The American Prospect #337

DAVID DAYEN: POLITICAL ECONOMY FAILURES AT THE EU DARA LIND: THE PERIL AND PROMISE OF HUMANITARIAN MIGRATION

I D E A S, P O L I T I C S & P O W E R

BIDEN IN A BOX

50 years of support for Israel is tested by the Gaza tragedy.

By Jonathan Guyer APRIL 2024 PROSPECT.ORG

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April 2024 VOL 35 #2

Features 16 How Biden Boxed Himself In on Gaza

40

The president draws on 50 years of unflagging support for Israel, and not even a humanitarian crisis can dislodge him from that viewpoint. By Jonathan Guyer

22 Eurocrats on the Brink

In a world on fire, with corporate and anti-democratic forces rising, why are European policymakers so slow to react? By David Dayen

55

32 Still Bring Us Your Tired

Bad policy and worse politics threaten the post-WWII imperative to admit victims of persecution. But in parts of America, humanitarian migration remains a cherished tradition. By Dara Lind

32

40 Against the Wind

Climate science deniers, right-wing think tanks, and fossil fuel shills are plotting to foil the renewableenergy revolution. By Rebecca Burns

48 New York City’s Last Dictatorship

After 20 years, New York reconsiders mayoral control of its education system. By Liz Rosenberg

Prospects 04 Liberals Need to Be Radicals By Robert Kuttner

Notebook 06 The In-Flight Magazine for Corporate Jets By Luke Goldstein 10 California Public-Transit Agencies Confront Rider Harassment By Gabrielle Gurley 13 Can Florida Democrats Make a Comeback? By Ramenda Cyrus

Culture 55 H. Claire Brown on Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry 58 David Cay Johnston on The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America 61 Rick Perlstein on Revisionist Zionism 64 Parting Shot: Handmaids of the Patriarchy By Francesca Fiorentini Cover art by Jan Feindt

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 1

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This success in Michigan’s primary cannot be taken lightly. It’s too easy for the Biden campaign to whistle past the graveyard by assuming that Arab American and other Muslim voters will appreciate in November that Trump would be even worse for them. Many may just not turn out.—Robert Kuttner, On Tap, The Prospect’s Daily Newsletter When it comes to swatting, one obvious point to start with is that it is at bottom a crime of spectacle— and that anything that de-spectacularizes policing would [be of benefit].

—Rick Perlstein, in his weekly newsletter, “The Infernal Triangle” 2 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

ELECTIONS

2024

Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is running a campaign to be one of 100 and maybe in a Republican Senate—a body that would potentially have little interest in an old-school moderate like a former governor of Maryland.

—Gabrielle Gurley

The administration’s announced investigation into electric vehicles produced in China is nominally due to the security risks from auto software, cameras, and sensors that may spy on its passengers or allow for remote shutoff; but the real reason is that a surge of cheap Chinese EVs could devastate the domestic market.—David Dayen on “The Chinese Auto Conundrum”

EXECUTIVE EDITOR David Dayen FOUNDING CO-EDITORS Robert Kuttner,

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APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 3

S T C E P S PRO ROBERT KUTTNER

Liberals Need to Be Radicals

Media commentators crats in the White House and Congress have are mystified about why Joe Biden has not gotten more credit for an improved economy, with inflation down nearly to prepandemic levels and job creation setting records. The reason is not hard to grasp.

None of the recent improvements have altered the basic situation of most Americans, in which reliable careers are scarce, college requires the burden of debt, health coverage is more expensive and less reliable, and housing is unaffordable.

The American dream of a good job, decent health care, homeownership, college education without crippling debt, and a better life for the next generation was once within reach of most Americans. Now, it’s far harder to attain. Even with a twoincome family, the cost of good child care is excessive.

The remedies are all necessarily radical.

Biden’s State of the Union address was directionally and rhetorically right. He called for containing Big Pharma to reduce drug prices, raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations to finance broad benefits such as housing down-payment subsidies and affordable child care, as well as protecting and strengthening Social Security and Medicare. But in a second term, and in his campaign to earn a second term, Biden needs to go a lot deeper.

Since Jimmy Carter, mainstream Demo4 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

been complicit in the corporate erosion of the American dream. They agreed to mixed public-private approaches that resulted in systems that were inefficient, lucrative to for-profit players, and impenetrably frustrating to ordinary citizens. Consider four emblematic cases of policy dead ends that now require radical remedies.

The first is affordable college. When I was a student, public universities were free, as they had been since land grant colleges were invented during the Lincoln administration. If you wanted to design a system to destroy the life chances of young adults, you could not do better than the student loan system.

The debt program was the work of both parties. While state legislatures gradually withdrew tax support for universities, Pell grants steadily dropped in relative benefit. In 1980, a Pell grant covered more than three-fourths of the cost of attending a public university. Today, it covers less than 30 percent; student debt must make up the rest.

In this shift, Republicans at both the state and federal level were worse than Democrats. But today, the typical state university is only about 50 percent tax-supported, and the figure is about the same in blue states as in red ones. At the University of Massachusetts, in a state that has been blue for generations, in-state tuition, fees, room,

board, and other needs cost about $37,000 per year. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about what private college cost 40 years ago.

Obama and Biden tinkered around the edges. Obama shifted the student loan program from private lenders to direct federal loans. Biden provided some relief for nearly four million debtors, within the limits of his executive power. But the true remedy is radical: cancel most student debt and make public higher education free. Bernie Sanders has a plan that would do this. You just have to increase taxes on rich people to pay for it. Student debt is an American invention. Several other nations, even ones where a larger percentage of young people attend university, still have free, tax-supported higher education.

Or take health care. Liberals, going back to Truman, used to be for national health insurance. Bill Clinton’s proposed plan and its two variants, Romneycare in Massachusetts and then Obamacare nationally, were all variations on the same theme: “managed competition” using the genius of the market to offer choices and contain costs. Insurers would offer policies, with subsidies for poorer people, and then consumers would shop around for the most appropriate plan.

This approach has been a fiasco. Insurers keep devising ways to game the system.

In hundreds of counties, there is only one insurer. The ostensibly public parts of the system, like Medicare, keep being privatized: Medicare Advantage profits by denying needed care, private drug plans use the Medicare brand, and there are for-profit mental health carve-outs under Medicaid.

Meanwhile, nonprofit hospitals, in the struggle for market share, are behaving more and more like for-profit ones, and the whole hospital sector is becoming more rapacious. More and more middlemen take a bigger and bigger cut, at the expense of patients and care workers. Cost-containment schemes devised by government backfire and become new ways for commercial players to game the system.

We now spend 18 percent of GDP on health care, for a system that leaves tens of millions without coverage and tens of millions more who are nominally insured unable to afford care because of deductibles and co-pays. The U.K., which has chronically underfunded the NHS, still has better morbidity and mortality statistics than the U.S., because they cover everyone without the sheer waste and gamesmanship.

The radical remedy is not just single-

payer national health insurance. We need to de-commodify and de-commercialize the entire system. That would save massive sums by simplifying the system and getting rid of the middlemen, and be easier on both patients and clinicians.

Free higher education and true national health insurance are at the fringes of public debate. Biden could make them mainstream. Competent government run by sane and decent people, in contrast to Trumpian lunacy, ought to be a major selling point with voters this year, but it isn’t. The country is in a populist mood. We will either offer and eventually deliver progressive economic populism, or we will keep getting far-right, nihilist MAGA populism.

Here are two more aspects of the lost American dream where radical policies are needed to make a palpable difference. Biden can’t deliver them without a Democratic Congress. But running on these themes makes it more likely that he will get one.

Fifty years ago, the typical worker in a primary labor market job had a true pension. The pension was based on years of service times wages paid in the final few years. A worker might retire with 80 or 85 percent of his or her final wages. These socalled defined pensions operated not just in unionized companies but in Fortune 1000 employers generally.

In the 1970s, when industry had a bad decade, major companies began shifting to 401(k) plans, where the worker paid more of the cost and bore all of the risk. Today, only 11 percent of workers have traditional pensions, and only a small fraction of workers in their fifties and sixties have enough money in 401(k) plans to finance more than a few years of retirement. Workers risk outliving savings, getting caught in a down stock market, and making bad choices in terms of which financial companies hold and manage their accounts.

All told, 401(k) accounts hold about $7 trillion of assets. If Wall Street middlemen take out 2 percent, that’s $140 billion a year.

Comparatively speaking, the public Social Security system is simplicity itself. You pay FICA taxes during your working life, and when you retire the government cuts you a check that reliably comes every month.

It’s adjusted for inflation. It comes as long as you live. Administrative costs are trivial and no fees are taken out by middlemen.

There is no risk of making bad investments.

We are not likely to go back to a traditional pension system. We don’t have the stable corporate structure of that era, and it was easier to build such a system during the postwar boom when the ratio of workers to retirees was more favorable.

The sensible and radical remedy is to create a second tier of Social Security, as a universal, portable pension. Unlike Social Security, which is pay-as-you-go, the second tier would be funded. Income on the fund, as in a traditional pension, would pay out benefits. That would require higher taxes— on the rich, please. The system would take a generation to mature. Canada is moving toward such a system.

It’s great that Biden is defending Social Security against Republican cuts. But the 40 percent of the elderly whose sole source of income is Social Security are close to poverty. The deeper problem that requires radical remedy is inadequate income in old age.

More jobs are becoming gigs. Biden has made a good start by having his Labor Department crack down on misclassification and wage theft, by embracing unions, and requiring that jobs created by his several infrastructure programs be union-friendly. His National Labor Relations Board has administratively enacted some of provisions of the PRO Act, such as banning captive antiunion meetings. With a working majority in Congress, Biden could do a great deal more.

The final core pillar of the American dream is a variant on the same story—housing. This is in some ways the most difficult.

Earlier postwar generations enjoyed economic tailwinds that made it easy to have benign policies on housing. Our parents and many of us bought homes when they were affordable and enjoyed a lifetime of wealth appreciation.

The main reason for this windfall was a combination of cheap land, governmentbacked mortgages, and tax benefits. We cannot recreate the cheap land, much of which was converted from farmland. But we could subsidize homeownership for firsttime buyers. Biden in his State of the Union offered the beginnings of such a policy: a tax credit (which is as good as cash) of up to $400 a month for first-time homebuyers. Removing the burden of student debt would also be a huge help for young wouldbe homeowners.

Transportation policy could complement housing policy. There is a great deal of affordable housing within 75 miles of

major metro areas, but commuter rail is in such dismal shape that if you work, say, in Boston, and live in affordable Springfield, it takes forever to get to work. High-speed rail on commuter lines would be good policy in its own right and bring affordable housing to more people.

We have defunded public rental housing and substituted two policies that create unreliable substitutes by subsidizing developers, middlemen, and landlords.

One is housing vouchers, the so-called Section 8 program; the other is the LowIncome Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Both are expensive and inefficient, and neither produces enough rental housing for people who nominally qualify. With Section 8, the landlord is free to evict the tenant when the neighborhood gentrifies. The LIHTC lines the pockets of middlemen who syndicate the tax shelter, and creates a bureaucratic maze for low-income developers.

Good social housing, of the sort widely used in Austria and the Netherlands, is the remedy. In both countries, it is attractive to the middle class as well as the poor. That strategy, in turn, reduces NIMBYism.

None of this is going to be enacted anytime soon. But there is a latent constituency for more radical policies. In 2016, Bernie Sanders was suddenly among the most popular political leaders in America. The press was mystified. Sanders was at the radical fringe of American politics; he was a socialist. Yet voters, especially young people and working-class people, loved him, because he spoke to their needs. He was the plausible alternative to Trump.

Biden surprised most of us by governing more in the spirit of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

He did so in part because of the economic emergency he inherited, but his progressivism persisted. He has accomplished much, given a legislative majority that has ranged from scant to nonexistent. In 2020, Biden said he expected to be a transitional president to a younger generation of leaders. But he could serve a more profound transition, back (and forward) to Roosevelt-style progressive populism that delivers for ordinary Americans.

In his State of the Union address, Biden aptly framed America’s choice as hate and retribution versus hope and possibility. To save his presidency, our democracy, and the aspirations of Americans, Biden needs to go even bigger. n APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

NOTEBOOK

The In-Flight Magazine for Corporate Jets The Economist has channeled the concerns of elites for decades. It sees the Biden administration as a threat.

By Luke Goldstein Jon Stewart stoked controversy in his return to The Daily Show in February for having the audacity to point out that the president is old. A maelstrom of rage was directed at Stewart for letting the secret get out. Amid 6 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

the uproar, the interview he paired with the opening monologue mostly escaped the public’s notice.

After the commercial break, out to the host’s desk strode Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor in chief of The Economist, the British weekly known for channeling the hopes

and fears of the international business class.

The rationale for her selection was pretty clear. The magazine carries significant sway across both sides of the Atlantic, and the cover of a recent issue chastised Biden for placing “vanity” above “duty” by not stepping aside. “In failing to look past Joe Biden, Democrats have shown cowardice and complacency,” it reads.

On cue, Beddoes suggested Biden was a doddering old man nearly the same age as her father, unequipped for another campaign run. But the conversation would soon

move beyond mere theater criticism, proving to be far more revealing about the war of ideas between the corporate and populist factions of the Democratic Party.

Stewart referred to Beddoes’s publication as “the establishment,” which evidently touched a nerve. The Economist, she interjected, championed British liberalism, the more patrician classical sort, not the bastardized American kind. Free markets, limited government, and the free flow of international capital and peoples across borders were its guiding principles. That’s what The Economist had always stood for, she insisted, and for the past several decades those ideas were the prevailing consensus on both sides of the Atlantic, spanning the governments of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.

But times had changed. “We’re absolutely not the establishment anymore … industrial policy is in, big state is in, protectionism is in,” Beddoes remarked. She was describing the core pillars of what’s been dubbed “Biden­omics,” which is credited for introducing the post-neoliberal turn in U.S. policymaking by rejecting market fundamentalism.

Stewart appeared nonplussed that his guest had more of an ideological bone to pick with Biden. He quickly pivoted the conversation to more common ground: the global crack-up of the international order wrought by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising right-wing movements.

But the moment stuck out. Beddoes’s pushback was actually a remarkably selfaware assessment that summed up the full-scale repositioning undertaken by The Economist during the Biden years.

Seemingly unbeknownst to Stewart, the venerable publication has become one of the leading attack dogs against the Biden administration’s domestic economic agenda, with as much gusto as The Wall Street Journal editorial pages. The short list of policies criticized most vehemently by The Economist could fill an entire State of the Union address: renewed antitrust enforcement, pro-union labor board rulings, public investments for domestic manufacturing and greenhouse gas reduction, more robust social spending. It also questioned the withdrawal from Afghanistan, featuring an op-ed from none other than Henry Kiss-

The venerable publication has become one of the leading attack dogs against the Biden administration’s domestic economic agenda. inger as he was knocking on death’s door.

Only as of late has the Biden age question become a topic of concern, with the more neutral critique about competence serving as cover for the ideological revolt. Reading The Economist provides a glimpse into the pro-corporate forces assembling behind the scenes, eager to pin the collapse of the Biden campaign on the more populist measures adopted by his administration.

Beddoes’s recent appearance on The Daily Show begs the question: Why should an upper-crust British interlocutor, clearly disdainful of our country’s policy decisions, be considered a credible figure to tell Americans how to handle our next election?

Wasn’t the whole point of the American Revolution to escape these sorts of people unduly meddling in our country’s affairs?

Well, The Economist is not just any international outlet. Its inf luence within the U.S., among both the business and political elite, has been unusually potent for decades.

In the 1990s, George H.W. Bush was often seen striding across the White House lawn clutching the latest issue under his arm. On his way out the door in 2016, Barack Obama became the first American president to pen an editorial in its crisp pages, in a bid to cement his legacy.

The magazine’s clout trickled down among rank-and-file government staffers in Washington, who prominently displayed fresh copies in their offices as a kind of status symbol. These days, The Economist may have lost a step, perhaps because of its persistent attacks. Biden recently cited its rival, the Financial Times, as his preferred publication.

But it has retained its pull in the C-suites.

Bill Gates has described it as essential reading, and its elite readership is summed up by a notorious tagline that the publication hired renowned adman David Abbott to craft in 1990: “It’s lonely at the top, but at least there’s something to read.”

The Economist’s staff comes almost exclusively from the British upper echelons; one of the magazine’s four trustees, who choose the editor in chief, is named Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone. Its signature style is the lack of individual author attribution to its articles, delivering a monolithic editorial voice across its pages. For that reason, one high-up editor once remarked that he didn’t believe the publication would necessarily be served well by more “diversity” of background, or viewpoint for that matter.

But the magazine opened up its ranks in 2014 and welcomed the first female editor in its 150-year history: Beddoes, who’d been the economics editor for well over a decade.

Her previous work is even more illuminating about the publication’s current disposition toward the splintering of the liberal international order.

Since its inception, The Economist has held that spreading markets abroad, whether at gunpoint (during British colonialism) or through free-trade agreements, would liberate the world economy and dissuade global conflicts. Beddoes was on the front lines of putting this worldview into practice.

Fresh out of Harvard in the early 1990s, she was recruited by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of the chief architects of the market reform experiment in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, known as “shock therapy.” This entailed forced liberalization of the economy by selling off state assets to the highest bidders, creating a new class of oligarchs and engendering widespread corruption. Beddoes learned these tools of the trade and took them to the International Monetary Fund, where she replicated those policies across post-Soviet satellite states.

The failure of that liberalization regime, with its corruption, sky-high inf lation, and scarcity of goods is widely understood as one of the driving factors behind the rise of anti-liberal authoritarians in Eastern Europe like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Andrzej Duda in Poland.

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

NOTEBOOK The Economist and Beddoes remain undeterred in the myths they’ve spun about globalization. They continue to push the same policies even as the rise of China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reveal that a more interconnected global economy can arguably be even more effectively weaponized by bad actors. As the pandemic showed, concentration in production overseas created brittle supply chains that fail to deliver even basic goods in times of upheaval.

When the election of Donald Trump in 2016 marked the first signs of this crackup in the global order, the magazine wrestled with the rise of populist politics and the crisis of liberal democracy with a bit of soul-searching. And it came to some rather unexpected conclusions. In order to restore trust in liberal institutions and the political center, The Economist conceded that the technocrats would have to better distribute the gains of economic growth across the citizenry.

In particular, the publication identified monopoly power as a corrosive feature fueling public anger across the West. Its 2018 special report on competition opened with a startling acknowledgment: “America’s economy has become a capitalist dystopia; a system of extraction by entrenched giants.” Some of those sweeping statements were qualified with counterarguments later on. But after ticking off consolidated markets in aviation and telecom and credit card banking, the basic thesis was this: “The view that competition might be in peril … feeds into the public’s sense that the economy is rigged.”

The special report was inspired in large part by the attendance of several editors at the University of Chicago antitrust conference, which was becoming a bastion at that time for the growing neo-Brandeis­ ian movement.

The report by no means embraced the more radical edge of antitrust proponents.

But it was seen as a validation of the underlying premise that concentration was constraining innovation. “It was like, even The Economist gets that this is a real problem,” said Hal Singer, an economics professor at the University of Utah who moonlights as the pre-eminent watchdog of The Economist’s most wrong takes.

In many ways, that 2018 report mirrors the rationale that numerous Biden administration officials have employed to crack down on corporate power. Yet just a few 8 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

years later, The Economist has done a complete about-face on the issue.

The Wall Street Journal may be the leading critic of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, averaging one editorial screed against her every 11 days, according to the American Economic Liberties Project. But The Economist is very close behind, routinely lambasting Khan for “treating all big firms as criminals” and “most mergers [as] offenses.”

In a recent editorial, the publication went so far as to write that “the single biggest reason why Bidenomics has got a bad rap has been his competition agenda, led

by Lina Khan.”

This onslaught has been relentless. Mainly, they claim the merger guidelines she and the Justice Department finalized at the end of last year are too restrictive and that her legal cases have lost in courts.

Another piece on “why trustbusters have

fallen short of their ambitions” cites Khan’s failure to block the Microsoft-Activision merger and others as evidence of her failed approach. It parrots the ad hominem attacks about staff treatment at the FTC spread by a New York magazine piece in December, “Lina Khan’s Rough Year.”

Since that piece ran, the FTC has put together a string of victories, scuttling merger deals between Figma and Adobe, Illumina and Grail, and IQVIA and DeepIntent, while banning Rite Aid from using facial recognition software to harass customers, forcing GlaxoSmithKline to withdraw unlawful patents, and persuading Boehringer Ingelheim to drop the price of inhalers by hundreds of dollars.

The Economist has yet to cover any of these developments.

When not trashing Lina Khan, The Economist has gone on the attack against industrial-policy initiatives like the Infla-

The recent history of The Economist offers a warning: Beware of ideological attacks using Biden’s age as cover. a factor in the pandemic supply crunch, and is equally cited by administration officials as reason to revitalize the industrial base.

The Economist blames Biden’s spending packages for the inflationary pressures of the past several years, ignoring that the U.S. has one of the lowest inflation rates among industrialized nations. It also holds special contempt for the “greedflation” theory that excess corporate markups could possibly be contributing to rising prices, which has recently been taken up by President Biden.

In short, it offers full-throated support for a corporate-friendly agenda.

Zanny Minton Beddoes, The Economist’s editor in chief, was the opening-night guest on Jon Stewart’s return to The Daily Show. tion Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, which it argues will lead to disastrous “protectionism” and potential inflationary spirals. A recent special issue focused on discrediting the “homeland economics” model being developed in the U.S., critiquing reshoring efforts for failing to admire the efficiency and low prices that free trade delivers.

The report brushes aside the supply chain shortages during the pandemic—which shifted the conversation about industrial-policy reforms in the U.S.—as a oncein-a-lifetime event. Policy changes this drastic, it argues, shouldn’t be predicated on anomalies.

This fails to contend with other motivating factors for supply chain resiliency.

Earthquakes in Taiwan in the 1990s or the hurricane in Puerto Rico threatened to knock out access to key medical and technology supplies. Extreme weather was even

Why would a publication all of a sudden argue against its own policy recommendations from a few years ago, just as they gain traction? “I’ve never seen such an obvious top-down change in editorial line.

It’s frankly corrupt and gross,” said Matt Stoller, director of research of the American Economic Liberties Project.

It’s hard to shake the sense that such an abrupt change emanated from outside inf luence. On the business side, audience capture is a very real phenomenon. After proving to be one of the most successful publications to make the digital transition in the 2000s, The Economist’s revenue numbers started to sink like many other outlets’. It couldn’t really afford to shed its remaining white-collar subscribers and advertisers.

The makeup of its board of trustees, chock-full of financiers with holdings across industries, also should be noted. In 2013, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt joined the board for a brief stint.

The publication claims to adhere to a strict professional firewall between the editorial and business sides, but that firewall only goes so far. On several occasions, the coziness between its writers and board members has been abundantly apparent.

Sebastian Mallaby, former editor at The

Economist and husband of Minton Beddoes, wrote a book in 2022 about the history of venture capital called The Power Law. As reviewers noted, it took an all-too-uncritical view of VC as an indomitable engine of growth. One of the subjects whom Mallaby managed to secure a rare extensive interview with was Eric Schmidt, for a chapter portraying the heroic risks VC took to foster a tech superstar like Google, run by an impressive founder like Schmidt.

Ideological capture often precedes any overt directives from corporate powers.

What’s clear is that The Economist was shaken by the more populist direction it saw in the Biden administration.

As with much of the Democratic Party’s donor class, it thought a Biden presidency would merely represent a “return to normalcy,” and the enduring stability of the political center. In the run-up to the 2020 election, The Economist tempered “fears of a leftward lurch under Biden” by reassuring business leaders that “the charge is wide of the mark. Mr Biden has rejected the Utopian ideas of the left.” Their hopes were shattered by the appointments of Lina Khan and other aggressive reformers, and the more interventionist economic policy approach.

What The Economist proposed from 2017 to 2019 were tweaks to the system to shore up its legitimacy. The Biden brain trust believed that a much broader transformation was needed to effectively move beyond neoliberalism. “I don’t think the publication was fully prepared for the declaration of ‘a new Washington consensus’ [by national security adviser Jake Sullivan] or giving someone like Lina Khan free rein,” said Singer.

There are plenty of reasons to be worried about Biden’s fitness for a grueling campaign and to criticize his administration, in particular for its handling of the war in Gaza. Many have called for him to step aside for those reasons.

But the recent history of The Economist offers a warning: Beware of ideological attacks using Biden’s age as cover. The progressive wing of the party has more skin in the game with the Biden presidency than any previous administration of recent decades. The political center will inevitably use a Biden loss in November to try and discredit its populist leanings. The Economist is laying the groundwork for that already. n APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

NOTEBOOK

California PublicTransit Agencies Confront Rider Harassment

New laws require the state’s largest systems to survey riders about their safety concerns.

By Gabrielle Gurley “Leave this Black queen alone!”

Headed to UCLA on a February day, Karen Mack expected her usual uneventful ride on a Wilshire Boulevard bus in Los Angeles.

Living in a transit-rich area in the center of the city, she gave up her car last year and knows neighborhood bus routes well.

In the middle of a cellphone conversation, Mack noticed that a man—“mentally challenged” is how she describes him—got on the bus. He had been talking to himself and began lashing out at riders as he walked down the aisle. He saw Mack talking on her phone. “You’ve got my phone,” he yelled and demanded that she hand it over.

“I’m not a shrinking violet,” says Mack, who is the founder of the arts and culture organization LA Commons and a member of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission. She resisted and the two began arguing. That’s when a second man intervened and shouted at him to stop bothering her.

“We almost were double-teaming him,” says Mack, “and then he just got off the bus.”

Street harassment is a common phenomenon that many public-transit riders, but especially women and girls, experience on buses and trains, in stations and at bus stops, as they travel between their homes, jobs, schools, events, and recreational activities.

Public-transit agencies often hear complaints from riders about harassment. But system officials don’t always know what to do about it, since public transportation is not immune from the wider social problems that communities face. That’s especially 10 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

true for large urban systems like San Francisco’s BART, which have had a big chunk of riders drop out of transit altogether in the work-from-home transition.

What they do know is that no system can afford to lose more passengers due to heightened fears. That pressure has forced California systems to get serious about combating street harassment.

California has taken a two-step approach to harassment. A 2022 law directed the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University (MTI) to create a survey to help public-transportation systems collect data on riders’ safety concerns. A second law passed last year requires the state’s ten largest public-transit agencies to collect data from passengers about harassment, and make the findings public by the end of 2024.

Available in more than a dozen languages and free to any U.S. transit agency, the MTI survey will help systems figure out how best to handle the confrontations that riders face: if specific lines have more incidents than others, and if riders are being targeted because of their gender, race, language, or religion, or other personal characteristics.

They will also help transit officials learn more about the perpetrators.

Street harassment is “transit’s dirty little secret,” says Alicia Trost, chief communications officer for San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), the regional rail network. “It’s the biggest hurdle to even begin the conversation.”

“I’ve seen harassment based on race, gender, all kinds of situations,” says Eli Lipmen, executive director of Move LA, a community organization that works on public transpor-

tation, affordable housing, and other issues.

Concerns about harassment can make it difficult to switch from driving to transit—or to keep riding. “If you have a very serious incident, you just don’t know if you can do that again, because it can be really traumatizing,” he says.

Antisocial behavior on transit certainly predated COVID-19, but the early months of the pandemic saw an explosion of harassment in parks, stores, on streets, and on transit, with Asian Americans frequently targeted.

From mid-March 2020 to December 2021, Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition fighting racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, logged about 11,000 attacks.

Another two-year survey indicated that 40 percent of those attacks took place in public spaces and nearly 10 percent on transit.

Those incidents persuaded the coalition that transit deserved a special focus.

“Ever since [COVID-19] became the ‘China virus,’ a lot of AAPIs really felt like they are not safe in public and nonpublic spaces,” says California state Sen. Dave Min (D-Irvine), who heard about incidents from family, neighbors, and other AAPI members.

Min, who is seeking the congressional seat that Katie Porter relinquished when she ran for Senate, helped steer the two street harassment laws through the legislature.

Street harassment runs the gamut from threatening comments, racist gestures, catcalling, and swearing, to stalking and flashing body parts, and to physical violence like groping, muggings, and sexual assaults.

The perpetrators act out against the people they target based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or disabilities.

In early 2020, MTI surveyed nearly 900 San Jose State University (SJSU) students and found that sexual harassment on transit is widespread. The downtown campus has regional rail and bus options and more than 60 percent of students use transit, especially buses. Women were overwhelmingly victims of harassment: 70 percent of women students reported verbal harassment compared to 36 percent of men. Nearly twice the number of women as men reported all sorts of harassment, which included indecent exposure, being shown pornographic images, and stalking and physical harassment, ranging from groping and other unwanted touching to rape and sexual assault.

Asha Weinstein Agrawal, MTI’s education director, also notes that most incidents

“But also, some people might not want to admit that some of these things had happened to them.”

The onset of the pandemic actually gave BART, California’s third-largest public-transit agency, an opening to focus on the issue. At the end of 2020, BA RT began collecting data about harassment incidents. The A lliance for Girls, a San Francisco youth advocacy group, had shared its own 2019 study about the indignities that women and girls suffered on buses and trains. Young people had concerns about gender and racial harassment taking place not just on the BART trains or on the region’s buses but also on the way to and from transit stations and bus stops. BART, the alliance, and community partners launched a street harassment public-information campaign.

“It’s a difficult topic to discuss because you’re worried you’re going to use the wrong language or you don’t know where to begin,” says Trost, “or you’re going to scare away potential riders or you’re going to victim-blame or shame instead of holding the aggressors accountable.”

Most transit agencies also do not have qualified people in-house to take on a full-fledged anti-harassment initiative. BART hired a cultural strategist to help them to do outreach to women, speakers of second languages, and other groups. They also worked with local community organizations to determine how best to approach passengers about harassment.

Recruiting residents and specialists helps boards of directors, some of whom never use public transportation, and agency officials to confront skeptical questions like “Why now?” “Shouldn’t we really be thinking about just safety holistically?” or “Why is this only about women and girls?”

An advertisement for BART’s antiharassment campaign

Public transportation is not immune from the wider social problems that communities face. go unreported and that contrary to what people assume, do not always happen at night. Some women respond by changing their routines, routes, and the time of day that they travel, if they can. Others give up on transit completely. Forty-five percent

of women bus riders who took part in the SJSU survey reported that their fears about sexual harassment led them to cut back on bus trips; only 7 percent of men curtailed their use of transit.

Some transit riders also may not understand that behaviors like catcalling or suggestive remarks or looks constitute harassment.

Agrawal recognizes that if you ask people if they have been harassed, they may say no, but if they are asked about specific verbal, nonverbal, and physical behaviors, those same people will say yes. “There are some people who may not feel that they have been harassed but who do witness it,” she says.

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

Consultations with police forces are important, but since many harassment behaviors do not constitute criminal violations under local penal codes, there are limits to the actions that police can take.

And young people, no matter what their background, tend to fear encounters with police. BART established teams of unarmed ambassadors, specially trained individuals selected from its own police department’s community service officers, to monitor rider behavior and offer assistance.

What systems can do, says Trost, is update passenger codes of conduct and websites with statements indicating zero tolerance for harassment. That shows how seriously a system is about addressing threatening behavior. “You need to actually say that it’s not welcomed and they will take action if someone else witnesses it,” she says. “Unless you’ve done that, anything you say falls empty.”

At roughly the same time as BART, the A police officer on Los Angeles’ Metro system

12 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) undertook a women’s travel patterns study. It reported that while most women feel safe riding buses and trains during the day, they were more apprehensive about using them at night and wanted to see better lighting and more police and security staff in the system. Women had been deserting the system since before the pandemic. LA

What systems can do is update passenger codes of conduct with statements indicating zero tolerance for harassment.

Metro launched its own transit ambassador program modeled on the BART initiative in 2022.

For its part, BART started running shorter trains. Fewer cars with more people on each car helps people feel safer. After this change, the agency has had fewer incidents involving police. The system distributed “bystander intervention” cards. Proposed by youth design teams, the cards are available in stations and designed to inform riders about their options when they observe harassment or when someone is bothering them.

Many passengers suggested that BART install call buttons, not knowing that trains already had them, so the agency raised awareness about that fact in subsequent public-information campaigns. Artists have designed posters with examples of acceptable behavior and unwelcome acts. They were designed so riders, especially the elderly and disabled, would be able to see themselves and the problems they face in the art.

“Trying to be funny or cheeky,” Trost says, “It’s not the vibes I’m going for.”

In response to the question “Have you experienced gender based sexual harassment in the last six months at BART?” for the period October to December 2023, 7 percent of BART riders answered yes to that question, a slight improvement over the same period in October–December 2022, when 9 percent did. Nevertheless, BART still suffers from anemic overall ridership at 42 percent of pre-COVID levels. Weekend ridership is considerably higher.

LA Metro saw its highest ridership increases last year after its high-profile moves to offer information services and deploy more security officers, transit ambassadors, crisis intervention specialists, and workers to handle people suffering from drug abuse and homelessness. The agency also made numerous facility safety improvements, adding new lighting, additional call boxes, station music, and modified entrances.

“The pandemic led to a general breakdown of social order, in a sense, and we’re having to kind of claw that back as people come back to work and are using the system,” says Lipmen of Move LA. Service that is frequent and reliable will keep riders and attract new ones. “The more we see people traveling together—families, students, seniors,” he says, will go a long way toward providing the atmosphere of safety that helps reverse negative perceptions. n

DAMIAN DOVARGANES / AP PHOTO

NOTEBOOK

Democrat Tom Keen won a special election to the Florida House despite being outspent 2-1.

Clawing Their Way Back to Relevance

The Florida Democratic Party aims to take advantage of Republican miscues and sweep up the voters who are fed up with them.

FLORIDA HOUSE PHOTO

By Ramenda Cyrus After the 2022 midterms, Florida seemed like a lost cause for the Democrats. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won a second term, flipping multiple counties that President Joe Biden took in 2020. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) beat Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) by more than 15 percentage points. GOP voter turnout was strong at 67 percent compared to the Democrats’ 52 percent.

But the red wave that washed over Flor-

ida in 2022 brought home some unpleasant facts for the Democratic Party. Florida’s congressional delegation has two longtime GOP senators and a majority of Republican House members. The GOP has controlled both houses of the state legislature for more than two decades, and those majorities now are more than willing to do the bidding of DeSantis—which reinforces the pervading sense of doom. “It’s hard to suggest there are stakes when the Democrats aren’t really competing in Florida,” one anonymous

Democratic consultant told ABC News.

At least this is how the GOP spins its dominance of the state’s political scene. It would be convenient for the party to have the voters—who once exercised their swing-state powers, going twice for George W. Bush and twice for Barack Obama—accept this seemingly permanent Republican majority.

It diverts attention away from the party’s preoccupation with culture-war politics at the expense of pocketbook issues like the high cost of housing, a governor who has blown millions of dollars on a failed presidential campaign, and the other serious issues gripping the state. Some, like abortion access, mirror the controversies in other Republican strongholds. Others are unique to Florida, which has some of the highest insurance premiums in the country.

The divisive political landscape that the GOP has created makes them vulnerable.

Hot-button issues invigorate their loyal voters, but they alienate independents who make up nearly a third of the Florida electorate and whose numbers are growing. To APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

NOTEBOOK further complicate life for Republican leaders, the Florida GOP is also in disarray after a sex scandal and rape allegations forced the removal of the state party chairman. Combine that episode with dysfunction in the Michigan GOP and elsewhere, and there are growing indications that there are serious problems brewing in battleground states.

Undeniably, the Florida Democratic Party is outmatched by Republicans in a number of ways, from campaign contributions to registered voters. Yet there are signs of life within the FDP. The bigger question, then, is whether personnel changes, strategic spending and messaging, and grassroots campaigning can harness the energy of the current political moment to pull together a stronger showing in November and make future elections competitive.

Recent Democratic victories suggest that the party is not, as DeSantis put it last year, a “dead, rotten carcass.” In January, Democrat Tom Keen clinched a victory in the state House race for District 35, which includes sections of Orlando, Florida’s fourth most populous city. Both Democrats and Republicans showered dollars on this race, but Republicans outspent the Democrats 2 to 1.

In the end, Rep. Keen narrowly took the seat by roughly two percentage points.

In 2023, Donna Deegan, a Democrat and a longtime local television anchor, became the first female mayor of Jacksonville, the state’s largest city. Until this “major upset,” Jacksonville had been the largest city in the country with a Republican mayor.

Deegan, a Jacksonville native, was able to pull together a bipartisan coalition to win the highly contested race. Deegan stressed her desire to promote greater transparency in the mayor’s office and to restore a sense of community after last year’s racial unrest in the city. She beat her Republican opponent by four percentage points.

“The Democrats are in a position where they’re gonna need to grind it out, make gains where they can [and] show that they have life,” Matthew Isbell, an elections data consultant for Democrats in Florida, told the Prospect.

But perhaps the party’s biggest hurdle is the fact that Republicans are consistently able to raise more money. There are nearly 800,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state. In the 2020 election season, the Florida GOP collected about $43 million in contributions, compared to 14 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

the Democrats’ roughly $14 million. In 2022, that gap only widened, and though contributions plummeted after the election, Republicans still outpaced Democrats through the end of 2023.

After the 2022 drubbing, former Miami mayor Manny Diaz stepped down as the state Democratic Party chair. He delivered a scathing appraisal of the party’s inner workings in his resignation statement: “We cannot win elections if we continue to rely on voter registration to drive turnout, build field operations only around elections, and expect to get our vote out without engaging voters where they live; listening to them and earning their trust.”

Nikki Fried, the former state agricultural and consumer services commissioner, succeeded Diaz. Fried, who failed to win the 2022 Democratic nomination for governor, seemed to agree that the FDP needed to completely revamp its operations. She pledged to rebuild the FDP “from the ground up.”

In March, Fried started in on the party’s spring cleaning, suspending the chairs of the Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Franklin County Democratic Parties. According to a Politico report, the Miami-Dade chair, Robert Dempster, was canned due to allegations of irregularities at county meetings and in filling committee vacancies; Mindy Koch of Palm Beach reportedly failed to cancel contracts that Democratic Party’s executive committee had not agreed to; and Carol Barfield, chair of the Franklin County party, allegedly misplaced one membership list and a year’s worth of financial audits.

“Florida Democrats are serious about creating the infrastructure and party apparatus we need to take back our state, restore our rights and freedoms and re-elect Democrats all the way up the ticket. The country is counting on us,” Fried said in a statement.

Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, praised Fried’s moves, but the jury is still out on whether these changes are enough to convince donors that the party is worth fresh investments.

The furor over abortion could sway some races in the Democrats’ favor. Florida voters will likely consider a proposed state constitutional amendment that would permit abortions up to viability, about 24 weeks. The organizers of the amendment campaign, Floridians Protecting Freedom, collected nearly one million verified signatures, more than the 800,000 needed to put the initiative on the ballot. That process

The divisive political landscape that the GOP has created in Florida makes them vulnerable. has been held up by a legal challenge from the state GOP that questioned the clarity of the initiative language. In February, Chief Justice Carlos G. Muñiz expressed skepticism about the lawsuit, noting that “people of Florida are not stupid.” The court has yet to rule on the challenge.

Climate change has intensified Florida’s severe storms, leading to catastrophic damage on the coasts, most recently in Southwest Florida after Hurricane Ian. The cycles of building and rebuilding in areas prone to flooding and wind damage have contributed to the flight of major insurance companies, driving up property insurance rates to historic levels. Florida homeowners pay the country’s highest average home insurance premiums. In 2023, the average annual premium was $6,000, 42 percent more than in 2022, according to the Insurance Information Institute. For many, Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the state-created insurer of last resort, is the only option.

Citizens currently holds over 1.3 million homeowner policies, and is now the largest homeowner insurer in the state.

But many Florida consumers, especially people who have experienced hurricane damage or losses, have fallen prey to “takeouts.” A Washington Post investigation found that insurance startups have descended on the Florida market, picking up thousands of policies at one time. The practice, a solution that Florida lawmakers devised to reduce the pressure on Citizens, has further contracted an already stressed market and left Floridians paying high prices for subpar insurers.

In February, Florida lawmakers proposed retooling Citizens’ operations so that the company would cover all Floridians, a daunting proposition.

With all of this turmoil, DeSantis’s approval rating has dropped slightly since the beginning of the year. Keen, the state representative, told the Prospect that voters repeatedly voiced—unprompted—their displeasure over restrictive abortion laws and

JOHN R AOUX / AP PHOTO

Jacksonville was the largest city in the country with a Republican mayor until Donna Deegan’s upset victory in 2022.

high insurance premiums. Rep. Keen’s campaign ran ads that continuously emphasized his GOP challenger Erika Booth’s support for the GOP’s six-week abortion ban. “[The] feedback that we received was that the Republican Party here in Florida were not addressing those two key issues. They just flat out weren’t doing it, and I did it,” says Keen. GOP messaging, Keen adds, was lackluster, and focused on the wrong things.

Keen says that he personally knocked on over 3,000 of the 7,000 doors that his team canvassed in the district. This sort of grassroots discipline can be a game changer for a campaign in a state with such a large number of independents. As of 2023, there are 3.5 million independents, 4.3 million Democrats, and five million Republicans in the state.

FDP county parties told the Prospect that messaging discipline will be extremely important in this upcoming election. “We all worked together with the same goal of making sure that Tom won that special election and to send a strong message that we are

back and we can win tough races in swing seats,” says Samuel Vilchez Santiago, chair of the Orange County Democrats, which includes sections of District 35. “I really haven’t seen the level of message discipline that was displayed in many other races in the state of Florida.”

As Jim Rosinus, the interim chair of the Democratic Party of Lee County in Southwest Florida, told the Prospect, “We have found that, in this area at least, while certain voters are nervous about voting for a ‘D,’ they like our policies and positions and will vote for those.” Santiago says that the Orange County Democrats are focusing on congressional seats that Biden won in 2020 but that the GOP currently hold.

Democrats are also focusing on increasing voter turnout, registering Democratic voters whose registrations have lapsed, and spreading the word about absentee or mailin ballot options.

Perhaps sensing the heat, DeSantis and Republican state lawmakers have begun to walk back unpopular policies. After the

Alabama Supreme Court decision in February that raised questions about legal liabilities involving in vitro fertilization (IVF), the Florida legislature suspended consideration of a bill that had been dubbed the “fetal personhood bill.” The bill would have defined a fetus as an unborn child and extended civil negligence protection laws to a fetus (which would have allowed parents to receive financial compensation in case of death of the fetus).

DeSantis and the GOP’s grip on power in Florida may have reached its zenith. Anger over developments on issues like abortion and insurance has given the Democrats an opening. But the Florida Democratic Party can’t adopt a scorched-earth approach to seats they have no chance of winning. In 2024, it’s all about the long game—setting the table for future gains. “Democrats have less room for error, that’s for sure. “You have to be smarter with things,” says Isbell, the political consultant. “It will force the Democrats to be strategic about which races they’re going to target.” n APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

N E D I B HOW D HIMSELF E X O B A Z A G N IN O The president draws on 50 years of unflagging support for Israel, and not even a humanitarian crisis can dislodge him from that viewpoint.

By Jonathan Guyer ILLUSTRATION BY JAN FEINDT

I

sraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a knack for making world leaders do the jobs of their subordinates. President Joe Biden had to call Netanyahu himself in October— in the first weeks of Israel’s brutal assault on the occupied territory of Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attacks of October 7—to urge that Israel allow more than 100 trucks of relief aid a day into Gaza. Normally, that’s a task a low-level economic officer at the embassy might handle.

Five months later, the situation has only gotten more humiliating, with Palestinians suffering from an Israeli-sponsored famine. In mid-February, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan was expressing desperation that flour paid for by U.S. taxpayers reach Palestinians in Gaza. USAID Administrator Samantha Power was visiting stockpiles of humanitarian assistance in Jordan that were also held up. Then the Biden administration floated the idea of air-dropping aid into Gaza, a tactic of colossal expense and little value when Israel could just speed inspections and open up more entry points.

The next day, Israeli troops launched what became known as the “flour massacre,” 16 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

opening fire on Palestinians in Gaza waiting in a bread line, killing over 100 people and injuring hundreds more. The U.S. went ahead with the airdrop. Now the administration is planning to build a makeshift port near Gaza City to prevent Israeli forces from stopping U.S. aid with U.S.-made weapons.

The U.S. looks powerless. Biden initially warned Israel not to perpetuate the mistakes the U.S. made after the September 11 attacks. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” he said to Israelis in October, though now Israel very much has done that and has not faced consequences.

If nothing changes, the destruction of Palestine will be a major piece of Biden’s legacy.

Since October 7, the Biden administration has not applied pressure on Netanyahu to stop a widespread humanitarian crisis, but rather has transferred more weapons (often sidestepping Congress to do so), used its veto power at the United Nations to shield Israel from resolutions in support of a cease-fire, and played the role of technocratic fixer, trying to distribute aid that Israel is obligated under international law to provide to Palestinian civilians.

Experts are almost unanimous about what policy changes are needed to save lives

today: securing an immediate cease-fire, conditioning weapons transfers on following the laws of war, and withholding diplomatic cover in forums like the U.N. Security Council. Biden’s team has tinkered with its rhetoric incrementally to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians and call for what they now call a cease-fire (previously, it was a “humanitarian pause”; both would only last six weeks). It has introduced some policy mechanisms that could in the future hold Israel accountable for what have been credibly described as war crimes.

But for all of the outcry from voters, officials who have resigned in protest, and Democratic politicians, as well as anonymous, leaked criticisms from Biden’s own team, there has been no re-evaluation of the policy course. Beyond being unable or unwilling to stop Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians or the leveling of Gaza, Biden has not even been able to enforce the United States’ own laws on Israel.

The reason for Joe Biden’s particular brand of Israel policy is Joe Biden. People who worked with him throughout his 45-year career as senator and then vice president say that on this issue, he is Zionist and pro-Israel, and he means it. He’s been

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

close with every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir, as he reminds audiences, and his go-to one-liner is “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.”

For Biden, Israel is not just a foreign-policy issue. As Haim Saban, the Israeli American businessman who’s raising millions for the re-election campaign, put it, Biden is pro-Israel in his gut. “It’s in his kishkes.”

Biden has at times been forward-thinking on domestic policy and flexible in updating his old-school thinking when it comes to anti-monopoly policy or reproductive rights.

As a retail politician, he’s eager to listen to workers on the issues they care about.

On foreign policy, he has often strayed from the Washington establishment, withdrawing from Afghanistan and avoiding knee-jerk hawkishness on China. Not so on Israel and Palestine. And that willingness to buck the establishment has given him confidence in the face of outside criticism, and an allergy to changing course.

Biden is stuck in a box of his own creation.

He has watched while Netanyahu runs a war campaign so ruthless, lethal, and indiscriminate that the International Court of Justice is investigating it for charges of genocide. And still, Biden appears oblivious to how much the U.S. electorate has moved in its support of Palestinians. Several recent surveys show that a majority of Americans, especially Democrats, disagree with his approach to Israel. American voters’ support for Palestinians has been steadily increasing for a decade.

Can Biden climb out of the box? The selfmade trap preceded the war, says Yousef Munayyer, a researcher with the Arab Center Washington DC. “U.S. policy toward this issue was fundamentally flawed on October 6,” he told me. “And that really put the U.S. in a horrible position in terms of responding to this crisis once it started.”

The driving force behind Biden’s Middle East policy, before the war, was that “Palestine is just not that important anymore,” Munayyer explained. “That turned out to be catastrophically flawed.”

Remembrance of Things Past

As a child, Biden lived in a world without the State of Israel. As a politician, his approach to Israel was shaped in the era of the country’s founding, by events that happened before many of his advisers were even born. He speaks about the Jewish state with the flourish of a vintage AIPAC speech. “You know, the miracle of Israel is Israel. It’s Israel 18 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

itself—the hope it inspires, the light it represents to the world,” Biden said on October 11.

“I truly believe, were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe.

It’s the only ultimate guarantee,” Biden added, another phrase from his usual repertoire. On that day, many American Jews wondered why America isn’t that place.

He so regularly recounts his 1973 meeting with Golda Meir, and her admonition to him that “We Jews have a secret weapon in the battle with the Arabs … we have no place else to go,” that it clearly still informs his thinking. Biden has been even to the right of the ultra-hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, founder of the Likud party, which Netanyahu today leads.

In 1982, Biden told Begin that he fervently backed Israel’s war on Lebanon, even if it involved Israel killing women and children.

“I disassociated myself from these remarks,” Begin told reporters upon returning to Israel. “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war.”

He’s long been a favorite on the pro-Israel circuit. “I don’t think there’s any senator who’s ever done more fundraisers for AIPAC or gone around the country more for AIPAC,” Biden told their policy conference in 1992. He even lashed out at the George H.W. Bush administration for pushing Israel too hard in its diplomatic efforts that laid the groundwork for a peace process.

When the Israeli government embarrassed Biden—and the U.S.—by announcing the construction of new settlements in the West Bank during the vice president’s Middle East trip in 2010, Biden nonetheless defended Netanyahu.

He has ideological blinders, says Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute. Israel for him is a kind of moral touchstone that transcends history and geopolitics, he told me. “Most presidents have had this Israelcentric view of the region, but even they were able to see when Israel went too far.

Biden is not able to see that, and that’s the part that’s really astonishing.”

And he’s missed opportunities to engage with Israel through his term so far.

Biden is hugely popular in Israel, especially after his public bear hug after October 7. Inside the country, there are portraits and murals and graffiti of Biden on street corners, all coming from a place of true goodwill toward the president. But he is unwilling to use what should be a tremendous amount

of earned leverage to draw firm red lines in Israel’s military operations and the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians— or else cut off weapons to Israel.

No one has been able to convince him otherwise. “This is Biden’s personal project, this is his decision,” Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, told me. “Nobody can touch it except Biden. He is the one that is holding reins of this policy of arming Israel.”

Israel is no longer a small, defenseless state. It is a nuclear-armed regional power whose politics has been shaped by the endless occupation of Palestinian lands, policies that Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups have documented as apartheid, and now the incredible lethality that characterizes the ongoing systemic violence in Gaza.

The Israeli center has been pulled to the right by Netanyahu’s Likud party, with extremist settlers in Bibi’s cabinet like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Emboldened by this fundamentalist flank, West Bank settlers have accelerated attacks against Palestinians—notably in a rampage in the village of Huwara that burned 30 Palestinian homes, with the Israeli military standing by.

Now, Netanyahu’s extremist allies are using the pretext of Hamas’s attacks to fundamentally reshape Gaza and Palestine.

“Israel this time has a different set of objectives,” Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace told me. “They want to take this moment to fundamentally change the paradigm and erase Gaza.”

Throughout, Biden has held steady, refusing to look outside of this side of the box.

Adviser “Groupthink”

“The Middle East is quieter than it has been for decades,” Jake Sullivan, the White House’s foreign-policy gatekeeper, proclaimed a week before Hamas’s attacks in

A willingness to buck the foreign-policy establishment has given Biden confidence in the face of outside criticism, and an allergy to changing course.

MAJDI FATHI / AP PHOTO

At least half of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to researchers.

October. He was confident enough to commit that to writing in a cover story for Foreign Affairs magazine.

Biden was the first Democratic president in a generation to not show a serious effort toward a Palestinian state. The idea was to keep the Middle East, a perennial careerkiller, off the president’s desk. That led to a diplomatic void and the further disenfranchisement of Palestinians, which likely contributed to the current war. There were a handful of minor economic summits between Israel, the U.S., and Arab states, while settler violence surged in the West Bank. Even before the October attacks, Israeli human rights watchdog Yesh Din called 2023 “the most violent year in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in both the number of incidents and their severity,” which highlights just how late the Biden administration has been in its sanctioning of Israeli settlers.

“I don’t want to finger one person, but it’s groupthink,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founding president of J Street, which has sought to be a liberal, but still pro-Israel, counterweight to AIPAC. Running point from the White House is Brett McGurk, the National Security

Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, who worked on Iraq in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. McGurk said early on that Biden was pursuing a “back to basics” approach to the Middle East, but it’s unclear where the U.S. would be going back to. (McGurk worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq during the U.S. occupation in 2003, so hopefully not back there!)

In contrast, experts say that deputy national security adviser Jon Finer gets it.

Finer, who started his career as a Middle East journalist for The Washington Post and worked in the Obama White House, is one of the administration’s progressive voices on foreign policy. In advance of the Michigan primary in February, he was dispatched to meet with frustrated Arab American voters in Dearborn. Other advisers include Amos Hochstein, a U.S.-Israeli dual citizen who has served in the Israeli military; despite holding an energy investment portfolio, Hochstein has been a key voice on national security. There are also two respected Middle East specialists, Philip Gordon and Ilan Goldenberg, who work in Vice President Kamala Harris’s office.

The White House aide who most clearly

articulates the president’s perspective is, not surprisingly, spokesperson John Kirby. His defenses of seemingly indefensible Israeli actions from the podium have now become viral memes. A typical line: When Israel had already killed 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza on October 27, Kirby said, “We’re not drawing red lines for Israel.”

Washington insiders say the White House is directing Israel-Palestine policy, not the State Department.

Still, the top officials at State, including those who have met with Israel’s war cabinet, largely share Biden’s pro-Israel ideology, chief among them Secretary of State Antony Blinken. As Biden’s longtime aide, he pushed Biden’s pro-Israel viewpoints and continues to, to this day. The special envoy for humanitarian issues, David Satterfield, has longtime links to the Israel lobby and managed to avoid any Department of Justice prosecution for handing off confidential information to AIPAC in 2005. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew served as an informal emissary to the American Jewish community when he was Obama’s chief of staff, and Democratic Majority for Israel applauded his new appointment. Counselor Derek Chollet also worked as a senior nationalAPRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19

security official in the Obama administration, where he shepherded advanced weapons transfers to Israel that were unprecedented. Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, hails from the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy. When she co-authored a 2020 essay about U.S. policy toward Israel, she didn’t mention Palestinians.

“There is no debate, and criticism of Israel is so hard to express within the administration,” Josh Paul, who resigned in protest from a State Department security assistance job in October, told me.

Very few Arab or Muslim Americans serve at high levels of Biden foreign policy. Hady Amr, the special representative for Palestinian affairs, has been noticeably absent from press briefings, high-level meetings, and public appearances.

The U.S. military, for its part, may be the most skeptical if not downright critical of this whole approach, as epitomized by airman Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington.

But many of Biden’s appointees to the Pen-

Arab American protesters in Dearborn, Michigan. The Uncommitted campaign received 13 percent of the primary vote in the state.

20 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

tagon, naturally, share the president’s view.

Of note is Daniel Shapiro, the top civilian for Middle East policy at the Department of Defense, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Israel and then stayed on in the country, working as an adviser to Israeli companies like the notorious spyware-maker NSO Group.

Still, Biden’s most important adviser is Biden. He believes in his own foreign-policy judgment and won’t be easily swayed by others. Meanwhile, Biden’s advisers say that they are working tirelessly to tinker with policies, but there is no major reassessment in the works.

“Every time their policy has shown to not be working, instead of changing course or adjusting, they double down on it,” Elgindy told me. “At this point they are so heavily invested in what is a catastrophically failed approach, and to change course in anything but rhetoric would mean conceding that they were wrong from the beginning.”

A Shifting Electorate

Biden’s formative years in Washington were a time when being reflexively pro-Israel was

good politics. From his perspective, you never pay a price for being too supportive of Israel.

“The group of people around him in his close political circle went by the rulebook of the 1990s,” Ben-Ami told me. “And God forbid you do something that gets you on the wrong side of the Jewish community.”

That may have been true when Biden was a junior senator, but today he speaks for a much narrower constituency. While many older voters share his views, he has grown out of touch with younger voters, minority voters, and Arab voters. Those groups happen to increasingly occupy positions in Democratic campaigns and as political appointees.

Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American appointee, was the first member of the Biden administration to resign over Gaza.

Habash told me Biden has been willing to “embrace innovative policies on domestic issues,” like in forgiving student loans, which Habash was leading in the Department of Education. Habash says Biden has been on the “forefront of listening to working Americans.” But on Palestine, Biden

Biden doesn’t seem to get the Arab world, where the cause of Palestine remains popular and galvanizing. won’t move from his “unrelenting support and unrestricted military funding.”

“They have not been listening for the past four and a half months” to Arab Americans, Habash told me. “If you’re not willing to take tiny steps to exert any kind of pressure, why would you expect Arabs to come out and vote for you?”

This also contributes to the experience of many Arab Americans who feel that Biden lacks humanity and empathy for them.

Hundreds of members of Biden’s own campaign staff have spoken out, and members of the White House have begun organizing protests. “Islamophobia is not being taken seriously,” a current White House official with the group Staffers for Ceasefire told me.

In response to the electoral realities of the Democratic Party in 2024, Biden’s team has slightly changed its message and amped up its humanitarian efforts. But those tonal shifts haven’t come with significant policy changes. And that was not enough to win over the 100,000 voters in Michigan who rebuked Biden with an uncommitted vote in the primary. While that accounted for a little over 13 percent of the primary vote, in Minnesota the next week, nearly 19 percent of the vote cast an uncommitted ballot.

This side of the box may be the one that Biden may be forced to confront head on. He might lose the election over this issue. But for now, Biden’s team is helping him avoid pro-Palestine protests on the campaign trail rather than address the root of the dissent.

CARLOS OSORIO / AP PHOTO

Misunderstanding the Middle East

Arab cartoonists are already skewering President Biden’s callousness for licking an ice-cream cone while prognosticating about a temporary cease-fire (a prediction that didn’t come true). Does the Biden administration grasp how detested its policies are in the Arab Middle East?

Biden doesn’t seem to get the Arab world, where the cause of Palestine remains popu-

lar and galvanizing. And he has lost a lot of Arabs who were on his side. As Emile Hokayem of the British think tank IISS said, “the disaster in Gaza has completely disabused a large segment of liberals and professionals in the Arab world about Western claims of upholding and caring about values in the conduct of foreign policy.” That will detract from the United States’ ability to assert its interests, in the Middle East and beyond.

United Nations votes show America isolated from the world, with just a few countries on its side.

At the same time, Biden’s concept of the U.S. as an indispensable superpower requires huge costs and major risks—especially to U.S. personnel, as evidenced by the killing of three U.S. troops in Jordan in January. Thousands of service members continue to participate in endless wars in Iraq, Syria, and a network of bases in the Middle East and Africa, and run the risk of getting drawn into this war. For all of Biden’s enthusiasm to end the war in Afghanistan, no such commitment has been shown for these forever wars. So the U.S. is caught fighting old, irrelevant conflicts under the guise of countering ISIS or Iran or continuing the war on terrorism, and coming under fire at a time when militant groups see the U.S. as complicit in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians.

In that climate, Biden’s advisers thought they could clinch a long-shot deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and just set aside Palestinians. The concept is an extension of the “Abraham Accords,” an initiative of President Trump. Even now, Biden’s team has kept in place Jared Kushner’s formula of casting away Palestinian aspirations in service of pushing to normalize relations between Israel and Arab countries. In doing so, Biden kept in place most of Trump’s Mideast policies. (Only in February, four and a half months into the war, did the Biden administration overturn the Pompeo Doctrine of not viewing Israeli settlements as against international law.)

The administration is clinging to the triple bank shot of a policy that: (a) Saudi Arabia would at long last normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, in exchange for (b) an Israeli pledge toward the establishment of a Palestinian state and (c) U.S. inducements for Saudi Arabia that might include nuclear technology and even an American security guarantee for the kingdom, which polling shows Americans don’t support. This would

require so many contingencies—the buy-in of Israel’s extreme right-wing government, congressional approval, and fast-moving politics in an election year—that it’s difficult to take it seriously.

The idea is reminiscent of another Biden fantasy solution, the three-way partition of Iraq along ethnic lines that he dreamed up with the late foreign-policy strategist Leslie Gelb. It was a ridiculous and incendiary idea that didn’t take into account how U.S. foreign policy affects actual people. By the way, as an undergraduate, Sullivan worked as Gelb’s intern at the Council on Foreign Relations, and now at the White House, he continues to channel that Great Game mentality of U.S. exceptionalism in the world.

In a Box With Biden

Unless President Biden is willing to kick down the sides of the box—checking his own assumptions about Israel, facing down the realities of the electorate, turning to new advisers with a broader perspective, and seeing the Middle East as it is—he will remain constrained.

Many policies to ensure human rights and accountability are already enshrined in law. They are lying in wait, unused. “If we’re going to keep arming Israel then there’s not that much to talk about,” Yager told me.

On most topics in any presidential administration, credit or blame can be broadly distributed. But in this case, the pro-Israel directives are coming from the president himself, with his instincts from another era.

“Biden has a multi-decade career where he has proudly stood with Israel at every turn,” Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me. “The idea that now, in his later years, he is going to want to distract from that legacy is unlikely.”

The most powerful foreign-policy officials in the Biden administration are negotiating with Israel about getting more flour into Gaza, tweaking rhetoric in press conferences, urging their boss to adjust small policies on the margin, like holding Israeli settlers to account, while failing to make the bigger adjustments needed to deal with the gravity of the crisis at hand. The story is not really one of foreign policy, but of the ideology and psychology of President Biden. n Jonathan Guyer is a foreign-policy reporter and editor based in New York. He worked as managing editor of the Prospect from 2019 to 2021.

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

Eurocrats on the k n i r B In a world on fire, with corporate and anti-democratic forces rising, why are European policymakers so slow to react?

By David Dayen BRUSSELS – I was just getting to sleep when the honking began. I stumbled to the window, and a line of tractors motored down the city street. One had a horn that sounded like the “Baby Shark” song. Police in orange pinnies were trying (and failing) to direct traffic.

Angry farmers had been crisscrossing Europe for months, and were now encircling the European Union capital on the eve of a parliamentary summit. They decided to flow into the city right alongside my hotel, the Steigenberger Wiltcher’s. I was with them at 11 p.m. when they first appeared; when they came back three hours later, my enthusiasm was muted.

The list of grievances was long, but the main complaint was that EU policies were damaging farmers’ livelihoods. Expensive measures in the EU’s Green Deal to limit agricultural emissions had not been balanced with compensation for compliance.

And waivers to border tariffs and quotas for Ukraine were undercutting Eastern European wheat growers. Both climate change and the war in Ukraine are key priorities in Europe, but EU bureaucrats invested little effort to mollify those affected by the policies.

22 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

Officials were scrambling to respond, delaying rules that mandated keeping some farmland fallow as a carbon sink and protecting “sensitive” EU crops. But farmers weren’t satisfied. “We produce the food and we don’t make a living,” one protester told Reuters. “Because of free trade agreements.

Because of deregulation. Because the prices are below the cost of production.”

Earlier that day, at the conference that brought me to Brussels, Andreas Mundt, head of the antitrust enforcement agency of Germany, offered his apologies that he missed a speakers’ dinner the night before.

“I could say I was a victim of the farmers who blocked Brussels last night, I couldn’t get in,” Mundt said. “But I could also turn it another way and say I was a victim of European regulation.”

The circumstances that led farmers to burn tires and spray manure at riot police are not isolated. In Europe, a cloistered set of Brussels technocrats, ensconced in siloed bureaucracies, make decisions with limited public input and scant consideration of unintended consequences. The result can be counterproductive: buoying national champions while harming competition, immiserating workers in favor of other goals. “I didn’t want to leave guilt with the farmers. Maybe one should think about if they have a good reason to be on the street,” Mundt told me later.

At a time when the U.S. Congress has all but ceased to function, the EU can actually pass laws. New measures regulating Big Tech and artificial intelligence are coming

The European Parliament complex in Brussels

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

European Antitrust Enforcement Dropped After Adoption of New Standards Regulation 139/2004

Percent of Notified Cases

8%

6%

4%

2%

0%

’91

’95

’00

’05

’10

’15

’20

’23

■ Phase II Cases Initiated ■ Approvals ■ Remedies ■ Prohibitions ■ Withdrawals Source: European Commission, Merger Statistics (2023)

into force. But the European Commission, which is responsible for implementation, seems to treat regulation and enforcement as separate rather than complementary processes. Olivier Guersent, lead bureaucrat for Europe’s competition directorate, stirred debate at the conference when he called antitrust a “side dish,” diminishing what his own life’s work can achieve.

By contrast, the Biden administration has tried to coordinate competition, industrial policy, and trade issues through a “whole of government” approach. This has vaulted the U.S. past the EU, with a new aggressiveness against corporate power and a revival of domestic manufacturing. The strategic vision to identify linkages across policies is lacking in Europe, according to civil society groups, former EU bureaucrats, and members of Parliament.

“We’re deluding ourselves [in Europe] that because we passed the laws, we are ahead,” said Cristina Caffarra, the brassy, bejeweled economist who has become a severe critic of the practitioners of Europe’s status quo. In her view, they “haven’t remotely embraced the vision that antitrust is about liberty and the check on power. You are a bunch of Brahmins sitting in a tower, you only meet CEOs.” Caffarra put on the conference in Brussels, entitled “Antitrust, Regulation and the Next World Order.” Politico termed it 24 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

the “anti-Davos”; on my first day there, I heard it called Woodstock for antitrust.

Top U.S. regulators and law enforcers traveled to Brussels to explain their approach, and maybe inspire some courage across the Atlantic. I joined them to understand why Europe seemed so stuck, after a period in the Trump years when it seemed they were the only ones who cared about corporate concentration and economic liberty.

The Bubble

Rue du Luxembourg, which leads into the plaza that fronts the European Parliament, is the K Street of Europe. In a Brussels teeming with neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau architecture, the buildings here are noticeably taller and sleeker. The street is packed with takeaway shops, the type popular with White House officials who don’t want meetings with lobbyists entered into the logbooks. There’s even a French bakery chain, Paul, that is also on K Street in Washington, about a block from the Prospect offices.

In this milieu, bureaucrats from the European Commission, Europe’s executive branch, ply their trade alongside consultants and lawyers, when they are not speaking at international conferences alongside consultants and lawyers. The Eurocrats, as they are known, are nominally part of an elected government, but more broadly they’re members of a tribe, with the same

credentials and pedigrees as their corporate interlocutors, and the same predilection toward slow and steady tweaks rather than paradigmatic change.

Out of the ashes of World War II, Europe gradually pulled its disparate nations, cultures, and languages closer together, forming first a customs union and then a more muscular federal government. But the 27 national governments (the member states) retain most of their sovereignty, and the two biggest dominate the proceedings. “The EU is a French and German institution and everyone else is along for the ride,” said Caffarra.

The European Union has a Council made up of the leaders of its 27 member states, a relatively weak Commission as its executive, and an even weaker 705-member Parliament, who affiliate not by national origin but ideology; currently, the center-right European People’s Party is in charge. All member states must concur on major EU decisions, and even smaller issues are subject to a “trilogue” between Parliament, the Commission, and the Council, with endless backroom negotiations and compromise.

The Commission, which is in charge of both proposing and implementing laws, has the least connection to the public. Its president is elected by Parliament, not voters.

Outside of the commissioners of the directorates, who are political appointees, its

The European Commission seems to treat regulation and enforcement as separate rather than complementary processes. main policymakers, like DG Comp’s Olivier Guersent, are career bureaucrats.

There was some intentional design here, to give less discretion to Germany and France and more power to the Eurocrats.

But without the need to obtain votes, the Commission has no pressure to hear from anyone but the businesses they regulate.

And the EU only spends less than 2 percent of total European GDP, making the Commission the bureaucracy of a weak state: underfunded, relegated to the confines of the EU capital, and at significant remove from the population it serves.

U.S. leftists often think of Europe as a progressive wonderland, and in many ways it is, with its strong social benefits, national health care, free higher education, and highly developed taxation systems. But these are legacy policies from an earlier time when social democratic welfare states were built, nation by nation. The EU’s core economic policies, which all member states must obey, adhere to the neoliberal consensus, which favors unfettered free trade, laissez-faire regulation, privatization of public services, and globalized supply chains.

This is in part an artifact of the Maastricht Treaty of 1993, which created the modern EU constitution. Germany conditioned giving up its deutsche mark currency for the euro on strict austerity rules for member states, with limits on deficit spending and on “state aid” for expanding industrial capacity. And the attempt to create a single state out of 27 countries required the free movement of capital and trade. We don’t restrict money from California to Texas; but the free-trade rules, overlaid onto the national structure of Europe, allowed races to the bottom that immiserated labor and boosted capital.

Barry Lynn, the longtime corporate power critic who runs the Open Markets Institute, argues that the neoliberal mindset further fragmented and undermined

the Commission in its very structure. “Part of neoliberalism was silo-fication, rather than competition policy being the coating that underlies everything in the political economy,” Lynn said. “You guys have this yard you can walk around in but dare not talk to each other. All the Western governments fell into this situation.”

That describes well the directorates-general of the Commission: one is responsible for competition, another for justice, another for telecommunications, and so on, with little coordination. The different silos predictably undermine one another. For example, the Commission recently signaled an openness to telecom mergers, to support the buildout of digital infrastructure. A similar dynamic exists in defense, where Commission president Ursula von der Leyen kicked off her bid for a second term by urging an increase in EU military spending, to “consolidate our defense industrial base.”

A common strategy to facilitate telecom infrastructure buildout and alleviate severe shortages in industrial capacity for arms and ammunition makes sense. But consolidation could bring its own problems of waste, militarism, and market power. The CEO of the Italian defense multinational Leonardo has explicitly warned antitrust enforcers to back off and let weapons companies merge. “Antitrust weakens us, it doesn’t help us. The concept has a sense in many sectors but we need to identify sectors like security and energy where the competition is global,” Roberto Cingolani told reporters in February.

The Commission’s Secretariat-General could exert stronger control. “Their job is to say, ‘Get the fuck in here. Your two things are in conflict,’ and point in the right direction,” said Johnny Ryan, senior fellow for the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. “That’s all broken at the European Commission.” So there’s a bubble over the Commission, and a bubble among the different directorates that make up the Commission. It’s a nesting doll of weakness, sloth, and ideological mush.

Rise and Fall

For decades, the Commission’s philosophy on competition policy has followed Robert Bork and the Chicago school’s belief that merger review need only concern itself with consumer welfare and economic efficiency. “It got out of hand, what we did in the 1980s, [saying] ‘Let’s leave it to the experts,’” said Tommaso Valletti, who was

chief economist for the European Commission’s directorate-general for competition (DG Comp) from 2016 to 2019.

Valletti has chastised the economics profession for assuming they can precisely excise the bad pieces of a merger and keep the good, when in reality postmerger studies consistently show price increases and other harms. He concluded his remarks at the Brussels conference by asking his fellow economists: “The relevant question for us is do we have anything to say about power, and if we don’t … why should people listen to us?”

A 2004 change to merger review standards (known as Council Regulation 139/2004), inspired by Chicago school thinking that prioritized economic analysis and incorporated potential “efficiencies” from mergers, cut investigations of mergers by more than half compared to the previous 13 years, according to a recent working paper by Brianna Rock. Preventions of mergers also fell by half under the new rules. Of the 6,462 mergers announced from 2005 to November 2023, the EU has only prevented 44.

For an extended period, it looked like Europe had broken away from these constraints. Margrethe Vestager, a Danish politician who was the model for the lead character in the TV show Borgen, became lead commissioner for DG Comp in 2014.

Across the world, there was meager appetite for challenging giants of industry, particularly the billowing tech platforms. Amid this vacuum, Vestager took action.

The EU’s first case against Google dates back to 2010; three cases in all would eventually yield 8 billion euros in fines. Vestager opened investigations into Apple, Facebook, Qualcomm, Amazon, and Microsoft.

She focused heavily on data privacy, leading to adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which most of the world copied.

Vestager was lauded in the American and British press as a new warrior against Silicon Valley. The animating reason for why Barry Lynn was kicked out of the Googlefriendly New America Foundation in 2017 was a press statement praising Vestager for fining Google 2.4 billion euros for selfpreferencing its own products. “Sometimes you need to stand someone up as a hero … you hope they play the role,” Lynn reflected.

“The Euros deserve some credit for standing in the breach, trying to figure it out by APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

themselves, often with Obama and Trump attacking them.”

The push went beyond digital enforcement. Valletti, who was at DG Comp in this period, explained that the directorate brought a novel theory of harm to challenge the Dow-DuPont merger, arguing that the public would be injured if the merged company didn’t perform enough basic research and development. DG Comp also blocked a merger between Siemens and Alstom, the largest German and the largest French manufacturer of high-speed trains, defying the presumed leviathans of the EU. “There was a lot of pressure, but only DG Comp with 27 member states can have this success,” Valletti said.

But even then, there were warning signs, like the rise of economic consultancies, de facto lobbyists producing reams of analysis but seldom deviating from the philosophy of protecting corporate rents. Caffarra and others have estimated that the three biggest consultancies in Europe earn over $1 billion per year advising corporate clients.

“Everybody’s making money hand over fist,” said Caffarra.

A few months after the 2018 approval of a $63 billion merger between Bayer and Monsanto, DG Comp official Daniel Coublucq exited to leading consultant Compass Lexecon, which had lobbied DG Comp for a third party, BASF, that received significant assets from Bayer as part of a divestiture associated with the merger. Coublucq later rejoined DG Comp.

This revolving-door pattern is also common with Big Tech. In 2021, three Eurocrats who led investigations into Amazon, Apple, and Facebook went to work for law firms that have those companies as clients. That same year, DG Comp hired consultant RBB Economics to evaluate its merger tools; RBB has represented Google in all of its cases against the EU. It took until last October for DG Comp to drop RBB. Valletti left DG Comp in 2019, and at the same time Vestager got a promotion, still running the competition authority but also serving as an executive vice president of the Commission, responsible for something called “A Europe Fit for the Digital Age.” Valletti focused in his tenure on bringing new evidence to the directorate, challenging the established wisdom. But that gradually faded in favor of the same impenetrable language of “efficiency” and “competitive processes.”

26 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

One major red f lag came during the Trump/Biden transition period in late 2020.

Google had announced a merger with Fitbit, the popular fitness tracker. Given Vestager’s preoccupation with concentration of data as the locus of antitrust enforcement, combining the world’s most powerful holder of information with the leading company gathering data on the human body would have seemed clearly off-limits. But DG Comp let the merger through, with some conditions.

To René Repasi, a socialist member of the European Parliament from Germany, the problem was that the merger regulations say nothing about what happens if the conditions are not met. “You can redo conditions but only to alleviate them,” Repasi told me.

The silo tendency created further problems, he added. “In the Facebook-WhatsApp merger, there was an explicit paragraph that it might create privacy concerns, but this was not something for DG Comp to check.

Same with Google-Fitbit.”

It started to dawn on Europeans that the vaunted set of investigations and fines for the tech platforms, the area upon which Vestager staked her reputation, had limited practical impact. “The Google cases concluded with no change on the ground,” Caffarra said. “Two cases with Amazon, nothingburger. Apple case, opened in 2017, still not concluded. The Microsoft case, not going anywhere.”

Some chalked this up to the elongated timeline for antitrust cases, which never capture the speed-of-light changes in the digital marketplace. (Mundt noted that Germany’s groundbreaking case against Facebook took three years from beginning to end.) But regulation fell short too, in part because it was disconnected from corporate power.

In 2019, a year after the GDPR came into force, Johnny Ryan appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told them that “things I think are looking very bleak for our colleagues at Google and at Facebook … it is highly likely that they will be forced to change how they do business.”

At the time, he was working for Brave, a privacy-focused web browser founded by the author of the Javascript programming language.

I asked Ryan what happened. “I was a naïve young man,” he chuckled. In fairness, at the time he added the caveat that the Europeans had yet to enforce their own policy. The Commission shipped out

Europe’s vaunted set of investigations and fines for the tech platforms had limited practical impact. enforcement to member states’ data protection authorities, without much pressure to apply the law as written. Tech platforms quickly realized that if they headquartered in one EU country, they could funnel all GDPR regulatory enforcement there. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta set up shop in Ireland, and Amazon in Luxembourg; both are notorious tax havens with incentives to be friendly to Big Tech. Ryan made a public records request asking how many Irish investigators were working on GDPR, and was told the agency didn’t even have records to find out who was investigating.

“If you have free movement within the EU but strong national state authorities in their territories, it’s obvious that corporates will play them against each other,” said Repasi, and that’s what happened. A parallel problem is that the GDPR didn’t focus enforcement toward the biggest purveyors of data, meaning that the smallest website operators—“local sports clubs and dentists,” Ryan said—felt the biggest relative impact.

“When a member state doesn’t enforce European law,” Ryan added, “the European Commission is the guardian of the treaties of the EU and they should take that state to court … [but] 10 to 15 years ago the Commission stopped taking cases against member states. It’s love instead of power.”

Vestager, who is not expected to remain in charge of DG Comp after this year, no longer receives the same glorious press. She waged an unsuccessful battle to try to get Fiona Scott Morton, an American economist who has consulted for Amazon and Apple, installed as chief economist. In January, Vestager visited Silicon Valley and, in contrast to her previous image as a giantslayer, took photo ops with tech CEOs. The trip was disparaged by critics as a “selfie tour,” even as DG Comp had open cases with some of the companies visited, like Google.

Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, called DG Comp “spectacularly incompetent” for failing to safeguard competition in Europe,

The merger between Google and Fitbit, which European enforcers waved through in late 2020, was seen as a red flag. and urged Vestager to resign. When the invitations went out for Caffarra’s conference, Vestager was one of the few European competition officials left off the list. Caffarra told me: “She has nothing to say.”

ISTOCK, BRIAN ACH/ AP PHOTO

The American Charge

Caffarra started her annual Brussels conferences 15 years ago, in the same luxury hotel now owned by a Chinese conglomerate.

(U.S. Justice Department officials stayed elsewhere because of the potential spying capabilities.) While it initially focused specifically on antitrust, this year she pitched it more broadly. “The entire posture in antitrust needs to take into account what the world before us has turned into,” she said in opening remarks before a massive ballroom filled with lawyers, government officials, advocates, and corporate types doing reconnaissance. Over 1,900 people signed up for the conference, and the hallways and lounge areas were packed all day long.

In 2015, Lynn brought his staffer, a young journalist named Lina Khan, to the conference. This year, Khan, now the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair, appeared via

teleconference, and her colleague Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was in Brussels. Slaughter was joined by assistant attorney general for antitrust Jonathan Kanter and his deputy Doha Mekki, and U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) director Rohit Chopra and Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) member Heather Boushey appeared via teleconference as well.

These officials represent the vanguard of a revolution in thinking about political economy, connecting overwhelming market power to the ideals of liberty and democracy that so many see as under threat. “The establishment and established ways of thinking are hitting up against undeniable realities of changes in our world and how the public interest needs to adapt and assert ourselves about what’s happening in our economies,” said Tai in an interview.

On issues like trade, privacy, industrial policy, and antitrust, the output resembles the “bold experimentation” that New Deal officials implemented amid the crisis of the Depression, and a firm break

with the neoliberal past. The Justice Department has used labor harms, not consumer harms, to successfully block a big merger in publishing, and the FTC is doing the same for the proposed grocery merger between Kroger and Albertsons.

Antitrust cases against Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are in process. USTR shelved a digital trade framework that would have made it difficult for national governments to institute restrictions on data f lows across borders. CFPB has used its consumer protection tools to further competition in credit card markets.

The CEA is the intellectual heart of the Bidenomics effort to revitalize domestic manufacturing, reduce carbon emissions, and increase labor standards. All of these agencies have worked in close coordination on artificial intelligence, corporate price-gouging, supply chain diversification and reshoring, and more.

While Congress has provided public investment for green technologies and semiconductor factories, most of the laws in the U.S. on these issues have not changed.

Instead, aggressive enforcement and a new APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

28 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

Cristina Caffarra’s annual antitrust conference in Brussels featured numerous American regulators this year. terms that were exclusionary,” Kanter told Caffarra in a fireside chat. “When you talk to these people, they understand what’s going on. We can learn a lot from them, we just need to invite them into the conversation.”

Caffarra told me later that this activity— not just questioning long-held assumptions but involving the public in that dialogue— would be “unthinkable in Europe.” But she saw a younger crowd at her conference, longing for that engagement. “I had a number of junior lawyers saying ‘the partners didn’t want us to come,’” she said. “I had young lawyers who said this conference was mind-expanding.”

From the confines of his office, Chopra summed up what the Americans were pitch-

ing to Europe. “We all need the courage to learn,” he said, citing the title of a paper written by the American Economic Liberties Project. “If we want to save the ideals of democracy, we’ll need to use a totally different playbook.”

A Side Dish?

The tension between the American and European approaches came out in the opening panel. Guersent, DG Comp’s leading Eurocrat, was asked about how Europe can rebuild industrial capacity, after watching the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act draw investment in green manufacturing away.

Guersent replied that Europe has already led on this front through state subsidies, and

CORY DOCTOROW/ CC AT TRIBUTION

mindset expanded the boundaries for agency action across the government.

It’s starkly at odds with the siloed European approach. “Europe is leading its change at more macro [regulatory] levels,” Tai told me. “But that change is top-heavy … Europe is still more comfortable with the way trade and globalization has operated in the past, than embracing the trade moment right now. The disconnect on our side is the legislating … in the executive branch where we’re moving with a very clear vision. They’re grappling with their embrace of change.”

At the conference, Tai stated bluntly that “every consumer is a worker,” and therefore the public interest cannot be served solely by moderating prices through cheap imports to benefit multinationals. She connected this focus on workers to our “antitrust cousins … using different tools for the same goals.”

This was a constant theme of the conference: the need to build a common purpose to use all implements of power—merger enforcement, competition rulemaking, consumer protection, trade agreements, public investment, and public options—as a bulwark against corporate control of society.

There was a real uniformity in the American message. Slaughter explained how economic analysis cannot present allegedly scientific analysis that assumes away the problem of power. Mekki explained that in their biggest cases, “we’ve talked about what power really looks like.” Tai said that Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, a founding document of globalization that calls for open trade when another country can supply a cheaper particular good, “doesn’t translate into the real world” because it ushers in a series of nation-specific monopolies. In a wide-ranging one-onone with Caffarra, Khan talked about “a gap between how antitrust was conceiving of markets and market power and how markets would function, and how those markets were functioning in the real world.”

Kanter and Khan, whose agencies coauthored new merger guidelines that describe what the law says about when corporate tie-ups will be challenged, described how they mean to open up the conversation to the public. Both have visited law schools and business schools, to a rapturous reception, while also talking to people affected by monopoly, from farmers to pharmacists to doctors to owners of community newspapers. “For most of my career, antitrust was the domain of an insular few. We used

DG Comp’s waning appetite for fighting the tech giants in the late 2010s changed Europe’s governance posture. in its Green Deal created a matching clause, enabling member states to equal subsidies that companies could get in the U.S. But Andreas Schwab, a European People’s Party member of Parliament, cautioned that the Commission must guard against jeopardizing fair competition within the EU. When Caffarra, who moderates just about every panel at the conference, followed up, Guersent snapped. “I hate to say this but by focusing on antitrust you get the impression that competition is either the problem or the solution,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s neither. It’s a side dish.” He pointed to regulatory policies to manage competitiveness concerns, and stated that antitrust can only pick at the edges.

The comment became a punching bag for the rest of the day. Slaughter, the FTC commissioner, forcefully disagreed with Guersent, saying that competition “underlies and is implicated by all the work of government,” citing regulatory examples that can be pro-competitive. “We have to make sure that the next commission does not regard competition as merely a side dish,” Ryan said on his panel.

After the conference, things got interesting on the pages of the Financial Times. Columnist Rana Foroohar, in her recap of the conference, cited the “side dish” comment as evidence of European incrementalism and adherence to outdated consumer welfare thinking. Guersent responded with a letter to the editor, saying that Foroohar had “a clear disdain for facts” and that Europe’s record on competition and mergers is “without equivalent … acting for the longest, and doing the most.” For that reason, Guersent wrote, there is “no need for a radical revolution” in European enforcement.

Guersent’s examples were curious for someone touting a 35-year unblemished antitrust record. Most of them were just from the last year, when DG Comp, amid the strong American response, blocked eTraveli’s merger with Booking.com, Ado-

be’s merger with Figma, and Amazon’s merger with iRobot, which the Big Tech giant abandoned in January. The U.K. was also challenging the Adobe deal, and the FTC was about to file suit against AmazoniRobot as well, something Amazon didn’t include in its announcement. Sources speculated to me that Amazon was content to make it look like the EU drove them off of the acquisition, building up a tame enforcement agency as fearsome.

But even if DG Comp’s enforcement genuinely brought Amazon to heel, that would represent the very first Big Tech deal it had ever stopped. The record to that point was one of a lot of grasping at action without much change. The European Digital SME Alliance, a coalition of smaller tech companies, rebutted Guersent in the Financial Times, characterizing their industry as in a “state of crisis” and urging DG Comp to go “beyond the narrow focus on consumer welfare, looking not just at the index of prices, but focusing on the broader economic and societal effects of power accumulation by [Big Tech] giants.”

The defensiveness revealed more about Europe than its leaders perhaps wanted.

“The Brussels bubble hasn’t been burst yet,” Valletti said.

Back to Regulation

DG Comp’s waning appetite for fighting the tech giants in the late 2010s changed Europe’s governance posture. “The reaction to Google-Fitbit told the Commission that they reached the end of support,” Repasi said. Rather than endure endless legal cases with minimal results, the EU set out to shape laws to prohibit behaviors before harms proliferated. The result was the Digital Markets Act. The DMA is a multifaceted set of regulations designed to address unfair practices by the biggest digital platforms, including the tendency to lock in users and preference their own products. There are 23 separate obligations and prohibitions, including a “choice screen” for browsers and search engines, a restriction on transferring user data to power multiple services, a ban on “steering” users toward platform services at the expense of competitors on the platform, alternative app stores for web and mobile, and interoperability (the ability to export data from one website to a competitor). Overall, it’s a menu of options that U.S. reformers have desired for years. And the

EU can issue fines for up to 20 percent of global revenue if the platforms don’t comply.

Policymakers sought to correct the pitfalls that made the GDPR ineffective. Rather than forcing compliance on every website operator, it affects only the top six platforms—Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and ByteDance, owner of TikTok. (Booking.com will also meet the DMA’s thresholds soon.) And instead of enforcement being the responsibility of the member state regulators, the Commission, through DG Comp, will enforce directly, preventing the “race to the bottom” that we saw with GDPR. Another regulation, the Digital Services Act, has a similar structure.

The new formula was the brainchild of Schwab, a lead author of the DMA. “Germans are for the decentralized approach, I have been arguing for centralized,” he told me. “Now the Commission must prove they can do it.”

One problem with being able to prove that is that DG Comp only has roughly 80 people to assign to enforcement. (Schwab called for nearly tripling that two years ago.)

By comparison, 651 companies and associations are working to influence the EU on digital economy issues alone, according to a report from Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl.

The lack of manpower has led Guersent and others to play down early expectations. “They are finally advertising for a chief technology officer,” Valletti said. “You cannot start a huge negotiation with companies that are the biggest in the world by saying, ‘We don’t have the resources, we are very weak.’”

Another issue cited by critics is that DG Comp has not laid out specific guardrails for the platforms. After a series of workshops and consultations, the platforms submit a compliance proposal, which DG Comp then decides whether or not to accept. It’s hardly the adversarial process between the regulator and the regulated that one would hope for.

“The easy way out for regulation and enforcement is to tell the companies, ‘Do it yourself and we will check if there is manifest abuse of your theorems,’” said Repasi.

“This is what destroyed digital markets from being markets.”

The companies have tended to offer the least they could get away with. Apple announced several changes for the EU, which allowed for a separate app store and APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

reduced commissions on in-app purchases.

But it will also charge a “core technology fee” for every download of popular apps outside its app store, and reserved the right to block competing app stores. Apple has also claimed that its compliance with a U.S. court ruling, which added a new tax of 27 percent on outside-the-app web purchases and installed a “scare screen” warning users that Apple cannot vouch for user privacy if they go to the web, complies with the DMA. Epic Games, makers of Fortnight, has called the changes “hot garbage”; Spotify said they “make a mockery of the DMA.” Google’s announced compliance, according to testing run by one of its chief antagonists, the user recommendation site Yelp, similarly undermines the intent of the law.

Yelp analyzed the new search engine results pages that Google provided to them months earlier, and even though Google removed its Google Flights service and created a dedicated section for other shopping and comparison websites, Yelp found “that not only do they violate the DMA’s prohibition against self-preferencing, they actually increase the rate at which users will remain within Google’s walled garden.” While Google was retaining 55 percent of search traffic under the old rules, with the new ones Google is holding on to 73 percent, according to Yelp. Other EU travel sites have criticized Google’s work.

TikTok, Apple, and Meta have already sued over the DMA, forcing the same protracted legal fights the regulation was invoked to prevent. Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy reportedly lobbied White House officials to place trade sanctions on Europe, to “defend” U.S. companies from the DMA. Apple got its iMessage service exempted, as did Microsoft with its Bing search engine and Edge web browser.

The superficial compliance risks undermining the Commission’s tenuous support from stakeholders, and stokes fears that understaffed bureaucrats will check boxes rather than demand results. “The commission has been passive in this process,” said Max von Thun, Europe director for the Open Markets Institute. “They are having Big Tech companies drive what compliance looks like, rather than saying to tech companies this is what we expect from you.” At the Brussels conference, even DG Comp’s head of digital platforms, Alberto Bacchiega, expressed doubt about full compliance on day one.

30 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

The DMA came into force on March 7. One ray of hope is that DG Comp does seem to be responding to complaints. After Apple banned the developer account Epic Games was going to use to launch its app store in Europe, the Commission investigated and Epic had its account restored. The Commission has also opened a formal investigation into TikTok’s compliance with the Digital Services Act, specifically around protection of minors and “risks of addictive design.”

Even Google changed its search engine and browser choice screens after the Commission provided feedback.

But the way in which the Commission talks about the DMA shows that the silos remain. At a conference in Washington called Remedyfest, the head of DMA enforcement, Lucia Bonova, gave a presentation where she said, “Contrary to antitrust, which really seeks to punish for a bad behavior, what the DMA is trying to do is to really calibrate the rules so that there are incentives to comply.” The comment again reduced antitrust to a side dish. “There is not a radical rethink, and saying, ‘Do something that is effective or we will break you up,’” Valletti said.

The AI Act, another pathbreaking piece of regulation, suffers from a similar problem. The EU is the first entity in the world that has created binding rules for artificial intelligence. But they are primarily confined to ensuring AI systems are safe, and providing transparency to users about AI-generated content. Market power is not within the AI Act’s scope; it’s being managed under the Commission’s directorate for justice. “It needs to be strongly complemented by aggressive competition policy,” said von Thun, who wrote about the issue for Euractiv. “If [DG Comp] waits around two years for the AI Act to do anything, Big Tech companies will be more dominant and will be hard to regulate them.”

Early returns are again mixed. Civil society groups have asked the Commission to investigate the “partnerships” between AI developers and Big Tech firms, like Microsoft’s tie-ups with Open AI and French developer Mistral. But while the Commission has opened investigations, Vestager, the DG Comp commissioner, said in early March that the Mistral partnership did not raise any competition concerns.

The twin regulatory goals of making digital markets fair and contestable may reach

The twin regulatory goals of making digital markets fair and contestable may reach beyond the capacity of the Commission. beyond the capacity of the Commission, or of purely regulatory measures. “We can induce platforms to be a little more fair, I think that is achievable,” Caffarra said.

“When you are thinking about dispersing power, it is inconceivable that these rules will change that … The reality is that all these companies are just laughing.”

The Next Commission

EU parliamentary elections are scheduled for early June, with the expectation that the Parliament will be shifting to the right.

The far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group includes French nationalist Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) party, the neo-Nazi-linked Alternative for Germany, Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom Party, and other anti-immigrant groups in Austria and Italy.

Polls show RN leading the parliamentary vote in France, and Politico estimates that, while the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) will remain the largest in Parliament with the socialists well behind in second, ID could end up with the third-most seats. If ID and its right-wing colleagues in the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) obtain even a quarter of the parliamentary slots, they could force EPP to take them on as coalition partners and have a say in EU governance for the first time.

The major questions animating elections in Europe, understandably, are migration and war. As the EU layers on more rules, the backlash from Euroskeptic parties grows. But because political-economy issues are enveloped in bureaucracy, they aren’t encompassed into a counternarrative about democracy, and freedom from market tyrannies.

I asked members running for Parliament whether antitrust and trade were a factor in the elections. “I am always pleading about how brave we were to make sure that the social market economic principles

DAVID DAYEN

EU parliamentary elections are expected to be a victory for the right. have been translated into digital economy,” Schwab said. “But let’s be blunt, nobody has been excited about this.”

The elections will also lead to the restructuring of the Commission. Von der Leyen, the EPP’s candidate, is expected to retain the presidency, and she could structure the directorates as she sees fit. Every member state gets a commissioner, and member states horse-trade over the leadership of the directorates, balancing their influence with giving everyone some power.

With Germany in the presidency and France’s Thierry Breton likely for the vice presidency, smaller countries can control the directorates. Vestager is not expected to retain DG Comp. “The question is, who takes up that role and are they more progressive and bringing us to the U.S. approach, or someone more conservative,” von Thun said.

Von Thun’s Open Markets Institute is part of a civil society coalition that has put out their own “people’s manifesto” for the elections. “A lot of it is technical about what the DGs should do, at the philosophical level and the practical enforcement level,” said Lynn, who runs the organization. In contrast to von der Leyen’s stronger common defense DG, for example, the manifesto calls for a new industrial strategy DG, combining defense and supply chain resiliency.

The pressure from the outside is intended to pop the Brussels bubble, and there are signs of results. In late February, trade unions successfully got Amazon lobbyists banned from Parliament, only the second time in history that a corporation’s representatives have been removed from the premises.

More fines have come down from DG Comp, this time a 1.8 billion euro levy on Apple for abusive restrictions on music streaming apps. And there’s a continuing fight over Google’s advertising technology systems, which DG Comp suggested might need to be broken up from Google’s parent company, which would be unprecedented.

Even as Guersent called antitrust a side dish at the Brussels conference, he mused about making Big Tech platforms “essential facilities,” which would give competitors full access to platform infrastructure, though that would of course have to pass muster with the courts. It was strong language for a Eurocrat.

But his credibility, and the Commission’s, is on the line, as the regulatory effort, elections, and the informal competition with the U.S. comes to a head. Mundt pointed to his remarks in Brussels, and a successive conference he put on in Berlin, that

the enforcement posture is rolling out in stages. “Competition was enforcement 1.0.

The DMA is 2.0. Then if that fails, we will go to enforcement 3.0,” he said. “Policymakers will not look at a failure, they will react.

Then we will think about structural remedies.” That means breakups.

That debate could crawl Europe closer to its U.S. colleagues, and create virtuous competition among the competition authorities. But the same plodding approach might not reach the finish line in time. Europe has a ton of challenges: raging war, energy shortfalls, porous borders, and the uneasy balance of a cosmopolitan federal authority with intense nationalist sentiment. Political economy in Europe may slot in under those portentous issues. But maybe that’s exactly what Europe’s getting wrong.

“We have a spectacular opportunity to put into place beginning in 2025 a next world system,” Lynn exclaimed in his conference speech. “One that increases radically human liberty, true democracy, deep security, real peace, and the kind of innovation that will help us fight climate change … We can achieve these opportunities only if Europe steps up with a vision of how to address these threats, all of them. There is a great vacuum in the world and that vacuum is here in Europe.” n APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

32 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

Still Bring Us Your Tired Bad policy and worse politics threaten the post-WWII imperative to admit victims of persecution. But in parts of America, humanitarian migration remains a cherished tradition.

By Dara Lind Illustration by Rob Dobi Two things about our immigration debate are both true. One, America is in danger of turning its back on the global order set by the Refugee Convention—the commitment by the nations of the world, in the wake of the Holocaust, to welcome victims of persecution. Two, America still loves a refugee.

A single individual is a protagonist, whose story of the horrors they fled back home, and fear of what they might experience in the future, inspire sympathy and identification. A large group of people traveling together? That’s an invasion. When a picture of a single asylum seeker goes viral, it’s from immigration doves horrified at the costs of hawkish policies. Images of “migrant caravans” form the backdrop for Republican campaign ads aimed at skittish swing voters.

But the world doesn’t produce refugees on a bespoke basis. It produces them at industrial scale, as collateral damage from global upheavals. Each individual leaves for their own reasons, but the aggregate masses denote crisis, in both the countries they leave and the countries they flee to.

And today, global displacement has reached all-time highs, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.

So here we are, facing a presidential election, with a significant fraction of Americans—predominantly Republicans—citing immigration as the most important issue facing the country, and the administration of President Joe Biden anxious to do something it can point to as “shutting down” the U.S.-Mexico border.

U.S. asylum processing does face a very real collapse, forcing hundreds of thousands of people a month to wait years for a hearing before an immigration judge. That collapse is itself the result of a decade of choices to try to stop people from accessing the asylum system, rather than investing in its survival. Some presidents (generally Democrats) claim to be restricting access to asylum to protect the system’s integrity, while others (generally Republicans) have moved toward a general skepticism of humanitarian protection itself. But both this president and his predecessor not-so-secretly yearn for a return to the policy known as Title 42, in

place from March 2020 to May 2023, which used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to keep people on U.S. soil from exercising their right to seek asylum.

While asylum remains under constant threat, humanitarian immigration has rebounded from its Trump-era trough. The Biden administration claims it’s on track to meet its ambitious goal of resettling 125,000 refugees from abroad by the end of fiscal year 2024, bringing refugee resettlement back from the brink of extinction and taking in meaningful numbers from our own hemisphere for arguably the first time.

Large numbers of displaced Afghans and Ukrainians have been welcomed into communities around the country and granted temporary protection. As of November 2023, nearly 375,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela had been granted two-year grants to live in the U.S. and work legally, part of Biden’s “humanitarian parole” program that attracted 1.5 million applications in its first six months.

Conventional wisdom is that immigration is a losing issue for politicians; the APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

34 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

tor is the difference between the major-city failures we see in national media and the successes, in communities from Maine to Iowa, that we don’t. The problem, of course, is that when only the failures are visible, the political backlash—led most recently

by Donald Trump, who did more than any other president to dismantle the support system that’s accounted for the successes— threatens to destroy the whole thing.

In late 2023, during ill-fated Senate negotiations over a bill that would create a new expulsion authority in exchange for supplying military aid to Ukraine, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) remarked that “50 years from now, no one is going to remember whether we changed asylum policy. They will remember whether we let Putin take another country by force in a ground war in Europe.” Schatz didn’t notice the irony: Part of the postwar international order that made ground wars in Europe unthinkable was the right to asylum, as enshrined in the Refugee Convention, first written in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust.

In 1968, the United States signed on to the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, committing to the principle of “non-refoulement”: that no one should be returned to a country in which they would be persecuted. It took until the Refugee Act of 1980 to formalize the processes by which the U.S. would adhere to that commitment, both for resettling refugees in the United States and for processing asylum claims made by people who’d already arrived.

An asylum claim could take the form of a written application filed within a year of arrival in the U.S., or a claim made before an immigration judge in deportation proceedings. Like refugees, would-be asylees had to demonstrate persecution on behalf of their race, nationality, religion, political opinion, or membership in a “particular social group”; like refugees, they are eligible to apply for green cards (and, subsequently, citizenship) a year after their asylum application is approved.

Over time, laws and regulations barred people from getting asylum for various reasons, such as having committed particular crimes in the U.S. Importantly, though, entering the U.S. illegally did not disqualify someone from an asylum claim. The Immigration and Nationality Act makes it clear that asylum is open to anyone who

arrives in the U.S., “whether or not at a designated port of arrival.” The 1996 immigration law signed by Bill Clinton created an “expedited removal” process for people caught entering the U.S. without legal status, which added an additional step for asylum seekers: They now had to pass a screening interview to demonstrate they Ronald Reagan implemented the Refugee Act of 1980 in a way shaped by the pressures and prejudices of the Cold War.

had a “credible fear” of persecution before being allowed to make a case before an immigration judge. But once they cleared that hurdle, asylum was still available.

When the 1996 bill was debated, the stereotypical asylum seeker politicians envisioned was someone coming into JFK with a plane ticket but no visa. It wasn’t a border issue. Most people, including most politicians, assume that anyone crossing

DENNIS COOK / AP PHOTO

Democratic mayor of New York declares his city full. But it turns out that America, as a whole, is still pretty good at welcoming newcomers. Some are parolees, some refugees, and some are asylum seekers who still lack formal legal status. All fall under the umbrella of humanitarian migration. Taken together, they’re a sizable force, broadly distributed throughout the country, demonized by Trump and his allies as invaders.

But when they’re being welcomed, they’re welcomed as individuals, and that makes all the difference.

To square this circle, it’s important to understand that there are two different policy questions when it comes to humanitarian migration: how to select people to settle in the U.S., and how to support them.

The question of selection—who qualifies for protections and how they demonstrate it—is what politicians tend to debate. It implies a clear distinction between refugees screened before they arrive on U.S. soil, and asylum seekers whose presence on U.S. soil gives them a right to seek protection. And it turns on the sympathetic stories of the individuals, via a process that requires asylum seekers to articulate why they fear persecution if returned to their home countries.

The system rests on the premise that the government can and will distinguish the truly sympathetic from the rest. Right now, with a swamped and underresourced bureaucracy, it simply can’t.

The second question is one of support: what obligations the U.S. has to take care of these people. Unlike other immigrants, people coming here for humanitarian reasons don’t have to have family ties, an existing or promised job, or a certain level of education.

They are often starting from a baseline of zero, dropped into a strange community without housing, employment prospects, or language skills. Refugees are given an on-ramp: 90 days of federal support, routed through a local nonprofit that places new arrivals into communities and helps them find jobs, schools, and housing. The Biden administration has expanded the role of Americans in sponsoring refugees, piloting a version of Canada’s “private sponsorship” program that allows individuals and universities to participate.

Giving immigrants the ability to work legally in the U.S. soon after arrival, housing and language access if needed, and sponsors who can serve as both safety net and men-

into the U.S. from Mexico without papers is an economic migrant rather than a refugee. In other words, only people coming from outside the Western Hemisphere are truly victims of persecution; people coming northward by land, instead of westward by air, are mere opportunists.

Collectively labeling regions’ worth of

under U.S. law, in the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, was a victim of persecution who came either from the Middle East or from “any Communist or Communist-dominated country or area.” Victims of repressive right-wing governments backed by the U.S. in the name of anti-Communism need not apply.

While asylum remains under constant threat, humanitarian immigration has rebounded from its Trump-era trough. people as economic migrants, of course, is ostensibly what the asylum process, with its individual adjudication, is supposed to prevent. But it’s been an uphill battle. The international commitment to non-refoulement may have its roots in the reaction to the Holocaust, but U.S. refugee and asylum policy was shaped just as much by the pressures and prejudices of the Cold War. The original definition of a refugee

The Refugee Act was supposed to fix that, by enshrining the Refugee Convention’s grounds of persecution—including persecution based on “political opinion”— regardless of the government doing the persecuting. But implementation of the 1980 law was left to the Reagan administration, which was hardly inclined to look favorably on people who claimed they’d been persecuted by America’s allies. Even after the end

of the Cold War, presidents’ annual refugee resettlement targets all but overlooked Central and South America and the Caribbean in favor of the Eastern Hemisphere. And when people took it on themselves to seek shelter in the United States, the U.S. was prone to send them back.

The result is vividly chronicled in New Yorker writer Jonathan Blitzer’s new book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, which is in large part a history of the relationship between the United States, El Salvador, and the immigrants caught in between.

Throughout the 1980s, Salvadoran asylum seekers f leeing the U.S.-backed junta were awarded asylum at the astoundingly low rate of 3 percent. Guatemalans f leeing ethnic cleansing and slaughter had a 1 percent success rate. (Plenty of people f led Communist Cuba for the U.S., too, but the U.S. gave them a separate preferential path to green cards rather than forcing them to seek asylum.)

The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, which eventually brought religious border activists in the Southwestern U.S. under federal prosecution, was in Blitzer’s telling a response to the impossible situation faced by Salvadoran dissidents in the U.S. They knew death faced them if they were deported, but they knew deportation would be the result of filing for asylum. Activists counseled Salvadorans to remain in the shadows rather than bringing themselves to the attention of the authorities. The Sanctuary Movement, meanwhile, knew that Immigration and Naturalization Service agents wouldn’t invade churches, and sheltered vulnerable Salvadorans there.

Salvadorans had a choice about whether to apply for asylum because most unauthorized border-crossers were able to enter the U.S. without being caught by the Border Patrol. In 1984, 2,000 Border Patrol agents were responsible for patrolling the entire 3,000-plus miles of land and river between the U.S. and Mexico. Border enforcement was stepped up by Presidents George H.W. Bush (under Attorney General William Barr) and Bill Clinton, leading to more than 9,000 Border Patrol agents by 2001.When the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11, border enforcement was split from the rest of the immigration bureaucracy, eventually becoming a separate agency (Customs and Border Protection) whose budget Congress was happy to increase. By 2013, APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

It’s tempting to say that asylum has been swallowed by the U.S.-Mexico border. It may be true that record numbers of crossings, with most of those apprehended released with far-off court dates, have triggered Americans’ fears and made them less likely to see the issue as one of a fundamental humanitarian commitment. But it’s arguably truer the other way around: Asylum swallowed border enforcement and infrastructure, which wasn’t built to accommodate people seeking humanitarian protection, much less to adjudicate their claims.

Unauthorized migration from Mexico collapsed during the Great Recession, and never recovered. In its place, starting during Barack Obama’s second term, was unauthorized migration from the three “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. They couldn’t simply be bused back to Mexico once caught by Border Patrol, because they weren’t Mexican. Court rulings and space constraints made it impossible to keep more than a few families in immigration detention. And many of them couldn’t be quickly deported, because they were asking for asylum. Border infrastructure, which had been built for swift and certain returns, was incapable of handling these new people and their new needs.

“Swift and certain” is difficult enough in asylum proceedings, which are immensely dependent on each individual case. Because few migrants understand asylum, sifting out persecution from other horrible things a person has experienced requires extensive preparation and careful questioning (which is one reason why judges prefer that asylum seekers have lawyers to help them present their cases). Many Northern Triangle asylum seekers had fled gang violence in their home countries, forcing adjudicators to consider whether they were being persecuted based on a Refugee Convention–protected identity, and whether their governments were unwilling or unable to protect them. Swift and certain outcomes to these questions would require massive investment from the federal government: places to house and care for asylees, asylum officers to screen their cases, and immigration judges to hear the final claims.

36 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

Instead, over and over again for a decade, the federal government attempted to stop the growth of the asylum backlog by trying to deter people from coming at all. Muchhyped crackdowns were put in place that subjected asylum seekers to extra screenings, worse conditions, or faster deportations. But since these required resources, the crackdowns only ever applied to some of the people coming in. Border numbers

42. Biden administration officials publicized harsher penalties for deportation under immigration law compared to expulsion under Title 42, and unveiled a new regulation that theoretically subjects most border-crossers to the higher screening standard applied to “withholding of removal” cases in order to qualify for asylum.

Nearly everyone had assumed there would be a surge of pent-up demand after Title

A crudely fashioned migrant shelter near the Arizona border

Border enforcement and infrastructure wasn’t built to accommodate people seeking humanitarian protection, much less to adjudicate their claims. would drop for a few months as people waited to see how the new policies would shake out. Then, as some people succeeded in getting through and sent back word, numbers rose again.

This pattern repeated itself, under three presidents, right up to the 2023 end of Title

42 ended, but due to the policy change, fewer people crossed into the U.S. than expected at first. However, the surge was merely delayed until it was clear that over half of asylees passed the higher screening standard—and because the government didn’t have nearly enough asylum officers

GREGORY BULL / AP PHOTO

the Border Patrol workforce grew to over 20,000, and the likelihood of apprehension grew with it.

to conduct more intensive screenings, most people were being given court dates without being screened at all.

The end of Title 42 also made clear that the population of border-crossers had transformed yet again. They weren’t just coming from one country, or even three. They were coming from Venezuela and Haiti, but also India and China and Cameroon. They didn’t necessarily know

anyone in the U.S. who could house or support them until they could work legally. For most, that couldn’t happen until at least six months after filing an asylum application, which given the court backlog and the scarcity of lawyers was a time-consuming endeavor. They didn’t always have

a U.S. destination in mind; when asked for an address to send court notices to, some migrants provided a social services office in New York City.

Given the housing crunch in many American cities, and the efforts of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to bus people to “sanctuary cities” after federal agents released them from custody, the ensuing crisis, with its overloaded shelters and mayoral panics, might seem inevitable.

It wasn’t.

Abbott’s stunts have created a false impression that everyone agrees that new arrivals are a burden. But the reality has always been that what local governments are really afraid of is having too many people come in without the resources to support them, and help them support themselves. When that gap is closed, surprising champions step up.

As the first Abbott bus pulled into Philadelphia in December 2022, volunteers were ready to meet new arrivals at the drop-off point, with clothes, information about shelters and legal services, and even bus passes.

California cities have taken in large numbers of new arrivals without high-profile complaint; Denver has started to buckle under the strain, but only after months of state and local efforts to provide people with shelter and help them find places to settle.

All of that happened with no federal coordination and little financial support. The Biden administration has pioneered the use of FEMA grants to places experiencing an influx of asylum seekers, but most local and state governments are struggling to apply for aid and get timely reimbursements. Yet volunteers and their cities and states stepped into the breach, all while many of these same cities were already taking in temporary parolees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, and refugees from around the world.

The ten national nonprofit agencies with which the feds partner for refugee resettlement all have their roots in church outreach, immigrant mutual aid, or in the case of HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, both. In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union began to collapse, enormous numbers of Soviet Jews were finally able to leave the country, creating a refugee crisis in Eastern Europe just as Holocaust survivors had 40 years before.

Many wished to go to the United States, but major U.S. cities were seriously con-

cerned about their ability to accommodate so many poor Jews. The government asked HIAS, which had gotten its start helping the Jewish refugees of the early 20th century, to identify people and congregations outside the obvious hubs that might be willing to take in some refugees.

In February 1990, a HIAS representative visited a congregation in West Lafayette, Indiana, to enlist them in the effort. Lev Golinkin, whose memoir A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka recounts his family’s flight from the Soviet Union and their resettlement in West Lafayette, calls Linda Forman, an architect who stepped in to coordinate the effort, his “American mother.” In the Golinkins’ first year, Forman spent more time with her refugee charges than her own family, and took care of everything from introducing them to American holidays to teaching Lev’s father and older sister to drive.

Golinkin’s memoir, a warts-and-all reflection on the Soviet Jewish refugee crisis, makes clear that resettlement is often hard, both for refugees and for those welcoming them, but that it’s an American tradition for a reason. The U.S. has a long tradition of the descendants of past refugees—who, like most descendants of immigrants, have fully assimilated to the U.S. for better or worse—helping their more-recently-arrived peers. Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky analyzed millions of records from the early-20th-century era of mass migration for their book Streets of Gold. They found that people fleeing war and oppression were more likely than other immigrants to learn English, perhaps because they came to the U.S. with the intention of putting down roots instead of returning home once they’d earned enough money.

Welcoming refugees has become in some places a gateway to economic revitalization. Congressional Budget Office forecasts from February 2024 attribute the faster-than-expected recovery of the U.S. economy since the COVID-19 pandemic to the rebound in immigration levels over the past couple of years, much of it under the auspices of humanitarian immigration, including refugees. Around the same time as the CBO report, the Department of Health and Human Services finally released a report on the net fiscal impact of refugees and asylees, after a failed attempt by the Trump administration to quash evidence of benefits and count only costs. The APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

report revealed that refugees and asylees contributed more to government coffers than they took out, with state and local governments reaping the biggest benefit.

As an example, Buffalo, New York, reversed decades of population decline in part by becoming a refugee hub.

Elsewhere, welcoming has become a matter of local culture, with the best example the now deep-red state of Iowa. When the U.S. stepped up resettlement of Southeast Asian “boat people” fleeing the Vietnam War—part of its ad hoc Cold War approach to refugee resettlement—President Gerald Ford offered governors $500 a head to take in refugees. Iowa’s Republican governor, Robert Ray, committed to take in thousands; “I didn’t think we could just sit here idly and say, ‘Let those people die,’” Ray later said.

At the time, Cold War hawks were some of the biggest supporters of refugee resettlement. When all refugees were anti-Communists, anti-Communists had plenty of reasons to be pro-refugee. But the use of federal dollars for resettlement, enshrined with the creation of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the 1980 Refugee Act, gave some Republicans in Congress pause.

Ray, and other Republican state and local politicians, put his conservative opposition to government redistribution aside and accepted the federal aid, and Iowa became a pro-refugee state. In 1996, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) joined with Ted Kennedy to prevent Congress from capping the number of refugees the president could resettle in a given year at 50,000.

The politics of the issue were scrambled: Bill Clinton lost re-election as governor of Arkansas in part due to a backlash against Cuban refugees, and carried that memory into a hawkish presidency. It took until the Obama administration for immigration to become straightforwardly partisan, with hawks winning the day in the Republican Party and doves winning among Democrats. After 9/11, the Cold War mentality that led to dissidents from enemy regimes being celebrated as heroes gave way to the “clash of civilizations” mentality of the war on terror and the Trump era, in which coming from a “s***hole country,” as Donald Trump infamously put it, makes someone more suspect rather than less.

The new politics crystallized during the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. The Unit38 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

ed States resettled 100,000 refugees in fiscal year 2016, in part because of Syrians. As this ramped up, then-candidate Donald Trump made a point of arguing for all of them to be rejected, leading red-state governors (led by Indiana’s chief executive and eventual vice president Mike Pence) to try to shut Syrians out of their states.

Trump’s rhetoric has always implied

“fight their own war”—implying that refugees were either cowards or covert government agents.

That logic, which Trump expanded to refugees around the world as president, is a rejection of the Refugee Convention itself, which at its heart acknowledges that some people are choosing not between fight and flight but between life and death. Long

The U.S. has never resettled more than 7,500 refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean in a fiscal year; it’s on pace to hit that mark in March. that migrants are “sent” by their governments deliberately, exporting undesirables to America. In the case of Syrians, he raised the specter of a “Trojan horse” attack, a line of reasoning his son Don Jr. extended in 2016 in a tweet comparing terrorist refugees to one poisoned Skittle in a handful of candy. Trump was especially concerned about “young, strong men” f leeing Syria instead of staying to

before Trump turned his efforts toward restrictive border policies, his administration was slashing refugee admissions and the budgets of nonprofits contracted to resettle refugees. By the end of Trump’s term, refugee resettlement in the U.S. had been almost fully dismantled.

President Biden hasn’t been as aggressive in rebuilding the refugee program as his

campaign suggested he would be; it was never realistic to go from admitting 12,000 people in 2020 to 100,000 in 2021. But the administration claims that it will, in fact, resettle 125,000 refugees by the end of September 2024. As of the end of February, over 40,000 refugees had arrived in the United States; since refugee admissions usually accelerate over the course of the

BORIS ROESSLER PICTURE-ALLIANCE DPA / AP IMAGES

Afghan refugees arrive at a U.S. air base in Germany in 2021.

fiscal year (in fiscal year 2023, 80 percent of refugees arrived after February), it’s not out of the question.

Biden’s team worked to rebuild infrastructure and bolster the national organizations with private sponsorship, tapping into Americans’ long-standing interest in welcoming refugees. When Texas and other Republican-led states sued to stop one humanitarian parole program,

American sponsors (and would-be sponsors) intervened to defend it. Some were relatives or in-laws of their parolees, but others were simply committed volunteers who wanted to make America welcoming again.

If the refugee goal is reached, it will be in large part because of Latin American refugees, whom the administration is finally turning its attention to. The U.S. has never resettled more than 7,500 refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean in a fiscal year; it’s on pace to hit that mark in March. The U.S. is finally seeing refugees in this hemisphere because it’s finally looking for them. The Biden administration has opened a handful of Safe Mobility Offices throughout the hemisphere, at which people can find out whether they’re eligible for immigration status in the U.S.; so far, it’s been working mostly to identify and screen refugees. The fact that so many bona fide refugees are being identified in this hemisphere is powerful evidence that the asylum seekers can’t all be written off as “economic migrants.”

Even more significant, quantitatively, are the people to whom this administration has given “humanitarian parole,” which is only valid for a certain amount of time, but can be reauthorized. These programs aren’t designed for refugees, per se—you don’t have to show evidence of persecution to qualify—but the overwhelming majority of Biden’s parolees are war refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, and the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans from the CHNV program, all of whom come from failed and/or repressive states. Because parole doesn’t itself give you access to permanent status, applying for asylum once here, or hoping for another form of temporary protection, is the most likely way for any of these people to stay.

The parolees, too, are settling largely without incident, and with support. Congress authorized Afghan and Ukrainian evacuees to receive refugee benefits for their first year in the U.S. Through the Uniting for Ukraine and CHNV programs, American sponsors have to promise to support the parolees if they can’t find work in the United States.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has acknowledged that the 30,000 Ukrainians his city has welcomed haven’t put meaningful strain on local government—“No one has

even noticed,” he told The Atlantic—and he attributed this to the presence of support.

Even Afghan refugees, who as non-European Muslims could face “Trojan horse” paranoia, have received support from local churches and veterans’ groups.

It’s not perfect. Iowa, in particular, struggled with Afghan resettlement in 2021, with families complaining of subpar housing and caseworkers they couldn’t reach in emergencies. But instead of rejecting future refugees, the state committed to take on Ukrainians as well. In Maine, a housing crunch in Portland has led refugees to settle in smaller towns in the center of the state; but instead of complaining of limited capacity, Maine is set to take in twice as many refugees in 2024 as it did last year.

You can tell a story about this that is reassuring: Politicians’ hyperventilation hasn’t gotten in the way of American welcoming. But unfortunately, this welcoming doesn’t come close to meeting the scope of the problem. Resettlement is resourceintensive, especially when asylum seekers, who choose where they want to live, go to places with high housing costs. And as the last eight years have proven, it’s much easier to shut down than to build up again.

More importantly, if the United States isn’t forcefully arguing for humanitarian migration, it can’t discourage other countries from shutting their own borders, and turning their backs on refugees and asylum seekers alike.

The global displacement crisis is likely to get worse. The future portends more “climate migration,” a term that makes less sense as a discrete phenomenon than as a way to underscore that climate change will continue to force ever more people to flee or die. Not everyone displaced by climate change will fit existing refugee definitions, but some of them truly will. Which is to say that existing laws won’t solve the problem on their own, but prevent the U.S. or any other country from preemptively declaring itself full.

The U.S. isn’t full. Its people are demonstrating every day that they can make more room; that they can support newcomers and therefore lead them to better support themselves. America still loves a refugee. It’s just not clear whether the American government is up to the task. n Dara Lind is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and a longtime immigration reporter.

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

Against Climate science deniers, right-wing think tanks, and fossil fuel shills are plotting to foil the renewableenergy revolution.

By Rebecca Burns

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANSON CHAN

40 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

Last July, a small group of rabble-rousers boarded a trio of powerboats, banners and bullhorns in hand. They were headed for the massive floating construction site of an offshore wind farm 35 miles from the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. As the boats motored through the swells, the self-styled activists broke into a chorus of pleas for the wind farm construction to cease—chants likely intended less for the still-faraway workers than for the camera there to capture footage. “Hear this message: We’re here to save the whales!” called out a man in a black polo shirt.

“If you were a fossil fuel project, you would have been shut down long ago.”

That apparent conservation activist was, in fact, an infamous climate change disinformation artist: Marc Morano, who’s done more than perhaps any other person to manufacture doubt about global warming. From his perch at Climate Depot, the blog he’s run since 2009, Morano has elevated fake climate experts, encouraged the harassment of real climate scientists, and promoted the myth of “global cooling.”

More recently, Morano has been talking about whales—specifically, the idea that the higherthan-usual number of dead ones washing ashore along the East Coast is the result of President Joe Biden’s push to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore

wind power by the end of the decade. In fact, the spate of whale strandings began in January 2016, before most survey activity for ocean turbines had even begun. Federal agencies are still investigating “unusual mortality events” for three whale species, but regulators and academic researchers say there’s no evidence of a link to wind development. Since 2019, hundreds of gray whales have also washed up dead on the West Coast, where offshore wind development is only now getting under way. The clearest common factor is rising ocean temperatures, which are disrupting whales’ feeding and migration patterns. In other words, climate change. But no matter—video of Morano’s boat protest landed on Fox News and spread like a ripple through the social media groups that have sprouted to oppose offshore wind.

Morano and company’s mission failed, as construction continued on the 12 turbines that now compose one of the largest offshore wind farms built to date in the United States. In December, New York flipped the switch on South Fork Wind, which will deliver renewable power to some 70,000 homes in the state. But figures like Morano may be gaining ground in a larger mission: twisting public opinion against renewable energy in other would-be host communities.

Morano works at the Committee for a Con-

THE

Wind

structive Tomorrow, part of a sprawling climate denial machine assembled with funding from fossil fuel interests like ExxonMobil and the Charles Koch Foundation and dark-money groups like DonorsTrust. Between 1998 and 2014, ExxonMobil and its foundation gave more than half a million dollars to the committee, which did not respond to a request for comment. DonorsTrust gave the group nearly $8 million between 2008 and 2017, according to federal tax data. Today, as both the science and the tangible effects of a warming planet become irrefutable, it’s increas-

ingly rare to encounter the kind of outright climate denial these groups pioneered. Instead, it’s being replaced by what misinformation experts call “climate delayism”—a coordinated campaign to undermine climate solutions.

For fossil fuel ideologues, sowing misinformation about wind and solar power is proving to be an effective stall tactic. Public opinion surveys show that renewable energy remains popular with a bipartisan majority of Americans; in a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, 7 out of 10 people said they’d be comfortable

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

with a wind farm in their own community. But in New Jersey—where Morano’s group has gone so far as to buy billboards reading “Save Whales Stop Windmills”—nearly half of all the state’s residents now believe that such a connection probably exists, according to an August poll from Monmouth University.

“There is absolutely zero evidence that any of the offshore wind activity has been involved in any of those strandings,” says Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. Claims that noise from offshore wind surveys are driving whales into harm’s way don’t hold water, according to Nowacek—and it bears noting that seismic surveys for oil and gas are far louder. Many of the dead whales have borne signs of ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear.

Yet in lawsuits challenging offshore wind projects, opponents continue to routinely cite alleged threats to whales. Two separate groups of plaintiffs retained an attorney, David Hubbard, who also represents Morano’s group.

(Citing attorney-client privilege, Hubbard declined to discuss the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.) Courts have rejected such challenges to date. But coupled with high interest rates and supply chain disruptions, such lawsuits could delay the offshore wind sector’s development.

It’s not just offshore wind at risk either. In order for the Biden administration to hit its goal of a 100 percent clean power grid by 2035, the nation needs to rapidly increase the rate of new wind and solar power installations.

Hard-won federal policies like the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act put that target within reach.

But at the local level, challenges are mounting. A report from Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law identified nearly 230 local measures across 35 states that have been enacted to restrict renewable-energy development. Matthew Eisenson, the report’s author, said these could amount to a “serious obstacle” to achieving U.S. climate goals.

Many such measures bear the fingerprints of “wind war42 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

riors” who have re-emerged in dozens of local fights to stymie the energy transition at key points. For more than a decade, climate deniers and fossil fuel interests have quietly cultivated ties with these activists, equipping them with talking points, legal muscle, model ordinances, and other tools to try to subvert renewable-energy adoption. Now, from coastal hamlets in New York to rural farming towns in Ohio, residents supporting wind and solar in their communities are running up

against the same barrier: a chorus of disinformation, much of it tied to, or even circulated directly by, fossil fuel–backed groups waging an existential fight to preserve the status quo.

In their book Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway detail how Big Oil took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook to stoke the embers of the climate denial movement. The longer industry groups could “keep the controversy alive” by creating the appearance of scientific debate, the longer they could continue to stall regulations and rake in profits. Oreskes and Conway even spotted overlap in the operatives carrying out this strategy, as figures like tobacco lobbyist Steven Milloy made a seamless transition from denying the health impacts of secondhand smoke to smearing climate scientists. Today, Milloy can be found attacking renewable energy—such as in a bizarre 2023 tweet in which he claimed that “wind power made the trans-Atlantic slave trade possible.”

While slick public relations operatives were once the go-to for industry spin, today scrappy antagonists working through social media can be highly effective, according to Joshua Fergen, a sociologist who has studied how online groups opposing wind energy stoked local conflict over its development in Ohio. Deepening political polarization, fueled by social media, has helped transform renewable energy into a culture-war issue—and extended the reach of its most ardent opponents.

Fergen emphasizes that valid concerns arise about how renewable developers engage communities and choose project locations. But browse the myriad local Facebook groups dedicated to opposing renewable energy and you’ll see a different set of themes repeat.

Along with AI-generated images of whales washed ashore in front of wind turbines, there are memes of the Grim Reaper holding a turbine in place of a scythe. In 2021, a viral post blaming Texa s’s deadly winter blackout on iced-over wind turbines used an image from Sweden—and originated from a prominent oil and gas consultant, as USA Today reported.

Certain names also pop up over and over—many of them tied to a 2012 antiwind confab in Washington, D.C. Fergen says that the seeds of today’s online wind wars were in a draft public relations strategy that circulated the same year; a leaked document outlined how

wind warriors can “create so much confusion, so many opinions on this, that you don’t really want to step in it,” he says.

One of those names is John Droz. He is a retired real estate investor who has been involved in an impressive array of local energy fights over the past 15 years. It was Droz who convened the 2012 meeting that brought together staff from groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow with local wind opponents. Droz also edited the PR document that put forth tactics including a meme campaign, a “dummy business” to go into communities considering wind development, and youth science fairs “with preset parameters that cause students to steer away from wind.” The watchdog group Checks and Balances Project, which obtained documents from the conference, told The Guardian that it marked “the first time that local NIMBY anti-wind groups are coordinating and working with national fossil-fuel-funded advocacy groups to wreck the wind industry,” referring to “not in my backyard” anti-wind groups that proliferated during the mid-aughts.

Droz, who once worked at General Electric and describes himself as an “independent physicist,” has links to some of the key organs of the right. He has been a guest speaker at the infamous climate denial conferences hosted by the Heartland Institute. But Droz has achieved much of his impact through fastidious networking in communities with planned renewableenergy projects. On his website, the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions, he provides a menu of wind ordinance templates.

The ordinances often focus on “setback” rules, which mandate how far wind turbines must be located from neighboring properties. In one strategy document, Droz explains that the point of setbacks should be to make them “so restrictive that the cost of the project becomes prohibitive and the developer leaves.”

Droz denies that his ordinances have had this effect; he also says that he does not keep track of how many have passed.

But his name has turned up in the local meeting minutes of towns like Richland, New York, which enacted restrictive setbacks in 2018. In the nearby town of Worth, where dozens of residents turned out to try to stop the passage of a similar measure, documents filed with the state utility regulator show that the town board consulted Droz as an “independent wind expert.”

Many such local regulations act as de facto wind farm bans, according to Columbia University’s Eisenson.

Local governments extend six-month moratoriums indefinitely, or set caps on the acreage renewables can occupy.

“If you have a one-mile setback from roads, you essentially need to have a property that’s at least four square miles in order to have a single wind turbine,” Eisenson says.

Dave Anderson, a policy analyst at the pro-renewables Energy and Policy Institute, has watched figures like Droz reappear perennially. The upshot, he

As both the science and the tangible effects of a warming planet become irrefutable, it’s increasingly rare to encounter outright climate denial.

Instead, it’s being replaced by what misinformation experts call “climate delayism.”

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

says, is that while local anti-renewable groups may not have been started by the fossil fuel industry, “very quickly, they began to coordinate and get a lot of their information from think tanks and front groups” for the industry.

For more than a decade, Anderson’s group has chronicled this kind of coordination in purportedly grassroots campaigns. That included a yearslong, nationwide assault on state renewable-energy mandates led by the State Policy Network, a 50-state group of Koch-affiliated think tanks. Network members turned up to testify on behalf of cut-and-paste legislation rolling back the renewable requirements—sometimes citing debunked studies from other Koch-backed groups. In Ohio, which froze its requirements in 2014, conservative think tanks and utility lobbyists cultivated ties with local wind opponents to stage public meetings featuring a David-andGoliath narrative about the invasion of “Big Wind.”

In August 2021, a press conference staged on the steps of the Massachusetts State House seemed to repeat the same formula. After two Nantucket residents announced plans to file suit against a planned offshore wind project, a man with a shock of white hair and a smart blue suit stepped forward.

Homeowners fighting wind turbines “need help,” he said, which is why he had traveled from Delaware to announce a new coalition “pairing think tanks like ours from various states with beach community groups.”

The speaker was David Stevenson, a former DuPont executive and adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 transition team. The think tank he was referring to is the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Delaware affiliate of the State Policy Network, where Stevenson works. At least five State Policy Network groups now work within the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, the new anti-wind umbrella group Stevenson announced. The coalition hadn’t received any Koch money to date, Stevenson told reporters at the statehouse press conference. He then added, “Not that we wouldn’t take it.”

Stevenson said in an email that the coalition has provided organizational but not financial support to local offshorewind opponents. The dollar amount raised by the Caesar Rodney Institute for its Ocean Environment Legal Defense Fund is confidential, he said, “but it is substantial.”

A woman dressed in a full-body whale costume sat in the front row of a school gymnasium in Rhode Island last March, holding a sign that read “Save Me.” The event was an info session about planned offshore wind projects with a panel of experts including Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies at Brown University. The woman, Mary Chalke, was one of the Nantucket homeowners from Stevenson’s press conference. Roberts had first encountered affiliated local wind opponents earlier that year, when they began publishing a series of over-thetop warnings. One said that just as chemical dispersants had intensified

the environmental damage from the 2010 Gulf oil spill, so, too, could offshore wind prove to be a cure worse than the disease of climate change.

“The claims were so unsupported by the evidence and so sensationalized, and they really seemed to be just playing on people’s fears,” Roberts says.

A few years ago, Roberts was part of a team that modeled possible pathways to decarbonization in Rhode Island and found that nearly two-thirds of its electricity could be supplied by offshore wind, the most viable option in the densely populated state. After watching wind misinformation mount, Roberts switched gears and, with his students, produced a report analyzing opponents’ tactics. The report found that while wind foes circulated voluminous studies, white papers, and regulatory comments that gave the impression of rigor, they relied on fake experts and cherrypicked or misrepresented data—mainstays of the larger climate denial movement.

Take the evolution of the narrative that wind turbines are killing whales. Conservative tabloids in Britain began falsely reporting a link more than a decade ago, sometimes referencing findings from Scotland’s University of St Andrews. In 2011, one of the university’s researchers protested when The Daily Telegraph cited his study linking naval exercises to whale strandings—in order to claim that wind farms “posed an even greater threat” to whales. The newspaper issued a correction, but the same claim, with the same citation, continued circulating nonetheless. In 2016, it was picked up by Paul Driessen, head of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Driessen’s blog post on whale deaths, citing the debunked article, is now marshaled as evidence by U.S. opponents of offshore wind.

University of Rhode Island marine scientist Robert Kenney tried to correct the record in 2017, when a Daily Caller article linked the death of a humpback whale to the first U.S. offshore wind farm. “Whales themselves are louder than turbines”—unlike ultra-loud naval sonar—Kenney and a colleague explained in a published response.

Plus, the Daily Caller piece had misstated the start of a series of humpback strandings to make the whales’ death rate appear three times as high. “The only thing in the whole article that was true was that there was a dead whale,” Kenney says.

Kenney’s research has tracked the decline of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. Since 2011, the whales’ deaths—largely from ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear—have outpaced births.

The most effective protections would

Conservative think tanks and utility lobbyists cultivated ties with local wind opponents to stage public meetings featuring a Davidand-Goliath narrative.

44 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

involve stricter regulations on commercial fishing, according to Kenney. But, he says, “the fishing industry fights tooth and nail every step of the way.”

It’s suspicious, then, that the fishing industry is now one of the loudest voices decrying the supposed dangers that offshore wind poses to right whales. In 2021, six commercial fishing associations sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, alleging that its approval of a wind farm off the coast of Nantucket violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The legal muscle behind the case was provided free of charge by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank. The group, which does not comment on its donors, has received at least $4 million from fossil fuel interests.

Amplified by fossil fuel–backed groups and Fox News, the

claims about whale deaths have derailed support for offshore wind in communities like Long Beach, New York, where many residents thought their community would welcome a proposed wind farm. Long Beach sits on a thin strip of land on the South Shore of Long Island, an area devastated by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. In the storm’s aftermath, the city came out in staunch opposition to a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal off its coastline. Residents packed public meetings and staged beachfront rallies. When then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo arrived in the city in 2015 to announce his veto of the gas project, a crowd of 200 people burst into applause.

During the past year, a vocal group of locals mounted a mirror-image campaign against a proposed offshore wind farm whose underwater cable would make landfall in Long Beach APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

before carrying power to some one million New York homes. “I’m all for green energy, believe me. I recycle every little thing I can,” said one area resident at a public hearing before New York’s utility regulator last October. Then she continued, “I am vehemently opposed to this entire project.

The whales washing up that never used to wash up before.”

W ind opponent s bega n showing up to nearly every city council meeting. “There weren’t that many of them, but they were very organized, and very loud,” says Ellen Gluck Feldman, an environmental planner who has lived in Long Beach for almost four decades.

She watched in dismay as the city council came out in formal opposition to the project last summer, leaving its path forward uncertain.

Gluck Feldman had thought that renewable energy would be a relatively easy sell in a community intimately familiar with climate calamity. “We should be the first ones to step up and do it because of what happened with Sandy,” she says. “We should be the first ones to say yes, we’re on board. And instead, we said no.

It just boggles the mind.”

In many parts of the country, the tactics honed by anti-wind campaigners are now being deployed against solar.

In late November, residents of Knox County, Ohio, packed a 1,000-seat theater to enjoy snacks and free alcohol and learn about a solar project proposed for their area. The catered town hall was hosted by Knox Smart Development, an anonymously funded LLC incorporated less than three weeks earlier.

The speakers included Steve Goreham, a policy adviser for the Heartland Institute whose latest book forecasts a “coming renewable energy failure.” Attendees were instructed on how they could voice their opposition to the state regulator now reviewing the solar project.

Kathy Gamble attended the town hall to pass out information on behalf of Knox County for Responsible Solar, a group she founded to support residents’ rights to use their land as they choose, including for renewable-energy development.

The solar scare tactics are straining local relationships to the breaking point, she says. “Landowners are afraid to admit that they have land in the project.”

A mostly rural area outside of Columbus, Knox County happens to be home to the Ariel Corporation, a major manu46 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

facturer of methane gas compressors. Gamble suspects that its CEO, Republican mega-donor Karen Buchwald Wright, is behind the new anti-renewables group. Around the same time as the town hall, according to Gamble, residents began receiving copies of Goreham’s book with a handwritten note from Buchwald Wright. (Neither Knox Smart Development nor the Ariel Corporation responded to a request for comment.)

Gamble is unfazed by these tactics. The dark-money group in Knox County is just the latest of its kind to pop up in Ohio, where fossil fuel and utility companies have launched some of their most brazen attacks on renewable energy. Last year, the Empowerment Alliance, a separate group linked to Buchwald Wright that runs ads attacking wind and solar, successfully lobbied for state legislation categorizing methane gas as green energy. In 2019, Ohioans weathered a $9.5 million advertising blitz in favor of another disastrous energy law. The pressure campaign had been orchestrated by a front group for FirstEnergy, a bankrupt utility at the center of the state’s largest-ever corruption scandal. The utility company built a sprawling network of dark-money groups—and spent some $60 million on outright bribes—to grease the way for the state’s bailout

of two aging nuclear plants. The 2019 legislation also gutted renewable-energy standards and left taxpayers on the hook for ongoing coal subsidies benefiting FirstEnergy that will total nearly $2 billion by the end of this decade.

While the corruption at the heart of Ohio’s disastrous energy policy has been uncovered, the shadow it cast over the state’s climate future remains. Ohio utilities rank among the worst in the nation for the amount of electricity generated by renewables, and the state’s setback requirements for wind turbines are ten times greater than those for oil and gas wells. Largescale solar projects like the one in Knox County could provide a path forward—but only if they can make it through an approval process that’s increasingly stacked against renewables.

Three years ago, legislation co-sponsored by Republican state Rep. Bill Seitz handed counties the power to veto renewable-energy projects—and to proclaim themselves off-limits to wind and solar altogether. Communities lack any equivalent power to reject new fossil fuel projects. At least ten counties in the state have since enacted such bans. And even in counties that haven’t passed such measures, the Ohio Power Siting Board has nonetheless begun rejecting new renewable projects, citing the presence of community opposition as evidence that they don’t adequately serve the public interest.

That’s a stark departure from precedent, according to Karin Nordstrom, an attorney for the nonprofit Ohio Environmental Council. In 2019, the board approved a controversial methane gas pipeline over the protest of communities in its path. Treating community opposition as a sufficient basis for denial appears to be a standard applied only to renewable energy, Nordstrom says. It’s “inappropriate” not to consider a project’s impact on climate change as part of the public interest.

Fossil fuel interests have a history of covert intervention in Ohio’s renewable-energy siting. In one now-infamous example, coal producer Murray Energy was unmasked in 2018 as the money behind a yearslong lawsuit against a proposed Lake Erie wind farm. That was after an apparent front group for the coal industry—going by the name of Campaign for Affordable and Reliable Energy—tried unsuccessfully to intervene directly in several renewable-energy siting cases. Murray Energy was also a major backer of the corruption-tainted 2019 nuclear and coal bailout.

Even after the astroturf anti-wind scheme was exposed in local media, an attorney for Murray Energy, John Stock, continued to represent groups fighting renewable-energy projects until the coal company’s 2019 bankruptcy.

At least two of Stock’s cases were then taken over by Jack Van Kley, a Columbus attorney who has since helped accelerate denials of renewable projects in Ohio. In the past four years, Van Kley has helped kill at least three other renewable-energy projects, and he’s currently representing intervenors in four solar cases before the siting board. Last summer, The Plain Dealer spotted a reference to an “independent

individual” chipping in $10,000 toward Van Kley’s fee in the meeting minutes of one of the townships he’s representing.

Van Kley said in an email that he has never represented or been paid by fossil fuel companies; his clients pay his fees.

Other than the support they get from landowners who benefit financially, according to Van Kley, the projects “are almost universally opposed.”

In Madison County, Ohio, a solar proponent named John Boeckl has tried to counter that narrative. Boeckl researches photovoltaics for the nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and his land is a few hundred yards from the proposed site of the Oak Run Solar Project, which could become one of the largest solar projects built to date nationwide. With the help of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center, Boeckl filed testimony on behalf of the project. He says that the objections he has heard from area residents boil down to scare tactics: “They’re taking away all our farmland, and we’re going to be eating soy.” The rhetoric echoes lines about the loss of farmland circulated by new fossil fuel–linked groups like the Empowerment Alliance, as well as older ones like the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. In fact, Oak Run Solar could break new ground in agrovoltaics, the practice of co-locating crops and solar panels, which can increase some crop yields and reduce the amount of water needed for irrigation.

Local opponents have also raised concerns about the waste generated by solar panels; last year, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Colorado School of Mines warned that such claims may be slowing solar deployment, even though decarbonization “represents a substantial reduction in mass and toxicity of waste.” At present, they found, as much toxic coal ash is generated globally in one month as solar panels are expected to produce in the next 35 years.

Van Kley is also representing residents seeking to intervene in the solar case in Knox County, which banned large wind farms in 2022 and is now considering a solar ban. Knox Smart Development has more town halls planned and is circulating information from the Buckeye Institute, the Ohio affiliate of the Koch-backed State Policy Network.

In the face of well-financed opposition, Gamble feels outgunned. “You can hardly turn on a computer in this area without seeing their ads,” she says. But she’ll keep having conversations with her neighbors, and she plans to make her opinions known at siting board meetings when hearings get under way this spring. “I plan to get up and say my piece there,” she says, no matter the size of the opposition. “I do know that I just plan to keep on doing what I do.” n

In many parts of the country, the tactics honed by anti-wind campaigners are now being deployed against solar.

This article was published in conjunction with Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club.

Rebecca Burns is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work has been featured in Bloomberg Green, The Guardian, and The New Republic.

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

D

NEW YORK CITY’S LAST

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P I H S R O T DICTA After 20 years, New York reconsiders mayoral control of its education system.

JANDOS ROTHSTEIN

By Liz Rosenberg

On a school night last May, Alyssa Cartagena, age 19, logged on to a New York City Department of Education (DOE) Zoom meeting from her boyfriend’s bedroom. She needed to once again explain why West Side, a transfer alternative school that admits older students who have fallen behind in credits, dropped out, or need a fresh start, should be allowed to stay in its building on West 102nd Street.

After her son Shawn was born in January 2022, Cartagena had planned on taking a year off from The Heritage School, where she was in the 11th grade. “My school was far and I didn’t have a babysitter,” says Cartagena, who lives with her son in Harlem. Like many new teen moms, this would have put her at risk of never finishing high school or attending college.

Transferring to West Side allowed her to stay in school and on target to graduate, which she did in June of 2023. The school offered in-house day care, health care, counseling, and teachers and administrators trained to support students in her situation, who were trying to simultaneously graduate and manage complex life circumstances.

On this evening, the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, or the PEP, was set to vote on a proposal to swap West Side’s building with The Young Women’s Leadership School’s much smaller home across town in East Harlem. The DOE used enrollment numbers to justify the swap: Leadership, a magnet school serving girls grades 6–12, had a student body almost twice as large as West Side’s, 450 ver-

sus 240. But their school site, located in an office building with cramped hallways and half a gym, could not host the day care or the clinic, which would remain at West Side.

Enrollment was down at West Side in part due to changes in graduation requirements during the pandemic. Longtime staff expected enrollment to rise again as the system moved back to stricter criteria. But that wouldn’t happen if students like Cartagena couldn’t get critical services at school. “We shouldn’t be looked at as numbers,” Cartagena says. “If we aren’t able to graduate, our kids will struggle. They’re treating our babies like they don’t matter either.”

After putting Shawn to bed, Cartagena stayed awake to hear the pleas of her fellow West Side supporters—a group of more than 100 teachers, parents, students, former administrators, local city council members, state legislators, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and Comptroller Brad Lander.

But although West Side’s advocates had the numbers, Leadership had something more important: the mayor, and a governance structure that allows him to enact education policies unilaterally.

Mayor Eric Adams appointed the NYC school chancellor, David Banks, and the founders of Leadership’s network, the billionaire Tisch family, had contributed to the foundation where Banks was previously employed and donated generously to Adams’s mayoral campaign.

Though elected officials and non-mayoral

appointees to the PEP suggested alternative spaces for Leadership, Chancellor Banks doubled down on his support of the swap, emphasizing that West Side could make do with less: less school-appropriate space, less access to wraparound services, less everything.

Cartagena eventually dozed off, but she woke up in time to hear all 11 mayoral appointees in attendance vote yes to the building swap, enough to carry the motion.

“If central wants it, if the mayor wants it, it’s gonna pass, regardless of who says something,” said Tazin Azad, the Brooklyn borough president’s appointee to the Panel for Educational Policy.

Fighting for Democracy in Schools In the state of New York, an elected school board governs 678 out of 680 school districts, a higher rate than the 97 percent of districts across the country with school board control. Only in Yonkers and New York City—a system with just over one million students—does the mayor decide what’s best for schools and the children they serve.

Mayoral control puts the outcomes of tens of thousands of students in the hands of one politician who may have little experience in education, and whose motivations may be more tied to donors or financial partners.

When the state legislature granted Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s request to take control of New York City’s school system in 2002, local superintendents no longer answered to elected district boards, but took their cues from the chancellor, appointed by the mayor. Whatever influence or opportunities for collaboration parents and educators had in the old system, as imperfect as it was, disappeared in a cloud of promises to fix the schools.

In other cities, removing the power to elect school board members occurs preAPRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

dominantly in districts with a majority of Black and Latino students. “Elected school boards are just different because they were designed to be this independent body, sort of closest to the community,” says Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs, a lawyer by trade who is now the executive director and CEO of the National School Boards Association. “We have much data that speaks to school board policy directly impacting outcomes for kids.”

Once in place, mayoral control is typically used to make sweeping changes, which backers say would not be possible if power were distributed or shared with community members.

The law establishing mayoral control in New York City included a sunset clause. This June, state legislators will decide whether or not to renew the mayor’s powers.

In 2022, the New York State Legislature extended mayoral control for two years and, in a nod to advocates, added more parentelected members to the PEP. But the math continues to favor the mayor, who gets to appoint 13 of the panel’s 23 members.

The renewal bill also charged state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa with conducting a “comprehensive review and assessment of the overall effectiveness of the city of New York’s school governance system.” That assessment is due March 31 and could play a major role in the final outcome.

A coalition of parents, advocates, teach50 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

ers, and public school alumni from all over the city are working to make sure what happened to West Side and so many other school communities stops. They recently selected the name Democracy in NYC Schools. The group meets frequently, gearing up for hearings Commissioner Rosa is required to hold in each borough to gather public input. They stand on the shoulders of several coalitions that came before them whose members wrote reports and pushed hard for similar changes. They hope 2024 will finally be the year legislators end mayoral control of the school system.

Sen. John Liu of Queens chairs the state Senate’s committee on New York City education, and will play a big role in his fellow legislators’ decision on whether to renew mayoral control. He says Rosa’s March 31 report will factor heavily in his thinking.

“We essentially commissioned the report.

We take it very seriously,” say Liu. “The system of school governance, mayoral control or some other system, should not be reflective of who the mayor happens to be,” says Liu. “It should be a system that works best no matter who the mayor is.”

As New Yorkers consider their options, they can look to Chicago. Right now, Illinois legislators are working through the details of a recently passed law requiring the city to move to a fully elected board, after nearly 30 years of mayoral control.

How Chicago Won an Elected Board In 1995, the Illinois state legislature granted then-Mayor Richard M. Daley full control of the school system. Since then, Daley and his successor Rahm Emanuel closed or completely revamped the schools of over 70,000 students, according to a WBEZ report. Of the students who experienced closures and “turnarounds,” under 600 of them were white and more than 85 percent were Black.

The mayors said they were targeting underperforming and/or under-enrolled schools, but schools with enrollment declines in wealthier areas remained open, advocates say, and subsequent studies showed students from closed schools’ math scores suffered for four or more years afterward. In addition, majority-Black neighborhoods with closed schools saw increased declines in population.

In response, community groups, scholars, parents, students, and teachers built a 15-year, citywide campaign to secure the right to elect a representative school board.

“I was an education organizer for the historic Kenwood Oakland Community Organization,” said Jitu Brown in an interview with PBS in 2022. “We fought to save this school, a four-year campaign that resulted in a 34-day hunger strike. Black parents who were deeply engaged in the education of our children had to go to those lengths in order to be heard.”

Parents went door-to-door collecting signatures on a petition to put a nonbinding

HANS PENNINK / AP PHOTO

State Sen. John Liu of Queens chairs the committee on New York City education, and will play a big role in whether mayoral control is kept.

referendum supporting an elected school board on the ballot. They succeeded in getting the topic before voters in many wards across the city, most recently in 2015. In the 37 wards that voted, the proposal overwhelmingly passed.

This clear mandate from the public was instrumental in moving legislators to act. In July of 2021, the Illinois legislature passed a bill requiring that Chicago transition to an elected school board. Details of the electoral map are still being sorted out ahead of elections set to begin in November.

Chicago advocates also called for school board campaigns to be publicly financed, with a limit on how much any individual candidate could spend. The Los Angeles school board provides a cautionary tale. A 2017 Los Angeles Times analysis shows contributions to candidates totaled $15 million.

Charter proponents shelled out nearly $10 million, while unions spent just over $5 million. According to Pauline Lipman, professor of educational students at University of Illinois Chicago, without checks on campaign finance, it’s easy to end up with something very similar to the appointed board that an elected board is meant to replace.

Twenty Years of Mayoral Control in New York City Margaret Kelley served on the school board for nearly eight years in District 15, which includes Red Hook, Park Slope, Sunset Park, and Carroll Gardens, but in 2003 her tenure came to an abrupt halt. Community Education Councils (CECs) replaced elected district boards and all sitting members were removed. The power to hire, fire, and evaluate superintendents at the local level transferred to the chancellor, Joel Klein, who was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg.

When she was on the board, parents stopped Kelley at the grocery store or on the street to talk about district or school policies. The board had access to the super-

Mayoral control puts the outcomes of tens of thousands of students in the hands of one politician who may have little experience in education.

intendent, could ask for data or for an explanation of a particular policy and was guaranteed a comprehensive reply—powers not seen since the onset of mayoral control.

Proponents have alleged that mayoral control would increase achievement levels and close the achievement gap. “Neither of those promises has really been met,” says Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

One set of data is not enough to fully understand learning in New York City under mayoral control, but it’s still instructive.

From 2003 to 2019, New York City’s fourth grade students’ average math scores were the same as their peers’ nationally, while a significant gap persisted between students in higher- and lower-income families.

Though graduation rates in New York City have improved over the past 20 years, some of those gains resulted because of new credit recovery policies implemented under Klein that made it easier for students to finish high school.

Mayoral control can also be detached from the realities of teachers and schools.

In 2012, the DOE press office released teacher evaluation scores based on students’ test performance. The New York Post wrote a piece outing the teacher who performed the “worst,” neglecting to learn what led to her low score. Like many teachers of English language learners, her students were forced to take a test they could not possibly pass—some of them had just arrived in the U.S. Her low score was emblematic of an unjust rating system, not her actual performance, as reported by her colleagues and school leaders.

The Panel for Educational Policy is supposed to be a check on mayoral power. The PEP typically includes several public school parents, and many parents turn to the PEP when they want to be heard.

But during a move in 2004 that became known as the “Monday Night Massacre,” Bloomberg removed and replaced his PEP appointees to ensure his plan to hold back students who failed state tests would pass.

Whether or not the policy was right for the system, members of the PEP, who were listening to the public and education experts, were not ready to pass it.

Letting Down Black, Latino, and Low-Income Families In the current era of mayoral control in New York City, Black and brown parents have been stripped of power in a school

system that is 41 percent Hispanic, 24 percent Black, 17 percent Asian, and 15 percent white. “We are not seen or treated as a valid source or contribution to this system operating at all,” says Erika Kendall, CEC president of Brooklyn’s District 17, which includes parts of Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and Brownsville.

Speaking at a joint public hearing of the New York State Legislature’s education committees in 2022, Kendall summed up her district’s experience with mayoral control. “I think I can tie a direct line between mayoral control as an institution, and the decline of some of the poorest and, frankly, most predominantly Black and brown districts in this city,” she said. “And all I have to do is look at the business section of any of our newspapers, and see reports about how our former mayor [Bloomberg], the one who precipitated this decline, is now pouring just shy of a billion dollars into the charter school industry to really understand why.”

In District 17, nearly 25 percent of students attend charter schools, while only 4 percent of students in District 2, which covers a large part of Manhattan, attend them. Kendall regularly hears the frustration and anger of community members wondering why district leadership, which she argues is unable to meet community needs under mayoral control, isn’t doing more to protect traditional neighborhood schools from disinvestment. “The community sees this [influx of charters] as an indictment of the quality of our schools,” Kendall says. “But when the people in control of your community’s schools are not actually in your community daily, this is what happens.”

In the Bloomberg era, the District 17 community fought hard to save Paul Robeson High School, which their families had attended for generations. Around the time of the announced closure in 2011, Robeson was 88 percent Black and 11 percent Native American and Latino. Nearly 80 percent of its students received free or reduced-priced lunch.

These students came from communities that experienced government disinvestment and structural racism. Yet former Chancellor Klein could not understand why they would be upset that he could find no other solution than to phase out a school with such “wretched performance,” in his words.

He didn’t account for how Robeson had welcomed many students from other closed high schools, which some felt had contributed to its eventual struggles.

“The absence of resources and accountAPRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

ability, feels like the DOE divested—from Black teachers, Black administrators, Black families, and Black students,” Kendall said at the 2022 hearing. “We are being systematically given to a fully unaccountable system. And I don’t believe the current conversation around renewing mayoral control considers that.”

Adams’s Big-Money Support This has all resulted in increasingly unequal outcomes for New York City students. A 2019 Research Alliance for New York City Schools report found 77 percent of Asian students and 68 percent of white students enrolled in college immediately after graduation, a much higher rate than their Black and Latino peers, who enrolled right after high school just over 50 percent of the time.

Even the promises of Mayor Bill de Blasio (2014–2021) to end the “tale of two cities” fell short. A 2021 UCLA Civil Rights Project report shows about 85 percent of Black students and 75 percent of Latino students attend schools that are 90 percent or more students of color. White and Asian students were typically placed into schools with higher-quality education.

Under New York’s current mayor, racial and economic segregation are likely to grow because of increased academic screening in admissions and plans to open more specialized high schools.

Adams’s overall position on selective admissions is backed by key donor support and endorsements from groups like Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, whose leaders, cozy with Moms

for Liberty, were recently caught writing anti-trans messages on a private chat group.

Ronald Lauder, a booster for specialized schools, donated $5,100 to Adams in December of 2021, after he’d already won the mayoralty. And Michael Bloomberg, who regularly meets with the mayor, was instrumental in expanding the number of specialized schools.

Selective admissions, while it fits with education reformers’ notions of meritocracy, is not well backed up by research.

A recent study comparing schools in the U.K. that do and do not screen students into selective and nonselective schools suggests that screening might not be beneficial to the highest and lowest achievers. “There’s no evidence that [selective systems] add to increasing overall performance,” says Xin Shao, research fellow at the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities at University College London.

Ahead of the 2022 renewal, Mayor Adams argued that elected school boards were hobbled by patronage and political corruption. These claims have become particularly ironic, as more and more of Adams’s closest aides are indicted or have their devices confiscated by the FBI. Shortly after Adams became mayor, his partner, Tracey Collins, landed a job in the DOE as senior adviser to the deputy chancellor of school leadership. “She turned around schools. Should she leave the DOE because her boo became mayor? I don’t think so!

Come on, let’s stop this,” Adams said at a press conference last June.

Though Adams has an approval rating of

NYC and National 4th Grade Math Average Scale Scores Scores under NYC mayoral control show little deviation from the national average.

270

■ National Low Income ■ NYC Low Income ■ National Higher Income ■ NYC Higher Income

260

Proficient cutoff

250 240 230 220

Basic cutoff

210 200 190

2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 Note: According to the National Center for Education Statistics, grade level falls between basic and proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

52 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

Advocates outline a system of open and inclusive deliberation around key policies, and distributing power at all levels. only 31 percent for his handling of schools, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, some powerful donors continue to advocate for keeping him or any mayor in control.

In December, Kathryn Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City and often quoted in the press, shared why she continues to support mayoral control in an article in Gothamist, arguing that it promotes “less contention and more effective allocation of resources.” Her support extends beyond speaking to the press. The Partnership’s PAC gave $2,000 to Adams’s mayoral campaign, $25,000 to the New York State Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and Wylde personally contributed $3,500 in support of Gov. Kathy Hochul in recent years.

“Many districts that retain a separate school system governed by an elected board are doing well,” says Jeffrey Henig, professor of political science and education at Teachers College. “Given the various pros and cons, I lean towards favoring an elected board, but I’d counsel against assuming it would make NYC education better all by itself,” says Henig, who has long studied mayoral control. He adds that conversations about school governance also offer opportunities to unearth the public’s educational vision, which he says is even more important than a particular governance structure.

“Mayors can take a leadership role in school reform without necessarily demanding formal power to do so.”

Brooklyn Knows What’s Going On The message state legislators received at Boys and Girls High School in BedfordStuyvesant in early January was as clear as the night’s sky.

On the stage, Education Commissioner Rosa was flanked by members of the state Board of Regents, including Chancellor Lester Young. Behind them, a large screen projected speakers’ faces so that people in the back of the sleek red-and-black auditorium could see their peers when they spoke.

Panel for Educational Policy member Tazin Azad (left) and student Tea Healy speak out at a hearing on mayoral control in Brooklyn.

More than 80 percent of speakers at the largest of the five hearings demanded that the state end mayoral control, including many who asked for an elected board.

Chief among the criticisms of the Adams/ Banks administration was budget cuts, including for schools supporting newly arrived immigrants. The cuts have made it impossible—perhaps by design—to implement class size reductions mandated by the state. Teachers were also frustrated with a new reading curriculum they said doesn’t connect with students’ culture.

Though the law says the commissioner’s report should include student input, few students spoke at the hearings and those who did were highly critical of Adams and mayoral control.

As Tea Healy spoke, her mother, Paullette, rubbed her back.

“My mother, aunts, and so many people have spent years of my childhood fighting for the schools my brother Lucas and I deserve.

And do you know what they’ve never had despite all of their work—all the PEPs, and all the committees and task forces? Power,” said Healy. She referred to the mayor, who starts every press conference by blasting the song “Empire State of Mind,” as a “party promoter.”

Tajh Sutton, who had a friend read her testimony because she was home with COVID, took on the mayor’s habit of referring to mayoral control as “mayoral accountability.”

“There is nothing and no one held accountable under mayoral control,” said Sutton. “Someone would answer for the lack of sports and arts programming in the same neighborhoods with a cop in every train station.”

Tazin Azad, a non-mayoral PEP appointee, took to the mic describing the absence of democracy on the system’s governing board, even for its own members.

“The current iteration of school governance was never built to empower underresourced, disenfranchised people. It’s only meant to empower one person,” said Azad.

“Why is it that we accept that majority Black and brown global majority people of New York City are thought to be incapable of proposing, creating, and then participating in a school governance structure that represents them?”

A Critical Few Months New York City advocates are not asking for a complete return to the system before mayoral control, a time historians refer to as decentralization. Groups like the Education Council Consortium and The Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) are more aligned with the movement for community control in the late 1960s, led by Black and Latino parents who saw enacting solutions that bubble up locally as the key to student success.

In a handout that groups distributed at recent hearings, they outline a system of open and inclusive deliberation around key policies, policymaking that is centered on the needs of the most disenfranchised communities, and distributing power at all levels.

Legislators will have two months to dig into Commissioner Rosa’s report before the June deadline to renew, revise, or change school governance in New York City.

Rosa says she can’t control whether or not her report influences policy. Some senators, like Liu, are not weighing in until they’ve read it. Others, like Gov. Kathy Hochul and Assembly Education Committee chair Michael Benedetto, both of whom have received endorsements from Adams in the past, have already said they support an extension before taking into account public feedback or Rosa’s report.

“We’ve made every attempt, from the website, advertising, come out and share your best thoughts, and we will produce a report at the end of it, and then we turn it over to the governor, we turn it over to the legislature,” says Rosa. “And it is their decision.” n Liz Rosenberg is a freelance reporter who writes about public health, climate change, and education. Her work has appeared in DeSmog, Chalkbeat, and more.

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

“An island of hope in a sea of inanity.” —Nancy Fraser

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CULTURE

Who Controls Your Shopping Cart?

Austin Frerick’s ‘Barons’ follows the food-industry giants that have cornered giant portions of the market for everything from coffee to chicken thighs.

By H. Claire Brown

JANDOS ROTHSTEIN / ISTOCK

Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry

By Austin Frerick Island Press In January of 2022, more than 8,000 employees at King Soopers stores in the Denver area went on strike demanding higher wages, better health care coverage, and stronger store security. After ten days, they reached a tentative agreement with the grocery chain, which is owned by Kroger.

According to the union, the new contract included wage increases of $2 or more per hour

in the first year for more than 95 percent of leading employers to secure higher wages workers, topping out at an increase of $5.99 per across the board. (It’s possible the retailers hour. King Soopers agreed to invest more than worked together behind the scenes to limit $170 million in wages throughout the three- the impact of this strategy: A 2024 lawsuit filed by the Colorado attorney general alleges year agreement, plus more for health care.

Leading up to the strike, the King Soopers Albertsons promised not to poach any King union encouraged customers to move their Soopers employees during the strike.) shopping and prescriptions to the chain’s Months later, King Soopers’ parent competitor, Albertsons. Once the King Soop- Kroger announced plans to purchase Albers contract was ratified, the United Food ertsons in a $24.6 billion deal. It was the and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local largest proposed supermarket merger in 7 union was able to leverage the threat of the history of U.S. grocery, and would bring Kroger- and Albertsons-owned another strike to persuade Albertsons to implement the same wage increases, brands under the same umbrella, Books according to a Federal Trade Commisincluding Harris Teeter, Safeway, sion complaint filed in late February. The Ralphs, Fred Meyer, Shaw’s, Acme Markets, union capitalized on competition between and more. A subsequent lawsuit alleged that APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

CULTURE

56 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

The proposed $24.6 billion merger between Kroger and Albertsons has been challenged by the Federal Trade Commission.

have ended in acquittals for executives charged with price-fixing and settlements for chicken companies accused of wage-fixing. The Antitrust Division last year issued another lawsuit against Agri Stats, a company that provides granular information to meat processors that prosecutors say is used as an illegal collusion tool to raise prices.

Regardless of whether the FTC’s lawsuit is successful, the agency’s action on Kroger and Albertsons sends a message about the administration’s priorities. In the pecking order of U.S. grocery stores, Kroger and Albertsons each fall somewhere near the top. A 2021 ranking of grocery retailers measured by sales put Kroger at number three and Albertsons in eighth position.

The FTC is questioning whether permitting their merger will worsen grocery prices and lower workers’ pay. Kroger and Albertsons are questioning whether they can continue to compete successfully with Walmart and Amazon without joining forces.

A timely new book asks a third question: How did a handful of businesses come to dominate virtually every facet of the food industry, from grocery stores to coffee grinds?

In Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, former Treasury Department official Austin Frerick charts the rise of seven food-industry giants,

many of which are not household names.

He follows hog farmers Jeff and Deb Hansen as their confined swine operations fan out across his home state of Iowa; sweeps through the 150-year expansion of the grain empire assembled by Cargill, Inc., which he calls “arguably the most powerful private corporation in modern history”; and digs into the history of the family-run German conglomerate JAB Holding Company, which owns a dizzying array of coffee brands including Peet’s, Caribou, Stumptown, La Colombe, Intelligentsia, and Green Mountain—plus Keurig, which sells individually portioned “K-Cup” pods filled with grinds from its sister subsidiaries.

We also meet the couple behind the milk brand Fairlife, the Driscoll family responsible for reshaping the strawberry business, and the bribery-prone Batista brothers who run JBS, the largest meatpacking company in the world. The book finishes with the Walton family and Walmart, their cutthroat superstore chain that either does or doesn’t threaten the ongoing existence of Kroger, depending on who you ask.

Frerick is an agricultural and antitrust policy expert and a current fellow at the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University.

He worked as the co-chair of the Biden campaign’s Agriculture Antitrust Policy Committee and advised several of the leading Democratic presidential candidates on agricultural policy leading up to the 2020 election. He has also run for election to the Iowa state Senate (in 2022) and the U.S. House of Representatives (in 2018).

SAR AH A . MILLER, ROGELIO V. SOLIS / AP PHOTOS

the retailers’ close relationship preceded the merger announcement.

Had this merger happened before the 2022 strike, the outcome for King Soopers workers might have been very different. As the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wrote in its complaint, “the combined Kroger/Albertsons would likely be able to impose terms on union grocery workers that slow wage increases.” Arguing that the merger had the potential to raise prices for customers while simultaneously weakening unions’ bargaining power, the FTC sued to block the deal in late February 2024. Several state attorneys general joined the lawsuit, including the Republican attorney general of Wyoming.

News of the government’s intervention came at a time of heightened political scrutiny of the food industry. The cost of groceries has risen by more than 25 percent since February 2020, the fastest since the 1970s.

As President Biden fights for re-election in November, an internal White House analysis recently showed that grocery prices are the single largest factor dragging down consumer economic sentiment, The New York Times reported.

The Biden administration has linked foodindustry inflation to corporate consolidation, arguing that a handful of powerful companies are taking advantage of their overwhelming market share to hike prices and goose profit margins. In public appearances, the president has been harping on “shrinkflation”—a phenomenon in which companies quietly reduce the amount of food in a package without lowering the price—targeting snack brands in a Super Bowl–themed ad and working the concept into the State of the Union address.

Anti-monopoly messaging seems to have some bipartisan appeal. Republican Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) said FTC chair Lina Khan was “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job” the day after the Kroger lawsuit was filed. (Elsewhere, Republicans have been hitting the food-cost angle hard, but many blame rising prices on Biden’s economic policies, not corporate greed.)

In addition to the bully pulpit, President Biden has promised to challenge food-industry power players by fighting mergers like the Kroger-Albertsons deal, promoting competition, and prosecuting anti-competitive behavior throughout the industry. The prosecution side of the equation, largely handled by the Department of Justice, has had uneven results: Various Antitrust Division actions

That Frerick could have chosen from any number of other food-industry barons speaks to the prevalence of this kind of story in the food industry. He could just as easily have focused on Monsanto’s capture of the seed industry, Coca-Cola’s soda success, Tyson’s takeover of chicken, AB InBev’s dominance in the beer aisle, or even the rise and fall of the Walmart precursor A&P. (His choices may have been influenced by the fact that excellent books have been written about all five: Bartow J. Elmore’s Seed Money and Citizen Coke, Christopher Leonard’s The Meat Racket, Julie MacIntosh’s Dethroning the King, and Marc Levinson’s The Great A&P.) The most salacious story of the bunch is that of Brazil’s Batista brothers, who have grown from a five-cattle-per-day slaughterhouse operation their father launched in 1953 to the largest meatpacking company in the world. (Perhaps not surprisingly, JBS is also the world’s largest leather processor.) In the aughts, the brothers went on a $20 billion global acquisition spree, made possible through $148 million in strategic bribes to more than 1,800 Brazilian politicians and government officials. These off-the-books payments resulted in low-interest development loans obtained with government support. Later, the brothers also allegedly bribed Brazilian meat inspectors to allow salmonella-contaminated meat into the export market and expired meat into public schools. That scandal burst into view in 2017, and the brothers made history again that year when Joesley Batista wore a wire to discuss bribes with then-president Michel Temer as part of a plea bargain related to his own corruption charges. The tape leaked, and Temer finished his term in disgrace.

For the last 15 years or so, JBS has quietly made inroads in the U.S., purchasing a majority stake in chicken supplier Pilgrim’s Pride and pork producer Swift & Company.

The company does not sell meat under the JBS name in the U.S.; instead, it owns 45 different brands sold domestically. This is a recurring feature of Frerick’s book: Barons’ products are sold under a wide variety of brands, maintaining the appearance of competition even as many are controlled by the same parent company.

JBS has been back in the spotlight in recent weeks as it moves toward an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States. In January, a bipartisan group of 15 senators including Democrats Elizabeth Warren and John Fetterman and Republicans Marco

Rubio and Josh Hawley, along with independent Bernie Sanders, asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to reject the listing, arguing that JBS’s track record of “corruption, human rights abuses, monopolization of the meatpacking market, as well as environmental risks” represents a threat to potential shareholders. New York Attorney General Letitia James followed up with a February lawsuit accusing the company of misleading the public about its plans to address climate change. JBS has promised to hit net-zero emissions by 2040; prosecutors say it has no real plans to do so.

In Frerick’s telling, the success of the JBS expansion, combined with rampant consolidation elsewhere in the meat industry, is at least partially responsible for the current state of affairs in which Americans are overcharged for meat, ranchers have few options to sell their cattle, and workers labor under dangerous conditions. In response to all this, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has announced a plan to promote competition by distributing a billion dollars to new, independent slaughterhouses.

In my favorite line of the book, Frerick writes: “This plan is like dumping a billion dollars on Ask Jeeves and wishing the company good luck against Google.”

Taken together, the stories of the barons paint a picture of a food system in which the abundance of options at the grocery store is just an illusion. Yet the story of the quiet, creeping consolidation of the U.S. food industry is just as much about policy as it is about business. Frerick’s greatest strength is in drawing out the federal, state, and local policies (and policymakers) that fueled the rise of the captains of industry he profiles. In Iowa, the Hog Barons got a huge assist from then-Gov. Terry Branstad, who signed a 1995 law stripping counties of their authority to block proposed hog farms. The Grain Barons spent years lobbying against New Deal–era federal farm policy issues, an effort that eventually resulted in a more probusiness approach in the periodic congressional updates to agricultural policy, what Frerick calls the “Wall Street Farm Bill.”

Frerick points to the reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement as one possible tool for reversing the trends exemplified by his barons. The Biden administration has embraced this project, issuing new merger guidelines that, while not legally binding, will be put to the test in the Kroger case.

Washington has been less hospitable to Frerick’s other ideas. He points to the farm bill as a potential vehicle for a sea change in food policy. Reauthorized once every five years, the omnibus legislation has long coupled government spending on federal food assistance programs like SNAP and WIC with crop subsidies. It’s been an often-uncomfortable political marriage between urban and rural legislators; many experts have argued that the safety net and farm country might look very different if welfare spending were uncoupled from commodity subsidies.

Like many Democrats, Frerick would like to see robust spending on food assistance without also subsidizing corn and soy. But the most recent farm bill expired in 2023, and such an upheaval is not looking likely.

At present, legislators are currently eyeing a 2025 reauthorization as they fight old battles: Democrats are trying to protect SNAP (and now, climate funding), and Republicans are demanding higher payouts for farmers.

Nor is the Department of Agriculture likely to pursue the aggressive reforms Frerick would like to see. The author is candid about this: “[W]e need to have a conversation about the US Department of Agriculture,” he writes. “Laws and policies are only as good as the enforcers. Through administrations of both parties, the USDA increasingly seems to serve the interest of the barons and Wall Street.” Many hoped Biden would select a progressive secretary of agriculture when he took office in 2021, but the president signaled a degree of comfort with the status quo with his selection of Tom Vilsack, who is currently reprising a role he first filled under President Obama.

He spent the intervening years promoting dairy exports under a checkoff program Frerick would like to see sunsetted. The Department of Agriculture did recently follow through on a campaign promise to strengthen protections for livestock growers, the second of four expected rules promoting competition in the meat industry.

Farm advocates have been fighting foodsystem consolidation for decades, but the trend lines have remained stubbornly constant. Antitrust advocates have found a friendly ear in President Biden, but as Frerick points out, it will take more than a few splashy lawsuits to fix the food system. n H. Claire Brown is a writer who lives in New York. She frequently covers food, climate, and the environment.

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CULTURE

Antitax Nation

Michael Graetz’s new book explains how clever marketing duped America into shoveling more tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations.

By David Cay Johnston The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America

By Michael J. Graetz Princeton University Press When Ronald Reagan accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, he presented himself as a tax magician. “We are taxing ourselves into economic exhaustion and stagnation,” he said before making a tantalizing promise. He would slash income tax rates by 30 percent over three years.

Government revenue would miraculously increase, because lowered taxes would foster massive new investment, creating more jobs at higher pay. Libertarian economists Milton Friedman and Arthur Laffer vigorously championed Reagan’s claims, but even many conservatives scoffed. Herbert Stein, President Nixon’s chief economic adviser, remarked that the likelihood that tax cuts increase revenue was about the same as finding “there is human life on Mars.” George H.W. Bush called it “voodoo economics.”

Those on the upper rungs of the income ladder made out well from the Reagan Revolution. They enjoyed significant tax savings in 1981 and 1986 as the top rate was slashed from 70 to 28 percent, a reduction twice as big as what Reagan promised. But the magic didn’t work: Under Reagan, economic growth ran slightly below, not above, the postwar average.

Ballooning annual deficits more than doubled the federal debt in eight years. And Reagan didn’t shrink the federal government relative to the economy, as promised: The share of our economy paid in federal taxes was the same when Reagan assumed office and when he left.

Why, then, do such proposals continue to flourish? In his eloquent and absorbing new book The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America, Michael J. Graetz argues that “the modern antitax movement is the most overlooked social and political movement” of the past halfcentury. This movement once existed on the 58 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

fringes, as we see with conservative criticism of the Reagan plan. But Graetz writes that it has grown “into a powerful force that transformed American politics and undermined the nation’s financial strength.”

Graetz is not the first to explore antitax political culture, as old a concept in America as Fries’s Rebellion, a 1799 Pennsylvania revolt against a new federal levy on enslaved people and land. Dorothy A. Brown’s trenchant 2021 study The Whiteness of Wealth shows how our tax system “impoverishes Black Americans.” Then there’s sociologist Isaac William Martin’s eye-opening 2013 book Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent, which focused on semi-con man J.A. Arnold, who 111 years ago created antitax clubs, often led by bankers, that stirred resentment of the newly imposed federal income tax.

Beginning in the 1940s, Martin showed, antitax ideology moved into mainstream conservatism after Robert Dresser, a Harvard-educated lawyer and New England textile heir, deftly blended anti-communist, anti-union, and racist appeals into tax policy. Graetz tells the next chapter in this story, tracing how modern charlatans duped the middle and upper-middle class into helping the rich shed the burden of taxes, while hurting themselves in the process. It’s primarily a tale of ideological marketing—selling the sizzle so smartly that few notice the overcooked meat is rotten.

Graetz’s title comes from an 1819 Supreme Court decision, McCulloch v.

Maryland, which noted that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” His great insight is that the power to destroy also applies when our government fails to tax us enough to invest in the future—for education, infrastructure, health, scientific research, and other aspects of modern society—in ways that enable broad prosperity, economic growth, and social stability.

In the postwar era, high federal tax rates limited top incomes, forcing owners to

turn most of their profits over to the federal government unless they reinvested in their businesses, which in turn created jobs. But reliance on local property taxes to finance local and state government, including schools, alarmed many homeowners and renters. In the South, racists opened nonprofit “Christian academies” to ensure that white children didn’t attend school with children of color following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Congress decreed that charities may not discriminate but left it to the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department to enforce the law, creating new opportunities to gin up resistance to taxes, especially property taxes, and demonize the IRS. The 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts united the interests of segregationists and antitaxers. Southern state legislatures tightened spending on underfunded public schools for Black children, prompting legal battles that lasted decades.

Policy entrepreneurs like Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, a pioneer in direct mail fundraising and lifelong fan of Sen. Joe McCarthy, saw opportunity in this economic and social turmoil. In 1973, Weyrich co-founded two of America’s most influential antitax organizations, the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Both promote lower taxes, especially on corporations and investors, while pushing right-wing social policies like banning abortion.

In 1974, Ford White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld met with economist Arthur Laffer. On a napkin, Laffer drew what came to be known as the “Laffer Curve,” which purported to show that the government collected nothing if the tax rate was either 100 percent or zero, with a smooth curve in between. (Actual results since have shown that the curve is more akin to a ball of yarn after a kitten plays with it—all over the place.) Three dedicated and influential antitaxers promoted the Laffer Curve: longtime Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley, his subordinate Jude Wanniski, and Republican congressman and former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jack Kemp. Their writings and speeches made the Laffer Curve a centerpiece of tax policy debates to this day.

Reagan’s antitax message, eventually wrapped in his hopeful “Morning in America” theme, changed the nature of tax policy debates. Instead of asking what can be done

AP PHOTO

Howard Jarvis (right) was the author of Proposition 13, which capped property taxes in California and was a major victory for the antitax movement.

with taxes to build a more perfect union and promote the general welfare, the debate shifted to what you could do with more of your money in your pocket. In this political drama pitting fears against hopes, Republicans and many Democrats went along with Reagan as his tax cuts stuffed hundreddollar bills into the deepening pockets of the already rich, while tossing nickels and dimes to most Americans.

Graetz traces the modern antitax movement to the only political victory of Howard Jarvis, a prosperous Los Angeles landlord and perennial antitax candidate for state and local office. Jarvis wrote Proposition 13, which California voters passed by a two-thirds majority in 1978. His proposition made 1975 property values permanent for those holding their real estate. It capped property tax rates at 1 percent of these values plus any existing bonded debt owed by schools and municipal governments.

It barred any property tax rate increases

unless a supermajority approved. California property tax revenues have since increased by only about a third of inflation. Owning a home in California for 50 years means you pay little in property tax today, while the folks who just bought the house next door may pay 30 times as much, because taxable property values reassess after sale to reflect the purchase price.

As time passed, more savings flowed to industrial, retail, and commercial property because corporations, unlike people, don’t die, so sales forcing revaluations are rare. California homeowners saved about $30 billion in 2018 thanks to Proposition 13, while commercial and industrial owners saved more than $11 billion. Renters were promised that landlords would pass their savings to tenants, but there’s no evidence of that. California schools, especially in poor and most nonwhite communities, remain badly underfunded because of Proposition 13.

Embedded in Reagan’s 1980 campaign was the role of tax cuts in maintaining white dominance. Reagan launched his campaign near a small Mississippi town known for nothing except local police murdering three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. It was a signal to racists, as were Reagan’s speeches about a mythical welfare queen with “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards” and a Cadillac.

Kevin Phillips, a perceptive Republican political commentator, was one of the first to recognize that shifting the focus of tax debates from broad social benefits to “welfare” encouraged “Negrophobe” Southern whites to switch to the GOP, a Southern strategy that would ensure Republican dominance in Washington. “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” said Phillips.

Racial animosity helped the antitax movement gain traction when economic APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

CULTURE statistics were less than promising. “Racial dog whistles have been common in antitax movements,” Graetz writes, “except when, as with Donald Trump, they are in a register everyone can hear.”

During the last 45 years, America enjoyed only one period of economic growth that converted the red ink on government ledgers to black. Economic growth accelerated after Bill Clinton persuaded Congress to raise tax rates in 1993. Clinton’s second term then produced four successive budget surpluses.

(His critics credit those surpluses to antitax House Republicans holding down spending.)

The turn-of-the-millennium opportunity to pay down the federal debt was squandered when antitaxer George W. Bush became president. Bush followed Reagan’s borrow-and-spend playbook. Later, Donald Trump slashed tax rates on wealthy business owners, including himself, by 40 percent, while everyone else’s income tax burdens have changed little. He let companies pay as little as 8 percent on an estimated $3 trillion of untaxed profits that had been tucked away overseas. A 1986 Reagan tax policy change that the press missed allowed multinational companies to defer tax payments by moving profits offshore. By investing the untaxed money, companies convert the burden of taxes into profits. When I revealed that in The New York Times, readers told my editors I must be crazy. Congress ordered a study.

The 1,800-page, three-volume Joint Committee on Taxation report showed that I was right, and that Enron stamped “profit center” on some internal tax records, as I had predicted.

Borrowed money financed the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump tax cuts, not the illusory cornucopias of additional revenue. That means what looks like a tax cut is, in truth, a tax increase pushed into the future. In other words, ordinary Americans are subsidizing big companies and wealthy families, while making do with fewer government services.

If you take into account payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, raised at Reagan’s request in 1983, the bottom 90 percent face essentially the same total federal tax burden as they did a half-century ago. My analysis of the 400 highest income tax returns for 1961 and 2006 showed those at the top enjoyed a 60 percent drop in their tax burden, even as their after-tax incomes grew 28-fold.

60 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

Racial animosity helped the antitax movement gain traction when economic statistics were less than promising.

Nowadays, cheating is almost impossible for workers because taxes are taken out before they collect what’s left of their pay.

However, wealthy business owners operate under separate and unequal rules. A vigorous Internal Revenue Service surveillance could stop the tax avoidance, but antitax lawmakers so restricted the IRS budget that for decades it struggled just to process tax returns. The number of taxpayers reporting $1 million or more in income grew by close to half from 2012 to 2021. However, audits of these high-income Americans plummeted 86 percent, and additional tax recommended by auditors fell even more, down 99 percent. With the corporate tax rate at just 21 percent, antitaxers know there isn’t a lot to gain from further rate reductions.

So, Graetz notes, they are turning instead to further restricting audits and quietly adding legal rules that insulate wealth from scrutiny—complex policy issues unlikely to arouse visceral opposition from voters.

The news media is partly responsible for today’s state of affairs, as journalists have often failed to explain tax policy in plain English. Few people know that in 1982 Reagan signed the biggest tax increase in American history, because the Great Communicator’s White House persuaded the Washington press corps to euphemize tax hikes as “revenue enhancers,” including a boost to the federal gasoline tax by a nickel a gallon. Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts equaled 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product. The five tax increases he signed, plus one each by the first President Bush and President Clinton, equaled—drum roll—2.9 percent of the gross domestic product. Reagan basically shifted the tax burden from the already rich few down to those less able to pay.

The antitaxers inflicted the pain from lost property tax revenues on children attending money-starved public schools, on users of libraries that closed or halted book-buy-

ing, on visitors to parks where weeds proliferated and water fountains failed, and on motorists who had to shell out cash for frequent wheel alignments as California developed something previously known only in colder climates—potholes.

Only in the last three years have we seen glimmers of a shift away from antitax policy. Leveraging decades of experience on Capitol Hill and in the White House, Joe Biden won passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and other significant legislation to spend taxpayer money in areas that foster economic growth: education, highvalue domestic manufacturing, infrastructure, and scientific research. The IRA also included $80 billion in IRS funding; the agency recently announced that, thanks to increased staff, it will pursue an estimated 125,000 high-income Americans who didn’t even file tax returns, despite making $800,000 on average.

Surveys show that millennials, facing ruinous debts to get an advanced education, jobs paying less than grandpa and grandma earned, and aware of disclosures that multibillionaires pay little to no taxes, aren’t buying into the antitax movement the way their parents did. More than 40 percent of millennials don’t believe American capitalism is working well, Wake Forest University researchers found, and other surveys have shown for a decade, that half of young adults favor socialism over capitalism.

For all his cogent insights, Graetz surprisingly adopts the antitaxers’ use of the misleading term “deregulation.” There is no such thing. We have experienced re-regulation, under new rules that favor the wealthy and corporations at the expense of everyone else. That is, to be sure, mere lint on Graetz’s beautifully woven story of how the antitaxers hijacked our nation. Tax, like death, is a subject many prefer not to consider. But if we change our perspective from how badly designed taxes can destroy individual prosperity to how well-designed tax systems can finance commonwealth goods, we can then realize, as Graetz has, that taxing too little destroys society while smartly taxing can enrich us all. n David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize– winning investigative reporter, formerly with The New York Times, who has written three best-selling books on tax and economic policy. He teaches at Syracuse University College of Law.

The Neglected History of the State of Israel

The Revisionist faction of Zionism that ended up triumphing adhered to literal fascist doctrines and traditions.

ODED BALILTY / AP PHOTO

By Rick Perlstein I begin with full-throated praise: Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker is the greatest interviewer alive.

He asks the most terrible people alive, or sometimes just conspicuously dodgy people, the bluntest questions imaginable. They evade; he follows up—ruthlessly. They’re reduced to puddles of incoherence. We get to peer inside the mystery of moral failure—an accomplishment few other writers can man-

age. Just as valuable are his straightforward informational interviews, especially these past months in which Chotiner has been methodically flushing out all-too-shrouded facts of the inhumanity on the ground in Israel and Palestine, from all sides.

One of Chotiner’s best interviews ran this past November. A leader of the militant West Bank settlement movement told him that Jews have a sacred duty to occupy all the land between “the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest,” that noth-

ing west of the Jordan River was ever “Arab place or property,” and that no Arabs, even citizens, should have civil rights in Israel.

Stunning stuff, and extremely valuable to have on the record, especially given the settler movement’s close ties to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

I praise Chotiner, however, as a bridge to a separate point: Even the most learned and thoughtful observers of Israel and Palestine miss a basic historical foundation of the crisis.

Return to that November interview.

Chotiner asked, “So rights are not some sort of universal thing that every person has. They’re something that you can win or lose.” The settler answered, “That’s right.”

He followed up: “When you see Palestinian children dying, what’s your emotional reaction as a human being?” She replied: “I go by a very basic human law of nature. My children are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My children are first.”

Chotiner responded with incredulity: “We are talking about children. I don’t know if the law of nature is what we need to be looking at here.” The settler, unfazed, repeated herself: “I say my children are first.”

It’s a remarkable thing to hear such horrifying sentiments, unadorned. But it is also APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

CULTURE remarkable how surprised we are by them.

I’ve been reading an outstanding 2005 study, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy, by historian Eran Kaplan. You should too. One of the things you’ll learn: That settler is repeating almost word for word the doctrines of one of Zionism’s original political traditions—the faction that ended up winning, and whose foundations were literally fascist.

I use the word “fascist” in the literal sense.

Do not flinch from it. The founders of Revisionist Zionism certainly didn’t. Respect them enough to take them at their word.

In 1928, a prominent Revisionist named Abba Ahimeir published a series of articles entitled “From the Diary of a Fascist.”

They refer to the founder of their movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (his adopted first name is Hebrew for “wolf”), as “il duce.” In 1935, his comrade Hen Merhavia wrote that Revisionists were doing what Mussolini did: “establish a nucleus of an exemplary life of morality and purity. Like us, the Italian fascists look back to their historical heritage. We seek to return to the kingdom of the House of David; they want to return to the glory of the Roman Empire.” They even opened a maritime academy in Italy, under Mussolini’s sponsorship, for the navy they hoped to build in their new Israeli state. “[T]he views and the political and social inclinations of the Revisionists,” an Italian magazine reported, “are absolutely in accordance with the fascist doctrine … as our students they will bring the Italian and fascist culture to Palestine.”

Like all fascists, Revisionists believed the most exemplary lives were lived in violence, in pursuit of return to a racially pure arcadia. Their rivals, the Labor Zionists, who beat out the Revisionists in the political battle to establish the Jewish state in their own image, hardly shrank from violence, of course. But they saw it as a necessary evil—and defensive. Revisionists believed in violence, offensive violence, as a positive good. “Now it is not enough to learn how to shoot,” Jabotinsky’s successor as Revisionist leader put it in 1945, five years after Jabotinsky’s death. “In the name of historical justice, in the name of life’s instinct, in the name of truth—we must shoot.”

And like all fascisms, it expressed an overwhelming ethnic chauvinism. One of the kookiest things I learned from Kaplan’s book was that Jabotinsky believed “the Semitic sounds 62 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

An autograph book that once belonged to the author’s grandfather contains a Yiddish inscription signed by Golda Meir. of Arabic were but a series of noises without distinction or character,” with which Hebrew had little in common. Hebrew was actually a Mediterranean language, Jabotinsky believed.

Recovering the non-guttural sound of real Hebrew “would evoke in the nation’s youth the true national characteristics that had all but disappeared in the Diaspora.”

“Revisionism was, first and foremost,” Kaplan writes, “an attack on modernity … an attempt to revise the course of Jewish history and release it from the hands of the champions of such ideals as progress, rationality, and universal rights.”

You might imagine, if you had a typical American education like mine, this doctrine could never get far among Jews, of all people, who introduced the world to those ideals. “Western civilization,” as my high school world history teacher said, “walks on two legs: Jerusalem and Athens.” Dancing in circles, kibbutzim, wars only because hostile neighbors forced them on us: That was what the typical American Jewish education taught us Israel was all about.

Only if you were more sophisticated in such matters would you know that in 1977, the very same young Revisionist who praised killing “in the name of life’s instinct, in the name of truth” became Israel’s prime minister. As a commander in Israel’s War of Independence, Menachem Begin wrote a telegram to his forces who had just massacred over a hun-

dred Arabs before razing their village: “Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, thou has chosen us for conquest.” In 1946, an underground militia Begin led set a bomb in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, in an attempt to chase the British out of the country, that murdered 91 civilians.

I’m no expert on Israeli history and politics. (If I get anything wrong here, or if you disagree, I want to hear from you at infernaltriangle@prospect.org. All these essays are conversations.)

I am, however, an expert on how another nation—this one—has made forgetting, repressing, and distorting the ugliest parts of its past a foundation of its self-understanding. Generations learned about happy slaves from Gone With the Wind, and even the best-informed white observers—like me—were only vaguely aware of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where airplanes literally bombed a thriving Black neighborhood out of existence, slaughtering hundreds, until an HBO show based on a comic book brought it to the cultural fore. I feel like I have something valuable to say about this particular America-Israel special relationship—partly based on what I haven’t known.

Israeli history was everywhere during my upbringing—for instance, in our basement rec room, where we displayed the framed first issue of a newspaper that used to be called The Palestine Post, but then, what with its banner

Like all fascists, Revisionists believed the most exemplary lives were lived in violence. headline “State of Israel Is Born,” became The Jerusalem Post. But I only learned about the King David Hotel bombing when I was around 30, at … the King David Hotel.

Kaplan starts his 2005 monograph by noting that this “dark side of the Zionist dream … has long been ignored and overlooked by both the Zionist (and Israeli) academic and the political leadership.” Just so: I have a textbook, Understanding Israel, by the distinguished Israeli academic Amos Elon, published in 1976 for the American Sunday school market, written on a high school level. It mentions Jabotinsky and Revisionism precisely once.

I asked my Facebook friends what they knew about Revisionist Zionism: Almost without exception, they knew less than what I knew about the Tulsa Race Massacre before exploring it further after seeing Watchmen on HBO. With trepidation, I reached out to Isaac Chotiner to ask him what he had known about Revisionism when he was so shocked by the settler reciting its doctrines. (And make no mistake: What this settler told him was doctrine. “For Jabotinsky,” Kaplan writes, “human rights, civil equality, and even political equality could not create harmony among individuals. Only the common ties of blood, history, and language could bring people together.”) I explained to Isaac my idea for this essay, with himself as its proof text. Graciously, he gave me his blessing. He had known practically nothing about Revisionism, too.

Reading up on Revisionism, your head might spin at how many of the things you understood as Judaism and Zionism, like bet follows aleph, simply are not so. For instance, everyone has heard the joke “Two Jews, three opinions.”

Now, I will never hear it again without cringing.

Kaplan quotes Amos Oz: “Israel is a fiery collection of arguments, and I like it this way.”

Jabotinsky did not like it that way. He was a political monist. “In a healthy soul there is only

one ideal,” he wrote. Same for nations: Like Maoists pursuing cultural revolution, Revisionists wished to “purge the Zionist agenda of all other aspirations.” Kaplan summarizes their ideal: “When a person is one with the nation, there is no room for individuality.”

Astonishingly, Revisionists abjured the entire tradition of rabbinic learning: The Hebrew Bible, as a heroic chronicle of a race mighty of warlords, required no interpretation. They especially despised any interpretation that found in Judaism a universalist moral vision—especially the socialist one of their Labor Zionist rivals, the tradition that won the battle to determine Israel’s reality and future.

Until, that is, having won that battle, Labor Zionism, by this late date, lost the war.

Reading Kaplan, I thought of my grandpa, who grew up in the Labor Zionist hotbed of Milwaukee. Its matriarch Golda Meir wrote in Yiddish (Revisionists despised Yiddish) in his autograph book how she looked forward to seeing him some day in Eretz Yisrael. He was sent to agricultural college to prepare to pursue the foundational Labor Zionist dream, “making the desert bloom” as a farmer. Long story short: He ended up staying in Milwaukee instead, but was always puttering around his garden in Sabra-like khaki shorts and work shirt.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky would have hated my grandfather: To him, farming was emasculating diasporic silliness.

In Jabotinsky’s allegorical novel Samson, Samson’s father teaches the future warrior king, “It is a sin to rape the land. She is our mother.” Kaplan paraphrases the lesson: Liberated from the farmer’s life, “Samson’s spiritual powers become so great that by merely standing by the side of the road, he made traveling merchants stop and give him their goods.” He continued: “Revisionist ideology called upon Jabotinsky’s disciples to follow the same path, to become what Yoseph Klausner, the Revisionist historian and author, described as the ideal warrior … ‘the warrior of life as part of life itself.’”

And I thought of my late father, during my childhood in the age of Menachem Begin.

He may also have hardly heard of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. But political ideas can be transmitted in ways far more strange and subtle than via mere books and doctrines. Sometimes, they are just in the air. Dad displayed a full-size replica of an Uzi on his office wall. The model Israeli tanks and warplanes he built in the basement as a hobby were scattered around

the house, even hanging from fishing line from the ceiling. He might not have quite had words to express it, but Jabotinsky-style visions of the redemptive power of violence were what his Zionism was all about.

You may know how the story of Revisionism and Israel now plays out. Jabotinsky had a close associate named Benzion, who begat a son, Benjamin Netanyahu, who as prime minister, Kaplan notes, is if anything closer to Jabotinsky’s original Revisionist vision. Begin focused mostly on Revisionism’s vision of territorial conquest. “To Begin,” Kaplan writes, “the Jews were in a constant battle against Amalek.”

If you’ve been following the news from Gaza, you’ll understand the reference.

But Netanyahu added back something Begin had neglected: Zionism as a totalizing reactionary cultural project. For instance, his supporters launched a magazine, Azure, whose editor pressed the idea that Zionism went astray when it embraced “the universalist heritage of the Enlightenment.”

A few weeks back, I recorded a segment for the show Democracy Now!. As I awaited my turn, I heard host Amy Goodman interview Simone Zimmerman, founder of the activist group IfNotNow, which calls itself “a movement of American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis.” I heard Zimmerman say of the war there, “It’s so deeply contrary to our values as Jewish people.” And I knew why she was wrong—at least if by “our” she means all Jews.

I also have come to understand why that kind of utterance never quite made sense to me: They certainly weren’t values I learned in my natal home, looking up at celebratory F-15s. In the course of Zionism’s longer history, it makes even less sense. Say it plain: That is one set of Jewish values. Another celebrates razing Arab villages, just like another set of American values than my own celebrates razing Black ones. In both cases, it is up to people with a stake in those nations to give their all to determine that the humane set of values prevails. n Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-volume series on the history of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan. His weekly essay series The Infernal Triangle is available at prospect.org every Wednesday in 2024.

APRIL 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

PARTINGSHOT

Handmaids of the Patriarchy Republicans offer a lesson in how not to win women back to their party.

Because I’m cursed with having a capacity for empathy, I sometimes spare a thought for how much it must suck to be a woman in the Republican Party.

Sure, many Republican women have it good: They tend to be wealthier and their homes are big enough to never have to see their spouses, who think of them as trophies rather than humans. But they’re also trapped in a party that relishes misogyny. It’s not golden handcuffs so much as a gilded obstacle course that gives an illusion of freedom but disciplines them swiftly if they wander off-track.

Two events that led to my latest bout of sympathy? Nikki Haley’s exit from the Republican primary, and Sen. Katie Britt’s overacted rebuttal to the State of the Union address, which was torched even by her own party.

“All a woman’s good for in my book is having babies and taking care of the house,” a male Republican voter in North Carolina told NBC when asked if he would vote for Haley. An older female Republican voter in Texas told Fox News she wouldn’t vote for Haley either, because “she’s probably menopausal.”

That was the level of respect Haley garnered from the GOP base. Now, as a progressive, I’d like to toss Haley’s hawkish neoconservative corporatism into the dustbin of history. But you can’t help but appreciate her for staying in the primary as long as she did, and having a bigger pair than any of her male counterparts when critiquing Trump. But rather than knock her on the merits, she’s reduced to her gender.

Then there’s Britt, whose monologue was called “creepy” and “cringe” by Republicans. And I mean, sure. Except she gave Republicans what they claim to want out of women: a beautiful tradwife in her rightful place, the kitchen, railing against Joe Biden.

She even served up a harrowing anecdote about a woman who was supposedly raped by a drug cartel in the U.S., only to be caught lying about nearly every part of the story, all in service of re-electing Donald Trump, a guy found legally liable for sexual abuse and a serial liar.

Republicans are arguably more desperate for 64 PROSPECT.ORG APRIL 2024

women to represent their cause than ever, as they simultaneously seek the female vote while explicitly taking away those voters’ rights to abortion, and in some cases, even IVF. So you’d think they’d be a tad more forgiving of the women still trying to participate in GOP politics, which for them has become a beauty pageant where the interview question is “How would you make yourself a second-class citizen?” And yes, there is a swimsuit portion.

Contestants must meet impossible qualifications: be conventionally hot, white, feminine, married, unquestioningly loyal to your husband whose infidelities you forget and whose kids you raise, well educated but not smarter than any man, an effective attack dog but never the alpha—ALL while pretending you don’t love Taylor Swift. If you don’t check all of those boxes, then you had better overcompensate with Stepford Wife loyalty coupled with craven bullying—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elise Stefanik, Nancy Mace, Kristi Noem. If you’re a woman just getting your start in GOP politics, you had better throw on a wet MAGA T-shirt and take a blowtorch to a children’s library full of “woke” books.

That’s not even a joke: Missouri secretary of state candidate Valentina Gomez did that in a campaign video.

And even if you somehow do check all the boxes, all it takes is an overrehearsed speech full of lies to take you down. You know, the kinds of things Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham or Donald Trump regularly get away with, all while looking like a slice of salami that fell on the floor.

Of course, these handmaids of the patriarchy are not without agency. Maybe for elected officials, the money and the fame, as limited as they may be, are worth tying yourself in knots to excuse your party’s contempt for your gender. But what’s in it for average female voters who don’t get the big house and the private jet?

And why am I the one concerned? Why don’t they have any empathy for ... themselves? —Francesca Fiorentini

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Funding our future

By Randi Weingarten, President, AFT

In years past, when I and others advocated for higher pay for teachers and adequate and equitable education funding, the right wing would fire back, “money doesn’t matter.” But evidence matters, and I admire those willing to follow it, like researcher Eric Hanushek, who has made a stunning turnaround after arguing for decades that more funding didn’t lead to better educational outcomes. Hanushek has reviewed the most rigorous research on education funding and finds that money does, in fact, matter.

That is why we all should be concerned about the looming fiscal cliff when pandemic relief aid ends this fall. Schools received $190 billion in federal funding to help students recover from learning loss during the pandemic. Research by Harvard’s Thomas Kane and others shows that achievement gains from 2022 to 2023 were large relative both to historical trends and to what prior research would lead us to expect. Loss of that aid will equate to an average reduction in yearly spending of more than $1,000 per student. The cliff will be worse in districts serving high-need students.

In the United States, education is largely controlled by the states, including K-12 school financing. While many state leaders talk about the importance of education, they don’t walk the walk. A new report finds that 39 states devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 public schools than they did in 2006. “The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems,” by researchers at the Albert Shanker Institute, the University of Miami and Rutgers University, estimates that this decrease in “fiscal effort” cost schools the equivalent of $360 billion in state and local funding between 2016 and 2021. Instead of restoring funding as states’ economies grew following the disastrous cuts to education during the Great Recession, 4 out of 5 states have not returned to the fiscal effort they were making to fund public schools in 2006.

“The reality is that it costs more to achieve higher educational outcomes,” noted Bruce Baker, one of the report’s authors. “And states are unlikely

to see much return on their investments when they are not really making those investments.”

“Equal opportunity is the endgame in education policy,” says co-author Matthew Di Carlo. The key question, then, is whether funding is adequate for students from all backgrounds to achieve common outcome goals. The report found that every single state funds its affluent districts more adequately than higher-poverty districts that serve the most vulnerable students—creating opportunity gaps ranging from moderate to huge. Di Carlo notes that “states with large opportunity gaps are essentially inequality factories, with affluent districts funded to achieve higher student outcomes than lower-income districts.

We cannot expect to close achievement gaps when states’ systems are designed to reproduce them.”

States must narrow these opportunity gaps by targeting additional state aid for higher-poverty districts, which have greater needs and less ability to meet those needs with local property tax revenue. Take one state, California, whose 2013 Local Control Funding Formula increased state support to schools by $18 billion over eight years after a history of low school funding. LCFF-induced increases in school spending significantly improved academic achievement and high school graduation rates, especially for poor and minority students.

This school finance report drives home a fact that I have seen firsthand in schools here and abroad:

School funding currently is not adequate to create equal opportunity for students from all backgrounds.

We often say in education that if kids can see it and touch it, they can be it. But first we must build it. The AFT is about real solutions that help create a better life and provide opportunity, but that doesn’t happen without resources spent wisely. I invite you to read this important report at www.school financedata.org for practical solutions we must ask lawmakers to enact so all our children have access to the great public schools they deserve.

Photo: Asher Huey

M

oney may not buy love or happiness, but it can provide a big bang for the buck in education.

Research shows that targeting more money for education, especially for students from low-income families, increases student achievement and graduation rates and is linked to higher earnings and other positive life outcomes—all things to be pretty happy about.

Public schools in the United States are among the most inequitably funded of any in the industrialized world. There have been countless times I have wished that lawmakers (as well as critics of public schools) could see what I see in well-resourced public schools—whether it’s cutting-edge career and technical education programs, impressive theater productions, or students engrossed in Socratic seminars. Just as often, I have wanted to shine a light on the tragic inequity in under-resourced schools that robs huge numbers of American children of the opportunities they deserve as much as any other child. These students have overcrowded classrooms, decrepit and unsafe school buildings, inadequate and outdated learning materials, and shortages of teachers, school nurses, counselors and librarians.

Weingarten at the announcement of a new health sciences high school in Queens, N.Y., on Feb. 14.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: threads.net/randiweingarten

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