, and nutritious food. Her parents, knowledgeable about brain development, talked to her, using vastly more vocabulary words than children of other classes hear.

When she was away from her parents, they paid for comparably stimulating child-care settings.

Researcher Meredith Phillips found that by age six, wealthier children spent as many as 1,300 more hours a year than poor children on enrichment activities such as travel, music lessons, visits to museums, and summer camp.

All this results in much higher math and reading skills and other attainments later in life.

Success-bound Miranda had more opportunities than her non-wealthy peers to develop the important social capital that results from more time with parents and time spent in social institutions such as religious congregations, civic organizations, and extracurricular activities. Working-class youth, often with parents holding down multiple jobs to make up for several decades of stagnant wages, are more socially disconnected or connected in dysfunctional ways. As a result, they develop fewer “soft skills” useful in job networking and workplaces.

As our foursome enter K-12 school, once considered the great avenue to equal opportunity, disparities widen. The early literacy and reading support conferred by the more

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advantaged families leads their children to pull away from others, not just those with low incomes. Class-based disparities in the cognitive skills of reading and math test scores have grown since the 1970s, corresponding with the national income and wealth gap. According to researcher Sean Reardon, the income-­ achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 percent to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born in 1976.

Among “high achievers,” the top 4 percent of students nationwide, 34 percent come from the top quartile, households with incomes of more than $120,776. Only 17 percent come from the bottom quartile, with incomes of less than $41,472. The income-achievement gap is

now bigger than the race gap, a reverse from 50 years earlier. The main explanation is that high-income parents of all races are investing more in children’s cognitive development.

Family Advantage and College Success All four of our young adults graduated from their high schools in the top fifth of their classes. But their high-school experience was quite divergent, based on their community and neighborhood. The key decision point— as to whether to attend college and where— was largely driven by disparities in income and wealth in the form of parental investment, K-12 education systems, and college-­ preparatory supports.

In the 70 years since World War II, college attendance has played a significant role in employment opportunity and lifetime earnings.

Over these 70 years, college entry has increased by more than 50 percent, and the rate of college completion by age 25 has more than quadrupled. But since 1980, an income-based gap has grown up in terms of college completion.

Low-income students born around 1980 only increased their college-graduation rates by 4 percent—whereas higher-income cohorts saw their graduation rates go up by 18 percent. The greatest inequality has been among women, driven by increases in college completion by the daughters of higher-income households—and the lack of opportunities for non-wealthy women.

Marcus’s family, like Miranda’s, placed a strong emphasis on attending college and college preparation. He went to a suburban public school that provided college-bound students with Advanced Placement classes, college counseling, and seminars for parents. While not as wealthy as Miranda’s family, Marcus’s family,

suze 777 / istockphoto

Parental Investments from Birth

In our increasingly plutocratic politics, the very wealthy have less stake in opportunitybuilding mechanisms for others, as their own progeny advance through privatized systems.

also like Miranda’s, paid for the services of the burgeoning college-preparation industry to boost their child’s SAT scores. But in terms of family wealth, Marcus was on his own after high school, venturing into higher education and work without family resources and a financial safety net. As a consequence, in his thirties and forties, he will have more debts than assets.

Miranda and barista Tony share an important parental boost that college student Marcus didn’t have: Their parents passed on financialpreparation and money-literacy skills. Both children learned about money from parents who gave them allowances to manage and encouraged them to open bank accounts and save.

Initial research suggests that financial literacy may be a more important factor than schooling in lifetime wealth accumulation and retirement savings. Tony learned thrift and debt avoidance. These skills are much more important in the current environment, with unregulated predatory lenders and a bewildering variety of student-loan products to choose from.

Tony will benefit from modest family-wealth transfers, thanks to a previous generation of social investments, which include his grandfather’s government-subsidized home mortgage.

Tony will tap into what Sally Koslow, in her book Slouching toward Adulthood, calls the “middle class trust fund”: free room and board and cable and Internet access. Tony’s parents don’t consider their support for him a legacy advantage. They understand that the deck is stacked against their son, who will most likely never be rich without a winning lottery ticket or marrying into money. Their temporary housing and modest gifts—the purchase of a truck and money to get a trade license—are hedges against his downward mobility and destitution.

Cordelia’s parents did what they could to

better her prospects, ensuring she was in a good elementary school and steered to engaging teachers. They found her affordable summer day camps and other enrichment experiences. But when it came time for her to consider college, Cordelia was flying solo. Like many talented low-income students, she didn’t apply to one of the nation’s selective schools.

Only 5 percent of the total enrollment at the 28 most selective private colleges is from families in the bottom fifth of income distribution. But 70 percent of the enrollment consists of students in the highest-income distribution. Like the majority of low-income college students, Cordelia did not complete college. A key missing ingredient for Cordelia was effective college guidance, within her school and at home.

How young people finance college has its own disparities. Low-income and minority students that get proper guidance can sometimes obtain significant scholarships at private colleges and graduate with less debt than students attending public universities. Miranda’s parents paid full freight for her college. Marcus, navigating the college-financing jungle on his own, got little financial aid and signed up for a loan package that will cost him twice as much over time due to higher interest payments as the cheapest available plan. If Marcus were attending college 40 years earlier, he probably would have graduated debt-free as a result of lower tuition and public financial-aid programs.

One of the huge breakaway wealth advantages is unpaid internships in one’s career area, an essential leg up in the transition from school to work. Entry-level workers are now expected to show up with work experience. Research shows that half of college-graduate hires had previously interned at the firm where they were hired. While Miranda received family support

to take unpaid internships, other college students like Marcus used every non-school hour to earn money in jobs outside their career area.

Family wealth also serves as a form of adversity insurance, as young adults face potential setbacks including prolonged unemployment, bad credit, health or addiction problems, criminal arrests, car breakdowns or accidents, or early parenthood. Young adults may make poor decisions or face unforeseen circumstances, but in almost every case, family wealth will help keep young people on track, whether it comes in legal assistance, treatment, or regular cash infusions.

Closing the Advantage Gap What, if anything, can be done to offset the torrent of perks and advantages that wealthy parents confer to their progeny as they compete for slots in educational institutions, internships in their field of interest, entry-level jobs, affordable housing, and other resources?

The first step is to acknowledge the depth of the declining mobility and opportunity problem, a story that is just beginning to be understood after three decades of extreme inequality. The image of post–World War II white mobility still reverberates and dominates our national mythology, especially for our political class and whites over the age of 50. But the present inequalities of wealth have fundamentally altered the playing field for the next two generations.

Even ideological critics of social investment have begun to acknowledge the intergenerational class disparities. Conservative Reihan Salam acknowledges the “incumbent-­ protection story” of wealthy families, observing that “it is possible that non-black families in the top three-fifths of the income distribution are giving their children advantages that protect them from scrappy upstarts in ways that

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 67

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for youth enrichment, arts and sports programs, summer camps, and stimulating after-school programs survive budget cutting. This must include resources for outreach to the most socially disconnected families to ensure their children have access to these opportunities.

The U.S. Department of Labor should police the unpaid and underpaid internship marketplace, cracking down on companies that replace paid positions with unpaid ones. Certain sectors that disproportionately offer unpaid internships as a stepping-stone to career networks—journalism, politics, and entertainment—should do deep soul-­ searching about the implications for the widespread exclusion of working- and middle-class

youth. Private-sector and government agencies that offer internships should create stipend and compensation pools to ensure that nonwealthy young people have an equal shot at internships. Donors should fund internship positions at nonprofit organizations they care about, expanding the pool of young people that can intern there.

Privileged families will always seek to extend their own advantages to their children, but restoring greater progressivity to the tax system would ensure that wealthy families still contribute to the opportunities of others.

Another intervention would be to eliminate or reduce the tax deductibility of contributions to private schools and colleges, except if directly used for scholarships for disadvantaged youth.

One elegant solution would be to tax wealth to broaden opportunity. Revenue from a steeply progressive estate or inheritance tax could capitalize an “education-opportunity trust fund” to provide debt-free college educations for first-generation college students.

Wealthy families concerned about declining social mobility should use their special privileges to stop the advantage arms race. They should match any family subsidies with tax dollars and donations to organizations that promote mobility. Without such interventions, the U.S. will further drift toward being a caste society, where opportunity, occupation, and social status are based on inherited advantage, fractured along class lines.  Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good (www.inequality.org). He is also cofounder of United for a Fair Economy and Wealth for the Common Good.

yuri arcurs / fotolia

might damage our growth prospects.” Let alone principles of fairness, opportunity, and equity!

Sustained public investments in opportunity are critical to level a playing field that is constantly being upended by wealth advantage. We can’t remove the capacity of well-off families to help advantage their offspring, but we can give others more of a shot.

Other industrialized countries have demonstrated that public investments in health, education, and family well-being can offset the private advantages of wealth and improve social mobility. Initiatives like the “Baby College” of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Head Start, the U.S.’s Nurse-Family Partnership program, and universal preschool programs, such as those in France and Denmark, partially close the gaps in school achievement and subsequent wages. Several of these initiatives coach new parents on childhood health and wellness, discipline, brain development, and games and enrichment resources available to their children.

High-quality pre-kindergarten education, access to health care and nutrition, good K-12 public education, and early diagnosis of learning disabilities and special needs are key interventions that help people equalize life chances.

The fact that inequalities of opportunity now accelerate as schooling begins is testament to the need to defend and expand funding for public education at all levels. More than three-fourths of undergraduate college students attend public universities and colleges, which are facing the worst state cuts.

There are also private-sector and personal interventions that could reduce runaway unequal opportunity. Community foundations can partner with business and cultural institutions to ensure that public and private funding

The image of mobility still dominates our national mythology, but the present inequalities of wealth and privilege have fundamentally tilted the playing field for the next two generations.

Cascading Effects of Parental Stress Economic hardship reverberates through the family in multiple ways that harm children.

By Carly Tubbs and Lawrence Aber

O

n August 14, 2003, the lights went out in cities across the Northeast.

This rolling blackout, one of the worst in U.S. history, was a cascading failure, in which a local power surge on an already-overloaded system triggered failures across the network. Five years later, much of America was in the midst of another type of cascading failure. Like the Northeast blackout of 2003, the collapse of the housing market in 2007 flowed through multiple and interconnected systems, resulting in the deepest and most sustained global economic slowdown since the Great Depression.

The ensuing recession reverberated through families, placing economic stresses on parents, with repercussions for an entire generation of children. These ripple effects couldn’t have come at a worse time for U.S. families already weighed down by a decade of stagnant wages and growing income inequality, particularly for low- and middle-income families.

As developmental scientists, we know that economic deprivation—including poverty, homelessness, onetime job or income shocks, and recessions—leads to reduced resources and toxic levels of stress within families, schools, and neighborhoods that can disrupt children’s healthy development. But we also know that with the right supports at the right times, children demonstrate a remarkable resilience to such adversities.

Economic Hardships and Emotional Distress Other articles in this report have documented the extent of the collapse. Unemployed parents who cannot find full-time work take on insecure, temporary, or part-time jobs that are often inadequate to meet their families’ needs. Families’ losses may also be affected by

cutbacks in federal or state social-assistance programs meant to help parents temporarily smooth over the loss in income.

Parents’ employment and financial struggles combined with the daily difficulties of paying bills and affording basic necessities trigger emotional reactions within the family that affect children’s development. Adults who lose their jobs on average report an increase in depression and anxiety compared to adults who remain in stable employment. Even parents who don’t lose their jobs but only perceive them to be at risk show higher signs of depression and have increased use of antidepressants.

Overwhelmed, parents under financial pressure tend to fight more, leading to divorce or dysfunctional marriage.

Parents in distress are less affectionate and nurturing, and increasingly harsh, irritable, and inconsistent when dealing with their children. Research has even shown that children of long-term unemployed parents are more likely to be hospitalized for abuse and neglect.

Parents’ emotional distress can also affect children in less obvious but no less damaging ways.

For example, during infancy—a particularly sensitive period for brain and neurological development—maternal depression has been linked to a decrease in electrical activity in the areas of the brain associated with selfregulation and positive emotion. Moreover, these early effects may be enduring. Evidence suggests that children whose mothers were depressed during infancy still show high levels of behavior problems as toddlers—even after mothers’ depression abated. As children age, adolescent children of depressed parents who experience financial troubles have higher risks for developing anxiety and depression, problems with friends, and academic difficulties.

In addition to the impact of economic hardship on the quality of parents, financial distress decreases parents’ ability to invest time and money in their children’s upbringing, with particular consequences for cognitive and academic development. Starting in early childhood, mothers in households that experience a loss in income are less likely to spend time reading to their children, teaching them numbers and colors, and taking them to museums.

Children of parents who lose their job have a 15 percent higher chance of being held back in school compared to before the job loss. In the long term, children whose parents lost a job are less likely to graduate from college and, in fact, earn 9 percent less annually as adults compared to similar children whose fathers did not experience an income loss.

Family stress likely radiates outward into other settings: most notably, in children’s schools and neighborhoods. Social scientists are just beginning to understand the ways in which macroeconomic forces f low through such settings to influence children’s development, and at this stage we can only make logical inferences. Take, for example, a study from Duke University showing that higher statewide unemployment levels were associated with lower statewide eighth-grade math scores.

The magnitude of this finding suggests that children of both employed and unemployed parents suffered during the economic downturn. But if not through stressed-out families, then through what channels? A recent study by Heather Hill, Pamela Morris, and others raises an intriguing possibility: that maternal job loss causes an increase in the extent to which children act out in classrooms. As any teacher will tell you, one problem child in the classroom can disrupt the learning of all students

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 69

As children grow, toxic stress in their families and stunted economic resources affect kids’ ability to learn and to build relationships with their teachers, peers, and neighbors.

Kids in the Economic Blackout It’s too soon to know definitively how children will be affected long term by the recession, the persistent period of high unemployment, and cuts in social outlays. Much of the recession’s effects on children may not manifest immediately but will be apparent in the longer term, as the downturn takes its continuing toll on family relationships, school resources, and work opportunities. Infant mortality continued to decline during the recession, while child obesity rates stayed the same. Asthma rates increased for African American, Latino, and Asian children, groups hard hit by the recession. Families largely maintained health-insurance coverage for children during the recession, thanks initially to the temporary help of the 2009 stimulus program (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). More than a year later, the Affordable Care Act added additional protections for children, requiring states to maintain Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Program eligibility. These data should be regarded as only the first word. Quality indicators of children’s holistic development—such as measures of how children learn, think, and build relationships with others—are not generally available in large-scale national data sets.

We do know that the first step in the cascading chain reaction has already begun. By any measure, parents faced unprecedented economic adversities during the recession. A total of 8.5 million adults lost their jobs during the recession, leaving one in nine children

70 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

living with an unemployed parent. The number of children living in financially stressed households is much larger. As of November 2009, an additional 14.4 million adults were unemployed or underemployed, which includes people who wanted to work full-time but had either given up looking for work or were working part-time. As other articles in this special report have shown, the economic impact on children and families is continuing.

Even today, in a weak recovery, many families are still in economic turmoil. Around five million people, or nearly 40 percent of those currently unemployed, have been without work for approximately six months or more. The effects of such long-term employment are pernicious: The longer people are unemployed, the more unlikely they are to find a new job, often dropping out of the labor market altogether.

In the face of such lingering unemployment and a decrease in government benefits, many families forced into poverty during the recession remain in poverty today.

These enormous difficulties have already taken their toll on parents’ mental health. Between 2008 and 2009, 25- to 44-year-olds (those of prime parenting age) reported an increase in serious psychological distress. According to a recent article in the medical journal The Lancet, 4,750 more people committed suicide between 2007 and 2010 than would be expected in the absence of the recession. Divorce rates actually declined during the recession—but the most likely explanation is that economic necessity has forced many couples to stay together. It is hardly healthy for kids when parents who’d rather split up remain in a stressful marriage.

In the face of this evidence, we have reason to be concerned about our children’s futures. For children who were babies during the prolonged

slump, parents’ toxic stress and reduced ability to afford quality food and health care may actually alter children’s brain development, stunting their chances across their lifespan. We are concerned about whether children will develop nurturing bonds with their caregivers and whether they will learn how to regulate their emotions in stressful and chaotic families. As children age, family stress and low levels of resources affect their ability to learn and to build relationships with their teachers, peers, and neighbors. We worry about whether children will stay in school and if they do, whether they will succeed. For adolescents during the recession, we are concerned about how they will find employment, become financially independent, and develop the agency to meet their goals—all hallmarks of a successful transition to adulthood.

The Policy Buffers We Need We can prevent such a dark future by providing our most vulnerable children with access to policy “insulators” that buffer them from the worst of cascading failures in their families, schools, and neighborhoods. President Obama and the 111th Congress made an unprecedented level of short-term policy investments to support children, especially low-income children and their families, through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Approximately $153 billion of the $787 billion in the ARRA— nearly 20 percent—went directly to children and children’s programs, primarily via education and early education ($86.3 billion), tax programs ($30.7 billion), and health and nutrition ($28.7 billion). Another $70 billion indirectly supported children by supporting their families (primarily via tax credits and increases in unemployment insurance). In addition to stimulating the economy and protecting against

sergiyn / fotolia

in the class. While more research needs to be done to document these so-called peer effects, they raise enormous questions about the multiple and cumulative ways in which children’s futures are shaped by economic hardship.

Children of Color in the Persistent Downturn

BY ALGERNON AUSTIN

c h a r t d ata : u . s . c e n s u s b u r e a u h i s t o r i c a l p o v e r t y ta b l e s ; p h o t o : t o m a lu / f o t o l i a

Lawrence Aber is distinguished professor of applied psychology and public policy at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University.

Carly Tubbs is a Ph.D. student in the psychology and social intervention program at NYU.

CHILD POVERTY BY RACE, 2000 AND 2011

30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5%

38.8% 31.2%

2000 2011

35%

28.4% 34.1%

40%

9.1% 12.5%

further job loss, these ARRA funds temporarily provided America’s most vulnerable children and families with resources to withstand the shocks so many experienced.

Unfortunately, many of the insulators provided in the 2009 stimulus package came to an abrupt end. At this juncture, in the midst of the government sequester, needed policy supports are at risk. The Ryan budget, recently passed in the House, gets 66 percent of its cuts from health/nutrition and tax programs that provide support for low- and middle-income families.

Negative economic shocks are predictably unpredictable, but negative effects of those shocks on parenting and on child health and development are quite predictable—and can be prevented. We can do so in multiple ways.

We can pass a budget that protects the next generation of children: It should increase revenues without shifting the cost for important education and health supports to states. At the family, school, and neighborhood level, we can allocate funds to design, mount, and rigorously evaluate large-scale state experiments to protect children’s development during times of economic crisis. As part of such an initiative, we can expand data-collection efforts to enable us to better understand how recessions and other crises shape children’s development—in turn allowing us to develop more solutions. Programs that invest in children are cost-effective and hold the promise of improved responses to economic crises in the future. 

The effects of the prolonged slump show up both in short-term deprivation and in its long-term consequences. These include homelessness, poor health, hunger, and joblessness.

16.2% 21.9%

A

t the peak of economic boom times in 2000, the U.S. child-poverty rate reached a historic low of 16.2 percent. Even then, UNICEF ranked the United States as having the second highest child-poverty rate out of 26 rich countries. The United States had a child-poverty rate twice Germany’s, five times Sweden’s, and nearly ten times Denmark’s. The only country scoring worse than the United States was Mexico.

The picture is substantially bleaker today. The child-poverty rate reached 21.9 percent in 2011. For many children of color and for immigrant children, poverty rates are typically higher than the overall average, and they have worsened over the prolonged downturn. In the “good” economic times of 2000, the official Latino child-poverty rate was 28.4 percent. By 2011, that rate had jumped to 34.1 percent.

For African American children, the child-poverty rate went from 31.2 percent in 2000 to 38.8 percent in 2011.

Poverty is also extreme among immigrant children.

In 2011, one out of two children (49.6 percent) born in Mexico but living in the United States was impoverished. Middle Eastern–born children had a similarly high poverty rate, 46.5 percent.

One out of three (35 percent) Caribbean-born children lived in poverty. One out of five (19.8 percent) children born in Asia experienced similar destitution.

0

All

White

Latino

Black

It is difficult to measure the homeless population. Is a family that has lost a home to foreclosure but is now living with relatives homeless? A portion of the homeless population resides in shelters, but many sleep in places where the general public doesn’t see them and where enumerators have difficulty finding them.

However we define homelessness, we likely underestimate its magnitude.

African Americans are typically found in the homeless population at three times their rate in the overall population. In 2010, the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that African Americans made

Homelessness A bursting housing bubble and high levels of unemployment have led to an increase in homeless families. “Among industrialized nations, the United States has the largest number of homeless women and children,” reports the National Center on Family Homelessness. “Not since the Great Depression have so many families been without homes.” In January 2013, the Coalition for the Homeless found 21,000 children in New York City’s homeless shelters. Other areas have also reported increases in their homeless populations since the start of the recession in 2007, with a 23 percent increase in Washington, D.C.’s family homelessness between 2008 and 2012.

up 37 percent of the population in shelters although they were only 12.4 percent of the total population. The downturn has hurt American families broadly, but African American families have experienced above-­average rates of economic distress (high levels of unemployment, poverty, foreclosure), which will continue to cause them to be overrepresented among the homeless.

Homeless children are more likely than other children to suffer from asthma,

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 71

Hunger

Joblessness At the center of this story are prolonged high levels of joblessness. Adult joblessness harms kids, and in poor families, teenagers enter labor markets with dismal prospects for good earnings or decent careers.

While most middle-class children go on to college after high school, for many low-income children “adult” life begins in the teen years.

72 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

TEEN EMPLOYMENT RATES

BY RACE, 2000 AND 2012 2000 2012

22.1%

15%

29%

25% 20%

10%

16.6%

35% 30%

29.8%

38.6%

40%

45.2%

45%

49.1%

50%

26.1%

In as rich a country as the United States, no child should be hungry. But many children are, and the rates also vary by race. Food insecurity is defined as one or more family members not having enough to eat at times during the year. Latino children had the highest rate of residing in foodinsecure households in 2011 at 17.4 percent. Black children had the second highest rate at 14.6 percent. The food-­insecurity rate for white children was 6.7 percent, less than half the rates for Latino and black children.

5% 0

All

White Latino

Black

were enrolled in higher education, compared to 45.7 percent of Latinos and 41.2 percent of blacks. A healthy teen labor market matters to a large share of youth of all races, but it is more important to blacks and Latinos.

Teen joblessness needs to be understood in terms of the employment rate—the percent employed out of the total population—rather than the unemployment rate. To be counted as unemployed, one has to be actively looking for work. When teens can’t find work,

they often stop looking because they usually have a parent who can support them. Thus, the unemployment rate can substantially underestimate the labormarket difficulties faced by teens. The employment rate provides a better measure of whether the teen labor market is strong or weak.

Like child poverty, which was increasing even before the recession began, the teen job crisis has been going on for a decade.

From 1970 to 2001, more than 40 percent of teens were employed. But by 2007, the teen employment rate had fallen to 35 percent. The recession and its aftermath greatly worsened the situation. In 2012, the teen employment rate was 26.1 percent, more than 14 percentage points below what is typical. With teen employment, we can see the usual racial disparities. White, Latino, and black teens all share the overall pattern of declining employment from the early 2000s and a catastrophic decline since 2007. However, white teens have the highest rates of employment followed by Latino teens and then black teens.

In 2012, the teen employment rate for whites was 29 percent. For Latinos, it was 22.1 percent. For blacks, it was 16.6 percent.

We are not likely to improve the teen labor market until we improve the overall health of the American economy. With 12 million people unemployed, not enough jobs

exist for workers of any age. Teens are generally the least experienced and least educated workers, and employers are not likely to hire them if they can find older workers at the same wage. Only when the labor market is tight will employers begin to hire teens at adequate rates.

In an economy where businesses are making strong profits and the stock market is high but job growth is meager, the federal government needs to step in to stimulate job growth. Infrastructure investments produce a big job-creation bang for each buck spent and help ensure a productive and competitive economy for our children in the future. A significant share of the jobs created from infrastructure investments will reach Latinos and blacks. Latinos receive jobs because they are overrepresented in the construction industry. Blacks receive

jobs because infrastructure investments also increase the demand for workers in the transportation and manufacturing industries where black workers have decent representation.

On a per capita basis, the United States is richer than Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, yet, by relative poverty measures, the United States has a much higher rate of child poverty. Thus our childpoverty problem reflects the unequal distribution of income and wealth.

The United States is rich enough to have a lower child-poverty rate than Germany, Sweden, and Denmark and maintain a high standard of living for all, but our political system has not allowed the development of the safety net, jobs, labor, and tax policies that would produce that result.

Though the recession is officially over, America’s children still suffer from high levels of poverty, hunger, homelessness, and joblessness. Like the rest of society’s benefits and adversities, these are not equally distributed by race.

Each year that we tolerate high unemployment, we add to the permanent physical and emotional scars of large numbers of low-income children.  Algernon Austin directs the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, which works to advance policies that enable people of color to participate fully in the American economy and benefit equitably from gains in prosperity.

c h a r t d ata : b u r e a u o f l a b o r s tat i s t i c s , c u r r e n t p o p u l at i o n s u r v e y ; p h o t o s : k at h y d e wa r , n at e m a x f i e l d / i s t o c k p h o t o ; n o lt e lo u r e n s / f o t o l i a

respiratory and ear infections, and gastrointestinal problems, as well as a range of emotional and behavioral problems. These early setbacks cause damage that reverberates through entire lives.

Low-income teens who don’t attend college need to work to help their parents, support themselves, and in some cases help support a partner and children. For these low-income youth, a healthy teen labor market means that they can begin to transition into adult roles, while a weak labor market means that many will be in limbo after high school.

Because Latinos and blacks are less likely to be middle-class, they are less likely to go to college.

In 2011, 56.2 percent of whites 20 to 21 years old

Intergenerational Injustice

It’s not Social Security deficits that are destroying the life chances of the young but a prolonged slump compounded by bad policies.

By Tamara Draut

G

enerational fairness has been a big theme of the austerity crusaders, whose most strident advocates tend to be financiers and business titans of substantial net worth. Yet their calls to radically reduce social investment out of a sense of generational equity diminishes the prospects of young people. The true generational injustice has little to do with the projected public debt and everything to do with the real crisis going on right now. Today’s young adults—especially 20- and 30-­somethings with young children—face shrinking opportunity and growing insecurity.

The fate of today’s infants and toddlers is inextricably connected to that of their millennial-­generation parents. Two-thirds of children under the age of 5 are raised by parents younger than 34. The true generational injustice is a threadbare to nonexistent social contract that has made it harder than ever before for the young to either work or educate their way into the middle class—and stay there if they’re lucky enough to arrive. The prolonged downturn intensified the struggle; state and federal budget cuts only deepened the damage.

More than three years after the official end of the recession, more than 5.6 million 18- to 34-year-olds want a job and can’t find one. An additional 4.7 million young adults are underemployed—they’re either working part time when they really want a full-time position, or they’ve simply given up on their job search. High unemployment is unlikely to abate anytime soon without much greater public investment, direct action to create jobs, or both. If we continue to add jobs at the current rate, it will be 2022 before the country recovers to full employment, and even under those conditions workers younger than 25 will

face unemployment rates double the national average—and flat or declining wages.

While much media attention has focused on young college-educated grads who can’t find work or are working at jobs that don’t require their degrees, the greatest pain accrues further down the income and education ladder.

Less-privileged young people are experiencing joblessness at levels not seen since the Great Depression. Young African Americans face joblessness at a rate double that of young whites, and the gaps between those with college degrees and high-school diplomas is even wider. Most children of baby boomers will not be able to achieve even their parents’ standard of living.

And Baby Makes Broke The millennial generation is now in its peak childbearing years, and more than in any previous generation, the cultural and economic expectation is that both mom and dad will be in the workforce throughout their children’s lives.

Compared to baby boomers and gen-Xers, millennials are much more supportive of policies that would make child care widely more available and affordable and that would provide paid family leave for new parents. With good reason: They earn less than their parents did at their age, they have more debt, and both men and women have come of age expecting to be full participants in both parenting and bread-winning. Our society is not meeting their needs—and as this sizable generation continues to progress through its childbearing stage, austerity measures are likely to make the child-care crisis even worse.

Compared to other rich nations, the United States spends considerably less of its national wealth on child care. The United States ranks 32nd out of 39 rich nations in spending on child care as a percentage of gross domestic product,

which means that high-quality care is spectacularly expensive, and as a result, in short supply. Most public child-care spending is targeted toward single parents, delivered primarily through Head Start, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the Child Care Development Block Grant. But none of these supports is fully funded, so the supply of available slots falls short of the demand for services. State and federal budget cuts have further shrunk the number of children and families who will benefit from early care and learning programs.

More than one in three young families lived in poverty in 2010, the highest share on record. The price of child care is rising faster than inflation, with average monthly fees for two children exceeding median rent in every state. Because of these high costs, professional child care is unaffordable for many families, and only a fraction of families with working mothers put their children in paid care. Lowerincome families are increasingly turning to their own extended family—grandparents and other relatives—to watch their children while they’re at work. The quality is dramatically uneven, and lower-income children are much more likely to end up in less stable and developmentally rich child-care settings.

Single parents, mainly single mothers, have a particularly tough time. Without the benefit of a second income, they often have trouble making ends meet. Just as this generation is experiencing growing inequality in their pursuit of higher education, their ability to provide top-quality care for their young children depends greatly on where they fall in America’s increasingly skewed income distribution.

For low-income families who don’t have relatives to provide care, paying for child care takes a substantial bite out of their incomes.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 73

The national average for center-based child-care costs in 2010 was $8,900 for full-time care for an infant and $7,150 for full-time care for a preschooler. Families making less than $1,500 per month with children under the age of five that paid for child care spent more than half of their monthly income on child-care expenses. It’s not uncommon for young children to be bounced around between several different settings during their formative years as child-care subsidies decrease with their mom’s earnings or cuts in state funding result in longer waiting lists or loss of a subsidized slot due to tightened eligibility. Investing in the critical first three years of life has been shown to be essential for a strong cognitive and social foundation. Reaching vulnerable children at birth is especially critical in preventing early and persistent learning gaps. Yet our nation, unlike other advanced and wealthy nations, leaves this stage of life largely to chance.

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made a commitment to ensure universal pre-kindergarten for fouryear-olds. Given the enormous political pressures to continue cutting the federal budget, it’s a long shot that we’ll be able to achieve universal pre-K anytime soon, let alone make significant strides toward ensuring all infants and toddlers are provided with nurturing and developmentally appropriate care while their parents work. Indeed, the issue of child care more broadly remains at the margins of political debate, gaining prominence only when existing funding is threatened or cut.

The Generational Earnings Gap While the cost of child care has nearly doubled since the mid-1980s, over the same time the typical earnings of young people—many of whom need to purchase that care—have failed

74 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

to keep pace. Between 1980 and 2011, typical earnings for young workers declined for all but college-educated women. Everyone else either lost ground or stayed in place—failing to either match or exceed what their parents earned a generation ago. Overall, young men in their mid-twenties to early thirties are earning 90 cents for every dollar their father earned in 1980, while young women overall have pulled ahead, earning $1.17 in 2010 for every dollar earned by their mothers in 1980—a gain entirely driven by college-educated women.

But these averages mask large differences in the generational earnings gap that has occurred for non-college-educated young people. The typical inflation-adjusted earnings for young men with no education beyond high school are 25 percent less than in 1980, a loss of more than $10,000. Young women without any college credentials earn less too, but their loss is $2,500. The declines continue for young people with some college or an associate’s degree, though the drop in earnings power is less severe. It’s important to note that the generational decline in earnings power was well under way before the recession hit, and it shows no sign of improving in the absence of public policies to increase the minimum wage, enforce existing labor laws, universalize career paths in health-services occupations, and bolster the practical right to collective bargaining.

There are millions of jobs that can’t be shipped overseas or replaced by robots—think home health-care aides, stockers, day-care workers, waiters, cooks—and these jobs will continue to be the largest source of new positions in the next decade. The only way to improve job quality for millions of workers in these occupations is through public-­policy choices and collective-bargaining rights, aimed at

professionalizing jobs and pay levels, improving working conditions, and providing pathways out of entry-level jobs.

In the meantime, going to college remains the best route to the middle class. It’s become a common refrain that a college graduate today will earn more than $1 million more in his or her lifetime than someone without a college degree.

What’s less appreciated is that the so-called college premium isn’t due to the average college grad making out like gangbusters; it’s because everybody else’s earnings have taken a nosedive.

Some in the media have taken the job slump of recent college grads and their rising debt burdens as a reason to question whether a college degree is still worth it today. But that’s the wrong conclusion. The more appropriate question to ask in the wake of $1 trillion in college debt is whether our debt-for-diploma system is a good way to provide access to college and a real chance at upward mobility.

The Debt-for-Diploma System What gets lost in the trendy conversation about whether college is really worth it is the radical nature of the current status quo. Today, two-thirds of college-going students borrow to help pay for the cost, graduating with an average of $26,000 in undergraduate debt.

African Americans and lower-income students are much more likely to borrow, and at higher amounts, than their white and more privileged peers. Fully eight out of ten African American college students take on debt to pay for college (average graduating debt: more than $28,000), compared to just over six out of ten white students, who graduate with $4,000 less debt than their African American counterparts. Not everyone makes it to commencement, of course. Today, dropping out often

yuri arcurs / fotolia

means leaving the college gates with debt but no degree—a fate that befalls almost 30 percent of college students who take out loans, leaving them with less income to defray debt.

The path to our current debt-for-diploma system is the result of several overlapping trends.

The first is a steady decline in public investment in state colleges and universities, down 26 percent per full-time equivalent over two decades.

This, more than any other trend, fueled the tripling of public university tuition in one generation. Second, as tuition spiraled, the purchasing power of the Pell grant dwindled from covering about $70 out of every $100 in college costs to around $30 of every $100 today. In addition, many states and colleges shifted their aid programs to play the rankings game and attract the highest-scoring students, diverting scarce resources away from students with financial need. The result of all of this is a widening level of unmet need—the amount of money after all available aid that students need to either earn or borrow to pay for school. Students from modest backgrounds coped with the yawning gap between their resources and the cost of college by working more hours at part- or full-time jobs and piling on debt. Having to work while attending college reduces one’s chance of graduating within five years—or graduating at all. The whole system serves to harden class lines.

The debt-for-diploma system has distorted the way we think about the returns to a college education. Vanishing from our discourse is acknowledgment of the vital role higher education plays in a democracy or the vast public benefit we all derive from an open and affordable college system. The debt that is now required to attend college has essentially commoditized and privatized what has been since our nation’s founding a public good. Our national

As debt financing has become the gateway for attending a four-year university, we’re experiencing growing gaps by race and class in who enrolls and completes four-year degrees.

discussion about college has become dominated by business-speak. Major foundations and a growing cadre of public intellectuals have commandeered the dialogue to press for a greater return on investment by ensuring today’s college degrees have labor-market value. But in a debt-for-diploma system, “labor-market value” becomes harder to define or achieve. Has a teacher with $30,000 in student debt who is making $25,000 a year achieved labor-market value?

What about the music-studies major who took out $15,000 in loans and makes a living teaching piano lessons to neighborhood kids and serving lattes, while performing in the all-volunteer community symphony? Does his degree produce defensible labor-market value? Does the answer change if we add to the analysis that the teacher

is the first to go to college in her family while the Wall Streeter comes from a well-heeled family of Ivy Leaguers? How about the business major who takes out $60,000 in loans and lands a job on Wall Street making $150,000? No question her degree has good labor-market value. Does it make her investment better than the teacher’s investment? Suppose the Wall Streeter used her knowledge to enrich herself at the expense of her customers or helped crash the economy? The very premise of labor-market value presumes that markets accurately value social goods, of which education is a prime example. The fact that society needs tax-supported primary and secondary education in the first place is longstanding proof that markets do not value education correctly.

The debt-for-diploma system has consequences of bigger import than whether it helps an individual land a job that makes going to college “worth it.” As debt financing has become the required gateway for attending a four-year university, we’re experiencing growing gaps by race and class in who enrolls and completes four-year degrees. Smart and passionate young people from modest or poor backgrounds are doing the best they can to avoid debt by enrolling part-time and working full-time—the two biggest factors for dropping out. Meanwhile, our nation’s most elite colleges are engaged in a battle of “who has more luxuries” so they can entice well-heeled students who will pay full price.

Until about the mid-1990s, state universities and colleges were affordable for middleincome households, with summer jobs helping fill any leftover financial need. Lower-income students could pay the bill with grants and part-time jobs. Debt was the exception, not the rule. Well-funded public universities and

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 75

generous financial aid is what made America’s older population the most educated in the world. The debt-for-diploma system has made America’s younger population the 14th most educated in the world, while our older population ranks No. 1 in education attainment. Every year, millions of smart and passionate young people downscale or abandon their dreams because college has become so financially complicated. For those lucky enough to make it to graduation thanks to five-figure student loans, their monthly loan payments will exert a slow drag on their pocketbooks, slowing down their savings and ability to buy a home and even distorting key life decisions like getting married and starting a family. So the economic pain and diminished prospects of the parents will be reflected in the next generation.

Our nation has a long, rich history of expanding access to higher education through generous public investment—a path that has been abandoned in one generation. At the other end of the education spectrum, however, our system of early childhood education and care has overwhelmingly been treated as a private good, with access to high-quality care largely dependent on whether a family can afford to pay top dollar.

What Can We Afford?

Outlays on social goods such as child care or higher education have always drawn conservative opposition. But the struggle has intensified as the super-affluent have gained more power and influence over our political priorities and decision-making. It turns out that the rich, who have private options, also have different opinions than most Americans on key policies that shape opportunity and living standards. Because policymakers engage much more directly and routinely with this relatively

76 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

small group of affluent Americans, their priorities and preferences are much more likely to shape the agenda and the terms of the debate.

A recent survey funded by the Russell Sage Foundation found that the policy preferences of those with average annual incomes of more than $1 million vary widely from those of most citizens. This survey found that the general public is more open than the wealthy to a variety of policies designed to reduce inequality and strengthen economic opportunity, including raising the minimum wage, ensuring jobs for all who want one, and protecting our most vulnerable residents.

But the aff luent don’t just hold different opinions about public policies—they are much more able to convert those preferences into policy changes. In his recent book, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, political scientist Martin Gilens concludes that “the American government does respond to the public’s preferences, but that responsiveness is strongly tilted toward the most affluent citizens. Indeed, under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.”

Gilens shows that, in many cases, public-policy outcomes would have been quite different if Congress and the president had been equally responsive to all income groups.

The role that the donor class plays in both shaping and affecting the outcomes of policy is particularly critical on economic policy, notably high-income Americans’ stronger opposition to taxes (which are essential to affording anything) and corporate regulation. In his 2008 book, Unequal Democracy, political scientist Larry Bartels writes that “the

preferences of people in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent impact on the behavior of their elected officials.”

Our nation is pulling apart—politically and economically—in a toxic, mutually reinforcing cycle that confers more political advantages to the privileged few, while the majority of Americans struggle under an economic system whose rules are written to increasingly reward only those at the top. The millennial generation is coming of age and growing into adulthood at the pinnacle of this inequality era—and all indications are they will be worse off than previous generations. Their children are likely to be still worse off. This is not because of happenstance, nor is it due to the ravages of the lingering downturn. The descent of this generation has its roots in political changes that began just when they were being born, when conservatives began their assertive and effective assault on our common good.

Privileges at birth were never supposed to define one’s life in America, and while this has always been more aspirational and mythical than we’d like to think, it is perhaps the idea that most defines us as Americans. Throughout most of our history, we’ve taken deliberate steps toward closing the gap between this idea and our actual lives. Today we are no longer on a path toward more equality of opportunity, and this generation’s challenges provide ample evidence of our retreat. There is nothing inevitable about this fate, but altering the prospects of young Americans and their own children will require drastically different politics and policies.  Tamara Draut is vice president of policy and research at Dēmos and author of Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead.

r e d - b lu e p h o t o / f o t o l i a

Our system of early childhood education and care is treated as a private good, with access to high-quality service largely dependent on a family’s financial resources.

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University Press of Kansas Phone 785-864-4155 • Fax 785-864-4586 www.kansaspress.ku.edu

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Dancing with Herself The anti-celebrity of Frances Ha star Greta Gerwig BY JESSICA WEISBERG F

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omic actress Greta Gerwig has a versatile look—indolent or boyish, athletic or glamorous, always blond and beautiful but with broad shoulders and doughy cheeks that make her resemble an improbably attractive rugby player.

The through line in her work is her pained gaze telegraphing that she’s alone in the world, and she wouldn’t expect otherwise.

Gerwig started her career in movies referred to as “mumblecore.” By definition, a mumblecore

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film was a low-key drama set in post-college American life in the first decade of the 21st century, made with sweat and the contents of a piggy bank. Many of the actors were nonprofessionals, and the stories they told were about welleducated people too creative to get a law degree but too pragmatic to idealize bohemian poverty.

Both in front of and behind the camera, the mumblecore crew seemed like happy underachievers, confronting their tenuous

existence with a mix of navelgazing and bravery—in their element before the economy crashed and social media came along, with its opportunities and pressures to seek followers and a wider audience. This was a genre that celebrated the precocity of a certain kind of privileged, extended youth, with characters so different from the compulsively entrepreneurial go-getters graduating from their alma maters today that it’s hard to believe their moment

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came less than ten years ago.

Gerwig was one of few recurring females in the mumblecore universe. She appeared in three movies directed by Joe Swanberg and one by the Duplass brothers, in each playing a buoyant intern type who expresses a deep insecurity by being incredibly kind.

In Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), Gerwig’s character is an associate at a production company run by guys. “You’re the smartest person here,” one of her bosses tells her. Gerwig’s character accepts the compliment but doesn’t ask for a raise.

After stealing several films in a supporting role, Gerwig is finally set to own one. Frances Ha, a favorite at last fall’s film festivals,

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 79

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is directed by Noah Baumbach, who previously specialized in harshly funny indie dramas set among misanthropic intellectuals like The Squid and the Whale (2005). Baumbach’s work is often criticized for creating characters too scathing to believe, but this is a cheerful movie that fluidly dances between art and life (the title character is heavily based on Gerwig, who co-wrote the movie and is dating Baumbach). It’s shot in crisp black and white, recalling Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and the soundtrack includes airy tunes by Georges Delerue, who scored countless New Wave French classics. At a moment when we seem concerned about young people, as demonstrated by daily news stories about how they’re loaded down with debt (and overly worried articles about how they’re always texting and unable to make eye contact) Frances Ha is an argument for the dreamy beauty of being untethered.

GERWIG PLAYS FRANCES, a 27-year-

old apprentice at a dance company who doesn’t have a boyfriend, money, or a career plan; her most intimate bond and proudest possession in life is the relationship with her best friend from college, Sophie (Mickey Sumner).

But Sophie abandons Frances for a preppy financial analyst named Patch.

There’s little arc to the plot. Frances lives in Brooklyn with Sophie and then moves to Manhattan, where she lives with two trust-fund kids who help cover the rent; she goes home to Sacramento (also Gerwig’s hometown) and takes a poorly planned two-day vacation to Paris. At her lowest, she spends the summer working as a hostess at Vassar College. Frances distances herself from Sophie just when she needs her friend the most, preferring in their family dynamic to play the mother instead of the child. The pair’s closeness belies an odd, fierce competition in which each strives to be not the most successful but the most content.

As Frances, Gerwig has an unkempt beauty. She’s clumsy, wears a uniform of tunic and leggings, and constantly needs to push her hair away from her face. She’s shot in a way that makes her appear almost ogreishly tall, towering above the tidy women with clipped

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bangs that her male roommates bring home at night. She offers to take one of her dates out for dinner, then raggedly sprints through the East Village looking for an ATM and returns a long while later, bleeding from her arm.

“I’m not a real person yet,” she tells him by way of apology.

Frances’s handsome date is played

by Adam Driver, best known as the reptilian, sweet but borderline sociopathic boyfriend of Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath character on Girls.

Frances Ha is bound to draw arguedover comparisons with Dunham’s series. As writers and performers, Gerwig and Dunham both come from a do-it-yourself background and bring an anti-­Hollywood aesthetic to their exploration of female friendship and young people in New York trying to build creative careers; and both are, by the entertainment industry’s narrow definition of prettiness, big-boned exotics. But while Frances is gentle and self-effacing, Hannah is brazen and theatrically masochistic. Hannah, who aspires to be a writer, sees her youth as a commercially viable product. She does drugs not for fun but because it gets her a paid writing gig; her process of self-discovery is indistinguishable from her process of building a career.

At times, Dunham’s Hannah can seem painfully unaware of her privilege, treating minor financial or personal setbacks as if a tectonic plate has moved asunder. (“I don’t really think that you guys are understanding the severity of this situation,” Hannah tells her parents when they ask her to join them in celebrating their 30th anniversary and she wants to go on a date with a pharmacist she just met. “I have been dating someone who treats my heart like it’s monkey meat. I feel like a delusional, invisible person half the time.

So I have to learn what it’s like to be treated well before it’s too late for me.”)

But Hannah’s anxiety fits our precarious time: Though she was raised in a comfortably middle-class household, she’s coming of age at a moment when being rich seems like the only alternative to being poor. As the show goes on, Hannah’s anxiety has evolved from a shtick into a disabling obsessivecompulsive disorder; and generational

The casual unfolding of Gerwig’s career makes her success seem like a

WHIMSICAL ACCIDENT. It’s not

quite that.

The poster for Greta Gerwig’s latest film.

anxiety has become a central theme, with characters contending with alcoholism and chronic underemployment. Hannah is desperate for success because the gap between victory and failure seems to be growing wider; she demands attention because its opposite, utter invisibility, terrifies her.

Frances, meanwhile, is an expert in acting as if everything is fine. When she breaks up with her boyfriend or loses her job or feels spurned by Sophie, she drinks a little too much and goes home. Frances’s perception of being young—and this film’s, too—feels formed in a bygone era, when youth was meant to be squandered and ambition was something to hide. Frances is not especially opinionated—she’s not one to boast that her approach to life is superior— but she has an idealized notion of the artist as a noble outsider. Much of the time, it seems she’s reacting to the same fears that Hannah faces by denying them.

To this otherwise light and fleeting film, Gerwig brings an emotional depth, making Frances seem like she’s smiling on the brink of collapse. In recent years, after her mumblecore launch, Gerwig had been exploring characters for whom failure seemed so inevitable that it might be easier not to try. In Greenberg (2010), also directed by Baumbach, she plays Florence, a babysitter in L.A. who wants to improve her station in life but is in no particular rush. “I’ve been out of college as long as I was in, and no one cares whether or not I wake up in the morning,” Florence says, observing, not complaining.

(Gerwig supposedly said this to Baumbach the first time they met.)

Gerwig has also excelled when she’s allowed to be strange—not just goofy but bizarre. In Whit Stillman’s quirky musical Damsels in Distress (2011), about a group of college-aged women who treat their own depression by attempting to help even sadder classmates, she plays a girl with odd coping strategies, like inventing a dance she hopes will become an international craze. In Alison Bagnall’s The Dish & the Spoon (2011), she plays Rose, a young woman who, after finding out that her husband has cheated on her, takes up with a homeless teenage boy.

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Rose and the boy share an innocent romance during a blistery winter week.

But she has violent urges that she never sees through. Deciding whether to return to her husband, she tests how she might live without him, uncertainly performing a vicious version of herself.

Frances Ha isn’t Gerwig’s dancing debut. She’s danced in several earlier films, often without a partner. Gerwig, who studied ballet for many years, turns her solos into moments of reluctant selfacceptance. In The Dish & the Spoon, on the stage of an abandoned auditorium, she begins with an arm-flailing tap dance and then, after taking off her socks and shoes, slides, spins, and bounds across the stage, which seems almost too small to contain her.

THE CASUAL UNFOLDING of Gerwig’s

career makes her success seem like a whimsical accident, a myth different from the one surrounding the slightly younger, famously driven Dunham, who was scheduling meetings with HBO before most people buy a couch.

It’s not quite that: At Barnard, where Gerwig studied English and philosophy, she co-founded an improv group and wrote plays. When she was a junior, she went to Cinema Village and saw

Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha, considered by many to be the first mumblecore film. She went back to see it the next three nights. She met Joe Swanberg through friends during a trip to Chicago, and they decided to collaborate. Yet a few years ago, she was still working as an SAT tutor, and in interviews, not wanting to seem opportunistic, she says things like, “I don’t force a lot of decisions on my life” and “I’m pretty happy with whatever occurs.”

On the surface, the trajectory of Gerwig’s career recalls that of Diane Keaton, who became famous for her collaborations with boyfriend Woody Allen. Keaton went on to star in movies directed by Warren Beatty, whom she also dated—her ambitions often seeming catalyzed by the grander purpose of supporting the ambitions of someone she loved. In her early career, Keaton, like Gerwig, had a tendency to play unintimidating characters whose charm rested not in their wit but in their acknowledgment of how witless they were. But Keaton’s characters, belonging to an earlier generation, seemed to expect that a man would eventually show up.

Gerwig’s don’t. Frances has little faith in romantic love—she’s not sure if it’s

Greta Gerwig as Violet, performing the dance she hopes to make an international craze in Damsels in Distress (2011).

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even something worth pursuing.

Being “relatable” has always been a useful trait for performers. But in our era, those famous for appearing familiar give fodder to a distinctly contemporary fantasy: that anyone with a platform—a Twitter account, say—might be able to make a living by being herself. Gerwig, according to The New York Times’ T magazine, has become “the go-to actress for offbeat, likeable female roles.” Gerwig’s likability is a product of her quiet ambitions, self-­deprecating humor, and comfort in being an outsider. Our era has also popularized a narrative about the enterprising outsider—we admire bloggers and venture capitalists and start-up founders, people who have taken some aspect of the fragmentary nature of the way we live and made it profitable. Most of Gerwig’s characters, like Frances, are too humble to brand themselves; unlike Hannah they choose to own their invisibility. Gerwig is both an embodiment of the Internet generation and a rebel against its competitive ethos.

In Frances Ha, Frances choreographs a piece that begins with a crowd of dancers moving independently and ends with them walking in sync but still immune to each other’s presence—their loneliness like an uncanny precondition they can’t ever address. There’s an intoxicating frivolity to Frances Ha, with its musical sequences and city montages, its joyous disregard for the crueler aspects of young adulthood today in favor of a platonic idea of youth. The film borrows back in time from the communal insouciance of 1960s hippies and 1990s slackers. It’s Gerwig, with her palpable sense of precariousness, who grounds it in contemporary life.

Frances isn’t a hippie or a slacker, and she’s not in a relationship; it’s not clear where she belongs. Even as the movie gestures toward a pat happy ending, it treats isolation as a truth one can either resist or embrace.

Frances, in her endearing pragmatism, chooses the latter. At one point in the movie, she sprints and bounces through downtown Manhattan with David Bowie’s “Modern Love” playing in the background. No love is more modern than that toward oneself. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 81

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The Past Is Never Dead How the white-supremacist South made possible the New Deal—and drastically curtailed it BY RICHARD YESELSON B

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nvoking “dysfunction” is now the basic black of punditry about American politics. As the British political theorist David Runciman recently observed in the London Review of Books, “Commentators find it almost impossible to write about American democracy these days without reaching for the word ‘dysfunctional.’” Consider the lowlights of our political culture in just the past 15 years: a puerile impeachment; the subsequent president elected via a Supreme Court filled with political allies; a radicalized Republican Party, convinced that taxation and domestic government spending are a form of socialism; a failure by bipartisan elites even to prioritize, let alone tackle, continued high unemployment and the looming catastrophe of climate change. As Runciman’s editors titled his own essay on America’s lumbering democracy, “How can it work?”

It is one measure of the power of Ira Katznelson’s important, overstuffed new book, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, that the reader conjures thoughts of today’s challenges to our American experiment from a work so firmly set in the crisis of 75 years ago. Katznelson traces U.S. domestic and foreign policy during the long New Deal, from Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration through the end of Harry Truman’s presidency. With a largeness of vision tethered to dense and gritty research, he shows how the South—not just the states of the Confederacy but border states as far north as Delaware—exercised a decisive influence over every stage.

Southern politicians, solidly Democratic, weighed the value of their party loyalty against their fear that new laws and proposed initiatives would disrupt the system of cheap African American labor that grounded their indigenous racial hierarchy. These included the monumental decision to

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prepare for and enter World War II. In an unintentionally hilarious part of the book, Katznelson describes how Hitler’s propagandists hoped that white Southerners, whom they saw as kindred spirits in bigotry, would provide an American fifth column. But the white-supremacist South baffled and disappointed Berlin. Against opposition from isolationist Republicans, it was the South—guided by, in addition to patriotism, the region’s desire for export markets, military bases, and assurances that its apartheid would remain stable—whose crucial votes in Congress supplied the British with arms and conscripted a vast military force to fight the Nazis.

In a wonderful phrase, Katznelson calls this an expression of the South’s “provincial internationalism.”

Katznelson, a professor at Columbia and a giant in the fields of history and political science over the past 40 years, concedes in the introduction that the Southern voting bloc’s influence over the New Deal is not a new topic. Katznelson covered some of this ground in When Affirmative Action Was White (2005), arguing that in such crucial areas as military personnel and Social Security, the era’s policymakers created an enduring set of discriminatory advantages for whites.

In Fear Itself, Katznelson gives these themes more relentless investigation. He widens the lens onto how the South affected the very “character of capitalism” and makes the broadest possible claim for the Southern bloc—both its uniqueness and its influence. “Make no mistake. … The South was singular … an entrenched system of racial humiliation that became everyday practice,” he writes. Southern lawmakers, moreover, “acted not on the fringes, but as an indispensible part of the governing political party. New Deal lawmaking would have failed without the active consent and governing

FEAR ITSELF: THE NEW DEAL AND THE ORIGINS OF OUR TIME

BY IRA KATZNELSON

Liveright (Norton)

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creativity of these southern members of Congress.”

Yet Katznelson concedes that the New Deal did not fail. The United States, following economic devastation and war, emerged a better and stronger nation. We didn’t cancel national elections as Great Britain did. FDR pushed the boundaries of democratic norms—once, during the war, he told Congress he’d implement the partial repeal of the Emergency Price Control Act himself if it didn’t pass the repeal by the end of the month. But we did not succumb to fascism or communism.

From the shards of the Depression, we built a social insurance and regulatory state that protected the elderly, guaranteed the rights of workers to collectively bargain, and monitored the stock market. We remade the most productive and creative economy in the world. As Katznelson writes, “I ascribe to the New Deal an import on par almost with the French Revolution … not merely an important event in the history of the United States, but the most important twentieth century testing ground for representative government in an age of mass politics” (emphasis added).

Emerging better and stronger is not the same as being politically virtuous.

Katznelson is concerned that through FDR’s partnership with white supremacy’s enforcers and, later, with Stalin’s Soviet Union, America undermined “core tenets of liberal democracy,” fostering a new “ethos of unaccountability.” The elites of the “greatest generation” turned a blind eye to racism, effectively lied on behalf of Stalin’s reign of terror, and destroyed whole cities in bombing campaigns that caused the deaths of 750,000 German and Japanese civilians. To situate this quandary, Katznelson cites Michael Walzer’s famous essay about the problem of “dirty hands” in politics. The book’s unstated question is, how dirty is too dirty?

IT’S NOT NEWS TO SAY that the

South was different. Katznelson quotes Ulrich Phillips, early 20thcentury historian of the antebellum slave South, observing that the region’s “white folk [are] a people

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 83

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with common resolve indomitably maintained—that [the South] shall be and remain a white man’s country.”

Katznelson notes that as late as 1938, only 4 percent of African Americans in the South were registered to vote.

As University of Michigan political scientist Robert Mickey argues in his forthcoming study, Paths out of Dixie, during this period, there were, in fact, significant variations between “Outer” Southern states and the region’s core—states like Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina that Mickey labels “authoritarian enclaves” under the loose aegis of a democratic federal government. But during the New Deal, at the level of national lawmaking in Washington, D.C., these variations mattered little: The region’s members of Congress mostly supported or opposed the same bills.

Katznelson concentrates on Congress rather than the oft-explored theme of presidential leadership embodied in, say, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Roosevelt. How did almost every vote of consequence depend on the weight applied by the Southern legislators? The short answer is one-party rule by the Democrats. Katznelson traces a sequence of reinforcing structural dynamics. Uncontested elections led to the accrual of Southern political seniority.

Seniority resulted in leadership positions. The guaranteed long tenures of Southern politicians gave them a deep understanding of how Congress worked. Throughout the period, Southerners chaired the majority of committees in both houses and sometimes held the majority of seats within the Democratic Party.

Katznelson’s mining of the record yields dazzling, daunting results. In battle after legislative battle, Southern Democrats found themselves pitted on the one hand against Republicans who opposed government expansion and entry into the war and on the other hand against liberal Northern Democrats like Senator Robert Wagner of New York, who sought to strengthen labor and expand African Americans’ civil and political rights.

In the New Deal’s early years, Southern members of Congress stuck with their long-held Democratic loyalty

and championed the vast sums of federal dollars rushing into their impoverished states. Even the rabidly racist Theodore Bilbo, senator from Mississippi, who proposed as late as 1946 that blacks be resettled in Liberia, voted in 1935 for the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), labor’s socalled Magna Carta.

That was before union growth tripled in little more than a decade— and the political muscle of Southern blacks started to flex. At war’s end, the South found itself faced with the prospect of an interracial movement for economic empowerment. This was symbolized by the CIO’s “Operation Dixie,” begun in 1946 as an ambitious campaign to organize the low-wage, biracial Southern working class. The region’s political and economic elites race- and redbaited the effort, which stands to this day as one of organized labor’s great failures.

Operation Dixie epitomized the fear of white Southern elites that an emergent labor movement could organize workers—including black workers—at the levels of 35 percent or more found in many Northern states. A militant movement, supported by Democratic presidents and a sympathetic National Labor Relations Board, would do more than undermine the region’s exploitative wages. It would augment the embryonic political strength of blacks, already enjoying a boost after the Supreme Court’s 1944 abolition of the South’s whites-only primary election system. Katznelson’s critical synthesis is to track the fate of labor and employment legislation—from the passage of the NLRA to the dramatic, restrictive revisions of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 to the final defeat of the Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1950—and show how closely its weakening correlated with the emerging civil-rights activism of African Americans.

Southern legislators began rejecting or watering down any bill that enhanced union power, gave the federal government more authority to manage the labor market, or—in the case of granting GIs the right to vote during World War II—promised to enhance in any way the political power of African Americans. The

Senator Robert Wagner of New York at an NLRB meeting, January 1, 1939.

He was one of the Southern bloc’s most implacable foes.

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legislators’ choice marked a turning point in the history of midcentury America—what the historian Nelson Lichtenstein has called “the eclipse of social democracy.” While the fight took place in workplaces and town squares throughout the South, Katznelson renders the national expression of it in revelatory detail.

He evokes the climate in a profile of Mississippi’s Bilbo, whose reactionary barbarism shocked his Southern peers no more than his “loud check suits and brash ties.” It is chilling to realize there are living Americans who can recall a U.S. senator scolding Eleanor Roosevelt for her support of black civil rights by saying that she “would like to compel Southern girls to use the stools and toilets of damn syphilitic nigger women.” New York’s Wagner, meanwhile, emerges as one of the Southern bloc’s most implacable foes.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 85

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86 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

Fear Itself convincingly shows how Bilbo and his colleagues eroded the social-justice and egalitarian possibilities of the New Deal. But Katznelson is too sanguine about the technocratic nirvana that might have been if not for the “Southern imposition.” He spends several pages describing one of the era’s intra-liberal-left domestic battles over broader economic policy.

How should capitalism be managed?

Fiscal Keynesians—sitting in this case to the “right”—favored the manipulation of taxes and revenues to enhance consumption. Advocates of planning wanted the government to work with business and organized labor in directing investment to capital markets and workers to job markets. The planners enjoyed their widest latitude during the early war years. But no popular movement ever arose to back their wonkish vision for America, and after the war their dreams fizzled. Yes, white Southern solidarity blocked a more capacious social-insurance state. No, a continental-size Sweden was never in the offing.

Katznelson also ascribes to organized labor a more intellectually coherent, politically potent desire for planning than it possessed. Walter Reuther, the brilliant president of the United Auto Workers, indeed favored European-style joint planning in which labor worked with management to effectively run the company.

But by the spring of 1946, Reuther had already waged his famous 113-day strike against General Motors—he’d demanded a union seat at the management table—and lost.

There is a bigger meta-argument here, invoked in Katznelson’s title and guiding metaphor of the New Deal traveling “uncharted territory, often without maps in hand.” “To understand [the New Deal’s] achievements and their price,” he argues, “we must incorporate uncertainty’s state of doubt, and identify the objects of fear and the effects of being frightened.”

To make this larger claim, Katznelson alludes to fear to such a degree that it seems everywhere in his book, and everywhere in America from 1932 to 1952. On page after page, he repeats dramatic variations on the theme of fear and what he takes to be the grave

risks of making policy choices in a crisis. He writes, “A climate of universal fear deeply affected political understandings and concerns. Nothing was sure.” Later he says, “Spreading like fire from rooftop to rooftop, fear provided a context and served as a motivation for thought and action both for American leaders and ordinary citizens.” There is a poetic, narrative sweep to this method. But a comparison to another recent book with fear in the title is illuminating. In Fear: The History of a Political Idea (2004), political scientist Corey Robin reads canonical texts in political philosophy and reconstructs the real-world impact of fear during the McCarthy era and in the employer-controlled workplace. Robin views political fear as a kind of collective identity formation—a perverse social vitality, encouraged by the state in reaction to traumatic events like September 11—and also as a weapon of social control: “The most salient political fear … is the fear among the less powerful of the more powerful.”

Fear Itself lacks such a precise analytical purchase. Toward the book’s end, it switches perspective from domestic politics to the postwar creation of the American nationalsecurity state. As Katznelson argues, Congress slowly but surely abdicated its oversight of nuclear weaponry, military and scientific research, and war-making powers to the president and the executive branch, beginning a trend that has lasted to this day.

Other scholars have more extensively treated this material, so these sections have an “I must get to the end of Truman’s term” feel to them.

There’s also nothing especially “Southern” in this abdication, so the book’s strongest narrative thread gets lost. (The South, however, did gain enormously from military spending and bases in the region. With so many Northern Democrats defeated in the 1942 and 1946 midterms, the Southerners’ influence only grew. By 1948, they represented almost 60 percent of the Democrats in Congress.)

The irony here is that Southerners who had spent 15 years in worried opposition to federal powers joined the legislative rush to hand the

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t h o m a s d . m c av oy / t i m e l i f e p i c t u r e s / g e t t y i m a g e s

Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi voted for labor‘s “Magna Carta” in 1935 but as late as 1946 proposed deporting blacks to Liberia.

executive branch and the newly created Department of Defense more power—in the realm of national security and invasive investigations into the political views and sexual orientation of federal employees. Two emblematic policy fights of the postwar era concerned the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission and later the National Science Foundation. Public-minded civilian-planning types faced off against most (if not all) scientists, the military, and university officials, who saw visions of a lucrative military industrial complex dancing before their eyes. By 1950, the civilian planners had lost. The national-­ security state as we know it was founded. Over the decades, this state has become ever more divorced from democratic accountability. Katznelson sees it as lacking a humanist civil purpose, almost a soul. pages of detailed endnotes, Fear Itself displays the artisanal mastery of a scholar immersed in his subject. I loved these endnotes, with their discursive references ranging from Robert Musil to Bernard Bailyn to Henry James. Yet Katznelson’s knowledge serves more than a professional standard. Katznelson wrote a poignantly academic (the oxymoron is deliberate) book, Desolation and Enlightenment (2003), about postwar intellectuals such as Hannah WITH ITS 150-PLUS

Arendt, Karl Polanyi, and Richard Hofstadter who rethought Western liberalism in the face of totalitarianism, world war, and mass extermination. As Katznelson once recalled in homage to his early mentor, Hofstadter “taught me to prize the craft of writing history and social science as an aspect of public life and political responsibility.”

In its ambition and affecting earnestness, if not its contents, Fear Itself reminds me somewhat of a work by another postwar social scientist Katznelson discusses in Desolation and Enlightenment, Charles Lind­ blom’s Politics and Markets. In both books the reader senses the quietly emotional undercurrent of a great intellectual self-consciously grappling with the largest questions. How to balance democracy and capitalism in an age of American global hegemony?

Sometimes, the questions can’t be satisfactorily answered. Katznelson can’t quite reconcile the two valences he gives to the word “planning.” He stands in support of democratic domestic planning and in opposition to secretive national-security planning.

Fear Itself is an uneven but extraordinary and suggestive achievement. It is also timely, arriving as the Supreme Court, in considering the constitutionality of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, ponders anew this book’s question: When did the South fully

It’s one measure of Katznelson’s important, overstuffed book that the reader conjures thoughts of today’s challenges from a work set in the crisis of 75 years ago.

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integrate itself into the United States?

Has it ever? At the same time, during a “war on terror” that feels as endless as the Cold War seemed in the 1950s, at least some of our elites are worried about the president’s accountability to democratic protocols. Entwined in every aspect of our political culture is the fear of one major political party that its cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity might disqualify it indefinitely from presidential power.

Somehow, we are still arguing about the social solidarity arduously forged out of the New Deal.

“The past is never dead,” a character of Faulkner’s famously said. “It’s not even past.” In thinking about Fear Itself, I read a speech given by Frederick Douglass following a visit to South Carolina and Georgia in 1888, a full generation after the South had been left decimated at the Civil War’s end.

Douglass, the 19th century’s greatest African American leader, addressed a continuing “love of power” in the white South. Douglass warned that this love of and “talent” for power “makes the old master class of the South not only the masters of the Negro, but the masters of Congress and, if not checked, will make them the masters of the nation.”

Early in Fear Itself, Katznelson briefly revisits some of the intellectuals to whom he devoted Desolation and Enlightenment. By 1935 and 1936 many of these mostly German Jewish émigrés—Arendt, Adorno, Strauss, Morgenthau, Neumann—had fled Europe and were meeting at New York’s New School for Social Research, in a regular “general seminar” to discuss the fate of liberal democracy and policies that might sustain it.

In doing so, writes Katznelson, they seized the challenge of their time, “defending liberal democracy in an open, rich and cosmopolitan way.”

Fear Itself elliptically reminds us that we, too, in our much more modest way, should try to defend against the authoritarian and the parochial with open, rich, and cosmopolitan hearts.

Read the book, argue with it. Dive in: Don’t be intimidated by its expansive and sometimes digressive scope. I mean, you remember what the man in the wheelchair said about fear itself, right? 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 87

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Rediscovering Albert Hirschman

own profession that a revised, gentler version of this essay, like others of his, was published in the flagship American Economic Review, where the typical article has more algebra than text.

Resistance fighter. Development economist. Philosopher.

A new biography of the thinker who redeemed political economy for liberals. BY ROBERT KUTTNER B

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O O

o consider the life story of development economist turned moral philosopher Albert Hirschman is to appreciate that no other generation is likely to accumulate the experience of the European émigrés to America who came of age just before World War II, survived it, and went on to contribute to the political and scholarly foundations of postwar civilization. Of that generation, nobody did so with more range and grace than Hirschman.

There was a time in the 1970s and 1980s when Hirschman, who died last December at 97, enjoyed a wide general audience. But outside of academia, his works connecting economics and policies to core human values haven’t made it into the canon of writings that educated people feel they need to read. The results of my informal survey suggest that even among teachers who admire him, Hirschman’s work is invoked but not routinely assigned.

This is a loss to our collective wisdom.

We can hope that the publication of Jeremy Adelman’s new biography, Worldly Philosopher, and the 2015 centenary of Hirschman’s birth will rekindle interest.

Hirschman’s life breaks roughly into three phases. He was born in Berlin in 1915 to a moderately affluent German Jewish family and entered university in the fateful year 1932, completing one semester before Jewish students were expelled by the new Hitler government.

The journey to finish his studies took him to Paris and London and Trieste; he also served in the Spanish Civil War and the French underground, running an operation under the noses of the Gestapo that helped more than 2,000 anti-fascists escape over the Pyrenees.

Hirschman, bearing forged documents under the nom de guerre Albert Hermant, was not yet 26. In 1941, he took the same route out and came to the United States.

After serving in the U. S. Army and

88 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

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HIRSCHMAN IS BEST known for a

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trying to gain his professional footing, in 1951 he accepted an improbable offer from Colombia’s National Planning Council to take up residence as a senior adviser. He relocated to Bogotá with his family and spent much of his midlife either based in Latin America or regularly traveling there, earning admiration as an expert who went into the field and listened to locals and whose empirical approach transcended the usual left and right categories.

Had Hirschman’s life ended in the late 1960s, he would be remembered as a development economist with a specialist audience. But in the third phase, he re-emerged as a modern philosophe. Beginning in 1970, he published a profusion of books and essays that crossed disciplinary boundaries, drawing on his fluency in five languages, integrating his farflung experience and reading with his self-description as a trespasser. Above all, these works combined respectful attention to what was unique and particular about the subject at hand with a capacity to infer universal insights about human behavior and society.

What linked Hirschman’s early classical education and Latin American fieldwork to his later writings was an appreciation of human complexity.

In his 1984 essay “Against Parsimony” (a characteristically playful title), he writes, “Economists often propose to deal with unethical or antisocial behavior by raising the cost of that behavior rather than by proclaiming standards. … They think of citizens [only] as consumers. … This view tends to neglect the possibility that people are capable of changing their values.” Economic orthodoxy ignores the trait of self-evaluation.

Others have criticized the onedimensional view of homo economicus but none with Hirschman’s wit and dazzling gift for forging connections.

Yet he was sufficiently esteemed in his

WORLDLY PHILOSOPHER: THE ODYSSEY OF ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN

BY JEREMY ADELMAN

Princeton University Press

short book with an odd title, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, published in 1970. When I first came across it, the juxtaposition of those three words in the title seemed quirky, as if each one referred to a different category of concept. But as I wrote in an obituary appreciation last December, Hirschman’s core insight is elegant and coherent. Citizens, consumers, and workers, he writes, when they find anything from a product to an employer, politician, neighbor, or nation unsatisfactory, have two basic ways of responding. They can walk away (Exit) or stay and provide constructive feedback (Voice). Though most economists emphasize Exit as the main source of market discipline—consumers abandoning high prices or shoddy goods, workers pursuing different jobs, shareholders deserting failing companies, emigrants seeking new shores— Hirschman observed that Voice had an important place in both politics and economics. Voice made possible civil society. Voice made business enterprises more than a collection of spot transactions. Voice offered useful feedback that facilitated “recuperation” of an enterprise, community, or polity. And to complete the trilogy of his title, Voice engendered reciprocity and Loyalty.

In the 1960s and 1970s, various social sciences were straining to emulate the natural sciences: Economics and political science chased the premise of “rational choice,” while psychologists chased rats. Hirschman aimed to restore the humanistic essence of the social sciences, reconnecting economics, politics, sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy. Long before the new specialty of behavioral economics arrived in the 1980s, with a richer empirical approach to complex economic motivations than either its rat-lab or rat-choice predecessors (yielding a Nobel Prize for one of its pioneers, Daniel Kahneman), Hirschman was laying the

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h e r m a n l a n d s h o f f / t h e s h e l b y w h i t e a n d l eo n l e v y a r c h i v e s c en t er , i n s t i t u t e f o r a dva n c ed s t u dy, p r i n c e to n , n . j .

Hirschman in 1981

groundwork. At the time Hirschman made his transition from development expert to philosopher, the field of political economy had pretty much been left to Marxists. Hirschman redeemed it for liberals.

It’s surely the moment for a rediscovery of Albert Hirschman. A new generation is demanding Voice, whether immigrants seeking inclusion, women pursuing equality that acknowledges difference, workers who experience corporate employers as deaf to their needs, or young people finding self-expression in social media. As the democratic enterprise itself becomes captured by financial elites, discouraged citizens are increasingly opting for Exit when they should be redoubling civic Voice.

To read Hirschman at the peak of his intellectual powers is to enter a

discourse filled with erudition, wordplay, and paradox, with taproots drawing from a vast range of sources. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty was informed not only by the classics and the upheavals of the 1960s but by Hirschman’s insights about the inefficiency of the Nigerian rail system, the arrogance of Milton Friedman, consumer complaints forwarded to Hirschman by Ralph Nader, Hirschman’s reinterpretation of Lord Acton, and the multiple exits and entrances of his own life.

Reread after 40 years, Hirschman’s writing is above all fresh.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty won Hirschman a devoted following and remains one of the most-cited works of social science. From his mid-fifties to his late seventies, Hirschman followed with books and dozens of essays imaginatively exploring how thinkers since

It’s surely the moment for a rediscovery of Hirschman and his classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

the Enlightenment had addressed the interplay of market and society.

Hirschman was credible as a critic of his profession because he had serious training as an economist. His dissertation at Trieste was a careful piece of technical work on French public finance. His faculty appointments at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia were in economics. In the standard HH index still used in antitrust cases that measures the degree of market concentration, one “H” stands for Hirschman.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty includes four short appendices putting his arguments into formal mathematics. But the brilliance of Hirschman’s work is his synthesis of the sensibility of economist and anti-economist. He is dismayed at how orthodox economics settles by assumption issues that beg for curiosity.

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 89

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WHERE DID SUCH A man come from?

Jeremy Adelman, a distinguished historian of Latin America at Princeton, has written the first major Hirschman biography—close to an authorized one, since Adelman had access to Hirschman’s papers, diaries, and letters; he interviewed Hirschman while his subject was still active and enjoyed the cooperation of his family and colleagues. Worldly Philosopher will be the definitive work on Hirschman for some time. But despite 657 pages and scads of fascinating new details, the book stops just short of being a full intellectual biography.

The first half, on Hirschman’s youth and early adulthood, is superb.

Hirschman, we learn, grew up in a warm home filled with books and classical music on the gramophone.

He was athletic as well as intellectual.

There were summer beach vacations, winter ski holidays, backpacking trips.

Hirschman’s father, Carl, was a doctor, and the family was not just assimilated but patriotic. Hirschman’s original name was Otto Albert Hirschmann (with a second “N”): Otto for Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Albert for his own grandfather. Known as OA, he showed an early affinity for wordplay in multiple languages. Devouring Hegel and Thomas Mann, he epitomized the German tradition of Bildung—intellectual and spiritual cultivation of the self.

He was an idealist, even a romantic, but above all a survivor. Unlike some German Jews, Hirschman, not yet 18, was never in denial of what was coming. On April 1, 1933, the day of his father’s funeral, Adelman writes, “the first wave of government-sanctioned violence swept Berlin, with assaults and boycotts on Jewish shops and businesses.” Among the mourners, his 13-year-old sister Eva “was inconsolable,” and Carl’s widow, Hedwig, “burst in great fits of sobbing.” But Otto Albert “was a model of unfeigned stoicism. … As evening approached, OA emerged from the bedroom to inform the guests and his mother that he would be leaving very soon for Paris. … On April 2, he was gone.” Not until decades later, in the introduction to a German translation of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, did Hirschman acknowledge that his own abrupt exit

had informed his sensibilities.

Through Berlin contacts and recommendations from his old lycée, Hirschman applied to Paris’s grandes écoles. A colleague discouraged him from trying for the prestigious Sciences Po, which primarily graduated civil servants and diplomats. He was accepted at the school of business and accounting, the École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC), with delicate hints that this was the better place for a Jew. In Paris, he found political mentors. The lover and later husband of his older sister Ursula, an Italian philosopher and socialist of range and depth named Eugenio Colorni, six years Hirschman’s senior, became a cherished friend. Colorni, later a notable anti-fascist underground activist, survived Mussolini only to be murdered by a Nazi gang in 1944. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is dedicated to him.

Hirschman chafed at the narrow confines of the HEC, and in 1935 he

Hirschman’s French identity card from 1940

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applied for a fellowship at the London School of Economics. There he encountered the great economists of the age, both left and right. He was standing in line at the campus bookshop when Keynes’s General Theory went on sale, Adelman reports. “It was not just what economists were arguing about that intrigued Hirschman,” Adelman writes, “it was the fact that they were arguing about ideas.”

But ideas were under assault from multiple quarters, and in 1936, Hirschman joined up with anti-fascist intellectuals volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Italian exiles in Paris had organized some of the first international brigades. One of the early casualties was Hirschman’s former Italian tutor. Fighting alongside Italian volunteers, Hirschman narrowly escaped death—most likely in the grisly battle of Monte Pelato on the Aragonese front, according to Adelman. After three months in Spain, Hirschman followed Ursula to Trieste.

By the time Hirschman finished his doctorate, Jews were being hounded out of Italian academia. Hirschman again served as a resistance fighter. One of the most vivid parts of his story is his Casablanca-like role as forger, courier, and visa procurer in Marseille. The tale has been told before, but Adelman enriches the story. To give refugees false identities, Hirschman purchased demobilization papers from former French soldiers. He did a brisk business in forged Czech, Lithuanian, Polish, and Panamanian passports that qualified the holder for a transit visa.

Working with the American journalist Varian Fry, he traced out a refugee escape route over the Pyrenees into fascist though neutral Spain—none too hospitable—and thence to allied Portugal. Among those saved were Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Alma Mahler, Max Ernst, and Jacques Lipchitz, as well as opposition leaders of Europe’s socialist and liberal parties.

Hirschman followed the same path out in late 1940, armed with a fellowship offer from the Rockefeller Foundation. When he landed, the immigration authorities at Elizabeth, New Jersey, stripped the second “N” from his surname and Hirschman

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 91

flipped the order of his first and middle names to go by the more American sounding Albert. Exit, again.

This part of Adelman’s book is valuable not just for the gripping story but for the new information about the soil in which Hirschman grew. One lifelong concept Hirschman took from Colorni was that of piccole idee—small insights that could grow into a large idea. Hirschman and his wife Sarah, whom he was to meet at Berkeley, mostly spoke French at home and were forever exchanging and celebrating petites idées. The phrase became an endearment reflecting the affinity of an intellectually and emotionally close marriage that spanned six decades. Adelman, who notes Hirschman’s good looks and enjoyment of the company of women, reports that among his other virtues there is not a shred of evidence that Hirschman ever had an affair. Loyalty was something he lived.

In 1942, after finishing his fellowship at Berkeley, Hirschman enlisted in the U.S. Army and was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services as a translator. In Italy, he served as interpreter at one of the first allied war-crimes trials. During the five-day proceeding, Hirschman sat side by side with Nazi general Anton Dostler, who’d given an order to execute prisoners. The New York Times reported that the young interpreter turned pale as he translated the death sentence.

If you liked Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, you will find Adelman’s story of Hirschman’s early life riveting—a book-club quality read. The book’s second half, however, is slower going. Adelman recounts a forest of primary-source detail on comings and goings, logistics and academic politics. Occasionally he misses the tree—Hirschman himself.

EXIT, VOICE, AND LOYALTY

BY ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN

Harvard University Press

THE PASSIONS AND THE INTERESTS: POLITICAL ARGUMENTS FOR CAPITALISM BEFORE ITS TRIUMPH

BY ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN

Princeton University Press

HIRSCHMAN BECAME A development

expert almost by accident. He’d been invited to work on the Marshall Plan but was denied a security clearance.

As an active anti-Nazi in the 1930s, he had inevitably consorted with radicals. A fine chapter reflecting Adelman’s extensive detective work describes how postwar bureaucratic paranoia led to the conclusion that

92 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

THE RHETORIC OF REACTION: PERVERSITY, FUTILITY, JEOPARDY

BY ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

this anti-fascist, anti-­communist intellectual might be a security risk. So off the Hirschman family went to Colombia. Hirschman’s initial charge was to help formulate a master plan for Colombian development. But he ended up traversing the country to gain insight on the “micro-­foundations of economic development.” As Adelman writes, “He crisscrossed Colombia, pen in hand and paper handy, examining irrigation projects, talking to local bankers about their farm loans, and scribbling calculations about the costs of road building.”

In the postwar years, Latin America was assumed by mainstream economists to be a victim of internal obstacles to development, which ranged from corruption to protectionism to the legacy of feudalism. Radicals, by contrast, emphasized neocolonial influences and the region’s dependency on global capitalism. In his own work on development, Hirschman criticized the dominant theories of the time, like those associated with economists Paul Rosenstein-Rodan of the World Bank and MIT ’s W.W. Rostow, which held that underdeveloped economies needed a big, Western-style push to allow “takeoff” and “self-sustaining growth.”

While advocates of “balanced growth” tended to favor grand plans and large infrastructure projects, Hirschman, ever embracing paradox, thought growth in fits and starts would produce pressure for needed infrastructure. In Hirschman’s term, development “linkages” could either reach forward to products or backward to inputs. Rejecting universal blueprints, Hirschman urged countries to play to their distinctive strengths.

Oddly, given that Adelman is a historian of Latin America, this is one of the weaker parts of the book. It may be that he is too close to the material or that he got bogged down in the detail of Hirschman’s endless trips. For all of Adelman’s fine reporting, his discussion of Hirschman’s intellectual debate with other development theorists is somewhat murky, and he neglects to address how Hirschman’s views have stood the test of time. In fact, many successful late-industrializing nations, from Korea to Brazil, opted for the big

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push of which Hirschman was so skeptical, though they did often reject the World Bank’s formula.

One important thing we do learn from Adelman is that Hirschman’s courageous rescue instincts followed him from Marseille to Buenos Aires and Santiago. He used foundation and university contacts to secure positions in the U.S. for at-risk intellectuals in countries under dictatorships, much as the Rockefeller Foundation had done for him four decades before. Adelman also suggests how Hirschman’s fieldwork reinforced habits that aided his great capacity for synthesis later on: “As he travelled, Hirschman filled his notebooks with petites idées, insights he accumulated along the way: observe, infer, compare, generalize, and then check these generalizations against new observations—and where possible, aphorize. There was a thread in all this: tracing the hidden, unexpected, and sometimes surprisingly positive effects of projects often missed in cost-benefit calculus.”

IN 1968, ON SABBATICAL at the Insti-

tute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, Hirschman wrote the essay that became the germ of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Adelman describes the book as a “hyphen linking an ‘early’ Hirschman concerned with economic development in Latin America to a ‘later’ Hirschman working from a broadened intellectual palette.” Yes, but this leaves out the formative Hirschman—the voracious student of political classics, resistance fighter, and refugee scholar who unmistakably makes a reappearance in the later philosophical works.

Hirschman, who found teaching a chore, thrived in an interdisciplinary milieu with colleagues but not students. In 1972, he landed in a setting that could have been made for him.

He was recruited for a visiting fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and after a oneyear stint he was approved (by the unusually enthusiastic vote of 14-0) for a rare permanent position.

Discussing Hirschman in his most

influential period, Adelman pinpoints arguments and sources from the notebooks that fed into the writing. He doesn’t always get the import quite right. In The Passions and the Interests, Hirschman explored how Enlightenment political philosophers hoped that passions, explosive and nonnegotiable, could be tamed into interests available for brokering and compromise. With contending passions, there could be no civil society, Hirschman wrote. But with interests, there could be the give-and-take of democracy. In Adelman’s retelling, “The rule of passions, without checks, could lead to horrible utopias; the reign of interests to soulless pragmatism.” This wasn’t Hirschman’s point.

In his 1982 essay “Rival Views of Market Society,” Hirschman marveled at the fact that over three centuries, conservatives and radicals have switched sides on the question of whether markets are supportive or destructive of society. Adam Smith was embraced by 18th-century liberal reformers, who correctly foresaw that market forces would overthrow aristocratic privilege. Conservatives like Edmund Burke feared the same disruptive consequences. But by the 19th century, conservatives were cheering the dynamism of markets, while critics such as Marx deplored the trampling of historic rights of peasants and artisans. Later, 20th-century liberals such as Karl Polanyi and Hirschman saw markets as crowding out other values. Advocates from Montesquieu onward hoped that the bonds of commerce would tame bellicose impulses; two world wars among trading partners demolished that hypothesis.

In Adelman’s account, Hirschman comes across as somewhat friendlier to Smith than Hirschman does in his own work—and Hirschman became less enamored of Smith over time.

Though hard to pigeonhole, Hirschman was a man of the moderate left. As American politics moved to the right and free-market ideas gained traction in the academy, his critique became more explicit. In The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), a wholly original synthesis of the classic and the modern, Hirschman notes the recurrence of three conservative arguments

Long before behavioral economics arrived in the 1980s, with its richer empirical approach to

ECONOMIC MOTIVATIONS, Hirschman was laying the groundwork.

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against social reform through the ages. He names them Perversity, Futility, and Jeopardy. Reform allegedly hurts the very people it hopes to help (Perversity); it incurs costs only to end in failure (Futility); and it undermines cherished values (Jeopardy). Thus the arguments of modern reactionaries such as Charles Murray have precise antecedents in the 18th century, such as Bernard de Mandeville’s essay “The Fable of the Bees.” The book displays Hirschman’s almost childlike joy of discovery. It is his innocence as a seeker that keeps him from seeming pretentious or show-offy.

HIRSCHMAN’S LIFE, Adelman aptly

points out, “can be recounted as the biography of a reader. … Such a narrative would arc across familiar categories of an intellectual biography, from formation to contribution, from absorption to creation.” Exactly so, though in the biography Adelman has chosen to write, we learn more of the life than the life of the mind. Despite blemishes, however, Worldly Philosopher is a prodigious piece of research, lovingly told and immensely worthwhile for the new light that it sheds on the odyssey of a writer whose small ideas add up to major insights.

Late in Adelman’s book there is a poignant chapter on Hirschman’s return trip to Berlin in 1990 and 1991.

Hirschman’s notes on the visit, prepared for an essay he never completed, reflect on the “silent exit” of so many refugees. As he visited monuments to the deportations, Hirschman seemed defiant, according to his son-in-law Peter Gourevitch’s interview with Adelman—as if to say, “I survived. I am back. You lost.”

If Hirschman’s survival as a widely read author is in doubt, Adelman offers some clues as to why. Hirschman was a crosser of boundaries, and no one discipline can quite claim him. He is not a natural for either an undergraduate syllabus or for recreational reading.

He was modest and bookish, far from a self-promoter. But as we pursue the recovery of Voice, Hirschman should be part of our common heritage. He is one of a small number of 20th-century social scientists whose work can be called timeless. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 93

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Sheryl Sandberg’s Can-Do Feminism Why she’s a reformer in the church of meritocracy and not a heretic BY IRIN CARMON B

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n 1956, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School, her class of more than 500 students included nine women and one black man. Erwin Griswold, the school’s dean, summoned the nine women and asked each to answer a question: How could she justify taking a place that would otherwise have gone to a man?

Griswold would later insist he’d just been playing devil’s advocate. Ginsburg, who still tells this story with a tinge of resentment, emerged from the meeting determined to prove him wrong. A half-century later, Angie Kim, Harvard Law School class of ’93, surveyed 226 women in her class.

A decade and a half after graduating, almost one-third of the women described themselves as stay-at-home mothers, which they indicated was a temporary status; nearly another third had arranged “mommy track” parttime or flexible work. With numbers like these among women with every privilege, did Griswold have a point?

When Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was at Harvard College in the late 1980s, she admits in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, she didn’t call herself a feminist, nor did any of her friends, because “we mistakenly thought there was nothing left to fight for.” At school and in the workforce, Sandberg writes, “I believed it was just a matter of time until my generation took our fair share of the leadership roles.” She went on to Harvard Business School, which in Ginsburg’s day had admitted no women at all, and where women are still only 40 percent of the students.

Fiercely determined, she moved up the ranks at the Treasury Department and then at Google and Facebook.

“But with each passing year, fewer and fewer of my colleagues were women,” Sandberg writes. “More and more often, I was the only woman in the room.” She adds, “We have ceased

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making real progress at the top of any industry.” In her new book, Sandberg urges women to “lean in,” or be more assertive on behalf of their careers, and she gives some advice on how to do it. Women who want children, she says, should not be daunted into preemptively withdrawing from their ambitions. They should take a seat at the table, literally and figuratively. They should stop hiding their accomplishments and start demanding more from their workplaces and their partners. They should acknowledge sexism is out there but not let it thwart them.

Sandberg believes bleak “having it all” conversations have discouraged young women, as has “choose my choice” feminism (though she doesn’t use this phrase), which calls any option feminist if a woman takes it. “We have to ask ourselves if we have become so focused on supporting personal choices that we’re failing to encourage women to aspire to leadership,” she writes. Just as crucially, she wants men to step up and be full professional and personal partners in parity. (Ginsburg’s husband was famously this kind of better half.)

For these rather modest proposals, Sandberg has been accused in the media of wanting women to “pull themselves up by the Louboutin straps” (USA Today) and being “the elite leading the slightly-less-elite, for the sake of [her] bottom line” (The Washington Post); some feminists and progressives have critiqued her earlier pronouncements for not focusing enough on policy or structural discrimination, mistaking personal branding for a social movement, and failing to meaningfully address concerns of working-class women like the domestic workers she and her husband employ. Sandberg agrees, in fact, that it’s necessary to push for provisions, from paid family leave to affordable day care, that would improve

LEAN IN: WOMEN, WORK, AND THE WILL TO LEAD

BY SHERYL SANDBERG

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women’s participation. But countries far more advanced on the policy front than the United States haven’t done much better in female representation at the top. Something else is happening, and Sandberg—who now proudly identifies as a feminist—has some ideas based on personal experience and her reading of the research.

As Sandberg concedes, her prescriptions are most relevant to privileged women with “choices”—she is already famous (or infamous) for saying she leaves work at 5:30 to be with her family—and, I would add, to women who share her unapologetic, almost retro love of career. Her book isn’t only for them, or should I say us.

Practical tips on how to advocate for yourself while threading the needle of sexism can help those for whom work is by necessity work, not vocation.

Though her notion of leadership as the apex of a woman’s career is fairly conventional, this is a more enthusiastically feminist book than your average executive how-to, and it marshals more optimism and real-world power—what Sandberg delicately refers to as her “front row seat”—than earlier exhortations to get to work and stay there.

As a result, this will never be a book for people who believe that the personal accrual and deployment of power is inherently oppositional to feminism or a prize won at the expense of other women. Sandberg rejects marginalization as a symbolic virtue. She demands a more perfect meritocracy, and she has set out to make one.

BEFORE SANDBERG STARTED speak-

ing out about gender roles, she was best known for helping to turn ascendant Internet companies into grown-up businesses that make money, starting with Google and then Facebook, and for being mentored by former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Larry Summers. Summers advised Sandberg’s undergraduate thesis on the economic dynamics of spousal abuse and hired her at the World Bank and at Treasury, where she rose to become his chief of staff. She managed to work productively with Summers and later with another man of celebrated

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intellectual capacities and notoriously terrible interpersonal skills, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. (Both appear often, and uncontroversially, in Lean In.) The spheres these men came from and came to lead were also Sandberg’s, and understanding their milieu helps us see the limits of her vision—but also how far out on a limb she has already ventured.

Sandberg has exceptional interpersonal skills, as I learned firsthand attending a dinner she held in New York in November and one of her monthly “women’s dinners” at her house in Atherton, California, in January. She had not come to lecture, she made it clear; she had come to learn, and in California, to share some of her leverage with a more diverse pool of people than I’d seen anywhere else in the tech world. In person and in the book, she exemplifies traditionally feminine virtues: assiduous credit-giving, cheerful selfeffacement (which she says she is trying to get over!). For every critic who has demanded to know who Sandberg thinks she is, bossing women around, you get the sense she’s probably already sorry.

In 2008, these skills were called upon in the service of Summers, who had joined Obama’s economic team but carried baggage with women’s groups. As president of Harvard three years earlier, Summers had given a clumsy talk before female scientists citing research on women’s quantitative aptitude, which some of them took to mean he believed women are underrepresented in their fields for biological reasons.

What Summers actually said is contested. But even if this was a case, as he later explained, of a “purely academic exploration of hypotheses,” his musing aloud betrayed its own ideologies. First, his attendance at the church of empiricism, with its belief that research has no bias; second, the apparent surprise that extemporaneously mansplaining biological differences to a bunch of female scientists would cause him any trouble. To be sure, it would take many bull-in-a-china-shop moments to topple Summers’s presidency. (A woman, Drew Gilpin Faust, succeeded

96 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

Female leadership has

BARELY BEEN TRIED OUT, let alone normalized, nor has selfmade female wealth.

him.) Sandberg defended Summers, arguing that while he had perhaps “communicated poorly—and even insensitively,” he had a track record of advocating policies benefiting women and had been “a supportive and deeply caring mentor for me and many other women.” In Lean In’s chapter on mentoring, she talks about how it is not a one-sided transaction; the mentee also gives back, and Sandberg did.

For all of Sandberg’s social fluidity, she is taking a risk with Lean In. As she writes in the book, “Within traditional institutions, success has often been contingent upon a woman not speaking out but fitting in.” Calling out sexism counts as not fitting in. At Treasury, Sandberg “worried that pointing out the disadvantages women face in the workforce might be misinterpreted as whining or asking for special treatment.” That worry would have been rational. After the Democrats lost the 2000 election and she moved west to seek her fortune, Sandberg joined a social order even more invested in believing it had transcended all structural barriers to success, despite its blinding homogeneity.

That would be Silicon Valley, with its driving creed of purported meritocracy. “Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich,” wrote TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington in a 2010 post titled “Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming the Men.” (Notably, the two concepts on either side of Arrington’s slash—changing the world, getting rich—are not seen as opposed in a world shaped by Google and Facebook, even as the companies have grown and are under greater pressure to maximize profits, and as the ways in which they’re changing the world are no longer so politically neutral.) Sandberg could herself be held up as proof, but she is one of the few. If meritocracy is the local religion, Sandberg is the reformation, if not wholly a heretic.

The unshakeable belief in the power

of technology—and technologists—to transcend social and political divisions is fundamental in Sandberg’s current world. A powerful insider calling out the limits of that credo from within is what makes her project so unusual, and so potent. Recognizing, perhaps, that a woman will never quite “fit in,” she has given up trying so hard and run with this feminist stuff anyway.

“My own attempts to point out gender bias have generated more than my fair share of eye rolling from others,” she writes. But having “leaned in” and conquered, she can’t be accused of being an embittered outsider. That makes Sandberg a “surprising validator,” to borrow legal scholar Cass Sunstein’s term for a person best situated to change others’ minds.

IN COLLEGE, SANDBERG attended a

Phi Beta Kappa speech by the feminist Peggy McIntosh on “Feeling Like a Fraud,” which led Sandberg to realize that even in her success she’d always felt like an impostor. Men and women who had achieved this same academic honor attended separate ceremonies— a lingering legacy of Harvard and Radcliffe’s gender segregation—so Sandberg excitedly filled in a male friend at a reception afterward. “Why would that be interesting?” he asked, confused. Sandberg and her best friend joked that the men’s talk had been “How to Cope in a World Where Not Everyone Is as Smart as You.” In other words, Sandberg writes in agreement with a point feminists have long argued, men are encouraged to feel a sense of entitlement from an early age. On the other hand, she has observed on the job that women suffer too often from “tiara syndrome”—the bad habit of expecting someone will notice your achievements and place a tiara on your head. (It’s a mentality that usually works better in school, which may be why women do so well there.) “Do not wait for power to be offered,” Sandberg writes. “Like that tiara, it might never materialize.”

Sandberg is also on feminist terrain when she says women are being partly held back by fear: “Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching.

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Fear of being judged. Fear of failure.

And the holy trinity of fear: The fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.”

Even as she owns up to feeling such fear, she counsels working around it.

In negotiation, for example, “a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence.”

This is meeting the world as it is, not as one would like it. But Sandberg also thinks women should demand more, especially from men, and especially from men who are their partners. In Anne-Marie Slaughter’s widely discussed Atlantic piece, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Slaughter thanked her husband for support but seemed to assume the woman in a heterosexual marriage will always do more of the unpaid labor at home and probably always feel more love for her children, fueling the painful pull of competing duties and loyalties. By contrast, Sandberg urges women to demand more and to “make your partner a real partner.”

That means seeking out a partner who is supportive of one’s career goals and who picks up half of the work at home, even if, as a result, women must cede some control of household duties and child rearing.

Because she is so focused on power sharing between men and women, particularly when it comes to raising children, Sandberg has been criticized for leaving out anyone who isn’t heterosexual. But notably left out of her equation are all women who lack a partner—especially women raising kids on their own. When Sandberg writes, “I don’t know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully—and I mean fully—supportive of her career,” she is uncritically describing a socioeconomic reality in which stable partnership has become both a luxury good and a technique for doubling down on advantage.

Marriage has worked for Sandberg (the second time around, after an early divorce). So have institutions, from Harvard to government to technology corporations, even when she has found them deficient. Indeed, Sandberg is at her most wrongheaded when she puts too much faith in such institutions’ benevolent interests in

Sheryl Sandberg in September 2010, two years after joining Facebook as chief operating officer.

helping their employees. At one point, she encourages the frank discussion of possible future pregnancies in job interviews, even as she recognizes that it would brush up against the law.

The reason such conversations are regulated by anti-discrimination law is that employers do, in fact, discriminate against pregnant employees.

Some bosses may, like Sandberg, be happy to work around such plans in order to get the best talent. But laws are intended to protect employees from the worst bosses.

Sandberg believes that the citadels of power will improve when more women are the boss and institutions will improve when they become true meritocracies. In this, she hasn’t strayed too far from her mentor’s remedy for inequality. Summers’s most shining legacy at Harvard was vastly expanding financial aid, calling income inequality “the most serious domestic problem in the United States today” and education “the most powerful weapon we have to address that problem.” The attendant assumption is that if the children of maids and janitors can become investment bankers too, the whole system would be

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both fairer (unquestionably true) and better for everyone (a matter for serious debate).

Making the system fairer—giving a greater range of people potential access to its benefits—is nevertheless a decent goal in itself and a starting point for something more, which is why it matters whether a privileged woman is among privileged men in executive corridors at Davos or TED or the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium or the G8 Summit. We should care about why women aren’t there just as we care about why women almost never win the Oscar for Best Director—an elite subcategory, to be sure—and why we celebrate when 20 women join the flawed institution that is the Senate.

Female leadership has barely been tried out, let alone normalized, nor has self-made female wealth. Sandberg is—of course—optimistic: “The more women attain positions of power, the less pressure there will be to conform, and the more they will do for other women.” This approach gives collective justification to the book’s exhortations for individual women to rise—to ask for more money, to choose jobs for their growth potential, to communicate directly and unapologetically.

This doesn’t mean there would be no collective benefit. (Sandberg kicks her book off with a small example: No one at Google thought to have special parking for pregnant women until she, a rare female executive, needed it.) Meritocracy, with its investment in individual achievement before broad social change, has split the difference with social movements and the old hierarchical ways. It is still a vast improvement on those older ways.

Arguing that gender inequality matters is radical in Sandberg’s own context, but she could go further still.

Then again, she is someone who has already listened to critics who found her structural analysis lacking. Two years ago, she was described in a New Yorker profile as not believing there is a “glass ceiling.” Now she is staking her career on talking about breakdowns in the system. Who knows? The current wave of critics might be more effective if they saw her less as a natural enemy and more as a potential convert. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 97

Unlinked Social reading will bring us together while restoring a long tradition in the history of the book. Still … BY ANNE TRUBEK

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t night, I find incredible pleasure in my Kindle. I pick up all 7.8 ounces of it, palm it, turn out the lights. Then, the only physical act required is a small swipe of my finger across an index-card-size piece of glass. I can choose to go almost anywhere, as long as I am willing to pay.

The Kindle offers the purest form of immersive reading I have ever experienced. There is something narcotic about it. As scholar Alan Jacobs writes, “Once you start reading a book on the Kindle—and this is equally true of the other e-readers I’ve tried—the technology generates an inertia that makes it significantly easier to keep reading than to do anything else.” The compulsion to keep reading stems partially from the lack of distractions: E-books, thin, gray, and underdesigned, shear off the blurbs and author bios and test-marketed bookjacket covers.

But when I am reading on my Kindle, I am not alone. While swiping my fingers across the pages of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, for example, every dozen pages or so, I come across underlined sentences and above the words a tally: “513 Highlights.” That refers to the number of people who have pressed their fingers against the glass at the same point in the text.

The Kindle has several such built-in but optional features that fall under the label of “social reading.” Social reading is basically what we have been trained to do while we read online. Newspapers and magazines have taught us to like, share, and retweet what we read, and URL links have us accustomed to switching between various texts. Why, the producers of social reading are suggesting as they unveil new gimmicks, should we stop with articles? Books should get into the fray, too.

There are two main types of social

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reading. One kind, occurring after the reader has finished a book, is familiar to us—Facebook book groups and Twitter chats are two of many examples; although the term assumes a digital platform, these activities are updated versions of book clubs or classroom discussions. Other features are newer, bringing interaction into the text in a way that, like a hyperlink in an online news story, shows up inside the book. You can tweet your annotations as you read James Gleick’s The Information on your Nook. On your Kobo, you can read comments left by other readers about that sentence on page 57. On your iPad, you can download Subtext and watch a video by the author, who is no longer a shadowy absent-presence behind the words.

Back at the Kindle webpage, I can see the most highlighted Kindle passage of all time, this sentence from Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them” (17, 784 highlights). The most highlighted book of all time is The Holy Bible. (Most popular passage: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”) The No. 2 book is Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. (Most popular passage: “Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume you are.”)

The second most highlighted line is the first sentence from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, has created a matrix breaking down the two main categories of social reading into a more complex taxonomy organized by whether discussion occurs offline or on and whether it is ephemeral or persistent, synchronous or asynchronous, or just plain face-to-face. (The

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Kindle webpage is what he would call asynchronous, or informal, social reading.) Stein’s institute has further developed CommentPress, an opensource software that allows readers to enter comments within a text, “turning a document into a conversation.” Stephen Duncombe, associate professor of media and culture at New York University, has used CommentPress to create a free online version of Thomas More’s Utopia “open to read, open to copying, open to modification” and published by the institute’s platform, Social Book.

Stein and Duncombe are on the front lines of social reading for scholarly and pedagogical purposes, archiving what had previously been ephemeral discussions into documents as persistent as the Talmud. Social Book allows for fuller discussions among readers than does Kindle; with enormous potential for academia, it permits students and scholars to gather within a text, instead of, say, talking about it while sitting in rows, books on their desks.

Social reading sounds newfangled.

But looked at another way, it’s not so new. Reading, historically, was “social” for far longer than it has been private. The concept of reading as primarily an individual, solo act— which the modifying “social” in “social reading” assumes—is a modern phenomenon. Homeric poetry and other oral genres were recited to crowds for centuries before the notion of reading came around. The most beautiful depiction of learning in Western art may be Raphael’s School of Athens, which shows Socrates speaking as disciples surround him, listening and taking notes.

After writing became more widespread, it was often a prompt for speaking, something one used as an aid in orating, reciting, or declaring to others. When Saint Augustine watched Ambrose read a book without moving his lips or making any sounds, he was shocked: Until about the eighth century, most people read by reading words out loud. No one was curling up with the large, bulky, vellum-and-wooden books that were kept chained to desks in monasteries.

This kind of “social reading” con-

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the inherently connective tissue that is human consciousness. As David Foster Wallace put it: “Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion—these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”

Unlinked reading is engrossing— a “curling up with” a book that has nothing to do with paper and ink but with experience.

tinued throughout most of the Middle Ages, as scribes copying manuscripts assumed readers would enunciate the words they saw on the page. Written texts developed from and aided oral communication, and since there are no commas or capital letters in speech, there were initially no spaces between words, no lower-case letters, and no punctuation in manuscripts, either. THEIRSENTENCESLOOKED LIKETHIS. As late as the 19th century, Victorian readers could still often aptly be called “listeners” as they sat in chairs in a circle lit by candlelight, with one person reading out loud the copy of the latest triple-decker installment of, say, a Dickens novel. Even for us moderns, reading can be construed as an inherently social act, not as in “sitting in a room with others” but as in “together, alone.” Reading can be one of the most profound encounters a human can have, revealing

BUT HERE’S THE THING : Even with history and theory behind me, I do not want to see those Kindle Highlights on my screen. Not because I am averse to the digital or the social. This has nothing to do with technology.

It is not “private reading” I crave.

It is—as long as we are coining terms—unlinked reading. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, we may need a digital-native term to best describe the varieties of reading now available to us. Unlinked reading is the kind that requires of me deeper attention and allows me to ruminate. It is engrossing—a “curling up with” a book that has to do not with paper and ink but with experience.

We need both kinds of reading.

Social—I mean, linked—reading returns us to a long tradition in the history of the book. Academics who are exploring it for classroom texts are enriching age-old pedagogies.

Access to what others deemed important to highlight or to conversations about a text in real time also has a democratizing element. The Amazon Kindle page is like a high-level, crowd-sourced CliffsNotes, a cheat sheet for America circa 2013, a fount of data about our ambitions, fears, God, and gods.

But we need unlinked reading, too.

What I crave when I pick up my Kindle is absorption, to be inside another world, floating in the flow of narrative or argument. Once so immersed, freed from the existential problems of constant contact, and the narcissistic silo-ing of small experience, I can think hard or feel deeply—pleasure and intellectual work at once. What can I say? I am a modern. 

MAY/JUN 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 99

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Ted Talk

BY ABBY RAPOPORT

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arly this spring, when rumors began circulating that freshman Senator Ted Cruz of Texas might run for president in 2016, liberals found the idea just as delightful as their Tea Party counterparts did—though for different reasons. What could do more to hurt the Republicans’ comeback chances than a candidate who’s so extreme that his own caucus-mate, John McCain, publicly labeled him a “wacko bird”? If Cruz ran and lost in the primaries, he could either become a disruption and embarrass the party or force the eventual nominee to move way to the right. If he somehow won the nomination, he’d surely be the second coming of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Run, Ted, run!

Cruz’s rise to national notoriety had been sudden and, for many outside the Tea Party, baffling.

Just one year ago, Cruz was a long-shot challenger in the Texas GOP Senate primary, an obscure, second-­generation Cuban American and Ivy League–educated solicitor general. He had never run for any office, he displayed no discernible charisma or charm, and he spoke in a style more professorial than rabble-rousing. But his message was pure Tea Party gospel. He swore he would never betray it. This was just what Texas Republicans wanted, apparently, and Cruz pulled off the upset.

Months after arriving in Washington, Cruz had probably made more enemies than most of his senior colleagues collect in

decade-long careers. In February, Cruz falsely claimed that the Iranian government had “publicly celebrated” when President Barack Obama nominated former Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, for defense secretary, then went on to air unsubstantiated allegations that Hagel was doing business with U.S. enemies in North Korea, earning McCain’s enmity.

In closed-door meetings with Republican colleagues during the gun-control debate, Cruz advised them to stop being “a bunch of squishes,” which many did not appreciate. At press conferences on the Hill, Cruz developed a habit of hijacking the proceedings and holding forth while senior Republicans waited their turn.

To most observers—liberals, Democrats, and old-school Republicans alike—Cruz personifies what’s sinking the GOP brand. But that’s because they don’t understand, as Cruz does, what makes the Tea Party tick. In April, the Prospect published findings from the first major political-science survey of Tea Party activists. (The lead author, William and Mary political-science professor Ronald Rapoport, is my father.) The central conclusion: Tea Partiers do not want compromise.

Four-fifths of the activists agreed with the statement “When we feel strongly about political issues, we should not be willing to compromise with our political opponents.”

(Only 10 percent disagreed even “slightly.”) They don’t want to win for the sake of winning or just to beat the Democrats. They expect

their politicians to do two things: stand inflexibly firm on bedrock issues like gun rights and set fire to the establishment. The pragmatic interests of the Republican Party are of little interest to Tea Party activists; 23 percent don’t identify as Republican at all. If you’ve wondered why Tea Party Republicans are so unyielding, now you know: It’s because that’s what their supporters elect them to be.

The Tea Party doesn’t expect its politicians to get things done; it sends them to Washington to prevent things from being done.

Cruz’s surpassing arrogance, his refusal to hold his tongue or abide

by Senate decorum, and his devotion to the Tea Party platform—the qualities that led many to dismiss his chances in national politics— are precisely the qualities that make Tea Party activists go weak in the knees at the thought of a President Cruz. These folks don’t expect their politicians to get things done; they send them to Washington and to state capitals to prevent things from being done. The national

Tea Party’s agenda is—at least for now—far too extreme to enact.

The Tea Party’s real power lies in electing Ted Cruzes and Rand Pauls who can throw a wrench into almost anything those socialists in Washington, D.C., are trying to do. Cruz relishes the role; he’s made his name by loudly opposing gun control and Hagel and immigration reform, not by sponsoring or supporting anything of substance.

The Tea Party, as we’re learning, plays by its own rules. Back in March, most observers were convinced that Cruz had finally gotten his comeuppance after he devoted several minutes of a hearing on background checks for gun purchases to lecturing Dianne Feinstein, the four-term California senator, about the purpose of the First and Second amendments.

“I am not a sixth-grader,” she informed her junior colleague when she finally had the chance to speak.

Slapdown! pundits and liberals said. What they didn’t realize was that Cruz had won the exchange just as much as Feinstein had. His supporters used the clip to show how their man was raising hell in Washington. National Rifle Association members applauded a video of the back-and-forth at their annual conference in May. In their eyes, here was a brand-new Tea Party senator daring to talk down to a liberal icon who’d famously watched two colleagues die from gunshot wounds—and during a gun-control hearing! It wasn’t inappropriate or unappealingly pushy. It was what they had elected him to do. 

VOLUME 24, NUMBER 3. 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 © 2013 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.

100 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAY/JUN 2013

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have yet to see a perfect piece of legislation, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), often referred to as Obamacare, has real flaws.

But even at this early stage, its accomplishments are important. Millions of previously uninsured people have gained healthcare coverage; the law has begun to rein in healthcare costs; consumers are starting to realize savings; patients have greater access to preventive care; and carrots and sticks throughout the healthcare industry are spurring moves to improve quality. But key elements of the act have yet to take effect, and this is a vital period to realizing its potential.

The ACA has been threatened with extinction since its inception. The U.S. House of Representatives recently held its 36th unsuccessful vote to repeal the act, and House Republicans have denied the appropriations necessary to fully implement it.

Many governors have refused to establish insurance exchanges central to the law and to expand Medicaid in their states. These efforts amount to what Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein calls “cutting off your nose to spite Obama.”

But it’s not just elected officials who have an interest in the success or failure of the law. We all have a stake—whether through gaining access to affordable care, controlling healthcare costs to free up funding for other priorities, or knowing that emergency rooms will be for emergencies, not for patients who have no other options for care. It’s time to get the law right, not tear it apart.

Nurses and other frontline healthcare workers are uniquely qualified to identify what’s working for patients and communities in America’s health system—and what’s not. The AFT is one of the largest unions of registered nurses and other healthcare personnel in the United States. Our members support proper implementation of the ACA in order to make affordable, high-quality

healthcare available to all, and they are working on a number of fronts to enhance patient care.

The deliberate understaffing of nurses to save money adversely affects patient health and safety—and AFT Healthcare members have identified it as their top professional concern. Nurse staffing shortages are a factor in 1 out of every 4 unexpected hospital

in Washington state and to set a precedent for other states.

The AFT’s teacher members see the inadequacies in America’s healthcare system, as well. One of the key issues for Chicago teachers who went on strike last fall was the need to increase the number of school nurses to provide adequate care for students. And teachers in Cincinnati have

Photo: Michael Campbell

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

deaths or injuries caused by errors. The additional costs associated with patients who develop complications due to understaffing are greater than the labor savings. We’re fighting for safe-staffing legislation, and AFT Healthcare affiliates in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and elsewhere have used the union contract as a tool to correct staffing problems.

AFT Healthcare members in Oregon and Vermont have championed the use of teams of healthcare personnel, doctors and managers to identify areas in need of improvement and to take action to address them. Such teams have successfully helped lower operating costs while making improvements to the quality of care.

Nurses belonging to the Washington State Nurses Association just this month won a case before the state Supreme Court affirming nurses’ right to take breaks during shifts that can last 10, 12 or even more hours. They fought for nine years to ensure safe, high-quality care for patients

Politics and profits should never be elevated above patients.

worked with the school district to ensure all students have access to health services right in their schools.

In February, we took a historic step toward giving nurses a stronger voice on issues affecting their profession and their ability to provide high-quality patient care.

The 34,000 registered nurses in Montana, Ohio, Oregon and Washington state who belong to the National Federation of Nurses affiliated with the AFT, joining more than 48,000 nurses and thousands of other healthcare workers. This is particularly important now, in this time of transition, when America’s healthcare industry is rapidly changing and the ACA is being implemented.

I am proud to represent dedicated healthcare professionals committed to the ideal that politics and profits should never be elevated above patients.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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