The American Prospect

Hillary Clinton’s Agenda State of the Parties Donald Trump’s Constitution Paul Starr

Harold Meyerson

Robert kuttner

liberal intelligence

Summer 2016

Political Awakenings The Fight for Decent Wages Nick Hanauer Steven Greenhouse David Howell

The Immigrant Vote Karthick Ramakrishnan Eliza Newlin Carney Nathalie Baptiste

We’re Taking on Wall Street for Working Families Big money in politics is corrupting our democracy. Big Money and greed on Wall Street has rigged our economy against working people who play by the rules.

Unions, financial reform groups, consumer and public interest activists are working together to restore some balance to our economy. With allies like Senator Elizabeth Warren we can end taxpayer subsidization of runaway Wall Street greed and make Wall Street pay its fair share.

TakeonWallStreet.org

Communications Workers of America

contents

volume 27, number 3 Summer 2016

5 prospects Donald Trump’s Constitution by Robert Kuttner

notebook 9 Meanwhile, Back on Most Campuses by Eyal Press 11 Papa’s Not a Rolling Stone: Low-Income Men and their Children by Natasha J. Cabrera and Ron Mincy 14 Solar Eclipse? by Joan Fitzgerald

Features 18 What Is Hillary Clinton’s Agenda? by Paul Starr 24 The First Post-Middle-Class Election by Harold Meyerson 28 Blue Cities, Red States by abby Rapoport 34 special report: The New Labor Economy 35 Confronting the Parasite Economy by Nick Hanauer 41 On Demand, and Demanding Their Rights by Steven Greenhouse 48 Reframing the Minimum-Wage Debate by David R. Howell 53 The Subtle Force of Tom Perez by Justin Miller 62 special report: The Immigrant Factor 63 How Asian Americans Became Democrats by Karthick Ramakrishnan 68 Is This the Year of the Latino Voter? by Eliza Newlin Carney 72 Don’t Assume Trump’s Bias is Mere Bluster by Sasha Abramsky 76 Arizona’s Blue Horizons by Nathalie Baptiste 80 How “They” Become “We” by Michael Fix 82 Trump and the Racial Politics of the South by Kevin O’Leary 88 A Just Transition for U.S. Fossil Fuel Industry Workers by Robert Pollin and Brian Callaci 94 Liberal Governor, Divided Government by Rachel M. Cohen 98 Sidebar Philly’s New Mayor by Jake Blumgart

culture 103 When Liberalism Came Apart by Julian E. Zelizer 106 Swept Away in the Sixties by Todd Gitlin 108 How America Grew—And Grew Unequal by Eric Rauchway 111 Using American Power Prudently by Lawrence Korb Cover photo by Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call via AP Images

1

from the Editors

co-editors Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr co-founder Robert B. Reich Executive editor Harold Meyerson Senior Editor Eliza Newlin Carney Deputy Editor Gabrielle Gurley art director Mary Parsons managing editor Amanda Teuscher associate Editor Sam Ross-Brown Writing Fellows Nathalie Baptiste, Rachel M. Cohen, Justin Miller proofreader susanna Beiser

W

editorial interns Jennifer Baik, Mariam Baksh, Branko Marcetic

e are thrilled to announce the appointment of a new publisher of the Prospect. She is Amy Marshall Lambrecht, a Prospect alum who served as our vice president for development more than a decade ago.

Amy brings to this position extensive experience in nonprofit advocacy organizations, having spent over 25 years at the Scholars Strategy Network, the Advancement Project, the Washington Monthly, Campaign for America’s Future, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute, as well as the Prospect.

Lambrecht Four years ago, we had to turn to our readers in a campaign to Save the Prospect. A year ago, the magazine celebrated our 25th anniversary—back in sound financial shape. As we continue our mission of publishing articles that define a decent society, Amy will help assure that we thrive as a strong institution.

contributing editors Marcia Angell, Gabriel Arana, Jamelle Bouie, Alan Brinkley, Jonathan Cohn, Ann Crittenden, Garrett Epps, Jeff Faux, Michelle Goldberg, Gershom Gorenberg, E.J. Graff, Bob Herbert, Arlie Hochschild, Christopher Jencks, Randall Kennedy, Bob Moser, Karen Paget, Sarah Posner, Jedediah Purdy, Robert D. Putnam, Richard Rothstein, Adele M. Stan, Deborah A. Stone, Michael Tomasky, Paul Waldman, William Julius Wilson, Matthew Yglesias

In this issue, we are featuring three clusters of path-breaking pieces. The two found-

Publisher Amy Marshall Lambrecht

2 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

Director of Business Operations Ed Connors Development Manager Annie Diner tom williams / cq roll c all via ap images

ing editors, Bob Kuttner and Paul Starr, joined by executive editor Harold Meyerson, assess the election and the stakes. Never in our political lifetime, not since the election of 1860, has there been a more fateful election for the American Republic. These articles ask the questions: What will Hillary Clinton try to accomplish? How would Donald Trump stretch the Constitution? Will the two parties suffer fragmentation, or muster unity—and on behalf of what?

We also have a package of pieces on the role of immigrants and the children of immigrants in this election—the threats they face, and their potential for mobilization. Not only is this year’s story about voter suppression and rising Hispanic engagement; it turns out that Asian Americans, both east Asian and south Asian, have shifted in the direction of the Democrats and progressive values to an unprecedented degree, a trend that predates Donald Trump’s demonization of Muslims.

A third group of articles continues our ongoing coverage of the issue of wages in the economy—the shifts in the structure of labor markets and management tactics, which produce new insecurity for workers, but also produce heartening political response.

Depressed wages and depressed life chances are now a center-stage political issue.

These pieces advance our understanding of both the economics and the politics.

Digital Engagement intern Isaac Park

Publishing assistant Stephen Whiteside board of directors Michael Stern (Chair), Sarah Fitzrandolph Brown, Lindsey Franklin, Jacob Hacker, Stephen Heintz, Robert Kuttner, Mario Lugay, Miles Rapoport, Janet Shenk, Adele Simmons, William Spriggs, Paul Starr Fulfillment Palm Coast Data subscription customer service 1-888-MUST-READ (1-888-687-8732) subscription rates $19.95 (U.S.), $29.95 (Canada), and $34.95 (other International) reprints permissions@prospect.org

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Prospects

Donald Trump’s Constitution

by Robert Kuttner

I

n 1952, contemplating Dwight D. Eisenhower as the next president, Harry Truman famously remarked, “He’ll sit there and he’ll say ‘Do this! Do that!’ and nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the army.” The comment reflected President Truman’s frustration with a balky bureaucracy and rival political power centers.

Since Truman, the presidency has only grown stronger. We’ve had three bouts of serious presidential overreach under Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney regime, and some nasty forays under Ronald Reagan. In each case, democracy recoiled and recovered, yet the imperial presidency keeps expanding.

In his prescient 2010 book, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman warned of what he called the “structural extremism” of the modern presidency, which invited “presidential lawlessness.” He urged his readers not to be reassured by Barack Obama’s moderation after Bush and Cheney. He added, eerily, “The next insurgent president may not possess the same sense of constitutional restraint.”

Donald Trump was nowhere on the political horizon when Ackerman wrote. But burgeoning executive power was a constitutional catastrophe waiting to happen— awaiting the right political moment and the right Caesarist leader.

An imperial presidency is only half of the story. As the executive branch has grown stronger,

countervailing democracy has grown weaker. Faith in government has declined, as has voting participation. Republicans have deliberately curtailed the right to vote.

The Supreme Court has never been more partisan. All our institutions of government have lost legitimacy, even the courts and the military, not to mention Congress.

Paradoxically, in a period of bitter partisan divide, separation of powers has worked all too well.

Despite the immense power of the presidency, government has been stymied in the face of pressing national problems, deepening popular loss of confidence in democracy itself. The cynical Republican strategy of blockage has strengthened the Republican story that government is a hopeless mess.

All of this set the stage for Donald Trump as candidate. But what would he do as president?

Trump has already sent alarming signals. He would punish the press. He would find ways to settle scores with judges. He would use the power of mobs to intimidate opponents. He would attack the business interests of critics. All of this points to a personalist presidency, contemptuous of constitutional restraints.

Some of the commentary on the limits of a President Trump’s power has been surprisingly sanguine. University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, in an October 23, 2015, Slate op-ed, summarized—and largely dismissed—charges of executive excess going back to George Washington. Posner concluded:

[T]he U.S. political system has not produced any dictators, ever; at some point, our own experience needs to trump [sic!] fears based on events in foreign countries and the distant past. Economic stagnation, foreign threats, and environmental degradation have created anxious times, and in times of anxiety people look to the

Gridlock, however, is legislative. A look at the executive tactics available to a Trump suggests the potential for mischief. The Constitution is only a document.

It has survived despite bouts of excess because even our most reckless leaders have respected its basic norms. Nixon, Johnson, and Cheney were paragons of constitutional restraint compared with Donald Trump.

The growth of unrestrained executive power has been tyranny waiting to happen. government. The real source of anxiety is not presidential aggrandizement—that’s the solution [emphasis added].

The real source of anxiety is the inability of an even very powerful president to solve any of these problems.

This seems profoundly wrong when one imagines a President Trump. Many people, in fact, are not looking to government; they are disgusted with government.

Hence the appeal of a Caesar.

The New York Times, in a May 21 news feature, was also blasé.

Writer Nelson Schwartz observed that many of Trump’s proposals, from massively cutting taxes to repealing the Affordable Care Act, would take legislation: “However stupendous Mr. Trump’s dealmaking skills may be, the forces of gridlock in the nation’s capital are no less awesome.”

Mix the worst excesses under Nixon et al., throw in J. Edgar Hoover and the Red Squads, Southern sheriffs winking at mobs, add the digitized nationalsecurity state, blend with Trump’s own personal malice, and you get a sense of the brew. Here are some particulars.

Absolute Loyalty to the Boss.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, trying to limit the damage of Trump’s attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, explained that Trump would be constrained by the White House counsel. But dictators surround themselves with loyalists. Business tycoons famously look for lawyers to rationalize doing what they want, not to tell them why they can’t do it.

Cheney and Bush got legal cover to justify warrantless surveillance and torture, both clearly prohibited by law, from a toadying Office of Legal Counsel, with

summer 2016 The American Prospect 5

Prospects

preposterous opinions by Jay Bybee and John Yoo. Trump’s counsels would be even more supine—or they’d be fired. His lawyers would be about as independent as Vladimir Putin’s.

Each of the recent hubristic presidencies still had rival power centers as sources of restraint. Lyndon Johnson, despite his role as commander in chief and overwhelming mandate in the 1964 election, had the Fulbright hearings to reckon with. By 1967, his own defense secretary, Robert McNamara, was challenging his escalation of the Vietnam War; by 1968, Johnson abdicated, wracked by self-doubt.

Does Trump do self-doubt?

Nixon created his own “Plumbers” unit because he could not get the FBI and CIA to do his bidding.

The FBI was appalled by Nixon, and was leaking to The Washington Post. Though he fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, Nixon submitted to the authority of

legislative battles over the budget, tax policy, the Affordable Care Act, and so on—but virtually no congressional investigation of executive excess. Republicans have already been all too willing to sacrifice democracy in pursuit of partisan and ideological goals.

ICE as a Gestapo for the Foreign-Born. Most of the overreach

that undid recent presidents was lawless. Cheney and Bush broke the law in their moves to expand NSA spying. Nixon illegally created the Plumbers unit, and doubled down with the cover-up. Much of Trump’s likely excess would be lawful. Consider U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A president has immense discretion over how to enforce immigration laws (see “Don’t Assume Trump’s Bias Is Mere Bluster,” by Sasha Abramsky, page 72). A President Trump could direct immigration officials not just to bar foreign Muslims as security risks,

commissioners, Randolph Thrower, Johnnie Walters, and Donald Alexander, who refused to bend.

I know this story well because it was the subject of my first investigative piece for a national magazine (“The Taxing Trials of IRS,” The New York Times Magazine, 1974). The system held, and Nixon backed off. His effort to misuse the IRS became one of the high crimes in the Articles of Impeachment.

Trump would not make the same mistake. The IRS has immense discretionary power over whom to audit. It would take a brave IRS commissioner to resist a call from the White House, and Trump’s commissioner would be a faithful crony.

The IRS could also go after 501(c)3 groups. There was a scandal in 2013, when mid-level IRS officials used heavy-handed criteria in reviewing applications for tax-exempt status. The career official in charge of the tax-exempt

Imagine Donald Trump’s Justice Department prosecutors, IRS, NSA,and immigration authorities on presidential fishing expeditions. the courts and Congress. Once the White House tapes were disclosed, he meekly turned them over. Such was the outcry over the 18-minute gap in one tape that Nixon never again tried destroying evidence. What would Trump do in such circumstances?

Partisan Control of All Three Branches. Much of the Watergate

scandal was exposed by congressional hearings armed with subpoenas. Under Reagan, likewise, a Democratic Congress helped unearth the Iran-Contra affair.

But if Trump wins the election, he would almost surely have a Republican Congress—plus at least two appointees to the Supreme Court.

The ease with which the Republican establishment endorsed Trump suggests that Republicans would be mainly his enablers. There would be

6 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

but to aggressively deport undocumented migrants living here.

He could also go after authorized immigrants and even citizens who seek to protect their families, for the felony of committing conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens.

Even under Obama, detention and expedited deportation policies have violated norms of due process, but the courts have not intervened.

If Trump’s goal is to demonize immigrants, especially Hispanics and Muslims, and to destroy their communities, he would not have to break the law to do it.

Politicizing the IRS. In 1973, Nixon clumsily attempted to use the Internal Revenue Service to punish political adversaries on his famous Enemies List. He ran into the professionalism of three successive Republican IRS

office, Lois Lerner, was forced to take early retirement.

These missteps, however, were bureaucratic. A Trump IRS commissioner bent on destroying progressive groups could revise the standards on what counts as impermissible political activity.

Much of the American progressive movement is organized as 501(c)3 groups (which may not engage in politics) in order to receive taxdeductible grants and gifts.

The IRS, as a politicized hit squad, could also intimidate the foundations that finance progressive infrastructure and threaten their tax-exempt status. The IRS could even-handedly go after rightwing nonprofits. Their tax-exempt status matters less, because the far right has so much more money that its donors don’t need the tax

deductions. This would be another perfectly legal witch hunt.

Under Reagan, right-wing groups sponsored a strategy called Defund the Left. The idea was to deny progressive groups direct and indirect support from government. The Reagan administration partly succeeded in killing grants from agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and anti-poverty programs that sometimes went to advocacy groups; and the right’s demonizing of “trial lawyers” drastically cut back class-action suits. But if you search “de-fund the left” you will find articles in conservative journals expressing disappointment that the tactic did not realize its promise. Trump could easily pick up where Reagan left off—perfectly legal. Consider the Republican effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood, times ten.

Prosecutorial Discretion. The use of selective prosecutions to insulate allies and punish enemies has grown in recent years. As Alec MacGillis recounted in a brilliant piece for The New Republic, Chris Christie, while U.S. attorney for New Jersey, built his power base in a famously corrupt state by selectively prosecuting enemies and sparing corrupt players whom he was courting as allies. Selective criminal prosecution has been endemic in the financial collapse. Prosecutors targeted a few small fry but never the top executives, whose fraudulent strategies crashed the economy.

Before the suicide of internet activist and programming prodigy Aaron Swartz, who improperly downloaded millions of articles from the academic database JSTOR , prosecutors threw the book at him. As Emily Bazelon has pointed out, they sought to use his case to scare other hackers, charging Swartz with violation of the notoriously broad Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which provides prison terms of up to 35 years. Imagine how a Trump Justice Department on a fishing expedition might use that law.

Prospects

Presidential Regulatory and Executive Power. There was a

time when executive-branch commissions were known as “independent regulatory agencies.” But more and more, these have been brought under White House control. Since Reagan, the issuance of regulations by quasi-independent agencies such as the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration has required the review and approval of a little-known White House agency, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. OIRA has the power to stop regulations cold.

Trump has promised to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act. That would take an act of Congress, but would not be necessary. He’d need only to appoint stooges to several key Treasury positions, or repeal existing regulations and not write new ones. The same is true of a broad swath of environmental, civilrights, and labor regulation, not to mention rights of immigrants.

Recent executive actions have belatedly enforced worker rights, such as overtime pay and increased protections against wage theft. The Labor Department has moved to protect collective-bargaining rights. All this could be swept away. Simply denying funding to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the source of much of the raw data documenting income inequality, would undermine much of that debate. If you want to deny climate change, just de-fund the science—or put the deniers in charge.

Trump and the Labor Movement. Presumably, Trump would

use his Labor Department to further weaken the trade union movement, a mainstay of progressive Democratic politics. Labor is very vulnerable. Only the timely death of Justice Antonin Scalia spared public-employee unions from a near-certain ruling undercutting their ability to collect dues.

But Trump would likely be craftier than that. As one senior labor leader points out, fascist and quasifascist leaders engage labor with a mix of repression and co-optation.

Trump has courted working-class voters with tough talk on trade.

He has also spoken of the need to rebuild decaying infrastructure.

Trump could reach out to such relatively conservative unions as police, fire, and building trades with a blend of carrots and sticks.

He could try to enlist industrial unions such as the Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers that are most threatened by trade, and ask for their explicit support. Then he could concentrate his fire on left unions like the Service Employees International Union, which has a heavily black and Latino membership. His white working-class bona fides would be strengthened—and the labor movement’s alliance with the Democratic Party sundered.

The Use of Mobs. Fascist movements and leaders rely on the intimidating power of mobs.

Trump has given us a preview of his taste for these tactics by egging on thugs at his rallies to beat up protesters. For the most part, we’ve avoided this in the U.S., exceptions being the use by Southern racist sheriffs of “deputies” and lynch mobs to help intimidate and murder blacks, and the Wilson administration’s use of vigilantes against pacifists during World War I. One recent exception was the white-collar mob of congressional staffers hastily organized by the George W. Bush campaign to descend on Florida and create a phony mass movement to dissuade local election officials from recounts. A Trump presidency would not be shy about enlisting the worst (armed) bullies in America to intimidate opponents and to create incidents that would then require intervention of police.

National Security Emergencies and Subversives. The mas-

sacre in Orlando makes clear that we can expect more attacks. The Snowden revelations disclosed the reach of our burgeoning surveillance state. After the attacks of September 11, the USA Patriot Act, a grab bag of accumulated wish lists by cops, spy agencies, and prosecutors seeking shortcuts,

was rushed through Congress with hardly any scrutiny or dissent. It is not hard to imagine Trump using the next nationalsecurity crisis (or creating it) to intensify invasions of privacy.

A Trump administration could seek—and get—new emergency powers. Those in turn would make it easier for the government to round up those deemed security risks, for speech as well as for acts.

Anyone a few degrees of separation from a foreigner deemed a possible terrorist would be fair game. The NSA knows just about anything it wants to know. It has been guilty of abuses, but they are minor compared with what is technically possible.

Playing Favorites and Enemies with the Press. Watergate

intervened before Nixon could fully implement the strategy of using the power of government to harass and destroy enemies. When informed of what The Washington Post had on him, then–Attorney General John Mitchell warned— on the record—that publisher “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer.” But Mitchell himself was in jail before he could deliver. Trump’s threats against the Post suggest how he could proceed. It’s not hard to imagine Trump directing his Federal Trade Commission chair or antitrust chief to create problems for current Post publisher (and Amazon chief) Jeff Bezos.

Trump could easily pick favorites and deny access to media considered unfriendly, as he has already done in the campaign. Even in the era of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, the Post and The New York Times had full press privileges.

But these are unwritten norms, not constitutional guarantees.

Trump as Commander in Chief.

The president also heads the armed forces. He has the power to federalize the National Guard. He can send Americans into combat.

We are already close to an Or-

wellian state of quasi-permanent warfare. The War on Terror, the

Patriot Act, and the surveillance state have become all too bipartisan and normal.

America has been very lucky that three of our greatest wartime presidents were paragons of restraint. George Washington could have been king, but he chose to cast his lot with a republic, to put a broad spectrum of Federalists and anti-Federalists into his cabinet, and to step down after two terms. There were calls for Franklin Roosevelt to assume dictatorial authority, but for the most part he did not ask for or use emergency powers. His appalling decision to round up loyal Japanese Americans into concentration camps was the exception. Lincoln, as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, deliberately named rivals to his cabinet, who served as checks on his own predispositions. He implemented emergency wartime measures, such as suspension of habeas corpus, sparingly and with reluctance.

Trump would use emergency powers to excess and with relish.

The founders of our republic devised a complex system of checks and balances as a bulwark against tyranny. But much of our liberty depends on the internalized constitutions of our leaders, their respect for democratic norms and their sense of restraint. When that falters, the latent power of the other two branches of government kicks in— but sometimes it doesn’t. A Trump presidency would likely display neither the self-restraint of a Lincoln or a Roosevelt, nor the institutional checks and balances that ultimately brought down Nixon.

America under Trump would have much in common with illiberal, nominal democracies such as Russia, Hungary, or Turkey, where critics are intimidated, an opposition press scarcely exists, civil society is eroded, and elections are rigged to assure that the opposition never gets to govern. It’s no coincidence that Trump admires Putin.

At a time of broad disaffection, do enough of our citizens grasp these risks? We’ll find out all too soon.

summer 2016 The American Prospect 7

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By E ya l P r e s s

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ast September, The Atlantic published a disquieting cover story about the current generation of college students. According to the article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, young people raised by overindulgent parents increasingly come to colleges and universities demanding

protection from ideas that might challenge them. Instead of learning to think critically, students police the air for “microaggressions”—offhand comments that may reinforce stereotypes—and insist that “trigger warnings” be placed on potentially disturbing texts, including classic works of literature such as The Great Gatsby. Entitled, hypersensitive,

quick to take offense: This is the new normal among undergraduates, the article warned, fostering a vindictive atmosphere of political correctness “in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”

Last month, The New Yorker reinforced this impression in a deeply reported piece about undergraduate hypersensitivity at Oberlin. The article depicted the campus as a tense battleground where the free exchange of ideas had completely broken down and ultra-vigilant student activists bristled at everything from discomfiting books on the curriculum to disagreeable murals on the walls. “There’s this persistent, low-grade dehumanization from everyone,” said a student named Cyrus Eosphoros, who had called for trigger warnings on the play Antigone. Some even took issue with the school’s dining vendor, complaining that certain cafeteria dishes (substandard sushi, an inauthentic bánh mì sandwich) were culturally offensive.

It’s a disturbing portrait of a generation of students who seem increasingly disconnected from the real world. But does it describe most undergraduates? This past spring, I had a very different experience while serving as a visiting professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz. I’d been hired to teach an undergraduate journalism seminar that focused on polarizing, divisive subjects: abortion, immigration, Islamophobia, the gun debate, campus rape. Issues likely to touch sensitive nerves, in other words, and to stir considerable discomfort among my students.

Several of the students in my class felt strongly about these issues. A few chose to write term papers that drew on personal experiences as well as on research and interviews they did. But no one in the class seemed uncomfortable talking about them. Nor

did anyone object when I told them that, especially when reporting on issues close to their heart in which they had a personal stake, it was essential to talk to people whose opinions they did not share and to imagine things from multiple points of view, including views that disturbed or repelled them. None of the students called for trigger warnings to be placed on any of the books or articles on the course syllabus, despite the fact that several contained vivid descriptions of abuse and violence.

When students aired criticisms of the readings in class discussions, the objections were about the quality of the work, not the offensiveness of the content.

In addition to teaching a seminar, I visited half a dozen classes in other departments (English, history, international relations) while at New Paltz. On these occasions, too, I did not come away with the impression that the students belonged to a generation that’s been coddled. If anything, the opposite was the case. The undergrads I met did not express a desire to be spared from exposure to disturbing literature. What they did express, over and over again, was a desire to be spared from the financial debt they were accumulating. After one class, I spoke with Martina Nadeau, a junior majoring in political science.

Nadeau had transferred to SUNY New Paltz from American University because going there was too expensive. New Paltz, as a part of the state system, was a lot cheaper, but the cost of room, board, tuition, and other fees still exceeded $20,000 annually. Two and a half years into her education, Nadeau, who grew up in a middleclass family in Long Island (her mother was a nurse, her father a retired carpenter), had $45,000 in unpaid loans. “I’m graduating early,” she said, explaining that she had decided to cram four years of coursework into three and a half.

“And that’s why I’m graduating

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(The firestorm prompted the faculty member to resign.) In December came the story about students at Oberlin protesting culturally insensitive cafeteria food. Both of these stories made national news, deepening the perception that nothing is too trivial to cause liberal college students to take offense nowadays. Even the dining hall fare must be politically correct! Lost in the commotion was the fact that only a small group of extremely privileged students attend institutions like Oberlin and Yale.

Aside from occasional grumbles that the food was expensive, I didn’t hear many students at SUNY New Paltz complain about the dining options on campus. What I did frequently overhear were complaints about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s socalled “rational tuition policy,” a plan unveiled in 2011 that called for regular tuition increases of $300 a year. The policy does not seem rational to many students, and for good reason: Since 2008, the year the Great Recession began to increase the strain on many middle-class families, the cost of a public four-year college in New York has risen by 25.8 percent, while state spending per student has declined by 7 percent. As bad as things are in New York, they’re worse for students attending public universities in other

The Excelsior Concourse, one of the busiest parts of the SUNY New Paltz campus

In March, a throng of New Paltz students marched across campus, carrying bullhorns and a banner that read:

FREEZE TUITION.

states. In Arizona, for example, tuition to attend a four-year state institution has increased by 83.6 percent since 2008, while spending per student has declined by 47 percent. In California, the cost has gone up 62.2 percent.

In March, a throng of New Paltz students walked out of their classes and marched across campus, carrying bullhorns and a banner that read: FREEZE TUITION. Afterward, they flooded Cuomo’s office with phone calls. The protest kicked off “20 days of action,” a campaign launched by New York Students Rising, a statewide organization pushing to defend public education and to raise awareness of how difficult it is becoming for many students to access. Unlike the uproar about cafeteria food at Oberlin, none of this made national news.

Those who bemoan political correctness on college campuses often associate it with a reflexive form of identity politics that is notably blind to one form of privilege: class. But young people at less-rarified institutions seem acutely aware of inequality and class.

Like many of the students I met at New Paltz, Martina Nadeau described herself as a feminist, and said she was paying close attention to the presidential campaign. She was undecided between supporting Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, but is attracted

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early. I literally can’t afford it.”

Nadeau was one of 15 students in a class I’d visited the previous day.

When I asked how many of them would be graduating with debt, 13 of the students raised their hands. If few seemed concerned about microaggressions, it’s perhaps because they were too busy trying to keep up with their coursework while earning money in their limited spare time. The very real aggression they experienced was their financial bind.

Other faculty members at SUNY New Paltz told me that, on occasion, trigger warnings and microaggressions have entered classroom discourse. Yet for most students, the far more pressing preoccupation is paying the bills. A May 15 Pew survey found that 75 percent of Americans 18 years of age and older say college is too expensive for people to afford.

Nadeau worked up to 20 hours a week as a gallery assistant at a local museum to try to defray the costs.

Several students I met at New Paltz were working two or three jobs.

Nadeau had considered doing this, but she wanted to go to law school— where she knows she will accumulate even more debt—and had decided to enhance her resume by interning as a student judicial advocate, a position that was unpaid. When I asked her how she met all these responsibilities while finding time to sleep, she chuckled and told me that, often, she didn’t. The previous night, she’d been up till 5 a.m. It was her 29th all-nighter of the semester, she said.

Far from entitled, the students I met seemed overburdened and financially strapped, members of what Robert Kuttner has aptly termed “the shafted generation” in the pages of this magazine. It’s possible that their experiences and struggles aren’t representative, of course. But this possibility is rarely considered when it comes to students who attend the Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges where the culture wars have grown especially heated of late. Last October, a lecturer sparked an outcry at Yale after writing an email that suggested students should be allowed to wear whatever Halloween costumes they wanted, even if this offended some people.

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to Sanders’s call to make all public colleges and universities tuition-free. On several occasions, I sampled opinion about the campaign in the classes I visited. The students overwhelmingly backed Sanders, irrespective of gender, and nearly always for the same reason Nadeau articulated.

On some campuses, there clearly is a heightened sensitivity to racism and sexism nowadays. At Princeton and Yale, students have pressed for the names of Woodrow Wilson, a blatant racist, and John C. Calhoun, an unrepentant slave-owner, to be removed from buildings. At other schools, this heightened sensitivity has focused on stranger targets. In April, a group of students at Brown protested a performance of Hindu chants by an alum, Carrie Grossman, because she is white. The protesters saw this as an act of cultural appropriation. It fell to Rajan Zed Kirtan, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, to tell Inside Higher Ed the “color of the person should not matter in devotional singing, and anybody should be able to pay respectful homage to Hindu deities.” In all likelihood, the episode will now find its way into articles lambasting the stifling mood of political correctness on campuses and, in this case, the criticism will be deserved.

On some campuses, a dogmatic form of identity politics clearly has taken hold. But what’s too often missing from this picture is the very thing that opponents of political correctness so often decry: a sense of proportion and judgment, and an awareness that what transpires on the radical edges of elite universities is not always an accurate barometer of what’s happening in the wider world.

Even at places like Brown and Oberlin, there are plenty of less-privileged students struggling to make ends meet. Like their peers at state universities and community colleges, these students have genuine grievances that are grounded in reality and in the very real material burdens that so many young graduates will soon face.

Eyal Press is a New York–based writer whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation.

Papa’s Not a Rolling Stone: Low-Income Men and Their Children Kids benefit when their dads make more time for them.

Try doing it while juggling two or three minimum-wage jobs.

By N ata s h a J. C a br e r a a n d R o n M inc y Papa was a rolling stone, Wherever he laid his hat was his home And when he died, all he left us was alone.

—The Temptations

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here is a widespread belief that poor men make bad fathers because they can’t or won’t support their families and are often absent from their children’s lives. The perception of the deadbeat, uninvolved dad has been fueled by national statistics about the rates of marriage, cohabitation, employment, and childsupport payments among poor men.

These national findings, however, depict averages and do not reveal the personal struggles of low-income fathers and the individual stories behind the statistics. A burgeoning body of social science research on how poor men engage with their children presents a much more nuanced story.

This research finds that many poor men are very much involved in their children’s lives, including reading and playing—activities that help children gain the social and cognitive skills they need to do well in school and beyond— and that more fathers want to be more engaged with their kids. To the extent that low-income fathers are not involved, it’s often because these men are working in multiple jobs that pay little and leave them little if any time to spend time with their children.

A father participating in a study aimed at understanding how much time fathers spend with their children asked the interviewer, somewhat exasperated, “So, when are you going to ask me how many jobs I have so I can support my family?”

Poor fathers’ emotional contribution to their children’s well-being may be acknowledged by researchers as just as important as their financial contribution—but it is mostly ignored in public policy and public narratives.

The public and social expectation is that poor men should support their children financially, no matter how grim the conditions or rewards of work, because work is the best thing they can do for their families.

The reality is that many poor men work in jobs that pay at or near the minimum wage; after working two or three such jobs, they still do not make much money. Besides the low pay, their hours tend to be inflexible or unpredictable, based on shift work or on-demand work. Working long hours and on weekends takes them out of the home for the majority of the day. These are the lowest-paid workers, earning in the bottom quarter of the earnings distribution, in low-status but growing sectors such as line cooks, fast-food workers, movers, laborers, stock boys, janitors, and security guards. It should come as no surprise that nonwhites, immigrants, and adults with less than a high school diploma often bear these burdensome work schedules.

Although the men we interviewed are aware that they must work long days to support their families, they are also aware that working multiple jobs for many hours is incompatible with their belief that being a “good parent” means spending time with your child.

As participants in our study told us, working and taking care of children is a consistent source of stress: “Once I get out of work, I pick him up from her [grandmother’s] house … and once we get home, we cook something, and then it is already too late to go out, so I can’t take him out [to the park]; it is 7 or 8:30 P.M.” Our research suggests that most would rather be working during normal business hours so they could be more available to their families.

An unintended consequence is that the low-wage economy pits the demands of work against the demands

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out of trouble. Consequently, poor men spend little time at home, and also run the risk of becoming estranged from their families. Some men in this position tend to disengage from their families over time, which can decrease both the financial and emotional support they provide. One of the men we interviewed became estranged from his family after working long hours and getting in trouble with the police.

Upon release, he tried to reach out to his 9-year-old daughter, but she wanted nothing to do with him.

The social science research sug-

reasoned that more money or more “things” were not what his son needed most: More meaningful parental involvement, which he could afford, was what his son needed. He wrote: In my years as lead parent, I have gotten the kids out of the house in the morning; enforced bedtimes at night; monitored computer and TV use; attempted to ensure that homework got done right; encouraged involvement in sports and music; attended the baseball games, piano lessons, plays, and concerts that resulted; and kept tabs on social lives. To this day, I am listed first on emergency forms; I am the parent who drops everything in the event of a crisis. These tasks aren’t intrinsically difficult, and my to-do list is far shorter than that of parents who cannot afford household help. Yet the role has unavoidably taken a toll on my professional productivity.

These calculations and decisions are out of reach for most poor men. The costs of putting children’s needs first are prohibitive for them; the consequences would be dire indeed. Reducing their workload could mean losing their job. Instead, low-income fathers must work longer hours to afford better housing that could help their children get into a better school and stay

gests that fathers who are positively involved in their children’s lives can make an important difference in their children’s development. The benefits of positive father involvement are not restricted to affluent families. There is tremendous variability in the quality of parenting in low-income families and evidence that low-income fathers can be sensitive and responsive to their children. Fathers may be an untapped resource for reducing disparities in the outcomes of children in low-income families. Unfortunately, the low-wage economy, plus prevailing norms and policy assumptions, may be discouraging many fathers from playing this role, in favor of merely providing financial support. Despite rhetoric about the value of paternal involvement, there is no public support for low-income men’s emotional involvement in their children’s lives.

Decades of research conducted with mostly middle-class mothers have shown that the quality of the relationship a parent shares with their child is fundamental to the well-being of both. Fathers who engage in daily care become attuned to their child’s needs and are able to respond sensitively and engage in interactions that lead to healthy and nurturing relationships. Such a relationship facilitates a secure attachment and provides the growing infant with a sense of security and love that is sustained across the lifespan.

We also know from many studies that fathers tend to engage in more “rough and tumble” play with their children than mothers. Such stimulation, when performed safely, is

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of being a parent. The strain is especially difficult for parents with young children, who demand a lot of time, attention, and care.

One man told us that as his children got older, the long hours at work meant little contact with them. Soon, one of his sons joined a gang and was killed, leaving him with a grandchild.

He was convinced that what got his son killed was the fact that he and his wife were not able to properly monitor and supervise him. He vowed not to make the same mistake with his grandchild; he has taken another job so his wife can quit her job and stay home to take care of their grandson.

Of course, balancing long workdays and family is not just the plight of poor men. Men at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum also work long hours (usually in one job), but they typically have more flexibility to make choices that serve their families. Alex Williams, in a 2012 article for The New York Times, wrote about the increasing number of (mostly professional) fathers who have chosen to leave their 70-to-90-hour jobs to raise their children. Similarly, a recent article by Andrew Moravcsik in The Atlantic discussed his choice to put his prestigious career as a college professor partly on hold and to put his wife’s career first so he could stay home and be the “lead” parent after one child was getting into trouble at school.

Managers and professional workers often have jobs that offer flexible time or allow them to work partly at home. Depending on the occupation, 10 percent to 30 percent of these workers do just that. Working at home gives them opportunities to be a much more consistent presence in their children’s lives in ways that children value most—such as attending a recital, accompanying them on a school trip, watching a soccer game, attending teacher conferences, or racing to the school when a child is injured or sick.

A poor man does not typically have a job that allows him family flexibility, and taking time off to attend children’s activities can get him fired.

After Moravcsik’s older son got mixed up with bad company, was skipping school, failing some classes, and even got arrested, Moravcsik

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exciting for infants and contributes to healthy brain development and enhanced social skills. As children age, such play develops into more rough-and-tumble recreation, with both child and father engaging in limit-setting that promotes emotional development. By exploring their own strengths and attending to set boundaries in the context of roughand-tumble play, children are able to practice self-regulation, or the ability to control emotions and behaviors.

In middle childhood, fathers often challenge their sons and daughters to try new things and tend to encourage autonomy. Such behaviors build confidence and promote independence, both of which help children develop problem-solving skills that facilitate success in academic and social pursuits. At this stage, fathers have been shown to influence self-esteem more than mothers. By fostering independence, fathers lay an important foundation for positive psychosocial development in the future.

In adolescence, fathers continue to serve as an important source of advice and conversation, although the research on this population is sparse.

Some fathers may withdraw from their teenagers, either to continue to encourage independence or for other reasons such as stress or feeling unneeded. For example, adolescent girls tend to rely on their mothers more for emotional support during this time, though their relationship with their fathers continues to build their self-esteem and forms a basis for how to relate to members of the opposite sex.

Parents’ support and love for their children pay dividends both in the short and long term. A strong body of correlational (and some experimental) evidence suggests that the quality of the early parent-child relationship builds children’s self-esteem, helps them stay connected to families, prepares them to handle discrimination and bias, and gives them the tools they need to learn and succeed. But this is a tall order. Low-income parents, as do all parents, need help to do this. Our public policy remains focused on closing the income gap between children in high- and low-income families, and on insisting that fathers’ primary

Noncustodial fathers could play a far greater role in the lives of their children if we had more-supportive public policies.

role in achieving this goal is through financial contributions. At the same time, our policies pay virtually no attention to the other dimension of being a parent: providing emotional support for children whenever and however they need it, which plants the seed for positive and mutually nurturing relationships. Efforts to engage fathers in Head Start, home visiting, and other parenting programs that focus on helping them develop positive relationships with their children would go a long way in the right direction. Though divorce or single parenthood are sometimes a factor in preventing fathers from emotionally supporting their children, noncustodial fathers could play a far greater role in the lives of their children given more-supportive public policies.

To turn this situation around we need three things. First, we need to do a better job of helping low-income fathers fulfill what they, mothers, and taxpayers expect them to do—namely, to support their children. A higher minimum wage will help, but many fathers earn substantially more than the minimum wage and still have difficulty sustaining their families and paying their child support.

A better solution is to provide a more generous subsidy for low-income fathers’ wages, especially the wages of nonresident fathers. The 1993 budget dramatically expanded the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), now the largest program in our arsenal to reduce poverty. Because it was intended to reduce poverty through work, the credit depends on earnings, other income, and the number of children. For example, childless workers get up to $500 from the EITC; if the same worker has two kids, the credit is more than ten times as much.

Paradoxically, the EITC treats noncustodial parents, usually fathers, as if they were childless workers even if they pay all the child support they owe, which is not tax-deductible. At the same time, a mother who works and has custody of the children receives as much as $5,500 per year. Because the parent who has custody bears more of the cost of raising children, she should get a bigger EITC than the other parent.

But besides helping low-income working parents provide for their children, the EITC is also supposed to encourage work. From this vantage point, the tenfold differential between what mothers and nonresident fathers receive from the EITC makes no sense. So the first thing we need to do is raise the amount nonresident fathers get from the EITC. This is a good start, but it’s only more money; and as we have said, kids need more than money from their dads.

The second thing we must do is to change our social expectations about low-income fathers. We need to fund efforts to include fathers in a variety of settings in which adults are preparing to become parents, children are forming attachments to their parents, both parents and children are learning how to communicate with one another, and parents are learning how to promote their children’s health and development. These settings include prenatal care, well-baby clinics, home-visiting programs, breastfeeding and immunization programs, and early-childhood education programs, especially Head Start, which despite its emphasis on family engagement rarely includes fathers in services that target mothers and children.

Finally, we need to rigorously evaluate the effects of such efforts on mothers, fathers, and children. After doing so, we need to discard what does not work and develop what shows progress. This is the only way we can figure out how to match what is best for mothers, fathers, and taxpayers with what is best for children.

Until legislators and policy-makers recognize that money is not all that low-income men can offer children, and institute these kinds of reforms, lowincome fathers who spend little time with their children will remain the iconic image of Papa as a rolling stone.

Natasha J. Cabrera is a professor of human development and director of the Family Involvement Laboratory at the University of Maryland.

Ron Mincy is director of the Center for Research on Fathers, Children and Family Well-Being at Columbia University, and a professor of social policy and social work practice at Columbia’s School of Social Work.

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its patented string ribbon technology that used considerably less silicon than other panels. But silicon prices dropped, undermining Evergreen’s market advantage. By August 2011, Evergreen too had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sold its assets to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars to its creditors. Evergreen, along with Solyndra, has become a favorite whipping boy of conservatives warning against the perils of industrial policy.

Solar Eclipse?

Can the U.S. have a coherent solar policy in the face of China’s strategic trade moves?

By J o a n F it z g e r a l d

T

he United States does not like to engage in explicit economic planning. Direct government pursuit of industrial objectives violates both our professed belief in free markets and our global commitment to liberal trade devoid of national favoritism. Nonetheless, the U.S. has been willing to use something close to economic planning when it comes to transitioning to both photovoltaic (PV) power installation and production of solar cells—a transition that markets won’t make on their own because of the current pricing advantage enjoyed by carbon-based fuels.

States and cities have subsidized solar startups. The federal government has used tax credits to subsidize solar production. The Department of Energy has underwritten research and even operated as a venture capitalist. However, because of the uncoordinated and slightly guilty nature of solar planning U.S.-style, the American effort on solar has been fragmented, bordering on incoherent—and is in grave danger of being displaced by a player that has no compunctions about using as much subsidy and as much government direction as necessary to capture the world’s solar production industry. That, of course, would be China. The U.S. has lost the first round. The question is whether we can lead again in next-generation solar—and what that means: PV production, installation, advanced R&D, or all three? It also requires U.S. policy to be a lot clearer about the linkages between these three aspects of a solar transition.

The current era of solar includes lots of false starts, whose lessons should inform policy for the next era. In my 2010 book Emerald Cities (and in my 2009 article for the Prospect), I wrote enthusiastically about how states and cities were building a new solar production industry in the United States. An unlikely story I told was of two solar

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manufacturers in Toledo, Ohio. Toledo was long a center of glass production.

Research at the University of Toledo used expertise in glass to create advantage in solar cells. When First Solar opened its first factory in nearby Perrysburg in 2001, it was the country’s largest PV solar panel producer.

Another manufacturing success out of Toledo was Xunlight, using flexible thin-film solar technology. The company was started by a University of Toledo physics professor, Xunming Deng, and his wife in 2002. With $3 million in startup funds from the university’s Innovation Enterprises, $2 million in state and local tax credits, and a $4 million state loan, the company began producing its flexible stainless steel solar cells. Xunlight also received $34.5 million in tax credits from the stimulus in 2010, in addition to a $3 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a typical case of how solar entrepreneurs in the U.S. cobble together diverse subsidies.

In 2007, Xunlight raised $7 million in financing followed by another $22 million from major technology investment firms. It seemed on track to becoming an international leader in thin-film flexible solar modules. In 2010, Xunlight invested $2 million to open a production facility in Kunshan, China. The idea, or so CEO Deng said, was to assemble panels at a lower cost while expanding the Toledo plant. Two years later, the plant was sold. By the end of 2014, Xunlight filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and closed all operations, a victim of China’s pricing advantage.

In my home state of Massachusetts, Evergreen Solar was the darling of the solar industry. Started in 1994, Evergreen expanded in 2008 into a $450 million facility in the former Fort Devens, outside Boston. With more than $50 million in various state and local subsidies and land deals, Evergreen’s claim to fame was

How could so many promising U.S. solar companies go bankrupt when worldwide solar installations are growing so fast?

What happened? How could these promising companies go bankrupt when worldwide solar installations are growing? Last year, 30 percent of the new electricity generation in the country came from solar, and the industry projects about 100 gigawatts of annual deployment by 2018.

The main explanation is China.

To establish a solar industry, China offered huge subsidies and free land to U.S. solar companies to locate there. The only stipulation was that they couldn’t sell their products in China. This happens to violate free trade principles and arguably trade law, but many U.S. companies took the deal and the U.S. government did not make an issue of it. Then China started developing its own solar industry and dumping products on the world market at below-cost prices—something that also violates trade law. By 2011, prices began falling dramatically and many U.S. and German producers couldn’t compete.

In 2012, U.S. manufacturers sought relief from Chinese dumping, and the Department of Commerce imposed tariffs averaging 31 percent. In 2014, Commerce closed loopholes and imposed tariffs averaging 52 percent (ranging from 26 to 165 percent) on PV panels from both China and Taiwan (because China had been using Taiwanese inputs to avoid tariffs).

After review in January 2015, the department set the tariffs at an average of about 20 percent.

But the tariffs came too late to save much of the U.S. industry. At least 14 U.S. solar manufacturers went out of business by 2012, and almost 60 worldwide. With its explicit industrial policy of state-subsidized production and discrimination against imports,

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China is playing by its own rules and demolishing other nations’ efforts, even as it depends on their imports of its products. By 2015, seven of the top ten PV producers were Chinese.

Only two U.S. companies, SunPower and First Solar, made the list. And although First Solar is building solar farms in the U.S. and throughout the world, almost all of its highly efficient panels are made in Malaysia.

And now China has created a huge internal market. China’s first big push in solar was an investment of $221 billion in renewable energy development as part of a stimulus package in 2009.

This investment would help China meet a goal of producing 11.4 percent of its primary energy from renewable sources by 2015, and 15 percent by 2020. The five-year plan that started in 2011 originally had a goal of producing 5 gigawatts of solar energy, which was increased several times. A

Sun Rising In The East: Solar panels and wind turbines at a photovoltaic power station in Yiyang county, Luoyang city, central China’s Henan province, January 2016

2015 goal of adding 17.8 gigawatts was exceeded by 20 percent. The plan covering 2016 through 2020 calls for 100 gigawatts. China’s solar producers are building huge solar farms to meet the renewable goals of the five-year plans.

The good news is that solar PV in the U.S. is coming back—after dropping from the peak 2010 production of 1,205 megawatts to 517 in 2012, production was back up to 1,288 megawatts in 2015. While much of the growth has been in utility scale and rooftop residential installations, GTM Research predicts that the commercial sector of the market will reach $3.8 billion by 2020, due to the extension of the federal tax credit and increasing corporate adoption of solar.

But the comeback is largely based on states subsidizing a new round of incrementally better, tried-and-true crystalline solar PV panels and not cutting-edge technologies considered to be

“next generation” solar. With this strategy, in the words of Varun Sivaram, who follows the solar industry at the Council on Foreign Relations, “solar is headed down a path of profitless prosperity.”

The issue of where production is located is thus related to the question of the solar industry’s rapidly evolving technology. Will the U.S. lead in developing next-generation technology, and if so, how? A related question is whether U.S. manufacturers truly need to be producing PV products using current technologies in order to keep moving to more advanced technologies.

MIT ’s 2015 “Future of Solar” report maintains that considerable R&D needs to focus on achieving large-scale expansion of thin-film solar, integrating increasing amounts of solar power into the grid, and developing technology for large-scale storage. Further, reducing costs requires innovation in manufacturing technologies for

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producing solar, such as the elimination of expensive vacuum processing.

Why thin-film? Because the monocrystalline silicon cell technology that is currently being installed will not get much higher than 25 percent efficiency (the percentage of radiation hitting the cell that is converted to electricity).

Many experts following the field argue that we need to double the long-run performance. Presumably, we need to incubate those companies that will be able to produce high-value-added products at low cost. If ultra-light, flexible solar panels could be produced at considerably lower cost per watt, companies could actually make real margins, not profitless technologies.

The Obama administration has been ramping up funding on renewable energy. The stimulus package invested $90 billion in clean tech, of which about $20 billion was on tax incentives for solar and wind, and about $50 billion for energy technology programs, mostly focused on the grid and energy efficiency. Although it is difficult to estimate total investment, as it’s spread across many departments and programs, annual federal funding on solar and other renewable energy is about $6.4 billion and will increase by 10 percent in the 2016 budget. And if it ever gets through Congress, Obama and 19 other world leaders launched the Mission Innovation initiative at the Paris Climate Summit, committing to doubling investment in clean tech research. If the U.S. is to be a solar leader, we need to direct more investment to developing more advanced panel and storage technologies.

The globalized nature of the industry makes it challenging to target domestic production as well as R&D and installation. A typical company may have its headquarters and some research in one country and its production in various locations. Even with the lure of subsidies, these corporate decisions are often beyond the reach of national policy.

In 2012, SolarWorld (headquartered in Germany), the largest crystalline PV solar producer in the U.S., closed its California operation and shut down lines in Hillsboro, Oregon. Then in 2014, when market

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demand had increased, the company announced a $10 million new line in Hillsboro that will increase production from 380 to 530 megawatts annually and increase employment from 700 to 900. Demand for the company’s 72-cell bifacial solar panel technology, which is up to 25 percent more efficient than other models, is growing, with an increase in shipments of 62 percent in 2015. But SolarWorld still imports panels it produces in Germany for installation in the U.S. Georgia-based Suniva also struggled, but is coming back after a controlling stake was bought by China-based Shunfeng International Clean Energy.

It moved production from overseas to a new domestic plant, which opened in 2014 in Saginaw Township, Michigan.

The company was given a five-year $15 million tax credit from the Michigan Economic Growth Authority, and pledged to create 350 jobs and produce 170 megawatts of monocrystalline modules a year by 2017, which are Buy America–compliant—containing 80 percent U.S. content.

The nation’s biggest new solar production facility was originally scheduled to open later this year in Buffalo.

In exchange for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion” economic development program,

Sun Stroke?

The billion-dollar, corruptionafflicted SolarCity “gigafactory” under construction in upstate New York

which subsidizes construction of SolarCity’s “gigafactory,” the company committed to creating almost 1,500 production jobs to produce one gigawatt annually. This will be the installation company’s first foray into manufacturing. In fact, SolarCity argued against putting tariffs on Chinese panels—which is not surprising given that the company has received close to $1 billion in domestic tax subsidies and grants for installing Chinese panels throughout the U.S. New York state is paying $750 million of the $900 million cost to build the factory, in exchange for SolarCity’s promise to spend $5 billion on the operation over a decade. The investment is part of a $1 billion commitment to create jobs and investment in targeted growth industries.

The significance of this plant is that it combines elements of crystalline with thin-film technology to make highly efficient panels. This is not next-generation solar technology, but it will make the most efficient panels on the market if the panels produced at scale perform as well as the pilot did. And the production process is supposedly highly efficient as well— taking considerably few steps than other producers. Despite its efficiency and a robust distribution and supply

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chain, its success as a manufacturer is not guaranteed. Its opening has been pushed back several times due to delays in obtaining equipment and is now scheduled for the summer of 2017.

The project, a signature initiative of Governor Andrew Cuomo, has been marred by scandal—exactly the sort of conflicts of interest that lead conservatives to conclude government should avoid industrial policy. An ongoing investigation is revealing that politically connected developers who were donors to Cuomo’s campaign got contracts for SolarCity and other major upstate economic-development initiatives.

Instead of opening the plant in 2016, the company reduced its projection of 1,400 factory employees to 500, bringing into question whether it was necessary for the state to build a 1.2-million-square-feet facility.

And there is reason to question SolarCity’s employment commitment.

When provided with an $11.8 million subsidy for a $27 million project to install solar panels at Oregon State University and the Oregon Institute of Technology, SolarCity originally partnered with SolarWorld to produce the panels in Hillsboro, Oregon, which would have generated $10 million in wages. Instead, the panels are being produced by convict labor. SolarCity gave the contract to Suniva under a subcontract with Norcross, which employed workers from Oregon’s Federal Correctional Institute. These inmates were paid 93 cents an hour, compared with the $11 starting wage at SolarWorld. This is not exactly the job creation envisioned by the Oregon Department of Energy’s Business Energy Tax Credit program, which has since been shut down.

This saga raises the bigger question

of whether states should be subsidizing solar production facilities to compete with China, especially when the domestic production represents only modest technical innovation. There is widespread agreement that we need to expand solar installations, which still produce less than 1 percent of our electricity. Our national policy to stimulate installation of solar is more coherent than our policy on innovation and production, but only marginally so.

U.S. policy to promote and subsidize conversion to solar is a

fragmented

muddle.

One of the most important stimulants for private investment in installation is the federal tax credit for solar and wind energy. The tax credit has been in place since 2005, but only for short periods and with no guarantee of renewal. Investment slows when the credit’s future is uncertain.

The credit is essential to the business model of installers such as SolarCity, which leases its panels to homeowners. As the owner, the company gets the federal 30 percent investment tax credit. Fortunately, in 2015, Congress extended the tax through 2021. GTM Research estimates that this extension alone will result in more than 50 percent net growth in U.S. solar installations from 2016 to 2020. The credit will be eliminated for residential installations permanently in 2021, and reduced to 10 percent for commercial installations.

There is a crazy quilt of state policies to subsidize solar installations. A total of 29 states have renewable portfolio standards, which require utilities to purchase a defined percentage of renewable energy. And 41 states have

Solar Installation and Production

Selected major solar installers and manufacturers serving the U.S. market Company

First Solar SunPower SolarWorld Suniva SolarCity Verengo Sunrun RGS Energy REC Solar Trina Solar Yingli headquartered in:

Produces in U.S. Produces overseas

Installs in U.S.

✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

✔

✔

✔

✔

✔

✔

Installs overseas

✔

■ U.S ■ China ■ Germany

mandatory net metering, in which consumers sell solar or wind power back to the utility. Connecticut, with low sunlight and high electricity rates, has heavy subsidies for solar. Nevada has a lot of sunlight and used to be third in the nation in solar installations. But in 2015, the Public Utility Commission increased fees to solar customers and reduced the price utilities pay to buy

solar power back from rooftop panels—essentially negating net metering for retail customers, which allowed many to install solar to begin with.

SolarCity, Vivint Solar, and Sunrun left the state as their business models cannot work without net metering.

The debate about solar parallels

arguments about other industrial policies. The U.S. has given up much of its traditional manufacturing in such industries as machine tools, textiles, steel, and consumer electronics. Those losses have consequences both for jobs and for our balance of trade. It took extensive and aggressive trade policies to prevent the loss of the U.S. semiconductor industry to Japan and Korea, as well. However, the U.S. loss of most of the video- and audio-manufacturing industry did not prevent Apple from leapfrogging into entirely new product categories.

And of course, the actual products are manufactured mainly in Asia.

Solar does provide domestic jobs, but relatively few are in production.

According to the Solar Foundation’s 2015 survey, there are 209,000 solar workers in the U.S., an increase of 20 percent since 2014 and 123 percent since 2010. Only about 15 percent, however, are in production; with automation, that is not likely to increase much, even if the U.S. stays in the game. Of the remaining jobs, about 57 percent are in installation, with the rest in sales, distribution, and project development. So the rationale for more investment in innovation and production is not simply about jobs.

Solar—both installation and manufacturing—epitomizes the technology of the future economy. The debate will continue about whether America truly needs to produce solar cells in order to ramp up generation of solar power.

But one thing is clear. If we want U.S. companies to stay in the production business, we need far more coherent policies—on trade, on subsidies, on technology, and on the connection between production and installation— than the ones we have now.

Joan Fitzgerald is a professor of public policy and urban affairs at Northeastern University.

summer 2016 The American Prospect 17

What Is Hillary Clinton’s Agenda?

She’s had so much to say on so many issues that voters may not know what she wants to accomplish.

B y Paul S tarr

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I

mark lennihan / ap images

t is misleading, some observers have rightly pointed out, to treat the 2016 election as a contest between two candidates who are equally serious about policy. Donald Trump has been on both sides of many issues, contradicting himself from one day to the next. On occasion, he has given a speech written by advisers on a subject like energy where he seemed as surprised by the text as the audience was.

He has a core of symbolically important positions on such issues as immigration, but otherwise his views are murky. Much of what he says about foreign or domestic problems is all impulse and no thought, so when his impulse momentarily changes, his positions change too.

For Hillary Clinton, however, substance actually does matter. Her seriousness defines her. We have not reached the stage of gender equality when a woman candidate for president could get away with being as subject to changing moods and personal pique as Trump is. While no one would know what to expect from a Trump presidency in major areas of policy, Clinton has laid out plans in virtually every domain. That plenitude of nuanced and multilayered policies is both an asset and a limitation. It is valuable in signaling to different groups where her commitments lie, and it will be an asset in governing if she is elected. But it is a limitation in a political campaign for reasons that have been especially clear this year.

Whether voters love or hate Trump, they can name a few big things he says he would do as president: build a wall on the Mexican border, round up and deport illegal immigrants, ban Muslims from coming to America, and redo trade deals. Similarly, Democratic primary voters this year were able to identify Bernie Sanders with a few major promises: break up the banks, make public college free, and pass what he calls “Medicare for all.”

Despite Clinton’s ample detail—her website covers more than 30 different issue areas, each with bullet points about specifics—voters would probably be hard-pressed to come up with three or four big ideas they identify with her. Although it is hardly a weakness of a presidential candidate to be prepared for the scope of the job, her campaign has not had a clarifying focus on a few big themes or proposals that

instantly communicate what she wants to do.

The strategy that Clinton has adopted thus far this year may be partly to blame. Seeking to rally diverse constituencies, she has framed her candidacy in broad, progressive terms, often saying she wants to break down “all the barriers” facing people—not just economic barriers, but also those based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other sources of disadvantage. She also says she wants to build on Barack Obama’s presidency, and since Obama has previously supported much of what she favors, those ideas do not have her own stamp—at least not yet. In contrast to Sanders, she has repeatedly said she doesn’t want to make unrealistic promises, and against both Sanders and Trump, she has cast herself as the candidate of responsibility and refused to call for huge programs or huge tax cuts that would balloon the federal deficit. In another presidential year, she might get credit for good judgment; this year, she gets criticized for lacking imagination.

Perhaps concerned about the media seizing on whatever issue she leaves out, Clinton has resisted indicating which of her proposals would have priority. In a profile this spring in New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister reports Clinton saying she doesn’t accept the premise that as president she would have to choose which issues to advance first, assuming a twoyear window of opportunity to move legislation through Congress. “I want to take everything I’ve said I’m going to work on and be as teed up as possible from the very beginning. I want to give [Congress] every opportunity to move forward on several fronts.”

Of course, advances along those fronts depend on the outcome of the congressional election. If Democrats win control of the Senate as well as the presidency, it would help Clinton

with both judicial and executive nominations, but not necessarily with epochal legislation if Republicans still hold their House majority.

In the less likely scenario in which Democrats also win back the House, the legislative logjam since 2011 could break open—especially if Senate Democrats eliminate the filibuster (as they did for appellate court nominations in 2013).

Even if the odds of full control of Congress are low, Clinton ought to be “teed up” to take advantage of that possibility. Both Bill Clinton and Obama had a two-year window at the beginning of their presidencies, and most of the progressive legislation of recent decades was enacted during those intervals—the only four years of unified Democratic government in the past 36.

Before getting ahead of herself, however, Clinton has to win the election, and it is first of all for that purpose that she needs to define her priorities more sharply. Unlike Trump, she’s not going to go to extremes to make her case. But voters should know what to expect from her, and she needs to find ways to convey ideas that will stand out in their minds.

Focusing Clinton’s Economic Agenda

The economy and jobs usually top the list of voter concerns, so let’s begin there. Although Clinton’s approach to economic issues isn’t embodied in one or two signature policies, her agenda does have a thematic unity, summed up in a phrase she often uses, “giving working families a raise.”

A higher minimum wage is an unambiguous expression of that theme. In the Democratic primaries, the clash between Clinton and Sanders over the size of a minimum-wage increase obscured their agreement on a big jump. Raising the federal minimum from $7.25 to $12—the level Clinton has endorsed— would be the single largest increase in the history of the minimum wage in either percentage or absolute terms. (She also supports efforts in states and municipalities to raise their minimum wages to $15.) Clinton should be able to draw a sharp contrast on the issue with Trump, who has said that wages in America are “too high,” though in his customary style, he has also casually suggested he could support a minimum-wage increase, as if a Republican Congress would send him one.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 19

Several other elements fit into Clinton’s overall theme, each of which articulates to other elements in her campaign. Like Obama, who increased infrastructure spending as part of the economic-recovery program soon after taking office, Clinton says that during her first 100 days she will call upon Congress to boost investment in roads, bridges, and other public works more than at any time since the development of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. Closely related are policies to increase investment in clean energy, including measures aimed at installing half a billion solar panels and generating enough power from alternative sources to run all of America’s homes in four years. In line with the effort to give working families a raise, she’s pledged not to increase taxes for those making less than $250,000 a year, proposing instead to finance investments in infrastructure and other measures by closing “corporate tax loopholes” and mak-

The flip side of the Obama record on taxes has been higher taxation of upper-income households. In 2010, congressional Democrats and the president prevented the extension of the tax cuts for the rich enacted under George W. Bush, increasing the top marginal income tax rate back to its level during the Clinton administration (39.6 percent) and reducing tax cuts on investment income and estates. When these changes went into effect in 2013, the top 0.1 percent paid $50 billion in taxes more than they would have paid under the previous rules.

Partly as a result of a provision in the ACA , the tax rate on capital gains has gone from 15 percent to 23.8 percent.

Clinton’s proposals move in the same progressive direction, raising taxes on top incomes and providing relief to the less affluent. To pay for her new initiatives, she is calling for a 4 percent surtax on people with incomes over $5 million and a new minimum tax of 30

Electoral conflicts shape presidential priorities. The 2016 election has become a referendum on the kind of society that the American people want. ing “the most fortunate pay their fair share.”

Here it is worth taking a moment to consider Clinton’s revenue and tax-fairness proposals in light of what Obama has done. Although you might never know it from discussion among progressives, the Obama years have seen a major shift in tax burdens from lower- and middle-income people to the rich. In 2009, Congress enacted three tax-credit increases that were later made permanent (the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the American Opportunity Tax Credit).

Together, these have cut taxes for 24 million working- and middle-class families by an average of about $1,000. The subsidies for healthinsurance premiums in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) represent another substantial benefit for those with low to middle incomes. At the median income, the federal income tax rate is now 5.3 percent, which is lower than the average in any presidential administration since the 1950s, indeed, less than half the rate during Jimmy Carter’s presidency (1977–1980).

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percent on those with pre-deduction incomes of more than $1 million. Several of her tax proposals are aimed at promoting long-term investment within the United States. These include increases in capital gains taxes for assets held for less than six years and other changes in tax policy to discourage high-frequency trading and shifts of corporations, jobs, and investment abroad. One little-discussed idea she has endorsed is a tax credit to encourage corporations to adopt employee profit-sharing plans. According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Clinton’s tax proposals would generate about $1.1 trillion over a decade: “Nearly all of the tax increases would fall on the top 1 percent; the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers would see little or no change in their taxes.”

Besides paying for infrastructure investments, much of the tax revenue Clinton proposes to raise would go to purposes that bear out her theme of “giving working families a raise.” Clinton would use some of the revenue

to finance her proposal for paid family leave. In the same vein, she is proposing to move toward universal pre-K by providing new funds to states that expand access to preschool for all four-year-olds. She has also discussed limiting families’ child-care costs to 10 percent of income, and although she hasn’t yet spelled out the details, that idea could involve refundable tax credits. The proposals add up to a clear message, if Clinton and the Democrats can communicate it: tax fairness on behalf of families who are struggling to make ends meet.

On taxes, the contrast with Trump could hardly be more dramatic. Trump’s tax plan calls for sharp cuts in federal income tax rates, including a reduction in the top rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. According to the Tax Policy Center, the top 1 percent would see their taxes fall on average by more than $275,000, while the top 0.1 percent would enjoy a windfall averaging over $1.3 million. For the lowest-income households, the tax cut would amount to $128; for middle-income households, $2,700. In addition, Trump would also completely eliminate federal estate taxes—which currently apply only to estates worth more than $5.45 million—and reduce taxes on business. The total loss in federal revenue, conservatively estimated by the Tax Policy Center at $9.5 trillion over ten years, would lead to severe cuts in federal programs or massive increases in deficits, or both.

(The estimate of lost revenue is conservative because it doesn’t take into account rising interest costs from rising deficits.) Trump has ruled out cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

On that assumption, other federal spending— defense, transportation, health, education, and so on—would have to be cut by about 80 percent to balance the budget. Since cuts of that magnitude aren’t feasible, the deficit would likely grow explosively.

In the contest over economic policy, Trump benefits from the undeserved impression that he has been a business genius and, more generally, from gendered expectations about the two candidates. In contrast to Clinton’s family-centered economics, Trump offers a seemingly more muscular, nationalist alternative. He promises to get factories humming by slapping tariffs on foreign imports, undoing environmental and other regulations, and

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

boosting production of fossil fuels, including coal. Deporting the 11 million unauthorized immigrants fits with the same approach.

It’s a turn-back-the-clock agenda that may appeal especially to white, industrial workers who have lost ground in recent decades, even though the job losses in manufacturing over the past half-century primarily stem from long-term technological change that, especially with advances in robotics, will almost certainly continue regardless of Trump’s policies. Rather than helping workers, Trump’s threatened tariffs could set off a trade war that would cost jobs in export-oriented industries, and the mass deportations he calls for would be not only inhumane but also economically devastating to the regions in the United States where immigrants account for much of the workforce and consumer demand.

Clinton isn’t conceding ground to Trump on industrial jobs. She is proposing to devote $10 billion to regional alliances called “Make it in America Partnerships,” aimed at strengthening industrial competitiveness and building on the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation established under legislation that Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown sponsored in 2014. The clean-energy proposals also aim at fostering manufacturing jobs. Acknowledging that trade has had mixed effects on manufacturing, she says new trade agreements have to meet “a high bar” and has backed away from supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But whereas Trump wants to wall America off from outsiders and revert to an unrecoverable past, Clinton’s agenda is fundamentally modernizing. She calls for more investment in science and technology, urges increased assistance to students to make college debt-free, accepts the facts of climate change, and generally favors trade and openness to the world. As against Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, she is committed to upholding America’s international agreements and leadership role on a planet that has become more interconnected than ever. Her support for paid family leave, universal pre-K, and assistance with child-care costs reflects a commitment to bring national policy in line with the contemporary realities of family life.

Clinton properly frames those family-centered economic policies as a foundation of general prosperity. “The movement of women

into the American workforce over the past 40 years was responsible for more than $3.5 trillion in economic growth,” she argued in a speech last July. But whereas “the United States used to rank seventh out of 24 advanced countries in women’s labor force participation,” America dropped to 19th by 2013, partly because other countries are “expanding familyfriendly policies like paid leave and we are not.” High-quality, affordable child care, she said, “is not a luxury. It’s a growth strategy.”

Clinton’s challenge is to persuade voters that

bombast, Clinton also has to fill in what are still blanks in many voters’ minds about her own program, spelling out how she would “give working families a raise.” A historic increase in the minimum wage, a big infrastructure program, tax fairness, and new policies centered on families and children can provide the substance behind that theme.

A Referendum on America

The priorities that emerge from an election and shape a presidency often depend on the con-

Clinton talks with a youngster at an early childhood education center in New York in 2015.

her vision of what she calls a “growth and fairness economy” is rooted in today’s America, and Trump’s is stuck in yesterday’s. “When he says, ‘Let’s make America great again,’” Clinton declared on June 7, “that is code for ‘Let’s take America backward.’” She needs to press the case that Trump has lied about who would benefit from his tax plan and that the tough-guy image is fake—he has no practical way of making American industry great again, either by muscling other countries in trade or by deporting millions of immigrants. But while framing Trump’s notions as backward-looking

flicts that the election itself highlights, based on the identities and personalities of the candidates as well as the issues they campaign on.

The 2016 election has become a referendum on the kind of society that the American people want. Eight years ago, Barack Obama’s candidacy put to the test how far Americans had come in accepting African Americans as full and equal citizens. This year’s election is also about diversity, but the conflict now focuses on immigrants because of Trump and on women because of Clinton—and Clinton has every reason, and shows every sign, of using the stark

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 21

Immigration reform—together with racialjustice issues—will likely receive priority for another reason: the political debt that Democrats, and Clinton in particular, owe to the black, Latino, and Asian American communities. Clinton would not be the presumptive Democratic nominee if she hadn’t won overwhelming majorities among minority voters in the primaries. One of the first speeches she gave in the campaign was about ending the era of mass incarceration; she was also early

Clinton testifies on health-care reform in 1993. Improving the ACA would be a top priority now.

If Democrats win big in November, I expect the outcome will be seen, above all, as providing a mandate on immigration reform. A decisive rejection of Trump will be a vote for an open, diverse society, and both Clinton and congressional Democrats will be emboldened to confirm that choice. But if Democrats fall short and immigration reform fails again, Clinton has committed to maintaining and expanding the administrative actions that Obama has taken in protecting Dreamers and others among the undocumented (actions, however, that are pending before the Supreme Court).

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to focus on the drinking-water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as an issue of environmental justice. She cannot afford to forget those commitments. Four years from now, minority voters could again be crucial to her re-election.

Gender-related concerns were bound to arise in the first presidential election with a woman at the head of a major-party ticket.

But Trump’s sexist comments about women, open talk about the size of his penis, and peacock-like demeanor have put the politics of gender into the spotlight in an unprecedented way. Clinton couldn’t have picked a better foil

for making her case for women’s rights and a vision of prosperity with families and children at the center. Just as with immigration, Clinton will have the basis for claiming a mandate on those issues if she wins in November.

If the Republican Party hadn’t turned as

far right as it has in recent years, there might well have been possibilities for bipartisan cooperation on other major issues besides immigration. Two of these, climate change and health care, have now become long-term reform projects identified with the Democratic Party, begun in earnest under Obama and necessarily of high priority to a Democratic successor.

Trump again makes the stakes exceptionally clear. While some Republicans at least acknowledge global warming, Trump once tweeted that the very idea is a Chinese conspiracy to dismantle American manufacturing. In May, as part of his energy speech, which could have been summed up as “fossil fuels forever,” he pledged to “cancel the Paris climate agreement” and rescind environmental regulations that cut carbon emissions.

Picking up where Obama leaves off, Clinton has primarily focused on using authority under existing law to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution. The failure of Senate Democrats in 2010 to pass a cap-and-trade program approved by the House showed how difficult it is for Democrats, even with a Senate majority, to get representatives from coal-dependent states to vote for any bill moving the country toward energy alternatives. Besides defending Obama’s executive actions—in particular, the Clean Power Plan, which effectively bars new coal-fired power plants—Clinton is calling for higher fuel-efficiency standards, changes in leasing practices on federal lands, and stricter regulation of methane emissions (and therefore of fracking). Democratic control of Congress would be necessary for some measures Clinton is supporting, such as new investments in clean-energy infrastructure and an end to tax subsidies to the oil and gas industries.

On health care, there was some confusion last fall about where Trump stood. While calling for the repeal of Obamacare, he suggested that he might deviate from Republican orthodoxy and propose a program for universal coverage. But

by February he backtracked, issuing a plan that

doug mills / ap images

challenge that Trump poses as a call to arms to voters and, if she wins, a mandate for action.

By nominating Trump, Republicans have raised the stakes on immigration. Under George W. Bush and again in the wake of the 2012 election, Democrats thought they could reach agreement with Republicans on legislation to provide a path to citizenship for longsettled, law-abiding unauthorized immigrants.

That era appears to be gone now that the GOP has a nominee threatening mass deportations.

would not only end coverage for about 20 million people who have gained it through the ACA but also effectively nullify state regulation of health insurance. The plan would allow insurance to be sold across state lines, enabling insurers to locate in states with the weakest laws.

Health-care reform has been the national issue most closely identified with Clinton, dating back to her role as the public advocate for her husband’s plan in 1993. She has a grasp of health policy few other public figures can match, and while continuing to carry out the ACA , she may now also have the opportunity to fix problems with the law, especially if Democrats secure a congressional majority.

In their early going, major reforms often need reforming themselves. After enacting Social Security in 1935, Democrats controlled both Congress and the presidency for more than a decade, which enabled them to amend and consolidate the program. Likewise, after passing Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, they were also able soon afterward to adjust those programs in amendments. But immediately after passing the ACA , Democrats lost control of Congress, and although Republicans have been unable to repeal the law, they have blocked constructive changes. The ACA , many Democrats initially said, would be a foundation they could build on, but they haven’t had the chance due to the gridlock in Washington.

Several problems now stand out as legitimate sources of dissatisfaction with healthcare reform: high levels of patient cost-sharing in plans available in the insurance marketplaces; continued difficulties among low-income families in affording premiums; narrow networks (that is, lack of choice of physicians and other providers); and lack of competition among insurers in some states and regions. To help make coverage more affordable, Clinton is proposing a tax credit of up to $5,000 per family to offset a portion of the out-of-pocket and premium costs that exceed 5 percent of family income—another example of giving working families a raise. She would require insurers to limit out-of-pocket prescription drug costs to $250 per month for patients with chronic or serious conditions. She wants to increase incentives for states to expand Medicaid. And, as she did in her 2008 presidential campaign, she is supporting the establishment of a “public

option” as a competitive alternative to private plans in the insurance marketplaces.

A public option could come in different forms. One possibility endorsed by Clinton is a Medicare buy-in for people when they reach age 50 or 55. This is not a new idea; Bill Clinton proposed it for 55- to 64-year-olds in the late 1990s and Al Gore supported it in his 2000 presidential campaign. The difficulty then was the likely cost resulting from “adverse selection”; the people most likely to enroll would have been those in poor health with high medical costs. Although this problem won’t have disappeared, it should be more manageable because of the subsidized plans already available in the insurance marketplaces. In fact, by taking 50- or 55- to 64-year-olds out of the general risk pool, a Medicare buy-in could result in lower premiums (and therefore lower federal tax subsidies) for everyone else in the insurance marketplaces. Letting Medi-

national standard for early voting (allowing voting to begin 20 days or more before an election). She’s endorsed a small-donor matching program as part of campaign-finance reform and wants to reverse the Supreme Court’s weakening of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, as well as the Court’s Citizens United decision.

Although Clinton would not be able to bring about many of these changes on her own authority without a Democratic Congress, she could have an enormous influence on the democracy agenda through Supreme Court and other judicial appointments. Assuming the Senate does not confirm Judge Merrick Garland during the lame-duck session after the election, Clinton—or for that matter Trump— could make as many as four Supreme Court appointments. Those choices could be the most important decisions the next president makes.

Ultimately, many people who cast their bal-

Clinton couldn’t have picked a better foil for making her case for women’s rights and a vision of prosperity with families and children at the center. care compete for middle-aged enrollees in the insurance exchanges could be an incremental step toward a general public option. Short of congressional action on the Medicare buy-in or a general public option at the national level, Clinton has said she will use the flexibility already provided by the ACA to help states establish their own public options. Considering Clinton’s long personal involvement in health-care reform, the issue should be a top priority of hers.

To the short list of reform projects

that will likely rank high on Clinton’s agenda, we can add one more—democracy itself.

Recent decisions by the Supreme Court and policies adopted by Republicans at the state level have increased the political importance of voting and campaign-finance rules. Whereas Republican-controlled state governments have sought to make voting more difficult, Clinton wants to make it easier. She favors automatic voter registration for 18-year-olds and a new

lots for Clinton may vote more against Trump than for her, in part because they know enough about Trump to fear him, although they may be less clear about what Clinton would do. But Clinton has the basis for a stronger, positive case. She wouldn’t just make political history by becoming America’s first woman president; her family-centered economics provides the substance to make her presidency a milestone in American social life. After the long rise of inequality, it would not be a little thing to increase the minimum wage by 65 percent or to enact paid family leave and support for child care and universal pre-K. Affirming America’s commitment to an open and diverse society through immigration reform would also be a big deal. So would pushing ahead on the great energy transition and universal health care, as well as a revitalized democracy. The battle during the primaries left some Democrats feeling that Clinton wasn’t reaching high enough. But if she can accomplish half of her agenda, they may feel very different.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 23

The First Post-Middle-Class Election The politics of downward mobility and racial diversity have eroded the center, pushing Democrats to the left and Republicans toward an authoritarian right.

By Haro ld M e ye rs o n

T

wo years ago, a pollster for Democratic candidates told me he’d begun advising his clients to cease emphasizing “the middle class” when speaking of those Americans whose interests they were defending. Many Americans who once thought of themselves as middle-class, he argued, no longer did.

Last year, a Pew Research Center survey confirmed those Americans’ assessment. The share of income going to middle-class Americans declined from 62 percent in 1970 to 43 percent in 2014, while the share going to upper-income households rose from 29 percent to 49 percent.

The erosion of middle-class America has been afoot for 40 years, but it was the financial crisis of 2008 and the tepid recovery that followed it that have shaken American politics to its foundations. Post-collapse, the debt that millions of families amassed to maintain their living standards was called in. Working Americans over 50 who lost their jobs found few comparable opportunities available, while younger Americans found that making a living—one that enabled them to move out of mom and pop’s place—was no easy task.

Economic upheavals shake up nations’ politics. So does demographic change—racial, religious, cultural. While the crash came in 2008, it’s only in the years since that we’ve grasped just how profound are its ensuing economic dislocations. Our understanding of its political implications has lagged even further behind. Virtually no one foresaw that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination for president, or that Bernie Sanders, the one

24 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

and only democratic socialist even visible in contemporary politics, would win more than 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote.

What explains this collective failure to understand that the 2008 crash and its aftermath might have an effect similar to that of the 1929 crash and its aftermath, both in the United States and Europe? To be sure, neither the economics nor politics of the 1930s have re-emerged full-blown today: In 2009, unlike 1929, governments did just enough to keep the world economy from toppling into the abyss.

But the disruptions and dashed expectations that followed the collapse were deep enough to push both the Democratic and Republican Parties into uncharted waters. As in the 1930s, a new generation of Democrats moved their party leftward, challenging many of the practices and some of the tenets of capitalism. For their part, Republicans who had faithfully served the interests of big business while stoking the ire of their white working-class constituents against minorities and immigrants discovered that those downwardly mobile working-class whites had had it with the catering to big business. Instead, they harkened to the one candidate who voiced their rage at the multiracial nation they saw supplanting white America.

With their conventions approaching, both parties now confront definitional—perhaps even existential—challenges. Will the Democrats, as they did between 1928 and 1936, and again in 1964 and 1965, redefine their fundamental mission? Will the Republicans become, overtly and primarily, a white nationalist party? It will take years for the parties

to answer these questions fully, but how they respond during the upcoming weeks and months should tell us a lot.

The Democrats

One way to gauge the future of a political party is to watch the ways in which its leading political figures change their positions in the course of an intra-party campaign. This year, Hillary Clinton clearly moved left on a range of economic issues: Reversing her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and her earlier positive stance toward the Keystone XL Pipeline; moving from a position of limiting the increase of Social Security benefits to supporting their expansion (an evolution she shares with President Obama); and backing a higher standard for the federal minimum wage (also in tandem with Obama). She also put forth a range of financial regulations that go beyond those in Dodd-Frank, although— as with all these moves leftward—they don’t go as far as those proposed by Sanders.

Sanders, by contrast, looked at first glance to be the immovable object of American politics. His analysis of, proposals for, and rhetoric about our economic and political system stayed the same throughout his campaign. On closer examination, however, the class warrior from nearly all-white Vermont increasingly zeroed in on racial as well as economic inequality. By the California primary, he even peppered his speeches with moving evocations of the pain that our official hostility to immigrants brings to divided families on the U.S.-Mexican border, recounting how he’d seen family members reach through the fence to touch loved ones on the other side.

al dr ago / cq roll c all via ap images

In a sense, Clinton was inching toward where the Democratic Party needs to go, while Sanders was catching up with where the party has been. Since the mid-1960s—almost since the day Sanders attended the 1963 March on Washington—the Democrats have been the party of America’s out-groups: initially, racial minorities and women; more recently, immigrants, gays, lesbians, and transgender people.

Since the 2008 crash and its aftermath, however, the party has moved left on economic issues. Last November, 56 percent of Democrats (including 52 percent of Hillary Clinton supporters) told New York Times pollsters that they had a favorable view of socialism, while Gallup has documented that the share of Democrats who call themselves liberal increased from 29 percent in 2000 to 45 percent in 2015.

The Democrats’ left turn on matters economic has been particularly pronounced among the young. A Harvard Institute of Politics poll of millennials this spring revealed that a narrow majority didn’t support capitalism. It also showed a clear generational preference for Sanders.

Indeed, in no previous election that I know of has age been so determinative of candidate preference. A Wall Street Journal aggregation of exit polls in early June showed Sanders had won 71.6 percent support from voters 29 and younger, while Clinton had won 71.3 percent support from voters 65 and older. The age difference bisects minority communities as well. A USC Dornsife poll of California voters taken on the eve of that state’s primary (there were no exit polls, and USC Dornsife was the one pre-primary poll that had Clinton winning the state by what turned out to be her actual margin) showed that minority voters under 50 preferred Sanders over Clinton by a 59 percent to 32 percent margin, while those over 50 preferred Clinton over Sanders by a 64 percent to 20 percent margin.

Why this huge generation gap? The likely answer is that the experience of millennials in the wake of the 2008 crash has been as distinct and defining as that of the young people who went through the Great Depression and thereafter formed the base of the New Deal coalition.

Consider, for instance, the recent Pew survey that found that the percentage of Americans ages 18 to 34 who live with their parents (32.1 percent) exceeds for the first time in recorded history (the Census Bureau started measuring

this in 1880) the percentage who live with a partner or spouse (31.6 percent) or with friends or by themselves. Consider the recent finding by economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger that the number of traditional full-time employee positions created since the recovery began has actually declined, even as the total number of nontraditional jobs—contingent, subcontracted, temp, independent contractor (whether correctly labeled or not), on-demand, gig—has increased. Those are the jobs, or gigs, whose levels of pay and security have left record numbers of millennials living with their parents. Many of

those who have managed to escape still struggle under the burden of student debt.

From this perspective, it shouldn’t be surprising that Sanders’s call for public funding for tuition at state colleges and universities resonated with the young. Millennials’ antipathy to a capitalist system that fails to offer them the opportunities it once afforded boomers shouldn’t be a surprise, either. Their preference for Sanders over Clinton is due in part to the fact that he confronts the system head-on in his critique, even if his remedies are 97 parts Franklin Roosevelt to 3 parts Karl Marx.

Thus a challenge for the Democrats generally, and for Clinton in particular: How far, if at all, will they distance themselves from

current-day capitalism, with its heightened rewards for investors at the expense of workers and its greater risks of economic collapse? How far will Democrats go to change the workings of the economy itself?

Twice before in the past hundred years, Democrats have redefined themselves by changing their answers to these questions.

The FDR Legacy and Its Limits

In the 1920s, with the Progressive Movement exhausted and dispersed, the Democrats largely acquiesced in the laissez-faire economics of the time. Rent not by economic questions but by the culture war between native-born Protestants and immigrant Catholics, the party ended up anointing Wall Street lawyer John W. Davis as their 1924 presidential nominee. (Thirteen years later, Davis argued business’s case against the National Labor Relations Act before the Supreme Court. He lost.) In 1928, New York Governor Al Smith, the de facto tribune for the whole second wave of non-Protestant immigrants, was the Democrats’ presidential nominee, but he drew few demarcations on economic policy between himself and the GOP nominee, Herbert Hoover. The party’s national chairman in those years was John J. Raskob, the former chairman of General Motors’ finance committee, and all-around consigliere to the Du Pont family, who were GM’s largest shareholders.

Between 1929 and 1936, of course, the Depression changed American politics—and, more slowly than many realize, the Democratic Party. In his first two years in office, Roosevelt supported cartelizing much of the American economy in order to revive it—an approach that many corporate executives welcomed. Only gradually did Roosevelt come to sign the several laws regulating Wall Street; not until 1935, prompted by a wave of strikes and the rise of a left that stretched from Upton Sinclair to Huey Long, did he sign the bills legalizing collective bargaining and creating Social Security.

In 1935 and 1936, Roosevelt’s rhetoric took on an anti-big-business tone never before (or since) heard from an American president.

Many of the previous generation of party leaders were appalled. Smith and Raskob formed the Liberty League, where they campaigned against Roosevelt’s re-election, inveighing against what they saw as FDR’s dangerously

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anti-capitalist initiatives. Despite their efforts, Roosevelt’s 1936 victory remains the most sweeping in U.S. history. His left turn greatly expanded the electorate, bringing record numbers of manufacturing workers, Catholic immigrants, and their children to the polls.

Just as the strikes and unrest of the 1930s helped prompt the Democrats’ left turn in 1935 and 1936, so the civil-rights demonstrations of the 1950s and early 1960s helped prompt the epochal shift in the Democrats’ mission in 1964 and 1965. By the early 1960s, the workings of the world-bestriding American economy—with its booming manufacturing, its relatively small and tightly regulated financial sector, and its broadly shared prosperity—were a marvel to behold. Convinced there was no further need to tinker with the structure of the economy, the Democrats—President Lyndon Johnson in particular—turned their attention to those left out of the bounty: African Americans and the

insurance that unions had been able to win for workers and their families. “Great Society policymakers,” Cowie writes, “presumed that the main sectors of the economy would remain unionized indefinitely.”

In the years following the Great Society’s heyday, Democrats focused on expanding access to individual rights within the market economy. Meanwhile, however, the private-sector economy on which their policies were premised was turning sharply against the workers whose well-being the Democrats believed they had ensured long before.

Just as their 1930s shift to New Deal policies had both cost the Democrats some longtime supporters and gained them new ones, so their 1960s shift to championing minority rights reshuffled electoral alignments. Not only, as Johnson remarked to an aide, did support for civil rights cost the party the allegiance of its most longstanding constituency, the white

There are moments when parties must redefine themselves to meet fundamental new challenges. That’s something FDR, LBJ and Bernie Sanders knew in their bones. poor. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the various measures (such as Head Start) that constituted the War on Poverty expanded rights and opportunities to groups of Americans that had long been denied them.

As Vanderbilt University historian Jefferson Cowie writes in his important new book, The Great Exception, “The Great Society was built on the premise that the New Deal generation had solved the [economy’s] major structural problems and that the New Deal order would persist. … The federal government’s focus on limited welfare arrangements was intended simply to fill in the gaps for those outside of the well-organized and well-remunerated sectors of the economy.”

The most collectively oriented programs of the Great Society, the ones that most resembled those of the New Deal—Medicare and Medicaid—were directed at the minority of Americans outside the mainstream job market, who lacked access to the employer-provided health

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South, but in time, Northern working-class whites saw their living standards stagnate and those voters, too, drifted away. At the same time, Democrats won the allegiance of the growing number of blacks, Asians, and Latinos; and, as the GOP took on more and more of the cultural provincialism of the white South, Democrats also increased their votes among socially liberal and moderate white professionals.

In the wake of this year’s primaries, it should be clear that another Democratic redefinition is in order. The support that young women and minorities have given to Sanders over Clinton means that the party’s longstanding battle for legal and social equality for America’s historically disadvantaged, while just as important as ever, can no longer in itself compel young voters’ allegiance or enthusiasm. For the millennial generation, greater economic opportunity and equality has become as important as it was to the generation that came of age in the 1930s.

It’s not as if mainstream Democrats have been indifferent to these concerns. President Obama’s successful campaign for the Affordable Care Act, the recent spate of executive orders bolstering workers’ rights, and the enactment by Democrats at the city and state level of wage hikes and paid sick leave show the party focusing, as it had not in many decades, on remedying the inequities of the market economy. But even these measures will not transform the fundamental economic condition that has caused such unease among millennials and downwardly mobile workers. In this context, Sanders’s call for a radical expansion of economic rights and income redistribution would, if enacted, mark the greatest shift to the left the party has known since the New Deal. Like the previous shifts, it would bring an excited core of new constituents to the party, even while costing it some others— disproportionately, some of the socially liberal wealthy donors who have helped fill the party’s coffers for the past several decades and who continue to fill Clinton’s coffers today.

Clinton surely understands that, in light of the growing populism of the electorate, her ties to finance have become an electoral liability.

While she cannot credibly morph into a Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren, she’d do well to embrace more of their positions—calling for the breakup of the mega-banks, for a tax on financial transactions, for greater public provision for the cost of college. More fundamentally, she’d do well to acknowledge more explicitly the great and growing imbalance of power and income between workers and owners, between ordinary Americans and the economic elite, and to situate her proposals under that rubric.

Clinton has been right to insist that there are more kinds of inequality than the economic variety that Sanders rails against. She does not have to abandon her concerns for the myriad inequalities that Democrats have worked to mitigate for the past 50 years. But to win not just the votes but the allegiance of millennials, she needs to do what Democrats have largely avoided doing for decades: acknowledge the breakdown of a once-thriving economic order, identify the culprits, and propose a solution.

Identifying the culprits is the part that does not come naturally to her, but there are moments when simple leadership requires it. Those are the moments when parties must reorient

to face fundamental new challenges. That’s something that Roosevelt, Johnson, and Bernie Sanders knew in their bones.

The Republicans

What Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party this year may best be described as outing. He has stripped off its thinning veneer of respectability—what he refers to as “political correctness”—and revealed it to be the party of xenophobic white nationalism, its decades of simmering racism now adjusted to full boil. Well before the thought that Trump could become the party’s presidential nominee had occurred to any but Trump himself, Republicans had demonized minorities, stranded more than ten million immigrants in legal limbo, and done their damnedest to suppress minority voting.

As in the 1930s, when many in the middle class saw their hitherto secure existences thrown into turmoil, so the economic dislocations of recent decades, and particularly since 2008, have driven millions of older, workingclass whites into either lower-paying jobs or an uneasy early retirement. In the 1930s, fascist demagogues preyed on these people’s anxieties and biases by demonizing presumably alien “others”—with more success in Europe than in the United States. (Father Coughlin is a footnote today; Adolf Hitler is not.) In the U.S., the Depression struck at a time when immigration had already been shut down, and Southern Democrats compelled Roosevelt to craft the New Deal’s new rights and benefits so they largely didn’t apply to blacks. That didn’t leave much of a target for far-right rabble-rousers.

This time around, the nationalist right has found more congenial ground. The downward mobility of working-class whites, coupled with the inattention to their legitimate economic concerns by elites of both parties, has created a sense of abandonment that registers in all manner of social indices, including rising death rates. As was not the case in the 1930s, this downward mobility has taken place in a period of widespread immigration by racial minorities, even though that immigrant wave has greatly subsided since the crash of 2008. Displaced from their role at the center of a once-thriving economy, and from their role as the dominant constituency in the American electorate (working-class whites constituted 65 percent of the

electorate in 1980; they constitute just 36 percent today), a sizable segment of the white working class and middle class has displaced its rage onto the nation’s growing nonwhite population, and its African American president.

Before Trump came along, Republicans sought to channel this rage in “respectable” ways—stoking it to the point that voters would keep sending them back to Congress to ward off immigration reform and block any programs that might help minorities, but shunning the kind of bigoted outbursts at which talk-radio shock jocks excelled.

Trump has won his party’s nomination not only by demonstrating the authenticity of his rage through shock-jock talk, but also by displaying a Manichean white-nationalist worldview his supporters could appreciate. In Trump’s world, there’s a good welfare state (Social Security and Medicare, which reward elderly whites for their work) and a bad one (Obamacare, welfare, and other programs, which presumably are targeted to minorities). The economic elites who devised the trade deals that hollowed out the economy are the enemy, too.

Trump’s narcissism poses an immediate challenge to Republican prospects this year, but it’s a challenge peculiar to Trump himself, and will pass from the scene when he does. The genie of white nationalism that he’s uncorked, however, presents the GOP with a deeper dilemma. Will Trump’s supporters rally only to candidates who hate and fear the “other” as Trump does? If so, can the party survive, or will it fade to insignificance, like the GOP in California, which made the fatal mistake in the 1990s of demonizing Latino immigrants in an increasingly multiracial state?

When Republicans meet in Cleveland this July, we will get more of a sense of whether major forces in the GOP will step forward to reject Trump’s appeal to nativism and racism, and whether any prominent Republican will be able to generate a different narrative for the fall campaign. At best, the Republicans will come out of the convention as a deeply divided party.

Philadelphia

Eighty years ago this summer, the Democrats convened in Philadelphia (as they will this July) to re-nominate Franklin Roosevelt. On the final night of the convention, the delegates, in the company of nearly 100,000 other Demo-

crats, repaired to Franklin Field to hear Roosevelt’s acceptance speech—one of the most remarkable addresses in the history of presidential politics. Roosevelt understood that his speech marked a fundamental redefinition of what the Democrats, and the citizens of Depression-era America, were about.

Noting that it was in Philadelphia that Americans had first defined their nation’s creed, Roosevelt equated their break with the British crown with the New Deal’s break with the “economic royalists” of 20th-century America.

“Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the [founding] fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. … The political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality.”

The task before the nation, Roosevelt continued, was thus to equalize both economic and political power. “If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.”

At a time when totalitarian regimes were rising around the world, Roosevelt said, the success of American democracy—of democracy itself—depended on its ability to create a more broad-based prosperity, a more egalitarian economy. Ours, he said, “is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy.”

“This generation of Americans,” he concluded, “has a rendezvous with destiny.”

Whether the current generation’s challenge is anywhere as epochal as all that remains to be seen. As the Democrats and their presumptive nominee gather in Philadelphia this summer, however, the sense and sensibility of Roosevelt’s words should stand as a model of how a party and its standard-bearer can grapple with the nation’s deepest dilemmas, can disenthrall themselves from outmoded analyses and policies, and can reset their compass for the challenges that a new generation of Americans confronts every day.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 27

Blue Cities, As cities have moved left and states have moved right, the conflicts between them have escalated.

W

hen Denton, Texas, passed a fracking ban in November 2014, it was national news.

The story seemed out of a movie, a David-and-Goliath tale in which a scrappy band of citizens goes up against big industry and wins. Located in the heart of oil and gas territory, the town is hardly a liberal bastion; its state representative is a staunch conservative, and among its biggest annual events is the North Texas State Fair and Rodeo.

But residents were watching gas drills come closer and closer to their parks and schools. Adam Briggle, a professor at the University of North Texas in Denton, found himself attending more and more meetings as he tried to understand the environmental impact of fracking, a process used to extract oil and natural gas from the ground. Tara Linn Hunter, a music teacher, found herself with debilitating adult asthma, a condition she attributed at least partly to pollution generated by the efforts to get natural gas. After the city council approved new drills just hundreds of feet from a park and a hospital in 2009, citizens began to organize. By 2014, Hunter and Briggle were part of Frack Free Denton, a group that sought to put a fracking ban on the ballot; Hunter helped coordinate volunteers collecting 2,000 signatures. Oil and gas industry groups poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into opposing the ban, outspending the activists nearly 10 to 1. In the end,

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that money didn’t matter—nearly 59 percent of Denton’s citizens voted in favor of the measure.

But from the beginning of its campaign, Frack Free Denton was aware that electoral victory wouldn’t be enough. The activists knew that with a single measure, the Texas state legislature could invalidate their local ban.

What’s more, in doing so, the legislature would be acting under a completely legal state prerogative that reminds cities how limited their lawmaking power really is.

Sure enough, despite widespread local support, it only took months to make Denton’s fracking ban history.

The GOP-dominated Texas state legislature, under pressure from the oil and gas industry, passed a law forbidding any locality from banning fracking. Denton’s own state representative voted for the measure. “We were so excited it passed, but I think we knew then we were up against a challenge because of the wave of folks who were voted up alongside the ban,” says Hunter. “We got a hard lesson in the state of our democracy, the state of our government.”

“Preemption” laws are not new, nor are they necessarily about undoing local legislation. But with some notable exceptions, past preemption laws have generally enforced what can be called “minimum preemption”: They force localities to do something where they might otherwise have done little or nothing.

As it’s often said, they set a “floor” for regu-

lation. For instance, the federal government has been setting minimum standards of environmental protection for years, preempting the states from allowing lower environmental standards. Similarly, states often set a floor for various local regulations, whether regarding pollution, trade licensing, gun ownership, or other matters.

Most current preemption laws, by contrast, are what one might call “maximum preemption.” These laws aren’t about setting minimums; instead, they prohibit local regulation.

States have prevented localities from creating paid sick leave requirements for businesses, or raising the minimum wage. Many who oppose these measures blame their proliferation on the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, which has drafted “model” preemption bills for state lawmakers to use. “Pretty much anything you can think of that matters to the American family is under assault by local preemption,” says Mark Pertschuk, the director of Grassroots Change, which fights preemption laws around the country.

Earlier this year, a fight in North Carolina over Charlotte’s anti-discrimination ordinance cast such maximum preemption laws into the national spotlight. The Charlotte City Council had passed a measure extending civil-rights protections for its LGBT community. The policy also allowed transgender individuals to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity rather than with their biological

r o s c h e t z k y l s t o c k p h o t o , f o t o v oya g e r / i s t o c k

By Abb y Ra p o p o rt

Red States

tony gutierrez / ap images

City Limits: Anti-fracking protesters won in Denton, Texas—but lost in the state legislature.

sex. Including gay and transgender people in anti-discrimination ordinances has become a standard business-friendly move; nationwide, 225 cities and counties have passed similar measures, in part to attract businesses. While Republican Governor Pat McCrory and state legislature leaders threatened to intervene in Charlotte, Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, an advocate of the measure, wasn’t overly concerned. “I thought they’d make a big noise about it but they’d recognize it was just Charlotte, it’s a progressive city, and they didn’t need to come in and change anything because it would jeopardize the economy,” she says.

But when the state Republicans responded, they sent shockwaves around the country by passing a maximum preemption measure that invalidated all local anti-discrimination ordinances, including those protecting women and racial minorities. Not only did they force

transgender people to use public bathrooms based on their reproductive organs; for good measure, they also rolled a provision into the bill that forbade any North Carolina city from increasing the minimum wage.

The strategic use of maximum preemption laws dates back to the 1980s, when localities began passing smoking bans and smokefree requirements. As court documents later revealed, R.J. Reynolds began promoting preemption because, in its own words, “state laws which preempt local anti-tobacco ordinances are the most effective means to counter local challenges.” Although further grim research findings eventually dealt the tobacco industry’s campaign mortal blows, other groups learned from its efforts. The National Rifle Association used similar tactics in the 1990s when concerns about crime prompted local gun regulations; 43 states now have some form of maximum

preemption preventing localities from passing additional gun regulations on top of state law.

In the last five years, as Republicans have captured an unprecedented number of state legislatures and as cities have become hotbeds for progressive organizing, the number of maximum preemption laws has grown dramatically. In 2011, after Wisconsin passed a bill limiting the local ability to require paid sick days, ALEC and the National Restaurant Association took up the cause, and now 15 states have preempted local paid sick day requirements. According to Grassroots Change, in 2015 at least 29 states introduced a maximum preemption measure and, of them, 17 considered more than one. The progressive source PR Watch reports that Florida alone considered 20 such measures. The bills’ concerns range from forbidding local plastic-bag bans to preventing towns from increasing the minimum wage. Last year saw a rise in what progressives call “super-preemption” bills, which both limit local authority and offer the right to sue noncompliant cities or counties to both individuals and corporations.

ALEC currently has five model bills on its website explicitly designed to preempt local measures, and last year, Jon Russell, the director of the American City County Exchange (ACCE), ALEC ’s local government initiative, wrote a piece titled “Preemption Laws Provide Backstop for Localized Progressive Politics.”

The National Restaurant Association has also thrown its support behind measures to ban local minimum-wage hikes and other attempts to increase labor standards.

“We realized it’s much more convenient for them to fight this in 50 state capitals than in 13,000 cities and localities,” says Kim Haddow, a consultant who works with groups that oppose these maximum preemption laws.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 29

With Congress gridlocked and Republicans holding most state legislatures, local government has become the prime venue for progressive agendas. Many city officials oppose what their state is doing politically—on gay rights, on living wages, on immigration— and pass measures state lawmakers wouldn’t consider.

Many groups that work against these laws push for policies that conservative state legislatures oppose. For instance, Family Values @ Work and the Rockefeller Family Fund both promote paid sick leave and workers’ rights. Others, like Grassroots Change, which monitors preemption measures through its Preemption Watch initiative, and the Center for Media and Democracy, which created the ALEC Exposed website to show that organization’s reach, focus on what preemption means for political participation and democracy. These groups often work together; anti-preemption workshops convened by the Mayors Innovation Project, a national networking initiative that connects local officials and promotes progressive policies, have featured all of them.

Preemption is a relatively cut-and-dry legal matter in most states. Localities are creations of the states and have whatever power states grant them. “For more than a century, it’s been understood that city power derives from state law,” says Harvard Law School professor Gerald Frug, co-author of City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation. “A lot of the fights have to be done at the state [level].”

Some states grant cities more clout than others. States like Virginia follow the so-called “Dillon’s Rule,” a principle named after a 19thcentury judge and law professor, John Forrest Dillon, who formulated the doctrine of state preeminence over local governments when he was on the Iowa Supreme Court. Municipalities, according to Dillon, “derive their powers and rights wholly from the [state] legislature.

It breathes into them the breath of life. … As it creates, so may it destroy. If it may destroy, it may abridge and control.”

Other states allow “home rule,” granting cities more flexibility. But the distinction only matters when outside groups bring a lawsuit against a

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local ordinance. Whereas home-rule cities don’t have to ask permission before they pass certain types of laws, courts may find that a city in a Dillon’s Rule state never had the authority to pass a civil-rights ordinance or minimum-wage hike in the first place. But even in a home-rule state, if a state legislature takes back authority, be it over plastic bags or paid leave, there seldom is much the city can do. “The system is still based on the idea that the states are hierarchical superiors,” explains Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School and an expert on state and local government law. State constitutions usually protect city authority only over narrowly defined areas, such as hiring procedures for municipal workers.

This top-down structure has a rationale, says Aaron Renn, author of the city policy blog Urbanophile and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “States are expected to serve as a backstop to local government in a way that the federal government is not expected to serve as a backstop to the states,” he says. “When you give people control and then they get into trouble and you have to bail them out, that becomes a bit of a moral hazard.”

The explanation for the recent rise in maximum preemption isn’t hard to figure out. There hasn’t been any change in the country’s legal structure. Instead, with Congress gridlocked and with Republicans holding most state legislatures, local government has become the prime venue for progressive agendas. Many city officials oppose what their state is doing politically—on gay rights, on living wages, on immigration—and pass measures state lawmakers wouldn’t consider. The trouble is that cities have little power in relation to the state.

“Nowhere in the Constitution does it talk about the delegation of powers to cities and counties,” ACCE’s Russell said on a conference

call. “Both the Dillon Rule and the home rule are creations of the state. Local powers can be given and local powers can be taken away.”

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey didn’t

like what he was seeing—local pushes in Tucson and Tempe to consider paid sick leave ordinances, a group in Flagstaff hoping to get a minimum-wage increase on the ballot. So at this year’s State of the State address, he was explicit that cities adopting progressive policies would face repercussions. “I … encourage all our cities and towns to put the brakes on illadvised plans to create a patchwork of different wage and employment laws,” he stated. “If these political subdivisions don’t stop, they’ll drive our economy off a cliff.” Ducey promised to use “every constitutional power of the Executive Branch” to prevent such a patchwork, including withholding shared revenue funds that usually pay for firehouses, police departments, and other public safety services.

Two months later, the state legislature sent the governor a bill with a creative, systematic, and especially punitive approach to preemption. Under this measure, which Ducey signed and which will go into effect in the fall, any state legislator can ask the state attorney general if a local ordinance is in conflict with state law, and if the attorney general determines the local measure is indeed in violation, the town or city will have just 30 days to reverse the measure or watch the state distribute its share of state funds to other towns. Another law passed in Arizona bars localities from mandating the fringe benefits that businesses offer employees, while a third bars communities from penalizing companies for changing employees’ work schedules. Still a fourth measure seeks to punish Tucson and other cities that have kept gun regulations on the books despite state laws pre-

rick scuteri / ap images

empting them. The measure allows courts to remove public officials from office and impose penalties up to $50,000.

Such laws limit the innovative, problemsolving potential of local governments. Many city councils don’t have partisan affiliations and even where they do, officials are often less beholden to party politics. City services are not siloed the way they are at the state

compared with their states as a whole. Urban elected officials often embrace controversial policies they believe would improve the general functioning of their city—whether improving environmental standards or making the city friendlier to gay residents. “It’s one more reflection of the growing partisan polarization that we see,” explains Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University. “There’s a growing divide between red states and the very blue, very progressive urban areas within those states.”

Cities are those states’ economic drivers; urban centers are responsible for a huge, and growing, proportion of economic growth. During the past 15 years, the share of economic output produced in metropolitan areas has risen from 85 percent to 91 percent, according Keeping Localities In Line: Governor Doug Ducey signed a highly punitive preemption law. to the 2015 U.S. Metro Economies Report from level. Mayors can easily sit down with those in the United States Conference of Mayors and charge of housing, transportation, and waste the Council on Metro Economies and the New management to discuss a problem that affects American City. When conservative state govall three areas. Similarly, local government ernments override local policies that reflect the solutions often emerge out of conversations progressive culture and politics of cities—as with nongovernmental entities: businesses, of North Carolina did in adopting its “bathroom” course, but also local nonprofits, foundations, law—the state risks driving away the people and activist groups on all sides. who are fostering prosperity.

“The partnerships can sometimes be chalBruce Katz, an expert on global urbanizalenging to the partisan nature of state govern- tion at the Brookings Institution, points out, ment,” says Brooks Rainwater, director of the however, that it’s not only red states that cause City Solutions and Applied Research Center at problems for blue cities. Just because a blue the National League of Cities. “At the city level, state isn’t fighting its cities on plastic-bag bans at the end of the day, mayors and city council doesn’t mean that its Democratic state legislamembers have to get stuff done. Potholes have ture gives cities access to capital or the right to to be fixed and the trash has to be collected.” annex adjoining (and often wealthy) areas. In But with some metropolitan areas increas- fact, Katz points out, plenty of western states ingly differentiating themselves from smaller do allow annexation. “I don’t think either party, towns and rural areas, conflicts between cities once they get in power in a state, really deals and state legislatures are increasing. As Harold with the city in the way that it needs to. I don’t Meyerson has written in this magazine (“The think either party has a monopoly on really Revolt of the Cities,” May/June 2014), America’s dealing with a city well,” he says. “Does [a city] urban populations have become younger, gayer, have access to enough capital to solve its proband less white than the rest of the country, and lems? Because at the end of the day it’s the in the process have become more progressive problem solver. Not the state. Not the federal

government. The true unit of the economy is the metropolis.”

Of course, maximum preemption laws do not simply affect major cities, and small towns are often more constrained than their more populous counterparts. But maximum preemption bills largely target the big cities that have values at odds with those of their state legislature. A 2015 survey of 89 mayors in 31 states conducted by Boston University’s Initiative on Cities showed mayors felt “overly burdened by restrictions from their state government” and wished they could expand revenue-raising options and free themselves of other limitations on their autonomy. According to the survey, most mayors feel they have a worse relationship with their state legislature than with the federal government.

As American politics continue to polarize, there’s little incentive for state legislatures to compromise with cities that rural and suburban voters distrust. Neither side is free from accusations of hypocrisy. Conservatives who frequently invoke state and local control as an argument against federal overreach now embrace maximum preemption laws that limit local authority. While state legislatures may have the legal authority to impose those limits, systematically taking power from cities and towns doesn’t look good for a party that’s spent eight years railing against Obama administration “power grabs.”

But progressives also champion preemption laws at the state level, albeit minimum preemption laws that build higher regulatory floors: stricter environmental measures, for instance, or higher minimum wages or stronger anti-discrimination measures. And their initiatives too can seem driven more by ideology and national aims than by practical, local results. “With things like the minimum wage, people are very explicit that they are doing this to promote national change,” says Renn. “A lot of these progressive policies are not about delivering traditional municipal services better. They’re about addressing national issues better.”

ACCE’s Russell agrees. “When you take a state like Oregon,” which has raised the minimum wage statewide, “you never hear people say local control,” says Russell. “A lot of this is driven by local interests at the local level who have lost

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 31

In Birmingham, Alabama, nearly threequarters of the residents are African American, and nearly a third of the people live in poverty. The city became an industrial center in the late 19th century because all the necessary ingredients for making steel—iron ore, coal, and limestone—were nearby. Like so many old industrial cities, Birmingham now relies more on finance and other services for its economic growth. But 40,000 of its own residents make just $7.25 an hour (the federal minimum wage), and many of these workers rely on food stamps and public housing to make ends meet. Unlike the vast majority of states, Alabama’s state legislature has never set a minimum wage above the federal level.

32 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

When fast-food workers in the city joined the Fight for 15 movement, a national effort advocating for a $15 minimum wage, the effort quickly gained momentum. In August 2015, after a lengthy series of debates and research, the council decided to increase the city’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2017. In doing so, Birmingham became the first city in the South to offer residents a minimum-wage hike.

among the plaintiffs, as is Greater Birmingham Ministries and the Alabama Chapter of the NAACP. The case is predicated on how quickly the majority-white legislature overrode a majority-black city council on a matter that would disproportionately impact African American workers, and on the character of the 1901 Alabama Constitution, which enshrines state preemption. That constitu-

Birmingham Jail: Alabama’s legislature preempted a local bill setting a minimum wage of $10.10 an hour for a city where three out of four people are African American. Now labor advocates are suing the state, claiming racial animus.

“It wasn’t the $15 an hour we need,” said Antwan Adams, a local Hardee’s employee, in a prepared statement, yet “I began to dream of a life where buying dinner or paying the electricity bill didn’t cause panic.”

But then, he said, “the state stole my raise.”

Before the ordinance could go into effect, the governor called a special session to roll back the measure. Representative David Faulkner, whose Mountain Spring district is among the state’s wealthiest, sponsored the measure; it passed within a week of being introduced.

(Faulkner did not respond to multiple calls to his office requesting comments for this story.)

Now, labor advocates are suing the state, claiming that the preemption law shows racial animus and violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Adams is

tion also still allows for a literacy test to vote, outlaws intermarriage, and requires segregation in education. (Federal law and Supreme Court decisions have rendered most of these laws unenforceable.) The labor advocates’ suit agues that when state legislators rely on the preemption authority given by such an openly racist document, they are showing similarly discriminatory intent.

Penda Hair, co-founder of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights legal group, says this would be the first time she is aware of that racial-discrimination claims have been used against a preemption law. “It is not going to be like all preemption laws across the country are suddenly suspect because of this,” says Hair.

“But it could cause other laws to be vulnerable.”

(Hair is not directly involved in the Alabama lit-

north country public r adio

the ability to get their way at the state level.”

For progressives, however, the distinction between maximum and minimum preemption measures is enormous. “You don’t want local communities to undo protections, but you do want them to be able to increase protections,” says Ellen Bravo, director of Family Values @ Work, an advocacy group for paid sick days and paid family leave.

Most progressive activists fighting preemption measures readily admit they’d like to see some of these local ordinances become state or federal law. But they’re also blunt about how unrealistic such hopes seem. “Increasingly, if you’re an advocate for workplace reform, the only place you can move is at the county or city level,” says consultant Haddow. With the federal government gridlocked and so many state legislatures controlled by hard-line Republicans, there’s less opportunity for minority-party measures even to be debated at a committee hearing, let alone passed. In the deep red states, city councils and county boards have become the last available forum for discussing paid leave, higher minimum wages, or environmental standards. When maximum preemption laws pass, it often ends the discussion; local activists have nowhere to turn.

“I still feel disempowered and dejected by HB 40,” the measure that undid Denton’s fracking ban, says Adam Briggle, the professor who fought to pass the ban. “I also feel turned off from civic action because of the way the fissures have opened up in our own community [after the law was passed].”

Local activists must grapple with whether they should take a fight to town hall if that means bringing down the wrath of the state capitol. But local actions can ripple throughout the country and change the conversation.

igation, though she has talked with the plaintiffs and spoke on a media call about the lawsuit.)

If the Birmingham case is successful, it may offer a new tactic for localities trying to fight preemption laws. Typically, such fights are extremely difficult, since cities cannot lay claim to any inherent rights of self-determination.

Publicity has often been the most effective method for combating preemption bills. In Georgia, a so-called “religious liberty” bill that passed the state legislature would have allowed faith-based groups to deny services to gay or transgender people. But national publicity made it clear that the cost of such a measure would have been huge, as major companies said they’d pull their operations out of the state.

The NFL threatened to take Atlanta out of consideration for the Super Bowl; Disney promised to stop filming in the state. Ultimately, the governor vetoed the measure.

Because conservative politicians lay so much store in the importance of state and local control, advocates have also found some success emphasizing the hypocrisy of Republican legislatures passing such measures. Notably, in South Dakota, Governor Dennis Daugaard vetoed a measure that would have prevented local school districts from allowing transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity rather than their biological sex. The bill, the governor declared, “removes the ability of local school districts to determine the most appropriate accommodations for their individual students and replaces that flexibility with a state mandate.”

But most liberal activists don’t want to just cross their fingers and hold their breath hoping for a governor’s veto. Consultant Haddow says the campaigns she works with usually level with communities seeking advice or help;

national support organizations often won’t work on measures particularly likely to draw a preemption law. Family Values @ Work’s Bravo argues that the next step for communities is to try to put initiatives on the state ballot where that option is available. Taking back state governments from conservatives would clearly do the most to avoid the preemption problem. “We have got to vote these individuals out of office,” says Alabama’s NAACP President Bernard Simelton. “That’s the only way we’re going to effect a change for sure.”

For now, however, local activists must grapple with whether they should take a fight to town hall if that means bringing down the wrath of the state capitol. Hunter, the Denton music teacher who threw herself into the fracking-ban efforts, readily admits that watching fracking drills roll into her town after the state’s preemption measure was heartbreaking. Nevertheless, she appreciates how local actions can ripple throughout the country and change the conversation. She says she often heard from other activists across the country that if the people of North Texas—the homeland of fracking—could ban it, they could too.

The question is how long such victories can last without winning elections statewide.

Two hundred miles south of Denton,

Austin was having its own fight with business.

Not over oil and gas or living-wage issues but, ironically, with Uber, the “ridesharing” app company, currently valued at $50 billion. The company operates as a competitor to taxi services, allowing anyone to sign up as a driver, submit to a background check through a separate company, and then respond to ride requests. The company is so popular with consumers, it’s successfully pushed past the various concerns about the adequacy of these

background checks, which have been raised by taxi companies (who fear being put out of business) and by city councils in a number of places.

But in Austin, the issue blew up when the city council voted in December to require drivers for Uber (and fellow rideshare company Lyft) to submit to fingerprint-based background checks like those that taxi drivers must undergo.

Both companies had already promised to pull out of Austin if the city made additional background check requirements. After the city council passed the ordinance requiring fingerprinting, the companies launched a campaign to repeal it through a ballot proposition.

They poured more than $8 million into the fight, breaking all records for spending in city elections. They employed thousands of block walkers to comb the city and sent out a seemingly limitless supply of flyers. Uber sent out text blasts to customers, pushing them to vote (an act that resulted in a federal lawsuit and a complaint to the Federal Communications Commission). The opposition had less than $200,000 with which to push back. For many, the battle had become about just how much power industry should have over city councils.

The May election results were clear: 56 percent of Austinites voted against the measure. The companies pulled out, disappointing users, but seemingly affirming that cities can indeed set limits on all-powerful companies.

Within 24 hours, however, two Republican state senators had promised to repeal the measure—and with it, yet another piece of local power.

Abby Rapoport is a freelance writer and former Prospect staff writer from Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in a number of outlets including National Journal, The Texas Observer, and The New Republic.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 33

the

New Labor economy

Low wages and unreliable jobs have finally become center-stage issues. Ideas for improvements are plentiful.

Remedies will take a massive power shift.

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Confronting the Parasite Economy Why low-wage work is bad for business— and all of us

By N ic k Hanauer

m i l a n t r a c y / s i pa v i a a p i m a g e s

T

here are two types of businesses in America today: those that pay their workers a living wage—the real economy—and those that don’t— the parasite economy. And all of us who live and work in the real economy should be royally pissed at the way the parasite economy is sucking us dry.

Here in the real economy, we solve the problems, build the things, and pay the wages that make America great.

When politicians of both parties promise to attract “good jobs” to their districts or states, they’re talking about the kind of real-economy jobs that pay a decent middle-class wage—jobs that provide the income, benefits, and security necessary to participate robustly in the economy as a consumer and taxpayer. It is the real economy that drives both production and demand, and that fills our tax coffers with the money needed to educate our children, maintain our infrastructure, invest in research and development, fund our social safety net, and provide for the national defense.

But in the parasite economy—where companies large and small cling to low-wage business models out of ignorance or habit or simple greed—“good jobs,” and the economic dynamism they produce, are in short supply. This is the economy in which tens of millions of Americans work for poverty wages with few if any benefits, often in the face of abusive scheduling practices that make it impossible to plan their life from day to day, let alone month to month.

The difference between these two economies is stark.

The real economy pays the wages that drive consumer demand, while the parasite economy erodes it. The real economy generates about $5 trillion a year in local, state, and federal tax revenue, while the parasite economy is subsidized by taxes. The real economy provides our children the education and opportunity necessary to grow into the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and civic leaders, while the parasite economy traps them in a cycle of intergenerational poverty.

The real economy delivers on the promise of capitalism.

The parasite economy relentlessly undermines it.

If, as many on the right are wont to do, we divide our nation into one of “makers” and “takers,” it’s not the working poor who deserve our derision, but the low-wage businesses

that exploit them. These are the real deadbeats of the parasite economy: companies with a business model predicated on a cheap supply of taxpayer-subsidized labor, growing fat on the vast wealth of consumer demand generated by the middleclass wages of the real economy, while leaving employees with little if any discretionary income of their own.

To be clear, I am not making a moral argument for the real economy (though there is surely a moral argument to be made), but rather a cold and calculated economic appeal based on self-interest properly understood. You see, I am an entrepreneur and venture capitalist invested mostly in technology companies that pay the sort of middle-class wages that enable our workers to fully participate in the economy as consumers of other companies’ products.

That’s the way a market economy is supposed to work. We buy your products. You buy ours. But low-wage workers at parasite companies—mostly giant and profitable corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s—cannot afford to robustly consume our products, or most anybody else’s, in return. The parasite economy is simply bad for business.

At best, a worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour can barely manage to pay the rent, buy some groceries, and maybe a bus pass, leaving little disposable income for anything else. No restaurants. No hair salons.

No health club or yoga studio memberships, let alone the latest tech gadget or service from one of my companies. In business, the first, second, and third most important thing is demand. If demand is high, almost any other obstacle can be overcome. Workers earning $7 or $8 an hour cannot demand most products and services. They can barely subsist.

As an entrepreneur and investor, I have founded or financed 35 companies across a wide range of industries: manufacturing, retailing, software, e-commerce, robotics, health care, financial services, and banking. I know a thing or two about sales and customers. And I have never been in a business that considered minimum-wage workers earning $10,000 to $20,000 per year as our target customer. Except for pawnshops or payday lenders, a typical business’s core customers very likely earn more than minimum wage. It is demand from middle-income workers that supports the small local businesses that create

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 35

Low-wage business models are a

choice.

For every Walmart, there’s a Costco.

64 percent of new private-sector jobs and 49 percent of all jobs in America. So a fair question to ask is: If no business wants customers who make $7.25 an hour, why in the world would we tolerate—or even worse, subsidize—businesses that pay their workers so little?

A leading advocate of the parasite economy is the National Restaurant Association (the other NRA), which has worked assiduously to keep wages low. The federal minimum wage for tipped workers, unchanged since 1991, is a shocking $2.13 an hour. Lest you think all those workers are raking in tips, as a small elite of servers in high-end urban restaurants do, the median hourly wage for restaurant servers, including tips, is just $9.25 per hour. Tipped workers are more than twice as likely as the average worker to fall under the federal poverty line, and restaurant servers nearly three times as likely, according to a 2011 study by the Economic Policy Institute. Ironically, in its 2014 edition of “Consumer Spending in Restaurants,” the NRA notes that “[t]he primary influencer on consumer spending in restaurants is disposable income.” American households earning less than $30,000 a year—about a third of all households—make up only 15 percent of all restaurant spending, the NRA reports. Can you imagine how much more profitable the restaurant industry would be if one out of three Americans had more disposable income to spend at restaurants? The NRA appears to want every American to eat in restaurants—except restaurant workers.

I used to take parasitic business practices for granted, believing that they were an inherent and unavoidable feature of capitalism. But the more I examined the evidence, the more I realized that this just isn’t true. Some companies just choose to pay their workers as little as possible, and others don’t—while some companies have simply never bothered to imagine that there might be any other way.

And yes, some companies reluctantly keep wages low in the face of market pressure from more willfully parasitic competitors. But in the end, all of us—workers and business owners alike—pay the price in the form of decreased demand, higher taxes, and slower economic growth.

And yes, these low-wage business models are a choice.

While there are parasite companies and parasite jobs, there are no parasite industries or occupations, and there is no line of work worth doing that cannot command a living wage. For every Walmart, there’s a Costco. For every McDonald’s, there’s an In-N-Out Burger. For every single mom waiting tables at the local diner for $2.13 an hour, there’s a healthier, wealthier counterpart earning $13 an hour or more (soon to be $15!) in Seattle or San Francisco or in the thousands of real-economy businesses nationwide where management understands that the “minimum wage” is meant to be a minimum, not a maximum.

In any industry, there are many different strategies for

36 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

running a profitable business—some of which honor the contributions of their workers and some that don’t. And if these businesses that choose to follow a low-wage model represented isolated incidents, I would shower them with moral opprobrium and leave it at that. But there’s nothing isolated about it: It’s a pervasive pattern that warps the entire economy. Economists have a name for this sort of strategy; they call it “free riding.” And make no mistake— free riding doesn’t come free.

According to data compiled by the Brookings Institution, 73 million Americans—nearly one-quarter of our population—live in households eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a benefit exclusively available to the working poor. I want to underscore this point. Nearly a quarter of our fellow citizens are poor—not because they don’t have jobs, but because they or their family members do—mostly working for giant profitable corporations.

These are people who labor long hours preparing our food, stocking our shelves, cleaning our offices, caring for our children, and performing the many other tasks and services that define our modern way of life.

Today, a majority of the money we collectively spend on anti-poverty programs doesn’t go to the jobless, it goes to the working poor. According to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, 69.2 percent of all public benefits go to non-elderly households with at least one working member, nearly half of whom work at least full-time.

In 2014, the EITC alone cost U.S. taxpayers $67 billion, directly supplementing the incomes of the working poor and thus, indirectly, the payrolls of their parasite employers. The Child Tax Credit (CTC) cost the federal government another $58 billion; food stamps, $80 billion; housing vouchers and rental assistance, $38 billion—again, all programs that largely benefit families of the working poor.

These numbers keep growing; the most recent 10-K filings of food manufacturer Mead Johnson reported that “approximately 47% of all infants born in the United States during the 12-month period [that] ended December 31, 2015 benefited from the WIC [Women, Infants, and Children] program,” which provides food assistance to “those considered to be at nutritional risk, including lowincome pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding women and infants and children up to age five.” It is a national disgrace that the parents of nearly one in two infants born in America require government aid just to meet the daily nutritional needs of their children.

And then there’s Medicaid. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, total state and federal Medicaid spending cost U.S. taxpayers $475 billion in 2014. Conservatives disparage Medicaid as a costly “entitlement,” but an entitlement to whom? Workers can’t work when they’re sick or dead; that’s why real-economy companies provide their

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jae c . hong / ap images

economy workers with health insurance and paid sick leave. But parasite economy companies pass that cost off to taxpayers.

This is a ridiculously inefficient way to run an economy.

Complex bureaucracies like food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance are expensive to administer, while the relentless task of applying, qualifying, and maintaining eligibility for the various state and federal programs can be a time-consuming and humiliating process for those compelled to use them. Being poor is hard work in and of itself.

So why spend billions on a bureaucratic redistribution system when employers could simply pay workers enough to afford food, medical care, and housing on their own?

I am not making an argument against anti-poverty programs; the EITC alone lifted 6.2 million Americans out of poverty in 2013 (more than half of them children), while reducing the severity of poverty for another 21.6 million working Americans and their families. But while the EITC has done an admirable job incentivizing low-wage work, it also has the unintended consequence of incentivizing employers to keep wages low—indeed, a 2010 study by Andrew Leigh in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy finds that “a 10 percent increase in the generosity of the EITC is associated with a 5 percent fall in the wages of high school dropouts and a 2 percent fall in the wages of those with only a high school diploma.” Why in the world would you pay your workers enough to clothe, house, and feed themselves, a growing number of my fellow CEOs apparently figure, when taxpayers are willing to do it for you?

In the fast-food industry, more than half of all families—52 percent—are enrolled in at least one public assistance program, at a combined cost of $7 billion a year.

(Until 2013, McDonald’s even provided a “McResources” hotline to help its impoverished workers apply for government aid.) And Walmart alone, according to a 2014 report from Americans for Tax Fairness, costs U.S. taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion a year in public assistance to its 1.4 million mostly low-wage workers—coincidentally, an amount roughly equal to the $6.5 billion a year the company lavished on stock buybacks over the previous decade. Quite simply, McDonald’s and Walmart and other businesses in the parasite economy have grown to rely on the tax dollars of other companies and other workers to indirectly subsidize their payroll—and their immense profits. In effect, many real-economy companies end up subsidizing their parasite-economy competitors.

Compare Walmart’s Sam’s Club chain of warehouse discount stores with its rival Costco—perhaps the most elegant (and studied) head-to-head comparison of lowwage versus living-wage business models in America today.

In an effort to reverse high turnover costs, a reputation for poor customer service, and stagnant same-store sales, notoriously low-wage Walmart recently made news by rais-

ing starting wages at all its stores, including Sam’s Club, to $9 an hour in April 2015, and to $10 an hour in 2016.

“Bottom line—it’s working,” Walmart CEO Douglas McMillon reassured nervous investors in a recent blog post. But don’t mistake this minor course correction for a change in business models; Sam’s Club wages remain substantially lower than those at rival Costco.

To the casual observer, the two chains look virtually identical: cavernous warehouses stacked high with pallets of heavily discounted goods, from groceries to apparel, electronics to major appliances, and everything in between.

Both chains earn a substantial portion of their profits from annual membership fees ($45 a year at Sam’s Club, $55 at Costco), and both chains offer myriad other discounted services to their members, from insurance to travel to

banking. Together, the two chains dominate the warehouse retail category: Sam’s Club claims the largest geographic footprint, with 652 stores located throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico, compared with Costco’s 492 stores. But Costco is the perennial market leader in paid members (currently 84 million, while Sam’s Club had 47 million in 2012), gross revenue ($113 billion in 2014 versus $57 billion), and pretax earnings ($3.2 billion versus $2 billion).

But the biggest difference? Costco offers its average worker the opportunity to earn a living wage, while Sam’s Club does not.

Neither company publishes its wage scale, so exact numbers are hard to pin down, but Costco is famous for its generous compensation policies. Walmart is infamous for the opposite. Glassdoor.com, which relies on worker-reported data, lists an average wage for a Sam’s Club cashier at less than $10 an hour, while a Costco cashier earns nearly $15. Costco’s wages may start only a couple bucks an hour

The pay of this Walmart “associate” may well be supplemented by taxpayers.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 37

Costco cashiers are well-paid workers whom the public doesn’t subsidize.

This irony is repeated throughout the nexus between the real and parasite economies: Low-wage McDonald’s (just over $8 an hour) is subsidized by higher-wage In-N-Out Burger (about $11.50 an hour). Low-wage Macy’s (about $9 an hour) is subsidized by higher-wage Nordstrom (nearly $12 an hour). Low-wage Kroger (just over $8 an hour) is subsidized by higher-wage Safeway (more than $11 an hour).

In industry after industry, direct competitors are paying employees vastly different wages to perform the exact same job. But there is little difference between a Sam’s Club cashier and a Costco cashier other than the fact that one qualifies for government assistance while the other helps pay for it.

Both models can be highly profitable—both Costco and Sam’s Club have returned billions of dollars to shareholders.

But only one model lifts workers into the Great American Middle Class that is the primary engine of economic growth.

So why should we subsidize a low-wage parasite economy when the high-wage real economy offers so much more?

38 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

Of course, some will argue that the question is moot—that the labor market efficiently determines wages, not wellmeaning CEOs or self-serving policy-makers (or meddling know-it-alls like me), and that if a Sam’s Club cashier is worth $15 an hour, then that is what the labor market would force Sam’s Club to pay. “Supply and demand,” and all that.

That is nonsense. Take it from someone who has created dozens of businesses—people don’t get paid what they are “worth.” They get paid what they negotiate. We can all point to examples of CEOs who negotiated far more than they are worth, but there are many, many more people in our country who are worth far more than they negotiated.

That’s because more than any other market, the labor market is distorted by a profound imbalance of power between buyers and sellers; in fact, other than the small share of workers who have a collective-bargaining agreement, the vast majority of workers enjoy little bargaining power at all. Most workers have limited resources and immediate needs—to eat, to pay rent, to provide for their children—while most employers could leave any particular position unfilled indefinitely without suffering any personal hardship at all. As Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations: “In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.”

So why do parasite employers keep wages low? Because they can. And in recent decades, employers have relentlessly exploited this power imbalance, eroding labor’s share of the economy from an average of 50 percent of GDP between 1950 and 1980 to a ten-year average of only 43 percent today, while profits’ share of GDP has risen by a similar amount. That’s about a trillion dollars a year that used to go to wages that now goes to profits. But that trillion dollars isn’t profit because it needs to be, or has to be, or should be. It’s profit because powerful people like me prefer it to be, and workers no longer have enough power to negotiate a fairer and more economically sensible split.

Clearly, wages are low in the parasite economy because many employers choose to keep them low and workers lack the power to affect that choice. And in highly pricecompetitive markets, even the most noble and generous CEOs are limited by the dynamics of competition.

This brings me to an uncomfortable confession, and the part of this essay that is least fun to write: I’m a parasite, too. And I hate it.

I worked my way up through the family business, Pacific Coast Feather Company, one of the largest domestic manufacturers of textile products in the nation. We employ roughly 750 workers in factories across the United States, making pillows, comforters, and mattress pads. And I’ll admit it: I am not proud of the wages we pay many of our workers. We do pay more than 90 percent of our employees

c a r o ly n k a s t e r / a p i m a g e s

higher than at Sam’s Club, but Costco quickly rewards workers for their loyalty and experience. A 2008 article in Slate reported that a Costco cashier with five years’ experience earns $40,000 a year plus benefits—enough for a two-cashier Costco family to find themselves firmly ensconced in the American middle class, enough to pay into the federal Treasury rather than draw out of it.

Which brings us to the cruelest irony of these dueling business models: High-wage Costco and its workers are essentially subsidizing through their taxes their competition from low-wage Sam’s Club. But it isn’t just the tax subsidies that are so maddening. Costco employees can afford to shop at Sam’s Club, while impoverished Sam’s Club employees cannot afford to shop at Costco.

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economy above the state minimum wage—and the majority of those minimum-wage workers are in California, where the wage floor was recently raised to $10 an hour (and will go to $15 over the next five years)—but at any given time, between 20 and 30 percent of our workforce (around 250 people, give or take) come from temporary labor firms, which very likely do not pay those employees enough to sustain anything close to a middle-class life.

Today, I co-chair the board with my brother; a nonfamily CEO manages the day-to-day operations. But like many other business owners in the parasite economy, I feel trapped by the low standards and competitive dynamics of our highly price-sensitive industry. The retailers we sell our product through are viciously price-competitive; if our prices inch higher than our competitors’ on pillows and comforters of comparable quality, we’d lose the bulk of our market share in a New York minute. I desperately want to pay our workers a living wage, but while labor only accounts for a fraction of our costs, we just couldn’t compete against manufacturers paying at parasitic wage levels. No doubt our better-paid workers would be more productive, happy, and loyal, but I fear the labor cost differential might be too great and our margins too small for us to survive.

And yet.

If every company paid a reasonable wage, everybody would benefit as a result. Every worker would benefit from higher wages. Every company would benefit from higher worker productivity, lower turnover, and from increased demand for goods and services, without being squeezed by low-wage competitors. Every community would benefit from the jobs created by that extra demand. Every taxpayer would benefit from decreased need for poverty programs.

Imagine an economy in which every worker could afford to treat themselves daily to a fancy espresso drink—how great would this be for Starbucks, even if Starbucks had to pay its own workers a little bit more, too?

If you give the poorest Americans a raise, they will spend that money within their community. We have plenty of data to back this up. When San Jose increased its minimum wage by $2 in 2013, the organization Puget Sound Sage reports, registered businesses in San Jose increased by 3 percent in the year after the raise, and small-retailer registration increased by 19 percent. Furthermore, unemployment decreased by a full percent, and more than 4,000 jobs were added in the restaurant and hospitality sector alone.

Which brings me to my main point. We could collectively solve the problem of the parasite economy quickly and fairly, simply by raising the federal minimum wage back to a reasonable level—say $12 to $15 an hour. And the ironic part is that everyone would benefit—even the companies that currently pay low wages.

Markets are defined by rules; indeed, no high-func-

tioning market economy is possible without the effective rule of law. Some of these rules are necessary to prevent companies from cheating—for example, the enforcement of standard weights and measures. Some of these rules are necessary to protect the health and safety of consumers, such as food and drug standards. And some of these rules are necessary to prevent companies from gaining an unfair advantage by externalizing their costs—such as dumping toxic chemicals rather than paying the cost of safe disposal. In a very real sense, that is exactly what parasite companies are doing: externalizing their costs. They pay their workers so little that they are forcing the rest of us to pick up part of the cost. And in the process, these parasite companies gain an unfair labor cost advantage over their higher-wage competitors, setting off a downward spiral of lower wages and lower consumer demand.

A race to the bottom isn’t how you build an economy; it’s how you take advantage of it. So let’s stop conflating collectivism—which is bad—with collective action—which is indispensable to the success of every social human endeavor. Collective action can enable individuals to take actions they know are beneficial—for themselves and others— but that they feel constrained from doing by themselves.

Throughout the 1970s, most National Hockey League players refused to wear helmets, despite the known risk of serious head injuries. Some players went helmetless out of vanity, or fear of being ridiculed, while others believed that wearing a helmet imposed a slight competitive disadvantage. In 1969, one player admitted to Newsweek: “It’s foolish not to wear a helmet. But I don’t—because the other guys don’t. I know that’s silly, but most of the players feel the same way. If the league made us do it, though, we’d all wear them and nobody would mind.” A decade later, the NHL began requiring helmets, and now every player—and the league as a whole—is better off as a result. Both the NHL’s helmet rule and the minimum wage are forms of collective action; they solve collective problems that no individual could solve on his or her own. Collective action is not anti-capitalist or anti-market; in fact, a functional market would not be possible without it.

Yes, the parasite economy is a choice. But while there are some individual bad players, it is largely a choice that we as a nation have collectively made. In Washington, D.C., and in state capitals nationwide, we have chosen to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. We have chosen to sit quietly by as corporate America has stripped workers of the benefits that define what it means to be middle class.

We have chosen not just to tolerate the parasite economy, but also to subsidize it.

But the great news is: Collectively, we can make a different choice.

About a

trillion dollars

a year that used to go to wages now goes to profit.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 39

High wages kill jobs? Metro Seattle ranks

second

in the U.S. in smallbusiness job growth.

Nick Hanauer is a Seattlebased entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and founder of Civic Ventures, a public-policy incubator.

Stagnant wages are a collective-action problem that Pacific Coast Feather Company cannot solve on its own; but if Congress were to solve it for us by gradually raising the minimum wage for all American workers—including those of our competitors—it would be no problem for us at all. In fact, it would be fantastic—not just for workers, but also for my family business. Obviously, the three million hourly workers currently scraping by at or below the $7.25 federal minimum wage aren’t buying many new pillows—and neither are the tens of millions of Americans earning just a few bucks more. Nineteen percent of American workers currently earn under $12.50 an hour; 42 percent earn under $15. Every dollar an hour amounts to another $2,080 in annual income. In 2010, Americans spent $740 million on pillows. How many more would be sold if half of America could afford one more pillow per year? Sure, the price of a new pillow might rise a few pennies to cover the higher labor costs. But what a tradeoff! What a difference! What a great nation in which to sell pillows!

Given a choice between a high-wage America and a low-wage America, I’d happily choose higher wages. But I can’t make this choice on my own. I need you to make me do it. I need you to level the playing field by forcing me and my competitors to raise our wages, so that one low-wage employer can no longer drag the rest of us down with him.

I need you to raise the minimum wage.

Many readers will claim this is all a pipe dream, that it could never work in practice. But in fact, it is working— right where I live, in Washington state. Washington has long recognized the fundamental law of capitalism—that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers and hire more workers. That is the model that we have been following here, and our economy has been booming as a result. At $9.47 an hour (indexed to inflation), Washington state’s minimum wage had long been the highest in the nation, and as one of a handful of states with no tip penalty, our tipped workers already earn four and a half times the $2.13-an-hour tipped minimum wage in much of the rest of the country.

And yet according to Bloomberg, high-wage Seattle supports the second-highest concentration of eateries per capita in the nation—trailing only even higher-wage San Francisco. And according to the Paychex IHS Small Business Jobs Index, Washington also enjoyed the highest rate of small-business job growth in the nation, while even higher-wage Seattle ranks second by major metropolitan areas.

Why are small businesses booming here despite our high minimum wage? Because that’s how capitalism works!

Our minimum-wage workers spend so much more on the things that drive small businesses than they ever could while earning just $7.25 an hour. They eat at restaurants.

40 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

They get haircuts and manicures. They send their mom flowers on Mother’s Day. When workers have more money, businesses have more customers. And when businesses have more customers, they create more jobs.

In 2014, Seattle took its high-wage model one step further, passing the first $15 minimum wage in the nation.

Restaurateurs and right-wing think tanks warned of ruin.

Businesses would close. Workers would lose their jobs.

The invisible hand would punch us in the mouth. But it never happened.

As the Puget Sound Business Journal recently reported in a front-page story titled “Apocalypse Not: $15 and the Cuts That Never Came,” six months after the first wage increase went into effect, Seattle’s restaurant industry is growing faster than ever. Even celebrity chef Tom Douglas, who had warned that Seattle could lose a quarter of its downtown restaurants, has continued to add restaurants to his local empire. “Douglas has now changed his mind about the law,” the PSBJ reports, “saying he was ‘naïve’ to think that restaurants would raise pay on their own.” That he was. And then on February 15, 2016, The Seattle Times reported that ADP’s national survey of economic vitality ranked Washington state number one in the country for both wage and job growth. And you thought higher wages killed jobs. Not hardly.

It is appealing to believe that the parasite economy will eventually correct itself. Or that a few high-road employers will set an example that will eliminate it. But trust me when I tell you: This is wishful thinking. I know because I am one of those employers. People like me, when faced with brutal competitive dynamics, will not pay workers a living wage unless all of our competitors do the same.

And the only way that will happen is if citizens like you require employers like us to do it. Until then, corporate America will continue to build its record profits on the backs of cheap labor.

“I do not prize the word ‘cheap,’” President William McKinley once said. “[Cheap] is not a badge of honor. It is a symbol of despair. Cheap prices make for cheap goods; cheap goods make for cheap men; and cheap men make for a cheap country.”

In the absence of collective action, the parasite economy will continue to pay parasite wages, cheapening the real economy with it. But when we lift wages through reasonable increases in the minimum wage, everyone prospers— and more than just financially. Dezi Bonow, the head chef at Douglas’s new Carlile Room, told the PSBJ that $15 is a particular boon to kitchen employees, who don’t get tips.

“It legitimizes cooking as a craft,” he said.

Imagine an economy where all work is honored as craft, and all craftsmen are compensated accordingly. Imagine a country where no labor is dismissed as “cheap.”

the

new labor

economy

On Demand, and Demanding Their Rights

Gig workers in the Uber economy are organizing to win more say over their jobs—and writing a new chapter in American labor history.

By S tev en Greenh ouse

T

ravis Kalanick, Uber’s founder, recently recalled that when he first started the company seven years ago, “it was easy to communicate with the handful of drivers using the app.” Uber’s marketing manager called each of the drivers regularly, Kalanick said, “to get their feedback and make sure things were working well.”

Nowadays, Uber has far more than a handful of drivers—it has more than 400,000 in the United States alone, and many drivers complain that Uber’s managers no longer listen to them to make sure things are working well.

“They do whatever they want,” said Bigu Haider, an Uber driver in New York who is furious at Uber over fare cuts and other moves that have reduced his income. “I don’t see any voice for the drivers.”

Such heartfelt complaints are heard across much of the digital on-demand economy, whether at Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit, Lyft, or Instacart. The internet is crackling with gig workers’ complaints about sub-minimum wages, 12-hour workdays, and companies that stiff them on pay.

Within these tales of woe is a frequent refrain: that gig workers are not listened to, that they have little or no voice or leverage on the job.

Considering the nature of the platform-based economy, it shouldn’t be a surprise that so many workers feel they have so little voice. The companies are often remote, and many workers rarely, if ever, communicate with managers. Instead, they typically deal with apps and algorithms, which don’t exactly encourage dialogue—or ask about workers’ concerns.

App-based workers are often isolated from each other and dispersed. Mechanical Turk workers toil at home, transcribing audio, typing in details of receipts, or inspecting YouTube videos for profanity. TaskRabbit workers do plumbing or carpentry at this house or that one, and Uber and Lyft drivers are in their cars, ferrying passengers around.

Despite the atomization of this workforce, there are stirrings from below among the app-based, crowdsourced, microtasking masses. As has so often happened across history when workers feel underpaid and unheeded, the toilers of the on-demand economy are stepping up and taking steps—some tentative, some innovative, and a few inge-

nious—to be heard and heeded. To these workers, myriad problems cry out for fixing: pay that is often below minimum wage; managers who systematically ignore their concerns; being misclassified as independent contractors, and being fired, blocked, or deactivated by platforms with little notice or justification.

Many gig workers are seeking to lift their voices by banding together.

At Upwork, a platform that connects freelancers with projects, workers have showered the company with complaints that its stated minimum pay of $3 an hour is inexcusably low. (Like most platformbased companies, Upwork insists that its workers are independent contractors, a group not covered by minimum-wage and overtime Uber founder Travis Kalanick laws.) To Uber’s dismay, its drivers in Seattle have formed an association that they hope—thanks to an innovative Seattle law—will evolve into a formal union that does collective bargaining, even when the workers are considered independent contractors. Workers for Mechanical Turk—which giant online retailer Amazon developed and owns—have created numerous online forums to share advice with each other and warn about requesters who cheat them by refusing to pay them for their work. Helped by several researchers at Stanford, Mechanical Turk workers have also set up a thriving forum, called Dynamo, a virtual union hall where workers brainstorm strategies to press for better pay and conditions.

“There is enormous creativity and dynamism going on—a multiplicity of approaches,” says Wilma Liebman, former chair of the National Labor Relations Board. “To me, it’s just inspiring—there’s all this energy, all this thinking, all this commitment. There’s all this experimentation at the local level.”

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 41

42 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

the platform Homemade—far different from Uber drivers or Mechanical Turk workers—have the power to determine the prices of their meals and what dishes to offer.

Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, estimates that there are 600,000 workers in the nation’s digital on-demand economy, but some gig economy experts, like Sara Horowitz, founder of the 300,000-member Freelancers Union, say there are millions of such workers. Defining who exactly is an on-demand worker can be difficult. Nearly eight million caregivers have registered on Care.com, but should they be considered workers in the digital on-demand economy?

Mechanical Turk boasts that it has more than 500,000 workers worldwide to draw from to do a range of tasks, but an International Labour Organization study estimated that it has a stable workforce of just 20,000.

Whatever the number, the on-demand economy is growing so fast and has stirred such vast interest from investors, the public, and the news media that how this innovative sector treats—and mistreats—its workers has become a major issue. Indeed, how gig workers respond to these challenges and how they exert collective power are shaping up as an important new chapter in the nation’s labor history.

Back in 2007, Rochelle LaPlante was a full-time social worker in Seattle, and at a friend’s suggestion, she began supplementing her income by working part-time for Mechanical Turk doing HITs (“human intelligence tasks”).

LaPlante has since moved to Los Angeles and now often spends 30 hours a week “turking”—she transcribes audio, scans bar codes to tell companies what products match them, and watches YouTube videos to see whether they’re appropriate for children. Many HITs pay just 3, 5, or 10 cents each, and sometimes LaPlante can do 100, even 200 of them, in an hour.

“There are days the pay is amazing, and some days it’s awful,” she says. A study by Janine Berg, a senior economist at the International Labour Organization (ILO), found that median pay for Turkers in the United States is $4.65 an hour, although LaPlante says her average is “ten-ish.”

Among Turkers, one of the most common complaints is requesters who refuse to pay. Sometimes requesters legitimately conclude that Turkers’ work on a HIT was not up to snuff. Sometimes they simply cheat workers.

“That happens all the time. That happens daily,” LaPlante said. “There are definitely cases where it’s done on purpose. They reject because they don’t want to pay, and they take the completed work and use it.”

To deal with this wage theft, many Turkers contribute to Turkopticon, a browser plug-in that rates Mechanical Turk requesters. Companies that repeatedly reject Turkers’ work for no good reason without paying get a red light,

p r e v i o u s pa g e : m ay s u n / p i c t u r e - a l l i a n c e / d pa / a p i m a g e s ; t h i s pa g e : d a n i e l a c k e r / b lo o m b e r g v i a g e t t y i m a g e s

The Amazon Mechanical Turk website (as of April 2014)

“None of these groups yet have the power unions once had in collective bargaining,” Liebman adds. “But they’re working on it.”

In many ways, digital on-demand workers face far more obstacles to organizing and being heard than workers in the traditional economy. Isolated as so many of them are, on-demand workers rarely meet face to face, and online forums are a second-best substitute for building trust and solidarity. Sometimes when these workers communicate online, companies spy on them—and even kick potential troublemakers off their platforms. Moreover, since ondemand workers are frequently considered independent contractors, they aren’t protected by federal labor laws that prohibit companies from retaliating against employees who join together to improve conditions.

Notwithstanding such obstacles, “workers are finding ways to move their voices,” says Leonard Smith, a Teamster organizer in Seattle, where the Uber drivers have arguably done more to organize than any other platformbased workers in the country. “Whether this leads to more union organizing in the traditional or nontraditional economy, I don’t think we know yet. It really depends on the ability of the labor movement to adapt to the workers of today, rather than have workers adapt to the labor movement.”

Inasmuch as digital on-demand companies come in different shapes and sizes and use workers in different ways, workers in those companies may need to embrace different strategies. TaskRabbit and Care.com, which provides homecare aides, nannies, and housekeepers, are online exchanges that match workers with customers. Uber and Lyft serve as exchanges, too, but also play a powerful role in managing, hiring, and firing drivers. Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower are digital marketplaces that sell crowdsourced labor online. And a few on-demand companies, like Instacart (whose workers buy and deliver groceries), Shyp (which picks up, packages, and sends things), and Hello Alfred (a butlerlike service that helps with shopping, cleaning, and laundry) treat most of their workers as W-2 employees.

Seth Harris, a former deputy secretary of labor, notes that some on-demand workers already have plenty of voice and bargaining power. For instance, the chefs on

the

new labor

economy while those who pay well, give clear instructions, and readily accept Turkers’ work get a green light. Two researchers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, set up Turkopticon in 2008 to give these “invisible” workers a tool against requesters who cheat.

“Our first goal was to give workers an ability to help each other: mutual aid,” says Irani, a professor of communications at the University of California, San Diego. “But that isn’t the same as voice. It doesn’t mean Amazon will listen to them. But it means requesters could be pushed to listen.”

Many Turkers voice frustration that Amazon, which owns Mechanical Turk, refuses to intervene when a requester rejects their work and refuses to pay without justification. The Amazon “participation agreement” that Turkers must sign to work says Amazon is “not involved in the transactions between Requesters and Providers” and is “not responsible for the actions of any Requester or Provider.” Moreover, the agreement states, “As a Provider you are performing Services for a Requester in your personal capacity as an independent contractor and not as an employee of the Requester.”

Irani has seen an evolution of Turkers’ views. “When we first began Turkopticon, the reaction workers had was, ‘We don’t want to be in a labor union. Is this going to turn into a union thing?’” Irani says. (Turkopticon is not a labor union and was not founded with formal unionization in mind.) “But over the years, it seems workers have become more open to how unions can help them. They see how recalcitrant Amazon has been on making changes.”

Miriam Cherry, a labor law professor at St. Louis University who has written extensively on crowdsourcing, says it was unfair that platforms like Mechanical Turk (which are eager to attract as many requesters as they can to maximize their commissions) turn a blind eye to workers’ concerns by refusing to do anything about complaints that requesters are cheating them. “The platforms unanimously let people reject your work and not pay you,” Cherry says.

“In the real world, if someone is doing a bad job, you can fire them, but you still have to pay for the previous week’s work.”

LaPlante and other Turkers use not only Turkopticon, but also online forums like Mturk Crowd and Turkernation to recommend lucrative new HITs, to warn against bad requesters, and to share tips on how to “turk” more efficiently. Some forum members text their forum buddies as soon as especially good HITs are posted.

“I try to do between $12 and $15 an hour. Sometimes I far exceed that and sometimes I’m well below,” says LaPlante, the mother of a 7-year-old and 5-year-old. “My husband has a job. Without that, there is no way we could live in L.A. on what I make turking.”

The ILO study found that Turkers’ median pay in India is $1.65 an hour, compared with $4.65 in the U.S., where the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. According to the

ILO’s survey of 814 Turkers, their average age is 35, while

38 percent of American Turkers said Mechanical Turk was their main source of income. Turkers and Crowdflower workers (also included in the survey) said they average 28.4 hours of work per week—21.8 hours of paid work and 6.6 hours of unpaid work, searching for HITs and doing preparatory work.

Eleven percent of U.S. Turkers have postgraduate degrees, 34 percent have a bachelor’s, and 37 percent have some college, with a significant percentage of them pursuing a bachelor’s degree. The survey found that only 10 percent of American Turkers earn more than $10 an hour—around what LaPlante says she averages.

“Most Turkers are very educated and they choose to do this,” LaPlante says. “They have three children at home or are caring for a parent at home or they have a disability, and it’s hard to get out of the house. It’s not just people who sit solitary in their basement. I know someone who is an attorney who does it in the evening.”

LaPlante, who has a degree in human services from Western Washington University, helps run two forums for fellow Turkers, which lifts her mood and her earnings. “The forums provide a lot of socialization for people,” she says.

“Without the forums, people would be completely lost, they wouldn’t know what to do, where to start. It’s just totally jumping into the deep end of the pool. Forums help workers, especially those who are new and don’t know what to do.”

When a new requester begins posting numerous HITs, LaPlante and other forum members often send messages to that requester, recommending how to make instructions clearer or perhaps protesting that the proposed pay is too low. When a new requester rejects their recommendations, they sometimes push to get hundreds of Turkers to shun that requester’s HITs. All this sometimes results in getting better instructions and sometimes even higher pay.

These forums provide some worker voice, but their power is limited, partly because it’s hard to herd Turkers, who are invisible to each other and dispersed around the nation—and world. Janice Bellace, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, calls Mechanical Turk’s microtasking “post-industrial homework”—similar to the underpaid piecework that garment workers did at home a century ago on New York’s Lower East Side.

Crowdsourcing can involve highly skilled work. Germany’s biggest labor union, IG Metall, has grown worried that even industrial giants Daimler and Bosch have turned to crowdsourcing for help on several elaborate design projects. In April, IG Metall brought together organizers and academics from around the world for a conference in Frankfurt to discuss whether crowdsourcing might undercut high-road employers and unionized workers and what, if anything, should be done about it.

Toilers of the

on-demand

economy are taking steps—some tentative, some innovative, a few brilliant— to be heard and heeded.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 43

Three

powerful

unions have clashed

in their efforts to represent New York City’s 35,000 Uber drivers.

In the ILO’s study, one Turker told of a requester who had blocked her “after I sent him an email suggesting politely that he could pay a tiny bit more for the work he was asking people to do.” (Requesters can block Turkers they’re unhappy with from working on their HITs.) The Turker said the requester “was very condescending and rude” and wrote that blocking her was aimed at putting her overall Mechanical Turk account in jeopardy.

“This is unreal,” the blocked Turker said. “I reported it to Amazon, but they have done nothing.”

With more than 500 Turker members, the Dynamo forum, with its concept of a virtual union hall, is seeking to exert far more collective pressure on Amazon than other forums. Dynamo’s website proclaims, “Turkers are human beings, not algorithms,” and displays a letter to Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, saying, “Turkers are not only actual human beings, but people who deserve respect, fair treatment and open communication.”

Much like union members, Dynamo’s members debate and decide on what issues and campaigns to pursue. One campaign has pressed academic researchers who use Mechanical Turk to adopt a code of ethics; academics often turn to the platform to find people to complete surveys and tests. And when many Turkers in India were complaining that Amazon paid them by check—which often took several weeks to arrive, that is, if the check didn’t get lost in the mail—a Dynamo campaign persuaded Amazon to start paying Turkers in India through direct deposit. On the Dynamo website in early June, nearly 50 Turkers were calling for a campaign to pressure Amazon to reduce its commissions—which generally run from 20 percent to 40 percent—of what requesters pay.

“Dynamo allows us a place to work together and beat around ideas of what to do,” says Kristy Milland, a longtime Turker in Toronto. “Do we submit crappy data to a company that’s abusive to Turkers to teach it a lesson? Or do we assemble people at Amazon headquarters in Seattle to protest?”

Milland agrees with Rochelle LaPlante that when online forums communicate directly with—and pressure— requesters, that can pay off, at least a little. “Requesters,” Milland says, “can get work done almost automatically and super-cheap, and they realize, ‘Oh my God, these are human beings. I’m paying them like slave labor.’” Thanks to this realization, Milland says, some requesters have agreed to pay more for their HITs, but there’s a long way to go.

While Turkers have taken to their computer key-

boards to win better conditions, Uber drivers have taken to the streets—and done much else to make their voices heard. Indeed, within the digital on-demand economy, Uber drivers have led the way in uniting and fighting. In

44 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

New York, hundreds of Uber drivers went on a one-day strike in February to protest fare cuts, while drivers in Tampa clocked out for one or two peak hours a week in protest. Drivers have filed ambitious class actions asserting that Uber has unlawfully classified them as independent contractors to save money. And drivers, helped by the Teamsters and other unions, persuaded the Seattle City Council to pass a landmark unionization law for app-based drivers. There is so much energy and activity in organizing Uber drivers that at times things have degenerated into a turf war, most notably in New York City, where three powerful unions have clashed in their efforts to represent the city’s 35,000 Uber drivers.

Harry Campbell, an Uber driver who has a popular blog, The RideShare Guy, says drivers are pushing to be heard because Uber—which calls its drivers “partners”—has long ignored their pleas. Many drivers are at first exhilarated with being able to set their own hours, Campbell says, adding that they initially buy into Uber’s rhetoric that they’re their own boss. But then the drivers start seeing the downsides—having to pay for insurance, gasoline, and automobile maintenance; not getting any retirement or health plan through their job; having to drive 50 or more hours a week to support their families. Their problems were compounded when Uber ordered wave upon wave of fare cuts across the U.S. “That’s where you lose that feeling of being your own boss. If you were your own boss, you probably wouldn’t give yourself a 30 percent pay cut,” says Campbell, a former aerospace engineer. “Not only are they cutting rates, but they’re telling drivers, ‘This is going to be good for you [by bringing you more passengers].’ I haven’t spoken to a single driver who says, ‘I’m making more after the rate cuts.’”

“This is where the drivers’ voice gets drowned out,” Campbell continues. “Obviously drivers complain about rate cuts. Uber doesn’t listen. It basically ignores you.”

Anger about the fare cuts and the low pay has fueled a multiplicity of efforts to find ways to get Uber to pay drivers more and treat them better. In a class-action lawsuit, drivers in California sought to be declared employees, thereby compelling Uber to make Social Security contributions on their behalf and pay for such “employee” expenses as insurance, gasoline, and car maintenance (as California law requires for employees). In New York, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers got several hundred Uber drivers at LaGuardia Airport to sign pro-union cards last February and then asked the National Labor Relations Board to hold a unionization vote so it could represent some 600 drivers. But the Machinists’ union, which has long sought to unionize New York’s limousine drivers, protested that it should have jurisdiction over the Uber drivers. And the Taxi Workers Alliance, a powerful

the

new labor

economy

a n t h o n y b e h a r / s i pa v i a a p i m a g e s

Uber driver protesting fare cut in New York City

taxi drivers union with 19,000 members, including 5,000 Uber drivers, also claimed jurisdiction.

With all this commotion, there has been a wave of important developments in recent weeks in connection with Uber drivers’ battle for better pay and conditions.

■ On March 4, the United States Chamber of Commerce filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Seattle in an effort to overturn the law giving the city’s Uber and Lyft drivers the right to unionize even though they are independent contractors. Many labor advocates have praised the Seattle law, enacted last December, as a pioneering approach to unionizing app-based drivers. The Chamber’s lawsuit asserts that if independent-contractor drivers band together to bargain on fares and other matters, that would violate antitrust laws as a conspiracy in restraint of trade. The law’s backers argue that the drivers’ union would enjoy a state immunity exemption to antitrust laws because the city council took official government action to make the Uber drivers’ union possible. (The National Labor Relations Act excludes independent contractors from the federal right to bargain collectively, just as it excludes public employees and farmworkers. Seeing that many states and cities have given public employees collective-bargaining rights, the Seattle City Council concluded that it had the power to create such rights for independent contractors, too.)

■ On April 21, Uber announced a far-reaching settlement of class-action lawsuits brought in California and Massachusetts over whether drivers in those states were independent contractors. Under the settlement, drivers in those two states would continue to be considered independent contractors and Uber would pay them up to $100 million. In the settlement, Uber agreed for the first time to publish a deactivation policy and give drivers a warning and reasons when they face deactivation. The settlement also set up an appeals process for drivers who feel they were wrongly terminated.

According to the April announcement, Uber also agreed to “facilitate and recognize the formation of a Driver Association, which will have leaders elected by fellow Uber drivers, who will be able to bring drivers’ concerns to Uber management.” The settlement calls for quarterly meetings with Uber officials, with the associations receiving some financial assistance from the company. In announcing the settlement, Uber’s Kalanick acknowledged, “We haven’t always done a good job working with drivers.”

More than 150 California drivers have asked the judge to vacate the settlement, however, arguing that it awards too little money to drivers and that the attorney representing the plaintiff drivers shouldn’t have surrendered on the independent-contractor-versus-employee question.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 45

After

“taskers”

complained,

Task Rabbit’s CEO announced a minimum wage of $11.20 and set a onehour minimum for any task.

■ On May 10, after labor leaders had persuaded the electrical workers to delay their unionization push in New York, Uber and Local 15 of the International Association of Machinists announced a five-year deal in which that union would set up an Uber-blessed “Independent Drivers Guild” to, in the Machinists’ words, “give the 35,000 [New York] drivers using the app a strong voice as well as new protections and benefits.” As part of that agreement, drivers would continue to be treated as independent contractors, and the drivers guild would meet monthly with Uber.

Under the agreement, the guild—which doesn’t purport to be an official union—would not be allowed to bargain over fares, commissions, or benefits as part of any effort to get an official contract (although the Machinists say those issues can be discussed).

Deactivated drivers in New York would also get an appeals process, and the Machinists said drivers would gain access to life insurance, discounted legal services, and education courses. The Machinists also agreed not to seek to unionize the drivers during the agreement’s five years, unless the NLRB rules during that time that Uber drivers are employees and thus have a right to unionize.

■ On June 2, the Taxi Workers Alliance filed a federal class-action lawsuit asserting that Uber has misclassified its drivers as independent contractors, violated minimumwage and overtime laws, and unlawfully taken surcharges from drivers’ fares. The lawsuit says, “Uber, through its practices and broken promises, severely harmed the thousands of drivers they recruited, and contributed greatly to a ‘race to the bottom.’” Uber, which vigorously insists its drivers are independent contractors, called the lawsuit “a thinly veiled stunt.”

Bhairavi Desai, the alliance’s executive director, says her group had filed the lawsuit partly out of frustration that the Machinists had agreed that Uber drivers could continue to be considered independent contractors. Desai says the Taxi Workers Alliance hopes someday to win a union representation election for Uber drivers in New York. (Getting a majority of the city’s 35,000 Uber drivers to vote for a union might not be easy, considering that Uber would likely mount a fierce anti-union campaign.)

“I don’t see why the Machinists should capitulate on employee status or collective bargaining,” Desai says. “This is a betrayal of historic proportions for drivers, especially because this company is the most well-financed and politically aggressive, and is rewriting labor law. Why would you concede to them?”

James Conigliaro Jr., a lawyer for the Machinists, defends his union’s agreement with Uber. “We believe this is the best model right now because it achieves immediate results,” he says. “The drivers get immediate support and a body that will advocate for them. They will have a seat at the table with

46 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

Uber managers. They will have a voice at the workplace.”

Conigliaro argues that this halfway solution—a nonunion guild—made sense because the Machinists had encountered huge difficulties unionizing black-car limousine drivers over the past two decades because of employer opposition, even though the union had won NLRB decisions declaring those drivers employees. And the Machinists would likely encounter far more formidable opposition if it sought to unionize Uber drivers.

Defending the Machinists’ decision to create a guild, Congliaro adds, “We saw this as a great opportunity to help workers and also get labor’s foot in the door in the gig economy.”

Liebman, the former NLRB chair, gave the deal tentative praise. “It’s a first step,” she says. “It’s a foot in the door.

It gives them some access to benefits. … They said they would have a regular forum for dialogue with Uber and a right to represent drivers in deactivations. Those are not insignificant matters.”

But Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard, is more skeptical about both the drivers guild in New York and the drivers associations in California and Massachusetts. “The biggest question mark is, is this a way of avoiding and subverting meaningful worker voice, or is it an onramp to meaningful worker voice?” he says.

Sachs expresses concern that these driver groups could in effect become company unions. On one hand, he notes “they can lead to something more; that is, if you give workers a taste of what it’s like to be in community with one another,” they might then push for a true union. But on the other hand, he says if this effort “feels like it’s going to be a dead end, then it will be a dead end.”

If management clearly dominates and manipulates these groups, he continues, the NLRB might find them to be illegal company unions—but to do that, the labor board would first have to determine that the drivers are employees. Sachs says that these groups probably wouldn’t be considered company unions if they do next to nothing and serve as a mere suggestion box, or if they become independent of Uber and actually make decisions. Sachs adds that companies saying, “‘We listen to what our employees say’ has a kind of ‘welfare capitalism’ feel to it—which history shows we should be skeptical of.”

(Under the “welfare capitalism” of the 1920s, companycontrolled unions provided some benefits to their employees—until the companies abandoned those unions after the 1929 market crash.)

The Uber-employee model he likes most, Sachs says, is the Seattle ordinance because it “provides a road to genuine collective organization and collective voice.”

“But I hedge about being optimistic,” he continues. “It’s hard to unionize a dispersed workforce, even when you have the legal architecture to do that. It shows how far back

the

new labor

economy we’ve moved—now, when a group of workers is declared to have unionization rights, we celebrate that, as if it’s not insanely difficult to unionize workers.”

noam gal ai / get t y images

Notwithstanding such pessimism and the myri-

ad obstacles, on-demand workers have racked up some undeniable—and largely unadvertised—gains, thanks to their speaking up and pressuring companies. After some “taskers” complained that they were earning less than the minimum wage, Leah Busque, TaskRabbit’s then- CEO announced in July 2014 that her company would ensure a minimum-wage floor of $11.20 for its 30,000 workers.

Since then, TaskRabbit has required that every task posted on its site pay for at least one hour’s work and that pay average out to at least $11.20 per hour.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), an advocacy and organizing group for home-care aides, housekeepers, and nannies, has created a Good Work Code that a dozen platform-based companies, including CareLinx.com, DoorDash, and Managed by Q, have adopted. Among other things, the code calls for safe, stable, and flexible working conditions. Palak Shah, the alliance official overseeing that effort, is also urging companies to embrace its “Fair Care Pledge.” NDWA has partnered with Care.com, a giant online marketplace with 11 million users, to post the pledge on the company’s website. As a result, 130,000 families have promised to follow the Fair Care Pledge with the caregivers and housekeepers they hire. This pledge includes treating workers with respect, signing a work agreement, paying at least $15 an hour, and providing paid sick days, paid holidays, and paid vacation.

“I was worried that there were a lot of people out there in the gig economy speaking for workers who were not from worker organizations,” Shah says. “They said they had to figure out how they’re going to have a quality labor force, and we wanted to offer a road map of how they should start thinking about this.”

Many worker advocates are talking up what they see as the ideal way to assure ample worker voice and leverage in the on-demand economy—set up platform cooperatives owned by the workers themselves, be they microtaskers, home-care aides, or livery drivers. But while there is immense enthusiasm for this idea, such on-demand cooperatives are in the embryonic stage in the U.S. For instance, Juno, a brand-new company seeking to compete with Uber, says it will treat its drivers as employees, not independent contractors, and holds itself out as a semi-cooperative—it’s reserving 50 percent of its equity for drivers.

Trebor Scholz, a professor of culture and media at the New School, is the foremost champion of platform cooperatives and points to Stocksy, a photographer-owned online cooperative that sells stock photographs. Richard

Freeman, a labor economist at Harvard, applauds the idea of cooperatives, but warns that fledgling, startup cooperatives, whether Juno or a home-care aides’ cooperative, might have a hard time growing because they’d be dwarfed by established giants like Uber and Care.com. Moreover, Freeman notes, employee-owned companies and cooperatives in the U.S. have often stumbled and been riven by divisions as they’ve grown larger.

The most contentious labor issue in the on-demand economy is of course whether workers are independent contractors or employees, and many workers have pushed hard and brought lawsuits on this issue. Instacart, a grocery-delivery company, agreed to make its shoppers employees only after being sued, but it also realized that if it wanted a stable of loyal, dependable, welltrained shoppers, it was far better to have W-2 employees.

But some on-demand startups have taken the high road on this from the start. Three years ago, when two Harvard Business School graduates founded Hello Alfred, a company that provides personal services—buying groceries, picking up dry cleaning, hiring a plumber— they wanted to make sure they provided customers with tip-top service. To accomplish that, the two founders, Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck, realized that they had to treat their workers well. That meant treating them as W-2 employees (not contractors), paying them well (starting pay is $18 an hour), and last but not least, listening to what their workers have to say. Some entrepreneurs criticized Sapone and Beck for not going the independent-contractor route—hiring workers as employees costs 20 percent to 30 percent more because it entails many extra employer costs, including paying for Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance.

But “when we explained it,” Beck says, “a lot of people [business school friends, fellow entrepreneurs, potential investors] saw exactly what we were doing and they got right behind the vision.”

Hello Alfred’s founders realized that they needed loyal, long-term workers its customers would get to know and trust. “Our retention is extremely high,” says Beck, now chief operating officer, noting that the company works hard to make employees, known as Alfreds, feel valued and heard.

Marcela Sapone, CEO of Hello Alfred, where workers have decent pay, a voice on the job, but no union

Steven Greenhouse was a reporter at The New York Times for 31 years and was its labor and workplace reporter from 1995 to 2014.

He is currently a visiting researcher at the Russell Sage Foundation. He is author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker and is currently working on a book about the future of America’s workers.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 47

“We do a ton of work with our Alfreds on how to make the tool better, how to make their jobs better,” she says. “Every week, Alfreds fill in a survey. Was there job satisfaction? What can we do better?”

Sapone, Hello Alfred’s CEO, adds, “We don’t have a suggestion box because we’re talking to our people all the time, every single day.”

Chris Mooney, a 31-year-old Navy veteran who began working for Hello Alfred in November, says the Alfreds meet twice a week with managers “to discuss problems, to disseminate information, to try to find ways to boost morale.”

“I never felt that I wasn’t listened to, that I didn’t have a voice,” he adds.

Similarly, Managed by Q, a startup that cleans and provides maintenance services to office buildings, also treats its workers as employees—it, too, says it needs loyal, well-trained workers to provide excellent service. Managed by Q pays a minimum of $12.50 an hour, well above the minimum wage, offers full health-care benefits and a 401(k) plan, and even gave 5 percent of the company’s equity to its workers. CEO Dan Teran said Managed by Q listens closely to its workers, noting that it doesn’t make decisions on employees’ benefits until it discusses them with its employees.

Not surprisingly, workers at high-road companies like Hello Alfred and Managed by Q aren’t clamoring for a union or for more voice. Harvard’s Professor Sachs praises such companies, where workers are respected and listened to, but he says that’s not enough. “Workers need an independent collective voice, even when the employer is a high-road employer,” he said.

Brishen Rogers, a labor and employment law professor at Temple University, says that when on-demand workers have a voice, or a union, “it gives workers more power in the workplace and society, but it can also help companies understand what it is their workers want and hear workers’ ideas on how company operations and employee morale can be improved.”

Most digital on-demand companies are not even a decade old, and the many efforts by ondemand workers to organize are even more recent. Some experts say these efforts are still in an embryonic stage. Embryonic or not, for American labor, an important question is how successful these workers will be in gaining a bigger voice—and stake—in the fast-growing new economy.

48 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

Reframing the Minimum-Wage Debate

Why “no job loss” is the wrong standard for setting the right wage floor B y D avid R. H owell

A

fter experiencing substantial wage gains during the shared-growth decades of the postwar era, American workers have increasingly confronted labor markets of precarious jobs that pay too little to provide a minimally decent standard of living. This reality has finally broken through politically in the movement for a $15 federal minimum wage. However, some prominent economists contend that a minimum wage high enough to provide a decent standard of living poses too high a risk of job loss.

But this fear is purely speculative; we have no reliable evidence that a $15 wage floor, phased in over four to six years, would cause declining employment opportunities for low-wage workers. Indeed, the wage threshold at which substantial employment effects are likely to occur may be considerably higher. What we do know is that a $15 wage would have big impacts on the living standards of millions of working families. The recent commitments of California and New York state to establish a $15 minimum are estimated to increase the income of more than one-third of the workers in each state. The effects on consumer demand, and consequently on other low-wage employment, will be enormous.

For decades, the dominant premise has been that the right criterion for evaluating proposed minimum-wage hikes is whether they would produce any job loss at all— in any establishment anywhere. However, maintaining a strict zero-job-loss standard is the wrong approach.

We should be focusing on overall employment effects for low-wage workers, and better yet, net benefits for all lowwage working families after taking into account improved incomes for the vast majority. Moreover, any potential modest negative employment impacts could be offset by

the

new labor

economy the right macroeconomic and public investment policies.

Taking the longer view, a high-productivity and highwage path necessarily requires getting rid of low-productivity, low-wage jobs. That should not be seen as a bad outcome. We don’t see it this way when workplace safety, child labor, or environmental rules raise labor costs. Few would argue that we should apply a zero-job-loss criterion to the adoption of new technologies, foreign investments, or imports. Why should a zero-job-loss standard apply only to minimum-wage policy, especially when the main beneficiaries would be the lowest paid, who are at least one-third of all workers? The sensible approach is to ensure that change takes place at a pace that allows for workers to adjust, with the help of complementary policies (public jobs, retraining) that together ensure that low-wage workers do not bear the burden of the transition to a living-wage economy.

It is well established that America’s productiv-

ity growth since the late 1970s has not benefited the vast majority of workers. In 2014, the average wages at the 10th, 20th, and 30th percentiles were just $8.62, $10.08, and $12.09, respectively—nearly exactly what they earned in inflation-adjusted terms almost four decades ago in 1979.

Even the median wage (the 50th percentile) increased by just 85 cents between 1979 and 1999 ($16.02 to $16.87), and just 3 cents more since 1999, reaching $16.90 in 2014.

This has been a particularly disastrous period for young workers (ages 18 to 34) without a college degree. For these workers, the low-wage share of employment increased from 36.1 percent in 1979 to 61.4 percent in 2014 (the dollar value of the low-wage threshold is $12.50 in 2014 dollars, using the conventional cutoff of two-thirds of the median full-time wage).

Not since the Depression years of the 1930s has the majority of the American workforce faced such a low-paying, precarious labor market. This insecurity is compounded by the shift to contingent jobs, where full-time work is the exception.

It is popular among economists to blame globalization and technology—intrinsic features of capitalist development that no sane policy-maker would want to block in any fundamental way. The answer, economists and pundits say, is more education and training. But this orthodox reasoning, consistent with textbook stories and convenient for low-wage employers, flies in the face of history, theory, and evidence.

Though skills and earnings are broadly correlated and an economy is clearly better off with higher-skilled workers than lower-skilled ones, the long debate about whether skills are the main driver of recent widening inequality is now largely settled. Stagnant and declining wages are mainly the result of the deliberate weakening of equalizing institutions, from wage regulation to trade unions and not the result of increas-

ing demand for skills. Even prominent advocates of the skills hypothesis, such as MIT ’s David Autor, have lately conceded that these institutional factors are a major part of the story.

The historical record is that the American labor market also failed to provide a minimally decent standard of living for vast numbers of working families in the decades before the Great Depression. This was recognized by leading mainstream economists of the day, including John Bates Clark (after whom the American Economic Association’s award for the top economist under the age of 40 is named), who in 1913 reluctantly supported a statutory minimum wage to counter the effects of the “hunger discipline” of unregulated labor market competition, which systematically bid the prevailing wage down to subsistence levels and below—well below what Clark called the worker’s “marginal productivity” (the extra value generated by the worker).

In Britain, Prime Minister David Lloyd George argued in 1919 that a broader view of economic efficiency required a minimum wage (it took almost a century until Britain finally got one, in 1999): Every worker should be ensured a minimum wage which will enable him or her to maintain a becoming standard of life for himself and his family. Apart altogether from considerations of humanity it is on the highest interest to the State that children should be brought up under conditions that will make them fit and efficient citizens.

This recognition that the bottom of the labor market, absent offsetting legislation or collective bargaining, would be pushed down toward a subsistence wage has a long pedigree. Well over two centuries ago, Adam Smith was unequivocal: As long as workers bargained individually, employers would always have the bargaining advantage.

And in competitive product markets, employers would be forced to take the low road and pay the lowest possible wage.

The outcome is the widespread payment of belowsubsistence wages whenever there is a surplus pool of workers—a condition that has characterized capitalist labor markets since Smith’s time. This is a classic case of “rational irrationality,” where what is rational, and indeed necessary, in unregulated labor markets is irrational from a social and economic-efficiency perspective. This is why the great social reformer Sidney Webb in 1912 called the payment of below-subsistence wages a “vicious form of parasitism.” The same is true today: Taxpayers heavily subsidize Walmart’s near–minimum wage policy. (See “Confronting the Parasite Economy” by Nick Hanauer, page 35.)

Modern technology and globalization have contributed to this historical pattern. New computer-based laborsaving production technologies tend to reduce demand for less-skilled workers; technological advances and lower

It is misleading to pose a higher

minimum

wage

and more social income as alternatives.

We need both.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 49

communication and transportation costs facilitate offshoring of work to the lowest-wage locations. The antidote is not just higher skills, but wage regulation and countervailing worker power, to put limits on low-road employer policies—as J.B. Clark, Lloyd George, Sidney Webb, and many other leading figures understood over a century ago.

low-education employment rate

The statutory minimum wage can help keep full-time workers out of poverty. An appropriately designed wage floor also increases the incentive to work, reduces wage and income inequality, and lessens the need for means-tested social assistance for working-poor families. But this has not been the path of the American federal minimum wage, which has collapsed in value from $9.54 in 1968 to $8.81 in 1989 to $7.25 in 2014 (in 2014 dollars), where it Decent Wages Don’t Hurt Employment remains today, even as The incidence of low pay and employment rates for young (age 25–34), less-educated workers in 18 countries, 2015 productivity has more than doubled. Today’s 70% POR NOR NL minimum wage is 65% AUT just 37 percent of the NZ DK AUS 60% median wage, which UK US FNl 55% has been essentially GER CA Bel FR IT SP flat for four decades.

50% GRE The experience of 45% other countries demIRE 40% onstrates that a race 0 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% to the bottom is not low-wage share of employment the only way to run an Sources: Data for the Netherlands (2006), France (2005), and Norway efficient, technologically advanced economy. With aver(2009) are from “Low-wage Lessons,” by John Schmitt, the age incomes and productivity levels continuing to rise, Center for Economic and Policy Research, January 2012. Lowthe incidence of very low pay in a country is explained not wage shares for the remaining countries are from the OECD, by exposure to new production technologies and global except for Spain and Italy (2012).

The low-education employment competition, but by political choices over how to regulate rate is for 25- to 34-year-olds with less than upper secondary the low-wage labor market.

In France and Australia, to schooling. take just two examples, the minimum wage relative to the median wage is far higher than America’s 37 percent: It’s 53 percent for Australia and 61 percent in France (2014).

Doesn’t a higher minimum wage depress employment, especially among the low-skilled? Evidently not. If we compare the prevalence of low pay and the employment rates of young workers across 18 affluent nations, it’s simply not the case that lower wages at the bottom produce more jobs. As the chart shows, there is no correlation at all. While these numbers show a 14 percentage-point gap in the low-wage share of employment between France (with 11 percent) and the U.S. (with 25 percent), the employment rates for young, less-educated workers is nearly the same. Similarly, Australia’s incidence of low pay (15.8 percent) is about 9 percentage points below the U.S. level, but with low-education employment rates about 7 points higher. Denmark displays the strongest challenge to the orthodox prediction—a low-

50 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

wage share of employment of below 8 percent, a full 17 points below the 25 percent of the U.S., and Denmark still shows a superior employment rate for young workers with less education. Above all else, what explains these outcomes is collective bargaining and the imposition of a wage floor, mandated either through collective bargaining or by statute.

It is also misleading to pose a higher minimum wage and more social income as policy alternatives. We clearly need both. Other affluent countries that choose a high-wage path for their workers also provide a much higher “social wage” in the form of universal (not means-tested) support for health, housing, education, and especially child care. In the current context, the legal wage floor must in the U.S. carry a much higher burden than in other affluent countries for maintaining minimally decent family incomes, and yet the U.S. is an extreme bottom-end outlier when it comes to income support. The fact that the U.S. has both a lower minimum wage and less social income reflects a common factor—the balance of political power.

The federal minimum wage was first established in 1938 by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to ensure a

“minimum standard of living necessary for health, efficiency, and general well being of workers.” The debate over minimum-wage legislation in the 1930s focused on the constitutional right of the federal government to intervene in private voluntary contracting between two parties (workers and firms), on the issue of interference in local and state economic affairs, and on the consequences for Southern regional competitiveness. But above all, opponents before and since the FLSA have made the case against a meaningful wage floor on the grounds that it will have the perverse effect of harming the very workers it aims to benefit. As the FLSA also states, the objective of a decent standard of living should be achieved “without substantially curtailing employment.”

After a long political struggle, the compromise was a nationwide minimum wage set at just 25 cents an hour (President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins’s goal was 40 cents). This amount was equivalent to about $4.20 in inflation-adjusted 2015 dollars, and covered only about one-fifth of the workforce. The final minimumwage policy contained no formula to set the future wage floors, nor a mechanism to index it to inflation. Accordingly, any future increases would require an act of Congress, which guaranteed that it would be a political battle to just maintain the purchasing power of the minimum wage, much less make it high enough to actually ensure that full-time work could maintain “the general well being of workers.”

In response to congressional inaction over the years, many states and localities have legislated large increases in their own statutory minimum wage. California and New York state passed large increases in their statewide

the

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economy

$21.07

$25.86

$14.03

$26.40

$15.67

$22.67

$13.91

$24.90

$13.45

$24.06

$14.10

$23.59

$39.35

(three months before the increase) to 15.2 percent in February 1950 (one month after), and then fell further to just 12 percent in April (three months after)—still before the callups began for the Korean War. A year later, in April 1951, the teenage unemployment rate was down to 7.9 percent. Over the same period (October 1949 to April 1951), the overall unemployment rate fell from 7.9 percent to 3.1 percent. Much the same story can be told for the 33.3 percent increase in the minimum wage that took place on March 1, Making Ends Meet 1956. Other factors simThe full-time hourly wage required for basic needs in 2016 ■ Single Adult ■ With one Child ply swamped the impact $40 of a higher wage floor. proposed minimum wages: 2021 $15 ($13.34) $35 Similarly, as the New 2020 $12 ($10.92) $30 York State Department $25 of Labor has put it, $20 “New York increased $15 its minimum wage $10 eight times from 1991 $5 through 2015 and six 0 of those times, the data BakersPhoenix Colorado Houston Chicago Buffalo Washingfield Springs ton, D.C. show an employment Lines showing proposed minimum uptick following an wages in 2016 dollars increase in the state’s minimum wage.” The lesson of these Source: “The Growing Movement $15,” by Irene Tung et al., the examples is that any tendency for negative employment for National Employment Law Project, 2015, derived from EPI’s Family effects can be swamped by other factors—most impor- Budget Calculator. tantly by the strength of the macroeconomy.

According to the U.K.’s Low Pay Commission, which was charged by the government to use a criterion of no “significant negative effect on employment or the economy,” rather than strictly zero job loss, in researching the impact of minimum-wage legislation that has been on the books since 1999: $14.64

minimum wage rates in early 2016. California’s wage will be raised in increments from the current $10 per hour until it reaches $15 by 2022. The New York rate will reach $15 by the end of 2018 for New York City employers with 11 or more employees. Even strongly Republican states have recently passed large minimum-wage increases. At least eight cities, including Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, are scheduled to raise the municipal minimum wage to around $15 over the next several years.

According to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), 42 percent of all workers earn less than $15 per hour—clearly barely adequate for a single full-time worker, much less a family with dependent children. What would a $15 minimum wage do for a working family with just one full-time worker? In recent years, a number of “basicneeds budgets” have been developed, designed to estimate the costs that a wage must cover for a minimally decent standard of living for each of many different family types.

The chart shows these costs, as calculated by the Economic Policy Institute, for two family types in nine metropolitan areas, a single worker and a single worker with one dependent child. These calculations indicate that a wage of about $13.45 is necessary for a single worker in Colorado Springs, but $15.67 is required in Chicago and $21.07 in Washington, D.C. With a dependent child, the basic-needs wages in these cities jump to $24.90, $26.40, and $39.35, respectively. In short, a $15 wage would not come close to covering a basic-needs budget for a family with a single dependent child anywhere in the United States.

How do these figures compare to the current proposals for large hikes in the minimum wage over the next four to six years? The chart shows the current values of two proposed target wage floors. One is a 2020 federal minimum wage of $12, which is the equivalent of $10.92 in 2016 (based on CBO inflation projections); the second is a $15 minimum wage that would be fully phased in by 2021— about $13.34 in today’s dollars. As the figure shows, even the more generous $15 proposal would not cover even a basic-needs budget for a single worker alone in any of these cities, much less a family with a dependent child. From a standard-of-living perspective, a $15 minimum wage phased in over four to six years seems barely adequate.

Since 1999 the Low Pay Commission has commissioned over 130 research projects that have covered various aspects of the impact of the National Minimum Wage on the economy. In that period the low paid have received higher than average wage increases but the research has, in general, found little adverse effect on aggregate employment; the relative employment shares of the low-paying sectors; individual employment or unemployment probabilities; or regional employment or unemployment differences.

How risky is a phased-in $15 wage floor? We don’t

know for certain, but we can begin with some historical evidence. On January 25, 1950, the wage floor was increased by 87.5 percent, from 40 cents to 75 cents. This represented a sudden increase in the ratio of the minimum wage to the average hourly earnings of non-farm private-sector workers, from 31.4 percent in 1949 to 56.2 percent in 1950.

What was the impact on jobs? Teenage (ages 16 to 19) unemployment rates fell, from 15.8 percent in October 1949

In the U.S., surveys report that employers are able to recoup some of the cost of higher wages in the form of lower turnover, less absenteeism, and increased productivity. Studies of the Los Angeles airport estimate that the institution of a living wage reduced turnover by up to 17 percentage points. A study of home-care workers covered by a living-wage increase in California found that turnover decreased 57 percent after the wage was implemented. Studies for citywide minimum-wage

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 51

The test is not “zero job loss” but what wage will provide a

minimally

decent standard of living.

David R. Howell is a professor of economics and public policy at the New School.

This article is based on “What’s the Right Minimum Wage? Reframing the Debate from ‘No Job Loss’ to a ‘Minimum Living Wage,’” a working paper co-authored

by Kea Fiedler and Stephanie Luce, to be released by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth in June.

laws find similar results. Economists Sylvia Allegretto and Michael Reich examined the effects of a 25 percent hike in the minimum wage on restaurant prices in San Jose, California, and found no negative employment effects.

A phased increase from $7.25 to $15 would in fact be an increase from at least $9 in 12 states (in 21 states, only the $7.25 federal wage floor applies), and the annual percentage increase for every state would be far less than the 1951 and 1956 increases. In terms of the absolute level of a $15 wage, it is instructive that Costco has just announced that starting pay for all its workers in its U.S. stores is now at least $13, which compares to the current value of $13.34 for a $15 wage in 2021. The alternative business model is Walmart, whose low-pay strategy has netted the store fantastic profits; the Walton family is said to be worth $150 billion, and four family members recently made Forbes’s list of the top 20 richest Americans.

The closest thing we have to a reliable estimate of the net effects of a $15 wage is a recent comprehensive study on the New York state proposal done by the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Like the results calculated by EPI’s David Cooper, this study estimates that raising New York’s wage floor from $9 to $15 will increase earnings for about 3.2 million workers and increase average pay for those getting raises by 23 percent (about $5,000 a year). While the study’s model suggests there may be as many as 78,000 lost jobs, these are expected to be more than offset by the (more certain) gains from increased consumer demand, leading to a slight positive net effect (3,000 jobs).

The study concludes, “In the end, the costs of the minimum wage will be borne by turnover reductions, productivity increases and modest price increases.” This list fails to mention the possibility of lower wage increases for higher-income employees and, most importantly, of lower but acceptable profit margins for business firms.

There is another benefit. Means-tested social spending is increasingly tied to work, through the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and other programs. Much of America’s public assistance goes to working families with very low incomes, effectively subsidizing low-wage employers. According to the Berkeley Labor Center, about $13.1 billion is spent on public assistance for working families in New York state; EPI’s David Cooper estimates this figure to be about $8.7 billion.

A $15 New York state minimum wage would dramatically reduce this taxpayer subsidy to employers. Let’s say this increase in worker pay leads to a 25 percent decrease in means-tested public assistance to working families in New York, and let’s also assume a worst-case scenario in which 78,000 workers lose their jobs under a $15 wage, with zero offsetting job gains from increased consumer demand.

This would make available between $28,154 (Cooper) and $48,875 (Labor Center) for each displaced worker. And 3.1

52 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

million workers would still get wage increases. The net benefits of a $15 minimum wage for the living standards of working families and taxpayers that come from a “highroad” economy could be huge.

The progressive case for a substantial increase in

the minimum wage should be reoriented from a “no-harm” framing to one that explicitly calls for a minimum living wage on broadly defined net-benefit grounds. This includes not just a higher wage’s net monetary benefits to working families’ standard of living, but also the many positive spillover effects of a “high-road” employment model. Decent pay helps working families avoid dependence on public spending that is stigmatizing and politically divisive, and would help end the current practice of subsidizing lowwage “race to the bottom” employment models that have increasingly characterized human-resources practices at for-profit, nonprofit, and government employers alike.

While a target like $15 can be a good political strategy, the process of raising the statutory wage floor to the highest level possible without causing intolerably large employment effects is to establish an annual rate of increase, either in percentage or absolute dollar terms. A commission, much like the UK’s Low Pay Commission, would closely monitor the wage hikes for effects on the standard of living of working families (given prevailing means-tested benefits, which will need to be adjusted), business closures, and job opportunities.

As Tony Atkinson, the eminent British researcher on inequality, has argued, to effectively combat poverty and inequality, we often need a change in the discourse. Concerning the debate over the minimum wage, the criterion for setting the appropriate national legal wage floor should not be driven by statistical contests over which particular wage threshold poses “little or no risk of job loss,” but rather by determining what wage will ensure a minimally decent standard of living from full-time work, and what policies can complement a minimum living wage that will ensure that any costs of job loss are adequately compensated.

If we really care about maximizing employment opportunities, we would put a much higher priority on fullemployment fiscal and monetary macroeconomic policy, minor variations in which have had massively greater employment effects than even the highest statutory wage floors that have been proposed. But it is also well within our capabilities to counter any job loss with such remedies as extended unemployment benefits, education and training subsidies, public jobs programs, and other social income.

A minimum living wage combined with meaningful child cash allowances would promote work incentives while all but eliminating both in-work poverty and child poverty.

It would put the U.S. into waters that most other affluent nations have charted and are already navigating.

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The Subtle Force of Tom Perez

The labor secretary, a son of Dominican immigrants, has used his power to make real gains for workers—so successfully that he’s become a vice presidential prospect.

By Ju stin M iller

M

ay was a good month for Tom Perez, though you won’t hear it from him.

In mid-May, the United States labor secretary flew on Air Force Two with Vice President Joe Biden to Columbus, Ohio. There, at a downtown outlet of a socially conscious, all-natural ice cream chain, they announced the White House’s bold new overtime rule, which Perez is widely credited for making as strong as possible. The rule will likely increase incomes for millions of workers; many have already cast it as the administration’s biggest second-term domestic policy achievement.

The weekend before the overtime announcement, Perez met privately with the CEO of Verizon and the leaders of two unions, 40,000 of whose members were embroiled in an increasingly contentious strike—the largest and longest U.S. work stoppage in years—against the company. Perez convinced Verizon and the unions to go back to the table and restart negotiations. Less than two weeks later, Verizon and the unions announced that they had reached a contract— one that’s been heralded as an unusually strong win for workers in a time when workers seldom win anything at all.

In his three years as President Barack Obama’s secondterm labor secretary, Perez has become one of the most prominent members of the president’s cabinet and has worked his way into the White House inner circle. With the administration’s ability to promote its domestic agenda—centered on policies to revive the middle class—limited almost entirely to the executive branch, Perez’s department has arguably become the White House’s most important asset.

“Everything is a workaround, just about,” Perez told employees at the website Gawker last year. “I’m not waiting for a functional Congress to do my job. And the good news is, I have ample tools in my toolbox to do my job,” he told The Washington Post. His mission, as the Post describes it, is to “shore up workers’ rights with the regulatory equivalents of duct tape and string.”

Perez has proven himself an able handyman, steering a dizzying array of labor rules and regulations through Washington’s often-stymied bureaucracy despite constant

political threats and general hostility coming from Republicans and the business lobby. Those include not only the overtime rule, but an expansion of federal labor protections to cover domestic workers; a long-shot crusade to establish new standards in the retirement-advising industry; an executive order to use the federal government’s contracting process to create good jobs; and a stern guidance aimed at stopping rampant worker misclassification.

His ability to promulgate a clearinghouse of policy proposals that have been on union and labor advocate wish lists since as far back as the Carter administration has led some of his allies in the labor movement to call him the most important U.S. labor secretary since Frances Perkins, who, under Franklin Roosevelt, implemented the trailblazing federal labor laws of the 1930s that still make up much of our framework to this day. “[Perkins] was the gold standard. If she is gold, [Perez] is certainly silver,” says Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, a nonpartisan labor advocacy group that has worked closely with the DOL on policy issues. “He came in with a sense of opportunity and need and was really grounded in all the ways that workers had lost ground under both Republican and Democratic administrations. He took on some big issues that had languished and made sure he pushed them through.”

Perez has Perkins’s portrait right behind his desk—he’s read her biography and has repeatedly called her his “North Star” during his tenure at the department. And the policies that he’s helped implement and advocate for have built on her legacy—the first federal minimum wage, overtime laws, and bargaining rights for workers were enacted on her watch.

“I think even though his tenure has been fairly short, he’ll end up in the pantheon of really excellent secretaries of labor,” says Seth Harris, who was acting labor secretary before Perez took the reins. “He’s shown a surprising level of courage and insight into a wide range of issues that were quite knotty.”

As Perez has steadily risen through the ranks of government, he has effectively shifted the trajectories of the institutions where he’s worked—from Montgomery County

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 53

When Labor Secretary

President Obama announces his nominee for labor secretary, Thomas E. Perez, on March 18, 2013, in the East Room of the White House.

Hilda Solis stepped down at the end of Obama’s first term, labor saw a chance to insert a staunch ally who, unlike Solis, could gain access to the White House.

With prior experience as Maryland’s labor secretary, considerable popularity in progressive circles, and the reputation he built heading the civil-rights division at the Department of Justice during Obama’s first term, Perez was on many people’s lists. He had shown himself to be a talented asset to many in the president’s inner circle, including Perez’s boss, Eric Holder, and Obama’s confidante, Valerie Jarrett.

“People recognized that this was a person who was ready for an even larger platform to work on and try to accomplish the president’s goals in the last four years,” says Melody Barnes, Obama’s domestic policy adviser in the first term and a former colleague of Perez’s on Senator Edward Kennedy’s staff. “There was a confluence of things that came together.”

That confluence included a seismic strategic shift within the White House—the Obama administration had finally given up trying to compromise with a Republican-controlled Congress that had become paralyzed by Tea Party intransigence. Obama and his advisers were determined to advance a second-term domestic policy agenda that hinged on executive power, much of which, it turns out, fell under the Labor Department’s authority.

54 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

Obama nominated Perez in 2013. Republicans promptly pounced on the nomination. Senate conservatives cast Perez as a dangerous left-winger who pushed a radical legal agenda at the DOJ and supported illegal immigration through his work with immigrant-rights groups. Breitbart declared that if confirmed, Perez would be the most radical cabinet secretary since FDR’s agriculture secretary, Henry Wallace. “If the GOP Senators cannot stop Tom Perez, they cannot stop anyone,” the website ominously warned.

It took Perez four months to get confirmed by the Senate. But when he finally was, he hit the ground running.

He immediately set out to move the stockpile of ambitious rules and regulations that included drastically expanding the federal overtime salary threshold, granting domestic workers protection under minimum-wage and overtime law, pushing out the long-delayed rule that limits workers’ exposure to silica dust, and reining in the retirement advising industry, among others.

From the start, he said the clock was working against him. Perez has won some notoriety among colleagues for knowing at any given time exactly how many days are left in the administration’s second term, often blurting the number out in the middle of meetings. Clearly, he has learned some hard lessons from the experience of his predecessors in previous Democratic administrations: The Carter administration issued its overtime rule so late that President Reagan was able to promptly throw it out upon entering the White House; the Clinton White House pushed out a workplace safety rule and kick-started the home-care rule at the last minute—both of which were quickly repealed by the Bush administration.

In its final year, the Obama administration has pushed out a flurry of rules and regulations—at 195 so far, it’s a rate nearly one-third faster than the three preceding years. The White House’s legacy-shaping has become a sprint against a clock imposed by the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to expedite challenges to rules and regulations within 60 legislative days after they are issued. In the waning months of the administration, lagging regulations would be vulnerable to repeal if a Republican were to win the White House.

An institutional ball of energy, Perez comes to meetings armed with data, facts, and ideas, but he aims to listen more than speak. He is a quick study; a wonk able to quickly grasp the granular details of an issue and their potential consequences, but also zoom out and see the big picture. “He has a real curiosity, which is very good in a leader. In all my interactions with him, I’ve never felt like he’s come in to just make a speech and leave. He’s really wanted to engage people and ask a lot of questions,” says Sarita Gupta, head of the worker advocacy organization Jobs With Justice. “It’s never the Tom Perez show.”

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

Council and the Maryland state government to the Justice Department’s civil-rights division and now the DOL—in a more progressive direction. At each stage, he’s won admirers—from civil-rights and immigrant-rights advocates to labor activists. Now, Perez is rumored to be on the short list for Hillary Clinton’s vice president pick. He’s an attractive political choice for more than just his resume and accomplishments: He’s Latino and might just be progressive enough to enthuse Bernie Sanders’s supporters come November. No prior labor secretary has scaled comparable political heights.

the

new labor

economy Perez has proven himself a highly effective public face for the department. He often takes his office on the road to lift up the struggles of those he can’t necessarily help with the current rules and regulations. He’s constantly traveling across the country to meet with low-wage workers fighting for a $15 minimum wage, state and local policy-makers considering paid family leave laws, and business leaders who have enacted “high road” policies.

Perez was out in front on the Fight for 15 long before others saw its potential, understanding early on that the campaign wasn’t about raising the federal minimum wage, but rather creating momentum at the state and local levels and putting pressure on private-sector employers to boost wages. “The Fight for $15 is more than a number,” Perez has said. “This is a movement for fairness and voice.”

“The idea that the labor secretary thinks their fight is moral and just is a huge affirmation to them [movement leaders and low-wage workers],” says SEIU President Mary Kay Henry, whose union has invested millions of dollars backing the campaign.

Solis’s DOL had already built the scaffolding for some

new rules and regulations, but much of it just wasn’t on the White House’s agenda in the first term. During her tenure, the department had done a lot of rulemaking legwork on a rule that would remove the federal overtime and minimumwage exemption for home-care and domestic workers, who have historically been predominately women of color. The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and Jobs With Justice teamed up to form Caring Across Generations, which became the most vocal advocate for the rule.

“When Secretary Perez came into office, those efforts continued to ramp up,” NDWA’s Ai-jen Poo says. “It was [Perez’s] really strong leadership and tenacity that just continued to move the process forward. His team also included some of the best legal and policy minds—they recognized that it was one of the most important advances that administration could be taking on.”

In 2014, the rule was finalized and the implementation period began. It was a remarkable milestone for workers who had long been marginalized by an exemption rife with racial discrimination.

The DOL had already amped up enforcement of rules forbidding wage theft and worker misclassification under Solis, and Perez was eager to continue bolstering enforcement. He worked successfully to get leading misclassification expert David Weil appointed as Wage and Hour administrator.

Weil has since issued new guidelines for employers, outlining when a worker is and is not an independent contractor. The guidelines served as a stern warning for employers whose business models had come to rely on misclassification.

Through enforcement of wage and hour law, the depart-

ment collected $250 million in back pay for workers in fiscal year 2013, compared with $173 million in fiscal year 2009. Those recovered wages are benefiting workers in more low-wage industries than before. The number of man-hours spent on investigation is up by nearly half. That uptick has held steady under Perez, and Weil has brought a strategic new vision that has led to an increase in agencyinitiated investigations.

In June 2015, Obama directed the DOL to develop a rule that would expand overtime protections to all salaried workers making $50,400 or less a year—the level had been stuck at an anemic $23,660 since 1975. Just how much to raise the threshold was hotly debated within the White House; economic advisers were wary of such a big increase. Perez was a persistent voice from within calling to raise it as high as possible. Jared Bernstein, who advocated for a high threshold in White House meetings as the rule was still being shaped, recalls getting a phone call one night as he was getting ready for bed. It was Perez, who enthusiastically gave Bernstein a 15-minute pep talk. “This was the guy who really had the spirit to do the job,” Bernstein remembers thinking.

Updating the threshold for overtime has been a policy priority for worker advocates since as far back as the Carter administration. Carter’s labor secretary, Ray Marshall, had pushed for an expansion of the overtime salary threshold, and after a lengthy internal battle with the OMB, the DOL issued a final rule. But it came so late in Carter’s term that the effective start date was pushed back past Reagan’s inauguration. Predictably, Reagan withdrew the rule. Since then, no administration—including the Clinton White House— had done anything to address the outdated salary threshold. “[In the Clinton administration] they were always looking over their shoulders, always worrying about what the Republicans in Congress would do and how the business community would react,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, who first outlined the overtime rule change that Obama eventually championed.

“Tom Perez has one of the most anti-labor, anti-president Congresses—and yet he’s getting this rule done,” Eisenbrey says. “He’s persuaded the White House to push ahead.”

Perez shepherded the policy through the DOL’s rulemaking process and met with business leaders to smooth out opposition wherever possible, eventually revising the threshold downward to $47,476. Overcoming continued resistance from the big-business lobby, which insisted that expanding the threshold would force companies to curb hiring and shift salaried workers to hourly pay, Perez prevailed. In May 2016, Obama signed the executive order putting the rule into effect.

Along with the Affordable Care Act, says Bernstein, “the overtime rule may be one of the more important policies coming out of this administration to directly help middle-class people.”

Perez was out in front on the

Fight

for $15 long before

others saw its potential.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 55

In February 2015, Obama called on the DOL to use its

Perez pushed through a

long-stalled

rule requiring

managers of retirement funds to put retirees’ interests first.

authority to mandate that retirement advisers put their clients’ best interest, not their own financial interest, first—a part of his package of consumer protections against Wall Street that the White House would bill as a “key legacy achievement.” The administration said that conflicted retirement advice costs account-holders up to $17 billion a year. One study later found that high fees could add on an additional three years before a worker could retire.

The rule, dubbed the fiduciary standard, or the conflictof-interest rule, had long been a priority for Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis Borzi, who had a reputation as a strong-willed bureaucrat undeterred by industry pressure.

She had first proposed such a rule in 2010, arguing that Americans’ retirement savings accounts were being eaten away by high fees and subpar investment portfolios that promised advisers lucrative perks.

But the rule ran into resistance from the powerful financial-services industry, Republicans, and even some Democrats. More than 200 lawmakers, including thenDemocratic Representative Barney Frank, sent letters to the department strongly urging it to withdraw and revise the rule. Industry leaders lobbied the White House’s National Economic Council, compelling the advisers to step in—then-director Gene Sperling later told Bloom­ berg, “We felt it was important to make sure any steps were balanced, well-targeted, and reasonably coordinated.” Six months later, the DOL announced that it was withdrawing its regulation and would propose a new version in early 2012, after it received more input on the rule.

Many advocates took this as a sign that the fiduciary standard was dead. It seemed impossible to move against the entrenched financial-services industry, especially with a somewhat hesitant White House.

When Perez took over as head of the DOL , he was publicly supportive of Borzi’s rule and said he was committed to seeing the rule through. He made a point of holding dozens of meetings with concerned parties. It was a case study, proponents of the rule say, in his deftness at balancing interests.

Over the course of the rulemaking process, it became clear that Perez might be able to pull the rabbit out of the hat. Reaching back to his days on the Hill, Perez worked tirelessly to address the concerns of Democrats—and to at least hear out the Republicans—and was willing to make adjustments where he saw fit. But he was also boosted by new political realities. Perez had a new White House ally in Jeff Zients, who took over the National Economic Council in 2014. He had a big assist from Senator Elizabeth Warren and congressional progressives, who used their clout to push back against Wall Street’s resistance.

“He did masterful work hearing out business groups, concerned Democrats, and Republicans,” says AFL-CIO

56 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

Government Affairs Director Bill Samuel. “They’re not going to be able to reverse this.” Despite a steady drumbeat of criticism from The Wall Street Journal, the Chamber of Commerce, and Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, Perez announced the DOL’s fiduciary standard on April 6, 2016, before a packed room at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. “The regulatory structure that protects people’s investments has not kept up with the changing landscape,” Perez said. “In a world where people are more on their own in making financial decisions, financial advisers are not required to give advice that is in their clients’ best interest.”

The new rule, he said, “really puts in place a fundamental principle of consumer protection into the American retirement marketplace, which is that consumers’ best interests must now come before the adviser’s financial interest.”

In a testament to how heavy a political lift the rule was, he was prominently joined by Senators Warren and Cory Booker, and notably, the White House’s Zients. He also made sure to credit DOL staffers at the Employee Benefits Security Administration, including Borzi, calling on them to stand amid a wave of applause.

Perez, labor leaders say, was also critical in getting the White House to issue the executive orders, formulated but not promulgated in Obama’s first term, to lift up the millions of low-wage workers employed by federal contractors.

In 2014, Obama signed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order, mandating that most corporations with federal contracts must pay their contracted workers $10.10 an hour and provide paid sick leave. “Perez was the engineer who helped make it happen,” labor leader Joseph Geevarghese says. “He helped move political, legal, and other obstacles inside the White House out of the way, and said, ‘Mr. President, this is the moment you must lead with the power of the pen.’”

While labor leaders tend to effuse over Perez’s tenure at the DOL , it has not been without its complications. While most commend his courage in calling on private-sector companies to do right by their employees, some say he’s remained eerily quiet about Walmart, the largest low-wage private employer in the country, a serial violator of labor law, and the target of a major recent worker-organizing campaign.

As the member of the administration closest to unions, Perez has also been a key supporter of the president’s controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. That has put Perez in an awkward position with much of the labor movement, which has consistently and passionately argued that it will kill middle-class jobs and doesn’t have adequate enforcement mechanisms for the international labor-law framework it establishes. Perez has been sympathetic to the critique, but is convinced that the TPP will be stronger than NAFTA . “He didn’t ignore [labor’s] frustration and

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 57

the anger,” Gupta says. “Given labor’s real frustration, he did what he could.”

Union leaders have largely been sympathetic to the secretary’s quandary and they insist it has not impacted working relationships on other fronts.

Perez quickly distinguished himself on Ted Kennedy’s staff and became one of the senator’s

closest

advisers.

Perez is the child of political refugees who fled dictator Rafael Trujillo’s vicious rule in the Dominican Republic. His maternal grandfather was the republic’s ambassador to the United States but was exiled after speaking out against the dictatorship’s massacre of thousands of Haitians. Perez’s father, a doctor, also fled the country for the United States, where he went on to serve in the Army as a physician. His parents both ended up in Buffalo, New York. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Perez had a front-row seat to the devastating effects of deindustrialization that swept through Rust Belt cities.

Buffalo was hemorrhaging jobs and its middle class was disintegrating—in the 1970s alone, the city lost more than 100,000 residents. It’s left an impression on him politically as he’s been quick to critique the shortcomings of NAFTA .

Perez’s father died of a heart attack when Perez was 12, throwing his family into economic uncertainty. Shortly after, his mother was hospitalized. The American dream his immigrant parents had built seemed to be in peril. “I’ve had better summers than the summer of 1974,” Perez said during a 2014 talk at Brown. “Kind of like Richard Nixon, I bet.”

He found a father figure in a friend’s father, who was an unemployed Teamsters union member, and Perez saw firsthand how important the union’s safety net was for the family.

Perez excelled in school, but there were times when his family’s ability to pay for college was in question. When he was accepted to Brown University, he relied on work-study programs and Pell grants. To help pay his way through, Perez worked in a warehouse, a cafeteria, and as a trash collector. It was at Brown where the “Catholic boy from Buffalo,” as he calls himself, was first exposed to the diverse array of people and perspectives that have shaped his personal values. “I hate the word tolerate. I tolerate Brussels sprouts,” he said in 2014. “Brown taught me to embrace diversity.” He found a close mentor in Ed Beiser, a New York City Orthodox Jew and political science professor, for whom Perez became a teaching assistant for a course on the politics of the legal system.

After graduating from Brown with a concentration on political science and international relations, Perez set his sights on law school. It was a divergence from his older siblings, who were all doctors like his father—he quickly realized that the medical profession wasn’t for him when he almost fainted as he watched his brother operate in surgery.

“I knew I wanted to do something where I could make a difference, change the world for the better. So I looked

58 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

around and saw the change agents tended to be lawyers,” Perez said during a 2013 interview with Brown Alumni Magazine. He went to Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.

After graduating cum laude in 1987, he worked as a law clerk for a federal judge in Colorado, then became a career prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. He quickly made a name for himself for his prosecution of a gang of white supremacists in Texas who went on a shooting spree that targeted African Americans in an attempt to spark a “race war.” In the Clinton administration, he earned a top post as deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, where he chaired a Worker Exploitation Task Force that developed initiatives to protect vulnerable workers.

In the mid-1990s, he went to work for the Senate Judiciary Committee as a special adviser to Senator Ted Kennedy on civil rights, criminal justice, and constitutional issues. “He had a reputation as a deeply committed and energetic advocate,” says Ronald Weich, who was Kennedy’s chief counsel at the time and has since become close friends with Perez.

Kennedy surrounded himself with the smartest, most ambitious young progressive minds—John Kerry called his Massachusetts colleague’s staff “the farm system for the Democratic Party for a generation.” Amid a competitive field of staffers all vying for Kennedy’s ear, Perez quickly distinguished himself and became one of the senator’s closest advisers. He built a reputation as a sharp legislative strategist and displayed a knack for developing good working relationships within both parties on the Hill. He was the architect of legislation that would eventually expand federal hate-crime protections to include violence against women and gay people.

When George W. Bush took office, Perez left the federal government and became a law professor at the University of Maryland, where he taught a clinical law class that took students into the community to survey victims of predatory lending.

In 2002, he became board president at CASA de Maryland, which at the time was a small organization that provided services to Central American immigrants. Perez had an ambitious vision to bolster the group’s educational services while also turning CASA into a political advocate for immigration reform in the state. His plan impressed Gustavo Torres, CASA’s longtime executive director.

“We never imagined we would ever be as big as we are now,” Torres told me at CASA’s headquarters, which sits in the heart of a Latino community in Prince George’s County, Maryland. “But because Perez was exposed to many people at the national level, he brought those ideas to our organization.”

Perez helped the organization establish worker centers—

Perez in 2012, as assistant attorney general for civil rights, announcing a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona

as a full-throated progressive. In a close race, Perez narrowly came out on top—a landmark victory, as he became the first Latino to sit on the council.

During his tenure, Perez pushed ambitious legislation on issues not yet in the political mainstream. In 2005, he sponsored and steered to passage a bill to protect minority communities from predatory lenders. The ordinance soon ran into political headwinds when the Bush administration said it would “usurp federal authority to establish uniform rules.”

He also fiercely advocated for the rights of day laborers in the county, and fought for legislation to establish local centers for workers to congregate. “That was a political hot potato,” Torres says. He didn’t care about that. He just said, ‘These are human beings, they are making a contribution.’”

Perhaps most boldly, he embarked on a crusade to allow Montgomery County residents to purchase prescription drugs from Canada. The council overwhelmingly passed the ordinance. The move was seen as a direct challenge to

60 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

the Montgomery County–based Food and Drug Administration, which contended that such laws violated federal law—a claim that a U.S. district court eventually upheld.

By the third year of Perez’s term, his colleagues on the council selected him to serve as council president—a testament to his leadership skills and vision, says Montgomery County Councilmember George Leventhal. Perez’s allies say he left an indelible mark on the county’s political culture, opening the door for more people of color to follow in his footsteps and widening the scope of the local progressive policy imagination.

Through the course of his term, Perez had become a rising star in Maryland politics, and it became clear his political aim was set higher than the local level. When his term ended in 2006, he ran for Maryland’s open attorney general seat.

He was waging a formidable campaign—having raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and garnered support from unions—when the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that he didn’t meet the required ten years of legal experience in the state.

What could have been a devastating blow to Perez’s young political career soon proved to be a minor speed bump. When Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley won the Maryland governor’s race that year, he recruited Perez to head the state’s Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, a backwater agency often described as an octopus with regulatory tentacles reaching into different sectors of the state. Like a traditional labor department, it was charged with workforce development and training; but it also had various regulatory functions in the state’s banking and mortgage industries.

Perez saw his appointment as an opportunity to work on groundbreaking policy, and quickly attracted a talented staff eager to follow his leadership. Foreshadowing his later work at the DOL , Perez targeted Maryland employers who were misclassifying workers as independent contractors to avoid paying for Social Security and Medicare and to skirt labor laws like the minimum wage. He also hired more safety and health inspectors, which helped “remove 97,235 workers from hazardous conditions,” a 2008 report found, and he cracked down on predatory lending.

“Tom and his team were doing some of the most creative policy stuff. Very, very quickly, he moved to the front of the line in terms of cabinet secretaries we were most reliant on and putting out in front,” Matthew D. Gallagher, O’Malley’s onetime chief of staff, says. “He’s so passionate and articulate, and has an ability to explain things in ways legislators can understand, but also the man and woman on the street.”

ross d. fr anklin / ap images

which provided services for day laborers and vocational training in partnership with local community colleges—in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., and in Baltimore.

After he had left the federal government in 2001, Perez began thinking about running for public office. He lived with his wife and children in Takoma Park, Maryland, a D.C. suburb with a reputation as an incubator for progressive politicians. He ultimately decided to run for a seat on the Montgomery County Council. Perez ran as a progressive challenger to an establishment candidate backed by the county executive. He ran an aggressive campaign, door-knocking across the district and introducing himself

the

new labor

economy “I think that Tom turned a lot of people on to the idea that this second-tier agency that was kind of this hodgepodge of regulatory and workforce functions really had the capacity that people didn’t really understand or appreciate to help people’s lives,” Gallagher says.

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Perez was primed to head the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, a position he had been working up to since the 1990s. Civilrights advocates wanted a quick confirmation in order to fix a division that had become dysfunctional and hamstrung by politicization during the Bush years. Obama nominated Perez in March of 2009. Republicans, however, quickly obstructed his confirmation. They voiced concern about Perez’s involvement with so-called radical groups like CASA .

In October of 2009, Perez was finally confirmed and set out to reform a division in disarray. Under Bush, the division was accused of ousting career prosecutors who were insufficiently conservative and punishing those who didn’t leave. In his early months, it reportedly wasn’t uncommon for staffers to break down in Perez’s office as they recalled the trauma.

Within a year, Perez turned around morale and transformed the division into a formidable enforcement machine.

One of the division’s hallmarks was its aggressive investigations into rampant misconduct in American police departments—an issue that was systemically ignored by Bush’s DOJ. Perez led investigations into Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and Puerto Rico’s police forces, to name just a few. By 2011, the division was investigating 17 police and sheriff departments—the most in the DOJ’s history.

For Perez, it was personal. “There was a lot of lawlessness in the Dominican Republic,” Perez told Mother Jones in 2012. “What my parents taught me was that the hallmark of a thriving democracy was an effective and respectful police force.”

“Now when people see law enforcement gone wrong, they think: Can the DOJ do something?” says Samuel Bagenstos, Perez’s former principal deputy. “That wasn’t the case 10 years ago.”

Perez was thrust into the public eye in 2012 when he sued Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his department after a three-year investigation uncovered systematic discrimination against Latinos in traffic stops and targeted immigration raids, as well as rampant harassment of Latino inmates. Many were surprised that the DOJ actually took up the case, which was both politically and legally complex. Legally, it required identifying racial discrimination within the realities of immigration enforcement near the Mexican border. Politically, it put the Obama administration in the middle of a tense national debate over illegal immigration. Perez was confident in the case’s strength, and also recognized the symbolic opportunity

to highlight the intersecting issues of racial discrimination and immigration and to send a clear message to local authorities that they couldn’t bully minority communities.

In 2015, the DOJ reached a settlement with the department, though it hasn’t backed off on other legal fronts.

Those who know Perez say he remains a trial lawyer at heart, someone who knows the importance of weaving a compelling narrative. It’s a skill that’s served Perez well not only at the DOJ, but is also one he’s leaned on at the DOL . He knows how to look at a hodgepodge of facts on a particular issue and determine which threads to pull out to weave a compelling story.

Perez’s dedication to immigrants’ rights has at times put him in a seemingly uncomfortable position.

Even as the Obama administration battles in the Supreme Court over its use of executive power to grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Childhood Arrivals, or DAPA/DACA), his administration has continued launching deportation raids—since 2009, it has deported more than 2.5 million undocumented immigrants.

I asked Gustavo Torres, Perez’s longtime friend and CASA director, whether he thinks Perez has struggled with Obama’s deportations. “Absolutely. I truly believe so,” he says. “I’m very sure that he has been suffering tremendously for this situation. I am very sure that if we pass DAPA/ DACA , he is going to be so relieved. Because if not, what is going to happen is the legacy of this president will be two million deported. That is not a pretty legacy for him or anybody in his administration.”

“He’s walking a very fine line,” Gupta says. “Given his own history and knowing how much of a big advocate for working people he is, I imagine there have been moments in his tenure that have been hard. I think he’s done remarkably well to push as far as he can. It’s got to be a hard path.”

Even so, Perez has not shied away from struggles in immigrant communities. He’s met with undocumented workers—like carwasheros and domestic workers in New York City—to hear about the challenges and fears they face as they try to organize on the job. Perez has also pushed his department to vigorously uphold its arrangement with the Department of Homeland Security to protect undocumented workers who are organizing in the workplace, exposing themselves to the risk of deportation.

His family’s history has instilled within him a deep devotion to easing immigrants’—and all Americans’—struggles.

“This country gave so much to my parents,” Perez said in the Brown Alumni Magazine interview, “who were exiled from the Dominican Republic, so they didn’t have a country. And in turn they made sure that their kids understood that the ladder of opportunity should always be down.”

Perez remains

a trial lawyer

at heart,

someone who knows the importance of a compelling narrative.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 61

Election 2016

the

Immigrant Factor The future of American politics and the future of immigrant communities have never been tied more closely together.

62 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

How Asian Americans Became Democrats The last two decades have seen a major shift in the party preferences of Asian Americans, but they’re still not deeply engaged in civic life.

By Karthick Ramak ris hnan

f i r e at d u s k / i s t o c k

A

s a force at the ballot box, Asian Americans caught the media’s attention in 2012, when exit polls showed that they supported Barack Obama with 73 percent of their votes, a level exceeded only by African Americans. That year, Obama also won a big majority of Latinos, but his strong showing among Asian Americans was a much bigger surprise. In 1992, the majority of Asian Americans had voted for George H.W. Bush, creating the impression that as an upwardly mobile and affluent group, they would continue to vote Republican. But 20 years later, in an astounding shift, Asian Americans moved 40 points toward the Democrats in presidential elections. Since they’re also the fastest growing racial group in the United States, the change has major implications for the future of American politics.

While the attention to Asian Americans in 2012 was long overdue, much of the commentary was short-sighted and misleading. By that year, the high level of Asian American support for Democrats should not have come as a surprise; a leftward shift had been building from one election cycle to the next. Some pundits also misread the sources of the change. In 1992, writing in The Washington Post, Stanley Karnow had claimed that Asian immigrants were more likely to identify as Republican because they valued individual responsibility and free enterprise and many of them had fled communist countries. In 2012, New York Times columnist David Brooks claimed that Asian Americans voted Democratic because they came from cultures that do not put a high value on individualism and instead approve government intervention. If cultural values can be used to explain both voting Republican and voting Democratic, they may not explain either one very well. The actions of parties and political leaders over the past two decades provide a far better explanation for the politics of Asian Americans today than do the disparate cultural traditions that immigrants have brought with them.

To understand the shifting political allegiances of Asian Americans, we need to look closely at the evidence of their political attitudes and behavior. Recent years have seen a

significant increase in survey data on Asian Americans from such sources as the collaborative National Asian American Survey (NAAS) and AAPI Data, a project that I direct. These and other surveys help to correct some mistaken explanations for the shift of Asian Americans to the Democrats, but they also show another pattern that blunts the impact of that shift. Despite their high average levels of education and income, Asian Americans have among the lowest levels of civic and political participation in the United States.

This low level of participation should worry not just Democrats but anyone concerned about the future of race relations in America. The juxtaposition of large-scale Asian immigration, high levels of economic achievement, and low levels of civic integration runs the risk of reverting Asian Americans to a place they have occupied through much of U.S. history: a “middleman minority” in America’s racial order, ignored by the powerful and resented by the powerless. Any effort to make sense of Asian Americans’ politics today has to begin with that historical background.

Exclusion, Then Mobilization

Asians came to the United States in significant numbers starting in the mid-1800s. For a century, they were seen primarily as economic migrants—occupying special occupational niches or fulfilling certain economic needs, but not deserving of the kinds of political rights or public recognition accorded to white, European immigrants.

After the Civil War, the United States signed treaties with China to encourage Chinese immigrants to come to work on the western railroads, but unlike their Irish counterparts who worked on the eastern railroads, the Chinese were not eligible to naturalize as U.S. citizens. The 1880 Angell Treaty declared that Chinese laborers would have “all the rights, privileges, immunities and exemptions which are accorded to the citizens and subjects of the most favored nation.” But, in practice, they were not protected against attacks by local mobs or discriminatory treatment.

Indeed, local resistance to Chinese immigration was so strong that California wrote anti-Chinese provisions into

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 63

40-point

shift toward

Democratic presidential candidates in a 20-year span.

The Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, California, 1943

Given these dramatic, and often draconian, moves toward Asian immigrant exclusion, Asian Americans might have become more politically engaged after the end of World War II. There is some evidence for a spike in political interest in the postwar period. For example, Dalip Singh Saund, an Indian immigrant who received a doctorate in mathematics from Berkeley in 1924, helped push for the rights of Indian and Filipino immigrants to naturalize under the Luce-Celler Act of 1946. Soon after being naturalized himself, Saund won elected office, first as a local judge and then as the first Asian American member of Congress. After World War II, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) pushed for the repeal of alien land laws and helped to establish the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. In Hawaii, Japanese American farmworkers became highly politicized in the 1950s, helping to overthrow the ruling Republican Party in territorial elections and ushering in a new era of statehood and Democratic Party dominance. Except for these few examples, however, Asian Americans largely stayed on the margins of political life until the civil-rights era.

The 1960s proved critical in mobilizing a new generation of Asian American youth into politics and social movements. The JACL participated in the 1963 March on Washington and pushed for the repeal of anti-miscegenation

64 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

laws, while Asian American organizations in San Francisco fought against community displacement resulting from “urban renewal” programs. Several other developments during the 1960s—anti-war protests, Third World freedom struggles, civil-rights demonstrations, and the formation of ethnic studies departments—helped to usher in a new wave of Asian American political empowerment.

Surprisingly, however, these civil rights–era developments among Asian Americans did not fully translate into party politics. In 1992, when national exit polls started counting Asian Americans separately, they showed a group that was mostly Republican. That year, Asian Americans supported George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton by a margin of 55 percent to 31 percent and were twice as likely to describe themselves as conservative than as liberal. They were also less likely than African Americans and Latinos to believe that “government should do more to solve national problems.”

These national exit polls were limited in that they included no Asian-language support, and they were not designed to be geographically representative of the Asian American population (the same limitations hold true today). Still, the finding of a conservative-leaning Asian American electorate in 1992 corresponded to the pattern that many observers saw among political donors and other community notables.

Although not much was written on the subject at the time, some observers attributed the conservative leanings of Asian Americans to a combination of anti-communist sentiment among Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean immigrants and a commitment to “hard work and family solidarity [over] … welfarism,” as The Washington Post’s Stanley Karnow wrote in 1992. Indeed, Karnow went on to note, “Asian Americans whose roots in the United States go back two or three generations are likely to be more liberal than recent arrivals. Familiar with American ways, they feel entitled to assert their rights.” According to Karnow, the post-1965 wave of Asian immigrants served as a counterweight to the civil-rights era, shifting the Asian American community in a more conservative direction.

A Strong Leftward Shift

If post-1965 immigrants did indeed move the Asian American community to the right, the group’s leftward shift since 1992 is all the more remarkable. Although Bill Clinton won only 31 percent of the Asian American vote in 1992 (or 36 percent of the two-party vote if we exclude Ross Perot), Al Gore won 55 percent in 2000, followed by John Kerry with 56 percent in 2004, and Obama with 62 percent and 73 percent in 2008 and 2012, respectively.

In just two decades, the Democratic Party’s share of the Asian American presidential vote more than doubled. Even more remarkably, Obama won every major national origin group of Asian Americans in 2012, including Vietnamese

ap images

Neither the cultural nor the geographic explanations can account for the

its 1879 Constitution, and the state lobbied the federal government to pass anti-Chinese laws such as the 1875 Page Act and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Later waves of immigrants from Japan and British India also learned the hard way that economic gains did little to foster social and political integration. In fact, economic gains without political integration bred resentment and further calls for exclusion. In the early 1900s, for example, California and a few other western states passed “alien land laws” to limit the economic advancement of Japanese and Indian immigrants in agriculture. Most dramatically, the United States stripped Japanese Americans on the West Coast of their fundamental constitutional rights during World War II, forcing them into internment camps.

the

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symbolic place among Asian American voters. A 2014 AAPI Data survey of Asian American registered voters found that 41 percent would consider switching their support away from a candidate who expresses strong anti-immigrant views.

Immigration thus matters to Asian American voters less as a top policy priority than as an indicator of whether candidates and parties respect immigrants and welcome them.

Another development pushing Asian Americans away from the GOP has been the rise of Christian conservatism in the Republican Party. The 2012 Pew survey on Asian Americans indicated that the strongest level of Democratic Party support comes from Hindus and those who claim no religious affiliation (these groups make up a significant Moving to the Democrats share of Indian Americans Latino and Asian American vote compared, 1992–2012 and Chinese Americans, 70 respectively). The same Pew survey did not contain a 60 sufficient number of Mus50 lim respondents, estimated ■ Asian American 40 to be about 4 percent of the ■ Latino Asian American population, 30 to produce reliable estimates 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 of their party preference.

However, the group’s 2011 survey of Muslim Americans Presidential Vote Choice also indicated very strong Among Asian Americans in 2012 support for the Democratic ■ Romney ■ Obama ■ other Party. Finally, a 2016 AAPI 16% 84% Asian Indian Data survey of Asian Ameri23% 77% Cambodian can registered voters indi24% 76% Hmong 29% 71% Laotian cated that 43 percent would 29% 70% Japanese consider switching their 29% 69% Chinese support away from a candi33% 66% Korean date who expresses strongly 62% 37% Filipino anti-Muslim views.

39% 61% Vietnamese Party stances on policies have also helped to reinforce Data Sources: (top) roper center for public opinion research / the shift of Asian Americans toward the Democrats. Nation- cornell university; (bottom) 2012 al surveys have shown that on issues that matter to them such AAPI Post-Election Survey as education, job creation, and health care, Asian American voters have consistently favored the Democratic Party and the positions that Democrats endorse. For example, Asian American majorities have supported steps to expand healthcare access, such as the Affordable Care Act (asked in the 2012 NAAS). Asian Americans are also strong supporters of gun control (asked by AAPI Data in 2014 and 2016), and they tend to support bigger government spending even if it means paying higher taxes (asked in 2012 surveys by Pew and NAAS).

High-level Democratic Party efforts at symbolic outreach have built on this foundation of agreement about percent voting democratic

Americans, who have traditionally leaned Republican.

Such group realignments have taken place only rarely in the past century—first, with the shift of Jewish and black voters to the Democrats during the New Deal and, subsequently, with the shift of Southern whites to the Republicans that began in the civil-rights era. The driving forces behind these changes have usually been the choices of political parties in differentiating themselves from each other on important issues of the day. Even though the New Deal failed to attack racial discrimination, the Democratic Party’s focus on economic redistribution helped to shift African Americans away from the party of Lincoln. Historical research on Jewish voters suggests a combination of factors at play in making the group a Democratic voting bloc, including selective outreach by local Democratic Party machines, Republican restrictions on immigration in the 1920s (which blocked more Jews from entering the country), and Roosevelt’s support for progressive social and economic policies and his early and steadfast opposition to Nazi Germany.

Parties have similarly played an important role in shifting Asian American attitudes. As my colleague Taeku Lee and I have argued, “pull factors” have drawn Asian Americans toward the Democratic Party, while “push factors” have driven them from the Republicans. The actions of political parties may be particularly consequential for a group like Asian Americans, many of whom, as first-generation immigrants, have yet to develop strong partisan attachments.

During the 1990s, Bill Clinton played a key role by making the Democratic Party more appealing to Asian Americans. Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council projected a pro-business image that was attractive to many Asian American entrepreneurs, and millions of Asian Americans naturalized during a period of strong economic growth. Clinton and Gore also devoted considerable attention to Asian American donors, although a fundraising scandal in 1996 tempered that enthusiasm. In addition, the Clinton administration brought a new generation of Asian Americans into campaign work and appointed positions, including Norman Mineta as secretary of transportation, the first Asian American cabinet secretary in American history. By 2000, Asian Americans were roughly evenly split in their preference between Gore and George W. Bush.

Since then, the leftward shift in the Asian American vote has also reflected “push factors” from the Republican side.

Congressional Republicans have outdone one another in anti-immigrant rhetoric and proposals and, despite efforts by the Bush administration, consistently scuttled efforts to enact comprehensive immigration reform. To be sure, immigration has never been a top issue for Asian American voters; the economy, education, and health care usually lead as the top three issues in surveys. Still, immigration holds a

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 65

national policy. Obama re-established the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in 2009 and nominated a record number of Asian Americans to cabinet posts and federal judgeships. Hillary Clinton has also maintained strong connections with Asian Americans. All of these efforts have contributed to the Asian American political realignment.

Some analysts have offered other explanations for party change among Asian Americans. I have already mentioned the cultural theory advocated by David Brooks and others. The political scientist Andrew Gelman points to geographic differences within the United States, arguing that the high concentration of Asian Americans in deep-blue states such as California and New York accounts for their strong support for Democrats.

Neither the cultural nor the geographic explanations, however, can account for the 40-point shift toward Democratic presidential candidates in a 20-year span. The basic problem with the cultural explanation is that deeply rooted values do not change so quickly. Some might argue that the cultural values of Asian Americans have shifted as a result of a changing national-origin mix—more Indian Americans and fewer Japanese Americans, for example. But my Civic Participation research indicates that these Asian American adult citizens compared with the U.S. Average demographic changes have 47% Voted done little to change the mix in 2012 62% of Asian immigrants who 27% Voted in 2014 42% are pro-government versus Contacted 5% pro-enterprise. Similarly, ■ Asian American officials (2013) 11% ■ U.S. Average there has been no dramatAttended political 6% meeting (2008) 11% ic change in the shares of 11% Supported a poAsian Americans living in litical campaign 16% “blue states” compared with “red states.” In the last 20 Data Sources: Author’s analysis of Current Population Survey years, the number of Asian Americans has actually been Voter Supplements (2012, 2014) and Civic Engagement Supplements growing faster in red states and swing states.

(2008, 2013) Some other commentators suggest that Republicans would have the backing of Asian Americans if only the party presented them with a more friendly face. For example, writing in Slate in the wake of the 2012 election, Richard Posner claimed that Asian Americans were not acting instrumentally (that is, on the basis of self-interest or group interest), but rather expressively, recoiling from Republicans whom they perceive to be hostile to minorities. Charles Murray, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, argued that Asian Americans favor Republicans on economic issues but could not bring themselves to support a “party of Biblethumping, anti-gay, anti-abortion creationists.”

These explanations are in line with one side of our partydriven argument: The Republican Parry has indeed pushed Asian Americans away. But neither Posner nor Murray is

66 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

willing to acknowledge what attracts Asian Americans to the Democrats. The 2008 and 2012 NAAS data show that Asian Americans are rewarding parties and candidates who share their views about issues such as health care, government spending, and gun control. The 2012 survey shows that Asian Americans support increasing taxes to help reduce the federal deficit, and a Pew survey from early 2012 indicates that Asian Americans prefer a bigger government that provides more services to a smaller government providing fewer services (55 percent to 36 percent, respectively). That’s the opposite of what Pew found for the public as a whole (39 percent to 52 percent, respectively).

The support of Asian Americans for government spending today is a significant departure from their views in 1992 and 1996, when they were more likely to favor private solutions. Changes in party preference and policy views among Asian Americans have reinforced each other over the last two decades. First, symbolic appeals and outreach efforts drew more Asian American voters into the Democratic Party tent. Then, as a growing number of Asian Americans began to identify as Democrats, their policy views began to align more closely with the party’s mainstream.

In a parallel development, harsh rhetoric by prominent Republicans has made the party more unwelcoming to Asian Americans, reducing the proportion of voters who self-identify with the party and support the conservative policy views that Republicans espouse.

The Republican Party has attempted to make amends.

After the 2012 presidential defeat, the Republican National Committee issued a comprehensive assessment, the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” which recommended making greater investments in outreach to Asian American voters, supporting Asian American candidates, and creating a new team of Asian American political operatives. The RNC seems to have made some significant progress in places such as Southern California, where Republican recruitment and outreach efforts helped three Asian American women win seats in the state legislature in 2014. The RNC also seemed to be making headway in Nevada and northern Virginia, two important battleground states in recent presidential elections.

But all of these investments may be in jeopardy this year. During the Republican primaries, Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, and even Jeb Bush made remarks that, in various ways, denigrated Asian Americans. Looking ahead to November, it is an open question whether the 26 percent support that Romney won among Asian Americans will be the low-water mark for a Republican presidential candidate. Early survey results from 2016 indicate that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric is likely to further reduce Asian American support for Republicans and might even be crystallizing party identification among those who pre-

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viously leaned Democrat. The data also show, however, that the political effects of exclusionary rhetoric may be somewhat muted for Chinese Americans.

j o h n lo c h e r / a p i m a g e s

A Worrisome Pattern of Disengagement

While they have shifted their voting, Asian Americans still aren’t making their voices heard effectively. Surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau have consistently shown that Asian Americans have the lowest rates of civic participation. This is true even among people typically associated with high levels of participation, including seniors and those with high incomes and college degrees.

Asian Americans are less likely than other groups not only to vote, but also to attend public meetings, contact public officials, and volunteer—the activities that make American democracy hum. This disjuncture should worry us all.

Community leaders should be concerned that low participation will mean that the concerns of Asian Americans will fail to get the attention of elected officials. Mainstream civic and political leaders should be concerned that they are failing to harness the talents and resources of this rapidly growing population.

In 1999 and 2000, I interviewed party officials and leaders of Asian American organizations about their efforts to get immigrants more involved. Asian American leaders repeatedly told me that the members of their community were primarily interested in ensuring their economic advancement and had neither the time nor the motivation to participate in civic life. Today community leaders still talk about the difficulty of generating political interest among people who are working two jobs to make ends meet or working longer days in search of upward mobility and the trappings of upper-middle-class life.

Some might argue that there is nothing wrong with Asian Americans pursuing this kind of advancement strategy. Why bother engaging in politics, the argument goes, when people are able to satisfy their needs through private enterprise? At first blush, it is difficult to argue with this sentiment. If political involvement is purely instrumental—just another way of getting ahead—we should not be concerned about low participation among people who get ahead in the marketplace. But there is more to involvement in the public arena than economic gain. Political participation signals who belongs and who counts in a society.

As the long history of Asian American political exclusion shows, economic advancement without political voice is a recipe for trouble.

So, what can be done to improve Asian American civic participation? Research has long shown that people are much more likely to participate if they are asked to do so.

Outreach is particularly important for first-generation immigrants, who constitute the vast majority of Asian

American adult citizens. Political parties and candidates can play an important role here. The battleground map of presidential politics, however, does not encourage parties to invest in Asian American mobilization. Among all racial groups, Asian Americans have the lowest proportion of residents who live in swing states. It is not surprising, then, to see national surveys showing that Asian Americans are less likely than other groups to be contacted by a party.

In some states, however, political party outreach to Asian Americans can help minority political parties make gains in state legislatures and lay the groundwork for long-term gains. This seems to be happening among Republicans in Southern California and among Democrats in Houston and other Texas cities. In addition, the number of Asian Americans running for Congress continues to grow, and Asian American women have notched some significant successes in local elections from Seattle to Philadelphia and Boston.

The last few years have also seen an uptick in voter registration and mobilization by national nonprofits like APIAVote and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, political committees such as AAPI Victory Fund and CAPA21, and local efforts by various labor unions and community organizations. There is some initial evidence that these efforts are working, but they have yet to reach the scale necessary to fully integrate Asian Americans into American civic and political life.

As the population of Asian Americans continues to grow at a rapid pace, the stakes in mobilizing them politically will increase. How big a political role Asian Americans will play is not yet clear, but the days when parties and candidates could simply ignore them are over.

Cynthia Ameli, center, a Chinese American, picks up materials from Sarah Gibson before heading out to canvass for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in Las Vegas.

Karthick Ramakrishnan is professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside, and director of AAPI Data and the National Asian American Survey.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 67

Is This the Year of the Latino Voter?

Latinos have had some of the lowest voter turnout rates, but this November—with unprecedented mobilization campaigns and the specter of a Trump presidency—may be different.

By El iza Newl in Carne y

M

iami residents of all ages streamed by the hundreds to Marlins Park on a recent spring Saturday, but they weren’t there for a baseball game.

True, the event opened with members of the crowd rising to place their hands over their hearts.

But instead of singing the national anthem, the group of stadium-goers who kicked off the festivities that March 19 were reciting the Oath of Allegiance that marks the naturalization ceremony for U.S. citizenship. And the 1,600 people standing in line in the stadium loggia weren’t waiting for hot dogs. They were immigrants with green cards waiting patiently for help filling out the paperwork to apply for naturalization themselves.

“I’ve had my residency papers for 19 years, but one of the main reasons I’m becoming a citizen now is because I want to vote against Donald Trump,” Cuban exile Antonio Fernandez Robinson told NBC News that day. “He offends me because he is insulting all Hispanics and what he is doing is wrong.”

It’s a familiar refrain among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants now scrambling to become U.S. citizens in time for Election Day. Trump is not the only reason that near-record numbers of immigrants, particularly Latinos, are filling out the paperwork to become citizens and register to vote this year. Latino political engagement has been rising steadily for a decade, fueled by fights over immigration reform, for-profit detention centers, record deportations, and a Supreme Court challenge to President Barack Obama’s order to give millions of young undocumented immigrants and their parents work permits in the U.S. But for all that, Latinos have been punching below their weight politically. There are more than 55 million Latinos in the United States and 23.3 million were eligible to vote in 2012, but only 11.2 million actually cast ballots in that presidential election—a 48 percent turnout rate that fell well short of the 61.8 percent turnout overall. Moreover, more than 5 million Latinos hold green cards but have not yet become citizens. If all those legal permanent residents actually naturalized, registered, and turned out to

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vote, and if all eligible Latino voters actually cast ballots, the size of the Latino electorate would more than double.

That’s a gap that the specter of a Trump presidency may close. Latinos aren’t the only minority group galvanized by Trump, to be sure. The GOP standard-bearer’s defamation of Mexicans as criminals and “rapists” who should pay for a massive wall along the border, and his pledges to bar Muslims from the U.S., have outraged immigrants, minorities, and tens of millions of other Americans. Asian Americans, who now comprise 6 percent of the U.S. population, are also aggressively mobilizing voters this year.

But the arguably most politically powerful minority group now mobilizing for the coming election are the nation’s Latinos, whose population of eligible voters is expected to double to 40 million by 2030. A popular topic among Latino policy experts this year is California’s Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative, supported by then– Republican Governor Pete Wilson, that sought to block unauthorized immigrants from public services such as health care and even the right to attend K-12 schools. The initiative passed, but was blocked in court and sparked a backlash that both brought Latinos to the polls in record numbers and turned them resolutely against the Republican Party. The labor movement spent millions on registering Latino voters and getting them to the polls, helping fuel a backlash that is credited with turning California from a purple state to one of deepest blue.

“The U.S. as a whole is sort of going through its Prop 187 moment,” says Manuel Pastor, director of the Center for the Study of Immigration Integration at the University of Southern California.

The fallout will be felt on the presidential campaign trail and well beyond, now that Trump has emerged as the presumptive GOP nominee. Trump’s favorability rating among Latinos is 12 percent, according to Gallup, compared with 59 percent for Hillary Clinton, Trump’s likely opponent this fall. In a matchup with either Clinton or Bernie Sanders, Trump would win a mere 11 percent of the Latino vote, the lowest share ever, according to projec-

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tions from the immigration reform group America’s Voice.

Latinos would probably not favor a Republican for president in any case; Obama beat Mitt Romney among Latinos by 71 percent to 27 percent in 2012. What may jar Republicans more is the down-ballot damage Trump could inflict.

Several states at the heart of the battle for control of the Senate have large Latino populations, including Arizona, Florida, and Nevada.

“People are chomping at the bit to get out and pummel and punish the Republican Party, which has so blatantly shown its contempt and disrespect for Latinos and immigrants,” says Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change, which has teamed up with the Latino Victory Project and America’s Voice on a $15 million campaign to educate and turn out Latino voters in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada.

“And from the perspective of advocacy organizations, we are going to do everything we can to ensure that our communities register to vote, and turn out to vote.”

The challenge for Latinos is to translate their community’s latent voting power into actual ballots cast. Several factors have long depressed Latino voter participation.

These include comparatively lower levels of income and education—though those same variables exist among African Americans, who turned out at a rate of 66.6 percent in 2012. The Latino population is also disproportionately young, according to the Pew Research Center—about a quarter, or 14.6 million, are millennials younger than 33, a cohort that includes many first-time voters and tends to turn out at lower rates.

The story of the Latino electorate, Pew data show, is one of vast unrealized potential. Some 5.4 million Latinos are eligible to become citizens, as legal permanent residents who have lived in the U.S. for five years, but have not yet naturalized. Another 9.6 million are eligible to vote but have not yet registered. That adds up to 15 million potential voters in the Latino electorate who are not showing up at the polls. Given that 13.1 million are projected to cast ballots on Election Day in 2016, that means Latinos are fulfilling less than half their electoral potential.

“We know there’s a performance gap,” acknowledged Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund (NALEO), at a February briefing at the National Press Club. “As much as we know Latinos are decisive and their

Taking the oath of citizenship at a naturalization ceremony at Marlins Park, Miami, in March

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 69

percent of eligible voters

in millions

voting has made a difference in the outcome of statewide elections [and] presidential elections, we also know we have work to do.”

NALEO is one of dozens of immigrant advocacy, civilrights, labor, and progressive groups working to change all that in 2016. It’s not the first time organizers have sought to naturalize immigrants and turn them out to vote. But a perfect storm of factors has ramped up immigrant civic engagement efforts in 2016. A pair of national initiatives focused on immigrant naturalization—the New Americans Campaign and the National Partnership for New Americans— Latino Participation in presidential elections, 1988–2012 have gotten a big assist from the White House, which has 25 12.1 pumped $10 million into a “Stand Stronger” citizenship 20 campaign, complete with 15 public service announcements and celebrity “ambas11.2 Eligible voters who 10 sadors,” to help naturalize did not vote the 8.8 million immigrants 5 Estimated who are eligible to become number of votes cast U.S. citizens.

0 Immigrant and Latino 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 advocacy groups that had Estimated number of votes cast is based on individual voting self-reports. sprung into action to implement Obama’s executive orders to give more work Voter Turnout by Race in presidential elections, 1988–2012 permits to young immiwhites blacks hispanics asians grants and their parents— ■ ■ ■ ■ 70 known as Deferred Action 65 for Childhood Arrivals and 60 Deferred Action for Parental Accountability—had to 55 suspend those efforts when 50 both DAPA and the DACA 45 expansion were held up by 40 lawsuits, and now await 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 action by the Supreme Note: White, black, and asian populations include only non-hispanics who reported a single race. Native American and mixed-race groups not shown.

Court. Instead of sending The Estimated number of votes cast is based on individual voting self-reports. their volunteers and field data Source: pew research center tabulations from the current organizers home, immigrant advocates redirected their population survey, november supplements activities toward political mobilization. Notes Pastor, “What happens if you are all dressed up, and you have nowhere to go?”

And then there’s Trump. Interviews with community activists and volunteers around the country suggest that Trump has helped fuel a massive spike in the number of immigrants seeking naturalization for the express purpose of voting against him. Nationwide, applications for citizenship shot up 14 percent in the last six months of 2015, the most recent benchmark available. By some estimates, the

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number of citizenship applications will hit one million this year, some 200,000 higher than average.

Naturalizations tend to spike during election years in any case, and often go up for unrelated reasons such as looming green-card fee hikes. But organizers running naturalization workshops in libraries, churches, synagogues, schools, and community centers around the country say the foot traffic of immigrants coming through their doors has doubled and even tripled. At the New York Immigration Coalition, which expects to naturalize 5,000 immigrants this year, executive director Steven Choi says field organizers around the state tell him that the immigrants flocking to their citizenship workshops cite Trump as the number one reason they want to naturalize.

“In the past, it was, ‘I want to naturalize because I want to claim Social Security benefits,’ or ‘I want to be able to travel more,’ or ‘I want to access certain types of jobs,’” says Choi. “This year, people are coming and saying, ‘I want to naturalize and become a citizen because I need to vote in the November elections. I need to vote because of what Donald Trump is saying.’”

Also new this year, says Choi, is unprecedented coordination among immigrant advocates focused on getting immigrants to the polls. In the past, balkanized campaigns for naturalization, voter registration, political messaging, and turnout all tended to take place on separate tracks.

Now, organizers are working together to launch immigrants on a glide path that starts with naturalization and steers citizens seamlessly toward voting. Immigrants seeking naturalization or becoming citizens also get help registering; registered voters get help learning about candidates and finding their polling places; voters casting ballots have access to hotlines in the event that they run into trouble at the polls with voter ID or other problems.

“People are naturalizing, and they are going to register, and they are going to turn out to vote, and they are going to reward their friends and punish their enemies,” declares Josh Hoyt, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans.

Hoyt’s organization is part of an army of progressive, labor, and advocacy groups mobilizing to engage Latinos, from NALEO to Voto Latino, the National Council of La Raza, Mi Familia Vota, United We Dream, and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. They’ve launched campaigns with slogans like “Stand Up to Hate” and “Citizenship Now!” and have rolled out toll-free numbers, collaborations with Latino media, and digital and TV ad campaigns. The deep-pocketed advocacy group FWD.us, a pro-immigration reform effort backed by Silicon Valley executives, has pitched in with a series of slick ads that excoriate Trump and detail the costs of his plans for mass deportation.

Spanish-language broadcaster Univision has hosted hun-

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c h a r l e s o m m a n n e y / wa s h i n g t o n p o s t v i a g e t t y i m a g e s

dreds of voter-registration and citizenship drives that have drawn more than 100,000 people. NALEO projects that 13.1 million Latinos will cast ballots on Election Day, a 17 percent increase in turnout over 2012, and an 8.7 percent bigger share of the overall electorate.

Republicans are bracing for the worst. Trump appears to have accelerated a Latino tsunami headed for the GOP. Following the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee’s “Growth and Opportunity Project” postmortem warned that unless the GOP tackled its problem with Hispanics and other emerging demographic groups, “we will lose future elections.” Yet GOP primary voters in 2016 rejected the presidential hopefuls who might have appealed to Latinos, including former Governor Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio, both of Florida. As the implications of Trump’s emergence as GOP standard-bearer sink in, some Republicans are sounding the alarm.

“If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket,” Arizona Senator John McCain told a group of donors at a private fundraiser in April, “here in Arizona, with over 30 percent of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life,” according to a recording obtained

by Politico. Polls show McCain is facing a strong challenge this year from U.S. Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, his likely Democratic opponent. (After Trump locked down the nomination, McCain endorsed him but also announced he would not attend the Republican Convention this summer.)

In several other key Senate battlegrounds, most notably Florida and Nevada, Latino voters could deliver Democrats a decisive assist. One of the reasons Hispanic voting power has been diluted nationally is that high percentages of the Latino population live in California and Texas—states that are not considered political battlegrounds. But both the Florida and Nevada Senate contests are pure toss-ups, and both states have growing Latino electorates. In Nevada, the likely GOP nominee—House Republican Joe Heck—is expected to face Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, the state’s former attorney general. If elected, she would be the Senate’s first Latina. The NALEO Educational Fund projects that 194,000 Latinos will cast ballots in Nevada this year, boosting Latinos’ turnout by 7.1 percent over 2012.

In Florida’s open-seat contest to succeed Rubio, the crowded field includes Republicans Ron DeSantis, a House member, and Lieutenant Governor Carlos LopezCantera, as well as Democratic House members Patrick Murphy and Alan Grayson. Florida’s anticipated Latino turnout is 1.7 million, the NALEO Educational Fund projects, a full 19.6 percent increase over 2012. Considered a national bellwether this year, Florida is also a state with considerable latent Latino voting power. A full 830,000 of the legal permanent residents living in Florida, a high

percentage of them Latino, are eligible to naturalize, according to the federal Office of Immigration Statistics.

It’s impossible to predict how many green-card holders, in Florida or elsewhere, will ultimately become citizens, register, and vote in this election. And anyone who has applied for naturalization later than May 30 will probably be out of luck on Election Day, as it typically takes at least five months for citizenship applications to be processed.

Predictions of massive Latino electoral impact have been made before—for instance, when some Hispanic voters pledged to punish Republicans who blocked immigration reform legislation in 2010—only to fall short.

“Are people who didn’t vote in 2012 going to show up to vote in 2016 because of Trump?” asks Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center.

“That’s the question that I don’t think research has really answered yet.”

Historically, immigrants to the U.S. have come of age politically when galvanized by existing institutions. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Irish immigrants were integral to the Democratic political machine in New York City known as Tammany Hall. That Democratic organization aggressively naturalized Irish immigrants—sometimes fraudulently—and doled out aid and jobs to low-income Irish communities. (The abuses of that era still resonate in conservatives’ campaign to suppress Democratic votes by reining in alleged voter fraud through voter ID and other ballot-access limits aimed in part at Latinos. Reported instances of such fraud are all but nonexistent.) Today, the

Two canvassers from Mi Familia Vota talk to a potential voter outside a Unidos Market in Kissimmee, Florida.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 71

key to unlocking Latinos’ political voice may lie with the established labor and progressive groups now organizing on a massive scale.

But for all the energy generated by Trump and the 2016 election, says Pastor of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, the awakening of the sleeping Latino giant is a gradual process that has been building for years, and whose full impact may not be felt until the next presidential contest.

“In 2020, the demographics will have moved further,” Pastor says. “It’s a presidential year, so you are going to get more people of color voting in that year. And that [coincides] with the 2020 Census, and the elections that will reshape the state legislatures for the next decade. And that may be when the giant really wakes up.”

Whatever happens this year, time is on Latino voters’ side. The youthful tilt of the Latino community can depress turnout, but it also means that even if immigrant organizers did absolutely nothing, the Hispanic electorate would continue to balloon. The Pew Research Center estimates that 803,000 U.S.-born Latinos turn 18 every year. Pew projects that Hispanics will account for 40 percent of the growth in the nation’s votingeligible electorate between now and 2030, when the number of Latinos eligible to vote will hit 40 million, compared with 27.3 million today.

“If we can engage the youth within the Latino community, we can change our political structure for years to come,” predicts Ben Monterroso, executive director of Mi Familia Vota, which promotes Latino civic participation.

If the 1,600 Floridians who sought naturalization help in March at the Marlins Park “MEGA Citizenship Day” are any indication, Latinos are on track to at least send a strong message to Trump and the Republican Party this year. That’s partly because naturalized citizens tend to vote at a higher rate than native-born citizens in immigrant communities.

“Although it’s an unfortunate time in our country, it’s also one of promise and opportunity for all of us,” says Greisa Martinez, an undocumented immigrant who is advocacy director of the youth network United We Dream. “The promise is a more engaged electorate, an electorate that understands its role in stopping people from coming to power, and understands its role in keeping elected officials and representatives accountable.”

72 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

Don’t Assume Trump’s Bias Is Mere Bluster How the Republican nominee could bar Muslim immigrants

By S as ha Ab ram s k y

O

n December 7, in a seemingly throwaway line, Donald Trump said that if he were president he would move to bar all Muslims from entering the country until we “can figure out what the hell is going on.” No more Muslim immigrants.

No more Muslim visitors. In other comments, he has toyed with the idea of making all Muslims already in the country register with federal authorities.

These are policies so extreme that most commentators have dismissed them as simple Trumpian bluster, unconstitutional from the outset, designed to appeal to a bigoted base but unlikely ever to be legally enforced. After all, discriminating so overtly by religion, barring 1.6 billion people from entering the country, would be inconsistent with America’s rejection of religious discrimination and place the United States firmly outside international law, putting it in conflict with the founding charter of the United Nations and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Since World War II, the world’s open societies have prided themselves on increasingly inclusive immigration policies as well as firm protection of freedom of religion. Trump’s ideas, by contrast, are far outside the mainstream, instead echoing those of neofascists in Europe.

Extreme though they are, Trump’s proposals should not be treated as mere rhetoric. Using existing immigration statutes and legal precedents, President Trump would, in fact, have plenty of ways of making life miserable for Muslims currently living in or hoping to come to the United States.

Such an attempt would likely start, says Boston College law professor Daniel Kanstroom, who specializes in constitutional and immigration law, with an expansive interpreta-

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tion of Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The security-related provisions of Section 212 allow U.S. officials to bar any “alien whose entry or proposed activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” People may also be denied entry if they are involved in “any activity a purpose of which is the opposition to, or the control or overthrow of, the Government of the United States by force, violence, or other unlawful means.” Section 212 provided the basis on which U.S. officials blocked Communists from visiting or moving to the United States during the Cold War. “If Congress wanted to exclude all Muslims, constitutionally they can,” says Mae Ngai, a Columbia University historian of U.S. immigration policy who has written extensively on the Chinese Exclusion Act. “Congress can exclude anyone it wants to. Nobody has a right to enter the country.”

Were a Trump administration to argue that America was essentially at war with large parts of the Muslim world and that Islam per se was an un-American, totalitarian ideology—a position already taken in public speeches by a number of state legislators in Oklahoma, Texas, and other states—it could then, conceivably, craft a legal argument that any Muslim was, by definition, a potential foreign policy threat or national security risk. It could empower consulate officers and officials at ports of entry to try to root out suspected Muslims and bar them from entry; and it could also then use national-security arguments to require all noncitizen Muslims in the United States to register with federal authorities, with deportation as the penalty for noncompliance.

Would a Trumpian ban on Muslim immigrants and visitors, as well as measures directed at Muslim noncitizens in the United States, be challenged in court? Of course. In the interim, however, while the challenges were working their way up to the Supreme Court, it’s conceivable that the lower courts would let such policies stand, says Drexel University constitutional and human rights law expert Anil Kalhan.

Carlton Larson, a legal historian at the University of California Davis School of Law, doesn’t think the courts would accept measures directed at Muslims across the board. But he believes they might agree that adherence to particular strains of politicized Islam was ideologically incompatible with entry into, or continued residence in, the United States. Instead of calling for a ban on all Muslims, Trump might therefore focus on adherents of what he and other Republicans refer to as “radical Islam.” While such a ban would not categorically exclude all Muslims, the government would then have grounds for inquiring into the beliefs of all Muslims—prospective immigrants and visitors as well as legal residents—to determine who among them held radical beliefs dangerous to national security.

There are, of course, precedents. It was on nationalsecurity grounds that Japanese Americans were interned following Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Limited numbers of German Americans were also temporarily detained during World War II. In both of these instances, citizens and noncitizens alike were targeted. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of Japanese internment as a national-security imperative in 1944, in a 6–3 decision in Korematsu v. United States, a ruling that has continued to be cited favorably by the Court. And in Narenji v. Civiletti, the Court ruled that the expulsion of Iranian students during the Iranian hostage crisis under President Jimmy Carter didn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Korematsu introduced the legal standard of “strict scrutiny” for any race-based policy adopted by the government. The Court applies the same standard to governmental measures involving religion. Under strict scrutiny, a policy based on any “suspect classification” must meet several criteria. Besides serving a compelling public purpose—which can be used by the government to argue that a policy doesn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause—such a measure cannot be overbroad.

Were a Trumpian administration to try to ban all Muslims from entering the country, on the grounds that the government had a compelling interest to protect the country from Islamist terrorists, lawsuits challenging the policy would argue the categories used were too vague. “Narrow tailoring is the magic phrase,” says Yale law professor Ian Ayres. Courts have held, especially in recent cases involving affirmative action, that the policies must be narrowly tailored to further the government’s compelling interest without ensnaring people unnecessarily. Ayres doesn’t see how a blanket ban on all Muslims would ultimately withstand this test. But, like Larson, he does think that a ban could exclude followers of specific ayatollahs, and possibly members of particularly extreme sects.

Post–9/11, the Bush administration developed a slew of programs, under an umbrella FBI initiative known as Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation (PENTTBOM), which was designed to register, and monitor, groups of people who came to the United States from countries that were Muslim-majority and considered to be incubators of Islamist terrorism and extremist religious ideology. Among these programs was the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which required individuals from 25 countries to be registered, fingerprinted, and photographed. Ultimately NSEERS affected more than 80,000 people. The Bush administration presented NSEERS and related programs as vital to national security in an era when al-Qaeda was planning more attacks, and the program was deemed constitutional in a number of cases, in

Using existing immigration statutes and legal precedents,

President

Trump would have

plenty of ways to make life miserable for Muslims.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 73

which evidence was presented in secret, closed sessions.

In 2003, after spending more than 18 months reviewing the publicly available evidence, researchers from the Migration Policy Institute concluded that the special registration requirements and tightening up of immigration enforcement—including roundups of Muslims and Arabs, 13,000 of whom were placed in deportation proceedings—had “failed to locate terrorists, and damaged one of our great potential assets in the war on terrorism: the communities of Arab- and Muslim-Americans.” Nonetheless, the programs stayed in place, most of them until 2011, some still ongoing.

“We now have a broad array of measures that have targeted one particular slice of the noncitizen community: Arabs and Muslims,” explains Susan Akram, director of the

entry to people based on their geographic origins. One suit was withdrawn after the plaintiffs had their application processed; no ruling has yet been handed down in the other case. A freedom-of-information request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California turned up evidence that between 2008 and 2012, CARRP affected more than 19,000 people globally. More recently, a Las Vegas–based journalist’s FOIA request found that the number had reached nearly 42,000.

“The CARRP program directs agency officers to delay and ultimately deny the immigration benefits applications of applicants it has blacklisted, all without even telling these individuals that they were labeled threats to our nation, let alone giving them an opportunity to respond to the allegations,” wrote Jennie Pasquarella, director of immigrant rights at the ACLU of Southern California, in the 2013 report “Muslims Need Not Apply.” Applicants could be listed as “national security concerns” simply for attending a mosque the FBI had under surveillance or for traveling through an area of known terrorist activity.

While CARRP has been implemented largely in secret, UC Irvine School of Law professor Sameer Ashar believes a Trump administration could publicize its provisions and use it as a political tool to further limit Muslim entry.

Pasquarella, too, believes it could be used to dramatically curtail the number of Muslim refugees entering the United States from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war-torn regions of the Muslim world, as well as family members seeking to join relatives in the U.S. Trump could, she says, explicitly “tether it to religious criteria.”

Protesters stand across the street from a Donald Trump rally holding signs for “Muslims for Peace,” March 5, 2016, in Orlando, Florida.

human-rights law clinic at Boston University. “There’s a great deal of latitude in singling out Arab and Muslim communities in a way that would not pass muster for U.S. citizens.”

Muslim citizens seeking to bring family members to the United States under the family reunification provisions of current immigration laws might be in a stronger legal position than prospective immigrants themselves to contest a ban on Muslim migration into the country. But then again, maybe not. In 2008, the Bush administration introduced the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP), which allowed federal agencies to go slow on approving visas, refugee or asylum status, work eligibility, and adjustment-of-status requests for family members from certain Muslim-majority countries.

CARRP was introduced, in secret, with no congressional approval or oversight, by the Citizenship and Immigration Services. Since 2013, two suits have been filed alleging that the go-slow procedures amount to a decision to deny

74 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

forceable,” says Kanstroom about a ban on Muslims. “But let’s imagine they can come up with a machine to identify Muslims. The question is, is it legal? The Chinese Exclusion Act is a good starting point.”

Passed in 1882, the act excluded all Chinese laborers, though it allowed Chinese merchants, students, and ministers to enter the country as long as they carried with them what was known as a Section 6 certificate. Seven years later, a case came to the Supreme Court involving a man who had lived lawfully in San Francisco for 12 years and then was barred from re-entering the country after he returned to China to visit his family. The Court ruled that under the Plenary Power Doctrine, noncitizens seeking entry into the United States had no constitutional claims.

In 2017, the Plenary Power Doctrine would form a core part of the Trumpian legal argument that America could bar entry to people using religion as a criterion. Under Plenary Powers, Muslim nonpermanent residents on work visas, student visas, and so on could conceivably find themselves denied permission to re-enter America should they

brynn ander son / ap images

“As a practical matter, it’s ridiculous; it’s unen-

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temporarily leave, says Ashar. Theoretically, so too could some citizens. In recent years, a handful of U.S. citizens who traveled to Yemen, presumably to liaise with al-Qaeda, have had their passports either seized or revoked by embassy officials in Yemen, thus effectively preventing their re-entry into the United States.

But all of this leaves the huge question of how one determines who is, in fact, a Muslim. Is “Muslim-ness” about beliefs in God or simply a set of cultural values? Is it about rituals followed or the name on one’s birth certificate?

Putting government in the business of religion-testing would almost certainly involve consular officers asking visa applicants questions about their beliefs, the holidays they observed, their dietary habits, their parents’ religious affiliations, and other similar questions.

“Can you force someone to eat or not eat something?” asks the writer and creative director of Affinis Labs, Wajahat Ali, who has written a number of reports on the growing dangers of Islamophobia in America. “Do you dangle a pork sandwich in front of them? Do you check backpacks for Halal items?”

Is the TSA going to have a circumcision-inspection squad?

Conceivably, says Ali, if the rationale is “anyone who is a Muslim is a potential suspect, and we’d rather be safe than sorry.”

Demagogues like Trump who target outside groups usually have a core set of hatreds. What shines through Trump’s public statements—from his fetishizing the idea of torturing terror suspects to his advocacy of dipping bullets in pig’s blood and using them to summarily execute Muslim terrorists, from his support for collective punishment against Muslims to his statements that Muslims as a group hate America—is his animus against Muslims. The more he expresses his dislike of Muslims, the more he empowers every tin-pot race- and religion-baiter to come out and not just publicly espouse intolerance but act on it. Trump is creating a culture that invites violence against Muslims, and if the history of official targeting of minorities is any indication of what may happen, his proposals need to be taken extremely seriously. For if elected, he will need more red meat to throw to his energized mob to keep them on board as he builds his power base.

This kind of popular agitation makes court rulings unpredictable and less dependent on past precedent. The historian of anti-homosexuality law William Eskridge has documented the moral panics that fueled campaigns against free-love advocates, contraception, and feminism in the 19th century, as well as anti-homosexuality laws, prosecutions, and employment witch hunts in the decades after World War II. How did these laws withstand 14th Amendment challenges? he asks in his 2008 book Dishonorable Passions. Because, he answers, “legislators and judges came to understand the Fourteenth Amendment pragmatically, in light of public opinion.”

If Trump—with the full powers of the presidency at

his disposal—convinces enough people that Muslims as a group constitute a major safety risk, a threat to public order, and a potential Fifth Column, Akram believes the courts wouldn’t necessarily act as a buffer.

Could a Trumpian Congress—or a non-Trumpian Congress intimidated into acquiescence by a populist president’s willingness to tap into the culture of fear and to exploit public reactions to ongoing acts of Islamic terror on U.S. soil— define Islam as a national-security threat? Could distributing the Quran be considered proselytizing for an un-American political system? Such proposals have already been mooted by groups such as the Center for Security Policy, as well as legislators in Oklahoma such as John Bennett and Sally Kern.

About two-thirds of foreign-born Muslims in the country are naturalized citizens, and they would be protected by the First Amendment’s provision for “free exercise” of religion. But that protection has not always been rigorously observed. In the 19th century, Congress crafted several anti-Mormon laws—officially defined as being anti-polygamy rather than anti-Mormon—that had the effect of drastically curtailing the franchise and other rights of Mormons.

That the courts upheld such laws was at least in part because large sections of the population were deeply hostile to Mormonism. “The normative landscape can shift dramatically around a set of legal opinions based on how public opinion is mobilized,” argues Kalhan. “When highly politicized questions go to court, all bets are off.”

A blanket denial of entry to Muslims would likely have ricochet effects in other areas. After all, if the Justice Department is arguing in court that Muslims as a group are a national security threat, surely they shouldn’t work for the government or in the military or hold sensitive scientific or industrial positions. And if Muslims pose a danger to the nation’s security, surely communities should have the right to exemptions from Fair Housing Act requirements so as to be able to bar Muslims from living in their midst.

If Trump’s dislike of Muslims is as intense as his public comments suggest it to be, it isn’t beyond the bounds of the possible that, step by step, Muslims’ status in the country, as well as their daily security, would be undermined during the first years of his presidency.

Could we end up with attempts to ferret out closeted Muslims, as vice squads did homosexuals in decades past, or as the Spanish Inquisition’s investigators did against Conversos (Jews who had allegedly converted but who in secret still adhered to Jewish rituals)? Surely not in 21stcentury America. Then again, that’s what rational, modern-minded, enlightened Germans would have thought, in the twilight days of Weimar, about the possibility of medieval religious codes being reintroduced against Jews.

Things can get ugly, Larson concludes, “if you have people mobilized into a raging froth of hate.”

The Plenary Power Doctrine would underpin the

Trumpian

legal

argument to bar entry to people on the basis of religion.

Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at Dēmos and a freelance writer on social-justice themes. His 2013 book The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives was a New York Times notable book of the year.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 75

Arizona’s Blue Horizons

With increasing Latino activism, once-Republican Arizona is becoming contested terrain, though registration still lags.

Will this be the year?

By Nathal ie Bap tiste

S

ix years ago, as a response to a repressive antiimmigrant law, Silvana Salcido Esparza, who owns the popular Mexican restaurant Barrio Café near downtown Phoenix, began the Calle 16 mural project. Artists from the area came together to paint murals showcasing Mexican and Arizonian pride. Now, artists in Phoenix are poised to do the same thing in response to Donald Trump. In March, a famous anonymous street artist known as El Peezo resurfaced after almost two years of absence to paint a mural depicting Trump as Jabba the Hutt—the slug-like alien from the Star Wars film franchise—in the heart of Phoenix.

(The mural has since been removed.)

As a normally red state that borders Mexico, with a growing Latino population, Arizona is a breeding ground for both Trumpism and for the backlash against him.

The state is an extreme case of the polarization afflicting America. Some white people resent the growing presence of Latinos, while immigrants, undocumented or not, are justifiably anxious. In his speech announcing his intention to run for president, Trump set the tone for his campaign by implying that Mexican immigrants crossing the border were largely criminals and rapists.

But before there was Donald Trump, there was Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, which encompasses Phoenix and its suburbs. Arpaio, who styles himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” is flagrantly anti-immigrant. The sheriff, first elected in 1992, has been embroiled in numerous controversies about racial profiling and the treatment of inmates at the Maricopa County jails.

Lawsuits against him and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office have cost the county more than $140 million, and he was found in civil contempt of court in May 2016 for ignoring a judge’s order to cease racial profiling. Unsurprisingly, Sheriff Arpaio welcomed the Trump candidacy with open arms.

For all the negative attention he brought to the state, Latino groups do credit Arpaio with boosting Latino political participation. In the midterm cycles between 2002 and

76 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

2014, Latino voter registration grew by 165 percent. If these trends continue, the Latino voting bloc could become a powerhouse statewide. “It could mean something like one million Latino voters in Arizona,” says Antonio Gonzalez, the president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP).

Trump’s egregious hostility to not just undocumented immigrants but Latinos in general is certain to increase Latino turnout this year in Arizona. But by how much, and by what mechanisms?

Even without an intensified mobilization effort, demographic shifts work in favor of increased Latino voting participation. The Latino share of Arizona’s population nearly doubled from about 16 percent in 1980 to 31 percent today, and their numbers are growing faster than non-Latinos. They represent 22 percent of eligible voters statewide, a figure that will also grow.

The gap between the population share and the percentage of eligible voters reflects the fact that only about 48 percent of Latinos in Arizona are citizens. Some are undocumented, but hundreds of thousands are eligible to vote or are legal residents eligible to naturalize. For Latinos, the political challenge is to increase naturalization, voter registration, and turnout. According to the William C. Velasquez Institute, turnout among registered Latino voters in Arizona in 2012 was 77.5 percent, up from 71 percent in 2008, but still well behind the white turnout rate of nearly 87 percent.

“I would expect that number to get bumped up,” says Gonzalez. “Maybe you’ll get 80 percent of registered voters, which would be very high for Arizona Latinos,” he predicts. “All of this is because of Trump. He will excite people. Just not the way he wants.” SVREP has launched a Fight the Wall campaign with an online registration push where potential voters can download a free smartphone application and register to vote.

Although turnout climbed between the last two presidential elections, nearly half a million Latino citizens were not registered to vote. Only about 52 percent of eligible

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lef t: ross d. fr anklin / ap images; right: janessa hilliard / phoenix new times

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Latinos were registered in both the last two presidential elections, well below the white rate of just under 70 percent. One indicator of increasing Latino engagement is early registration. In 2010, according to The New York Times, 91,000 Arizona Latinos were registered to vote by mail. Today that number has grown to more than 300,000.

Arizona has been a solidly red state in recent presidential elections. The last time Arizonians voted for a Democrat was in 1996, in Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign.

Before that, Harry Truman was the last Democrat to carry the state, in 1948. However, five of the last ten governors have been Democrats, most recently Janet Napolitano, who served from 2003 to 2009.

Gonzalez compares the potential impact of Trump in Arizona to Proposition 187 in California, a ballot initiative promoted in 1994 by Governor Pete Wilson to deprive undocumented immigrants of basic public services. The initiative pushed Latinos solidly into the Democratic camp and increased political mobilization and turnout. California has been a reliably blue state ever since. “I’ve been saying Arizona is the next purple state. Everyone told me I was crazy!” Gonzalez says with a laugh.

Immigrant advocates say a state law passed in 2010, S.B. 1070, is reminiscent of Prop 187 in California. First introduced in the Arizona State Senate, the law made it a misdemeanor for an immigrant to be in the state without carrying proper registration and identification. More

ominously, the law also requires law enforcement officials to determine a person’s immigration status during police stops when there is “reasonable suspicion” that he is or she is an undocumented immigrant. The Latino community and immigrant-rights advocates were quick to point out that this was racial profiling.

According to Raquel Terán, the Arizona state director for Mi Familia Vota, which promotes Latino political participation, “One of the reasons we had S.B. 1070 is because Latinos were not part of the decision-making process.” In 2010, the Republicans held a supermajority in the Arizona State Senate. Shortly after S.B. 1070 passed, Mi Familia Vota and other Latino organizations came together to form One Arizona, an alliance of groups that would work within marginalized communities in the state.

One of Mi Familia Vota’s primary functions is helping immigrants with the naturalization process and holding voter registration drives. At workshops sponsored by the group, lawyers explain the process to potential citizens and Mi Familia Vota sends them off with study materials.

At MFV’s citizenship workshops, the organization and volunteers help immigrants fill out the required forms.

The group tries to follow up with those who came to the forums and took their application materials home. “We assisted more than 1,500 folks in the last four months,” Terán reports.

To promote voter registration, “We visit high-traffic

Above left: Protesters rally outside the office of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who violated a judge’s order to end racial profiling.

Above right: The Trumpas-Jabba-the-Hutt mural

by El Peezo that went up in downtown Phoenix in March

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 77

Veteran Republican Senator John McCain faces a tough race.

Insulted

by Trump,

McCain nonetheless supports him.

areas like the Motor Vehicle Division, libraries, supermarkets, and soccer tournaments,” Terán says. MVF also held registration drives at a Cinco De Mayo festival and at high schools. “We registered over 1,000 high school students in Phoenix and Tuscon,” she adds.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services estimates that it can take six months or more to process naturalization applications. So applicants who hope to vote in November need to have their applications in process by now. Terán explains that the people who come to Mi Familia Vota for help with the citizenship process are always energized in an election year, but this year is different. “A lot of the folks that came in wanted to be ready in November,” she says. “Trump has been a motivator. They’ve been motivated by his rhetoric.”

A complication, however, is that Latinos tend to be somewhat skeptical of both political parties. While there is appreciation for President Obama’s efforts to suspend deportation of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, many Latinos resent the intensified immigration enforcement directed at others. Since Obama took office in January 2009, the U.S. has deported more than 2.5 million immigrants.

In the summer of 2014, when young children from Central America were fleeing the violence of their home countries, they were not treated as refugees and many were deported, despite the Obama administration knowing that some of them could be facing death.

Some of the children who made it across the border into Texas were then bused to Arizona and held in detention centers. The executive director of the Arizona AFL-CIO, Rebekah Friend, is passionate when she speaks of the child migrants she tried to help. “They had nothing—some of them didn’t even have toothbrushes,” says Friend. “All that happened under Obama.”

That same year, Janet Murguía, head of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil-rights group, began calling Obama the Deporter-in-Chief. The president appeared to making inroads with the Latino community when he issued an executive order that would stop the removal of undocumented immigrants who hadn’t broken any other laws. But then in early 2016, immigration raids resumed— this time targeting the refugees from Central America.

“In my fantasy world,” says Friend, the risk of Trump “makes everybody stand up and run to the polls. But the reality of it is [Latinos] are so disengaged from the political process.” Latinos haven’t been harnessing their electoral power because “both parties have a tendency to pander to groups and not address the real issues,” she adds. “[Latinos] don’t feel as if the Democrats have really stood up for them on immigration reform,” says Friend.

Comprehensive immigration reform has been a political

78 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

hot button for decades, but neither party has taken steps to address the issue in any real substantial way.

Another Arizona Trump casualty could be Repub-

lican Senator John McCain, who has been whipsawed by the GOP candidate’s campaign. Trump insulted McCain’s iconic status as a war hero, saying he “liked people who weren’t captured” in reference to McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Trump has never served in the military. Yet today, McCain says he is supporting Trump.

Despite that support, many Trump supporters view the senator as the type of establishment Republican rejected by the Tea Party right, so McCain stands to lose support from both Trump backers and the anti-Trump camp.

McCain is facing formidable challengers both in the Republican primary and from Democratic Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, whom he will face in the November election if he survives the August primary. A May 2016 Public Policy Polling survey found that McCain had a 50 percent disapproval rating, and showed him tied with GOP primary challenger Kelli Ward. The poll also showed McCain leading Kirkpatrick by just six points, and 39 percent of respondents said they were less likely to support a Senate candidate who backed Trump.

McCain remains the favorite, but considers this election “the race of my life.” If Latino turnout surges, Democrats could take an Arizona Senate seat for the first time in two decades. The state’s last Democratic senator, Dennis DeConcini, was first elected in 1976, won re-election three times, and retired in 1995.

Rumors about Hillary Clinton’s running mate began circulating almost as soon as it became clear she would become the Democratic nominee. Among the rumored vice presidential candidates were two influential Latino men: Julián Castro and Thomas Perez. Castro was the mayor of San Antonio, Texas, from 2009 to 2014 until Obama tapped him to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Perez was serving as an assistant attorney general for civil rights until joining Obama’s cabinet as the secretary of labor in 2013.

Presumably, picking a Latino as her running mate would galvanize voters and increase turnout, but that line of thinking may be too simplistic. “A Latino last name is not going to trick anybody,” says Raquel Terán. “Our electorate has matured a lot.” Arizona State Representative Juan Mendez also has his doubts. “It wouldn’t be a clincher,” he says.

“I think we have the ability to do it, but is the will there to do it?” asks Friend about getting Latino turnout high enough to stop Trump. Despite her concerns, she is still working to make sure her union members get to the polls in November. “For most labor [unions], the idea of a Trump presidency is frightening,” she says. “We’ve been trying to

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Factor

Latino activists hope to increase Hispanic voting turnout to 80 percent this year.

move our members to vote early,” she explains. “You don’t get hit with as much garbage” before the last few weeks of the election season, when the advertisements get overwhelming.

Friend says that, alongside registration drives, the Arizona AFL-CIO stresses education and making sure people actually go to the polls. “You can register as many people as you want, but the more important piece for me is getting them to the ballot box,” she says. “Sometimes, in the flurry to up registration numbers, we forget about that piece.”

m at t yo r k / a p i m a g e s

As in other Republican-led states, Arizona turn-

out could be held down by voter-suppression maneuvers.

Arizona is one of 11 states with strict voter-ID laws. In the state’s March presidential primary, Arizonians reported standing in long lines for up to five hours. There were reports of the mishandling of voter registration cards, in which voters were mysteriously switched from Democratic to independent, thus denying them the right to vote in the state’s closed primary.

There was also a drastic cut in the number of polling places, especially in heavily Latino areas. In Maricopa County, which is just under 30 percent Latino, voting locations were cut from 200 to just 60 before the primary.

In heavily Latino South Phoenix, the last ballot at South Mountain Community Center, the community’s only polling place, was cast at 12:12 a.m. on Wednesday morning.

Affluent areas reported much shorter lines and wait times.

“In my district, you had access to three, if not four, polling

locations,” says Juan Mendez, who represents District 26 in the Arizona House. But things were drastically different in the heavily Latino West Valley region. “There were entire districts in West Valley that had no polling locations,” he says.

Despite the chaos of the presidential primary, Mendez is still optimistic about the general election in November.

“We have a lot of initiatives,” he says of the ballot. Not only will Arizonians be voting for president and senator, but they can expect to vote on the legalization of marijuana, on raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020, and on strengthening their public campaign-finance system. “That’s a lot of stuff that is going to turn out voters and young voters, too,” Mendez says. From an organizing standpoint, Mendez sees great value in Kirkpatrick’s campaign for U.S. Senate.

“They [Kirkpatrick’s campaign] have done a great job; they scooped up all of our young organizers around the colleges.”

Despite gerrymandering, the Arizona legislature has already been becoming less overwhelmingly Republican.

After the 2010 election, Republicans enjoyed an advantage over Democrats of 21 to 9 in the Arizona State Senate and 40 to 20 in the House. Today, that majority has been cut to 18 to 12 in the senate and 36 to 24 in the House. Mendez, who is currently running for state senate, thinks the Democrats have a shot this year at making the senate an even 15 to 15.

It may take a few more elections before Arizona can be counted as purple, if not potentially blue. But politicians like Joe Arpaio and Donald Trump are certainly helping the process along.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 79

How “They” Become“We”

Here’s what America does well in integrating immigrants and what we could do better—unless anti-immigrant passions take over.

By Michael Fix

A

lthough the United States has only about 5 percent of the world’s population, it is home to nearly 20 percent of the world’s international migrants.

The current xenophobia-tinged election-year rhetoric and polarized stalemate on immigration policy may suggest that America has given up on its tradition of incorporating newcomers and weaving their cultures into the national experience. But that conclusion would be a mistake. Immigrants have continued to become successfully integrated into American society—more successfully than have immigrants to European countries that are now confronting severe conflicts over these issues.

The federal government has historically taken a handsoff approach to integrating immigrants. Rather than exercising any direct regulation, it has let immigrants and their families find their way—sometimes with the help of local and voluntary organizations, state and local authorities, and members of their own community. But national policy has played a crucial part in immigrant integration, from the adoption of the 14th Amendment’s provision for birthright citizenship in 1868 to the 1965 immigration law that diversified the flow of newcomers and the education and labor policies benefiting immigrants that were also enacted as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The surprise is that this tradition of support for immigrants remains strong despite partisan deadlock on broad immigration reform. In recent years, Congress has been able to summon bipartisan majorities to pass two measures that foster immigrant opportunity and advancement. One of these should enable some immigrants to enter workforce training programs that have previously excluded them. The other, the successor to No Child Left Behind, is likely to put greater pressure on schools and state governments to serve English-language learners, most of whom are the U.S.-born children of immigrants.

Policy still falls short in other ways. But to appreciate the American achievement in integrating immigrants is also to understand what is at stake if the federal government begins mass deportations of the unauthorized and disrupts

80 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

the lives of millions of families long settled in this country.

Thanks to a two-year inquiry by the National Academies of Sciences, we now have a solid base of factual information for understanding how well immigrants are integrating into American society. (Full disclosure: I served on the 17-member National Academies panel.) Immigrants and their children are now learning English as fast or faster than they have in the past. Immigrant men are employed at higher rates than those born in the United States. The data reveal that by the second generation (that is, the U.S.born children of immigrants), all immigrant groups make substantial gains. The proportions completing high school and attending college rise rapidly by generation (or remain high), so the overall educational attainment of immigrant children closes the gap with the native born. Immigrants make similar gains in incomes. Other research finds that the children of immigrants catch up to the U.S.-born in their literacy and numeracy skills.

The upshot of these trends is that members of the second generation come to resemble the native born in their social and economic position. This evolution from “they” to “we” is nowhere more evident than in U.S. intermarriage rates.

Today, one in seven marriages is interracial or interethnic—double the share just a generation ago. As a result, 35 percent of all Americans now say they have “close kin” of another race. This pattern of integration in the United States differs from Europe, where unemployment rates for immigrants are typically higher than for natives and the limited language skills and poor earnings of immigrants persist into the second and even the third generation.

Not all the trends in the United States are positive.

Race matters for immigrants as it does for the native born: Poverty is higher among the second generation of black immigrants than among the first generation. Earnings grow more slowly among Hispanics than among other immigrant groups. While Asians do well on many integration measures, they earn less than non-Hispanic whites with similar educational credentials.

Becoming more similar to native-born Americans does

the

immigrant

Factor

not always work to immigrants’ advantage. While immigrants themselves have a three-year longer life expectancy than the native born, their children do not—health advantages decline by the second generation. The share of two-parent families also falls, as divorce rates and out-ofwedlock births rise over generations. On balance, though, immigrants and their children derive substantial social and economic gains from coming to America.

What accounts for the relatively successful inte-

gration of the largely nonwhite flows of immigrants who have entered the United States since the 1965 Immigration Act? By abolishing national-origin preferences that had favored Europeans, that legislation has made possible increased immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The relatively open labor market in the United States has helped to incorporate immigrants and their children at all skill levels. In many European countries, in contrast, discrimination and structural barriers limiting entry to many fields of work result in significantly higher unemployment rates among both low- and high-skilled immigrants than among their native counterparts.

National policies dating to the Great Society have also promoted immigrant integration in the United States.

The most important of these measures have funded bilingual education and compelled schools to take account of the needs of English-language learners. These concerns were embedded in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and later expressly adopted in the 1968 Bilingual Education Act, which sought to eliminate discrimination based on national origin. Federal court decisions and subsequent legislation have extended these policies, which today govern instruction for the five million English-language learners who make up one in ten students in K-12 schools across the country. It was also during the Great Society that federal policy began to support adult basic education and the provision of English as a second language (ESL) to adults.

Despite the deadlock on immigration policy, Congress has passed two major laws with bipartisan support that should benefit immigrants. The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, enacted in 2014, singles out Englishlanguage learners, people with low levels of literacy, and “individuals facing substantial cultural barriers” as priorities for assistance with education and training. The law, however, does not provide additional funding, so much will depend on how the states carry out the program. The Every Student Succeeds Act—enacted in 2015 as the successor to No Child Left Behind—may also improve education for immigrants. Like its predecessor, Every Student Succeeds holds schools accountable for the progress and outcomes of English-language learners. But it goes further by making those students’ progress in English proficiency central to

how schools’ performance will be assessed. This provision should put more pressure on states to serve English learners.

We could do more to facilitate the integration of immigrants. Since immigrants do so much of the low-wage work in America, they would particularly benefit from better enforcement of federal and state labor laws. National policies should also not forget the two million immigrants with college degrees who are underemployed in low-skill jobs or not employed at all. Licensing laws could more readily recognize foreign-earned credentials. Providing low-cost bridge courses to fill educational gaps could open the way to higher-skilled employment.

Naturalization rates are lower for immigrants in this country than in Canada and Australia; 8.8 million immigrants in the United States are eligible to naturalize but have not done so. One way to enable more immigrants to become citizens would be to lower the fees. In 1996, it cost $95 to apply for citizenship; by 2015, the fees had risen to $680. Expanding waivers for low-income applicants would reduce the barriers. The waiting period to apply for citizenship could also be shorter (Canada’s is four years); the civics and language tests could be easier (Sweden doesn’t administer a language test); and the government could boost spending on English language for civics purposes.

At no recent time in the United States has the future of immigrant communities hung more clearly on the outcome of an election, with one party’s presidential candidate promising to begin mass deportations of the roughly 11 million unauthorized and the other party seeking to give them a path to citizenship. The deportations would also affect the 4.5 million children—nearly all U.S. citizens themselves—who live in “mixed-status families” with one or more unauthorized parents. Some of these children would be left behind in deep poverty, while others would be forced to adjust to countries and languages they do not know. Contrary to widely held perceptions, most of the unauthorized are not recently arrived single men; nearly 80 percent have been in the United States for five years or more, half for at least ten years. They have become embedded in local communities and economies that would be massively disrupted by the loss of workers and consumers. These community-level effects would be highly concentrated geographically; Nevada, Texas, California, Florida, and New Jersey would be hit the hardest.

The break from the recent past would be dramatic.

Although national policy toward immigrants has been hands-off, it has largely aided their integration into American society, especially since the 1960s. The stakes this year are high not just for the parties and candidates, but for the future of immigrant communities. America’s much-envied historical accomplishment of turning “they” into “we” may be in jeopardy in an election when anti-immigrant voices are hoping to turn “us” against “them.”

Thanks to national policy, immigrants have continued to become

successfully

integrated into American society—more successfully than have immigrants in Europe.

Michael Fix is president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that studies international migration and immigrant integration in the United States and abroad. He served on the National Academies of Sciences committee that produced the report “The Integration of Immigrants into American Society.”

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 81

Trump and the Racial Politics of the South

The legacy of slavery and segregation creeps northward.

By Ke v in O ’Le ary

F

or decades, Donald Trump has been known as a narcissistic, bombastic New York businessman who craves the media spotlight. However, if you unpack the dynamics of his support as a politician, Trump’s stunningly successful run to the top of the Republican ticket is less New York chutzpah and more Southern demagogue. Trump’s appeal to disaffected whites, especially working-class white men, evokes the racial politics of the white South.

For a century and a half, a possible alliance between lower-income black and white Southern voters has been blocked by elites appealing to racial division. There is plenty of racism in the North, of course, though the South is the epicenter of this brand of right-wing populism. As the economic fortunes of working- and middle-class white men have faltered in the past generation, resurgent racism has filled the political vacuum. While anti-immigrant politics have their own history in America going back to the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, Southern right-wing populism has often been anti-foreign as well as anti-black. Trump has been able to fuse the appeals of nativism and racism in his appeal to aggrieved whites.

For decades, old-style white supremacy has been increasingly virulent at the level of Southern state and local politics, but until Trump it did not have a plausible national leader.

Blueblood Republican presidential nominees like Mitt Romney and the Bushes, or mainstream standard-bearers like John McCain and Robert Dole, were the antithesis of right-

82 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

wing populism. This year’s Trump revolt is the instrument of long-simmering resentment against both parties.

The Democrats, meanwhile, have become the party of cosmopolitan cultural liberalism—friendly to a mosaic of immigrant groups and to newly asserted rights demanded by the gay, lesbian, and now transgender community, as well as to redoubled demands to complete the movement for equal rights for blacks and women. All of this created the preconditions for a Trump, whose criticism of P.C. politics blends anti-black, anti-foreign, anti-rational, and antimodern sentiments. The America that his base wants to make great again is a white America— the America of the pre–civil rights South.

After the advances of the era of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson, the 1970s ushered in a generation of Southern Democratic governors like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who presided over biracial governing coalitions of racial liberals and economic moderates. As recently as 1992, Democrat Ray Mabus in Mississippi—Mississippi!—was that sort of governor. Mabus received about 40 percent of the white vote in the 1987 election.

But those days are over. A lot of the jobs turned out to be low-wage jobs. Traditional industries that paid decently, like textiles and furniture, all but collapsed. The New South economy was confined to small high-tech oases. The Republican Party doubled down on the Southern Strategy advanced by Richard Nixon—running against civil rights and black gains. An

influx of immigrants only added to the backlash.

By the beginning of this decade, most Southern whites had moved decisively to the Republican Party, most of the Southern Democratic Party had become a black party, and the biracial governing coalitions were unattainable. “White Democrats in the South are gone,” says Hodding Carter III, the journalist who was a spokesman for President Carter and whose father was a crusading Mississippi publisher and one of the South’s great liberals in the civil-rights era.

With the advent of the Tea Party, which anticipated Trump, the dog whistle became almost audible. With Trump, the racism has become explicit. But it never really went away.

At its core, today’s reactionary right is a marriage of the ideological children of the Southern slave aristocracy and the right-wing edge of the business elite—within a single political party. In the Civil War era, Northern business interests and the anti-slavery movement were united in the fledgling Republican Party; today’s Republican Party is the opposite—it combines resurgent racism and far-right business hostility to government.

In the Old South, racism was the key to preventing an alliance of poor whites and poor blacks that would threaten both white supremacy and the continued power of the planter aristocracy. This was especially true after the Populist revolt of the 1890s when, for a brief period, poor whites and poor blacks united in a common cause against the upper crust. The response by the Southern oligarchy was twofold.

First, the white elite disenfranchised nearly all

victor juha sz

blacks and a good portion of the white working class with a variety of political and economic devices, including the infamous poll tax and changes in the system of land tenure that caused white smallholders as well as blacks to become sharecroppers. Second, the planters and their urban business partners developed and per-

fected a brand of politics based on turning poor whites against blacks to head off the biracial coalition of working-class blacks and whites that could again threaten the power of the bourbon elite. By 1910, virtually all black elected officials were expunged from the states of the former Confederacy, along with nearly all black voters.

More than a century after the destruction of the original Reconstruction, Trump and the GOP have returned to the same dual strategy of voter suppression and the politics of racial resentment to block liberal advances or a biracial coalition. The epitome of affront to the America of white supremacy was the

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 83

election of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama. “By 2010, there was full horror that a black man was now president and a full-fledged liberal,” says Hodding Carter, who served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President Carter and is now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). “Obama was at the door and soon in the bedroom. It brought back all the atavistic, Old South fears.” Before Trump began bashing immigrants, he promoted the canard that Obama was born in Kenya, a lie that sent exactly the right signals to the base.

If you want to see a 20th-century politi-

cian who prefigured the Trump coalition, look no further than Alabama Governor George C. Wallace. A four-time presidential candidate and former Democrat, Wallace helped deliver the White House to Richard Nixon in 1968 when he headed the American Independent ticket and garnered 13.5 percent of the vote and carried five states with 46 ballots in the Electoral College. Wallace stunned political observers by showing surprising strength in the North. His support among blue-collar workers cost Democrat Hubert Humphrey dearly in such states as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, where Wallace votes exceeded Nixon’s margin over Humphrey. A mid-September AFL-CIO poll showed roughly one in three union members supporting Wallace, and a Chicago SunTimes poll showed that Wallace had the support of 44 percent of white steelworkers in Chicago.

“Trump’s voters are the sons and daughters, mostly the sons, of the Wallace voters,” says Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at UNC Chapel Hill. Every modern Republican presidential candidate starts with a white base in the South. What is new is Trump’s audacious attempt to take the white politics of the South national via an aggressive demonization of immigrants, Muslims, women, blacks, and minorities of all stripes.

Wallace, interestingly, began as a racial moderate and a protégé of Alabama Governor “Big Jim” Folsom, who disliked racial politics and ended every speech by stepping into the crowd to shake the hand of the first black supporter he found. Following the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, an intense backlash of white opinion in the

84 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

South called for massive resistance. Attacked for being soft on the race issue, Wallace lost his first race for governor in 1958. Afterward, Wallace told his inner circle, “no other son-ofa-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.”

As the civil-rights movement burgeoned, Wallace repositioned himself to lead the white resistance and famously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Wallace, a political innovator of the first rank, pioneered the sublimation of racial rage into hatred of government, not just the federal imposition of black rights in a second Reconstruction, but government meddling generally.

This anticipated the politics of Newt Gingrich,

Like Trump, Southern segregationist politicians were cavalier about policy issues. One issue mattered—race.

Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, and the Tea Party because it connected Southern racial resentment to the anti-government libertarian economics of the business right. The explicit racism became latent and coded—a dog whistle. The stars of today’s Republican right are all practitioners of this art. But Trump went them one better.

“Trump doesn’t tweet dog whistles, he blasts foghorns,” wrote Washington Post op-ed columnist Eugene Robinson. In this, Trump echoes an earlier band of 20th-century Southern demagogues. Southern politicians such as Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, South Carolina’s “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, and Georgia’s Eugene Talmadge were more blatant and direct than Wallace in demeaning blacks. And like Trump, they relished the fact that they were not about issues—for issues (other than race) mattered little in traditional Southern politics. Instead, they concentrated on providing a venomous, racist form of entertainment for the white

working class—another parallel with Trump.

In the Old South, the central role of race crowded out discussion of other issues and other possible coalitions. Said one Southern judge, “Issues? Why, son, they don’t have a damn thing to do with it [getting elected].”

In Politics in the New South, a leading text on Southern politics, University of Florida political scientist Richard K. Scher explains: Since it was possible, indeed legitimate and necessary, to blame blacks for the ills of the South, the politician need not then bother with serious discussion of public problems.

Issues were of little or no significance, since the causes of southern problems were not a colonial economy and maldistribution of resources leading to poor education, ignorance, poverty, and disease. Rather, they were the consequence of a large black population that sucked energy and resources from whites in the region.

Using the government to improve public welfare might increase health and well-being for the South’s impoverished population—both black and white. But this was unacceptable because it “might lead to increased levels of equality between the races.”

James K. Vardaman, elected governor of Mississippi in 1903, explained, “Why squander money on [black] education when the only effect is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook?” Real issues had the potential of arousing the public, causing people to pay attention, ask questions, and demand that their leaders solve problems.

The disdain of issues is also pure Trump. It doesn’t seem to matter that Trump is all over the place on serious public questions. One week he is anti-banker; the next week is he saying reassuring things about all the bankers he works with. He likes Planned Parenthood, then he doesn’t. But just as “issues” didn’t matter to whites who clearly got the message from Talmadge, Bilbo, et al. that they were defending the white race against blacks, the Trump constituency gets the deeper message. It’s not about issues as conventionally understood. But it’s very much about the white working class sense of unresolved grievance and the scapegoating of blacks and immigrants. Like the older

George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate in 1968, stunned observers by gaining white working-class support in the North.

demagogues, Trump is all ethos (“trust me”) and pathos (“fear them”), no logos or argument.

ap images

As recently as the turn of the current

century, scholars were celebrating the success of the Second Reconstruction, which emerged from the coalition of Democratic presidents (Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson) working with civil-rights leaders and activists. In his seminal history The Two Reconstructions, written in 2004, Swarthmore political scientist Richard Valelly argued it was a triumph across both the courts and parties (specifically the Democratic Party) that allowed the Second Reconstruction to become institutionalized and durable. Whereas the First Reconstruction was destroyed in 1876 by a cynical alliance between a resurgent Southern planter class and Northern Democrats, it seemed as if the modern civil-rights movement, changing racial attitudes, and the alliance between rights activists and the national government had moved the nation into a period where the New South was quite different from the Old South and the United States as a whole had turned the page.

The culmination of America’s new maturity

on race was the election of Barack Obama.

Now it is clear that the celebration was premature. In the post-Reagan era, the GOP has become a traditional white Southern party, even more so than in the Nixon era. Republicans have shifted from a party of small government to a party that is fiercely anti-government.

The 1970s-to-1990s governing coalition of blacks, racially liberal whites, and moderate business leaders that elected governors such as Carter and Clinton has been overtaken by a Republican governing coalition of neo-segregationists, anti-government libertarians, and right-wing business leaders. The rightward tilt of the Republican Party in the South, in turn, has strongly influenced the national GOP as the Tea Party base destroys moderates from Maine to Arizona with primary challenges or threats.

Today in the states of the Old Confederacy, the white Republican Party has a stranglehold on governorships, state legislatures, and nearly all congressional seats outside black-majority districts (into which African American voters have been packed in order to weaken their voting strength elsewhere.) “There are very few biracial coalitions left at the state level,” says

Representative David Price of North Carolina, one of the few remaining Southern white Democrats in Congress. The same racial pattern has made deep inroads into border states such as West Virginia and Kentucky. States like Tennessee that once elected economically populist, racially moderate Democrats are now deep red.

As Republicans more flagrantly became the white party, Democratic statewide candidates, be they white or black, have failed to “attract sufficient white votes to marry to the united support provided by African American voters,” write political scientists Charles Bullock and Ronald Gaddie. An exception is Virginia, whose northern suburbs are distinctly non-Southern.

After passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, under the direction of New South governors such as Carter in Georgia, Clinton in Arkansas, Mabus in Mississippi, and Mike Easley in North Carolina, a number of Southern states “adopted parallel strategies of bolstering public education, improving physical infrastructure, and aggressively recruiting new economic enterprise,” writes UNC ’s Guillory in his 2012 essay “The South in Red and Purple.”

As growth brought new revenue, these governors supported higher education, sought public school reforms, sustained Medicaid, and launched various activist government initiatives. But in the 2000s, and especially in the wake of the 2008 economic crash, Republicans countered by “widely challenging even the premises of government,” using radical antigovernment rhetoric and actions. The right’s devotion to “privatization, their adherence to budget cutting, and above all, their determined resistance to tax increases,” Guillory writes, was an assault that took the wind out of the sails of New South–style governance in state capitols across the region. And race, once again, became central to the politics of division.

Southern white voting was going Republican at the presidential level before it worked its way down to the state and local level. Trump did not cause the resurgence of racial politics, but he intensifies that trend and takes it national.

The parallels between the attacks on voting rights in the First and the Second Reconstructions are striking. Between 1890 and 1910, the black electorate was radically reduced by a combination of “literacy tests, poll taxes, stringent residency requirements, requirements that reg-

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 85

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istration occur months before elections,” writes Valelly, as well as inconvenient hours, harassment, and intimidation. In the midst of the Second Reconstruction, we see a new wave of voter-suppression techniques. Since 2011, the Republicans have moved with strategic intensity to limit the vote of key Democratic constituents—primarily the elderly, minorities, and the young, abetted by a partisan Supreme Court.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has estimated that the changes put in place in just 2011 and 2012 have made it “significantly harder for 5 million citizens to vote.”

The multidimensional GOP onslaught picked up speed in 2011, when 19 states passed 25 laws to make it harder for people to vote. As Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint recently admitted, it was a coordinated strategy to suppress voter turnout among groups that favor Democrats. In a radio interview, the former South Carolina senator said, “It’s something we’re working on all over the country, because in the states where they do have voter-ID laws you’ve seen, actually, elections begin to change towards more conservative candidates.”

It may be counterintuitive to imagine Trump, a New York billionaire and reality television star, as heir to the politics of Bilbo and Wallace.

But this is the coalition he leads and this is his message. Forty years ago, there was broad hope that the New South was becoming more like the rest of America. Trump’s appeal suggests that working-class America is becoming uncomfortably like the Old South. Can Trump be stopped?

There is a Southern saying that Rev-

erend William Barber II likes to recount: “A dying mule kicks the hardest.” Barber, who is president of the North Carolina NAACP and founder of the Moral Mondays movement, says the white reactionaries know they will ultimately lose. The challenge is more than about voting rights, says Barber. It is the “intersection of voting rights and worker rights.” Barber believes that the path forward is for liberals to stress a moral narrative that explains to working-class whites how a great many government programs help a great many more whites, like themselves and their neighbors, than they do minorities. Barber cites a Harvard Medical School study saying the decision by 25 red-state governors to opt out of the Med-

icaid expansion offered by the Affordable Care Act has resulted in the deaths of thousands of working-class and poor whites. Barber’s message: The attack on people of color and immigrants by the right is, “in fact, hurting all of us.”

Increasingly, there are liberal islands in a sea of red, as Southern cities split with states on social issues. The New York Times reports that the “digital commons, economic growth and a rising cohort of millennials” have remade the culture in Southern cities from Birmingham to Dallas to Jackson to Raleigh. Howell Raines, a Southerner and the former editor and editorial page editor of The New York Times, argues that the Southern Republicans are living in “a

Forty years ago, the New South was becoming more Northern. Today, the working-class North looks more like the Old South. dream world,” pretending their ultraconservative policies can go on indefinitely. Raines says the overwhelming white flight to the Republican Party allowed the reactionaries to defeat the biracial Democratic coalitions, but now “we are seeing a new coalition politics, in which Hispanic, black, and Asian voters are joined

by Democratic-leaning younger whites who, unlike older white voters, do not care about dogwhistle issues.” Change is afoot as a multiethnic Democratic Party has the opportunity of breaking the Republican lock on the South, starting with Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, with Georgia and then Texas on track to go purple in the near future. But that future may be a way off.

In North Carolina, where three moderate white Democratic congressmen have lost their seats in the past ten years, Hodding Carter is less sanguine about the Democrats “making a coalition to break the back of one-party racial politics.” Since Jimmy Carter’s presi-

dency, which began with the former Georgia governor winning a series of Southern states including Mississippi, “there have been a few more moments of possibility” for an enduring biracial coalition, but each “lasted like a heartbeat.” Hodding Carter recalls a moment in 1989 when The New York Times ran a photo of three sons of the South—Governors Mabus of Mississippi, Clinton of Arkansas, and Buddy Roemer of Louisiana—ambitious young Democrats with “aggressive agendas, Ivy League pedigrees and boyish good looks,” who personified the New South’s politics. Each had a program focused on economic development, education investment, and fiscal moderation, which appealed to both whites and blacks in three states that were ranked in the bottom 12 nationally for per capita income. “You kept thinking, this time we will reverse it,” says Hodding Carter. “We are putting down the foundation for a new workable party, but it was built on sand. Yes, we could elect individuals, but after their time in office, it all falls apart.”

For now, white moderates have been stymied in their efforts to build a biracial—or now a multiracial and cosmopolitan—electorate in the South. Yet Democrats may not need the South to spare the country Trump. The electoral math works for the Democrats to win the White House based on the West Coast, the Northeast, and the industrial Midwest while conceding the South to the Republicans.

Their challenge is to prevent Trump from taking a Southern strategy national, as Wallace began to do, for there are plenty of aggrieved, downwardly mobile whites outside the South.

However, if Democrats cat get beyond the current spasm of hate and offer something hopeful to an angry white working class, the long-term demographic trends are in their favor. Even so, this is a frightening time for the republic.

Rarely have the differences between the two major political parties been so broad, so clear, and so significant, and a presidential election so consequential.

Kevin O’Leary, a journalist and political scientist, is a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of a forthcoming book, The Right Against America: Trump and the Reactionary Threat.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 87

A Just Transition for U.S. Fossil Fuel Industry Workers

A combination of better jobs and pensions will remove one political obstacle to a green transition— and it’s the right thing to do.

By Ro bert Pol lin a nd B ria n Ca lla ci The Sewell “R” coal mine in Yukon, West Virginia

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ccording to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015 was the globe’s warmest year since at least 1880, when such figures were first recorded. 2014 was the next warmest, and the hottest five years also include 2013, 2010, and 2005. Can it be any more obvious that we absolutely must stop playing Russian roulette with the global climate?

The two most important things we need to do to stabilize the climate are straightforward.

First, the world must dramatically cut its reliance on oil, coal, and natural gas in energy production. This is because carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions generated through burning fossil fuels, along with methane emissions released during fossil fuel extraction processes, are responsible for about 75 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. Second, as the alternative to fossil fuel consumption, again on a global scale, we must massively expand investments in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy sources—solar, wind, geothermal, low-emissions bioenergy, and small-scale hydropower.

Both parts of this climate stabilization program will produce large-scale impacts on the employment opportunities for working people as well as on the communities in which they live. The investments in efficiency and clean renewables will generate millions of new jobs.

But workers and communities whose livelihoods depend on the fossil fuel industry will unavoidably lose out in the clean energy transition. Unless strong policies are advanced to support these workers, they will face layoffs, falling incomes, and declining public-sector budgets to support schools, health clinics, and public safety.

This in turn will increase political resistance to any effective climate stabilization program.

It follows that the global climate stabilization project must unequivocally commit to providing generous transitional support for workers and communities tied to the fossil fuel industry. The late U.S. labor leader and environmental visionary Tony Mazzocchi pioneered thinking on what is now termed a “Just Transition” for these workers and communities. As Mazzocchi wrote as early as 1993, “Paying people to make the transition from

one kind of economy to another is not welfare.

Those who work with toxic materials on a daily basis … in order to provide the world with the energy and the materials it needs deserve a helping hand to make a new start in life.”

In this article, we propose a Just Transition framework for U.S. workers. Our rough highend estimate for such a program is a relatively modest $600 million per year. This is about 1 percent of the annual level of public investment that will be needed to advance a successful overall U.S. climate stabilization program. As we show, this level of funding would pay for income and pension-fund support for workers facing retrenchments as well as effective transition programs for what are now fossil fuel–dependent communities.

One reason that the costs for this program can be kept relatively modest is precisely because the fossil fuel industry cutbacks will be occurring in conjunction with the growth of the clean energy industry. This is critical because, among other factors, within the U.S. economy, the number of jobs generated by clean energy investments will be much larger than the jobs that will be lost through fossil fuel industry retrenchments. Specifically, spending $1 million on clean energy investments generates about 17 jobs across all sectors of the U.S. economy, while spending the same $1 million on maintaining the existing fossil fuel infrastructure produces only about five jobs. Clean energy investments will produce more jobs for electricians, roofers, steelworkers, machinists, engineers, truck drivers, research scientists, lawyers, accountants, and administrative assistants. One major policy challenge is to locate good jobs in areas that will be hard hit by the decline of fossil fuel businesses.

Developing a viable Just Transition program is a matter of simple justice, as Mazzoc-

chi emphasized. But it is equally a matter of strategic politics. Without such adjustment assistance, the workers and communities facing retrenchment will, predictably and understandably, fight to defend their livelihoods. This, in turn, will create unacceptable delays in proceeding with effective climate stabilization policies. As one stark case in point, in mid-May, the AFL-CIO Building Trades department sent a blistering letter to the federation’s president, Richard Trumka, condemning the AFL-CIO’s newly announced get-out-the-vote alliance with environmental funder and activist Tom Steyer.

The broader rift in the U.S. between several major unions and environmentalists over projects that provide union jobs, like the Keystone Pipeline, demonstrates clearly what is at stake.

How Large a Contraction for U.S. Fossil Fuels?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides conservative benchmarks on what’s required to stabilize the average global temperature at no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial average. A fair summary of their assessment is that global CO2 emissions need to fall by 40 percent by 2035 and by 80 percent by 2050.

Let’s say that U.S. emissions will need to decline at this average global rate, and let’s focus on the 20-year goal of a 40 percent decline.

To accomplish this goal will require acrossthe-board cuts in both production and consumption in all domestic fossil fuel sectors. But cuts will need to be greater for coal. Per unit of energy produced, emissions from burning coal are about 40 percent higher than oil and 50 percent higher than natural gas. In addition, certainly over the next 20 years, it will be more difficult to find substitutes for oil as a liquid fuel in transportation than for coal as a generator of electricity. Given these considerations, we proceed with the assumption that, by 2035, U.S. coal consumption will need to fall by 60 percent, while the cuts will need to be around 40 percent for oil and 30 percent for natural gas.

Other major differences between coal versus oil and gas are also important for our purposes—in particular, the fact that the U.S. coal industry has experienced a sharp decline in profitability over the past decade. The rise of

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environmental regulations has been only one factor here. Competition from low-cost natural gas, generated through fracking technology, has also caused major losses. The combined impact has been devastating. Bloomberg News reported in January that “coal producers are suffering through a historic rout. Over the past five years, the industry has lost 94 percent of its market value, from $68.6 billion to $4.02 billion.” In addition, half the debt issued by U.S. coal companies is presently in default, and major coal producers Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources, and Peabody Energy have all filed for bankruptcy over the past year. This is all before we would begin the 60 percent cut in production over the next 20 years.

Conditions in oil and gas are different. The industry was booming from 2011 to 2014, as crude oil prices hovered around $100 a barrel.

But profitability fell sharply as the price of oil declined to less than $60 a barrel in 2015 and less than $40 a barrel in 2016. Plunging oil prices also rendered unprofitable most projects to produce natural gas through fracking. In 2016, defaults on debt by oil and gas companies reached nearly 15 percent. In Texas alone, the industry shed about 70,000 jobs. It is not clear how much of an increase in the oil price would be needed to reverse these negative trends, or whether any such oil price increase is likely to emerge soon. In any case, a 30 percent to 40 percent production cut over the next 20 years will certainly worsen the already unstable situation. What will this mean for fossil fuel industry workers and communities?

Subsidizing Early Retirements

The U.S. government has mounted multiple programs designed to assist workers facing job losses resulting from government policy choices.

The most prominent of these is the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) initiative, which was first implemented in 1962 and still operates today. The TAA is designed to help workers displaced by shifts in U.S. global trade policies. The program supports wage subsidies, health insurance, counseling, retraining, relocation, and job search. The overall cost is about $10,000 per worker per year, and workers, on average, benefit for about two years. However, the labor movement has long derided this level of funding as paltry, the equivalent of burial insurance.

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Similar federal programs have been no more effective than the TAA in relocating displaced workers into good new jobs. Rather, despite such initiatives, displaced workers have been largely shunted into low-wage occupations. For example, a 1999 study by Laura Powers and Ann Markusen on the post–Cold War transition programs such as the Defense Reinvestment and Conversion Initiative found that “a majority of the workers displaced from defense-related industries between 1987 and 1997 now work at jobs that pay them less than their former wages and that fail to take advantage of their defensebred skills, and a sizable minority has experienced a drop in earnings of 50 percent or more.”

Given this pattern, one cannot be optimistic

A full buyout for all workers in fossil fuel industries facing displacement is surprisingly affordable. that the results would be significantly better if similar policies were implemented as one component of the clean energy transition. Fortunately, there is a simple and relatively inexpensive alternative approach that can work.

This is to provide a one-year early retirement program for some workers. If we focus on the industry contractions through 2035—60 percent for coal, 40 percent for oil, and 30 percent for natural gas—the needed retrenchments will be only slightly in excess of the normal rate at which fossil fuel–sector workers will be retiring anyway at age 65.

Here are the basic figures. As of May 2015, there were 69,000 people employed in the U.S. coal-mining industry, and 194,000 in oil and gas extraction. This includes the people directly engaged in the mining and extraction work itself as well as everyone else doing all kinds of jobs involved in producing coal, oil, and natural

gas, ranging from office support to top-level executives. The adjustment assistance program would apply across the board to all employees in both industries, regardless of occupation.

Starting with the coal industry, let’s assume that production does decline by 60 percent over a 20-year period. This means that the industry will shed about 41,000 jobs over the next 20 years. That averages out to about 2,100 job losses per year in the industry.

There are 28,000 workers in the coal industry between the ages of 45 and 64. This translates to an average of 1,400 workers retiring per year over the next 20 years. In other words, two-thirds of the 2,100 jobs that have to be shed per year in the coal industry will happen through natural attrition via retirements at age 65. But that does still leave nearly 700 jobs that need to be shed by workers who would not have reached the standard retirement age of 65.

These additional job cuts can be handled simply by providing a fund that would provide full-compensation buyouts at age 64 for these 700 workers. We estimate the average level of total compensation (wages plus benefits) in the industry, including that for executives, to be about $78,000 per year. This would amount to buyouts totaling around $55 million for the 700 workers per year. The federal government would need to pay for these buyouts.

We can apply comparable calculations for the 194,000 people employed in the oil and gas industry. Assuming that production in the industry will need to fall by roughly 40 percent within 20 years, about 900 workers per year will need to be supported through a full-compensation buyout when they reach age 64. The average compensation in the industry, again including the pay for executives, is presently around $120,000. This means that the total buyout package for the 900 64-year-old oil and gas workers will be about $108 million per year. The buyouts for workers in both the coal and oil industries total about $165 million per year—a remarkably modest sum.

In addition to workers directly employed in the U.S. coal, oil, and natural gas industries in all occupations, there are additional workers engaged in “support activities” for these and kindred industries. Providing fair retirement subsidies for these workers should also be readily manageable. As of the 2015 government

figures, about 412,000 people were employed in all support activities for all U.S. mining and extractive industries. These include workers in management, professional jobs, manufacturing, construction, transportation, clerical jobs, and cleaning services. There are another 72,000 workers in the U.S. engaged in various petroleum-refining activities.

Most of these roughly 500,000 people— including workers employed in support activities as well as refining—will not be significantly affected through retrenchments in the fossil fuel industries. Among other factors, a high proportion of them are connected with sectors such as iron and copper mining rather than fossil fuel extraction. With refining, a large share are engaged in producing petrochemicals, as opposed to refined gasoline. Petrochemical production will not have to be cut as part of a clean energy transition, since it generates only negligible CO2 emissions. Still more significant, the expanding clean energy sectors will need to employ a large number of support workers to perform services similar to those needed for fossil fuel production.

It is difficult to calculate with precision how many workers employed in these support activities will be significantly affected by the decline in U.S. fossil fuel production. A highend estimate would place these costs at being roughly equal to the costs of the buyouts for the directly affected workers—another $165 million per year. As such, a high-end estimate of total costs of providing buyout benefits at age 64 to all workers facing layoffs—as opposed to the natural progression into retirement at 65—would be about $330 million per year.

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Guaranteeing Fully Funded Pensions

If our Just Transition program is going to rely heavily on workforce attrition through retirements at either age 64 or 65, then it is imperative that all affected workers have secure and decent pensions waiting for them upon retirement.

Accomplishing this will be a major challenge.

This is because most U.S. workers, both those working within the fossil fuel industry and more generally, have inadequate pension coverage.

U.S. workers finance their retirements through a combination of three sources—Social Security, their own private savings, and employer-based pensions. Individual savings are not

nearly high enough to finance retirement. This is especially true in the aftermath of the 2007– 2009 financial collapse. Most households have yet to recover from the nearly 30 percent decline in overall household wealth resulting from the crisis. With Social Security, the current average benefit is about $16,000, which is only slightly higher than the $15,300 threshold for food stamp eligibility. Meanwhile, about one-third of all private-sector workers had no access to retirement benefits from their employers.

Within this context, the most effective approach to guaranteeing adequate retirement support for fossil fuel industry workers would be provide such support to all workers, regardless of the industries that employ them. However, short of such an ambitious overhaul of the entire U.S. pension system, there are measures that the federal government will need to take to ensure pension security for the fossil fuel industry workers specifically.

At present, the main pension programs in both the coal and oil industries are already underfunded. The situation is most severe with coal. The industry’s pension funds are managed through the United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds, which covers multiple employers. But this fund has suffered from the rapid attrition of the coal industry and is currently underfunded by $1.8 billion. A February 9 Washington Post story reported that the coal miners’ fund has “rapidly declined as some coal companies shed dues-paying workers and others filed for bankruptcy protection.

Without intervention, some of the funds— chiefly those associated with firms in bankruptcy—could run out of cash before spring.”

The Obama administration introduced an initiative last year called “Power Plus” that calls for more than $1 billion in spending for jobs training and economic development as well as additional funds to shore up workers’ pension and health funds. To date, this proposal has been blocked by the Republican congressional leadership. But even if a version of it were to pass, it is not clear that it would fully cover the current $1.8 billion underfunding gap.

This pension fund simply must be made whole. To prevent an even greater underfunding gap, the fund could be “frozen” at its existing level of commitments to workers. The fund would be closed to newly hired employees, but

there are likely to be very few such new hires in any case, as the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy proceeds. The required policy intervention here—through Power Plus and any additional measures, as needed—would be for the federal government to ensure that the $1.8 billion gap is closed through a combination of commitments made by both the companies and the government.

As noted, the oil and gas corporations are currently at nowhere near the level of distress faced by coal companies. From 2009 to 2014, publicly traded companies in the industry reported $234 billion in profits, $147 billion in dividends, and $47 billion in share buybacks. They did lose $200 billion in 2015 as oil prices plunged. But they still managed to distribute $23 billion in dividends and $1.5 billion in share buybacks that year. At the same time, however, the five largest U.S. oil and gas companies by themselves—ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Devon Energy, and Anadarko—were carrying nearly $13 billion in unfunded pension liabilities as of 2014 and $14 billion as of 2015.

Given that the oil and gas industry will need to contract by between 30 percent and 40 percent over the next 20 years as part of the clean energy transition, we should expect that the companies are not going to prioritize replenishing their pension funds as a matter of course. The federal government will therefore have to mandate full funding. One way to enforce this would be for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC)—an arm of the federal government—to utilize its powers under the 2006 Pension Protection Act to prohibit the oil companies from paying dividends or financing share buybacks until their pension funds have been brought to full funding and then maintained at that level. As needed, the PBGC can also exercise its authority under the 2006 act to place liens on company assets when pension funds are underfunded.

Combining Community Support with Green Investments

Communities that are dependent on the fossil fuel industry will face formidable challenges adjusting to the decline of the industry. This will be true even if all workforce reductions can be managed through attrition by retirement

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and all pension fund obligations to retired fos- of fossil fuel industries will be occurring in upgrading the energy efficiency of their building conjunction with the rise of the clean energy stock and electrical grid transmission system. sil fuel workers are honored in full.

Large cities tied to the fossil fuel industry, economy. In the 2014 study Green Growth, one Previous federal programs can serve as usesuch as Houston and Dallas, will unavoidably of us (Pollin), along with co-authors, estimated ful models on how to leverage this wave of face big adjustments, similar to those expe- that the overall annual public and private costs clean energy investments to also support fossil rienced by major manufacturing cities such of a 20-year program to cut U.S. CO2 emis- fuel–dependent communities facing transition. as Detroit and Pittsburgh over the past three sions by 40 percent would be about $200 bil- There are both positive and negative lessons on decades. But smaller communities that are less lion per year. Of that total level of investment which to build. One example is the Worker and diversified will experience still greater losses. spending, Pollin and co-authors estimated the Community Transition program that operMidland, Texas, a city of 120,000 residents, annual need for public spending at around ated through the Department of Energy from relies both on traditional oil and gas extraction $50 billion per year, or 25 percent of the total, 1994 to 2004. Its mission was “to mitigate the as well as more recent shale oil projects to gen- with about $150 billion per year coming from impacts on workers and communities caused by changing Department of erate 65 percent of the city’s overall economic activity. Midland Energy missions.” This program, and its sister city, Odessa, were along with related initiatives, booming in recent years, with was targeted at 13 communities average real earnings in the fosthat had been heavily dependent sil fuel sectors rising by an averon nuclear-industry jobs but subage of 22 percent between 2006 sequently faced retrenchment and 2014, due especially to the due to nuclear decommissiongrowth in shale oil extraction. ing. It provided grants as well But the area also experienced as other forms of assistance in a loss of about 13,000 jobs in order to promote diversification 2015—7.5 percent of the area’s for these 13 affected commuoverall workforce—as oil prices nities and to maintain jobs or fell. Without an effective trancreate new employment opporsition program, this pattern of tunities. Appropriations for the decline will persist. program totaled around $200 The situation is, again, still million annually in its initial worse for coal-dependent comyears, but became much smaller, munities. For example, in Boone in the range of $20 million, in the County, West Virginia, 47 perfinal years of operation. cent of all jobs in recent years A study by John Lynch and were with the region’s coal Seth Kirshenberg in 2000 proA Dwindling Sector: Technology and fuel alternatives will cut coal mining jobs. vided a generally favorable industry. However, just between assessment of the program.

They concluded 2011 and 2015, coal-mining employment in private investments encouraged by public supthe area fell from 4,600 to 1,400, a 70 per- port. This combined level of public and private that “the 13 communities, as a general rule, cent decline. The county’s budget also fell 45 investments in clean energy projects should have performed a remarkable role in attracting percent between 2012 and 2015. Since the generate a net expansion of about three million new replacement jobs and in cushioning the beginning of 2016, the county has laid off 70 jobs throughout the U.S. economy, even after impact of the cutbacks at the energy-weapons teachers and consolidated three elementary we fully factor in the job losses in fossil fuel complex across the country.” But as Lynch and schools. Again, in the absence of a well-func- industries and related activities.

Kirshenberg note, “The most serious probtioning transition program, this pattern will Within this broader clean energy invest- lem facing the energy-impacted communities persist in Boone County and in similarly coal- ment program, policies can be designed so … was the lack of a basic regional economic that regions with larger-than-average fossil development and industrial diversification dependent communities.

The U.S. can nevertheless advance viable fuel industries will receive generous support capacity for most of the regions affected by readjustment programs that are capable, at to advance regionally appropriate clean ener- the cutbacks.” To address this problem directleast, of significantly softening the blows to be gy projects. For example, Texas and Wyoming ly, community-assistance initiatives could faced by Midland, Boone County, and many could receive additional support to build wind- encourage the formation of new clean energy similarly situated communities. Accomplish- energy production projects. Initiatives along businesses in the affected areas. One example these lines have already begun. The Appala- of a successful diversification program was the ing this will be a matter of political will.

To begin with, let’s recall that the decline chian region could receive extra support for repurposing of a nuclear test site in Nevada

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to what is now a solar proving ground. More than 25 miles of the former nuclear site are now used to demonstrate concentrated solarpower technologies and help bring them to commercialization.

It is not realistic to expect that transitional programs will, in all cases, lead to developing new economic bases that support a region’s previous level of population and community income. In some cases, the role of community assistance will be to enable communities, moving forward, to shrink to a size that a new economic base can support.

It is important to keep in mind that the extent of the overall community displacement that will result through the clean energy transition will be no greater than what the U.S. experienced after the end of the Cold War. Between 1987 and 1996, 1.4 million jobs were lost overall in the defense and aerospace industries, a 40 percent decline. San Diego and Philadelphia both lost around 50,000 jobs over this period, representing declines in both cases of about 6 percent of their respective workforces.

The federal government did advance substantial transition programs during this period, in particular through the Defense Reinvestment and Conversion Initiative, whose total funding amounted to more than $16.5 billion from 1993 to 1997, or about $4 billion per year.

The 1999 study by Powers and Markusen found that these programs were adequate in terms of overall funding levels, at about $12,000 per displaced worker. Still, Powers and Markusen concluded that the program did not succeed in supporting the well-being of the individual workers and their communities. This was because the transition policies were primarily focused on providing support for the defenseindustry contractors, through the promotion of mergers and the expansion of foreign weapons markets. The laid-off workers often did not find the assistance necessary to make satisfactory job and career changes.

Clearly, mounting a federal transition program, even if it is well funded, is not a solution in itself. The central challenge will be to effectively integrate these transition programs with the coming wave of public and private investments in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy and the millions of new job opportunities generated by these investments.

Overall Costs for Just Transition

The Just Transition program that we have sketched here will require significant levels of government spending in three areas. These include: Retirements at age 64 with full compensation. Our high-end estimate for this, including

workers employed in the relevant support and refining activities that are outside the fossil fuel industry per se, is $330 million per year.

Fully guaranteed pensions. As a high-end figure, the U.S. government will have to spend $1.8 billion to bring the United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds to full funding. This amounts to $90 million per year over 20 years. The figure can be lower to

A transition program for fossil fuel workers needs to be complemented with investment in clean-energy jobs. the extent that the coal companies can be made to contribute toward closing their underfunding gap. The oil and gas companies, by contrast, are still fully capable of closing their underfunding gaps. These gaps should therefore be handled through regulatory interventions.

Community transition. Working from the largely successful Worker and Community Transition program, the high-end level of support would be around $200 million per year.

This would be in addition to the direct clean energy investment projects flowing into all regions of the country. Alternatively, if we use the less-successful Defense Reinvestment and Conversion Initiative as a financial model, that would imply spending about $12,000 per displaced worker, amounting to annual spending of around $150 million per year. Thus, a reasonable range for these programs is between $150 million and $200 million per year.

Combining these three policy areas, we approximate the total costs as being about $600 million per year over a 20-year transition period. This level of federal spending can be readily absorbed within the broader $200 billion annual U.S. clean energy investment program that we have sketched above, with direct public spending in this program at around $50 billion per year. The Just Transition program we are proposing, costing around $600 million per year, would amount to about 1.2 percent of the $50 billion in overall public spending needed to build a U.S. clean energy economy.

As one option, these funds could be generated through the savings the federal government would obtain through investments to raise efficiency standards by 30 percent in most of the buildings they own or lease, as stipulated by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. These building-efficiency investments should save the federal government about $1.3 billion per year, or more than twice as much as would be needed for the Just Transition program. Beyond this, establishing a carbon cap or tax to discourage fossil fuel consumption could realistically generate about $200 billion per year. The total costs of the Just Transition program would therefore amount to about 0.3 percent of the revenues that could come from a carbon tax or cap.

In short, a Just Transition for U.S. fossil fuel industry workers is eminently affordable. It is also an imperative—both a moral and strategic imperative. It will be virtually impossible to move forward at the pace that is necessary for a clean energy transformation without making firm commitments to generously supporting the workers and communities that will be hurt by this transition. To again recall Tony Mazzocchi’s words, “Those who work with toxic materials on a daily basis … in order to provide the world with the energy and the materials it needs deserve a helping hand to make a new start in life.”

Robert Pollin is Distinguished Professor of Economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His most recent book is Greening the Global Economy.

Brian Callaci is a UMass Amherst Ph.D. student in economics and former researcher at Change to Win.

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Liberal Governor, Divided Government Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf, among the nation’s most progressive governors, has been checked by the most right-wing legislature in state history—but there are always executive orders.

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n February, at the Pennsylvania State Capitol building in Harrisburg, first-term Democratic Governor Tom Wolf readied himself for his second budget address.

These were not normal times for Pennsylvania politics: The state had been operating without a budget for eight months, an unprecedented crisis as the Republicancontrolled General Assembly fought with the governor’s

office over issues of taxation, spending, and pension reform. As the impasse dragged on, school districts and nonprofit organizations across the state were forced to borrow money, lay off employees, and reduce social services.

“My fellow Pennsylvanians: Our Commonwealth is in crisis. A crisis that threatens our future,” Wolf declared from the podium.

“This crisis is not about politics at all. This is about math.”

Wolf went on to outline the dramatic consequences he foresaw if state legislators failed to pass a budget that included sufficient spending increases. Thousands of teachers and guidance counselors would lose their jobs, he said. Classroom sizes would grow, and tens of thousands of children would lose access to early childhood education. The state would lose nearly $200 million in services for Pennsylvania’s seniors, and $180 million for those with mental illness and learning disabilities. From slashed funds for child care to shuttered domestic-violence shelters, the negative outcomes went on and on.

“This is not a threat. This is not political posturing. This is simply what the math tells us will happen if this crisis is not resolved,” Wolf stressed. “I didn’t run for this office to be party to the corner-cutting and budget gimmickry that got us into this mess. We can’t afford to play political games.”

Wolf ’s speech aside, the problem facing Pennsylvania is most certainly about politics— and particularly the challenges of democratic governance in an era of deepening party polarization. While Republicans and Democrats have long staked out different positions on issues of public policy, political scientists are finding that the parties are even further apart than they’ve been in at least 50 years; this polarization has extended to the general public, too, resulting in increasingly parti-

san communal institutions and news media.

The story of Tom Wolf is the story of how a progressive, liberal Democrat attempts to govern in such an era, at a time when split government means something quite different than it did even a decade ago. The challenges Wolf wrestles with in Harrisburg, with the state’s most conservative legislature in modern history, in one of the most ideologically divided states in the union, are growing increasingly common across the country. They also mirror the challenges President Barack Obama faces in Washington, D.C., as he navigates a Republican-controlled Congress whose leadership has shown unprecedented determination in obstructing Obama’s initiatives and any attempts to broker compromises.

Wolf’s dilemma, then, is both a product of polarized times, and intensely personal: How can he advance a progressive agenda given the political landscape he inherited? What tools are at his disposal? What blame, if any, does he shoulder for a failure to get things done?

In 2014, Wolf was elected governor with

a margin large enough to claim a mandate. Not only was he the first person in four decades to defeat a sitting Pennsylvania governor, ousting Republican incumbent Tom Corbett, but he won by ten percentage points. And while the budget impasse has largely defined Wolf’s time in office—dragging on for nine months between July 2015 and March 2016—he also found ways to promote progressive policies amidst the stalemate.

The 67-year-old businessman from south-central Pennsylvania had never before held elected office. The way he emphasized “math” and deemphasized politics in his budget address reflected the way he often describes his vision and responsibilities—for better or for worse. On the campaign trail, Tom Wolf ran on a platform to restore

cuts to education, and to do so by passing an extraction tax on natural gas in the Marcellus Shale. Though angering many environmentalists and progressives, Wolf opted to embrace the booming fracking industry in his state.

Soon after taking office, Wolf expanded Medicaid, transitioning away from the complicated alternative system his Republican predecessor had implemented. Five hundred thousand beneficiaries were enrolled within his first year—in a far more streamlined and straightforward program than had existed before.

“Pennsylvania is not a state that you would think of as being at the forefront of health-care issues, but now with Wolf, it is,” says Drew Altman, the president and CEO of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and a longtime friend of Wolf. “He stands out among governors when it comes to making health and health access top priorities.”

Wolf also signed a series of executive orders for political appointees and state workers, banning gifts to state officials and requiring that all state contracts with private-sector providers go through a bidding process. He declared a moratorium on the death penalty, granting temporary reprieves to 180 inmates on death row as a state task force formally reviews the policy. He also raised the minimum wage— mostly for state janitorial workers and parttime clerical staff—increasing their pay from $7.25 to $10.15 per hour. And in the wake of North Carolina’s passing a law that stripped rights from gay and transgender people, Wolf issued a pair of executive orders that expanded protections against discrimination based on one’s sexual orientation or gender identity. He wanted “to show the world that Pennsylvania is a welcoming place for everyone.”

But as G. Terry Madonna, the director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, points out, Wolf simply “can’t make change for 12 million Pennsylvanians on his own.” His executive actions carry symbolic power, no doubt, but in practice they yield only limited impact. “For really big change,” Madonna says, “Wolf needs the legislature.”

And that’s where he runs into problems.

Shortly after entering office, Wolf

introduced his budget proposal, which called for more than $1 billion in new education

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spending, a 5 percent natural gas extraction tax, property tax relief, and an increase to the state’s sales and personal income tax.

While widely seen as “ambitious,” this type of budget proposal, Madonna says, was not actually that unusual. “Governors don’t just put out their first-year agenda, they really try to put out a four-year-agenda,” he explains. “They’re laying out what they’re really trying to do now, and that could change by the end of the first year—you might have new issues, you could have a recession in the middle of your term, any number of things. But what he did was not unusual.”

The Republicans didn’t bite. When the GOPcontrolled General Assembly sent Wolf their $30.2 billion budget bill in late June, they included no new taxes, and none of Wolf’s other stated priorities. Wolf struck it down—the first time a Pennsylvania governor vetoed an entire budget in modern history.

What followed were months of debates between lawmakers and the governor’s office over reforming the state’s pension system, the future of the state’s liquor system, tax redistribution, and education spending. As the impasse dragged on, school districts were forced to borrow roughly $900 million, and nonprofits across the state had to scale back.

“People were completely stressed out, and impact on morale was severe,” says Anne Gingerich, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of Nonprofit Organizations.

“You had organizations with longtime staff that quit and went on to get other jobs because they couldn’t handle that instability.”

“Everyone has concerns about the state and health of our pension system—short- and longterm,” says Helen Gym, a Philadelphia City Council member and strong public schools advocate. “But that’s not an excuse. … If it weren’t pensions, honestly, it would be something else. The legislature is evading a central responsibility, and they hold our kids hostage as they fail to deliver required dollars to schools.”

Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, he’s been criticized for being aloof, for not investing enough in interpersonal relationships with members of Congress. If Obama would just invite Republicans out to golf, to grab a beer, or to dine a few evenings at the White House, the thinking went, then maybe the toxic political atmosphere that seems to

96 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

Wolf’s challenge mirrors President Obama’s: How to navigate divided government in an age of ideological polarization. derail political compromise could change.

But a lack of schmoozing is certainly not Tom Wolf’s problem. From the very start of his time in office, he began hosting policy breakfasts and lunches with members of the legislature from both parties. He regularly brought people into his office, and dropped by theirs, unannounced, throughout the week.

“I’ve never seen a governor who did so much reaching out to all the members of the legislature,” says State Representative Dan Frankel, the Democratic Caucus chair in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

T.J. Rooney, the former chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party and a former member of the Pennsylvania House, says that Wolf and Obama are similar in that they are both progressive intellectuals. “But Governor Wolf’s approach with the legislature—and I say this in an endearing way—Tom’s approach was much more aggressive than the president’s approach,” he says. “I mean, literally, he spent weeks upon his inauguration walking from office to office to rank-and-file legislators to introduce himself and get to know them.” While Rooney acknowledges these entreaties have not yet “paid off in a big way,” he thinks that, over time, such gestures are not lost and forgotten.

But Stephen Miskin, the spokesman for the House Republican Caucus, views Wolf’s outreach as “absolutely insincere engagement.”

While he admits that Wolf has gone and met with Republican and Democratic legislators more than Miskin has ever seen since he started in state politics in 1984, he argues that the governor’s courteousness and kindness just does not make up for doing “everything he can to undermine” Republicans.

As the stalemate stretched on, some pundits

criticized Wolf, saying he was too beholden to unions and other progressive constituencies that helped elect him to office. Wolf certainly was no fan of the GOP ’s proposals for pension reform. But by November, Wolf made clear that he would sign a pension-reform bill that included a traditional defined benefit plan for future state and public school employees combined with a 401(k)-style plan. The compromise framework also included large increases in education funding and made headway on restoring prior cuts to social services. The Senate passed this framework budget deal in December.

But Republican House leaders did not even let the bill come up for a vote. Mike Turzai, the House speaker—the same man who said that voter-ID laws would “allow” Mitt Romney to win Pennsylvania in 2012—canceled sessions twice before Christmas, and sent everyone home.

“We have legislation waiting for us to vote on. Yet, the House speaker decided not to hold session,” State Representative Ed Gainey, a Democrat, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in December. “It’s bewildering to me, especially when the impasse is wreaking havoc on social services, and schools are considering keeping their doors closed after the holidays. This is the height of irresponsibility.”

The unions had signaled that they would back the Senate budget framework, despite its pension-reform provisions. “SEIU members supported the overall budget framework reached by the governor and legislative leaders last year … despite strong reservations about some aspects of it, because it included significant investments in education and other priorities that are vital for our state’s future,” says Neal Bisno, the president of SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania.

Turzai and his allies claimed they didn’t bring the budget up for a vote because it wasn’t clear how the spending bill would be funded. In fact, the leaders generally understood where the revenues would come from; they just didn’t like it.

Still, with no final bill to sign, Wolf was forced to pass a stop-gap budget, as the talks dragged on.

Meeting with the governor in April, I asked him what has most surprised him about his time in office so far. “I was surprised when I thought we had a deal back in December,” Wolf told me.

“I understood that when I wrote my first budget, … it was very ‘ambitious’—as the Republicans kept reminding me. I understood I wasn’t going

to get all that. But when I got to the fall and I had gotten what I thought was a good compromise—I had made concessions and they had made some good concessions themselves—and it passed the Senate 43–7, I was surprised when the leadership pulled the plug and said, ‘We’re going to go home.’ Yeah, that was a surprise.”

The nine-month impasse finally ended in March, when Wolf allowed a budget to pass into law without his signature, a budget that he said adds to the deficit and underfunds key programs throughout the state. “I cannot in good conscience attach my name to a budget that simply does not add up,” he said in a press conference. “But to allow us to move on to face

“I’m becoming particularly pessimistic that we’re [not] going to get a budget that deals with the structural deficit,” says Frankel, the Democratic Caucus chair. “I just don’t see Republicans cooperating to get a sustainable fix. I think we’ll get a smoke-and-mirrors budget.”

Wolf’s problem is not only that he’s dealing with large Republican majorities in the House and Senate, but also with legislators who are markedly more conservative than the Republicans who came before.

“You used to have leadership in both chambers who were pragmatic. … They’d go through the partisan motions that we all go through, and then they’d say, ‘OK, we’ll negotiate,’” says

He sees himself as a “curious human being” and believes books help him ask better questions.

He went to Dartmouth for his undergraduate education, though he took some time off to volunteer with the Peace Corps in Orissa, India.

He went to the University of London for his master’s, where he met Frances, his wife of 40 years. Next, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a doctorate in political science, where he wrote a national-awardwinning dissertation on the structural change in the U.S. House of Representatives. Despite his love for learning, friends say it would be a mistake to think he just holed himself up in the library. “Tom was a revered graduate student,

lef t: chris knight; right: james robinson / ap images

Governor Wolf announcing his veto of the Republicans’ budget (left) championed by House Speaker Mike Turzai (right), June 2015

budget challenges of 2016-17, I am going to allow [it] to become law.”

House and Senate leaders both say they do not want to go through another long impasse during the next budget cycle. Still, many worry that during an election year, the political will to raise revenue will be even lower. Wolf’s 2016– 2017 budget proposal is more modest than his first one, but he still calls for a $2.7 billion taxincrease package to fix the structural deficit.

“There has not been a general tax hike on sales and income tax—two of the biggest sources of revenue—in an election year in modern history,” says Madonna. While he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of getting a “niche tax or two”— on, for instance, tobacco products—Madonna does not foresee the Republicans changing their stance on taxation anytime soon.

Frankel, who was first elected in 1998. “That doesn’t exist now. They seem really beholden to their conservative constituents, who are growing more conservative.”

“Wolf can work with the Senate; there’s still sanity there,” says Rooney. “But the inability to deliver in the House is the biggest impediment that he faces.”

Born and raised in York County, Pennsyl-

vania, Tom Wolf grew up in a world of comfort.

His wealthy family was well known locally: They ran a successful kitchen-cabinet business, regularly fundraised for political candidates, and donated often to charitable causes.

Wolf has a reputation for being an avid reader and a serious intellectual (when I met him, he was finishing up Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom).

such a wonderful human, and so nice,” says Drew Altman, a fellow grad student from MIT who played intramural sports with Wolf. “He just had such a winning personality. It was sometimes even a little bit annoying to people.”

After graduate school, to the surprise of many of his academic colleagues, Wolf headed back to York to help run his family’s business. Seven years after his return, he and two cousins bought the company, WOLF, from Wolf’s retiring father, and over the next two decades the profitable business continued to expand—employing some 600 workers, who, as a consequence of the company’s unusually conscientious profit-sharing program, reaped between 20 percent and 30 percent of its profits. The company grew to become the largest supplier of kitchen and bath cabinets in the

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 97

Wolf compromised with Senate Republicans: Some pension reform in return for more spending on schools. But House Republicans never brought the bill to a vote. eral governor in America, based on a review of his public statements, press releases, campaign platforms, and voting records. But if you talk to Wolf, he doesn’t see himself as very ideological at all. He insists that his progressive values are just outgrowths of his pragmatic character, shaped by his years at MIT and in the private sector. Being a progressive, he says, is really just about doing the “smart” thing.

He cites his recent nondiscrimination executive order as an example. “That’s not a dogmatic

Philly’s New Mayor

How many progressive changes can Jim Kenney bring to an old-style city with an antique political culture?

By Jake Blumgart

N

o one ever said being mayor of Philadelphia would be easy.

America’s fifth-largest city suffers a poverty rate of over 25 percent, $5.7 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, and a school system ravaged by austerity and segregation.

The new mayor, Jim Kenney, was elected last year in a landslide by knit-

ting together a disparate coalition and promising big changes ahead. The question is whether a city like Philadelphia, with all its lurking fiscal issues and petty political rivalries, is willing to accommodate a mayor with big policy ambitions.

Kenney’s election last year was hailed as the latest in a string of progressive urban electoral

98 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

victories. Bill de Blasio’s 2013 win in New York was the most notable, but that year also saw liberal Democratic politicians take power in Los Angeles (Eric Garcetti), Seattle (Ed Murray), Boston (Marty Walsh), Minneapolis (Betsy Hodges), and Pittsburgh (Bill Peduto)—new leaders hailed as potential pioneers of progressive policy.

thing; that’s just something that makes common sense,” he tells me. “When I’m in business and I want good talent in my company, why would I want to limit the talent pool by saying I’m only going to look at people who, say, look like me?

You don’t do that. You want the best possible people you can [get]. If they work hard, they’re willing to take risks, you want that person.”

There’s a political logic to Wolf’s attempts to position himself as non-ideological, rather than as a liberal progressive. While Pennsylvania leans slightly Democratic, the western part of the state tends to be more culturally Midwestern and politically conservative. And, as Madonna explains, there are also a handful of Democrats in the southwestern region of Pennsylvania who represent districts that have been trending Republican over the past decade. These Democrats are not just conservative on social issues like guns and abortion, but increasingly on fiscal issues as well. Many of these constituents would have been in an uproar if their leaders backed the general tax hikes that Wolf put forth.

But sometimes Wolf’s claims of being above partisanship and ideology have felt grating, even insensitive. He regularly uses phrases like “let’s be honest with ourselves” and urges legislators to do the “right thing”—meaning the thing he thinks needs to be done. He describes

In some ways, Kenney fits this narrative. Although he started his political life as a conservative South Philly row house rabblerouser, he evolved over the course of 23 years on city council to champion a range of progressive policies on immigrant rights, LGBT equality, and, most notably, the decriminalization of marijuana.

“I’ve always characterized my work as being about equity and fairness,” says Kenney, sitting in his City Hall offices. “I don’t like when people are marginalized, or boxed into some category that allows people

to discriminate against them in society. I want to give people the opportunity to meet their potential. We all have a responsibility for each other.”

During his campaign, Kenney said all the right things about creating bike lanes and defending public schools. He promised to act on an essential issue motivating the Black Lives Matter movement, saying, “If [elected] mayor, ‘stop and frisk’ will end in Philadelphia, no question.”

Kenney also promised universal pre-K, saying it would be funded not by taxes but by voluntary

m at t r o u r k e / a p i m a g e s

United States, and on the campaign trail, Wolf cited his successful business record and his generous management style as proof of his leadership credentials.

“Although he’s a very wealthy fellow, he really does not bring to the table some of the far-right-wing positions that wealthy Pennsylvanians and wealthy Americans tend to,” says David Fillman, the executive director of AFS­ CME Council 13. “Governor Wolf is very laborfriendly, and it’s just been very refreshing.”

Friends and colleagues talk about Wolf’s “strong moral compass.” Raised in a household that taught him that his privilege obligates him to give back and work for the greater good, Wolf donates his entire government salary to charity. He speaks excitedly about democracy, and calls public servants “stewards of a grand democratic tradition.” He prioritizes ethics reforms like gift bans, increased government transparency, and campaign-finance overhauls. While he won every county in the Democratic primary, Wolf acknowledges that turnout of eligible voters was extremely low.

His ultimate goal, he says, is to restore trust in government so more people will exercise their fundamental responsibility of citizenship.

In 2015, InsideGov, a government research organization, ranked Tom Wolf as the most lib-

his job as “helping people understand” the mathematical issues at hand. He tells me his international hero is Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement, because he really “took that idea of pragmatism, of goodness.”

“We have a governor who literally believes he is an emperor,” says Miskin, the GOP spokesperson. “He issues decrees and gets upset when people don’t agree with him.”

When I asked Wolf if there were things he’d

like to get done while in office in order to feel like his time there was a success, he said yes, but “done the right way.” For him, “transactional politics”—which he defines as the day-to-day work of being in office—are less important to him. “I care more about making lives better, making my home state a lot better, and taking advantage of all the great things we have here, than I do about whether this moves bills forward at this pace. I care more about making sure we do it right, and the math adds up.”

He looks at his margin of victory as evidence that the voters also want him to lead in this way. “It’s liberating. I can do what I think is right, and I think people voted for me because they thought that’s the kind of person I am,” Wolf says. “I’m not as concerned with what

people think about me as I’m concerned if I’m doing the right thing—whether my daughters and my wife respect me after I make a decision.

Those things are a lot more important to me.”

But not everyone is so pleased with Wolf’s confidence to move at his own pace. Cynthia Figueroa, the president of Congreso de Latinos Unidos in Philadelphia, a multi-service organization located in the poorest ZIP code in the state, witnessed firsthand how difficult it was to provide social services during the budget impasse. Figueroa’s organization had to furlough staff, reduce programming, and delay the start of other initiatives that normally would have been funded at the start of the fiscal cycle. Congreso de Latinos Unidos in Philadelphia has been around for nearly 40 years, and Figueroa says that while she spoke out and pushed state leaders to take action, a lot of other organizations “were suffering in silence” because they didn’t want to scare off their individual donor base, and worried their government contracts might be transferred to other people if they made an outcry.

When I asked her if she felt like leaders in Harrisburg really understood the ramifications of their failure to pass a budget, she said absolutely not. “It was a lot of men digging their heels in, a lot of ego,” she says. “It really felt like

Mayor Jim Kenney on Inauguration Day

contributions from nonprofits and by a variety of city sources, such as the proceeds from selling commercial tax liens (Pennsylvania’s uniformity clause

doesn’t allow for a tax targeted to the rich—not that Philly has that many wealthy people to tax).

Kenney coasted to victory in the Democratic primary

(the only election that matters in Philadelphia), winning endorsements from the police union, young urbanist groups, some Hispanic leaders, the building trades, and a group of influential middle-class African American leaders despite the presence of numerous black candidates. No one had won by such a sweeping margin since the 1970s. On his first day in office, Kenney made Philadelphia a Sanctuary City again, disengaging the local law enforcement apparatus from cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

In his March budget

it was playing poker with poor people’s lives.”

Samantha Balbier, the executive director of the Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership, a coalition of 420 nonprofits in Southwestern Pennsylvania, says that they found that nonprofits that were not Medicaid-reimbursable, with budgets less than $10 million, were hit particularly hard by the impasse—organizations such as senior-care service providers, domesticviolence shelters, and some drug and alcohol facilities. While Balbier’s organization is encouraged that Wolf recognizes both the importance of restoring human-services funding and how the impasse cost nonprofits money, she says there’s still a lot of concern that “there could be a precedent set where the budget is just never passed on time, and where Pennsylvania politics emulate what happens on the federal level.”

In his final State of the Union address, President Obama issued a call to end gerrymandering. “We’ve got to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around,” he declared.

Pennsylvania is considered one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the union.

After the 2010 elections, Keystone State Republicans helped redraw the lines around

address, the new mayor proposed a new way to pay for pre-K: a three-centsper-ounce tax on sugary beverages. Kenney said the levy could bring in $400 million over five years. More than half would be spent for universal pre-K programs, the rest going to parks and other worthy causes.

Kenney counted on his close relationships with political players to get his agenda enacted. But that strategy is fraught with complication, and peril, because Philadelphia’s power structure is more Democratic than liberal. In many ways, it is a throwback to an older

era of urban regimes. The city’s politics are very insular and often defined by crude racial appeals, petty corruption, and a patchwork of machines riven by factional rivalries.

Kenney came up in this environment—his political mentor, former state senator Vince Fumo, was convicted on 137 counts of corruption in 2009. It’s a style of politics that can easily undermine an ambitious agenda, so Kenney will have to work overtime to appease enough of the local players to get things done.

“Big tents get circus-y,” Kenney notes.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 99

Nonetheless, much of the mayor’s coalition lined up behind him on the sugarydrink proposal, even as significant fissures opened up when the powerful city council president, Darrell Clarke, attacked the proposal as “ridiculous.” But controversy was inevitable. Kenney’s predecessor, Michael Nutter, proposed a similar levy twice, but his proposals focused on the health benefits of drinking less soda.

Kenney voted it down both times, as did a majority of his council colleagues.

“Mayor Nutter had a difficult relationship [with council], but Mayor Kenney

statewide initiatives. Since Pennsylvania has no such process, advocates anticipate a much longer, and tougher, fight.

Still, there is reason to think that Pennsylvania’s new era of polarization is rooted in factors that extend beyond gerrymandering. Democratic legislators in the southwestern part of the state, after all, have grown more conservative because their constituents have grown more conservative. Political scientists have measured the ideological position of congres-

is still in the honeymoon phase and people want to help him,” Larry Ceisler, a Democratic political consultant, said in April.

Ceisler was orchestrating the campaign against the mayor’s tax proposal, just as he did during the last two attempts to enact such a levy. “The way the issue is being presented is different.

For Mayor Kenney it’s not that he’s a zealot about a tax on sugary drinks, but he is a zealot for trying to find revenue for his programs.”

The opposition of the soda industry and the Teamsters who drive its delivery trucks came as no

100 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

surprise. But many progressive city leaders are not thrilled by a tax they see as regressive, even if they are excited about the programs it is meant to pay for. Three councilmembers quickly declared their opposition to it, another proposed a container tax instead, and Clarke has proposed his own version, which would be much smaller, with reduced funding for pre-K. Even Bernie Sanders weighed in against the tax, calling it a “regressive grocery tax,” and recommended taxing the rich to pay for the desired policies instead.

“Bernie Sanders doesn’t

sional members and found that representatives in gerrymandered districts are not more extreme than those in others.

Today, there are 19 other states like Pennsylvania where control of the governorship, state Senate, and state House is split between the two parties. Republicans control both the executive and legislative branches in 23 states, compared with just seven Democratic-controlled states.

The states that are entirely GOP-controlled have moved their policies sharply rightward; states like California and Oregon, which are controlled

by Democrats, have grown far more liberal.

“Redistricting couldn’t hurt, creating more moderate districts would help, but I think more political scientists see this as a problem of where the voters in the two parties are geographically located,” says Paul Pierson, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Even if districts were redrawn, there’s reason to assume that many districts would still lean heavily Democratic and heavily Republican given where these voters tend to live.

So what is to be done? The challenges facing Wolf in Pennsylvania look a lot like the challenges facing the president in Washington, D.C. And on the federal level, there are various tools at legislators’ disposal, like the filibuster, that can make gridlock even more likely.

know what he’s talking about,” says Kenney. “If he’d done his homework, he’d know we have a uniformity clause in Pennsylvania, so we can’t charge rich people more than poor.

Wage taxes are regressive.

This is a tax that people choose to pay if they buy the product.”

Even as Kenney distanced his proposal from Nutter’s, there are other contrasts between them that are less flattering.

Philadelphia’s municipal bureaucracy has a deserved reputation for opacity, inefficiency, and patronage.

Nutter did much to change

that, conducting national searches for appointees and staffing offices like the Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT) and the Office of Transportation and Utilities with talented young professionals.

But under Kenney, oldschool appointees have been instated in many of these positions, disappointing his young urbanist enthusiasts. The transportation office is now helmed by a former revenue commissioner with no background in transportation, while a parade of talented staffers have been exiting the OIT because of what

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competitive areas to make them swing more easily in their favor. In 2012, Republicans took nearly 75 percent of the state’s congressional seats—13 out of 18—though more than half of all votes cast in the state during that election for the U.S. House were for Democrats.

“Due to gerrymandering, our districts are not competitive, and so the legislatures are unaccountable—especially the leadership,” says Barry Kauffman, the executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania. “They don’t feel the voters anymore. They know they will get re-elected, and they can be as ideologically pure as they want and refuse to negotiate.”

Common Cause Pennsylvania is part of a statewide coalition of civic groups advocating for redistricting reform. Their long-term goal is to establish an independent redistricting commission, which will prevent sitting legislators from drawing district lines for political gain. “We want it to be people who don’t have a specific dog in the fight, and who will ensure the districts are equal in population, compact, and contiguous,” says Kauffman.

Creating more-competitive elections, advocates say, will lead to greater accountability.

The two states with model independent commissions are Arizona and California, and in both cases, voters won this reform through

Where possible, Obama has effectively opted to work without Congress during his second term, issuing presidential orders and letting the courts weigh in on whether his actions were appropriate uses of executive power.

“I’ve learned a lot from Obama,” Wolf tells me. “I think the executive order is something that I have the right to do, and I can exercise my veto pen.” Unlike the president, the governor can also use his line-item veto power to pick and choose which parts of the budget he likes. “The governor is not afraid to avail himself of the constitutional provisions of his office,” says Rooney.

Historically, American political parties were more ideologically diverse and diffuse; it was not uncommon to find more conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans in their ranks.

“Now, the parties act much more like coherent teams, and they all take the same positions and back the same people and oppose the other side,” says Pierson. “It’s really hard to figure out how you get this process to go in reverse. A lot of political scientists are asking what would shift this and I haven’t heard a lot of good ideas.”

In January, seven months into the budget impasse, a Franklin & Marshall College poll found that two out of three Pennsylvania voters felt their state was on the wrong track.

they described as a stultifying new work environment under an old municipal hand. The Zoning Board of Adjustment is now helmed by a South Philly community leader who also happens to be the chiropractor for John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty, the powerful business manager of Electricians Union Local 98 and one of Kenney’s most important supporters.

On Kenney’s left flank is another constituency he really can’t afford to anger.

Philadelphia is a majority–African American city, and the police department’s relationship with the black

Progressive and other civic groups want an independent redistricting commission, but in a state with no initiative process, that’s a steep climb.

According to an analysis conducted by a local newspaper, this marked the highest voter dissatisfaction rate in the 21 years that F&M had conducted this poll. Poll respondents placed more blame on the state House and Senate for failing to pass a budget, rather than the governor. The legislature received a 15 percent voter approval rate, compared with Wolf’s 33 percent.

But a Quinnipiac University poll released in April found Wolf earning his worst approval ratings since he first took office. Among Republicans, 75 percent said they disapproved of

neighborhoods is fraught, to put it mildly. Since taking office, Kenney has issued more-nuanced statements on stop and frisk and no longer insists that it be ended.

“It’s a media term being used around the country, but it was never formal policy in Philly,” says Kenney. “Our effort is to make pedestrian stops constitutional, reasonable, and respectful.”

This evolution of his rhetoric has already resulted in a heated town hall with Black Lives Matter activists and discomfiture among some civil-rights and neighborhood groups.

“He’s backtracked off

of stop and frisk and that’s very disturbing to many in the African American community,” says Reverend Gregory Holston, senior pastor of New Vision United Methodist Church in North Philadelphia and leader of the communityorganizing group POWER .

“I still sincerely think he’s a good man. But he’s failed to understand how deeply painful the issue of stop and frisk is and that it could swallow up everything else he’s trying to do if he doesn’t get it right.”

There are other potential cleavages as well. Kenney enjoys close ties with

Wolf’s job performance, and so did 49 percent of independents. Among Democrats, 59 percent approved of his performance. Whether the gridlock will weaken him to the point that he will face a serious challenge in 2018 remains to be seen.

Overall, these broad political dynamics do not bode well for liberals. The more that citizens think the system is rigged—either that their votes don’t really count because of gerrymandering or that nothing will ever get done because of gridlock—the greater is the likelihood that voters will disengage entirely, creating a downward spiral of popular engagement.

The effect of “this kind of dysfunction is not neutral between the parties,” says Pierson. “If I become alienated and think government is not working, on balance, I think that would be more advantageous to the anti-government party.”

Tom Wolf is caught in a hard place, in a tough moment for national, state, and local politics.

But he says he’s enjoyed every minute of the time he’s been in office. It’s important to do more than “make the trains run on time,” he tells me, in a reference to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. “You’ve got to make the trains run on times in the democratic context.

You’ve got to do it right. I think we politicians today lose sight of that second dimension. We’re stewards of a grand democratic tradition.”

the city’s powerful building trades unions, which were 76 percent white in 2012 in a city where only 41 percent of the population is white. (The numbers are even more dramatic when the Laborers union, which is majority people of color, isn’t considered.) Kenney claims his strong relationships with the trades can help bring diversity to their ranks—and that his $400 million soda tax–funded policy will bring a lot of construction work— but these unions have been resisting such calls since World War II. If the fissures in Kenney’s coalition are already

evident, they were also inevitable. No one could keep that many interests happy while governing a city as famously fractious and money-strapped as Philadelphia. His aggressive opening gambit with the soda tax seems to have worked, and could serve to keep his alliances knit together. If it doesn’t, well, Kenney wouldn’t be the first to have his dreams dashed by a city, and a political culture, that isn’t known for thinking big.

Jake Blumgart is a reporter and editor based in Philadelphia.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 101

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When Liberalism Came Apart Two new books about the late 1960s provide grist for thinking about political turbulence today. By Julian E. Zelizer b

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Robert F. Kennedy, while he was attorney general, speaking to a civil-rights demonstration outside the Justice Department in June 1963

he raucous rallies for George Wallace in 1968 revealed that something had gone terribly wrong in America. As the presidential candidate of the American Independent Party, the racist Alabama governor who had defied federal efforts to desegregate his state attracted the support of many white working-class Democrats, who now angrily rejected their old liberal allies. Outside a rally at Madison Square Garden, as Michael Cohen recounts in his new book American Maelstrom, there were “shoving matches and fist fights” as “Confederate battle flags were flown, then wrested away and set aflame to chants of ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ Cries of ‘Sieg Heil!’ were matched by chants of ‘Commie faggots!’”

The 1960s ended in traumatic fashion for liberals and the New Deal coalition. The Vietnam War blew open a divide between anti-war activists and Lyndon Johnson’s administration, while racial unrest and changes in sexuality generated a conservative white backlash against liberal social and cultural values. Most frightening to politicians in Washington, nobody in either party seemed to respect the political establishment anymore. The outsiders of the time—Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy on the left and California Governor Ronald Reagan on the right—were the politicians whose voices resonated at the grassroots. Bob Dylan was right: The times they were a-changin’; it just wasn’t clear in what direction.

The biggest beneficiary of this turmoil proved to be Richard Nixon, who defeated Hubert Humphrey and Wallace in an extraordinarily close presidential race. Liberals who hoped that

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the country would keep moving to the left found themselves in a state of disbelief. Nixon, the red-baiting politician who had remade himself into a party statesman, took control of the White House.

Amid the turbulence of the 2016 presidential election, it’s instructive to read two new books about the political battles of the late 1960s. Neither Cohen’s narrative history of the 1968 election nor Larry Tye’s Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon fundamentally challenges prevailing interpretations of the era. But both books explore in depth the people and the battles of those years and illuminate how the liberalism of the 1960s came undone.

Based on newly released archival material, Tye’s book shows the connections between Robert F. Kennedy’s early years as a hard-line anti-communist and his later political career as a liberal. Although other accounts have discussed Kennedy’s conservative origins, few authors have probed so deeply into just how committed and ruthless the young lawyer had been, willing to violate civil liberties in pursuit of his goals. Kennedy developed a strong attachment to the anticommunist zealot Senator Joseph McCarthy, even though he understood the excesses of McCarthyism. When McCarthy died in 1957, Kennedy was so grief-stricken that he sent his staff away while he recovered his composure. Three years later, drawing on the rough tactics he had learned in his apprenticeship to McCarthy, he masterminded a brilliant campaign for his brother Jack, first against Humphrey in the primaries and then against Nixon in the general election.

As attorney general in his brother’s administration, Kennedy continued to hit hard against organized crime, while leaving untouched people such as Frank Sinatra and big-business leaders whom the Justice Department might also have prosecuted.

When advising the president on foreign policy, Kennedy was not a dove.

Dismantling Kennedy’s own account of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Tye shows that he was an “outspoken hawk” willing to use military force against the Soviets. Moreover, the

104 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division

By Michael A. Cohen

Oxford University Press

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

By Larry Tye

Random House

crisis itself was a direct outgrowth of the clandestine policies toward Cuba (Operation Mongoose) that Bobby Kennedy helped to engineer. “The attorney general,” Tye writes, “was employing precisely the methods that he had condemned in actions by the Soviet Union: subverting another country’s government, underwriting guerrilla armies, and operating under the cloak of darkness rather than in the light of day, where Bobby said democracy did best.”

Even as Kennedy gradually awakened to the tragic state of race relations in the South, he authorized FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. While Kennedy’s role in that decision is not new information, Tye’s book puts it in the context of his tactics during the anticommunist crusades of the 1950s and shows how he brought those methods into the government.

So how did Bobby Kennedy change? Tye argues that he underwent a series of turning-point experiences in the 1960s when he was awakened to the progressive side of his party’s tradition and learned about the struggles of African Americans and farmworkers and the costs of military conflict.

Tye centers his narrative around such experiences as the trip that Kennedy took while he was a senator from New York to meet with the poor in Mississippi. “I’d formed an image of him as a tough, arrogant, politically driven man from the Joseph McCarthy era,” Marian Wright Edelman recalled.

“These feelings dissolved as I saw Kennedy profoundly moved by Mississippi’s hungry children.”

Tye argues that by the time Kennedy decided to run for president in 1968, he saw the potential for a new Democratic coalition that would be more inclusive and vibrant than the one Franklin Roosevelt had created. His embrace of issues such as civil rights was genuine, not born of political calculation. Kennedy had an extraordinary political gift. On the campaign trail, Tye writes, Kennedy could “make rhinoceros-hided scribes fall in love with him to an extent not seen since Franklin Roosevelt or perhaps his distant cousin Teddy.” At the very moment that George Wallace was

trying to tear working-class Americans away from the Democratic Party through racist populist appeals, there were many Democrats, and idealistic reporters, who believed that RFK had the potential to keep the New Deal intact and to expand it to include new constituencies such as Hispanics.

To be sure, Tye acknowledges, Kennedy was a complicated figure who was beset by contradictions and inconsistencies, but this was part of what made him so intriguing as a political figure. He was willing to defy the conventional political divisions— embracing the cause of civil rights while also understanding the need for law and order in the cities and the case for market-based approaches to domestic problems. The book ends on a tragic note, as Kennedy’s assassination on the night of the California primary shattered liberal hopes.

In American Maelstrom, Cohen devotes a chapter to each of the key figures in the 1968 election. His portrait of Lyndon Johnson emphasizes the president’s disastrous decisions on Vietnam—a sobering contrast to recent accounts that have highlighted Johnson’s political acumen. According to Cohen, none of the Democratic candidates, not even Kennedy, could have mounted a successful campaign that year.

Here is where the two books engage in a debate rather than a conversation. Cohen sees Kennedy as more of an opportunist (as he is depicted in Robert Caro’s work) and disputes the claim that Kennedy could have been a coalition-building candidate. According to Cohen, this was a “mirage” that reporters at the time mistakenly accepted. Despite Kennedy’s primary victory in California, his campaign was falling apart, and one of his strongest assets—his support among African Americans—would have been a huge liability in the general election.

Kennedy is not the only Democrat who comes in for criticism in Cohen’s account. Eugene McCarthy receives the most favorable treatment for his inspirational anti-war campaign, but he was not much of a campaigner. McCarthy didn’t like the give-and-take of retail politics and at key points became emotionally disconnected from the

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campaign. Given his role as vice president, Humphrey didn’t stand much of a chance of overcoming the burden of Vietnam. As Cohen portrays him, Humphrey was a craven politician who repeatedly acceded to political pressure even when he knew that a policy was not in the best interest of the country.

While Cohen argues that Republicans were also divided—in their case, between moderates and conservatives—they had a number of advantages that tilted the campaign their way. Most important, Republicans were not the party of Johnson and the Vietnam War. Unlike the Democrats, they also had a seasoned candidate in Nixon, who ran a sophisticated mediacentered campaign that avoided specifics while hitting the right notes on the issues that angered the electorate.

Nixon was able to capitalize on the working-class fury that also drove Wallace’s third-party campaign.

The good news for liberals from Cohen’s book, which is spot on, was that Democrats were able to institutionalize their policy achievements in the 1960s, while “conservatives failed to translate [the country’s rightward shift] into direct policy gains.” It was only later, as the Republican Party moved further to the right, that conservatives finally started to roll back liberal policies.

Both authors would have benefited from doing more to incorporate the robust historical literature that has been published in recent years about conservatism before the 1970s. Historians such as Kimberly PhillipsFein, Ira Katznelson, Michael Kazin, Michael Hogan, and Kevin Kruse have shown that previous scholars had overstated the dominance of liberalism and missed the ideological civil war that persisted during the New Deal era. As I’ve also argued in my own work, the right was central to American politics all along. On Capitol Hill, a conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans ruled the roost from the 1930s to the 1970s. This was not an era of liberal dominance in the House and Senate. Liberalism thrived not because there was any kind of consensus but because strategic party activists and elected officials figured out ways to mobilize and legislate over the opposition of entrenched congressional

Governor George Wallace of Alabama in October 1968, when he was running as an independent candidate for president trying to capitalize on the white backlash against changing race relations in America

and business opponents. This is the context needed to make sense of liberalism’s defeats.

Both books also raise the perennial question about how much weight to put on individuals and elections in explaining the political dynamics of an era. Tye’s biography often delves so deeply into Kennedy’s life that the social movements and party battles that rocked the nation fade into the background. He presents Kennedy’s evolution as resulting from personal awakenings rather than the broader changes in American politics.

Cohen repeatedly criticizes “game change” narratives about politics but still works within that framework.

The 1968 election, he says, shifted politics for decades to come. Political scientists like David Mayhew have argued that focusing on individual elections can mislead scholars in understanding causality by shortening their time perspective. Many of the political phrases that Cohen says came out of the 1968 election— such as Republican pledges to be “tough on crime” or denunciations of a “liberal elite” that was “weak on defense”—were merely variants of a discourse that had been taking shape since World War II. A focus on a single election also tends to make the

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differences between the candidates seem more historically significant than they sometimes are. It is difficult to distinguish between a large pack of candidates competing individually and a true factional war in which the candidates represent large and sizable party constituencies.

Cohen’s book, however, makes an important contribution by bringing out the significance of conservative populism in the 1960s. Building on the work of Rick Perlstein, Cohen shows that the new development in the 1968 election was the emergence of Wallace’s politics of fear and his brand of angry conservative populism. Over time, as Cohen argues, Wallace provided the template for Republican politics. With Donald Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee in 2016, that insight will resonate with readers more than Cohen could have ever anticipated when he began his book. Readers would do well to look back to 1968 as we all try to figure out what the nation is going through today.

Julian E. Zelizer is a political historian at Princeton University and fellow at New America. He is the author of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 105

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Swept Away in the Sixties What did the era amount to? One thing is certain: It wasn’t a revolution. By Todd Gitlin b

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aleidoscopic pastiche is a serviceable form for conveying a helter-skelter swath of history, featuring many characters, locations, and vectors of action. Exemplifying the genre, Clara Bingham’s vivid Witness to the Revolution sets many scenes well and gets many moods right in conveying the sheer wildness and horror of the year that ended in August and September 1970, when a bombing at the University of Wisconsin Army Math Research Center killed an anti-war graduate student.

It was a time of extremes. In the fall of 1969, behind closed doors, President Richard Nixon threatened a drastic expansion of the Vietnam War, to the point of possibly using nuclear weapons. (Henry Kissinger told Nixon: “The action must be brutal.”) But Nixon backed off, also behind closed doors, when millions of Americans took part in demonstrations. In April 1970, he expanded the ground war into Cambodia (having already secretly expanded it from the air). The next month, in an unprecedented display of outrage, a majority of American college students took part in anti-war protests, and National Guard troops opened fire at Kent State, killing four students. Arson attacks on buildings linked to the military were commonplace. The largest student organization of the New Left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was split between Marxist-Leninist factions, one of which, the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground), believed “the time was right for violent revolution.” The Rolling Stones had already used that line, albeit ironically, but the Weathermen were not into irony.

Reaching beyond the circle of usual sources, Bingham listens to National Security Council dissidents and FBI agents as well as would-be revolutionaries. She relishes derring-do, of which there was plenty to go around.

Take the time, in September 1970,

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when the Weather Underground sprang the drug impresario Timothy Leary from federal prison (he was serving 20 years for marijuana possession) and smuggled him to Algeria. There, Leary was taken in by the incendiary Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and then subjected to “revolutionary detainment.” So says Brian Flanagan, a Weather Underground member who escorted Leary to his not-so-happy exile, where, he says, “Eldridge was the lord of the manor.” Later, Leary informed on the folks who sprang him, claiming that the information he gave up was useless for prosecution. Such betrayals did not require police agents, though often enough they helped inflame the atmosphere to the boiling point.

The book is full of such particulars, most powerfully in the words of lesser-known people. It’s one thing to hear gruesome tales from Vietnam, but it’s unusual to hear from one soldier, Wayne Smith, to this intimate effect: When I got home my family was very happy to see me. But I didn’t like them. They had no sense of how to ask what I did. I’m not sure I wanted to talk about it, but for them not even to ask, just to pretend, was avoiding this obvious subject. I treated them like strangers.

Unavoidably, the saga of the violent left looms large. New detail emerges about what happened when, in a fever of sectarian zeal, the Weather Underground broke up SDS. Mark Rudd, who had led the Columbia University SDS chapter before joining the Weathermen, explains he was “one of the people” to carry out the decision to shut SDS down nationally and in New York. Rudd and Ted Gold (later blown up with the rest of his bomb-making collective in a Greenwich Village townhouse) dumped the mailing-list stencils for the New York region into a

Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul

by Clara Bingham

Random House

garbage barge on the Hudson River.

“That was the end of SDS,” says Rudd. “If I had been an FBI agent, I couldn’t have done it better.” The Weathermen surely smashed up many bonds of trust, but from the accounts in this book I find myself wondering anew how important it was that SDS was no longer around when the student movement mushroomed after the Cambodia invasion and the Kent State killings. Sectarianism and delusion were driving it into a wall. Likely, Nixon’s minions and local Red Squads would have kept up the pressure and shattered the militant student left one way or the other.

Bingham’s book works best when the narrated events are compact or revolve around a single group or place. In the fall of 1969, the organizers of a nationwide protest called the Moratorium to End the War mobilized millions of people in Washington and elsewhere, from small-town greens to Army bases. Sam Brown, David Hawk, David Mixner, and Marge Tabankin, the Moratorium’s organizers, have rarely received the attention they deserve.

They were less picturesque than the New Left heavies, but no less mauled by the Nixon White House. Mixner, a then-closeted gay, describes being seduced by a government agent, photographed having sex, and threatened by two other agents that if he didn’t leave the Moratorium in three days, “they were going to send these pictures to my family and the press.” Contemplating suicide, he opted to withdraw from a public role in the Moratorium instead.

Then the Moratorium was targeted with still more blackmail from another quarter. Sam Brown testifies that the Weathermen’s Bill Ayers told him that for $20,000, they would call off their militant demonstration at the Justice Department so as not to distract from the Moratorium’s much larger, and peaceful, protest.

The accounts of the Kent State shootings are gripping and break new ground. One student saw the Guardsmen loading live ammunition but didn’t make the connection with what they were planning to do. He also witnessed them bayoneting fleeing students. Joe Lewis, a student who was shot twice, says that “some of the testimony [in

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scrappy and thin. Her feminist witnesses are too few. Some snippets sound too-often-told.

Errors creep in, such as the claim that SDS began as a civil-rights group (it was multi-issue from the start) and that it held its first convention in Ann Arbor, rather than in Port Huron, north of Detroit. But, leaving aside these points of detail, the more important question is what Witness to the Revolution tells us about the conflict that ruptured America in the 1960s.

What did it all amount

the students’ civil lawsuit against the National Guardsmen] was locked away for seventy-five years,” until 2050. Too bad Bingham doesn’t ask why.

Bingham’s story of the anti-war movement in Madison, Wisconsin, is properly detailed and dark. Madison gets short shrift in most movement histories, and Bingham makes good use of her wide-angle kaleidoscope.

She gets an account from a Madison policeman, Tom McCarthy, whose face was smashed with a brick at a demonstration. McCarthy didn’t forget. He reports: Everyone on the Madison police force celebrated after we heard about the Kent State shootings.

During the riots that followed, I would taunt the kids by putting up four fingers with one hand and make a zero with the other, like a score keeper: Kent students zero, Army four [meaning that the National Guard had killed four].

Such stories are, to say the least, telling.

At times, Bingham’s account goes

May 4, 1970: The Ohio National Guard moves in on demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding eleven.

to? Bingham concludes rightly that “the cultural revolutionaries won and the political revolutionaries lost,” and that “[h]ippies, feminists, and black power, environmental, and gay rights advocates permanently changed the DNA of American freedom.” It would be less triumphal, and more thorough, to note that they also panicked much of America and spurred an unending right-wing recoil.

By any serious definition, there was no revolution. What shall we call what happened, then? A merciless, devastating, unwinnable, unpopular war fueled a mass uprising, or rather, several; authorities disgraced themselves, and conventional Cold War politics hollowed out. It’s ungainly to put it that way. No wonder authors like Bingham reach for the word revolution as a capsule description.

After all these years, the surest assessment of the “political revolution” that didn’t happen remains a January 1969 article in The New York Review of Books by Barrington Moore Jr., sociological master of the comparative study of modern revolutions. Well before the Weathermen took shape, Moore was telling them, and their rival would-be revolutionaries, what they did not want to hear.

The left offered no ideological current that would have been both plausible

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and new. The political-economic system was reformable. The ruling elites had not lost “unified control over the instruments of violence: the army and the police.” True, the armed forces were seriously dysfunctional. Bingham reports that the Pentagon counted 162,000 deserters in 1969 and 1970; roughly three times as many went AWOL . Nixon at his most astute ended the draft and shipped tens of thousands of veterans home where they were free to live out their rage and bewilderment without much help.

As for the prospects for mass revolt, Moore wrote coolly that the conditions were absent: The main factors that create a revolutionary mass are a sudden increase in hardship coming on top of quite serious deprivations, together with the breakdown of the routines of daily life—getting food, going to work, etc.—that tie people to the prevailing order. … [The] proximate cause is the general breakdown of the flow of supplies into the city.

Moore concluded, “There has never been any such thing as a long-term revolutionary mass movement in an urban environment.” The Weather Underground and other terrorist handfuls were inspired by Latin American urban guerrillas, none of whom succeeded in taking power.

Revolutionary movements need secure bases (China’s hinterland, Cuba’s Sierra Maestra), which New Left wannabes could not duplicate with “such symbolic gestures as offering sanctuary to draft resisters or ‘liberating’ a university through a student riot.”

Major disruptions might be possible, Moore went on, but “would very likely result in martial law or worse. … [A]ny temporary collapse within the next twenty or thirty years would probably have utterly tragic consequences. Even if it succeeds in taking power, a revolution that tries to remold society against the mores and folkways of the mass of the population must turn to terror and propaganda on a gigantic scale in order to stay in control.” A Bolshevik-type takeover “would almost certainly be a failure.”

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 107

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How much more desperate might things have gotten? Brian Flanagan refers tantalizingly to the Weathermen’s “unconscionable” preparations, and says that on March 6, 1970, the day the townhouse blew up, “there were other things that were going to go on that day, too, that were going to get a lot of people killed.” Readers will discover more, in October, when the historian Arthur Eckstein’s Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution is published by Yale University Press. In fact, hundreds of people would have been killed if the three planned Weather Underground bombs had gone off that day at their intended targets (the townhouse bomb blew up prematurely, while one in Detroit was a dud and another was defused, unexploded, by a police infiltrator). In the aftermath, thousands of New Left activists would have been herded into concentration camps, as urged by one high official of the FBI while J. Edgar Hoover dragged his feet. Not exactly martial law, but not far from it.

Although what took place in 1969 and 1970 was no revolution, it was something uncanny, unprecedented, hugely consequential, and passing strange. Bingham nicely conveys some of the weirdness but doesn’t sufficiently explore the effects of the violent turn. For example, some interviewees think that the movement violence of that year set back the left. Paul Soglin, an anti-war member of the Madison City Council (and later mayor), says that the Army Math bombing “sucked the life out of the national antiwar movement. … If the bombing had not taken place, the movement would have been far stronger as we went into the fall of 1970 and the winter of 1971.”

The known unknowns will remain unknown, and if nothing else, this book is an enlivening reminder of how many remain.

Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in communications at Columbia University, is the author of 17 books, including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and a forthcoming novel set in that decade, The Opposition.

108 WWW.Prospect.org Summer 2016

How America Grew— and Grew Unequal Today’s inequality has more to do with historical accident and political power than economic efficiency. By Eric Rauchway b

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erhaps the most arresting moment in Robert J. Gordon’s comprehensive history of American economic growth comes near the end, when he explains that the yardstick he has been using no longer works very well. “Throughout this book, progress has been measured by the rate of advance of average real GDP per person. … Such averages … may be misleading if the pace of improvement benefits those who have high incomes more than those who have middle or low incomes.”

And indeed, he goes on to note, that turns out to be the case. We’ve long known we live in an era of remarkable and increasing income inequality, in which a small number of very rich Americans enjoy economic, educational, and political opportunities foreign to most of us. But the rich have lately grown so different from you and me that they’ve spoiled the social science that sufficed for 600 pages of solid economic history and, Gordon says, now threaten to end altogether the story of American prosperity he has sought to tell.

Gordon argues that the century from 1870 to 1970 was special, owing to the unrepeatable and broadly diffused economic benefits of inventions that emerged during this period.

During this time, Americans moved from farms to cities, and eventually even the basic technologies of the city reached the farms. The American home, once a lonely and self-contained enterprise, became a node in a national network of electricity, gas, running water, sewer lines, transportation, and communications. This joining of the nation’s isolated atoms into a single whole permitted access to markets and also improvements in health and quality of life that amounted to a “revolution in the American standard of living.” But that national network now exists, so we cannot

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again reap the benefits of forging its links. The age of revolutionary growth has passed. Moreover, Gordon says, even a return to strong evolutionary growth appears unlikely in the face of what he calls “headwinds”—including inequality, accumulated debt, environmental damage, poorer education, and an aging population—that blow opposite to the direction Americans would wish to go.

Gordon’s ending admonition that the increasingly disproportionate share of income raked off by the very rich threatens economic growth may surprise any readers used to thinking of the wealthy as job creators, virtuously willing to part for a time with their capital, investing it in enterprises that generate employment. On this view, increasing inequality is both the economic equivalent of potential energy, a coiled spring set to produce growth at any moment, and also evidence that bread cast upon the waters returns manifold after the passage of time. But Gordon’s work suggests otherwise: Over the course of the century he examines, the years of strongest economic growth fall in the middle, during the period of lowest inequality, which occurred in part because of government policy. At the time of the U.S. economy’s strongest growth, the federal government taxed incomes at a top rate of 90 percent and inheritances at nearly 80 percent.

What Gordon observes about inequality and growth in history was outlined by John Maynard Keynes when the pattern Gordon describes still lay in the future. Keynes concluded his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by offering a set of policy recommendations. He observed that the engine of economic growth was not investment by the few, but consumption by the many. Still, he allowed, “significant inequalities” should continue to exist—not because

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they were essential to economic growth, but because they offered an outlet to predatory impulses that might otherwise fuel more antisocial activities. “It is better,” Keynes suggested, “that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens.” (He recognized that a sated appetite for money did not necessarily obviate the zeal for cruelty, but “sometimes at least it is an alternative.”) Even so, Keynes said, if society should suffer some inequality to persist, it should not be much and certainly “it is not necessary for the … satisfaction of these proclivities that the game should be played for such high stakes as at present.”

Indeed, at the time Keynes was writing, the stakes for investment activities were at a historic peak, as Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson document in their Unequal Gains. (Full disclosure: Lindert is an emeritus professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, where I teach in the history department; we once co-authored a 2004 op-ed on trade policy.) The returns to purely financial investment would shortly plummet, in part because the U.S. government under the New Deal regulated the financial sector, making it less profitable and more stable—which it remained until it was deregulated, beginning in the 1970s. Lindert and Williamson find that the failure to regulate returns to high finance as Keynes suggested is one of several non-economic factors that drive inequality. Politics, wars, demographic shifts, international trade, and education are also consequential, they write.

“Inequality movements are not driven by any fundamental law of capitalist development but instead by episodic shifts,” they write, which means that sometimes the trend of inequality is unpredictable, and at other times—as recently—it is entirely avoidable.

Because Lindert and Williamson concern themselves with relative income, comparing Americans’ standards of living to those of people elsewhere in the world, they are less impressed with the century from 1870 to 1970 than Gordon. Their study is both briefer and wider-ranging than his. Indeed, Lindert and Williamson

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

by Robert J. Gordon

Princeton University Press

Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700

by Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson

Princeton University Press

focus much of their effort on bringing together and analyzing new, pre-1870 data. They find that the colonial-era slogans that America was a land of opportunity and “the best poor man’s country in the world” hold up. Income was high and inequality low, so that all but the very richest British North Americans had a higher standard of living than their counterparts in Britain.

The price of the war for independence was a drop in that comparatively high standard of living. After the new republic was established, Americans’ incomes began to rise again. Then, after 1860, the U.S. Civil War sent them downward again. In Lindert and Williamson’s account, which emphasizes relative rather than absolute gains in standards of living, Gordon’s “special century” of growth after 1870 was largely a period of catching up. By the end of it, in 1970, Americans’ real incomes, relative to those of Britain, had reached about the same level they were in 1770.

Indeed, these exceptions to the rule of increasing American inequality since the 1970s may help explain the political resistance to understanding, let alone addressing, the situation. Among white American men during this period, all but the rich have lost ground relative to their fellow citizens. An unregulated financial sector has promoted economic instability while disproportionately rewarding the very wealthiest Americans. Perhaps, logically, most white American men ought therefore to support a state that, as Keynes argued and Gordon argues, would restrain that financial sector and redistribute income. But so long as white American men can be induced to resent instead the women and the African Americans who have slowly and incompletely made progress toward equality, the evidence suggests they will not support such policies.

Indeed, Lindert and Williamson show clearly that history has borne out Keynes’s predictions. Higher rates of taxation and adequate public services have not retarded economic growth, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. There is “no lost GDP from taxing the wealthy heavily.” The benefits from doing it “are there, like hundred

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John Maynard Keynes: Ahead of his time in 1919, 1936, and still a prophetic voice in the wilderness today.

dollar bills lying on the sidewalk.” We lack only the flexibility and dexterity required to retrieve them.

Both these books take great empirical pains, carefully presenting a variety of measures that disprove the refrain of American politics today— the insistence that we cannot afford better. We could, without imperiling the action of America’s great economic engine, invest more in education, health, and the well-being of our citizenry by ensuring that rich Americans enjoyed a share of the nation’s wealth that is merely outsized, not world-historically disproportionate. But both books are equally clear in their glum prediction that we probably won’t.

Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis.

His most recent book is The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace.

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 109

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Using American Power Prudently Our core national-security interests and the limits of military force By Lawrence Korb b

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ew York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman argues that the next president must read Michael Mandelbaum’s latest book, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era, to avoid mistakes of the last several years and have a more successful nationalsecurity policy. Our next president should also read Andrew Bacevich’s latest book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.

Between them, Mandelbaum and Bacevich have written more than 20 books on U.S. national-security policy.

While these authors often overstate their case, they offer useful insights.

Taking their critiques seriously will help prevent our next chief executive from reflexively following the advice of the foreign-policy establishment that Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, refers to as the Blob.

While Mandelbaum and Bacevich come to many of the same conclusions, they differ on how we arrived at our current situation. For Mandelbaum, the problems began when the Cold War ended and the main focus of U.S. national-security policy shifted from containment and war to transformation and governance, something that began with the creation of a no-fly zone in northern Iraq in 1991.

This policy involved not only military interventions but also nonmilitary actions, in an attempt to change the internal politics of countries like China and Russia by such policies as linking trade to human rights and democratization.

Mandelbaum does admit that these military missions were often successful in ridding the world of some horrible leaders in places like Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. However, the failure was in the political missions that followed. Why? Because the political transformation was up to the locals, but they were not up to it.

The answer to the dilemma posed by

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Mandelbaum is to ensure that before using military force, unless it is an existential threat, the next president should also consider what happens “the day after,” and whether the U.S. has the will to see the political mission through—something we have not done adequately between the end of the Cold War and the Obama administration, when the president not only withdrew from Iraq but did not intervene in the Syrian civil war and focused only on defeating ISIS militarily.

For Bacevich, the mistake was assuming, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing after the Cold War, that many of the challenges in the greater Middle East, which the U.S. had previously outsourced to other nations or handled by using diplomats and spies (as in the Iran coup of 1954), now demanded a direct U.S. military solution. As Bacevich points out, in using its military power in the region, the U.S. had a choice between a policy of containment (as it did during the Cold War) or crush (eliminate the problem through sustained military action). Instead, in too many cases, the U.S. chose a midway course, which he labels aggravation. As a result, with politicians and military leaders declaring victory too quickly, and the public too quickly withdrawing support in the face of hardship, U.S. forces rarely stayed long enough to finish the job. Thus in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. is still waging limited, seemingly endless, wars.

Why did we allow ourselves to embrace the policies that led to the fiascos in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya? According to Mandelbaum, though the reasons Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush gave for these missions were different, they ended up in the same place. For Clinton, we conducted military operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo to protect the people from the depredations of local despots.

Bush launched the wars in Iraq and

Mission Failure: America and the World in the PostCold War Era

by Michael Mandelbaum

Oxford University Press

America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History

by Andrew J. Bacevich

Random House

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Afghanistan to defend the security of the United States after September 11. However, both ended up trying to transform these societies. The foreignpolicy establishment favored sustaining an expansive international role, even after the end of the Cold War, because they mistakenly believed that American values and institutions had universal utility, and that the U.S. should spread both as widely as possible, regardless of the cost or the likelihood of success. This would play out badly in the Middle East.

According to Bacevich, four questionable assumptions underlay this policy. First, that our leaders properly understand the historical forces at work in the Middle East. Second, that the U.S. has the wisdom to control or direct those forces—and the means to do so.

Third, that U.S. military power offers the most expeditious means for promoting universal freedom. And fourth, that it’s inevitable that America’s purposes will ultimately win acceptance, even in the Islamic world. None of these has been borne out by events.

For Mandelbaum, the U.S. needs to confront real threats to its security, like the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran, China’s drive to reassert dominance in East Asia, and Putin’s military adventures in Eastern Europe. Mandelbaum argues that by devoting so many resources and too much attention to other missions that could not succeed, the Bush administration allowed more pressing threats to develop and grow. For example, in 2003, when North Korea crossed a crucial threshold on its way to developing a nuclear weapon, by withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and began to remove fuel rods, the Bush administration was so preoccupied with Iraq that it did not contemplate, much less take, military action. Similarly, the Bush administration, chastened by the trauma of Iraq, did not threaten to use military force when Iran expanded its bomb-making capability.

In addition to the failure of Iraq policy, Mandelbaum flags two other foreign-policy failures—NATO expansion and the stalemated IsraelPalestine peace process. In expanding NATO eastward to the Russian

Summer 2016 The American Prospect 111

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border, Mandelbaum argues, the U.S. gained nothing while provoking Russia. NATO was hardly necessary to ensure democracy in its new members, the rationale the Clinton administration claimed as the reason for the expansion. (NATO has included autocratic regimes in Greece and Turkey.) Not only did this expansion alienate the Russians, as George Kennan, the father of containment, predicted; it also broke what many Russians believed was the promise that if they allowed Germany to unify, NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe. Part of the reason Russia invaded Georgia and Ukraine was the public pronouncement in 2008 by the Bush administration that it was open to granting NATO membership to those countries.

The mistake the U.S. made by involving itself in the Arab-Israeli peace process was the failure to recognize that the basic cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict was the Arab and Palestinian refusal to accept Israel’s presence in the Middle East.

Therefore, according to Mandelbaum, it made no sense for the U.S. to spend so much political capital trying to mediate a solution.

While some of Mandelbaum’s arguments make sense, he oversteps in at least two areas. In the Arab-Israeli peace process, U.S. involvement keeps the situation from becoming even more volatile and partly offsets the influence of Arab and Muslim extremists and what they see as U.S. bias toward Israel—particularly since the U.S. provides Israel with billions of dollars of military equipment each year.

Second, while it is true that trying to transform societies after American arms prevailed is a futile undertaking, it is a stretch to claim that these efforts not only prevented us from dealing with the more important threats from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, but

With no draft and no tax hike to finance military costs, most Americans are insulated from Middle East wars’ harmful effects.

actually caused them. In fact, since 2013, President Obama has turned his attention to these threats.

For Bacevich, the real questions are why the world’s mightiest military has achieved so little in the greater Middle East; and, since we haven’t won, why we do not stop waging these wars. The answer to the first question is that unlike in the Cold War, our purposes and military policies were never aligned. Not only is the Middle East resistant to shaping because of its Muslim culture, but our interventions made things worse.

For Bacevich, one key reason for the continued U.S. military involvement in these Middle East conflicts is that Americans are for the most part insulated from the wars’ harmful effects. Without a draft and without increased taxes to pay for these wars, the burden for waging them is placed on a small part of the population, and the trillion-dollar cost that results from these adventures is passed on to future generations.

Bacevich gets a lot right, but not everything. First, he fails to distinguish the different variants of Islam in the many Muslim countries we have invaded, and fails to note the struggle between radicals and modernists for the future of the Middle East. Second, in 1980, at the time of the launch of the Carter Doctrine, there was a legitimate concern about both our access to the region’s oil and about Soviet advances there, especially after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

Third, he claims that we intervened because of the absence of an anti-war party. But while many Democrats did support the invasion of Iraq and Libya and want to get more militarily involved in the Syrian civil war, there are several prominent antiwar Democrats who oppose both interventions. In fact, half of the Democrats in the House voted against the Iraq War, and

Obama was chosen as the Democratic nominee in 2008 partly because of his opposition to that war. Moreover, since coming into office, the president has withdrawn from Iraq and ended the combat mission in Afghanistan.

Where Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and combat veteran who lost a son in Iraq, really gets it right is when he claims that Americans are insulated from the wars’ effects. Imagine what Americans and their elected representatives would have done if President Bush had activated Selective Service and raised taxes before requesting a vote on the invasion of Iraq? Many more members of Congress would have read the classified version of the national intelligence estimate, which we now know really undermined the case for war, and would not have voted to authorize it.

If the next president is to avoid these mission failures and end the wars in the greater Middle East, she or he must confront dangerous myths, perpetuated by many of those who served as cheerleaders for the senseless invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In this view, espoused by Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan, among others, only America can lead and therefore must increase spending on defense (even though it already spends more on defense than the next seven nations combined) and continue to try to reshape other countries.

In confronting this myth, she or he must recognize that, as James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, recently noted, the U.S. cannot fix the problems that are plaguing the Middle East. We must use our military forces sparingly and multilaterally, and only as a last resort. Finally, the U.S. should put more focus on the nonmilitary tools of national-security policy, enhance our homeland security, and place more emphasis on nation-building at home in order to truly enhance our national security.

Lawrence Korb is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

He served as assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985.

volume 27, number 3. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published quarterly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2016 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. printed in the u.s.a.

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Honoring our past and inspiring our future

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS he American Federation of Teachers reached a significant milestone last month: the centennial of our founding. As I’ve pored over historical documents from our archives, it’s clear that, from generation to generation, our union has been a vehicle to fight for positive change both in public schools and in society. As we enter our second century, we remain fiercely committed to creating educational opportunity, building professional voice and agency, and advancing economic, racial and social justice for all.

The seeds of teacher unionism were sown in the late 19th century, with teachers like Henrietta Rodman, who helped found a teachers union in New York City and led the fight to allow women teachers to keep their jobs when they married or had children. In Chicago, Margaret Haley worked through her local union to challenge pervasive poverty, teachers’ lack of resources and low pay, and a curriculum imposed by bureaucrats.

Recognizing the strength they would have as affiliates of a national union in a larger labor movement, in 1916 both women’s unions joined with five other local unions to form the American Federation of Teachers.

equal educational opportunities for African-American children. In 1953, the AFT filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs in the Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, the only educational organization and union to do so. Hundreds of AFT members traveled south in the 1960s to register new African-American voters and teach in AFT-run Freedom Schools. Today, the AFT is working to attract and retain teachers of color and to promote racial equity in education, the economy and criminal justice. And we stand up against bigotry in all its forms.

The AFT’s greatest strength has always been our members, professionals whose skills, knowledge and ideas both strengthen, and are strengthened by, their union. The AFT’s Share My Lesson is the fastest-growing free digital collection of resources for educators. The AFT Innovation Fund cultivates promising union-led ideas to strengthen public education.

Our student debt clinics have helped members sharply

reduce crushing college debt. And AFT members—from registered nurses and adjunct professors to paraprofessionals and parole officers—practice solution-driven unionism, using our expertise to improve the quality of our work.

You don’t hit 100 without some setbacks. Austerity has caused harmful cuts to public education and services throughout our history. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and other governors intent on destroying any curb on their power have waged war on public sector unions. Many elected officials have sought to destabilize public schools and services in order to promote flawed privatization schemes.

It’s all the more reason to honor the example of the AFT’s founding mothers and fathers, to take our anger, build on our aspirations, and channel them into action—for our cause, our country and our members, and for those we serve and those who will follow. From one generation to the next, we are honoring our past and inspiring our future.

At 100, the AFT remains fiercely committed to creating educational opportunity and advancing economic, racial and social justice for all.

Then, as now, working people had many reasons to be angry. The AFT has worked to channel the aspirations underlying that anger into positive action. From the start, our leaders have known that power is necessary to bring about change, and that working people build power through their collective action at the ballot box and the bargaining table and through their skills, knowledge and ideas.

Photo by Michael Campbell

For 100 years, the AFT has worked to build power and use it for good. In the 1920s, the AFT lobbied Congress for children’s rights, improved teacher salaries and programs to combat adult illiteracy. We have continued that work.

For example, in 2015, as Congress worked to reauthorize the primary federal education law, AFT members took more than 120,000 online actions and met face to face with legislators to help shape the law so it could have the potential to give educators the voice and resources they need to give children the education they deserve.

The AFT has grown to include other school employees, professors, government workers, nurses and healthcare professionals, and early childhood educators. While the AFT and the larger labor movement grew, so did America’s middle-class and working families’ standard of living. The labor movement helped ensure that working people, not simply special interests, had power in our democracy.

Collective bargaining provided AFT affiliates leverage to advocate for quality, agency and voice on the job—the embodiment of our motto: “A union of professionals.”

The AFT has also used collective action to advance racial and social justice. As early as 1918, the AFT demanded equal pay for African-American teachers and lobbied for

Photo by Michael Campbell

Weingarten, right, with Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers (AFT Local 2), and Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union (AFT Local 1).

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

Our nation’s profit-driven Our nation’s profit-driven justice system is producing justice system is producing aa level of mass incarceration level of mass incarceration that is anything but just. that is anything but just.

The AFL-CIO believes formerly incarcerated The AFL-CIO believes formerly incarcerated people deserve a path to redemption people deserve a path to redemption that includes access to the ballot box, that includes access to the ballot box, jobs, education, housing, credit and all the jobs, education, housing, credit and all the components of a better life. components of a better life.

RICHARD L. TRUMKA

ELIZABETH H. SHULER

TEFERE GEBRE

RICHARD L. TRUMKA

ELIZABETH H. SHULER

TEFERE GEBRE

President President

Secretary-Treasurer Secretary-Treasurer

Executive Vice President Executive Vice President