The American Prospect #305

Can a Born-Again Liberal Democratize Elections?

BY ANDY KROLL

The Rise and Pratfall of Norman Mailer

BY TOM CARSON

Pandora’s Box:

The Next Revolution Will Be 3-D Printed

BY JEFF SAGINOR

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contents

VOLUME 24, NUMBER 5 SEP/OCT 2013 PAGE 12

PAGE 20

PAGE 56

PAGE 69

NOTEBOOK 7 PANDORA’S BOX BY JEFF SAGINOR 12 WELFARE ROW BY STEVE BRODNER 15 DADDY’S HOME BY SHARON LERNER

FEATURES COVER REPORT THE STATE OF WORK IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY 20 THE FORTY-YEAR SLUMP BY HAROLD MEYERSON 34 PHOTO ESSAY HICKEY FREEMAN FACTORY BY SUSAN MEISELAS 42 THE ROBOT INVASION BY RICK WARTZMAN 46 THE TASK RABBIT ECONOMY BY ROBERT KUTTNER 56 THE EVANGELIST BY ANDY KROLL

CULTURE 69 MAILER’S MARK BY TOM CARSON 72 REAGAN’S COURT V. THE LIBERTARIANS’ BY GARRETT EPPS 76 RISE OF THE “NONES” BY AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX 80 LAST DAY OF A BLACK MAN BY ROXANE GAY 84 WE SHALL OVERWHELM BY DAVID CAY JOHNSTON 87 THE CONFLICTED GAY PIONEER BY RICK VALELLY

COLUMNS 5 PROSPECTS BREAKING THE LONG DEADLOCK BY PAUL STARR 92 COMMENT CAN REPUBLICANS BUCK THE TEA PARTY? BY ABBY RAPOPORT Cover art by Jason Schneider.

Art above by Steve Brodner, Jason Schneider, Gregg Segal, and John Cuneo

1

GARRETT EPPS is the Supreme Court correspondent for theatlantic.com and a Prospect contributer. He teaches at the University of Baltimore School of Law. His latest book is American Epic: Reading the U.S. Constitution.

He discusses four recent works about the Supreme Court. “Most people have no idea how far right the Roberts Court has moved,” he says. “These books make it clear.”

JEFF SAGINOR writes about technology and policy. He investigates advances in 3-D printing. “I grew up watching Star Trek, and a big part of that Utopian vision was a device that could create anything you asked it to,” he says. “Today’s 3-D printers aren’t there yet, but they are getting closer—and they pose big questions about what we’ll do with that power.”

ROXANE GAY writes about gender, race, and popular culture.

Her novel An Untamed State and essay collection Bad Feminist will be released in 2014. “I was struck by the humanity of Fruitvale Station juxtaposed with the senseless tragedy of Oscar Grant’s death,” she says. “I wanted to examine that contrast and consider what Fruitvale Station offers contemporary black cinema.”

TOM CARSON is a National Magazine Award winner. He reviews J. Michael Lennon’s Norman Mailer.

“Revisiting Mailer is like listening to some ambitious record I loved in the ’70s and feeling sheepish about how stentorian it sounds,” he says.

“Even so, I wish this biography had better explained why he was as exciting as a really smart rock band— to English majors and political junkies, anyway.”

AMELIA THOMSON-­ DEVEAUX is a Prospect writing fellow. She explores the rise of nonbelief in the American religious landscape. “More and more Americans say they’re nonreligious—but that doesn’t mean they’re rejecting spirituality, prayer, and ritual,” she says.

“I was fascinated by the idea that for this growing group, ‘religious atheist’ might not be an oxymoron.”

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON is the board president of Investigative Reporters & Editors. He is the editor of Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, due out in February 2014.

He reviews Isaac William Martin’s Rich People’s Movements. “My law students learn how today’s rules trace to Hammurabi,” he says, “just as the Tea Party grew from earlier antitax movements.”

ANDY KROLL is a Mother Jones staff writer. He profiles Jim Gilliam, creator of NationBuilder.

“Jim’s story is unlike any I’ve encountered: born-again Christian, programming wunderkind, transforms into a liberal activist after 9/11, beats cancer, gets new lungs, and creates this brilliant tech company,” Kroll says. “And he’s only 35 years old.”

SUSAN MEISELAS joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and is best known for covering the insurrection in Nicaragua and human-rights issues in Latin America. Her photo essay depicts the Hickey Freeman men’s suits factory. “I don’t know what I’m going to come back with,” she says of shooting a particular place.

“It’s about being a witness to it— documenting it and recording it.”

PUBLISHER JAY HARRIS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KIT RACHLIS FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR EXECUTIVE EDITOR BOB MOSER ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS CULTURE EDITOR SARAH KERR EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON SENIOR EDITORS CHRISTEN ARAGONI, GABRIEL ARANA WEB EDITOR CLARE MALONE SENIOR WRITER MONICA POTTS ASSOCIATE EDITOR JAIME FULLER STAFF REPORTER ABBY RAPOPORT RESEARCH EDITOR SUSAN O’BRIAN WRITING FELLOW AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX EDITORIAL INTERNS COLIN DAILEDA, ERIC GARCIA, MARISSA LEE, JOE MCKNIGHT, TONYA RILEY, 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, MARIO LUGAY, ARNIE MILLER, KIT RACHLIS, MILES RAPOPORT, ADELE SIMMONS, PAUL STARR, BEN TAYLOR AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT ACME PUBLISHING SERVICES 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 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PERMISSIONS@PROSPECT.ORG

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Prospects

Breaking the Long Deadlock

BY PAUL STARR

H

ow you think about many immediate issues facing the country should hinge on your expectations about the future. Consider the battle shaping up this fall over the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees, particularly the three he has nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit—Patricia Millett, Cornelia Pillard, and Robert Wilkins. Control of the D.C. Court is important in itself, but the bigger issue is the willingness of Senate Democrats to restrict use of the filibuster and revamp the ground rules in an institution that has often obstructed liberal reform.

The D.C. Court is particularly significant for national policy because it rules on federal regulations affecting labor, environmental protection, financial reform, and other key matters. Refusing to consider any of the president’s three nominees on their merits, Senate Republicans want to reduce the number of judges on the court to eliminate the three current vacancies and preserve conservative control. If Obama’s nominees are going to get a vote, Majority Leader Harry Reid will need to threaten, as he has before, to “go nuclear”—that is, to change Senate rules ending the minority’s ability to filibuster presidential nominations.

In this struggle, it’s crucial that Senate Democrats provide Reid the support he needs. Some liberal senators, however, are worried that eliminating the filibuster might give a future Republican

president the ability to confirm far-right conservative nominees.

Here’s where your view of the future—and the past—comes in.

Liberals, it seems to me, should be short-term pessimists and longterm optimists about the future of American politics. It’s hard to be anything but pessimistic about addressing the nation’s problems as long as right-wing Republicans are in control of the House, tying up the government in repeated crises, limiting the president’s ambitions, and blocking even initiatives such as the immigration bill that have significant bipartisan support. But the long term looks a lot more promising as a result of generational turnover and demographic changes that are eroding the Republican base, shifting the partisan and ideological balance, and eventually likely to force Republicans to move back toward the center.

If that’s right, it should sway Senate Democrats in favor of institutional reforms that will enable a future president and Congress to act more effectively and decisively.

Among all the major democracies, the United States has the most sclerotic, anti-majoritarian political institutions. The filibuster is not the only source of that institutional status quo bias, but the other obstacles lie in constitutional arrangements and are nearly impossible to alter. (Of the world’s major democracies, the United States has the constitution that is the most difficult to amend.) If liberals are going to make the most of a future majority, they should want to see the filibuster restricted and ultimately eliminated.

The filibuster has been far more of an obstacle to Democratic presidents and Senate majorities than to their Republican counterparts.

The Democrats have for some time been the more ideologically diverse party. As a result, Republican presidents have often been able to obtain enough support from conservatives and centrists in the Democratic caucus to reach the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, whereas Democratic presidents have found it far more difficult to obtain votes

it at the beginning of 2009, Obama’s election might have ushered in an era of historic reform; instead, legislation was deeply compromised in the effort to obtain 60 votes, and the Senate became the graveyard for important measures such as climate legislation.

Unblocking the Senate on the grounds that long-term trends favor liberals is a calculated risk.

The long term may be a long time in coming. In 2014, Republicans may well win a majority in the Senate

Liberals should be short-term pessimists and long-term optimists about the future of American politics. they need from the dwindling number of Republicans willing to work with them. These differences then affect the ideological character of each party’s choices for the bench.

In recent decades, Republican presidents have had stalwart conservative nominees confirmed, but Democratic presidents have not even tried to nominate equally stalwart liberals, and the judicial center has moved to the right.

Breaking the filibuster on judicial nominations alone is therefore crucial for unlocking the longterm political potential that liberals have, thanks to demographic and generational change. But that should just be the first step in doing away with the filibuster. If Democrats had been willing to eliminate

as well as the House; and two years later, they have at least a 50-50 chance of electing a president, which could give them control of all branches of the federal government. With that possibility in mind, some Democrats may want to preserve the filibuster, which would be their only remaining point of leverage at the federal level.

But that would be shortsighted; historically, the filibuster has hurt Democrats far more than it has helped them. Instead of perpetuating the minority’s ability to obstruct, the Senate’s Democrats should think mainly about laying the groundwork for a new era of reform. The cards are likely to come their way; the big question is how they are going to play their hand. 

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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Pandora’s Box How do we harness the power of 3-D printing while protecting ourselves from its dark side?

BY J E F F S A G I N O R

j es se l en z

O

n a clear day this past May, Cody Wilson stood at a firing range just south of Austin, Texas. The BBC crew he’d invited stood a few feet away as the 25-year-old University of Texas law student adjusted his earplugs and sized up his target— a mound of dirt off in the distance. He raised a small handgun, pulled the trigger, and a .380 caliber shot rang out, kicking up a cloud of dust. The pistol Wilson held was made of black-and-white

plastic and looked like a cheap children’s toy. What had drawn the BBC was that the gun, which Wilson dubbed the “Liberator,” had been created with an $8,000 3-D printer bought used on eBay. A self-described “technoanarchist,” Wilson is on a quest to prove that new technology is rapidly changing what we can hope to regulate—from information and ideas to physical objects.

The proof is that anyone with an Internet connection, a computer,

and a 3-D printer can now manufacture a gun.

Three-dimensional printing is Star Trek fantasy conjured into reality. Bre Pettis, a founder of MakerBot, the leading manufacturer of personal 3-D printers, envisions a world in which everything from shoes to hearing aids is produced in our homes for next to nothing. He dreams of kids growing up with 3-D printers as he did with an Apple II+ in the 1980s—hacking, experimenting,

creating stuff we can’t even conceive of today. Like those early computers, 3-D printers look utilitarian and conspicuously lowtech; black and beige boxes with gears and cables exposed, they resemble inside-out microwave ovens. Fire one up, though, and its true nature is revealed: The machine buzzes to life, its print arms whizzing about in precise concentric patterns, then spits out a three-­dimensional object.

Two years ago, carpenter Richard Van As was at home outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, when the table saw he was using slipped, mutilating much of his right hand. In the emergency room, he had an epiphany. “I was going to make a set of fingers for myself,” Van As says.

“The more people told me it was

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

impossible, the more I decided that it was possible.”

When he was released from the hospital, Van As scoured YouTube for ideas and came across an unlikely collaborator: a prop maker in Washington state named Ivan Owen whose specialty was constructing enormous, multi-jointed mechanical hands. The two started talking, but the distance made working together difficult. They reached out to MakerBot, sensing the potential 3-D printing might hold for their project, and the company agreed to donate two machines. Soon the men were sending digital blueprints over the Internet and printing out their objects. Together, they created a prosthetic so precise that it could catch a ball in midair. They called it the Robohand. Traditional prosthetics that approximate human movement can cost $10,000 per finger; the Robohand cost less than $200 in parts.

Then Van As did something bold: He posted his prosthetic blueprints to Thingiverse, MakerBot’s online design community, for free. Kids from all over the world born with conditions like amniotic band syndrome—a congenital disorder in which fibrous bands wrap around the fingers in utero, choking off blood flow and requiring amputation after birth— began downloading and building the Robohand. With the device, some of these kids were able to grasp an object for the first time in their life. As they get older and outgrow their Robohands, the digital files can be adjusted using computer software, and larger hands printed.

Of course, the primary use of 3-D printers will be to create quotidian items: toothbrushes and toilet-paper holders, chess pieces and iPhone cases, wrenches and showerheads, toys, pens, birdhouses, model airplanes. They will no doubt produce a lot of schlock, too. Custom bobblehead dolls have been a perennial favorite since the devices began to go mainstream, and it’s not hard to picture the landfills of the future overflowing with yesterday’s home-printed novelties. Yet researchers have already found that just by producing common household items, a 3-D printer will pay for itself in less than a year. “With

8 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

the exponential growth of free designs and expansion of 3-D printing, we are creating enormous potential wealth for everyone,” says Joshua Pearce, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Michigan Technological University. Those who work closely with 3-D printers also see potential for the technology in an unexpected area: food. In theory, packets of soy protein, meat, or cookie dough could be loaded into 3-D printers. With recipes programmed from the Internet, you could “print” a finished meal right onto a plate. This may sound about as appetizing as the dehydrated ice cream famously eaten by astronauts. But those nutritional building blocks would be cheap and shelf-stable for decades. With more than eight billion people soon to be vying for Earth’s dwindling resources, 3-D printing could become an important part of feeding future generations.

The age in which a 3-D printer sits in every living room may be here sooner than we think. Last month, Stratasys—one of the largest industrial 3-D printer companies in the world—purchased MakerBot for

Cody Wilson made a handgun he calls the “Liberator” using a 3-D printer bought on eBay.

Three-D enthusiasts produce novelties like the wind-up walking TARDIS , Dr. Who’s transporter.

half a billion dollars. From 2008 to 2011, personal 3-D printer sales averaged an astounding 346 percent growth, according to industry analysts Wohlers Associates. This June, Staples became the first major retailer to carry the machines in its stores. Three-D printers are becoming cheaper by the day; a sophisticated model can now be had for less than a thousand dollars.

This growth foretells drastic changes in global manufacturing: The factories of the 21st century will be our homes. Digital files containing the blueprints for millions of objects will be bought and sold on the Internet, downloaded and printed on our personal machines. Last month, MakerBot released a scanner that lets you create a blueprint of anything you place inside it—a digital file that you can send straight to your 3-D printer.

It brings with it the fantastical ability to make a copy of many of the things you see around you.

But when 3-D printers arrive in our homes, will we be ready for them?

The Internet has already played havoc with intellectual property—think of all the songs that have been illegally

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shared. What will businesses do when they no longer hold a monopoly on manufacturing, when the digital blueprints for tangible things are uploaded and downloaded from millions of devices around the world?

The number of people employed in manufacturing in the United States has dropped dramatically in the past decade. Will the 3-D printer accelerate that decline? Will it upend manufacturing in developing countries, disrupting economies that depend on cheap mass labor? And, oh, yes, how will we stop every garage from becoming a factory for 3-D printed guns?

makerbot

TO UNDERSTAND WHY 3-D printers

are so revolutionary, one must first understand how they work. Traditional manufacturing is a process of controlled destruction. Lasers, saws, mills, lathes, and drills—the all-stars of industrial machinery— take a big piece of something and whittle it down. Three-D printing flips the process; it is additive instead of subtractive. In the most common 3-D printers, a material—usually a plastic—is heated to its melting point and extruded through a nozzle, like frosting piped onto a cake. The layers build upon one another from the bottom up. Before you know it, the build surface contains a three-dimensional object. Crucially, this process is driven by computer software that designs and manipulates digital 3-D models that can be found on the Internet. Changing designs is as simple as changing a document’s font on your computer.

Three-dimensional printing isn’t new. Chuck Hull, founder of the company 3D Systems, now one of the biggest producers of the devices in the world, invented what became known as “additive manufacturing” nearly 30 years ago. Back then, the machines were prized for their ability to quickly give engineers and designers an object to hold in their hands instead of relying solely on 2-D blueprints.

Ford was an early adopter and used the machines to create the negatives for steel-part casting molds. Today, companies like Boeing and General Electric use 3-D printers the size of cars to produce everything from turbines to jet cabins. Many of the

non-flight-critical final parts in Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner were made exclusively using 3-D printers.

Some of the technology’s most remarkable breakthroughs have appeared in the field of medicine.

Researchers are loading up animal cells suspended in a bio gel to create rat kidneys capable of filtering blood and producing urine. Stents are printed from bioresorbable plastics that disappear as you heal, and model hearts based on CT scans allow surgeons to perform risky procedures on replicas before attempting them on patients. Researchers are now even printing human cells. Next June, the International Space Station will get its own 3-D printer to build replacement parts in orbit instead of shipping them from Earth—NASA , not surprisingly, also has plans to begin printing astronauts’ food, including pizza.

The small-scale changes the technology has spurred have been equally striking. Dentists are using the devices to churn out tooth crowns and other customized dental work. Architecture firms are transforming blueprints into scale models in minutes rather than days.

The key to the 3-D printer is more than its many applications. Because of the printer’s unprecedented ability for rapid prototyping, the machines allow companies to “fail faster,” in the words of Hod Lipson, associate professor of robotics at Cornell

This June, Staples became the first major retailer to carry 3-D printers in its stores. A sophisticated model can now be had for

LESS THAN $1,000.

Richard Van As, inventor of the Robohand, which can be enlarged from digital blueprints as kids grow

University and founder of one of the first university 3-D printing labs.

This, he says, will lead to untold innovations: “It allows people to try new things. A lot of people will fail, but they will fail faster, and the cost of experimentation will decrease.”

For much of their history, 3-D printers were like the computer mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s—very large, very powerful, and very expensive.

Then around 2005, expiring industrial patents and a pair of open-source university projects—Lipson’s Fab@ Home and a similar project named RepRap at the University of Bath in England—combined to drive down prices to the point that the technology became accessible to everyday consumers. “These two open-source 3-D printers were cheap, but they were also hackable,” Lipson says. “That allowed people to take it apart, improve it, play around with the materials, and that’s where it really took off.”

Materials long thought of as too advanced to manipulate with 3-D printers—ABS plastic and nylon, ceramics, even steel and titanium (“what the big boys use,” as Lipson says)—began to show up in common industrial applications and trickled down to home use. Thingiverse blossomed, allowing owners of 3-D printers to discuss and share what they had created. “It’s been a really wonderful adventure seeing the community grow,” Bre Pettis says. “Being able to develop better and better machines and to get to the place we’re at now where we’re actually having an impact on the way the world thinks about things.”

BEFORE SHAWN FANNING founded Napster out of a Northeastern University dorm room in 1999, the music industry was on top of the world. Pop radio minted money. Revenue for the world’s biggest record labels was $38 billion—more at the time than the combined income of Apple and Microsoft. In two years, Napster devastated the music industry. Illegal file-sharing exploded. Profit margins evaporated.

Musicians lost royalties. Post-Napster, all it took to acquire a song was an Internet connection and a computer.

An entire generation came of age with the notion that Internet freedom

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

meant downloading anything they wanted for free. Three-D printing is Napster writ large. A factory sitting in your home means that everything normally bought at a store can be searched online, downloaded, and printed with a click of a mouse.

“There will be an industry in the next couple of years that will be fundamentally changed by consumer access to 3-D printing,” says Michael Weinberg of the open-Internet group Public Knowledge. Already, nearly all the objects in our modern offices are made using 3-D printed prototypes. “Your mouse, keyboard, chair, tape holder, coffee cup,” Hod Lipson says, then rattles off a dozen more common items. Combine this with the Internet’s most notorious and effective utility—piracy—and you’ve got a recipe for the widespread reproduction of almost anything—from cheap trinkets to patented industrial components. Take, for example, the much-maligned Crocs shoe, which is made entirely of plastic. As with music piracy pre-Napster, the product is already counterfeited for cheap, resulting in losses to the company of about $10 million a year. But 3-D printing will make this possible on an entirely different scale. It’s likely that someone has reverse engineered

10 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

that design and 3-D printed a perfect replica already, in his size, for free.

All it would take is for that digital file to make it online. Then anyone can have a new set of Crocs without bothering to go to the store—or paying the manufacturers. Even at this early stage, websites are popping up to sell the digital replicas of designer furniture and jewelry, all for fractions of their retail prices, to be printed at home for only the cost of the materials. “I have students who in one hand are carrying a jail-broken iPhone with songs they downloaded,” Lipson says, “and the other hand is raised, and they ask what if somebody steals my design and 3-D prints it?” It’s not just makers of small-scale items who are in trouble. We won’t be printing patented jet engines in our home garages, but can the same be said for companies in developing nations?

The implications for work are just as stark. It’s difficult to envision how the printer won’t accelerate the decrease in the number of people employed in American manufacturing, which currently stands at 12 million but has dropped by more than 5 million in the past decade. “I can have on operator running ten machines building all sorts of stuff. He’s a highly technical worker making a nice salary,

A 3-D printer in your home means that everything normally bought at a store can be searched online, downloaded, and printed with a click of a mouse.

A technology fair in Shanghai last May was one more indication that the Chinese are heavily investing in 3-D printing.

but he’s replacing a whole slew of lowcost workers,” says Michael Hayes, head of advanced research at Boeing.

In the near term, however, some argue the technology could prove to be a boon for Western post-industrial economies. “One of the first impacts this will have is to re-shore some work,” says Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “You’ll find businesses are able to spring up based on the availability of 3-D printing that you would have never expected to return.” These first businesses, perhaps counterintuitively, will produce simple, customized items—bracelets, toys—things that aren’t worth the cost of shipping great distances. Yet they will take advantage of the technology’s unique ability for “mass customization”: a bracelet with exactly what you want to say on it, a toy with your face on it. That will mean less reliance on outsourced manufacturing—which will in turn disrupt the economies of big-exporter nations. “From an American economic perspective, that is a net gain,” Paul says.

Countries like China and India have been able to rapidly grow their economies by keeping down the cost of labor, a cycle that has in turn moved most of our low- and medium-skilled manufacturing jobs overseas. But 3-D printing doesn’t rely on low-skilled labor in the same way. A factory full of the machines can pivot from making one part to a different one overnight and can be managed by a handful of machine operators. It may not happen in the next five years, but manufacturing in the future will be less concerned with the cost of labor and more sensitive to factors like material cost and shipping. This will disrupt the low-wage factory model as global demand for cheap labor reverts back to demand for local production. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Chinese government has pledged to invest $245 million in 3-D printing over the next seven years.

What no one knows, however, is what impact the 3-D printer will have on high-skilled industrial workers. At the end of 2011, skilled-­manufacturing jobs in this country commanded 38 percent greater monthly earnings

ren yuming / imaginechina / ap images

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compared to other sectors of the economy. These jobs have only modest barriers to entry—most don’t require a college degree—meaning that the skilled-manufacturing sector is one of the last bastions of true American mobility. It’s these “middle-skill” jobs that may ultimately be most at risk from 3-D printing. “I don’t know anyone in the manufacturing movement who’s a Luddite, who says, ‘No, we don’t want to embrace technology,’ especially if they think it is going to make their company more competitive,” Paul says. Lipson talks about a local business in Ithaca, New York, that had been using 3-D printing technology. When he asked what kind of operators were running its machines—were they Ph.D.s, mechanical engineers?—he received an unexpected answer. “Somebody can show up on time, clean and sober,” the owner told him, “and they can operate this machine.”

x i n h u a / e y e v i n e / r e d u x ; k e v i n m o lo n e y / t h e n e w yo r k t i m e s / r e d u x

CORY DOCTOROW, the influential

futurist and founder of the website BoingBoing, likes to say that our world is now “made of computers.”

Three-dimensional printers are just the beginning of an era in which most things will be digitized and connected to the Internet, outside the reach of what their creators and our governments tell us we can do with them. Long before The Anarchist’s Cookbook, information with the potential to do us harm—bomb schematics, instructions for a homemade Saturday-­night special—has been available for those looking for it. But the reason Napster was such a seismic force was that it made copying and sharing easy. After Cody Wilson fired the Liberator, the news raced through the media. “We’re facing a situation where anyone—a felon, a terrorist—can open a gun factory in their garage,” Senator Charles Schumer intoned. Headlines from Forbes to The Washington Post warned of the coming threat to gun control. Those who had never even heard of 3-D printing were suddenly aware that it was now possible to download a file and produce a firearm. But the Liberator is only the harbinger of a much larger change.

Materials including plastic and ceramics, steel and titanium, and even human cells can be loaded into 3-D printers. Top: living tissue produced at the Hangzhou Dianzi University in China; Bottom: a plaster model of a historic Baptist church slated for restoration

When I asked Bre Pettis how we could nurture 3-D printing for good and protect ourselves from its dark side, he was ambivalent. “You can look at any technology and there are always challenges,” he says. “We make MakerBots with the intention that they are going to be used for positive and wonderful uses. We make it so if you upload deadly weapons to Thingiverse, the community flags them, and they come down. So that’s how we’re addressing it.”

That’s not really an answer.

“The only real solution is to get away from the technology and focus on what you are really worried about,” Michael Weinberg of Public Knowledge says. “If you are worried about printing guns, make it illegal to manufacture guns at home. Or force people to get licensed in some way. Then, if someone creates a gun at home, prosecute them for violating the law.”

He admitted this wasn’t a satisfying answer either.

For more than a decade, we’ve struggled with the question of how

to tap the Internet’s great potential while safeguarding against its many perils. But it’s also true that a system of responsible control—part regulation and part social conditioning— has emerged, however sheepishly.

As Weinberg says, we will need to be practical, passing laws to protect us— regulating undetectable plastic firearms or banning their home creation altogether. But the bigger step will ultimately be to adjust our attitudes about technology’s dangers. It will be about deciding as a culture what we are willing to accept.

Businesses will have to do the same. That much became clear in the aftermath of the last great technological disruption. This year, the record industry grew for the first time in a decade—from $16.4 billion to $16.5 billion. It’s still less than half its size before Napster. The music business fought ferociously to defend its traditional profit models, to challenge emerging technologies instead of learning from them, and for what? In the process, it alienated a generation of potential consumers and put itself at the mercy of digital distributors like iTunes, now the biggest music seller in the world, that saw a market and pounced. In the end, though, the changes were probably inevitable; illuminated manuscripts, by analogy, didn’t stand much of a chance once the printing press came along.

So what of Cody Wilson and his 3-D printed handgun? For now, the government is responding the oldfashioned way. The State Department forced Wilson to pull the file for his 3-D gun from the Internet. Relying on its authority to regulate international arms, the department made the case that because the gun was posted online, anyone in the world could download it, which violated foreignsale laws. But the State Department has neither the charter nor the manpower to patrol every file across the Web. After being taken offline, the Liberator’s blueprints have popped up on mirror sites across the world, including on the influential file-­sharing website The Pirate Bay. “The shit gets downloaded,” Wilson told me. ”I can be the bogeyman forever. But the gun is still out there, and we won.” 

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

PROCTER & GAMBLE

$1.1 BILLION A.G. Lafley

PG&E

$908 MILLION Anthony F.

APPLE

$176 MILLION Tim Cook

Earley Jr.

IBM

HEWLETTPACKARD

$2.8 BILLION Ginni Rometty

$892 MILLION Meg Whitman

COCA-COLA

$820 MILLION Muhtar Kent

WELLS FARGO

VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS

$4.1 BILLION Lowell C. McAdam

GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP AT&T

$4.8 BILLION

Randall L. Stephenson

12 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

$1.1 BILLION Lloyd C. Blankfein

s o u rc e s : c it izen s fo r ta x j u s t i c e , t h e n e w yo r k t im e s

$6 BILLION John G. Stumpf

Corporate welfare is built into the federal tax code.

Every year, many of the nation’s biggest companies take advantage of loopholes that their lobbyists helped push through Congress, saving tens of billions that the businesses would otherwise have owed.

These corporations, represented here by their CEOs, receive some of the largest breaks. The dollar amounts show the annual average differences, from 2008 to 2010, between what a firm paid in taxes and what it would have paid under the 35 percent corporate tax rate.

The exception is Shell.

Its figure reflects a tax break from the state of Pennsylvania in 2012.

ART BY STEVE BRODNER

PNC FINANCIAL SERVICES GROUP

$1.1 BILLION William S.

BOEING

$1.2 BILLION Jim McNerney Jr.

Demchak

WELFARE ROW EXXONMOBIL

$1.4 BILLION Rex W.

MERCK

$953 MILLION Kenneth Frazier

Tillerson

research by bryce stucki

SHELL

$1.7 BILLION Peter Voser

GE

$2.8 BILLION Jeffrey Immelt SEP/OCT SEP/OCT 20132013 THE THE AMERICAN AMERICAN PROSPECT PROSPECT 13 13

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Daddy’s Home In California, a growing number of fathers are taking advantage of paid parental leave.

BY S H A R O N L E R N E R

a n n i e t r i t t / t h e n e w yo r k t i m e s / r e d u x

M

any mornings this year Matt Nuttall and his friend Ryan Faulkner met up in one of several neighborhood parks located between their houses in Pleasant Hill, California. While they changed diapers, dispensed snacks, and made sure their little ones didn’t fall off the playground equipment, the dads “talked to each other in adult,” as Nuttall puts it.

Before too long, their children would begin to fade, and they’d head back to their respective houses to prepare lunch and oversee afternoon naps.

“We didn’t do much, just sat around and kept the kids and ourselves from going crazy,” says Nuttall, who teaches ninth- and tenth-grade English at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory in San Francisco. After his wife returned to her job, Nuttall took 12 weeks off from his. For half of that time, he received $945 a week through California’s Paid Family Leave program. The program, which has been in existence since 2004, offers workers up to six weeks off with maximum pay of $1,067 a week to care for a new baby or sick relative.

For Nuttall, the decision to take paid paternity leave, which is funded by deductions from employees’ pay, was a no-brainer. “This is money that comes out of my check every month,” he says. “Not to take advantage of something I’d been paying into the whole time would be foolish.”

While at least 81 countries provide paid paternity leave and all but a handful provide paid maternity leave, the United States has yet to enact any national paid leave. As a result, only about 1 in 20 fathers nationwide takes more than two weeks off after the birth of a child, and only 1 in 100 takes more than four weeks off. But in California, one of three states that has paid family- and medical-leave laws, the percentage of dads taking at least some time off to care for their children

is on the rise. (The other two states are New Jersey, where the program is four years old, and Rhode Island, where the law goes into effect next year.)

In the first eight years of the program, men in California went from taking less than a fifth of all leaves to taking nearly a third of them, according to Eileen Appelbaum, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, and Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at CUNY Graduate Center, who have been tracking the effects of the program since its implementation. Their book, Unfinished Business, which will be published this fall, puts the number of California fathers taking paid time off at more than 53,000 in 2012, more than double the number that took such leaves eight years ago.

“The law is creating cultural change,” Appelbaum says. “It’s a signal not just to the other men but also to the companies that it’s OK to take leave.” While mothers in California still take significantly more time off after having a baby—an average of 12 weeks as opposed to 3 for fathers—the gender imbalance has been steadily tipping as awareness of the program spreads. Although most Californians still don’t realize they have paid time off available to them—70 percent, according to a survey done by Appelbaum and Milkman—taking leave is becoming easier and more acceptable as people learn about it.

Eric Forsberg, an agricultural standards investigator for Alameda County, had his first child in 2006, when the law was still new enough that no one in his department had used it or, for that matter, heard about it. When he announced his intentions to get paid while he took a few weeks off to be with his newborn son, his supervisors “were like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Forsberg says. “It went all the way up to the commissioner and

With California’s familyleave law, the number of fathers taking paid time off has doubled.

81 countries provide paid paternity leave and all but a handful provide paid maternity leave.The United States has yet to enact any national paid leave.

beyond. They had never heard of such a thing.” But Forsberg’s experience was considerably different when he had a second son four years later. Not only was his paperwork processed quickly, the attitude of his co-workers had changed, too. “The second time, it went from ‘Why do you need that?’ to ‘Wow, that’s great. I wish they’d had that when I had a child.’”

Nuttall has his own gauges of change. Although he only knows of one other male teacher at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory who took paternity leave before he did, this year two others did so to be with their babies. When he was on leave, he found plenty of fathers available for weekday play dates. In addition to Faulkner, Nuttall knows dozens of other fathers through a Bay Area stay-at-home dads’ group, which was launched last October and now has 53 members.

Some of those fathers have followed a path traveled by many mothers before them: extending their temporary leaves into longer stretches at home with their children. Brandon Wall, founder of the group, took his six paid weeks when his son was six months old. “It was like a beta test for us,” says Wall, a former manager of research and insight at the KIPP Foundation, who, when his son was a year old, left his job to be with his son full time.

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

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lee cel ano / ap images

THE KEY FACTOR RAISING the num-

ber of men taking leave, researchers agree, is that the time off is paid. “If we hadn’t had that leave money, we would have had a terrible time,” says Stephen McMullin, who had been working as a house painter in San Francisco before his son was born. But the “paid” part of paid leave offers more than the ability to stave off debt. “There’s something else going on here, too,” says Linda Houser, an assistant professor of social work at Widener University in Pennsylvania. She found that men in California whose private employers had offered paid paternity leave before the law was passed were significantly more likely to take it after the law was in place. “There’s something about a state saying we place this economic value on your time off that matters,” she says, “and it appears to translate more for men than women.”

Why would men respond more to paid leave than women? “The money butches it up,” is how psychologist Laurie Rudman puts it. Rudman, who has found that men who request family leave are more likely to be penalized and viewed as poor contributors at their workplace than women, thinks this is part of the reason so few fathers take time off to care for their babies in the rest of the country—and money may lessen the stigma.

Another possibility is that the policy is not so much creating cultural change as allowing workplaces to catch up with it. “Until the 1970s, being a good father meant leaving home to be a good breadwinner,” says Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. “Now, many younger men, though not all, see being a good father as requiring involvement in children’s daily lives and activities.” One reason fathers in California appear to be embracing the paid-leave program, Williams says, is that it allows them to “live up to this new ideal as day-to-day nurturer and keep their old role as providers.”

There’s mounting evidence that the shift is good for families. More equitable parental-leave policies increase the likelihood that mothers will return to their jobs after having a child. Some might worry that helping women stay

Governor Gray Davis signed California’s family-leave bill in September 2002.

In the first eight years of the program, men in California went from taking less than a fifth of all leaves to taking nearly a third of them.

in the workforce means they’ll spend less time at home with their children.

But because many women without paid leave go back to work in less than six weeks, the law also increases the amount of time some mothers have with their young children. Paid leave makes families more economically stable; research shows that mothers and fathers who take paid leave are less likely to receive public assistance in the year after a child’s birth.

According to Appelbaum, almost all of the parents in California who took paid family leave felt the time off had a positive effect on their ability to care for their children. Most also felt it enabled them to make child-care arrangements. According to a 2007 study by Columbia University researchers, fathers who take longer leaves wind up more involved in child care months after they return to work, which many studies indicate is beneficial for kids.

The country has been stuck in a circular conversation about the possibility of expanding parental-leave benefits for years. Policy watchers note, on the one hand, the impossibility of passing such a law without cultural change and, on the other hand, the difficulty of inducing cultural change without first passing a law. If California’s experience with paid family leave hasn’t resolved the chicken-and-egg question of whether policy creates cultural change or the other way around, it has clarified that

progress on both fronts is possible and far easier than people might expect.

Although there were plenty of dire predictions about the consequences of paid family leave in California before the law passed (the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, the California Chamber of Commerce, and the California Business Roundtable all denounced it as a “mega job-killing bill”), the program has been overwhelmingly well received. Appelbaum and Milkman interviewed more than 250 employers in California and found that the vast majority thought paid family leave had either no effect or a positive effect on productivity, profitability, turnover, and worker morale.

Even before the law went into effect, most Californians were in favor of increasing the payroll tax to provide these benefits for workers, especially because the change came at no direct cost to employers. According to a 2003 poll, 85 percent of all adult Californians—and 77 percent of self-­ identified conservatives—supported the program. Recent national polls also show high levels of bipartisan support.

The across-the-political spectrum enthusiasm is good news for advocates trying to create similar paidleave programs elsewhere, including in New York and Washington state.

But, because only a few states have the infrastructure to administer their programs easily, most observers believe that federal action will ultimately be required. House Democrats introduced a bill for paid family and medical leave in the current session, but no one thinks it will get through this Congress. It may be two years, or five, or even ten before the United States offers paid time off to working parents. But judging from California, whenever it happens, many American fathers will want to spend time with their babies. 

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

THE STATE OF WORK From 1947 through 1974, American workers brought home most of the wealth that they produced. Since 1974, they’ve steadily lost power­­—and they’re getting just a fraction of the wealth that they produce today.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y J A S O N S C H N E I D E R

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in the Age of Anxiety SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19

The Forty-Year Slump

By Harold Meyerson

1974

The steady stream of Watergate revelations, President Richard Nixon’s twists and turns to fend off disclosures, the impeachment hearings, and finally an unprecedented resignation—all these riveted the nation’s attention in 1974.

Hardly anyone paid attention to a story that seemed no more than a statistical oddity: That year, for the first time since the end of World War II, Americans’ wages declined.

Since 1947, Americans at all points on the economic spectrum had become a little better off with each passing year. The economy’s rising tide, as President John F. Kennedy had famously said, was lifting all boats. Productivity had risen by 97 percent in the preceding quarter-century, and median wages had risen by 95 percent. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted in The Affluent Society, this newly middle-class nation had become more egalitarian. The poorest fifth had seen their incomes increase by 42 percent since the end of the war, while the wealthiest fifth had seen their incomes rise by just 8 percent. Economists have dubbed the period the “Great Compression.”

This egalitarianism, of course, was severely circumscribed. African Americans had only recently won civil equality, and economic equality remained a distant dream. Women entered the workforce in record numbers during the early 1970s to find a profoundly discriminatory labor market. A new generation of workers rebelled at the regimentation of factory life, staging strikes across the Midwest to slow down and humanize the assembly line. But no one could deny that Americans in 1974 lived lives of greater comfort and security than they had a quarter-century earlier. During that time, median family income more than doubled.

Then, it all stopped. In 1974, wages fell by 2.1

20 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

percent and median household income shrunk by $1,500. To be sure, it was a year of mild recession, but the nation had experienced five previous downturns during its 25-year run of prosperity without seeing wages come down.

What no one grasped at the time was that this wasn’t a one-year anomaly, that 1974 would mark a fundamental breakpoint in American economic history. In the years since, the tide has continued to rise, but a growing number of boats have been chained to the bottom.

Productivity has increased by 80 percent, but median compensation (that’s wages plus benefits) has risen by just 11 percent during that time. The middle-income jobs of the nation’s postwar boom years have disproportionately vanished. Low-wage jobs have disproportionately burgeoned. Employment has become less secure. Benefits have been cut. The dictionary definition of “layoff” has changed, from denoting a temporary severance from one’s job to denoting a permanent severance.

As their incomes f lat-lined, Americans struggled to maintain their standard of living. In most families, both adults entered the workforce. They worked longer hours. When paychecks stopped increasing, they tried to keep up by incurring an enormous amount of debt. The combination of skyrocketing debt and stagnating income proved predictably calamitous (though few predicted it). Since the crash of 2008, that debt has been called in.

All the factors that had slowly been eroding Americans’ economic lives over the preceding three decades—globalization, deunionization, financialization, Wal-Martization, robotization, the whole megillah of nefarious –izations—have now descended en masse on the American people. Since 2000, even as the economy has grown by 18 percent, the median income of households

headed by people under 65 has declined by 12.4 percent. Since 2001, employment in low-wage occupations has increased by 8.7 percent while employment in middle-wage occupations has decreased by 7.3 percent. Since 2003, the median wage has not grown at all.

The middle has fallen out of the American economy—precipitously since 2008, but it’s been falling out slowly and cumulatively for the past 40 years. Far from a statistical oddity, 1974 marked an epochal turn. The age of economic security ended. The age of anxiety began.

1950

The economic landscape of the quarter-century following World War II has become not just unfamiliar but almost unimaginable today. It constitutes what historian Vaclav Smil has termed “a remarkable singularity”: The United States came out of World War II dominating the world’s production and markets, and its unprecedented wealth was shared broadly among its citizens.

The defining practice of the day was Fordism (named after Henry Ford), under which employers paid their workers enough that they could afford to buy the goods they mass-­ produced. The course of Fordism never ran as smoothly as it may seem in retrospect. Winning pay increases in halcyon postwar America required a continual succession of strikes.

At the commanding heights of the U.S. economy, the largest American company, General Motors, and the most militant and powerful American union, the United Auto Workers, had fought an epochal battle in the winter of 1945–1946, the UAW’s members staying off the job for nearly four months in what proved to be a vain attempt to win a co-equal say in the company’s management. In 1948, with GM

fearing another massive disruption and the UAW willing to give up on co-management, the two sides reached a pattern-setting agreement: In return for a two-year no-strike pledge from the union, GM signed a contract granting its workers not only a sizable raise but an annual cost-of-living adjustment that matched the rate of inflation, and an “annual improvement factor” that raised pay in tandem with the increase in the nation’s productivity. In 1950, after a brief strike, the two sides signed a fiveyear contract—dubbed the Treaty of Detroit— that extended the no-strike pledge, the raise, the cost-of-living adjustment, and the annual improvement factor and added health coverage and more generous pensions. As the economy grew, so would the autoworkers’ paychecks.

Within a few years, the increases that GM had agreed to became standard in half the union contracts in America, though workers still had to strike to win these gains. In 1952, 2.7 million workers participated in work stoppages. Throughout the 1950s, the yearly number of major strikes averaged more than 300. The largest strike in American history, in terms of work hours lost, occurred in 1959, when 500,000 steelworkers walked off the job for 116 days to secure increased wages and improved health and pension coverage.

Management was no fan of these disruptions, but they were regarded as the normal ebb and flow of labor relations. Indeed, throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, many corporate executives believed that their workers’ well-being mattered.

“The job of management is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups: stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large,” the chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) said in 1951. Once

The middle has fallen out of the American economy— precipitously since 2008, but it had been falling slowly and cumulatively for the past four decades.

hired, a good worker became part of the family, which entitled him to certain rewards. “Maximizing employee security is a prime company goal,” Earl Willis, General Electric’s manager of employee benefits, wrote in 1962.

During these years, the GI Bill enabled far more Americans to attend college than ever had before. The ranks of America’s professionals swelled, and America’s income swelled with them. But the contracts enjoyed by the nation’s union members—who then made up a third of the nation’s workforce—boosted personal income in the U.S. even more. Indeed, these contracts covered so many workers that their gains spilled over to nonmembers as well. Prince­ ton economist Henry Farber calculated that the wages of workers in nonunion firms in industries that were at least 25 percent unionized were 7.5 percent higher than the wages of comparable workers in industries with no union presence.

In the three decades following World War II, the United States experienced both high levels of growth and rising levels of equality, a combination that confounded historical precedent and the theories of conservative economists. By 1973, the share of Americans living in poverty bottomed out at 11.1 percent. It has never been that low since.

1981

By the early 1980s, the Treaty of Detroit had been unilaterally repealed. Three signal events— Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s deliberately induced recession, President Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air-traffic controllers, and General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s declaration that his company would reward its shareholders at the expense of its workers—made clear that the age of broadly shared prosperity was over.

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

In the three decades following World War II, the United States experienced both high levels of growth and rising levels of equality—a combination that confounded the theories of conservative economists.

The abrogation didn’t arrive unheralded.

Beginning in 1974, inf lation had begun to plague the American economy. The 1970s were framed by two “oil shocks”: the OPEC embargo of 1973 and the U.S. boycott of Iranian oil after the mullahs swept to power in 1979. During the decade, the price of a barrel of oil rose from $3 to $31. Productivity, which had been rising at nearly a 3 percent annual clip in the postwar decades, slowed to a 1 percent yearly increase during the 1970s. Europe and Japan had recovered from the devastation of World War II, and Japanese imports, chiefly autos, doubled during the late ’60s. In 1971, the U.S. experienced its first trade deficit since the late 1800s. Starting in 1976, it has run a trade deficit every year.

Profits of America’s still largely domestic corporations suffered. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had inched past 1,000 in 1972, tanked with the oil embargo the following year and didn’t climb back to that level for another decade. Although the biggest contributor to inflation was the increase in energy prices, a growing number of executives and commentators laid the blame for the economy’s troubles on the wages of American workers. “Some people will have to do with less,” Business Week editorialized. “Yet it will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.”

With the second oil shock, inflation surged to 13.5 percent. Volcker responded by inducing a recession. “The standard of living of the average American,” he said, “has to decline.”

Raising the federal funds interest rate to nearly 20 percent throughout 1981, the Fed chairman brought much of American business— particularly the auto industry, where sales collapsed in the face of high borrowing costs—to a standstill. By 1982, unemployment

22 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

had risen to a postwar high of 10.8 percent.

The industrial Midwest never recovered.

Between 1979 and 1983, 2.4 million manufacturing jobs vanished. The number of U.S. steelworkers went from 450,000 at the start of the 1980s to 170,000 at decade’s end, even as the wages of those who remained shrank by 17 percent. The decline in auto was even more precipitous, from 760,000 employees in 1978 to 490,000 three years later. In 1979, with Chrysler on the verge of bankruptcy, the UAW agreed to give up more than $650 million in wages and benefits to keep the company in business. General Motors and Ford were not facing bankruptcy but demanded and received similar concessions. In return for GM pledging not to close several U.S. factories, the UAW agreed to defer its cost-of-living adjustment and eliminate its annual improvement increases. Henceforth, as the productivity of the American economy increased, the wages of American workers would not increase with it. Tide and boats parted company.

Democrats as well as Republicans responded to the inflation of the late 1970s with policies that significantly reduced workers’ incomes. The Democrats’ solution of choice, promoted by both President Jimmy Carter and his liberal rival Senator Edward Kennedy, was deregulation.

At their initiative, both trucking and airlines were deregulated, lowering prices and wages in both industries. In the quarter-­century following 1975, drivers’ pay fell by 30 percent. Wage declines followed in other deregulated industries, such as telecommunications.

If Volcker’s and Carter’s attacks on unions were indirect, Reagan’s was altogether frontal.

In the 1980 election, the union of air-traffic controllers was one of a handful of labor organizations that endorsed Reagan’s candidacy.

Nevertheless, they could not reach an accord with the government, and when they opted to strike in violation of federal law, Reagan fired them all. (His actions contrasted sharply with those of President Nixon, who responded to an illegal wildcat strike of postal workers in 1970 by negotiating a settlement and letting them return to their jobs.)

Reagan’s union busting was quickly emulated by many private-sector employers. In 1983, the nation’s second-largest copper-mining company, Phelps Dodge, ended its cost-of-living adjustment, provoking a walkout of its workers, whom it replaced with new hires who then decertified the union. The same year, Greyhound Bus cut wages, pushing its workers out on strike, then hired replacements at lower wages. Also in 1983, Louisiana Pacific, the second-largest timber company, reduced its starting hourly wage, forcing a strike that culminated in the same kind of worker defeats seen at Phelps Dodge and Greyhound. Eastern Airlines, Boise Cascade, International Paper, Hormel meatpacking—all went down the path of forcing strikes to weaken or destroy their unions.

In the topsy-turvy world of the 1980s, the strike had become a tool for management to break unions. Save in the most exceptional circumstances, unions abandoned the strike. The number of major strikes plummeted from 286 a year in the 1960s and 1970s, to 83 a year in the 1980s, to 34 a year in the 1990s, to 20 a year in the 2000s. The end of the strike transformed the American economy. From the 1820s through the 1970s, workers had two ways to bid up their wages: threatening to take their services elsewhere in a full-employment economy and walking off the job with their fellow workers until managers met their demands. Since the early 1980s, only the full-employment-

making it work Younger Americans tell their stories

NAME: Angela Rokosz AGE: 23

OCCUPATION: Registered dental hygienist ANNUAL INCOME: $28,000

LOCATION: Youngwood, Pennsylvania

economy option has been available—and just barely. Save for the late 1990s, the economy has been nowhere near full employment.

The loss of workers’ leverage was compounded by a radical shift in corporations’ view of their mission. In August 1981, at New York’s Pierre Hotel, Jack Welch, General Electric’s new CEO, delivered a kind of inaugural address, which he titled “Growing Fast in a Slow-Growth Economy.” GE, Welch proclaimed, would henceforth shed all its divisions that weren’t No. 1 or No. 2 in their markets. If that meant shedding workers, so be it. All that mattered was pushing the company to pre-eminence, and the measure of a company’s pre-eminence was its stock price.

Between late 1980 and 1985, Welch reduced the number of GE employees from 411,000 to 299,000. He cut basic research. The company’s stock price soared. So much for balancing the interests of employees, stockholders, consumers, and the public. The new model company was answerable solely to its stockholders.

In the decade preceding Welch’s speech, a number of conservative economists, chiefly from the University of Chicago, had argued that the midcentury U.S. corporation had to contend with a mishmash of competing demands. Boosting the company’s share price, they contended, gave corporate executives a clear purpose—even clearer if those executives were incentivized by receiving their payments in stock. After Welch’s speech, the goal of America’s corporate executives became the elevation of the company’s— and their own—stock. If revenues weren’t rising, and even if they were, that goal could be accomplished by reducing wages, curtailing pensions, making employees pay more for their health coverage, cutting research, eliminating worker training, and offshoring production.

I’m a very realistic kind of person.

I enjoy what I do, and then from that I’ve been able to enjoy my life because I can support myself. I’m usually dental assisting. I go in with the dentist and do the operative care like fillings and root canals and bridgework and extractions. I start at 9 A.M. I work for two practices, three different offices. One office is in Mount Pleasant, one is in Greensburg, so either way it’s five miles. Youngwood is in the middle, which is a great thing because that saves gas money. I got a raise in the middle of the year so that made a difference. I don’t get paid vacation time or any kind of sick days or overtime. Certain weeks I work more hours than others. One week I could work 25 hours, the next week I could work up to 50 hours.

As an 18-year-old who had no idea what they wanted to do with their life, I did what everybody else did: went to school, John Carroll, a four-year university in Ohio, and I was trying to figure out a major.

Nothing was my passion. I was homesick a lot, so I came home and thought, well maybe I’ll just go to Seton Hill, which is a private school in Greensburg, and maybe I’ll do education, and I applied. I got in and had my roommate, had my dorm room, and it was the day before I was supposed to move in, and I saw how much money one semester was for classes I didn’t even know I wanted to take—$13,000. At John Carroll I had $20,000 already built up in debt. I didn’t feel secure that I was going to find something that I was going to do. So I said, “No, I’m not going to do it.”

My cousin is a hygienist. She had no school loans, she loved her job, she had a nice apartment, a nice car. She had her stuff together, and she’s only 25. And I said, “What did you do and how can I do that?” I wanted to be secure. I wanted to make sure that I was able to support myself. So I figured out

what I needed to do to get into the program, and I enrolled at the community college.

It was honestly so much harder than I thought it was going to be. You have to take three different board examinations.

You have to take two written examinations and one clinical. My clinical examination I failed two times, and I almost quit, I almost stopped, but I was like, well, I have a degree in dental hygiene, what else am I going to do with my life if I don’t pass my boards? So I took it the third time, and I passed.

The tuition was about $1,500 a semester, multiply that by seven semesters, it would be around $10,000, plus you add in supplies and insurance and all this other stuff, which I never really factored in. I worked the entire time. I had school Monday through Thursday, and I worked Friday, Saturday, Sunday at Wal-Mart in their lawn and garden section. I do have student-loan debt from the one year at John Carroll. My dad paid off most of it. He cashed in his 401(k) and paid off all of our loans because we have five kids who all went to college, and he was just sick of the interest, and he knew it was going to crush us.

So, now we just owe him the money back.

NAME: Alex Mason AGE: 34

OCCUPATION: Architect SALARY: $43,000

LOCATION: Los Angeles, California

Because we’re a small firm, I have a lot of responsibilities. My dominant role here is representation, so I do all of our 3-D modeling, most of our Photoshop, all of the documents that are either used for communicating the grand design of a space or of getting a really quick idea across to the client. In addition to that, I have a handful of projects that I’m also the lead on. Ninety percent of what we do is bars and restaurants.

It’s ridiculous hours. The expectation is that you’re here from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M., but there’s so much work to do that staying from 9 to 6 is never going to be enough. I live four miles from the office. >>> page 28

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

The Decline of the American Job,1974--

From the end of World War II through the mid-1970s, American jobs—and with them, the American economy—steadily improved.

President Kennedy’s description of how the economy worked was substantially accurate: “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Pay raises matched increases in the nation’s productivity at all points along the economic spectrum. Workers at the bottom of the pay scale saw their wages increase in tandem with everyone else’s. In growing numbers, employers provided pensions and health insurance to their workers. But beginning in the ’70s, the rising tide began leaving some, then most, and today nearly all boats behind.

PAY STOPPED RISING

GROWTH OF WORKER COMPENSATION AND PRODUCTIVITY, 1947–2009: 300%

254%

250%

PRODUCTIVITY 200% 150%

113%

100%

HOURLY COMPENSATION

50% 0%

’47 ’55 ’63 ’71 ’79 ’87 ’95 ’03 ’09

What median annual household income would be had it kept pace with increases in productivity:

$86,426 What median annual household income actually is:

$50,054

35% 30%

31%

28%

DEFINED CONTRIBUTION ONLY

25% 20% 15%

10%

11%

BOTH

10% 5%

DEFINED BENEFIT ONLY

7%

3%

0%

’80 ’82 ’84 ’86 ’88 ’90 ’92 ’94 ’96 ’98

’00 ’02

’04 ’06 ’08

’10

Employers stopped offering health coverage

(2011 NUMBERS)

SHARE OF WORKERS PROVIDED WITH HEALTH INSURANCE, 1979–2010:

Hourly wages are a buck and a half below their 1972 levels

70%

AVERAGE HOURLY EARNINGS (IN 2008 DOLLARS), 1964–2008:

66%

68% 64%

$20.06

$20

Secure retirements went the way of the dodo PRIVATE-SECTOR EMPLOYEES PARTICIPATING IN RETIREMENT PLANS BY TYPE, 1979–2011:

62% 60%

$18.52

$19

58% 56%

$18

54% 52%

$17

50%

$16

’80 ’82 ’84 ’86 ’88 ’90 ’92

’94

’96 ’98 ’00

’02

’04 ’06

’08 ’10

’64 ’66 ’68 ’70 ’72 ’74 ’76 ’78 ’80 ’82 ’84 ’86 ’88 ’90 ’92 ’94 ’96 ’98 ’00 ’02 ’04 ’06 ’08

HOW DID AMERICANS GET BY?

The minimum wage ain’t what it used to be REAL VALUE OF THE FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE IN 2012 DOLLARS, 1968–2012: $11 $10 $9 $8

$10.56

Pay raises vanished

They spent money they didn’t have

ANNUAL CHANGES IN AVERAGE HOURLY COMPENSATION (WAGES PLUS BENEFITS):

HOUSEHOLD DEBT AS A PERCENTAGE OF DISPOSABLE INCOME:

3.0% $7.25 1.1% 1.0% 0.8% 0.1% –0.2%

$7 $6 $5

’68 ’72 ’76 ’80 ’84 ’88 ’92 ’96 ’00 ’04 ’08 ’12

24 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

1948– 1973

1973– 1979

1979– 1989

1989– 2000

2000– 2007– 2007 2011

67% 1980

127% 2007

sources: bureau of economic analysis; bureau of labor statistics; center for economic and policy research; dēmos; economic policy institute; employee benefit research institute; u.s. census bureau; u.s. federal reserve

Worker income once rose with productivity increases. Then it didn’t

BENEFITS GOT CUT

ONLY IN AMERICA

WHAT HAPPENED TO JOBS THAT PAID WELL?

When it comes to low-wage work, we’re No. 1

Manufacturing jobs got slashed; low-paying service jobs increased

SHARE OF EMPLOYEES EARNING LESS THAN TWO-THIRDS OF THE MEDIAN WAGE:

SHARE OF NONFARM EMPLOYMENT BY MAJOR INDUSTRIAL SECTOR, 1950–2007:

USA

100%

UK

20.6%

90%

CANADA

20.5%

80%

IRELAND

20.2%

GERMANY

20.2%

AUSTRIA 16.0% SPAIN 15.7%

40%

JAPAN

14.7%

AUSTRALIA

14.4%

PORTUGAL

20%

14.2%

10%

GREECE 13.5%

0

FRANCE

NORWAY

8.0%

ITALY

8.0%

BELGIUM

4.0%

0

5%

’54

’58

’62

’66

’70

’74

’78

10%

15%

20%

Unions got crushed, and workers lost the power to bargain for wages UNION MEMBERSHIP, 1948–2012:

25% 40%

When it comes to hours worked, we’re No. 1

35%

HOURS WORKED ANNUALLY PER EMPLOYED PERSON, 2006:

20%

USA

GERMANY

NORWAY

25%

15%

5%

1,564 hours

0

1,436 hours

1948

1,407 hours

AVERAGE ANNUAL REAL WAGE GROWTH AS A SHARE OF AVERAGE ANNUAL PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH, 2001–2007:

300%

BELGIUM

76.9%

DENMARK

76.4%

FRANCE SWEDEN

GERMANY

59.2%

0

’06

CEO PAY

350%

298%

250% 200%

100%

51.7%

50%

45.4%

PRODUCTION WORKER PAY 4.3%

0

USA 1.7%

’02

150%

56%

AUSTRIA

’98

SHARE OF PRE-TAX INCOME GROWTH (IN 2005 DOLLARS), 1990–2005: 400%

’94

CEOs, whose compensation has skyrocketed

And when it comes to productivity gains raising wages, we’re dead last

’90

SO WHO BENEFITED?

1,000 1,200 1,400 1,600 1,800

2012

1,391 hours

NETHERLANDS

’86

Number of jobs lost in computer and electronics manufacturing, 1990–2010

10%

1,577 hours

DENMARK

FRANCE

30%

1,804 hours

’82

760 THOUSAND

11.1%

8.5%

FINLAND

OTHER GOODS-PRODUCING INDUSTRIES

MANUFACTURING

’50

12.5%

NEW ZEALAND

TRADE, TRANSPORTATION, UTILITIES

30%

13.6%

DENMARK

GOVERNMENT SERVICES

60% 50%

OTHER SERVICE-PRODUCING INDUSTRIES

70%

17.6%

NETHERLANDS

sources: bureau of labor statistics; center for economic and policy research; institute for policy studies and united for a fair economy; international labor organization; labor research association; mason and saverda (2010); organisation for economic co-operation and development

24.8%

20%

40%

60%

80%

-50%

’90

FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE -9.3% ’91 ’92

’93

’94 ’95

’96

’97

’98

’99

’00

’01

’02

’03

’04 ’05

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

The Collapse of the American Job, 2008-Between 1979 and the crash of 2008, the American job declined slowly and steadily. Since the crash, it has declined precipitously and relentlessly. Middle-income jobs have dried up; part-time, temporary, and poverty-wage jobs have boomed. Today, 1 in 12 American workers is employed in a restaurant or fast-food stand, and 1 in 5 is employed only part time.

CRUMMY JOBS PREVAIL

THE UPSHOT?

The middle (not the bottom) falls out of the economy

SHARES OF TOTAL MARKET-BASED HOUSEHOLD* INCOME GROWTH IN THREE ERAS:

Who got what, then and now

OCCUPATIONAL GROWTH RATES, INDEXED TO 2001: LOWER-WAGE OCCUPATIONS

10%

BROADLY SHARED PROSPERITY

THE YEARS OF DECLINE

THE INEQUALITY OF NOW

1947–1979

1979–2007

2009–2011

121%

5%

HIGHER-WAGE OCCUPATIONS

0%

79% 60%

-5%

MID-WAGE OCCUPATIONS

2001 2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011 2012

13%

Part-time jobs (for workers who wanted full-time jobs) ballooned and stayed high

BOTTOM 95 %

PART-TIME WORKERS FOR ECONOMIC REASONS, SEASONALLY ADJUSTED, 2005–2013:

95%– 99%

7.8%

19%

21%

TOP 1%

BOTTOM 95 %

95%– 99%

BOTTOM 95 % TOP 1%

*Income reported on individual tax returns including labor income, dividends, interest payments, realized capital gains, and rents from other business income that accrue to owners of capital.

26% 95%– 99%

TOP 1%

-47%

20%

19%

19.6%

(JULY 2013) 18%

17%

RECESSION 16%

Amount that the U.S. economy has

Amount that median household income* has

since 2000

since 2000

GROWN

15%

19.8% 12.4%

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

DECLINED

*households headed by people under 65

2013

AND IT’S ONLY LIKELY TO GET WORSE

EXPECTED NUMBER OF NEW JOBS, 2010–2020

MEDIAN ANNUAL WAGE IN 2010

These six occupations have the highest projected job growth 711,900

706,800

706,300

607,000

489,500

398,000

$64,690

$20,670

$20,560

$19,640

$26,610

$17,950

REGISTERED NURSES

RETAIL SALESPEOPLE

CERTIFIED HOME HEALTH AIDES

NON-CERTIFIED PERSONAL CARE AIDES

GENERAL OFFICE CLERKS

FOOD PREP AND SERVING WORKERS

26 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

sources: bureau of labor statistics; economic policy institute; national employment law project analysis of current population survey; the wall street journal; u.s. census bureau; u.s. federal reserve

-10%

(After CEO Louis Gerstner announced in 1999 that IBM, long considered a model employer, would no longer pay its workers defined benefits and would switch to 401(k)s, corporate America largely abandoned paying for its employees’ secure retirements.)

By the end of the century, corporations acknowledged that they had downgraded workers in their calculus of concerns. In the 1980s, a Conference Board survey of corporate executives found that 56 percent agreed that “employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.” When the Conference Board asked the same question in the 1990s, 6 percent of executives agreed. “Loyalty to a company,” Welch once said, “it’s nonsense.”

1990

In 1938, while campaigning, successfully, to persuade Congress to establish a federal minimum wage, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told a crowd in Fort Worth, “You need more industries in Texas, but I know you know the importance of not trying to get industries by the route of cheap wages for industrial workers.” In fact, Southern business and political leaders knew nothing of the sort. What prevented most American corporations from establishing facilities in the South was its oppressive weather and even more oppressive racial discrimination.

By the 1970s, the South was both air-­ conditioned and moderately desegregated. The decade was the first in the 20th century that saw more Americans moving into the region than leaving it. Indeed, during the 1970s, just 14 percent of newly created jobs were located in the Northeast and Midwest, while 86 percent were located in the Sunbelt.

In 2013, America’s three largest private-sector employers are all low-wage retailers: Wal-Mart,Yum! Brands (owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken), and McDonald’s.

The definitive Southern company, and the company that has done the most to subject the American job to the substandard standards of the South, has been Wal-Mart, which began as a single store in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962.

That year, the federal minimum wage, set at $1.15 an hour, was extended to retail workers, much to the dismay of Sam Walton, who was paying the employees at his fast-growing chain half that amount. Since the law initially applied to businesses with 50 or more employees, Walton argued that each of his stores was a separate entity, a claim that the Department of Labor rejected, fining Walton for his evasion of federal law.

Undaunted, Wal-Mart has carried its commitment to low wages through a subsequent half-century of relentless expansion. In 1990, it became the country’s largest retailer, and today the chain is the world’s largest private-sector employer, with 1.3 million employees in the United States and just under a million abroad.

As Wal-Mart grew beyond its Ozark base, it brought Walton’s Southern standards north. In retail marketing, payroll generally constitutes between 8 percent and 12 percent of sales, but at Wal-Mart, managers are directed to keep payroll expenses between 5.5 percent and 8 percent of sales. Managers who fail at this don’t remain managers for long. While Wal-Mart claims the average hourly wage of its workers is $12.67, employees contend it is several dollars lower.

When a Wal-Mart opens in a new territory, it either drives out the higher-wage competition or compels that competition to lower its pay.

David Neumark, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, has shown that eight years after Wal-Mart comes to a county, it drives down wages for all (not just retail) workers until they’re 2.5 percent to 4.8 percent below wages in

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

making it work continued from page 23

Because it’s L.A., that’s a 15- to 20-minute commute. I try to take the bus two or three times a week. I’ll often drive to work and then take the bus home and then take the bus the next day back. As an East Coaster, I really value walking, and I find it super rejuvenating and balancing to have that hour commute.

I went to Tufts for undergrad, and I did art history and architectural studies. There was a very big gap between undergrad and grad school. I was traveling the country giving away random promotional materials—I gave juice away for a couple of years for SoBe. Every week I’d be in a different state.

While I was on the road with SoBe, I wound up meeting my eventual wife. She’s an L.A. girl, and I realized I needed to be out here where she was. I did a summer program at UCLA that is a sort of a crash course in architectural design. My studio instructor from that program wrote me a recommendation to get into UCLA. In order to become a licensed architect, it’s closest to a medical doctor, in that you go to school, get out of school, spend a bunch of time doing an internship which is something like 5,700 hours, and once you’ve satisfied all those intern hours, you’re eligible to take a series of seven exams. After you’ve taken those exams and have passed them all, then you’re a licensed architect. I came out of undergrad with $20,000 in debt for four years. By the time I came out of UCLA, I was somehow at $140,000 in student-loan debt.

My monthly loan payments are $900.

I think that for a lot of people the appeal of architecture from the outside is really strong. Do you watch Seinfeld? George’s alter ego is an architect. There’s all sorts of pop-culture fantasies about what the life of an architect is about. I was always interested in architecture because it’s about bringing together different disciplines and being the person who understands how all of them work and coordinates all of them, and I come to find out that I’m just not that interested in coordinating. That for me has been the biggest

28 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

thing that I’ve learned so far—that in 15 years I will probably not be an architect anymore.

The stuff I’m most interested in extends a bit more to branding. Or, if I stay in the field, I would be less in a design capacity and more in the partner capacity, the partners being the ones that actually go out and get work and get business. I think that that’s where my skill set probably lies.

NAME: Patricia Sondergaard AGE: 26

ANNUAL SALARY: $39,000

OCCUPATION: Biomedical engineer LOCATION: Columbus, Ohio

In high school, I did an internship at the Cleveland Clinic. I worked with a biomedical engineer there and really got interested in the field. Miami University of Ohio did not have a biomedical engineering program yet, so I did chemical engineering there with a focus in biomedical. I graduated in 2009 and took the summer off and then went to Ohio State University. I got my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering last December.

After I graduated, I did look at industry jobs pretty heavily. My husband has a job in Columbus, and so for ease of everything I tried to find a job here. For industry, they did want people with more experience. Obviously, I worked in a lab for the entirety of my Ph.D. work, but that didn’t really count as experience, so it’s kind of that catch-22 of entry-level positions. They want people with experience, but I can’t get experience without getting the entry-level position.

I ended up finding a post doctoral position in the research center of a children’s hospital. I started pretty much a week after graduation, so I didn’t have any downtime. I work in the Center for Gene Therapy, and we’re working on treatments for muscular dystrophy. Here we work in conjunction with several physicians who see patients with muscular dystrophy, so we are very close to the patient in terms of >>> page 30

comparable counties with no Wal-Mart outlets.

By controlling a huge share of the U.S. retail market, including an estimated 20 percent of the grocery trade, Wal-Mart has also been able to mandate reduced prices all along its worldwide supply chain. In response, manufacturers have slashed the wages of their employees and gone abroad in search of cheaper labor. The warehouse workers who unload the containers in which the company’s goods are shipped from China to the U.S. and repackage them for sale are retained by low-wage temporary employment agencies, though many of those workers have held the same job for years.

Shunting its workers off to temp agencies is just one of the many ways Wal-Mart diminishes what it sees as the risk of unionization. When the employees in one Canadian store voted to unionize, Wal-Mart closed the store. When butchers in one Texas outlet voted to go union, Wal-Mart eliminated the meat department in that store and in every other store in Texas and the six surrounding states. But Wal-Mart’s antipathy to unions and affinity for low wages merely reflects the South’s historic opposition to worker autonomy and employee rights. By coming north, though, Wal-Mart has lowered retail-sector wages throughout the U.S. The more recent influx of European- and Japanese-owned nonunion factories to the South has had a similar effect. In their homelands, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Toyota work closely with unions, and the German companies pay their workers as much as or more than the most highly paid American autoworkers.

When such companies move into the American South, however, they go native, not only paying their workers far less than they do in Europe or Japan but also opposing their efforts to form a union. (Under pressure from the German

autoworkers union, however, Volkswagen has recently committed itself to establishing a consultative works council at its Tennessee plant. Such councils are standard at Volkswagen plants in Germany and other nations; in the U.S., the particulars of American labor law require that the company recognize the UAW as the workers’ representative.)

One way these factories reduce workers’ wages is not to employ them directly. By the estimate of one former manager, roughly 70 percent of the workers at Nissan’s plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, aren’t Nissan employees but rather are under contract to temporary employment-service companies that pay them roughly half the hourly wage of Nissan’s own employees. One academic survey found that while just 2.3 percent of manufacturing workers in 1989 were temps, by 2004 the number had risen to 8.7 percent.

Southern competition is one reason newer hires at the Detroit Three’s auto plants have hourly wages that top out between $16 and $19, while workers hired before the institution of the two-tier system can see their base pay rise to between $29 and $33 an hour. A cumulative effect of Wal-Martization is that incomes in the industrial Midwest have been dropping toward levels set in Alabama and Tennessee.

According to Moody’s Analytics, the wage-andbenefit gap between Midwestern and Southern workers, which was $7 in 2008, had shrunk to just $3.34 by the end of 2011.

2000

As corporate executives came under pressure to reward shareholders by cutting labor costs, the revolution in transportation and communication enabled them to move production facilities to the developing world where workers

So was the America of 1947–1974 the great exception in the nation’s economic history?

Are the forces of globalization inevitably going to raise the incomes of the few and cut the incomes of the many?

came cheap. The flight of jobs to low-wage nations was accelerated by a series of trade accords, most prominently the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and the extension of Permanent Normal Trade Relations to China in 2000.

The textile and apparel industry lost more than 900,000 jobs in the 1990s and 2000s.

High-tech manufacturing was not spared, either.

The computer and electronics-­manufacturing sector lost an estimated 760,000 jobs during that time. By offshoring the production of its iPhone to the Chinese labor contractor Foxconn, Apple has realized a profit margin of 64 percent on each device, one of many reasons its stock price soared. From 2000 to 2010, the number of Americans employed in manufacturing shrank from 17.1 million to just 11.3 million. In 2011, the number of workers in the low-paying retail sector surpassed the number in manufacturing for the first time.

The decimation of manufacturing wasn’t due to a sharp acceleration of manufacturing productivity—indeed, productivity increases were higher in the previous decade, which saw less job loss. What made the difference was trade policy. Economist Rob Scott has calculated that the United States lost 2.4 million jobs just to China in the eight years following the passage of normalized trade relations.

Offshoring has had an even broader effect on the jobs that have remained behind. Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist who was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1990s, has estimated that roughly 25 percent of all American jobs are potentially offshorable, from producing steel to writing software to drafting contracts. This has placed a ceiling on wages in these and myriad other occupations that can be sent overseas.

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

making it work continued from page 28

seeing the real impact of our work. Eventually, I do want to move into industry. It’s just the first year of my postdoc, so we’ll see.

People tend to come in between 7 and 9 A.M. and leave accordingly. Depending on what’s going on, I’ve had later nights. It is definitely overwhelming at times, but overall I love it. It’s great here. For the most part, I’d say it was what I was expecting. Luckily, my husband is in a comfortable position.

He is in finance for a clothing company. He certainly works his butt off. We actually just bought our first house, so we’re in the process of leaving the renting world and moving toward a mortgage. But I’m also very much a saver and a budgeter, so we’re OK. I also don’t have any debt from school.

My dad is a Ph.D. in chemistry and owns his own consulting company, and my mom studied chemistry in undergrad but works as an administrative assistant. Both of my parents are from South America. I’d like to think my life will be pretty similar to theirs.

My husband and I want to have kids. Worklife balance is extremely important, so hopefully my husband will not be working 12-hour days. I actually read an article saying that my generation is the first that is not going to be doing better than our parents.

I’d like to think that I can take the level that my parents started at and move up with it.

NAME: Jesse Bonds AGE: 30

OCCUPATION: Electrician HOURLY WAGE: $18.50

ANNUAL SALARY: $35,000

LOCATION: Conway, Arkansas

After high school, I wanted to go to community college in Morrilton, Arkansas, just to give it a try. I had a full scholarship there. But they offered me full tuition at Arkansas Tech, too, so my parents were like, “Give it a shot at a four-year school instead.” I signed up late for Tech, and I just had to pick a major at random, so I chose computer sciences. I walked into class, and they wrote binary-number code on the board. The guy was like, “I’m

30 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

not going to go into binary code. Everybody knows all of this.” Everybody just giggled, like, “Oh, yeah.” I was just like, “This is a bad idea.” I kind of got discouraged. I just stopped showing up.

After about half a semester, I left that and went to work for Arkansas Electric, building substations. After about six months of that, there were enough substations built so they laid our crew off. That’s when I got my first electrical job at the Van Buren County hospital when they were building it, and so I did that for a year. Then I got done with that job and helped them lay tiles and stuff.

When that work was finished, I went back to school at ITT Technical Institute in Little Rock and got an associate’s in electronic engineering. I saw all the commercials and stuff. I got in there to apply, and they’re like, “Oh, you scored the highest on this entrance test of anybody that’s come through here in the last couple of years! You’ll be perfect for this program.” Just kind of muled me along a little bit and talked me a little bit more into it. That turned out to be a disaster.

I borrowed for all of the tuition. The admissions lady had told me, “People pay like $150, $200 a month. You’ll be paying on student loans the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter.” After I graduated in 2006, I started getting the bills. They let a 21-year-old kid get a $47,000 loan just on his own, hardly no credit, no credit at all.

I could never afford the $600-­something a month payments. I negotiated with them, and now my payments are about $315 a month.

ITT didn’t really prepare me for the work. All the equipment was outdated.

You’d do the study guide in class, and you just had to remember what the answers were for the quiz. I was placed in a job at an alarm company that was making like $10 an hour. Nobody else I worked with had a degree. I wound up being poorer coming out of college than I was going in, and it’s stayed that way ever since I graduated.

If I wouldn’t have gone there, if I had just stayed being an electrician, I’d be a lot better off and have no debt. >>> page 31

2013

Economists have long thought that labor’s share of the national income varied so little that it could be considered a constant. The immovability of labor’s share was called “Bowley’s Law,” after the British economic historian Arthur Bowley, who first identified it nearly a century ago.

In the wake of the economic collapse of 2008, Bowley’s Law was swept away—along with many of the economic standards that had characterized American life. Today, the share of the nation’s income going to wages, which for decades was more than 50 percent, is at a record low of 43 percent, while the share of the nation’s income going to corporate profits is at a record high. The economic lives of Americans today paint a picture of mass downward mobility. According to a National Employment Law Project study in 2012, low-wage jobs (paying less than $13.83 an hour) made up 21 percent of the jobs lost during the recession but more than half of the jobs created since the recession ended. Middle-income jobs (paying between $13.84 and $21.13 hourly) made up three-fifths of the jobs lost during the recession but just 22 percent of the jobs created since.

In 2013, America’s three largest private-­ sector employers are all low-wage retailers: Wal-Mart, Yum! Brands (which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken) and McDonald’s. In 1960, the three largest employers were high-wage unionized manufacturers or utilities: General Motors, AT&T, and Ford.

The most telling illustration of the decline of Americans’ work life may be that drawn by economists John Schmitt and Janelle Jones of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

They calculated the share of good jobs Americans held in 1979 and in 2010. If only because workers in 2010 were, on average, seven years

making it work continued from page 30

older and more educated than their 1979 counterparts, they should have been doing better. The two economists devised three indices of a good job: that it paid at least the 1979 male median wage ($37,000 in 2010 dollars), provided health benefits, and came with a 401(k) or pension.

By those standards, 27.4 percent of American workers had good jobs in 1979. Three decades later, that figure had dropped to 24.6 percent.

The decline of the American job is ultimately the consequence of the decline of worker power.

Beginning in the 1970s, corporate management was increasingly determined to block unions’ expansion to any regions of the country (the South and Southwest) or sectors of the economy (such as retail and restaurants) that were growing. An entire new industry—consultants who helped companies defeat workers’ efforts to unionize—sprang up. Although the National Labor Relations Act prohibits the firing of a worker involved in a union-organizing campaign, the penalties are negligible. Firings became routine.

Four efforts by unions to strengthen workers’ protections during the Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama presidencies came up short.

By 2013, the share of private-sector workers in unions declined to just 6.6 percent, and collective bargaining had been effectively eliminated from the private-sector economy.

The collapse of workers’ power to bargain helps explain one of the primary paradoxes of the current American economy: why productivity gains are not passed on to employees.

“The average U.S. factory worker is responsible today for more than $180,000 of annual output, triple the $60,000 in 1972,” University of Michigan economist Mark Perry has written.

“We’re able to produce twice as much manufacturing output today as in the 1970s, with about seven million fewer workers.” In many

Now I work at Kazi Electrical in Clinton.

It’s fun. Sometimes when I’m crawling in attics and under houses and stuff—and it’s hot and nasty and dirty—it’s not fun. But I really do like service work. My girlfriend will be graduating school next year with her RN, and so, we want to move somewhere else when she’s done. I was in Seattle for a week earlier this year for a job training and loved it up there. Everybody told me that I needed to come down to Oregon. They’re like, “You’d love Portland. You’ve got the big beard. You look like a Portlandian.”

NAME: Kameelah Janan Rasheed AGE: 28

OCCUPATION: Teacher/ teacher trainer ANNUAL SALARY: $80,000

LOCATION: Brooklyn, New York

I’ve been involved with teaching, tutoring, and working with youths since I was about 11. I was in the Bay Area, in a small town called East Palo Alto.

Even though it borders Stanford University, it wasn’t a town that was very affluent, and it wasn’t a town that people paid attention to insofar as providing programs and educational support. My little brother was in special education, and my mom would go to his class every single day and notice all these things that were going horribly wrong: classes that were too large, teachers who weren’t doing what they needed to do. She worked a long time to make things better.

Seeing my mother advocate for my brother but also for other kids made me fall in love with the thought of teaching and working with kids.

I got scholarships to go to Pomona College in Claremont, California. I had a lot of people push me toward Ph.D. programs and law programs, and for a long time I worried that mentors felt like I let them down.

Their questions were, “How did you come from a poor neighborhood and go to these great universities, and do so well at these universities, and win all these awards and then become a teacher?” The assumption was that if you are a black kid who made

it to great colleges, you should not waste your time becoming something that anyone could become. You should spend your time becoming something that’s extraordinary.

Teachers aren’t seen as extraordinary.

I got my master’s degree at Stanford in education and taught for two years at a charter school in California for $52,000 a year. Then in 2010, I moved to Brooklyn and started teaching history at another charter school. The first year my salary was $65,000, and thereafter it was $70,000. There is a hiring freeze for history teachers in New York City, so there’s no way for me to teach at a traditional public school here. Last year, I taught in East New York at a charter school designed for over-age, under-credit kids— kids who have been in and out of juvenile facilities, in and out of shelters and other social systems and programs. My salary was $65,000, and then I had a stipend on top, so it evened out to about $72,000. The bureaucracy of the school and the lack of transparency were difficult, and the inability of the administration to respond to the needs of kids was exhausting. Teachers would see the holes in the administration’s duties and fill them to make sure each kid has what he needs, even though you know it’s not your job and you don’t have the time to do it and attend to your personal needs.

I have student loans, but I’m very lucky because I got scholarships. I have $20,000 in interest-free loans I pay back to Pomona College. That’s $200 a month. I took out about $9,000 in loans from Stanford. In total, I have about $30,000 worth of loans, and they should be paid off in the next two years.

I was preparing to teach again this year, but this opportunity arose to develop curriculum and work with teachers on how to integrate technology for both traditional public schools and charter schools. The salary is $80,000. I’m going to help develop some curriculum around social studies, work with social-studies and English teachers at schools to help them know their curriculum, and figure out how to improve their teaching.

I’m going to help them use Google apps to compile data and >>> page 32

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

making it work continued from page 31

use these tools to make their days easier.

Instead of inputting things into a grade book, they’ll be able to put in student scores in a Google app and then use the same system to generate a letter for parents, a letter for students, archive the information, and then share it among a wide cross section of people at the school level or at the district level.

NAME: Shannon Tapia AGE: 29

OCCUPATION: Primary-care physician ANNUAL SALARY: $51,000

LOCATION: Lancaster, Pennsylvania

I grew up in Denver, Colorado, where my dad is a geriatrician. I didn’t know I was going to do exactly what he did, but it turned out that way. I was really good at science, and I’m like, “Well I’m good at this, and I like it, and I like talking to people, so I’m going to go into medicine.” In medical school, I wanted a well-rounded bit of everything, and I was a little bit indecisive about what field within primary care I liked most, so I just decided to do family medicine.

My parents helped with most of college but couldn’t cover graduate education.

Med school was on me, which meant I took out tuition and my living expenses. It was about $60,000 a year for four years, so it was a little more than $200,000. The year I started, they increased the interest rate, so most of my loans were at about 7 percent, which is huge. My husband is a different situation. His single mom died when he was young, but she had a trust fund for him that covered about two years of medical school. There was a house attached to the trust, and we sold it. Along with some money my husband received when his grandparents passed while we were in residency, the money allowed us to pay off all but about $55,000 of our loans.

Honestly, I am really grateful for this but also sad that our financial stability came because of my husband’s loss. This was also crucial because it used to be that your interest on your loans didn’t start accruing until after residency. Now, it starts the

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second you graduate medical school. So if you aren’t paying off loans while in residency, you go into forbearance, which is expensive.

Residency is cheap labor. They have changed it a lot in the last ten years. They’ve put in restrictions on how much residents can work. You can’t work more than 80 hours in a week on average. They have restricted the amount of hours an intern can work in a row to less than 16, and theoretically no resident is supposed to be in charge of patient care for longer than 24 hours straight. It isn’t really feasible for many residencies to comply with all this and still train doctors and take care of patients.

I quickly realized that I loved geriatrics, which falls under primary care. It is actually the most needed of all the specialties and is a specialty that has very high job satisfaction. I chose to do an extra year, where I get paid like a resident, in geriatrics. The trouble is, when you’re in primary care, your work is really never done. You have to do work from home, especially with all of these electronic medical records, which is a huge change for primary-care doctors in the last couple of years. There’s good and bad things about it, but the bottom line is that it seriously increases our work.

Documenting and paperwork take time, and lots of it, but you are not paid for that time. They pay you for seeing patients in person.

In primary care this comes at a cost to patients, because docs have to churn out visits to make ends meet. In geriatrics, it is frustrating because the system doesn’t recognize the hours you give in family meetings, chart review, and attention to detail that you can’t get from “seeing” a patient, particularly if they have memory loss or are unable to communicate. So while I love geriatrics, I can see why new doctors who have a debt burden like I initially did would opt out of it.

I’m not getting paid like a doctor yet.

Nor is my husband, because he’s still a resident too. Starting out as a geriatrician, my expected salary is between $100,000 and $200,000. >>> page 49

industries, the increase in productivity has exceeded Perry’s estimates. “Thirty years ago, it took ten hours per worker to produce one ton of steel,” said U.S. Steel CEO John Surma in 2011. “Today, it takes two hours.”

In conventional economic theory, those productivity increases should have resulted in sizable pay increases for workers. Where conventional economic theory flounders is its failure to factor in the power of management and stockholders and the weakness of labor. Sociologist Tali Kristal has documented that the share of revenues going to wages and benefits in manufacturing has declined by 14 percent since 1970, while the share going to profits has correspondingly increased. She found similar shifts in transportation, where labor’s share has been reduced by 10 percent, and construction, where it has been cut by 5 percent. What these three sectors have in common is that their rate of unionization has been cut in half during the past four decades. All of which is to say, gains in productivity have been apportioned by the simple arithmetic of power.

Only if the suppression of labor’s power is made part of the equation can the overall decline in good jobs over the past 35 years be explained. Only by considering the waning of worker power can we understand why American corporations, sitting on more than $1.5 trillion in unexpended cash, have used those funds to buy back stock and increase dividends but almost universally failed even to consider raising their workers’ wages.

2020

So was the America of 1947– 1974—the America of the boomers’ youth—the great exception in the nation’s economic history, a golden age that came and went and can never come again?

Were the conditions that led to the postwar boom and its egalitarian prosperity so anomalous that the American economic success story will continue to recede in our rearview mirrors? Are the forces of globalization and robotization inevitably going to raise the incomes of the few and depress the incomes of the many?

That the American supremacy over the global economy in the three decades after World War II was a one-time phenomenon is a given. That globalization and automation have made and will continue to make massive changes in America’s economy is obvious. But it’s worth noting that one high-wage advanced manufacturing nation has seen its workers thrive in the past 40 years: Germany. Like American multinationals, all the iconic German manufacturers—Daimler, Siemens, BASF, and others—have factories scattered across the globe. Unlike the American multinationals, however, they have kept their most remunerative and highest-value-added production jobs at home. Nineteen percent of the German workforce is employed in manufacturing, well above the 8 percent of the American workforce. German industrial workers’ wages and benefits are about one-third higher than Americans’. While the U.S. runs the world’s largest trade deficit, Germany runs a surplus second only to China’s and occasionally surpasses it.

To be sure, Germany’s identity is more wrapped up in manufacturing than America’s is, but that’s because of national arrangements that not just bolster manufacturing through such policies as excellent vocational education but also give workers more power. By law, all German companies with more than 1,000 employees must have equal numbers of worker and management representatives on their corporate boards. For the most part, German companies don’t get their funding from issuing

The extinction of a large and vibrant American middle class wasn’t ordained by the laws of either economics or physics. It was workers’ diminishing political power that did the middle class in.

stocks and bonds but rather by generating investment either internally or by borrowing from banks; the role of the shareholder is insignificant. By practicing a brand of capitalism in which employees and communities still matter, Germany has been able to subject itself to the same forces of globalization that the United States has without substantially diminishing its workers’ power and income.

What has vanished over the past 40 years isn’t just Americans’ rising incomes. It’s their sense of control over their lives. The young college graduates working in jobs requiring no more than a high-school degree, the middleaged unemployed who have permanently opted out of a labor market that has no place for them, the 45- to 60-year-olds who say they will have to delay their retirement because they have insufficient savings—all these and more are leading lives that have diverged from the aspirations that Americans until recently believed they could fulfill. This May, a Pew poll asked respondents if they thought that today’s children would be better or worse off than their parents. Sixtytwo percent said worse off, while 33 percent said better. Studies that document the decline of intergenerational mobility suggest that this newfound pessimism is well grounded.

The extinction of a large and vibrant American middle class isn’t ordained by the laws of either economics or physics. Many of the impediments to creating anew a broadly prosperous America are ultimately political creations that are susceptible to political remedy.

Amassing the power to secure those remedies will require an extraordinary, sustained, and heroic political mobilization. Americans will have to transform their anxiety into indignation and direct that indignation to the task of reclaiming their stake in the nation’s future. 

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

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THE STATE OF WORK HICKEY FREEMAN FACTORY

Founded in 1899, Hickey Freeman, one of the country’s iconic menswear companies, operates out of a 77,000-square-foot factory in Rochester, New York, locally known as the “Temple to Fine Tailoring.”

While much of the American clothing industry collapsed in the 1970s, Hickey Freeman has endured—albeit through bankruptcies and changes of ownership—partly because of its unusual business model. Instead of outsourcing labor abroad, the manufacturer brings international skilled workers to Rochester. The company, which will be purchased in mid-September by Grano Retail Investments, owner of the highend Canadian menswear company Samuelsohn, currently employs 400 tailors from more than 30 countries.

Susan Meiselas began photographing the Hickey Freeman factory in spring 2012 as part of Magnum Photos’ ongoing “Postcards from America” project. These photographs are part of her larger series, which maps the factory’s production cycles, explores its history, and tells the stories of the tailors who have come from around the world.

Alper, from Turkey, is a touch-up presser.

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THE STATE OF WORK HICKEY FREEMAN FACTORY

Pabitra, from Bhutan, trims waistbands.

Kledia, from Albania, adds piping to crotch pieces.

Viet, from Vietnam, presses pants.

Sultan, from Turkey, sews buttonholes.

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

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THE STATE OF WORK HICKEY FREEMAN FACTORY

Workstation for trimming pockets

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

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THE STATE OF WORK HICKEY FREEMAN FACTORY

Final touch-up inspection area

Heydar, from Cuba, shapes fronts.

Mike, from Italy, conducts a final review.

Final inspection area

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

The Robot Invasion

By Rick Wartzman

I

f you want a sense of where the nation’s job market is headed, a good place to stand is inside the half-mile-long Skechers warehouse in Moreno Valley, California, where box after box of shoes is stacked upon row after row of shelving, which soars some 40 feet in the air. Physically, the place is a wonder— quiet, sleek, and environmentally friendly (at 1.8 million square feet, it’s the largest officially certified “LEED Gold” building in the country).

But what’s most remarkable about the $250 million structure, which opened in 2011, is how few people work there.

The day I visited, a clump of men and women toiled away near a series of conveyor belts, filling small specialty orders. But machines— not human beings—were handling the bulk of the chores. “As you can see, there are no more people doing the retrieving,” Iddo Benzeevi, the chief executive of Highland Fairview, the firm that developed the site, told me. “It’s the computer doing it all by itself.”

A driverless crane swung into motion nearby, delivering a box of shoes to its appointed spot in the stacks. A moment later, guided by a web of sensors and software, the mammoth contraption plucked another box and shuttled it in a different direction. Then it zipped back, red lights flashing. In this immense section of the facility, nobody lays a finger on any of the goods, all stamped “Made in China.”

About 700 people work in the Skechers warehouse, according to Benzeevi, and as many as 300 more could be added in the next few years as business expands. That, however, is about 30 percent fewer jobs than one would expect at a more traditional logistics operation of the same size. A local newspaper, The Press-Enterprise, reported last year that because Skechers transferred work to Moreno Valley from a handful

42 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

of less-automated warehouses, it has meant a net loss of as many as 400 jobs across the area.

(Skechers officials declined to comment.)

Benzeevi is unapologetic about any such casualties and points to a growing logistics industry, the fierce nature of global competition, the unrelenting march of technology, and the quality of jobs that are found at his cutting-edge distribution center—relatively highskilled, high-paying ones (such as programming computers and repairing sophisticated pieces of equipment) versus the more menial variety that have been wiped out (like hauling around pallets with a forklift). “They are better jobs, which is where America should be,” he says.

Perhaps. But looking around the warehouse, much of which feels like a ghost town, one can’t help but wonder: Where does it all end?

FEARS THAT AUTOMATION will eat employ-

ment are hardly new. A decade or so after the end of World War II, concerns about what some were calling the “Second Industrial Revolution” mounted.

“With automatic machines taking over so many jobs,” the wife of an unemployed textile worker in Roanoke, Virginia, told a reporter in 1959, “it looks like the men may have finally outsmarted themselves.” James Carey, president of the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, was blunter. “Automation could displace most workers,” he warned.

Corporate executives of the era largely dismissed these worries, maintaining that for every worker cast aside by a machine, even more jobs were being generated. “Technological progress sets off a sort of chain reaction of economic growth,” Ralph Cordiner, the president of General Electric, assured Congress in 1955.

Sometimes, new enterprises sprang to life.

“The automatic-control industry is young and incredibly vigorous,” John Diebold, dubbed “the prophet of information technology,” told a gathering of business leaders in 1954.

Mostly, job gains were realized at the very same companies where new technology was being deployed, as huge increases in output led to the need for more workers overall—office personnel, engineers, maintenance staff, factory hands—to keep up with rising consumer demand. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein has pointed out that payrolls in the U.S. automobile industry swelled by about 15 percent through the 1950s and 1960s even as technology spread and factory productivity more than doubled.

More broadly, a 1963 study by University of Chicago economist Yale Brozen found that while 13 million jobs had been destroyed during the 1950s, the adoption of new technology was among the key ingredients that led to the creation of more than 20 million jobs.

“Instead of being alarmed about growing automation, we ought to be cheering it on,” he wrote. “The catastrophe that doom criers constantly threaten us with has retreated into such a dim future that we simply cannot take their pronouncements seriously.”

Brozen was too dismissive. Technological upheaval caused both the steel and rail industries, for instance, to suffer drops in employment in the late 1950s. “In converting to more automated processes, many industries found it less costly to build a new plant in another area rather than converting their older factories, thus leaving whole communities of employees stranded,” the Department of Labor noted in one study of the period.

In the end, the first big wave of postwar technological change was far from benign. But,

on balance, it didn’t destroy nearly as many jobs as some had predicted. Even labor leaders acknowledged it was inevitable that machines would play an ever larger role in the lives of workers and that the trend could bring plenty of benefits if managed right. “You can’t stop technological progress, and it would be silly to try it if you could,” said Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers. The best that unions and their allies could hope for was to temper automation’s ill effects.

REUTHER, FOR ONE, RESPONDED to advanc-

ing technology in various ways, including pushing for a guaranteed annual wage from the car companies—a cash balm for any workers idled by automation. But the surest means of keeping machines from biting too hard was to teach as many people as possible to use them.

To that end, some 30,000 General Motors employees were enrolled in various training programs in the late 1950s. In 1959, Armour & Co. created a special “automation fund” for retraining purposes, putting aside 14 cents for every 100 tons of meat it shipped. At General Electric, veteran workers laid off because of automation were guaranteed during a retraining period at least 95 percent of their pay for as many weeks as they had years of service. “This was an effort to stabilize income while the employee prepared for the next job,” explained Earl Willis, a GE manager of employee benefits.

Today, U.S. companies continue to invest heavily in training, pouring more than $60 billion a year into such initiatives. But unlike in the past, businesses say they can no longer rely on their workers’ obtaining the skills they need from another crucial source: the public classroom.

For a long time, “because the American people were the most educated in the world, they

A driverless crane swung into motion nearby, delivering a box to its appointed spot in the stacks. A minute later, it zipped back. Nobody lays a finger on any of the goods, all stamped “Made in China.”

were in the best position to invent, be entrepreneurial, and produce goods and services using advanced technologies,” Harvard professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz assert in their 2008 book, The Race Between Education and Technology. For those born from the 1870s until about 1950, the authors found, every decade witnessed an uptick of about 0.8 years of education. In other words, “during that 80-year period the vast majority of parents had children whose educational attainment greatly exceeded theirs.” But then something happened: “Educational change between the generations … came to an abrupt standstill.”

The timing couldn’t have been worse. To perform practically any function in the Skechers warehouse, “you need to use a computer,” Benzeevi says. “It takes new skills.” Yet relatively few people have them. Even fewer are prepared for the kinds of jobs that may come next.

In the future, “it is a safe bet that the human labor market will center on three kinds of work,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Frank Levy and Harvard’s Richard Murnane write in “Dancing with Robots,” a report issued in June by the Washington-based think tank Third Way. The first is solving unstructured problems. The second is acquiring, making sense of, and communicating new information. Computers aren’t good at either of these tasks. The third is nonroutine manual labor (like schlepping furniture), which also can’t be tackled by a computer.

The first two will undoubtedly pay well.

The third will not. “In this context,” Levy and Murnane conclude, “the nation’s challenge is to sharply increase the fraction of American children with the foundational skills needed to develop job-relevant knowledge and to learn efficiently over a lifetime.” As daunting as all of this is, it isn’t what concerns some the most.

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

AS THE LABOR MARKET continues to struggle

to recover all of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, the question that haunted the 1950s is rising again: Have we reached a stage at which technology is destroying more jobs than it is creating? After all, what took 1,000 people to churn out in 1950—when blue-collar work could launch someone with a high-school degree into the middle class—now takes fewer than 200.

Most economists dismiss (or at least heavily discount) the idea. Follow the historic pattern, they argue. Innovative and entrepreneurial, the United States has always found a way to make lots of jobs out of the next new thing. It can be difficult getting from here to there—“very, very disruptive and very, very hard” for masses of people caught in the transition, as James Cash, a Harvard business professor, puts it. But we’ve always produced enough jobs while absorbing the mechanical cotton picker, the mainframe, the microprocessor, the robot, and so much more. “Over the long term, employment rates are fairly stable,” Lawrence Katz told the MIT Technology Review earlier this year. “People have always been able to create new jobs.”

John Husing, an economist in the Inland Empire, the region east of Los Angeles where the Skechers facility is located, agrees. Even though he was the one who told me about the warehouse, marveling at the way “nobody touches a box, nobody touches a shoe,” he believes that we’re in the midst of a classic structural shift in the economy. “Do I think there will be enough jobs?” he asks. “Yes, I do.”

Then he adds: “How are you going to distribute the shoes? Somebody has to drive the trucks.”

Well, maybe not for long. Over the summer, The Wall Street Journal reported on a growing phenomenon: autonomous trucks. A fleet of these driverless rigs requires “no workers’

44 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

Have we reached a stage at which technology is now destroying more jobs than it is creating?

After all, what took 1,000 people to churn out in 1950 now takes fewer than 200.

compensation, no payroll tax, no health-care benefits,” James Barrett, the president of a transport company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, told the Journal. “You keep going down the checklist, and it becomes pretty cheap.”

The example is telling. In an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review last year, professor Erik Brynjolfsson and research scientist Andrew McAfee pointed out that less than a decade ago, truck driving was viewed as an occupation that would be difficult, if not impossible, to automate. But in 2010, Google announced that its driverless cars were hitting the road, and now Caterpillar is rolling out driverless trucks at an Australian mine. In short order, “real-world driving went from being an example of a task that couldn’t be automated to an example of one that was,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee wrote.

The duo, who co-authored the 2011 book Race Against the Machine, are convinced that, as Brynjolfsson has described it, “we’re having the automation and the job destruction,” but “we’re not having the creation at the same pace” anymore. Life will change for the better in many ways because of these breakthroughs.

Consumers will delight in a wealth of new products, services, and experiences. But, say Brynjolfsson and McAfee, we “also need to start preparing for a technology-fueled economy that’s ever more productive but that just might not need a great deal of human labor.”

What that portends for our social fabric, one can only imagine. When the UAW’s Walter Reuther visited a state-of-the-art Ford plant in Cleveland in 1954, the executive showing him around pointed to a series of automated loading machines. “How are you going to collect union dues from these guys?” the executive asked. Replied Reuther: “How are you going to get them to buy Fords?” 

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

TheTask Rabbit Economy

By Robert Kuttner

T

askRabbit.com markets itself as a Web service that matches clients seeking someone to do odd jobs with “college students, recent retirees, stay-at-home moms, [and] young professionals” looking for extra income. The company website calls it “a marketplace dedicated to empowering people to do what they love.” The name Task Rabbit doesn’t exactly suggest the dignity of work, and the love often takes humble forms. Customers hire Task Rabbits to clean garages, haul clothes to the laundry, paint apartments, assemble Ikea products, buy groceries, or do almost anything else that’s legal.

The San Francisco–based company, which has raised $38 million in venture capital since it was founded in 2008, makes its money by tacking on a 20 percent surcharge to the fees paid by clients. The firm performs criminal background checks on aspiring Rabbits, who then get access to chore requests posted by customers. Using the familiar metrics of the Internet, the more than 10,000 approved Rabbits are rated by past users. Early this year, Patricia Marx wrote a witty New Yorker piece titled “Outsource Yourself” on her experience hiring a Task Rabbit to purchase and deliver hors d’oeuvres for her book group. When Marx fell behind in her reading, she hired a second Rabbit to summarize the book for her (Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, no less) and to ghostwrite some clever comments. She then retained a third Rabbit to bake madeleines.

Marx’s adventure reads like a cross between Woody Allen’s famous short story, “The Whore of Mensa” (in which a character hires a young Brandeis graduate to talk pseudo-intellectual to him), and a labor-market fantasy by Friedrich Hayek. But Task Rabbit is more than a hip, Web-based temp agency. It’s the reserve

46 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

army of the unemployed made flesh. What’s diabolically brilliant and emblematic about the company is that prospective errand-runners bid against one another for jobs. To get an assignment, an aspiring Rabbit offers to do the chore for less money than he or she thinks other prospective Rabbits are bidding. That’s what makes it a metaphor for the new economy, a dystopia where regular careers are vanishing, every worker is a freelancer, every labor transaction is a one-night stand, and we collude with one another to cut our wages.

At the rate things are going, tens of millions of us could end up in the role of Task Rabbits.

Not actual Task Rabbits, mind you. But temps, contract employees, casual day laborers, baristas, warehouse pickers at Amazon, fast-food workers, call-center operators, nurse’s aides, underemployed “consultants,” and adjunct professors all have one core trait in common with freelance errand-runners: They have lost bargaining power. Even people with regular paychecks are less likely than their parents to have decent pay, benefits, and job security.

In its technology, the Task Rabbit economy is very 21st-century, but it brings back the 19th, an era when most people who didn’t farm or own property were casual labor.

THE PRECARIOUS LABOR market raises a

host of questions. Is this trend economically efficient? Is it technologically inevitable? Must workers lacking advanced skills necessarily be relegated to a virtual hiring hall of low-paid day labor?

Further, in a relentlessly competitive global economy of intensified creative destruction, is job security no longer possible for employers to provide? Is a stable career a foolish aspiration? We hear that with lifetime employment

defunct, workers should not only adjust to the need to pursue multiple jobs, skills, and careers but welcome the challenge. Do Task Rabbits love the freelance life, or are they quietly desperate people internalizing the new norms of job insecurity?

Finally comes the political question. To the extent that at least some of this erosion of decent work is optional, what will it take to restore an economy of living-wage jobs?

As we try to figure out why the United States is becoming an economy of ever more casual employment and how to reverse this trend, we had better get the answers to these questions right.

Somehow, despite the claims for efficiency, a hyper-competitive labor market has not yielded superior overall economic performance. On the contrary, the era of more-stable employment in the quarter-century after World War II had almost double the recent rate of economic growth. Even the postwar era had its Task Rabbits, of course. My mother, widowed with a small child, took a temp job selling classified ads from home. Young people baby-sat, delivered newspapers, and fetched groceries for old folks at subprime wages. Minorities were relegated to insecure domestic, janitorial, and farm labor. But the norm for primeage (white, male) breadwinners was regular payroll employment.

Katherine Stone, a professor of labor law at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies the erosion of what she terms the “standard contract of employment.” She doesn’t mean a literal contract, though some workers had one, but a set of norms and assumptions. That contract included a regularized workweek and paycheck and the expectation of continued employment assuming satisfactory job performance. The

social protections that were added throughout the 20th century—wage and hour laws, unemployment insurance, workers’ comp for injuries, apprenticeship programs, regulated fringe benefits, anti-discrimination rules, Social Security, the right to bargain collectively, health and safety standards—were predicated on the assumption of a standard workweek. To use Stone’s term, they were “layered” on top of the normal employment contract.

As Stone notes, regular employment promoted solidarity: “By giving workers the actual or potential experience of working together over extended periods of time, the standard employment contract taught them how to organize for industrial and political action.”

None of this happened spontaneously or was an artifact of a particular stage of capitalism.

It took political struggle and victories in Congress and on the shop floor.

As the standard contract of employment has eroded, the added protections of labor regulation have eroded along with it. What economists call “contingent” workers—casual labor—generally don’t get unemployment insurance, workers’ comp, or fringe benefits; they pay their own Social Security and can’t organize unions. The move to insecure, irregular jobs represents the most profound economic change of the past four decades. The $64 trillion question is whether this collapse in what used to be standard reflects a shift in fundamentals—or merely a shift in political power from labor to capital.

A LARGE COTTAGE INDUSTRY of academic

economists and policy advocates contends that America’s widening income inequality is primarily a reflection of new technologies and global competition that leave lesser-skilled

At the rate things are going, tens of millions of us could end up in the role of Task Rabbits.

Not actual Task Rabbits, mind you, but temps, contract employees, call-center operators, baristas, and the like.

workers far behind. So the main cure for widening inequality is said to be a better-educated and -trained workforce. The economist’s term for this supposedly inexorable trend is “skillbiased technological change.”

The foundation-funded Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce published an influential 1990 report, America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages. But as more and more people have completed college and upgraded their skills in the 23 years since, a better characterization of the U.S. workforce might be high skills and low wages. The 2007 sequel Tough Choices or Tough Times warned that “American workers at every skill level are in increasing competition with workers in every corner of the globe.” For these reports, the remedy is ever more stringent education standards.

There are several problems with the skills hypothesis, but here are the main ones. The fourdecade transfer of income to the top had little to do with skill and more to do with opportunities for corporations to weaken labor and capture more of the national product. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute concluded that deregulation of financial markets has allowed elites to extract abnormal profits that are neither checked by market competition nor restrained by rules—super-profits that economists call “rents.” In this case, rents were available thanks to the deliberate opacity of toxic financial products and trading strategies. Consider: Some of the most “skilled” financial engineers on Wall Street were rewarded with billions for costing the economy trillions. Measured against the economic consequences, the value of their skills was negative. A regulated labor market may be imperfect at aligning pay with skill, but a laissezfaire economy can be even worse.

Conversely, other highly skilled people, such

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

The move to insecure, irregular jobs represents the most profound economic change of the past four decades.

The question is whether this collapse reflects a shift in fundamentals or a shift in political power. as physicians and research scientists, have had fairly flat incomes. The relative premium to college education, the usual proxy for a skilled workforce, has increased more slowly since the 1990s. Further, there are many occupations in which people learn to work with advanced technology but receive no additional compensation. Today’s autoworker has an impressive set of computer skills but earns less than his father.

As the economist Robert Gordon points out, all of the major advanced economies have had essentially the same technological trends but widely differing income distributions. Further, there is no evidence that the economy’s rate of new demand for skills is above its historic trend.

According to a report from the blue-chip business group The Conference Board, jobs for architects and engineers have declined this year by 18,800, and jobs in computers and mathematics have dropped by another 35,500.

Meanwhile, jobs have increased in such lowwage service occupations as transportation (by 36,200) and food service (by 18,800).

It’s important to appreciate the political and ideological function of the emphasis on worker skills. For conservatives seeking to divert attention from the true causes of inequality and low wages, the focus on skills promotes the scapegoating of public schools and places the blame for paltry pay and job insecurity on workers rather than on changes in the rules of the system. Blaming high overall unemployment on skills deficits also gives conservatives a basis for opposing fiscal stimulus.

Another oft-cited cause is the shift from manufacturing to services. The production economy has more jobs in the middle of the income distribution, while services has more at the extremes. So as we switch to services, an economy of extremes is only natural, right? But

48 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

it’s not as if metal bending is inherently a highwage job. The decent wages took strong unions.

Before Franklin Roosevelt and the industrial labor movement, most factory jobs were in sweatshops. In much of the world, they still are.

Globalization is another popular explanation, but here again there is more than one possible set of rules for trade. The system created at Bretton Woods in 1944 deliberately constrained private financial speculation in order to promote domestic economies of full employment. John Maynard Keynes’s insight was that speculative flows of private capital pressure debtor nations to shrink their economies rather than pressing creditor countries to expand. The original International Monetary Fund was to help tide nations over during periods of payments imbalances. The World Bank was to provide publicdevelopment capital. Since the 1970s, however, the IMF, the World Bank, and the sister World Trade Organization have been used to demolish this managed form of capitalism, and globalization has become an enabler of laissez-faire.

That, too, is optional. (The current penury of Greece, Spain, et al. proves Keynes’s point.)

THE NEW ECONOMY IS SAID to reward flexi-

bility and innovation. But as labor-market policies in Northern Europe demonstrate, there is more than one road to greater efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness.

The two iconic versions of more egalitarian competitiveness operate in Sweden and Denmark. In Sweden, for more than half a century the formula has included full employment, continuous investment in the workforce, and a deliberate effort to narrow wage gaps (known as a “solidarity wage policy”). Government strives to provide a job for everybody who wants one. During regional or national

downturns, it redoubles investment in public infrastructure and training. Workers can take retraining sabbaticals, opening jobs for other workers. Regional development and subsidies go to localities where old industries are in decline to help incubate new ones. The solidarity wage policy seeks to more nearly equalize earnings across industries and occupations, both as an end in itself and to promote job mobility so that a worker’s move to a new sector doesn’t entail an income loss. Over time, the entire economy becomes more productive.

The Danish version goes even further.

Unemployed Danish workers can get up to two years of subsidized re-education and training, with compensation of up to 90 percent of their former earnings. Since the system produces security of employment rather than security based on a current job, Denmark boasts the world’s highest rate of voluntary turnover.

This strategy is known as “flexicurity.” Workers can be flexible because they enjoy security of employment and earnings. Thanks to such policies, these nations have been able to have open economies with world-class multinational corporations based on skilled workforces.

For purposes of the U.S. debate, what’s notable about the Nordic model is that it reconciles a well-paid labor force with economic dynamism, refuting the conservative claim that a supple labor market requires insecure workers.

Germany lies somewhere in between the Scandinavian and the U.S. systems. For decades, Germany has maintained a highwage, highly competitive economy by investing heavily in its workers and promoting a model that rewards reciprocal loyalty between workers and firms. During economic downturns and bouts of regional or national unemployment, the federal government subsidizes

making it work continued from page 32

reduced working hours and job-sharing, so that a skilled local workforce does not disperse. Germany pioneered co-determination on company boards, in which workers get a say in corporate governance. It has the world’s most comprehensive apprenticeship programs.

But here’s the bad news. In recent years, neoliberal global trends have reached even Northern Europe. Conservative governments in Stockholm and Copenhagen have cut taxes, reduced these social outlays, and promoted a more individualist ethic and set of national policies. Labor-market policies have become more punitive, with less subsidized retraining and more U.S.–style closely monitored job searches for the unemployed. Though both nations remain among the world’s most equal, low-wage work is starting to creep in.

Labor market “reforms” in Germany, likewise, reduced unemployment protections and created a new underclass.

Once again, however, these shifts are not inevitable. There is nothing about new technologies that requires them to undermine job security and worker pay. Rather, the governing rules of the global economy—license for capital, no social standards in trade, international pressure to reduce domestic regulation—pull all of its players in a free-market direction, even the Swedes. Along with exploding financial products, these policies are among America’s more toxic exports.

In the mid-1970s, as the postwar social contract was beginning to unravel, the political scientist Andrew Martin wrote the classic essay “Is Democratic Control of Capitalist Economies Possible?” Martin concluded that because of the concentrated power of organized business and finance in a market economy, an egalitarian society was possible, but

Starting at $200,000 would be really amazing for a primary-care physician. It doesn’t really happen, though, unless I wanted to work like I was a resident. And I don’t—I’m a mom too.

My dad just turned 57 and still works.

Primary-care physicians don’t really retire, because most are passionate about caring for their patients and frequently can’t afford to. I don’t think my dad had a huge salary throughout—it’s always been kind of the same until recently when he sold the practice he worked years to build—but he didn’t have the debt burden at all. Medical school was relatively free for him. My parents struggled to make ends meet with four kids, but there was never this “Oh my gosh, I have to get out of debt, I have to get out of debt.”

NAME: Austin Pheiffer AGE: 26

OCCUPATION: Carpenter HOURLY WAGE: $15

ANNUAL INCOME: $23,000–$25,000 LOCATION: St. Louis, Missouri

I work for Klassen and Son Enterprises. It’s a small renovation, remodeling, and addition company. Basically, I work for this guy Harvey Klassen. Been with them for about three years now. I went to school in New York for graphic design. I made it three and a half years through and kind of burned myself out. I came back here, and I was just kind of at my folks’ house, laying around and not really doing anything and mooching drinks off friends whenever we went out. I’m living at home right now. I’ve been actively looking for a place to move to for a month or so now.

When I first came in I was sweep man— which means I was keeping the job site clean—and cut man, where people were yelling measurements at me, and I was cutting twoby-fours. I didn’t know anything, but I picked it up as I went along. The world of tools is a vast, vast universe, but the stuff we use is all pretty

simple, though there’s some heavy-duty stuff, like your circular saws. The most important part is getting used to it. We’ve got a young guy with us now basically doing what I was doing a couple of years ago— sweeping out, cutting—you can see he’s uncomfortable with the saw. I’m sure I was the same way. You’re worried the entire time that it’s going to kick back on you.

We were framing a wall once, and three or four of us were lifting it up and there was a nail loose and it kind of gashed my hand. It was stitches-worthy, but I wasn’t screaming holy mercy. There’s workman’s comp for while I’m at work, but I don’t get health insurance. Right now I make $15 an hour.

My company is not union. Most of the smaller construction companies aren’t. When I started I was probably at $10 or $11, and I’ve been getting a buck raise pretty regularly.

Though, if you ask me, I should be getting paid more, but that’s just the way it is right now till I ask for a raise. And if there’s not work, there’s not work, and we don’t get paid. The union guys, they’re all coming from making $25, $26, $27 an hour and getting benefits. They come to work for Harvey, and they’re not guaranteed 40 hours a week, and they’re taking a pretty sizable pay cut.

When the economy was slow, the union guys just didn’t want to bother. They’d rather just keep getting unemployment and wait until they get some more union work.

Generally spring and summer are busy season. It slows down in fall, and it’s usually pretty slow in winter. This winter, I’ll probably try to call up UPS and see if I can get a gig as one of these seasonal drivers/helpers, when they’re busy between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I still do some freelance graphic design here and there. Last year, I was thinking of moving to Kansas City and maybe picking up some courses because they’ve got a good little art institute. I see myself doing this for at least another few years and then either somehow escaping and successfully shifting into design with a little bit of side labor. Maybe I’ll try to shift to the contractor side of things. Either way, I don’t see myself making gobs of money, but hopefully not coming home quite as sweaty.

I don’t know. >>> page 50

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

making it work continued from page 49 NAME: Colin Lieberman AGE: 34

TITLE: Manager, sustaining-

engineering team ANNUAL SALARY: $140,000 LOCATION: Oakland, California I started doing computer programming when I was six or seven. In high school, I took programming courses and had small IT jobs. But when I went to college, I didn’t want to sit in front of a computer all day. I majored in photography at the College of Santa Fe and was one of the few lucky ones whose parents were prepared for that.

After I graduated in 2003, I tried for eight months to find a job and ended up working at a one-hour photo place in Portland, Oregon. After an 18-month stint in Japan teaching English, I went back to computers.

I worked as the IT guy for a small disabilityrights law firm in Berkeley, then for a San Francisco company that sells font software, which was my first real programming job.

Since I’d been out of the programming loop for nearly a decade, I had to learn a lot in a hurry, but I was 25, not married, didn’t have kids, so I had the time to do a lot of reading up on the technological changes and innovations that had taken place. After that, I was with Yahoo for three and a half years before ending up at Turnitin.

Turnitin is a grading and writing-­ evaluation system that detects plagiarism used by a number of large school systems, including the University of California. Students submit their work, which is checked against a database that’s grown organically over the last 15 years. I work for the sustaining-­engineering team, which handles high-level issues that get escalated out of customer support. I oversee three junior people in the U.S., and we’re hiring two positions in Newcastle, England. I spend a lot of time in meetings—I see my role as going to meetings so the whole team doesn’t have to. In the last year or so, I realized how much more I enjoy management than actual development. It’s exciting to make something and have millions of people use it. But it’s more exciting to work with five or six people and give them the tools to succeed and watch them kick butt.

50 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

I see myself as staying here for a long time and have brought a lot of people here with me because it’s such a great place to work. We have three weeks of paid vacation plus ten holidays, as well as two volunteer days.

My wife and I have two boys, ages three and five. I try to get in at 7:30 A.M. and get out the door by 4 or 5. But there’s no one keeping track of hours and asking, “Where were you from 3:30 to 4?” If you’re sick but don’t feel like you need to take the day off, you can work from home. As long as the work’s getting done, we’re happy. I take the BART system to the office, which takes about 20 minutes. The child-care center is across the street from the train station. We pay a small fortune for child care—about $2,000 a month.

NAME: Lara Shipley AGE: 32

OCCUPATION: Adjunct professor SALARY: $25,000

LOCATION: Lawrence, Kansas

I was working as an online photography editor at National Geographic.

It was a time when everyone was getting laid off, and I got laid off, too, in 2008. It seemed like a good time to re-evaluate. I decided to go back for my master’s degree in fine arts.

I went to Arizona State University to a three-year program. I took out probably $45,000 in loans—I didn’t have any savings going into grad school, but I was able to have school paid for with grants and scholarships and working as a teacher. But three years of just living expenses, they definitely add up.

One thing that was great about the school I went to is that you’re able to teach the whole time you’re there. I really loved doing it, and it was a good fit.

Also, I wanted to find a way to be a working artist, and teaching in academia is one of the best places to do that because it’s kind of written into your job that 40 percent of what you do is research, >>> page 53

just barely. It required a strong labor movement, high voter turnout by the non-rich, and a labor or social democratic party that was the party of government most of the time. Political scientists speak of “American exceptionalism.”

Maybe, Martin mused, it was more fitting to talk of Swedish exceptionalism. In the four intervening decades, global capitalism on the Anglo-Saxon model has become more ferocious and expansive, putting even the islands of greater security and equality at risk. “It may be,” Martin presciently wrote, “that the democratic control of capitalism has become impossible elsewhere because it remains impossible in the United States.”

But that conclusion may yet be too pessimistic. For there was a time, the era of the postwar settlement, when the stars were in alignment politically for a far more secure and egalitarian economy. If we can restore a more progressive politics, there is no purely economic obstacle to a far more secure society than the one we have.

SUPPOSE WE WANTED TO GET serious about

creating an American economy of greater employment security and higher wages, in which nobody who wanted to work full time would be poor. For starters, we’d need a national strategy of using every available policy tool.

Block the Low Road. The most important labor-market trend of recent decades has been a concerted effort by industry to cheapen jobs.

Some of these maneuvers are legal. Many are not. Both kinds should be opposed by public policy and political action.

Wage theft has become endemic in the United States. Employers steal wages (typically from the poorest and most vulnerable workers) in a variety of ways. As Kim Bobo’s definitive Wage Theft in America recounts,

employers steal tips, fail to pay required overtime, add bogus deductions to paychecks, and misclassify regular employees as contract workers in order to avoid paying Social Security, unemployment taxes, or workers’ comp.

They illegally make workers “clock out” during slack times of the day and make them work “off the clock” at the end of shifts. They bill workers for uniforms and safety equipment, dropping their real wages below the legal minimum. Sometimes, they just flatly fail to pay wages owed.

All of these strategies for stealing worker wages take advantage of the absence or weakness of countervailing institutions to protect workers’ rights and enforce the law. The Labor Department, which is responsible for enforcing nearly all of these laws, has far fewer inspectors now than it did in the late 1930s and early 1940s when the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 became effective. Bobo reports that in 1941, the Labor Department had 1,769 wage and hour inspectors for 15.5 million covered workers and 360,000 employers. In 2011, it had just 1,000 inspectors responsible for 130 million workers in 7 million enterprises.

Meanwhile, the government has managed to find several hundred billion dollars to hire many tens of thousands of new federal workers on homeland security.

When a wage-thief is caught, the “penalty” is to pay a portion of the wages that were stolen.

This is not petty cash. Back-pay settlements with companies like Wal-Mart, State Farm Insurance, and Citigroup have run well into the millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars.

As Bobo writes, “If you rob someone’s house, you will probably go to jail. If you rob someone’s wages, you might have to repay the wages. Or maybe not.” Imagine the deterrent effect if the

The transfer of income to the top had little to do with skill and more to do with opportunities for corporations to weaken labor and capture more of the national product.

worst penalty for someone caught robbing a bank were to have to give the money back.

The labor movement has been pressing Obama to take executive actions to assure that federal tax dollars do not underwrite substandard jobs via outsourcing. Wage theft is only the most glaring part of a low-road labor strategy that has become part of America’s standard business model. Policy should target outright theft but also promote a high road of regularized work. For instance, employers should be required to provide the same benefits to temps and part-timers that full-time workers receive, to discourage the strategy of redefining normal jobs as contingent ones. The Dutch version of “flexicurity” accords parttimers the same labor rights as full-timers, with the result that most part-time jobs in the Netherlands are considered good jobs, which in turn promotes healthy family life. In the typical Dutch family with children, two parents work one and a half jobs. (Yes, it’s mostly mothers who have the half-time jobs, but the percentage of fathers is slowly increasing.)

Full Employment. As labor costs (and incomes) rise with increased wages and productivity, it becomes all the more important to keep the economy at full employment so that workers displaced from bad jobs can get better ones. That’s a challenge for both macroeconomic and public-investment policy. Fiscal policies like the sequester cut in exactly the wrong direction. Instead we should be investing massively in a program of improved public infrastructure.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the U.S. has a deficit of $3.6 trillion in basic infrastructure—roads, bridges, tunnels, water and sewer systems, and public buildings. That doesn’t even include the

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

A system of employer-based benefits not only creates more vulnerability for citizens but also adds incentives for employers to shift to casual work in order to save the company money. imperative to invest in systems to protect coasts against storm surges or retrofit buildings for energy savings or to create smart-grid electrical systems, greener waste disposal, and universal high-speed broadband. A multitrillion-­dollar public investment would provide good, domestic jobs as it improves the productivity and growth rate of the economy.

Tight labor markets by themselves improve labor’s bargaining power. One of the reasons wages are so low today is persistent joblessness and insecure work.

Economists like the late Hyman Minsky, the man famous for describing the dynamics of the 2008 financial collapse decades before it occurred, have made the point that the advocates of skills upgrading as the panacea for low wages have the sequence backward. As Minsky observed, we should start by keeping the economy at full employment. In that climate, workers would remain in the active labor market and skills upgrading would move them up the jobs ladder. But in an economy of high unemployment, it makes little sense to train people for nonexistent jobs, and training alone doesn’t get us back to full employment.

Certainly, a skilled worker is likely to earn more than an unskilled one, other things being equal. But those other things matter a lot.

When World War II broke out, unemployment evaporated. The war production machine was the greatest jobs program ever but also the greatest skills program ever. Unemployed people with no skills—white, black, male, female— learned them on the job. Full employment came first, and it needs to come first once again.

Minimum Wages. The ongoing campaign of one-day strikes by fast-food workers includes a demand for a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

At $7.25 an hour, the current federal minimum

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wage is far below the inflation-adjusted postwar norm of $10 an hour relative to the average wage. If the growth of the minimum wage had kept pace with the increase in hourly productivity, it would be roughly $19 an hour, enough to end poverty.

According to a Dēmos study, “Retail’s Hidden Potential,” raising wages so that all retail workers earned at least $25,000 a year (about a $12.25 hourly minimum wage) would cost $20.8 billion, or just 1 percent of the $2.17 trillion annual sales of large retailers. According to a University of California study, raising the minimum wage to $9.80 per hour would increase the cost of a hamburger by about 2 percent and would increase the cost of groceries by less than 1 percent.

Higher labor costs would indeed increase automation, eliminating lots of low-wage jobs in the short run and even some high-wage ones. But as long as we have macroeconomic and public-investment policies to keep the economy at full employment and labor-market strategies to promote job mobility, substituting capital for labor is what makes us more productive and richer in the long run. Without such policies, of course, workers suffer the effects of automation.

But the enemy is not automation; it’s the failure to use the fruits of automation to convert a wealthier economy to one of well-paid jobs. There’s nothing inherently “good” about a job assembling cars, pumping gas, or serving fast food. Society’s goal over time should be to replace low-end jobs with machinery and move people into better jobs. Hence the need for full employment as the cushion, as well as other policies to mandate good wages.

The Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief liked to tell a parable in which the economy becomes

so productive that there is only one production worker left, and her job is to flip the switch. At that point, the pressing economic questions become distributive: Where does all that wealth go, and what does everyone else do for a living?

The benefits of the automation can go to the factory owners, who become fabulously rich. Or the wealth can be spread around in the form of well-paid service jobs and leisure time. Unregulated markets tend to enrich mainly the owners.

Reregulation of Finance. As wage and salary income has become more precarious and more unequal, a steadily increasing share of the national product has gone to finance.

Wage inequality and a shift of the total national income to capital are distinct but reinforcing trends. The more money Wall Street has, the more power it has to resist a regulated form of capitalism across the board. Reregulating finance would return banking to its historic function of being a servant of the rest of the economy rather than the master. The top 1 percent would have fewer opportunities to make off with so much of the national income, leaving more money for everyone else, and Wall Street would be proportionally weakened politically.

Social Standards in Trade. The conventional argument against labor and environmental standards in trade has been that citizens of Third World countries need to work for a pittance in order to help their countries get a foot on the ladder. “The central challenge in the poorest countries,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2009, “is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.” The same arguments were made a century ago for domestic sweatshop labor. But once workers organized, better factory wages and conditions benefited them as well as the larger economy.

making it work continued from page 50

Labor standards in trade can put a floor under wages and working conditions and preclude the worst forms of a low-road business strategy. If every garment-factory owner had to pay a global minimum wage, the cost of a T-shirt might be a few cents higher, but trade once again would be based on factors other than a universal race to the bottom. Countries where citizens and workers have battled for a century to get decent social standards have every right to insist on a social tariff as a defense against conditions close to slave labor.

Otherwise, we import the cheap standards along with the cheap products.

Professionalized Human Services. A related need is a national policy to convert all jobs caring for the old, the sick, and the young into good professional jobs. Nearly all human-­ service jobs are underwritten or subsidized by government. Public policy has a choice. We can define child-care and pre-kindergarten positions basically as baby-sitters or train and compensate people who work with preschoolers to the standards of schoolteachers.

If after-school and pre-K jobs pay, say, $40,000 a year rather than $8 an hour, our kids will benefit from a child-development-­ oriented experience instead of merely custodial care. Better-trained and -compensated professionals will produce better-educated students, and the whole society gains.

Nurse’s aide positions in eldercare facilities and hospitals, likewise, can either be minimumwage jobs with little training and frequent turnover or they can be part of a continuum of well-trained health professionals. Studies of nursing homes have shown that increased training and pay improve patient outcomes and reduce adverse incidents such as falls and bedsores. The problem is that nursing homes rely

and that research is your own art practice.

I just graduated last spring. I was applying for a tenure-track position everywhere and so was my boyfriend, who was finishing up his master’s in fine arts in photography as well, and we were just going to see what happened. It was very stressful. For the longest time, we didn’t know what was going to happen. I got close in a couple of jobs, but I didn’t end up getting a full-time position, and then he got one at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. They agreed to bring me on as an adjunct. That seemed like a good plan for the time being, and then when I got here, I was checking in with other universities in the area. Now I’m teaching at another school, too, so I have two jobs in two places.

My salary is going to end up being $25,000 for two semesters plus a little bit extra for traveling. I think we’re kind of lucky. Photography is a really popular course for undergrads, so there seems to be plenty of photography positions. I know other people who are in some other medium, and it’s really difficult for them to find even adjunct work.

Because it’s so low-paid, it’s really not something anyone expects to do long term.

One of the things about academia that’s kind of tough is that there’s a once-a-year market. Jobs are going to be posted in the fall, and then people get interviewed in the spring, and then there’s some shuffling around, and then there’s really nothing else you can do until next fall. So I plan to apply to full-time positions. I think with more teaching experience this year I will be able to find something more full time.

I’m really happy with it so far, though. I have great students. I’m teaching photography classes, which is exactly what I wanted. So that makes it easier.

It does feel a little bit like starting over, coming back on the low totem pole, working my way into something more permanent. That feels very much like it did when I got out of journalism school almost ten years ago. So I’m hoping this is going to be the last big change.

NAME: Isaac Benham AGE: 28

OCCUPATION: Contract lawyer HOURLY WAGE: $30

ANNUAL INCOME: $60,000

LOCATION: Washington, D.C.

In college, I was an English and philosophy major, because those were the classes I liked, and then I started thinking, “OK, I need a plan for making money once I graduate.” So I started looking at law school, because that is maybe the one thing you can do with an English and philosophy degree. Or so I thought.

When I went into law school—I graduated from Georgetown in 2010—I thought it was easy to get a job. Pretty much everyone I went to school with thought that. There’s a well-organized courtship process that law schools oversee between firms and their students. If you get a summer associate internship at the end of your 2L year, generally that will turn into an offer of employment after your 3L year. If you don’t get a summer associate position, you have to get creative.

I didn’t get a summer associate job, and right around the time, the market crashed.

I knew I was going to have to pound the pavement to find a job. Normally, Georgetown’s hiring statistic is something like 90 percent of people looking for firm jobs get them. My year, I believe it was around 50 percent—at least after 2L summer— because of the financial crisis. Many people who landed jobs had to target smaller firms and conduct a job search outside the usual track of summer associate to regular associate.

By the time I graduated, it was still my idea to work in a firm. I had six-figure debt. Shortly after taking the bar, I started to work as a contract attorney.

I go through a company, and I rarely have more than two weeks off over the course of several months. On a project, every day is a lot like the day before. I’ll get to the office around 8 or 8:30 A.M. and work till 6 or 6:30 P.M. Pretty much the entire day is spent going through e-mails that have been turned over by a party in litigation. >>> page 54

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

making it work continued from page 53

I will just go through, populating a document template on the computer, saying whether those e-mails are relevant to the litigation, under what categories are they relevant, and also determining if they’re protected by attorney-­client privilege. For the past year or so, I have been fortunate enough to work in a sort of managerial capacity, which is less monotonous and a bit more interesting than the lower-level stuff. There are still plenty of days where I’m reviewing docs like everybody else and then it’s pretty much lather, rinse, and repeat. It’s not too intellectually stimulating.

When I first started out “doc reviewing,” I was thinking it was a very short-term gig; I kept my eye out for jobs, mostly at smaller local law firms. However, about nine months in or so, maybe earlier, I kind of stopped looking for a firm job, because I didn’t think I wanted to be a lawyer long term. I started to see what firm life would be like through contracting with firms and seeing what their associates did. I frankly dislike the work. Also, I had a lot of friends from law school who were working in firms, and the lifestyle didn’t appeal to me. A lot of my friends at firms don’t really have nearly the amount of time to do what they want to do that I have. I decided I value that, and I like my lifestyle. I’m willing to give up a fair amount of income to keep that balance.

NAME: Steve Ferguson AGE: 30

OCCUPATION: Contract autoworker HOURLY WAGE: $15.70

ANNUAL SALARY: $28,000 to $30,000 LOCATION: Smyrna, Tennessee

For two years, I’ve been working for Yates, the temp agency that hires out for Nissan. They hire workers to come inside the plant, whether that is on the manufacturing line or picking parts to go to the manufacturing line. Before that, I worked for a subcontractor for Nissan down in Lewisburg, Tennessee. My fiancée’s grandmother heard something on the news that they were going to be hiring a bunch of people up here,

54 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

and so I applied. Three or four months later, I ended up getting a phone call to come up here for an interview and orientation.

The lady that interviewed me, she works for the company, and I asked, “How long do I have to work here to possibly get hired on as a full-time Nissan employee?” And her response to me: Dead center, looked me in my eyes and said, “You probably never will be hired as a Nissan employee. They have not hired anybody on in Nissan in probably nine to ten years.” But the starting pay was better than what I was making where I was at. Plus, where I lived at the time was a 30-minute drive to work, and I was only making $10 an hour. I was topped out already. I have two little girls, and at that time I was divorced and I just met the woman who is now my fiancée. I wanted to make something of myself. My father worked for GM for 30 years, so the way I looked at it was, even though it’s two different companies, it’s car manufacturing, and there’s good money in that. I wanted to be able to provide for my daughters and my family the way my father provided for me and my mother. So then when I got hired and had my interview and was told that, well, it was a rock and a hard spot.

I work on the truck line. I work on the Pathfinder and the Infiniti JX. I haven’t been treated terribly. I think a lot of what Yates does is what Nissan will allow them to do. I don’t think they can pay us any more right now because they only get a certain amount from Nissan. I work next to Nissan employees every day doing the same work that they do, but I make half of what they make. They think that it’s really unfair for us. I pay everything on time. But do I have enough to take my kids out to go get an ice cream cone or take my fiancée out on a date night or something? Some weeks I don’t. Ten years from now, I want to be doing whatever will provide for my family. If that’s me still working at Nissan, then as long as I’m able to provide for my family, I’ll be happy. 

heavily on Medicaid reimbursements, which are too low to allow decent pay for nurse’s aides.

Professionalizing these occupations will require different national priorities.

Social Income. In America, our threadbare welfare state has come to connote benefits for the officially certified poor. A more useful phrase and concept is the old-fashioned British term: social income. It’s the income that all of us receive as citizens, not just as workers. If everyone receives universal health benefits, a retirement package, paid parental leave, access to professionalized child care and to higher education without crippling debt, the effective income distribution becomes more equal and a society in which people change jobs frequently is less onerous to the individual.

By historical accident, the United States ended up with a partial welfare state in which most benefits were either directly job-related (health care, retirement), predicated on the assumption, in Katherine Stone’s term, of a standard employment contract (unemployment insurance, collective-bargaining rights), or were for the needy. The great exceptions are Social Security and Medicare, which are for everyone.

In Europe, the welfare state is better defended, because more benefits (child care, pre-K, universal health insurance) are for everyone.

In an economy of increased job mobility, this link between employer and social benefits has become perverse. A system of employerbased benefits not only creates more vulnerability for citizens but also adds incentives for employers to shift to casual work in order to save the company money. Although the Affordable Care Act, which exempts many part-time employees, intensifies the shift to contingent work as an employer strategy of tax-avoidance, corporations were shifting to temp, part-time,

and contract work long before Obamacare. As a source of health coverage, government should be more than the default provider; employers should be removed from the equation entirely. Today’s economy will continue to have more job mobility than the mass-production, stable-­corporation economy of the postwar era. The more labor transition we have, the more our social benefits should be universal and tax-supported.

Progressive Taxation. To finance a national policy of using public investment to keep the economy at full employment, upgrading human-service work, and universalizing social income, we would need roughly an additional trillion dollars more revenue a year. That’s about 6 percent of gross domestic product.

Simply reverting to the pre–George W. Bush tax code would provide almost half of that each year. Getting serious about collecting taxes from offshore tax evasion by corporations and individuals would produce another $100 billion to $200 billion yearly. A financial-­ transactions tax would raise at least another $200 billion and reduce purely speculative activity on Wall Street. If we did increase taxation as a share of GDP from its current level of about 17 percent to 23 percent, that would still leave the United States among the more lightly taxed of advanced capitalist nations.

The Right to Unionize. One of the unenforced laws on the books is the Wagner Act, which guarantees the right to organize or join a union without the risk of retaliation. Today, if you try to organize a union, you are likely to be fired.

One of the best defenses against wage theft and other management abuses is a union. If you had all of the other policies advocated in this article, maybe you wouldn’t even need unions.

But without stronger unions, we are unlikely to

There’s nothing inherently “good” about a job assembling cars or pumping gas.

Society’s goal over time should be to replace low-end jobs with machinery and move people into better jobs.

get the other policies. Organized labor needs to be understood both as a set of collective-­ bargaining institutions and as a social movement cum political force. Even though most of America is suffering from work and income anxiety, what’s missing is not the policy tools but the politics.

IF WE PURSUE THIS SUITE of policies, the

American economy in the Internet age will still be more dynamic, supple, and innovative than its postwar counterpart was. There will still be plenty of people who deliberately choose to have multiple careers, plenty of eager freelance entrepreneurs, and lots of odd jobs for Task Rabbits. But more young professionals will be working in the professions for which they were expensively trained rather than picking up other people’s laundry. More college students will be spending time at their studies rather than seeking low-wage strategies for paying the bills. More retired people will be able to afford retirement rather than running errands or bagging groceries. More moms (and dads) will be staying at home with their children thanks to paid parental leave. More parents will be enjoying part-time jobs with the same pay scale and social benefits as full-time ones rather than rushing out to assemble someone else’s Ikea crib at minimum wage or less—and paying other workers minimum wages to watch their kids.

Even Task Rabbits would gain. In a tight labor market, clients who needed odd jobs performed would have to pay decently. Without a reserve army of “distributed workers,” clients would have to bid wages up, instead of enjoying the spectacle of anxious Rabbits bidding them down. Being empowered to do the work we love is the right slogan. It just doesn’t describe the Task Rabbit economy. 

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

THE EVANGELIST

Jim Gilliam says his software will “democratize democracy.”

So why do many of his progressive friends consider him a traitor?

BY ANDY KRO LL PHOTOGRAPHS BY GREGG SEGAL

wo years ago on a summer morning, Jim Gilliam stood offstage at New York University’s Skirball Center. It was the second day of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual gathering of civic-minded coders, hackers, and online organizers. Many in the crowd knew Gilliam as much for his appearance—he’s sixfoot-nine, bald, ivory-pale, and impossibly thin—as for his brilliance as a programmer and his passion for progressive causes. Gilliam, who was 33 years old, had never spoken before such a large audience, and as he strode across the stage and looked out on all the people, he was terrified.

“Growing up,” he began, “I had two loves: Jesus and the Internet.” He had titled his speech “The Internet Is My Religion,” and he was surprised the conference’s organizers had agreed to let him give a talk steeped in God and faith. Even though he’d rehearsed for weeks, he expected to bomb. Still, he had to do this. His entire life, he believed, had led him to this point. “I was born again when I was eight,” Gilliam told the audience. Wandering the stage TED -talk style, he wore thick-lensed Oakley glasses, a T-shirt depicting Abraham Lincoln, and skinny jeans cinched tight at the waist. He had grown up in Silicon Valley, he continued, where he was “quite the precocious young conservative,” who went to church three times a week, called in to talk radio, and listened to Rush Limbaugh. Gilliam’s mother homeschooled him and his two sisters, shielding him from the secular world.

One day, his father brought home a weird-looking phone and plugged it into the household computer. “It made a bizarre screeching noise like it was trying to mate with a

56 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

rhinoceros or something. Instead, it attracted me, and that’s when I found out that computers could talk to each other.”

The story that followed was improbable, and few people in the audience, including many who were friends of Gilliam, were aware of its outlines. In 1994, his family moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he attended the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. In his first year, Gilliam was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Two weeks into chemotherapy, Gilliam learned that his mother had cancer. “I survived, my mom didn’t, our family fell apart, and my faith in God was shattered.”

Gilliam dropped out of Liberty and fled to Boston to join an Internet start-up. Within months, the cancer returned; he had leukemia. Near death, lying in the intensive care unit, he would hit a button at his bedside that injected him with dilaudid (otherwise known as “hospital heroin”) to blunt the pain. “Every time I pressed it, I felt defeated and broken,” he said. “I just wanted it to end. God had forsaken me.”

The doctors had not. A bone-marrow transplant saved Gilliam’s life. “I couldn’t waste another second of my life, so I gave myself to the Internet, what I loved most.” He established himself as a wunderkind coder during the first dot-com boom. Then September 11 happened, and he gave up his tech career for liberal activism. “I had no illusions at all that I could change anything,” he said, “but knew … that if I didn’t at least try, I would look back in ten years and regret it.” He volunteered first for the anti-war group MoveOn and then went on to co-found Brave New Films with left-wing documentary CEO Jim Gilliam at the director Robert Greenwald, where NationBuilder offices in downtown Los Angeles he pioneered online fundraising and

distribution. Then, just shy of his 28th birthday, Gilliam found himself struggling to breathe. Doctors told him he needed a double-lung transplant. The chemo that had saved his life had destroyed his lungs.

On a cloudy February morning in 2007, he received the lungs of a recently deceased 22-year-old man. As he headed into surgery, he had a revelation. When he awoke—if he awoke—he would have the DNA of three different people: The marrow donor’s, the lung donor’s, and his own. “And that’s when I truly found God. God is just what happens when humanity is connected.”

He would be dead, he said, if not for the people who had sacrificed to save his life. “We are all connected. We are all in debt to each other. We all owe every moment of our lives to countless people we will never meet. The Internet gives us the opportunity to pay back a small part of that debt.”

Raising his hands to the ceiling, looking down at his feet, pausing for emphasis, Gilliam could have been a preacher offering a prayer. “What the people in this room do is spiri-

he had devoted his late twenties to progressive causes, he planned to offer NationBuilder to everyone: liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, war hawks, peaceniks, beauty queens, beer brewers, Tea Partiers, feminists, white supremacists. Everyone. That decision—which his critics would say had nothing to do with idealism but everything to do with making money—would help NationBuilder attract nearly $15 million from some of Silicon Valley’s savviest investors. It would also alienate Gilliam from people who had once considered him an ally. In their eyes, he wasn’t an evangelist for the Internet but a traitor.

“LIKE, MOSES WAS THE ORIGINAL community orga-

nizer, at least as far as I can tell, right? He stands up to the Pharaoh. He organizes his people. He gets the waters parted, the whole thing.” Sitting in a conference room in downtown Los Angeles, Gilliam is telling, by way of the Bible, the story of his company. NationBuilder is a set of digital tools bundled like Microsoft Office that lets people organize, take action, stand up to their own Pharaohs. With NationBuilder, you can start a webGILLIAM MARVELED AT THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN’S site, write blog posts, plan events, raise money online, blast out e-mails to groups of people, and TECHNOLOGICAL PROWESS, BUT HE KNEW HOW manage your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social media accounts.

EXPENSIVE IT WAS TO PULL OFF. WHAT IF ONLINE None of this is revolutionary. Dozens of companies specialize in mass e-mails or online ORGANIZING WERE USER-FRIENDLY AND AFFORDABLE? fundraising or social media. NationBuilder is distinctive because it weaves all these features tual. It is profound. We are the leaders of this new religion. in a smart, intuitive way so that the whole is greater than We have faith that people connected can create a new world.” the sum of its parts. If you’re a political candidate, NationWhen he finished speaking, Gilliam ran off the stage to Builder helps convert Twitter followers into donors, donors a standing ovation. Audience members mobbed him in the into volunteers, Facebook friends into block captains and hall. “Not a dry eye in the house,” tweeted the tech writer precinct leaders, and so on. Play in a band? NationBuilder Cory Doctorow. The website Business Insider called the can track your biggest supporters and help you mobilize talk “a modern epic.” The video became a YouTube sensa- those fans to go to your next show or to donate so you can tion, with eventually more than 500,000 views. Capital record your next CD. New York declared it “the best video on the Internet.”

Gilliam took inspiration from Barack Obama’s 2008 What most people heard in Gilliam’s speech was the run, which was the first presidential campaign to marry story of a man who had beaten death three times and who cutting-edge technologies with old-school community had lost his faith in God, only to find it in the Internet. organizing. “Obama applied the principles of community Most didn’t realize that when Gilliam spoke of repaying organizing, and it was explosive. It was unstoppable,” Gila “debt” and creating a “new world,” it wasn’t a rhetorical liam says. “We’re taking those principles and actually bakflourish. A few months earlier, he had unveiled a piece of ing them into software.” The tech geeks who spearheaded software called NationBuilder. He fervently believed that Obama’s strategy have taken notice. “People want to say NationBuilder, which he had written from scratch in his there isn’t a division between organizers and technology apartment, would, in his words, “democratize democracy.” people, but there is,” says Harper Reed, who served as If the Internet’s power came from connecting humanity, chief technology officer on Obama’s 2012 campaign. “The then NationBuilder would give ordinary people the means trick is getting organizers and technology types to work to harness that power to make change. Run for Congress. together. What Jim says is, ‘Actually, just use my product.’”

Build a bridge. Topple a dictator. Get new lungs.

What makes NationBuilder groundbreaking is not just Gilliam’s idealism took him one step further. Although what its software does but how cheap it is. For the renters’

58 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

rights activist running for city council in Nashville, the Boston native starting a “Celtics Fans in Los Angeles” club, or the mother in Omaha creating her own conservation group, $30 or $50 a month offers the same tools used by political candidates, labor unions, best-selling authors, and nonprofits, not to mention access to a free voter-registration file. The price climbs as your “nation,” NationBuilder’s term for its customers, grows its database and e-mails more people. For Gilliam, this was always the core of his vision: Make NationBuilder available to those of modest means who want to spur their fellow citizens.

When seated, Gilliam is all shoulder blades and legs, his long limbs folding into one another as if he were squeezed into the backseat of a car. NationBuilder’s corporate color is robin’s-egg blue, and his wardrobe leans toward the same hue: robin’s-egg hoodie (“I get cold easily,” he says), company T-shirt, navy blue knit scarf, and dark blue jeans. He still has the shy, unassuming air of someone who has spent much of his life in front of a computer screen, but colleagues say that since his appearance at the Personal Democracy Forum, he has grown more confident as a public speaker. He talks in quick-fire bursts, his hands dancing through the air.

Outside the conference room, several dozen employees peck at their Macs. Developers and engineers gaze at lines of code. Salespeople and customer-service reps, internally called “organizers,” talk into their headsets while sitting on brightly colored ball chairs or on tufted red leather couches. The company’s mascot, a four-foot stuffed giraffe named Sally, dressed in a NationBuilder T-shirt and leg warmers, welcomes visitors at the front door. On white, glossy, erasable wallpaper, employees have scribbled lists, equations, and diagrams. Will Hunting got a day job.

Gilliam has no desk, preferring to roam the office. When he needs to code or send an e-mail, he splays out with a laptop on a couch under a bank of windows with a view of Pershing Square. He deliberately chose not to open NationBuilder’s office in the Bay Area, Washington, D.C., or even L.A.’s own tech corridor in Santa Monica. He liked downtown Los Angeles because, he says, it was far away from the Beltway bubble, where all anyone cares about is winning the next election and cashing in, and far away from the Bay Area bubble, where all anyone cares about is building the next Twitter and cashing in. NationBuilder, he believed, needed to exist outside those insular cultures.

Pershing Square is surrounded by blocks of diamond stores and jewelry wholesalers (¡Compramos oro y plata!), corporate office towers for Wells Fargo and Bank of America, and the odd hipster bar and restaurant. Within five minutes of each other are the Jazz Age opulence of the Millennium Biltmore Hotel and the multitudes of Skid Row. Gilliam rents a studio apartment nearby, and he points out that, in the year and a half since NationBuilder moved into

its offices, Pershing Square has gone from a grungy backwater to an up-and-coming neighborhood. “There’s this whole resurgence within this area of people taking the old and creating something new,” he says. “That really felt right.”

Before NationBuilder came along, online organizing was the province of political campaigns, labor unions, and advocacy groups. It was split along partisan lines, with Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals developing their own software and databases. For the longest time, unions and large nonprofits tended to rely on big, slow-moving companies like Convio and Blackbaud (now one company) to build their websites and manage their e-mail lists. Many now use younger firms like Blue State Digital and Salsa. These tools are not cheap. ActionKit, the software developed by MoveOn.org, starts at $2,200 a month.

When NationBuilder launched, it announced a $19-a-month starter package. “It was a little bit of a bombshell,” says Nicco Mele, the webmaster for Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.

Blowing things up was Gilliam’s plan. Although he worked to elect Obama, belonged to MoveOn, and played a key role in the progressive netroots movement, he voices equal disgust with Democrats and Republicans. Both are culpable for the vast sums of money flowing in and out of the political system. “You don’t even have to explain how screwed up the political system is anymore,” Gilliam says. In an ideal world, there would be no need for political parties, he says. Citizens would be able to bypass elections and directly participate, via the Internet, in their own governance.

One of Gilliam’s heroes is Buckminster Fuller, and he’s fond of quoting the iconoclastic architect: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Gilliam believes NationBuilder can be the new model. “The technology community is really good at replacing inefficient industries,” he told an interviewer in 2009. “We’ve done it to the music industry. Sort of one after another, they’re toppling down from technologists.

What if we do that to government?”

GILLIAM’S STRONGEST CHILDHOOD memories are of

Los Gatos, California, a suburb of San Jose in what was then firmly middle-class Silicon Valley. His parents moved there in 1982, five years after he was born. His father was a software engineer for IBM, at the time the dominant computer company in the world. The family’s life revolved around Los Gatos Christian, the megachurch that was a Western outpost of Falwell’s Moral Majority movement.

Gilliam attended Los Gatos Christian’s school and played in the church’s baseball, basketball, and soccer leagues.

When Gilliam was 10, his father was transferred to an IBM office in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, and the family moved to a leafy neighborhood in nearby Chapel

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

Hill. His closest friend was Jesse Haff, who would go on to become the second employee at NationBuilder. The two boys couldn’t have been more different—Jesse listened to heavy metal and came from a secular household—but they bonded over their love of computers. Gilliam’s dad had brought home one of the first IBM PCs; the Haffs had a Mac. What attracted Gilliam to computers wasn’t hardware and motherboards; it was the ability to escape his cloistered life. He was an avid user of the bulletin board system, or BBS, an early version of the Internet. Users coded their own BBS site—Jim called his “Gilligan’s Island”—and then, using their modems, dialed into other people’s BBSs to read news, leave messages, and download files. BBSs were so popular among middle-aged hobbyists in the 1980s and 1990s that they had their own trade magazines, Boardwatch and BBS Magazine. Gilliam loved BBS because everyone treated him as a peer. No one knew he was a gawky 12-year-old homeschooled Christian kid with flaming red hair.

The Gilliams searched for but never found in North

attacks the immune system. Two weeks after learning of her son’s illness, Gilliam’s mother was told she had adrenal cancer, an even rarer disease for which there was no treatment. After nine rounds of chemotherapy, Gilliam’s cancer went into remission. His mother died within five months; Falwell spoke at her funeral and helped lower her casket into the ground.

Years later in a blog post, Gilliam recalled the last time he talked with his mother:

Today is mother’s day. … This holiday is difficult, not in that I never knew her, or can only reconstruct a memory of her from old pictures. … No, this is tough for me because I remember vividly so many things. I remember the things she hated: cooking, being lied to, and Hillary Clinton. I remember the things she loved: sewing, houses, and my Dad. …

The most vivid memory was the last conversation we ever had. It was the middle of the night. Everyone was asleep except for the two of us. She was on so much pain medication and the cancer BEFORE NATIONBUILDER CAME ALONG, ONLINE was ravaging her mind so terribly that she was becoming delusional. And this is what ORGANIZING WAS THE PROVINCE OF CAMPAIGNS, she said to me: “We’re going to beat this! Grandma and SPLIT ALONG PARTISAN LINES, WITH EACH PARTY Grandpa don’t want us to, but we’re going to beat it, Jimmy! No one else can help us. Just DEVELOPING ITS OWN SOFTWARE AND DATABASES. you and me.”

“Yes, mom, we’re gonna beat it.” My mom Carolina the Christian community they’d left behind in didn’t have any chance of surviving, but at that point, Northern California. At the end of Jim’s last year of high it looked like my chances were pretty good. My last school, his father left IBM to take a job with the Swedwords to her that I knew she understood, were a lie. ish tech firm Ericsson. The reason for the move was that To the woman who hated being lied to. the company had offices in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I went upstairs and sobbed the rest of the night.

Falwell’s congregation was located. Gilliam’s two sisters enrolled in Falwell’s Liberty Christian Academy. Although Gilliam was 19 years old when he left Liberty and took Jim had lobbied for the University of North Carolina, his a tech job in Boston. On his own for the first time, he parents insisted that he attend Liberty University. loved the work and his newfound freedom. At first, he’d One day, Will Samson, the head of academic comput- feel guilty on Sunday mornings for not going to church. ing at Liberty, received a call from a campus librarian. “I The regret didn’t last. Six months after arriving in Boston, think some kid hacked past your firewall,” the librarian told his idyll came to a sudden end: Cancer had reappeared in him. What kid? Samson asked. “He’s got red hair,” came the form of leukemia. By the time he’d recovered from the the reply, “and he’s really, really, really tall.” When Samson bone-marrow transplant, Gilliam had shed the last of his caught up with Gilliam, he hired him on the spot. Gilliam faith. When people asked if he still believed in God, he’d brought the Internet to Liberty, built the school’s first web- reply, “Yeah, he’s an asshole.” site, and fixed Falwell’s IBM ThinkPad when it broke down.

Gilliam landed a job with Lycos, the dominant search In the spring of his first year, Gilliam came down with engine in the pre-Google era, and established himself as a severe cold, which he ignored until his mother insisted one of the company’s top coders. Tucked away in a dark he see a doctor, who told him he was suffering from bron- corner of the office nicknamed the “man cave,” dancing in chitis. The symptoms never went away, and he agreed to his chair to whatever song piped through his headphones, get another opinion. This time, X-rays revealed that he Gilliam had found his home. Sangam Pant, who was had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare form of cancer that Lycos’s vice president of engineering, describes Gilliam

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as one of the most talented programmers he’s ever met. when too many people tried to buy a poster or a DVD. “Stuff that takes weeks or months to do, he’d do it in an Gilliam knew he couldn’t hide his computer prowess any all-night session,” Pant says. “There are people who are longer. He rebuilt Greenwald’s website in a day and con10 times or 100 times more productive than others. Jim structed a platform to organize the thousands of house falls into that category.” parties Greenwald had dreamed up to screen Outfoxed.

In 1999, Gilliam followed Pant to Santa Monica to join In 2005, Greenwald and Gilliam launched Brave New an Internet incubator called eCompanies. The following Films, the first Internet-based film company. Its mission, spring, eCompanies was preparing to launch an online according to Gilliam, was to make movies that were so business directory called Business.com, a domain name for powerful “there was no way this country could ever go to which it had paid $7.5 million. The outside contractor hired war again under false pretenses.” Gilliam promoted the to construct Business.com’s operating system had taken six company’s films through YouTube, then in its infancy, and months and done such a shoddy job that the launch was in created one of the earliest crowdsourcing platforms to jeopardy. Gilliam offered to fix it. To everyone’s astonish- fund projects. For Iraq for Sale, a documentary about war ment, he rebuilt Business.com, top to bottom, in 17 days. profiteering, Gilliam asked for $15, $20, or $25 donations; (In 2007, eCompanies sold Business.com for $345 million.) he ended up raising $260,000 online, enough to make the In the days after the September 11 attacks, he watched movie. Every donor got his or her name in the credits. “It’ll Falwell, his former mentor, blame the attacks on pagans, be longer than Lord of the Rings,” Gilliam joked. abortion providers, feminists, gays, lesbians, and the Gilliam started Brave New Films not knowing how American Civil Liberties Union. Gilliam was still pro- much longer he had to live. His breathing had gotten so bad gramming at eCompanies, but he was burned out, sick of Silicon Valley. The bottom had fallen out of GILLIAM’S ACTIVIST FRIENDS SAW HIM AS BOTH A the tech boom. Now he wanted to do something more important than making other people rich.

LEADER AND A PRODUCT OF THE NETROOTS. NOW HE His political views had been shifting to the left, but President George W. Bush’s plan to invade WAS COURTING REPUBLICANS, TRYING TO PERSUADE Iraq was the turning point. Gilliam had made some money from Lycos stock, so he decided to THEM TO USE HIS PRODUCT TO DEFEAT DEMOCRATS. quit his job, help MoveOn publicize its anti-war efforts, and start blogging about politics. Seizing on every nugget of news to question the administration’s he couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs or take a shower withcase for war, quoting liberal stalwarts like Paul Krugman out collapsing from exhaustion. When he finally visited a and Markos Moulitsas, full of indignation and snark and pulmonologist—he hadn’t bothered with a referral from frenzy, his posts captured the outrage of the anti-war a primary-care physician, instead calling up the closest movement: “I wonder if people will ever realize that Bush specialist in Culver City and asking for an appointment— exceeded bin Laden’s wildest dreams by invading Iraq. he learned that the chemo he’d undergone as a teenager Osama wanted a war—jihad—and not only did Bush oblige, had charred his lungs. He needed a new pair right away. he made it damn convenient too ... just down the street Double-lung transplants are one of the most complifrom bin Laden’s cave. 9/11 was the greatest PR stunt since cated procedures in medicine. To get on a transplant list, a the crucifixion. The only way to win is simply not to play. hospital had to review his case and medical history, decide Terrorism doesn’t work if you’re not afraid.” if he was a good candidate, and sponsor him. He sent his Through MoveOn, Gilliam met Robert Greenwald, the file to the best hospitals in Los Angeles—Cedars-Sinai; producer of some 50 made-for-TV movies, who needed a University of Southern California; University of California, researcher for a documentary he was making about how the Los Angeles. In September 2005, UCLA , home to one of Bush administration had sold the Iraq War to the Ameri- the best cardiothoracic surgery departments in the world, can people. When the director offered him the job in the rejected him, saying he was too much of a risk. Because summer of 2003, Gilliam accepted with one condition: “I lung-transplant recipients are on immunosuppressants don’t want to fix anybody’s computer.” The documentary, for the rest of their lives, they’re more vulnerable to sickUncovered, was released on DVD later that year and became ness; in Gilliam’s case, doctors feared his cancer might a touchstone for the anti-war movement. Greenwald’s next return. Because he was so tall, finding a suitable pair of documentary, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Jour- lungs also would be difficult. He relayed the news on his nalism, an exposé of Fox News released in 2004, was so blog and said he planned to register the domain name popular that the company website would occasionally crash uclasurgeonsarepussies.com.

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

After hearing of UCLA’s rejection, a friend wrote an angry e-mail and sent it to a generic address at UCLA .

Gilliam’s sister followed with her own e-mail. So did other friends and co-workers. Two weeks later, the phone rang.

When could he come in for an appointment, a scheduler from UCLA asked. Many months and appointments later, the lung-transplant committee voted to put him on the list.

When Gilliam asked what had changed, his doctor, the head of the cardiothoracic surgery department, replied, “I never saw your file the first time. But I did get the e-mails.”

gathered in Chicago in 2007 for the second YearlyKos conference, later renamed Netroots Nation, the guest list featured seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was the first to hire staff who were as immersed in social media and opensource coding as they were in door-to-door canvassing. The Obama techies saw the Internet as more than a means to bombard supporters with pitches and petitions. In their view, the Internet was a way to interact with voters and learn which issues they were passionate about. Knowing THE ORIGINS OF NATIONBUILDER can be traced back your supporters makes it a lot easier to ask them for time to September 18, 1998, when Joan Blades and Wes Boyd and money. started a website. A married couple who had struck it By constantly testing the efficacy of fundraising e-mails, rich in Silicon Valley (they invented the “flying toasters” the campaign boosted its haul by $100 million. Every screensaver), Blades and Boyd were sick of the excessive week, call centers conducted between 5,000 and 10,000 outrage and wall-to-wall coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky interviews with voters in battleground states. By combinscandal. Their website asked people to sign a petition tell- ing the results of those interviews with data like voting ing Congress to censure Clinton and “move on” to more history and credit-card purchases, the campaign could assign two scores to each voter. One measured the likelihood he or she would vote; the other THE CHALLENGES NATIONBUILDER FACES ARE NOT gauged support for Obama. The campaign used those scores to know whom to target and where THOSE OF A TYPICAL START-UP. THE NEXT TUMBLR OR to spend finite resources. Obama’s staffers had so much information streaming into their databasINSTAGRAM DOESN’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT PARTISAN es that they adjusted their voter scores weekly.

John McCain’s campaign calculated a similar WARFARE OR THE IDEOLOGIES OF ITS FOUNDER. voter score once in the entire campaign.

Gilliam marveled at the Obama campaign’s pressing issues. The site collected 100,000 signatures technological prowess, but he knew how expensive and within a week, eventually amassing a half million. News intricate it was to pull off. What if online organizing were stories treated MoveOn.org as a freak occurrence, but a user-friendly and affordable? On Halloween night 2009, new era in politics and organizing had begun. he wrote the first line of code that would become NationBy 2003, MoveOn’s e-mail list had grown to some 1.4 Builder, and for the next year, he spent 16 hours a day codmillion people, and the site had emerged as a leading voice ing in his Los Angeles apartment. of opposition to the Iraq War. That summer, MoveOn conIn late 2010, Gilliam met with a well-connected entreducted its own Democratic presidential “primary.” Few preneur named Joe Green, who was perhaps best known were surprised that Vermont Governor Howard Dean won as Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate who didn’t quit Harvard the most votes. He was strongly opposed to the war, and and join Facebook. Instead, Green had worked as an orgahis campaign was the first to leverage the Internet, rally- nizer for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Green, too, ing supporters through Meetup.com and raising money saw the potential of the Internet to mobilize ordinary by e-mail—so much money that for a brief moment, until people around issues. He once tried to recruit Gilliam to he self-destructed after the Iowa caucuses, the liberal his company Causes, which had created a Facebook app politician from a tiny Northeastern state was the party’s that encouraged volunteerism and philanthropy. Sitting front-runner. Direct mail was dead; e-mail was the future. in Green’s Berkeley office, Gilliam described his vision The early 2000s also saw the rise of the progressive for NationBuilder. Green was knocked out. “This is the blogosphere, specifically Daily Kos, the online community thing,” he told him. “This is it.” (Green went on to become started by Markos Moulitsas. Kos was the rowdy voice of NationBuilder’s first president, serving for almost a year. what soon came to be called the netroots, endorsing candi- He remains on the board of directors.) dates, bashing Republicans, seeking funds, and generating NationBuilder launched in April 2011. Although it had petitions to pressure members of Congress. It was a testa- only 20 paying customers, the early results were encouragment to Kos’s growing clout that when the site’s bloggers ing. Alex Torpey, an independent candidate for mayor of

64 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

South Orange, New Jersey, squeaked out a 14-vote win— votes, he says, he can link directly to NationBuilder saving him time and money. The Scottish National Party used NationBuilder and retook the majority in the Scottish Parliament. Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah, a rising star in the GOP, signed up with NationBuilder for his re-election campaign.

Before he’d written a single line of code, Gilliam had decided that NationBuilder would be nonpartisan. Aaron Straus Garcia, a field organizer on Obama’s 2008 campaign who briefly worked at NationBuilder, recalls a conversation he had with Gilliam early on. “What happens when the Tea Party comes knocking on our door?” Garcia asked. Gilliam’s response was immediate: “There’s no way we close doors, or we start picking or choosing. This is what will set us apart.”

It was always going to be a controversial strategy.

Gilliam’s activist friends saw him as both a leader and a product of the netroots; the liberal Campaign for America’s Future had even given him an award for being an unsung progressive hero. Now he was courting Republicans, trying to persuade them to use his product to defeat Democrats. In June 2012, NationBuilder announced that it had signed “probably the largest deal ever struck in political technology” with the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), whose primary mission is to elect GOP candidates at the state level. His competitors scoffed at the claim, but the agreement potentially put NationBuilder into the hands of several thousand Republican politicians.

The backlash was fierce. Jason Rosenbaum, at the time a senior staffer at the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, accused Gilliam of being a mercenary. “Progressives should think carefully about who they’re helping when they use NationBuilder,” Rosenbaum told a reporter for the website TechPresident. “Every dollar you spend directly aids your opponents.” The candidates benefiting from the RSLC ’s help, he said, “are the folks who helped pass Scott Walker’s agenda, who want to give transvaginal ultrasounds to women, who want to disenfranchise the minorities, who want to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Helping them win elections is pretty evil.”

In the same article, Raven Brooks, the executive director of Netroots Nation, called for a boycott of NationBuilder.

How do we know, he asked, that NationBuilder won’t share with conservatives data it gathers for progressives? The boycott never came about, and Brooks no longer brings up NationBuilder’s integrity, but his view of the company hasn’t budged. “Just the idea,” he says, “that you would do anything to help this group of people is offensive, really.”

(Robert Greenwald, perhaps out of loyalty to his former partner, has refused to weigh in on the controversy.)

In the wake of the RSLC deal, Gilliam was defiant. In a response to TechPresident, he called Brooks a hypocrite, pointing out that Rally.org, an online fundraising tool used by Mitt Romney’s campaign, had sponsored Netroots Nation in 2012. But it was the questions about the safety of customer data that upset him the most. He accused Brooks of lying and blasted out a mass e-mail claiming that NGP VAN, a prominent technology firm that only serves Democrats, had told customers that their data wasn’t secure with

NationBuilder. “This is appalling,” he wrote, “and we want to make sure our customers know the truth. … We will never give [your data] to someone else. Ever.”

Stu Trevelyan, NGP VAN’s president and CEO, denies his firm ever tried to sabotage NationBuilder. But like Brooks, he does not believe in helping the other side. The Democratic Party at the state and national level, he says, has invested millions of dollars to establish an advantage in data and technology. When Democratic candidates use Democratic-only tools and the party voter file, they improve that data with information gleaned during canvasses and phone calls. By continually updating their inhouse data, Democrats better know whom to target with ads and whom to turn out on Election Day. The more Democrats use NationBuilder, Trevelyan says, the less they

NationBuilder, Jim Gilliam says, is about changing the culture of politics.

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 65

improve the party’s data, which only helps the GOP. “I think Jim comes from, frankly, a sadly uneducated place,” he says. “Out of the box, I think he thought NationBuilder was going to disrupt politics. At the end of the day, it hasn’t.”

“NationBuilder pretends to be nonpartisan,” Andy Barkett, the CTO of the Republican National Committee, said this summer. “It’s just not true.”

Even Gilliam’s admirers have their reservations. “As the CTO of the Obama campaign, I would never have used a IN JUNE, NATIONBUILDER raised $8 million in Series B nonpartisan start-up,” Harper Reed says. “Because how funding, with most of it coming from the Omidyar Network, could we trust them? What are they sharing? What comthe venture capital firm started by eBay founder Pierre bined intelligence are they giving? What are we doing that Omidyar. The company’s other big investor is Andreessen they’re giving to our enemies?”

Horowitz, the highly regarded Silicon Valley venture capiAlthough the word “profitable”—as in the need to make tal firm, which led an earlier $6.25 million round of fund- NationBuilder profitable—has now crept into his speech, ing. Gilliam acknowledges that NationBuilder will require Gilliam still talks with the fervor of an evangelist. “Nationsubstantial investment as it fine-tunes its low-cost, high- Builder,” he says, “is about changing the culture and helping volume business model. “The only way to bust through,” he people to understand that you have this amazing opportusays, “is to have a long enough runway so that you can build nity to be whatever you want to be. We’ve got the software the right product and get it to the right price point where to help you manage the whole thing. But what you’ve got you can get to customers and where it can be profitable.” to get in your head is that you’re not about waiting around By any measure, the company is growing. The number of for somebody else to tell you what to do. You’ve got to find employees has increased from 42 to 73 since February. The that thing that you and only you were meant to uniquely contribute to the world.”

When Gilliam speaks this way, the idealism GILLIAM CHOSE DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES BECAUSE, that has fueled his entire life comes to the fore.

As a born-again Christian, he put his faith in HE SAYS, IT WAS FAR AWAY FROM THE BELTWAY God and Jesus Christ to protect and guide him.

As a progressive activist, he believed he could BUBBLE, WHERE ALL ANYONE CARES ABOUT IS make movies that would prevent the United States from ever entering an unjust war. Now, WINNING THE NEXT ELECTION AND CASHING IN. as a technologist, he believes the Internet can transform democracy so radically that it will customer base has more than doubled in the same period, render the Democratic and Republican parties obsolete expanding from 1,598 to 4,000. Early this year, Nation- and usher in a new era of direct, participatory democracy.

Builder unveiled three new editions, or “verticals,” aimed Critics like Trevelyan and Brooks believe his idealism is at nonprofits, businesses, and government. Although the naïve and therefore dangerous. His admirers believe that company is now focused on the U.S.—a Washington, D.C., his idealism is what sets him apart. “I’ve been around for sales office is about to open—it plans to expand interna- 20 years,” says Todor Tashev of Omidyar Network, “and tionally. Perhaps the most significant indication of Nation- you rarely see a CEO who is as maniacally focused on the Builder’s impact is that its competitors have begun to lower vision and purpose of the company and delivering on that their prices. vision as Jim is.”

Still, the challenges Gilliam faces are not those of a In its two-and-a-half-year existence, NationBuilder typical start-up. The next Tumblr or Instagram doesn’t hasn’t transformed politics. Billionaires still pour money have to worry about partisan warfare or the ideologies of into elections. The two parties still exert control over who its founder. NationBuilder does, and it has hindered the runs for office. Gilliam’s dream of putting sophisticated, company’s ability to break into the limited but lucrative Obama-style organizing software into the hands of ordifield of high-profile campaigns. In the last election cycle, nary citizens may not democratize democracy. Still, his few congressional or senatorial candidates—Democratic or software does provide a powerful tool for citizens who Republican—used the software. Earlier this year, Nation- want to take action. That’s no small accomplishment. For Builder’s best-known customer, Cory Booker, the Demo- all his concerns about NationBuilder, Harper Reed says he cratic mayor of Newark, switched to using NGP VAN in the can’t wait for what comes next. “Companies like NGP VAN middle of his U.S. Senate campaign. It was a public blow are what NationBuilder could’ve become if they chose the to NationBuilder, though according to a campaign consul- partisan path,” Reed says. “We don’t know what Nationtant, the decision had nothing to do with the company’s Builder will become because they didn’t choose that route. policies but with needing a more established technology. And that’s really fucking exciting.” 

66 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

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Mailer’s Mark His writing turned out to be mortal. But in post–World War II American culture, he’s still a giant. BY TOM CARSON B

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t sometimes chagrins me that there is no author whose work I’ll ever know the way I do Norman Mailer’s. An adolescent immersion in Alexander Pope (unlikely) or Stendhal (if only) might have stood me in better stead, but it wasn’t to be. Until I came up for air sometime after college—Mailer as lodestar didn’t survive Edith Wharton, let alone Nabokov—I was an avid member of the boys’ club inflamed by his example.

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I’ve never met a woman who clamored for admission. Or much of anyone under 50 who wants in even as a kibitzer, which is bad news for the immortality Mailer craved. As he himself told us, he “formed the desire to be a major writer”—note the crucial adjective—shortly before turning 17, thanks to discovering John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In his

Depression-era boyhood, though, Mailer had thrilled to the romances of Rafael Sabatini, the immortal (well, more so than James T. Farrell) author of Captain Blood. That swashbuckling influence stayed with him forever. Far from the least of his appeal to acolytes like me was the effect Mailer’s writing gave of gallantly fighting duels while seated and alone in a room, coincidentally an apt description of our love lives.

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Few of us tried to ape Mailer’s style once we acquired our own bylines. That wasn’t only because its formidable sinuosities and cascades of metaphor were beyond our gifts or our editors’ patience. The mirror-happy convolutions of his shape-shifting prose were predicated on and, indeed, artistically justified only by his celebrity. A writer who lacked it simply couldn’t have had Mailer’s particular access to and perceptions of life in the American vortex, let alone expressed the latter with such a magniloquent sense of their consequence. Being the notorious “Norman Mailer” wasn’t only his identity; it was his vantage point, his crow’s nest, his claim to expertise in understanding how society worked.

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 69

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Thanks to 1948’s best-selling World War II novel The Naked and the Dead— in its Dos Passos–influenced naturalism, about as predictive of Mailer’s later career as Rahm Emanuel’s ballet days were of his, but his reputation’s permanent “Get Out of Jail Free” card just the same—fame came to him early. It was fame of a sort unimaginable today for a literary figure, since it’s not as if J.K. Rowling were being listed for a Nobel Prize the same week the Harry Potter theme park gaudily opened in Orlando.

As a result, Mailer’s intelligibility to modern readers requires considerable boning up on the 20th-century carnival.

Failing to recognize as much is the main limitation of J. Michael Lennon’s Norman Mailer: A Double Life.

Granted, this huge tome—928 pages long, with hardly a dull one for old Mailer fans—is likely to be the bio later exegetes will mine for the basic facts.

Partly because Lennon talked to a great many people who either are no longer with us or won’t be much longer, the book is as informative as it is devotional, and that’s saying a lot.

Still, few biographies would benefit as much from the extra dimension implied by the corny title-page formula: “… And His Times.” Friends with his subject for more than 25 years, Lennon is essentially a trad-minded academic with a meal ticket. As diligent and intelligent as he is, you may yearn for the kind of Greil Marcus–style critic weaned on playing ping-pong with the culture. Lennon doesn’t have the gallivanting instincts to convey the impact of the uptight 1950s, explosive 1960s, and tacky 1970s on Mailer’s career.

Yet those decades were the villains and henchmen he encountered on his Sabatini-­like wade up the castle stairs.

I’ve met Mike Lennon once—at the 1999 conference of the James Jones Literary Society, which may tell you more about us both than you need to know—and he’s definitely one of the good guys. But biographers have to decide whether they’re Boswell or Robert A. Caro. Though Lennon is trying to be magisterial— this is one of those bios whose author enters the story as a minor character named “J. Michael Lennon,” avoiding a distractingly chummy “I”—he’s still FOR THE RECORD,

70 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

NORMAN MAILER: A DOUBLE LIFE

BY J. MICHAEL LENNON

Simon & Schuster

got a man crush on you know who.

At Lennon’s worst, he can rush in to debarb the eldest Mailer daughter’s unbesotted description of her dad’s one-upmanship-oriented parenting: “If Mailer could hear these words, he might respond by saying that he came on strong with his children and friends to keep the dialectic supple, to encourage a strong response.”

Beyond-the-grave emphasis added, and really? Plenty of egotistic fathers downing one more at the Dew Drop Inn would be gratified by a defense so eloquent, at least once you explained the meaning of “dialectic” to them.

Lennon is strongest when he’s adding fresh details to the vital events in Mailer’s CV—as well as to plenty of non-vital ones, meaning your mileage may vary. Young Norman’s Brooklyn upbringing by a mother convinced he was a genius and his experiences as a Jew at then ultra-WASP y Harvard have been recounted before, but never this comprehensively. Better yet, because Mailer not only wrote The Naked and the Dead but often made it plain that soldiering in the Pacific had taught him more about America than Harvard or even Brooklyn did, some of us have pined for years for an authoritative description of his 1944– 1946 Army service—but no more.

Though he saw some not very intense combat in the Philippines and made good use of it, his stints near Yokohama and elsewhere with our occupation forces after V-J Day have been largely neglected by biographers until now. Yet the peacetime Army is usually the Army at its most Mickey Mouse, and Mailer the malcontent may have been born here. He once joked about following up his famous first book with The Naked and the Dead Go to Japan, and reading Lennon makes you wish he’d done it.

Leaping ahead, Lennon’s account of the most traumatic evening of Mailer’s life—the 1960 party that ended with his drunkenly stabbing his second wife (she survived, but that’s hardly something for him to brag about) and then doing a stint in Bellevue—is as definitive as we’re likely to get. The fascination is that Mailer’s career not only survived but thrived. In essence, the New York literary establishment

decided he was too valuable or maybe just too piquant to spurn, not that Mailer was especially cowed or repentant. His next novel, An American Dream, starred a man who murdered his wife and got away with it.

Even so, his colorful life—six marriages in all and plenty of flaps, feuds, and scandals—doesn’t justify a book even longer than Carlos Baker’s prosaic but pioneering Ernest Hemingway bio. Six years after Mailer’s death, we want assessments, and what did all this Sturm und Drang produce that’s worth eternity’s attention? One certifiable classic—The Armies of the Night, his innovatively self-referential account of 1967’s Vietnam-protesting March on the Pentagon—and one compilation whose very title’s effrontery was pivotal to 20th-century notions of celebrity: Advertisements for Myself, a 1959 conversion of (mostly) dross into Warholanticipating gold. As impressive as The Executioner’s Song is, that 1979 “true life” narrative of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore’s last days is also somewhat out of category. In its scrupulous omission of any authorial personality, it’s the least Maileresque book of our man’s mature career.

Those three aside, he wrote enough emblematic political and social journalism to more than earn a reliquary in the Zeitgeist Hall of Fame. But I can’t think of one novel of his I’d swear deserves to live forever, not even The Naked and the Dead, which is finally too conventional and imitative in technique to qualify for capital-G Greatness. (The wonder is that 25-year-old Norman got close.) When it comes to looming large in strictly literary history, Kurt Vonnegut is the tortoise to Mailer’s hare.

BUT CULTURAL HISTORY—well, that’s

a whole other kettle of white whales, you might say. From figuratively tussling with Hemingway’s ghost and literally arm-wrestling Muhammad Ali to playing bull in the arena to women’s lib, Mailer conflated the roles of spectator and set-upon gladiator in a way that made him, for a while, the literary world’s answer to Bob Dylan. That Mailer saw no point in staying on the sidelines whenever he could scramble onstage is, presumably, what Lennon

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means to convey with his A Double Life subtitle—Norman as observer versus Norman as participant.

So it’s unfortunate that our biographer never elucidates what made Mailer’s lightning-rod stance so potent in his prime. Among other things, Lennon doesn’t even try to make sense of Mailer’s politics. They were sometimes brave, never practical, and often foolish—but foolish in a way that illuminated their turbulent context, the quality that gives so much of his work its best shot at lasting interest. After supporting Henry Wallace for president in 1948—what a classic amateur move!—he tricked himself out as the kind of illusion-free Marxist for whom reality always betrays the dream. That was largely owing to the tutelage of French novelist Jean Malaquais, a man whose hauteur leaves Noam Chomsky looking like he’d fit in around the cracker barrel on The Andy Griffith Show. Even so, a romantic right down to his fundament—in fact, a romantic about his fundament, though Lennon is understandably gingerly when it comes to his man’s once-famous rump fetish—Mailer couldn’t help romanticizing Malaquais’s anti-romanticism in his botched but haunting second novel, 1951’s Barbary Shore.

Then, having discovered marijuana and out to pull intellectual rank on Kerouac and the Beats even as he borrowed their cachet, he detoured into what he called “existentialism.”

As Gore Vidal wickedly pointed out, Mailer didn’t actually seem to know what the word meant. But as fatuous as some of his trial-and-error posturing could be in those days, the 1950s incubated his shift from a more or less conventional novelistic trajectory—after Barbary Shore, his undervalued Hollywood novel The Deer Park was the only other book of fiction he published in that decade—to an unruly combo of provocateur, mystic, clown, and bellwether. From co-founding The Village Voice to writing “The White Negro”— his infuriating, now badly dated but seminal 1957 bid to define what grew into the counterculture—no writer not named Allen Ginsberg better anticipated the cataclysms to come.

No wonder the ’60s were Mailer’s zenith, starting with “Superman

Comes to the Supermarket,” his genuinely prescient essay on the 1960 Democratic convention and what John F. Kennedy’s nomination meant for the country’s future. (It’s still imitated today, albeit by people who may no longer know it’s the urtext for conceptualizing politicians as pop stars.) Finally, Norman the hipster and Norman the unorthodox lefty— not to mention Norman the celebrity, the binding ingredient here—could cohabit to fertile effect, whether he was transforming his own vanities, mishaps, and haphazard élan into a barometer of the national condition in The Armies of the Night or running for mayor of New York City and covering the Apollo 11 moon landing just weeks apart in 1969. It’s faintly maddening that nothing in Lennon’s tone—no change in pacing, no fresh excitement in his steadfastly meat-and-potatoes prose—conveys the crackle of it all.

Romantics still make lousy political thinkers, however. Virtually the only consistent note in Mailer’s allover-the-map political writing is his yen for a hero to whom he can look up if not bow down, not a particularly democratic goal. He thought he’d found one in JFK before getting jilted at the prom—meaning the Bay of Pigs, not Dallas—and he spent the rest of Camelot swooning over Castro. For a man who prided himself on detecting the totalitarianism in everything from modern architecture to ban-the-Bomb campaigns, his inability to recognize the implications of his own appetite for captains, kings, and men on horseback is either troubling or comic.

The upside was that his penchant for cults of personality made him scathing about the right wing’s messiahs, from Barry Goldwater and littleengine-that-could Richard Nixon to then-Governor Ronald Reagan, later to be the unwelcome culmination of Mailer’s fantasies about an actor playing the part of a great president. But for Mailer, as for so many people, romanticism bit the dust for good in 1968. Once politics was no longer a topic his imagination could transform into Captain Blood thrashing all comers on the world-historical

Being the notorious “Norman Mailer” was his vantage point, his claim to expertise in understanding how society worked.

Mailer in 1982

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stage, his political pieces went from exhilarating to wearily paycheckpaunchy until his loathing of the Iraq War galvanized him into one final burst of eloquence.

Long before that point, feminism was his ultimate undoing—and deservedly so. Despite many blown guesses, he’d never so blatantly been on the wrong side of history. Perhaps the only thing worse than the pronouncements that got him in feminists’ black books to begin with—“the prime responsibility of a woman is probably to be on earth long enough to find the best mate possible for herself and conceive children who will improve the species,” and so on—was his idea of transcending his own prejudices. “So let woman [sic] be what she would, and what she could,” goes the peroration that concludes The Prisoner of Sex, his Christ-they’re-coming-forme-now 1971 take on what was then called Women’s Lib. “Let her cohabit with elephants if she had to, and fuck with Borzoi hounds.” The latter quote doesn’t appear in Lennon’s biography, incidentally. No fool, he doubtless knows when to exit whistling.

Live by the zeitgeist, die by the zeitgeist. It was no small feat of talent, energy, and inventiveness to stay electrifying for a quarter-century.

But Mailer lived another 30 years to witness the decrepitude of his generation’s idea of what being a “major” writer in the American landscape meant. Outside a padded cell, no living novelist would brag, as Mailer did in the opening pages of Advertisements for Myself, of his determination to “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” (Not merely to affect it, notice—the limit of what his idol Hemingway had conceivably succeeded in doing—but revolutionize it.) Just the same, do I feel any residual affection for Grandpa Guignol? Of course I do. Despite the many areas where I can’t and don’t care to defend him, he was the first exemplar I had. Nowadays, a heroic conception of the literary life is bound to strike me and my peers as absurd, but it wasn’t a bad flag to spot fluttering away in the distance once upon a time. 

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Reagan’s Court v. the Libertarians’ Chief Justice Roberts sides with his hero’s ghost, for now. BY GARRETT EPPS B

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n 1983, Chief Justice Warren Burger asked Congress to create a new national appeals court to resolve cases the Supreme Court was too busy to hear. At the Reagan White House, a cheeky 28-year-old Harvard Law graduate named John G. Roberts was horrified.

“The President we serve has long campaigned against government bureaucracy and the excessive role of the federal courts,” Roberts wrote to White House Counsel Fred Fielding.

Burger’s proposal would create “an additional bureaucratic structure to permit the federal courts to do more than they already do.” Anyway, Roberts continued, the Supreme Court already made too many decisions.

“There are practical limits on the capacity of the Justices, and those limits are a significant check preventing the Court from usurping even more of the prerogatives of the other branches. The generally-accepted notion that the Court can only hear roughly 150 cases each term gives the same sense of reassurance as the adjournment of the Court in July, when we know that the Constitution is safe for the summer.”

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court adjourned after a term in which it decided only 78 cases. Roberts, now chief justice, departed for Prague, leaving an impression across the political spectrum that the Constitution may not be safe. A Pew Research Center poll, taken in March, found the Court’s public approval at an all-time low, though equal numbers of those polled considered the court “liberal” as “conservative.”

The confusion is not surprising. In 2012, Roberts cast the deciding vote to uphold President Barack Obama’s health-care legislation; in 2013, the Court—again by one vote, with Roberts this time in dissent—struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, boosting the ongoing campaign for marriage equality. For two years in a row, in

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other words, a marquee end-of-term “liberal” result has drawn the public’s attention away from the Roberts Court’s overall drive to the right.

Consider the Affordable Care Act (ACA) case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.

Observers wrote that Roberts’s vote had saved the act’s centerpiece individual mandate by voiding it as a commercial regulation but upholding it as a tax; in doing so, however, Roberts held that Congress can use the commerce power to regulate “activity” but not “inactivity.” Taxpayers who choose not to buy health insurance somehow remain “outside” commerce, even though their collective economic decision to impose their own health-care costs on others threatens to wreck both the federal budget and the national economy. In the same case, Roberts also mustered seven votes for a limit on Congress’s spending power. That power is the major tool Congress— every Congress, whether Democratic or Republican—uses to regulate the economy in areas ranging from health care to environmental protection and civil rights. It works because Congress can require states to take certain actions—educational reform, for example—as a condition of accepting federal funds. The new doctrine means that conservative states can refuse to implement the expansion of Medicaid to cover more of the uninsured while still demanding that Congress fund their existing Medicaid programs.

The “inactivity” doctrine and the spending-power limit are legal innovations. (Roberts’s opinion on these questions was short on logic and case law; instead, it relied on vaporous platitudes like “That is not the country the Framers of our Constitution envisioned.”) Before the decision, many scholars on the left and right would have called both arguments absurd.

Conservative legal icons like Judges Laurence Silberman and Jeffrey Sutton

THE ROBERTS COURT: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE CONSTITUTION

BY MARCIA COYLE

Simon & Schuster

IN THE BALANCE: LAW AND POLITICS ON THE ROBERTS COURT

BY MARK TUSHNET

Norton

THE TOUGH LUCK CONSTITUTION AND THE ASSAULT ON HEALTH CARE REFORM

BY ANDREW KOPPELMAN

Oxford University Press

UNPRECEDENTED: THE CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE TO OBAMACARE

BY JOSH BLACKMAN

PublicAffairs

had found the “individual mandate” easily constitutional; and not a single lower court—even those that voided the mandate—had seen merit in the spending-clause argument. But these invented limits on congressional power are now, improbably, the law. Depending on future appointments, they portend trouble for progressive legislation in the years to come.

In the term just ended, the decision in the Defense of Marriage Act case, United States v. Windsor, came just a few days after Shelby County v. Holder, one of the most reactionary decisions in American history. The 5-4 opinion in Shelby County carved out the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, freeing local governments, regardless of their racist histories, to implement election-law changes without pre­ approval from the Justice Department.

Roberts wrote the opinion, and few doubt that he drove the result.

The Court said, in effect, that the civil-rights era is over. Minorities in the covered jurisdictions can now vote and hold office; problem solved. The requirement of advance clearance, Roberts wrote, thus has “no logical relation to the present day.” Not since the Gilded Age Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, declaring that blacks must cease “to be the special favorite of the laws,” has a Court majority shown such open contempt for both Congress and for minority rights. As the flood of vote suppression under way in its aftermath shows, Shelby County has done huge damage to the cause of racial equality.

“Judges are like umpires,” Roberts told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005. “Umpires don’t make the rules—they apply them.” In Shelby County, he and the Court majority did act like an umpire—like Tim McClelland, that is, who in the 1983 “pine tar” incident invoked an obscure and irrelevant rule to reverse a Kansas City Royals home run and tip the game to the Yankees. The league commissioner overturned McClelland’s decision; Roberts, alas, is the commissioner as well as the umpire in his league.

The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution is the indispensable first stop for readers, MARCIA COYLE’S

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

John Roberts during his confirmation hearing in 2005

lawyers and lay alike, seeking to understand the making of this Court.

Coyle, a correspondent for The National Law Journal, is widely respected for her evenhandedness and clarity.

She interviewed a number of justices, as well as former clerks and current practitioners. Her book is built around four recent landmark 5–4 decisions— Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), which gutted the power of school boards to promote studentbody diversity; District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which announced a personal right to handgun possession; Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which abolished restrictions on “independent expenditures” in federal campaigns by wealthy individuals, unions, and corporations; and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the health-care case. These cases, Coyle writes, “reveal a confident conservative majority with a muscular sense of

power, a notable disdain for Congress, and a willingness to act aggressively and in distinctly unconservative ways.”

For Coyle, the story of this Court is the emergence of Roberts as a selfassured and effectual leader. He can take the Court in a radical direction when he chooses—and rein it in when he does not. Though many people still regard Justice Anthony Kennedy, the supposed “swing justice,” as the defining force on the Court, she writes that “with the health care decision, the Kennedy Court faded into the background and the Roberts Court firmly emerged.”

Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the nation’s top constitutional scholars, draws on his own experiences (including service as clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall during the term in which Roe v. Wade was decided) to imagine the intellectual struggle inside the new Court. Roberts, Tushnet argues in his new book, In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts

In Shelby County, Roberts and the Court majority did act like an umpire—the one in the 1983 “pine tar” baseball incident who tipped the game to the Yankees.

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Court, is less a politician in a robe than a conscientious lawyer whose basic beliefs were formed during the Reagan administration. Tushnet’s explanation for Roberts’s vote to uphold the mandate? There was no last-minute switch as posited by other observers. There was no “caving” to political pressure, no political calculation. Instead, the “opinion upholding the ACA on tax power grounds—and finding it outside Congress’s commerce power—expressed Roberts’s best judgment about what the law as he understood it required. He called it as he saw it: one ball and one strike.”

Tushnet’s thesis, if true, explains a lot. The arguments against the ACA—unlike those in the race, guns, and money cases—were novel. This much is clear from two detailed new accounts of the health-care litigation, one from the left and one from the right. In The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform, Northwestern University scholar Andrew Koppelman points out that the legal arguments deployed against the mandate flowed not from constitutional text or precedent but from early, “Tough Luck Libertarian” ideas of the political philosopher Robert Nozick. Koppelman traces the evolution of this extreme school of thought into a contemporary belief, powerful among conservative lawyers and libertarian think tanks, that any governmental regulation, and really any taxation, is not just unwise but immoral. Koppelman captures the flavor by quoting “libertarian blogger Sasha Volokh, who has argued that it would be immoral to tax people to prevent an asteroid from destroying the earth.” This radical vision could be heard echoing in the health-care oral arguments when lawyer Michael Carvin, representing a small-business federation, solemnly assured the justices that even if a plague were guaranteed to kill half the nation’s people, the federal government could not require mass vaccination. Tough luck indeed.

Against these more recent arguments, the chief justice upheld the mandate as a tax because, as far as he could tell, it is a tax—and a tax is, in fact, what it is. Koppelman shares Tushnet’s conviction that Roberts

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 73

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“was conscientiously trying to do the best job he could.” That explanation does not satisfy Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law. Blackman has written a deeply researched, highly readable account of the conservative challenge to the ACA , which, as a recent law graduate, he witnessed from the inside; Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare includes an introduction from its own hero, Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett. The intellectual godfather of the challenge, Barnett has been pleading the libertarian case to the Court for years (he argued and lost Gonzales v. Raich, in which he contended that Congress could not regulate personal possession of medical marijuana). His scholarship lays out a truly radical view of government and the Constitution. In The Tough Luck Constitution, Koppelman writes that Barnett “wants to privatize schools, prisons, courts, streets, parks, and the police.”

Barnett attained legal rock-star status by creating the “activity/inactivity” argument more or less out of thin air. (Koppelman calls him, in genuine admiration, “the most successful legal rhetorician since Catharine MacKinnon,” the creator of sexual-harassment law.) After the mandate was upheld, Barnett angrily dismissed Roberts’s opinion as “political, rather than legal.” Blackman writes acerbically, “Roberts rewrote the most controversial provision of the ACA ,” affirming “a statute that Congress did not write.”

No one could suspect either Barnett or Blackman of crass partisanship— that is, of wanting the mandate struck down to boost the electoral chances of Mitt Romney, say, or to help Republicans retake Senate control. Both men are serious, committed scholars, and their anger arises out of principle: Roberts abdicated what they see as the proper role of a libertarian Court.

But what was “unprecedented” in Sebelius was not so much the mandate as the vision of the Constitution put forth by the “tough luck” crowd.

Thus, as Tushnet suggests, it shouldn’t be surprising that it did not achieve total victory. To be sure, Roberts is thoroughly conservative. But his is

the conservatism of the 1980s rather than the new, more aggressive version minted for the Age of Obama. Still counted among the right’s heroes in that decade was the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who did not believe in untrammeled “liberty.” To Burke, “the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.”

“John Roberts’s constitutional philosophy was shaped before and during the Reagan years,” Tushnet argues, “and there’s no reason to think that he’s a partisan hack whose views change as new leaders come to the fore in the party.” Still, the new tough-luck libertarian philosophy resonates in the Court. Witness Roberts’s use of the “inactivity” argument to void the mandate under the commerce power; witness the four votes to void the whole ACA . Even a swing justice like Anthony Kennedy—like the younger and stunningly rigid Samuel Alito—was willing to adopt the tough-luck argument in its entirety. As Simon Lazarus recently pointed out in The New Republic, radical libertarian ideas are gaining ground in amicus briefs and lowercourt opinions and finding their way into the minds of the conservative bloc.

But it is Ronald Reagan’s ghost that haunts the chief justice’s chambers, much as Franklin Roosevelt’s haunted the chambers of Justices Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter for decades after his death. Roosevelt and Reagan are the only two 20th-century presidents who consciously pursued a judicial revolution at the Court. Roosevelt’s legal philosophy was based on government as the agent of freedom, equality, and opportunity; Reagan famously declared that “government is the problem,” but he tempered his motto with a willingness to govern, to compromise with political adversaries, and to tax and spend when necessary.

TODAY’S CONSERVATIVE majority as

a whole was forged in the Reagan era.

Before Reagan put him on the high court, Anthony Kennedy was a political ally in Sacramento. Reagan named Antonin Scalia to both the appellate and Supreme benches. He lifted an obscure bureaucrat named Clarence Thomas to national status by making

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him head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Roberts was an assistant to Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, and then to his White House counsel, Fred Fielding; and Samuel Alito came to Washington to join Reagan’s solicitor general’s office, then was an assistant to his hardest-line legal ideologist, Attorney General Edwin Meese. It is no coincidence these five form a bloc, or that Kennedy—the only one who is not a full-fledged child of the Reagan Revolution—should be the least rigid of the five.

Consider the priorities set by the Reagan Justice Department when it came to power in 1981: reversal of Roe v. Wade; a cutback on the establishment clause governing the separation of church and state; an end to affirmative action; an abortive attempt to restore tax-exempt status to segregated private schools; a fight—with Roberts, from his post in the attorney general’s office, providing the rationale—to keep Congress from strengthening the Voting Rights Act. Any law that “favored” minorities roused the ire of Reagan, Meese, and company—as they rouse the Court majority’s ire today.

That is true of Roberts in particular. When the issue is race, the chief comes—there is no polite way to say this—a bit unhinged. Coyle recalls shock in the courtroom when Roberts asked a lawyer for a local school district whether a program that occasionally used racial diversity as a tiebreaker wasn’t the moral equivalent of Southern segregation.

(Meese once called affirmative action “a new version of the separate but equal doctrine.”) During argument in the latest affirmative-action case, Roberts turned red in the face at the very existence of check boxes for race on college applications (he seemed to think that applicants were required to use them). Hearing a case about the Indian Child Welfare Act, he suggested that some Native American tribes might in essence be fraudulent social clubs, open to posers “who think culturally” they are Indians and want “extraordinary rights.”

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote in

Randy Barnett (center), intellectual godfather of the libertarians’ legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, testifies with other witnesses before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Seattle Schools, the 2007 desegregation opinion, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The words are Reaganism at its purest. In a major civil-rights speech in 1985, Reagan told the nation that advocates of what he called “quotas” had “turned our civil-rights laws on their head, claiming they mean exactly the opposite of what they say. … Our administration has worked to return the civil-rights laws to their original meaning—to prevent discrimination against any and all Americans.”

In fact, while Roberts was at the White House, conservatives led by Meese worked to rewrite Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which required federal contractors to create affirmative-action programs; the new version would have done away with the goals and timetables instituted under the order by the Nixon administration.

Cooler heads in the Labor Department and on Capitol Hill convinced them that the fight would be too costly. But according to scholar Nicholas Laham, by early 1986 the White House had prepared a new executive order, policy memos, and talking points—as well as a speech for the president, never delivered, that said, in part, “Those who point us in the direction of equal rights and racial quotas talk about ‘discrimination in order to end discrimination.’ … It just doesn’t work that way. The only way to end discrimination is to end discrimination—once and for all, immediately.”

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At the time, Roberts’s job included reviewing proposed executive orders, and the words read as if he wrote them.

Or perhaps we should say that the Seattle Schools opinion, and the even more radical opinion in Shelby County v.

Holder, read as if Reagan had written them. They adopt his underlying assumption that racism is a minor, forgotten blemish on America’s innocence. Civil-rights advocates are the real racists, hucksters in what Roberts in an earlier Voting Rights Act opinion once called “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

Reagan was popular, but Reaganism never really was; too many citizens saw, and continue to see, government less as a problem than as a potential ally in areas from civil rights to health care. If “government is the problem” is to triumph, it will have to do so by judicial fiat. This may be the Roberts Court, but he seems determined to build the Reagan Court, a rear guard left behind to achieve from the bench what could not be won at the polls.

Of course, we cannot know the true meaning of the Roberts Court until we learn the names of the next one or two justices. If a Democratic nominee succeeds one of the older conservatives, Roberts and Reaganism will be on the run. Tushnet advances the thesis that the junior justice, Elena Kagan, is in fact Roberts’s most powerful antagonist on the Court. That may be a premature call; but Kagan could very well turn out to be the most brilliant mind named to the Court since Louis D. Brandeis. With one more vote, she could lead a powerful center-left bloc.

On the other hand, if a Republican nominee replaces Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Roberts may find himself swept into the tough-luck libertarian camp, with incalculable results for the future of American law.

For the near term, however, we have a Court with a 5–4 conservative majority. Even if the more radical vision does not triumph, we should be prepared for many more pine-tar moments (and much less calling of balls and strikes) in the years ahead.

John Roberts seems prepared to lead his Court against the “problem” that is government—and indeed, the problem that is the voters. 

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Rise of the “Nones”

followers, too, in part because Christianity is gaining a reputation for touting shallow, anti-science, and sexually repressive teachings.

One-third of Americans under age 30, meanwhile, say they have no religion. This group, though still majority-­white, is substantially more diverse than the older unaffiliated.

Many of its members are choosing other nonbelievers as life partners, raising new questions about non­ religious families and child rearing.

Amid this churn, demographers and sociologists have no reason to believe that Americans’ flight from organized religion will ebb anytime soon.

America’s rapidly changing religious landscape BY AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX B

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n the two years leading up to his death this past February, the legal and political philosopher Ronald Dworkin was completing a slim volume with a weighty title. Religion without God, which began as a series of lectures in 2011, set a lofty goal: to propose a “religious attitude” in the absence of belief. Dworkin’s objective was not just theological. The book, he hoped, would help lower the temperature in the past decade’s battle between a group of scientists and philosophers dubbed the New Atheists and an array of critics who have accused them of everything from Islamophobia to fundamentalism to heresy.

Although the New Atheists are part of a long and distinguished tradition, including (but not limited to) philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bertrand Russell, they are notable because they have made atheism a pop success in the U.S. Since the 2004 publication of Sam Harris’s post–September 11 polemic, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, the kingpins of the movement—Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, and A.C. Grayling, to name a few—have launched diatribes against God and belief. To them, religion is at best superfluous, at worst (in Hitchens’s words) “allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” This zealous attitude has earned the New Atheists high-­profile critics, including Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain, who recently wrote in a column for The Spectator: Where is there the remotest sense that [the New Atheists] have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the

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meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or nonexistence of an objective moral order … and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?

For a religious leader like Sacks, who has staked his career on interfaith cooperation, the New Atheists’ antagonism is obnoxious. But it turns out all the public sparring may have been missing the point. Thanks to an even more seismic shift, nonbelievers in the U.S. are already leaving the New Atheists behind.

Americans are abandoning organized religion in droves. Data from the Public Religion Research Institute shows that while only 7 percent of Americans were raised outside a religious tradition, nearly 19 percent are religiously unaffiliated today. According to the General Social Survey, the number of Americans who say they have “no religion” has more than doubled since 1990.

Although they are one of the fastest-­ growing groups today, the unaffiliated are just one wave on a sea of religious change. Minorities are playing a greater role in shaping Christian denominations traditionally dominated by whites. The Catholic Church is hemorrhaging followers—by some estimates, 12 percent of Americans today are former Catholics—but recent immigrants from Latin America have buoyed its membership, making at least some changes in leadership and emphasis inevitable. Latino Americans are also converting to evangelical Christianity, which is sure to jostle the old alliances of the Christian conservative movement. The Christian right has battened down the hatches for a long tussle with the forces of secularization. But Christian pollsters warn that evangelical churches are losing

THE NEW ATHEISTS ARE eager to

RELIGION WITHOUT GOD

BY RONALD DWORKIN

Harvard University Press

THE HAPPY ATHEIST

BY PZ MYERS

Pantheon

claim the transformation. In a recent video debate, Daniel Dennett, a New Atheist patriarch complete with a venerable-­looking white beard, declared, “We gave [the unaffiliated] permission to declare their lack of interest in religion … and we have significant numbers of converts on our tally sheets. We get e-mailed from them all the time.” Yet atheists— especially those bold enough to e-mail Dennett—are only a vocal minority. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, more than two-thirds of the unaffiliated believe in God; nearly four in ten say they are “spiritual” but not “religious”; more than one-fifth say they pray every day.

Pollsters and demographers strain to arrange the swelling numbers of nonbelievers into categories that make sense. But their rapid growth—and our lack of a language to identify their convictions—makes every hypothesis feel obsolete before it’s published.

After decades of surveys that use church attendance as the primary measure of religiosity, what can we say about Americans who rarely set foot in a sanctuary but nevertheless believe in God? Or who disavow God but call themselves spiritual or say they’ve had a religious or mystical experience?

Pew and others still unsatisfyingly refer to the unaffiliated as the “nones.”

They’re hard to organize (as liberal political operatives have discovered, to their chagrin) and even harder to convert—whether those evangelizing are atheists or believers. In fact,

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the unaffiliated are blurring the line between religion and atheism.

Online, the intrepid seeker can find secular wedding vows and baptism alternatives, as well as links to support groups and defenders of nonbelievers’ rights like the Secular Coalition for America. There is also an increasing amount of information about how to raise children in a nonreligious household, how to say a godless grace, and how to grieve without God or an afterlife. None of this pretends to be definitive. Rather, it’s a collective effort to grapple with a widely shared set of questions and anxieties. Among the unaffiliated, the will to create non­ religious community is humming. But rather than being handed down from on high, it’s being crowdsourced.

Atheist churches are a topic of perennial media interest—although the media appears more obsessed than anyone else with hyping this phenomenon. Comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, the creators of the Sunday Assembly, a Londonbased weekly gathering for nonbelievers of all stripes, recently landed in the news after announcing that they were taking their project global.

Goofy marketing was almost certainly part of the appeal: In one YouTube video promoting the assembly, Jones promises, smiling manically, that the gathering will be “livelier than an eel in your underpants.” Pop philosopher Alain de Botton, the author of Religion for Atheists, takes credit for pioneering the concept of the “atheist church.” But de Botton’s effort to spell out all the rules feels out of step with the moment, and his grand plan to raid religious traditions for source material is a mixed bag. Ultimately, the book reads more like an ode to his favorite things—museums, Madonnas, Zen Buddhist retreats—than a replacement for the structures that for centuries have helped people express gratitude, cope with loss, and search for meaning and purpose.

Nonbelievers’ efforts to create a moral, happy life in the face of prejudice has created, for some, a kind of angry optimism. PZ (Paul Zachary) Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and one of the proprietors

Ronald Dworkin in 2011

of the blog Pharyngula—where you can read his take on science, current events, and cephalopods—is one of the latest to revel in the “joys of reality” and the folly of faith. His new book, The Happy Atheist, is a gleeful, selfrighteous celebration of life without belief. Much of Myers’s happiness, at least according to the book, is derived from mocking the spectacle of religious hypocrisy. But Myers seems distressed by the outsider’s perception that atheists subsist on glib patter. “What we atheists are saying,” he writes, “is that we need to turn away from the powerless rationalizations of the holy books, no matter how poetic they might be, and recognize that their power and their appeal flows from their humanity, not from their religiosity.” Far from missing the

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point, he proposes, atheists are even more deeply embedded in the sorrows and joys of human experience because they sidestep the “magical thinking” of religious belief.

Myers won’t win brownie points from those who want the New Atheists to temper their tone. Near the end, he calls believers “lazy-minded”—for him, that’s charitable. In his last essay, he seems almost ready to call a truce: quoting from The Epic of Gilgamesh, he declares that grief is “the touchstone, the common element that atheists and theists share.” But he can’t bring himself to admit that the concept of God might be anything but comical.

Ronald Dworkin is more willing to compromise. Religion without God is a genuinely thoughtful attempt to expand the categories of both “atheist” and “religious.” Far from sneering at the supernatural, Dworkin proposes that religion is too important to be discarded by nonbelievers. Many atheists, Dworkin writes, “have convictions and experiences similar to and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a ‘personal’ god, they nevertheless believe in a ‘force’ in the universe ‘greater than we are.’ They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted.” This faith—unconnected to God but no less profound because of it—provides the opportunity for an unrealized communion between believers and nonbelievers.

The premise for Religion without God may be its most valuable contribution. Elsewhere, Dworkin’s personal and aesthetic obsessions color the book in a way that is both endearing and frustrating. He explores physicists’ quasi-religious belief in the beauty of the universe for more than 50 pages. But for all of his reflections on the harmony of the heavens, Dworkin offers no sense of how mortals can achieve accord with one another.

The book also skirts the ache for ritual and community among the unaffiliated. Dworkin makes a point of dismissing prayer and worship

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as mere “godly convictions.” Yet on a basic level, rituals are habits that remind people, religious or not, who they are and what they hold important. Prayer and meditation can help cultivate self-discipline or ease stress.

Rituals are social, not just individual; community members can participate in grief and help draw the mourner toward a sense of acceptance.

At the end of Religion without God, Dworkin briefly reflects on death.

Religious atheists, he argues, should think of lives well lived as works of art—accomplishments that constitute an “achievement in just having been made, whether or not they continue to be admired or even survive.” The honesty of this section is touching, as is its stark brevity; in his last paragraph, Dworkin confesses that he knows “that may not be good enough for you: it may not even soften a bit the fear we face.” But it opens the door to a faith that does not rely on miracles.

DESPITE THEIR POTENTIAL for politi-

cal influence, nonbelievers have yet to breach the deep levels of antipathy toward the notion of nonreligious elected officials. Nearly half of Americans say that the growing numbers of people who are not religious is a bad thing, while only 11 percent say it is a good thing. Fully two-thirds of Americans are uncomfortable with the idea of an atheist in the White House. In July, a vigorous debate over whether atheists and humanists should join the Army Chaplain Corps illustrated the dangers of voicing sympathy with the nonreligious. Republican congressmen, declaring that such chaplains would “make a mockery” of the institution, darkly hypothesized that atheist chaplains would tell grieving families that their sons were “worm food.” Hostility toward nonbelief is still recommended for lawmakers who want to keep their jobs; since 9/11 it’s become hard to imagine a speech that doesn’t end with “God bless America.”

Nor does it help that the unaffiliated are one of the most politically disengaged groups in the country.

Dworkin turns his legal eye to this uncomfortable reality. Historically, he says, courts have assumed that a “religion” must have a God, or at least

something that resembles a deity. But what privileges should theists receive in a country with a rapidly growing number of religiously unaffiliated citizens? For Dworkin, the solution is simple: Replace the right to religious freedom with the right to something he calls “ethical independence.” This, according to Dworkin, “limits the reasons government may offer for any constraint on a citizen’s freedom,” without providing a special right that fixes on a particular subject (in this case, religion). To receive a religious exemption, in other words, belief in God would be beside the point.

Adjusting the scope of freedom of religion is a controversial move for any legal scholar to make, and Dworkin’s argument has its critics. In an article for the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Rafael Domingo dismisses Dworkin’s view as reductive, unable to encompass “a conception of religion as a fact and a value.” In a practical sense, Dworkin’s approach is also a pipe dream. For his proposition to succeed, religious institutions and individuals would have to relinquish their significant legal clout and, in so doing, admit that the United States is no longer a nation “under God.” But the spirit of the argument points toward a laying-down of arms in the culture wars that Dworkin cautiously hoped might soon be on the horizon.

Even if the right of religious exercise isn’t reframed, transformations in the country’s religious landscape may convince believers to accept that faith in God does not give them the moral high ground, at least in the public square. The next few years will tell whether his optimism was justified.

Atheists may come to see the benefits of compromise as well. Earlier this year, Juan Mendez, an atheist lawmaker in the Arizona House of Representatives, standing up to give the daily invocation, asked his colleagues to look around and take a moment to acknowledge their shared humanity. Mendez’s action was powerful (one might even say Dworkinian) because it undermined the notion that the statehouse is a place for Christian prayer but did not insist that ethical reflection be removed.

Dworkin is right: A broader

Among the unaffiliated, the will to create nonreligious community is humming.

Rather than being handed down from on high, it’s being

CROWDSOURCED.

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conception of religion and values will not result in chaos. This is something that countless religiously unaffiliated Americans have already discovered.

Attitudes toward atheists and nonbelievers in public office, while still frosty, are thawing just a little. Last fall, the election to Congress of two secular lawmakers—Arizona’s Krysten Sinema and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin—signaled that Americans can accept political campaigns in which the candidates’ religion does not play a central role. Meanwhile, the New Atheists’ attitudes are softening, too: Sam Harris, a linchpin of the movement, is writing a defense of spirituality.

Yet a tension remains between the necessary loneliness of an individual’s hunt for the secrets of the universe and the desire for companions along the way. Clearly we’re not all looking for the same answers. In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, an aging preacher contemplates his relationship with his friend’s estranged son, writing: Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable. … We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

The search for kinship among the unaffiliated will be an exercise in communication, because no assumptions can be made about shared values or priorities, at least not at first. But without the shared language of belief or an ethical script handed down through religious tradition, the unaffiliated can engage—either together or alone—in exciting acts of reinvention.

We’re hurtling toward a new moment in the American religious experience— one in which, for many, belief and nonbelief will exist side by side. 

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Last Day of a Black Man Fruitvale Station’s intimate, exuberant portrait of the murdered Oscar Grant BY ROXANE GAY F

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hree hours before the advance screening of Fruitvale Station I attended in Chicago, a line of eager fans snaked through the Cineplex. Many were dressed up, hair done right, faces beat. Writer and director Ryan Coogler and stars Octavia Spencer and Michael B. Jordan were on hand for a talkback after the screening. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, introducing the actors and the drama, which won the 2013 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, referred to the movie’s subject matter as “Trayvon Martin in real time” and led a vigorous call-and-response.

There was a charge in the air, like the one I felt a month earlier at a crowded screening of the romantic comedy Peeples, written and directed

by Tina Gordon Chism. During both screenings, attended by predominantly black audiences, the crowd laughed, nodded in the darkness, and, when each movie finished, offered sighs of contentment and effusive praise. At the end of Fruitvale Station, there were also tears.

Contemporary black film is something of a cultural desert, with little water to be found. When movies by a promising black writer-director, like Fruitvale Station—or even Peeples— premiere, black audiences wonder if finally their thirst might be quenched.

Or maybe it’s just me. I am real damn thirsty. Broadly speaking, if contemporary black cinema were divided into categories, we’d have raunchy comedies like Soul Plane, the feel-good family films frequented by Eddie Murphy and Ice Cube, the awareness-raising films that tackle major race-related issues, and, of course, the work of Tyler Perry, a hideous genre unto itself. Most black movies, for better or worse, carry a burden of expectation, having to be everything to everyone because we have so little to choose from.

Suffice it to say, a movie about a notorious incident of police

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brutality like Fruitvale Station enters an already-fraught conversation. On New Year’s Day in 2009, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer Johannes Mehserle, working at the BART station in Oakland’s heavily Latino Fruitvale district, shot Oscar Grant, a young black man returning to Oakland after celebrating with friends in San Francisco, in the back.

Earlier that night, BART police had responded to reports of a fight by removing Grant and several of his friends from the train. Accounts of what happened next differ, but matters escalated quickly.

Bystanders took a number of videos and images of the incident, and soon these artifacts of Grant’s death went viral. Oakland residents held a vigil and rioted, releasing a long-­simmering rage over the plight of young black men in the city. Protests, some violent, would continue for more than a year. Four years later, digital traces of Grant’s death linger across the Internet, continuing to bear witness.

FRUITVALE STATION BEGINS with

Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) and his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) talking about their New Year’s resolutions. Then the film jumps to 2:15 A.M. in the nearly empty station. Oscar and a group of his friends are seated on the ground. Officers surround them, both the young men and the police shouting. The footage, from a cell phone, is shaky and grainy, but there is no ambiguity about what is taking place.

The rest of the movie chronicles the events leading up to that moment.

Oscar is shown as a charming young man with a troubled past who is finally on the right path. After two stints in prison for drug dealing, he is working to reconnect with Sophina. He dotingly parents his daughter, Tatiana, and strives to be a good son to his mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer). A movie about limited options for young

When movies by a promising black writerdirector like Fruitvale Station’s Ryan Coogler premiere, black audiences wonder if finally their thirst might be quenched.

inner-city black men, Fruitvale also explores the multiple identities many of these men must adopt. Oscar is a master of code-switching—the man he is with his mother is different from the man he is with his girlfriend and child, with his friends, and in prison. As director Coogler, who is from the Bay Area, notes, “Oftentimes you’ve got to be different people just to stay alive.”

When Oscar picks Tatiana up from day care, they race back to the car, their bodies so full of joy it’s like they’re trying to outrun the feeling.

Actor Michael B. Jordan, best known as Wallace, the 16-year-old dealer from The Wire, and Vince, the highschool quarterback from Friday Night Lights, expresses that joy from his face to the kick of his heels. In scenes with Diaz, Jordan brings out the raw appeal of a young man in his prime— slow drawls, sexy smiles, toned body.

He also expresses openness and vulnerability when he confesses to his girlfriend that he has lost his job and when, in prison, he begs his mother not to leave him alone.

As Wanda, Octavia Spencer is the movie’s moral center. She embodies nurturing, tough love and the small ways a mother never lets go. She chides Oscar for driving and talking on his cell phone, urging him to take the train home so he doesn’t drink and drive.

In a powerful flashback, Wanda visits Oscar in prison. He’s in his uniform, thrilled to see a familiar face. Wanda is loving but weary, trying to hang on to what normalcy she can. During her visit, Oscar gets drawn into a verbal altercation with another inmate, revealing the aggressive, defiant man he can be when pushed. Wanda tries to calm him. But it’s too much, how he has to straddle two worlds, and when he sits back down his body is coiled with frustration. Wanda tells Oscar she won’t be coming back to see him.

Spencer’s handling of the moment, with quiet control and resolve and no hysterics, is heartbreaking.

There are moments of levity, like when Oscar has to buy a birthday card on behalf of his sister. Despite the sister’s express instructions not to, he gets a card with white people on the front. Such moments not only humanize Oscar, they allow the audience to

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laugh, to exhale. We need that.

Director Coogler had only the length of a movie—90 minutes, in this case—to give us a sense of who Oscar Grant was, someone to mourn when the end came. He conducted extensive research on Grant’s whereabouts on that final day and overcame the family’s apprehension to work closely with them. In a prophetic scene, Oscar comforts a bleeding dog hit by a car, whispering kind words so the animal won’t die alone. When Oscar is at the grocery store buying crab for his mother, a young woman at the butcher counter wants to fry fish but is unsure how. Oscar gets his Grandma Bonnie on the phone to school her. On the streets of San Francisco

Actor Michael B. Jordan as Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009.

after midnight, surrounded by revelers, Oscar and his friends convince a storeowner closing shop to let their girlfriends, and the pregnant wife of a couple they don’t know, use the restroom. The men enjoy the camaraderie of strangers, and we see Oscar plan for a future he will not be part of.

At times, Coogler’s choices verge on the sentimental, if not manipulative. His investment in Grant’s story is palpable. There are indulgent directorial choices, like the super­ imposing of text messages and phone numbers on the screen when Oscar is using his cell phone. It is a testament to the movie’s excellence that the flaws are in the details.

Fruitvale Station could have been

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an angry movie, but Coogler has crafted an intimate, at times exuberant portrait. This was a deliberate choice, co-star Octavia Spencer said during the question-and-answer session after the screening: “Anger without action leads to riots. I didn’t know if that was the best emotion to associate with this film.” Still, it is hard to consider what made the movie possible without surrendering to some amount of rage.

“Grant’s murder came at a time where people in Oakland were optimistic about race.” In one night, that optimism was taken away. Oakland, the eighth-largest city in California, is a particularly difficult place for young black men. According AS COOGLER NOTES,

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to a June 2011 report from the Oakland Unified School District on African-­ American Male Achievement, “In Oakland, African American male students have the worst outcomes of any demographic group, despite improvements in some areas in recent years.”

The world beyond the school system provides little statistical solace.

According to the NAACP, nearly 1 million of the 2.3 million Americans in prison are African American. Further racial disparities persist in the length of sentencing, and the effect of incarceration after release. The institutional biases make it difficult to envision how young black men can succeed. Or as Oscar seems to say in the movie, “I’m tired. Thought I could start over fresh but shit ain’t working out.”

Year after year, we discuss these statistics and the impossibility of them. Year after year, we tell the same stories, using these statistics, to show how shit ain’t working out. Accurately conceiving of what young black men face when we talk about them as numbers, though, is difficult. Some statistics loom so pervasively they have become myths. For example, a commonly recited “fact” is that more black men end up in jail than attend college.

Ivory A. Toldson, a professor at Howard University, refutes this statement, noting in a series on black education for The Root that “today there are approximately 600,000 more black men in college than in jail, and the best research evidence suggests that the line was never true to begin with.”

Behind the statistics for black men in Oakland and across the United States are men who are being failed by society. These statistics, when offered without any kind of reflection, do little to advance the conversation, and when they go unquestioned, as Toldson suggests, they distort the conversation.

It is in this context that Fruitvale Station works to treat Oscar Grant as a man. Forced to decide whether to sell drugs to support his family, Oscar makes what we hope is the right choice, throwing a large quantity of marijuana into the bay. He tries to get his job back at a local grocer after being fired. Not only are his options drastically limited, his learning curve

Director Ryan Coogler at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, California

is steep. There is little room for error.

For some young black men, there is no room for error at all.

Depicting this reality was Coogler’s primary aim because, he says, “we struggle with a mass loss of life [in the Bay Area], and the root of these issues is a demonization of young black men.” Contemporary black cinema will not end the demonization of young black men, but a movie like Fruitvale Station offers us a necessary insight into the consequences.

WHEN BLACK MOVIES FAIL at the box

office, too often it becomes a race to see who will first say, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” Take the case of Red Tails, produced by George Lucas and directed by Anthony Hemingway, which only earned a bit less than $50 million domestically.

In interviews at the time of the film’s release, Lucas, having put his own money behind the project to ensure it would receive a wide launch, essentially insisted the movie-going public bore a responsibility to see the movie. In an interview with USA Today, Lucas said, “I realize that by accident I’ve now put the black film community at risk (with Red Tails, whose $58 million budget

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far exceeds typical all-black productions). I’m saying, if this doesn’t work, there’s a good chance you’ll stay where you are for quite a while. It’ll be harder for you guys to break out of that (lower-­budget) mold.” Self-important and grandiose as his statement is, Lucas also gets at a frustrating truth.

Each time a black movie is made, it has to succeed or risk fallout for the movies that follow. Fruitvale Station bodes well, though, having grossed more than $13 million in its first month; the quality of the movie offers hope that a broader range of black movies might be made and that we will see black people portrayed in more nuanced ways.

Movies matter. But still, there is this painful reality. Each time Oscar says goodbye to his girlfriend or family in Fruitvale Station, he adds, “I love you.”

Coogler remarked that many young men in the inner city do this, because “every time we leave the house, we know we might not make it back.”

Such is their uncanny burden. There is also this. Oscar Grant was 22 years old when he was murdered. Johannes Mehserle, after serving just one year of a two-year sentence, was released from prison on June 13, 2011. 

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We Shall Overwhelm A new book explores when and why America’s rich protest. BY DAVID CAY JOHNSTON B

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our years ago, the modern Tea Party seemed to emerge from nowhere, leaving journalists bewildered and the public with few reference points to understand seemingly spontaneous rallies by middleclass people seeking lower tax rates.

A search for the phrase “tea party” in connection with “politics” in major newspapers yielded fewer than 100 mentions in 2008—and when the words did appear linked together, they suggested studied formality and decorum. The next year, they appeared more than 1,500 times, often connected to “protest demonstration.”

But little was spontaneous about the new party. “Social movements that explicitly defend the interests of the rich and the almost-rich have been a recurring feature of American politics,” Isaac William Martin, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, reminds us in his new book, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent. “Such movements shook the American polity before the Obama era, before the Reagan era, and before Barry Goldwater ran for president— before, even, the New Deal.”

With meticulous research, Martin shows how the modern Tea Party grew from decades of efforts by American oligarchs to de-tax themselves.

They relied on cranks, rogues, and a few scholars to polish the most effective ideological marketing pitches.

Their goal was selling the notion that if the rich bear less of the burden of government, all of us will somehow end up better off. These pitches have worked best when some newly proposed government initiative—like President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act—arrives to pose the threat of major policy change. They have depended on diverting attention from obvious questions, such as just how does a smaller tax bill for the Koch brothers benefit us?

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Spanning decades, the residue of relationships, movement-building skills, and organizations from past enlistments of the affluent many to agitate for the interests of the superelite few could be seen merely as an example of what Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab called “cultural baggage” in their 1971 book The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970. Instead, Martin says, these movements bequeathed to us “not just a suitcase we drag along behind us” but “a toolkit” to remake American public policy. Martin also concurs with historian Richard Hofstadter, who pointed out a halfcentury ago how many practitioners of his famous theory—the paranoid style in American politics—found their roots in the arrival, in 1913, of the 16th Amendment. That amendment, ratified on the eve of World War I, resolved disputes over the meaning of the phrase “direct taxes shall be apportioned,” and in doing so ushered in the modern income tax.

BY THE 1920S, Martin writes, corpo-

rate boardrooms were rife with “rich men who were scared of progressive taxation, but did not know how to fight it.” Along came J.A. Arnold, a semi– con man who told them he knew what to do. Arnold grew up in central Illinois, near the birthplace of rabblerousing William Jennings Bryan and a few years behind him. Populist movements fueled by abuses of railroads and their underwriters surrounded him in his youth. Arnold saw opportunity— not in fighting the railroads but in fighting the progressives. By age 34, he had discovered what Martin calls “a talent for flattering rich and powerful men.” Again and again, Arnold would “seek out a rich patron, turn the conversation to politics, profit.”

Arnold, allied with traditional bankers, fought the Texas land banks that helped small farmers prosper.

RICH PEOPLE’S MOVEMENTS: GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGNS TO UNTAX THE ONE PERCENT

BY ISAAC WILLIAM MARTIN

Oxford University Press

Then he hit the big time, organizing “tax clubs” that, like the Tea Party, seemed to emerge from nowhere. In just 33 days, as 1924 became 1925, Texas tax clubs held an astonishing 216 gatherings. The clubs “were in the pure image of the Texas Farmers’ Union and the Farmers’ Alliance,” Martin writes. “The participants in the tax clubs, however, were not farmers: They were overwhelmingly bankers.” Indeed, all but 7 percent of conference chairs were bankers, the great majority of them bank presidents. Their pitch was that lowered taxes would encourage productive investments, an idea that resonates with today’s economic and tax debates. (Knowing this kind of backstory makes it less surprising when today’s Heritage Foundation professionals describe their employer as a leading advocate for the poor.)

Arnold found his greatest support in the Old South, where he had organized the Southern Tariff Association to promote tariffs over income taxes. Delta plantation owners and their economic peers “worried that federal spending threatened their political power” because broader economic opportunity would “endanger the willingness of the black poor to work for low wages.”

Martin notes that Mississippi had been among the first states to ratify the 16th Amendment, because Mississippians had so little income to tax. But by 1940, the legislature voted to repeal it—even though fewer than 300 Mississippi residents owed enough income tax to expect any income tax cut.

Martin also shows how adept tax opponents have been at using sleight-of-hand arguments. Back in the 1920s, for example, the brothers Pierre and Irénée DuPont attacked the federal enforcement of Prohibition—“a particularly sore point to pious rich.” In the elite view, the federal government unfairly made up for its lost revenue with higher income taxes, “thereby letting the sinners off scot-free while shifting the costs of their sins onto the rich.” But one rich people’s organization found that its appeal met greater success after abandoning the narrow argument that legalizing and taxing liquor sales would ease the burden on the

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teetotaling wealthy. The new idea was that ending Prohibition would “provide additional revenue to state and federal governments in crisis.” Thus it was that in the early days of the Great Depression, ending Prohibition gained early favor with lawmakers “in states that were increasingly stressed to pay for basic public services.” Pennsylvania led the way in stopping the funding of enforcement. This kind of shift in rhetoric remains relevant today as congressional Republicans push a 25 percent cut in the IRS budget just as more states ponder legalizing—and taxing—the sale of marijuana.

In time, J.A. Arnold lost favor, partly because he prospered even as his movements faltered. But others came along eager to pick up the slack. Edward Aloysius Rumely, a onetime Progressive turned rightwinger by Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 effort to pack the Supreme Court, and a specialist in direct-mail publicity, “would do the most to transform the

movement to untax the rich.” Among Rumely’s successors was Connecticut manufacturer Vivien Kellems—a veteran of the fight for women’s suffrage (the civil-­disobedience techniques of which she brought into the antitax movement) and a standout in the man’s world of 1930s big business who grew much richer thanks to New Deal and World War II government contracts. Still, she compared IRS agents to Hitler’s enforcers. She insisted that small business was “marked for liquidation,” and in one jeremiad warned that “we are one step removed in this country from the Firing Squad and the Concentration camp.” In a 1948 Los Angeles speech, Kellems announced she would cease withholding income taxes from her employees’ checks. The gesture made her a hero to this day to the virulent, sometimes violent cliques that claim the paying of taxes is voluntary and the federal government is a criminal organization.

Martin also examines more

Enlisting the

AFFLUENT MANY to agitate for the

SUPER-ELITE FEW is a tradition spanning back decades.

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sophisticated anti-tax advocates, like Robert Dresser, a New England textile heir, Harvard-educated lawyer, and union opponent who led the way in what Martin calls “clever policy crafting,” an essential feature of rich people’s movements. Dresser’s work toward a constitutional amendment limiting the federal government’s power to tax helped make the oncefringe cause “increasingly palatable” to mainstream conservatives starting in the 1940s, almost four decades before Californians enacted Proposition 13.

In his dotage, at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Dresser embraced John Bircher conspiracy theories. It’s but one thread in a taut fabric Martin weaves from many connections among Southern racists, anti-­communist crazies, corporate welfare queens, and rich people’s de-tax movements.

Another thread is the little-known story of the young organizer Grover Norquist’s many trips in the early 1980s to Angola. He went there to learn tactics from the Marxist turned anti-communist revolutionary Jonas Savimbi, who had the support of many of the right-wingers around President Ronald Reagan; Norquist would soon put what he learned into practice as he transformed a new organization, Americans for Tax Reform, from a “short-term lobbying project” into the vehicle for a “war of attrition against the American welfare state.”

A RECURRING DREAM of the century-­

long effort Martin chronicles is getting the top tax rate down to 25 percent or even 15 percent. Reagan got tantalizingly close with the 28 percent top rate in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, enacted with bipartisan support. George W. Bush won the number that matters most—long-term capital gains and dividend rates down to 15 percent— from 2003 to 2012. More than 30 percent of America’s capital gains now flow to the fewer than 8,300 households with annual incomes of $10 million or more, while the nearly twothirds of U.S. households making less than $50,000 collect just 3 percent.

Martin’s title is an homage to Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s seminal 1978 book Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How

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Grover Norquist at a 2011 meeting of millionaires gathered to discuss debt supercommittee issues.

They Fail. Piven and Cloward showed that the poor get heard when they stop being docile. Or, as Frederick Douglass put it, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Mass demonstrations, strikes, and even riots scare the oligarchs into paying attention.

The problem with disruption as a strategy is that the wealthy, having smart advisers and plenty of money, co-opt threatening movements. We can see this in the 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, later a Supreme Court justice, wrote for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as it tried to understand and undercut the burgeoning consumer movement. Powell’s proposed strategies included creating subtly anti-consumer institutions modeled superficially on the work of consumer advocates like Ralph Nader, adding a patina of concern for public interest to obscure their agenda.

In the case of the modern Tea Party, we now know that a good chunk of the money to stage events came from the Koch brothers, inheritors of wealth who are no strangers to the benefits of government-granted corporate monopolies as well as to laws that let them avoid, defer, and even escape taxes. That the mainstream news gives so little attention to the Kochs’ behind-the-scenes manipulations is

a tragedy. The Tea Party’s very name sows confusion: The original 1773 Tea Party opposed tax favors for the wealthy owners of the British East India Company. Contrast this with modern Tea Party demands that a congress and president—elected by the people—lack legitimacy and must reduce taxes, especially on business and owners of capital.

Rich people’s movements waxed and waned over much of the last century, going dormant only to reappear when roused by a new policy threat.

They have yet to achieve many of their goals. But thanks to decades of wellfunded organizing, favorable laws in Washington and state capitals that passed while few noticed, and now the dark-money opportunities of Citizens United, they are here to stay. Martin’s book is useful in understanding a forgotten history that preceded the seemingly sudden assaults on consumers, unions, and workers by legislatures and governors in Michigan, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, and other states where extremists are currently in power.

While the actions are indeed abrupt, contemptuous, and cruel, they grow from a neglected but by now lengthy tradition of lessons the rich and their advisers learned from failures past. 

har a z n. ghanbari / ap images

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The Conflicted Gay Pioneer Donald Webster Cory’s 1951 landmark book The Homosexual in America inspired early activists.

Then he disavowed its message. BY RICK VALELLY B

trudi fuller

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hen it comes to American political thought, who in our nation’s history did the thinking and writing that we ought to care about? The Puritans, for starters.

They created a theocracy in a strange land and the idea of American exceptionalism. The Founders invented a new democratic form of government, wrote its charters—the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights— and explained the logics of its nascent institutions. The argument about whether and how to remain true to these texts has unfolded ever since, with contributions from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan to today. Because the Founders built a new government on a narrow social base of slave owners and propertied white men, significant political thought must also include the works of abolitionists and champions of blacks’, women’s, immigrants’ rights—everyone who persuaded Americans to update and expand what was meant by “We the People.”

In the wake of our country’s enormous gains in gay rights, it’s time to think about which advocate for gay rights should enter the canon. The first candidate seems clear: Frank Kameny has been called the movement’s Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr. rolled into one. In 1957, the government fired him from his job as an astronomer (on a technicality but with the underlying reason understood to be sexual orientation).

In 1961, Kameny filed a famously eloquent brief to the Supreme Court basing his right to work on the Declaration of Independence. In 1965, he helped organize the first gay protest outside the White House, seeking civil-service protection. By the early 1970s, he was leading a broader fight to destigmatize homosexuality.

Kameny didn’t arrive until the 1960s, though. What about his

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predecessors? The recent re-issue of a biographical sketch by historian Martin Duberman reminds us of a nearly forgotten but fascinating figure, Donald Webster Cory, the author of a pioneering Cold War–era work on gays in America: The Homosexual in America (1951). For a time, Cory became the theorist of the early gay-rights activists of the 1950s and early 1960s, in somewhat the same way that historian C. Vann Woodward’s 1955 classic, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, was read and circulated among black civil-rights groups as they strategized and acted in the civil-rights movement’s early years.

The case for Cory is richly ambiguous, though. Cory was the pseudonym for Edward Sagarin, whose name still stirs unease. A decade and a half after his pathbreaking 1951 contribution, Sagarin began to insist, as a tenured sociologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice specializing in the study of “deviance,” on pathologizing homosexuality. Any accounting of Cory’s impact must reckon with Sagarin—both the life that he led and the odyssey that caused him to depart from his initial convictions. The cultural conservatism that he eventually espoused has had the effect of cloaking the power and force of his first book under his pseudonym. Edward Sagarin’s professional career eventually placed grenades around Donald Webster Cory’s underappreciated legacy.

Yet rereading The Homosexual in America, one realizes that this is a good moment to revisit its prophetic element. The fullest biography of Sagarin that we have is the above-­mentioned sketch, first published in 1997 in The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, now reissued in The Martin Duberman Reader: The Essential Historical, Biographical, and Autobiographical Writings. This collection spans Duberman’s career as an essayist, memoirist, playwright, historian of abolition and

A photo of Edward Sagarin—the real identity of pseudonymous author Donald Webster Cory— accompanied his 1974 novel Flake of Snow.

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gay radicalism, and provocative public intellectual based at the City University of New York.

Duberman interviewed Sagarin’s wife and contemporaries, read his correspondence and researched his political activity, and unearthed a welter of evocative details. Sagarin was one of eight children born to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants in Schenectady, New York, in 1913. The family moved to New York City after the early death of his mother, and by the early 1930s, amid the Great Depression and what would be lifelong health issues, he dropped out of City College of New York. He spent a year in France, where he met the writer André Gide, a personal hero whose defense of homosexuality, Corydon, was—with the spelling rearranged— to inspire his pseudonym. Sagarin briefly went to Alabama to be one of the agitators on hand at the trial of the Scottsboro Boys. Later, he found a niche ghostwriting and editing European correspondence for a cosmetics firm, becoming along the way a salesman and an expert on the science of perfume. He married a woman sympathetic to his politics, but he appears to have led, from the beginning, a parallel, sexually active gay life—open enough in gay company but closeted to the world outside.

BY 1948, ALONG WITH countless other

Americans, Sagarin would have been reading the blockbuster report of Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Kinsey’s report was part of a midcentury American explosion of interest and change in sexuality, sexual practice, and gender roles.

Among other topics Kinsey opened up to a wide readership was the question of homosexuality, which the author suggested was natural and common, in both fantasy and practice.

Before the postwar era, no organized gay or lesbian civil-rights groups or associations had existed in the

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 87

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U.S. beyond a tiny, short-lived group in Chicago founded in the 1920s by Henry Gerber, a postal worker who lost his job as a result. Fledgling gay and lesbian enclaves—and cultural and social visibility, especially in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—had emerged and quietly were beginning to thrive in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Gays and lesbians served in large numbers in World War II and were treated with a mixture of contempt and, in some quarters, a surprising degree of acceptance; according to historian Allan Bérubé, military psychiatrists advised top brass on how to accommodate them.

This entente collapsed in the late 1940s, when the federal government became deeply and officially homophobic. The Veterans Administration denied GI Bill benefits to gay veterans. The newly consolidated Defense Department announced that homosexuals and lesbians must be discharged as rapidly as possible from the armed forces. The Senate launched an extensive closed-door investigation in the summer of 1950 that led to the publication of a special report, “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government”— an excerpt of which Cory would include in an appendix to his book.

The Senate report called for the investigation and dismissal of all homosexuals and lesbians. In a phrase that is well known among LGBT historians, the report stated: “One homosexual can pollute a government office.” In the ensuing years, thousands lost their jobs, and many committed suicide. One man who was booted from the State Department shot himself on the street in Washington, D.C., right after he left work.

With The Homosexual in America, Cory offered an intellectual response to the government’s mailed fist—to the climate that fostered lurid speculations in the halls of Congress that homosexuals were likely to be Communists (and vice versa), and to stepped-up police raids on gay and lesbian bars. In his preface, Cory explained that it was time for someone who was homosexual to write about what it was like to be homosexual in America.

Cory opened the book by declaring

that “minority rights” are the “challenge of this century … the corner stone upon which democracy must build and flourish, or perish in the decades to come.” Homosexuals were, he claimed, a “group without a spokesman, without a leader, without a publication, without an organization, without a philosophy of life, without an accepted justification for its own existence.” This was incorrect; the groundbreaking homophile organization the Mattachine Society had recently been founded in Los Angeles by Harry Hay. But Cory clearly thought that he was providing a manifesto.

Cory identified—and then dismantled—the primary justifications for homophobia, all of which are cited by those who still oppose gay rights. Same-sex attraction is contrary to nature (if that’s true, then why has it always existed?); condemnation is essential for a strong society (the strongest society is one unafraid of basic social facts); civilization will fail to reproduce itself if it encourages homosexuality (the demographic explosion of the 20th century suggests that civilization is safe); and homosexuals are moral outlaws (“Much of the sordid character of the lives of some homosexuals is due to the social attitudes of which they are the victims,” Cory writes. “The dominant group creates a vicious circle, in which inequality is forced upon a minority, and the conditions resulting from inequality are then cited as justification of the unequal status”).

This idea of a vicious circle is the first of Cory’s insights that raise the book to the level of democratic theory. He identifies a social cage for gays, one built on straight supremacy (though he does not use that term) and on stereotype-­ confirming dominance. Cory’s second insight is that gays have established their own social institutions and practices—house parties, bars, drag balls—that provide informal, largely hidden safe havens in a hostile world.

The subtext is clear and startling: America is a kind of straight police state, with an underground resistance.

His chapter “The Society We Envisage” leads off with the question “What does the homosexual want?”

The problem, Cory says, is that the

THE HOMOSEXUAL IN AMERICA: A SUBJECTIVE APPROACH

BY DONALD WEBSTER CORY

Greenberg

THE MARTIN DUBERMAN READER: THE ESSENTIAL HISTORICAL, BIOGRAPHICAL, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS

BY MARTIN DUBERMAN

The New Press

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question has no answer because no freedom of political expression exists for gays, and gays have no institutional contexts in which to resolve their inevitable differences about what to do. Citing a proverbial sociologist’s quip that there are no minority problems, only majority problems, Cory points more than once in his book to the all-encompassing, suffocating nature of homophobia (a term that would not be invented until the late 1960s). If gays speak out or identify themselves, they pay steep personal costs, including blacklisting in the labor market. Most straights have no interest in changing the status quo. It is all too possible for gay men to pass as straight: “The inherent tragedy— not the saving grace—of homosexuality is found in the ease of concealment.

If the homosexual were as readily recognizable as are members of … other minority groups, the social condemnation could not possibly exist … our achievements in society and our contributions … would become wellknown, and not merely the arsenal of argument in the knowledge of a few.”

The solution was as simple as it was difficult. Gay men and women would have to speak for themselves.

Break the societal hush. Continue to talk freely and talk yet more after the silence is broken. Social change through discussion would transform the civic status of homosexuals.

More than that, it would enlighten all of society. This general public enlightenment would paradoxically take place in private lives: If “sexual freedom” truly existed, the intimate lives of heterosexuals would become far more open as well. Here it takes an effort to realize that in 1951 some of what heterosexual couples do, like oral and anal sex, was illegal (though it is quite doubtful that the law deterred anybody).

Particularly interesting is Cory’s insistence that if the social silence were broken, then American democracy would no longer be crippled by its unwitting resemblance to fascism and totalitarianism. “At this moment in history, when the forces of totalitarianism seek to extend the conspiracy of silence and the distortions of truth to all phases of life—to science

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 89

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and politics and human relations— the homosexuals … are seeking to extend freedom of the individual, of speech, press, and thought to an entirely new realm.”

Cory’s discussion of gay emancipation in the Cold War context was, for its time, breathtaking. America’s political, military, and national-­security elites had taken the position that homosexuality was liberal democracy’s weak link. Without evidence, they argued that gay men and women in public service were security risks, in government or in defense-related manufacturing, because they were subject to blackmail.

Cory held that liberal democracy would be made safer if the coils of organized homophobia were unwound. Public debate would recognize that minorities and inassimilable differences are “a pillar of democratic strength. … No force will be able to weave these groups into a single totalitarian unity which is the unanimity of the graveyard.” Here Cory joins earlier prophets of cultural pluralism, such as Horace Kallen, and anticipates later theorists of multiculturalism, such as Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, and Will Kymlicka.

BEWARE : READING CORY is not, alas,

like reading a gay Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine. A lot of The Homosexual in America reads like a clunky version of a pop sociologist like Charles Murray, with references to “typical” figures who only have first names, such as Steve or Bernard. Scenes— such as party conversations—are recreated with cloying dialogue, in a corny “Inside Gay America” style. Cory has nothing to say about lesbians in the 1951 book and wrestles awkwardly with the question of how psychology explains homosexuality. Despite his view that psychiatry ought to foster self-acceptance instead of a cure, he accepts the determinist 1950s belief that an upbringing in a dysfunctional family causes homosexuality. Here is the seed of a different Cory—and ultimately, perhaps, of Edward Sagarin’s alliance with more conservative psychologists in the 1970s.

The book was issued by the small publisher Greenberg. Sales figures

and reviews are hard to come by, but its reception briefly led Sagarin to operate a gay-themed book club that may have helped build early connections in the movement. Cory received letters of appreciation from around the country. The African American magazine Jet, then just recently established, scoffed at the book. Norman Mailer, who reflected on his reaction for a homophile magazine in 1954, wrote that it was “hardly a great book” but “I can think of few books which cut so radically at my prejudices and altered my ideas so profoundly.” Cory approached Alfred Kinsey for a foreword—a fascinating fact unearthed by the Canadian historian of psychology Henry Minton.

Kinsey “enthusiastically approved” of Cory’s work but declined the offer, perhaps figuring that he already had enough controversy on his hands.

Most important, nearly all the early homophile leaders are known to have read and been influenced by it.

As Cory, Sagarin followed up with a 1953 edited anthology, 21 Variations on a Theme, gathering fiction with gay and lesbian overtones by authors from Stefan Zweig to Sherwood Anderson. His later attempts at pop-expert social commentary never again struck the same nerve as The Homosexual in America. Professionally, meanwhile, he moved from perfume into a belated, prolific career in academic sociology, specializing in criminology, stigma, and deviance. On homosexuality, his views had begun to change. As an activist in the early 1960s, he tried and failed to guide the New York Mattachine Society toward an empathetic but conservative view that homosexuality is, whatever one wishes, not normal.

In 1966, under his own name, he completed a dissertation about the group’s New York chapter. Yet he used it to settle political scores with factional opponents who were committed to openly pressuring elected officials for better treatment. By the early 1970s, as the gay-rights movement was heading in a liberationist, assertive direction inspired by the symbolism of the Stonewall Rebellion, Sagarin had burned many bridges.

One can only speculate about the

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antagonisms. The psychologist who ended up writing the foreword to the 1951 edition of The Homosexual in America was Albert Ellis, the soonto-be behavioral-therapy pioneer.

Known for his liberal views on sex, he was nonetheless then still committed to the proposition that homosexuality required therapy; later, Ellis famously changed his mind, but Duberman thinks Sagarin may have been a patient. Sagarin’s midlife metamorphosis into a credentialed expert may also have contributed to his estrangement from the cause of gay rights. In 1973, he wrote an essay for an academic journal denouncing the idea that gay men and women are healthy and asserting that they needed a “cure” because it is better to be heterosexual. By the late 1970s, he took same-sex orientation to be a “perversion of the instinctual drives” and recommended therapy. He died of a heart attack in 1986 at the age of 73.

In light of this history, one can see

Members of the Mattachine Society stage a “sip-in” at Julius’s Bar in 1966, protesting New York liquor laws that barred service to gay customers.

another irony, which has to do with Frank Kameny and his relationship to Cory’s book. By the early 1960s, Kameny the emerging gay-rights leader clashed with an increasingly behind-the-times Cory. In his history of the movement, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, John D’Emilio quotes Kameny’s harsh letter: “You have become no longer the vigorous Father of the Homophile Movement, to be revered, respected, and listened to, but the senile Grandfather of the Homophile Movement, to be humored and tolerated at best; to be ignored and disregarded usually; and to be ridiculed at worst.” Kameny nonetheless remembered Cory’s book as an important and essential text, which had helped to give him the courage that he showed later as an activist.

Late in his life, Kameny was asked fancifully by an LGBT blog editor what favorite books he might have taken with him to the moon. Kameny replied that he would have taken two

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written works: the Declaration of Independence and Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America.

Even as Cory/ Sagarin embraced the “adjust your sick self” model of homosexual identity, Kameny identified this model as needing to be smashed. He set about doing just that. He organized disruptions at meetings of the American Psychiatric Association and called for striking homosexuality as a disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the manual. A line runs through history, via Kameny, from Cory’s 1951 book to this 1973 decision.

The moral of the story is that before protest and response came political thought: someone saying something new, in the face of heightened repression, about gays as a minority, and connecting their fate to that of American democracy. The first gay protests broke out into the open in Washington, D.C., and in Philadelphia in 1965, with pickets in front of the White House and the Civil Service Commission and in Independence Park. Conservatively dressed men and women carried signs challenging the federal government’s exclusions. It was precisely these prohibitions—in the military or on any civil-service or private-­sector job requiring a national-­security clearance—that Cory had denounced in 1951. Cory had made himself marginal to the struggle. But the people who launched this brave public fight were well versed in his most liberated book. 

SEP/OCT 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 91

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Can Republicans Buck the Tea Party?

BY ABBY RAPOPORT

S

ince the Tea Party emerged in response to President Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, Republican governors have frequently been the faces of some of the most extreme policies in recent political memory. Even before her infamous “finger point” at the president, Arizona’s Jan Brewer was signing and defending her state’s racial-­profiling bill, SB 1070. In Ohio, John Kasich championed a law—later repealed by voters—to strip public employees of bargaining rights.

In Florida, Rick Scott has pushed a plethora of hard-right policies, from drug screening of welfare recipients and government employees to reductions in early voting. Michigan’s Rick Snyder, who has a moderate streak, went to the extreme last December when he approved “right to work” legislation in a state built largely by union labor.

Yet Brewer, Kasich, Snyder, and Scott are among the nine GOP governors who have staked considerable political capital on Medicaid expansion, a key piece of the Affordable Care Act. They haven’t been quiet about it, either. Brewer made good on a threat to veto every piece of legislation that came before her until lawmakers sent her a bill to expand Medicaid. Snyder rankled his party when he told recalcitrant Republican state senators to “take a vote, not a vacation.”

Scott was among the first Republicans to announce his support for

expansion. Kasich, struggling to win support from his party’s lawmakers, has vowed to find a way to expand Medicaid even if they won’t.

By championing Medicaid expansion, these governors are defying the Tea Party, which was instrumental in their elections and which loathes the ACA as the emblem of Obama’s big-­ government liberalism. Such defiance has been exceedingly rare from Republican officeholders on any level since the Tea Party revolution of 2010. That election transformed state legislatures and governors’ mansions—in many cases overnight—into ideological strongholds. Increasingly, the policy priorities of national rightwing groups like ALEC and Americans United for Life began to take precedence over state-­specific agendas, and bipartisanship disappeared from state capitols almost as thoroughly as it has Congress. “The broader pathologies of our politics have clearly moved to the state level,” says Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

But Kasich, Snyder, and Scott govern states that Obama has won twice. They have all struggled with low approval ratings and polarized the electorate with their far-right policies. They all face tough battles for re-election in 2014. By backing Medicaid, they were guaranteed to inspire Tea Party wrath. By opposing it, they would deny health coverage to huge numbers of low-income

residents, shut the door on billions in federal funding, and risk further alienating voters.

“Republican governors are caught in a tug-of-war between arithmetic and ideology,” says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “For some of them, ideology wins, and for others, who are looking to their self-interest and the interests of their state at least in the short to medium term, they have done a very simple calculation and that is that the Medicaid expansion is a good deal for their states.”

Medicaid expansion is a good deal for every state. For the first three years, the federal government will pick up 100 percent of the cost for new recipients. After that, states will never pay more than 10 percent of the costs of expanded coverage; the rest of the bill goes to Washington. In Ohio alone, more than 500,000 people would gain access to coverage. With more people covered, of course, the costs to states of uncompensated care will drop.

In June, a report from the Rand Corporation found that the first 14 states that opted out of expanding Medicaid will have 3.6 million more uninsured residents, lose $8.4 billion a year in federal payments, and pay an additional $1 billion in uncompensated care in 2016.

The arithmetic hasn’t been enough to convince most Republican governors to back Medicaid.

Sixteen of the 30 oppose expansion, including the chief executive of another state Obama won twice,

Wisconsin’s Scott Walker. Four other GOP governors, as of early September, had yet to venture a position. Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett is emblematic of the dilemma facing unpopular Republicans in swing states: After announcing that the state would reject federal funds, he changed his mind, supporting Medicaid expansion if the federal government agreed to certain concessions. The issue remains unresolved. Both Corbett and Walker are up for re-election in 2014. Walker is a strong favorite, thanks to weak and divided opposition following Wisconsin Democrats’ failed attempt to recall him. But Corbett is one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the country. He has stuck to the Tea Party agenda on everything from voter ID to welfare cuts, and wherever he winds up on Medicaid, he’s likely to lose.

That a minority of Republican governors has backed Medicaid expansion does not add up to a major shift in the political dynamic. But it could be significant, depending on the outcome of the 2014 elections. If a governor like Scott or Kasich can manage to win re-election even after infuriating his right-wing base on a key issue, it will send a couple of important messages to other Republicans, at least those in purple states: Yes, the Tea Party can be bucked.

And no, making policy based on the needs of your state does not amount to certain political death.

It might even save you from it. 

VOLUME 24, NUMBER 5. 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.

92 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG SEP/OCT 2013

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Reclaiming the Promise

I

f there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that it is as important to heed the wisdom and experience of our elders as it is to draw on the passion and truthfulness of the young. The only man to speak at the 1963 March on Washington as well as at the recent commemoration of that march embodies both. John Lewis, now a member of Congress, was the youngest speaker at the march 50 years ago. He decried the poverty that imprisoned the economically oppressed; the persecution of peaceful protesters; and the agony of slow, insufficient change. “Wake up, America!” he implored. A half century later, America is out of its slumber, and Lewis is an elder statesman of the civil rights movement but still fiery, warning that “We must never, ever give up.”

Asean Johnson, the youngest speaker to address the march 50 years later, is heeding that call. Asean, a 9-year-old veteran of marches to fight school closures, asked the hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall to help fight the drastic education cuts, mass layoffs of school staff, and closures of neighborhood schools that are robbing students of the education they need and deserve—in his hometown of Chicago and throughout the country.

Asean called on people to “Help us fight for freedom, racial equality, jobs and public education.” This young man gets it: All these things are connected.

I was honored to be with both Asean and Rep. Lewis as we participated in the commemorations of that great march demanding justice and opportunity for all Americans. In my remarks, I said that while we have become a country that believes in equality, we must become a country that acts on that belief.

And so, while the commemorations of the March on Washington are behind us, the work to achieve its goals is before us.

We have so far to go. Children born poor today are likely to stay poor. The public schools where kids need the most of-

ten get the least. Austerity hawks, privatizers and profiteers are undermining public schools and doing a great injustice to the students who attend them.

The growing economic unfairness in our country and widespread loss of good jobs that pay living wages are further destabilizing families, communities and the econ-

past, but as it can be to fulfill our collective responsibility to help all children succeed. This means creating safe and welcoming environments; supporting great neighborhood schools; freeing teachers to teach, not just test; and ensuring access to art, music and other offerings that enrich and engage, and to the wraparound servic-

Weingarten with Asean Johnson and Rep. John Lewis.

Photo: Marcus Mrowka

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

omy. Collective bargaining rights for workers are under assault, and all Americans are paying a steep price. Millions of Americans work hard every day but can’t earn a living wage. The percentage of mid-wage jobs lost during the recession is roughly the same as the low-wage positions created during the recovery, about 60 percent.

Leaders of the 1963 march understood that the struggle for civil rights and racial equality is a struggle for good jobs and decent wages. And they understood, as we do today, that public education is an economic necessity, an anchor of democracy and a fundamental right.

We must reclaim the promise of public education—not as it is today or was in the

We have become a country that believes in equality; we must become a country that acts on that belief.

es that address students’ social, health and emotional needs.

And we must keep fighting the income inequality and economic immobility that not only hurt workers and families but also undermine the kind of country we are becoming.

As Rep. John Lewis said 50 years ago, America must wake up to the challenges and injustices around us. Marchers a half century ago ushered in monumental changes despite tremendous obstacles, and many in a new generation are picking up their mantle. So too must we.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten