As Trump Comes Apart,Can Dems ComeTogether? ROBERT KUTTNER THE STRIKE IS BACK! STEVEN GREENHOUSE
EPA CUTS & YOU DERRICK JACKSON
W I N T E R 2 019
LIBERAL INTELLIGENCE
SISTER POWER FEMINISM AS A DECISIVE ELECTORAL ISSUE Anna Greenberg THE STRATEGIC USE OF WOMEN’S RAGE Stephanie Coontz REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS AT RISK Kalena Thomhave
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE STATES? DEMOCRATIC OPPORTUNITIES AFTER THE MIDTERMS
Harold Meyerson • Bob Moser • Richard H. Pildes • Amy Hanauer • Justin Miller PLUS Erwin Chemerinsky: FIXING AMERICA’S CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS Miles Rapoport: HOW TO EXPAND THE FRANCHISE Arthur Goldhammer: EUROPE’S WINTER OF DISCONTENT Denis MacShane: THE SORRY STATE OF BRITISH LABOUR
Fighting Every Day for Our Freedom at Work The AFL-CIO proudly represents 12.5 million working people and fights for workplace freedom for all. We believe all working people deserve good jobs and the power to determine their wages and working conditions. We know that when working people come together and speak up, we make things better for everyone. At the AFL-CIO, we join together, fight together and win together!
RICHARD L. TRUMKA President
ELIZABETH H. SHULER Secretary-Treasurer
TEFERE GEBRE Executive Vice President
contents
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 WINTER 2019
COLUMNS 4 PROSPECTS AS TRUMP COMES APART, CAN DEMOCRATS COME TOGETHER? BY ROBERT KUTTNER
NOTEBOOK 7 EUROPE’S WINTER OF DISCONTENT BY ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER 11 CAN THE HOUSE STOP TRUMP’S GROSS IMMIGRATION ABUSE? BY MANUEL MADRID
FEATURES 14 SPECIAL REPORT BEYOND 2018 15 IMPERATIVES FOR DEMOCRATS BY HAROLD MEYERSON 19 A NEW PLAYING FIELD FOR DEMOCRACY REFORM BY MILES RAPOPORT AND CECILY HINES 23 WINNING THE GENDER WARS BY ANNA GREENBERG 27 HOW DEMOCRATS SHOULD REFORM ELECTIONS IN THE STATES BY RICHARD H. PILDES 29 STATES OF CHANGE BY AMY HANAUER 34 WAS BETO THE TEXAS DEMOCRATS’ LONE STAR? BY JUSTIN MILLER 37 A NEW SOUTH RISING: THIS TIME FOR REAL BY BOB MOSER 42 UNLEARNING THE LESSONS OF HILLBILLY ELEGY BY STANLEY B. GREENBERG 50 EPA ROLLBACKS: HURTING AMERICANS WHERE THEY LIVE BY DERRICK Z. JACKSON 56 REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS AT RISK, WITH OR WITHOUT ROE BY KALENA THOMHAVE 61 THE RETURN OF THE STRIKE BY STEVEN GREENHOUSE 67 BRITISH LABOUR’S SELF-INFLICTED MARGINALIZATION BY DENIS MACSHANE 72 THE FIRST PRIORITY: MAKING AMERICA A DEMOCRACY BY ERWIN CHEMERINSKY
CULTURE 77 GETTING ANGRY AT THE RIGHT TARGETS IN THE RIGHT WAY BY STEPHANIE COONTZ 81 VALUE BEYOND PRICE BY MIKE KONCZAL 83 THE NEW ECONOMIC CONCENTRATION BY DAVID DAYEN 85 WHOSE RECOVERY WAS IT? BY SARAH BLOOM RASKIN 87 THE DIGITAL DESTRUCTION OF DEMOCRACY BY ANYA SCHIFFRIN
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from the Editors
O
ther election years have been hailed as the Year of the Woman, but this one truly was. As we go to press, the number of women expected to serve in the next Congress is 126. A disproportionate number of the Democratic challengers who pulled off some of the most improbable upsets were women, including Lucy McBath in Newt Gingrich’s old Georgia district, and many, like McBath, were minority as well. A total of 24, or more than half of the House Democratic pickups, were won by women. The new House will have 35 freshman Democratic women, also a record. The grassroots energy that powered the impressive Democratic wins was also disproportionately female. Research by Theda Skocpol and Lara Putnam documented the extensive role played by women of all ages in the proliferation of volunteer energy. This movement began, fittingly enough, with the women’s marches in hundreds of American cities during the first week of the Trump presidency, and it’s only grown since then. It will continue to grow between now and the 2020 election. Greenberg Fittingly too, the highest-ranking woman leader in American public life, and one of the most astute, Nancy Pelosi, beat back an attempt (orchestrated mainly by more centrist men) to dethrone her as the new House Speaker. Many of the most exciting new members of Congress, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Boston, and Katie Porter of Orange County, California, are women. And of course at least four likely contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are women—Elizabeth Coontz Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar. As ANNA GREENBERG , one of our leading public opinion analysts explains in her piece in this issue, “Winning the Gender Wars,” not only was the gender gap a record 23 points in 2018. On issue after issue, women voted based on explicit feminist understandings of what was at stake. And in her review essay on three new books on women’s oppression and women’s rage, social scientist STEPHANIE COONTZ , Thomhave a longtime contributor to the Prospect, explains the increasingly strategic use of anger to produce durable institutional change. Our writing fellow KALENA THOMHAVE contributes a comprehensive assessment of abortion rights, and how they are under siege even without an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade, by the slow drip of state-by-state restrictions tolerated by the courts. In the 1970s, some critics of the judicial route to reproductive rights contended that the issue first needed to be won politically. It will Meany need to be won again.
WITH THIS ISSUE, we also are delighted to introduce our new publisher, ELLEN J. MEANY,
who was the longtime creative director of the alternative print and multimedia weekly Isthmus, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Ellen succeeds AMY LAMBRECHT, who had to step down to deal with family health issues. We also offer thanks and bid farewell to two other valued Prospect colleagues who are moving on to new pursuits, managing editor AMANDA TEUSCHER and development and communications manager JUSTIN SPEES . And congratulations to our current publishing assistant STEPHEN WHITESIDE , who will succeed Justin.
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CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER AND PAUL STARR CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH EXECUTIVE EDITOR HAROLD MEYERSON DEPUTY EDITOR GABRIELLE GURLEY ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS MANAGING EDITOR AMANDA TEUSCHER ASSOCIATE EDITOR SAM ROSS-BROWN WRITING FELLOWS MANUEL MADRID, KALENA THOMHAVE PROOFREADER SUSANNA BEISER EDITORIAL INTERNS REGAN JAMESON, MIHO WATABE, EMILY ERDOS, FIONA REDMOND CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MARCIA ANGELL, GABRIEL ARANA, DAVID BACON, JAMELLE BOUIE, HEATHER BOUSHEY, ALAN BRINKLEY, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, DAVID DAYEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, JOHN B. JUDIS, RANDALL KENNEDY, BOB MOSER, KAREN PAGET, SARAH POSNER, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, ADELE M. STAN, DEBORAH A. STONE, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, SAM WANG, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS, JULIAN ZELIZER PUBLISHER ELLEN J. MEANY COMPTROLLER ANNE BEECH BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST STEPHEN WHITESIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS MICHAEL STERN (CHAIR), CHUCK COLLINS, SHANTI FRY, STANLEY B. GREENBERG, JACOB S. HACKER, ROBERT KUTTNER, RONALD B. MINCY, MILES RAPOPORT, JANET SHENK, ADELE SIMMONS, GANESH SITARAMAN, 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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“Masterly.”
—Atul Gawande, The New Yorker “One of the ‘6 Books to Help Understand Trump’s Win.’” —The New York Times on 11/9/16 “This is a smart, respectful and compelling book.” —JASON DePARLE, The New York Times Book Review “The anger and hurt of the author’s interviewees is intelligible to all. In today’s political climate, this may be invaluable.” —The Economist “Exemplary. . . . It is the clearest narrative exposition yet of the social basis of the Trump backlash and of right-wing populism generally.” —ROBERT KUTTNER,
The American Prospect
THE ACCLAIMED BOOK THAT TELLS THE DEEP STORY OF THE AMERICAN RIGHT AND CAPTURES THE CURRENT POLITICAL DIVIDE, WITH A NEW POST-ELECTION AFTERWORD
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Prospects
As Trump Comes Apart, Can Democrats Come Together? BY ROBERT KUTTNER
T
he Democrats have much to celebrate. They did better than expected in the House, made notable gains in the states, and Donald Trump is on the ropes. House Democrats are primed to launch several investigations, showing the nation what serious governing and legislative comity look like. It’s possible to be both partisan and respectful of democratic norms. George H.W. Bush, object of extended eulogies for his decency, used his veto pen 44 times, a modern record for a one-term president, yet he displayed a courtesy that further shames Trump. Trump’s moves have increasingly backfired both politically and legally. His efforts to turn a refugee caravan into a national security threat disgusted more voters than they rallied. Hatred failed to galvanize his supporters. The election of 11 minority Democrats in heavily white districts, some deep in Trump country, suggests that the spasm of racism stoked by Trump may have peaked. Black Democrats even flipped seats in the districts of two former GOP House speakers. In Newt Gingrich’s old district in suburban Atlanta, which is just 15 percent African American, Lucy McBath took the seat. Her son, Jordan, had been murdered in cold blood by a white racist for the sin of playing music too loudly. She ran on a platform that included gun control and a Medicare buy-in. West of Chicago, in Denny Hastert’s
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old exurban district, long a safe Republican seat that is 2.9 percent African American, a 32-year-old black nurse named Lauren Underwood took the seat running as a flat-out progressive. As the 116th Congress convenes, House Democrats will pick up where Special Counsel Robert Mueller left off, notably the Judiciary Committee under the capable Jerry Nadler and the Intelligence Committee led by Adam Schiff, a former prosecutor. There is already ample evidence, hidden in plain view, that Trump committed several impeachable offenses and even criminal ones. Obstruction of justice, abuse of office, flagrant violations of the emoluments clause, and fraudulent hush-money payments are only part of it. We may well also see tax evasion, money laundering, and criminal violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. House committees will fill in remaining blanks, as Mueller wraps up his own investigation. Despite the pressure from some quarters to rush directly to impeachment, the House Democrats know they need to assemble an irrefutable case, brick by brick, to win over public sentiment. Watergate took more than two years. The break-in occurred in June 1972, and Woodward and Bernstein began publishing their investigative pieces in the late summer. Nixon was re-elected in November. Criminal indictments of Nixon henchmen began
playing out in Judge John Sirica’s courtroom in the spring of 1973. The Senate Watergate Committee under Sam Ervin began work that May. But then the drama played out for another whole year. Only in May 1974 did the official House impeachment inquiry begin. Because so much evidence had already been assembled, the endgame went quickly. Between July 27 and 29, the House Judiciary Committee voted for three articles of impeachment, for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. On August 5, responding to a unanimous order from the Supreme Court, the White House belatedly released the “smoking gun” tape, detailing the extent of Nixon’s personal involvement in the bungled coverup. At that, his remaining Republican defenders defected. A House floor vote to impeach was imminent when a delegation led by Barry Goldwater called on Nixon on August 7 to inform him that Senate conviction was assured. Nixon resigned the next day. Since Mueller has already laid so much groundwork, and because Trump’s abuses of office are so flagrant, the process is likely to be telescoped this time. We could move from committee investigations to a formal impeachment process by summer or fall of 2019. Some, like billionaire, activist, and prospective presidential candidate Tom Steyer, want the House to proceed directly to impeachment. Many others believe that
impeachment would be a distraction from an electoral process that increasingly favors Democrats. Better to beat Trump in 2020. The impeachment of Bill Clinton backfired on Republicans in the 1998 midterms, the argument goes, and in any case, the Republican Senate would never convict. Both views, I think, are wrong. Steyer and company are mistaken, because we need to let the process unfold with all deliberate speed. Public opinion is not there yet, but it will come. Conversely, given the grossly impeachable offenses of President Trump, it would be a dereliction of constitutional duty not to eventually impeach him. And impeachment, if timed properly, could also turn out to be winning politics. Trump’s abuses are so grotesque, so palpable, and so corrupt that Republican senators will have a hard time condoning them. As Trump is increasingly cornered, he will make more impulsive and authoritarian blunders, adding to the case for his removal. By the time articles of impeachment are voted, at least some Republicans, especially the seven politically vulnerable ones up for re-election in 2020, will feel compelled to seriously consider voting to convict. Even if Trump narrowly avoids removal from office, his will be a ruined presidency and the Republicans will be a fragmented party. That will not be good for their prospects in 2020. I wish I could end this column here, with the Democrats
Prospects
resurgent and Trump (to evoke another Nixon-era phrase) twisting slowly in the wind. Alas, there is more to the picture. I HAVE BEEN ARGUING for decades, in this space, in several books, and in other magazine articles, that the lost future of ordinary Americans was seeding the ground for someone like Trump. The loss of a decent economy of broad prosperity is the result not of technology or globalization but of political choices. These reflect the concentrated political and economic sway of financial and corporate elites, and the substantial capture of the presidential wings of both political parties by Wall Street. Barack Obama was as decent and honorable a man as has ever held the presidency, but his financial team epitomized the Wall Street revolving door; the dismantling of regulatory structures that made finance servant rather than master began with Bill Clinton. Both presidents embraced budget balance at times when the economy needed massive public investments. That need is more urgent than ever. To begin the process of repairing our democracy, our economy, and public confidence in government, Democrats need not only to win, but to win as economic progressives. And that is by no means assured. We are already seeing the kind of destructive infighting that could not only deny the nomination to a pocketbook progressive, but hand the presidency to the Republicans. At this writing, upwards of 20 Democrats are seriously considering a presidential run, including progressives, centrists, corporate Democrats pursuing makeovers, and charismatics of still vague ideology. During the midterm election, the ideological fault lines were mercifully kept under wraps. The expected tug-of-war between Clinton and Sanders factions did not materialize. The army of volunteers was focused on winning in 2018, not relitigating 2016. Democratic candidates found a
winning formula on the issues—call it kitchen-table economics. Even candidates who considered themselves fairly centrist ran on such issues as defending and expanding Social Security; offering a buy-in to Medicare; cracking down on drug company pricing; dealing with the student debt crisis; and launching a large-scale public infrastructure program. The supposed ideological distance between the party left and center narrowed. Progressive became the new moderate. But then the factionalism resumed with a vengeance. In one ring of the circus, the aborted revolt against Nancy Pelosi turned out to be largely the work of the small corporate wing of the House Democratic caucus, with help
ally, responded with a ferocious tweet: “Bruenig’s piece in the Post on Beto is just the latest attack by a supporter of Senator Sanders on Beto: joining Jilani [sic], Jacobin and Sirota. Feels a bit orchestrated and clearly they are worried.” Underlying this spat is the fact that party centrists have no plausible candidate, unless Joe Biden, who will be almost 78 on Election Day, or Hillary Clinton herself gets in. O’Rourke could well be another Obama—very charismatic, but Wall Street safe. Or he could be still a work in progress, increasingly leftish, and a unifier. For now, the CAP contingent sees him as a bulwark against Bernie redux. In yet another arena of the Demo-lition Derby, everyone piled
opinions align with progressives. The genius of the midterm theme was presenting kitchen-table progressive issues not as radical but as common-sense. Centrism also gets presented as a virtue in the ongoing claim by many pundits (long since demolished by our colleague Jacob Hacker) that American politics suffers from symmetrical extremism. Self-described centrists get depicted as people of rare public purpose. In fact, most turn out to be plain old corporate Democrats. In May, 12 Democratic senators joined Republicans to weaken the Dodd-Frank Act. These included several moderates often praised as seekers of bipartisanship, such as Tim Kaine of Virginia, Tom
Whatever else ails the Democratic Party, it is not a paucity of corporate senators like Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus. from the great triangulator Mark Penn. Pelosi deserves immense credit for keeping House Democratic candidates on message, rejecting identity politics and campaigning on the kitchen-table issues, as non-radical (but deeply progressive) themes that rally voters and divide Republicans. For about a week, diehard anti-Pelosi members such as Seth Moulton of Massachusetts tried to use progressive Democrats as a front. He described the left-wing Cleveland Representative Marcia Fudge, an African American, as his “mentor” in an effort to persuade her to run for leader. That quickly collapsed as the sheer cynicism sank in. No sooner did that infighting end than the talented Beto O’Rourke became the subject of a nasty slugfest that reflected deeper divisions. Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruenig wrote an op-ed opining that Beto wasn’t all that progressive. Center for American Progress (CAP) President Neera Tanden, a close Clinton
on Elizabeth Warren for her DNA/ Cherokee misstep. A frenzy of the sort that regularly disgraces the media echo chamber ensued, in which one commentator after another, based on interviews with sources both neutral and selfserving, pronounced Warren’s presidential prospects finished. At this rate of mutually assured destruction, the Democratic field of more than 20 viable contenders could rapidly be winnowed down to none—with the last Democrat standing being far from the best nominee. THERE IS A PRINCIPLED family quarrel here between the Clinton/ Obama center-left and the progressive left. It often gets conflated with two other discussions about moderation and centrism that are the subject of ongoing spin wars. It’s true that voters tend to describe themselves as moderates, but on all the key issues—Social Security, Medicare, education, drug prices, infrastructure—their
Carper of Delaware, and Michael Bennet of Colorado. But the reality is less ennobling. Their constituents were hardly clamoring to gut bank regulation. It was more a case of senators doing a favor for big business, on an issue to which most voters were not paying attention. Whatever else ails the Democratic Party, it is not a paucity of corporate senators like Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus. Whoever the eventual nominee, the next administration needs to contain America’s economic royalists, Roosevelt style, to restore the trust of everyone else. It’s understandable that the Democratic infighting has already begun. But given the stakes, can’t we have some kind of armscontrol pact? In Hillary Clinton’s near-miss 2016 campaign against the vulgarian Trump, one of her TV spots had the tagline “Our kids are listening.” As Democrats are on the verge of their quadrennial mutual mash-up, kids are still listening. Grown-ups, too.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel
Europe’s Winter of Discontent Domestic political turmoil in the European Union’s four largest economies spells trouble ahead. BY A RT H U R G OL DHAMMER
r a l f h i r s c h b e r g e r / d pa v i a a p i m a g e s
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he European Union’s troubles continue. When Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France in 2017, with strong support from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the opportunity seemed ripe for real reform of the EU. But since then, things have not gone well at home for either Merkel or Macron, and that opportunity has slipped away. In the meantime, Italy elected a populist coalition that lost no time before entering into direct confrontation with the European Commission. And as the Brexit tragedy heads toward a climax, it is clear only that the stage will be littered with bodies
before it ends, but the dénouement remains murky. Political turmoil in these four countries spells trouble for the European Union, the world’s second-largest economy, of which these “big four” countries account for the lion’s share. To assess the implications, let us survey the political landscape. START WITH GERMANY. At the
end of October, Angela Merkel announced that she would step down as chair of the Christian Democratic party (CDU) in December and seek no further elective office. Commentators who
had previously been trumpeting the two recent electoral debacles that led to this announcement, first in Bavaria and then in Hesse, abruptly changed their tone to praise the dignified ending Merkel had devised for her own story. It was as if everyone sought to paraphrase Shakespeare, to the effect that nothing in her tenure became her like the leaving of it. Such a dismissive judgment hardly does justice to the woman who has dominated her party for the past 18 years and who reigned as chancellor for 13 and still counting. Although she pledged only not to run again in 2021,
when her term is up, some think she cannot survive that long once she relinquishes the party chair. But the doomsayers may be wrong. The number of politicians who have underestimated the deliberate and soft-spoken chancellor in the past is legion. Outmaneuvering countless adversaries, she moved her party decisively to the center, where she governed in successive coalitions with junior partners to both her left and her right. And she may have outmaneuvered her rivals again by setting herself up as the only currently credible guarantor of stability. Germans may have grown impatient with the chancellor they call Mutti (“mommy”), but they are not yet ready to leave the cozy home she has made for them. In the contest to succeed her as leader of the CDU, her handpicked successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, defeated her principal challenger, Friedrich Merz—a financier whom Merkel drove from a party leadership position a decade ago. Under Merkel’s leadership, Germany recovered from the post-reunification slump of the early 1990s that had made it the “sick man of Europe” and became once again the dominant power in the European Union. But her single-minded dedication to honing Germany’s competitive edge in order to maintain the exportled growth that made this recovery possible narrowed her vision and made her less effective as a European leader and reformer than she might have been. Or rather, more accurately, it made her more perversely effective than she should have been in enforcing German dogma on economies to which it was not at all suited, imposing a decade of austerity and hindering recovery from the Great Recession in much of the continent. Habitually cautious, her one impulsive act—the decision to open the gates to refugees from the Syrian carnage—fueled the rise of a formidable adversary
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IT IS COMMONPLACE these days to
present these dramatic generational shifts as the consequence of a populist wave sweeping the democratic world in response to havoc wreaked by irresistible economic, demographic, and
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political change: globalization, immigration, and forfeiture of sovereignty to unelected and unaccountable technocrats. Clearly, these powerful forces cannot be discounted, but their effects are compounded by widespread impatience with the dearth of imaginative responses from the older leadership generation. In the past two years, confidence in the existing leadership collapsed not only in Germany but also in France and Italy. Voters not only turned against familiar leaders but also rejected the party systems that had produced and sustained those leaders and defined the parameters of their competition throughout the postwar era. No matter who wins the CDU leadership contest, however, it is clear that the post-Merkel era will no longer be dominated by just two parties, the Christian Democrats on the right and the Social Democrats (SPD) on the left. Disappointed by the mainstream parties but unwilling to vote for the xenophobic far right, many voters in Bavaria and Hesse opted for the resurgent Greens, who offer a younger, more dynamic leadership team (Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck). In recent years, the Greens have become less radical and anticapitalist than in the past, making the party more attractive to protest voters fleeing both the mainstream parties and the extremes. Still, the recent regional elections
Germany’s Green party leaders Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck represent generational change in Germany’s leadership.
If Germany’s party system is thus in flux, the French party system was utterly destroyed by the tumultuous presidential election of 2017.
may give a misleading picture of the party realignment currently under way in Germany. The stronghold of the AfD is in the economically struggling districts of the east, far from the more prosperous states that voted most recently. The three-way competition among the CDU, SPD, and Greens for the diminishing centrist vote, combined with the growing reluctance of center-right and center-left to continue with the “grand coalitions” that have kept the extremes at bay for decades, will almost certainly make for greater instability going forward. And instability in Germany translates into immense uncertainty for the rest of Europe, which strains uncomfortably at its German anchor yet depends on that fixed mooring to define its place in a world buffeted by increasingly violent and variable currents. IF GERMANY’S PARTY system is thus in flux, the French party system was utterly destroyed by the tumultuous presidential election of 2017. Macron’s En Marche! movement pulverized both the Socialist and Republican parties and left standing essentially a one-party state facing a scattered, disorganized, and disparate opposition, ranging from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise on the far left to Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National on the far right. The once-dominant center-right Republicans split in two, with half throwing in their lot with Macron, leaving the other half, led by Laurent Wauquiez, to hunt for support from the far right. Yet despite the magnitude of Macron’s victory (he won 66 percent of the vote in the second round against Marine Le Pen, while his République en Marche party won 53 percent of the seats in the subsequent legislative elections), his grip on power is less secure than it initially appeared. Although his labor market reforms aroused less union opposition than expected, his tax reforms, particularly the abolition of the wealth tax, quickly earned him the label “president of the rich.” This has proved to have more
bernd von jutrczenk a / dap via ap images
in the xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Ultimately, however, it was not the AfD that did her in but the passing of the postwar baby boom generation to which she belonged, coupled with fears that Germany’s current prosperity cannot last. The fears are not irrational. The high-flying German auto industry lags in the crucial areas of battery technology and self-driving vehicles. The recent scandal around tampering with emissions tests on diesel vehicles undermined confidence in Germany’s vaunted engineering prowess, and talk of a partial or total ban on the use of diesel automobiles worries citizens who paid good money for their precious but polluting rides. Meanwhile, German infrastructure is crumbling. Roads, bridges, and railways stand in urgent need of repair. And despite the introduction of Germany’s first-ever minimum-wage law under Merkel, inequality has increased. But generational change was an even more potent factor in sealing Merkel’s fate than economic and technological change. She is hardly the only European leader to have succumbed to the advent of a new era. At 64, she is the last of her cohort to lead one of continental Europe’s Big Three economies. In France, François Hollande (who was born, as Merkel was, in 1954), Nicolas Sarkozy (born in 1955), and Alain Juppé (born in 1945) have all been sidelined, eclipsed by Emmanuel Macron, who was still in diapers when they first entered the political arena in the 1970s. Italy, too, has witnessed a remarkable rejuvenation of its political class, with Silvio Berlusconi (born in 1936) at long last rendered irrelevant by the youthful Matteo Salvini (age 45) and Luigi Di Maio (a full 50 years younger than Berlusconi).
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staying power than “Jupiter,” the epithet the media chose for him in happier days, when he did indeed seem all-powerful. But Macron has since suffered grievously from a series of self-inflicted wounds, ranging from seemingly callous comments about unemployment to maladroit handling of an incident in which one of his close aides was videoed manhandling a demonstrator. Then, in mid-November, an anti-Macron movement sprang up in response to a hike in the tax on gasoline and diesel fuel—a measure touted by the government as a step toward realizing France’s ambitious goals for greenhouse gas reductions. The movement took its name, Gilets Jaunes, from the yellow safety vests that all French drivers are required to carry in their cars, which provided the protesters with a handy uniform and unmistakable visibility. Called to arms via social media, the Gilets Jaunes had no obvious leaders and no affiliation with any political party, labor union, or other organized groups. Some blocked traffic in small towns and cities across France, while others clashed with police on the Champs-Élysées. The movement appeared to be predominantly rural and exurban, drawing on workers, retirees, and the less-educated, thus highlighting the contrast with Macron’s world of managers and technocrats. Demonstrators repeatedly complained that the president was “distant,” “out of touch,” and “contemptuous” of people like them. And polls suggested strong support from as much as 80 percent of the population. Macron claimed to have understood the “suffering” of the protesters, but they were not mollified. The government quickly abandoned any pretense of standing firm and announced a six-month “suspension” of the fuel tax increase. Then Macron, who only days earlier had announced that he would never retreat from sound reforms, announced that the tax would be scrapped altogether but also insisted
The Gilets Jaunes (yellow vests) protests are a violent reaction to French President Emmanuel Macron’s topdown, technocratic style of governing.
that there would be no reinstatement of the wealth tax, whose abolition has been called “the original sin” of Macronism. On the Monday following the fourth weekend of protest, December 10, President Macron spoke to the nation in somber tones, apologizing for his insensitive language and announcing a series of measures, including an 8 percent hike in the minimum wage and a tax break for retirees, which he hoped would calm the anger. Some protesters thought it was too little, too late, but others seemed mollified and said they would not march again in Paris, for now—but it remains unclear whether these concessions will end the crisis. The president is trying to appease a group whose motivations transcend any specific demands and go rather to the heart of his whole approach to reform: top-down, technocratic, and focused on long-term results rather than alleviation of immediate grievances. His approval rating has plummeted even more rapidly than that of François Hollande, his unfortunate predecessor, and now stands at 25 percent. Recovery from this rapid decline seems difficult if not
impossible. The government’s retreat in the face of violent protest has only encouraged the demonstrators. As this article goes to press, authorities in Paris are bracing for renewed violence. The fate of Macron’s presidency hangs in the balance. IN ITALY, TOO, THE OLD party system collapsed—as abruptly and dramatically as the Morandi Bridge in Genoa. Parliamentary elections last March obliterated the once robust competition between Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Matteo Renzi’s Partito Democratico and replaced it with an improbable coalition of northern and southern populists. In many respects, Matteo Salvini’s League (formerly Northern League) and Luigi Di Maio’s Five Star Movement cordially detest one another, but they suspended their mutual animosity for the sake of power. The two parties took a while to agree on the contours of a new government, in part because of European Commission objections to their budget plans and choice of finance minister. Once the new government was in place, however, it wasted no time in highlighting
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youth voted to remain in the European Union, but they were outvoted by their elders. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—hardly a youthful face—has called for new elections if May’s government falls but has so far refrained from calling for a new referendum. At this writing, the situation therefore remains quite murky.
Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte, center, flanked by his two deputies Luigi Di Maio, left, and Matteo Salvini
With the generation that brought Europe the Single Market and the euro exhausted, the younger generation is divided and bereft of leaders.
that the confrontation is being dramatized by leaders on both sides eager to demonstrate their rhetorical commitment to principle without actually bringing the clash to a head. Neither side wants the kind of open breach precipitated by Britain’s 2016 referendum to exit the EU. WHICH BRINGS US to Brexit, the fourth of the European Union’s current woes. After protracted and arduous negotiations, the EU and the United Kingdom have finally agreed on a plan that pleases virtually no one and may bring down Prime Minister Theresa May’s government, from which several ministers, including Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, resigned in protest. If approved, it would leave Britain with most of the burdens of EU membership but with no say in European councils. The trade snafus of a hard Brexit would be avoided, yet many member-state perks will have been sacrificed. Polls suggest (not altogether convincingly, given the large percentage of undecideds) that public sentiment in the U.K. has turned against Brexit now that the terms of the deal are clear, but no major political leader has yet been willing to speak up in favor of a new referendum. The generational changes that have upended party systems in Italy, France, and Germany have yet to destabilize the British system. British
WITH A WEAK coalition government in Germany and a beleaguered Macron in France, the prospects for institutional reform of the European Union seem dim at best. Buoyed by his triumphant campaign, Macron proposed in 2017 that the way forward for the EU was to strengthen the central authority. But even before the fraying of her power became evident, Merkel dragged her feet on this proposal, which now seems dead in the water. Meanwhile, the two-pronged Italian challenge to the authority of the European Commission signifies that the momentum has now turned the other way: toward a greater devolution of authority to the member-states to counter the widespread popular perception that too much sovereignty has been ceded to the bureaucrats in Brussels. It has often been remarked that the EU evolves in spurts. The spurt of the postwar generation, the Maastricht generation, the generation that brought the Single Market and the free movement of capital, goods, and people, is now exhausted. The younger generation that will replace it has not yet figured out where it wants to go. Until it does, Europe will remain at a standstill, poised uneasily between increasingly formulaic celebrations of the peace that the European Union takes itself to have achieved and the conflicts that its internal contradictions are inciting today.
Arthur Goldhammer is a writer and translator who has translated more than 125 books from the French. He is an affiliate of Harvard’s Center for European Studies.
giuseppe l ami / ansa via ap images
its differences with the authorities in Brussels on two key issues: immigration and the budget. For Salvini, immigration was paramount. He came to power by blaming Italy’s problems on immigrants, and blamed Italy’s immigrants on the Dublin Treaty, under which socalled front-line states—the countries in which immigrants first set foot on European soil—are required to assume responsibility for housing, feeding, and classifying them and ultimately deciding their fate. With other member-states refusing to accept their fair share, Italy, Salvini argued, bore a disproportionate burden. Voters agreed, and Salvini, though nominally vice-premier, emerged as the government’s real strong man. Di Maio, meanwhile, insisted on making good on a campaign promise to provide a means-tested basic income to Italy’s poor and unemployed, many of whom resided in the southern half of the peninsula where the Five Star vote was concentrated. The measure meant reneging on the previous government’s pledge to Brussels to reduce Italy’s budget deficit to just 0.8 percent of GDP. The new government sent the European Commission a revised budget with a projected deficit of 2.4 percent, which was promptly rejected despite being within the Maastricht Treaty limit of 3 percent and actually less than the projected French deficit of 2.8 percent. The reasons for this seemingly unequal treatment are technical, having to do, as EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici explained, with Italy’s high debt load and the path of its structural deficit, but such technicalities are hardly convincing to the man in the street, and the commission’s insistence that the new government honor the commitment of the previous government, which voters had just resoundingly sent packing, was taken, as in the 2015 clash between the commission and Greece, as an affront to democracy. Italy now faces sanctions from the European Union, which can only complicate its already difficult economic situation. But so far the bond market, though jittery, has refused to panic, leading some observers to conclude
notebook
Can the House Stop Trump’s Gross Immigration Abuse? An overdue reform agenda awaits investigations and hearings. BY M A N U E L M A D R I D
W
ith the midterm elections over and Democrats back in control of the House, the Trump administration will no longer be able to count on congressional Republicans to protect its nativist agenda. The new House majority comes with committee chairmanships and accompanying subpoena power. Although the prospect of impeachment has been teased, the “I” word that features in the Democratic leadership agenda at present is immigration, which looks to be a priority for various committees. One of the first orders of business will be taking a closer look at the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border, according to Democratic committee staffers and ranking members. The policy drew public backlash, forcing Trump to sign an executive order in June doing away with the administration’s zero-tolerance immigration enforcement policy. Months later, reports have appeared signaling that the administration has resumed the practice. The Judiciary Committee, with its Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, is expected to lead on the family-separation policy with document requests and potentially multiple public hearings. The Oversight and Government Reform and Homeland Security Committees have also signaled oversight of the policy, but are looking to avoid doubling efforts. Not a single hearing on family separation was held under outgoing Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia. And Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who was called before the Senate Homeland Security Committee in May to answer for family separation, has not appeared once before the House Judiciary Committee since being sworn in.
During her Senate hearing, Nielsen repeatedly insisted that there was no family-separation policy. Months later, a confidential administration memo was released, proving that not only did the policy exist, but Nielsen herself apparently signed off on it. House staffers, who believe that Nielsen might have lied during her testimony to the Senate, want to bring Nielsen before the Judiciary Committee to discuss the policy again. Other potential investigative targets for the committee, which will be led by Representative Jerry Nadler of New York, are performance quotas placed on immigration judges by the Justice Department; former Office of Refugee Resettlement head Scott Lloyd’s now-defunct policy of refusing abortions to migrants in ORR care; and detention conditions faced by migrant children as well as other vulnerable populations detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Congress can also be expected to review the administration’s practices for screening refugees. The last time the House Judiciary Committee held a DHS oversight hearing was back in mid-2015. The last time the committee held a public hearing specifically about ICE was in 2012. Now that they have the gavel, House Democrats will be able to subpoena administration officials to testify, relying on select expert supporting witnesses as well. “What we’ve seen in Congress are hearings limited to agency leadership and one or two other civilians brought in from anti-immigration organizations that work closely with administration,” says Heidi Altman, policy director for the National Immigrant Justice Center. “It’s been an echo chamber of misleading statistics and lies, with little meaningful oversight.” But hearings are just one of many tools available to lawmakers, who are
DHS officials will have the unenviable task of providing evidence justifying Trump’s immigration policies as well as defending his public statements on them.
expected to demand an avalanche of official documents, memos, and internal communications. The requests will first be made politely through a letter from the chairperson and then, if ignored, followed by a subpoena. House Democrats can threaten further reprisals when it comes to funding. Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who is expected to chair the Homeland Security Committee, has prioritized cooperation with DHS, but has left the door open to pushing for cuts to funding should the agency resist oversight or continue abhorrent policies. Defunding could prove particularly painful to ICE officials, whose efforts to keep up with the administration’s bottomless appetite for migrant detention has led to steep agency shortfalls. Earlier this year, DHS quietly transferred $100 million in funding budgeted for other programs, including the Coast Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency, to pay for thousands of new beds in ICE detention centers. The agency recently made a request for $1 billion in funding, which Congress rejected, and continues to spend beyond its means. Other oversight targets on Thompson’s radar are the administration’s ban on travel from multiple majorityMuslim countries, the undercutting of protections for asylum seekers, and the recent tear-gassing of migrants at the border. DHS officials will have the unenviable task of providing evidence justifying the policies as well as defending Trump’s public statements on them, many littered with falsehoods and drenched in xenophobic overtones. In some cases, Trump’s policies, like the travel ban and termination of temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, have been contrary to determinations and recommendations made by his own administration. A public hearing is likely the right response to Trump’s deployment of 15,000 active-duty military troops to the border just days before the midterm elections—a shameless and expensive political ploy. But on other issues, such as the troubling drop in the acceptance rate of applications for naturalization by service members,
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11
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notebook
the House Armed Services Committee might be better off making private information requests and slipping in a provision when it comes time to greenlight defense spending. Incoming Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings and other Democrats on the Oversight Committee already have their own idea of where to start investigating, having had 64 subpoena requests rejected by Republican committee chairs during the past congressional session. The Oversight Committee expects to look into allegations of political hiring of immigration judges by the Justice Department along with the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 census. A certain amount of foot-dragging and obfuscation can be expected from any administration under the microscope, but in Trump we’ve seen a different kind of combativeness. “When a committee chairman sends a letter to an agency head requesting information, you tend to listen to it because it could end in a subpoena, which you don’t want to face,” says Ur Jaddou, a former chief counsel for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security. “At least, that’s the norm. But this administration acts far from ordinary. … They like to be the ones fighting for something, even if they know they’re going to lose. I wouldn’t be surprised if they welcomed the challenge.” In the past, Trump has cited executive privilege to protect himself and is likely to do so again in the face of particularly uncomfortable investigations. Probes into policies like the travel ban, family separation, and decisions to rescind deportation protections for undocumented youth may be allowed to proceed, so long as they circle cabinet officials and staffers rather than the president himself or those close to him. Some Democrats, particularly moderates from swing districts, have voiced concerns over appearing too partisan or having oversight attempts drown out their legislative agenda. “I think everybody is taking the approach that we’re not going to be like Republicans and go on witch
When Republican Darrell Issa (right) was chair of the House Oversight Committee under President Obama, he issued more than 100 subpoenas. Incoming Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (left) probably has a few subpoenas of his own he’d like to issue.
hunts,” says one Democratic aide, who did not wish to be named. That level of judiciousness bears a striking asymmetry to the actions of Republican majorities in the past. When California Republican Darrell Issa was Oversight Committee chairman under President Obama, he issued more than 100 subpoenas to Secretary of State John Kerry, the IRS commissioner, the attorney general, the Department of Health and Human Services over Obamacare, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Justice Department, and the National Park Service. Go back even further and you have Dan Burton of Indiana, who issued some 1,000 subpoenas during his fiveyear chairmanship. Representative Lou Correa of California, who currently sits on the Homeland Security Committee, believes that for oversight to be successful, it must be couched in pragmatic language so that it resonates broadly with the public, even on issues as polarizing as family separation. “You don’t separate children from their parents, that’s a given. But if we’re going to debate morality, well, the president will say that kind of
policy is OK, while we say it’s immoral,” says Correa. “But when you talk about inefficient spending and waste, that’s different. That’s something everyone can agree on.” That view suggests that not all Democrats are of the same mind on how to proceed, after being in the minority for eight years. Bennie Thompson will be one of just four House Democrats in office today with past experience leading a committee. There will be a learning curve in the first few months of the new Congress, particularly for new members. House Democrats will need to hire hundreds of new staffers to committee positions (one of the perks of being in the majority)—a process that will take weeks, if not months. “There’s been a ton of hype around oversight and to some extent that’s justified. Democrats have been waiting for this moment for a long time,” says a House staffer. “But you can’t rush this sort of thing. Expectations need to be tempered.” Patience and self-restraint become difficult to muster when faced with damage and suffering wrought by Trump’s callous immigration agenda. But at the very least, oversight presents some hope.
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13
BEYOND 2018
The Democrats’ stunning gains in 2018 demonstrated not just a revulsion against Trumpism but a long-deferred appetite for a more progressive and democratic America. If Democrats can seize the moment, they will have a mandate to reclaim and repair both the democracy and the economy.
14 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG WINTER 2019
BEYOND 2018
Imperatives for Democrats
For all their differences, House Democrats need to unite around a pro-worker agenda. The party also needs a smart way to winnow its immense field of presidential prospects. B Y H AR OLD MEYERSON
O
f all the dogs that did not bark in the night during the 2018 midterm-election campaigns—the anticipated attack ads that never got aired—the loudest silence came out of Wisconsin. There, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, running for re-election, had authored a bill that would substantially alter American capitalism, not in a way that most American capitalists would particularly like. Her bill required corporations to set aside onethird of the seats on their boards for members elected by their employees. If enacted, the days of pure shareholder governance—and the shoveling of nearly all profits to shareholders rather than to workers—would be over. Surely, this was raw meat for the Republican attack whippets. Baldwin wasn’t out on this limb by herself. Her Democratic colleague, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, also up for reelection, followed her lead with a similar bill, which went Baldwin’s one better by raising the share of worker representatives to 40 percent. (The term for such corporate-board splitting is co-determination.) But Warren was on the ballot in a solidly Democratic state, while Baldwin was running in purple Wisconsin. Moreover, the attack ads against Baldwin were already coming fast and furious by the time she introduced her bill. By February, groups funded by the Koch brothers had already spent $4.5 million on ads accusing her of all manner of misdeeds (ranging from misstated to fictitious).
Undoubtedly, an ad accusing her of undermining the American economy would be next. It never came. That was hardly for lack of resources; outside groups would drop another $10 million on attacks on Baldwin in the months before Election Day. Rather, the reason for the Republicans’ silence was simply that Baldwin’s proposal resonated with a hell of a lot of Americans. How many? Civis Analytics, a firm formed by data analysts who’d worked on President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, polled on the proposal for the group Data for Progress and found that 52 percent of Americans supported it while just 23 percent opposed it. Even more decisively, a plurality supported it in every congressional district in the nation. Within Wisconsin, it commanded support not just in ultra-liberal Madison and but also in rockribbed Republican small towns and farms. Americans, it seemed, have seen shareholder capitalism and concluded it doesn’t work. Putting workers on corporate boards was so clearly a no-brainer that attacking it would only raise issues the Koch brothers and their ilk didn’t want discussed. For her part, Baldwin attacked her Republican challenger, State Senator Leah Vukmir, as a stooge of corporate interests, citing her participation in and award from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing business consortium backed (as Baldwin’s ads pointed out) by such concerns as Pfizer, Exxon, and the Kochs.
On Election Day, Baldwin won with an 11-point margin over Vukmir. The exit polls showed that Baldwin even won 12 percent of the voters who’d cast their gubernatorial ballots for Republican Governor Scott Walker. This isn’t to say that Baldwin had run on her proposal to upend corporate governance. Like most Democrats, she ran on her support for health-care protections, and like her Democratic senatorial colleague Sherrod Brown, who won re-election this November in Ohio, she ran on her record of championing local industry and opposing the trade deals that had undermined it. Her campaign, like Brown’s, certainly provides a model for Democrats as they seek to retake the once-industrial Midwest in the 2020 presidential election. But the larger lesson for Democrats is found in the silence of the Republicans when confronted with a proposal to reshape some fundamentals of American capitalism. The lesson is that there are a number of policies that would redistribute wealth and power from the few to the many that are broadly popular, and that should unite Democrats—particularly Democrats in the new Congress—at a moment when, despite their differences, they need to demonstrate some unity of purpose and embrace a politics that the nation’s progressives and centrists both support. THE DEMOCRATS HAVE moved left in recent years—remarkably left, but that doesn’t mean they all occupy the same political space. A 2018 Gallup Poll showed that 57 percent of selfidentified Democrats held favorable views of socialism, while just 47 percent felt that way about capitalism. Still, the party is shifting left at two different speeds. Where minorities and millennials congregate (that is, in cities), the Democrats sent some radicals to Congress in 2018, including, but hardly limited to, socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Detroit. Given the demographics and economics of cities, there’s every reason to think that urban America will send more social democrats to Congress in coming elections and adopt a host of social democratic policies themselves. The urban shift left—though not universally toward social democracy—has become stunningly ubiquitous. Even in such historically conservative
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15
The campaigns of Tammy Baldwin (left) and Sherrod Brown (right) provide models for Democrats as they seek to retake the once-industrial Midwest in the 2020 presidential election.
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differences among Democrats from different political terrains. When the new Congress convenes, House Democrats will almost certainly come together to pass campaign-finance reforms, raise the minimum wage, and vote for some kind of rollback in drug prices. Most of those actions are so widely popular that they’d put Republican House members on the spot: After all, in November’s elections, voters in the Republican bastions of Utah, Idaho, and Nebraska elected to expand Medicaid, while voters in Arkansas and Missouri elected to raise their states’ minimum wage. But is that all? Other than investigating and possibly impeaching Donald Trump, will the rest of the congressional session be given over to intra-party disputes over how far to extend Medicare and how green a New Deal to promote? Or will the Democrats heed the lesson of the non-attack on Baldwin’s co-determination proposal and realize that they can support legislation that begins to shift the balance of power in the economy, and win widespread support in the process? Will they realize they can come together around an agenda that directly benefits America’s workers?
DEMOCRATS CAN BEGIN by reconceptualiz-
ing corporate taxes. Yet another dog that didn’t bark in the 2018 night was the support Republicans expected for enacting their new income tax law. By mid-year, the polling showed that Americans understood the law delivered the lion’s share of its reductions to corporations and the wealthy, while expanding deficits that menaced Social Security and Medicare. It signally failed to turn out more Republicans to the polls, while adding one more reason for Trump opponents to go out and vote. Over the course of 2018, a number of Democrats in addition to Baldwin and Warren authored bills to compel corporations to change the way they do business. In November, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and California Representative Ro Khanna introduced legislation that would forbid corporations from buying back their shares (the main way corporate executives reward major shareholders, very much including themselves) unless they paid their workers at least $15 an hour, afforded them seven days of sick leave per year, and maintained a ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay no greater than 150 to 1. Ohio’s Sherrod Brown has laid out a
l e f t : c h r i s t o p h e r d i t z / s i pa v i a a p i m a g e s ; r i g h t : j o h n m u n c h i l lo / a p i m a g e s
cities as Charleston, South Carolina; Salt Lake City; and Oklahoma City, Democratic challengers unseated Republican members of Congress in November’s elections. Democrats also prevailed in legendarily Republican suburbs, picking up seats outside Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, and sweeping California’s Orange County. It’s not the case that all those Democrats ran as relative moderates. In the Orange County district represented by Republican Mimi Walters— which includes the epicenter of the county’s conservatism, Newport Beach, where John Wayne docked his yacht—Democrat Katie Porter, a progressive attorney who is a protégé of Elizabeth Warren and who supported Medicare for All (to be sure, more vocally in the primary than in her fall campaign), handily defeated Walters. And, of course, while progressive Democratic gubernatorial candidates Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida narrowly lost their races, they ran well ahead of the more moderate Democrats who’d run for those offices in years past. Still, it’s clear that there are and will be
BEYOND 2018
similar proposal, only it also rewards corporations for good behavior in meeting such metrics. It wouldn’t be hard to mix and match the particulars of these and kindred proposals, in bills that either mandate changes, like the co-determination legislation, or that punish corporations for violating standards of decency (or reward them for meeting them). As a fallback, Democrats could scale corporate taxes to compliance with such standards. At a time of high public awareness of wage stagnation and the upward redistribution of income and wealth during recent decades, a linkage of corporate taxes to corporate behavior should command widespread Democratic support. Introducing such legislation as part of a package including campaign-finance reform proposals would highlight Democrats’ opposition to plutocracy’s eclipse of democracy (or, if you will, prompt the Democrats to move their opposition beyond the rhetorical). It would also compel Republican House members to take some exquisitely awkward votes. Many Democrats in the incoming House have pledged themselves to support Medicare for All. Despite that, incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made clear this is not the direction in which she wants her party’s legislating to move, for fear that Republicans will pounce on the tax increases that such a measure entails, and on the prospect many Americans will face of losing their current employer-provided insurance. One way to square this circle is to move to Medicare for All incrementally. Both political scientist Jacob Hacker and the Prospect’s Paul Starr have outlined proposals to expand the universe of Medicare recipients in such a way. Starr’s proposal, which he terms “Midlife Medicare,” would bring down the age of eligibility for the program to 55 or even 50. Recipients could either choose Medicare coverage for an affordable fee, or the expanded program, like the current one, could be publicly funded, financed in part by savings from mandated reductions in drug and procedure costs, and from dedicated corporate tax revenues that partially offset their savings from having to cover fewer employees. This latter proposal is one that might win the support of single-payer backers (it’s Medicare for, if not All, then A Lot More Americans) and of more hesitant moderates as well.
A THIRD SET OF INITIATIVES on which the
various sets of House Democrats could and should agree combines proposals for a Green New Deal (which Ocasio-Cortez has championed), government-backed full employment, infrastructure renewal, and regional development. Substantial numbers of House Democrats are committed to each of these four priorities, none of which has gone beyond the drawing-board phase—if that. This creates the possibility—indeed, it’s a necessity—of crafting programs that address all four of these priorities simultaneously. The problem that has given rise to the need for each of these policies is decades-long underinvestment, both private and public. In the realm of private capital, corporate America has downsized its presence in nonmetropolitan regions, preferring instead to offshore manufacturing and funnel money to shareholders. Government has failed to fill that gap, its lead-
is also registered in the steadily declining rate of prime-age male participation in the labor market. Currently, the percentage of men aged 25 to 54 not working full-time—even with official unemployment at a low 3.7 percent—is 19 percent. In 2007, before the crash, the rate was 16.6 percent; in 2000, 14.4 percent; and in 1989, 13.6 percent. These two sets of statistics, taken either separately or combined, point to some of the reasons for the stunning decline in life expectancy for the nation’s white working class, and to the rise therein of “deaths of despair.” Major targeted public investments in infrastructure, broadband, and green public power can help counter some of these grim developments. A green power public employment program, like a latter-day Civilian Conservation Corps, could be one way to meet these needs. These are policies with which Democrats across the ideological spectrum (more precisely,
Democrats can begin by reconceptualizing corporate taxes: Policies that would redistribute wealth and power from the few to the many are broadly popular. ers apparently forgetting that during the New Deal, it was government that brought affordable electric power to rural America and that during the Cold War, it spread its armament factories all across the land. For that matter, government has done precious little to introduce more clean and efficient transportation systems, or even shore up the existing ones. The evidence of this joint public and private neglect is apparent in both geographic and demographic statistics. A Brookings Institution study released this November documents the extent of the economic decline of nonmetropolitan areas. Since 2008, Brookings shows, the number of jobs has increased by 9 percent in large metropolitan areas, 5 percent in mediumsized metropolitan areas, 3 percent in small metropolitan areas, and 0 percent in small towns, while declining by 2 percent in rural areas adjacent to metropolitan areas and by 4 percent in rural areas not adjacent to them at all. The concomitant decline in manufacturing jobs and the underinvestment in construction
their ideological spectrum) could champion. Even within rural America—by every account the one terrain Donald Trump can claim as his own—there’s likely considerable receptivity to such policies. The results of the 2018 midterm elections have been depicted as a triumph for Democrats in the cities and suburbs, while Republicans held their own in rural areas. But according to an analysis from Catalist, a Democratic voter data firm, rural America, which gave Republicans a 35-point advantage over Democrats in 2016, saw that margin decline to 28 points in 2018. That was largely due to younger rural voters, age 18 through 29, who gave Republicans a 17-point advantage in 2016, and gave Democrats an 8-point advantage in 2018—a shift of 25 points. Clearly, the opportunity to develop a combination of programs to create meaningful employment and combat catastrophic climate change should be a focus of both the Democratic House and the various left and centerleft think tanks. At the same time, Democrats
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17
should not be lulled by the relative prosperity of metropolitan areas. It’s precisely in those areas where income inequality is at its highest, since their job markets are divided between a relatively small professional class and tech sector on one side, and a massive service and retail sector, disproportionately staffed by people of color, on the other. Indeed, in the current focus on the ravages that deindustrialization has inflicted on the white working class, most commentators have forgotten that the big-city deindustrialization of the 1960s through the 1980s wreaked havoc on black manufacturing workers—a development that sociologist William Julius Wilson documented in When Work Disappears, his landmark 1996 study of postindustrial urban black communities. And it is the particular misfortune of the Latino immigrants of the past 35 years that they have come to the United States just as the kinds of factory jobs that offered decent-paying, sometimes
Which is to say, Democrats need a workercentered economic policy for both town and country, and one that shifts the economy away from its deadly dependence on fossil fuels. That’s not the work of a single session of Congress, even a single session in which the Democrats control both houses and the White House as well. But developing that policy, albeit in fits and starts, is not only one more thing that the incoming House Democrats should be about, but something that both the left and centerleft should embrace—though they will differ, surely, on the speed of the turn to green. A PRO-WORKER DEMOCRATIC House over
the next two years is a crucial precondition for Democratic success in 2020. The more important precondition, of course, is a Democratic presidential nominee who can unseat Donald Trump—for which the same centrality of proworker policies and politics is no less essential.
Democrats need a worker-centered economic policy for both town and country, and one that shifts the economy away from its deadly dependence on fossil fuels. unionized, employment—the immigrants’ economic ladder—vanished, stranding them in the low-wage service-sector and non-union construction jobs of America’s cities. So the Democrats need two types of regional economic strategies, one for the small towns and rural areas where capital has taken flight, the other for cities where capital abounds but is concentrated in the wealthiest tenth. For the latter, there’s a need for jobs programs that make cities greener, for more job training and apprenticeships (as there is in rural America). But there are tens of millions of city folk in distinctly urban and suburban service, retail, and hospitality sectors whose basic needs won’t be met absent a higher minimum wage, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and changes in labor law that would enable them to form unions. There are also millions of contingent and independent contract workers who need a reworking of laws so they can receive adequate income and the kind of job-related benefits now reserved for a shrinking subset of direct employees.
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Many of the Democrats’ prospective candidates reflect in their positions their understanding that the energy in the party is on the left, while a few (Sanders, Warren, and Brown, at minimum) were on the left before that energy was evident. The problem for Democrats is the sheer number of prospective candidates. The party—and the American electoral process generally—has no good way to select a nominee when so many aspirants split the vote. In 2016, this was the Republicans’ problem, and the process produced the most appalling nominee—and then, president—in the nation’s history. A field of seven or eight establishment candidates split the vote in the early primaries and caucuses, allowing the one glaringly non-establishment candidate to rack up victories without ever winning more than a third of the votes. While the Democrats in 2020 won’t choose a nominee one one-thousandth as repellent as Trump, the prospect of, say, 15 candidates running in the first set of primaries and caucuses could produce a front-runner—
or worse, two front-runners—without wide appeal in the party’s ranks. The way people vote, of course, is seldom determined solely by neat ideological criteria, but it’s certainly possible that progressives could split their vote between, say, Warren and Sanders, allowing other candidates to surge to the fore. If those Democrats who want an African American nominee divide their vote between Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, a similar dynamic could play out. There is also the surge of Beto O’Rourke, whose ideological orientation remains obscure. The next nominee needs to be a unifier, but one who reflects and optimizes the increasing support in the party (and the country) for progressive economics. The one way to ensure that Democrats select a nominee whose victory reflects not just intensity of support but also breadth of support is for the party to change its rules to mandate ranked-choice voting. Giving primary voters the option of voting for, say, their top three or top five choices, in order of preference, would enable the party to avoid the pitfalls that come with an absurdly large field of candidates. It would also, I readily acknowledge, be a hellaciously complicated process. The counting would take some time, frustrating the media, the candidates, and the voters. And if the party decided to shift to ranked-choice voting, states would have to alter their vote-counting procedures, which would entail some public expense. Some states would probably resist, and the courts would have to decide the winner of any state-versus-party conflicts. Unlike the Republicans, who have been shedding moderates for years and have, under Trump, become a massive cult, the Democrats contain distinct multitudes. For all their differences, however, it’s clear that virtually the entire party is moving leftward, if at varying speeds, in response to the profound imbalance of wealth and power that has overtaken the nation in recent decades—under Democratic as well as Republican rule. If they can use their House majority to make clear that their purpose is to create a more equal polity and economy, if they can select a presidential nominee with that same purpose (which may require altering the way they go about the selecting), they’ll be in good shape to retake the government in 2020 and begin this necessary work.
BEYOND 2018
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (center) with fellow Democratic members of Congress, both current and just elected: Terri Sewell, Ilhan Omar, John Sarbannes, and Veronica Escobar
A New Playing Field for Democracy Reform
To win substantive reforms, our system is overdue for structural repairs. 2018 creates an opening.
j. s c o t t a p p l e w h i t e / a p i m a g e s
B Y M I LES R APOP O RT AND CECILY HINES
S
o, it looks like Fixing Our Democracy is officially Cool. Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats have announced that their first bill out of the box—H.R. 1—will be an omnibus democracy reform bill including voting rights, partisan gerrymandering, campaignfinance reform, and ethics reform. For many people who have worked on these issues for years, this is a significant moment. Of course,
there is the Senate, and the president, so no one thinks H.R. 1 will become law in anything close to its original form. But the message is major: that putting democracy reform front and center is not just “good government”; it is good politics. But if you want to see where democracy reform was Really Cool in 2018, let’s take a look at what happened in the states, and how the stage has been set for even further reforms.
THE NEW LANDSCAPE
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the 2018 midterms was the turnout itself. The latest estimates are that 116 million people voted, compared with 83 million in 2014. That striking turnout clearly helped fuel the Blue Wave, both in Congress and at the state level. The turnout of constituencies voting Democratic was even enough to overcome the walls of gerrymandering in many districts, at both the congressional and state levels. In the states, the shifts in state control were not a full-scale tsunami, but they were significant enough to dramatically shift the equation on democracy issues going forward. In terms of partisan control, two major changes occurred. First, governorships flipped from red to blue in seven states, bringing Democratic gubernatorial control to 23 states total. The Republican Party took one governorship that was held by an independent, reducing its overall gubernatorial control to 27 states (from 33). Importantly, the change to a Democratic governor in a few of those states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Kansas, most notably—ended
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19
Republican trifectas that had driven voter suppression efforts for years. Secondly, 75 percent of the states now have “trifecta” control—both houses and the governorship controlled by one party. Democrats increased theirs by six, giving them full control in 14 states, while Republicans dropped from 26 to 23. Thirteen states have divided government, but only one, Minnesota, actually has a divided state legislature. New Hampshire was particularly noteworthy; Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate in a state where a Republican trifecta had previously reigned and produced several voter-discouraging policies. Looking at secretary of state results is important, given their critical election role in most states. In 40 out of 50 states, the secretaries are the chief election official. Republicans controlled that office in 28 states prior to the election. They lost three elections to Democrats on November 6, and now control 26
tives passed by more than 60 percent, meaning that they had strong bipartisan voter support. Leading these results was the mammoth victory in Florida of Amendment 4, with almost 65 percent of the voters supporting the restoration of voting rights to 1.4 million former felons. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition led an extraordinary campaign that received bipartisan support, including from evangelical churches that believe in redemption. This will be transformative of democracy in Florida. Michigan had two major ballot initiative victories: one that created an independent redistricting commission, and a second, multifaceted initiative that enacted same-day registration, automatic registration, a constitutionally mandated post-election audit, and enhanced voting rights for veterans and military and overseas voters. According to Brandon Jessup, deputy director of Promote
Michigan, Missouri, Colorado, Utah, and Ohio all approved redistricting reforms to address gerrymandering abuse. Nonpartisan commissions will now have a major role. offices, while Democrats increased their control to 20. All nine Democratic secretaries who were up for re-election in 2018 were re-elected. Beyond party identification, an active democracy advocate in that office can make a major difference. In Michigan, in addition to new Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Jocelyn Benson, a longtime leading democracy advocate, was elected secretary of state. In Arizona, the election of Katie Hobbs has given advocates in Latino communities some real momentum in a state where much can be done administratively and at the local level. In Colorado, Jena Griswold will bring an activist perspective; though in fairness, Wayne Williams, the outgoing Republican secretary, has been a strong supporter of election reforms. BALLOT INITIATIVES RULE
From the point of view of democracy advocates, the results of election-related ballot initiatives were, in a word, stunning. A remarkable element of these wins was that most of the ballot initia-
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the Vote, the organization that led the fight on the voting initiative, it is expected that by 2020 these new laws will bring 300,000 new voters to the polls. In addition, ballot initiatives passed that will further expand registration and voting opportunities, including automatic voter registration in Nevada and same-day registration in Maryland. A number of local initiatives addressing campaign-finance reform passed as well, notably a new small-donor campaignfinance law that passed in Baltimore City. While passing a ballot initiative is a great accomplishment, it is only the first step. In addition to defense, the next crucial step is implementation, requiring a well-executed rollout and properly funded and planned administration of the newly passed initiatives. This is the case in Florida, where major questions now begin of how the restoration of voting rights will take place, including ensuring that unpaid fines not become an income-based form of disenfranchisement.
MAJOR PROGRESS AGAINST GERRYMANDERING
One remarkable result of the 2018 election is how different the redistricting process is likely to look in 2021. Partisan gerrymandering clearly emerged as a major enemy of fair representation and a key factor in results, as a number of states reported state legislative results where the total votes for Democrats far exceeded the share of seats they actually won. State legislative control was retained by Republicans in Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, among others, even though Democrats had a majority of votes cast in those legislative races. However, the process for drawing districts in 2021—if the results of 2018 hold, and democracy advocates keep up their efforts in 2020— will look very different, far less partisan, and far more participatory. Redistricting reform was a major part of the ballot initiative wave. All in all, in 2018, five states passed ballot initiatives that changed the redistricting process in a positive direction: Michigan, Missouri, Colorado, and, in a cliffhanger, Utah, all on Election Day. In addition, Ohio passed a significant reform by ballot initiative back in May as the result of negotiations between advocates and the legislature. In all of these states, nonpartisan commissions will have a major role in the process, sometimes in conjunction with legislative bodies, and sometimes on their own. In addition, in a number of states, including ones where major gerrymandering has ensured Republican control, the Democrats now have, according to Kelly Ward, director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, “a seat at the table,” even where they don’t have legislative control. “The number of seats where Republicans will have full control of the pen has dramatically decreased,” Ward says. For instance, in North Carolina, the Republicans lost their supermajorities in both houses. Combine that with a Democratic governor and a new 5–2 Democratic majority on the state supreme court after the election of leading civil rights litigator Anita Earls to the Court, and the process next time will necessarily be more collaborative and evenhanded, assuming that the current Democratic governor is re-elected. In Pennsylvania, the re-election of Governor Tom Wolf combined with court
BEYOND 2018
victories will assure an evenhanded approach. Based on the ballot initiative successes, it is likely that legislative proposals will emerge for further redistricting reform, to create independent redistricting commissions, strengthen transparency in the redistricting process by including much stronger mechanisms for public input and public access to map-drawing information, and for the adoption of clear and fair criteria that maps will have to conform to. Virginia (where legislative elections are in 2019) as well as Wisconsin, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania are likely places for these legislative fights to emerge. And in Arkansas, wording for a ballot initiative for an independent commission has already been approved by the attorney general. All this forward progress has pleased and also somewhat surprised veteran observers. Cathy Duvall is a managing consultant at the Redistricting Reform Project and has led efforts to leverage resources for reform. She recently said, “Overall, change for the better in how redistricting will be done in 2021 is much farther along than I would have imagined two years ago.” A FEW STATES TO WATCH IN 2019
It is early to be predicting what will actually happen in state legislative sessions, which won’t begin until January. But there are some obvious states with new dynamics where real fights will take place and real victories can be won. Here are just a few examples. New Mexico. This is a state poised for major reforms. Democrats have control of both houses of the legislature, and the new governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, joins Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver as leading statewide supporters of democracy reforms. In addition, a number of “resistant Dems” have been replaced by pro-democracy legislators. A challenge will be that, in some years, the state’s legislative session is only 60 days long, but advocates seem ready to move. Viki Harrison, the director of state operations for Common Cause and a former Common Cause New Mexico executive director, quickly ticked off four reforms ready to go: ethics legislation to implement the recently won ballot initiative; automatic voter registration; campaign-finance disclosure; and “three-day
registration,” which would allow voters to register and vote on the same day, up until three days before the election. New York. New York could move from the very back of the class—it has the worst election laws of any blue state in the nation—to the very front. The reason? An earthquake election year in which a rock-solid alliance between Republicans and rogue Democrats crumbled into dust. Insurgent progressives defeated seven center-right Democratic incumbents in the September primaries, and then eight more seats shifted from Republican to Democratic control in November. Structural reform of “the rules of the democratic game” have been supported by Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Assembly over the years, but always blocked by the Republican Senate majority. The governor has included a small-donor matching system proposal in his executive budget for seven years in a row, and is expected to do so again. The difference now is that he has a new partner in Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, herself a longtime champion of public financing of elections. Stewart-Cousins is joined by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie—the first time in any state that two African Americans have led both houses of a state legislature. Both are supporters of reform, and they will have lots of help from the outside. As Citizen Action’s Jessica Wisneski, a principal pro-democracy campaigner in the state, puts it: “Everything that state government does—on schools, housing, criminal justice, environmental regulation, you name it—can only get better if the power of big money is reduced, and if more people are participating in choosing our leaders. We want an inclusive democracy, and this is how we get one.” New Hampshire. This year, a Republican trifecta was destroyed when both houses of the state’s legislature flipped to Democratic control. With the voice of the voters on these democracy and ethics issues showing force, Governor Chris Sununu may be hard-pressed to resist democracy reform initiatives in that state. In recent years, state laws have made it harder for students to vote; Democrats can be expected to try to change those and go further in opening up the voting process. As an indication of the legislature’s mood, they came within
a hair of replacing Bill Gardner, the nation’s longest-serving secretary of state (since 1976). Gardner had been sharply criticized for supporting legislation making it more difficult for students to vote, and for serving on the deservedly short-lived Commission on Election Integrity, chaired by Kris Kobach, then secretary of state of Kansas. The vote on Gardner, who is a Democrat, was 209 –205 on a second ballot. Texas. In the Lone Star State, Republicans still control the governorship and both houses of the legislature. But major changes are happening at the city and county levels. For example, in Harris County, which includes the city of Houston, Democrats won the county judge, the district clerk, the county clerk, and the county treasurer, each defeating a Republican incumbent. These are very powerful positions and, taken together, form a strong base to counteract efforts of voter suppression championed for so many years by the Texas Legislature. In addition, appeals court races resulted in a large number of seats flipping to Democrats, such that future challenges to pro-democracy reforms now have a greater chance of failing. So, in Texas and other states where gerrymandering may take years to overcome in the state legislature, action at the city and county level may be the best avenue to effect real change. WATCH YOUR BACK
A recurring, unsettling theme in post-election discussions is that in a number of states where ballot initiatives were won, or where key offices shifted to Democrats, efforts are already under way during the lame-duck sessions to repeal or undercut the reforms that have been won, or to restrict the powers of the incoming officials. One example that will surprise no one is Wisconsin. Democrats swept the constitutional offices, winning governor, lieutenant governor, state treasurer, secretary of state, and attorney general. However, Wisconsin Republicans, led by Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, voted to seize control of key state boards, and limit the powers of both the governor and the newly elected Democratic attorney general. “We are not going to roll over and play dead like they assume we probably should,” Vos said. If Democrats do their jobs in the next two years, this cynical power grab could badly backfire in 2020.
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21
All in all, looking ahead to the state legislative sessions, we can expect democracy issues to be front-burner in states around the country. Jessie Ulibarri, the new executive director of the State Innovation Exchange (SIX), says: “2018 was a banner year of voter participation and interest in elections. Legislatures will respond, some to open doors of participation, and some to restrict access. Real reforms are likely in a number or states, and SIX will do what we can to help open the doors of democracy.” “YEAR-ROUND, ON THE GROUND”
At a recent post-election conference co-sponsored by Common Cause and the Democracy Initiative, the mood was one of celebration of the victories that had been won, and appreciation of the nonstop work by grassroots organizations in states around the country that made these victories possible. However, the primary focus was on the work that needs to be done, and the ongoing organizing and action that needs to occur over the next two years and beyond. As exemplified by the Democracy Initiative, the mantra of most grassroots organizations is now “year-round, on the ground.” That is, democracy work never stops, because voting and electing candidates is critical, but is just
22 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG WINTER 2019
one part of a strategy; fighting for the adoption and implementation of pro-voter policies, holding representatives accountable, and building ongoing organizations and coalitions are critical as well. A challenge in this shift to a year-round focus on democracy is to assemble the necessary resources—often in plentiful supply at election time but less so otherwise— on an ongoing basis so that staffing can be year-round, continuity can be maintained, and processes and relationships can develop, rather than having to be rebuilt every two years. One encouraging development is that organizations that in the past have been focused on one primary issue, such as the environment, workers’ rights, or gun control, have now realized that none of these issues can be successful if we do not have a functioning democracy. So a growing number of them, led by organizations such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and unions including the AFL-CIO, have decided to raise “democracy reform” to a top priority coequal with their other primary issues. This is an exponential boost to the power of this movement, as well as a deepening base of volunteers and resources. And it makes the much-needed trust and collaboration in the movement that much easier to create and sustain. Looking at just one of the newer organiza-
Miles Rapoport is former president of Dēmos and of Common Cause and the Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Cecily Hines is senior program coordinator of the Fellowship; she has served as general counsel and senior vice president of several global medical-device companies, and as president of the Minneapolis Parks Foundation.
j o h n h a r t / w i s c o n s i n s tat e j o u r n a l v i a a p i m a g e s
On a sour note, Wisconsin’s Republican legislature, led by Speaker Robin Vos (left) and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (right), voted to limit the governor’s powers before Democrat Tony Evers is sworn in.
tions, Indivisible, we find a seriously focused “next steps” agenda that places democratic reform at the very top of their priority list. They have rolled it out already at a training of new elected officials, and are developing it as a major strategic initiative for 2019. While major and national organizations such as the ACLU, Common Cause, the NAACP, UnidosUS, and others have the history, heft, money, and staff to help move democracy initiatives forward at the state level, much of the day-to-day heavy lifting is being done by an increasingly robust network of state-based and even local organizations. And as a sign of the times, many of these organizations are run by leaders of color. Among the new groups highlighted at Common Cause and Democracy Initiative events— and they are only examples, since so many organizations are on the ground moving democracy issues forward—are the New Georgia Project, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, Promote The Vote and Voters Not Politicians in Michigan, the Washington Democracy Hub, and the Virginia Civic Engagement Table. These organizations, and others like them, are doing amazingly effective work, often on a shoestring budget, and are making democracy issues real on the state and local level. The outlook for more gains in improving the functioning of our democracy is certainly far better today than it was before the 2018 elections, and mostly at the state level. Major victories were won, on ballot initiatives and in the composition of state legislatures and control of statewide offices. It is too early to say where this will lead in many of the states, but significant activity will be taking place in response to clear public support for a fairer and more just political system. Away from the maelstrom of Washington, there will be much to watch for and hope for.
BEYOND 2018
Winning the Gender Wars
Feminism and misogyny have assumed larger roles in Americans’ electoral identities. This worked to the Democrats’ advantage in the midterms, but may not in the presidential race two years hence. B Y AN N A GR EEN BERG
j a k e c r a n d a l l / t h e j o u r n a l- s ta r v i a a p i m a g e s
I
n the 2018 midterms, the women of this country delivered a severe rebuke to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The seeds were planted by the 2017 Women’s March, by many accounts the largest single-day demonstration in American history. Thousands of women subsequently decided to run for office, including the hundreds who ran for the House of Representatives (up from 120 in 2016). A record 126 women will serve in the 116th Congress. Nearly 60 percent of women voted for Democratic candidates, resulting in a historic 23-point gender gap between the parties. It is tempting to argue that this is all about Trump. He ran against the first female majorparty nominee for president, in a race where his attitudes and behavior toward women were on full display. The Access Hollywood tape in which Trump revealed his penchant for unwanted advances, the toleration of sexual harassment and allegations of assault he revealed in defending Roy Moore, the almost complete absence of female leadership in the White House—these and more left no doubt about where this president stands. Indeed, in a national poll of registered voters from February 2018, 67 percent said they believed Trump sexually harassed women and 56 percent think he is a sexual predator. But Trump simply exposed—and perhaps accelerated—a trend that has become central to American politics. Feminist beliefs are increasingly correlated with support for the Democratic Party, independent from ideology and even taking into account other factors like attitudes about race. The heightened importance of feminism and the increasing
politicization around gender in the last two elections will change the face of the Democratic Party. Women voters now play, and will play, a much larger role in determining outcomes in Democratic primaries, and certain groups of white women (college-educated women and younger women) now join, and will join, minority women who already represent the backbone of the party. But the gender dynamic that helped Democrats take back the House may not be entirely helpful in 2020. Views about gender roles—as opposed to generic support for equal rights— are polarizing, and activate voters who do not share an affinity to feminism. “Hostile sexism”
was a strong predictor of vote choice in the midterms. Democrats continue to struggle with the kinds of voters who hold conservative views on gender roles—especially white blue-collar men and women—the very voters who make the Electoral College map competitive for Trump. THE GENDER GAP IN ELECTORAL politics is long recognized and well understood. Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, Southern white men started leaving the Democratic Party when it began to champion civil and voting rights in the states and at the federal level. Northern white men followed suit throughout the 1970s, as the Democratic Party became associated with women’s rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. The campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon were the first Republican presidential campaigns to exploit racial animus as a way to target white voters. In the aftermath of the 1980 election, academics and pundits noted an increasing divergence between men and women, and termed it the “gender gap.” Fully 55 percent of men had voted for Ronald Reagan, compared with only 47 percent of women. The gender gap was relatively consistent in congressional races until 1994, when Democratic support among men collapsed—dropping from 52 percent to
Women’s March in Lincoln, Nebraska
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23
as expanding Aid to Families with DepenTHE GAP BETWEEN WOMEN’S MARGIN AND MEN’S MARGIN, 1982–2018 dent Children and elim Women Democratic Men Democratic Gender inating discriminatory YEAR D– R Margin D– R Margin Gap restrictions in programs 1982 58 – 42 16 55– 45 10 6 like unemploy ment 1984 54– 46 8 48– 52 –4 12 insurance, directly ben 1986 54– 46 8 51– 49 2 6 efited women. Perhaps surprisingly, “women’s 1988 57– 43 14 52– 48 4 10 issues” like abortion and 1990 54– 46 8 51– 49 2 6 the gender of the voter 1992 55– 45 10 52– 48 4 6 or the candidate have 1994 53– 47 6 42– 58 –16 22 played a very small role 1996 55– 45 10 46– 54 –8 18 in voting decisions. 1998 53– 47 6 46– 54 –8 14 But the thinking about the role that gender spe 2000 54– 46 8 45– 55 –10 18 cifically plays in elections 2002 50– 50 0 44– 56 –12 12 is changing, particularly 2004 53– 47 6 46– 54 –8 14 as the size of the gender 2006 56– 44 12 52– 48 4 8 gap grows. Academic 2008 57– 43 14 53– 47 6 8 research now focuses 2010 49– 51 –2 43– 57 –14 12 less on the way policy views might influence 2012 56– 44 12 46– 54 –8 20 partisanship and more 2014 52– 48 4 42– 58 –16 20 on the way partisanship 2016 54– 44 10 43– 55 –12 22 ref lects social sorting 2018 59– 40 19 47– 51 –4 23 and identity politics. In other words, identifying with a party is less a “rational” choice based on 42 percent and swelling the gender gap to a how a voter’s policy views align with a party, and historic 22 percentage points. Since 1994, the gender gap has been consis- more a reflection of how “partisan identity aligns tently in the double digits, with the exception with racial, religious, and ideological identities.” of 2006 and 2008, when Democrats made In this context, adherence to or opposition to historic gains in the House. Since those elec- feminist beliefs may also drive partisan gaps. Leonie Huddy and Johanna Willmann of the tions, the separation between men and women political science department at SUNY Stony has grown, with gender gaps of 20 points or higher in the last four congressional elections. Brook, using data from the American National In 2018, 59 percent of women voted for Demo- Election Studies (ANES), find that in both 2012 cratic candidates for Congress, delivering a and 2016, “feminist loyalty” and “feminist antipa19-point margin for the Democratic Party and thy” had an effect on Republican and Democratic a 23-point gender gap. affiliation independent of the effect that, say, Traditional explanations for this gender gap racial attitudes had—an effect more pronounced observe the differing policy preferences of men among women. Similarly, Susan Hansen, profesand women and the way these views affect par- sor emerita of political science at the University tisanship and vote choice. Commentators argue of Pittsburgh, finds that perception of a candithat women are more likely to support govern- date’s views on “equal roles for men and women” ment programs that support families and are predicts vote choice, even in elections highly less hawkish on foreign policy; women have also polarized around race (i.e., 2008 and 2012). Analysis by Brian Schaffner, a professor of been a little more socially and racially liberal than men. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that women political science at the University of Massaalso “stayed” in the Democratic Party because chusetts, shows how “hostile sexism” not only many of the policies of the Great Society, such played a significant role in presidential vote
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choice in 2016, but helped account for the growing gap between white college- and noncollege-educated voters. He finds that racism and sexism explain at least two-thirds of the education gap among white voters in the 2016 presidential election. And while the role of racism and sexism is often just considered among white voters, Schaffner finds these factors are still predictive when all voters of all races are included in the models. Adherence to or antipathy toward feminist beliefs, as well as hostile sexism, move different sets of voters in opposite directions. A majority of white women supported Donald Trump in 2016, and “sexist” beliefs played a significant role in their choice to support Trump. Political scientists Erin Cassese and Tiffany Barnes argue that the support that white women without a college degree gave to Trump “stemmed from a heightened tendency to endorse hostile sexism and weaker perceptions of discrimination against women in American society compared to white women with a college degree.” The critical point is that rather than the sex of the voter, it’s voters’ attitudes about gender roles, discrimination, feminism, and the like that drive gendered partisan politics. The fact that women are more likely to hold feminist attitudes than men and the fact that the effect is stronger for women help drive this gender gap. THE INCREASING IMPORTANCE of feminism
and sexism in determining partisanship and vote choice has not occurred in a vacuum: The parties have increasingly diverged on questions of women’s roles in the family and the workplace. As late as 1976, the Republican Party platform endorsed both the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and Roe v. Wade. But the rise of the Christian right and conservative activists like Phyllis Schlafly, and the election of Ronald Reagan, portended a real change. After 1980, Republicans opposed not just abortion, but sex education, access to birth control, and the ERA . Still, the political parties largely avoided discussion of issues like gender roles at work and at home until 1991, when the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings put sexual harassment on the map politically. One consequence was that it sparked the so-called “Year of the Woman,” in which a history-making four Democratic women were elected to the Senate.
c h a r t d ata s o u r c e : e x i t p o l l s
The Gender Gap in Congressional Elections
BEYOND 2018
Democrats responded legislatively, too. After George H.W. Bush twice vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act, Bill Clinton signed the legislation as one of his first acts as president. Clinton also elevated women to nontraditional roles in his cabinet, appointing, for instance, Madeleine Albright as secretary of state and Janet Reno as attorney general, as well as creating a policy role for First Lady Hillary Clinton. Presidential candidates George W. Bush and John McCain were mostly silent on women’s issues in their campaigns, but Barack Obama made opposition to the Ledbetter decision, and support for equal pay and Planned Parenthood, central planks in both of his presidential campaigns. There has also been an increasing difference in the two parties’ levels of commitment to women’s representation and leadership. In 1985, Ellen Malcolm founded EMILY’s List to recruit and support pro-choice Democratic women candidates, primarily through bundling campaign contributions. In 2006, Democrat Nancy Pelosi became the first woman speaker of the House and the most powerful woman leader in the nation’s history. Democratic conventions routinely featured “Women’s Night,” which highlighted the number of Democratic women in and running for elective office. While Hillary Clinton lost the primary to Obama in 2008, her nearly successful run signaled to voters the Democratic Party’s embrace of women’s national leadership. For his part, Obama appointed more women to the cabinet than any other president in history and placed two women on the U.S. Supreme Court. By contrast, the aftermath of the 2008 election ushered in a period of unrelenting misogyny from the Republican Party and its allies. The Republicans elected in the 2010 midterms were a different breed, disproportionately Tea Party adherents who ran against bailouts, the stimulus, and Obamacare. Once in office, in both statehouses and Congress, the Republicans introduced nearly 2,000 bills to restrict women’s access to abortion at the state and federal level in just the two years following their 2010 sweep. They passed a range of laws designed not just to reduce access to abortion, but to humiliate women who seek them. For example, many states passed legislation that required women to view ultrasound pictures of fetuses prior to receiving an abortion, even requiring the use of
transvaginal ultrasounds in the early weeks of pregnancy. Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania told women they could simply not look at the image if it was distressing: “You can’t make anybody watch, OK? Because you just have to close your eyes.” Republican members of Congress also introduced bills to limit federal funding for abortion (which covers poor women in instances of rape) by redefining “rape” as “forcible rape.” The 2012 election also saw its fair share of “gender controversy,” most prominently in Republican Todd Akin’s campaign against Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill. In an August interview, he noted that it was hard for women to get pregnant when experiencing a “legitimate rape” because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Richard Mourdock got himself similarly in trouble in his race against Joe Donnelly for Senate in Indiana when he observed that pregnancy as a result of rape is “something that God intended to
tion, hurling gendered attacks on primary rival Carly Fiorina and broadcaster Megyn Kelly, and accusing Clinton of being “such a nasty woman.” Trump and his supporters dismissed the Access Hollywood tape as “locker-room talk.” Given the role that feminism and sexism plays in vote choice, it should not be a surprise that 2016 produced a large gender gap. Clinton won women by 13 points and lost men by 9 points, producing a 22-point gender gap. But Trump’s victory also sparked a women’s revolution. The Women’s March, held the day after Trump’s inauguration, was only the beginning. Lara Putnam, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, and Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, have documented the rise of white middleclass women activists in the suburbs, not just in protesting Trump, but also in “repopulat[ing]” the “local layer” of the Democratic Party and running for office. EMILY’s List reports that after
In the first 2 years after Republicans took over in the 2010 midterms, nearly 2,000 bills to restrict women’s access to abortion were introduced at the state and federal level. happen.” These sort of comments gave voters the strong impression that the Republican Party was not only callous when it came to sexual assault, but also in the dark ages on women’s rights—and women’s bodies—more generally. 2016 marked a new high point for gendered elections. The Democrats nominated the first woman to run for president on a major party ticket and the historic nature of the candidacy was a feature of both the Clinton campaign and the media coverage. As had not been the case in her 2008 primary campaign, Clinton highlighted her historic status as the first female nominee for president. She heavily emphasized her personal story, her role as a mother and grandmother, and her work with women and girls throughout her career. Accused of playing the “woman card” by Trump, Clinton responded, “If fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in.” In contrast, Trump delivered an alpha-male performance throughout the primaries and the general elec-
the 2016 election, thousands of women contacted them about their interest in running for office. Foreshadowing the 2018 midterm results, the Virginia off-year elections saw an increased turnout and margin for Democrats among both white college-educated women and minority women. WOMEN UNLEASHED
The Women’s March, the rise of white middleclass women’s activism, and the results of offyear and special elections all pointed to a big shift toward Democrats among women. Certainly nothing Trump did during his first two years suggested that he was attempting to repair his image. His cabinet has fewer women than either Clinton’s or Obama’s, and his high-profile attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act always featured photos of large gatherings of white Republican men. His support for Roy Moore and other men accused of assault, the name-calling of women (especially women of color), and the Stormy Daniels episode were all just a continuation of his behavior before becoming president.
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25
BLAME THE VICTIM: PERCENT OF U.S. ADULTS WHO AGREE WITH THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS ■ november 2017
■ september 2018
False accusations of sexual assault are bigger problems than unreported assaults.
Women who complain about sexual harassment cause more problems than they solve.
Men who sexually assaulted women 20 years ago should not lose their jobs today.
0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%
0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
MEN WOMEN TRUMP VOTERS CLINTON VOTERS ALL 0 10% 20% 30% 40%
Perhaps no other event captured the profoundly gendered nature of our politics as much as the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. They took place against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, which had already polarized Americans across the political spectrum. In one poll taken in the days after the Harvey Weinstein revelations, for instance, 64 percent of adults said sexual harassment is a serious problem, a 17-point increase from 2011. This growth, however, was entirely driven by a 20-point increase among Democrats (79 percent called it a serious problem) and independents (66 percent). The share of Republicans saying it was a serious problem remained unchanged at 42 percent. Not surprisingly, views about the Kavanaugh nomi-
Hostile Sexism and Republican House Vote
PROBABILITY OF VOTING FOR A REPUBLICAN IN 2016 AND 2018 .6
.5
.4 ■ 2016 republican house vote ■ 2018 republican house vote .3 LEAST SEXIST
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MOST SEXIST
nation were almost completely divided along party lines, even as polls showed that most voters were more likely to believe Christine Blasey Ford than Kavanaugh. The year of #MeToo revelations and the Kavanaugh hearings may well have increased “hostile sexism” among Trump voters. Between 2017 and 2018, polling from The Economist shows significant numbers of Trump voters became more likely to agree that false accusations are a bigger problem than sexual assaults, that women who complain about harassment create more problems than they solve, and that men who sexually harassed women 20 years ago should not lose their jobs. Indeed, between 2016 and 2018, hostile sexism became a significant predictor of congressional vote choice. In the 2018 midterms, nearly 60 percent of women voted for Democratic candidates for Congress, which represented a 7-point increase over 2014’s percentage and a 5-point increase over 2016’s. The most dramatic shift occurred among white college-educated women, who went Democratic by a 57 percent to 43 percent margin. In 2010 and 2014, Democrats had lost white college-educated women by 4 and 10 points respectively; in the 2016 presidential race, they supported Clinton by 4 points, 49 percent to 45 percent. Overall, there was a net 11-point increase in Democratic support among white college-educated women between 2016 and 2018. Women of color receive less attention from pundits because they are already strong Demo-
cratic voters, but they turned out at higher rates than they had in 2014 and increased their level of support for Democrats from 76 percent to 88 percent. Millennial women supported Democrats with an astonishing 70 percent of the vote. In total, 60 percent of Democratic votes were cast by women. White women without a college education remain among the Republicans’ strongest supporters. Trump won these women by 21 points, 58 percent to 37 percent; in 2018, they voted for Republican congressional candidates by 17 points, 58 percent to 41 percent. The impact of these voters was relatively muted as Democratic gains came primarily from suburban, highly educated districts, and districts won by Clinton in 2016. There will be a different dynamic in 2020, when white non-college women, who represent a greater share of the electorate than white women with a college education, may help drive an Electoral College victory for Trump. THE HEIGHTENED ATTENTION to and con-
flict around gender in our politics will surely continue. Post-election stories have focused heavily on the new gender and racial diversity of the incoming Democratic freshmen and the stark contrast with the Republicans. The Democratic primary for president will feature many high-profile women candidates. After Clinton’s loss in 2016 and women’s victories in 2018, there will be an ongoing discussion as to whether the country is ready for a female president. It would be foolhardy to even guess what Trump will do in the coming two years that could add fuel to the fire. Partisan politics has become the setting for the battle over the unfulfilled promise of the women’s movement and second-wave feminism. Gains made by women in education and employment, through policies like Title IX and legalized abortion, have not resulted in equality in the workplace and the home, or even materially increased women’s representation in the highest corridors of power in politics and business. The reactions to these battles to secure these equalities will shape our elections and our politics in the years ahead. Anna Greenberg is the managing director of GQR , a Democratic polling firm based in Washington, D.C.
t o p c h a r t d ata s o u r c e : yo u g o v ; b o t t o m c h a r t : b a s e d o n a n a ly s i s o f 2 0 1 6 c o o p e r at i v e c o n g r e s s i o n a l e l e c t i o n s t u dy b y d f p s u r v e y b y b r i a n s c h a f f n e r
Views about Sexual Harassment Change over the Year of #MeToo
BEYOND 2018
How Democrats Should Reform Elections in the States Some reforms will be easy. The harder steps will be the real test. B Y R I C H AR D H. PIL DES
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s a result of the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats now have unified control of 14 state governments and the opportunity to carry out reforms of the electoral process. What should they do with these newfound powers? Most electoral reforms have historically taken place at the state level, though the rare measures Congress has taken—the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1993 Motor Voter Registration Act, the 2002 Help America Vote Act, and campaign-finance legislation in the 1970s and early 2000s—have had important ramifications. But with a divided federal government for at least the next two years, congressional action is a remote prospect, and the initiative will fall to the states. Among election-law experts, there is a substantial consensus in favor of certain desirable changes. Many of these are also easy lifts for Democrats, who are likely to see these reforms as aligning with their political interests. The more challenging issues for Democrats concern reforms that require political incumbents to relinquish some of the immediate political advantage they enjoy for the purpose of upholding democratic values and strengthening public confidence in the integrity of elections. I’ll start with the politically easy reforms. Election-law experts generally agree that the biggest regulatory barrier to more widespread participation is the voter-registration process. Unlike many other democracies where the government itself is responsible for registering eligible voters, most states in this country place the burden on the voters to get themselves registered. States often require registration long before elections,
when the less politically engaged are not thinking about voting. Moreover, when Americans move, the burden remains on them to re-register at their new address. The impact on voting participation of this system is substantial. Among registered voters, turnout is much higher than many people realize (87 percent in the 2016 election). But voter registration matters, and because only about 64 percent of eligible voters are typically registered, the overall turnout rate among eligible voters even at recent high points, such as the 2016 presidential election, remains around 60 percent. Moving to automatic voter registration helps to address this problem. In 2016, Oregon became the first to use automatic registration and now more than a dozen states and the Dis-
trict of Columbia have adopted it in various forms. With automatic registration, eligible citizens are registered—unless they opt out— when they interact with government agencies, such as by getting or renewing a driver’s license. These agencies then electronically transfer this information directly to election officials. Another crucial step would be to increase the portability of voter registration: People who move within the same state should have their voter registration updated automatically with changes in their mailing address. A further step—indeed, the single reform that has shown the most demonstrable impact in raising voter turnout—is same-day registration for voters who show up to vote and are not already registered but are otherwise eligible. Same-day registration makes particular sense in states that allow early voting, though some states also permit registration on Election Day itself. States need to weigh whether in practice they can implement Election Day registration without causing undue delays at the polls. But to the extent feasible, it would certainly enhance participation. In addition, moving to online registration, which most states now already use, would not only make registering easy for many people but also improve the accuracy of the registration rolls, compared with paper records that are often long out of date. Voting rolls in most states are often inflated with the names of dead
Governor Kate Brown in a celebratory mood after signing Oregon’s automatic voter registration bill in March 2015
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people or those who have moved out of the jurisdiction; we need to find ways to improve the accuracy of the rolls without wrongly removing eligible voters. Another easy lift for Democrats is to make it easier to vote on a day other than a single workday. On this front, early voting and voteby-mail (VBM) are to some extent functional alternatives, but early in-person voting has some clear advantages over VBM. States prefer VBM because it is less costly than staffing early-voting sites. But when there has been significant voter fraud in recent U.S. elections, it has been through the absentee ballot process, not in-person voting. In a notorious example, the courts ordered all the absentee ballots to be discarded in a Miami mayoral race in the mid-1990s because of pervasive absentee ballot fraud. As this article goes to press, North Carolina has refused to certify the results of one congressional race out of concern about
be counted after Election Day, and in which the winner cannot be determined well past a week afterward. In a world of hyperpolarized political parties and a frenzied social media ecosystem, delays of this length in determining election winners are dangerous. We got a taste of this problem after the recent midterms, when Speaker of the House Paul Ryan called California’s election system “bizarre” and said that it “defies logic” because many congressional races in California took days to be decided and the Democrat ended up winning despite having been behind on election night. There was nothing nefarious about California’s process, but prolonged delays invite suspicions. When the stakes are high, partisans will question the legitimacy of the process, and public confidence in elections is jeopardized. To the extent we can achieve reform goals while bringing closure to election results closer to Election Day, we should
Early in-person voting and vote-by-mail both provide flexibility on when to vote. But as the 2018 election showed, early voting has crucial advantages over mail-in ballots. possible absentee ballot fraud. No such problem has yet developed in the western states (Washington, Oregon, and Colorado) that now use VBM for all their elections, but we still ought to be concerned about the potential for fraud that VBM introduces. Another problem with VBM, which became more apparent this year, is that it prolongs Election Day and raises suspicions about fraud when the outcome shifts in the prolonged ballot-counting. Many voters are unwilling to trust the U.S. Postal Service and prefer to turn their ballots in by hand on Election Day, even though they are casting VBM ballots. When VBM ballots come in on Election Day, checking the signatures on the ballots against the signatures on the registration rolls adds considerable delay to the counting process. In addition, the VBM system depends on the Postal Service’s efficiency and effectiveness. We now face situations— such as the recent elections in Arizona and California—in which hundreds of thousands of ballots still have to
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do so. Early voting has clear advantages over VBM in this respect. NOW FOR SOME OF THE heavier lifts. Several
reforms that strengthen democracy challenge Democrats to resist the temptations of power. The creation of independent redistricting commissions is a key case in point. When any party is in power, it is likely to be reluctant to create independent redistricting commissions by statute because they would be viewed as a form of unilateral disarmament. Such commissions are required to draw districts according to substantively fair, transparent, and impartial criteria. But when the other party regains control, what’s to prevent it from repealing the statute and gerrymandering districts all over again? This is why most such commissions have been created by popular voter initiatives rather than by state legislatures. But in most states they control, Democratic legislatures could refer a potential state constitutional amendment on independent redistricting com-
missions to the voters, and a successful amendment would be more difficult to undo than a legislatively created commission. Even if a state constitutional amendment poses too high a hurdle, Democrats now have reasons to move ahead with legislatively created commissions despite the risks. Democrats and reform groups have made constraints on gerrymandering and the push for independent districting commissions one of their central democratic-reform causes. If Democrats fail to act on this issue when they have the power to do so, they will undermine the credibility of this reform effort. In addition, once such commissions are up and running, voter pressures may make it difficult for Republicans to eliminate them when they return to power, even if the commissions are created by statute. The public has become strongly supportive of commissions. Voters in 2018, when given a choice through ballot measures to adopt independent redistricting processes, opted in favor of doing so in all four states where the issue was on the ballot. But any commission structure and process that Democrats adopt must be perceived as fair and impartial. Many Republican officials oppose independent redistricting commissions in the belief that they favor Democrats. So, if the commissions are to become a stable solution to the gerrymandering problem, they need to be developed with as much bipartisan backing as possible and cannot serve as a covert means of creating a Democratic gerrymander. Were that to happen, it would delegitimize the move toward independent redistricting commissions not just in a particular state but nationally. A second important reform that requires political incumbents to relinquish some power is to take election administration entirely out of the hands of elected officials. In two-thirds of the states, partisan elected officials, such as secretaries of state, run elections. This is one of the unique pathologies of the American electoral system—illustrated in 2018 by what happened in Georgia, where Secretary of State Brian Kemp was able to set critical voting-related policies for an election in which he was the Republican candidate for governor. Some secretaries of state do perform in admirably nonpartisan fashion. Even so, the public would have greater confidence in the
BEYOND 2018
integrity of elections if they were run by independent administrative bodies, designed to require legislative support from both parties, with nonpartisan officials who serve beyond the terms of the elected leaders who appoint them. A number of democracies have created independent electoral tribunals that could also serve as a model for American reforms. These tribunals are a specialized branch of the courts whose jurisdiction is limited to electoral matters but includes most issues of election administration. Their ability to run closely contested elections fairly has helped give legitimacy to the results. Finally, Democratic states will undoubtedly debate campaign-finance reforms, including public financing, for state and local elections. Public financing has typically been centered on individual candidates rather than political parties. But parties are critical in making democratic politics and governance function effectively. So it’s a mistake for campaignfinance regulation of any form to give the role of political parties the short end of the stick and encourage money to flow primarily to individual candidates. One possibility is for states to provide targeted support for the parties to carry out functions for which the parties are particularly well suited, such as registering new voters. Another option is to create voucher systems that encourage voters to donate to parties. Parties should also be able to coordinate more with their candidates’ campaigns than is possible under federal law. National election reform is difficult, not just because government is divided along partisan lines, but because Americans are cautious about such changes. That includes a concern about the unintended consequences of change. States are inevitably the arena where most reforms of the political process are going to take place in the next few years, and this gives states an opportunity to prove that certain reforms are worth the candle. It will be all the more impressive if states that Democrats control adopt good-government reforms that not only align with their immediate political interests but sometimes run counter to them. Rick Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University and co-author of The Law of Democracy.
States of Change
The election win wasn’t just about Congress. Many of the openings for democratic reform will be in the states. BY AM Y HANAU E R
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innesotans, with their comparatively generous social safety net, live seven years longer than people in conservative (and low-income) Mississippi. Louisianans are more than five times more likely to be in prison as Mainers. And in New York, where bargaining rights are better protected, roughly a quarter of workers enjoy the security and wage premium of union membership, compared with fewer than 4 percent in union-hostile South Carolina. While other factors contribute to these realities, it’s safe to say that state policy matters immensely. The right gets this. In the 1970s, conservatives set their sights on statehouses as the best (and most readily captured) mechanism for rolling back the gains of the New Deal, the Great Society, and the civil rights movement. This assault is both intensely damaging and profoundly undemocratic. Its electoral gains depend on an unprecedented attack on voting rights. Its legislative agenda is paid for and carried out by the American Legislative Exchange Council, its corporate supporters, and other moneyed interests. And when citizens in cities and counties choose more progressive approaches, right-wing control of state government often preempts local control. All of this makes the 2018 election results, where power shifted decisively in many states, that much more promising. Those outcomes will have long-term and powerful implications for how many of our babies make it to their first birthdays, how secure we are at work, and how we participate in the democratic process, among other things. Republicans still have trifectas—both hous-
es and the governor’s office—in 23 states. But by the time all votes from 2018 were counted, Democrats had taken seven governors’ races, in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico, and Nevada, and lost one, in Alaska. They captured six state legislative chambers—the House in Minnesota and New Hampshire and the Senate in Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, and New York. Here too, they lost in Alaska, the state House. This left 13 states with divided government and Democratic trifectas in 14. Ballot initiatives were particularly good for workers, democracy, and criminal justice reform this cycle (although revenue-improving measures tanked in Colorado, Maine, and elsewhere). Voters gave formerly incarcerated adults the franchise in Florida, shed Jim Crow–era rules that allowed convictions with non-unanimous juries in Louisiana, raised the minimum wage in Arkansas and Missouri, and expanded Medicaid in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah. Citizens made voting easier or fixed districts in seven states (including Ohio, where a deal was negotiated before it reached the ballot), improved environmental protections in three, decriminalized pot in three, and passed LGBTQ protections in one. In states around the country, women and people of color were elected to an unprecedented degree. There will be more than 2,000 women state legislators, and at every level of government there are more black, Muslim, Latinx, Native American, LGBTQ , and other candidates who’ve historically been kept away from power. This will make a tremendous difference for the perspectives that get considered and the policies that advance.
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CONSISTENTLY PROGRESSIVE
States that were already all blue and have stayed so are most ambitious, determined not to squander the moment. “In California, the governor and the legislature have worked together to make consistent progress—to restore our fiscal health, build back programs, prepare for a recession, and strike some major deals on important gaps in our state,” says Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget and Policy Center. “Lives are better today because of that. There’s more money for schools, there’s an Earned Income Tax Credit, there’s a $15 minimum wage, and we’re gradually expanding child care and preschool. But behind that is very deep wage stagnation, global and national, made far worse by a housing affordability crisis.” Hoene is ready for the state to go beyond the crisis repair that has been done. “We have to strike a new social contract with the private sector in California, that they either start taking care of workers or there will be a public system response. If you’re not providing retirement and health—we’ll put in portable benefit systems and tax you to do it. Either you do it, or we’ll tax you and deal with it,” Hoene said. In Washington state, also still all blue, the
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Wisconsin Governor-elect Tony Evers and …
list is similarly ambitious. John Burbank, who runs the Economic Opportunity Institute there, rattles off disciplined post-election goals that emphasize early learning, health care, and scheduling reform in 2018, which he hopes to follow up with retirement security and vacation requirements in 2019. The state has already made groundbreaking strides on paid sick leave, paid family leave, minimum wage, and other pro-work policies. Burbank seeks also to raise progressive revenue, something that’s been elusive in Washington but that, if crafted right, could finally fly. BLUE SKIES AHEAD
States with recent Democratic trifectas are intent on now putting in place a new vision. When asked what’s now possible, James Jimenez, executive director of New Mexico Voices for Children in just-turned all-blue New Mexico, has one word: “everything.” “We have the opportunity to put forward an agenda focused on more than trickle-down, which defined the last eight years for New Mexico,” Jimenez says. “Early childhood education, K-12, home visiting, progressive tax reform, these are all back on the table.” New Mexico, where 75 percent of children are of
color, ranks 50th on the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s child well-being index. Jimenez says deep investments could demonstrably change those rankings. Better worker policy is also now attainable, from boosting the $7.50 minimum wage to giving a raise to teachers who’ve gone half a decade without one. The key is to use the victories to push for transformative change. “We need to continue to remind people that the winning message was opportunity for everyone. Now is the time to be bold, not incremental,” Jimenez says. In Illinois, Governor-elect J.B. Pritzker campaigned on changing the flat tax to a progressive income tax and legalizing marijuana. “The fight now is to make sure that happens,” says Amisha Patel, executive director of Grassroots Collaborative. “Some moderate Democrats love the idea of a revenue-neutral tax—that’s the last thing we need in this time of austerity,” Patel says. “We also have to make sure that the revenue from [marijuana] legalization goes back to the black communities that have been the target of the war on drugs.” Illinois, despite having the country’s fifthlargest economy, ranked 43rd per capita in spending on education, health care, and human
juan l abreche / ap images
New Mexico Governor-elect Michelle Lujan Grisham
BEYOND 2018
strategy to address early voting, vote by mail, public financing, to get corporate money out of our elections,” he says. “When the right takes power, first on their agenda is changing the rules to advance people with money. When we get power, number one has to be changing the rules back to help working people.” Activists in New York plan to follow that up with a slate of progressive priorities from a $15 minimum wage, to Medicare for all, to protection for Dreamers. “When it comes to policies that meaningfully change people’s material conditions, so many things happen in states,” Mitchell says. “In New York, many of the incoming legislators are insurgents who have come to deliver a progressive mandate. That’s what they were elected on.” In other states where Democrats have new trifectas—Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Maine—a quick survey of policy advocates and researchers found that almost all want to work
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… Lieutenant Governor-elect Mandela Barnes
services combined in 2016. Patel is unrelenting about the consequences of outgoing Governor Bruce Rauner’s right-wing regime, but she’s nearly as critical of the way Democrats handled their full control from 2003 to 2014. “The impact of Rauner’s radical right ideology was felt by a million people in Illinois who lost services, lost tuition waivers, lost home healthcare aides for their parents, lost day care for their children,” Patel says. “But the previous Democratic governors who had supermajorities did not do enough to raise wages or raise revenue from the wealthiest residents and that’s why they lost. Now that they’ve got it back, it’s a different moment, so this is when we need real deep organizing capacity to hold the new administration accountable and push the legislature to be bold.” Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell had similar optimism given New York’s new Democratic trifecta. “When you take a step back and look at all of the results, Election Day was really a remarkable day for working-class people,” he says. Mitchell sees job one in New York as reforming the state’s election system, led by a coalition of labor and people of color. “Our elections are stone-age, but there is now a robust, omnibus
be transformative, compared with that of defeated Governor Scott Walker. “Evers will be centering workers and the people of Wisconsin instead of corporations. Walker’s theme was ‘Wisconsin: Open for Business.’ Evers’s is ‘Building the state for the people.’ This in itself makes a difference.” Of course in Wisconsin, like in neighboring Michigan, new leaders can’t get sworn in quickly enough, as their lameduck sessions have featured shameless maneuvering by outgoing Republicans to disempower the incoming Democratic administrations. Still, Dresser balks at the notion that good policy can move only when Democrats hold unilateral power. “There’s a bunch of policy that we think of as blue-state policy that’s actually incredibly important to all of us. While the map is deeply divided, good policies can move in either kind of place. We make these blue things, but they aren’t.” Annie McKay, president and CEO of Kansas
The 2018 election resulted in a decisive power shift that will have long-term implications for progressive priorities and participation in the democratic process. on tax fairness, education investment from early childhood through college, and shoring up health care, among other priorities. DIVIDED GOVERNMENT, UNITED FOR IMPROVEMENTS
In states where Democrats have the governor’s mansion but face Republican legislators, analysts are nonetheless optimistic. “We will have people in charge who are actually interested in the project of running government well. This feels enormous, especially for the environment and social services,” says Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS (the Center on Wisconsin Strategy), a research center based at the University of WisconsinMadison. “Leadership that is committed to protecting water and resources, to enforcing the law and believing in science: This makes for a better Wisconsin, where state workers can actually do their jobs.” Dresser thinks the perspective of Governor-elect Tony Evers, a former teacher, will
Action for Children, agrees. “Republicans also have an eye on repairing the damage done in Kansas,” she says. Kansas’s results in November 2018 were mixed, with Democrat Laura Kelly winning as governor while some Democrats and moderates lost seats in the legislature, where Republicans still control both houses. McKay points to the extremity of the previous administration, led by far-right exGovernor Sam Brownback until early 2018. “Brownback was perfectly happy leaving federal welfare funds unspent while Kansas children were dying,” McKay says. That underfunding plus barriers to enrollment meant the number of families getting food aid and cash assistance plunged while the number of children in Kansas’s privatized foster-care system soared. The state weakened standards for child-welfare investigators, giving 18-year-old high school graduates positions that previously required a bachelor’s of social work. “All this added up to devastating, devastating impacts on children,” she says, describing a grisly series
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of child abuse and neglect cases, where repeated calls from relatives were ignored by overworked and underqualified caseworkers. Extremist policies led to multiple crises— in mental health and school achievement as well as foster care. But the tone has shifted. “We can now begin that repair. We’re helping policymakers see how we can invest in early education and child care now and take it out of criminal justice costs in 20 years,” McKay says. “With the new governor comes a new cabinet, so there are opportunities in staffing, in rules, and regulations—basically we have a chance to plug things back into the wall and get our state functioning again.” McKay points to past victories on child-care funding and tax credits for working families as evidence that bipartisanship can deliver wins for Kansas kids.
Even some states where Republicans retain full control have brighter possibilities for 2019. David Blatt, who runs the Oklahoma Policy Institute, describes Oklahoma’s roller-coaster political year. After the state enacted the most severe cuts to education funding in the nation, their teachers joined educators in West Virginia and Arizona to walk out of schools. Lawmakers then boosted taxes to better fund education. Blatt says, “Of the 19 who opposed the increase, only four will return. The rest were term-limited, retired, or lost.” With that more-moderate group emerging, Blatt says the general election “stopped being about taxes and teachers and started being about [Brett] Kavanaugh and caravans,” helping Republicans retain a trifecta. Despite that, Oklahoma teachers are getting an 18 percent raise and Blatt thinks surviving legislators will be wary of slashing taxes and spending. He also ticked off a litany of solid recent wins on ballot initiatives in the state— criminal justice reform in 2016, medical marijuana in 2018, and defeat of measures backed by Walmart in 2018 and big agribusiness in 2016. Like Dresser and McKay, Blatt rejects blue and red labels for reasonable policy. “There’s a disconnect between partisan affiliation and policy positions that is not unique to Oklahoma voters,” he says, citing minimum-wage increases and health-care expansions that passed this year in deep red states, even where
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Illinois Governor-elect J.B. Pritzker and Lieutenant Governor-elect Juliana Stratton
Republicans won. “On issues, we are a centerleft nation, but in rural and Southern areas, there’s a strong partisan attachment. Voters are very supportive of education, as we saw in the teacher walkouts. The massive cuts to public education had real consequences for conservatives in Oklahoma, who spent the last two years trying to get themselves out of the mess that tax cuts created for them.” But there are big risks to unilateral Republican control. In gerrymandered Ohio, Republicans held onto the governorship and supermajorities in both houses despite winning only 50 percent of state legislative votes. Within two weeks, legislators had held a hearing on a so-called right-to-work bill that would force unions to represent members who don’t pay any fees, passed an extreme version of “stand your ground” (redubbed “kill at will” by opponents) that will increase murders, as it has elsewhere, and passed a six-week abortion ban. If the bills pass in the Senate, they’ll likely be vetoed by outgoing Governor John Kasich. They’re nonetheless a harbinger of what unchecked extremeright leadership brings. A DIFFERENT CONVERSATION
As optimistic as advocates in purple and red states may be, the truth is that investments in families and workers fare better where more
Democrats are in power. While not perfectly correlated, higher minimum wages, more perpupil education spending, more health-care access, lower incarceration, and more progressive taxes tend to cluster in states where Democrats have had more power. There are surprises—Massachusetts, Illinois, and Colorado have flat income taxes that fall more heavily on poor people; Washington, despite the litany of pro-worker policies, still has no income tax. But places led by progressives do more progressive things. And it pays off— education, income, life expectancy, and other measures of well-being are generally higher in places with liberal policies. That’s because higher wages and more public spending leads to better outcomes. A recent study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) demonstrates that austerity is often rooted in racism. As report co-author Michael Mitchell tweeted, “Tax policy has been weaponized throughout history to harm communities of color and prevent progress.” The report describes how underfunding and privatization of public services, supermajority requirements for tax increases, and reliance on regressive sales taxes instead of progressive income taxes have both racist history and racially inequitable results. Fair taxes and strong public services, according to this
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“This is a moment for states to secure what has been lost. … So much damage was done to workers’ ability to stand together,” Walker says. “There is the possibility now to ensure that people earn enough to support their families, have rights on the job, have health care.” “These are not big scary policies,” Walker emphasizes, pointing out that an increased minimum wage has passed every time it’s been on a statewide ballot for the past 22 years. Walker wants EPI and its state partners to build on their traditional focus on workers and the economy. “The debacles on voting highlight the flaws in our election system. We have to remember that voting is a way that working people get closer to controlling their economic destinies.” In an America where moneyed interests more easily dominate when citizen power is limited, fair districts, universal registration, and easy voting are not just prodemocracy, they’re pro-worker.
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Kansas Governor-elect Laura Kelly
account, are not just smart, they are a profound lever for advancing racial justice. The report maps out an approach to taxation that lawmakers should follow throughout the country. That may happen. “A different conversation about revenue and public investment is now possible, and it’s possible in more states and in different kinds of states,” says Nicholas Johnson, who runs CBPP ’s network of state think tanks. Despite the challenges that revenue measures face on the ballot, Johnson’s survey of the platforms of candidates who flipped governorships found almost all called for significant new spending on K-12, pre-K, higher education, infrastructure, and other priorities. Johnson also sees potential to expand Medicaid in more states and protect those that have done so. “Medicaid expansion winning in Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska is jaw-dropping,” Johnson says. “With voters enthusiastically approving this in seemingly conservative places, I think legislators will either pass it or put it on the ballot themselves.” He mentioned Oklahoma, Missouri, and Florida as strong contenders for that. On this point, the confluence of race, region, and legislative control has been particularly acute. About 2.2 million poor adults fall into a “coverage gap” because their states didn’t accept federal Medicaid expansion dollars but
Education, income, and life expectancy are generally higher in places with liberal policies. That’s because higher wages and more public spending lead to better outcomes. they earn too little to qualify for other subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report. All live under Republican rule. Fully 89 percent live south of the Mason-Dixon line. More than half are people of color. COULD WORKERS RISE AGAIN?
Naomi Walker, who directs the Economic Analysis and Research Network out of the Economic Policy Institute, sees more opportunities for state-level worker justice than Americans have had since 2010, when Republicans gained control in many states. “We have a chance not just to get back to where we were but to make advances,” she says. Like others, Walker sees opportunity in states with Republican legislatures. She’s analyzing what governors and attorneys general can do without legislative approval to drive economic justice through executive orders, enforcement, and administrative action, including establishing labor enforcement units within attorney general offices.
Finally, the divided U.S. Congress shifts focus, interest, and possibilities to the states. After two years of Trump’s every tweet dominating the news cycle, it’s appealing to think that instead Americans can contemplate lead abatement and road repair in Michigan, health care in Maine, and wider voter participation in Florida, all galvanized by the 2018 election. America urgently needs policymakers to tackle deep economic divides that almost always track racial fault lines. In states with a progressive agenda ascendant, people will be more able to afford child care, pre-K, and college for their kids. Workers will have new tools to fight for better incomes and benefits. And perhaps most importantly, the point can be reinforced that electing those who defend workers, children, and the planet can improve lives—in every state. Amy Hanauer is the executive director of the research institute Policy Matters Ohio.
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Was Beto the Texas Democrats’ Lone Star?
O’Rourke’s near-victory has them seeing purple— but can they keep turning out more voters and moving Texas leftward when he’s not on the ballot? B Y J U ST I N MI LLER
T
he mood was bittersweet at the El Paso Chihuahuas’ Minor League stadium—just blocks away from the U.S.Mexico border—where thousands of Beto O’Rourke supporters had gathered for their election night party. For an hour or two, it appeared possible that O’Rourke was going to pull off the near-impossible: a Democratic victory in a Texas statewide election. Turnout had spiked all around the state, coming close to 2016 levels. It looked like maybe, just maybe, big urban margins and suburban gains could propel O’Rourke to victory. There was just one problem: Republicans were turning out in a big way, too. And when rural county returns started trickling in, it became clear that Ted Cruz was going back to the Senate. Just two years previous, O’Rourke was a backbench congressman from a dusty border town with no discernible profile in Washington, D.C., much less in the nation at large. Then, he transformed into a political phenom. He barnstormed through all of the state’s 254 counties in a rented Dodge Grand Caravan, live-streaming every stop along the way. He raised an astonishing $80 million, largely from small donors throughout the country, and built a volunteer base of tens of thousands. O’Rourke’s message was at times amorphous and post-partisan. But he refused to triangulate on the issues of criminal justice reform, gun control, and immigration, unlike previous Democrats who had waffled on them in past campaigns and lost nonetheless. The moment that propelled him to national celebrity was
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his answer to a question about whether he supported NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. He did, comparing the protesters to the civil rights activists of the 1960s. Many thought Beto a fool for throwing out the Republican-lite playbook. But O’Rourke lost to Cruz by just 2.6 percentage points, doing better than any statewide Democratic candidate in the past quarter-century. The question is whether he accelerates a trend that is pushing Texas out of the solid red–state column and closer to the purple one. Mitt Romney carried Texas in 2012 by roughly 16 percentage points, while four years later, Donald Trump won it by just under 9 percentage points—a slimmer margin than his Ohio win. For that matter, O’Rourke came a lot closer to victory than ousted red-state Democratic Senate incumbents Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, and Joe Donnelly in Indiana. Political coverage of the Lone Star State tends to frame any liberal wrinkle in the redstate narrative as reason to speculate, “Will Texas Go Blue?”—to the point that it’s difficult to determine what is real and what is hype. But something did change in 2018. Democrats flipped two congressional seats, picked up a dozen state House seats and another two state Senate seats. In the last year of straight-ticket voting, Harris County—home to Houston, the state’s largest city—not only remained firmly blue, but also saw a slate of black women judicial candidates sweep out Republican judges, and a 27-year-old Colombian immigrant who quit her grad school program to
run for office oust a popular moderate Republican from his position as the executive of the third-most populous county in the country. Far less clear, however, is whether the Democratic gains of 2018 are sustainable and signal an actual political realignment—or are just an enigmatic flash in the pan, the residuals of a Democrat hitting his head on a blue ceiling. O’ROURKE WAS A UNIQUELY dynamic can-
didate, capturing crossover voters and helping down-ballot Democrats make inroads in the suburban Republican strongholds surrounding Dallas, Houston, and Austin. O’Rourke even flipped Fort Worth’s Tarrant County, the biggest red county in the country. But it wasn’t all Beto; it was also Trump. The Democratic base, long since lulled to sleep by what looked to be unending Republican rule, was rudely awakened by the new president. As he did across the nation, Trump prompted an unprecedented surge of grassroots Democratic organizing and political mobilization. For the first time in 25 years, Democrats ran in each of the 36 Texas congressional races and mounted candidacies in almost every legislative seat—the odds be damned. The GOP ’s brazen gerrymandering had packed and cracked the state’s Democratic base. Ultra-liberal Austin, a city of nearly one million, has no core congressional representative and instead has been carved into six districts—five controlled by Republicans. In certain parts of town, you can walk just a few blocks and cross through three different congressional districts. Potentially competitive races, accordingly, were few and far between. While they won 43 percent of the vote in 2016, Democrats controlled just 11 of the 36 congressional seats. But those boundaries were drawn in 2011, and by 2018 the Republicans’ hold on some of those districts had severely weakened. The state is now home to five of the country’s 15 largest cities, and the suburban sprawl of new subdivisions is growing like vines on a trellis. Texas Governor Greg Abbott often jokes about building a wall not along the Mexico border, but on the state’s western border to stop inbound California liberals. Suddenly, legions of old white conservative congressmen who had grown complacent in their gerrymandered perches of power were facing strong Democratic challengers backed by grassroots energy and unprecedented sums
BEYOND 2018
n i c k wa g n e r / a u s t i n a m e r i c a n - s tat e s m a n v i a a p i m a g e s
Beto O’Rourke, a backbench congressman from a dusty border town in Texas, ran a dynamic campaign for the U.S. Senate that transformed him into a national political phenomenon.
of money. Texas is usually used by national Democrats as an ATM to withdraw liberal cash for more productive purposes elsewhere. But in this cycle, money stayed put. Democratic candidates were falling over each other trying to convince prospective donors and precinct walkers that they had a shot at winning. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s national strategy to take back the House centered on flipping highly educated aff luent suburbs that had voted for Clinton in 2016—and two of those seats were in Texas. One was held by Pete Sessions, a powerful incumbent who’d long represented North Dallas’s 32nd Congressional District, which is a bastion of country club conservatism (George W. Bush lives in this district). In suburban West Houston’s Seventh Congressional District, also filled with affluent enclaves, voters have elected Republicans since before George H.W. Bush held the seat in the late 1960s. Incumbent John Culber-
son had comfortably held the seat since 2001. Though Clinton would carry Sessions’s district in 2016, Democrats didn’t even field a candidate to challenge him that year. From 2012 to 2016, Culberson’s district saw the largest shift toward the Democrat in presidential voting outside of Utah, but Culberson still beat his underfunded opponent by more than 12 percentage points. Affluent moderates were already allergic to Trump, but their discomfort didn’t yet extend down the ballot. Republicans weren’t just losing their moderates. The districts had also changed dramatically—younger and more diverse families were flocking to new subdivisions in these areas. The Seventh has become 7.5 percent less white since it was drawn, according to Michael Li, a redistricting expert with the Brennan Center. “Those districts just weren’t designed to elect Republicans with that in mind,” Li told me— especially when facing serious challengers and a highly unpopular president’s headwind.
Previously apolitical suburbanites became mobilized and grew into hardcore activists, forming neighborhood Indivisible and Swing Left groups. They protested their congressmen, learned how to canvass neighborhoods and register voters, and filled long-vacant Democratic Party precinct chairs. An army of mostly white suburban women built local party infrastructures in what had been grassroots deserts. They not only made a point of persuading their neighbors in affluent enclaves to vote Democratic, but also worked to expand the electorate outside their own bubbles—and it made all the difference in hotly contested races like the Seventh and the 32nd. Culberson’s challenger, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a partner at a corporate law firm, and Sessions’s opponent, Colin Allred, a former NFL linebacker and Obama administration lawyer, both ran relatively moderate campaigns—focusing on issues like infrastructure in Dallas and flood control in Houston and the
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35
GOP ’s attacks on pre-existing conditions. Both
handily ousted their previously entrenched opponents by more than 5 percentage points. While those were the only two Texas seats Democrats were able to flip in the House, the blue wave washed into all of the state’s suburban districts. Democrats came within five points of victory in five more traditionally safe Republican seats—including three in the Austin metro area, one deep in the Dallas suburbs, and another around the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, one of the most diverse parts of the country. There, Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni built a sophisticated campaign with volunteers who spoke more than a dozen languages, mobilizing a highly diverse and fragmented Asian American population. He lost by 5 percentage points but shaved nearly 10 percentage points off Tea Party incumbent Pete Olson’s 2016 margin. All those seats will likely become top Democratic targets in 2020. The red suburban wall in Texas is eroding
for demographics to become destiny—and privately griping about why Latinos just won’t vote. Such politicians often treat Latinos as onedimensional voters, believing that they would turn out in droves solely because Trump has slandered Mexicans and gone after undocumented immigrants. Cristina Tzintzún, who heads Jolt, an organization focusing on young Latinos, says such reductionism doesn’t work. “It’s not enough to point to the other side and hope we’ll be sufficiently disgusted. That is not enough. That’s not a long-term strategy,” Tzintzún says. The state’s Latino population is far from monolithic. The 19-year-old daughter of a Central American immigrant who lives in Fort Worth is going to have a different political viewpoint than the 55-year-old San Antonian whose family lived in Texas when it was still Mexico. O’Rourke understood that, Tzintzún says. He didn’t just talk to Latino voters (in Spanish as well as English) about immigration, but also
Conservative Texas congressmen, thought safe in gerrymandered seats, were suddenly facing strong Democratic challengers backed by grassroots energy and lots of money. and, if it can’t be rebuilt, that presents an existential threat for the GOP. Try as they may, they can’t gerrymander all the suburbs. Republican John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell’s top lieutenant in the Senate, is up for reelection in 2020 and recently offered a rather candid assessment of the political landscape in his home state: “Texas is no longer, I believe, a reliably red state. We are on the precipice of turning purple, and we’ve got a lot of work to do to keep it red, because we lost, we got blown out in the urban areas. We got beat in the suburbs, which used to be our traditional strongholds. And if it wasn’t for the rural areas of the state where Senator Cruz won handily, [the Senate race] might not have turned out the way it did.” YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT Texas’s political future
without talking about the state’s exploding population of Latino voters. Herein lies the key to the Democratic Party’s path to power in Texas. Or so party operatives have confidently said, while otherwise sitting on their hands waiting
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about health care, education, and veterans’ services. He also ran, of course, as an unabashed champion of immigration and as a defender of the borderlands long portrayed by Republicans as violent wastelands. He made several trips through the Rio Grande Valley, the heavily Latino and deep-blue pocket in the southern tip of Texas, and drew bigger crowds with each stop. For myriad reasons, Texas Latinos are generally understood to be more conservative than in other parts of the country. But O’Rourke carried Latino voters by a 64 percent to 35 percent margin—a 9 percentage-point improvement on the level of 2014 Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis’s Latino support. Turnout rates have been generally abysmal along the border. But O’Rourke at least doubled turnout in the largest border counties over that of the 2014 midterms—and with little to no help from the dilapidated Texas Democratic Party. (Indeed, throughout his campaign, he was essentially scrambling to build a statewide political infrastructure which had long since
ceased to exist.) His campaign focused on likely Democratic voters in Hidalgo County, home to the largest pocket of Valley voters, where the local party has long put most of what money it has into politiqueras, long established “leaders” in Valley politics who charge campaigns money to deliver a certain number of votes. In 2018, however, a fledgling upstart called Cambio Texas tried to fill in the gaps, targeting some of the most unlikely voters in the area—people who had voted just once or twice in any election in the past ten years. They hired on dozens of young Latino organizers to canvass the colonias, some of the most impoverished and lowest-turnout areas in the Rio Grande Valley. Their efforts appear to have worked. While midterm turnout rates generally hover just above 20 percent in Hidalgo, they jumped to more than 40 percent in 2018. Cambio estimates that about 20 percent of the county’s early voters were people on whose doors they knocked. “I believe our impact was pretty substantial,” Ricco Garcia, a young lawyer and co-founder of Cambio, told me. The cobwebs have been cleared from the old voter data and more voters are on the rolls, primed for a big 2020 push. “Without Beto, none of this would have been inspired,” he said. The bigger challenge for organizers like Garcia and Tzintzún is how to build an infrastructure to mobilize Latino voters that’s not tethered to one single candidate or election cycle. Tzintzún is focused exclusively on the two million Texas Latinos who will turn 18 within the next decade. Half of the teenagers turning 18 every day in Texas are Latino, and by 2020, there will be 400,000 more young Latino voters than there were in 2018. Jolt joined a coalition of progressive organizations called the Texas Youth Power Alliance, which said it registered 20 percent of all of the state’s new voters in 2018. They intend to register 300,000 by 2020. “It’s going to be young and diverse voters that change the politics of hate,” Tzintzún says. To create an infrastructure that can mobilize those voters, she emphasizes that the Democratic Party needs to invest in local organizations led by people of color—but she’s not waiting for the DNC or the state party to become this knight in shining armor. “If I wait for them I might be waiting a long time,” she said.
charles a . smith / ap images
BEYOND 2018
FOR TEXAS DEMOCRATS, the path to purple has finally come into focus. Invest in the base—young progressives and communities of color—while getting suburban voters to stick around without selling out the latter. That’s a difficult balancing act for a weak Democratic state party with a penchant for squandering political opportunities—and it’s an open question whether the 2018 election results can be replicated without Beto at the top of the ticket. But the Texas GOP makes that job somewhat easier. Without any general election competition, the party has raced to the right and prioritized culture-war legislation on abortion, transgender bathroom access, K-12 curriculum minutiae, and immigration. In the meantime, the Republicans have neglected basic governing duties. The GOP-controlled legislature has cut state funding of public schools and left local school districts to pick up the tab, which has fueled a crisis of rising property taxes. They’ve refused to expand Medicaid and the attorney general is leading a lawsuit to get rid of Obamacare’s pre-existing condition protections. Nationally, and in those two Texas congressional districts, voters punished the GOP ’s extremism. For most of the 20th century, an uneasy coalition of liberal and conservative Democrats ruled the roost in Texas. That coalition began cracking apart during the realignment of the South in the wake of the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. When John Tower won an upset U.S. Senate race in 1960, he became the first Republican elected to statewide office since Reconstruction. George W. Bush ousted the last Democratic governor, Ann Richards, in 1994 and Democrats lost their last bastion of political power, the Texas House, in 2000. It took decades for Republicans to be able to consolidate a winning coalition that hinged almost exclusively on conservative Anglo voters. The pendulum will not swing to the other side in one or even two cycles—electoral shifts happen in fits and starts. But Trump’s presidency, combined with O’Rourke’s shock to the heart of Texas, could pave the way for a new and equally powerful Democratic coalition.
Justin Miller, a former Prospect writing fellow, covered the midterms for The Texas Observer.
Democratic senatorial candidate Mike Espy with supporters after his loss in a runoff election
A New South Rising: This Time for Real
The midterms made clear that progressive candidates can retake the region with young and minority voters. BY BO B M O S E R
B
y the time Mike Espy took the podium at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, conceding defeat in his U.S. Senate runoff, many observers of this year’s midterms down South had seen quite enough. Like Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida, African Americans who’d come agonizingly close to defeating far-right whites in November, Espy had raised hopes of a symbolically monumental victory over white conservatism
in—of all unlikely places—Mississippi. He’d done something similar years before, as a much younger man, becoming the first black congressman from Mississippi since Reconstruction in 1986. When Espy fell short, with 46 percent of the vote, it was a high-water mark for Mississippi Democrats in the 21st century. But it was still a heartbreaker—the year’s “final moment in a series of demoralizations of black voters in the South,” Vann Newkirk II wrote in The Atlantic. “After a century and change of
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37
waiting,” he added, “the tantalizing defeat on the brink of success is especially bitter.” That Espy’s opponent, recently appointed Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, had been making all the wrong kinds of news by voicing a vague fondness for lynchings and (not so vague) for voter suppression, only made things more bitter yet. So why was Espy up there smiling—convincingly—and calling his campaign “still a historic achievement”? The answer came in his further comments: “We built the largest grassroots organization our state has ever seen in a generation,” he said, quite accurately. “It is not a loss, it’s a movement.” The 65-year-old, a onetime secretary of agriculture in the Clinton Administration who’d emerged from a nearly 25-year political hibernation when longtime GOP Senator Thad Cochran resigned last spring, soon proved that his words weren’t mere political boilerplate: Three days after he lost, Espy filed to
observers. After all, the South had always been dominated by white, race-haunted reactionaries—Democrats from the Civil War to civil rights, and Republicans thereafter. And when the last white Democratic members of Congress from the Deep South were defeated in the midterm landslides of 2010 and 2014, with every legislative chamber in the former Confederacy firmly Republicanized, liberal pundits and strategists loudly insisted that Democrats give up on the region altogether. “Forget about the whole fetid place,” Michael Tomasky wrote in The Daily Beast after Senator Mary Landrieu was trounced in a Louisiana runoff four Decembers ago. “Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.” But the demise of the Blue Dogs did not spell doom for progressive prospects down South. Quite the contrary: What had actually, and helpfully, died was only the Democrats’ antiquated
Something mighty strange was afoot down South.Three unapologetic Deep South liberals rose up to dominate the midterm political buzz alongside new-wave Northern lefties. run against Hyde-Smith again in 2020. Espy, who helped Bill Clinton remold the Democratic Party into a centrist enterprise in the 1980s and 1990s, has always been more of a pragmatist (and opportunist, some would say) than an idealist. He’d never have undertaken a Senate campaign without knowing that the political landscape of the South was changing dramatically. And he wouldn’t be signing up for another run unless he was absolutely convinced that the Democratic near-misses in the marquee 2018 races in Georgia, Florida, and Texas—where white liberal Beto O’Rourke made Ted Cruz sweat his re-election—represented an enduring trend rather than some Trump-era fluke. For a decade and counting, liberal optimists like me have looked at the rapidly changing demographics and culture of the Sun Belt South—down the Atlantic Coast from Virginia to Florida, and along the Gulf to Texas—and predicted the imminent rise of a whole new breed of mostly nonwhite Southern progressives. It seemed like crazy talk to most political
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formula for winning elections in Dixie—the stubborn notion that only white, Clinton-style compromisers could ever hope to carry elections in the region. In the post–civil rights era, the formerly insular Sun Belt South had gradually—and then rapidly—transformed into the most racially and culturally diverse region in the country. But its politics had lagged behind, partly because the Democratic Party still clung to its old Southern stereotypes, convinced despite mounting setbacks that recapturing white Reagan Democrats was still the magic formula for success in a state like Georgia or Texas. Southern progressives saw it differently: Instead of helping Democrats win, the endless chase for crossover conservative white voters had convinced millions of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and young, liberal white folk to sit out elections. “The Democrats couldn’t see our power, even if we did,” says LaTosha Brown, the Atlanta-based co-founder of Black Voters Matter. And so BVM, along with an array of groups dedicated to turning the South’s ris-
ing majority into a political movement—Voto Latino, Texas’s Jolt Initiative, Woke Vote, and Black PAC , to name a few—set out to prove those Democrats wrong. The breakthroughs came quickly. In 2017, Chokwe Antar Lumumba and Randall Woodfin—both young, black, left-wing, and championed by Bernie Sanders—won mayoralties in Mississippi and Alabama’s largest cities, Jackson and Birmingham, respectively. In Virginia’s off-year elections, Democrats nearly erased Republicans’ sizable statehouse majority in one fell swoop—sending the state’s first Latina, socialist, and transgender delegates to Richmond along with a dozen more progressiveminded Dems—and elected 38-year-old Justin Fairfax, a progressive African American, as lieutenant governor and chief executive-inwaiting. But the most eye-opening result was yet to come: In Alabama that December, Democrat Doug Jones upset scandal-scarred Republican Roy Moore in a U.S. Senate runoff, propelled into office by groups like Black Voters Matter, whose organizing led to record black turnout for a non-presidential election. Something mighty strange was afoot down South. And if anybody failed to see it in 2017, they couldn’t miss it in 2018. Seemingly out of nowhere, three unapologetic Deep South liberals—Abrams, Gillum, and O’Rourke—rose up to dominate the midterm political buzz alongside new-wave Northern lefties like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Democrats hadn’t won governorships in Georgia or Florida, or a Senate race in Texas, since the mid-1990s—but this time, with candidates who’d completely thrown away the old centrist playbook, who all sounded far more like a Sanders than a Clinton, they threatened to break the GOP stranglehold right up to election night. Without the voter suppression unleashed in Southern states when the Supreme Court overturned a key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, all three of the South’s new progressive supernovas would likely have won. (And if exfelons had been allowed to vote in Mississippi, Espy would probably have added a fourth victory to the mix.) But the near-misses had forced the GOP to spend precious resources to defend Southern seats the party had long counted on winning easily. And the rising progressive tide
BEYOND 2018
john amis / ap images
Just as Bill Clinton was the old model for a successful Southern Democrat, Stacey Abrams is the standard bearer for the new Southern liberals.
lifted Democrats to surprising victories downballot in federal, state, and local elections. Ten Southern Republicans in the U.S. House were unseated by Democrats, eight of them women. In heavily gerrymandered Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas, Democrats made significant dents in Republican statehouse majorities. Democrats dominated in booming urban areas like Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston; in the last, in just one measure of the sea change, 19 black women ran for judgeships in Houston’s Harris County, and all of them won. Statewide in Texas, under-30 voting increased almost five-fold from 2014—while 64 percent of Latinos, who had given the close to majority of their votes four years ago to Republican Senator John Cornyn, backed O’Rourke. Even the most resolute of Northern Dixiephobes would have a hard time dismissing those outcomes as aberrations. All signs point to a seismic and lasting shift away from white conservative dominance in the large, electoralvote-rich states of the Sun Belt South. Abrams, who’s likely to run for Senate in 2020—a presidential-election year when Democratic turn-
out should go through the roof, courtesy of Trump—summed it up in her own defiantly optimistic Election Night speech to a ballroom full of tearful yet empowered folks in Atlanta: “Tonight,” she said, “we have closed the gap between yesterday and tomorrow.” JUST AS BILL CLINTON WAS the old model for a successful Southern Democrat, Abrams is the standard-bearer for the new Southern liberals. Her political ascendancy was built on something far more substantial than personal charisma. In 2013, as the minority leader of the state House, Abrams founded the New Georgia Project, which aimed to convert a substantial portion of the state’s 800,000 eligiblebut-unregistered voters of color into political stakeholders. While the Democratic Party still viewed the South as America’s eternal bastion of white supremacy, Abrams had a clear vision of the opportunities created by the Sun Belt South’s rising majority. Democrats had lost the South, she said, by failing to “place the same premium on voters of color that we do on white voters.” When she
announced her gubernatorial bid in 2017, after spearheading the effort to register more than 200,000 new voters, Abrams told The Washington Post, “People think I’m not gonna win because they’re still remembering the Georgia of Gone with the Wind, or maybe they’re conflating it with Selma. The reality is that the Georgia that people think they know is not the Georgia that is.” The success of the New Georgia Project— despite constant obstacles put in its way by Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the white nationalist who narrowly defeated Abrams for governor—inspired a small army of new grassroots organizers across the South. Unlike liberals in the rest of the country, for whom Donald Trump’s election was a waking nightmare, these activists saw a fresh opportunity to galvanize the untapped and uninspired progressives who abounded in states like Texas. “Trump unmasked and exposed the persistence of white supremacy in America,” says Cliff Albright, the other co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “People were just in dismay. But we’ve been up against this before. It’s what
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39
we’ve been organizing against our whole lives.” The weakness of Democratic parties in the South had already created an opportunity for new leaders—and a new progressive spirit— to emerge. And as Republican majorities in Southern state capitols turned into supermajorities in the landslides that followed Obama’s victory in 2008, the growing extremism of the increasingly unfettered white right was alienating the increasingly diverse populations of the largest Southern states. As they rejected federally funded Medicaid expansion, passed ever more extreme anti-abortion and anti-gay measures, and gutted public schools and services, the GOP made a widespread backlash inevitable. The main force holding it back was the Democratic Party. “There’s been historic underfunding and under-resourcing of Democratic structures in the South,” says DeJuana Thompson, a Birmingham native who founded Woke Vote, one of several post-2016 efforts to transform millennial Southerners into candidates and voters. “Progressive groups and the Democrats found the time and money to engage folks in California, Ohio, New Hampshire, you name it—but they couldn’t find the same time to engage communities in Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama.” As an organizer for Obama’s winning cam-
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paigns in North Carolina and Florida, Thompson had seen what a dose of loving attention could accomplish in the new South. The Obama campaigns had brought out record numbers of young, black, and Latino voters in those states and Virginia. But when the campaigns ended, so did the organizing—leaving a “void of political capital,” as she puts it. What the South needed was year-round grassroots organizing aimed not at electing particular candidates, but at empowering the disenfranchised—an effort that would take place independent of the Democratic Party. “We had to move away from a model that centers candidates to a model that re-centers voters,” Thompson says. “That’s where we have to be for long-term impact. Politics has long been very transactional and one-sided in communities of color: ‘Let’s help this Democrat win, and then maybe we’ll get something out of it.’ What we’re saying now is: Let’s liberate ourselves with our voting power, and these candidates will benefit from our liberation. And then hold them accountable and make it clear we won’t be there for them in the future if they’re not. Voting has to be a comma, not a period. Election days have to be commas, not periods.” While groups like Woke Vote, Black Voters Matter, and BlackPAC were building black
voting power for the long haul, organizers like Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez of Jolt Initiative and María Teresa Kumar of Voto Latino were doing the same for Latinos in Texas, Florida, and other parts of the South. Nobody expected Democrats to start carrying statewide elections in the near term. But the emergence of supertalented liberals in 2018 accelerated the process. These candidates saw the same untapped potential in Southern voters. And they saw just as clearly why Democrats had been leaving so many potential voters uninspired. “We keep running these races as Lite Republicans on the belief that if we’re just good enough, just nice enough, just acceptable enough—if we don’t say loud enough what we really believe in— that maybe they’ll like us and vote for us,” Gillum told The Washington Post in June. When I spoke to him in August, shortly before he defied the experts and defeated three well-funded white centrists for the gubernatorial nomination in Florida, he elaborated: “But when Republican voters have the choice between the real thing and the fake one, they go with the real one every time. Meanwhile our own voters have no motivation or stimulation to turn out. Why? Because they’re not sure we’re truly for them, either.” “The only way to change that,” Gillum added, “is by not shrinking from who we are and what
l e f t : c h e r i s s m ay / s i pa v i a a p i m a g e s ; r i g h t : s t e v e c a n n o n / a p i m a g e s
DeJuana Thompson (left) founded Woke Vote in an effort to transform millennial Southerners into candidates and voters. In his unsuccessful run for the Florida governor’s seat, Andrew Gillum (right) was one of the super-talented liberal candidates who helped accelerate the process of making Democrats statewide contenders in the South.
BEYOND 2018
we believe as Democrats. Putting our flag in the ground and giving people something to vote for and not just vote against—that’s how we’ll win.” While Abrams and Gillum were giving ’em something to vote for in Georgia and Florida, O’Rourke was turning Texas politics inside out with the same philosophy. Speaking to an NPR reporter this summer, he borrowed a classic line from legendary populist Jim Hightower to explain his approach: “The only thing that you’re going to find in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos,” he said. “You have to tell the people that you want to serve what it is you believe and what you are going to do on their behalf.” This new breed of Southern Democrat is more likely to pick fights with the NRA—as Gillum rather famously did as mayor of Tallahassee—than to don fatigues and round up reporters for a hunting photo-op. They’ll tell you that Medicare for All is a no-brainer, and so is same-sex marriage. They’re bracingly frank about the role that racism has played in stifling progress down South. They don’t have to rattle on forever about “hope and change,” because they embody it. And that’s why they, along with the organizers who nearly lifted them to victory in 2018, are the future for a region so long stuck in its past. IT’S HARD TO THINK OF a time in Ameri-
can history when the politics of a region have evolved so quickly. In 2020, it’s likely that Democrats will compete full-throttle in the five biggest Southern states—with Texas and Georgia joining Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida as battlegrounds. Alabama and Mississippi, with Doug Jones running for reelection and Mike Espy re-engaging Cindy Hyde-Smith, will both have competitive U.S. Senate races, though Democrats face steeper obstacles in those states over the long term. None of this means, of course, that these states will soon be flipping firmly from red to blue—none but Virginia, which now appears to be almost fully flipped. It took 20 years, after all, for Republicans to start sweeping the South in presidential elections post–civil rights. And by turning gerrymandering and voter suppression into dark arts, Southern Republicans have built themselves some powerful fortresses against the encroachment of rising progressive
majorities. In state legislatures, the GOP constructed such formidable majorities over time that it’ll be virtually impossible to erase them in a couple of cycles. In most of the Sun Belt South, they’ll still have the upper hand after 2020 when it’s time for decennial redistricting. And in the other half of the South, which I’ve conveniently failed to mention, the future still looks a lot like the past. States in the “interior South” like Arkansas and Oklahoma have attracted considerably fewer new residents of color, and Democratic victories there will remain fewer and farther between. Politically and culturally, the South is splitting in two. The big five Sun Belt states will come to resemble their increasingly Democraticleaning Western cousins—Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada—while the rest of the former Confederacy forms a solid conservative core in the heartland, joining Prairie states like Nebraska along with Rust Belt states like Ohio and Indi-
rather than places where democracy goes to die? The only thing that could stop these historic transformations from happening over time is a Republican Party that stops looking for ways to hold back the future and radically changes its ways. While a few G OP leaders—Rick Perry in Texas, who signed one of the first state-level DREAM Acts while tamping down his party’s anti-immigrant extremism, and Rick Scott in Florida, who’s assiduously and successfully courted his state’s rising Latino vote—have shown some foresight, their fellow Republicans have painted themselves into an ideological corner that’ll be hard to escape. How do you woo young progressive voters of color while continuing to rely on older whites who’ve become accustomed to far-right governance, and who live in fear of losing the unearned privileges long granted to white Southerners? The urban centers of the Sun Belt won’t stop growing, and becoming more diverse and more
Even the most resolute Northern Dixiephobes would have a hard time dismissing these outcomes as aberrations. All signs point to a seismic and lasting shift in the South. ana. Overall, that’s likely to be good news for Democrats; Texas, for instance, already has twice the electoral votes of Ohio, and is projected to pick up two or three more after the 2020 census while Ohio loses one or two. But while demographics and electoral votes are important, they can’t accurately measure the impact of the emphatic break with history that’s under way in the largest states of the South. What will it mean in Washington, for instance, when Georgia starts sending Stacey Abramses to Congress? (Already, in 2018, guncontrol advocate Lucy McBath was elected to fill Newt Gingrich’s old House seat.) Southern legislators have traditionally formed a bulwark against progressive policymaking—and they’ve kept Congress disproportionately white and conservative while the country’s population gets browner and more center-left. And what will it mean to historically downtrodden and forgotten people of color, not to mention lessprivileged whites, when Austin and Tallahassee and Raleigh become laboratories of democracy
progressive, any time in the foreseeable future. The rural South is as stagnant as the rest of rural America—and increasingly, in a state like Texas, that’s all the Republicans will have. One of the most startling assessments of the new reality that I’ve seen recently came from Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “If Republicans can’t keep Democratic numbers below 60 percent in urban Texas, winning elections is going to be much more difficult going forward.” Let that sink in: Republicans in Texas, the country’s largest Republican redoubt, reduced to cooking up ways to hold the Democratic vote in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio below 60 percent. That, my friends, is not a political shake-up. It’s an earthquake. And the reverberations will be felt for generations to come. Bob Moser is the author of Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority. He reports on politics for Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and other magazines.
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Unlearning the Lessons of Hillbilly Elegy America’s beleaguered poor and working class have a host of problems, but the culture of irresponsibility that J.D. Vance says they’re prey to isn’t one of them. B Y S TAN LEY B. GREENBERG
As the coal economy declined, white Appalachians migrated from stagnant Kentucky towns like Harlan (shown here in 1999) to seek jobs in the industrial Midwest.
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J.D.
m i c h e l l e pat t e r s o n / l e x i n g t o n h e r a l d l e a d e r / a p i m a g e s
Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has been on The New York Times’ bestseller list for nearly two years, and deservedly, given how improbable the author’s odyssey has been. Vance grew up with a drug-addicted mom involved with an untold number of men, in a world of broken marriages, teen pregnancies, alcoholism, violence, mistrust, anger, and fatalism. He owes his life and survival to loving grandparents who taught him to value hard work and education. After he graduated high school, he went into the Marine Corps, then to Ohio State, to Yale for his law degree, and on to Silicon Valley before moving back to Columbus, Ohio, where he wrote this memoir at age 31. The book is powerfully written and poignant—and for a year, I decided to give J.D. Vance a pass. It is important his story be told and respected. The problem is that Vance is wrong about the lessons we should take from his memoir. Liberals, too, are wrong to think they can do penance and better understand the Trump voter if they read the book. And conservatives are most certainly wrong to believe that this powerful personal story confirms their belief that poverty is invariably the result of bad personal choices and immune to any governmental solutions. The book’s cascading errors begin with its failure to appreciate how exceptional Appalachian white history and culture actually are, and how dangerous it is to equate Vance’s hillbillies with today’s white working class. Yet that is the equation Vance makes at the very beginning of his memoir: “You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” Vance’s equation reinforces conservatives’ and President Donald Trump’s mistaken conviction that coal mining and West Virginia are the epicenter of America’s working-class life. The pace of cascading errors grows with the classless and benign history Vance presents, one that erases from the Appalachian landscape the powerful business actors who seized the timber and mineral rights, fought the coal-mining unions, and created an economy of poverty. Outside companies had long since claimed the rights to the timber, the land, and the coal beneath it, rendering the region’s population—all their resources owned by outsiders—dependent on coal companies and shuttled into company towns.
The decline of the coal economy began well before Vance was born. Employment in the coal mines stalled during the Depression and crashed during the 1950s— six decades before the current debate. VANCE’S STORY BEGINS IN Breathitt County, Ken-
tucky, where between 1940 and 1960, one-third of the population left along the Hillbilly Corridor, which took people to Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati, but also to small riverbank industrial cities, like Middletown and Hamilton, that abut the Great Miami River. Wherever they went, the migrants formed Little Kentuckys in the cities and towns of the industrial Midwest—including Middletown, where Vance’s family relocated. But neither Vance’s family nor all the Little Kentuckys typify the Midwestern working class that is the object of so much concern today. They never did. America’s industrial infrastructure was built by and employed mostly Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, along with Protestant immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia, Jews from Russia’s Pale of Settlement, and Chinese and Japanese workers, until the United States enacted Chinese exclusion laws. A more sweeping nativist law effectively ended immigration in 1924. During World War II and the postwar boom, America’s industrial leaders found other sources of new workers, recruiting Southern blacks, Mexicans, and Appalachian whites on a massive scale from the poorest rural areas of North America.
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Vance’s story pretty much ignores the working-class battle to get its share of the pie, and the racial turmoil, riots, and struggle for civil rights that would shape the politics of America’s cities. It bypasses how millions of white workers would enter America’s middle class in the three decades after World War II, as the government invested in their education and subsidized their homeownership. It misses how these workers’ legs were then kicked out from under them by foreign competition, technology, globalization, and trade agreements like NAFTA that undercut American jobs. Indeed, Vance sympathizes with company executives who fought off unions, writing, “I might have done the same.” Remarkably, his account makes no mention of the staggering loss of wealth, homeownership, and wages among working people in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis—which has been America’s dominant reality during Vance’s entire adult life. That is why his story gives you no insight into what is happening with the strug-
Vance’s classless tale erases from the Appalachian landscape the powerful business actors who seized the timber and mineral rights and created an economy of poverty. gling white and nonwhite workers who populate the cities, suburbs, and smaller towns of the Rust Belt. And they are struggling. Working-class families are breaking down, the opioid epidemic is unchecked, the very lifespans of working-class whites are shrinking. But how much of this exceptional American problem is due, as Vance would have it, to the attitudes and culture of the working class itself? And how much is due to the loss of decently paid, secure jobs and the failure of public policy to meet the needs of the modern working family? VANCE SHINES HIS SPOTLIGHT squarely on the destructive culture in families like his—families that are “a hub of misery.” Vance’s grandparents had married as teenagers and settled quickly in Middletown because his grand father got a good job at Armco Steel. That enabled him to own a fairly big house, in a part of the town with neighbors almost exclusively from back home. The hillbillies were looked down on by those neighbors, who were not comfortable with slaughtering chickens, or toting guns quite so openly, or the outbursts of drunken violence. Vance’s grandparents felt guilty about leaving their Kentucky home and routinely visited their extended fam-
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ilies on weekends and holidays. Vance and his grandparents were always more comfortable there than in Ohio. That’s one important difference between the Midwest Appalachian transplants and the other streams of migrants who came north to the cities during World Wars I and II. The blacks who moved to Chicago to flee a segregated South certainly didn’t pine for or return to Mississippi. While extended family ties remained strong for African Americans, the culture of the Black Belt did not have the same kind of ongoing influence on Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland blacks that the culture of rural Kentucky had on the white Appalachian migrants. That was the culture in which Vance was raised. His addict mother had a revolving door of men in her life. She had violent fights with the kids, was taken away handcuffed by the police, and nearly got herself killed in an auto accident. Increasingly, Vance stayed with his grandparents. They demanded he get good grades, help Grandma with her chores, and get a job, and he dutifully worked in a store and warehouse. They believed in hard work and the American dream and made sure the kids had a stable place to live. Vance believes that a loving home accounts for everything good that follows. For Vance, the world he was born into—and from which his grandparents saved him—is “pessimistic” and “socially isolated.” He watched his neighbors abuse food stamps, disability benefits, and Section 8 housing, and he saw few of his friends from the warehouse willing to take more work even when the shifts were offered. “I have known many welfare queens,” he writes, “some were my neighbors, and all were white.” “What goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south,” he continues, is “about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. … Experience can be a difficult teacher, and it taught me that this story of economic insecurity is, at best, incomplete.” Maybe Vance’s hillbillies would not be helped by new and better job opportunities, higher wages, less outsourcing, investment in building infrastructure, expanded child tax credits and income supports, housing vouchers, nutrition programs, unpolluted rivers and air, consumer protections, affordable child care, paid family leave after bearing a child, and universal health insurance. Before we assent to Vance’s indictment, we’d do well to try out such policies. Nonetheless, nearly all the reviews of this powerful book (with the exception of Robert Kuttner’s in the Prospect) were sure it provided some insights for elites who needed a “genteel way” into these working-class communities where Trump had run up the score. Larry Summers
tweeted, “Anyone who wants to understand Trump’s rise or American inequality should read it.” In The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman gave Vance credit for putting the spotlight on family disintegration, addiction, and domestic violence in white working-class communities and showing us how complex is the problem of poverty. Not surprisingly, conservative reviewers loved the book. It bolstered their conviction that almost no public policy can change life’s trajectory. Writing in The Federalist, Mark Hemingway applauded Vance’s refusal “to moralize or pretend there are pat solutions to the problems he and so many other people in his circumstances have faced.” Conservatives applauded Vance’s assertion that “problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most people understand them) really exist.” Conservatives couldn’t have agreed more.
of Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and poor Mexican American neighborhoods of San Jose. And importantly, it would be very different from the thinking and politics in the non-Appalachian, Rust Belt white working-class communities that I would study a decade later. How did it happen that I researched and observed these neighborhoods between 1970 and 1973, when I did the fieldwork that led to my first book? I grew up acutely conscious of race and the battle for civil rights. When my family moved to Washington, D.C., for my father to take a job, we lived in an all-black neighborhood, then a mostly Jewish neighborhood before D.C.
al behrman / ap images
ROTHMAN’S NEW YORKER REVIEW pointed out that
Americans have had this discussion before, debating whether poverty is rooted in culture and norms or a function of economic and social conditions that government can address. In 1965, the Moynihan Report on urban black families set off a debate over whether poverty is determined mainly by culture or by economics, a choice most scholars ultimately rejected, concluding that both factors had “entwined and equal power.” As events would have it, I became a graduate student and professor in the midst of that debate and examined this very question. I conducted surveys and in-depth interviews in five poor neighborhoods, including a poor Appalachian community called Belmont in Hamilton, Ohio, just a few miles down the Great Miami River from Middletown, at about the time one Middletown resident, Vance’s mother, was entering her teenage years. I also conducted similar research in three very different poor—and black—neighborhoods in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, and in a Mexican American neighborhood in San Jose. What I discovered was that Belmont was the only community I studied where a culture of poverty played a major role in explaining attitudes and civic behavior. There is an ascendant “fatalism, personal impotence, limited time perspective, disorganization and apathy that combine to suppress any collective political urge,” I wrote in Politics and Poverty, a book I based on my dissertation. Vance’s description of hillbilly culture was painfully accurate, but it didn’t extend to the other poor communities I studied. It was very different from the dominant culture and attitudes in the poor black neighborhoods
schools were required to integrate. My junior class trip took us by bus across the South to New Orleans, where we witnessed separate water fountains and argued with our tour guide. The summer before going away to college, I worked at a factory with white workers from West Virginia, while blacks were segregated in the shipping department. At night I volunteered at the NAACP office on U Street and watched Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial from the organizing tent. That I ended up as a pollster was hardly foretold. For my senior project as a government major at Miami University in 1967, I conducted a mail survey with undergraduates, and based on that, I was hired the following summer before starting graduate school by MIT Professor Ithiel de Sola Pool to analyze a survey on student housing, using new technology that allowed you to produce cross tabulations on your desktop. Based on that, and even more improbably, I was hired by a pri-
A job at Armco Steel in Middletown, Ohio, was what drew Vance’s grandparents— and many other economic migrants—to the Midwest between 1940 and 1960.
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Fisher Body, and Beckett Paper. Migration had stopped by 1970, as manufacturing employment began to decline. Throughout Belmont, one could hear barely a murmur of politics. Only 12 percent indicated membership in any organization. The Hamilton Journal-News found only one instance where the community had joined together toward a common cause. The only visible organization was “O’Tuck”—Kentuckians in Ohio providing entertainment and relief for flood and mine victims back home—but few residents of Belmont got involved. One of the leaders of O’Tuck said, “What they have is in hand. They don’t try to build up anything.” The mayor was from Kentucky and operated a store in Belmont, though he lived on Hamilton’s richer west side. He may have had a house, but his “home” was in Harlan County. Once he made his fortune, he went back home. On trusting people in the neighborhood, the Belmont residents scored the lowest by far of those in the five communities I surveyed. On the question of whether “the wise person lives for today and lets tomorrow take care of itself,” they scored at least 20 points higher than any other neighborhood. That is why the mayor took for granted how much they suspected him of corruption, and how apathetic they were about it. In San Jose’s Mexican American community, residents were among the most organizationally engaged: 6 percent belonged to three organizations, a level six times that in Belmont. These included mutual benefit societies, electoral organizations, political pressure and civil rights groups, and government-funded advisory groups. One in five belonged to fractious organizations, with very different views of how to relate to the AngloAmerican mainstream. The poor neighborhood of Detroit’s East Side was a more stable community, due partly to Ford’s ongoing presence and its history of recruiting blacks and giving them equal pay to whites. Its organizations and elected leaders were suspicious of the intentions of whites, suspicious of city government and the unions, and looked out for the community’s interests. The East Side was the womb for black political careers, a neighborhood in which three-quarters of the adult population was registered, 45 percent of whom voted in congressional elections and 50 percent in local ones. No other community I studied came close to this level of political participation. The funeral homes, Baptist churches, and indigenous and independent black organizations advocated for black interests, even within the United Auto Workers. That was very different from the Summerhill area of Atlanta, where black organizations and people lent support to the progressive business alliance that helped prod Atlanta to offer a more accommodating response
ap images
Senator Robert F. Kennedy visited Millers Branch School, a one-room school in Breathitt, Kentucky, in April 1968, while on a tour of poverty areas in Appalachia.
vate research firm in Cambridge to lead a project that engaged with the poor themselves in a national evaluation of the War on Poverty for the Office of Economic Opportunity. It included an innovative leadership survey in 100 poor neighborhoods and a survey of the poor themselves in five of them. That ended up as my Harvard PhD thesis and first book. I conducted this research in a period after the urban riots had convulsed most American cities, and I was looking to see whether a more radical, anti-systemic black politics was now dominant, rather than the “culture of poverty” implied in the work of Edward Banfield, Herbert Gans, and James Q. Wilson, all of whom I studied with at Harvard. In fact, I was rooting for a more developed class consciousness, given the half-century of rural impoverishment, mass migration to cities, and industrialization that shaped these communities. All these hypotheses perished before the diversity of political consciousness in these neighborhoods. My hope for a developed class consciousness fared worst of all, as black auto workers thanked Ford for their pay, which was equal to that paid white workers, and Kentuckians thanked Champion Paper for their parks. But the very different consciousness and mostly empowering politics in the black and Mexican American neighborhoods left the culture of poverty theory in disrepute as well. However, that culture was a very large part of the story in Belmont, near where Vance grew up. He just did not realize how exceptional it was. By locating in Belmont, the Kentucky migrants had moved into the neighborhood with some of the lowestpriced housing in Hamilton, where chicken coops were converted into one-room houses. The better houses had enough land for a corn patch. Starting in World War II, the Kentuckians had come for jobs at Champion Paper,
to civil rights than other Southern cities. There were few institutions and no YMCA or political clubs in the neighborhood. Their voter turnout was modest, but residents scored very high on receptivity to politics and their sense of personal efficacy. North Central Philadelphia was characterized by its “frenetic politics,” as I wrote at the time. Fully 22 percent in that poor neighborhood belonged to an organization, the highest in the communities studied. It had vital tenant- and welfare-rights organizations, big churches and church-sponsored social-welfare programs, a large NAACP chapter, and a Model City program. It had strong citywide party electoral organizations that delivered patronage for votes. This poor community had high electoral turnout and scored highest on my receptivity to politics scale. And what of the non-Appalachian white working class? All the cities of the industrial Midwest had been shaped by the influx of Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, Polish, Slavic, and Jewish immigrants. They lived in largely homogenous neighborhoods, usually working their way from the poorest and most crowded inner cities to the inner suburbs. The triumph of the unions in manufacturing after World War II allowed many to climb into the middle class. In Detroit—America’s fourth largest city in the first half of the 20th century—Catholic immigrants from Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Italy, as well as the Slavic states, worked in the auto plants. They were passionately pro-union and after violent strikes, the United Automobile Workers won recognition by the big three auto companies by 1941. In the years between 1970 and 1985, these workers moved heavily to white suburbs, most especially Macomb County, which became home to the “Reagan Democrats.” Poor people from Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia had begun moving to Midwestern cities like Detroit during the hiring frenzy of World War II and kept coming until the early 1960s. Some moved into urban neighborhoods like Briggs and Corktown, which had been home to prior waves of immigrants, while others moved to nearby rural communities like Taylor and Hazel Park, which soon came to be called “Taylortucky” and “Hazeltucky.” There’s abundant contemporaneous evidence that the culture of these Appalachian white communities was not only distinctive but viewed as distinctive by other ethnic and working-class Americans at the time. Their very migration had distinctive roots. Henry Ford had bought coal mines in Appalachia and recruited the Appalachian whites to come to Detroit because they were “safe”—that is, much less likely to join a union. Just as Vance’s grandfather appreciated Armco Steel,
his employer, so in Detroit many Appalachian whites memorialized Henry Ford. And since many viewed their work in Detroit as seasonal or temporary, they were content to accept lower wages and competed with UAW supporters for jobs in Ford’s factories before the UAW unionized the company in 1941. Even thereafter, they resisted putting down roots and continued sending money back to their families in Kentucky. Commentators wrote about the Detroit Southerners (like the Hamilton Southerners) having their trucks jam-packed to head back to Kentucky when their shift ended. In 1934, a Wayne State University survey asked Detroit residents, “What people in Detroit are undesirable?” The respondents ranked “poor Southern whites, hillbillies, etc.” as the second-most undesirable, behind “criminals,” who topped the list. Given Detroit’s fractious black-white history, it’s notable that “Negroes” ranked fourth. Everywhere they resided, the Southerners were marginalized, with others labeling them as
Transplanted Appalachian white communities were not only distinctive but viewed as distinctive by other ethnic and workingclass Americans at the time. “crackers,” “white trash,” “red neck,” and “hillbillies,” terms that created very real “cultural boundaries.” In Briggs and Corktown, neighborhoods within a mile of downtown Detroit, many rented rooms in Victorianera homes that had been converted into rooming houses; others lived in overcrowded basements and garages. About the same time that I was conducting interviews in Hamilton, similar interviews with Detroit residents revealed an Appalachian white community in the 1960s that was clannish and religious. Landlords reported the tenants always having plumbing problems. Residents were seen as “rude” and “violent” and, like blacks, were discriminated against in getting rentals or even being allowed inside bars. A quarter-century later, when John Hartigan interviewed the Southern residents of the Briggs neighborhood in 1992 and 1993, he found “only a meager sense of solidarity” in this white haven. The “hillbillies” were renters in a city where most strived to be homeowners. They struggled to find work and half lived in poverty. “The white underclass in Briggs,” Hartigan wrote, “lives side-by-side with somewhat more financially secure, working-class neighbors.”
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While Vance and his reviewers readily equate “hillbillies” with the white working class, Detroit makes clear that that equation could not be more off-base. I conducted my research with the white working-class “Reagan Democrats” in the Detroit suburb of Macomb County, in the mid-1980s—when Vance was born. The white working class I researched and wrote about believed in hard work being rewarded, taking personal and family responsibility, owning a home with a yard, and being engaged in church, civic groups, and unions. It welcomed government that balanced corporate power with initiatives that gave working people greater security, opportunity, and mobility. The workers there benefited when government was supportive of unions and created a system of social insurance that allowed them to retire with security. The next generation climbed up the social and economic ladder when all had access to education. But some of their certitudes had begun to collapse. In July 1967, Detroit’s inner city erupted into five days
Conservatives wrongly think that Vance’s personal story confirms their belief that poverty is invariably the result of bad choices and immune to governmental solutions. of rioting and looting that took 43 lives and required the National Guard and U.S. paratroopers to reassert order. Detroit was the most segregated metropolitan area in the country, and in 1971, a federal judge ordered the use of school busing to integrate the suburbs. Macomb was the center of the anti-busing protests and organization. George Wallace got 67 percent of the Democratic primary vote in Macomb in 1972 and Reagan won 66 percent of the Macomb vote in 1984 against Walter Mondale, the candidate of organized labor. The world of the unionized Detroit auto workers had begun to crumble. Unemployment rose above 15 percent in Macomb County in March 1981, as the local industry contracted in the face of foreign competition and relocation to the non-union South. Companies demanded givebacks of wages and benefits from the workers in their negotiations with the UAW. As the workers in Macomb saw it, Democrats seemed to care more about blacks in Detroit and protesters on campus, more about equal rights and abortions, than about their ability to pay their mortgages, or for their kids’ future. Robert F. Kennedy, whom I worked for in 1968, advanced a formula to win both black and ethnic Catho-
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lic voters, but the formula died with him—until Bill Clinton, whom I also worked for, resurrected it in his 1992 campaign. Clinton was embraced early by black voters in Detroit and elsewhere in the primary, and nearly won Macomb’s white voters in the general. He attacked the 1980s as a “gilded age of greed, selfishness, irresponsibility, excess, and neglect,” and said, “I want the jetsetters and featherbedders of corporate America to know that if you sell your companies and your workers and your country down the river, you’ll get called on the carpet.” All the while, “millions of decent, ordinary people who worked hard, played by the rules and took responsibility for their own actions were falling behind.” Clinton declared those at the top must pay their fair share of taxes, but also that hardworking Americans were right to be upset about welfare. When Clinton announced his candidacy for president, he promised “to end welfare as we know it.” That meant new work requirements, but also major government initiatives to make work pay, including big investments in education, a higher minimum wage, a greatly expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and health insurance for all. Clinton’s offer was both “responsibility and opportunity,” and that is what both white and black working people wanted and voted for in 1992. Both groups were dealing with the accelerating retrenchment of manufacturing jobs from 1970 to the 1990s. The crisis only deepened after Congress ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and established permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, both supported by Clinton. The United States had lost 1.5 million manufacturing jobs during the decade of the 1980s, when many of these voters turned to Reagan, but in the quarter-century since NAFTA took effect, a further 4.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost, including 182,288 in Michigan. When Macomb County voters were deciding whether to support Barack Obama in the summer of 2008, he never brought up Detroit or black people, and he wasn’t running on “black issues,” as Jesse Jackson had in 1984. My surveys showed that only one-third of Macomb residents thought Obama would put the interests of blacks ahead of other Americans, and only a small minority believed affirmative action and “blacks not taking responsibility” posed a threat to the middle class. By contrast, they were nearly venomous in their critique of corporate CEOs, politicians, and elites of both parties who promoted global trade at the expense of American jobs. By a large majority, they said that “outsourcing of jobs to other countries” and “NAFTA and international trade agreements” were the biggest economic problems. They embraced the message that the middle class today is “threatened by global trade, CEOs
c a r lo s o s o r i o / a p i m a g e s
who care more about their companies than their own country, and politicians who support free trade agreements backed by corporate special interests.” THE FINANCIAL CRISIS OF 2008 and the Great Recession took a huge and enduring toll on working people, black and white, but so did policies that benefited the elites and did little or nothing for working Americans. Bonuses for bailed-out bankers (none of whom went to jail) continued to be paid, while home foreclosures continued unabated. Middle-income Hispanic and black households lost more than 40 percent of their wealth. The new jobs after the crash paid 17 percent less than the ones that had been lost, and median income did not return to its pre-crash level for an entire decade. Today, we worry about the deaths of despair, the suicide rate, the breakdown of marriage, and the spread of drugs throughout much of white working-class America. Middle-size cities and small towns have lost big companies, stores, and new investment. Many white residents in those terrains expressed their anger at the political and economic elites by voting for Donald Trump. When conservatives and Republican leaders think about these abandoned and beleaguered white workers, they see people who have grown dependent on government, for whom the War on Poverty, unemployment and disability benefits, food stamps, housing vouchers, and Medicaid have all failed to address their problems. Paul Ryan has termed these policies a hammock that allows people to comfortably drop out of the labor market. Vance’s book suggests a dysfunctional culture has left these people and communities disabled and our medicine cabinet of governmental remedies empty. The problem with those judgments is that you have to erase a lot of history and a lot of experience with policy outcomes to get there. Working-class families and communities are indeed in trouble, but a lot of factors contributed to it. The culprit was not bad choices. It was not lack of personal responsibility or a government that was clueless about how to get to a better economy and society. We are not powerless to address these ills. With the full Republican takeover of the U.S. government in 2016, however, the GOP got the opportunity to address the problems facing the white working class that had played such a big role in Donald Trump’s victory. In response, Republicans devoted 2018 to building in “work requirements” before the “able-bodied” could receive welfare benefits, food stamps, or be covered by Medicaid. They paid no attention to the evidence that prior imposition of work requirements had no longterm effect on the poverty rate or on people staying in the labor force. They ignored the fact that half of SNAP
recipients worked when they got food stamps and threequarters worked in the year afterward. They ignored that most of the beneficiaries are children. And the reason conservatives have embraced “work requirements” is to keep lower-income and workingclass Americans from becoming indolent—an idiocy, with the cruelest of consequences, they’d learned or relearned from Vance. Is that really all they have to offer working people? What an insult. The Republicans lost dramatically in the anti-Trump wave election of 2018, but most of all, they lost across
the industrial Midwest and Rust Belt, stretching from Pennsylvania to Michigan and Wisconsin to Kansas. Compared with the 2016 vote, Republicans faced some of their biggest losses among white working-class men and women. Working people showed they had wearied of Republicans’ anti-government slogans—and that they didn’t believe that food stamps and Medicaid led to people swinging idly in hammocks. Voters have stripped Republicans of their congressional majority, Paul Ryan has retired to his hammock, and Republicans would do well to unlearn the lessons of Hillbilly Elegy.
Trade agreements like NAFTA undercut American jobs and contributed to the hollowing out of Midwest cities like Detroit. Better government policies could reverse the trend.
Stanley B. Greenberg is a founding partner of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and Democracy Corps, and author of America Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation’s Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems and Leading the 21st Century.
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EPA ROLLBACKS:
Hurting Americans WhereThey Live A look inside the agency’s Midwest office B Y DE RRIC K Z . J AC KS O N
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his fall, the Midwest regional division of the Environmental Protection Agency posted soil-test results from homes located across from metal and mineral storage facilities along the Calumet River in southeast Chicago. Of more than 100 homes sampled, two-thirds had high levels of lead in their yards. Ironically, the EPA was primarily testing not for lead but for manganese dust, a neurotoxin that has been detected in this neighborhood of 20,000 residents, including in 1,700 children five years old and younger. Half of the homes indeed had manganese contamination. In a further irony, the first manganese detection in 2014 came from EPA air monitors sniffing for polution from a petcoke facility. The neighborhood had been plagued with dust storms blowing off piles of this oil-refining byproduct that were several stories high. Community activism and the EPA’s monitoring forced the elimination of the petcoke mountains. But the manganese and now the lead discoveries have community activists gearing up for another chapter in their endless campaign for environmental justice. Activists have been planning meetings to demand that the city come to the community to do free blood testing both because of cost and because it is very difficult to take public transportation to clinics. And they were hardly alone. A very short drive away over the Indiana border, EPA data found illegal levels of lead being spewed into the air by a metals plant. A massive cleanup was already under way for
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major lead soil contamination in the Indiana cities of Whiting and Hammond. “It’s been crazy because people don’t know what to do,” says Gina Ramirez, 35, a thirdgeneration resident of southeast Chicago who serves as community outreach coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “One woman told me she went to get a blood test but she’s uninsured so it took her a while to find a clinic. She had to wait a total of a month not eating anything out of her garden.” Marcelina Pedraza, 43, who lived near the facilities until her daughter was two, now lives a few blocks away and is a lifelong resident of the far South Side. “We’re in a forgotten world,” she tells me. The discovery of lead, she says, is a reminder of how drenched the area is in pollution. “About the only break we got in the smell was sometimes the wind would blow from General Mills so it smelled like Cheerios,” Pedraza says. “When I was a kid, we just accepted it because we were grateful for the jobs it produced.” “My dad worked at the steel mills,” she adds. “But the jobs are gone, the facilities are still dirty and not benefiting the community anymore. We’re more aware that we don’t have to live like this. I tell the tenants, don’t grow anything in the dirt.” Peggy Salazar, the director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, says, “If it’s too dirty for the North Side, it’s too dirty for us,” referring to the much wealthier and much whiter part of Chicago. “It’s time we see what modernization looks like down here.”
But just as residents ramp up calls for environmental justice, a key ally that should be in their corner and delivering the data they need to challenge industry and the government is rapidly shrinking from assistance—the EPA . AT THE AGENCY’S REGION 5 headquarters on the 12th floor of the Ralph Metcalfe Federal Building in downtown Chicago, you could see scientists, investigators, and lawyers swirling from office to office and chatting in the hallways. A conference room was packed for a data training session. The walls were adorned with photos of chemists, investigators, and response staff cleaning up spills, climbing to take measurements, analyzing lab samples, and engaging in community listening sessions. It was not immediately apparent that the EPA was disintegrating from a principled protector of the people to a grotesque guardian of polluting industries. But in this office, which is charged with protecting 338,000 square miles of air and water in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, such a conclusion was unmistakable. Current and recently departed staffers speak in a discordant litany of despair and defiance, pride and bewilderment, candor and fear of retribution. They report that their mission is more difficult to fulfill in the Trump administration than in any previous administration, even when prior presidents were heavily backed by the chemical and fossil fuel industries. “Some of us go back to Anne Gorsuch,” says recently retired Region 5 attorney Sherry Estes, recalling President Ronald Reagan’s first EPA
photos by derrick z. jack son
Homes located across from metal and mineral storage facilities along the Calumet River in East Chicago, Indiana, were found to have high levels of lead according to EPA soil-test results.
administrator, who cut 2,200 of the agency’s 13,000 employees. (She happened to be the mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.) “A lot of us came to the agency in the George W. Bush era, and he was no friend to the environment. We learned to batten down the hatches.” Despite that, she says that for most of her career, Region 5 remained desirable for young attorneys interested in the environment. “We had one position and you’d get 400 resumes. People had to walk on water to get a job.” Today, there are far fewer people at EPA to inspect water, let alone walk on it. The EPA had 17,359 employees during the first term of President Barack Obama. The agency is now at 13,758 employees, according to The Washington Post, the lowest number since 1987. With half of the remaining EPA staff reportedly eligible for retirement over the next five years, attrition alone may help the Trump administration shrink the EPA to fewer than 8,000 employees, the lowest level since the first two years after the agency was created in 1970. In the first year and a half of the Trump administration, the EPA’s offices for enforcement and compliance and for research and development have lost 15.7 percent and 10 percent of their staffs, respectively.
In actual numbers, a Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Freedom of Information Act request revealed that, in the first 19 months of the administration, 73 enforcement and compliance staffers left. Just four new staff members were hired, with two of them having odd résumés. Susan Bodine became assistant administrator, having worked at different times for the EPA and lobbying for heavy polluters. Patrick Traylor became deputy assistant administrator, having been a defense attorney for the Koch brothers. Staff losses at EPA began well before the Trump administration, as Republicans in Congress shrank the EPA’s budget from $10.3 billion in fiscal year 2010 to flat funding of about $8 billion during the last five years of Obama’s presidency. Trump sent agency morale into free-fall by installing Scott Pruitt as his first administrator, the same Pruitt who personally sued the EPA 14 times on behalf of polluting industries. From the outset, Pruitt unabashedly sabotaged the agency’s stated mission “to protect human health and the environment” by severely curtailing the scope of scientific investigations and regulatory enforcement. Pruitt resigned in July under a cloud of ethics scandals. The acting administrator is Andrew
Wheeler, formerly a major coal lobbyist. In September, The New York Times reported that Wheeler is dissolving the top office advising him on the science that guides decisions about proposed health and pollution regulations. The EPA also placed Ruth Etzel, the head of the agency’s Office of Children’s Health, on a mysterious administrative leave. Both offices report directly to Wheeler. “Clearly, this is an attempt to silence voices … to kill civil servants’ input and scientific perspectives on rule-making,” Michael Mikulka, president of Local 704 of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents all of Region 5’s bargaining unit employees, told the Times. It strains the imagination to believe that in a nation with more than 1,300 Superfund sites and 450,000 contaminated “brownfield” sites, an EPA trimmed to less than half its peak of employment can remotely begin to investigate, enforce, and monitor the immense variety of environmental threats under its purview. These range from industrial and transportation air pollution to coal ash and agricultural chemicals in our food supply and common household goods. Staffers say Region 5 is a national epicenter
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of pollution because of the heavy industrialization of the Midwest. That makes it a good place to see exactly how a hollowed-out agency forced to sideline science can ultimately harm the health of American families. TALKING ON THE CONDITION that they spoke
for themselves and not in official capacities, some say they felt pressure to issue permits to companies with less scrutiny. They say that new internal rules have sidelined investigations, with delayed action or no attention at all. “When I started, we had ten inspectors. Now we’re down to three,” says Lilly Simmons, who formerly inspected industrial injection wells to make sure their hazardous wastes don’t pollute groundwater. She remains at EPA in other capacities. “When someone says do more with less, they don’t know how much we already do.” In 2010, Region 5 had about 1,250 staffers.
uary [2018], and none have been replaced. They did the gumshoe work like police detectives.” “These were the people that go out to ask people who live by factories, ‘What did you see?’ ‘What did you do there?’ They talk to people who worked in steel production shops every day and ask, ‘What did you do with the waste pickle liquor?’ and the worker says, ‘Well, I took it out to the back 40.’” “The investigator would ask, ‘Where was it dumped?’ The worker would then draw a circle on an aerial photo and show where the waste had typically been dumped. Without this type of investigative work, we can’t hold companies accountable under Superfund.” Felicia Chase visits homes for water quality, and assisted in the Flint lead water crisis. Now, her division is down two inspectors. She says it means fewer people in the agency like Miguel Del Toral, the Region 5 water
tion’s first year. The EIP report highlighted how 15 major polluting facilities in Region 5 had received notices of violations during the Obama administration, but the Trump administration had at the time of the report announced no enforcement actions against any of them. More recently, a November report by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative found that Region 5 saw a 22 percent drop in both civil enforcement case initiations and conclusions from midyear 2017 to midyear 2018. And it was much worse in other regions covering states in the Southeast, Great Plains, and the Rockies. According to Nicole Cantello, chief union steward for Region 5, cases are already dropping out of sight because the EPA under Pruitt curtailed the independent powers of regional investigators to directly ask potential polluters to provide air, water, or waste data. Now such
Just as residents ramp up calls for environmental justice, a key ally is rapidly shrinking from assistance—the EPA. With the national flat funding, that number began eroding. Since Trump’s election, erosion became exodus. The region lost 120 staffers in the 22 months since the 2016 election, more than doubling the pace of departures of the prior six years. As of August 31, the region was down to 987 employees, according to its union. Echoing what UCS found at the national level, the single-largest category of departures in Region 5 was “environmental protection specialist.” According to the EPA , those specialists “play a central role” in planning and administering programs, including compliance and enforcement. They accounted for about a quarter of the 120 losses, according to records reviewed by UCS. The next two biggest categories were environmental scientists and environmental engineers. The three categories added up to nearly half of departures. It leads one to wonder if the EPA is trying to eliminate every position with “environmental” in its title. “At the start of January 2017, the region had four Superfund civil investigators. Now we have zero,” says Mikulka. “The last one retired in Jan-
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specialist who helped confirm lead in Flint’s drinking water. “With all the hells of Flint, plus East Chicago and so many other places around the nation with water at risk, I’m baffled by all the cuts,” Chase says. “With all the crises we’ve had in recent times, we’re been basically told to stand down. … It’s very difficult when everything you do is devalued and dismissed. We didn’t sign up to do nothing. It’s like the president does not care about this and is sending signals about who he thinks is disposable and who he does not represent.” Although she did not literally repeat President Trump’s famous fecal slur of Haiti and African nations during an immigration meeting last January, Chase ruefully says, “Perhaps he views these places as African countries.” BY ITS LACK OF ACTION in pollution enforcement, the Trump administration certainly seems to have treated huge swaths of America as disposable. The Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) found last February that civil pollution fines and required pollution cleanup costs plummeted in the Trump administra-
requests—especially those that require testing and sampling—must first go to Washington, D.C., for approval. For Chase, the change has been dramatic. Normally, she says, she would issue four to six requests per year to companies for water data, but she has issued none since Trump took office. “It’s the first critical piece to initiate our work,” she says. “We’re the ones who take our own on-site pictures, take our own videos. We see the red flags.” Jesse McGrath, an air-quality expert, recently left the agency for academia to study the relationship of crops to ozone and carbon dioxide. He says it was time to look for a new job when he discovered data discrepancies, incomplete air-quality records, and malfunctioning air monitors in a particular county. When he informed a supervisor of the problems, he says the response of the supervisor was that the prior data was “great.” McGrath says he was not sent back to the county for follow-up. McGrath is only 36. His departure automatically left an older office behind with no one clearly coming up the ranks with the skill to
properly interpret data coming from air monitors—or even to know if they’re working at all. McGrath says Region 5 has historically had some of the best air-quality data in the nation, going back four decades. That data has been critical in determining what is safe for communities abutting polluting facilities. He worries that meticulous scientists will not want to fill his shoes in a demoralized EPA .
the importance of my work in bold print,” she says. “In public, our work is so belittled you can get to the point where you feel your input does not matter. But the fact I knew I had to comfort a white woman to show her how to test the water, it was a human moment. She hugged us before we left. I was really living the true meaning of my agency.” Chase’s colleagues are particularly fearful that the meaning of the agency is at stake
merce mentality” to run DNR and Stepp was his woman. In a 2009 blog, she mocked DNR employees as “unelected bureaucrats” who were “anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes, karner blue butterflies, etc.” Wisconsin’s long history of producing conservationists such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Senator Gaylord Nelson, who founded Earth Day, was turned upside down under Stepp, a climate change skeptic. DNR deleted
THE LOSS OF DATA ANALYSTS like McGrath is
literally a matter of life and death. A 2013 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that air pollution kills 200,000 Americans each year, with the average victim losing a decade of life expectancy. Studies last year published in The New England Journal of Medicine and The Journal of the American Medical Association found that thousands of lives could be saved with relatively minor reductions in the fine particulate matter of soot. Several other studies in recent years have reached similar conclusions. As anyone who followed the Flint water crisis knows, lead and other toxic chemicals in drinking water can cause irreversible loss of cognitive skills in children. Yet in November 2018, the EPA announced the closure of its office that tests chemical safety for children, the same office that in December published research in the American Journal of Public Health that found that low-income people and African Americans are at higher risk of living near air pollution. Chase says the thing that goes most unappreciated after years of political attacks decrying the EPA as a job-killing agency is the passion and culturally sensitive human touch that inspectors and investigators can bring to their job—especially when so many issues of environmental justice impact communities that tend to see government agencies as insensitive. Chase, who is African American, remembers a moment while helping investigate the Flint water crisis when she and a colleague entered the home of a white woman who was five months pregnant. As she recounts, when her colleague, a white male, began to introduce himself and Chase, the pregnant woman said, “Stop! I don’t want to talk with you. Everyone who has told me the water’s safe looks like you.” Chase says she stepped forward to conduct the test. “That put
Christal Martinez and her children live along the Calumet River in a Southeast Chicago neighborhood that backs up against a massive warehouse holding bulk materials and metals. “There’s just too many factories around here,” she says.
because, while Scott Pruitt may be gone, he left many pro-industry appointees in his wake. One is Region 5 Administrator Cathy Stepp. STEPP CAME TO THE TRUMP administration’s
attention due to her six and a half years as secretary of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources under Governor Scott Walker. To environmentalists in the Badger State, she was to the right-wing Walker what Pruitt was to Trump. Walker installed her in 2011 as secretary despite the fact that she had no previous experience advocating on behalf of the environment. She was known for carping about regulations as a state senator and a co-owner of a family home-building business. Walker said he wanted “someone with a chamber-of-com-
from its website the fact that human activity is the main cause of climate change. Financial penalties for improper discharge of wastewater into Wisconsin waterways plummeted. In data obtained by the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation and reported on by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the state collected only $12,057 in wastewater fines in 2015, compared with the ten-year average of $455,407 a year. In overall environmental violation fines, Walker collected $6.4 million in his first four years, less than half the $15.2 million collected in the last four years of prior Governor Jim Doyle, a Democrat. A crowning abdication of Wisconsin’s environmental protection was the announcement last year that electronics behemoth Foxconn would build a factory complex in southeast
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Mountains of petcoke once were found along the Calumet River next to this facility (red structure) controlled by Koch Industries. Community activism put a stop to it.
Wisconsin that reportedly will have the footprint of 11 football stadiums. Ranked 25th in the Fortune Global 500 for revenue, the contract maker of smartphones, tablets, screens, and videogame consoles for top brands such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, HewlettPackard, Sony, and Nintendo was lured to the state to make liquid-crystal display (LCD) panels with $4 billion in state, county, and local taxpayer incentives. The state sealed the deal by waiving every environmental regulation it could. Despite the fact that LCD manufacturing usually involves toxic heavy metals, Foxconn was excused from wetlands discharge rules and from making environmental impact statements, and is being allowed to alter navigable streams and divert seven million gallons of water a day from Lake Michigan. Tia Nelson, daughter of Gaylord Nelson and former executive secretary of Wisconsin’s board of commissioners for public lands, says Walker and Stepp “singlehandedly destroyed decades of bipartisan tradition of protecting our environment. Cathy essentially destroyed the science division of DNR .” In her first year as Region 5 administrator, Stepp has made her office something of a dead zone itself, assuming an extremely low profile when Pruitt and Wheeler have more
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publicly undertaken industry’s dirty work. She said nothing in the spring when Pruitt himself waived federal smog limits for the Foxconn plant, nor did she or any regional administrator speak up when Wheeler canned his top national advisers for science and children’s health. THE FAMILIES THAT LIVE in the crosshairs,
crosswinds, and cursed waters of pollution need more than a mouthpiece in their regional EPA . With the EPA’s top leadership in Washington being so openly hostile to the agency’s mission, and state environmental agencies either financially strapped or prisoners of conservative anti-regulation politics, it is reasonable to assume that untold communities, particularly working-class and low-income neighborhoods in close proximity to industrial manufacturing, refining, shipping, and storage, are likely to suffer reversals of many hard-won environmental justice victories. Southeast Chicago is as much at risk as any community in America. When I visited earlier this year, I met Christal Martinez with her twoyear-old son Feliz and four-year-old daughter Julee whirling about her legs on the sidewalk. She stopped for a moment before dropping off her children with their grandma. A half-block behind Martinez was a foreboding sight. Unlike a suburban block that ends in a cul-
de-sac or a typical urban scene where rows of parked cars and trees stretch up the street, this neighborhood was starkly walled off by a massive warehouse holding bulk materials and metals storage along the Calumet River. “There’s just too many factories around here,” says Martinez, 28, a child-care provider. “My mom used to go to the meetings to complain about the dirt and dust. One company used to give us free car washes. Another replaced windows in homes.” “They say it’s better, but on some days, there’s still dirt and dust. There’s still piles of salt that blow around. A lot of people are sick around here. My daughter has asthma. I have an uncle with asthma. People complain that their skin gets irritated.” And that’s after three decades of community activism by groups such as the Southeast Environmental Task Force, which has promoted more green space in the neighborhood and opposed incinerators, landfills, a police shooting range, and even an airport. A symbol of recovery of the area’s remaining wetlands and woods is the return of nesting bald eagles. On windy days before the removal of the petcoke, clouds of black dust so smothered Martinez’s yard that it dulled the brilliance of her mother’s flowers. “You could see the dust flying off the mounds
like little tornadoes,” says Dave Diaz, 50. “In the summer, no matter how hot it got, we kept the windows closed.” Josie Gonzalez, a 44-year-old hair stylist, says, “On real windy days, it still got inside the windows. You’d wipe your dining room table and the next day, it was black again.” The elimination of the petcoke came significantly with the aid of the EPA , as the agency’s regional air experts had the data to debunk corporate intransigence. For instance, one of the companies that stored the petcoke is a subsidiary of Koch Industries. That company commissioned a study by Michael Dourson, then of the University of Cincinnati, whom environmentalists consider a hatchet man for the chemical industry. He concluded in 2016 that the petcoke dust in the region was “well below” harmful levels. To the contrary, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, based on
it’s because you’re breathing in something bad.” The discovery of manganese dust, and now the lead in the soil, reaffirms the need for full vigilance. The manganese came from the S.H. Bell Company. That Pittsburgh-based bulk material storage and metals-handling company, which has several terminals in the Midwest and along the East Coast, is notorious for manganese dust. “It was true science detective work and shows how research stacks up,” Cantello said. “If we hadn’t issued the letter for the air monitors to measure particulates, we never would have found the manganese.” Manganese is commonly used to fortify steel and, in small doses as part of a healthy diet of whole grains, is an important mineral nutrient promoting bone development. But it is a heavy metal neurotoxin if inhaled as dust in unsafe amounts. Evidence of the probable harm has been
Haynes told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “but we are just starting to understand manganese.” Earlier this year, after nearly a decade of data screaming for remediation, and despite 14 months of delay by the Trump administration, the EPA announced a final decree with S.H. Bell in East Liverpool to control dust and monitor emissions. Will such remediation reach back to the industry-heavy neighborhoods of Chicago and to mothers of young children like Martinez? Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are currently studying manganese exposure in child toenail samples. In December, Chicago public television reported that preliminary results show higher exposure in southeast Chicago than elsewhere in the city. No one yet knows what that exposure means, especially when the EPA is an increasingly shaky partner in science and has its own
The elimination of the petcoke came with The aid of EPA experts who had the data to debunk corporate intransigence. monitoring from the EPA , concluded that the dust blown from the petcoke piles “adversely impacts air quality in the community,” to the point of being an “acute and chronic health threat” to children and the elderly on poor air-quality days. The critical importance of EPA science was magnified even more last year when Trump attempted to nominate Dourson to run the EPA’s chemical safety division. The outcry over his blind eye to pollution was so intense that it even eroded support from key Republican senators. Dourson withdrew his name. IT DOES NOT TAKE MUCH to imagine what would have happened in neighborhoods like Martinez’s without strong EPA enforcement. Her boyfriend, Alejandro Gonzales, 30, who once did a college paper on lead exposure in East Chicago, says, “You can’t put up a fence or sign that says, ‘Dirt, get out!’ There’s no asterisk on the street signs or red flags you can put up warning you that you should have health concerns. When you sniffle, you don’t know if you just have sinuses or allergies or if
found in the vicinity of another massive S.H. Bell facility in East Liverpool, Ohio, along the Ohio River. That town was once known as the pottery capital of America. But with a current population of just 11,000, compared with 26,000 in the 1970s, East Liverpool has been in the national news for industrial pollution. On top of manganese, another company chronically releases illegal levels of pollutants in toxic waste incineration. Local environmental justice advocate Alonzo Spencer told The Columbus Dispatch in 2015 that people in the area live in a “sacrifice zone.” Bell’s contribution to the pollution, according to the EPA during the Obama administration, was “the highest levels of ambient manganese concentrations in the United States.” Until very recently, most prior knowledge about airborne manganese risk came from industrial workplace studies. In 2015, federal researchers found that people who lived in East Liverpool had more hand tremors, posture instability, and lower scores for immediate memory than residents of a control town. “Lead impacts are very clear,” lead author Erin
staff in Region 5 gasping for professional air. Whereas in East Liverpool, the Trump EPA was essentially forced to issue a consent decree to S.H. Bell, the city of Chicago took no chances waiting on a federal solution for the southeast side of town. In December 2017, it announced stringent regulations to ban outdoor storage of manganese and to suspend loading and unloading during high winds. “While President Trump and EPA Administrator Pruitt cut funding and appoint regional administrators with track records of environmental ambivalence, Chicago continues to step up,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a press release. But how long will it be until the EPA once again steps up for mothers like Christal Martinez and her two children? Derrick Z. Jackson is a Fellow at the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He is a 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a 2018 winner in online commentary from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
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REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS AT RISK With or Without Roe
In much of the country, access to abortion has already been blocked by state governments, especially for women in poverty. And if Roe goes, access will be scarcer still. BY KALE NA T HO M HAV E
R
ecent discussions of abortion rights have been understandably chockfull of apocalyptic imagery and language. Some protesters at the U.S. Capitol in the Trump era have dressed as handmaids à la The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s story of an ultra-conservative totalitarian government that compels women to have the children of the wealthy and powerful. After Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, many—on both the left and right—assumed that Roe v. Wade was soon to fall. “Roe v. Wade is doomed,” CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin pronounced last June to much media fanfare. But is the apocalypse that will befall us if Roe is overturned the only thing we should be focusing on? Or are we already there in many parts of the country, where access to abortion has been heavily curtailed? The dark forecasts may certainly be borne out. The future of abortion rights hangs in the balance of a thoroughly unbalanced Supreme Court. The Court will have many opportunities in the coming years to hand down a decision reversing the protections of Roe—or quietly continue to allow states to strike blows to abortion access at the state level. And yet, advances in technology and medication hold promise for an entirely different future of abortion, one that does not call up visions of totalitarian governments and the nightmare ways women were (and are) forced to end their
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pregnancies. Medication abortion, abortion by telemedicine, and even over-the-counter abortion could be options in a different, yet not-toodistant version of the United States. Currently, though, we’re closer to the nightmare. Indeed, many American women have already been living it. ACROSS THE COUNTRY, states have passed
an unprecedented number of abortion restrictions—more than 400—just since 2010. Without making it completely illegal to get an abortion, these restrictions make getting one as difficult as possible. They may also give us a glimpse of what abortion could look like in the near future. Many lawyers contend that an outright rejection of Roe is unlikely. (Some even argue that if Roe is struck down, the right would lose a major rallying point.) Instead, they say, the Court will slowly chip away at abortion protections, allowing states to further limit abortion within their jurisdictions, provoking less of a national outcry. After all, this is what’s been happening in a number of states. Abortion law nationwide is a patchwork of policies and procedures, many designed to put up more obstacles to abortion under the façade of protecting women’s health. That does not mean that the fear for Roe is misplaced. On the contrary, it means that things could soon be getting a lot worse for everyone. If Roe falls, what is already perilous would
metastasize. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, about half of states have “anti-choice” legislatures that would likely pass abortion bans or severe restrictions if the Court reversed Roe. And in four states, abortion would automatically become illegal, due to trigger bans designed to ban abortion if Roe is overturned. But in 18 others, other laws on the books would also immediately threaten the right to an abortion. Only nine states have protected the right to an abortion in their constitutions. And if Roe remains, the future will almost certainly still get bleaker, just more quietly. It’s difficult to fully grasp the scope and severity of each targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) law and other regulations designed to limit abortions. A steady stream of restrictions have continually descended from statehouses, among them laws that require abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges or even specified hallway widths in their clinics. Other restrictions have subjected women to waiting periods, counseling, and multiple trips to the abortion provider. “What’s really important to emphasize is that even if Roe isn’t actually overturned, the right to access abortion—which is what the decision stands for—can be so severely undermined that access for many, many, many people will be nearly eliminated,” says Julie Rikelman, senior litigation director at the Center for Reproductive Rights. A number of federal court cases that could
map data source: center for reproduc tive rights; gut tmacher institute; jen vill avicencio
be put in front of the Supreme Court offer an opportunity to overturn Roe, but they also offer opportunities to further limit abortion by allowing TRAP laws to be embedded even further into the reproductive landscape of the U.S. “Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t take the step of actually overruling Roe,” says Rikelman, “it can uphold one of the many restrictions that are already out there and essentially signal to the states that it’s going to uphold pretty much every restriction.” The number of those restrictions continues to grow. The midterm elections saw two states pass ballot initiatives that threaten or could one day wholly eliminate abortion access. Alabama voters passed a constitutional amendment saying that the state recognizes and supports “the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, most importantly the right to life in all manners and measures appropriate and lawful.” Right now, the messaging is mostly symbolic, but if Roe falls, the amendment could pave the way for Alabama to outlaw abortion. In West Virginia, voters ended the state Medicaid program’s coverage of abortions. That leaves just 15 states that provide Medicaid funding for the procedure. Due to the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976, federal funding cannot cover abortions. This November, just after the midterms, the Ohio legislature enacted a measure that would criminalize abortion providers who perform an abortion if a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Since it’s at roughly six weeks that a heartbeat can first be detected, this would effectively ban the procedure, as most women don’t even know they’re pregnant after just six weeks. This law, the sponsors said, was specifically designed to reach the Supreme Court and challenge Roe— but it could also pave the way for states to ban abortion earlier and earlier. “IN THEORY, ABORTION is legal,” says Stepha-
nie Ho, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health and a family physician and abortion provider in Arkansas—one of three abortion doctors in the state. “But it’s not accessible.” This past summer, Arkansas implemented a TRAP law that would have banned medication abortion if the medication abortion provider does not have a contract with an OB-GYN with admitting privileges at a hospital. Medication
Safe States? With the growing threat to abortion rights, the divide between states that actively attack access to reproductive care and those that protect it is becoming starker. Especially in regions most at risk of adopting anti-choice laws, living within driving distance of a state line could make a dramatic difference. Some of these possible “safe states” aren’t entirely protective of abortion, but they could represent the best chance that a person in the region can obtain care—if, of course, they’re able to travel. COLORADO lies in the center of a host of states hostile to abortion rights. Women in states like Utah, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas could travel here to receive their abortions.
ILLINOIS has already been seeing out-of-state residents travel to the state for their abortions. In 2017, more than 5,500 people crossed state lines into Illinois for an abortion procedure. If restrictions multiply in surrounding states, this trend would likely continue (and snowball).
WEST COAST: California, Oregon, and Washington all protect the right to an abortion. People in states such as Idaho, Utah, and Arizona could travel here. But like the Northeast, about 40 percent of clinics in the West only offer medication abortion.
■ HIGH RISK: States where abortion rights
are severely threatened if Roe is overturned.
■ MEDIUM RISK: somewhat threatened ■ LOW RISK: less threatened
NORTHEAST:
FLORIDA is friendlier to abortion than most other Southern states—it protects the right to an abortion in the state constitution—but the legislature is still largely anti-choice.
abortions, a much easier alternative to surgical abortions, are induced by ingesting one or two pills, triggering a process that “with the exception of how the process starts, is completely indistinguishable from a miscarriage,” says Ho. Generally, these pills are only able to be administered up until ten weeks into the pregnancy. After about ten weeks, a surgical abortion is necessary. The Arkansas law was in operation for two and a half weeks before a court put it on hold by granting a stay. But during that time period, Ho had to turn away more than 40 patients who were scheduled for medication abortions. If patients wanted a medication abortion, they had to travel across state lines, typically to Oklahoma. Ho’s clinic also helped patients navigate where to obtain a surgical abortion. One patient who’d had a medication abortion scheduled when the law was in effect, but went over the maximum ten weeks for medication abortion before the stay was granted, told Ho that she wouldn’t be able to do the surgery. The
Most states in the Northeast protect the right to have an abortion, but four in 10 clinics only facilitate medication abortion, which would be a problem for those who are further along in their pregnancies.
patient told Ho, “I guess I’m having a baby.” “The state of Arkansas forced her into having a child when she wasn’t financially capable to do so,” Ho says. While the law is in legal limbo, the Fayetteville Planned Parenthood facility where Ho works is still looking for a contracting physician to meet the terms of the law. It’s difficult to find one because some of the OB-GYNs in the state work for religious hospitals that don’t perform abortions; others “didn’t want the stigma of being associated with Planned Parenthood,” says Ho. Another restriction in Arkansas mandates abortion providers to tell patients falsehoods about their abortion. “I’m required to tell my patients that it’s possible to reverse their medication abortion, even though there is absolutely no credible evidence that supports that,” Ho says. “[The state is] using my mouth to tell their lies.” Some of Arkansas’s other restrictions include a 48-hour waiting period after the mandated counseling (“I have never met a patient who hadn’t already been contemplating her deci-
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57
“Abortion Deserts”
Restricting Abortion Access in Texas
DISTANCE TO THE CLOSEST ABORTION PROVIDER, IN MILES
NUMBER OF ABORTION CLINICS, BEFORE AND AFTER HB2 In 2013, Texas enacted House Bill 2, a TRAP law that required abortion clinics to secure admitting privileges at hospitals. As a result of the law, more than half of Texas’s 42 clinics were forced to close. 1
1
DISTANCE TO FACILITY
25.0 37.5
Many people have to travel hundreds of miles to reach a facility. The worst areas for abortion access are in the South and the Midwest.
45.0 50.0 62.5 87.5 100 >100
1 4
2013 (BEFORE HB2)
58 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG WINTER 2019
1 1 1
8
1
2 3
1
1
1 3 3
11
In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down the restrictions of HB2. But as of yet, only three clinics that were affected by HB2 have reopened.
The state-based restrictions mean that if sion for days or weeks,” says Ho) and parental consent before a minor can have an abortion. Roe were to fall or be weakened, the distancTwo other restrictive laws are currently stayed: es women might have to travel would greatly one giving the father of the fetus the right to increase. Ho’s clinic made referrals to clinics in sue the abortion provider, the other requiring Missouri and Oklahoma, but those states also that the fetal tissue be preserved. have strict abortion restrictions. Oklahoma “It’s important to think about all the differ- requires a waiting period, which likely means ent restrictions together. The reason that so hotel stays in a distant city. Missouri has only many people have so little access to abortion one abortion clinic in the entire state. is that barriers on top of barIf the number of states effecriers pile up,” Rikelman notes. tively curtailing abortion con“[Some states] don’t just have tinues to mount, those regions one abortion restriction, they and states with fewer abortion restrictions may see an influx of have many abortion restrictions. And they’re passing more every people traveling across state lines year.” A handful of states have to access services. In fact, this is already happening. In 2017, 20 or more abortion restrictions. more than 5,500 women travThese restrictions not only elled to Illinois from out of state build on each other, but they creNumber of obtain an abortion. If Arkanate geographic, financial, and states with just to sas’s medication abortion law is other barriers to people seeking one abortion upheld by the courts and other abortions. facility restrictions are implemented A recent study from Advancin Oklahoma and Missouri, an ing New Standards in ReproducArkansas woman seeking the procedure would tive Health, a research group at the University of need to travel all the way to Illinois. California at San Francisco, mapped access to abortion clinics discoverable by online searches. But not everyone can travel to access an aborThey found 27 “abortion deserts” in the United tion—particularly low-income people who can’t States, urban centers where people must travel afford to travel or to miss work. In 2014, three more than 100 miles to reach a clinic that pro- in four women who obtained abortions had vides abortions—and these are urban areas; low incomes. And as pervasive differences in rural access can be much worse. Rapid City, health-care access and income persist for people South Dakota, was the urban center farthest of color, people who don’t ascribe to the genfrom an abortion clinic, at 318 miles. der binary, and transgender people, it is much
6
2018 (AFTER HB2)
1
8
0.0 12.5
3 4
1 1
5
1
more difficult for these marginalized groups, too, to access abortion. “Every woman falls on the spectrum [of marginalization] in a different way and therefore their access is impacted in a different way,” Jen Villavicencio, an abortion provider in Michigan, says. “A wealthy white woman in Ann Arbor has very different access issues than a woman of color living in the rural Upper Peninsula [of Michigan].” Abortion restrictions, says Ho, are “essentially perpetuating poverty—you’re forcing women who know they’re not in a position to take care of a child … to give birth.” ONE OF JULIA MCDONALD’S favorite parts about working at Maine’s northernmost abortion clinic is driving through what she calls “the most beautiful woods in the country” to get to the clinic in Bangor. In the fall, she passes “autumn leaves in all their glory.” McDonald, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, is a full-spectrum family-medicine doctor who provides outpatient care to babies, children, and adults, and who also provides abortion services at two independent health centers, one in Augusta and one in Bangor. “The main challenge we face in Maine has to do with geography.” Maine, McDonald points out, is one of the least densely populated states in the country. “We have a lot of woods and a lot of roads,” she says, “and not a ton of people in population centers.” The state’s three abortion clinics are all located in the southern and central
te x a s map data source: jane’s due process; the te x a s tribune
2
abortion desert map source: a.f. cartwright, m. k arunaratne, j. barr-walker, n.e. johns, u.d. upadhyay: identifying national availability of abortion care and distance from major u.s. cities: systematic online search; j med internet res 2018 ; 20 ( 5 ):e 186 . doi: 10 . 2196 /jmir. 9717 ; map created by ian matthews / redivis
parts of the state. McDonald says that most of her patients come from outlying towns, driving long distances to access all the necessities for reproductive care: ultrasounds, blood work, lab work. Even more problematic, the farther from the population centers, the poorer the towns get. So abortion access isn’t so easy even in states like Maine that have few abortion restrictions. Maine is one of the nine states that have the right to an abortion as a statutory protection should Roe fall. In every state, the access problem is compounded not only by the closures of abortion clinics, but also by the shuttering of obstetrics wings of hospitals or entire hospitals in rural areas. Over the past several years, a growing number of rural hospitals have closed due to financial troubles—fewer physicians, fewer patients, fewer patients who can pay, particularly in states that didn’t expand Medicaid. These clinics and hospitals have been disproportionately closing in the South and the Midwest—where, of course, the most abortion restrictions are concentrated. Despite those closures, there are still far more hospitals in the United States (roughly 5,500) than there are abortion clinics (800). But only 4 percent of abortions are performed in hospitals. “Because of how abortion is restricted in this country, abortion care has been very much siloed away from the traditional health-care system [and into] free-standing clinics,” says Sanithia Williams, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health and a family planning fellow and abortion provider at the University of California at San Francisco. “And just because of the logistics of [operating clinics], those are most often located in urban areas and larger cities.” Weaving abortion into the traditional health-care system would not only reduce the stigma attached to abortions—normalizing what is already a normal and common procedure—but would also make it easier for those in rural areas to access abortion. In an ideal future, says Villavicencio, “there won’t be abortion providers. There will be healthcare providers. … It will become part of the typical reproductive health care that we offer. “[Other doctors] don’t say, ‘I’m a colonoscopy doctor!’ Or ‘I do wisdom teeth only!’” An abortion procedure could be considered
as common as giving birth. In rural Alaska, because medical clinics are so spread out, people can access transportation subsidies and stay in state-funded housing when they travel to give birth. What if this were replicated in other states across the U.S.—and what if it was replicated for abortion care too? THOUGH ACCESS TO ABORTION is increasing-
ly challenging, there have been grassroots efforts to make paying for the procedure easier for lowincome people. Sometimes, access requires helping women meet the cost of the actual medical service and the costs of missing work or needing child care (the majority of women who get abortions already have children). “Roe has never been a promise for abortion access due to cost, geography, and insurance,” says Yamani Hernandez, executive director Each figure = 100 doctors
35,500
Approximate number of OB-GYNs in the U.S.
1,700
Approximate number of abortion providers in the U.S.
of the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), a network of about 70 autonomous funds across the country. Abortion funds “exist to help make [abortion] access a reality,” not only by helping people in need of abortions pay for the procedure, but also, when possible, assisting with the costs of child care and lodging, even providing home stays. But abortion funds are invariably unable to meet all their financial demands. In 2017, abortion funds within NNAF received calls from approximately 150,000 pregnant women seeking help with paying for their abortions, Hernandez says. Yet those funds were able to support just over one in six of those callers—28,000. One of the funds in the network is the West Fund located in El Paso, Texas. The West Fund was created in 2013 during the debate surrounding Texas’s infamous HB2 law, which required abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges, and which resulted in the closure of more than half of Texas’s abortion clinics. (The Supreme Court overturned HB2 in 2016, but most of the clinics that were forced to close have not reopened.) Between 2014 and 2016, the number of abortions performed in Texas declined by about 14 percent. Callers seeking help leave a message for West Fund volunteers, who then determine how much the caller needs and how much West Fund can help. Many funds have strict eligibility requirements, but the West Fund has few—people just need to have their abortion appointment scheduled and be in the greater West Texas region. After a patient’s appointment, West Fund sends money covering part of the abortion directly to the clinic. The group doesn’t yet offer support for things like travel costs and child care, but it’s raising funds in hopes of doing that. The organization typically funds about 30 people a month, with its subsidies generally ranging from $25 to $150. In October, however, the fund had to increase its budget because it received more requests than average, and two that Alexis Akle, West Fund’s helpline manager, termed “extreme situations” that required more funding than usual. “It doesn’t matter [why] you’re deciding to get an abortion. We will never ask why,” says Akle. “We will just give you the money
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59
and try to help you as much as we can.” The fund has even been able to fund people from Ciudad Juárez, across the border in Mexico. Akle points out that El Paso, one of the poorest cities in the country, not only provides inadequate access to abortion, but also limited access to sex education and health care. “We don’t have access to the simplest things,” she says, and as a result, “we have a lot of people falling through the cracks of this system.” The clinic that the West Fund works with is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico— roughly a four-hour drive from El Paso. Other, closer clinics that the West Fund had worked with have closed. (Planned Parenthood just reopened in El Paso after having been closed for about a decade, and soon should be offering abortion services.)
States already are receiving “telemedicine” and “distance medicine.” Video conferencing with doctors and other technology is a way to “bring excellent and safe patient care closer to patients’ doorsteps who live far away [from urban centers], rather than requiring them to drive into cities,” says McDonald. There are a number of ways to safely have a medication abortion—and the very simplicity of inducing abortion through medication provides opportunities for abortion to be administered remotely. A clinician—not even a physician—could simply supervise the process through a video conference, which is already how some people in rural communities get abortions (though currently, 19 states mandate that a clinician be physically present to administer the procedure). But a physician or clinician may not even be necessary for medication abortion. “We need THE EMPHASIS ON Roe is completely understandable, but it’s insufficient when so many to get away from the medicalization of aborwomen currently don’t have access. More- tion care,” says McLemore, citing the research over, Roe may not be central to the alternative on the safety of self-managed abortion, which is also growing in popularity. Canada recently futures some abortion advocates imagine. “[Roe] is not the best we could have done,” approved an abortion pill that people can pick says Monica McLemore, an assistant professor up at the pharmacy with a prescription. They in the Family Health Care Nursing Depart- must meet with the prescribing clinician, but ment at the University of California at San can take the drug at home. McLemore believes that due to its safety, the aborFrancisco, as the ruling clearly tion pill should be available over does not have the teeth to ensure the counter. that anyone who wants an aborIn some countries, people tion can receive one. “Let’s say have long been able to discreetall our progressive fantasies ly receive medication abortion come true—what are we ready pills in the mail—and adminto ask for?” ister the abortion themselves Advances in medicine and Number of technology may provide alternawithout the presence of a doctor. abortion tives to the chilling possibility of An academic study of women in restrictions curtailing legal abortions, and Ireland who used a service that enacted since the realities already impeding provides pills found that “outRoe v. Wade comes compare favorably with them. And medication abortion, [those] in clinic protocols.” The the type of abortion that Arkanphysician who started the service fills the presas tried to limit, would likely play a big role in scriptions herself, and the service generally the ultimate progressive fantasy. “I think that the future for abortion provi- sends the pills to countries where abortion has sion is in some ways hopeful,” McDonald, the been outlawed. abortion provider in Maine, says. “With the But abortion by mail has now come to the internet and the spread of technology, women United States via a new service started by that have access to more information and hopefully same physician. The pills cost $95 and are increased access to medication abortion. The available to women who are less than ten weeks future of medicine is going to be decentralized.” pregnant, all of whom the service screens for Many rural communities in the United eligibility. Until recently, the founding doctor
1200
60 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG WINTER 2019
had refrained from operating in the United States out of fears that the anti-choice movement would shutter her operation. “It’s really important that the language that we use doesn’t demonize self-managed abortion,” says Villavicencio. “With the appropriate instruction, women can take medication and induce their own abortion in a safe manner. It’s not 1973 anymore. People have access to all the information they could possibly want. Self-managed abortions are going to be a huge part of the future one way or another.” “SOMETIMES PEOPLE just get really [focused]
on having abortion access, but there’s a lot more to [reproductive justice],” Akle with the West Fund says. “It encompasses all parts of life [and] any choice—whether it’s getting an abortion, having a child, getting access to contraceptives, or getting pap smears.” Winning true reproductive justice, McLemore adds, requires promoting paid family leave and health-care expansion. It’s no surprise that the states with the worst abortion access are also those with the worst policies relating to paid leave, and those that did not expand Medicaid. “Some people think access equals justice,” McLemore says. “I reject that—I think we can do better.” Until (and unless) we can do better, Roe is what we’ve got, and the immediate future doesn’t look bright. Many abortion advocates are trying to strengthen abortion rights in the safer states to ensure that there are at least some places where people can access the procedure. Advocates and providers are lobbying to codify Roe in a number of states, and in states where that’s not politically possible, Villavicencio says, “There’s some interest in at least pursuing anti-criminalization laws. … We don’t want to put women in jail for inducing their own miscarriages,” she says. “It’s a way to preempt some of the other laws that might be coming.” No one can be sure of what’s coming. What we can be sure about is that multitudes of women can’t readily access abortions now, with Roe still on the books. “I don’t want to focus on [Roe],” says Williams, “at the expense of thinking about the ways in which we continue to have such poor access to abortion for so many people.”
THE RETURN OF THE
STRIKE
This year, thousands of teachers, hotel workers, Google employees, and others walked off the job and won major gains. Which raises two questions: Why now? And will this continue? B Y ST EVEN GR EENH OUSE
F
or years, many labor experts seemed ready to write the obituary of strikes in America. In 2017, the number of major strikes—those involving more than 1,000 workers—dwindled to just seven in the private sector. Indeed, over the past decade, there were just 13 major strikes a year on average. That’s less than onesixth the average annual number in the 1980s (83), and less than one-twentieth the yearly average in the 1970s (288). In 1971 alone, 2.5 million private-sector workers went on strike, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics— that’s 100 times the number, 25,000, who went on strike in 2017. But then came 2018 and a startling surge of strikes in both the private and public sectors. More than 20,000 teachers and other school employees walked out in West Virginia in February, followed by at least 20,000 more in Oklahoma. Probably the biggest educators’ strike came in Arizona, where more than 40,000 walked out. There were smaller, but still large, teacher walkouts in Colorado, Kentucky, and North Carolina. This past September, 6,000 hotel workers
went on strike against 26 Chicago hotels to demand year-round health coverage for all hotel workers. In October, 7,700 workers struck 23 Marriott hotels in eight cities, including Boston, Detroit, Honolulu, and San Francisco. In November, 15,000 patientcare workers, including radiology technicians, respiratory therapists, and pharmacy workers, held a three-day strike against the University of California’s medical centers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Irvine, and Davis. An additional 24,000 union members, including truck drivers, gardeners, and cooks, struck in sympathy. And in one of the most startling work stoppages of all, an estimated 20,000 Google workers walked out on November 1 to protest how the company handled sexual harassment accusations against top managers. “That was remarkable,” says labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, pleased to see that even the elite workers at one of the world’s more prominent tech companies recognize the effectiveness of collective worker action. Some labor experts say the recent surge of strikes could portend a new wave of labor
activism, as more and more workers see that collective action can pay off. Others argue that the recent surge is more likely a one-time blip of militancy that will fade away as organized labor’s long-term decline continues. “The underlying factor connecting the various disputes [other than the Google walkout] is an improving economy in which certain groups feel left out,” says Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at Washington University-St. Louis. Teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona walked out after they grew frustrated and furious that they hadn’t received an across-the-board pay increase in years even though the economy was strong and their state legislatures were handing out big tax breaks to business. Similarly, Marriott’s workers went on strike after Marriott—which is enjoying record profits—had offered them a modest raise that barely kept up with inflation. “They made us a very bad offer on wages,” says Yolanda Murray, a kitchen steward in the Marriott-operated Westin Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. “We had to walk. It was a very hard decision. I explained to my son what I had to do. I had to show him what’s right for us.”
WINTER 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61
STRIKES HAVE BEEN AN important part of
American history, playing a huge and often unappreciated role in lifting workers—whether it’s the Uprising of the 20,000 female garment workers in 1909 and 1910, the Lawrence textile strike of 1912, the Flint sit-down strike of 1936 and 1937, or the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968. Historians say the 16-week walkout by 175,000 General Motors workers in late 1945 was a key factor in persuading GM to offer the UAW a series of remarkable contracts in 1948 and again in 1950 in exchange for years of labor peace—GM was eager to avoid more such painful work stoppages. In 1950, General Motors and the UAW agreed to a five-year settlement containing raises that guaranteed a 20 percent increase in real income over five years while also offering the best pensions and health coverage in the nation for blue-collar workers. That contract, known as the Treaty of Detroit, became a model, paving the way
was reached. It was President Ronald Reagan who gave the green light for corporate America to use permanent replacement workers when he fired 11,700 air traffic controllers who had engaged in an illegal strike in 1981. Globalization also helped reduce the frequency of walkouts because union members recognized that if they used militant tactics like strikes, that could accelerate management’s decision to move operations overseas where companies could hire a lower-wage, more pliant workforce. The number of major strikes fell to a record low—a mere five—in 2009, a recession year when workers were in an especially weak position and unemployment soared to 10 percent. But in 2018, after nine years of economic recovery and with the jobless rate falling below 4 percent, American workers were in a feistier, fighting mood. Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law
Some labor experts say the recent surge of strikes could portend a new wave of labor activism, as more and more workers see that collective action can pay off. toward building the world’s largest and richest middle class. Other unions wanted similar provisions in their contracts, and engaged in thousands of strikes in the 1950s to win them. At that time, when unions were robust and expanding, many non-union companies rushed to adopt the provisions of the “treaty” to help them keep out unions. Labor’s use of its most powerful weapon— strikes—declined markedly during the 1980s, chiefly because big business deployed a new counter-strategy. Pummeled by recession and imports, corporate America increasingly used its own powerful weapon—permanent replacement workers who often took the jobs of strikers—to defeat one walkout after another at Greyhound, Phelps-Dodge, International Paper, the Chicago Tribune, and many other companies. It was a sharp change from the 1950s and 1960s, when companies often used temporary replacements (“scabs”) to keep their operations running during strikes, but the strikers would return to their jobs once a settlement
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School, says labor’s renewed militancy reflects a broader shift in the zeitgeist. “When there’s a lot of collective action happening more generally—the Women’s March, immigration advocates, gun rights—people are thinking more about acting collectively, which is something that people hadn’t been thinking about for a long time in this country in a significant way.” Rebecca Garelli, a seventh-grade math and science teacher in Phoenix and one of the main organizers of the Arizona strike, says that anger about Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos helped fuel the teacher strikes. “They fired up a lot of people,” Garelli said. “Then you have Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the women’s movement, and the growing resistance, especially among women—remember teaching is over 70 percent women—and all the talk about arming teachers, and a lot of teachers just got fed up and angry.” D. Taylor, the president of Unite Here, the union that conducted the Chicago and Marriott hotel strikes, voices dismay that walkouts
have grown so rare. “I thought it was important to restore the strike to the arsenal of the labor movement,” Taylor says. “If you’re in a fight against powerful forces, why are you taking tactics off the table?” As for why Marriott’s housekeepers, bellhops, and kitchen workers walked out in eight cities, Taylor said, “The workers we represent were very frustrated because the industry is doing quite well and the hotels got an added special Christmas gift with the Trump tax cuts, but our members more and more couldn’t afford to live in the cities they’re working in. We thought it was an opportunity to spread the economic prosperity to our members and their families, and we were prepared to do whatever it takes—up to and including strikes.” Taylor has an impressive track record helping run and win strikes from his years heading Unite Here’s hugely successful 57,000-member local in Las Vegas, Culinary Workers Local 226. The Culinary won a famous strike against the Frontier Hotel that began in September 1991 and lasted six years, four months, and ten days, without a single one of the 550 Frontier strikers crossing the picket line. Taylor was tired of seeing companies rack up eye-popping profits and do multibilliondollar stock buybacks that enrich shareholders, while continuing to offer paltry raises to their workers whenever contract talks took place. “I think that the labor movement needs to be much bolder and much more willing to take risks to make gains,” Taylor said. “I don’t know why we’re holding back when we’re at these low union-density levels.” WITH UNION STRENGTH AT its lowest point in decades, many of the strikes this year took place alongside or completely outside traditional labor-management relations. Aside from the hotel strikes, says Block, “these other big actions by workers are outside of the formal structure [of union-management relations], which I think is really important.” Some of the teacher strikes have been spearheaded by Facebook groups or an ad hoc coalition of Facebook group leaders and union leaders. The Google walkout was organized through social media and an ad hoc group. “Workers are finding ways to act collectively in a big way on their own,” Block says.
ross d. fr anklin / ap images
come from an area that is known for [people] standing up for what they believe in. We believe we’re following in their footsteps.” (In the Battle of Blair Mountain, 10,000 miners battled 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers in 1921 in what was the largest uprising since the Civil War.) Soon a strike was declared in all of the state’s 55 counties, and school superintendents across West Virginia closed their districts in support. More than 10,000 teachers thronged the statehouse, hoisting #RedforEd signs and wearing red T-shirts. Their action persuaded the governor to promise a 5 percent raise in 2018, and their tenacity then helped push that raise through a reluctant, Republican-led legislature. “It looked like we weren’t going to win. But we fought our asses off,” Comer says. “Is 5 percent enough? Absolutely not. … But it’s incredible Rebecca Garelli (left), an organizer of the Arizona teachers’ strike, says that anger about Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos “fired up a lot of people.” that we won even a 5 percent raise. That’s a huge win. But this isn’t over In West Virginia, the two main teachers on them year after year. Then on January 10, by any means. We have to keep organizing.” unions—the affiliates of the National Educa- Governor Jim Justice—a billionaire coal-minAlberto Morejon, a 25-year-old history tion Association and the American Federa- ing heir who was West Virginia’s wealthiest teacher in Stillwater, Oklahoma, was watching tion of Teachers—have been weak for decades. man—announced plans to give teachers raises a television report about West Virginia’s teachThey’re not allowed to bargain collectively, of just 1 percent a year over the next five years. ers when he had an epiphany: He, too, could and they often feud with each other, fighting That meant annual raises of $404 for teachers, start a Facebook group. He named it “Oklato recruit members. whose average pay was $45,622; West Virgin- homa Teacher Walkout—The Time Is Now!” Emily Comer, a 28-year-old high school ia’s teacher pay ranked 48th among the states. and within one day, it gained 24,000 members. Spanish teacher in Charleston, was dismayed “People were already furious, and that just The state’s 42,000 teachers hadn’t received an by the unions’ lack of success; the teachers added to the fire,” Comer says. “People were across-the-board raise in a decade; their salahadn’t received raises in years. (In West Vir- saying, ‘When are we going to strike?’” If infla- ries were among the lowest in the nation, along ginia, it’s the state legislature that determines tion averaged 2.5 percent a year for five years, with Mississippi and South Dakota. Despite across-the-board raises.) “It felt like all our those 1 percent raises would translate into a occasional tensions between them, Morejon’s union leadership had been doing was lobbying, loss of real income of more than 7 percent. Facebook group and the Oklahoma Education “The teachers had enough,” says Dale Lee, Association agreed to call a strike on April 2. and we knew that wasn’t enough,” Comer says. One of Comer’s friends, Jay O’Neal, an president of the West Virginia Education They demanded an $800 million increase in eighth-grade English teacher in Charles- Association, “the years of broken promises, school funding and raises of $10,000 for teachton, created a Facebook group that sought to the years of seeing their paychecks dwindle, ers and $5,000 for support staff. improve things for teachers. She helped him no raises, increases on health care, the lack Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Mary Faladminister it, and at first the group grew slow- of respect for educators. Their frustration lin, prided herself on her record of slashing taxes. Eager to avoid a walkout, however, she ly. Then, in early 2018, it exploded to more than reached the maximum.” The walkouts began in three southern counsigned a bill that increased teacher salaries 20,000 members. Teachers grew angry when the state’s public employee insurance agency ties with a proud history of coal strikes. Katie by $6,100 on average and support staff pay indicated that many teachers would face steep Endicott, a high school English teacher in by $1,250 by raising $400 million for eduincreases in health-care premiums, on top of Gilbert, near where the Battle of Blair Moun- cation, chief ly through the state’s first tax the annual increases that had been inflicted tain took place, told The New York Times, “We increases since 1992. Viewing those moves as
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Hotel workers outside the Westin Copley Place hotel in Boston went on strike for a living wage, among other concerns.
taxes on the richest Arizonans. “We’ve learned that these legislators will only do so much,” Karvelis told Jacobin, “and that then you have to take the power into your own hands.” But the state Supreme Court, infuriating the teachers, threw the initiative off the ballot, declaring its language too vague. The teachers are intent on pressuring the legislature to increase school funding, and if that fails, they might try another ballot initiative. With the strike over, Karvelis says, “Facebook pages are great for mobilizing people, but they’re not great for long-term organizing.” For that, he said, “unions are vital.” Garelli, the science teacher who helped spearhead the strike, told Jacobin, “Fifty percent of the win here has been that we now have a strong, organized mass movement. And we’re not going away. People now have the courage to fight.” These statewide teacher walkouts won tremendous support from parents and students, partly because the teachers made clear that they were fighting not just for themselves, but for their students. The teachers demanded increases in school funding to reduce class sizes, renovate dilapidated classrooms, and replace tattered, obsolete textbooks. In this way, these strikes were part of a new approach to union bargaining, called “bargaining for the common good.”
“Part of the reason the teachers’ strikes were successful is that not only do communities hold teachers in respect, but the teachers were fighting for greater funding for schools,” says Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island. “It’s very difficult to frame these strikers as selfish when they’re trying to help students and the public.” ON OCTOBER 3, 1,500 HOTEL workers in Bos-
ton—housekeepers, bellhops, doormen, bartenders—went on strike against seven hotels operated by Marriott International. It was the first hotel walkout in the modern history of Boston. Among the hotels struck were the RitzCarlton Boston, the Westin Copley Place, and the Sheraton Boston, all operated by Marriott, which is the world’s largest hotel company. The strikers, members of the Unite Here hospitality workers’ union, voted to walk out for numerous reasons. They were unhappy with the modest wage increase Marriott was offering, much of which, the union said, would be eroded by higher out-of-pocket health costs. A number of strikers feared that robots and other new technologies would wipe out their jobs, and they wanted some protections in their new contract. Many housekeepers were demanding sexual assault alarm buttons in case they were attacked.
steven senne / ap images
inadequate, thousands of Oklahoma teachers walked out for nine days, but were unable to claw much more out of the Republican legislature, which believed it had already been plenty generous to the teachers. The teachers ended their strike, convinced that the only way to get the legislature to cough up more money would be to run more teachers for office and elect more education-friendly lawmakers. Jumping on the wave, Noah Karvelis, a 23-year-old elementary school music teacher in a Phoenix suburb, started a Facebook page, Arizona Educators United, on March 4. By the next day, it had 15,000 members, ultimately growing to 52,000. To build solidarity and gauge support for a walkout, Karvelis asked teachers to wear red shirts to school on March 7. Thousands of teachers wore red that day, angry that Arizona’s school spending, after factoring in inflation, had plunged 36.6 percent since 2008, the largest drop of any state. Arizona—far from the nation’s poorest state—nonetheless ranked 49th in spending per student. Those weekly protests expanded, and by April 11, 110,000 teachers and school staff were participating. Working closely with the statewide teachers union, Arizona Educators United called a strike for April 26 and demanded an immediate 20 percent pay increase and the restoration of $1 billion in school funding cuts. “West Virginia made us believe in ourselves again,” says Joe Thomas, president of the Arizona Education Association. “We were very good at talking with the legislature. … We had done everything you’re supposed to do, but we were ignored.” Running for re-election, Republican Governor Doug Ducey sought to prevent a strike by announcing he would give teachers raises totaling 20 percent over three years. The teachers were dubious because Ducey’s plan didn’t provide for funding to pay for the raises. So they struck. On April 26, more than 50,000 teachers and supporters crowded around the state capitol in Phoenix, carrying signs reading, “I am standing up for your child.” Speakers blasted Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” The walkout persuaded Ducey and the legislature to approve $400 million more in school funding, but the teachers felt that fell far short. They collected 270,000 signatures for an “Invest in Ed” ballot initiative that would raise $690 million more a year by increasing income
The overriding issue was that many workers were struggling to make ends meet, with many compelled to take a second job. Jissely Paulino, a 27-year-old mother of four and housekeeper at the Sheraton Boston, says she sometimes works 70 hours a week, juggling her hotel job with a job delivering pizza. “We approached Marriott and said, ‘You’re the dominant player in Boston. You’re the largest hotel company in the world. The last five years, you have made enormous profits, record profits,’” says Brian Lang, president of Unite Here’s Boston local. “As more rich people have moved into the city, housing prices have increased, pushing our members further and further out. They have to deal with crumbling transportation infrastructure. The burden on our members, who are responsible for the success of these hotels, has grown exponentially. We would like Marriott, as an industry leader, to help lead on the issue of dealing with income inequality.” The strikers got an unexpected boost when the New York Yankees crossed the picket line to stay at the Ritz-Carlton when they were facing the Red Sox in the playoffs. “Being able to paint the Yankees as strike breakers is one of the best P.R. moves possible in New England,” a hotbed of Yankee hatred, says Loomis, author of the new book A History of America in Ten Strikes. Soon Marriott also faced walkouts in Detroit, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and Hawaii. For several years, Unite Here’s locals had been preparing themselves for a major walkout, beefing up their strike funds and aligning contracts in different cities so they expired at the same time, enabling unions in those cities to strike simultaneously. In all the cities where the Marriott workers struck, the workers adopted the same slogan: “One Job Should Be Enough.” While picketing, Christopher Guerra, a burly Marriott worker in San Diego, wore a bright red shirt emblazoned with that slogan. To support his family, Guerra, 46, normally works two full-time jobs: from 2:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. each day as a banquet waiter at the Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter, and then from 11 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. doing maintenance work at the Marriot Vacation Club Pulse. “Oh, man, working 16 hours, the pain in your body is unbelievable,” Guerra said. “Your body is asking you to rest, but you have to continue.” His family often complains they don’t see him nearly
enough. “I miss so many birthdays,” Guerra said. Strikers say that many passers-by who stop to chat say they wholeheartedly support the “One Job Should Be Enough” slogan. “The slogan really resonates with working people,” says Anand Singh, president of Unite Here’s San Francisco local. “It’s such a modest demand when you’re talking about a multibillion-dollar company.” After more than a month on strike, Roland Laforga, a 26-year-old housekeeper at the Royal Hawaiian in Honolulu, described the walkout as both “exhilarating” and “exhausting,” although he noted that it’s not easy to keep up morale. To sustain the strikers, Unite Here has given them $300 a week in strike benefits and in some cities, locals increased that to $400 after several weeks to show Marriott that the union was digging in, not backing down. “A lot of people do two or three jobs because the rents are very high in Hawaii,” Laforga said. “A company as big as Marriott, they
pointed that Unite Here has chosen to resort to a strike,” the company said. “Marriott is a competitive employer that pays significantly above the minimum wage in most markets and provides generous benefits.” By early December, the union had reached settlements with Marriott in all eight cities. The union made impressive strides—housekeepers in San Diego won raises of 40 percent over four years (to $20 an hour from $14.25), while hotel workers in Boston will receive a 20 percent raise over 4½ years, a 37 percent increase in pension contributions, and six weeks of paid maternity leave (and two weeks for spouses). Marriott agreed to new protections against sexual assault and harassment, including alarm buttons for housekeepers. Marriott also agreed to give 165-day advance notice of the introduction of robots and other new technologies and to train workers whose jobs will be affected by such technologies.
In all the cities where the Marriott workers struck, they adopted the same slogan: “One Job Should Be Enough,” a modest demand from a multibillion-dollar company. can give back a little more to the workers.” In Hawaii, some hotel guests complained that the strikers’ day-long drumming and chanting were ruining their vacations. “You got to do what you got to do,” Laforga said. “We tell the guests that if you cross the picket line, you’re going to face these things.” In Boston, several condo associations representing residents living near the Ritz-Carlton hotel filed a lawsuit to stop the strikers’ drumming. Lang, president of the Boston local, had a tart response: “It’s perfectly within the rights of white millionaires to take legal action to try to silence black and brown working-class people.” The strikers have received considerable support from other unions. In Boston, SEIU’s janitor and security guard local gave Unite Here a floor of its office building rent-free as a strike headquarters. Lang said, “If our members go into a Starbucks near a strike line, half the time the baristas say, ‘Don’t worry. It’s taken care of.’” For its part, Marriott argued that its workers were well compensated. “We are disap-
Taylor said the settlements make “Marriott a leader in the hospitality industry in ensuring that one job is enough for hotel workers to live on with dignity.” For Unite Here, such a multi-city strike against one hotel chain is unusual. The union’s leaders and members recognize that such a strike applies far more pressure than a walkout in just one city. “We’ve never done anything quite like this,” says Singh, the San Francisco leader. “When we stand together and fight together, we make greater gains as a whole. We hope we’re even stronger next time around.” THE STRIKING TEACHERS and hotel workers did indeed make impressive gains. But will that translate into a lasting surge, or even an uptick, in strikes? Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University, doubts that it will. “I don’t see any major surge in strikes,” he says. “You just see a lot of high-profile disputes, but not many in general.”
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Nor is Washington University’s Rosenfeld ready to declare a substantial reversal in the downward trend in strikes. But he can envision something of an increase. “We know that successful strikes breed other strikes,” Rosenfeld says. “When the only models around end in disaster, other unions and workers are going to watch and think, ‘We’re not taking that chance.’ But when, say, teachers in Oklahoma see their West Virginia colleagues walking out and winning substantial pay increases, there is a contagion effect. They start to believe, ‘Hey, we can do that, too.’” Lichtenstein, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, cautions that new teacher strikes might “be a sign of weakness, not of strength.” He explains that after teachers flexed their muscles last spring and made electoral gains in numerous states this fall, they’re pushing for increased education funding from governors and state legislatures. If lawmak-
deliver substantial increases in pay and education funding. Los Angeles teachers, buoyed by teachers’ gains elsewhere, are also threatening to strike. They are at loggerheads with the school district about how the rapid expansion of charter schools has undermined traditional schools and their budgets. Across the country, there’s been a continuing wave of short fastfood strikes and nurses’ strikes, and hotel workers in Los Angeles might walk out this winter. In September, 16,000 steelworkers voted to authorize a strike against United States Steel, but the company averted a walkout by agreeing to give a 14 percent raise over four years. One factor that might be encouraging strikes is that with the unemployment rate so low, unions need not worry as much about permanent replacement workers taking their members’ jobs, because it’s harder for companies to find such workers. “Unions are finding safe spaces where risks are minimal or finding
Strikes are a palpable demonstration of organized labor’s clout: This year’s surge shows that the reports of labor’s death are greatly exaggerated. ers bend to the teachers’ new strength—and demands—by approving higher education budgets, that will in theory mean fewer strikes. When I asked Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association, whether there might be a new statewide teacher strike this year, he sounded doubtful. The reason is that Governor Justice, having felt the teachers’ sting earlier this year, said he would propose another 5 percent pay increase for educators (although the state’s Republican legislature might not embrace that idea). There are more teachers’ strikes on tap this school year. On December 5, 500 teachers went on strike against 15 charter schools in Chicago, demanding higher pay and smaller class sizes—it was the first strike by charter school teachers in the nation’s history. Some North Carolina teachers—after their brief walkout last year won few concessions—say they might walk out again this year. Seeing the gains in other states, Louisiana’s teachers are making noises about going on strike if the state doesn’t
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ways around the risks through short strikes,” says Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at City University of New York. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, predicts increased labor militancy, notwithstanding setbacks like the Supreme Court’s Janus decision. “I think you’re going to see more activism,” Weingarten says. “At some places there may be walkouts; in some places there will be other types of activism. People are much less afraid nowadays. The feeling is, ‘We won’t just despair.’ People are taking the risk to make something happen, to achieve change.” That certainly was the case at Google. In high tech, a field that prides itself on its individualism, Google’s workers recognized that to make a sufficiently big statement and to pressure their gargantuan company to mend its ways on how it handles sexual harassment, they could do that far more successfully en masse, with a worldwide walkout, than as individuals. “The idea that big collective action breeds
more collective action is important,” says Harvard Law School’s Sharon Block. “But the fact that union density is so low and we have so few strikes is troubling in terms of how to have workers continue to use this really important tool [strikes] to reassert some power in the economy.” To Block, it was not at all surprising that the first teachers to strike early this year came from West Virginia counties with a history of miner militancy. “The teachers there had a muscle memory,” Block says. “But a consequence of the historical low point in union density is that more and more people are losing that muscle memory.” The question labor faces, Block says, is: “Can workers learn about or build that muscle memory so we see more—and more effective—collective action?” When strikes were common, they were a palpable demonstration of organized labor’s clout, and the sharp decline in strikes has been a testament to labor’s waning power. This year’s surge of strikes shows, however, that the reports of labor’s death are greatly exaggerated. They show that when workers are being badly mistreated—for instance, when teachers receive no raises for years while class sizes are rising and the economy is booming—workers will embrace old-fashioned direct action to make themselves heard and achieve their demands. In theory, the success of the recent strikes should breed more strikes. But that might not happen, partly because many workers have lost the requisite muscle memory and partly because unions have been on the defensive for years as corporations, courts, conservative billionaires, and GOP lawmakers have colluded to cripple labor. This year’s mad-as-hell strikers have a defiant message for those who hope that labor unions and worker collective action will vanish from the earth: Sorry, but we workers— for the sake of fundamental fairness and to achieve basic gains—continue to need unions and collective action. And strikes. Steven Greenhouse was the The New York Times’s labor and workplace reporter from 1995 to 2014. He is the author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Time for the American Worker, and his new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, will be published next year.
British Labour’s Self-Inflicted Marginalization Why Her Majesty’s Opposition is failing to demolish the feeble Theresa May BY DE NIS M AC S HANE
b r u c e s ta n f i e l d / i s t o c k b y g e t t y
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ever in postwar British history has there been such a weak, divided, and poorly run Conservative government. Prime Minister Theresa May inherited the disaster of her predecessor David Cameron’s 2016 referendum to have Britain exit the European Union, whose results she embraced with unseemly haste. But she has been utterly unable to find a Brexit path that will not devastate the British economy. Since U.K. voters opted, by a 52–48 margin, to leave the European Union, the result has been agonizing interregnum, in which the terms of a post-EU British economy are in limbo, retarding confidence and investment. May has presided over the lowest growth in the G7, with Britain enduring austerity cuts that have seen cuts in police, teachers, health care, and local government services. Britain’s role in the world has also suffered. While leaders of Germany, France, Turkey, and Russia meet to discuss a cease-fire in Syria, no one bothers to invite the British prime minister, as the geopolitical isolationism of Brexit reduces the Tory government’s status as a foreign policy player. Several senior cabinet and other ministers have walked out of May’s government. Every weekend, Britain’s influential Sunday press describes a Tory party utterly divided, with MPs predicting May’s imminent demise. Boris Johnson, the darling of the rightwing, Europe-hating Tory rank and file, openly mocks May and offers himself as a
replacement, but can’t quite manage a coup. Other cabinet ministers would like to replace her, and are out on maneuvers. In early December, the European Court of Justice issued an important ruling that if Britain wanted a do-over, they could still reject Brexit, and revert to the status quo. This removes a major barrier to holding a new referendum. And on December 10, May suffered the humiliating defeat of having to put off the long-awaited vote in the House of Commons, knowing that she faced an overwhelming defeat. On December 12, a group of Tory MPs demanded a vote of no-confidence. After her Conservative colleagues considered the consequences of deposing May—with the party badly split and no logical successor—she won it by a vote of 200-117. But the win, if anything, left her even weaker in her effort to get the House to approve her Brexit pact, with 117 of her own party members now prepared to join the roughly 300 opposition MPs in voting down the deal. THIS SHOULD BE THE BEST of times for the
Labour opposition. But the opposite is the case. Labour is bitterly divided on Europe, almost as badly split as the Tories, and offers no credible opposition to May. Most opinion polls since the Labour Party convention in September 2018 show the Tories ahead. Jeremy Corbyn, who propelled Labour to a better-than-expected showing in the 2017 general election, now in his third year of leadership, has failed to make a breakthrough that
might establish himself as the next prime minister. His true views of Brexit are impossible to discern. Even some Labour MPs have told journalists they are not sure they will vote Labour as long as Corbyn is leader. At a time when Britain is yearning for a plausible alternative to May and the Tories, and a way out of the Brexit stalemate, the British democratic left is tired, demoralized, and far away from forming an opposition vision, much less a government. How did this come to pass? The short answer is that Labour is caught between two different pasts and a viable future. Following a turning-away from the long era of New Labour under centrist globalists Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Labour Party has reverted to a mélange of old-left nostalgia and postmodern cultural radicalism under Corbyn. Neither past is helpful in pointing to a way out of Britain’s Brexit mess. The story begins with Britain’s 1983 election, a triumphant win for Margaret Thatcher. In that year, which was generally bleak for Labour, three future Labour leaders in their early thirties were elected to parliament. Blair, Brown, and Corbyn all became MPs on the same day. It took 14 more years for Labour to win back power after the biggest makeover of the party since its founding in 1906. Labour’s long period in the political wilderness began in 1979, the so-called Winter of Discontent, when the government of Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan failed to deal with the combination of inflation, a weak pound, and
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trade union militancy in the face of falling real wages. Giant mountains of black rubbish bags piled up in London squares as strikes crippled the economy. Wildcat walkouts included ambulance drivers and gravediggers. The resulting Rupert Murdoch tabloid headlines blared, “Unions Won’t Even Let You Bury the Dead.” The Tories under Margaret Thatcher won that election as the middle class deserted Labour, and they hung onto power for two decades. But still the Labour left fought on with eloquent support from the leftist party leader Tony Benn, who denounced capitalism, the European Community, and the United States with rare eloquence. Labour lost four successive elections between 1979 and 1992. Once in the Commons, Blair and Brown were edgy revisionists, wanting to move Labour from the 1970s-style statist socialism—anti-Europe, anti-NATO, anti–market economics, pro–trade union militancy. Corbyn, by contrast, remained true to that model, and has remained thus committed ever since. Brown and Blair created policy commissions and tried to modernize Labour and bring it closer to a new post-industrial, post-collectivist, post-white electorate. Corbyn supported traditional left causes, while his fellow members of the Class of ’83 followed the traditional road of progressives who want to win power. Like the Italian or Japanese left, Labour seemed unable ever to win power again. And then came the Clinton shock, when a 1968-generation Rhodes Scholar, who had worked for George McGovern and who borrowed from the progressive thesaurus he knew by heart, won power. In January 1993, I organized a conference in London called “Clintonomics.” Clinton had just won the presidency, while Labour had just lost its fourth successive election in May 1992. Clinton’s New Democrats became role models for Blair’s New Labour. We brought over the best and the brightest of Clinton-generation politicians to advise Labour on how power might be won even under condition of early globalization, de-unionization, and the arrival of new social forces demanding rights for women, non-white, non-Christian citizens, and the LGBT community. These were precisely the groups and forces in society which late-20th-century leftism—pale, male, stale, and distrustful of open frontiers
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to trade, capital, or immigrants—had ignored. Blair became leader in 1994, while Corbyn was left on the margins. Yet with hindsight, it’s fair to say that many of Corbyn’s critiques were on target. Under Blair, Labour won decisively in 1997. With his massive majority in 1997 and the Tories flat on their back for a decade, Blair could have initiated a major makeover of how Britain was run. But he walked in fear of the markets and Murdoch. Brown, his finance minister, boasted of “light-touch regulation” to international speculators in the City (London’s counterpart to Wall Street), and helped seed the conditions for the 2008 collapse.
Jeremy Corbyn voted against every EU treaty presented to the Commons for ratification. His opposition to the 2016 Brexit referendum was halfhearted and listless. I was Labour’s representative at the Party of European Socialists (the bloc of democratic-left parties in the European Union), and Brown ordered me via his minions to block any efforts to increase labor rights. In 2000, 12 of the 15 EU governments were headed by social democrats, socialists, or Labour leaders or had socialists in a coalition. It was a golden moment to organize a serious Europe-wide political campaign for a real social market economy based on re-leveraging power out of the hands of finance capital. Blair had the stature and support to lead a 21st-century moment of European social democratic reformism. But orthodox neoliberal ideologues were running the Treasury, and
soon Blair was sucked into the vortex of George W. Bush’s Iraq folly and never recovered. The Blair-Brown tandem put together an economic program that sought support from unionized workers, professional public-sector managers, mobile individualized capital, and post-national Davos capitalism. Neither had confidence to try and go for a full social democratic makeover in the Northern European fashion. The Nordic-Teutonic social partnership economics was based on total class collaboration; unions negotiating wages at a national, not plant, level; works councils, not shop stewards or external union representation; unconditional support for free trade, open borders, and offshoring if that were necessary to allow firms to survive. Blair was right to reject the national protectionist policy of Benn and Corbyn, which was incompatible with EU membership. But he was unable to see that untrammeled, unregulated, uncontrolled globalized capitalism would in due course produce the ugly backlash of nationalist, xenophobic closed-border ideology that reached its apogee in 2016 with wins for Brexit and Trump, and which is now gaining ground in Europe. CORBYN BECAME PARTY LEADER in 2015
after Labour lost a second time to David Cameron. The Labour leader from 2010 to 2015, Ed Miliband, wanting to modernize and democratize his party, had changed the party rules to allow anyone to become a party member for 3 pounds ($4), the price of a small glass of beer. Seldom has such an attempted reform backfired so completely. The move brought back to power the old left. Party membership surged from 200,000 to 540,000 in 2018. Many were young millennials or students angry at the tripling of student tuition fees that the Conservative–Liberal Democratic coalition government had imposed. Others had been activists in different social movements—green, Occupy, environmental, anti-war, LGBT—who, for a token 3 pounds, could join Labour online. A large number of white-bearded, bald-pate old leftists—who had given up keeping their Labour Party card as Blair and Brown shifted the party to its embrace of business and support for Bush in the Iraq war—now rejoined Labour, as did former Trotskyists or commu-
p e t e r b y m e / p r e s s a s s o c i at i o n v i a a p i m a g e s
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
nists from the 1968 generation enjoying having their last outing in a political party. The second win in 2015 for the smug Old Etonian David Cameron and his government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich created an emotional feeling that the 25-year hegemony of New Labour had run its course. Blair and Brown had been commanding political leaders. Their political children, including Ed and David Miliband, and other protégés were the successor generation, which in varying degrees continued to argue for a return to New Labour verities. But they were Hillary Clinton when Labour Party activists wanted Bernie Sanders. Corbyn became leader almost by accident. On the day the small hard-left caucus of about 30 Labour MPs—the Campaign Group—were meeting in the Commons to nominate their candidate to be party leader, a TV reporter, Jon Craig, bumped into Corbyn, who was scurrying to get to the meeting. “Who are Campaign Group going to nominate?” asked Craig. “Search me,” replied Corbyn. “I’m going to find out,” and off he went. He emerged as the candidate because it was felt it was his turn. No one had quite realized that letting anyone and everyone join the Labour Party was going to produce a revolutionary change, and Corbyn
was easily voted in under the new party rules that gave the mass membership a decisive say, over the objection of MPs. The New Labour establishment was outraged. Many senior ex-ministers of the BlairBrown generation refused to serve on Corbyn’s team. A majority of Labour MPs were fairly clear in their own minds that a Corbyn-led Labour Party was unelectable. They organized a vote of no confidence in their new leader and all Blair-Brown–generation MPs in the shadow cabinet resigned. Corbyn faced down this attempt by MPs to oust him. He held a second leadership election in September 2016 and defeated the Blairite candidate 2 to 1. So Corbyn is now unchallengeable. He has turned from Labour MPs in the Commons to insist that the only authentic voice of the party is the mass-membership rank and file. Within Labour, a well-organized left group called Momentum has been set up. It supports left policies and seeks to oust local MPs who do not obey the Corbyn line. Corbyn commits strongly to many causes. The Palestinian cause. The cause of a nuclearfree world. The Irish nationalist cause. The cause of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, now Nicolas Maduro. Corbyn has been married three times; his second ex-wife and
current spouse are Latin American, and he speaks some Spanish. It is said he has visited most countries in the world, but few in Europe. He voted against every EU treaty that came to the House of Commons for ratification. His participation in the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign was half-hearted and listless. ONE OF THE MOST PROBLEMATIC aspects
of Corbyn’s leadership on its third anniversary were the relentless and well-documented accusations of anti-Semitism. Dave Rich, the author of The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel, and Anti-Semitism, writes that in 2016, when these allegations first surfaced, “most opinion columns about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party stressed that nobody accused Mr Corbyn of being anti-Semitic; his flaw was that he just did not recognize it, he did not think left-wing people were capable of it, or he had taken the necessary action to deal with it.” That is right. I have known Corbyn for decades, and the idea he has a single line of anti-Semitism or other racisms in his political DNA is absurd. But he is utterly tone-deaf to the fears of many Jews when they are confronted with the raw, racist hate of Israel’s right to exist now commonplace on the left. When Corbyn started in politics, the cause
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of Palestinian rights was one of a long list he and the left would have supported. But most of these causes have disappeared. The Vietnam and Iraq wars were a disaster. Apartheid, Pinochet, South Korean generals, fascist dictators in Spain and Portugal, and communist tyrannies in Eastern Europe have all been vanquished. But the Palestinian issue is still with us. The Labour Party banned anyone waving European flags at its 2018 conference. But it allowed Palestinian flags to be waved by delegates. The hatred of Israel from some Labour Party activists, especially those younger militant ones who have very little idea of the history and complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and almost none about the ideology of modern Islamism, has reached a peak and Corbyn has not known how to calm it down. Jewish Labour MPs have been hounded by foul anti-Jewish social media abuse or harangued by Corbyn militants at local party meetings. A few Labour councillors and candidates have posted overtly anti-Jewish Facebook or Twitter insults. Labour under Corbyn refused until September 2018 even to accept the European-wide definition of anti-Semitism promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, set up in 1998 by social democratic Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson. Unfortunately for Corbyn, the era of mobile phones recording events or just throwaway lines that in early times would have been mercifully left unrecorded and forgotten, meant that his wreath-laying where the organizers of the murder of Jewish Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics are commemorated in Tunis, or saying that British Jews did not understand “irony” in defense of an ugly anti-Semite, or any number of his appearances at rallies or protests dating back years have surfaced and allowed newspapers to front-page Corbyn as a man friendly to Jew-hating ideologues and terrorists. All three main Jewish papers in Britain denounced Corbyn’s failure to deal with anti-Semitism. For the Conservatives—both politicians and commentators—it was a gift from heaven. May devoted part of her keynote speech at the Conservative Party conference in October 2018 to attacking Corbyn’s handling of anti-Semitism. In October, Scotland Yard opened an investigation into anti-Semitic statements
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by Labour Party members. The Metropolitan Police made clear the party was not being accused of anti-Semitism. But the announcement of a formal criminal inquiry into Labour members dominated the TV news, with clips of Corbyn biking out of his North London home, turning his back curtly on reporters, or losing his temper in TV interviews when asked about his previous statements describing Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends.” All previous Labour leaders and prime ministers since 1950 had been close to British Jewry, and Corbyn’s enthusiastic embrace for the Palestinian cause dismayed the liberal-left Jewish intelligentsia. For uncritical Corbyn supporters, raising the question of anti-Semitism was just a smear tactic. But women Jewish Labour MPs had to have police protection and suffered unacceptable abuse by newly joined Labour Party members, many of whom seemed fueled by obsessive anti-Israel hate. To any outside observer, it seemed a self-inflicted wound that would be hard to heal. THUS LABOUR CONTINUES to be marginal-
ized by a combination of its fringe views on hot issues like anti-Semitism and its failure to offer a credible alternative to Brexit. Labour failed to gain key marginal seats in both the parliamentary election in 2017 and the municipal elections in 2018 where strong Jewish communities existed. But what of Corbyn’s economic policies? They are regularly denounced as Marxist, ultra-left socialism by the right-wing press. In fact, compared with Labour programs from 1950 to 2000, they are milk-and-water conventional if old-fashioned, soft-left ideas. One suggestion that roiled up right-wing commentators was for workers to sit on boards of companies. That has been official policy of the center-right German Christian Democrats in government since 1950. Another was to encourage employee share-ownership and profit-sharing, which have long been endorsed by pro-business, pro-capitalism advocates. A hike in the legal minimum wage is routine, and, in many European countries, having the railways, postal service, or water utilities in national or municipal public ownership would be uncontroversial. Critics of Corbyn, like the former Labour MP Tom Harris, have urged May to adopt Cor-
byn policies like allowing town councils to borrow money to build more social or project housing. May has already announced a 3 percent sales tax that foreigners will have to pay if they buy a house or apartment mainly for investment purposes in London. No university student in Europe has to pay the very high tuition fees demanded in England, so Corbyn’s pledge to abolish them is just the European norm, not some lurch toward Maduro-type socialism. Of course, all these promises will have to be costed out and paid for. At this stage, much of Labour policy is aspirational, not a serious worked-out program of government. For now, Corbyn is not much interested in formulating a new progressive left policy to handle the artificial intelligence, gig, startup, Airbnb, or Uber economy. He preaches in a solemn and serious manner about the defects of modern global capitalism, and his denunciations have captured a moment. But while he attracts large audiences as a new-left Messiah, it is not clear if it reaches middle, let alone Tory, England. In TV interviews, he becomes prickly and defensive about taking money from an Iranian TV channel that pumped out Tehran ideological propaganda, and he still has not found convincing words on the problems Labour has with anti-Semitism. Visitors to the 2018 Labour Party conference in September were struck at how either very young or quite old the delegates were and how white they were. Labour’s 26-strong shadow cabinet has 22 members who will be sexagenarians, septuagenarians, and even one 80-year-old at the next election. Corbyn and his chief lieutenants will all be over 70. This is a Bernie Sanders party that has been carrying the torch for the socialism of the 1968 generation that turned politically active in the McGovern 1970s. Corbyn is placing all his bets on the Tories imploding over Brexit, voting down May, and a collapse of her government, with a subsequent early election in 2019. But that requires an awful lot of Conservative MPs to be turkeys voting for Christmas, by siding with a Labour leader they despise, to destroy their own prime minister and risk a third general election in four years. It is true that Brexit votes in the Commons are unpredictable. But the Tories have been around for 300 years, spending more time governing
Britain than fretting over ideology or principle, and have well-developed survival instincts. Corbyn might have put himself at the head of the anti-Brexit forces in Britain which opinion polls show are now in a majority, especially amongst young voters, in Scotland and Wales, and in all big cities and university towns. Alas, his own 1970s dislike of European integration has held him back, plus the genuine sense that most Labour working-class seats in the North and the Midlands had majorities for leaving the EU. But with big companies like Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover announcing they will have to leave the U.K. if they lose current market access to Europe, many trade unions and Labour voters are now prepared to rethink Brexit. London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, Labour MPs on all wings of the party, and some big industrial unions have called for a new vote on Brexit. This move is supported by 86 percent of Labour Party members. All that’s missing is a leader. In one of the biggest postwar demonstrations ever seen, 700,000 marched in London in October with posters attacking the Tories over their anti-European Brexit policies. But Corbyn refused to take part and ordered his shadow cabinet members not to attend. The crowds chanted, “Where’s Jeremy Corbyn?” Unfortunately for the wider anti-Brexit left in Britain, those Labour MPs most prominent in calling for a reversal of Brexit since the plebiscite in June 2016 tend to be those associated with Blairism and were among those who tried to topple Corbyn early in 2016. Tony Blair himself has been the most articulate of former senior politicians who have spoken out against Brexit. Corbyn’s personal instincts and his detestation of Blair-era personalities means he does not want to line up behind the anti-Brexit campaign. But it leaves Labour seriously behind the political curve on Brexit and opens Corbyn to tailing behind May and the government, without any clear alternative except to demand she is replaced by a Labour administration. There are no electoral tests anytime soon. The next general election is not until 2022. Although Labour gained 30 seats in the 2017 general election under Corbyn, he also lost four presumed safe Labour seats and had a smaller share of the vote than Theresa May’s Conservative Party.
Labour still has 55 seats fewer than the Conservatives. If the latter proceed with their plans to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600, that will cost Labour another 20 to 30 seats. In short, there is a very big electoral mountain for Labour to climb. Labour MPs complain that Momentum can mobilize big turnouts for visits by Corbyn, where everyone sways to the chant “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” or wears T-shirts with his face on them—personality cult traits previously unknown in Labour. And while Momentum can pack a local party meeting to put pressure on a Labour MP who does not 100 percent
There is a danger that Corbyn, after 50 years of marginal political activism, sees Labour as a social movement of opposition and not a party aiming for power. follow the Corbyn line, the new members are not turning out to do the grassroots, door-todoor, street stall, leaflet delivery, or phonebank activity that connects a party to its voters. Corbyn’s advisers are men of his age, with a similar private school background, who have been doing hard-left politics for decades and were marginalized in the New Labour quartercentury, and they are telling him that only social media matters. Corbyn has attacked the press, which, given the cruel treatment he has suffered at tabloid and BBC hands, is understandable. But the politician who attacks the media is like the ship captain who attacks the weather. It changes nothing, and British journalists of all political persuasions don’t like
party leaders telling them they’re bad people. There is a danger that Corbyn, who has participated in just about every left social movement in Britain as they have come and gone over his 50 years in political activism, may see Labour as a social movement of opposition and not a party aiming for power. He invited to Labour’s conference Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the 67-year-old leader of a demagogic French social movement–type party whose latest name is La France Insoumise (literally, “Unsubmissive France”). Mélenchon is anti-capitalist, anti-European, anti-establishment—but his party is as far away from power as ever. Is that Labour’s fate under Corbyn? He has survived some brutal political efforts to remove him as leader and the worst media battering any opposition leader has ever faced. The Labour Party is back in business and its morale is high. But if May doesn’t collapse over Brexit, there are four long years before another general election, which gives the Tories a chance to find a new leader without May’s negatives—what then has Jeremy got to offer? Six months after the 1992 win for the Tories, Labour had established a 20-point lead it never lost. At the end of 2018 after eight years of Tory government and three years of Corbyn leadership, most polls in fall showed a Tory lead. For now, Corbyn is unchallenged as Labour Party leader and there is no doubt he speaks for the progressive spirit of the age that wants more fairness, social justice, and a politics that tackles inequality, climate change, and entrenched poverty both domestically and globally. But he seems unable to connect those concerns to the impending catastrophe of the day—how to resolve Brexit. If Labour is defeated under Corbyn in 2022, that will mean another 17-year run of Tory prime ministers, presiding over an economic decline that might have been prevented by political leadership. Denis MacShane is a lifelong Labour Party member and was a Labour MP for 18 years and served for eight years in ministerial posts in Tony Blair’s Foreign Office. He is the author of several books on European politics and has written three books on Brexit. He was the president of the U.K. National Union of Journalists and worked as an international trade union official before becoming an MP in 1994.
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THE FIRST PRIORITY:
MAKING AMERICA A
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mericans cling to many myths. One is that we live in a democracy. To be sure, there are aspects of our government that are democratic. There are regular elections that choose many of the officials who make the laws and govern our society. But in other ways, American government is profoundly undemocratic. We are governed by a president who lost the popular vote by three million votes. Twice in the last 16 years, the candidate who lost the popular vote was nonetheless selected as president because of the Electoral College. There is no other democratic country in the world where that can happen. Nor does any other democracy have an institution like the U.S. Senate. Because every state, regardless of its size, gets two senators, the Senate is hugely unrepresentative of the country. California, with 39.5 million people, has the same number of senators as Wyoming, with a population of 579,315. A slight majority of Americans live in just nine states. They have 18 votes in the Senate, while the minority holds 82 seats. These aspects of government cannot be reconciled with the claim that the United States is a democracy. And the democratic
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process offers no hope of reforming a number of them. Changing some fundamental constitutional provisions would require an amendment passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the states. A democratic majority is powerless to make constitutional changes, and the small states that benefit from greatly exaggerated representation will block a constitutional amendment. Yet the Constitution sets out its aspiration of democratic governance in its first few words: “We the People.” These words in the Preamble to the Constitution are enormously significant and underappreciated in making clear that the United States shall be a democracy. Democracy was hardly the most common form of government in the late 18th century. “We the People” conveys that it was the people who were creating the Constitution and therefore the people who hold ultimate sovereignty. This was in stark contrast to England, and most countries in the world at the time, where sovereignty was thought to reside in a monarchy. Some anti-democratic aspects of the Constitution seem impossible to realistically change. I cannot think of any solution to the anti-democratic nature of the Senate. Recently, New York University Law Professor Burt Neu-
borne suggested that the undemocratic nature of the Senate could be changed if the largest states—California, New York, and Illinois, for instance—break into smaller states. This seems quite unlikely and would cause enormous practical problems. A proposed initiative to break apart California into four states has garnered little support. Yet I regard the difficulty of amending the Constitution as a good thing. The Constitution is meant to be an anti-majoritarian document to safeguard some of our most precious values—the structure of government, individual rights—from easy change by the majority. But there are other anti-majoritarian aspects of the Constitution and American government that can and should be changed. The two most important for our political process are the Electoral College and partisan gerrymandering. THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
The only number that matters in a presidential election is 270. That is the number of electoral votes it takes to be elected president of the United States. There are 538 electors and victory requires getting a majority in the Electoral College. If no candidate receives a majority,
DEMOCRACY How Americans can move their country closer to majority rule
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then the House of Representatives chooses the president, with each state getting one vote. Each state has the number of electors equal to the sum of its senators and representatives. Additionally, the 23rd Amendment allocates three electors to the District of Columbia. The six states with the most electors are California (55), Texas (38), New York (29), Florida (29), Illinois (20), and Pennsylvania (20). The seven smallest states in population—Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming—each have three electors. The Electoral College emerged as the way of choosing the president late in the deliberations at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Many different methods of selecting the president were debated—among them, direct popular election, selection by the governors of the states, and election by Congress as in a parliamentary system. The Electoral College, once proposed, attracted widespread support at the Constitutional Convention. In large part, this reflected the distrust of majority rule on the part of the framers of the Constitution. They required senators to be chosen by state legislatures, Supreme Court justices and lower federal court judges selected
by the president with Senate approval, and the president determined by the Electoral College. There is no doubt that the Electoral College was created because of a distrust of the people and democracy. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 68, explained that the “immediate election [of the President] should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station.” He said that the electors should be a “small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, [who] will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” Hamilton effused that “if the manner of [presidential election] be not perfect, it is at least excellent. It unites in an eminent degree all the advantages the union of which was to be desired.” Small states strongly favored the Electoral College because it gave them much greater influence than they would have in direct election of the president. Today, in fact, states with only 23 percent of the country’s population have enough electoral votes to choose the president. The Electoral College also was very much a product of the compromises concerning slavery that were at the core of the Constitution’s drafting and ratification. Prior to consider-
ing the method of choosing the president, the Constitutional Convention had agreed to the “three-fifths clause,” the provision in Article I of the Constitution that had slaves counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining population for allocating seats in the House of Representatives. But slaves obviously could not vote. Southern states would not get the benefit of this population in presidential elections. The Electoral College was proposed to deal with this: Electors would be allocated based on seats in Congress and slaves would count toward that. If the president were directly elected by the voters, the voters in the North would outnumber Southern voters because the South’s half-million slaves were not voters. This was explicitly understood and expressed at the Constitutional Convention. One delegate, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, proposed “electors” appointed by the state legislatures. Ellsworth’s plan had electors apportioned based on population so that small states would have no special advantage. In response, James Madison, a slaveholder from Virginia, said that “one difficulty … of a serious nature” made election by the people impossible. Madison noted that the “right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the
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Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.” Hugh Williamson, a delegate from North Carolina, was even more explicit about this. He noted that under a direct election of the president, Virginia would be at a disadvantage because “[h]er slaves will have no suffrage.” The same would be true for all of the South. As Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar has repeatedly pointed out, the Electoral College “was originally much more about slavery than about a big-state, small-state balance.” This, in itself, should make us deeply uncomfortable with the Electoral College. Most fundamentally, the Electoral College is inconsistent with the core constitutional value of democratic governance. Five times in American history—in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016—the candidate who lost the popular vote became president. On November 6, 2012, Donald Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” For once, I can say that Trump was right. The United States is the only country in the world that chooses its leader of government in this way and the only nation where a person who loses the popular vote can be chosen as its chief executive. But I want to go further than to argue that the Electoral College is undesirable: I believe that it is unconstitutional and should be declared unconstitutional. Before I explain why, it is worth thinking about whether a provision of the Constitution can itself be unconstitutional. The answer is clearly yes if it violates one of the subsequent amendments to the Constitution. The provisions about slavery in the Constitution were repealed by the 13th Amendment. Article I authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce and this would allow federal licensing of the press, except that the First Amendment unquestionably makes that unconstitutional. Article III permits a federal court to hear a suit against a state by citizens of other states. But the 11th Amendment was adopted to preclude such litigation and has been interpreted broadly by the Supreme Court to prevent states from being sued. The amendments to the Constitution modify its text. The Supreme Court long has held that the Fifth Amendment’s assurance of due process
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of law includes a requirement that the federal government not deny any person equal protection of the laws. And for over half a century, the Court has ruled that a core aspect of equal protection is one person, one vote, that every person must have an equal ability to influence the outcome of an election. In Wesberry v. Sanders in 1964, the Supreme Court announced that as much as practicable, the Constitution requires that “one man’s vote … is to be worth as much as another’s.” In Bush v. Gore, in 2000, the Court stated, “Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not … value one person’s vote over that of another.” The Electoral College is inconsistent with this basic principle of democracy: one person, one vote. Because every state has two senators, smaller states have disproportionate influence in choosing the president. Wyoming, with a population of 579,315, has three electoral votes, which means that each Wyoming elector represents 193,105 voters. California, with a population of 39.5 million, has 55 electoral votes, so each elector represents 718,818 voters. Each presidential vote in Wyoming is worth roughly 3.72 times more than each vote in California. Courts thus can and should declare that the guarantee of equal protection found in the Fifth Amendment modifies Article II of the Constitution and requires that electors be allocated strictly on the basis of population. At first blush, there is likely discomfort with the courts fundamentally changing the system for the election of president by declaring unconstitutional the method of choosing the president outlined in Article II. But the judicial role is most important when the political system is incapable of reforming itself to comply with the Constitution. This is exactly why the Court’s decisions concerning apportionment were so crucial. Prior to the 1960s, many state legislatures and congressional districts were badly malapportioned; within a state they varied widely in population. But those who benefited from this were not about to redraw legislative districts to vote themselves out of power. The Court then articulated the rule of one person, one vote: For any legislative body, all districts must be about the same in population. Earl Warren, who was the Court’s chief justice when these rulings were made, remarked that the most important decisions
during his tenure on the Court were those ordering reapportionment, precisely because the political process never was going to solve the constitutional problem. The same is true with regard to the Electoral College. Amending the Constitution requires approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and then three-fourths of the states. There is no way that smaller states that benefit greatly from the Electoral College ever will approve a constitutional amendment to eliminate it. There have been innumerable proposed constitutional amendments to change the Electoral College; one commentator estimated that “nearly one-tenth of all constitutional amendments proposed in Congress have sought electoral college reform.” It is especially important for the Court to act because the political process never will deal with the clear unconstitutionality of the Electoral College. The problem of the Electoral College is compounded by state laws that provide that electoral votes are awarded on a winner-take-all basis. In all states except Nebraska and Maine, the candidate who wins the popular vote in a state— even by the narrowest margin—gets all of the electoral votes from that state. This, too, greatly increases the chances of the Electoral College choosing a president who lost the popular vote. Effectively, winner-take-all meant that a vote in 2016 for Donald Trump in California or Hillary Clinton in Texas had absolutely no effect on the outcome. Nebraska and Maine allocate electoral votes by congressional district, with the elector for each congressional district voting for the candidate who got the majority of the votes there, with the two remaining electors chosen statewide. Accordingly, there is a much more proportional allocation of electoral votes in Nebraska and Maine than in all other states. At the very least, the courts should hold “winner take all,” provided by state law and not the Constitution, to be unconstitutional. A lawsuit to do this is pending now. This would not entail declaring the Electoral College unconstitutional; it would merely strike down state laws that allocate electors. This would greatly increase the chances that the winner of the popular vote would be chosen as president. That is what should happen in a democracy. It is hard even to come up with a justification
for a system for electing the president that is so inconsistent with basic principles of democratic governance. A primary justification advanced in recent years is that the Electoral College causes presidential candidates to pay attention to smaller states, that presidential candidates would seldom campaign in such states. I question whether this is sufficient reason to justify the profoundly anti-democratic Electoral College. Besides, the Electoral College system compels candidates to largely ignore and not campaign in states where it is obvious who is going to win. I live in California, where there were very few ads from either candidate in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election. I am sure the same was true in Texas. But when I was in Ohio weeks before the election, ads for the candidates were everywhere. Any system of election will influence where campaigning is done, but that is not a reason to keep the Electoral College. The Constitution should be interpreted to mean that the requirement for equal protection found in the Fifth and 14th Amendments modifies the text of Article II, which allocates representatives in the Electoral College. If nothing else, courts should invalidate state laws requiring winner-take-all and require allocation of electors proportionate to population. Never again should there be the election of a president who lost the popular vote. PARTISAN GERRYMANDERING
Partisan gerrymandering—where the political party controlling the legislature draws election districts to maximize seats for that party—is nothing new. The practice is named for Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812 signed a bill that redrew state senate districts to benefit his Democratic-Republican party. But what has changed is the development of sophisticated computer programs and other techniques that make partisan gerrymandering far more effective than ever before. The political party that controls the legislature now can draw election districts to gain a much more disproportionate number of safe seats for itself. This is exactly what occurred in Wisconsin, where Republicans took advantage of their control of the legislature after 2010 to give themselves a much greater number of seats relative to their voting strength. The Repub-
licans employed two gerrymandering techniques in order to lessen the effect of votes for Democrats statewide: “cracking,” which is “dividing a party’s supporters among multiple districts so that they fall short of a majority in each one,” and “packing,” which is “concentrating one party’s backers in a few districts that they win by overwhelming margins.” The gerrymandering worked. As a federal court explained: “In 2012, the Democrats received 51.4% of the statewide vote, but that percentage translated into only 39 Assembly seats. A roughly equivalent vote share for Republicans (52% in 2014), however, trans-
IN THE U.S. TODAY, STATES WITH ONLY 23 PERCENT OF THE COUNTRY’S POPULATION HAVE ENOUGH ELECTORAL VOTES TO CHOOSE THE PRESIDENT. lated into 63 seats—a 24 seat disparity.” Put another way, “In 2012, the Republicans won 61% of Assembly seats with only 48.6% of the statewide vote. … In 2014, the Republicans garnered 52% of the statewide vote but secured 64% of Assembly seats. … Thus, the Republican Party in 2012 won about 13 Assembly seats in excess of what a party would be expected to win with 49% of the statewide vote, and in 2014 it won about 10 more Assembly seats than would be expected with 52% of the vote.” The same is true in many other states. In North Carolina, essentially a purple state, Republicans have nearly evenly split the total vote for U.S. House members with Democrats but control 10 of 13 congressional seats. In Pennsylvania, where the voters are fairly evenly split between the parties, gerrymandering meant that Republicans had 13 of the state’s 18 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
struck down the gerrymander as violating the Pennsylvania Constitution and redrew the district lines, Democrats emerged from the 2018 elections with nine U.S. House seats, with the Republican total reduced to nine as well. Like the Electoral College, partisan gerrymandering is inconsistent with basic principles of democratic government, as well as constitutional guarantees of equality in voting. Democracy enables voters to choose their elected officials, but partisan gerrymandering enables elected officials to choose their voters. Justice John Paul Stevens expressed this well when he stated in a dissent: “[The] danger of a partisan gerrymander is that the representative will perceive that the people who put her in power are those who drew the map rather than those who cast ballots, and she will feel beholden not to a subset of her constituency, but to no part of her constituency at all. The problem, simply put, is that the will of the cartographers rather than the will of the people will govern.” Even Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the opinion that partisan gerrymandering cannot be challenged in the federal courts, noted “the incompatibility of severe partisan gerrymanders with democratic principles.” Indeed, up until now, the Supreme Court has refused to deal with this serious threat to democratic governance. In Vieth v. Jubelirer, in 2004, the Court dismissed a challenge to partisan gerrymandering, and a plurality of four justices said that such suits are inherently nonjusticiable political questions. Scalia concluded that challenges to partisan gerrymandering are “political questions” that cannot be adjudicated by the courts. Joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Clarence Thomas, Scalia wrote that there are no judicially discoverable or manageable standards and no basis for courts ever to decide that partisan gerrymandering offends the Constitution. Justice Anthony Kennedy, concurring in the judgment, provided the fifth vote for the majority. He agreed to dismiss the case because of the lack of judicially discoverable or manageable standards, but also wrote that he believed that such standards might be developed in the future. Thus, he disagreed with the majority opinion that challenges to partisan gerrymandering are always political questions; he said
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that when standards are developed, such cases can be heard. Justices Stevens, David Souter, and Stephen Breyer wrote dissenting opinions, which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined, arguing that there are standards that courts can implement. In November 2016, a three-judge court in Wisconsin found that state’s partisan gerrymandering to be unconstitutional. This was the first court to find gerrymandering to be unconstitutional since the Supreme Court decisions a decade earlier. In a lengthy opinion, the court found that it now is possible to measure the effects of partisan gerrymandering by quantifying an “efficiency gap.” The court explained that “[t]he efficiency gap is the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast.” As I have written in a 2017 article for the Sacramento Bee, the court applied this through a three-part test: First, plaintiffs have to establish that a state had an intent to gerrymander for partisan advantage. Second, the plaintiffs need to prove a partisan effect, by proving that the efficiency gap for a plan exceeds a certain numerical threshold. Third, and finally, if the plaintiffs meet these requirements, then the burden is on the defendants to rebut the presumption by showing that the plan “is the necessary result of a legitimate state policy, or inevitable given the state’s underlying political geography.” If the state is unable to rebut the presumption, then the plan is unconstitutional. The three-judge court used this test and concluded in a 2-to-1 decision that the election districts for the Wisconsin legislature were drawn with the purpose and effect of enhancing Republican seats and decreasing those for Democrats. The court found no legitimate purpose for this disparity and found the partisan gerrymandering to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court granted review of the case, Gill v. Whitford, and heard oral arguments in October 2017. Many thought it would be a vehicle for the Court to declare partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional. But in June 2018, the Court reversed the lower court on procedural grounds, holding that the plaintiffs failed to prove that they lived in districts that had been affected by partisan gerrymandering. The Court sent the case back to the
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lower court to give the plaintiffs the chance to do this. The issue is sure to come back to the Supreme Court, though with Brett Kavanaugh succeeding Anthony Kennedy on the bench, it is harder to see a majority of the justices concluding that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional. Perhaps, as in Pennsylvania, a state court might find gerrymandering to violate its state constitution, but this is unlikely to happen in many places. Nonetheless, there is strong public support for eliminating partisan gerrymandering. A Harris Poll found that more than seven in ten Americans believe (71 percent, with 48 percent
DEMOCRACY ENABLES VOTERS TO CHOOSE THEIR ELECTED OFFICIALS, BUT PARTISAN GERRYMANDERING ENABLES OFFICIALS TO CHOOSE THEIR VOTERS. strongly so) “that those who stand to benefit from redrawing congressional districts should not have a say in how they are redrawn.” The Harris Poll revealed “comparable views when compared by both political affiliation” (74 percent of Republicans, 73 percent of Democrats, and 71 percent of independents) and “underlying political philosophy” (69 percent conservative, 71 percent moderate, and 73 percent liberal). Indeed, partisan gerrymandering long has been condemned. As a brief that historians filed in the Supreme Court explained: “Contrary to some misconceptions, although partisan gerrymanders have occurred at various times, they never have been regarded as an acceptable feature of American democracy. Rather, consistently since its inception, partisan gerrymandering has been forcefully denounced as unconstitutional, as a form of corruption that threatens American democracy, and as an infringement on voters’ rights.”
But as with the Electoral College and the malapportionment of legislatures before the one-person, one-vote court rulings, the legislative process will not fix the problem. Legislators who benefit from partisan gerrymandering are not about to vote for an alternative election system that has a likelihood of taking them and their political party out of power. Partisan gerrymandering is undesirable whether done by Democrats or Republicans. The Supreme Court should hold that challenges to it can be heard in the federal courts and explain that districting is unconstitutional when it disproportionately favors a political party with no other explanation besides partisanship. This is a chance for the Court to take a huge step to having our democratic process work. In recent years, some states have removed the redistricting function from legislatures. California and Arizona are among a minority of states where voters, through the initiative process, have established independent commissions to draw election districts. In this year’s midterm elections, voters in Michigan, Missouri, Colorado, and Utah voted to establish such commissions, too. Justice Ginsburg, writing for the Court in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2015), explained that independent redistricting commissions are desirable because they “impede legislators from choosing their voters instead of facilitating the voters’ choice of their representatives.” Of course, that decision, upholding independent districting commissions for congressional seats, was decided on a 5-to-4 vote, with Justice Kennedy in the majority. Now that he’s retired, the Court conceivably could revisit that ruling. Partisan gerrymanders and the Electoral College make a mockery of the notion that the United States is a functioning democracy. We have lived with these mockeries for far too long. They can be eliminated, or at minimum, they can be significantly scaled back. It can be done. It must be done. Erwin Chemerinsky is the Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. He is the author of We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century.
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omen’s rage is all the rage nowadays. Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad came out a month after Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. And the last two years have seen scores of articles with titles like “Does This Year Make Me Look Angry?”, “Women! Reclaim Your Rage,” and “Don’t Call Me ‘Dear,’ F**kface!”
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Some 2,400 years ago, Aristotle began a meditation on anger by saying, “Anybody can become angry—that is easy.” But he was addressing men in a patriarchal society where, as Homer put it in The Odyssey, political speech, especially angry speech, was “the business of men.” Back then, it was neither easy nor safe for women to get angry, and in many ways, it still isn’t.
From an early age, girls are pressured to suppress anger for fear of being labeled “disagreeable,” and are punished when they do not. The resulting internalization of anger is one reason women have far higher rates of depression, anxiety disorders, and phobias than men. Boys, by contrast, are socialized to suppress sadness or fear, often expelling it as anger. That’s
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one reason men have more antisocial personality disorders than women. Yet men’s anger is usually seen as forceful, while women’s is dismissed as bitter, hysterical, or even “unhinged.” Even simple selfassertion by women is often labeled anger and penalized as such. There are racial variations to these stereotypes. White middleclass and Asian females are generally assumed to be naturally “agreeable”—until they begin acting “unnaturally”—while black females are assumed to be inherently angry. This becomes the rationale for all sorts of discriminatory mistreatment, starting with kindergarten teachers and often ending—quite literally—with police. The “angry black woman” stereotype was relentlessly employed against even the poised Michelle Obama, whom conservative columnists described as “Barack’s Bitter Half” and “another angry black harridan.” Occasionally, the “double jeopardy” of race and gender has interesting trade-offs. In middle school, reports Chemaly, “African American students are the only subgroup in which girls have higher self-esteem than boys,” possibly because they are less often socialized to be passive. In adulthood, black women are more likely than white women to report high self-esteem. Although they are judged by harsher performance standards in professional settings than whites, the few black women who clear that higher bar incur less backlash for acting assertively than their white counterparts. As Columbia Business School Professor Katherine Phillips notes, in some situations racist stereotypes “may actually free black women to display the kind of dominance and agentic traits that white women are proscribed from doing,” leaving them more space to exercise leadership. These complex interactions among race, gender, and class are central both to the content of
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Traister’s book, which pays eloquent tribute to the leading role of black women in the resistance movements she describes, and to the audience Traister addresses. Good and Mad is largely aimed at—and has been most enthusiastically welcomed by—newly angry white women, especially liberal professionals. I do not say this disparagingly. Women of color will find much of interest in Traister’s book, but most of it will be validation, not revelation. As Traister shows, black women have been in touch with their anger for centuries, using it to fuel struggles against social injustice. The original #MeToo movement was founded in 2006 to combat sexual assault in communities of color; women have also been the central leaders of Black Lives Matter. Right-wing white women have been in touch with their anger for some time as well, whipped up first by opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion and then by the Tea Party. As late as 2015, surveys showed that conservative white women were the single angriest group in America. More recently, white female liberals have begun feeling the burn. By 2018, according to a poll by Elle and SurveyMonkey, 76 percent of Democratic women, compared with 57 percent of all women, said they were angrier this year than last. Almost 70 percent of African American women reported that the news made them angry every day, but so did almost 80 percent of white women. As Traister explains, many of these women had spent years working hard, following the rules, and patiently explaining how the rules needed changing, while trying to ride out the routine slights, insults, and harassments they hoped would end as women continued to make gains. By 2016, it seemed inevitable that one such gain would be the election of a female president. The misogyny of the 2016 election campaign, the revelations of the second #MeToo movement, and Trump’s unexpected victory triggered the first bouts of fury many of these women had ever allowed themselves to feel, much less display. Traister does a wonderful job of simultaneously validating
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GOOD AND MAD: THE REVOLUTIONARY POWER OF WOMEN’S ANGER BY REBECCA TRAISTER
Simon & Schuster
RAGE BECOMES HER: THE POWER OF WOMEN’S ANGER BY SORAYA CHEMALY
Simon & Schuster
ELOQUENT RAGE: A BLACK FEMINIST DISCOVERS HER SUPERPOWER BY BRITTNEY COOPER
St. Martin’s Press
their rage and educating them about the struggles of women “who have never not been angry.” She urges white women who came late to “the resistance” not only to find role models among the activist women of color who preceded them but also to respect the additional anger many such women feel at the historical complicity of white women in racial oppression. Traister assures women who may be taken aback by the intensity of their sudden rage that it can be a powerful tool for personal and political liberation. Her examples include the 18th-century slave Bet, later Elizabeth Freeman, whose suit for freedom in the Massachusetts courts led to the abolition of slavery there; feminist activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; temperance crusader Carrie Nation; labor organizers Clara Lemlich and Ella Reeve Bloor; and the drag queens and transwomen whose leading role in the Stonewall riots has largely been ignored. She draws especially rich portraits of black activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Florynce Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Lee, and Alicia Garza, a central founder of Black Lives Matter. These are important lessons, and judging from the number of “you go, girl” reviews her book has garnered, they mean a lot to Traister’s readers. But once women have fully embraced our anger, it might behoove us to examine the rest of Aristotle’s thoughts on the subject. The challenge, Aristotle said, is “to be angry with the right person” (or I would add, the right things), “to the right degree … at the right time … for the right purpose, and in the right way.” As Audre Lorde later put it, anger is a powerful impetus for social change when “focused with precision,” and we need precision to distinguish between potential “allies with whom we have grave differences, and … genuine enemies.” But as black feminist Brittney Cooper wryly admits of her own anger, even the most justified rage is not always “focused with precision.” Traister sometimes implies that every expression of anti-sexist fury is equally positive. She approvingly describes Women’s March placards
showing effigies of Donald Trump’s testicles, representing him as a pile of excrement, and—one of her “favorites”—proclaiming, “Fuck you, you fucking fuck.” But her most powerful examples of anger successfully furthering social justice are those where women have been focused and precise in their targets, demands, and words, sometimes to the point of containing their rage to expose the irrational fury of an opponent. Traister rightly lauds Rosa Parks as “a lifelong furious fighter,” not just an ordinary woman too tired to move to the back of the bus that historic day in Montgomery, Alabama. At age 10, Rosa grabbed a brick to threaten a white boy who attacked her, explaining, “I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it.’” Traister takes this as evidence that “women’s impulse to sometimes just let their fury out without a care to how it would be evaluated” is extremely “old and deep and urgent.” But the grownup Parks cared deeply how her fury would be evaluated. A disciplined activist who studied organizing strategy at the Highlander Folk School, a social justice leadership institute in Tennessee, she spent years working with the NAACP to engineer a situation where an effective legal and public-relations challenge could be mounted against segregation. Traister says that fury is cathartic, and I agree. Swearing actually relieves physical pain, and the stronger the profanity, the better people tolerate the pain. But in medical settings, women who curse while in pain receive less attentive care than those who do not. That is sexist, for sure, but it’s something to consider if we want to recruit people to help relieve our pain. Catharsis is good, but effectiveness matters more. And as that dead white male philosopher pointed out, anger is most effective when we identify the right targets and mobilize our anger in the right way. So at whom or what is feminist anger aimed? Traister deftly counters the claim that feminists hate men or sex. She contextualizes what have been called the excesses of the #MeToo movement, where unwanted
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A poster at the Women’s March after Trump’s inauguration
advances, bad dates, and sexist comments have sometimes inspired as much rage as actual assaults. There are different gradations and severity of sexist behaviors, she acknowledges, and not all should incur the same repercussions. But the common thread inspiring rage is that despite all their efforts, women are still not fully respected by their colleagues, do not have the “stature, authority, and economic security” to insist upon equal treatment, and must expend all too much energy heading off or “maneuvering around” patronization and harassment. Traister’s analysis of what has kept women from acquiring political authority and economic security is less precise, however. She identifies the source of women’s oppression as “the white patriarchy,” or elsewhere, “the capitalist patriarchal power structure.” But America today is very different from a classical patriarchal or caste
There is no central executive committee of “the white capitalist patriarchy,” however much the Federalist Society aspires to fill that role.
regime. Racist and patriarchal domination was once a legal entitlement. Now it is largely exercised through extralegal means, and when exposed it is often punished, even if inadequately and unevenly. Racial and gender handicaps that were once enforced by courts and police are now produced by the seemingly neutral mechanisms of cost-saving workforce decisions, profit-generating stock manipulations, “normal” supply-and-demand calculations, and regional, educational, and occupational inequalities that are no longer explicitly organized by race or gender but remain deeply deformed by their historical origins in segregation and exclusion. Think of the work rules designed for male workers who never got pregnant. Or the minority neighborhoods where for generations home values were artificially depressed; schools, infrastructures, and other public services were neglected; and landfills or chemical plants were frequently placed nearby.
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In today’s supposedly gender- and race-neutral system, some exceptionally talented or fortunate women and minorities can make it into the higher strata of economic and political life, though many barriers still confine a majority to the lower strata. Meanwhile, even as the pay gap between high- and low-wage occupations has grown, gender and racial pay gaps are now greatest in the highestpaid professions, while the lowest-paid occupations have the smallest wage gaps, according to economist John Schmitt. It used to be that the highest-paid women and minorities typically earned less than the average-paid white man. Now they make much more than the average white man, and much, much more than the average female or person of color. But they make less, on average, than their equally credentialed professional counterparts. Meanwhile, factory workers (historically mostly unionized white men), who used to earn higher-than-average wages, now receive lower-than-average pay. All this makes the social hierarchy less tidy than it used to be, producing contradictory interests and identifications that are not reducible to simplistic formulae. It also makes organizing across—and even along—class, race, and gender lines a challenge, raising hard questions about who we should be angry with at any given time, and where we might make alliances despite, in Lorde’s words, “grave differences.” Traister argues that “the white patriarchy” pursues a conscious divide-and-rule strategy by doling out economic handouts to white women through heterosexual marriage and patriarchal privileges for men, even non-white men. But there is no central executive committee of “the white capitalist patriarchy,” however much the Federalist Society aspires to fill
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that role. And if such a body existed, Trump would not have been its first choice for president. Super-wealthy individuals and corporations are not ideologically unified beyond the issue of preserving their wealth. In fact, on issues such as sexual morality, LGBT rights, gender equity, and immigration, some of the richest institutions and individuals are more liberal than most lower-income Americans. Despite lingering prejudices and a strong sense of personal entitlement, many elite white men are willing to offer equal—or near-equal—opportunities to women and people of color who are able to move into the professional class. But that’s not to say that they—or the women and minorities who have been admitted to their ranks—are willing to tamper with the institutions from which they derive their wealth and power, even when those institutions perpetuate racial and gender inequities. Traister’s explanation of why more married white heterosexual women vote Republican than do their single counterparts underestimates women’s own class agency and interests. Married women, she says, have been granted “proximal power: greater access, via their relation to powerful white men,” to wealth, jobs, education, and housing. The advantages their men “dole out” give these wives an incentive to protect “white male power.” Perhaps this is true for many among the top 10 percent of the population. According to a new analysis by University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen, among the richest 10 percent of couples, 32 percent of wives are wholly dependent on their husbands’ incomes. But in the two-earner families on which most Americans now rely, many women are protecting class interests of their own. The very act of getting married is increasingly an indication of a woman’s own class identity, since poorly educated, low-income women have poor marriage prospects; and once entered, marriage is important insurance against class slippage for both men and women. Among couples whose household income is $80,000 to $129,000, Cohen finds, 45 percent
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Rosa Parks, a “lifelong furious fighter”
Women have more experience than men at fine-tuning our emotions and managing them strategically.
of wives earn 40 percent or more of the family income. Among households earning $47,000 to $79,999, 41 percent of wives earn 40 percent or more. This mutual dependence cuts two ways. It gives high-earning women, even feminists, a direct stake in protecting institutions and policies, such as lower taxes, that favor the interests of the wealthy. And it gives many men a stake in policies and reforms that protect the earnings and working conditions of their wives and daughters. Traister concedes that angry blue-collar and rural whites have legitimate grievances, such as shrinking wages and declining social status. Unfortunately, these grievances all too often exacerbate racist and misogynist attitudes. Still, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, the phrase “white privilege” does not accurately reflect the insecurity that plagues so many working-class and rural whites, even if, on average, they remain better off than African
Americans. And heightened racism is not the inescapable reaction to such insecurity. In Washington state, where I live, our almost all-white logging counties went for Obama in 2008, and again in 2012, although less enthusiastically. But in 2016, like many Obama supporters in the Rust Belt, they abandoned “hope and change” for rage and blame. Their blame was misplaced, but their rage was understandable, because most liberal elites, including candidate Hillary Clinton, had ignored their deteriorating situation for far too long. A study of the differences among America’s ZIP codes in the run-up to the 2016 election revealed that almost 90 percent of the country’s prosperous ZIP codes added new jobs and businesses as the recovery from the 2008 recession accelerated between 2011 and 2015. But starting well before the recession and continuing throughout the recovery, distressed communities were losing ground. Two-thirds of the most distressed ZIP codes saw significant decreases in jobs from 2000 to 2015, and more than 70 percent had more businesses close than open. While ZIP codes inhabited mostly by minorities were twice as likely as predominantly white ones to be economically stressed, whites accounted for 44 percent of the more than 52 million Americans in the most distressed communities. That’s a lot of people who also have reason to be “good and mad.” We need to think strategically about how to find common ground with such potential allies without pandering to their prejudices, how to confront opponents without alienating individuals who might eventually be won over, and how to neutralize people who don’t support all the social justice demands we embrace but might be dissuaded from endorsing the repression that others will try to mobilize against us. Traister is right to argue that anger about injustice can be “contagious, transferrable to other contexts.” But such anger can only be caught by people not previously exposed to it when we get close enough to work or interact with them. As Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza told Traister: “I understand that the coalition that is going to save us has to be much bigger
m o n t g o m e r y c o u n t y s h e r i f f ’s o f f i c e / a p i m a g e s
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than what it is. … I’m mad as hell about a whole bunch of things, every single day. … But I want to be free more than I want to be mad. And I want to work with people who also want to be free more than they want to be mad, because maybe we will actually get to something that makes sense.” People have ambivalent and conflicting impulses, and those can be shifted. Here’s where our female gender socialization, for all its burdens, is an advantage. Women have more experience than men at fine-tuning our emotions and managing them strategically. When we channel our anger into the strategic, focused, and collaborative activism that Traister describes in her final chapters, we can indeed be a powerful force for change. And as the 2018 midterms demonstrated, we can infect new groups of people with righteous anger. November’s “blue wave” did not and will not wash away racial, gender, or economic injustice. But it reflected one dramatic turnaround, according to a study by Tufts University political scientist Brian Schaffner. In 2016, people who disapproved of sexist statements were just as likely to vote for a Republican House candidate as not. Many were evidently willing to overlook misogyny they disliked in order to gain things such as lower taxes, higher military spending, or deregulation. But this November, Schaffner notes, “less-sexist voters punished Republican House candidates in a way they did not in 2016.” The temper tantrums of Trump, Lindsey Graham, and Brett Kavanaugh may have stiffened the spine of the right-wing base, but they did not win enough new converts to offset those losses. And much of that is thanks to the aroused women who have mobilized their own anger to discredit rather than match the fury of sexists and racists. Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College and is the author of seven books, including The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.
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Value Beyond Price It isn’t only the marketplace that determines worth. BY MIKE KONCZAL B
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hether it is the financial sector, health care, trade, or the nature of work, the question of what is valuable in our economy has become more and more prevalent in our politics. Economists have not been particularly useful guides in this debate. This shouldn’t surprise us, argues economist Mariana Mazzucato in her new book, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Economists largely abandoned that question a century ago, assuming that anything and everything that trades for money counts as valuable, and little else. The title is based on Oscar Wilde’s comment that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. It’s easy to extend this one-liner to ridicule economists. But Mazzucato wants instead to reconnect the debate around value within a politics that fits our era. In her first, groundbreaking book, The Entrepreneurial State (2013), Mazzucato opened people’s eyes to the idea that the government plays a significant, crucial role when it comes to innovation. In the popular imagination and increasingly in academic discussions, innovation was the result of lone entrepreneurs and startups. Mazzucato sought to put the government back into this equation, as inventor, funder, risk-manager, and key component. Mazzucato got people thinking seriously about the government research that went into the iPhone and countless other commercial applications— and, in turn, how value is created. In her new book, Mazzucato extends this debate about creation of value to the economy as a whole. The book begins with a historical debate between two sets of actors over the notion of value. The first wave sees value as an open question, and she lays out the debate among the French Physiocrats of the 1700s (who saw value as deriving from land), the classical British economists Adam Smith
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and David Ricardo, culminating with the work of Karl Marx, who saw all value as coming from labor. Though the debates among these thinkers were wide, they all explored how to define true value as opposed to unproductive work. For Ricardo, unproductive labor is about redistributing value rather than creating it. For Marx, value is tied to surplus; the functions of capital that don’t produce value, such as interest or speculation, fall in the category of unproductive labor. For these classical thinkers, “use value” was at least as important as “exchange value.” The economy was seen as one of forces collaborating and competing for what was created. Value, and its allocation, come out of this essentially political question. This entire debate was wiped clean by the marginalists of the late 1800s. This handful of scholars, led by Alfred Marshall, looked to scarcity, the setting of prices, and the subjective experiences of individuals to determine value. Using calculus and other formal mathematical tools, these economists built their economics up from the idea that there is no objective value of goods, just their going price as people refine their preferences at the margin. Supply and demand takes over, and regulates value in terms of what someone will pay in the marketplace. For marginalists, all income is earned income, and the notion that there is productive and unproductive work simply disappears in a circular logic that something is valuable to the extent someone is willing to pay for it. The notion of “abnormal” profits simply can’t exist given the premise of a self-regulating economy. This kind of judgment was formalized both in the economic models taught to generations of students and in our national income statistics and the gross domestic product that forms our notions of growth. To demonstrate the failure of this
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paradigm, Mazzucato spends a third of the book exploring how the financial sector has hijacked the overall economy. This isn’t just about Too Big to Fail banks taking outsized risks, leaving the chaos for others to handle. Mazzucato summarizes the latest research arguing that finance is too big overall, and has come to dominate the nonfinancial economy. Economists struggle to understand this. Given that the sector is so profitable, standard theory holds that it must have added that much value. But what is actually value here? Who gains from this gigantic financial sector, and with what trade-offs? The marginalist revolution has removed not just a set of tools to discuss this major change critically, but it has removed it as even a question worth exploring. Mazzucato, cycling back to her earlier work, shows how this inability to discuss value also corrupts the discussion of innovation and the public sector. Patents and other tools have come to be seen as “rights” even as they reduce competition and shut down broader investment and experimentation. The government is seen as an inefficient beast best to starve through austerity, rather than a key component that sets the terms of how the economy runs. The book is an excellent overview on the latest arguments in all these areas. Though people are right to be worried about the financial sector, it would have been of interest for Mazzucato to go even wider with her analysis. Much of the classical debate about value was fundamentally about workers, but the workplace shows up in Mazzucato less than one would expect. Deep issues on how necessary household labor goes missing from the national accounts are treated only in passing. The analysis is sharp enough that a reader wants more. The book also forces a debate about the conventional view that the only problem with the economy is that it isn’t enough of a market. Mazzucato rehabilitates but also complicates the
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THE VALUE OF EVERYTHING: MAKING AND TAKING IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY BY MARIANA MAZZUCATO
Public Affairs
discussion of “rents,” the economist’s term for super-normal or excessive profits. In standard economics, rents are not much of a problem because of the assumption that the market itself soon competes them away, and any rents must be the work of government. Yet the exorbitant profits of platform monopolies and other industries with pricing power suggest that rents are pervasive. Conversely, much of what people want from the economy involves creating floors and protections, using excess profits for social uses. The ideas that nobody working full-time should be in poverty, and that people with pre-existing conditions should be able to get health care, suggest a politics that focuses on not creating a perfect market but instead thinking about how markets can be made to better serve people. The glib notion that getting government out of the market’s way can solve all economic problems can’t speak to good versus bad rents in the economy. As such, it largely defaults to attacking government action, as if there could be a market economy without the state. This is the essence of socalled public choice theory.
As Mazzucato writes, “It is not enough to look at impediments to an idealized form of perfect competition. Yet mainstream ideas about rent do not fundamentally challenge how value extraction occurs—which is why it persists.” Rent here becomes a question-begging exercise. As Mazzucato notes, using the “term ‘rent’ to analyse inequality will be influenced by [one’s] idea of what value is and what it represents.” As such, policy should be understood as “co-creating markets and value, not just ‘fixing’ markets or redistributing value.” This is an important contribution, one necessary to our moment. The Value of Everything reminds us that there is not just one way to do capitalism, that there can be capitalism beyond the fever dreams of Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan, and that markets can be structured to bring about more growth and a more balanced society. Mike Konczal is a Fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, where he works on financial reform, unemployment, inequality, and a progressive vision of the economy. He blogs on financial issues at Rortybomb.
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The New Economic Concentration The competition that justifies capitalism is being destroyed— by capitalists. Needed: a new antitrust. BY DAVID DAYEN B
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onathan Tepper is not happy. You might call him angry. “People haven’t used the word anger before, but you’re probably correct,” he told me in a phone call. The source of Tepper’s anger is capitalism; not the ideal laid out in textbooks, but how it’s been practiced since the 1980s. In a capitalist system, increased productivity and tight labor markets should lead to higher wages. But in the U.S., wages for the typical worker have been flat for four decades. In a capitalist system, “creative destruction” keeps the economy vibrant, as upstart companies push out less agile ones. But the rate of new business formation has been cut in half since the late 1970s. In a capitalist system, corporate profits should convert to increased investment. But while pre-tax profits keep growing, investment has lagged severely. The tipping point for Tepper, a macroeconomic analyst for hedge funds and high net-worth individuals, was the release of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The book was a powerhouse, but Tepper considered the premises off base. Meeting with friends at pubs in London where he lives, Tepper had to go to bat for capitalism. But he found it more and more difficult in the face of increasingly miserable evidence. Says Tepper, “The anger comes from having to defend a system that isn’t the system I’m defending. I got a little tired of it.” Tepper, by background and temperament, should not be the one to drive a stake into the heart of capitalism. But he believes he knows the source of capitalism’s woes: concentrated corporate power, which has distorted markets, stagnated wages, sat on innovation and entrepreneurship, and engendered helplessness among the public. In The Myth of Capitalism, Tepper and his co-author Denise Hearn painstakingly detail how the U.S. economy is drowning in this sea of monopoly. And he reserves
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his greatest scorn for the regulators, lawyers, and economists who allowed it to happen. Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who coined the term “network neutrality,” has a much cooler setting in his thin volume, The Curse of Bigness. Yet these two treatises on monopoly play well together. Tepper paints the landscape of our concentrated economy; Wu is more concerned with how we got here, reaching back as far as the Boston Tea Party (a revolt against the liberty-depriving power of the East India Company monopoly) to show that America has a tradition of fighting concentration, for the betterment of all citizens. Antitrust economists inexplicably comfort themselves with the belief that markets, under a technical measurement known as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, aren’t that consolidated. But the giveaway here is that that Federal Trade Commission stopped collecting data on industry concentration in 1981. The Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank, filled in the blanks in November with a report showing how a handful of players dominate all sorts of commercial activity, from cradle to grave, baby formula (where four firms make 89 percent of the product) to coffins (two firms control 76 percent of the market). As Tepper puts it, with every transaction in your daily life, you pay a small toll to one monopoly or another. “Capitalism without competition is not capitalism,” Tepper writes. Four airlines shuttle most Americans around the country. Two corporations brew most of the country’s beer. Three companies manage the lion’s share of pesticide and seed markets. Google and Apple host the entire mobile app market. You might think you have choices in the supermarket aisles, but a handful of companies produce all the varied brands. Every online travel booking site comes from one of two corporations. This is made worse when monopolists
THE MYTH OF CAPITALISM: MONOPOLIES AND THE DEATH OF COMPETITION BY JONATHAN TEPPER WITH DENISE HEARN
Wiley
THE CURSE OF BIGNESS: ANTITRUST IN THE NEW GILDED AGE BY TIM WU
Columbia Global Reports
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cooperate to carve up the country; over 75 percent of all households have only one choice of Internet provider. The concentration has spread to Wall Street, too. Tepper highlights Warren Buffett’s zeal for monopoly companies with economic “moats.” As investors copy Buffett’s strategies, they allow big firms to suck up available capital. The same big shareholders own large stakes in the main players in entire sectors, removing the incentive to compete. (In this sense, Tepper does mirror Piketty’s description of capital begetting capital, even if he would be uncomfortable with the comparison.) If companies know they must create moats to attract investors, they will use political power to raise barriers to new entrants or acquire patent protections, building the walls ever higher. Failing that, they’ll just buy out the competition. Tepper notes that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have purchased 436 companies and startups in the past ten years, without a single regulatory challenge to any acquisition. The effects of all this are profound. Tepper started the book to decipher the wage puzzle: Why did leading indicators keep pointing to higher wages that never came? He found that workers with fewer choices to deploy their talents—a condition known as monopsony—cannot bargain for better pay. As the benefits of economic growth pool in corporate boardrooms instead of workers’ pockets, inequality naturally follows. Service quality suffers amid no alternatives to pressure monopolists. Fragility abounds in concentrated markets. Monoculture crops planted in the farm belt are susceptible to wipeout from one fungus or disease; Hurricane Maria’s devastation in Puerto Rico knocked out the manufacturing centers for the two companies that make nearly all intravenous saline solution bags for hospitals. That’s right—last year we had a serious shortage of something so elemental as salt and water in a bag, thanks to the brittle supply chain of a duopoly. Where Tepper unfolds these nightmarish conditions, Wu offers a historical perspective. “From 1895 to 1904, at least 2,274 manufacturing
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firms merged,” Wu writes, recalling an era known as the Age of Trusts. Giants like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, along with commodity trusts in tobacco, rubber, and cotton, were nearly impervious to rivals and swollen with profits. These robber barons actually argued that “ruinous competition” made prices too low and hurt markets. Anger with monopolies in railroads had already birthed the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, with a mandate to decentralize power. But while it was passed to bust trusts, its language left enough room for interpretation that policymakers and courts, captured by dominant special interests, felt free to ignore it. Wu identifies two heroes, who would eventually face off on opposite sides of the monopoly divide. Theodore Roosevelt, thrust into the presidency after William McKinley’s assassination, courageously took down J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities railroad trust, just a couple of years after McKinley honored Morgan with a White House state dinner. Later, Roosevelt would initiate the case that dissolved Standard Oil. “When exaggerated wealth demands what is unfair,” he would later say, “its immense power can be met only by the still greater power of the people as a whole.” But Roosevelt ends up an enigmatic figure to Wu. In 1912, disappointed by the performance of his handpicked successor William Howard Taft, Roosevelt created the Bull Moose Party, with a platform favoring “regulated monopolies” under state control. Roosevelt welcomed big business as long as government was its overlord. But standing in his way in 1912 was Woodrow Wilson, and his economic adviser Louis Brandeis, whose collected writings, called The Curse of Bigness, provided Wu with his book’s title. Brandeis saw anti-monopoly laws like the Sherman Act as a check on private power and a necessary enabler of human freedom. In a democracy, Brandeis believed people should have “the right to live, and not merely to exist.” Both government and business forces can extinguish the liberty to pursue one’s own talents and interests. “Men are not free,” Brandeis wrote, “if dependent industrially on the
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Theodore Roosevelt came to favor regulated monopolies under state control.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have purchased
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Louis Brandeis saw antimonopoly laws as a check on private power and a necessary enabler of human freedom.
arbitrary will of another.” Brandeis, and Wilson, won the argument and the presidency in 1912, and for 60 years, America worked to secure the blessings of liberty through competition. And then came Robert Bork, and a revolution that ushered in our Second Gilded Age. Bork, best known for failing a Supreme Court nomination, was arguably more influential off the bench, rewriting the antitrust laws without changing a word in statute. Today, mergers are scrutinized under Bork’s “consumer welfare” standard, which has come to mean simply whether the merger will result in lower prices. They typically don’t, as retrospective studies from Northeastern University Professor John Kwoka show. But the change moved monopoly off the field of politics and onto economics, where corporations could easily hire enough economists promising efficiency benefits from mergers to win any trial. Tepper and Wu have plenty of recommendations to remedy our desiccated capitalism: enforcing antitrust laws, presumptively rejecting mergers that reduce competition to too few players, breaking up big companies and reversing mergers, reforming the consumer welfare standard, limiting patents, granting shares to workers,
and ending the revolving door between big business and government. But they really wish to re-energize the antitrust movement (its modern incarnation is sometimes called the New Brandeis movement). Americans, they say, have a preternatural resistance to bigness. Competition fits with Americans’ self-professed values of liberty and equality and opportunity. Modern capitalism snuffs out all of these values, handing society’s gains to too few hands. I’m not necessarily as hopeful that anti-monopoly sentiments can be reawakened on a mass scale. Even if Americans prefer trust-busting, their preference intensity may not run as hot as those desiring the status quo. And the mass media that could deliver the facts of our concentrated economy are themselves massively concentrated. But if you want a concise, comprehensive understanding of today’s predicament—and how to fix it—these volumes are the perfect place to start. Maybe they will be remembered someday as the first stirrings of America reclaiming its democracy. David Dayen is a contributing writer to The Nation and author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud.
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Whose Recovery Was It? How the government rescued finance while retaining most of the abuses that caused the collapse BY SARAH BLOOM RASKIN B
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n 2009, I was summoned to the Treasury Department by the men who were launching the recovery from the global financial crisis. At the time, I was a state banking commissioner and had my hands full managing the waves of mortgage foreclosures inundating Maryland communities. The purpose of this meeting was to hear the distant “provincial” concerns I was raising as a leader of state financial regulatory officials about the spreading crisis in local housing markets. I had some unfashionable and not-ready-for-the-policyelite views about why the post-crisis economy wasn’t improving and why household net worth was tumbling and destabilizing middle-class and working-class neighborhoods. My perspective focused on the gritty and corrupt dynamics of the American mortgage system, not the big-picture Washington narrative of global economic imbalances and the ChineseAmerican relationship. At the Treasury that day, I argued for a so-called “look down” to the cities, towns, and neighborhoods way below the power centers of Wall Street and K Street, to see what was happening in the offices of mortgage brokers and real-estate appraisers, the households of suddenly unemployed people trying to pay bloated mortgages on houses that had lost half their value, and whole communities wiped out by predatory and discriminatory mortgages. Even in 2009, it was clear that the Treasury and Federal Reserve rescue strategies were responding first and foremost to the needs of Wall Street, where recovery of liquidity and capital would be the top order of business, and only secondarily to the deepening crises on Main Street, the side streets, and the back streets. To understand the total inadequacy of the establishment response—not just how the immediate massive social and economic damage went unaddressed and became exacerbated,
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but how the handling of the global financial crisis actually reinforced the dangerously inegalitarian structure of our global economy—we have the gift of Adam Tooze’s expansive, timely, and insightful treatise Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. And a treatise it is, clocking in at a dense but gripping 706 pages (including all the reach-for-that-magnifier footnotes). The story is at once opaquely complex and dazzlingly simple. For economists, historians, and policy advocates, Crashed is a globally comprehensive, detail-rich, and riveting account of what happened and why. But for citizens who may be impatient with all the intricacies of the global financial meltdown—transatlantic financial linkages, the crises buffeting Greek society, the strategic positioning by the People’s Bank of China, the roller-coaster ride of the Russian ruble and its effects on Putin’s incursions into Crimea and Ukraine—I can cut to the chase: The financial system nearly collapsed, but we saved it by massive government intervention without changing its basic dynamics of inequality, instability, and license for speculative private finance. Tooze’s book leaves us with the inescapable conclusion that we need a new way. As devastating as the crisis was, the response by economic political elites around the world, while minimally satisfactory and competent from a short-term perspective, is almost more frightening because it left us massively weakened economically, with even sharper inequality and a stressed-out middle class, and politically even further adrift from viable strategies for inclusive democratic prosperity. Tooze illuminates the central role of the so-called currency swap lines that the Fed used to prop up the teetering world economy. These currency swap lines were Federal Reserve loans extended to other countries’
CRASHED: HOW A DECADE OF FINANCIAL CRISES CHANGED THE WORLD BY ADAM TOOZE
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central banks in exchange for those banks’ currencies to be repaid later with interest. By September 2010, total lending and repayment on swap facilities had logged in at a whopping and unprecedented $10 trillion. Tooze shrewdly uncovers the Federal Reserve’s liquidity operations, showing how the Fed made itself the lender of last resort to the world. Currency swap lines actually had been developed as a tool in the 1960s but were used sparingly and in decidedly lower amounts. It was not until the September 11 attacks that they were dusted off and tested more expansively. Then, in the run-up to the global financial crisis, as financial institutions in other countries confronted dollar shortages stemming from their need to repay other firms with greenbacks, the use of currency swap lines took off and the Fed became, with little fanfare and even less public comprehension, the lender of last resort to the planet. Just as the currency swap lines acted as a powerful tool to extinguish the systemic risk that was about to sink significant portions of the world’s financial sector, the Fed turned another powerful fire hose on the economy with its unprecedented and accelerating rounds of monetary policy accommodation through the use of large-scale assets purchases, using the disarming name “quantitative easing.” Over nearly a decade, QE1, QE2, and QE3 were continual confidenceenhancing injections of cash into the markets with no end dates in sight. The Federal Open Market Committee led the way, with infusions upwards of $4.4 trillion, followed by more liquidity from the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan. As Tooze explains for anyone who missed the point, these powerful tools—the currency swap lines, the funds that went to the so-called toobig-to-fail banks via the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the liberal use of liquidity facilities, and the successive injections of monetary accommodation via quantitative easing—had a discrete set of immediate beneficiaries. These instruments worked through the big banks, through their executives, and through the parts of the public that
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had invested in the stock market and could afford to keep their funds invested even during a prolonged downturn. The direct beneficiaries were obviously not the people who had lost their homes to foreclosure and their jobs to globalization and automation. The Treasury’s rhetoric of the day emphasized the need to “save the system,” which, it was assumed, would save the people along with it. The beneficiaries of the bailout, it was believed, would come to allocate credit on safe and affordable terms to households and businesses, and they would efficiently distinguish “avoidable” foreclosures from “unavoidable” ones. The theory was that mortgage servicers would be incentivized by profit to arrange prompt resells of the countless foreclosed homes that marred the American landscape with their overgrown yards, out-of-control mold, and broken pipes. A lot of communities are still waiting for the market to work its magic. The contrast between the solicitous care shown the culpable financial sector and the negligence shown to the innocent homeowner was startling. I remember, as a Federal Reserve governor, going to New York in 2012 to speak to financiers and being thanked profusely by them for my work in “ending” the crisis. But the next day, I traveled to Cleveland and saw packs of howling dogs scavenging at a boarded-up factory and “cash for gold” vans parked in vacant KMart lots where the opioid crisis was already in full bloom. The “trickle-down” benefits of recovery seemed like a cruel joke in giant swaths of America, where a deep discontent set in in what became the breeding grounds for the Donald Trump campaign. The question that hovers over Crashed is why the recovery strategies undertaken in the United States and abroad were so limited and selective in nature. Why was there so little in the policymaker’s toolbox to help households, especially those that had suffered the double whammy of a loss of a quality job and the loss of a home? To be sure, there were several wellintended policy incursions to assist homeowners—Remember HARP, HAMP, and other loan modification efforts?—but they were straitjacketed
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by draconian rules set up to ensure that “undeserving homeowners” would not benefit, a resolve wholly missing when it came to policies that benefited potentially undeserving banks and corporate executives. But right-wing ideology, never far from the surface of public debate, quickly found its bogeyman and asserted that “undeserving homeowners” should have known better than to be duped by their mortgage providers and should not be allowed to benefit from a reduction in the principal amount of their mortgages. When it came time to help the American people instead of the American financial system, the fire hose of financial aid had become an interval sprinkler timed to shut down as quickly as possible. I saw the same effect when it came to unemployment insurance, which progressive policymakers proposed strengthening and coupling with meaningful job training and retraining. This idea was left on the draftingroom floor, like the idea that federal taxpayer injections of capital to the banks needed to be matched with concrete commitments by those banks to engage in direct lending to small businesses, communities, and consumers. Similarly, the Fed did nothing with the problem of America’s $1.3 trillion (now $1.44 trillion) student loan debt, despite the fact that it had become a
The contrast between the solicitous care shown the culpable financial sector and the negligence shown to the innocent homeowner was startling.
ball and chain for millions of young people trying to launch their careers, homes, and families. In short, under the unimaginative and obsolescent dogmas of the Washington Consensus, the benefits of the recovery went to some of the most culpable quarters and least-deserving people, and not to many of the Americans who most needed them. This was bad politics and bad economics, too; for inequality has itself become poised to be a critical drag on the economy. The conventional verdict on the collapse, superbly challenged by Tooze, is that the Fed and the Treasury took aggressive and sweeping actions to address the crisis. And yes, the American taxpayer has been by and large repaid for the mountains of cash we put up for the bailout. But, for all their boldness, energy, and magnitude, these actions reinforced rather than reduced the dramatic disparities in wealth and income that have come to disfigure American democracy and drain our economy of strength. Tooze invites his readers to think of economics and politics as intertwined fields of play. “The political in ‘political economy’ demands to be taken seriously,” he writes, and he sees “political choice, ideology, and agency” as replete throughout this startling story. These lessons teach us to be wary of claims that there are inescapable economic imperatives outside of politics just as they teach the champions of democracy to be ready with independent economists, unbought political leaders, and comprehensive economic plans to address and, more importantly and more urgently, to prevent the next global financial crisis. Sarah Bloom Raskin served as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury from 2014 to 2017, and a Federal Reserve governor from 2010 to 2014. She currently is a Rubinstein Fellow at Duke University.
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The Digital Destruction of Democracy Social media is the best friend disinformation ever had, and the cure is far from obvious. BY ANYA SCHIFFRIN B
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isinformation and propaganda spread by media have long been a staple of politics. But the 2016 elections raised new questions about the role of new media. What role did the interplay of new and old media play in getting authoritarian demagogues elected? How do new media platforms supercharge the spread of conspiracy theories and false ideas? Is there something different about the way Facebook and Twitter spread hate and lies? How can we stop them from doing so? Yochai Benkler and his co-authors Robert Faris and Hal Roberts have amassed reams of data tracing how extreme propaganda and disinformation seeped from the edges to the center of U.S. discourse in 2016. Much of this was done via social media platforms, of course, but the authors of Network Propaganda explain how Breitbart and Fox News also played a pivotal role in disseminating extreme ideas to a broad swath of the U.S. population. A Harvard law professor who is a well-known theorist of the digital age, Benkler and colleagues have produced an authoritative tome that includes multiple taxonomies and literature reviews as well as visualizations of the flow of disinformation. They begin by sorting out the different types of disinformation and the groups that circulate it. These include “clickbait fabricators” with mainly financial motives for circulating false or misleading content; Russian hackers who spread propaganda via Facebook; Cambridge Analytica, which used data from Facebook profiles to micro-target voters with political advertising; and “white supremacist and alt-right trolls” who harnessed the power of the increasingly powerful “right-wing media ecosystem.” The authors include a history of the scholarship on propaganda, reminding the reader that much of the discussion began in the 1930s. Benkler’s optimistic 2007 book, The Wealth of Networks, predicted
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that the Internet would bring people together and transform the way information is created and spread. Today, Benkler is far less sanguine and has become one of the foremost researchers of disinformation networks. Using the MIT Media Lab’s Media Cloud software first developed with Ethan Zuckerman, Hal Roberts, and other colleagues, the authors analyzed some two million stories published during the 2016 election campaign and another 1.9 million stories that appeared during the first year of Trump’s presidency. Network Propaganda includes their maps of how propaganda and disinformation spread across the web and entered mainstream conservative media. A few key findings: The dishonest poison on the web is being spread mainly by the right. Benkler calls out Fox News, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, InfoWars, and Zero Hedge as the places where extreme lies and pieces of propaganda are created and then spread around the web and to other right-wing media. There is no equivalent level of disinformation and propaganda on the left or in the Democratic zone of news and information. The few conspiracy theories that exist on the left don’t spread. The idea of “balance” and “scoops,” intrinsic to the professionalized legacy media’s practice, inadvertently spread the disinformation peddled by the right. Benkler argues that the media’s commitment to balance meant that it gave air time to many of the egregious falsehoods disseminated on Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Zero Hedge, and InfoWars. As a result, mainstream journalists repeat and amplify the falsehoods even as they debunk them. An email included in the 2016 Wikileaks dump of Podesta emails that said the Clinton Health Access Initiative “would like to request that President Clinton call Sheik Mohammed to thank him for offering his plane to the conference in Ethiopia and expressing
NETWORK PROPAGANDA: MANIPULATION, DISINFORMATION, AND RADICALIZATION IN AMERICAN POLITICS BY YOCHAI BENKLER, ROBERT FARIS AND HAL ROBERTS
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regrets that his schedule does not permit him to attend” was reported in The Daily Caller as Bill Clinton accepting a free ride from Moroccan King Mohammed VI, who donated $28 million to the Clinton Foundation. This lie about the plane ride was then morphed into another unsubstantiated story that in 2011, the Clintons tried “to shut down the U.S. phosphate company Mosaic Fertilizer in exchange for a $15 million donation” from Morocco’s king, “ostensibly to help Morocco’s state-owned phosphate company.” Had these kinds of stories stayed in the right-wing media ecosystem, the damage might not have been great. In fact, Benkler finds that the mainstream media spent much of July, August, and September 2016 reporting on phony allegations of Clinton corruption, while coverage of Trump stayed focused on the issues he raised. “Defining Hillary Clinton in terms of corruption was the central success of the Trump campaign and the right-wing media campaign ecosystem during the 2016 election.” The best-selling book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, about foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation, was written by Breitbart news editor-at-large Peter Schweizer, funded by the Mercers (published by HarperCollins), and became a New York Times bestseller in 2015. The book, filled with inaccuracies and misinformation, became one of Breit bart’s most shared stories on Facebook in 2015 and gained legitimacy by being reported in The New York Times in early 2015. The book was made into a spurious documentary called Clinton Cash, which was launched in July 2016 by Steve Bannon and aimed at splitting Bernie Sanders’s supporters away from Clinton. The link to the film on YouTube then became the second-most shared story on Facebook about the Clinton Foundation in fall of 2016, and the most widely tweeted video throughout the election. Using network analysis and looking at patterns of how links are shared, the authors note that the film “straddled the line between core Trump supporters (based on its location in the
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network) and Bernie supporters (based on the community detection algorithms, which places it clearly within the Bernie community).” In keeping with much of the scholarship on media persuasion, Benkler and colleagues are cautious about blaming Facebook for the 2016 election results. There is no clear line, they argue, between Russian propaganda, Breitbart lies, and the Trump victory. They add that Fox News is probably more influential than Facebook. On this front, the evidence is in: Research published in one of the top economics journals in the fall of 2017 shows that the presence of Fox News in the United States causes an increase in votes for Republican candidates and in polarization. Facebook has information as to who was microtargeted with political advertising and disinformation in 2016, and this could be crossed with election data to detect the trends in voting patterns; but Facebook won’t release the information on which Facebook users were targeted. Facebook’s focus on profits above everything else means that, like YouTube and Twitter, it is the place where rumors, lies, and hate speech spread globally as well as in the United States. Once it became clear that the social media platforms were spreading lies, Russian disinformation, and hate speech, Facebook stonewalled when faced with government requests for information, not just in the United States but in the United Kingdom and at the European Commission. As a result of investigative reporting in The New York Times in November 2018, we know that after George Soros gave a speech in January 2018 calling for regulation of the social media platforms, Facebook hired a Republican opposition research firm to shovel dirt at George Soros. The firm, Definers Public Affairs, also spread rumors that groups supporting regulation of social media platforms were anti-Semites. It’s no surprise that social media
Senators Mark Warner and Richard Burr with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg after a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last September
platforms are just as greedy and unscrupulous as any other big business. The problem is what to do about companies whose business model is based on generating engagement—which includes systematic disinformation—and selling targeted advertising. Around the world, governments, businesses, foundations, journalists, and academics are trying a range of piecemeal fixes that may not work. The European Union has not yet tried to regulate disinformation (although they do have codes of practice for the platforms), instead focusing on taxation, competition regulation, and protection of privacy. But Germany has strengthened its regulations regarding online hate speech, including the liability of the social media platforms. Under German law, opinions are protected but false facts are not. It may be that the European Union will clamp down in the future, but the United States won’t because most speech here is protected by the First Amendment. Further, many of the Internet governance groups in the United States, which oppose European-type laws, receive some funding from Facebook. So Benkler, Faris, and Roberts are forced to fall back on low-hanging fruit such as disclosure of the sources of online political advertising. This common-sense approach has been
espoused by former FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel and others and is included in a bipartisan proposal, the Honest Ads Act, introduced in October 2017 by Senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar. It’s a bit toothless because, just as with offshore bank accounts, it may be possible to register which U.S. entity is paying for online political advertising, but it’s impossible to know whether that entity is getting its funds from overseas. Even the Honest Ads bill was too much for Facebook to take. As The New York Times reported in November, Facebook hired the Republican opposition research firm Defenders and went into full attack mode, enlisting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to strongarm opponents. The anger against Zuckerberg and Sandberg has been tremendous, similar to the outrage seen after the Cambridge Analytica revelations, but it’s not clear how this will translate into reforms. We’re left with a world of competing fixes that may not work and fragmented media systems whose audiences live in parallel worlds and believe different things. The authors of Network Propaganda note that by doing more surveillance, social media platforms may be able to minimize the amount of foreign propaganda entering public debate. They also call for regulation or self-regulation of the platforms and argue for laws supporting transparency of political advertising. But that won’t solve the problem of Rupert Murdoch and Steve Bannon. The book concludes, “[T]here is little that technocratic solutions can do consistent with a commitment to free expression.” Reading this prodigious piece of research, we are left with deeper understanding of how information networks circulate lies— and deeper frustration about possible remedies. Anya Schiffrin is the director of the media and technology specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a member of the Global Board of the Open Society Foundations.
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1. 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 © 2019 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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Electing to improve people’s lives By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
ast year, U.S. Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) authored an amendment to repeal the Affordable Care Act and allow insurers to raise premiums for people with pre-existing health conditions. Last week, MacArthur lost his seat to Andy Kim, who campaigned on expanding access to healthcare. Kathy Hoffman, a speech therapist and union member in a suburban Phoenix school district, was so appalled by Betsy DeVos’ inability to answer basic policy questions during her confirmation hearing that Hoffman ran to become Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction. Last week, she prevailed over a former Republican congressman who is a leader in the charter school movement. President Trump made the midterm elections a referendum on himself, using fear and lies in rally after rally to mobilize his base. Meanwhile, Democrats made a different choice, running hopeful campaigns focused on making life better for people—protecting Americans with pre-existing conditions; strengthening public schools; addressing gun violence; taking on student and medical debt and the opioid crisis; raising wages; securing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; and fixing roads, bridges and water systems. The midterms pitted fear against problem solving, and this time, problem solving won out. Such extensive Democratic victories in U.S. House of Representatives, gubernatorial and statehouse races were not a foregone conclusion. The economy is strong by many measures, although most Americans have not seen the benefits of it in their wages. And Republican gerrymandering has created scores of congressional districts and statehouse seats designed to give the GOP an impenetrable lock. But the American people sent a clear message. They voted for a check and balance on President Trump by taking control of the House from the GOP, which has served as a rubber stamp for Trump. And they rejected Trump’s politics of fear, division and lies, voting for decency over cruelty, fairness over prejudice, and democracy over demagoguery. These elections demonstrated a realignment in the electorate. Nearly 4 million more young voters (ages
18-29) cast ballots in the 2018 midterm elections than in the last midterms, and nearly all of that increase in turnout went to Democratic candidates. Democrats also carried majorities of women, well-educated voters, Independents and minority voters. A surge of suburban voters chose Democrats. And voters age 45 and older essentially split between Republicans and Democrats, a shift that Republican pollster Frank Luntz called “historically and catastrophically low for the GOP.” Voters flipped governor’s seats in Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin. In these states, the outgoing Republican governors had defunded and undermined public schools and universities, stripped workers’ and labor rights, and doled out corporate tax breaks that precipitated steep cutbacks in essential public services. The incoming governors, on the other hand, have detailed plans to reverse the damage, prioritize public education, and revitalize the infrastructure and services the people of their states need. Voters responded to a decade of disinvestment in public education and the Trump administration’s assault on public education and students, including student borrowers, by overwhelmingly choosing to invest in public schools and stand with educators. Arizona voters defeated a voucher initiative. And voters in at least a dozen states voted to raise their own property taxes to invest additional dollars for public education and colleges, including teacher pay.
to the point of paralysis. That means our advocacy remains hugely important—to press for the results people need, to demand checks and balances on an increasingly autocratic president, and to stand up against hatred and divisiveness. And if the people see results, or they see who is impeding those results, this election may usher in even greater changes.
The midterms pitted problem solving against fear, and problem solving won.
More than 300 AFT members ran for office this year, and more than 60 percent of them won. And in another rebuke to Trump’s attack on diversity, newly elected officeholders reflect America’s wonderful tapestry: More than 100 women were elected to the House of Representatives and 12 will serve in the Senate. And there were lots of “firsts”—the first Native American and Muslim women were elected to Congress, Maine and South Dakota elected their first female governors, Arizona and Tennessee elected their first women to the Senate, Connecticut and Massachusetts sent their first black women to the House, and Colorado elected its first openly gay governor. While voters chose candidates who want to problem solve and make life better for people, our work is far from over. Let’s be real—winning is meaningless unless it translates to actual change in people’s lives. Democrats will need partners to pass meaningful change. In order to get that done, the new majority in the House will need allies in the Senate, whose GOP leader is unmatched in the dark arts of obstructing political opponents
Photo by Adam Derstine
Weingarten (right) with AFT member and Michigan Gov.-elect Gretchen Whitmer.
Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten
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