The American Prospect

Foreign Policy: A New Realism for a New Reality BY JAMES MANN SEEDS OF A NEW LABOR MOVEMENT BY HAROLD MEYERSON

A WORKING PLANET BY CHUCK COLLINS

F A L L 2 014

LIBERAL INTELLIGENCE

BLACK AMERICA’S PROMISED LAND WHY I’M STILL A RACIAL OPTIMIST

BY RANDALL KENNEDY

contents

VOLUME 25, NUMBER 5 FALL 2014

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PAGE 54

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COLUMNS 5 PROSPECTS THE AMERICAN SITUATION BY PAUL STARR 100 COMMENT DEMOCRACY’S NEW MOMENT BY MILES RAPOPORT

NOTEBOOK 9 DANGER SIGNALS BY GERSHOM GORENBERG 12 VOTER SUPPRESSION: HOW BAD? BY WENDY WEISER 16 RECALLED BUT NOT REPAIRED BY RACHEL COHEN 20 THE CONVERSATION JAMELLE BOUIE & BEN JEALOUS

FEATURES 22 COVER STORY BLACK AMERICA’S PROMISED LAND BY RANDALL KENNEDY 30 ON REALISM, OLD AND NEW BY JAMES MANN 36 THE SEEDS OF A NEW LABOR MOVEMENT BY HAROLD MEYERSON 46 THE MAKING OF FERGUSON BY RICHARD ROTHSTEIN 54 WHAT CLINTON COULD LEARN FROM WARREN BY ROBERT KUTTNER 62 CAN WE EARN A LIVING ON A LIVING PLANET? BY CHUCK COLLINS 72 RAND PAUL’S 2020 VISION BY ADELE M. STAN 80 THE LEGACY OF CARL LEVIN BY DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

CULTURE 87 MUSIC AND MEMORY BY DEBORAH WEISGALL 92 DEFENDING CHOICE, YET AGAIN BY LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN 94 WHAT WOMEN NEED BY IRIN CARMON 96 THE END OF THE LAVENDER GHETTO BY DAVID L. KIRP 98 A TALENT FOR STORY-TELLING BY HEATHER COX RICHARDSON Cover photo by Charlie Riedel / AP Images

1

contributors

EDITORS’ NOTE

With this issue, The American Prospect returns to quarterly print publication, with Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr as the co-editors in charge.

RANDALL KENNEDY is a contributing editor and board member of the Prospect and professor at Harvard Law School. His several books include The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency. In his essay, Kennedy says he is “continuing a debate with his beloved, deceased father who could never forgive the United States for its mistreatment of African Americans.”

IRIN CARMON is a national reporter at MSNBC, covering gender and politics. She approached Deborah L. Rhode’s What Women Want with eagerness to leave the day-to-day exigencies of misogyny and feminism to the news cycle.

“I’m always happy to read something longer than 140 characters,” she says, “especially something that tries to marshal all the energy around feminism toward concrete goals.”

CHUCK COLLINS is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits inequality.org.

He examines how progressives can bridge schisms over ecological limits to growth.

“A lot of leaders in the environmental, labor, and community justice movements talk past each other,” he says. “But marching at the People’s Climate March in NYC demonstrated the unifying power of a just transition.”

ADELE M. STAN is the Prospect’s senior editor for the web. Much of her career, though, was devoted to covering the right wing of American politics. “In Rand Paul’s ascendence, I see the gathering together of all these different strands of the right, some of which have long been considered little more than fringe,” she says.

“I just had to dive back in.”

JAMES MANN is a fellow-in-­ residence at Johns Hopkins School of International Studies and author of several books on modern American foreign policy, including The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power.

“I enjoy keeping track of the ideas our leaders use to justify their policies, and to see how they change over time,” he says.

WENDY WEISER directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. She is a policy analyst, scholar, and litigator. “This is a critical year for voting rights,” she says. “Voters in nearly half the country will face new hurdles, and court cases will determine how politicians can restrict voting, targeting minorities, for partisan advantage.”

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “When Ferguson’s ‘Troubles’ erupted,” he says, “I suspected that federal, state, and local policy had deliberately segregated St. Louis County, as had occurred in so many other metropolises.

St. Louis was no different.”

RACHEL COHEN is a Prospect writing fellow. She writes about the millions of cars on the road with unfixed safety recalls, and the policy solutions needed to fix the problem. “There’s understandable pushback to requiring vehicle owners to do anything if it’s the manufacturer or the government that messed up,” she says. “But, at the end of the day, this is a public health issue.”

CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS WEB EDITOR ADELE M. STAN MANAGING EDITOR AMANDA TEUSCHER WRITING FELLOWS NATHALIE BAPTISTE, RACHEL COHEN WEB ASSISTANT KRISTEN DOERER EDITORIAL INTERNS AYANNA ALEXANDER, KATHERINE DOWNS, JUSTIN MILLER CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MARCIA ANGELL, JAMELLE BOUIE, ALAN BRINKLEY, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, RANDALL KENNEDY, BOB MOSER, SARAH POSNER, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, DEBORAH A. STONE, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS OPERATIONS ED CONNORS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER JOSEPH A. GALLANT JR. BOARD OF DIRECTORS JANET SHENK (CHAIR), SARAH FITZRANDOLPH BROWN, LINDSEY FRANKLIN, JACOB HACKER, STEPHEN HEINTZ, RANDALL KENNEDY, ROBERT KUTTNER, MARIO LUGAY, ARNIE MILLER, MILES RAPOPORT, ADELE SIMMONS, WILLIAM SPRIGGS, PAUL STARR, MICHAEL STERN, BEN TAYLOR FULFILLMENT PALM COAST DATA SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE 1-888-MUST-READ (687-8732) SUBSCRIPTION RATES $19.95 (U.S.), $29.95 (CANADA), AND $34.95 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PERMISSIONS@PROSPECT.ORG

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Prospects

The American Situation

BY PAUL STARR

A

merica, it seems, is stuck—unable to make significant progress on critical issues such as climate change, rising economic inequality, and immigration. To explain that inaction, people often point to political polarization. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, are now so sharply opposed to each other that they are unable to find common ground.

But while the country is stuck, it is not stationary. Some things are changing; it’s just not at the federal level that the changes are emerging.

Polarization leads to stalemate only under certain circumstances—when the two sides in a conflict are closely balanced, and political institutions and procedures (such as the Senate filibuster) enable each side to check the other. That has been the story in the federal government.

Under other circumstances, however, polarization can be a stimulus to change. When politics become polarized between two alternatives, voters have clearer choices. They have more reason to pay attention and turn out. Each side may then mobilize, take power, and get its way in different jurisdictions or private institutions. That is what is happening now in state and local governments and civil society.

Two ideologically based societies have developed within the United States, and the differences between them are growing. The question will ultimately be which America, red or blue, dominates the nation’s future.

THE UNITED STATES began

as two societies—one based on racial slavery, the other on free labor—and despite all that has since happened in the nation’s history, today’s political divisions are descended from that original split.

The current political map, to be sure, does not divide exactly along North-South lines. Some rural areas in the North are socially and politically more like the South, while some urban areas in the South are more like the North.

The West has its own divisions.

But the regional and racial continuities are unmistakable. The South continues to be the principal base of support for a party favoring harsher policies toward labor and the poor and drawing its support almost entirely from whites. The South’s culture and religion pervade the version of conservatism that dominates the Republican Party.

For most of the 20th century, it wasn’t at all clear that these old divisions would continue to define the lines of conflict in the United States. Until the 1980s, the prevailing currents of change favored the creation of a single national society. The Progressive era, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement and Great Society of the 1960s all brought nationalizing reforms; the Supreme Court extended constitutional requirements for equal rights and civil liberties to the states. As national markets, national corporations, and national media grew, they contributed to a narrowing of regional economic and cultural

differences. Especially during World War II and the Cold War, it was easy to believe—as many leading historians and social scientists did—that all Americans shared a consensus on values. While Europeans fought ideological battles, Americans supposedly worked out their differences within a common framework.

The belief in an American consensus was never entirely

an American consensus, the idea of a “culture war” was not entirely wrong, but it captured only part of the emerging conflict, primarily the backlash against the sexual revolution and change in gender relations that began in the 1960s.

That conception downplayed the conflict’s racial dimension and missed entirely its implications for economic inequality. It also underestimated the scope of the conser-

Two ideologically based societies have developed within the United States,and the differences between them are growing. right and, for that matter, never entirely wrong. Even when disagreeing, Americans have generally appealed to the same values of freedom and equality; we just interpret them in opposite ways.

Since the 1980s, however, after a long period when the prevailing currents favored convergence, the trends have reversed, and the country has split apart along its old seams—albeit with some new twists. Ethnic whites and white working-class men have left the Democratic Party as it has become more firmly identified with racial minorities and with causes such as feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism.

In the 1980s and ’90s, many observers saw the great divide in America as arising over culture and values. Like the earlier idea of

vative backlash, which now aims to roll back the changes of the 1930s as well as those of the 1960s. In the name of federalism, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court has brought back states’ rights and limits on federal powers.

It’s in state policy that ideological polarization has been most fully expressed, especially since the 2010 election, when Republicans gained unified control of many state governments and began to pursue in earnest what is now widely seen as the “redstate model.” That model typically includes sharply reduced taxes for those with higher incomes, reductions in spending on education and social programs, curbs on unions, and rollbacks of environmental laws, as well as some culture-war priorities such as

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expanded rights for gun owners and restrictions on abortion and gay marriage. Meanwhile, political leaders in some blue states such as Massachusetts and California and in cities such as New York and Seattle have pushed ahead with progressive policies that move in exactly the opposite direction: tax increases on the rich, more resources for education, expanded health care, increased minimum wages, and so on.

The polarization in social policy between red and blue states is apparent in their response to the Affordable Care Act. Here the Supreme Court under John Roberts played exactly the opposite role from the one that the Court played half a century earlier under Earl Warren. Although Roberts prevented his conservative colleagues from overturning the entire health-care law, he extended states’ rights in two respects, limiting the scope of federal authority under the Commerce Clause and restricting the use of federal appropriations as a means of securing state compliance with congressional aims. The immediate effect of the Court’s ruling was to make the Medicaid expansion optional to the states; the longerterm effect is to limit the ability of Congress to make equal rights a reality nationwide. One of the ACA’s principal objectives was to improve insurance protection and access to health care for all Americans, but instead the law has—at least so far—become another example of the growing divergence in state policy.

Different policies foster different economies and social structures. Historically, most of the red states have been poorer than the blue states and have used low wages as a lure for business. With their renewed emphasis on regressive taxes, low social spending, low minimum wages, and anti-union policies, the red states are upholding an old social order that many expected to fade away. The efforts to exclude blacks and Latinos

from power through voter-suppression strategies are part of the same return to the past. What is new in the recent right-wing takeovers is the imposition of this model on a state like North Carolina, which has had more liberal policies especially in education, and the effort to import the model into the upper Midwest in such states as Wisconsin and Michigan. These are “battleground states” not just electorally, but in the larger ideological conflict over America’s future.

HOW DEEP DOES the red-blue

conflict in America go? The political scientists who study public opinion have been divided over the question. Some analysts such as Morris P. Fiorina argue that only political elites have become polarized and that the public at large continues to be predominantly moderate. Others such as Alan Abramowitz counter that polarization has become more widespread and now extends to the politically engaged public. As Abramowitz shows, the more attention Americans pay to politics and the news, the more polarized they are ideologically.

The evidence, I think, favors Abramowitz’s position. Polarization has been spreading—but not just to wider segments of the public. It also affects patterns of community life and institutions such as religion and the media.

While red-blue differences among the states are writ large in electoral maps, the same cleavage also shapes the lives and relationships of Americans at a more local and immediate level.

American communities have become more ideologically homogeneous. The increased residential clustering of people with likeminded views was the subject of Bill Bishop’s 2008 book, The Big Sort. Americans appear to be choosing where to live on the basis of economic and social criteria that are highly correlated with their political views. As a result, at the local and county level,

elections are increasingly lopsided, with one party or the other able to dominate and get its way.

A similar pattern of increased ideological separation has developed in the sphere of religion. In the mid-20th century, Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to attend a church or synagogue regularly. The main lines of division were denominational— Protestant, Catholic, Jewish. By the 1980s, the divisions became increasingly ideological, with the conservative wings of each religion allying with one another against more liberal and secular tendencies. Now religiosity itself has become strongly related to partisanship. Republicans go to church and say grace before meals, while Democrats are more secular, and the gap between them has grown. “Americans have become polarized along religious lines,” Robert Putnam and David Campbell write in American Grace, their 2010 empirical study of religion and public life. “Americans are increasingly concentrated at opposite ends of the religious spectrum—the highly religious at one pole, and the avowedly secular at the other. The moderate religious middle is shrinking.”

In other domains as well, conservatives and liberals have now gone their separate ways. The media are a familiar example.

Most Americans used to watch the same evening news programs of the three television networks, but the network audience has declined, and instead the most politically attentive watch ideologically distinct cable news or get their news online from sources that fit their political perspective.

Increasingly, Americans with opposed views live not only physically apart but also in their own factual universes.

Ideology and partisanship have become more salient in American life in part because they carry more significance than they used to. When partisan differences were smaller—and when there were liberal Republicans and

conservative Democrats—knowing someone’s political party didn’t tell you all that much. Now it says a lot. In 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported that dating services found that their clients put far more emphasis on sharing political views than in the past. The head of one high-priced service told the Journal, “People now say ‘I don’t even want to meet anybody who’s from the other party,’ even if it’s someone who’s perfect in every other way.”

Of course, many Americans don’t care about politics and don’t make it a factor in personal relationships, though their social circles may still be relatively homogeneous because political views are so strongly related to social identities and status.

The danger, especially for the most politically engaged, lies in only hearing your own side. As a long traditional of psychological research on “group polarization” shows, when people with the same beliefs talk only with one another, they drift toward more extreme positions. If what you know about the news comes chiefly from partisan media and like-minded friends, you may misread what is happening in the wider society.

That is a genuine risk for all of us, liberal and conservative. Yet even as I acknowledge that risk, I am no less convinced that my side, the liberal side, has an edge and is more likely to prevail. On some issues, like climate change, I am optimistic for pessimistic reasons: the realities will ultimately be inescapable. On other issues, like gay rights, I am optimistic because the young have more liberal views than the old, and the effects of time are also inescapable. But at bottom, for me and I suspect for many others (like Randall Kennedy in this issue), there is something else: a confidence in the long arc of history, the power of reason, and the promise of democratic government to bring out the best possibilities within us.

It may take a while, but we have no other options.

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

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notebook

A convoy of vehicles and fighters from the al-Qaeda–linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq’s Anbar Province

with its claim to have established a new caliphate.

Danger Signals The arrival of ISIL makes an Israeli-Palestinian settlement even more urgent.

BY G E R S H O M G O R E N BE RG

ap i mages

I

n Hebrew, “black flag” refers to an immediate, glaring warning—as in, the “black flag of illegality” that figuratively flies over a military order that a soldier must refuse, or the actual flag put up by lifeguards to signal that the sea is too stormy for swimming.

The symbolism of the color is entirely arbitrary. In Arab culture, a black flag recalls the battle standards of the Prophet Muhammad and of the Abbasid caliphate, which ruled from Baghdad over a vast Islamic empire. Traditionally, the connotations are positive.

In recent months, though, the two meanings have converged.

Inscribed with the words “There is no god but God,” a black banner is now a symbol of danger, across the Middle East and beyond.

As the flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIL , the rebel organization in Iraq and Syria, the banner signals brutality, genocide, and the collapse of what was left of Iraq as a functioning state. It provokes horror, alarm, and sudden political shifts. Most obviously, the Obama administration has reluctantly returned to Middle Eastern wars, attempting to build a military coalition out of even more reluctant partners. Israel’s

government points to the Islamic State as a catalyst of regional realignment that puts Israel on the same side as Sunni Arab states—and by implication allows it to put off, yet again, dealing with the Palestinian issue.

And therefore, I’d argue, the black banner is a warning of additional dangers—those created

by America’s clumsiness in dealing with the Middle East and by Israel’s unwillingness to reach a two-state agreement with the Palestinians. To see why, we must look at the Islamic State’s rhetoric, its strategy, and its place in the wider regional conflicts—starting

IF YOU TOOK A MOMENT off from

being horrified by the Islamic State’s violence, you could find considerable irony in the group’s coronation of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as caliph, and his subsequent appearance at Mosul’s largest mosque in early July. Abu Bakr’s black garb, the choreography of the event, its venue—the Abbasid heartland—all were meant to appeal to Muslim memory of the Abbasid caliphate as a “civilizational golden age,” says Carool Kersten, a scholar of Islam at King’s College London.

Yet “people who look [to] the Abbasid caliphate usually point precisely at its cosmopolitanism, its pluralism,” says Kersten, co-editor of Demystifying the Caliphate: Historical Memory and Contemporary Contexts. “All

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

notebook

sorts of Islamic groups were allowed to operate side by side, and Christians, Persians, and Jews all [had] their contribution to make.” The Abbasid age represents an Islam that embraces science, literature, and philosophy— an Islam that stands in stark contrast to that of the Islamic State. The rebels’ use of Abbasid symbols, Kersten suggests, might stem from “their own ignorance about Islamic history.” Or merely from intensely selective nostalgia: In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Abbasid caliphate was a superpower that ruled from North Africa to Central Asia and united most of the world’s Muslims in a single polity.

The Ottoman sultans were the last Muslim rulers to successfully claim the title of caliph. Since Kemal Ataturk abolished the institution, the theme of reestablishing the caliphate has recurred in Islamic political movements. It can signify a closely formulated alternative to post-colonial states, or a distant utopia, or be little more than a battle cry.

ISIL certainly rejects the existing state structure of the Middle East.

Moreover, says Kersten, it appears to be heavily influenced by a jihadist strategic text that has been circulating since 2004, The Management of Savagery. That book describes the political division of the Middle East as an instrument of control by the “Jahili order,” meaning the reign of those ignorant of Islam.

None of this means that al-Baghdadi is about to be recognized as caliph by large numbers of Muslims, or even by other movements that call for a caliphate. It is “very difficult to take a claim to a universal leadership over Muslims seriously when those making the declaration appear to declare anyone who is outside of their group … as either sinful, deviants, or disbelievers,” political scientist Reza Pankhurst argued in a recent interview. Pankhurst is an adherent of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation, an intellectually oriented panIslamic group.

But the Islamic State’s caliphate claim does help explain how the organization attracts recruits and a wider circle of support. ISIL purports to offer the immediate restoration of an

10 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG FALL 2014

imagined glorious past. The less bearable people find the present, and the less hope other political paths offer for more realistic improvement, the greater the attraction of such a vision and the extreme means used in its service.

Thus, one force creating support for ISIL is “disappointment with the Arab revolutions” of recent years, says Ofra Bengio, a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. That’s coupled, she says, with the attraction of a group that presents startling victories along with an ideology that promises “to get rid of all those who have failed.”

The list of failures begins long before the revolts of 2011. Pankhurst describes Hizb ut-Tahrir’s founding as a response to the Arab military defeat

by Israel in 1948. Another defeat, in the 1967 war with Israel, widely discredited secular pan-Arabism and created an opening for movements that present Islam as a political program.

More recently, “Islamicists who were willing to take a procedural view of democracy and participated” in it “all felt cheated,” says Kersten. A key example is the short-lived rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It’s true, Kersten says, that the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi “made massive mistakes” as president, and that there’s reason to suspect Islamicist parties of seeing democracy as “one man, one vote, one time.” Yet Morsi’s overthrow left advocates of working within the system feeling cheated, and increased potential support for a much more uncompromising approach.

ALL OF WHICH BRINGS US to the

Palestinian-­Israeli arena, and another chain of disappointments. Hamas, a wing of the Brotherhood, won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election largely because the Palestinian Authority (PA) under President Mahmoud Abbas and his nationalist Fatah movement had failed twice over: It had not achieved Palestinian independence, and the autonomous PA regime in Gaza and the West Bank was riddled with corruption.

But Hamas’s election victory, combined with the organization’s terrorist record, brought an Israeli and

This image from video posted on a militant website purports to show the ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Western boycott of the PA. In the end, Hamas was left governing Gaza alone, isolated and bankrupt under Israeli and Egyptian blockade. Another attempt to re-enter the political system by forming a unity government with Fatah this past June accomplished little—unless one counts helping to spark the war with Israel, after which Hamas celebrated its supposed victory in the rubble of Gaza.

Hamas would put all the blame on its Palestinian rivals and Israel. But this doesn’t remove the sting: Neither by waging war nor by waging politics has Hamas fulfilled the hopes of its supporters, or succeeded where Fatah failed. Meanwhile, the Islamic State scored lightning victories this summer and announced re-establishment of the caliphate.

During one ceasefire in the Gaza War this summer, the Bethlehembased Palestinian Center for Public Opinion conducted a poll in Gaza that included the question “Do you support or oppose, in general, the …

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant?”

The pollsters highlighted the fact that 85 percent of respondents answered “oppose.” Just as important, though, fully 13 percent said they supported the jihadi organization.

If one equates Hamas and ISIL , as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he does, this hardly matters. But the two groups aren’t the same. Along with its rejection of Israel’s existence and its disregard for the lives of civilians, in Israel and in Gaza, Hamas has its pragmatic side. It has negotiated indirectly with Israel; it has enforced ceasefires and prevented rocket fire by more extreme Islamic groups; it joined a unity government under President Mahmoud Abbas, who is committed to a two-state outcome. The support of one-eighth of Gazans for ISIL is a sign that despair can lead people to positions much more radical than those of Hamas.

By refusing to distinguish between Hamas and the Islamic State, Israel does nothing to stop radicalization.

The way to reverse the process begins with understanding that achievements by Palestinian moderates can be successes for Israel. The best way to make the promise of a new caliphate

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irrelevant is to work seriously with Abbas and Fatah to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Which brings us back to America’s dwindling influence in the region.

“AMERICA WILL LEAD a broad coalition

to roll back this terrorist threat,” President Barack Obama said in his September 10 speech on the Islamic State.

Obama’s only allusion to the ethnicsectarian conflict in Iraq was asserting, somewhat prematurely, that the country now had an “inclusive government.” Obama did lay out a strategy for a new stage in the war against terrorism. The Islamic State’s own plan of action didn’t receive a mention.

To better understand that, let’s go back to The Management of Savagery.

(The name of the author, Abu Bakr Naji, is presumed to be a pseudonym.)

The book denounces any perceived influence on Islamic political movements by Western ideas, secular or religious. But it shows the immense influence of one stream of Western thought—the ideologies and strategies of modern political terrorism, as developed in European revolutions and anti-colonial armed struggles.

To this, it adds careful attention to manipulation of 21st-century media.

The mix is then given a veneer of religion as principles of jihad.

Savagery affirms the value of what previous revolutionaries called “armed propaganda,” with the United States as a particular target. Violence that seizes media attention, the book says, attracts new recruits who will be “dazzled by the operations … undertaken in opposition to America.”

It also provokes the United States to act directly rather than through proxies in the Islamic world, eventually revealing American weakness.

Extreme violence is also described as a means of “inflaming opposition” and polarizing the masses, who will find that there is no safe middle ground, no way to stay out of the fight.

Viewed in this light, the U.S. decision to intervene after the beheading of American journalists appears to be just what the Islamic State sought.

This isn’t proof that American intervention is wrong. It does reinforce the impression, unlikely to improve

The sudden rise of the Islamic State, with its videoed horrors and promises of renewed Islamic glory, is a warning of where Palestinian despair may lead.

Gershom Gorenberg is author of The Unmaking of Israel, of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, and of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He blogs at South Jerusalem.

America’s image in the region, that the murder of two Americans prompted air attacks and support for opposing groups of Syrian rebels, when neither the Islamic State’s atrocities against the Yezidi minority nor three years of civil war in Syria succeeded in doing so. It’s also a warning for the future: Washington needs, finally, to understand the strategic thinking of terrorists and consider how its own actions can outflank that strategy.

To avoid another pitfall, it’s essential to remember that the Islamic State is a Sunni group. While it is fighting other Sunnis, it’s also part of the multi-sided ethnic-sectarian war raging across Syria and Iraq. Before 2011 in Syria and 2003 in Iraq, these regimes “were like little Ottoman sultans” who held together a mix of religious groups and nationalities by force, much as the Tito regime once did in Yugoslavia, says prominent Syria expert Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Now, he says, religious identities such as “Alawite” and “Sunni” have “become much harder ethnic identities.” Ethnic cleansing has become a feature of the fierce conflict.

America’s conundrum in Syria has received considerable attention: To attack ISIL risks helping the Alawite Assad regime. Regionally, the Alawites are identified with Shiites, so America also risks being seen as fighting for Shiites against Sunnis.

In Iraq, though, the United States has already stumbled into this trap.

At the end of August, American airstrikes against ISIL helped Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Shiite militias allied with the Iraqi government to break the siege of Amirli, a Turkomen Shiite town in northern Iraq. The Americans “didn’t pay attention” to the fact that Amerli is surrounded by Sunni Arab villages, says Professor Amatzia Baram, head of the Center for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa. “The Americans allowed the Shiites to do whatever they wanted,” and the result was ethnic cleansing.

“The militias are not just dangerous,” he says, “they are fanatical.”

The Obama administration, he argues, must give help to the Iraqi

government on the condition of using a more disciplined army to drive ISIL from Sunni areas.

The original American mistake, Baram says, was the assumption that U.S.-style one-person, one-vote democracy could be imposed on Iraq, ignoring the internal divisions. In 1990, he recalls, he met in Europe with a “very senior” member of the Iraqi Shiite Dawa Party, who compared Iraq to “a donkey and a rider”— the Shiite majority as the donkey, the Sunnis as the rider. “All he wanted to do was reverse the order,” Baram says, not to bring about democracy. Elections allowed the Shiites to do so, and accelerated the breakup of the state.

At this moment, Baram argues, the United States has the leverage to insist that the central Iraqi government work on the basis of parity: equal representation for the ethnic-religious communities, and “nothing moves forward without compromise” between them. Iraq can survive as a state only if it is federalized, with power transferred to autonomous regions, he says.

Syria, Baram suggests, might best be divided into three countries—Kurdish in the northeast, Sunni in the center, and a secular Alawite regime in the West. But that optimistic scenario could well be wishful. The pessimistic prognosis is continued chaos.

THERE ARE TWO LESSONS here for the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first is for the Israeli right: The attempt to maintain a single state where Jews have power and Palestinians do not is doomed, even if the date of the explosion is unknown. The second is for foreign proponents of a “one-state solution” based on one-person, onevote, most of whom see themselves as being on the left: They are, ironically, proposing to repeat the mistake of the Bush administration in Iraq, imposing an American model that focuses on individual rights and ignores the reality of communal identities.

As of this writing, the Obama administration is putting together a Mideast coalition of the irresolute to fight the Islamic State. On the surface, every country in the region has reason to want ISIL defeated. In reality, each has contrary interests.

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Turkey’s top priority, as Baram notes, is the fall of the Assad regime, and it fears strengthening the Syrian Kurds.

Saudi Arabia is concerned about ISIL , but more concerned about Iran—and the Islamic State is a threat to Iran’s Shiite allies in Iraq.

Nonetheless, Netanyahu has greeted the coalition against ISIL as one more sign of a Middle East realignment that puts Israel on the same side as Sunni Arab governments, adding to a shared fear of Iran. “They’re reevaluating their relationship with Israel and they understand that Israel is not their enemy but their ally,” he asserted in a speech about terrorism on September 11. Implicit in Netanyahu’s message is that common interests with Israel have pushed the Palestinian issue off Arab leaders’ agenda.

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, whose advocacy of a two-state agreement has virtually made her the leader of an opposition faction within the government, rejects that thesis. The condition for an alliance with Arab states is renewing peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, she asserted after a meeting with Netanyahu, the day before his speech, adding, “Those who don’t want to solve this [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict are the ones who will lead us in the end to a bloody battle with beheaders.”

Baram backs up her doubts. Before the war in Gaza, he says, he attended a meeting with a senior member of the Saudi royal family and a younger, rising Saudi figure. The former implied and the latter said explicitly that “Israel has to do something about Palestinians, or we cannot get married.”

Netanyahu, yet again, is engaged in either spin or wishful thinking. The realignment he wants depends on reaching the peace agreement with the Palestinians that he has evaded.

The sudden rise of the Islamic State, with its videoed horrors and its promises of renewed Islamic glory, hasn’t changed that. Rather, it’s a warning of where Palestinian despair may lead, and of the potential consequences of maintaining what has become a de facto single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

The black flag is a warning, but it must be read correctly.

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Voter Suppression: How Bad? Not since the 19th century has government suppressed rather than enlarged the right to vote.

BY W E N DY W E I S E R

F

or the first time in decades, voters in nearly half the country will find it harder to cast a ballot in the upcoming elections. Voters in 22 states will face tougher rules than in the last midterms. In 15 states, 2014 is slated to be the first major election with new voting restrictions in place.

These changes are the product of a concerted push to restrict voting by legislative majorities that swept into office in 2010. They represent a sharp reversal for a country whose historical trajectory has been to expand voting rights and make the process more convenient and accessible.

Although some of these new laws are harsher than others, and some are still being fought in the courts, they have already dramatically altered the landscape for 2014. The outcomes of some of the tightest races this year could turn on the application of controversial new voting rules. Strict voter ID laws have gotten most of the attention, but are only part of the story. Cutbacks to early voting and voter registration opportunities, and other idiosyncratic changes to voting rules, have the potential to do just as much damage.

Why is this happening? Where are the most damaging new laws? What impact could they have in this year’s elections? And how effective are the efforts by voters to push back?

Voting Restrictions in Context

First, some perspective. The current assault on voting is highly unusual.

Election rules have long been prone to politicization, but the last large-scale push to curb voting access was more than a century ago, after Reconstruction. The first stirrings of a new movement to restrict voting came after the 2000 Florida election fiasco, which taught the unfortunate lesson that even small manipulations of election procedures could affect outcomes in close races. Even so, only a handful of

states imposed new restrictions over the decade that followed.

That changed dramatically after 2010, when state lawmakers across the country introduced hundreds of bills to restrict voting. Although many of the new laws passed in that first year were initially blocked or weakened by courts, the Department of Justice, and citizen initiatives, states continued to press new voting restrictions in 2013 and 2014.

What Explains This Sudden Shift?

Partisanship plays a key role. Of the 22 states with new restrictions, 18 passed them through entirely Republicancontrolled bodies. A study by social scientists Keith Bentele and Erin O’Brien of the University of Massachusetts Boston found that restrictions were more likely to pass “as the proportion of Republicans in the legislature increased or when a Republican governor was elected.” After Republicans took over state houses and governorships in 2010, voting restrictions typically followed party lines.

Race has been a significant factor.

In 2008, voter participation among African Americans and certain other groups surged. Then came backlash.

The more a state saw increases in minority and low-income voter turnout, the more likely it was to push laws cutting back on voting rights, according to the University of Massachusetts study. The Brennan Center for Justice likewise found that of the 11 states with the highest African American turnout in 2008, 7 passed laws making it harder to vote. Of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth in the 2010 Census, 9 have new restrictions in place. And of the 15 states that used to be monitored closely under the Voting Rights Act because of a history of racial discrimination in elections, 9 passed new restrictions.

Some laws are especially egregious in targeting how minorities vote. The

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Wisconsin. Generally, the days and hours most likely to be slashed were those most popular with minorities and hourly workers, like Sundays and evenings. According to a 2008 Ohio study, 56 percent of weekend voters in Cuyahoga County, the state’s most populous, were black.

Some politicians have been surprisingly candid about their motives. A Georgia state senator recently caused an uproar by criticizing local election officials for placing an early voting site in a black neighborhood, calling it a “blatantly partisan move,” and vowing to work in the next legislative session to “eliminate this election law loophole” that enabled officials to facilitate minority political participation. An Ohio official, explaining his 2012 vote to limit early voting hours, said, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban [read African American] voter-turnout machine.” push to shut down Sunday early voting in states where African American churches organized successful “Souls to the Polls” drives is a glaring example. Laws restricting voter registration drives are another such tactic.

African Americans and Latinos register through drives at twice the rate of white citizens, and in recent years, civic groups have used drives to help close the racial registration gap—as they have for veterans, young people, and other less registered populations. Instead of embracing these efforts, Florida and several other states passed laws that make it difficult—and, before a court stepped in, impossible—for groups to help voters register. The result was a significant drop in registrations.

danny johnston / ap images

Early Voting Cuts

The push to trim early voting provides another clear example of how new voting restrictions target minorities. For more than two decades, states have been increasing early voting opportunities. In fact, most states now offer early voting, and in the last two presidential elections, a full one-third of Americans voted early. The reason for this expansion? Early voting works well—voters like it, election officials like it, and it

Of the eleven states with the highest African American turnout in 2008, seven passed laws making it harder for citizens to vote.

improves the election system. It is so non-controversial that the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration recently recommended that all states adopt it to prevent long lines at the polls.

Despite this consensus, after the 2008 election, support for early voting eroded among Republican legislators in the South and Midwest. What changed? For the first time, African Americans had begun voting early at high rates. In Southern states, early voting by African Americans nearly tripled between 2004 and 2008, overtaking early voting by whites by a significant margin. In North Carolina, for example, seven in ten African Americans voted early in 2008, as compared to half of white voters. And while Republicans have traditionally been more likely to vote early, in 2008 Democratic early votes exceeded Republican ones.

Just as early voting has become successful among minorities and lower-income voters, it has become a target. Since 2011, eight states that saw recent increases in minority early voting usage have sharply cut back on early voting hours and days—Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and

Other Voting Restrictions Voter ID. While voter ID laws are noth-

ing new, before 2011 only two states required voters to show governmentissued photo IDs at the polls. Since 2011, nine states passed strict new ID laws. (Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.) Some accept stateissued student IDs while others do not, and some make it easier than others to obtain the necessary IDs. Four more states have passed somewhat less restrictive ID requirements. Nationally, 11 percent of Americans do not have the current state-issued photo IDs required under the stricter laws.

Voter Registration Restrictions.

Ten states passed laws making it harder for citizens to register. These include laws curbing voter registration drives (in Florida, Illinois, Texas, and Virginia); rules requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering (in Alabama, Kansas, Tennessee, and previously in Arizona); laws eliminating the highly popular same-day registration (in Nebraska and North Carolina); and a law making it harder for people who move to stay registered (in Wisconsin). Voter registration

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problems, which tend to pass under the radar, have long been the single greatest barrier to voting, causing millions of lost votes per year. Unless your state has same-day registration, if you are not registered, you cannot vote. One in four eligible Americans is not registered, and millions more have outdated registrations.

Curbs on Restoring Rights to People with Past Convictions. Florida,

Iowa, and South Dakota all made it significantly harder for Americans with past criminal convictions to have their voting rights restored. In Florida and Iowa, those citizens are essentially permanently disenfranchised.

Nationally, 5.85 million Americans who have done their time have lost the right to vote; 1.5 million are in Florida. Overall, 7.7 percent of African Americans have lost their right—­ compared to 1.8 percent of whites.

The number and complexity of new voting restrictions across the country are staggering. As Yale Law Professor Heather Gerken put it, “it’s a death by a thousand cuts strategy.”

Key States to Watch

In many of the closest races this year, new restrictions and ongoing court cases could become major factors.

North Carolina has the dubious distinction of having the nation’s harshest and most sweeping new voting law. Enacted immediately after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act last year, the law slashes seven early voting days, imposes a strict photo ID requirement, eliminates same-day registration, stops pre-registration for 16- and 17-yearolds, prohibits the counting of provisional votes cast outside of voters’ home precincts, and more. Other than the photo ID requirement, which will be implemented in 2016, all of these changes are currently in effect.

With a tight Senate race under way, these changes could have an impact on this year’s elections, though it is difficult to predict the magnitude.

In 2008, more than 700,000 North Carolinians voted during the week the state cut from early voting—including nearly a quarter of all African Americans who voted that year. Even in the 2010 midterms, more than 200,000

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voters cast ballots during that week.

Many voters will likely find another way to participate, but some will not.

When Florida cut a week of early voting before the 2012 election, it led to congestion and long lines both before and on Election Day. More than 200,000 Floridians did not vote that year because of long lines at the polls.

The elimination of same-day registration and out-of-precinct provisional balloting can also do damage. In 2012, nearly 100,000 citizens used sameday registration in North Carolina, almost one-third of whom were African Americans. Nationally, same-day registration is generally credited with boosting turnout by as much as 5 to 7 percent. Already this year, hundreds of citizens cast ballots that went uncounted in low-turnout primary elections because of the elimination of same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting.

It is uncertain which of these restrictions will still be in place for the elections. The Department of Justice and civil rights groups have challenged the law in federal court. A district court judge declined to block the changes in advance of the election, but during argument on appeal last week, one judge asked, “How come the state of North Carolina doesn’t want people to vote?” (Regardless of the outcome, the issue will not be fully settled this year; the case is scheduled for a full trial next summer.) Voters are pushing back in the streets as well; the new law spawned large-scale protests across the state by the “Moral Mondays” movement. That movement has also mobilized a voter registration and education campaign to counteract what the NAACP’s Reverend William Barber calls “the most regressive voter-suppression law passed by any state in this country since Jim Crow.”

Texas. In the midst of a high-profile gubernatorial race, the Lone Star State now has a voter ID law that is the toughest in the nation, and called “absurdly strict” by The New York Times. Not only does Texas unnecessarily limit the kinds of IDs it accepts for voting, it also cherry-picks— famously accepting concealed carry permits but not state-issued student IDs. Before implementing this law, Texas was initially required under

Early voting has been a huge success. Eight states have restricted it, while ten have made it hard for citizens to register.

the Voting Rights Act to get federal approval to make sure that the ID law was not discriminatory. Both the Department of Justice and a federal court blocked the law ahead of the 2012 elections, finding that it discriminated against minority voters. But while the case was awaiting appeal, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires Texas to seek pre-implementation review. Within hours of that decision, Texas moved to implement the law—despite the court’s earlier finding that it was discriminatory.

The law is now being challenged under a different part of the Voting Rights Act (Section 2) and the Constitution, but has already been applied in local and primary elections this year.

If allowed to stand, Texas’s voter ID law could have a substantial impact this November. Uncontroverted expert data presented at trial showed that 1.2 million eligible Texans do not have IDs that would be accepted under the new law. Among registered voters, more than 600,000 lack acceptable ID. The effect on black and Latino voters is disproportionate; Hispanic registered voters are 3.2 times more likely than white voters to lack ID, and black registered voters are 2.3 times more likely to lack ID, according to an expert study.

A weak state program to provide free IDs is unlikely to close this gap before Election Day. As of September, Texas had issued only 279 free IDs and had done virtually no voter education. Even if the ID itself is free, for many people the cost of obtaining the underlying documents necessary to get it is prohibitive. Lifelong voter Sammie Bates testified that it took her a while to save up the $42 needed to order her birth certificate, which she needed to get free ID: “You’re going to put the money where you feel the need is most urgent . … We couldn’t eat the birth certificate, and we couldn’t pay rent with the birth certificate.”

In the low-turnout November 2013 state primary, more than 250 provisional ballots were rejected because the voters failed to present qualifying ID. While most empirical studies show that requiring voter ID has a negative effect on turnout, there aren’t enough

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Suppressing the Right to Vote States with new voting restrictions since the 2010 election

■ Restrictions in

place for 2014

■ Restrictions passed before

2010, or a ballot measure

States with new voting restrictions since the 2010 election

■ Challenge to

a restrictive law

map source: brennan center for justice

■ Challenge to administrative action data yet to estimate with precision the impact the law will have on turnout if it remains in effect—especially since there has never been an ID requirement as strict as Texas’s. We may never find out, depending on what happens in the courts over the next few weeks. Closing arguments in the case challenging the law were made on September 22; a decision could come any day now.

Wisconsin. Unless a court steps in, a strict new voter ID law and cutbacks to early voting are slated to go into effect in Wisconsin for the first time this November. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker played a significant role in pressing these controversial new voting measures, and they could now

22 STATES

have new voting restrictions.

make a difference in his close re-election race this year.

The new voter ID law, which rivals Texas’s as the country’s most restrictive, was previously blocked by multiple state and federal courts, but those decisions were recently lifted, just weeks before the election. By a tie vote, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to re-hear the appeal en banc, with Judge Posner, who famously regretted his vote to uphold Indiana’s ID law, voting to re-hear. With almost no time to prepare or educate voters, and with early absentee voting already under way, this last-minute change could create serious snafus in the election. The thousands of people who have already mailed in absentee ballots have been told that they now need to send in copies of their photo IDs— assuming they have them—or their votes will not count. In addition to the confusion, the law will certainly create problems for the 300,000 eligible Wisconsin voters who do not have IDs acceptable under the new law. In Milwaukee County, the state’s largest, 7.3 percent of white voters, 13.2 percent of African Americans, and 14.9 percent of Latinos lack acceptable IDs. Wisconsin also eliminated weekend early voting, effectively preventing “Souls to the Polls” drives in the state this year. Florida’s experience in 2012 shows that cutting Sunday voting can make a serious dent in turnout; more than 18 percent of Floridians who voted on the last Sunday of early voting in 2008—eliminated in 2012—did not vote at all in 2012, according to an analysis by Professors Paul Gronke of Reed College and Charles Stewart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kansas and Arizona. Voting restrictions have the potential to make a difference in the close gubernatorial and Senate races in Kansas, and in close House races in Arizona this year. Both states now require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, a measure first authored by embattled Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Since January 2013, tens of thousands of voter registrations have been submitted in Kansas without the required documents. There are currently more than 20,000 Kansans

who attempted to register but will not be able to vote this November; many more would have been left out if not for unusual outreach efforts this year.

There are no new numbers in Arizona, but when the state first implemented its requirement in 2005, more than 31,000 applications were rejected for lack of documents, and communitybased voter registration plummeted by 44 percent in the state’s largest county.

Only 11,000 of those applicants were later able to register to vote, and about 20 percent of the remaining 20,000 unsuccessful applicants were Latino.

The laws are currently the subject of two lawsuits, only one of which is likely to be decided before the upcoming election. If voting advocates prevail in that suit, then voters who lack citizenship documentation will be able to register and vote in federal races only.

Florida has long led the country in voting restrictions. Most recently, in 2011, the state cut back on early voting, hampered voter registration drives, and rolled back voting rights for people with past convictions.

While the early voting and voter registration restrictions have been mitigated by court decisions and even a 2013 partial repeal, the 1.5 million Floridians who have completed their sentences and paid their debt to society are still essentially permanently disenfranchised because of changes Governor Rick Scott and his clemency board made to Florida’s rules in 2011.

Scott’s new criminal disenfranchisement rules, which rolled back pro-voter reforms passed by former Governor Charlie Crist, have the potential to make a big difference in this year’s neck-and-neck gubernatorial race between Scott and Crist.

Ohio may not have a close statewide race this year, but its voting shenanigans are always of national concern.

This year, state officials cut back on early voting—stopping all weekend early voting—and eliminated the period of same-day registration popularly known as “Golden Week.” As a federal court recently found, and an appeals court affirmed, these moves could hurt tens of thousands of voters, and disproportionately African Americans. The courts initially blocked these changes for this election, but

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just one day before early voting and Golden Week were scheduled to begin, the five conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated them.

These measures were put in place in response to the chaos and long lines at the polls in 2004; their loss could spell trouble this year. The fight in Ohio is not yet over for 2016.

Arkansas passed one of the new wave of strict voter ID laws last year.

With one of the country’s hottest Senate races in the balance, the law has taken on much greater significance this year. A state court found that the law violates the state’s constitution, which has strong protections for voting rights, but it declined to block the law. The case was heard by the Arkansas Supreme Court, and a decision could come down any day now.

What’s Next?

New voting laws aren’t the only concerns this year. Watch out for politically motivated attacks on groups that register voters, last-minute attempts to purge names off voter rolls, and voter harassment by vigilante groups—all of which have the potential to chill registration and participation. Watch also for widespread confusion and mistakes as a result of all these voting rules changes. And watch out for long lines at the polls, especially in minority communities; despite the uproar in 2012, the country still hasn’t taken key steps to prevent lines.

The courts will be critical in the coming days and weeks. In five key states—Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, North Carolina, and Texas—the voting rules are still up in the air as lawsuits challenging new laws make their way through the courts. In the leadup to the 2012 election, ten courts in seven states blocked, postponed, or mitigated virtually all of the harshest new voting restrictions that were slated to go into effect that year. But that was before the Supreme Court had gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The jury is still out on whether the courts will be as forceful in protecting voting rights this year.

The country needs them to be—or we risk cementing a new pattern of elections marred by discriminatory partisan changes to voting rules.

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Recalled But Not Repaired Why we have millions of cars with unfixed safety recalls—and Germany has none

BY R A C H E L M . C O H E N

O

n May 30, Angela Davidson, her husband Clarence, and their 12-year-old daughter Kira were driving a 2010 Dodge Ram down Highway 15 in California when they heard a loud knock, followed by a popping sound. Seconds later, their truck came to a screeching halt. After seeing smoke rolling into the truck, Angela opened the door to jump out, though one of her legs was quickly burned. Clarence barely had time to get Kira out before the entire truck became engulfed in flames.

The truck kept rolling backwards, causing a brush fire that burned more than three acres before the firefighters could put it out. Highway 15 was closed for almost four hours.

Eleven days earlier, the Davidsons had purchased the Dodge Ram from a CarMax dealer in Irvine; CarMax is the nation’s largest retailer of used cars and trucks. Angela says her family went to CarMax specifically because they advertise that all their vehicles are thoroughly examined, with expert technicians stamping a “Certified Quality Inspection” on each one.

When the Davidsons signed a contract on May 19 and drove their truck off the lot, they believed they had just purchased a safe vehicle for their family. A few days later, they contacted Dodge customer service with a question, and the representative informed them that oh, by the way, there appears to be a July 2013 safety recall issued for the pinion in your truck’s rear axle, and it’s very important to get it fixed right away.

“When I found out it was under recall I was furious,” says Angela. “I just felt like, this is so wrong, why would you guys sell us a car with an open recall like that? I thought of course CarMax would apologize and take the truck back.”

But CarMax—both the Irvine dealer and corporate headquarters— refused to take responsibility and told the Davidsons that it was up to

them to repair their truck. Although the Davidsons then took the car to a local Dodge dealer, which may hold some responsibility for the ultimate explosion, CarMax apparently sold the Davidsons an unsafe vehicle. “How did they know that we wouldn’t be killed the same day we bought it?”

Angela wrote in a draft testimony of the experience. “The answer is, they didn’t know. They just left it up to chance that we would even find out about the safety recall.”

STORIES ABOUT VEHICLES like the

Davidsons’ take on added significance in light of this year’s General Motors scandal, in which the automaker finally recalled nearly 2.6 million cars for an ignition switch defect known to company officials for more than a decade and linked to at least 54 crashes and 13 deaths. But six months after the recall, Automotive News reported that roughly 1 million car owners had yet to contact a dealership to fix their flawed ignition switches, and GM was struggling to track down contact information for many of those people.

In the United States, about one in every six cars on the road, or 37 million vehicles, has an unfixed safety recall. These are not minor problems; in safety recalls, the manufacturer or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has determined that a car or piece of motor vehicle equipment poses an unreasonable risk to safety or fails to meet minimum safety standards. When a recall is in effect, manufacturers are legally obligated to do the repairs for free.

Consumers, however, are not required to fix their car, regardless of the defect’s severity. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the annual recall compliance rate in the United States averages 65 percent.

The latest GM episode is not the first major auto recall crisis to prompt public concern about unrepaired

charlie riedel / ap images

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safety hazards. In August 2000, Ford Motor Company and Bridgestone/ Firestone jointly announced a recall of 6.5 million tires after they linked them to more than 200 deaths and at least 700 injuries. Six years after the recall announcement, however, experts estimated that more than 200,000 faulty tires had yet to be replaced. An investigative reporter in Georgia even found some of the recalled tires still for sale in 2013.

In direct response to the tire recall, Congress passed the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation Act (TREAD).

TREAD established a new early warning reporting system, which requires manufacturers and their suppliers to regularly submit information about possible safety issues to NHTSA . “The TREAD Act represents an important first step towards strengthening our nation’s motor vehicle laws,” President Bill Clinton declared when he signed the bill in 2000. “And its vigorous and

A shopper looks under the hood at a CarMax lot in Merriam, Kansas.

quick implementation will help save lives and prevent injuries.”

But recalls haven’t fallen. In fact, the number hit a new record this past July, with the most vehicles—39.85 million—ever recalled in a single year.

“The problem is only growing,” says Chris Basso, a spokesman for Carfax, a web-based service that tracks the history of every vehicle based on its Vehicle Identification Number (VIN). “We have a recall [compliance] rate that leaves 35 percent of cars unrepaired and that number is likely to go up.”

“I want every vehicle fixed, and I’ve been clear about that all along,” GM chief executive Mary Barra said on CNBC, adding, however, that “ultimately it’s the consumer who makes that choice.”

BUT WHY ARE THE repairs on safety

recalls optional? The risk, after all, is not just to the car owners but also to those who ride with them and others on the road. In light of the public safety

hazard, some countries have decided that it makes little sense for consumers to choose whether or not to repair defects on recalled cars. Germany, for example, makes those repairs mandatory. The German Federal Motor Transport Authority enforces that rule by refusing to renew the vehicle registrations of owners who fail to fix their cars. In 2010, Germany revoked owners’ registration due to outstanding safety recalls more than a thousand times. Consequently, the German annual recall compliance rate is 100 percent. Moreover, although German manufacturers aren’t legally required to bear the cost of the repair as they are in the United States, they do so nearly 100 percent of the time.

This combination of full compliance by the customer and full cost paid by the manufacturer creates an economic incentive for German car companies to build better cars the first time around.

“There is a popular saying in Germany: Quality is if the customer comes back—

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not the product,” says Stephan Immen, a spokesman for the German transport authority. “The one responsible for the product knows what it means and acts corresponding to that.”

The United States could follow Germany’s example and make car registration renewal contingent on auto recall completion. Such a policy would now be easy to carry out because DMVs can check each car’s VIN at the time of registration. Some states are already doing this successfully for energy emission standards. In California, if a vehicle owner fails to respond to an energy emission recall notice or the car fails to meet the state standard, the owner’s registration renewal will be denied until the repair is complete.

Organizations like the Center for Auto Safety favor applying this same concept to auto safety recalls.

While taking time out of one’s busy life to get a car repaired isn’t something people are excited to do, states typically give owners thirty to sixty days to get it done, and in these cases, the owners have to pay for the cost of the emissions repair themselves.

In contrast, if a similar system were applied to auto safety recalls, the repairs would be done at the manufacturer’s expense. Of course, giving up one’s car, even for just a few hours, may cause frustration and anxiety— often to the point where not fixing the car feels like the more sensible option.

But manufacturers already sometimes provide free rental or loaner vehicles to individuals while their car is being repaired. GM recently offered this option to consumers who need to fix their car’s defective ignition switch.

Some auto safety reformers hope that small policy changes—like using particularly urgent language in the mailed notice letters—will motivate more owners to fix their cars. “Some manufacturers send pablum [recall notices], so people don’t really think they’re that important,” says Joan Claybrook, a veteran auto safety advocate who headed NHTSA from 1977 to 1981. “NHTSA has the authority to review those letters before they go and make sure they say ‘Alert! Alert!’”

Others have tried to raise the recall compliance rate by hiking penalties for irresponsible manufacturers. One

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bill introduced in Congress would require key management officials to disclose serious dangers with their products or face a fine and up to five years in prison. Another would require manufacturers to submit accident reports to federal regulators, who

would need to make those documents immediately available to the public.

And a third would eliminate the cap on civil fines—now $35 million—that the Department of Transportation can levy on automakers for failing to report known defects.

The sponsors of these measures hope that a combination of harsher manufacturer penalties and heightened efforts to disseminate information to the public will lead, eventually, to safer roads. But they have shied away from the most direct approach: making registration renewal dependent on getting the safety defects repaired.

The battle over two more-limited measures—requiring recall repairs in used cars and rental cars—suggests where the political problems lie.

RENTAL CARS PRESENT what might

seem to be an easy case for auto recall reform. After all, the rental car companies should be concerned about protecting their reputation for quality and the value of their fleets. But until recently, rental car companies could and would lease cars that were subject to safety recalls. In 2004, sisters Raechel and Jacqueline Houck, 24 and 20 respectively, rented a Chrysler PT Cruiser from an Enterprise

News video of the rental car crash that killed the Houck sisters in 2004

Rent-A-Car dealer. This model had been recalled a month earlier after experts realized that the steering hose could leak and cause a fire. But the women were unaware because rental companies aren’t legally required to disclose safety recall information to customers. Driving down Highway 101 in northern California, the Houck sisters’ rental car caught fire and hit an oncoming tractor-trailer; they died instantly. After the accident, Enterprise tried to settle the scandal quietly, with a $3 million offer in exchange for the family’s confidentiality. The Houcks rejected the proposal and have been leading consumer safety efforts since.

Rental companies at first adamantly opposed changing their lenient recall policies, but activists and legislators continued to apply pressure.

As a result, the four largest companies—accounting for 93 percent of the rental car market—now pledge not to rent vehicles that are subject to a safety recall.

But consumer groups insist that without a law requiring recall repairs, individuals are forced to just trust rental companies to abide by their public commitments. Thus reformers are fighting for the passage of a Senate bill, the Raechel and Jacqueline Houck Safe Rental Car Act, which would bar rental car companies from renting recalled vehicles to consumers. Even the American Car Rental Association, the policy voice representing the rental car industry, now supports the legislation.

But some powerful groups have worked hard to prevent the bill from becoming law. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the auto industry’s trade association, has refused to support the bill on the grounds that “it would give rise to a myriad of anti-consumer impacts” like increased rental costs for consumers. The real reason, though, is a concern that such a law would expose carmakers to lawsuits.

“If Avis or Hertz has to take a car out of service for a week to get it fixed, particularly if it’s subject to a recall and the repair is not available, the rental companies may be looking at a car being out of service for three

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months,” says Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. “The auto companies are fearful that if this bill goes through they will be sued by the rental companies for the loss of use.”

The powerful National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), representing 16,000 new-car and -truck dealerships with about 32,000 domestic and international franchises, also opposes requiring rental companies to get defective cars fixed, arguing that the bill fails to differentiate one recall from another. (NHTSA does not distinguish recalls.) NADA says rental companies should only agree not to lease or sell defective vehicles if manufacturers issue “Do Not Drive” letters for recalls they deem to be the most serious. Rosemary Shahan, executive director of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety (CARS), says this is a cheap rhetorical trick because it is “extremely rare” for a manufacturer to voluntarily issue “Do Not Drive” letters—getting a company to issue a recall notice is hard enough as it is.

NADA’s political power also helps explain why Congress hasn’t passed a used car safety bill—a version of the Safe Rental Car Act, but for used cars.

In California, a bill—S.B. 686—was introduced in 2013 that would have prohibited auto dealers from selling recalled used vehicles to consumers. Statewide polling revealed that 88 percent of Californians backed this policy. Angela Davidson testified about her CarMax experience at an S.B. 686 hearing in June. But the California New Car Dealers Association, CarMax, and others managed to kill the bill. Activists are now considering a 2016 California ballot initiative, but gathering enough signatures to qualify could cost nearly $1.5 million.

NADA insists publicly that increasing financial penalties for manufacturers who delay recall notices, rather than barring dealers from selling unsafe vehicles, would “better result in consumer safety.” But dealers, like manufacturers, are no doubt worried that new legislation would hurt their ability to sell cars, and consequently cut into their profit margin.

The recall problem is compounded

by the growing shortage of qualified mechanics and technicians able to diagnose issues and make the necessary repairs. According to the Auto Care Association, demand for auto technicians has outstripped supply since 2010, and the nation is short about 90,000 mechanics. One of the reasons Germany has done so well in retaining its manufacturing base is its investment in vocational educational programs. Germany’s ability to produce high-quality cars—and to fix them when problems arise—is undoubtedly linked to its strong commitment to train people to build, maintain, and repair them.

WITHHOLDING CAR registrations

The United States could follow Germany’s example and make car registration renewal contingent on auto recall completion.

Such a policy would now be easy to carry out.

makes the most sense as a way to raise compliance with safety recalls, but other alternatives have also surfaced to fix the unfixed-vehicle problem.

Shahan says, “First, we’ve got to focus on things that don’t penalize the consumer who didn’t make the defective product.” CARS supports legislation requiring DMVs to issue recall warnings when vehicle registration notices get sent in the mail. Car insurance companies could also help by sending reminder notices to customers when they see evidence of an outstanding safety recall. “What we’ve found is that the reason a lot of the unfinished recalls are not done is because the consumer doesn’t know about it,” says Ditlow. Research shows that newer cars are repaired in higher numbers than older cars, so the sooner a recall is announced and the sooner the owner learns about it, the greater chance there is that it will actually be repaired.

This past February, NHTSA announced that it would institute a new mandatory label to help owners clearly identify recall mailings. But relying on the mail is proving increasingly difficult, as owners change addresses or hand off their cars, and the DMV often lacks reliable, updated records.

In light of these challenges, NHTSA and manufacturers are exploring new ways to reach vehicle owners through such means as text messaging, mobile apps, and emails. But some auto safety advocates worry about the digital divide. “Not everyone has access [to the Internet],” says Shahan, who also says

that government agencies need to do more to reach people who speak languages other than English.

DESPITE THE POLITICAL hurdles,

momentum is building for more substantial auto recall reform. In April, the Obama administration recommended that Congress ban the sale and rental of unfixed recalled vehicles.

Then this summer, New York City became the first city to prohibit the sale of recalled used cars. Jay Rockefeller, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, also recently introduced legislation that would give NHTSA new authority to order unsafe vehicles off the road, rather than merely suggesting they get repaired. His bill, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 2014, would also bar the sale of unrepaired used cars.

In the public policy world, there are a lot of intractable problems for legislators, activists, and reformers to tackle. Unfixed auto safety recalls are not one of them. This is a problem we can solve. It is not a fantasy to imagine a decent system that helps vehicle owners expediently take care of their safety problem with as little inconvenience as possible, so millions of unsafe cars are no longer on the road. It may take several steps; perhaps dealing with rental cars first, then used cars, and then all cars. But eventually, we could see an improvement in public safety and perhaps even higher-quality automotive manufacturing.

Auto safety reform has produced some of the most important public health advances in the last halfcentury; the advent of seat belts, airbags, and drunk-driving legislation has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Each time the government took steps to tighten safety regulation, the auto industry argued that the proposed changes were too costly, unfair, or futile. But the changes have been accepted, and hardly anyone wants to go back. The poll showing 88 percent of Californians favoring the Safe Rental Car Act ought to encourage politicians to tap into the public support for reform. As Shahan says, “These days, there isn’t much that polls at 88 percent.”

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T HE C ON V ERS AT I ON

Jamelle Bouie and Ben Jealous

W

hile the election of Barack Obama as president may have seemed to some to herald a new era in American race relations, the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, made clear that one of the venerable flash points in race relations—the police (or in the case of Sanford, self-appointed police) killings of young black men— is very much still with us. Discriminatory police treatment of African Americans remains one of the hardiest perennials in American life, as the “stop-and-frisk” tactic that New York’s police force employed against young blacks until just last year made clear.

During the past half-century, police violence against African Americans—at once, both grotesque and routine— sparked two great Los Angeles riots and other instances of civil unrest. In recent years, the protests against these police killings have taken the form of movements to reform police practices and change the nature of police training, as well as the composition of the police forces themselves.

These movements, however, have yet to engender a nationwide call for police reform. In the following conversation, Ben Jealous and Jamelle Bouie discuss what it would take to reshape America’s police departments and curtail the unprompted police killings that beset us still.

Ben Jealous, the former president and CEO of the NAACP, is a partner at Kapor Capital and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Jamelle Bouie, a former writing fellow and staff reporter at the Prospect, is a staff writer at Slate covering politics, policy, and race. —HAROLD MEYERSON

Jamelle Bouie: I’m still very focused on the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, and St. Louis County, though it’s receded in the public mind somewhat. And not just the protests and the demonstrations, or the broader specter of police militarization. In all of my writing and speaking on the events there, I keep coming back to the experiences of the young men and women I spoke to.

Everyone—everyone—could recall a recent encounter with the police, and almost everyone could point to a friend, or a cousin, or a spouse, or a sibling who was harassed by law enforce-

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ment. Even knowing the racial disparities in police contact, it was astounding to see, in person, a community all but occupied by police.

With all of that said, here’s my question: How normal is all of this? Compared to ten or fifteen years ago, are we looking at a worse relationship between young black people and police, or is this—as bad as it is—an improvement over the past? And related to this, one thing I noticed in Ferguson was the extent to which young women were as vocal about their encounters with the police as young men, which is a perspective

we don’t always get in these conversations. In fact, I tend to think that the broader response to Ferguson and similar events would be different if the faces of the unrest were women.

What are your thoughts?

Ben Jealous: When I was a young man, it was Rodney King. When I was a young professional, it was Amadou Diallo. Now I’m raising my son and daughter, and it’s Ramarley Graham, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and so many other cases we only pay attention to for a moment—like John Crawford III, the father of two who was shot by police in an Ohio Wal-Mart last month.

The sad fact is that this problem will not get bet-

Bouie

Jealous

ter by itself. We must be both more aggressive and smarter in our advocacy.

The situation in Sanford, Florida, improved because activists insisted on justice for Trayvon Martin and also insisted on a reorganizing of the police department, including firing the police chief.

In a broader sense, if we want to change the situation across the country, we need to be focused on removing not only officers with patterns of racial

abuse, but officers who are abusive, period. While it may be interesting to talk about the odd Klan member on the police force in a small Southern town, the much greater and more immediate problem is that we have too many former schoolyard bullies working as police officers. We need to be focused on removing officers who have patterns of explicit and implicit bias, but we also need to be focused on ensuring that people who are prone to abusive and violent behavior do not become officers in the first place.

We also need to adopt, at long last, meaningful national standards for use-offorce training for all police officers. While departmental standards vary widely throughout the country, the most common standard is that officers are trained on use of force exactly once in their careers: for eight hours on one day at the end of their training at police academy. In England, on the other hand, all officers are trained at least regularly throughout their careers.

Regarding young women, I’m very glad that you raised the question and encourage you to dig more. In the 20-plus years that I’ve worked investigating patterns of police abuse and organizing communities to create a mutually beneficial relationship between communities and police, it has repeatedly struck me that we spend too little time talking about the ways in which our girls and young women are abused by the very officers who have sworn to respect and protect them. I think of the righteous battle against then-Mayor Bloomberg’s massive racial profiling

program known as “stop and frisk,” in which dozens of young women had been stopped and physically mistreated by police in ways that can only be described as unnecessary and humiliating, and left many feeling as if they had been physically assaulted or sexually violated.

In New York City, we made a point of lifting up and giving voice to those women’s stories, and that made a difference. It’s important that concerned journalists search out and give voice to their stories too.

Jamelle Bouie: One thing I want to zero in on: You said, “We need to be focused on ensuring that people who are prone to abusive and violent behavior do not become officers in the first place,” and that “we also need to adopt, at long last, meaningful national standards for use-of-force training for all police officers.”

An odd thing about the public dialogue on policing is how we treat weapon discharge. Obviously, there are times when an officer needs to use his or her weapon, but in most cases, using a weapon isn’t necessary. You could even say firing a weapon represents a failure of training—ideally, the typical officer would never have to unholster his or her sidearm.

Instead, we tend to talk about officer shootings as some inevitable fact of life, like the sunlight or the wind.

Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time reading and exploring education policy, and specifically, how we train and evaluate teachers. If teachers were, say, graduating failing elementary school classes at the rate that police were shooting people— and if there were absolutely no accountability, as is the

charlie riedel / ap images

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case with many police departments—we’d have a national outrage. In fact, we have a national outrage over teacher performance right now, even though teacher failure is likely less pervasive than police shootings.

All of that is to say I think you’re absolutely right. As with teachers, we need to recruit the right kinds of people. Nearly half the states don’t require psychological screening for police applicants, nor are there any national standards for police screenings. Given the degree to which good policing requires a sound head, this is just astounding.

It would be as if we didn’t check teacher applicants for criminal charges, or let them lead classrooms without any certification. The same goes for national standards for use-of-force training—we require teachers to get regular certifications, we should do the same for police officers.

And yet, plenty of Americans can muster outrage for bad classroom performance, but shrug when it comes to police shootings and bad conduct. Do you have any thoughts on what’s behind this? Do you think there’s anything particular about the police that creates a certain complacency (or even hostility) around ideas for reform, at least among some parts of the public?

Ben Jealous: I’m not sure that I accept the premise of your question. Clearly, many more children are failed by schools every year than are killed by police.

And while school failures and police misconduct are both tragedies, they are far from comparable.

Moreover, it’s important to always keep in mind that police officers do

very tough jobs with very little recognition, and the majority of them succeed in helping to keep all of us safer. At one point in my life I sat with a 30-plusyear veteran of the force after the first time he had to shoot a suspect. Even though the suspect was in the midst of an armed robbery and the officer only wounded him, I saw the ways that the action tore into the officer’s soul and forced him to secondguess himself. This officer was a former Green Beret who had succeeded in not having shot anybody since the Vietnam War. Watching him react and seeing the toll that it took, I know that his decision to shoot was not one he made lightly.

That said, the issue here is a distinct minority of officers who are prone to use deadly force. Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, who co-founded the Center for Policing Equity at UCLA, has researched why police officers act aggressively toward black men. He showed that while racism is an important factor, officers can also be influenced by what they perceive to be threats to their masculinity. In fact, he showed that more than 80 percent of incidents involving police use of deadly force were triggered by this kind of perceived threat. Predilection toward this kind of behavior is the kind of thing you can detect prior to giving someone a badge and a gun. As you said, we should make psychological screening a standard procedure in police departments across the country.

I do agree with your conviction that we need a true national movement on this issue if we’re going to

eliminate the scourge of unnecessary police killings and other forms of abusive policing. I’ve been part of many local efforts across the country, but as the tragedies in Ferguson; Sanford, Florida; Beavercreek, Ohio; and so many other places remind us, this problem is national in scope and will ultimately require a strong federal response to solve at scale.

Jamelle Bouie: Understood. I don’t think I was trying to directly compare failed children to police shootings, as much as I was trying to say that both are public problems stemming from public institutions, and that if we had a similar level of failure among teachers as we do among police, we’d see national concern, if not panic.

In any case, Dr. Goff’s study is interesting, especially in what it implies about the role of racism in determining perceived threats to masculinity. If an individual has internalized ideas about black criminal

aggression, then even if this person isn’t outwardly prejudiced or holds consciously negative attitudes toward blacks, he might react more harshly to a black person challenging his authority than a white one.

I have one last question, and it relates to your final point: What kind of strong federal response would it take to make headway on this problem? Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department has been admirably aggressive on these issues— it’s investigating the shootings in Ferguson, Missouri, and Beavercreek, Ohio—but that’s just one part in a broader effort. What else can the federal government do?

Ben Jealous: Three things come to mind.

First, Congress should treat this recent spate of police shootings and the ongoing trends as a national emergency and pass national standards for use of force, and use-of-force training.

Second—and perhaps more achievable given the current state of Congress— the DOJ and the White House should examine all possibilities of achieving those same ends through their existing powers. The DOJ should also issue best practices guidelines on the selection and retention of local, state, and federal-level law enforcement officers—guidelines that would include the sort of screening or personality testing that we spoke

about earlier, which would work to weed out those who harbor any form of bias or other personality problems that might contribute to their abusing or even killing any of the fellow Americans they are supposed to protect.

Third, there are other, broader steps that the federal government can and should take to re-orient police officers more generally.

It could increase federal support for communityoriented policing. It could create the type of sentencing commission used by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal to reduce his state’s addiction to incarceration. If we want to get more specific, the DOJ could publish a report called “The Case for Less Incarceration,” which would essentially retract the misguided “The Case for More Incarceration” released by George H.W. Bush’s Justice Department in 1992. The report would embody the philosophy of reform embraced in recent years by the governors of Texas, New York, and Georgia, each of which is on a path toward less incarceration, smaller prisons, and, let’s hope, a different relationship between the local and state police departments, communities of color, and poor communities in general.

The DOJ’s “pattern or practice” investigation in St. Louis is an important first step, but the time has come for us to recognize that this problem isn’t particular to a given city or metro area at a specific point in time. It’s a problem that has plagued our nation for a long time.

Any true solutions will need to be calibrated to the actual scale of the problem at hand.

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

Hope and pessimism have defined two traditions of American thinking about race.

Fully acknowledging recent setbacks, the author makes the case for the tradition of hope.

BLACK AMERICA’S

Ferguson, Missouri, August 18, 2014: Duane Merrells walks with an upside down protest flag.

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PROMISED LAND Why I am Still a Racial Optimist B Y R A ND A L L K ENNEDY

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

NN

The racial front is the site of especially keen disappointment. In a 2013 survey pegged to the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, the Pew Research Center found that less than half (45 percent) of all Americans agreed that the country had made “a lot” of progress toward racial equality during the previous half-century. Among blacks, only 32 percent shared the same view. That dourness stems in part from persistent hard times. The economic meltdown that accompanied Obama to the White House (and probably played a major role in his initial election) devastated the earnings and assets of black Americans. Since his election, they have not recouped their losses in what has only been a tepid recovery tipped in favor of the haves. Adding to the unhappiness is anger at the recalcitrance Obama has faced since the outset of his administration, a resistance mainly from Republicans that many observers believe is substantially fueled by racism.

Slumping morale among blacks, however, is attributable to more than frustration with Obama’s enemies; it also reflects frustration with the president himself.

Although the overwhelming majority of politically active blacks supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 and continue to rally behind him defensively, an appreciable number feel let down. They maintain that he has been altogether too fearful of being charged with racial favoritism and has done too little to educate the public about the peculiar racial hazards that African Americans routinely face.

Beneath the malaise is a deep current of racial pessimism that has a long history in American and African American thought. Pessimists believe that racial harmony predicated on fairness is not part of the American future. They posit that the United States will not overcome its tragic racial past. They maintain that blacks are not and cannot become members of the American family (even with a black family occupying the White House).

They believe that the United States is a white nation that will always be governed on behalf of white folk.

For pessimists, the Obama presidency is no sign of

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racial transcendence; to the contrary, it is a demonstration of the intractability of American pigmentocracy.

For them, the Obama ascendancy shows that in order to rise to the top of American politics, a black politician must be willing to forgo substantively challenging the racial status quo (though he is allowed to cavil about it rhetorically). For them, the Obama administration simply mirrors the racial diversification of an existing order in which a relatively small sector of upper-crust blacks prosper while the condition of the black masses stagnates or deteriorates—the consequence of a misbegotten theory of racial trickle-down. For them, the Obama era is littered with bitter incongruity: While a black man is commander-in-chief, Michael Brown and thousands like him are stalked, harassed, brutalized, and occasionally killed in Ferguson-like locales across America.

The pedigree of black racial pessimism is impressive.

In its ranks one finds such figures as Henry McNeal Turner, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Randall Robinson, and the extraordinary W.E.B. Du Bois. One encounters Frederick Douglass declaring in 1847, “I cannot have any love for this country … or for its Constitution. I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible, and its Constitution shriveled in a thousand fragments.” In that tradition, one also finds Derrick Bell, professor of law at Harvard, teaching in the 1990s that the United States is irredeemably imprisoned by its past, that “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society,” and that “black people will never gain full equality in this country.”

The tradition of black racial pessimism has its white counterpart. According to Thomas Jefferson, “The two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”

Alexis de Tocqueville doubted that “the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing,” but believed “the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere.” According to Abraham Lincoln, differences between blacks and whites “will

p h o t o p r e v i o u s pa g e : c h a r l i e r i e d e l / a p i m a g e s

ot so long ago, black Americans were giddy witnesses to what many regarded as a miracle. Election night, November 4, 2008, seemed to be a millennial turning point as a majority of Americans entrusted an African American with the nation’s highest office and greatest powers. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” Barack Obama declared, “… tonight is your answer.” Against the backdrop of that high, a downturn was inevitable. But what many blacks are feeling now is more than a correction; it is depression.

g a r v e y, m u h a m m a d , d u b o i s , m a lc o m x : l i b r a r y o f c o n g r e s s ; b e l l : d av i d s h a n k b o n e

forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

But the pessimists, black and white, have not been the only influence on American thought about the prospects for racial progress. Arrayed against them are optimists who contend that blacks are (or can become) members of the American family and insist that racial harmony bottomed on fairness is attainable. This, in fact, has been the predominant tradition among blacks.

Its adherents include Booker T. Washington, Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Mary McLeod Bethune, Jesse Jackson, and John Lewis (joined by whites such as the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Presidents Lyndon Johnson

tional racial discrimination in major domains of the public sphere. In this society, no effort is made to rectify the oppressive consequences of past racial misconduct because, it is argued, trying to do so is futile, unfair to those innocent of past wrongdoing, and conducive to the perpetuation of race-mindedness. This view has been propounded vigorously in the legal writings of Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, mainly in critiques of affirmative action. Chief Justice John Roberts, also a champion of this view, expressed it epigrammatically when, abjuring a race-conscious plan for school integration, he quipped that the best way to stop racial discrimination is to stop racially discriminating—no matter whether the aim is to assist or oppress a vulner-

and Bill Clinton). The most memorable spokesman for the optimistic tradition was Martin Luther King Jr. On April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, he told his followers to take heart because he knew that, eventually, they would overcome the obstacles they faced. He knew this because he had “been to the mountaintop” and glimpsed the Promised Land, though he might not make it there himself.

King was vague, however, about the Promised Land’s boundaries and topography. He had famously spoken of a nation where individuals will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Yet that formulation is popular partly because it is open to contending interpretations. Is it a condemnation of all racial distinctions? Or is it a condemnation only of invidious racial distinctions? Is it meant to posit a rule of non­ discrimination that should go into effect immediately even at the cost of barring efforts to rectify past racial wrongdoing? Or is it meant to posit a rule of nondiscrimination that should go into effect only after the consequences of past wrongdoings have been ameliorated?

These questions underlie the debate that has been raging for decades over competing conceptions of the racial Promised Land. In one conception, the Promised Land is a society henceforth substantially free of inten-

able group. Under this conception, we enter the racial Promised Land when racial discrimination is a negligible feature of social life, even if the vestiges of racial subordination in the past are evident and consequential.

Let’s call this model of racial justice the conservative conception of the racial Promised Land.

The progressive conception of the racial Promised Land is more ambitious. It envisions two essential landmarks. The first is the requirement of the conservatives that invidious racial discrimination be reduced to a negligible influence. The second condition is that the vestiges of past discrimination—the racial gaps that so dramatically scar the social landscape—be erased. Pursuant to the progressive perspective, we will reach the racial Promised Land when blackness is no longer a uniform that, holding other variables steady, signals that its wearer bears a notably higher risk than whites of premature death, impoverishment, unemployment, incarceration, victimization by criminality, homelessness, police harassment, and similar afflictions. Today, one can go into a hospital, visit the ward for newborns, and make accurate estimates about the babies’ varying life trajectories on the basis of their racial identities. When accurate estimates of this sort are no longer possible, progressives contend, we will have reached the racial Promised Land.

THE PESSIMISTS: Henry McNeal Turner, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Randall Robinson, and Derrick Bell

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

Why? I am hopeful first and foremost because of the predominant trajectory of African Americans—a history that John Hope Franklin framed with the apt title From Slavery to Freedom. In 1860, four million African Americans were enslaved while another half-million were free but devoid of fundamental rights in many of the jurisdictions where they lived. In 1860, the very term “African American” was something of an oxymoron because the Supreme Court had ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that no black, free or enslaved, could be a citizen of the United States. But within a decade, the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established birthright citizenship and required all

testers who meet different fates when they seek to buy automobiles, rent housing, get jobs, or obtain loans. And then there are the lessons of everyday life that suggest forcefully that in crucial interactions with police officers, prosecutors, judges, and other authorities armed with discretion, outcomes differ, all too often, depending on the race of the person being assessed. It is difficult to imagine that the dismal train of events surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown would have been identical had they been white.

Even more distant is the progressive conception of the racial Promised Land. In practically every key index of well-being, a chasm separates the circumstances in which whites and blacks typically find themselves. The income gap separating blacks and whites widened from about $19,000 in the late 1960s to about $27,000 in 2011. The wealth gap increased from $75,000 in 1984 to $85,000 in 2011. Blacks are nearly three times more likely to live in deep poverty than whites. Black men are six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated. And on. And on. And on.

We have failed to reach the racial Promised Land in either its conservative or its progressive definition. With respect to both of these destinations, our society remains far afield. Still, I put myself in the optimistic camp.

states to accord all persons due process and equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited states from withholding the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

People who had been sold on the auction block as youngsters helped to govern their locales as public officials when they were adults. In 1861, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi resigned from the United States Senate to join the Confederate States of America, which he led as president. In 1870, Hiram Revels, the first black member of Congress, occupied the seat that Davis abandoned.

The First Reconstruction was overwhelmed by a devastating white supremacist reaction. But the most fundamental reforms it established proved resilient, providing the basis for a Second Reconstruction from the 1950s to the 1970s. During that period, too, the distance traveled by blacks was astonishing. In 1950, segregation was deemed to be consistent with federal constitutional equal protection. No federal law prevented proprietors of hotels, restaurants, and other privately owned public accommodations from engaging in racial discrimination. No federal law prohibited private employers from discriminating on a racial basis against applicants for jobs or current employees. No federal law effectively counteracted racial disenfranchisement. No

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bethune, mar shall, wilkins, jack son, king: libr ary of congress

THE OPTIMISTS: Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama

Some observers insist that what I have dubbed the conservative model of the racial Promised Land is at hand or at least nearby. They maintain that, for the most part, we have overcome. They proclaim “Mission Accomplished” or at least mission near-accomplished.

This is mistaken. Intentional invidious racial discrimination constitutes a force in American life that is far from negligible. It is a substantial headwind that blacks and other racial minorities face in many key areas, including housing, finance, employment, criminal justice, electoral politics, and markets for romance and marriage. There is a library of empirical literature establishing this fact beyond sensible controversy—studies based on similarly situated but racially disparate

federal law outlawed racial discrimination in private housing transactions. In contrast, by 1970 federal constitutional law thoroughly repudiated the lie of separate but equal. The 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade racial discrimination in privately owned places of public accommodation and many areas of private employment. The 1965 Voting Rights Act provided the basis for strong prophylactic action against racial exclusion at the ballot box. The 1968 Fair Housing Act addressed racial exclusion in a market that had been zealously insulated against federal regulation. None of these interventions were wholly successful. All were compromised. All occasioned backlash. But the racial situation in 1970 and afterwards was dramatically better than what it had been in 1950 and before.

Hamer and Rosa Parks, Julian Bond and Bob Moses, Medgar Evers and Bayard Rustin, Viola Liuzzo and Vernon Dahmer—and countless other tribunes for racial justice—have not been expended for naught. The facts of day-to-day life allow blacks to sing more confidently than ever before James Weldon Johnson’s magnificent hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black National Anthem: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us Facing the rising sun of our new day begun Let us march on till victory is won.

The belief that we can overcome makes more realistic the possibility that we shall overcome. Optimism gives buoyancy to thinking that might otherwise degenerate into nihilism.

Today, at a moment when progress has stalled, we need to recall how dramatically and unexpectedly conditions sometimes change. Until recently who’da thunk it possible for the president to be an African American? In the 1980s, I used to ask law students how long affirmative action programs ought to last.

Champions of such programs, seeking to ensure their longevity, would say that affirmative action would be needed until the country elected a black president.

That reply would elicit appreciative laughter as listeners supposed that that formula would preserve affirmative action for at least a century. But then along came Barack Obama and with him the remark that soon became a cliché: “I never thought that I’d live to see a black president.”

Obama’s election is much more than a monument to one politician’s talent and good fortune. Changes in public attitudes, law, and custom have clearly elevated the fortunes of African Americans as individuals and black America as a collectivity. Hard facts may give plausibility to the pessimistic tradition, but they make the optimistic tradition compelling. Despite the many wrongs that remain to be righted, blacks in America confront fewer racist impediments now than ever before in the history of the United States. The courage, intelligence, persistence, idealism, and sacrifice of Fannie Lou

My optimism involves more than a sociological prediction. I am also swayed by my intuition regarding which of these hypotheses—the pessimistic or the optimistic—will do the most good. Hope is a vital nutrient for effort; without it, there is no prospect for achievement. The belief that we can overcome makes more realistic the possibility that we shall overcome.

Optimism gives buoyancy to thinking that might otherwise degenerate into nihilism, encourages solidarity in those who might otherwise be satisfied by purely selfish indulgence, invites strategic planning that can usefully harness what might otherwise be impotent indignation, and inspires efforts that might otherwise be avoided due to fatalism.

On Election Day 1996, exit polling showed General Colin Powell beating President Bill Clinton by a comfortable margin. But Powell was not Clinton’s opponent.

Senator Bob Dole was. Powell had considered seeking the Republican Party nomination but declined in the end to do so. Before he made that decision, polls suggested that he could win the nomination and the general election, but friends were skeptical. Powell recalls that Earl Graves, the publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, told him, “Look, man … [w]hen [white voters] go in that booth, they ain’t going to vote for you.” Maybe Graves was correct. Real voting might have produced different

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

results from the polls. Furthermore, whereas the actual candidates had suffered a year of merciless scrutiny on the campaign trail, Powell on Election Day was a mere hypothetical candidate who suffered from none of the wear and tear that a presidential contest exacts. At the end of a campaign, the general might not have remained so attractive. Still, Powell’s apparent popularity does provide a basis for conjecturing that America’s readiness to elect a black president had been an unrecognized part of the political landscape for longer than many had appreciated. Powell may well have denied himself the opportunity to make a successful historic leap by being self-defeatingly pessimistic.

A major fear of many blacks is that acknowledging progress will prompt underestimation of racial obstacles

path, a black student who, years later, put Bell’s hypothesis to a test by seeking the highest elected office in the land under the slogan “Yes We Can!”?

That student, of course, was Barack Obama, and his presidency has been the setting for much debate between pessimists and optimists. Some detractors, perhaps the angriest, started from a position of raised expectations. They thought that Obama embodied the “audacity of hope” and that he would somehow bring about sweeping changes. Disappointed, they have expressed themselves in the angry, accusatory rhetoric of betrayal. Obama, Cornel West charges, “posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.” Others condemn Obama but without disappointment. They see their low expectations as having been validated.

That a black man has been master of the White House for the past six years reflects and reinforces a remarkable socio-psychological transformation. If that is “tokenism,” give us more of it. that blacks at every socioeconomic level continue to face.

When Americans are polled about their perceptions of racial affairs, whites are typically more upbeat than blacks. The more affluent they are, the more upbeat white observers tend to be. Inordinately impressed by progress, they all too often prematurely declare victory over racism.

Although complacency nourished by an overly rosy view of racial affairs is a real danger, I stand by my conviction that a clear-eyed assessment favors black optimism. Who, after all, have been the figures most beneficial to blacks? Was it the Martin Delany who decamped for Africa, thinking America to be irremediably racist? Or was it the Martin Delany who returned, recruited blacks for the Union, and participated significantly in Southern politics during Reconstruction?

Was it the pre-1966 Stokely Carmichael who sang “We Shall Overcome” in the splendid early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)? Or was it the post-1966 Stokely Carmichael (later renamed Kwame Ture) whose impatient bitterness helped to destroy the SNCC and rationalize an indulgent exile to Guinea that squandered a substantial talent? Was it my long-time colleague of blessed memory, Derrick Bell, who posited the permanence of racist white dominance?

Or was it a student who rightly admired Professor Bell but eschewed his pessimism and followed a different

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Certain pessimists have maintained that Obama’s election indicated little in terms of “real” racial progress. They even discount the symbolic significance of his ascendancy, stressing his exceptionality. Although he calls himself black, Obama is the offspring of a black African father and a white American mother and is thus distinguished genealogically from most African Americans. Much was made of his Muslim-sounding name. But some observers maintain that popular acceptance of that, too, should be viewed skeptically. It would have signaled more, they argue, had America elected a black person raised in, say, Detroit with a name such as Tyrone Washington or Jamal Jefferson. Pessimists argue that, substantively, the Obama presidency has delivered no more to blacks than would have been delivered by any other centrist-liberal Democrat (say, Hillary Clinton), and that in certain respects the Obama presidency delivered less because Obama sought excessively to prove that he was a president for all Americans and not merely black Americans. They contend that Obama’s blackness was an asset that he used for personal marketing and that the white establishment seized upon for advertising, “The United States cannot sensibly be accused of practicing or condoning racism! It just elected a black president!” Pessimists will now also enlist the horrifying events in Ferguson, Missouri, to reinforce their claim

g e o r g e s i m i a n / h a r va r d l aw s c h o o l

that despite the civil rights movement, antidiscrimination legislation, affirmative action, and the election of Obama, the narrative of race relations in America is a doleful tale—not a march upward from slavery to freedom, but a trek sideways from plantation to ghetto.

What is an optimist in the waning years of the Obama presidency to say in the face of this challenge?

Obama’s election signaled a dramatic, substantive change in racial beliefs and attitudes. In 1960, his victory would have been impossible: Too many whites would have been unwilling to vote for a black candidate—any black candidate—because of doubts about the capacities of anyone of black African ancestry. Recall that there were no black cabinet officers until Johnson appointed Robert Weaver as secretary of housing and urban development in 1966, and no black Supreme Court justices until Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall in 1967. The specter of black intellectual and characterological deficiency stunted the careers of many talented blacks, and still does. That Obama was able to win the presidency—twice—is a sign that rumors of racial inferiority, while still extant, are much diminished in influence.

In thinking about the meaning of Obama, it is important, too, to focus on the special status of the presidency.

The person who occupies that office is not only the head of the executive branch of the federal government, the person who nominates all federal judges, the commanderin-chief of the armed forces, and thus a person with the wherewithal to destroy most, if not all, of humankind. The president is also the nation’s mourner-in-chief, booster-inchief, spouse-in-chief, and parent-in-chief. That a black man has been the master of the White House for the past six years does indeed reflect and reinforce a remarkable socio-psychological transformation in the American racial scene. If that is “tokenism,” give us more of it.

I have emphasized progress that blacks have made in absolute terms: where they stood 50 years ago and where they stand today. But what about the position of blacks relative to whites—those yawning gaps in wealth, income, educational attainment, and risk of imprisonment that have remained unclosed and that have, in some ways, widened even further during Obama’s tenure? There is no use denying that reality. America remains racially stratified and will continue to be long after the Obama presidency.

There is also no use, however, in denying other fac-

ets of the American racial reality. One is a comparative view. In considering the appropriate attitude to adopt toward America—allegiance, for example, or disaffiliation—it is sensible to compare the United States to other divided societies. Negrophobia in America is, alas, all too present. But it pales in comparison with the prejudice against racial, ethnic, religious, and national minorities in many countries around the globe. As bad as the American racial problem is, as urgently as it calls for concentrated attention, its condition is less dire and more encouraging than might be gleaned from an analysis that views the American situation in isolation, divorced from international comparisons.

There is also no good purpose served by ignoring manifestations of progress that display themselves even in heartrending crises. Consider the events in Ferguson.

The killing of the unarmed teenager, the callous inattentiveness to his body, the militarized police response to protest, and the dubious investigation by local authorities of this tragic death display much of what is terrible in American race relations: an atavistic fear of young black men; quick resort to excessive force against African Americans; racial residential separation; black powerlessness that foments resentment; white dominance that encourages contempt; an utter lack of mutual trust.

But the events in Ferguson have also revealed other responses. The federal government took note of what happened and actively involved itself via the president, attorney general, and the director of the FBI. The Ferguson tragedy became the leading news story all over the country. Blacks have not been the only ones calling the police to account and demanding reform. Whites from various walks of life, including right-wing politicians like Rand Paul, have also been doing so. Never in American history, in analogous circumstances, has there been a higher level of interracial empathy.

Overcoming the racial burdens—individual, communal, institutional—that encumber us will take unremitting effort, major deployments of intelligence and imagination, daunting amounts of time, huge expenditures of money, and the resolute conviction that America’s racial affairs can and will improve. Is the uncertain prospect of a better future worth that investment? The lessons of American history and a comparison of our society with others around the world impel me to say yes. I am a racial optimist. Only time will tell whether my faith is wise.

THE AUTHOR: Randall Kennedy sides with the optimists

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On Realism, Old and New With new threats to the peace, it’s more important than ever to be clear about America’s core national interests.

BY J AM E S M ANN

T

hough few people realize it, it was Bill Clinton who first uttered the phrase on which U.S. foreign policy has remained so hopelessly fixated ever since. During his 1996 re-election campaign, striving to describe America’s role in the world, Clinton began to speak of this country as the “indispensable nation.” In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention that year, Clinton proclaimed, “We remain the world’s indispensable nation to advance prosperity, peace, and freedom and to keep our own children safe from the dangers of terror and weapons of mass destruction.”

(Clinton himself apparently got this phrase from historian James Chace and adviser Sid Blumenthal.) The words stuck and became a regular catchphrase for his second-term secretary of state, Madeleine Albright—so much so that many people mistakenly attribute the words to Albright.

“Indispensable nation” was the formulation Clinton put forth to the public. In private, however, he came to hold a different, more modest view of America’s role. Strobe Talbott, his close friend and, eventually, deputy secretary of state, recounted in a memoir how, after leaving the White House, Clinton told Talbott his goal as president had been to prepare America to live in a multipolar world. “I wanted to build a world for our grandchildren to live in where America was no longer the sole superpower, for a time when we would have to share the stage,” said the former president. Talbott asked Clinton why he had never said this while he was president. In an interview for my book The Obamians, Talbott recalled Clinton’s response: “That’s why you’re a wonk and I was president of the United States.

Because it’s political suicide to say, ‘Here is my vision—my vision is that we have to prepare for our children’s or grandchildren’s era when America’s not going to be the top dog.’

I’d have been ridden out of town on a rail!”

It is this duality—this conflict between what American leaders privately recognize and what they feel they have to say—that hobbles American perceptions of the world today.

In public, politicians of both parties feel compelled to return

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again and again to the touchstone of the United States as being “indispensable,” continuing to speak as if this was 1945, after the end of World War II, or 1989, at the end of the Cold War. On November 9, we will observe the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there have been all sorts of changes in the world since then. Yet we remain stuck in the formulations and self-conceptions of these earlier periods.

We seem unable to acknowledge to ourselves that other nations of the world do not always need us as a leader in exactly the same way they did in 1945 or 1989. Moreover, in resolving international crises, other nations have become indispensable to the United States, too—far more than they were in the recent past. Indeed, in some crises, other nations are even more indispensable than is the United States.

In short, America’s view of its role in the world has become downright, well, unrealistic. As Bill Clinton admitted, but only to his friends, we need to find a more realistic sense of the world as it is working today. Call it a different form of realism.

IN TALKING ABOUT FOREIGN policy, the word realism

comes up over and over again. In the loosest street definition of the word, realism boils down to whatever the speaker believes—those who disagree are then labeled “naïve” or “ideological.” Alternatively, the word is mistaken to mean “tough-minded.” For example, in popular terminology, some conservatives called Ronald Reagan a “realist” in dealing with the Soviet Union.

But this usage was doubly inaccurate. It’s not that Reagan was wrong about the nature of Soviet power; it’s that he wasn’t a “realist.” First, his own views and policies changed in the White House, from his early, arms-buildup years to the period when he began to do business with Mikhail Gorbachev. Few on the right remember it now, but from 1986 on, conservatives railed at Reagan’s policies. (Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus once branded Reagan “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”) During the 1988 campaign, George H.W. Bush, then Reagan’s vice presi-

dent, took a position to the right of Reagan on Soviet policy, arguing that Reagan was too willing to believe Gorbachev represented a fundamental change in the Soviet leadership.

Bush’s opposition underscores the second, more important reason that Reagan wasn’t a “realist.” Traditionally in foreign policy, “realism” has had a far more specific meaning. It refers to the school of thought that argues American foreign policy should be devoted to questions of national interest, geopolitics, and balance-of-power concerns, not to questions of values such as political freedom or democracy. The essence of this approach was expressed, in its simplest terms, by the man who came to embody traditional “realism” more than anyone else in American foreign policy: Brent Scowcroft, the national security advisor first to Gerald Ford and then to the senior Bush. What happens inside another country’s borders is none of our business, Scowcroft argued over and over again; what we care about is a nation’s behavior in dealing with the rest of the world.

Scowcroft was merely the most prominent of the many realists who became the dominant force in American foreign policy. He was himself a disciple of Henry Kissinger (who was originally America’s leading realist, but whose thoughts and style are so voluminous, changing, and intensely personalized that by now they defy categorization). And Scowcroft in turn served as friend and mentor to a generation of other senior American officials serving both Republican and Democratic presidents, including Robert Gates and Colin Powell.

that Hillary Clinton recently praised Henry Kissinger’s new book and sought to advertise her close association with him.

With the end of the Cold War, the continuing struggles between liberals and realists endured through the 1990s.

Realists like Scowcroft strongly opposed the idea of military action in the Balkans, while liberals favored the use of force for humanitarian purposes. In one famous confrontation, Albright asked Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Liberal leaders such as Bill Clinton and Albright pressed forward with the expansion of NATO, thus extending military protection to new democratic governments in central Europe, over the opposition of many realists, including a few Democrats.

eric dr aper / ap images

DURING THE COLD WAR, American liberals rarely if ever

identified themselves as realists. In those days, realism was used to justify American support for dictators around the globe, such as the Shah of Iran or Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and for coups against democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende in Chile.

In 1981, when he was vice president, George H.W. Bush, who eventually became another icon of realism, visited Manila and told Marcos, “We love your adherence to democratic principles and to democratic processes.” That remark pointed to another problem with Cold War realism: Ironically, it sometimes caused American leaders to stretch or deny reality. I was personally turned off on the realists in Washington when I served as a correspondent in Beijing.

America’s support for China during the last two years of the Cold War, based on principles of realism and the geopolitical struggle against the Soviet Union, caused American leaders to deny or explain away Beijing’s continuing political repression (and, later, the massive role of the state in its economy).

From the 1970s through the 1990s, Democratic candidates, from Jimmy Carter to Clinton, made it a staple of their campaigns to criticize Kissinger, Scowcroft, and their realist principles. It is a sign of how much things have changed, then,

It was not until a decade ago, at the time of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, that liberals began to identify themselves closely with the realists. Scowcroft and other realists had been the earliest and strongest opponents of that war and, in the process, Scowcroft won widespread praise from Democrats who cast aside their decades of objections to his views. (Amused, he told me during a 2002 interview for my book on Republican foreign policy, Rise of the Vulcans, “I think my views over the last 25 years have changed very little.

Twenty-five years ago, I was a leading hawk. I feel the same way about things, and now I’m a leading dove, apparently.”)

George W. Bush seemed to stigmatize the very notion of idealism, defined as a belief in democratic principles and political freedom, with his repeated assertions—mostly after the invasion, when no weapons of mass destruction were found— that the war was being fought on behalf of such ideals.

After the Iraq War, liberals construed realism to mean

Who’s the Realist? Brent Skowcroft, Colin Powell, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

simply anti-interventionism, even though historically it had meant both much more than that and, occasionally, much less than that. (Remember, Scowcroft and his boss, George H.W. Bush, were willing to mount a military intervention in Panama, where, a year earlier, Reagan had not.) By the time of the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama proclaimed himself to be an admirer of “foreign-policy realism,” citing Scowcroft and Bush 41 as models for the way he would deal with the world.

return to the old style of realism, Secretary of State John Kerry visited Egypt last June and proclaimed that General Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, its leader, “gave me a very strong sense of his commitment” to human rights—the very day before the regime sentenced three reporters from Al Jazeera to jail, amidst its continuing series of crackdowns on dissent.

Back to the future: This was an almost risible evocation of George H.W. Bush’s paean to Marcos’s love of democracy.

OBAMA INDEED STARTED OUT his presidency as a classic

OBAMA’S STRUGGLES RAISE the obvious question: What

realist, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. In 2009, when the Green Movement brought millions of people into the streets of Tehran, he kept a cool distance, trying to avoid doing or saying anything that might get in the way of his negotiating a nuclear agreement with the Iranian regime. He cut back on U.S. funding of programs for democracy and civil society in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt.

En route to her first visit to Beijing, Hillary Clinton told reporters she wouldn’t waste much time trying to talk to Chinese leaders about human rights.

This first, realist phase of the Obama administration lasted for roughly two years. By early 2011, Obama began to branch out in new directions, contrary to the advice of the old realists. Above all, Obama—like countless other people—became swept up in the possibilities of the Arab Spring; he concluded that a new wave of democratic change was sweeping through the Middle East, and that it made no sense to link American policy to the region’s monarchs and dictators. He abandoned Mubarak, in the process infuriating the Saudis (and causing a wave of anxiety in Israel, too). Over the advice of Secretary of Defense Gates, he approved the use of force against Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, eventually forcing him out of office.

At the apex of Obama’s idealist phase, in a speech about the Middle East in May 2011, he announced that American policy would no longer seek to preserve the existing order of authoritarian regimes. It would support reform, he said, adding, “The United States opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region. The United States supports a set of universal rights. And these rights include free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to choose your own leaders, whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus, Sanaa or Tehran.”

But then the Arab Spring came crashing down, hard.

Libya deteriorated into chaos and, worse, civil war broke out in Syria. In Egypt, the generals gave way to a democratically elected government headed by Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, which proved unable to govern and was replaced, in a coup, by the military. In the end, Obama found it easier to do business with the old Egyptian regime in a new incarnation. In a ludicrous

does realism mean these days? By now, virtually all politicians call themselves realists—from Hillary Clinton, with her muscular view of America’s role in the world, to Rand Paul, whose aides tell The Wall Street Journal he’s a realist, not an isolationist. Harvard University’s Stephen Walt, one of the leading academic proponents of realism, advocates a virtual American withdrawal from the Middle East (“It’s time to walk away and not look back,” he wrote last summer)—although the leading real-world practitioners of realism, like Scowcroft and Gates, favor no such thing.

Traditionally, old-line realists called for a foreign policy based on national interest, yet there are today even more disagreements than ever in the past about what those words mean. Is it in America’s national interest to eradicate the development of the new, well-funded, and murderous Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the heart of the Middle East, or, by contrast, avoid another American war that might alienate people throughout the region? Is it in America’s interest to work out an accommodation with a rising China, or to help other Asian countries avoid being dominated by it?

Moreover, in the old days, realists maintained that American foreign policy should ignore considerations like democracy and political freedom. Yet in speech after speech and article after article over the past two decades, practitioners of post–Cold War American foreign policy, such as Secretaries of State Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton, argued that the distinction between national interest and values, between realism and idealism, is a false one. In many of the problems confronting the United States, geopolitical considerations and values go hand in hand—for one reason because most of our allies, like Japan, South Korea, and the nations of NATO, are also democracies. Even Kissinger, in interviews for his recent book, has taken to arguing that the distinction between realism and values is artificial, and that American policy is based on both.

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LET US COME BACK NOW to that Bill Clinton notion of

America as an “indispensable nation,” forged amid the 1990s triumphalism of the end of the Cold War, and to his own private admission that it would be political suicide to acknowledge America was heading into a multipolar world.

I think a start to a new form of realism lies in the simple

awareness that the notion of America as the “indispensable nation”—and all the concomitant formulations about American “leadership”—obscure our ability to understand and deal with a changing world.

This is not to say America should retreat from the world, or should refrain from using its power to seek to influence the course of events around the world. What I mean is that the incessant incantation of American “leadership” and our self-description as “indispensable nation” are, sometimes, less than the full truth—and, more importantly, grate against other nations whose help we need and, in the process, actually undermine the leadership and influence we seek to wield.

Yes, other nations sometimes need our help, and deserve it.

But the fundamental reality we fail to recognize is that they do not need our “leadership” and will not follow it in the same way they did during the Cold War or the decade after it.

This was one of the primary mistakes of the Iraq War, which was, among many other things, a stunning diplomatic failure. Proponents of that war sincerely believed in 2002 that whatever initial objections to the war the nations of Europe and the Middle East might harbor at the outset, their leaders would in the end fall in line behind the United States, as they had during and immediately after the Cold War. But they were wrong again and again.

Turkey would not support an American invasion from its territory. More importantly, many of our old allies, friends, and partners—from France and Germany, to Mexico and Pakistan—refused to support the resolution authorizing force against Iraq at the UN Security Council.

What was the intellectual mistake of those who believed in 2002 and 2003 that once America led, others would follow? They failed to recognize that nations that had sided with American leadership in the Cold War would feel free to operate far more independently, once freed from the fundamental need for American military protection. Yes, these countries might need us, sometimes and in certain ways, but not as much as they used to.

LET’S TAKE ONE REAL-WORLD example where the mumbo

jumbo about America as the “indispensable nation” gets in the way of our comprehension of the world. Consider the past year of crisis in Ukraine.

Far on the outskirts of Berlin, in a place called Karlshorst, is a museum that attracts few American tourists. It is called the Deutsch-Russisches Museum (the GermanRussian museum), left behind after Soviet troops departed from East Berlin two decades ago. Go into it, and you are swept up into one of the most tangled and bloody histories of any two major powers in the world.

Looked at from the United States, the recent upheavals in Ukraine present above all a new confrontation between Washington and Moscow, with (as news stories and columns

regularly remind us) overtones of the Cold War. But from Europe, the recent crisis has also meant, among other things, a new chapter in the long-running epic of Germany and Russia. Ukraine, once the locus of bloody warfare between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, is now the focus of a struggle for influence, trade, and markets in eastern Europe between a rising Germany and a declining Russia.

To be sure, this is not to explain away Vladimir Putin’s behavior. Rather, it is to point out that in determining the course of events in Ukraine, Germany is as “indispensable” as the United States, if not more so. It was the (welcome) decision of a Germany-led European Union to bring in Ukraine that touched off the crisis in the first place. And, because Germany has vastly more trade with Russia than the United States does, it has been Germany that largely determines the course, extent, timing, and scope of economic sanctions against Russia. It is German (and EU) sanctions that Putin worries most about; the United States, with smaller trade, is secondary.

Consequently, the Western official who leads the way in dealing with Putin is not so much Obama as it is German

Brent Skowcroft, realist opponent of foolish wars, told me,“25 years ago, I was a leading hawk. I feel the same way about things, and now I’m a leading dove, apparently.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel. She uses the sanctions as a pressure valve, deciding when to ramp them up a bit more and when to hold back. Germany has its own interests. They are commonly taken to be commercial, and they are, but only partly. Germany has its geopolitical interests, too: It doesn’t want Russia to dominate eastern Europe, yet Germany doesn’t want to do anything that would create long-term instability in the region, either. Germany, at various times, has given crucial support to or has frustrated American policy.

Back in the United States, politicians and commentators drone on and on about America’s “leadership” role in dealing with Ukraine. The problem is the impact that the “indispensable nation” trope has on American policy.

Congress becomes swept up in whether the United States should pass tougher sanctions on Russia than the Europeans—never recognizing that the U.S. sanctions matter less than the European ones do. In fact, unilateral American sanctions could conceivably undermine the cause of tougher action against Putin, if, in passing them, the United States alienates Europe and deters it from taking

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

stronger action on the European sanctions that count.

This same analysis applies elsewhere beyond Ukraine.

Under Obama, the United States has had remarkable success in winning surprisingly strong international backing for sanctions against Iran, seeking to induce it to stop its nuclear weapons program. Yet American critics, and many in Congress, thunder about passing stronger, unilateral American sanctions—failing to understand that Iran is affected more by the international sanctions than the American ones, and that any action that weakens the international coalition also undermines the strength of the American position.

BARACK OBAMA’S GREATEST strength has been that, in

the face of relentless attacks from the political right and from the foreign-policy commentariat, he has, from time to time, been willing to admit to the changes in America’s role in the world, which Bill Clinton acknowledged only in private and only after he left the White House.

Obama has managed, with difficulty, to put together and to work through coalitions of nations, where George

A new form of realism requires us to admit that the notion of America as the “indispensable nation” obscures our ability to understand and deal with a changing world.

W. Bush, in the early years of his presidency, was unable to do so. Of course, sometimes America’s friends and partners don’t do exactly what we want. Whenever this happens, Obama is accused of failing, or of being weak, when in fact the realities are that the United States can’t succeed unilaterally, and that American presidents can’t compel compliance the way they did a half-century ago.

In one of his recent columns, Walt asked, “Is Barack Obama More of a Realist Than I Am?” The answer to that question is no, not in the way Walt defines his own realism.

Obama obviously does not favor American withdrawal from the Middle East, for starters. But yes, in the sense that Obama has been, from the start of his presidency, a realist about America’s role in the world—a role that is still powerful, but also less dominant than it once was.

To be sure, Obama frequently resorts to the old standbys.

In his recent speech announcing military action against ISIL , he declared, “American leadership is the one constant in an uncertain world.” But the recognition that America’s post–World War II role may not last forever also shows up in his ideas and speeches. In his Nobel Prize speech in

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2009, he said, “The United States has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” The verb tense of that sentence caused some jitters in Europe; it seemed to raise the question “What about now or in the future?”

In another first-year speech, he famously declared, “The nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

One of the recurrent themes of Obama’s presidency is that every time he gives voice to this new sort of realism about America’s role in the world, there are howls of outrage.

Take the great 2009 brouhaha over “Greek exceptionalism.”

The phrase “American exceptionalism” did not start with Ronald Reagan. In fact, ironically, the first regular use of the phrase “American exceptionalism” seems to have been in the 1920s, by communists who were concerned that America was immune to socialism. Since then, however, people all over the political spectrum have used the phrase to refer to the belief that the United States is somehow different or special. Reagan himself didn’t throw around the phrase “American exceptionalism” (he was shrewd enough to recognize that a word ending in “-ism” sounded too academic for his audiences)—but others used the words to characterize Reagan’s views. Since that time, politicians on the right have gradually turned the word into a slogan and litmus test, proclaiming that they believe in American exceptionalism and asking if their opponents do.

On Obama’s first trip to Europe, he was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism. He answered, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

That statement seems obvious (and, well, unexceptional), and I have yet to understand what was wrong in saying so. But his line about Brits and Greeks believing in exceptionalism, too, became a staple of years of antiObama attacks. And such attacks have not been confined to the political right. The notion that, in launching military action against Libya, the United States should let French and British warplanes take a large part in the invasion made plenty of sense, and was in the interest of saving American money and preserving its long-term power. Yet the idea of “leading from behind,” the phrase chosen by an Obama administration official to describe this approach, once again caused a furor: It brought up the touchy question of America’s post–World War II role.

Sometimes, it seems as though Obama is speaking in a different language, an idiom that is different from what Americans are used to. It is the language that politicians like Bill Clinton learned to avoid using. And many American reporters and commentators, with the right-wing criticisms of Obama in the backs of their minds, look for new controversies and don’t even try to explain what his words mean. Take the

uproar over Obama’s words in late August as he was preparing to take action against ISIL: “We don’t have a strategy yet.”

That sentence was seized upon again and again as a sign that Obama was clueless, or that his foreign policy was lacking.

It took the columnist Walter Pincus writing in The Washington Post to explain that at the moment Obama was speaking, his administration was in the process of working with other governments in Europe and the Middle East to find a common approach for dealing with ISIL . And so the “we” to which Obama referred meant “the United States and the countries we are talking with.” That made sense; even if the Obama administration knew what it wanted, it hadn’t arrived at a joint strategy with its partners. But in the idiom to which Americans are accustomed, “we” is assumed to mean simply the president and his team, or the administration, or the White House, or perhaps the royal “we”—something that is entirely American, rather than multilateral in nature. This sort of misunderstanding, of course, is not just an illustration of the superficial news coverage of Obama, but also of the public’s resistance to a more circumspect role for the United States, as well as Obama’s failure to communicate his views clearly.

This was, she said, a “New American Moment.” The speech was reminiscent of Henry Luce’s declaration in 1941 that this was “the American century.”

In her travels around the world from 2009 to 2013, Hillary Clinton must have recognized how much the world has changed, even since the 1990s. It is more evident today than two decades ago, in the (private, post-presidential) acknowledgment by Bill Clinton, that the United States is heading for a time when we will have to share the stage, an era when “America’s not going to be the top dog.”

But Bill Clinton also went on to say that anyone broaching that thought might be committing political suicide and “ridden out of town on a rail.” In her own campaign, and even in the White House if she gets there, Hillary Clinton

j. scot t applewhite / ap images

IN THIS NEW SENSE OF American realism, Obama is

ahead of his time, and he is paying a price for it. There will almost certainly be a counter-reaction. Most of the contestants getting ready to run for president in 2016 are already competing with one another to see who can proclaim the greatest devotion to U.S. “leadership” (and to mention as little as possible America’s need for support and help from other countries). In one recent column, Senator Marco Rubio decried the idea that the United States should “walk away from its traditional role as the guarantor of global security,” leaving aside questions of how long the United States will play that role, whether the American people will support it forever, or whether other countries are as willing to go along with it as much as they had in the past.

Nor are such sentiments confined to Republicans.

Hillary Clinton resorts to the “American leadership” and “indispensable nation” phrases as much as any politician in this country. This is not, for Hillary Clinton, merely a matter of slogans; she clearly and deeply believes that America can and should play the same role in the world as it did in 1945 or 1989. When Obama announced the end of American combat operations in Iraq in the summer of 2010, Clinton thought that his speech did not sufficiently address the question of America’s continuing role in the world. So she quickly set out to give a speech of her own, as a corrective to what she saw as Obama’s omission. It became one of the principal statements of her views as secretary of state. “Let me say it clearly: The United States can, must, and will lead in this new century,” she asserted.

will presumably recognize in private the ever-greater need to obtain support from other nations, while always speaking in public of America as playing the same hegemonic role it did in the last half of the 20th century.

Obama has been different, at least at times. With ISIL as the latest example, Obama has resorted to the use of force overseas so often and in so many places, no intelligent person could possibly call him a pacifist or an isolationist.

Yet it has been Obama’s role to be more realistic, to broach in public, however gingerly, the idea that America’s role in the world is changing. That has, in fact, been a hallmark of his foreign policy.

He hasn’t been completely ridden out of town on a rail.

But Obama’s approach to the world does reflect a new form of realism, and in a country accustomed to being told its post–World War II leadership role is an enduring one, his realism has not gone down smoothly.

Reluctant Realist: President Obama conducts a 2010 meeting about the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Marine Gen. James Cartwright, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft in attendance.

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The Seeds of a New Labor Movement SEIU’s David Rolf—virtuoso organizer and mastermind of Seattle’s $15 minimum wage campaign—says labor needs radically new ways to champion worker interests.

I

BY HARO LD M E YE RS O N

f anyone has the right to be upbeat about the prospects of the American labor movement, it should be David Rolf, the president of a Seattle-based long-term care local of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Between 1995 and 1999, while still in his 20s, Rolf directed a campaign that unionized 74,000 home care workers in Los Angeles. It was the largest single unionization since the United Auto Workers organized Ford in 1941. SEIU then sent him to Seattle, where he has nearly quadrupled SEIU’s Washington state membership. Last year, he led the initiative campaign that persuaded voters in SeaTac, the working-class Seattle suburb that is home to the city’s airport, to raise the local minimum wage to $15—the highest in the nation. He also managed to make SEIU’s campaign to organize fast-food workers and raise their pay to $15 the centerpiece of the mayoral race in Seattle proper. Prodded by the fast-food workers, State Senator Ed Murray ran on the promise to raise the local minimum to that level. After Murray was elected mayor, he appointed Rolf to lead the labor delegation on the business–labor task force that would devise the plan for phasing in Seattle’s new minimum. This summer, the city enacted the task force’s recommen-

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dations. The $15 minimum wage is now law.

Over the past 15 years, no American unionist has organized as many workers, or won them raises as substantial, as Rolf. Which makes it all the more telling that Rolf believes the American labor movement, as we know it, is on its deathbed, and that labor should focus its remaining energies on bequeathing its resources to start-up projects that may find more effective ways to advance workers’ interests than today’s embattled unions can.

In early 2012, Rolf attended a national SEIU board meeting in New Orleans, where he heard a presentation from the head of the union’s Louisiana local. The local had had 6,000 mem-

bers a few years earlier, but it had shrunk to 1,200 after the chambers of commerce in cities with which it had had contracts got court injunctions forbidding any such contracts.

“Anti-union injunctions?” Rolf asks incredulously. “Getting a federal law forbidding such injunctions was the No. 1 demand of unions in the 1928 presidential election. Were we back in 1928? Before Norris-LaGuardia [the 1932 federal act that forbade such injunctions in the private sector; the Louisiana local was public sector]? Before the Wagner Act? Before the New Deal? This set me on a quest to figure out what had happened to labor—and what we should do now.”

Leaders of the biggest local unions, Rolf realized, were clustered in a handful of regions where labor, though declining, had not yet disappeared. “If you’re a union leader in Seattle or New York or L.A., you can think things are OK,” Rolf says. “But there goes Wisconsin; there goes Indiana. If right-to-work passing in Michigan isn’t Lenin’s statue coming down in Red Square, I don’t know what is.”

Most labor leaders and activists concur that the union movement is in something close to mortal peril. With Rolf, they believe that the inadequacies of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act), which union-busting employers are able to violate with impunity,

benjamin benschneider / t h e s e at t l e t i m e s

David Rolf has spearheaded some of the most successful labor organizing campaigns of the 21st century, yet he thinks that the labor movement as we know it is on its deathbed.

have made it almost impossible to organize private-sector workers. Unable to grow, labor has also seen its ranks diminished by the offshoring of millions of jobs and the relegation of millions more to the ranks of contingent labor or ostensible self-employment. Today, the percentage of private-sector workers in unions has dropped to a bare 6.7 percent—roughly its level at the beginning of the 20th century, before the advent of a sizable middle class.

“The path to collective bargaining has been shut down in the United States,” says Larry Cohen, president of the Communications

Workers of America (CWA) and head of the AFL-CIO’s Organizing Committee. Where Rolf differs from most of his colleagues is in his belief that collective bargaining—at least, as the nation has known it for the past 80 years— is not coming back. In a paper he distributed to his colleagues in 2012 and in commentaries he wrote for several magazines (including this one), he argued that unions should acknowledge their impending demise—at least in the form that dates to the Wagner Act—and focus their energies and resources on incubating new institutions that can better address workers’

concerns. “The once powerful industrial labor unions that built the mid-century American middle class are in a deep crisis and are no longer able to protect the interests of American workers with the scale and power necessary to reverse contemporary economic trends,” he wrote in his paper. “The strategy and tactics that we’ve pursued since the 1947 TaftHartley Amendments [which narrowed the ground rules under which unions may operate] are out of date and have demonstrably failed to produce lasting economic power for workers. We must look to the future and invest our

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

resources in new organizational models that respond to our contemporary economy and the needs of today’s workers.”

This October, with funding from his local, from the national SEIU, and from several liberal foundations, Rolf will unveil the Future of Work Action Center, housed at the Roosevelt Institute in Washington, D.C. The center will study and, in time, invest in organizations that, in Rolf’s words, “have the potential to build economic power for workers, at scale, and to sustain themselves financially.” Whatever those organizations may be, they won’t be unions—at least, not unions as they currently exist.

Rolf’s prescriptions, and Rolf himself, have engendered a good deal of controversy within the labor movement. His blunt talk about unions’ inadequate present and nonexistent future have made him “a pariah to some in labor,” says David Freiboth, the head of the Seattle-area AFL-CIO. “He’s brilliant. He’s ego-

nizing domestic workers, who have no common employer. They are organizing taxi drivers, who are self-employed. The AFL-CIO’s major organizing effort, Working America, is a community-based campaign that until recently hadn’t dealt with its members’ workplace concerns or had a presence in those workplaces.

And in the fight to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15, even though few if any of the beneficiaries were or would become union members, Rolf ended up bargaining with employers on behalf of the city’s entire working class.

ROLF LOVES TALKING ABOUT the ins and

outs, the stratagems and tactical coups, of the campaigns he’s directed. The leader of the largest local union in Washington state—SEIU Local 775, which represents home care and nursing home workers—had not planned to wage a campaign last year to raise the minimum wage in SeaTac. But when the Port of

Rolf’s coup de théâtre was to arrange a televised debate of Seattle’s mayoral candidates in which all the questioners were low-wage workers. tistical. What he says about the movement, people take personally. He’s not wrong in what he says, but there’s a way to tell your wife she’s overweight. You don’t just say, ‘Honey, you’re fat.’ But that’s David’s way.”

But the unease that Rolf and his ideas have created can’t just be ascribed to a lack of tact.

Rolf’s role is that of a disruptive innovator in an embattled and defensive institution. He gives voice to the fears that many in labor share but are reluctant to acknowledge or act upon. And his quest for some new way to amass power for workers, something other than the decaying collective bargaining regime of the past eight decades, raises yet another fear: Suppose there is no new way for workers to assert their interests? What should labor—what should the nation—do then?

And yet, quite independent of Rolf’s writings, a growing share of the organizing in labor today is already taking place outside the structures of collective bargaining. Unions are orga-

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Seattle, which runs the airport, and Alaska Airlines, the airport’s dominant airline, spurned the efforts of SEIU’s organizers to unionize the baggage handlers and fry cooks who worked at the airport at or near minimum wage, “we needed a big piece of leverage to bring them to the table,” Rolf says.

The leverage was an initiative the unions said they’d place on SeaTac’s November 2013 ballot—an initiative so radical it would surely push Alaska Airlines and the Port to the table. The initiative would increase the local minimum wage from Washington state’s minimum of $9.32 to $15.00 at both the airport and its surrounding hotels. The phase-in period between election and implementation would be a mere seven weeks.

Still, Alaska Airlines and the Port refused to bargain. SeaTac voters would never approve such a measure, they believed; SeaTac wasn’t that kind of town.

Seated in his neat, sparsely decorated corner office in the downtown Seattle headquarters of Local 775, Rolf recounts how his union, the fast-food organizing campaign it guided, and the coalition it assembled proved them wrong. Rolf is 44, but his wide eyes and baby face make him look considerably younger—a union and political prodigy wise beyond his years. In the breadth of his historical references and in his occasional use of the high-tech business patois that is increasingly Seattle’s lingua franca, he can seem more like an unusually well-educated business academic than the labor leader who led the campaign that won the nation’s highest minimum wage.

“We were backed into the initiative by Alaska’s and the Port’s intransigence,” he says. He quickly recognized the measure could not pass absent an extraordinary effort. “There were 11,000 registered voters in SeaTac, and we figured the only way we could win was to expand the electorate.” The coalition’s canvassers registered 1,000 new voters, mainly immigrants.

(SeaTac is home to many Somali Americans who work at the airport.)

Speaking rapidly, warming to the topic, Rolf continues: “In the normal Washington-state model, your peak communication with voters is the Friday before election day. But we peaked when the ballot hit, well before the final weekend. [All voting in Washington is done by mail ballot.] We put 400 professional union organizers on the doorsteps that day and for the next five days—eight-hour shifts. We targeted people who never voted or only voted in presidential elections, but who had family, friends, someone they knew who worked at the airport.

The organizers each had a list of 25 voters; they went back to each initiative supporter’s house repeatedly until they saw they actually mailed the ballot.” The initiative passed by 77 votes.

But the triumph in SeaTac was only the second most important victory that Rolf’s union won last Election Day. In Seattle proper, State Senator Ed Murray was elected mayor, chiefly on the strength of his pledge to raise Seattle’s minimum to $15 as well. While SEIU’s “Fight for 15” campaign to unionize fast-food workers has highlighted the plight of low-wage workers in dozens of cities, only in Seattle did the issue come to dominate the municipal elections.

That was Rolf’s and his fast-food organizers’

d av i d r y d e r / r e u t e r s / l a n d o v

doing. They timed the workers’ demonstrations to coincide with key events during the campaign. Their coup de théâtre was to arrange a televised debate among the major mayoral candidates at which the questioners were all low-wage workers (including a Burger King employee active in the fast-food campaign)— who, of course, asked the aspirants if they supported a $15 minimum for Seattle. It was there that Murray, more than any of the other candidates, first spoke favorably of the idea. As the campaign progressed, as the demonstrations continued to draw widespread coverage, and as the $15 question came up at every candidates forum, the fight for 15 became Murray’s signature issue. On Election Day, his victory, the victory at SeaTac, and the upset Seattle city council victory of Kshama Sawant, a Trotskyist champion of the $15 standard, combined to create a perfect storm for a pay raise.

“David’s initiative, injecting the fast-food campaign into the mayor’s race, was the key to the Seattle raise,” says the AFL-CIO’s Freiboth.

Before he even took office this January, Mayor-elect Murray appointed a labor–business task force to arrive at a common plan for phasing in a new minimum wage. Both Freiboth and Rolf feared that national groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would mount an initiative campaign if the city government raised the minimum to $15. The way to forestall that was to have the plan that the city council would vote on devised by a task force that included Seattle’s own business leaders— particularly from the low-wage hotel and restaurant sectors.

When the deliberations on Murray’s task force threatened to break down, it was Rolf who held things together, says Howard Wright, the Seattle hotelier and convention executive who headed the task force’s business side. “He kept saying, ‘Let’s not have our desires for the perfect get in the way of success.’ He was practical, less ideological than other members of the task force.

If the labor movement had more David Rolfs, it would hold its own for a very long time.” (An assessment with which Rolf clearly disagrees.)

Confronted with the prospect of Sawant’s supporters mounting an initiative campaign like SeaTac’s, which would raise the minimum to $15 immediately, the task force’s businessside members had no real alternative but to

agree to a $15 standard that would be phased in more gradually. The labor side of the task force, which Rolf headed, prevailed on most points of contention. While stretching out the phase-in to seven years for mom-and-pop businesses, the task force voted almost unanimously to limit the phase-in to four years for corporate-affiliated franchises like McDonald’s, and to include tipped workers under the ordinance’s provisions. In June, the city council enacted the task force’s recommendations, and Murray signed the ordinance into law.

“It wasn’t traditional collective bargaining,”

proved easier to win a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour—which will hike the pay of an estimated 100,000 workers by the time it fully takes effect—than to organize just 4,000 workers at the airport.

Indeed, SEIU’s nationwide campaign to win fast-food workers a contract with such giant corporations as McDonald’s and Burger King has yet to add a single worker to its ranks.

That can’t happen unless those corporations recognize the union and sign a collective bargaining agreement with it, a happy ending that some union strategists can’t quite envision

Mayor Ed Murray cuts a celebratory cake during a rally at Seattle City Hall after the city council voted to approve a sharp increase in the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next seven years.

says Rolf, “but it was an alternative form of bargaining. It was very like Europe—politically constructed bargaining between the leaders of business and labor. Some of the people who will benefit from the raise will be union members in home care and grocery stores, but most will never be union members. It covers more people than any contract you could get today.”

But the unions’ success in raising the minimum to $15 also illustrates how difficult it has become to unionize workers, absent recourse to electoral politics and local government regulation. Given Seattle’s progressive politics, it

ever coming to pass. What the campaign has accomplished is to have highlighted the low pay and arbitrary work schedules of millions of workers, which in turn has led a growing number of liberal cities and states to enact minimum wage hikes—though none as farreaching as Seattle’s—and paid sick day laws.

The disjuncture between unions’ ability to advocate for workers in the political arena (though only where the center-left governs) and their inability to augment their shrinking ranks with new members cannot continue indefinitely, however. It takes the resources of unions like

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

public officials who will respond to workers’ concerns, just as it takes those resources to mobilize workers’ demonstrations of their concerns.

Within labor, “that’s one reason why the fastfood campaign engenders a sense of unease as well as a sense of excitement,” says one union official. “SEIU is making a huge investment with no clear sense that it will ever be able to claim a fast-food worker as a member. How long can that be a sustainable model?”

And yet, precisely because organizing that results in a union contract is all but impossible

Act, or the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is the federal minimum wage legislation. So we shifted our focus to changing labor laws in New York state.”

There, the alliance built an organization of domestic workers that demonstrated and held events to make themselves visible (to themselves no less than to everybody else) as a group of workers who were singularly devoid of the rights most Americans took for granted. After years of lobbying Albany, in 2010 they won a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights that protected them from discrimination and harassment,

Picketers from the New York Taxi Workers Alliance march near a taxi stand outside Pennsylvania Station. Although they are independent contractors, taxi drivers have had some success in organizing to win concessions from city taxi commissions.

save in a small number of sectors, much of the organizing currently under way in the United States is of and by workers who aren’t in standard employee relationships, or who seek legislative rather than contractual remedies, or both.

“WHEN WE STARTED organizing domestic

workers,” says Ai-jen Poo, founder and director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (and a recipient this year of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award), “we were calling for a standard contract. But domestic workers aren’t covered under the National Labor Relations

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gained them coverage under worker compensation laws, guaranteed them one day of rest per week, and entitled them to three paid sick days. Hawaii, California, and Massachusetts have since passed their own versions of the act. In October, the alliance, which has grown to include chapters in 42 cities, will join with SEIU and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in St. Louis for the first home care worker organizing summit, which, says Poo, “will look at, among other things, how we can raise our wages to $15.”

Since there’s no employer or agency with whom domestic workers can collectively bargain, building membership is arduous, and building a membership that can financially sustain the organization is, at least for now, impossible. Foundations and individual donors fund the alliance. One way to enroll workers in the group, Poo says, is to establish member-led enforcement programs once protective legislation is enacted. Members take assignments both to inform domestic workers of their rights and to provide them with and serve as member contacts when those rights are violated.

A similar dynamic exists at the National Taxi Workers Alliance, whose members are classified as independent contractors. Unlike domestic workers, however, taxi drivers (in most cities, an almost entirely immigrant workforce) come together in the course of their daily rounds in airport parking lots. When Bhairavi Desai, the daughter of Indian immigrants, began organizing New York’s cabbies in 1996, she spent most of her time in the taxi lines at LaGuardia Airport, with the goal of building an organization that could compel the city’s Taxi Commission to enact pro-driver (or at least mitigate anti-driver) regulations.

In 1998, more than 90 percent of the city’s drivers participated in a one-day strike over the commission’s newly enacted driver penalties, which the commission promptly rescinded. The Taxi Alliance’s biggest victory came in 2012, when the commission agreed to set aside six cents per fare to establish a supplemental health and disability fund that partially covers drivers’ dental and vision care.

Like the National Domestic Workers Alliance and many workers centers in immigrant communities, the Taxi Alliance provides workers with a range of services, including help in filing for citizenship and dealing with their children’s schools. Unlike most of those centers, however, it limits the amount of foundation grants it accepts, in the belief that such grants can restrict the organization’s freedom of action. Until the past couple of years, in consequence, Desai was its only paid staffer.

Of the 30,000 active drivers in New York, 17,000 belong to the Taxi Alliance, of whom 3,500 pay the annual dues of $100. The organization has also established chapters

peter morgan / ap images

SEIU and federations like the AFL-CIO to elect

in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Austin, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Nationally, 4,500 drivers pay dues to the organization.

Since 2012, traditional unions have begun organizing taxi drivers as well, notwithstanding that none are in traditional employer-employee relationships. The Teamsters have organized drivers in Washington, D.C.; AFSCME has organizing campaigns in Chicago and New Orleans; there are even campaigns in several cities to organize drivers for Uber.

The unions’ campaigns, and those of groups like the Domestic Workers and the Taxi Alliances, attest to many immigrants’ openness to organizing as a way to improve their generally abysmal working conditions and pay. But for most, such improvements may come outside of the collective bargaining arena.

In 2011, the AFL-CIO broke new ground by affiliating the National Taxi Workers Alliance.

“Many affiliates in the AFL-CIO or Change to Win [the mini-federation of the SEIU and the Teamsters] have some locals of contingent workers, or individual members who are contingent,” says Desai. “But we’re the first national affiliate where all the members are contingent.

We bear witness to the fact that workers anywhere and everywhere can organize.”

By far the largest number of members enrolled in a union-organized non-union are the 3.3 million members of Working America, an AFL-CIO–backed group that recruits people in working-class neighborhoods on their doorsteps in an effort to persuade them to support labor-backed candidates at election time. The program began a decade ago with the goal of swaying the votes of non-union white workingclass electors in such swing states as Ohio and Michigan by making the economic populist case for the AFL-CIO’s endorsed candidates.

Working America was “battling for people who otherwise would be captured by Fox News,” in the words of Karen Nussbaum, the organization’s director. In the dozen states in which it has been active, Working America is recognized as an effective political force that has influenced numerous elections.

Over the past couple of years, Working America has expanded its mission. In Albuquerque, it mobilized voters to pass an initiative giving the city council the power to raise the minimum wage, then organized them to pres-

sure the council to raise it, and then enrolled its activists to serve as informal enforcement agents—a task the city was slow to undertake.

(Members handed out palm cards reading “Got Your Raise Yet?” to workers in low-wage establishments.) It recently placed organizers in four cities, says Nussbaum, “in a pilot program to deal with workplace and community issues.”

Polling has shown that most Working America members support the candidates and positions the AFL-CIO recommends. In most places, however, it is not the kind of organization whose members ever attend a meeting, much less pay any dues. It’s a problem to which Nussbaum is no stranger. As one of the founders of 9to5, a proto-feminist organization of secretaries in Boston in 1973, she grappled with how to build a workers’ organization that couldn’t fund itself through collective bargaining. “Today, it’s become one of the biggest challenges not just to Working America

goals, and structures,” Rolf says. “In Seattle, the first unions evolved from gangs of white workers beating up Asians. Elsewhere, labor was shaped by syndicalists, anarchists, immigrant movements, communists, eight-hourday clubs—the sum total of all this wasn’t just unions but a range of very different movements. The Yiddish-speaking socialists had very little in common with the iron workers who blew up the L.A. Times.”

“We had competing models of how to build power for workers,” he continues. “We’ve had one model since 1935 [when the National Labor Relations Act was passed]. Which would be fine if it weren’t dying.”

Rolf has firsthand experience with what the 1935 model once could accomplish. Born and raised in Cincinnati, he grew up in middle-class surroundings (his father was an attorney; his mother a teacher active in Unitarian causes), just a generation removed from working-class

It proved easier to increase the minimum wage to $15 for an estimated 100,000 of Seattle’s workers than to unionize just 4,000 at the city’s airport. but to the entire progressive movement: How do you build self-sufficient workers’ organizations outside of collective bargaining?” Working America has begun experimenting with brokering health insurance policies under the Affordable Care Act to its members as a possible source of funding. “SEIU got its start providing burial insurance to janitors,” she notes.

MORE THAN MOST UNION leaders, Rolf is

a student of labor history. As an undergraduate at Bard College in the early 1990s, he wrote his senior thesis on the “Protocols of Peace”—the 1910 agreement between New York’s clothing manufacturers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, hammered out by Louis Brandeis, Edward Filene, and John Dewey.

“In the 19th and early 20th century, the American labor movement consisted of competing experiments with a range of origins,

roots. “My mother’s father would tell me about how the UAW changed his life,” Rolf says. “He would migrate back and forth from the farm to the factory, depending on the economy. He was an industrial carpenter at a GM plant in Ohio. Three times while he worked there, the union struck; three times he walked the picket lines. He credited that, he credited the UAW, for making him middle class.”

At Bard, Rolf was active in a range of progressive causes, particularly pro-choice groups and the campus chapter of ACT UP New York.

As his choice of topic for his senior thesis indicates, he was growing more interested in working people’s movements, and spent the summer between his junior and senior years interning for an SEIU organizing project in Atlanta. As graduation neared, he couldn’t figure out what graduate specialty he wished to pursue, so he decided to take a year off from academics by accepting a job offer from the SEIU local for

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

which he’d interned. “But I fell in love with working in the movement,” he says, “and never wanted to do anything else.”

The labor movement to which Rolf reported, however, could no longer grow and deliver as it had in his grandfather’s day. Rolf’s new employer was a local of Georgia state workers who had no legal bargaining rights—“then or now,” Rolf adds. “We had a theory that the local could first win the right to have its members check a box to set aside a small portion of their paycheck for union dues, just as they could check a box to set aside donations to the United Way. From there, we thought it could win some rights, though not collective bargaining, through an executive order by the governor, and then full bargaining rights through the legislature. What the hell were we thinking?”

Some of what SEIU was thinking was that the South was gradually becoming more like the rest of the nation in accepting unions. In

women of color—into a new SEIU local. To win the campaign, Rolf had to assemble a coalition of home care providers and clients to pressure the L.A. County Board of Supervisors to establish a public agency that would serve as the workers’ employer with whom they could negotiate. (Under California law, counties administer Medicaid-funded home health care.) Rolf also had to have SEIU wage, and win, a series of election campaigns on behalf of candidates who were allies and protégés of the supervisors.

He had the union develop a registry to match up clients and providers. Once the supervisors had agreed to establish the agency, SEIU had to win the union-ratification votes of tens of thousands of workers who shared no common workplaces. It was the largest organizing campaign the national union had ever run. When the vote results were announced, Rolf had just turned 30.

Rolf’s success in Atlanta and his triumph in Los Angeles, while both relying on his ability to

The disjuncture between unions’ ability to secure gains for workers in the political arena and their inability to organize new members cannot continue indefinitely. fact, the rest of the nation was becoming more like the South in rejecting them.

Though just 23, Rolf says, “I owned a suit and I could talk to politicians, so I got the job as a legislative assistant—really, our lobbyist.”

Traveling to every one of Georgia’s 180 legislative districts and calling on the legislators with groups of members, Rolf got a bill enacted that gave members the right to designate dues payments to the union. But there, as Georgia moved steadily to the right, the union’s progress halted. The hoped-for executive order and the right to collective bargaining grew steadily more implausible.

Nonetheless, Rolf’s success impressed Andy Stern, then SEIU’s national organizing director, who offered him the job of restarting Los Angeles’s stalled-out home care worker campaign in 1995. Rolf jumped at the chance, and within four years, he succeeded in organizing 74,000 L.A. home care workers—almost entirely

42 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG FALL 2014

turn out members at crucial times, were primarily victories achieved in the political arena. After the home care worker campaign, Rolf’s political skills were so apparent that Antonio Villaraigosa offered Rolf the position of campaign manager for his upcoming mayoral campaign, and Stern (by then, SEIU president) told him he could be SEIU’s top person on Al Gore’s presidential campaign—both offers that Rolf rejected in favor of another offer from Stern to go to Seattle.

The L.A. victory set the template for the subsequent efforts by SEIU and AFSCME to organize home care workers—the only truly large-scale organizing campaigns by any unions to have succeeded in the new century.

Among those successes were Rolf’s own efforts to organize such workers in Washington state.

Within four years of his arrival, Rolf steered to passage a statewide initiative to create a public authority that could bargain with home care workers; he made SEIU instrumental in the

election of friendly legislators; he had the union inspect and rehabilitate 723 ballots during the protracted recounts in the 2004 governor’s race. (Democrat Christine Gregoire ultimately won by 130 votes.) The local’s efforts produced a legislature and governor who not only backed the unionization of home care workers but also raised their pay in a succession of state budgets.

Since Rolf ’s arrival in 2000, Local 775 has grown from 1,600 to 43,000 members, while the total number of SEIU members in Washington state has swelled from 28,000 to 106,000. Full-time home care providers and nursing home employees have seen their pay doubled to the state’s median. “If you’re me, life is good,” Rolf acknowledges. But he’s convinced he’s swimming against a historic tide.

SHORTLY AFTER HIS GRIM epiphany on

labor’s decline at the New Orleans meeting, Rolf says, “I began looking at the data state by state. In 1983, Louisiana had the same share of unionized workers as Seattle had in 2012.

Tennessee had the same percentage that New York had that year. When I turned all this into a PowerPoint presentation, New York was the only state that still had more than 15 percent of its private-sector workers in unions. Then I had to change the presentation; New York fell beneath 15 percent.

“The more I researched, the more I became convinced that the rest of the world had forgotten about us. We weren’t even worth killing any more. Our collective bargaining model had lost all visibility to the majority of American workers. For most union members, unions were just an inherited fait accompli—their workplace had been unionized decades before they got there.

“Every condition and factor that underpinned unions’ power from the 1930s through the 1960s was gone: immobile capital, government assistance, the Cold War defense establishment, even organized crime, which propped up some unions so it could loot them.

Not to mention losing two generations of workers by not organizing in the private sector after the 1940s. In the ’80s and ’90s, Andy’s [Stern’s] generation rediscovered organizing, but it was too little, too late.”

The very existence of the employer-employee relationship, Rolf points out, is under attack.

“As we’re trying to turn contingent workers

like home care workers into full-time standard permanent employees, far more full-time standard permanent employees are being compelled to become contingent.

“I had been convinced that SEIU’s model of growth [which his own work exemplified] was working. But I lost my faith in it. I hoped someone had found the silver bullet that would reinvent growth. I talked to people at worker centers, but worker centers turned out to be permanent wards of charity. I talked to academics. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t even find a project devoted to finding it.”

understand what about collective bargaining worked, and try to recapture that. What really mattered was we created, first, the power to change workers’ lives economically; second, we created it on a scale that benefited millions, tens of millions, of workers; and third, we created a model of sustainability so our institutions could survive even in bad economies or when our political allies weren’t in power. Those are the three things that new institutions need to do.”

ROLF’S CRITICS VIEW THESE arguments as a

dismissal of the valuable work that unions still

el aine thompson / ap images

David Rolf speaks in view of a restored 1928 combo-wing airplane suspended overhead at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where supporters of the $15 minimum wage declared victory on November 26, 2013.

Rolf studied how Silicon Valley incubated startups. With Stern, he paid a call on former Intel CEO Andy Grove, that rare Silicon Valley guru who’d written critically about American business’s abandonment of American workers.

“Grove told us he didn’t know enough about the subject to offer specific advice,” Rolf says.

“But he did say [to] think about outcomes and treat everything else—laws, strategies, structures—as secondary.

“That made me understand the death of collective bargaining isn’t something we should be sentimental about,” Rolf says. “We should

perform. They see in them an arrogance—at once technocratic and prophetic—that some of them saw in Stern, who resigned as SEIU president in 2010 at least in part because, like Rolf, he believed the labor movement in its current form was both ineffectual and doomed. Rolf and Stern’s attraction to the culture of Silicon Valley, their belief that labor could profitably learn from the Valley’s experience with startups, and their penchant for business-school lingo have only further estranged their critics. (“Rolf says we need to become Labor 3.0,” moans one union official. “Christ.”)

Another union leader says he thinks Rolf’s diagnosis of labor’s ailments are brilliant, but that his prescriptions are “from Andy Land”—a reference to what he sees as Stern’s mistaken infatuation with the egalitarian potential of the digital economy. Rolf dismisses these concerns. “We don’t have to share the tech sector’s values to learn from its successes,” he says.

The same union leader also questions where Rolf and his new center are headed. “It’s not clear if Rolf wants to find new institutions that re-engage workers at the workplace, or new ways to mobilize them through politics or in partnership with employers,” he says.

“All the above,” Rolf replies. “I don’t have a singular theory of what will build worker power. I want to see how competing models fare—those where workers are opposed to their employers, those where they sometimes work with them, those where workers—like an increasing number of American workers—have no employer.”

A further difference between Rolf and his critics concerns union democracy. When Stern sent Rolf to Seattle, he made clear that one way Rolf could accelerate SEIU’s growth in Washington was to consolidate its 12 locals.

Rolf did just that—reducing the number of locals to five, while nearly quadrupling its membership. Merging locals into mega-locals would make them better able to organize, play politics, and win contracts. And if such consolidations limited the scope of rank-and-file input and union democracy, well, Stern and Rolf saw union democracy as often impeding unions’ ability to re-allocate resources, from serving their existing members, to organizing new ones.

Like Rolf, Working America’s Nussbaum has her list of criteria for what a new generation of workers’ organizations needs to do: amass power for workers to improve their lives, be financially self-sustaining, and be subject to workers’ democratic control. Rolf ’s list includes the first two points but not the third.

“He doesn’t want to screw around with bottomup democracy,” says Freiboth. “If a union is bottom up, it’s modeled to serve its existing members and can’t be strategic in focusing on growth. ‘Progressive’ unions are now often the least democratic. They’ll service their members, but they won’t let democratic initiatives

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

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get in the way of their strategic initiatives.”

The labor leader whom Rolf repeatedly cites as a model for casting off time-honored union practices and devising new ones is John L. Lewis. Lewis didn’t care a fig for union democracy, but he built the CIO. SEATTLE’S DECISION TO raise its minimum

wage has apparently inspired other cities governed by the center-left to raise their minimum wage levels as well, if not necessarily all the way to $15. Shortly after Seattle passed its ordinance, San Diego followed suit. San Francisco and Oakland have wage-hike referenda on their November ballots, and the mayors of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York look to be converging on a $13-and-change minimumwage standard for their cities.

If workers’ raises are to come from legislation rather than collective bargaining, however, is there a way they can use that legislation to build at least some organization? An embryonic version of Rolf’s new institutions? During Rolf’s meetings with a group of labor-community activists while the business–labor task force deliberated this year, that was a question he repeatedly raised. “David kept asking, ‘How can we leverage things like a minimum wage victory to support worker organizing?’” says Rich Stolz, who heads an immigrant advocacy group. “Even if it may not be the traditional collective bargaining model, can we create associate memberships that offer benefits to workers? What can we do?”

One possibility is to build an organization devoted to monitoring and enforcing the legislation that unions have won—as the National Domestic Workers Alliance has done by enlisting its members to make sure that domestic workers’ newly acquired rights aren’t violated, as Working America has done in Albuquerque to ensure that employers are actually paying the minimum wage. In Seattle, Murray recently unveiled an enforcement program in which the city will partner with a private nonprofit organization to inform workers of their rights. “David keeps saying, ‘If it’s 1 A.M. at Taco Bell and a worker is asked to work off the clock, City Hall won’t be there—it’ll be up to the worker,’” says Sejal Parikh, who heads Working Washington, the Seattle fast-food workers organization.

“Enforcing labor standards in the sectors most prone to victimization requires a bottomup approach,” says Rolf, who favors an even more ambitious nonprofit operation, employing numerous low-wage workers, than the one the mayor has proposed. “People have to know how to assert their rights on the job. To get there, we need workers going door-to-door and meeting in church basements.”

Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein notes that a number of such organizations have arisen at various times to enforce laws and ordinances. During World War II, thousands of CIO members and their spouses served as the de facto enforcers of the wartime price controls in countless stores across the nation.

The limitation on such organizations is that they’re not self-sustaining, and that the activists don’t win paychecks or receive benefits remotely comparable to those that workers get through union contracts. Murray’s proposed

unions should be “not to rebuild unions per se but to rebuild collective bargaining in a selfsustaining way.” Despite his success guiding Justice for Janitors—the single most notable organizing campaign of the 1990s—Lerner’s unconventional methods and ideas were not always welcome at SEIU, and in 2012, he left the union. Today, he is the chief strategist of three distinct but overlapping campaigns waged by local labor and community groups, all of which target the financial sector. The first organizes students to demand lower interest rates on college debt as well as lower tuition rates. The second organizes homeowners whose homes are underwater, calling for cities to take over bankowned properties through eminent domain.

The third rallies public employee unions and community organizations to pressure cities to demand renegotiation of their debts to Wall Street. Lerner doesn’t have Rolf’s focus on developing new institutions that can exercise

When labor’s two pre-eminent organizers agree that the collective bargaining regime established in 1935 is dead and not coming back, attention must be paid. nonprofit may have some workers on staff, but that won’t make it a workers’ organization.

How could such a group become a workers’ organization, dependent not on government but its own members for its survival? It may require the labors of Rolf’s Future of Work Action Center to figure that out.

ROLF IS NOT THE ONLY premier union opera-

tive who believes unions in their current form are on the way out. Just as Rolf is the most successful union organizer of the past 15 years, the most successful organizer of the preceding 15 was Stephen Lerner, architect of SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign that unionized tens of thousands of the low-wage workers who cleaned the office buildings in the downtowns of multiple Northeastern, Midwestern, and West Coast cities.

Like Rolf, albeit with some difference, Lerner believes that the primary purpose of today’s

power for workers. Rather, he concentrates more on actions that could give bargaining power to a far wider range of constituencies.

As befits their respective personalities, Rolf’s is a more methodical approach; Lerner’s is more loose and dynamic. But when labor’s two preeminent organizers of the past three decades agree that the collective bargaining regime established in 1935, in which the American labor movement has functioned for the past 80 years, is dead and not coming back, attention, as Willy Loman’s wife says, must be paid.

Rolf’s favored metaphor for the role that he believes today’s unions should play is that of a “nurse log”—a term used by forest ecologists. A nurse log is a fallen tree that, as it decays, provides nourishment and protection to seedlings, some of which will grow to become new trees.

“That’s our choice,” he says. “We can preserve the dying model, or we can use the resources of our model to give birth to what replaces it.”

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

Children watch from their home as people march to protest the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

46 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG FALL 2014

THE MAKING OF FERGUSON Long before the shooting of Michael Brown, official racial-isolation policies primed Ferguson for this summer’s events.

BY RIC HARD RO T HS T E IN

I

n 1968, Larman Williams was one of the first African Americans to buy a home in the white suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.

It wasn’t easy—when he first went to see the house, the real estate agent wouldn’t show it to him. Atypically, Williams belonged to a church with a white pastor, who contacted the agent on Williams’s behalf, only to be told that neighbors objected to sales to Negroes.

But after the pastor then gathered the owner and his neighbors for a prayer meeting, the owner told the agent he was no longer opposed to a black buyer.

Williams had been living in the St. Louis ghetto and worked as an assistant school principal in Wellston, a black St. Louis suburb.

His wife, Geraldine, taught in a state special education school. They could afford to live in middle-class Ferguson, and hoped to protect their three daughters from the violence of their St. Louis neighborhood. The girls would also get better educations in Ferguson than in Wellston, where Williams worked, because Ferguson’s stronger tax base provided more money per pupil than did Wellston’s; Ferguson could afford more skilled teachers, smaller classes, and extra enrichment programs.

Williams was familiar with Ferguson because he once lived in the neighboring black suburb of Kinloch. (California Congresswoman Maxine Waters and the comedian and

activist Dick Gregory grew up there.) In those years, Williams could enter Ferguson only during daytime; until the mid-1960s, Ferguson barred African Americans after dark, blocking the main road from Kinloch with a chain and construction materials. A second road remained open so housekeepers and nannies could get from Kinloch to jobs in Ferguson.

Kinloch and some middle-class white neighborhoods that also adjoin Ferguson were once unincorporated in St. Louis County, but in the late 1930s the white neighborhoods formed a city, Berkeley, to separate their schools from Kinloch’s. With a much smaller tax base, Kinloch’s schools were inferior to Berkeley’s and Ferguson’s, and after Berkeley’s incorporation, Kinloch took on more characteristics of a dilapidated ghetto. This arrangement persisted until 1975—several years after Williams moved into Ferguson—when federal courts ordered Berkeley, Ferguson, and other white towns to integrate their schools into a common district with Kinloch.

Other African Americans followed Williams into Ferguson, but the black community grew slowly. By 1970, Ferguson was still less than 1 percent black. But it had some multifamily buildings, so when public housing in St. Louis was demolished in the 1970s, the St. Louis Housing Authority gave vouchers to displaced families to subsidize rentals in

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

selected suburbs of st. louis Black Jack Ferguson Berkeley Kinloch St. Ann De Porres

(now part of Breckenridge Hills)

Creve Coeur

ou s t. l o u i s c

nty

lo u i s s t.

Kirkwood Fenton

I tell this story with some hesitation. I don’t mean to imply that there is anything special about racial history in Ferguson, St. Louis, or the St. Louis metropolitan area. Every policy and practice segregating St. Louis was duplicated in almost every metropolis nationwide. Yet this story of racial isolation and disadvantage, enforced by federal, state, and local policies, many of which are no longer practiced, is central to an appreciation of what occurred in Ferguson this past summer, many decades later. Policies that are no longer in effect and seemingly have been reformed still cast a long shadow.

48 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG FALL 2014

LARMAN AND GERALDINE Williams told their

story at a 1970 hearing of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, along with another middle-class black integration pioneer, Adel Allen, an engineer who came to St. Louis in 1962 to work at the McDonnell Space Center.

Allen was ready to quit and return home to Wichita, Kansas, after no realtor would sell him a suburban home. He was unwilling to live in a small apartment in the overcrowded St. Louis ghetto—apparently his only alternative.

Allen finally succeeded in getting a white friend to make a “straw purchase” (hiding the true buyer) of a home in Kirkwood, another nearly all-white St. Louis suburb; a second friend gave him $5,000 toward the $16,000 price. The funds were probably needed because the Federal Housing Administration would not insure mortgages for African Americans in Kirkwood, and no bank would issue them. Allen’s income was higher than those of the 30 white homeowners on his block—he alone had a college degree. Once he moved in as the second African American there, “for sale” signs sprung up on neighboring lawns; eight years later, the ratio was 30 black homeowners to 2 white homeowners.

Allen described life in Kirkwood in 1962 and then in 1970: [W]hen I first moved there … I don’t know if [the police] were protecting me or protecting someone from me. We had patrols on the hour. Our streets were swept neatly, monthly. Our trash pickups were regular and handled with dignity. The street lighting was always up to par. … We now have the most inadequate lighting in the city ... [P]eople from the other sections of town … now leave their cars parked on our streets when they want to abandon them. … [W]hat they are making now is a ghetto in the process. The buildings are maintained [by owners] better than they were when they were white but the city services are much less.

The commission’s general counsel then asked if Allen had ever been stopped by police.

He responded: Yes, I don’t think there’s a black man in South St. Louis County that hasn’t been

stopped at least once if he’s been here more than 2 weeks. … There’s an almost automatic suspicion that goes along with being black. … [T]here is an obvious attempt toward emasculation of the black man. I’ve been stopped, searched, and I don’t mean searched in the milder sense, I mean laying across the hood of a car. And then told after they found nothing that my tail light bulb was burned out … something like that.

Nearly two years before the Williamses and Allen told their stories, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated and African Americans rioted in scores of cities. President Lyndon Johnson asked some prominent Americans, headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, to investigate. The Kerner Commission concluded that stories like those of the Williamses and Allen were typical: discriminatory provision of municipal services, police practices reflecting “attempts toward emasculation of the black man,” housing discrimination, and much more.

Kerner’s report concluded that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

August’s confrontations in Ferguson suggest less has changed than many Americans think. Yet the government’s response has been to examine Ferguson as an isolated embarrassment. The Department of Justice is investigating the death of Michael Brown and the racial practices of Ferguson’s police department, but has not suggested recent events reflect anything broader than Ferguson’s unique problems.

Media reports have explained that suburbs once barred African Americans with private agreements among white homeowners (restrictive covenants) and with racially neutral zoning rules that restricted outer-ring suburbs to the affluent, with inner-ring suburbs flipping from white to black because of “white flight.” Modern segregation, in other words, is attributable to private prejudices of white homeowners who abandon neighborhoods when blacks arrive, and to the inability of African Americans to afford communities restricted to single-family homes on large lots.

No doubt, private prejudice and suburbanites’ desire for homogeneous middle-class environments contributed to segregation in St.

p h o t o p r e v i o u s pa g e : c h a r l i e r i e d e l / a p i m a g e s

Ferguson. By 1980, Ferguson was 14 percent black; by 1990, 25 percent; by 2000, 53 percent; and by 2010, 67 percent. Other northern and northwestern suburbs near St. Louis were similar. Meanwhile, those beyond the first ring to the south and west remained almost all white. Recently, the white population in the city itself has been expanding.

In what follows, I’ll describe how St. Louis became so segregated—a pattern where racial boundaries continually change but communities’ racial homogeneity persists. Neighborhoods that appear to be integrated are almost always those in transition, either from white to mostly black (like Ferguson), or from black to increasingly white (like St. Louis’s gentrifying neighborhoods). Such population shifts in St. Louis and in other metropolitan areas maintain segregation rules established a century ago.

Louis and other metropolitan areas. But this explanation too conveniently excuses public policy. A more powerful cause is the explicit intents of federal, state, and local governments to create racially segregated metropolises. The policies were mutually reinforcing: Zoning that defined ghetto boundaries within St. Louis, turning black neighborhoods into slums; Segregated public housing that replaced more integrated urban areas; Restrictive covenants adopted by government mandate; Government-subsidized suburban development for whites only; Boundary and redevelopment policies to keep blacks from white neighborhoods; Real estate and financial regulatory policy that promoted segregation; Denial of services in black ghettos; convincing whites that “blacks” and “slums” were synonymous; Urban renewal programs to shift ghetto locations, in the guise of cleaning up those slums; A government-sponsored dual labor market that made suburban housing less affordable for blacks.

That government, not private prejudice, was responsible for segregating greater St. Louis was once widely recognized. In 1974, a federal appeals court concluded, “Segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was … in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.” The Department of Justice stipulated to this truth but took no action in response. In 1980, a federal court ordered the state, county, and city governments to devise plans to integrate schools by integrating housing. Public officials ignored the order, devising only a voluntary busing plan to integrate schools, but not housing.

ALTHOUGH POLICIES TO impose segregation

are no longer explicit, their effect endures.

When we blame private prejudice and snobbishness for contemporary segregation, we not only whitewash history but avoid considering

Government actions, from enforced housing and school segregation to labor-market actions that systematically disadvantaged blacks, cast a shadow that lingered long after these policies were taken off the books. whether new policies might instead promote an integrated community.

In the early 20th century, St. Louis’s small black population resided alongside other lowwage workers and their families, including European immigrants. Some blocks had greater African American concentrations, interspersed with blocks concentrating other groups.

But then, segregationist sentiment and activity increased nationwide. In 1916, St. Louis voters approved a referendum prohibiting blacks from moving to predominantly white blocks.

One year later, the Supreme Court banned such ordinances, so St. Louis and other cities relied upon new, nominally race-neutral zoning rules that defined boundaries of industrial, commercial, multi-family residential, and singlefamily residential property. According to the city’s chief planner, a zoning goal was to prevent movement into “finer residential districts … by colored people.” St. Louis’s first zoning ordinance deliberately designated areas for industrial development that were in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial black populations. The policy continued for decades. In 1942, the Plan Commission rezoned a commercial

area as multi-family so it could “develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people.”

In 1948, it designated a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between black residences inside the U and white residences outside.

Polluting industry, taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution were permitted in black neighborhoods but violated zoning rules elsewhere. After the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established during the New Deal, these establishments rendered black neighborhoods ineligible for mortgage insurance, because they devalued nearby residential property. Later, ghettos were designated for slum clearance because zoning rules had made them unfit for habitation.

Urban zoning set patterns for the suburbs.

Those farthest from St. Louis were typically zoned for single-family homes with large lots only. Those closer were more likely to permit multi-family residences.

Racial motivation was sometimes open. In 1940, Kirkwood officials prepared a plan to shift its small black population to St. Louis because it was “more desirable for all of the colored families to be grouped in one major section.” A 1963 plan in Webster Grove, a town between St. Louis and Kirkwood, outlined steps to prevent enlargement of a “developing ghetto” across a rail bed it called the “Great Divide.”

In 1933, Congress authorized a public housing program, headed by Franklin Roosevelt confidante Harold Ickes, whose “neighborhood composition rule” declared that public housing could not alter neighborhood racial characteristics. But as Roosevelt’s biographer James MacGregor Burns concluded, cities “in which prewar segregation was virtually unknown … received segregated housing, starting a new ‘local custom’ still in force many years later.”

St. Louis proposed to raze a 40 percent black tenement neighborhood to construct a whitesonly project. When federal officials objected to the failure to accommodate African Americans, St. Louis eventually proposed an additional blacks-only project, removed from the one for whites and in another previously integrated area. The segregated projects were eventually opened in 1942, with preference for workers in war industries and then, later, for veterans.

One scholar of the St. Louis urban landscape has observed, “[T]he City Plan Commission,

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Whites observing the ghetto concluded that slum conditions were characteristics of black families, not of housing discrimination.

Government policy thus created stereotypes that spurred “white flight.”

functional public housing, characterized by welfare-dependent families and pervasive gang activity. It gave the lie to Senator Douglas’s promise that it would be in the “best interests of the Negro race that we carry through” with a segregated program. Deteriorating social conditions and public disinvestment made life in the projects so untenable that the federal government evicted all residents and dynamited the 33 towers, beginning in 1972.

When St. Louis leaders developed zoning rules to control black population movement early in the 20th century, private real estate agents and individual white homeowners began

to enact restrictive covenants to prevent African Americans from purchasing covered property.

The National Association of Real Estate Boards provided model language. Its St. Louis affiliate, the Real Estate Exchange, provided a “Uniform Restriction Agreement” for neighborhood groups to use. By 1945, about 300 neighborhood covenants were in force. The city’s Plan Commission hesitated to zone an area “first residential” if covenants were absent. Courts in Missouri and elsewhere ordered sales canceled if made in violation of such agreements.

Although the Supreme Court upheld the legality of such covenants in 1926, it found in 1948 that state courts could not enforce them without violating the 14th Amendment. The decision came in Detroit and St. Louis cases (others were litigated elsewhere), and came to be known by the St. Louis case, Shelley v. Kraemer.

It arose from a homeowners association covenant requiring a black family’s eviction. A Presbyterian church sponsored the association and funded the lawsuit. Another church was also a signatory; its pastor had previously defended the covenant in court.

Such sponsorship by tax-exempt institutions constituted a federal subsidy.

In an unrelated case four decades later, the Supreme Court found Bob Jones University ineligible for tax exemption because of its prohibition of interracial dating, but the government never questioned the prominent involvement of tax-exempt churches, hospitals, and universities in enforcing segregation. If church leaders had to choose between their tax exemptions and racial exclusion, there might have been many fewer covenants blanketing white St. Louis.

Racial covenants were an important condition, almost a requirement, of FHA suburban mortgage insurance. The FHA’s 1938 underwriting rules stated that “restrictive covenants should strengthen and supplement zoning ordinances.” It financed construction of entire subdivisions by making advance commitments to builders who met FHA standards for construction, design, and racial exclusivity.

Developers with such commitments could get low-interest loans to underwrite construction, and could assure potential (white) buyers that homes were FHA-approved for low-interest

i m a g e s c o u r t e s y m i s s o u r i h i s t o r y m u s e u m , s t. lo u i s

the St. Louis Housing Authority, the mayor’s office, and the Board of Aldermen conspired to transform two multiethnic mixed-race neighborhoods—one on the north side and one on the south side—into racially homogeneous projects.” A federal judge noted that the conspiracy included federal officials: “The limitation of [projects] to white occupancy was approved by the Public Housing Administration, conditioned upon the provision of [separate] facilities for non-white occupancy.”

With a nationwide civilian housing shortage, President Truman proposed a massive public housing effort in 1949. Republican opponents introduced a “poison pill” amendment prohibiting segregation in public housing, knowing that if it passed, southern Democrats who otherwise supported public housing would kill it.

Liberals had to choose either segregated public housing or none at all. Illinois Senator Paul Douglas argued, “I am ready to appeal to history and to time that it is in the best interests of the Negro race that we carry through the [segregated] housing program as planned, rather than put in the bill an amendment which will inevitably defeat it.” The amendment failed and the 1949 Housing Act, providing federal finance for segregated public housing, was adopted.

Several African American World War II veterans soon sued the St. Louis Housing Authority after being denied more desirable whites-only apartments. In 1955, a federal judge ordered the authority to cease segregation, but the ruling came too late. By then, FHA policy to move working-class whites to suburban home ownership was in full swing.

St. Louis’s white-designated projects gradually added African Americans as previous residents, many with federally guaranteed mortgages, departed for the suburbs from which blacks were excluded.

At this time, St. Louis also began constructing the Pruitt-Igoe towers. Pruitt had been intended for blacks and Igoe for whites, but by their 1955–1956 opening, few whites were interested; there were so many inexpensive options for them in south St. Louis and the suburbs.

Igoe then filled with black families as well.

Pruitt-Igoe became a national symbol of dys-

mortgages, with no or limited down payments.

The FHA’s suburban whites-only policy continued through the post-war housing boom that lasted through the mid-1960s. In 1947, the FHA sanitized its manual, removing literal race references but still demanding “compatibility among neighborhood occupants” for mortgage guarantees. In 1959, the Commission on Civil Rights summarized, “With the help of FHA financing, all-white suburbs have been constructed in recent years around almost every large city. Huge FHA-insured projects … have been built with an acknowledged policy of excluding Negroes.”

The FHA seal of approval guaranteed that a subdivision was for whites only. Advertisements like those from 1952 (shown below) were commonplace in St. Louis (and nationwide). The ad promotes “FHA Financed” Ferguson homes; the other ad promotes an “FHA approved” Kirkwood subdivision.

One builder, Charles Vatterott, obtained FHA guarantees for St. Ann, a town he started constructing in 1943. Its deeds stated, “No lot or portion of a lot or building erected thereon shall be sold, leased, rented or occupied by any other than those of the Caucasian race.” Vatterott then built a separate, lower-quality subdivision a few miles away, De Porres, for African Americans. De Porres buyers had incomes and occupations—from truck drivers to chemists— similar to those in St. Ann; had they been permitted, they could have moved to St. Ann or other white subdivisions built in the postwar period. Vatterott could not get FHA financing for his black subdivision, so many De Porres homes were rented. De Porres also lacked parks and playgrounds that Vatterott had built into St. Ann. AS COVENANTS and zoning

rules barred African Americans from most areas, a growing black population crowded ghettos on St. Louis’s north and west sides. Trash collection, street lighting, and emergency response were less

adequate than in white neighborhoods. African Americans paid higher rents than whites for similar space because their housing supply was constricted; less adequate city fire protection caused higher insurance rates. With FHA mortgages unavailable, families bought homes with very short repayment periods, or on contract where no equity accumulated. A late installment payment could trigger repossession. To make higher rent or contract payments, black families took in boarders or subdivided homes and apartments, exacerbating the overcrowding. With higher housing costs, African Americans with good jobs were less able to save than were whites with similar incomes, and reduced savings made leaving the ghetto for better surroundings more difficult. If a new black neighborhood developed, St. Louis sometimes changed its zoning to permit polluting industries and other deleterious businesses to locate there.

Whites observing the ghetto concluded that slum conditions were characteristics of black families, not of housing discrimination. Government policy thus created stereotypes that spurred “white flight.”

Suburbs sometimes employed eminent domain procedures to prevent blacks from moving in. In 1959, an African American couple attempted to build on a lot in the white

suburb of Creve Coeur. The town approved permits and construction had begun when neighbors discovered the buyers were black.

Townspeople raised contributions to purchase the property, but could not pressure the couple to sell, so the city condemned it for a playground. A Missouri appeals court ruled it could not question the town’s motives, provided the condemned property was for public use.

In 1969, a church-sponsored nonprofit group proposed to build federally subsidized, integrated, multi-family units in Black Jack, a white suburb in unincorporated St. Louis County. Black Jack quickly incorporated itself and adopted zoning rules prohibiting more than three homes per acre, making new moderate-income housing impossible. African American residents of St. Louis, noting their limited access to suburban employment, filed suit. A federal appeals court found that opposition to the project was “repeatedly expressed in racial terms by … leaders of the incorporation movement, by individuals circulating petitions, and by zoning commissioners themselves. … [R]ace played a significant role, both in the drive to incorporate and the decision to rezone.” But meanwhile, the church group lost its financing, interest rates climbed, and the federal government feared further white opposition. The church group’s lawyers acknowledged that, despite the ruling, “[n]o developer in his or her right mind” would proceed in the face of such hostility. It was never constructed.

Other suburbs, too, subsequently incorporated to forestall African American movement from St. Louis, where, as more public housing was demolished, less housing remained. Perhaps learning from Black Jack, civil rights groups mostly didn’t bother filing similar suits.

Several suburbs, with century-­ old black residential pockets, designed redevelopment projects that forced those residents to seek public housing back in St. Louis, while St. Louis itself implemented urban renewal that forced blacks into nearby suburbs and attracted

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u . s . g e o lo g i c a l s u r v e y

white suburbanites to the city. Beginning in the the sale, perhaps subsidizing it himself. Once the Plan Commission’s single-family zones.

1950s, slum housing occupied mostly by Afri- the family visibly arrived, real estate agents By 1930, the Plan Commission estimated that can Americans was razed and replaced with solicited nearby homeowners to sell quickly 80 percent of the city’s African Americans the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial before their homes lost value from the arrival were contained within zones established by (which includes the Gateway Arch), a museum, of blacks. Sometimes, agents hired black youth the exchange. Zone boundaries were revised a sports stadium, new industry and hotels, to drive around blasting music, placed ficti- substantially in 1941, and continued to guide university expansion, middle-­class housing tious sale advertisements in African Ameri- real estate practice afterwards. unaffordable to the former African American can newspapers (and showed copies to white The exchange had a rule adapted verbatim residents, and interstate highways (including homeowners), or hired black women to push from the 1924 National Association of Realtors ramps and interchanges) to bring suburban- baby carriages around. Some speculators did code: “A realtor should never be instrumental ites to white-collar city jobs. Sometimes, as not have initial African American buyers but in introducing into a neighborhood ... members happened nationwide, after African American simply bought property and let it stay empty of any race or nationality … whose presence neighborhoods were demolished, planners’ and deteriorate to depress the value of other will clearly be detrimental to property values designs for redevelopment never materialized nearby homes and panic homeowners to sell at in that neighborhood.” Both the exchange and and cleared land remained vacant. One early reduced prices. Speculators could then buy the state regulators, the Missouri Real Estate Com1960s St. Louis project demolished an Afri- homes and resell at inflated prices to African mission, deemed sales to African Americans can American neighborhood in white neighborhoods to conof 70 blocks and 221 acres. stitute professional misconduct Fifty years later, much of it leading to loss of license. remains vacant or paved over.

In 1953, an FHA report Half of displaced African acknowledged that St. Louis Americans were offered no had 80,000 African Amerirelocation assistance. Discans with stable employment placed families relocated to who could have afforded to parpublic housing or to apartticipate in the postwar suburments adjoining their former ban boom. But in 1955 (seven ghettos that were as substanyears after Shelley v. Kraemdard as prior residences. When er), with no objection from the public housing itself became FHA or any regulatory body, unavailable, the St. Louis the exchange notified realtors Housing Authority issued rent that “no Member of our Board supplement vouchers to eligible may, directly or indirectly, sell families. From 1950 to 1980, it to Negroes … unless there are assigned some 8,000 families three separate and distinct to public housing or subsidized buildings in such block already The Pruitt-Igoe towers became a national symbol of dysfunctional public housing. apartments, almost all in overoccupied by Negroes.” In 1969, whelmingly African American neighborhoods. Americans desperately needing housing. Some a year after the Fair Housing Act’s enactment, As space in St. Louis disappeared and Afri- agents did not resell homes, but subdivided a realtor boasted to an investigator, “We never can Americans pushed out, realtors “block- and rented them to black families. When Adel sell to colored.” At that time, St. Louis realtors busted” northern and northwestern suburbs, Allen described how “for sale” signs quickly still asserted they would lose their licenses if neighborhood by neighborhood. The practice went up on his Kirkwood block, real estate they violated the segregation rule. contributed to the transformation of inner- agents were probably involved.

Should these realtors’ practices be conring suburbs like Ferguson—from white comRealtor practice and state action were sidered private or state action? Almost every munities that excluded African Americans to inseparable in St. Louis and elsewhere. The industry is regulated to some extent, so state deteriorating nearly all-black (or becoming St. Louis Real Estate Exchange surveyed its action requires more than mere regulation. Yet all-black) suburbs. members in 1923 to define zones where African few industries are as regulated as real estate.

Blockbusting was not unique to St. Louis. Americans could live. City government worked Licenses require extensive study, testing, and It was commonplace nationwide. Typically, hand in glove with the exchange, providing it recertification. Regulations cover detailed an initial African American family, like the with data on changing racial residential pat- practices—not only rules for who can show Williamses or Allens, found housing in a terns so the exchange could adapt its zoning homes or proper handling of escrow, but reallower-middle-class white neighborhood just accordingly. The exchange’s determination of tors’ private behavior. Yet while racial steering outside the ghetto. A realtor might arrange whites-only neighborhoods corresponded to had been unlawful since 1866, Missouri and

national realtor ethics rules required it. Even blockbusting was not deemed unethical by the Missouri Real Estate Commission until 1970, two years after federal law reiterated its illegality; subsequently, enforcement has been weak or nonexistent.

Only banking and insurance are more regulated than real estate, and these industries also played important roles in segregating St. Louis and the nation. For most of the 20th century, banks routinely and openly practiced “redlining”—refusing mortgages or home improvement loans to African Americans in predominantly white as well as black neighborhoods. Federal and state regulators took no notice. Until the 1960s, insurance companies likewise refused to serve African Americans in redlined areas or where restrictive covenants were broken. The nation’s leading insurance companies became developers themselves of segregated apartment complexes.

The lower incomes of African Americans today, contributing to their inability to afford housing in the more affluent suburbs of St. Louis and other metropolitan areas, cannot be understood in isolation from this history of pervasive housing segregation. In the nearly two decades beginning in 1950, the number of jobs in the city of St. Louis declined by 20 percent, while those in suburban St. Louis County increased by 400 percent. The spatial mismatch between St. Louis neighborhoods where African Americans mostly lived, and the better suburban jobs they had difficulty accessing, exacerbated racial income inequality. That inequality, in turn, reinforced the housing segregation.

Even for black workers who were able to work in the suburbs, incomes were effectively reduced relative to those of whites because of higher commuting costs. For example, from 1959 to 2009, Chrysler operated an assembly plant in suburban Fenton. Black workers living in the St. Louis ghetto and unable to live near the plant spent up to an hour commuting each way. Today, the town of Fenton remains 96 percent white, less than 0.5 percent black.

The auto industry and union were unusually hospitable to black workers. But not all industries and unions were. Those African Americans who could have commuted to better jobs were denied membership by many white-

We flatter ourselves if we believe that the responsibility for Ferguson and other Fergusons is borne only by rogue police officers, white flight, and suburbanites’ desire for economic homogeneity. only labor unions. In St. Louis (and elsewhere), unions excluded black workers but nonetheless were recognized as exclusive bargaining agents by the federal government. Certification of such practices by the National Labor Relations Board was eventually found to be a constitutional violation, but not until the suburban housing boom was mostly complete. We now understand that, for both races, intergenerational income mobility is quite limited, which means we are still paying a price for these practices, with Ferguson but one illustration.

A CENTURY OF EVIDENCE demonstrates that

St. Louis was segregated by interlocking and racially explicit public policies of zoning, public housing, and suburban finance, and by publicly endorsed segregation policies of realty, banking, and insurance industries. These government policies interacted with public labor market policies that denied African Americans access to jobs that comparably skilled whites obtained. When all of these mutually reinforcing public policies conspired with private prejudice to turn St. Louis’s African American communities into slums, public officials razed those slums to devote acreage to more profitable (and less unsightly) uses. African Americans who were displaced then relocated to the few other places available, converting towns like Ferguson into new segregated enclaves.

As the federal court observed more than 30 years ago, school desegregation requires housing desegregation. Some schools in Ferguson today are 90 percent African American; performance of students this isolated is inadequate. As the tragic death of Michael Brown shows, the interaction of black men with police has much in common with Adel Allen’s experiences 50 years ago and black experiences nationwide, when such treatment set off the riots (Ferguson’s was mild) that the Kerner Commission investigated.

Litigation has revealed that in the 2000s, federally supervised banks marketed exploitative subprime loans to African American communities like Ferguson, expecting that African Americans (particularly the elderly) were too gullible to resist false promises. When the loans’ exploding interest rates combined with the collapse of the housing bubble, black neighborhoods’ devastation compounded. Half of Ferguson homes today are underwater, with owners owing more than their homes are worth.

Many practical programs and regulatory strategies can address the problems of Ferguson and communities like it nationwide. One example is a rule prohibiting landlords from refusing to accept tenants whose rent is subsidized—a few states and municipalities currently do prohibit it, but most do not. Another is to require even outer-ring suburbs to repeal their racially inspired exclusionary zoning ordinances. Going further, we could require every community to permit development of housing to accommodate its “fair share” of its region’s low-income and minority populations—New Jersey, for example, has taken a very modest step toward this requirement.

But we won’t consider such remedies if we remain blind to how Ferguson became Ferguson. We flatter ourselves that the responsibility is only borne by rogue police officers, white flight, and suburbanites’ desire for economic homogeneity. Prosecuting the officer who shot Michael Brown, or investigating and integrating Ferguson’s police department, can’t address the deeper obstacles to racial progress.

A more extensive report, including full source citations, on which this article draws, can be accessed at http://www.epi.org/publication/ making-ferguson/

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What Clinton Could Learn from Warren A more insurgent campaign, like the one Elizabeth Warren waged for the senate, could make Hillary Clinton a stronger candidate.

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or Democrats demoralized by a succession of presidents who ran as progressives but then governed as centrists, Elizabeth Warren is the real deal. She brought the house down at Netroots Nation last July with lines like these: “A kid gets caught with a few ounces of pot and goes to jail. But a big bank launders drug money and no one gets arrested. …

The game is rigged and it isn’t right.”

It’s hard to imagine Hillary Clinton giving such a speech.

And it’s easy to imagine this kind of appeal rousing Democrats and many independents as well—even the occasional Tea Party Republican who doesn’t like Wall Street any more than Warren does. Populism is damned in some quarters as demagogic, but there is a progressive brand of populism epitomized by Franklin Roosevelt that mobilizes the frustration of regular Americans against elites, in an entirely salutary form of class warfare. Progressive populism has been in short supply lately.

Warren’s speech had all the hallmarks of a political leader keeping her options open for a presidential run.

But despite the tables in the lobby promoting a Warren campaign, the senator has emphatically disavowed that effort and issued Shermanesque declarations that under no circumstances will she run. This pleases some on the party left, such as Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, better known as Kos, who noted in a widely circulated piece last July that Hillary Clinton is the all but certain nominee, and that it would be divisive and ultimately futile for Warren to challenge her. “Warren is building a strong base of support, using her perch in the Senate to help move the entire Democratic Party to the left,” Kos wrote. “If she runs and sports anemic numbers, her critics will use that to paint her as a fringe figure, and god knows there are many people desperate to do that.”

Warren still might conceivably run if Clinton were to drop out, but that is highly improbable. Clinton has all but declared her candidacy. The ideal candidate would be some fusion of Clinton with Warren, blending Warren’s ability to mobilize voters using a powerful populist message with Clinton’s broad experience in government. Such a fusion is impossible, of course. But there are things Clinton could learn from Warren, including how to appeal to America’s stressed working- and middle-class voters, and how to wage the kind of grassroots campaign that Warren ran for her Senate seat.

HILLARY CLINTON COULD BE the earliest non-incumbent

candidate to lock up the nomination in the history of the Democratic Party. That would surely be good for Democratic unity in the general election. Unlike Clinton’s near miss in 2008, there is no outsider primary challenger like Barack Obama poised to drain off voter excitement.

But political history is full of surprise insurgents who roughed up front-runners—and sometimes even defeated them. Obama improbably beat Clinton in 2008. Eugene McCarthy in 1967 set in motion forces that ousted a sitting president, in a pre-Internet children’s crusade that anticipated the Dean insurgency of 2004. Jimmy Carter began his presidential campaign with 1-percent national recognition ratings. In December 1974, when Carter called his press conference to formally declare his run for president, I was the junior reporter on The Washington Post’s national desk. I drew the assignment to cover his announcement, and not a single other reporter from the national political press showed up. My story ended up on the shipping page.

In 1984, the outsider Gary Hart nearly knocked off former Vice President Walter Mondale, the all but anointed nomi-

nee. Hart won 17 primaries and the race went all the way to the convention, where Mondale needed the votes of newly created “superdelegates” (party leaders and elected officials) to prevail. In 1988, Michael Dukakis did not begin as frontrunner, but edged out better-established candidates, as did Bill Clinton in 1992. Of all recent Democratic nominees, only Al Gore in 2000, as a sitting vice president, cruised to nomination, defeating Bill Bradley in every primary.

At this early stage of the 2016 election cycle, it’s hard to envision any of the rumored rivals defeating Hillary Clinton. Vice President Joe Biden will be nearly 74, and in his several races for president he never broke out of the second tier. Martin O’Malley, the popular and liberal governor of Maryland, is respected as a manager, not as a crowdpleaser. O’Malley is not plausible as the next Howard Dean (but then, neither was Howard Dean). Brian Schweitzer,

Senator Elizabeth Warren waves to the crowd after her introduction at the 2014 Netroots Nation conference in Detroit.

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An enthusiastic Netroots crowd cheers for Senator Warren.

nomination. Yet, as former Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi argues, someone invariably emerges and almost always gives the front-runner a closer race than anticipated. “As the netroots technology keeps evolving,” Trippi says, “it becomes easier and easier for an outsider to upset an incumbent.” And of course, because the press loves a contest, favorable publicity is lavished on the suddenly viable challenger, creating a snowball effect.

Clinton, moreover, could be more vulnerable to a challenger than she seems. At this point, she is somewhat to the right of the party base, both on foreign policy and on economics. In the campaign, the familiar complaints that dogged her in 2008 will be resurrected and redoubled—she is so-o-o last century and the public is sick of That ’90s Show; Bill is a loose cannon; she is too close to Wall Street.

Everything vaguely unsavory about the cross-promotions

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of the Clinton family political-cum-financial conglomerate will be subjected to intense scrutiny. And this time she will be 69 years old. Some of her decisions in recent months—in particular, taking six-figure honorariums for speaking at public universities—suggest a political compass that has yet to be calibrated to the sensibilities of a nation going through hard times.

Clinton’s Atlantic Monthly interview with Jeffrey Goldberg was also odd. Her comments criticizing President Obama’s foreign policy—from the right—seemed calculating, disloyal, and opportunistic. It was the sort of interview, distancing yourself from an unpopular president whose administration you served, that you give in anticipation of the general election. Lately, Obama himself has moved in Clinton’s direction. Even so, by giving the interview two years out, Clinton did herself no favors with a more dovish Democratic base.

At a time of broad voter pocketbook disaffection, Clinton seems the antithesis of a populist. According to Nicco Mele, the mastermind of Howard Dean’s netroots strategy in 2004, “The two things Americans hate most are Wall Street and Washington, D.C. You’d be hard-pressed to find another American leader more closely identified with those two places than Hillary Clinton.”

Yet one big factor could bullet-proof Clinton against the perception that she is too much the establishment candidate—her gender. As the first likely woman nominee and first prospective woman president, Clinton represents something fresh and important. No matter how much she evokes past eras, Clinton will have an animated base of energized supporters. And there are a number of things that Clinton could do to turn herself into a more plausible progressive grassroots candidate. For starters, she could expand her personification of women’s issues into a broader plea for the working family in all of its economic distress.

That would make her a champion of hard-pressed workingand middle-class voters, and would create some healthy distance from Wall Street.

Even better, argues Mele, “If Hillary voluntarily capped every donation at a hundred bucks, that would create an urgency and a sense of distance from special interests and from the wealthy elite in the United States. That would be exciting, especially if she’s up against a billionaire-funded Republican.”

Right now, however, Clinton is the opposite of a smallmoney insurgent, with her close ties to Wall Street financing and the far-flung money connections of the Clinton Foundation. Clinton would generate more enthusiasm as a candidate and, if elected, would stand a better chance of governing as an effective progressive if she took more seriously the pocketbook ills that have caused so many voters to turn against Democrats and the idea of affirmative

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the populist former governor of Montana, has signaled that he might contest the Democratic nomination. But though he’s progressive on economic issues, his views on issues like gun control would divide the party base. Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb, with fiery anti-war speeches, has sought to position himself to Clinton’s left on both foreign policy and economic issues, though he is also to the right of the party base on social issues. Another possible dark horse making noises about running is Russ Feingold, the former Wisconsin senator, a much admired but out-of-thenews progressive. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a democratic socialist, has told supporters that he will run in the Democratic primaries if no other progressive does, mainly to raise issues and push Clinton to the left.

None of the above seems likely to deny Clinton the

government itself. In this respect, Warren is an important role model for the issues she’s championed, for the grassroots campaign she ran, and for what her Senate campaign demonstrated about the nexus of grassroots enthusiasm, small money, and voter turnout.

WARREN HAS BEEN underestimated throughout her polit-

ical life. She is stereotyped as a preachy Harvard professor, but that’s far from either her life story or persona on the campaign trail. She came from a working-class family in Oklahoma and managed to go to college on a debate scholarship, after being named the best high school debater in her state. She attended George Washington University, one of only a few schools to offer debate scholarships, and married her high school boyfriend, Jim Warren, at 19. She dropped out to follow him to a new job in Houston, where she had her first child at 22. Warren managed to go back to school, toddler in tow, and eventually get a law degree.

Far more than Clinton’s life story, Warren’s is one that workaday America can relate to—as they did in the 2012 Senate campaign where Scott Brown’s symbolic pickup truck was no match for Warren’s actual lived experience.

While a professor at Harvard Law School, Warren performed pioneering research demonstrating that the vast majority of families forced into the humiliation of personal bankruptcy were broken not by profligate spending but by life emergencies such as medical bills or the death or divorce of a breadwinner. Warren led the fight to block a bankruptcy “reform” bill promoted by bankers that would make it far harder for households to get a clean start. Congressional liberals were able to block the bill for a full decade, but it was finally passed and signed by President Bush in 2005.

Warren’s role in that battle brought her to the attention of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who in 2008 appointed her to chair the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with oversight of the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). In that post, she managed to investigate and sharply criticize the performance of top Obama economic officials Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, while staying on cordial terms with Obama. She achieved the remarkable feat of keeping control of the staff and report-writing of a panel that had three Democrats and two Republicans, even though one of the Democrats, Richard Neiman, was close to Wall Street. She broadened the narrow and technical post of chair of the panel. Soon she was effectively functioning as leader of the loyal opposition to Obama on financial reform. She also involved herself closely in the drafting of what became the DoddFrank Act, working closely with key legislators and allies in the administration and the advocacy community who were pressing for tougher legislation than the Treasury had

drafted. By the time Warren decided to run for the Senate, she was no political novice, but one shrewd political player.

Warren won the 2012 Massachusetts Senate race by pursuing a strategy that has implications for presidential politics. First, she ran as a progressive, attracting hundreds of thousands of grassroots supporters—people who had been thirsting for a genuine liberal to run for high office.

After a somewhat bumpy takeoff, Warren got really good at retail politics. Second, she built a superb campaign operation, drawing in part on the grassroots machine already assembled by Democratic Governor Deval Patrick. Finally, she raised a ton of money, almost half of it in small contributions, both because of the Commonwealth’s relatively low donation ceilings and because of her principled refusal to seek corporate or Wall Street money.

Warren’s $43 million, the most that had ever been raised in a Senate race, came from more than 350,000 people, a stunning feat in a state where the entire electorate is a little more than 4.3 million. Warren did not make use of dummy, nominally unaffiliated fundraising fronts, and the outlays by bona fide independent groups such as the League of

Warren’s $43 million, the most that had ever been raised in a Senate race, came from more than 350,000 people, a stunning feat in a state where the electorate is a little more than 4.3 million.

Conservation Voters and EMILY’s List were relatively low.

About 41 percent of Warren’s donors were in-state. Do the arithmetic: Massachusetts has about 2 percent of the U.S. population. If a presidential candidate were to duplicate this scale of small-donor fundraising nationally, she would raise several hundred million in small money—and in the process mobilize about seven million citizen activists. All of which suggests that someone like Warren, if not Warren herself, could have national appeal as a candidate.

In the ten years since Howard Dean pioneered this strategy, digital technology for use in campaigns has matured and ramified. That is both good news and bad news for prospective insurgent candidates. It’s good news because insurgents like Dean and Warren can cultivate a strong base of support and, with it, take more risks. It’s bad news because a candidate like Obama or Clinton, with plenty of money and an aroused base, can use netroots technology about as well as an upstart—and then, once elected, quickly move to disable an independent grassroots army.

The Internet as leveler can cut both ways.

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As Micah Sifry observes in a smart and skeptical new book, The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet), social media in the hands of a genuinely insurgent candidate can be transformative and complement traditional on-the-ground organizing. But it can also be a force for “computational management” and “passive democratic engagement.” But after bashing a lot of recent pseudo-grassroots use of social media, Sifry concludes, trying to summon up some optimism, “The Internet does not have to become one more means for mass marketing and manipulation. It can also transform civic life into something far more participatory, transparent and engaging.” One might say the same of the Democratic Party.

FOR HALF A CENTURY, progressive Democrats have clung

to a fantasy that might uncharitably be described as Waiting for Lefty. If only a compelling candidate emerged, he or she could get nominated and elected—not as another centrist but as a progressive pledging to remedy the worsening economic conditions that mainstream politics never get around to fixing. Such a candidate could galvanize not

A “politics of excluded alternatives” is waiting in the wings. But such a politics takes a remarkable leader, a mass movement, and the right circumstances for it to break through. just Democrats, but many social conservatives who vote Republican because Democrats offer too little practical help as conditions only worsen. But, as in the Clifford Odets play, Lefty never comes.

Why not? Is the fantasy a delusion? If a lefty candidate truly had the potential to rally disaffected voters, wouldn’t one have gotten nominated by now?

I think the story is more complex. If we look again at political history, two conclusions emerge. First, deep structural factors create an undertow that drags progressives down. The mainstream media tends to disparage leftist candidates as class warriors or protectionists. More centrist candidates that can gesture left yet raise a lot of business money (and thus not challenge business hegemony once in office) are more likely to win nomination and election.

Second, it takes a very unusual individual to overcome these structural factors, and such people are in short supply. Looking back half a century, one such candidate who offered a compelling progressive narrative, Robert Ken-

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nedy, was assassinated the night he won the California primary. Had he lived, he would likely have won the nomination and the election—and governed as an economic progressive. Another genius at rallying ordinary people on behalf of progressive policies, Paul Wellstone, who was contemplating a presidential run in 2000, died in a plane crash.

The other lefties who contested the Democratic nomination and failed to win it are a quirky crew. The one insurgent who did manage to get nominated, George McGovern in 1972, was a mainstream progressive on economic issues (he had directed the Food for Peace program for President Kennedy), but first and foremost an anti-war candidate.

McGovern was swamped by Democratic Party divisions on one flank and the Nixon machine, then at its pre-Watergate apogee, on the other.

In 1976, two progressives, Fred Harris and Mo Udall, both sought the presidency and more or less canceled each other out. The three most instructive cases of economic progressives losing the nomination are those of Richard Gephardt in 1988, Howard Dean in 2004, and John Edwards in 2008. Gephardt was very much the labor candidate in 1988. He also ran against the unfair trade practices that were undermining the factory economy. For this, the mainstream press pilloried him as a protectionist.

Gephardt also was less than scintillating as a candidate.

In 2004, Dean demonstrated the power of a grassroots insurgency using new Internet technology. Like McGovern, however, Dean came to prominence mainly as an antiwar candidate. Having been a competent and respected governor of Vermont, Dean was far from an economic populist and was a somewhat improbable insurgent hero— I recall covering one of his early press conferences where he spoke of the importance of fiscal discipline. But Dean broke out with powerful speeches in which he upbraided the Democratic establishment for supporting the Iraq War, the same strategy that served Barack Obama, who was a novice Senate candidate that year. Speaking to a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, along with six other candidates, Dean demanded, “What I want to know is, why in the world the Democratic leadership is supporting the president’s unilateral attack on Iraq?” He soon became the favorite of the MoveOn.org activists.

Dean’s genius was to hire dozens of young people like Mele and give them free rein to experiment. As a total outsider with no national reputation and hardly any money, he was willing to take huge risks. The result was transformational. Using first Meetup.com and later netroots technology of the campaign’s own invention, Dean enlisted what would eventually be about 165,000 volunteers, blending live gatherings with virtual ones, raising more money online than any candidate before him.

But Dean’s candidacy ultimately failed because his cam-

c h a r l e s k r u pa / a p i m a g e s

Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean reaches into the crowd while campaigning in downtown Boston in 2003.

paign was inept at combining the novel Internet organizing with the traditional bread and butter of a competent field operation. Trippi, his campaign manager, wrote of the run-up to the Iowa precinct caucuses (which became Dean’s swan song, or more accurately his swan scream), “Our guy has become an unmitigated disaster on the road.

The unscripted candor that served him when he was the longest shot is now being played like a sort of political Tourette’s. … We’ve got no adults with him on the road—no seasoned political people—and so, naturally, he’s gaffing his way across Iowa.” The Dean campaign, however, laid the groundwork for the netroots era that followed.

In 2008, one more insurgent candidate auditioned for the role of Lefty, campaigning on the issue of poverty as an economically populist Southerner. But John Edwards, after winning considerable support among progressive Democrats, turned out to be a total phony. Running as the left candidate against strong female and African American contenders, he was almost certain to fail even had he not been a fraud.

Despite all these failures, what political scientist Walter Dean Burnham calls a “politics of excluded alternatives” is waiting in the wings for the right candidate, and a novel campaign technology has been created that could serve as her financial complement. But this politics takes a remarkable leader and the right circumstances for it to break through and reveal itself as majoritarian. That alignment has happened only twice in the past century.

The first time was when Franklin Roosevelt moved to the

left in office and used the crisis of the Great Depression, followed by World War II, to remake American capitalism and assemble a durable political coalition to support the modern mixed economy. The second was when Lyndon Johnson, an accidental president who had been a centrist majority leader and vice president, decided that it was his destiny to redeem the promises of Lincoln and Roosevelt.

Such leaders are extremely rare. The feeder system of American politics filters out most such people, well before they get to run for senator or governor. There are other effective progressives in American politics today, such as Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Al Franken of Minnesota, and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City. But none has quite Warren’s combination of mastery of the issues, astute political talents as an inside player, and mass popular appeal.

So the Waiting for Lefty fantasy is not completely fantastical, but really difficult to pull off. Though some think this is Elizabeth Warren’s moment, the stars are not in alignment. In the unlikely event that Clinton decides not to run, Warren might be drafted. But the wait for Lefty will probably continue.

CLINTON CANNOT MAKE herself over into Warren, least

of all at age 69, but she can learn from Warren’s experience—and from that of the man who beat her last time.

Some progressive activists, who went all out for Obama in 2008 and then were disappointed by his presidency, will be warier this time. After his election, Obama tamed

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

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and neutered his massive volunteer operation, Obama for America, making it part of the Democratic National Committee. That move prompted cries of outrage, but it was predictable—no president would tolerate an in-house freelance opposition. More troubling was the fact that he turned to the same Wall Street–oriented officials who invited the financial collapse to staff his administration, where they bailed out the banks. It was opposition to those politics that won Warren a national reputation.

If Clinton runs true to form and wins, she will be the fourth president since Carter to run as a moderate progressive and govern as a centrist. There is also a generational fault line that should concern her. At 69, Clinton is the quintessential boomer candidate. If she defends Social Security and Medicare as all good progressive Democrats must, but fails to offer some real hope for the economically stressed young, she runs the risk of leaving millennials (who voted in large numbers for Obama) as easy prey for either Republicans or apathy. Putting work and family issues front and center could go a long way to neutralizing this risk. The real division in American society, despite the contentions of centrist political pundits, is not boomers versus millennials, but the one percent versus everyone else. There are millennial bond traders, just as there are boomers choosing between rent, food, and medicine.

For a front-runner, the greatest risk is playing it safe.

Taking Mele’s suggestion and capping all donations at $100 would be more than a deft gesture. It would compel Clinton to fundamentally change the way she campaigns and give her license to break with Wall Street.

This time, the stakes are more than just ideological preference. The stakes are about what sort of country we are. Deep changes in the structure of the economy have produced a period of prolonged stagnation. Public systems that once offered opportunity and security to the non-rich have been seriously weakened. For many ordinary working people, tax-and-spend is not the attractive social bargain that it once was. Payroll employment with good benefits and career prospects is becoming the exception and nonstandard jobs the norm. These tidal shifts especially afflict the barista generation.

It will take more than token fixes, of the sort that are acceptable to financial elites, to transform this economy and reverse the related voter disaffection. The Clinton operation has historically taken its advice on economic policy from Robert Rubin and his protégés. These days, Rubin is a headliner at Clinton Global Initiative events.

The Rubinistas remain fixated on deficit reduction, combined with token outlays to help the poor. A Clinton campaign or presidency that offered such remedies as modest increases in the minimum wage, a little more job training, slight help for first-time homebuyers, and some mild

relief from college debt will make no real difference. And voter cynicism about the value of the public sector and the Democratic Party will only cumulate.

To govern as an effective progressive, a Democrat not only needs to get elected. She needs to offer broad enough appeal and large enough coattails to rebuild a working Democratic majority in Congress. The arithmetic of 2016 suggests that this feat will be achievable in the Senate (in a year when many vulnerable Republican seats will be up) but much harder in the House. President Obama was far more effective politically on the campaign trail than as a chief executive. As president, Hillary Clinton would need to present a bolder program that offered to make a real difference in people’s lives, and then ask voters to elect a Congress that could deliver it, as Franklin Roosevelt did

in 1934, and Lyndon Johnson did in 1964—and Barack Obama did not do in 2010.

In the era of the Gary Hart campaign, the young Sidney Blumenthal, who later became a Bill Clinton aide and who still advises Hillary Clinton, coined a very useful phrase and political concept—the insider as outsider. By that, he meant someone with enough experience in politics to be credible as a presidential candidate, but who champions the frustrations of people who feel excluded from the political system.

Clinton today is the ultimate insider. She may well take Blumenthal’s advice and posture as outsider, using her role as the first prospective woman nominee and president to give that posture credibility. But for Clinton to be a successful candidate and president, it has to be more than a pose. She would do well to spend a lot less time with Rubin and a lot more with Warren.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the 2013 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Senator John Kerry’s nomination to be secretary of state

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Can We Earn a Living

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on a Living Planet?

Labor and the Ecological Limits to Growth

BY CHUCK COLLINS

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—President Barack Obama, November 14, 2012, two weeks after Hurricane Sandy

I

t has been a tough couple of years in the effort to unite labor, community, and environmental groups, an alliance that has always been strained.

The extractive energy sector—coal, gas, oil—has historically had strong union representation and well-paying jobs. Tensions rose in 2011 after the Sierra Club escalated their campaign to close coal plants and 350.org, the climate protection group led by activist Bill McKibben, called for a halt to the Keystone XL Pipeline project. Even Obama’s relatively mild order this past June on reducing pollution from power plants was opposed by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Mineworkers.

At a February 2013 meeting of labor and environmental activists, Damon Silvers, the AFL-CIO’s director of policy and special counsel, yelled and pounded the table, “Where is the transition plan for workers? Why isn’t this part of your demands?”

Divisions will increase in the coming years, as two competing urgencies collide. Labor and community justice organizations will demand jobs, economic growth, and reductions in inequality. And environmental activists will increase pressure to curtail fossil fuel production in the face of climate disruptions. Both the politics and the policies of these goals seem to diverge. But must they?

“Pitting jobs versus the environment is a false choice,” says Joe Uehlein, a longtime trade unionist, now board president of the Labor Network for Sustainability, which builds alliances between environmental and labor sectors. “We need to figure out how to make a living on a living planet.”

VISIONS OF GROWTH

Liberal Keynesians and their trade union allies have long associated economic growth with better wages, tighter labor markets, and rising living standards. Rising gross

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domestic product (GDP), the traditional measure of growth, is said to reflect increased productivity. Of course, higher productivity doesn’t automatically yield better lives for workers—too much of it lately has been captured by the top one percent. Labor has never asserted that growth is the whole story—a broad diffusion of the economy’s productivity also requires labor market regulation, strong unions, progressive taxation, and social outlays. But still, it is hard to envision rising living standards without growth.

However, another important voice in progressive circles argues that our growth paradigm is a dead end—that we should face this fact and get on with the urgent work of transitioning to an ecologically sustainable new economy.

“Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with,” writes Richard Heinberg in The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. “There are now fundamental barriers to ongoing economic expansion and the world is colliding with those barriers.”

In some respects, these two core constituencies of American progressivism are talking past each other. By “growth,” liberal advocates of full employment and other measures of a well-performing economy don’t mean the trajectory we’ve been on. Market economies, left to their own devices, have produced both social injustice and environmental predation. GDP has come under well-deserved attack for counting “bads” (pollution, crime, prisons, medical treatment for preventable illness) as if they were economic goods—and underplaying social indicators of well-being. A new economy could raise living standards for most people, at a lower planetary toll, although “consumption” would have different ingredients.

There was a time when the limits-to-growth advocates were ridiculed by orthodox economists because the planetary crisis had not yet validated their warnings. Raw materials, contrary to their prophecies, were not becoming more expensive, but often cheaper. Some critics contended that they were elevating a lifestyle choice—voluntary simplicity—to an ecological imperative. Today, however, acceptance of the climate emergency is utterly mainstream and scientifically confirmed.

Yet there is still a fair debate about what sacrifices in living standards must be accepted (and by whom) to save the earth, and how to accommodate the aspirations of working people, in rich and poor countries alike, who never shared in the growth. Many in the environmental movement, especially “deep ecology” activists, counter that the survival of the planet trumps all other concerns. Humans must adjust to a lower level of material consumption. That view, which is surely valid as an existential assertion, is hard to accept

p r e v i o u s s p r e a d : m at t s lo c u m / a p i m a g e s ; n a s a

“I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused, on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody is going to go for that. I won’t go for that.”

if your level of material well-being has been declining for decades, or if you have never been party to Western-style consumption at all. Can this chasm be bridged?

I spent much of the past summer interviewing some of the most thoughtful people in both movements, sometimes in the same room. I came away feeling that the quest for common ground is challenging, but far from hopeless.

j o s h lo p e z

PERSONAL GROWTH

For me, this conundrum is personal. My adult life has existed at the intersection of struggles to reduce economic inequality and to save the environment. For 30 years, I’ve worked as a community organizer and researcher on issues of affordable housing, community development, and growing wealth inequality in the United States.

But I also came of political age in the late 1970s, fighting against the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. While living in Mexico, I questioned whether the U.S. economic model could expand to the Global South without huge ecological costs.

In the 1990s, I co-founded a national organization to address wealth inequality. I worked with Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett to fight the repeal of the federal estate tax.

Like many progressive Keynesians, I supported growth policies to remedy a stagnant wage economy.

While arguing for a better distribution of a bigger pie, I was immersing myself in the world of ecological limits and green economics. My vacation reading pile included books like Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, and new economy thinkers such as Peter Victor, Van Jones, Juliet Schor, David Korten, and Gus Speth.

In my Boston neighborhood, I co-founded Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition to build community resilience in the face of economic and ecological change. I encountered a whole neighborhood of local activists who were concerned about economic inequality and ecology, and were engaged in building a new food system, re-localized enterprises, and all manner of “small is beautiful” interventions.

In the back of my mind was a dawning appreciation of cognitive dissonance: How can we both “prime the economic pump” and recognize the “limits to growth”?

The technical questions come entangled with political ones. Do my inequality and job-creation allies disbelieve the science of planetary boundaries, or do they fear the dire implications of conceding the growth debate to the political right? Are my enviro allies tone-deaf to equity and employment issues?

Is there a program that grows the good parts of the economy—and raises the standards of living in communities that have been excluded from prosperity—while shrinking the destructive growth? Can we redefine growth in a way that could satisfy the job seekers and the planet savers?

THE ENDS OF GROWTH

Joe Uehlein personifies this quest for reconciliation. A singer-songwriter as well as an organizer, he grew up in a union family in Lorain, Ohio, with a mother who organized with the clothing workers union and a father who worked in the steel mills and helped found the steelworkers union.

“When I was 17, I got a job at an aluminum factory and became a member of the United Steelworkers of America,” says Uehlein, who grew up along the shores of Lake Erie.

In 1972, Uehlein was working construction, pouring concrete at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. He had to cross a picket line of anti-nuclear environmentalists to go to work. His union local put out a bumper sticker: “Hungry and Out of Work? Eat an Environmentalist.”

“We swam in the lake and ate yellow perch by the hun-

Union organizer and environmentalist Joe Uehlein was included in a photo series produced for Tar Sands Action.

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 65

dreds,” he says. “One day, there was a sign that said the lake was contaminated: No swimming or fishing.”

Today, he says, “There are people who say I’m no longer a trade unionist because I’ve spoken out against the Keystone XL Pipeline. That stings and it’s wrong.”

“There is short-term thinking in both corporations and the labor movement when it comes to climate change,” says Uehlein. “But the enviros need to understand that we won’t build a movement to reduce carbon emissions without addressing the economic security concerns facing a majority of workers.”

Another trade unionist drawn to the environmental cause is Ron Blackwell. Now retired from a senior post at the AFL-CIO, Blackwell has joined forces with Joe Uehlein to bridge the gap between blue and green—and strengthen these social movements.

“We are failing,” says Blackwell. “The atmosphere continues to warm and inequality continues to increase. We need to clarify the concepts that divide us and figure out how to grow human well-being.”

“For most trade unionists, growth means jobs,” Blackwell adds. “For many environmentalists, growth means destruction. Given that difference, it is mighty tough to build solidarity.”

LIMITS TO THE LIMITS TO GROWTH

After talking to labor people like Ron Blackwell and Joe Uehlein in Washington, D.C., I am eager to talk to supporters of ecological economics. I am invited, as a guest, to attend a board retreat of the Post Carbon Institute, a group of respected intellectuals and activists rooted in the limitsto-growth tradition. We meet at a stunning mountaintop conference center, Earthrise, looking north over Petaluma, California, with gorgeous views in every direction.

I have read five of Richard Heinberg’s books and hosted him as a speaker in Boston. He is representative of a group of independent scholars, ecological thinkers, and green economists who have been inserting nature back into the economic equation for decades.

Starting with the 1972 publication of Limits to Growth, these futurists have been warning that we are overshooting the earth’s carrying capacity in terms of population, pollution, and resource depletion. In 1973, ecological economist Herman Daly published Toward a Steady-State Economy, offering an alternative vision of a steady-state economy operating within planetary biophysical limits. Climate change is one of these planetary constraints, but not the only one. The Stockholm Resilience Center has identified nine, including biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and freshwater loss.

66 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG FALL 2014

Guiding the retreat conversation is Asher Miller, the director of the Post Carbon Institute, a serious-minded organizer in his forties who had previously spent a decade working on human rights. “The biosphere has surpassed limits of both what can be safely extracted but also dumped into our various ‘sinks’: our planet’s ability to absorb and process waste, such as carbon and methane,” Miller says.

“In a small economy, circa 1900, we could ignore these limits. But with the pace of exponential growth since then, we have surpassed our earth’s carrying capacity.”

Another pillar of the “limits” view is that we are at the end of the “cheap energy” era. We are not running out of oil, but we have already extracted the easy-to-get stuff.

As a result, we are scrambling for more “extreme” forms of fossil fuel production, including deep-sea oil drilling, hydraulic fracking, and tar sands extraction.

Some “limits” advocates say that our current model of growth and consumption, particularly in industrialized countries, does not add to well-being and health; no one denies that there are minimal material needs, but above a certain level the benefits of further material growth reach a point of diminishing returns. “Natural capital” is the foundation of our economic way of life, they argue. Once we hit hard limits—and the perpetual growth machine stops humming—then the billions of dollars in financial bets, based on the assumption of continuous growth, will tank. At that point, we will be left with both an ecologically degraded society and a stagnant economy.

Finally, some ecologists argue we must confront the anthropocentric hubris of our actions: Our growth model is destroying other species and habitats. Spaceship Earth is not for humans alone—and our fate is intertwined with the flourishing of other life forms.

I join a discussion with Miller, Mateo Nube from Movement Generation, and Diane Johnson. Nube and Johnson are both organizers and residents of Oakland. “We need a huge World War II–style mobilization to conserve energy and invest in renewables,” says Miller. “The bad news is, this politically won’t happen anytime soon. Which is why the local new economy transition movement is so important.”

“We need to protect our communities from extractive capitalism and re-localize our economy,” says Nube.

“The changes we are seeing in our food system—the move toward local and regional production—is what we need in all sectors, including energy.”

“We have to be careful in our efforts to build community resilience,” adds Johnson. “If we are not intentional about social justice and equity, our resiliency organizing efforts could replicate the inequalities of the old system.”

I feel in sync with these conversations. With our national political system evidently captured by the extractive energy industry, many people are shifting engagement to the local level, where they have agency. Local action could be the base for a new economy political movement, when the opportune moments emerge. But Johnson has a point.

Even these new community resilience movements could replicate the class and racial patterns of the old order.

“THE PARTY IS OVER?”

I return to Boston from the mountaintop summit with the “end of growth” people, eager to talk to my neighborhood co-workers who advocate a “just transition.”

I pick up the conversation with my colleague Carlos Espinoza-Toro, the lead organizer for the Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition. I mention Richard Heinberg’s book The Party’s Over, about oil depletion and its implications for the future of the United States’ standard of living.

“The party’s over?” Carlos repeats. “I wasn’t even invited to the party. In fact, I’ve been working at the party and hoping I would get to go some day.” He laughs, but I hear the sense of betrayal in his voice.

I reflect on what I know of Carlos’s life. I see him working at his father’s auto body shop in Lima, Peru. His father dips his hands into the chemical solvents, knowing they are toxic, but hoping for a better life for his children. I see his parents send Carlos off to the United States for an education, with hopes for a professional career.

“As organizers, we think of our work as the art of mobilizing people by raising expectations,” reflects Carlos. “People are engaged when there is a possibility of more—more dignity, more income, better working conditions, and a piece of the pie. How do we organize people around the reality that their aspiration—for a decent job, retirement security, a new car, a vacation, a better life for their children—is less possible? And what if the messengers are mostly privileged people, people who have been at the party?”

“Yeah, it was a great party,” I reply, mocking my own defensiveness. “Sorry that we affluent white people in the Global North ate all the food, drank all the booze, and trashed the house. Sorry it’s over. Now it’s time for you to sacrifice, tighten your belt.”

We are laughing. “I sure as hell don’t want to be the one to break the news to people,” says Carlos. “The only people who want to hear this are already Luddites.”

Among my community organizer friends, talking about any sort of limits to growth is a nonstarter, especially for those who were raised with little money, job stability, or creature comforts. The radical insistence on limits to

growth seems the choice of privileged people who volunteer for a simpler lifestyle and then inflict it on others with far fewer choices.

I meet my friend Alexie Torres-Fleming, who worked for two decades as an organizer in the South Bronx. “There is a total disconnect across race and class when we talk about the ecological limits to future growth. It will not be heard unless you speak to deprivation, loss, anger.”

I call Asher Miller at the Post Carbon Institute. “Yep, there is a serious communications issue,” he says. In 2008, Miller worked on a presidential political campaign that had a serious internal discussion about climate change.

The science experts and the political people debated whether the candidate should use words like “sacrifice” or “conserve.” They concluded they could talk about “efficiency,” because conservation signaled to people they were going to have to live with less.

“Remember the last major politician who tried to have

A new economy could raise living standards for most people, at a lower planetary toll, though “consumption” would have different ingredients. an honest political discussion about the limits of our energy consumption?” Miller asks.

I flash back to being 18 years old in 1978, and taking a Greyhound bus home from Boston to Detroit. On the rear of the bus was a big sign: “Thanks for taking the bus and saving energy,” signed Jimmy Carter.

I pull up several YouTube videos of President Carter addressing the nation about the energy crisis in 1977.

In one video, Carter sits by a crackling fire in the White House, wearing a yellow cardigan sweater. The message is, “Rosalynn and I are conserving heat here at the White House, and you can make a sacrifice, too.”

I am struck by the directness of Carter’s words in another address to the nation. “Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth,” he pronounces. “We waste more energy than we import.” Carter notes that the U.S. consumes twice as much energy as European nations, with the same standard of living.

Carter’s program for reducing dependence on foreign oil started with conservation. “If we all cooperate and make

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modest sacrifices,” he says in the video where he sits by the fire, “if we learn to live thriftily and remember the importance of helping our neighbors, then we can find ways to adjust and make our society more efficient and our own lives more enjoyable and productive.”

Sacrifice. Conservation. Thrift. These are not words I’ve heard in recent decades. Not surprisingly—the public didn’t buy it. Ronald Reagan’s ebullient 1984 “Morning in America” campaign message drove a gas-guzzling Hummer over Carter’s austerity rhetoric. Reagan removed Carter’s solar panels from the White House, and since 1980, the discourse about energy and economic growth has been, “We can have it all!”

The lesson: Talking about limits may be anti-American, and it certainly won’t win elections. Optimistic abundance is the way to go.

Since Carter, climate change and energy policy have become political culture-war issues. The right promotes

For trade unionists, growth means jobs.

For environmentalists, growth means destruction. Given that difference, it is mighty tough to build solidarity. a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy, where any constraints on consumption are viewed as big government, job-killing liberalism. In Democratic Party politics, no one wants to be perceived as soft on growth.

Can better ideas work as politics? I make a date to bicycle over to Boston College and talk to Juliet Schor, a professor of economics and sociology, and the author of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. But the next day it is nearly ninety degrees and humid, so I drive my car.

“Beware of people who say they can predict the future,” says Schor. “The climate cycle? The economy? Technological innovation? These are each huge and incredibly complex systems. And we’re talking about how they interact together. We can’t possibly forecast where we will be in the next decade.”

“The limits-to-growth folks are right about energy,” she adds. “We can’t replace cheap oil. But there are lots of unknowns, including the role of technological innovation to reduce waste and increase efficiency.”

Amory Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute have

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been arguing across four decades that improved energy efficiency is the “largest, cheapest, safest, cleanest, fastest way to provide energy services.” According to Lovins, the economy could save 50 percent of oil and gas and threequarters of electricity—at one-eighth the cost.

Schor points to innovation emerging at the local level— including neighborhood-based “makerspaces” and “fabrication labs,” enabling production of many things localities typically import, like snow shovels and wheelbarrows. People are planting trees and exploring new ways to sequester carbon. Young farmers are merging traditional farming wisdom with new technology and insights about soil fertility, boosting output while transitioning away from fossil fuel–intensive agriculture.

“We are redefining growth and wealth and measures of abundance,” smiles Schor. She puts on a broad sun hat and walks me back to my car, before setting out on foot for home.

I find Schor’s insights have a double edge. For the labor people, technological progress implies we can have our living standards and our sustainability, too. For the deep enviros, the inability to predict the future is reflected in the fact that climate change and sea level rise have proceeded much faster than projected, to the point of irreversibility.

Without drastic reductions in consumption, they insist, technology won’t save us.

GROWTH OF WHAT?

“We are fetishizing growth,” says Ron Blackwell, the retired labor economist. “Growth of what? We need to make a distinction between dead-end growth and healthy growth.”

Blackwell is invoking an important debate among economists, such as Herman Daly, about whether it is possible to reduce the worst aspects of destructive extraction, consumption, and waste dumping (“throughput”) from production of goods and services that improve our lives. Some economists say these are linked together; others, including Blackwell, argue they can be delinked. Green energy, for instance, reduces throughput.

I’ve pulled Blackwell and Schor into a meeting of the New Economy Working Group, in Washington, D.C. “We shouldn’t overplay the role of growth in the debate,” agrees Schor. “We’re living with low growth now. But we urgently need to bring emissions down.”

“I agree the frame of growth is problematic,” chimes in Randy Hayes, a longtime environmental activist. “What I don’t find problematic is selective growth and selective de-growth.”

“It’s not growth versus no growth,” agrees Robert Pollin, an economist from the Political Economy Research

Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“Some things should grow a lot, like the clean energy sector. Other things should shrink, like the fossil fuel sector.

The growth from massive investments in clean energy will lead to millions of jobs.”

As an economist, Pollin challenges the idea that there is a trade-off between jobs and the environment. “The climate movement needs workers on their side. It can’t just be billionaires like Michael Bloomberg who care about the environment and drive the process from the top down.”

Pollin’s new book-length report, Green Growth: A U.S. Program for Controlling Climate Change and Expanding Job Opportunities, spells out a bold plan to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 40 percent over the next 20 years and create 2.7 million net new jobs. The plan assumes “the U.S. economy will not experience any slowdown in economic growth.”

Pollin’s program requires an annual investment of $190 billion over the next 20 years, essentially a shift of 1.2 percent of the GDP. This investment would be steered toward “dramatically raising energy efficiency standards in buildings, transportation systems, and industrial processes, and, equally dramatically, expanding the supply of renewable energy sources—solar, wind, geothermal, small-scale hydro, and clean bioenergy power.”

PERSISTENT PETROLEUM

What is not to love about that program? We can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, expand employment, and maintain our standard of living. I can envision candidates running for office and winning on a “green growth” platform.

“We need ideas like the Pollin program,” says Joe Uehlein. “It is a macroeconomy policy vision that complements the local community social justice work.”

I am elated, but it only lasts until I talk to Asher Miller again. He offers a cautionary note: The transition to renewable energy can’t be achieved without massive fossil fuel expenditure and carbon emissions along the way. “What we forget,” says Miller, “is that the process of bringing renewable energy to mass scale requires huge fossil fuel inputs for extraction, manufacturing, and transport.”

My friendly Cassandras have a point: The ecological and economic breakdown is already under way for most of the planet. For the economically secure in the wealthier nations, we can periodically wake up to the breakdown, but still ignore its systemic nature. But if you’re a Bangladeshi farmer, you’re already trying to survive climate change and you’ve possibly become a climate refugee. If you’re a farmer in the Central Valley of California, you are

wondering if your unprecedented drought is part of a “new normal” with weather.

Power down. Use less. Reduce consumption. The ghost of Jimmy Carter is knocking on my double-paned insulated window.

AVERTING THE COMING CLASH

I see an approaching political and cultural clash. As the ecological crisis worsens, environmentalists become bolder, opposing any new fossil fuel extraction and working to put a price on carbon. But as economic inequality accelerates, we demand that our politicians create jobs, raising pressure to weaken environmental standards. Growth has faltered—not because the enviros are winning, but because the Keynesians are losing. Right-wingers and global corporations will be happy to deflect our progressive anger onto one another, stoking the culture war and pitting struggling workers against environmental protections.

Meanwhile, the push for energy independence in North America will lead to huge public and private investments in deep-water oil, tar sands, shale oil fracking, and pipelines to transport extreme energy, sources of many high-wage union jobs. The most militant elements of the environmentalist movement will expand direct-action tactics, blocking pipelines and confronting energy workers directly. There is an iconic news photo from the 1960s emblazoned in my memory: The hardhats beating up the anti-war activists.

Does it have to be this way? Europe appears to have an easier time with this growth conversation. For decades, all major parties have embraced high taxes on carbon as only sensible. That’s basic leadership that our politicians lack.

In Germany, the labor movement has embraced the rapid transition to decentralized renewable energy, especially in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan.

“German workers have less to fear,” observes Joe Uehlein. “They already have a just transition in the form of a social safety net. These German workers are not afraid of losing their health care, pension, paid vacations, and affordable educations for kids. We need the equivalent of military base–closing legislation as we close power plants, with planning and worker protections.”

Joe Uehlein’s point about Germany offers a clue to uniting labor, community, and environmental activists. If we really want to fix the environment, then we need coalitions to rewire an economic system that currently exploits humans and depletes nature.

“What we enviros need to understand is the centrality of work in people’s lives—and that in a society with deep social

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zocchi, a labor leader with roots in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) that started in the 1960s. I was lucky enough to meet Mazzocchi a few times, a man considered the Rachel Carson of the labor movement and a pioneer in the field of worker health and safety.

Mazzocchi’s view was that the environmentalists needed to become vocal advocates of a “just transition” program for workers, especially when green policies eliminate jobs.

This program goes beyond the small and often ineffective job retraining programs, like those administered under the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance program after NAFTA . Mazzocchi called these transitional labor subsidies the equivalent of “burial insurance.”

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“There is a Superfund for dirt,” Mazzocchi quipped, referring to the program for toxic waste sites. “There ought to be one for workers.”

In that spirit, the environmental movement needs to become a new economy movement that advocates for full employment, just transition for workers, and job-boosting public investment in education, infrastructure, and research. “We will fail if we can’t bring these movements together,” says Uehlein. “There is so much at stake. We have to blend our interests if we are going to reduce economic inequality and address the climate crisis.”

Those of us in the labor-equality camp need to understand that “making a living on a living planet” will entail more than the high-wage industrial jobs that organized labor has protected for a shrinking percentage of the workforce. It means rethinking livelihoods not just in terms of wage income, but meeting needs through self-provisioning, the sharing economy, community exchange, and yes, simplifying our lives. It may mean a shorter workweek, as wage work is spread around broadly.

Most progressives I spoke with, whether steady-state economists, community gardeners, doomsday preppers or “prime the pump” Keynesians, agree on a few points.

1. Conservation. We need to achieve European levels of energy conservation. We need a Marshall Plan of internal investment to retrofit buildings, raise auto emission standards, and reduce our carbon footprint. This is where technological innovation can make a tremendous difference.

2. Renewable Energy. Capital, subsidies, and incentives should shift away from the old fossil fuel economy toward the new sustainable and equitable economy. The Divest-Invest movement—to divest from fossil fuels—calls for reinvestment in a wide range of alternatives and new economy enterprises.

3. Pricing Carbon. Raise the price on carbon as quickly as possible. Use the proceeds of these funds for immediate green infrastructure investments as well as per capita dividends to individuals to offset the regressivity of the tax.

4. Power Down the Wealthy. Among progressives, there is agreement that the world’s rich need to power down, reduce excessive consumption, and pay restitution for decades of excess. We need to levy steep taxes on private jets and mega-mansions to offset their real environmental costs.

5. Community Resilience. We need to re-localize and regionalize our economies, specifically food systems, energy production, transportation, and other core businesses.

But there is no agreement about who else, aside from the very wealthy, should also be powering down. From a global equity perspective, many argue that the entire United States

jorisvo / fotolia

insecurity, your job is everything,” says Uehlein. “One’s livelihood, retirement, hopes, and dreams. We have everything to fear from an environmental movement that is silent about workers. Sustainability starts at the kitchen table, meaning our kid’s education, savings, food, and next job.”

To talk about 100–year scenarios and the survivability of other species, without standing with the immediate survival struggles of most people, is to retreat to a privileged and deeply disconnected space. Until we address the underlying insecurities that most people face, we will fail in our efforts to build a common movement.

Many I spoke with invoked the legacy of Tony Maz-

needs to immediately reduce its fossil fuel consumption.

Similarly, there is no agreement over what would constitute a sustainable standard of living and level of consumption.

Nor is there agreement over the urgency and timeline.

A huge rift remains over how to spend the remaining “carbon budget” over the next two decades. If we have a limited carbon budget, less than 500 gigatons of carbon, that we can burn before we push the earth’s temperature two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels (and that’s a big “if” that ignores the unknowable impact of feedback loops and climate science), how should it be spent? Should it be invested in infrastructure transition? Should a global priority be focused on lifting up the global poor, the people who were not invited to the party?

My personal takeaway: We should adopt the “precautionary principle.” Since we truly don’t know all the future holds—but have strong evidence that we’re approaching fundamental biological limits—we should proceed with all deliberate speed to reduce our fossil fuel use, even if it slows traditional measures of growth. We can start with waste and face the reality that our American way of life, even with advanced conservation technology, uses more than our global fair share.

Yet by embracing a “just transition,” we can combine reduced energy consumption with greater equity and community resilience. At the same time, I want to be part of a larger movement to promote macro-policies like the Pollin plan. And that effort has to be worldwide.

In negotiating a global treaty to reduce carbon while improving livelihoods in the Global South, progress has floundered largely due to the failure of the North, especially the United States, to take its overproduction of carbon seriously. It’s hard to expect China or India to agree to a serious program unless the U.S. is a full partner. An entente between the labor and the environmentalist perspectives could help change U.S. policy, which in turn could advance the necessary global collaboration.

It is hard to imagine today that the federal government, held hostage by Big Oil, could significantly address the climate crisis and reduce extreme wealth inequality. A lot of our work, therefore, is to prepare and be ready for a trigger moment when the wider public understands the failings of the old system and is ready to accept a new vision. Like preparing for the next hurricane or weird weather event, we should plan for a transformative political moment.

“Things can change quickly,” says Joe Uehlein. “As a kid in 1965, no one was thinking about pollution and Lake Erie. Then the Cuyahoga River caught fire and bam! Earth Day in 1970.”

A BETTER PARTY

Is the party over?

“We are going to organize a better party,” says Juliet Schor. “The party under extractive capitalism has made people sick, overworked, disconnected from one another and nature. We want to transition to a new economy that is radically more equal and better for the flourishing of humans.

We will not make progress if we stay in the “old growth” paradigm. We have to offer a different paradigm with different measures of well-being and community resilience.”

The great labor leader Samuel Gompers is often misquoted as saying, “More!” in response to the question “What does labor want?” Here’s what he actually said, in 1893: “What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better

“The party’s over? I wasn’t even invited to the party. In fact, I’ve been working at the party and hoping I would get to go some day.” natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.”

He was way ahead of his time.

What do labor, community justice advocates, and environmentalists want?

We want less inequality and more dignified work that contributes to the greater good and is safe from toxins and hazards. We want the material basis of economic prosperity and the ecological bounty required to thrive—clean water and air, fertile soil and wholesome food.

We want our children to flourish, their bodies to grow strong and healthy, with full voices and laughter. We want our elders to be honored and treasured. We want vibrant communities of art, creativity, song, and learning.

We want less toil and more rest. We want the weekend and a few more weekdays to delight in one another and care for the young, the old, and those in need. We want time to care for the earth, to be generous stewards and protectors of the commons, passing it on undiminished to future generations.

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Rand Paul’s 2020 Vision

Win or lose, the neo-libertarian stands to change the DNA of the Grand Old Party B Y A D E L E M . S TA N

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tom uhlman / ap images

o one in the political establishment seems to know quite what to make of Rand Paul, the United States senator from Kentucky and son of Ron, the three-time quixotic presidential candidate with a libertarian bent. In 2012, Ron Paul, the former congressman from Texas, said good-bye to all that, retiring his House seat and forswearing another presidential run, having prepared the ground for his progeny, who hopes to inherit the throngs of young followers nurtured by his father.

By turns quirky and cunning, rumpled and slick, Rand Paul, at this writing, is running neck and neck in the polls with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the undeclared establishment candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. And it’s not inconceivable that Paul could win it—if not this time, then perhaps in 2020, when the millennial generation, whose members he’s been courting, will comprise just under 40 percent of all eligible voters, according to the Center for American Progress.

The younger Paul, an ophthalmologist by trade, bounded onto the national stage in 2010, propelled by his father’s name recognition and the internal battles of the Republican Party, when he vanquished the hand-picked candidate of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the GOP senatorial primary of the leader’s own home state—a kind of horse’s head left at the foot of McConnell’s bed, delivered by sponsors of the Tea Party, who cared not for McConnell’s brand of pragmatic politics. Winning endorsements from the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and the Senate Conservatives Fund founded by then-Senator Jim DeMint, and enjoying a friendly relationship with the Koch brothers’ free-spending Americans for Prosperity, Rand Paul took his seat in the U.S. Senate as part of the great midterm Tea Party wave, the backlash election against all things Obama.

But Paul has never fit neatly under the Tea Party banner. As much as he shares the movement’s rhetoric on “limited government” and accusations of “tyranny” against the president—not to mention the Tea Partiers’ hardcore anti-abortion position—he’s prone to striking out on his own on matters of foreign policy, domestic spying, and criminal justice.

On those issues, he would have you believe he’s a libertarian—meaning non-interventionist in matters abroad, and liberty-loving in matters at home. In truth, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Take, for instance, his position on same-sex marriage, which is touted as freedom-loving by his supporters because he opposes any federal action to prevent it. On closer examination, though, one finds that Paul’s bias in this instance offers no protection for the personal liberty of gay, lesbian, or bisexual people; he would leave the matter for each state to determine. Live in a red state? Tough luck.

True libertarians deplore what they call statism, but Rand Paul’s propensity for leaving the states in charge of governing this most personal of matters—whom one will marry—is a contradiction echoed throughout his approach to many matters concerning individual rights.

In many ways, he’s as statist as they come.

On matters of foreign policy, when Paul has found his neo-isolationism bumping up against his political ambition, he’s been known to dial back the former, or at least try to split the difference. He may have voted against President Barack Obama’s plan for arming Syrian rebels, but just weeks before the vote—after the beheadings of two American journalists by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) began to drive public opinion—he expressed support for air strikes targeting ISIL , a reversal of his previous position.

That doesn’t mean he won’t bamboozle the various constituencies he apparently hopes to cobble together to fuel his likely presidential run: libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley donors, anti-tax Republicans, and privacy-driven millennials (defined by the Pew Research Center as those born between 1977 and 1992) whose political identities are still being formed.

IT’S TEMPTING TO WRITE off Paul, given some

of his audacious antics—his epic 2013 antidrone filibuster, his almost sure-to-fail lawsuit against the president (filed earlier this year as a challenge to the NSA’s domestic spying program)—but these are never exercised simply to draw the spotlight; they’re also organizing tools.

The filibuster, which really focused only on drone attacks against American citizens abroad, was accompanied by a ferocious Twitter campaign that engaged both social media and mainstream media for the duration of his utterances from the Senate floor that day and night, and drew in people who would ordinarily define themselves as progressives. And the quixotic lawsuit was revealed by Politico’s Katie Glueck to be a fundraising tool.

“Largely unnoticed in Paul’s effort is this: The names and email addresses of anyone who registers support for his class-action suit against the NSA ,” Glueck wrote, “goes straight into the Kentucky Republican senator’s political database, which he could leverage into a campaign.”

NSA domestic abuses, like drone attacks, are among issues that should draw the vociferous opposition of liberals. Yet for the most part, Democrats offered tepid shows of concern, leaving ripe areas for Paul to exploit, especially with liberty-loving millennials.

Few in American politics know how to seize a political moment like Paul does. When police in Ferguson, Missouri, rolled out tanklike vehicles and pointed assault weapons at unarmed protesters who took to the streets in response to the police killing of the unarmed African American Michael Brown, Paul weighed in quickly with an essay on Time magazine’s website, decrying the militarization of the nation’s police forces with surplus equipment gleaned from the federal government.

It was a stroke of genius, consonant with his professed libertarian values, but also a fencemending gesture, of which he has made many, for his rejection, based on an extreme reading of property rights, of the public accommodations section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—the part that desegregated lunch counters, restaurants, theaters, and retail establishments throughout the nation. While Paul took pen to paper, Hillary Clinton dithered, taking another two weeks after Paul’s August 14 Time essay to make remarks on the situation in Ferguson.

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Clinton camp,” Melich said, “who couldn’t quite understand [in 2008] what the Obama people were doing.”

AT THE 2013 CONSERVATIVE Political Action Conference (CPAC), movement faithful gath-

ered at a conference center at National Harbor, just outside Washington, D.C., as the Republican Party veered between soul-searching over its loss of the 2012 presidential election and contempt for campaign leaders who presided over Mitt Romney’s drubbing by President Obama. But as conference panelists looked backward in main-stage discussions with titles

Wonky Zealot: Paul at CPAC brandishing filibuster material

like “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?,” others were looking ahead—not least of them, Rand Paul.

On the CPAC stage, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida likely felt he was having a good outing. Warmly received by the crowd, his planned applause lines were drawing claps, and no one heckled him. But before his speech was over, the room began to fill with young people bearing professionally designed and printed signs that demanded, “Stand With Rand.” Most arrived by bus from area colleges, members and allies of the Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), a group founded as an offshoot of Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. The students’ raucous appreciation for the son, who followed Rubio on

the program, would ensure that Rubio’s speech would seem unremarkable by comparison.

As he approached the podium bearing two stuffed loose-leaf binders, Senator Paul exuded an air of satisfied triumph. Just the week before, his 13-hour talking filibuster in opposition to the nomination of John Brennan as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency won him hours of free airtime, as news shows picked up footage of his floor performance from C-SPAN, and invited him to their sets.

Paul, who likes to present himself as a proponent of civil liberties, focused on Brennan’s support for the use of drones to kill U.S. citizens deemed to be “enemy combatants” in the Global War on Terror. The filibuster ploy was a stunning success in the annals of public relations strategy, propelling Paul to national-figure status, and serving as the opening salvo in the 2016 Rand Paul for President campaign. A day after the filibuster, Paul told Politico he was considering a run for the nomination.

At CPAC, Paul held up his binders for the audience to admire, joking, “They told me I had a measly ten minutes. So, just in case, I brought thirteen hours of material.” When he said he had intended his filibuster as a message to the president, a young man shouted, “Don’t drone me, bro!” There was laughter all around. “He just boiled down my 13-hour speech into three words,” Paul responded with a smile.

Senator Paul went on to win the CPAC presidential straw poll later that week, just as his father had done in the years before, thanks to the savvy organizing of the Young Americans for Liberty. In 2014, Rand Paul did so again.

TODAY, YOUNG AMERICANS for Liberty

claims to have chapters on 527 college campuses across the nation, including seven in Iowa, and five in New Hampshire, the states that kick off the presidential nomination process with their respective caucuses and primary. Since 2008, Paul partisans have been organizing nationwide, especially among the young, via Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns, and outgrowth organizations such as the Campaign for Liberty and YAL .

ron sachs / ap images

If a Rand Paul presidential nomination by the Republican Party seems preposterous, says historian and former Republican Party official Tanya Melich, think back to 1964. At that time, Melich was a recent college graduate and former member of the Young Republicans, a group rooted on college campuses and ultimately taken over by supporters of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who improbably grabbed the Republican nomination out from under the feet of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, largely through the grassroots organizing of young conservatives. At the time, Melich said, she was covering the movement for ABC News, and “it became very clear that these Young Republican Goldwater people were really sharp,” she said in a telephone interview from her New York City home.

“They knew how to organize.”

For the past two presidential election cycles, and ever since, the Paul organization has focused on campus organizing, building lists of young people excited by both father and son’s talk of liberty, and promise of freedom from foreign entanglements.

For liberals, Goldwater often fills the role of punch line, given his landslide loss to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Sure, Goldwater was routed, but his campaign brought together the minds and builders of a movement that became known as the New Right, a movement that went on to create the religious right, elect Ronald Reagan president, and set the nation on a rightward course for decades. It all began with a longshot candidacy, a quirky candidate, and a horde of highly motivated young people. Surely Rand Paul has read that script.

Win or lose, Rand Paul’s aim is to re-create the GOP in his own image, infused with the vigor of his young followers and committed to a radical dismantling of the federal government as well as an even more radical devolution to the states’ rights philosophy of the old Confederacy—not to mention disengagement from the world. This movement, if successful, could alter the party for years to come. And the old, neoconservative Republican Party establishment may never see it coming.

“They’re a little bit like my buddies in the

With a name reminiscent of a group crucial to the Goldwater campaign (the Young Americans for Freedom), YAL appears poised to attempt a similar role for Paul: to organize young people to vote in the caucuses and primaries, and to position them as delegates to the national convention. (In 2012, even though Ron Paul only mustered a third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, the Iowa delegation cast 22 of its 28 votes for him on the convention floor, a testament to his organization’s prowess at seating delegates from the Hawkeye state. Similar situations arose in the Texas and Minnesota delegations.)

In 2016, however, first-time presidential voters will confront new voter identification laws, passed by legislatures in many of the red states, that have deemed college IDs unacceptable for ballot-casting—even those issued by state colleges and universities. Perhaps that’s one reason why Paul is casting himself as a champion of voting rights. At a September YAL event in Alexandria, Virginia, known as the Liberty Political Action Conference, or LPAC, Paul derided the GOP for trying to shrink the electorate to accommodate its needs.

“So many times, Republicans are seen as this party of ‘We don’t want black people to vote because they’re voting Democrat; we don’t want Hispanics to vote because they’re voting Democrat,’” he said to the LPAC audience. “You wonder why the Republican Party’s so small.

Why don’t we be the party that’s for voting rights?” The audience, much smaller and far more libertarian than the CPAC crowd, offered a hearty round of applause.

Indeed, the millennial generation is the largest and most racially and ethnically diverse in American history, according to a 2009 report by the Center for American Progress. In surveys ranking issues by importance, such as a July study by the libertarian magazine Reason, and a 2013 report by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, millennials rank the economy as their number one concern.

In his 2013 CPAC remarks, Paul cast the millennials as the Facebook generation. “They worry about jobs and money and rent and student loans,” he said. “They want leaders that won’t feed them a lot of crap, or sell them short.

They aren’t afraid of individual liberty. Ask the Facebook generation if we should put a kid in jail for the non-violent crime of drug use, and

you’ll hear a resounding ‘no.’ Ask the Facebook generation if they want to bail out too-big-tofail banks with their tax dollars, and you’ll hear a ‘hell, no!’ There is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street. Likewise, there is nothing progressive about billion-dollar loans to millionaires to build solar panels,” he added, referring to the right-wing obsession of the moment: Solyndra, a company that received government loans and then went belly-up.

Though the Facebook generation appears united in its concerns about the economy, its members’ view of the government’s role in the economic well-being of the people varies within the cohort. Libertarians, such as the authors of the Reason study, are quick to jump on an

THOUGH THE FACEBOOK GENERATION SEEMS TO LEAN LIBERTARIAN, ITS ACTUAL VIEWS ABOUT GOVERNMENT’S ROLE IN THE ECONOMY VARY WIDELY. overall figure for the generation that claims nearly half favor a fiscally conservative (and hence, smaller) government.

“We live in a culture, technologically, where we’re becoming more atomized with our phones and the way we do things. I don’t think they necessarily think that big is better,” said Jack Hunter, a libertarian and former member of Rand Paul’s Senate staff. Hunter now edits Rare, a website that’s a kind of conservative and more political answer to Upworthy, the liberal-leaning, feel-good clickbait website whose headlines have reshaped the way online media frame stories. (“You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next!”)

But if you drill down to look at which part of the millennial cohort expresses a belief in smaller government, it’s mostly white people,

and the percentage varies according to how the question is asked. A March report by Pew Research found that overall, some 38 percent of millennials, not half, favored smaller government and fewer services. But when looked at through the prism of race, 52 percent of white millennials did, while 71 percent of nonwhite millennials favored bigger government and more services—numbers that likely speak to just which segment of the millennial generation Paul is aiming for.

Across the board, millennials, even those from conservative religious backgrounds, are notably more liberal than their elders on nearly all the so-called social issues, except for abortion. They grew up knowing out-of-the-closet gays and lesbians, and more than any prior generation, grew up knowing people of other races and ethnic backgrounds. They don’t like hearing LGBT people dissed or immigrants demonized.

In an interview in Rare’s stylish offices just off the famous lobbying corridor of K Street in Washington, D.C., Hunter, who frequently speaks at YAL events on college campuses, said that today’s establishment Republicans can’t reach these younger voters with what he called their “checklist of prejudices.” Compared with the famously anti-immigrant gadfly Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, Hunter said, today’s crop is even more bellicose.

“I mean, you’re talking about xenophobic comments and things—it’s really out there,” he said. “That is a turnoff to young people. They want zero to do with that. They grew up in a multicultural, multilingual, diverse America.”

So, when Rand Paul speaks of the racial injustice of the war on drugs, as he did at LPAC, or steps up on police overreach in Ferguson, it’s not likely that he does so because he expects to bring more African Americans or Latinos to his campaign. It’s to assure his almost completely white group of young followers that, despite his stance on the Civil Rights Act, he’s not a bigot.

On matters of individual liberties, the preferences of millennials track closely with libertarian positions. They don’t like the robust surveillance and data collection conducted by the NSA , for example. They’re likely to appreciate Rand Paul’s call for an end to the federal war on drugs, his advocacy for an end to mass incarceration by ending federal mandatory minimum sentences, and his support for immi-

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gration reform (after the border is secured, he now says). They overwhelmingly support the legalization of same-sex marriage. And they’re wary of war and foreign intervention, Pew found in a 2011 survey.

What they just may miss amid Rand Paul’s libertarian rhetoric is that, even by his own admission, he’s not a true libertarian. “I’m a libertarian Republican. I’m a constitutional conservative,” he told The Washington Post.

What he doesn’t say is that he is a states’ rights advocate; many of his positions, such as his stance on LGBT rights, simply allow the individual 50 states to determine the scope of their citizens’ personal liberty, amounting to majority rule within the state’s borders, absent the modern understanding of the broader protections of the federal Constitution and the courts that interpret them.

When it comes to abortion, Paul is at odds with the millennial generation writ large, of which 61 percent favor keeping abortion legal.

But Paul is likely not aiming for the generation writ large; he’s looking to bring in the more conservative among them. Anti-choice millennials, according to a 2010 survey by NARAL Pro-choice America, have a greater intensity of feeling for their views on abortion than do pro-choice millennials.

For women, a Paulist GOP would offer more contraction than expansion of their personal liberty. Last year, Paul put his name to a bill that would confer personhood on a fertilized egg (proposed as a way of getting around Roe v.

Wade), granting it the same 14th Amendment rights as the woman carrying it—the amendment on which the Court decision rests. Of the Paycheck Fairness Act, Paul said he voted it down in 2012 because to pass it would be akin to having a Soviet-style Politburo. The marketplace should set wages, he said. So, if you happen to reside among a bigoted citizenry whose bigotry is aimed at you, well, too bad.

That’s the market’s judgment.

As he does on matters of race, Paul also offers the occasional contrarian offset on matters of gender fairness. For instance, he signed on to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s failed measure to remove the adjudication of sexual crimes in the military from the chain of command. The bill offered him a way to look as though he cared about the plight of women, but

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in a way that suits the anti-authoritarianism of the libertarian ethos. As in the patriarchy of the Old South, women in a world ruled by Rand Paul would have little agency, left to rely on the chivalry of men.

When the Tea Party first burst on the scene, a clever T-shirt slogan was “Party like it’s 1776.”

In Rand Paul’s world, you’d party like it’s 1850 and you’re living below the Mason-Dixon line.

If you’re a white man with property, everything will be great.

Researchers for the Reason survey found that millennials, despite their majority support for Democratic candidates, do not have overwhelmingly firm attachments to either political party. A full 34 percent claimed no

PAUL IS SADDLED WITH AWKWARD PRIOR POSITIONS: USING STATES’ RIGHTS TO CAMOUFLAGE STATISM; OPPOSING PARTS OF THE 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT; REJECTING FOREIGN AID. party affiliation—they saw themselves as independents who leaned toward neither party, in contrast to 11 percent of the general population over the age of 30. The Reason survey found that 60 percent of self-identified liberals in the millennial cohort said they were willing to vote for a libertarian-leaning candidate, though it’s unclear if they were offered a definition of what that meant.

Hunter could barely contain his glee when he recounted how a recent visit to Iowa by Rand Paul generated a rash of anti-Paul fundraising emails and tweets from Democrats. As to whether Democrats could continue to count on the youth vote to put them over the top in 2016, Hunter said, “It’s not a safe bet anymore, or not guaranteed.”

David Weigel, the Bloomberg News writer,

formerly of Slate, isn’t buying it. Having covered the Pauls, the libertarian movement, and national politics going back seven years to his early writing career at Reason, Weigel just doesn’t see the liberal hordes of young people abandoning the Democratic Party for Paul— especially if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, her gender being another big “first.”

“Is Hillary Clinton going to run as a supporter of police departments having tanks? I don’t think so,” Weigel said. Nor does Weigel believe that Clinton’s relative hawkishness could hurt her with millennials in a matchup with Paul.

In a full-on presidential contest, Weigel adds, opposition researchers and journalists will have a field day with Paul’s positions, as they did with his father’s. “The problem is that once you have a credible bid for president, then the contradictions and associations come out,” Weigel said.

IF ALL THERE WAS TO Rand Paul are the

views he expresses today, his long-shot strategy for winning the White House might be less long of a shot than it appears to the naked eye.

But Paul comes saddled with some questionable associations, and several policy positions in which his opponents will no doubt rejoice— most notably his aforementioned longtime opposition to the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act. His reasons for that opposition, he told Rachel Maddow just after he won the 2010 Kentucky Republican senatorial primary, were philosophical: He believed the section of the law that required private businesses to serve all who came through their doors to be a violation of property rights that was inconsistent with the constitutional guarantee of freedom of association, and also a threat to the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. It was exactly the same philosophical opposition to the law voiced by Goldwater when he voted against it in 1964.

Paul has since tried to explain it away, saying that he accepts the whole of the act today and that he was only a toddler when the act was passed, that had he been in Congress at the time the law was being written, he would have tried to “fix” it. But he has never said he has changed his mind regarding his assessment of that section of the act.

In April of last year, I covered, for AlterNet, Rand Paul’s speech to the students of the histor-

timothy d. ea sley / ap images

ically black Howard University, where he sug- tions with religious extremists and, like Gold- to intervention in the Middle East as the best gested that his positions had been “twist[ed] water, the John Birch Society—which, during way to protect Christians in the region from and distort[ed]” by his “political enemies.”

Goldwater’s time, was a segregationist organi- the ire of radical Islamists.

In the question-and-answer session that fol- zation. Reporting for AlterNet, Bruce Wilson Paul’s deft backing and filling sometimes lowed, Paul was asked about his stance on the discovered that, in 2009, Rand Paul appeared collides with his own impetuous propensity for Civil Rights Act, in which the questioner char- as the featured speaker at a Minnesota rally the outrageous. On September 11, Paul told an acterized Paul as an opponent of the landmark of the Constitution Party, the far-right party audience of millennials in New Hampshire that law. Paul countered that his concerns about “cer- founded by the late Howard Phillips. Phillips he’d repeal every executive order ever passed by tain portions” of the law anticipated unintend- was a disciple of Rousas John Rushdoony, the every president. The group he addressed was ed consequences; for example, he analogized father of Christian Reconstructionism, which Generation Opportunity, the outfit funded by the public accommodations section to current calls for the law of the Hebrew Bible to become the Koch brothers as a kind of junior achieveefforts to ban smoking in establishments that the law of the land, a mandate echoed in the ment project modeled by grown-up groups like serve the public, or to require restaurants to Constitution Party platform. the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity. Remarks put calorie counts on menus. But, he said, “I Perhaps of greater consequence, at least for like these will make voters wonder just what never offered anything to alter the Civil Rights mainstream media reporters, is Paul’s earlier he’d do as president.

Act, so your characterization is incorrect.” position, since revised, opposing all forms of If you happen to be an anti-regulatory neoProfessor Greg Carr, chair of libertarian who finds himself in the Howard’s Afro-American Studies White House, the opportunities are department, smiled when I asked limitless, since you’d be in charge him afterward what he made of of the enforcement of regulation. that answer. “Obfuscation would Remember the BP oil spill, and why be the charitable word,” he said. it happened? It was lax enforce“I think [Paul] would have scored ment of regulations on oil rigs by more points if indeed he [showed the Minerals Management Serhe] was coming here for a conversavice, first under George W. Bush, tion, by saying, ‘These are some of and then under Barack Obama. the things I’ve said in the past, and I Imagine what a president with an don’t know that I would necessarily expressly anti-regulatory agenda reconsider them, but let me explain could do with such latitude. to you why I said those things.’”

Then there are the cabinet-levPaul and his supporters can be el departments that Paul wants prickly when challenged about to eliminate altogether: Energy, this issue. When I asked Jack Education, Commerce, and HousHunter about Rand Paul’s coning and Urban Development. He Odd Couple: Paul with Mitch McConnell—whose protégé he trounced in 2010. troversial position on the Civil couldn’t do so without the help of Rights Act, he didn’t answer the Congress, but he could keep the substance, but immediately attacked Rachel foreign aid, which he articulated once again drumbeat and refuse to fill positions.

Maddow, whose interview of Paul on that sub- upon taking office. While a position consistent In the past, he’s expressed support for ject he termed “an ambush.” Paul had to dis- with his neo-libertarian views, it was seen as voucherizing Medicare, and privatizing Social miss Hunter from his staff in 2013, once media uniquely hostile to Israel, the largest recipient Security, which he has characterized, in its reports surfaced of Hunter’s earlier radio per- of U.S. aid. In a quick about-face, the sena- current formulation, as “a Ponzi scheme.” sona as the “Southern Avenger,” an over-the- tor said that he would countenance funding To hear Paul tell it, in his dream presidency, top shtick as a racist yahoo, who famously said some $5 billion in foreign aid. “Why $5 bil- he’d get to oversee the dismantling of much of that John Wilkes Booth didn’t try hard enough. lion?” asked The Washington Post’s David A. the U.S. government. And if Republicans had In April, Paul defended Cliven Bundy, the Fahrenthold in a September 14 article. “A Paul control of both houses of Congress during a Nevada rancher who defied the federal govern- aide said that amount would give Israel its full Paul presidency, he could get much of what ment by refusing to pay fees for grazing his cattle share—more than $3 billion per year—and still he wishes for. on federal land, posting an armed militia to have money left over.” guard his herd. The senator was later forced to At the Values Voter Summit convened in PAUL’S STRATEGY FOR WINNING the Repubwalk back his defense when Bundy said that slav- September by FRC Action, the political arm of lican presidential nomination relies on bringery had been a good deal for African Americans. the Family Research Council, Paul described, ing together under one banner movement Paul is also saddled with his father’s associa- to the largely pro-war crowd, his opposition constituencies that rest uneasily with each

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 77

other: the party’s free-marketeers, civil libertarians, and the religious right. There’s no satisfying all of them at once; the question is whether Paul’s courting of one faction can be accomplished without alienating the others.

In his LPAC speech, Paul made no explicit mention of his extreme anti-abortion position, or his religious beliefs. A week later, before the religious-right activists at the Values Voter Summit, he played a video as a lead-in to his speech that featured a fetal sonogram in its opening shot. “As Christians, we should always stand with the most defenseless,” he said in his remarks. “I believe that no civilization can long endure that does not respect life, from the notyet-born to life’s last breath.”

Religious-right radio host Steve Deace, for instance, seems taken with Paul, but is wary of the senator’s states’-rights approach to same-sex marriage. Likewise, some of the libertarians in attendance at LPAC expressed concerns about Paul’s willingness to sign on to the administration’s air strikes strategy for battling ISIL—even if he did decline to vote for the arming of Syrian rebels. “The question is: Where are the compromises?” one attendee said to MSNBC ’s Benjy Sarlin.

Some Tea Partiers, meanwhile, are put off by Paul’s endorsement of Mitch McConnell during this year’s Kentucky senatorial primary, in which the minority leader fielded a challenge from Tea Party candidate Matt Bevin.

Given the strong hold that war-mongering neocons have on the foreign policy of the GOP establishment—including many who identify with the Tea Party—Paul will need to flood the primaries and caucuses with his anti-war millennials if he’s to have a chance.

Winning the Iowa caucuses, given the strength of religious-right forces there, won’t be easy for Paul, but it’s not impossible, given the way the caucus system lends itself to grassroots organizing. New Hampshire is a more likely win for Paul, since the “Live Free or Die” state has long embraced a leave-me-alone credo.

In South Carolina, the third early primary state, Paul will again have to dance fast to show well in a state populated by conservative evangelicals, but it’s also a state that’s home to many military families, a constituency whose members donated nearly $200,000 in individual donations to his father’s 2008

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presidential run, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). And there, Paul will likely be able to tap the networks of Jack Hunter, a South Carolina native, and perhaps enjoy the support of former Senator Jim DeMint, who now runs the Heritage Foundation, and whose Senate Conservatives Fund backed Paul’s Senate race.

For Paul to maximize his libertarian credentials, he’ll need to stay in the race for the long haul, even after likely losses, to pick up delegates in Western states. And that will take an ample war chest. In September, to that end, he opened an office in San Francisco, the better to court Silicon Valley donors, many of whom lean libertarian. It’s smart strategy: In 2008,

PAUL’S STRATEGY REQUIRES HIM TO UNITE FRACTIOUS GOP CONSTITUENCIES— FREE MARKETEERS, CIVIL LIBERTARIANS, THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT, INTERVENTIONISTS, AND ISOLATIONISTS. his father gleaned some $755,000 in individual donations from employees of the Internet and computer sectors, according to CRP. Paul is also said to be courting the Koch brothers. In his Senate run, employees of Koch Industries ranked among his top 20 sources of donations. The Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit organization that spent nearly $35 million on so-called issue ads during the 2012 presidential campaign, was a sponsor of LPAC, the September conference hosted by the Pauls’ Young Americans for Liberty, as was the Charles Koch Institute. That same month, Paul addressed Generation Opportunity.

David Koch is known to be keen on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who, The New York Times reported, he tried to convince to run for the nomination in 2012. But that was

before the Bridgegate scandal in which Christie aides were revealed to have shut down lanes of the George Washington Bridge as payback to the mayor of Fort Lee, where the bridge originates. The mayor tangled with Christie on development projects and refused to endorse the governor’s re-election bid. And it would not be unthinkable for Koch-funded entities to help Paul stay in the race, as they did Herman Cain in 2012, if only for the purpose of pushing the rest of the Republican field toward their anti-regulatory positions.

At the top of the list of Rand Paul contributors in 2010 was the Club for Growth, a bundling operation that has had an outsized influence on the realignment of Congress to the right, a group whose members would likely shower him with dollars in a presidential run.

Then there’s the Pauls’ own Liberty Political Action Committee, and its organizing arm, the Campaign for Liberty. But whether Rand Paul could muster enough to counter the money operations of Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which wraps its arms around the GOP ’s more establishment candidates, is a big “if.” If Jeb Bush gets in, he will doubtlessly enjoy the support of the Rovefounded behemoths.

Were Paul to stay alive to the end, even without winning the nomination, he would spark a battle royal between the Republican establishment, with its targeting of older voters who are more inclined to support America’s foreign adventures and oppose immigration, and Paul’s neo-isolationists, who favor immigration reform. Should he put together a robust enough slate of delegates, there’s even the possibility of floor fights at the national convention over platform planks, and a show of disunity in the roll call of the states in the nomination process.

His presence in the race, even as an alsoran, would likely influence the Democratic primary, as well, forcing that party’s candidate to answer to Paul’s positions on NSA spying and the drug war, to name just two. Jack Hunter, for one, is rubbing his hands at the prospect of just such a spectacle. “I think it’s making people in the establishment of both parties nervous,” he said, “and I love it.”

And if Paul doesn’t make it this time, there’s always 2020.

“A must-read primer on fracking.”

—Wenonah hauter, author of Foodopoly “A reasoned and impassioned call for government to stop toxic trespass by the fracking industry.”

—Weston Wilson, environmental engineer and EPA whistle-blower “Cracks open the reality of fracking and seats us across the kitchen table from real people who have been poisoned—and who, despite being American citizens and taxpayers, can’t do a thing about it.”

—BarBara GottlieB, director for Environment and Health, Physicians for Social Responsibility “An important addition to an ongoing debate.”

—Kirkus Reviews Igniting Hearts & Minds www.beacon.org · blog: www.beaconbroadside.com

The Legacy of

CARL LEVIN Corporate America will cheer the Michigan senator’s retirement.

His investigations have flagged hundreds of billions in offshore tax evasion.

BY DAV ID C AY J O HNS T O N

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stronger environmental and trade regulations that improve public health and create jobs.

Now at age eighty, after thirty-six years in Washington, Levin is retiring. He could easily have won a seventh term—voters gave him 63 percent of their ballots in 2008, up from 60.6 percent in 2002 and margins in the fiftieth percentile in his first three races.

Pending retirement makes it a good time to assess his career, including accomplishments that few expected in January of 1979, when he came to Washington as a middle-aged lawyer from Detroit elected only because the popular incumbent flubbed his re-election bid. Now, with Levin as the last of the 20 freshman senators of that class, his departure raises the question of who will champion tax fairness in the Senate, and who will have the skill to win support for hard-hitting investigations of bad business practices with such decency that Republican senators like John McCain and Tom Coburn praise the reports.

Who will possess the personal integrity, never touched by the slightest hint of scandal, along with the backbone and brains to take on the most powerful institutions in America on behalf of not just the little guy, but of a healthier republic?

LAST YEAR, 55 OF THE Fortune 500 compa-

nies escaped $147.5 billion of U.S. corporate income taxes by siphoning domestic profits to offshore jurisdictions, where they paid an average tax rate of 6.7 percent, according to tabulations by Citizens for Tax Justice. The group also found that 362 of the 500 companies maintain at least 7,827 subsidiaries in tax havens. U.S. firms stuffed so much profit into Bermuda that it equaled 16 times the entire Bermudian economy. Ditto for the Cayman Islands.

I have long reported on statistics like these.

Levin’s great contribution has been to use his investigative powers to show just how companies like American Express, Nike, and PepsiCo pulled off this feat. There are three basic techniques, complex in execution, but simple in principle. They are known as: check-the-box, deferral, and transfer pricing.

Check-the-box is an IRS regulation that makes transactions between related offshore subsidiaries invisible to tax auditors (though not to Levin’s determined gumshoes). Deferral occurs when companies pay fees to their offshore subsidiaries, like royalties for using a patent, making the profits go untaxed unless and until the money is brought home. Transfer pricing occurs when a company sells goods to itself as they move from

s u s a n wa l s h / a p i m a g e s

F

or 15 years, Senator Carl Levin has taught Americans how our tax system really works. Hearings by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), which he heads, have exposed modern accounting alchemy that turns the black ink of domestic profits into the red ink of tax-deductible expenses.

Levin has shown how profits can be shipped tax-free to the Cayman Islands and, amazingly, how Apple figured out that profits booked in Ireland could be hidden from tax authorities of both Ireland and the United States in a cloak of invisibility. He exposed tax favors that were supposed to create jobs but ended up destroying them. He made Swiss bankers who solicited tax evasion on American soil squirm, destroying their claims that criminal conduct was the work of rogue bankers.

The senior senator from Michigan revealed that Goldman Sachs sold clients securities that it then bet would fail, eliciting eye-opening testimony from its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, who saw nothing wrong with this. Over the decades, Levin has exposed wasteful, and sometimes corrupt, military contracting arrangements.

His mind is even keen enough to attack regulations that strangle business while supporting

Senator Carl Levin on Capitol Hill in July 2014

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factory to company marketing arm to the ultimate customer, allowing the company to book the profits in a tax haven. Add them up, and multinational corporations pay tax at a rate far lower than most working Americans.

As PSI chairman, Levin can issue subpoenas on his own, authority that he used to pry loose many millions of pages of documents revealing the secret world of corporate and individual tax avoidance and evasion, of government contracting fraud, of abuse of bank customers, and many other issues. His hearings resonate because Levin gives the staff time to develop a deep understanding of the subtleties of corporate deals that can turn the burden of tax into a bounty.

Levin showed how Apple devised a costsharing scheme using check-the-box that made much of its domestic profits disappear into an account in Ireland that is also invisible to Irish

billion in federal income taxes each year—a huge sum when you consider that from 2009 through 2012, the corporate income tax revenue averaged less than $200 billion annually, all told.

TWO YEARS AGO, LEVIN presided over hear-

ings showing how Microsoft used research and development credits to reduce taxes on software it developed in the United States.

Then, from 2009 to 2011, Microsoft, which does nearly all of its software development in the U.S., sold intellectual property rights to some of its software to Singapore and Irish subsidiaries for $4 billion. Then it paid these subsidiaries $12 billion in royalties, effectively siphoning $8 billion out of the U.S. and lowering its effective tax rate on that money from 35 percent to 3 percent, Levin found.

Consider the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act—Levin did. Multinational corporations

Apple escaped $10 billion in federal income taxes annually­—a huge sum considering that the entire corporate income tax raises less than $200 billion a year. tax authorities. Apple structured its operations to take deductions in high-tax countries, notably the United States, and to declare profits in low-tax countries, like Ireland, where the corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent. Then Apple added a neat trick—it created two holding companies through which it ran two-thirds of its worldwide profits. By first siphoning profits out of the U.S. as tax-deductible royalties paid to one Irish holding company, and then transferring money to the second Irish subsidiary, it paid taxes only on the residue of profits caught in the net of technical tax rules.

Edward Kleinbard, a University of Southern California law professor who, as a Wall Street lawyer, designed such strategies, calls this “stateless income” because no country taxes such profits. Another former tax avoidance designer, Professor Stephen Shay of Harvard, calls this “ocean income” because to the tax authorities, it appears to be part of the deep blue sea, not profits on an accounting statement.

When you add it all up, Apple escaped $10

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another tax repatriation discount would produce similar results. Worse, he said, another tax break would strengthen the incentive for companies to siphon profits out of the country and invest overseas.

and Republican senators insisted it would create 660,000 jobs and increase spending on research and development, which in turn would stimulate economic growth. The bill gave companies an 85 percent discount on their taxes, charging just 5.25 percent instead of 35 percent, if they repatriated profits kept overseas.

Levin’s investigation showed that 840 corporations brought money home. Jobs created?

None. Indeed, the fifteen corporations that brought home most of the money, $155 billion, ended up cutting 20,931 jobs.

The PSI majority staff study “found no evidence that repatriation funds increased overall U.S. research and development outlays.” Research spending actually slowed at the fifteen biggest firms: Altria, BristolMyers Squibb, Coca-Cola, DuPont, Eli Lilly, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Oracle, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, and Schering-Plough (which merged with Merck in 2009). Levin warned in 2011 that new proposals to create

FACTS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN Levin’s stock-

in-trade. As chairman or ranking member of the PSI, Levin has dug through mountains of papers to find golden nuggets of fact that he polished up before making public. He spends weeks studying the documents the staff brings until, at public hearings, he can distill essential truths.

Elise Bean, who went to work for Levin 29 years ago as a freshly minted University of Michigan lawyer and eventually became staff director and chief counsel of the permanent subcommittee, said Levin is constantly on the lookout for policy failures. He had one inviolate rule about proposed investigative subjects: “If it wasn’t complicated, Carl wasn’t interested,” Bean said.

Linda Gustitus, a former PSI staff director, said Levin “doesn’t bring harm to anybody; he has a hard time saying a mean thing. It’s funny because his reputation is as this bulldog on issues he cares about, mostly social justice.

He has this absolute sense of fairness so when he takes on the head of Goldman Sachs or Citicorp or a defense contractor or a secretary of defense, it is because the facts have shown him that they are hurting people in an unfair way. He has a strong vision of government not as equalizing, but being supportive of people who need help legitimately. He thinks government is a good thing.”

Levin’s scholarly concentration inspired a dedicated and hardworking staff to not just investigate, but to conduct itself with respect for those under the microscope. Who and what was being looked at is kept confidential until the facts are thoroughly documented. No leaks. In this, Levin’s style is the opposite of the reckless Darrell Issa, the California Republican who makes accusations first and then looks for any shred of evidence to substantiate his claims, while ignoring facts that contradict what he has declared and silencing Democrats on his House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Levin shut down various investigations over the years because the facts did not hold up under inquiry, said Bean, Gustitus, and oth-

ers. No one, including Levin, would talk about who was the target of those closed inquiries.

j. scot t applewhite / ap images

LEVIN’S POLITE DETERMINATION, fairness,

and skill were on display last February in an allday hearing into Credit Suisse, which had sent bankers to the United States looking for rich Americans willing to criminally conceal their income from the Internal Revenue Service.

Levin opened the hearing by saying that Credit Suisse had voluntarily told the committee about 150 trips to the U.S. by ten Swiss bankers.

But then Levin foreshadowed what was to come by revealing that PSI staff “documented another 22 trips from 2002 to 2008.”

Levin elicited from Romeo Cerutti, the general counsel, that Credit Suisse was “very strict” about not allowing its bankers to solicit evasion on U.S. soil. Cerutti said U.S. trips were “only permitted for social purposes. …

Unfortunately, as we got to learn during our internal investigation, people used ‘social purposes’ to get the trip approved and met other clients during the same trips.”

That defense—mistakes were made, policies violated—was methodically demolished over the next few hours as Levin demonstrated his mastery of arcane facts, legal concepts, and the art of cross-examination.

Cerutti and Brady W. Dougan, the American CEO of Credit Suisse, said their internal investigation report presented the “unvarnished” facts.

They said a few Switzerland-based rogue bankers “went to great lengths to disguise their bad conduct from the bank.” Nearly three hours into the hearings, Levin asked Dougan to look at a March 2008 expense report filed by Markus Walder, head of the bank’s North American offshore private banking operation. It listed 49 meetings with existing and potential American clients.

“It’s obvious the person was doing business in the U.S., soliciting and servicing existing clients,” Levin observed.

“I would say it is, yes,” Dougan replied.

“Why did Credit Suisse ignore its own policies and pay for Swiss bankers to do this? Why did you approve that?” Levin asked.

“I think it was a mistake,” Dougan replied, saying any misconduct simply had been overlooked. “If we had understood this type of activity was going on, it should have been stopped.”

That word—if—drew Levin’s interest. Were

managers who signed off on the expense accounts, and the auditors who approved them, rogue bankers?

“Our policy is very clear,” Dougan said, evading the question.

Levin, in calm but firm voice, asked again.

“Were all those bankers rogue bankers?”

“They made mistakes,” Dougan replied, prompting another Levin question aimed at how higher-ups could not have been aware, given the many millions of dollars flowing from rich Americans into Credit Suisse.

“We felt these people were violating the poli-

“Even though this document on its face is very clear” that crimes were being solicited?

Levin asked.

“It is very clear, you’re right,” Dougan responded, giving Levin the unqualified admission that Dougan’s and Cerutti’s formal statements and carefully nuanced answers were crafted to avoid.

Levin still was not done. He named two Swiss financiers, both indicted on tax charges, who arranged for their clients to meet Credit Suisse bankers. The Credit Suisse executives described these men as fiduciaries, meaning people who have a legal duty to put the inter-

Senator Levin is a well-prepared and relentless interrogator of corporations and bankers who try to game the system.

cy intentionally and obviously hiding that from their management,” Dougan said, trying again to deflect responsibility.

“This isn’t hidden from me,” Levin responded, holding the expense account form. “It’s pretty obvious. … Over and over again, hotel for dinner to prepare for an introduction to somebody, obviously a customer. We went to this person, followed by lunch. … This is not hidden.”

Dougan gave up. “I couldn’t agree more.”

But Levin was not done. He asked, again, were the managers and auditors rogue bankers? Dougan answered that there were errors, adding, “Perhaps they were not vigilant” in reviewing the expense reports.

ests of their clients ahead of their own interests, an important admission in law.

Who else? Levin asked, seeking the names of more fiduciaries. Cerutti, the bank’s general counsel, tried to escape an answer, saying he would need to check with others at Credit Suisse.

How about the people sitting behind you?

Levin asked. Cerutti reluctantly turned to his entourage for a moment, and then said that under Swiss law, he was not allowed to name such people.

How many then? Levin asked. Cerutti then conceded that there were three other fiduciaries.

Levin continued this way for hours, question by carefully planned question, building

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 83

few synagogues, to win by a narrow margin.

John McCain told The American Prospect that he found it easy to work with Levin on the Senate Armed Services Committee partly because they shared similar views on military spending. Both men favor lots of it, but detest waste and contractor fraud. McCain went on and on, praising Levin as a man of his word, a character trait he indicated too few politicians possess. Levin would always check with the opposition first, he said, adding that they often found ways to agree, but when they could not, Levin would go his own way and fight for what

Levin and ranking Republican John McCain share a cordial working relationship: both detest waste of the taxpayers’ dollar.

ing of the calculated, deceptive strategies involved in the massive tax evasion among that thin but very rich slice of Americans who will commit felonies to escape taxes. Fair to say, Corporate America will not miss Levin, but honest taxpayers will.

LEVIN GOT TO WASHINGTON only because

Senator Robert P. Griffin, a popular Republican incumbent and the son of an autoworker, balked at seeking another term in 1978. By the time Griffin decided to get back into the race, the doubt his hesitation had created left an opening just large enough for a middleaged Harvard lawyer, a Jew in a state with

84 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG FALL 2014

he believed in—he never went back on his word.

As a boy growing up in Detroit with his brother, Sander, now a Michigan congressman and his sister, Hannah, his parents emphasized moral obligations and respect for others, both brothers said. Levin said his parents and siblings were all “strong New Dealers,” believing government should play a major role in creating opportunity and promoting justice and fairness.

One summer around 1950, the brothers and some friends set off on a five-thousand–mile cross-country car trip, their parents insisting they ride in separate cars so both would not die in the event of an accident. Sander said the brothers instead rode together because

they were much more cautious drivers than their friends.

As a young man, Levin worked briefly in an auto factory, learning firsthand the monotony of factory labor and the benefits of a strong union like the United Auto Workers. He also drove a cab, learning about a variety of people and their circumstances, work that he said has helped him understand the many sources and hearing witnesses he has met while exploring tax policy.

After graduating from Harvard Law and practicing at a private firm in Detroit, Levin first made himself a public figure by serving as general counsel of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission from 1964 to 1967. He was city council president when Coleman Young left the Michigan State Senate to become the city’s first black mayor, who, with Levin’s support, halved the city’s debt.

One of Levin’s favorite stories is about his father-in-law, an immigrant who in his will left $10,000 to the federal government. “He knew he wasn’t going to pay an estate tax—he was comfortable, but not wealthy—and as an immigrant he felt he owed a debt to America and he wanted to pay it one way or another. I tell that story, often on April 15, when wealthy people are complaining about their taxes.”

I asked Levin what he would tell his grandchildren if one wanted to become a politician.

He spoke of politics in terms not of power and victory, but of that duty of loyalty, the fiduciary duty that bankers, brokers, and others we entrust with our money and assets try so hard to escape: I would tell my grandchildren to first have an occupation they would be very happy in if they don’t win or, if they do win the election, that they can fall back on so they can follow the fiduciary path, which I believe is the right path for an elected official, which is to vote for what they think is best for their community. You have to be able to vote for what you think is best, even if it’s unpopular, if you want to be a fiduciary and truly represent the interests of your community and not yourself.

I would urge them to listen to their constituents, but also to the opposition, because the opposition deserves to be heard before decisions are made. I would urge them to learn how to compromise

j. scot t applewhite / ap images

a solid case that Credit Suisse knew exactly what it was doing, knew it was actively promoting criminal conduct on American soil and that its internal investigation report was not the unvarnished truth, but whitewash.

Alas, while Levin’s skillful interrogation did result in criminal charges, the bank was not expelled from the U.S. market. Attorney General Eric Holder, a corporate lawyer before and likely after his government stint, let Credit Suisse settle the charges by paying $2.6 billion in civil penalties.

Still, Levin elevated the public understand-

because that is the only way something gets done in a place like the Senate. I would urge them not just to listen to the opposition and to consider their arguments, but if they end up taking a position in prevailing I would urge them to give the other guy some ground to stand on.

Levin said that was “something Stennis talked a lot about,” referring to John C. Stennis, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee when Levin joined his freshman year as the junior Democrat. That Levin, a tireless advocate for civil rights, invoked as a mentor one of the most notorious white supremacists to serve in the United States Senate is indicative of Levin’s deep regard for the comity that makes the Senate function—or once did.

Starting with what Stennis told him and then mixing it with his own values, Levin said: Someday you’re going to not have the votes and you want the other guy to come out of the battle with something, so never give up on the principle [Stennis advised], but always give consideration to the other person’s position so they have somewhere to stand afterward.

I always look forward to being told by people who go after me, ‘I don’t agree with you but I respect that you tell the truth as you see it and you don’t speak out of both sides of your mouth.’ Frankly, I would— not quite, but almost—prefer to hear that to someone coming up to me and saying, ‘You’re great and I agree with you 100 percent of the time,’ because I don’t even agree with myself 100 percent of the time.

Levin, despite his support for military outlays, was a leading dove on the military committee when it came to resisting what President Obama memorably called “stupid stuff.” He opposed the war in Iraq and he took a role in denouncing torture and euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Levin often talks of his respect for those in uniform.

He said the one surprise of his decades of work on the committee dealing with military spending was that senior officers turned out “to be much more cautious about the use of force than I expected” before becoming a senator. He said

that before taking office, he thought, “perhaps stereotypically, that military leaders would think of force as the best approach to a problem, but they turn out to be much more cautious than many of our civilian leaders. … Even with Republican presidents, I found their military leaders to be much more cautious. Looking at [Colin] Powell, who really didn’t want to go to war in Iraq [in 2003]—one of his great failings was not saying that to the president and not saying he could not go along. That reluctance, however, came through to us on the Hill.”

Were he to stay in the Senate, Levin said he would “continue the battle I am waging right now. Much of the work on PSI has to do with role of taxes, tax avoidance, excessive greed, Wall Street abuses, which have all contributed to a growing income gap in this country.”

The reason, he said, is the threat they pose to compliance with tax laws and support for

tion over taxes, Maria Cantwell of Washington state has shown a taste for investigation. But Cantwell is not on the PSI or its parent committee, and it’s not at all clear that Democrats will be the Senate majority party after January.

You might think, with hundreds of billions of dollars in the low-hanging fruit of evaded taxes, it would be easy to win recruits to his cause.

But though the crusade for deficit reduction is underwritten by corporate elites, it is hard to find a corporate sponsor for collecting taxes owed. The senator is optimistic, though: “We are in the early stages of reform,” Levin said.

There will be reform because we are not going in a sustainable direction. This country is too ingrained as an egalitarian country to continue to accept this direction and the status quo; it is unacceptable.

It is unacceptable that you have folks mak-

With Carl Levin leaving the Senate, who will continue his work of exposing the complex tax-evasion maneuvers used by America’s most powerful economic interests? government, as well as their undermining of government’s fiscal integrity.

And he said his primary behind-the-scenes goal would be to recruit Republican supporters for integrity in the tax system. “Loopholes in our tax law allow the wealthiest and most profitable corporations to avoid paying taxes— these are loopholes I have been fighting to close and will continue fighting to my last day. I am trying to find a Republican—who I know exists, but so far who will not sign up—for closing unjustified tax loopholes.”

WITH LEVIN LEAVING, who, if anyone, will

undertake the methodical, often tedious work of digging deeply into the complex maneuvers used by the most powerful economic interests in America? Next in seniority on the investigations subcommittee are Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, both centrist Democrats and both facing tough reelections this fall. Of ranking Democrats on the Finance Committee, which has policy jurisdic-

ing billions of dollars, but avoiding paying taxes so they can make more billions of dollars without paying taxes. This is a function of leadership, to be able to explain clearly, and hopefully in a non-demagogic way, as I tried for my hearings, with some success in the legislation that has been enacted, that taxes and a fair tax system are central to our democracy.

Levin believes we will get real tax reform only when the gaming of the system by large corporations and super-wealthy individuals “becomes an issue, becomes the issue, in the presidential contest.” That may be a long way off. For now, the question is: Who will step into Levin’s very large shoes?

David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer prizewinning journalist, now retired from The New York Times. He writes for Newsweek, Al Jazeera America, and NationalMemo.com and teaches at Syracuse University.

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Chizuk Amuno Synagogue in Baltimore, Maryland

Music and Memory The ominous state of Zionism invites us to cherish the diaspora as Jewish cultural and religious homeland. BY DEBORAH WEISGALL B

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ur choir rehearsals start about a month before the High Holidays, toward the end of summer. The lake is getting colder, the swamp maples have started to turn red, and the lines of cars clogging the roads in midcoast Maine have thinned.

We rehearse in the synagogue in Rockland, a working-class town not yet completely transformed into a destination for vacationers.

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The synagogue is a small clapboard building on a side street a couple of blocks from the ferry terminal. Thirty years ago, when I first went to services here with my father, an east wind blew the smell of the fish-processing plant into its open windows. The congregation was small; a few of the children and grandchildren of eastern European immigrants who found their way to Maine and

established the synagogue in 1912 kept it going.

It is a surprise to discover an outpost of the diaspora in a place defined by lobsters and Protestant rusticators. It is even more surprising—and the congregation’s original families would have found it as alien as the taste of lobster—to hear the music we sing there now. But the synagogue is thriving in large part because

of the music, which my father brought to Rockland.

Though the choir is more than 20 years old, we need our rehearsals. This is not music to perform without preparation: It has complicated modulations and tricky entrances. It’s what you would expect to hear in a concert hall; you could imagine that Schubert wrote some of it, or Mendelssohn, or even Verdi. In this former Baptist church, we sing great 19thcentury choral music—not masses or requiems or choruses from operas, but settings of the Hebrew liturgy. We sing a cappella, four parts, sometimes five or six. There are only a few other places in the world where this glorious music, once sung in synagogues all over

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central and western Europe, remains part of a service. It has been forgotten, almost.

I have known this music all my life.

These were the services my grandfather and my father sang, preserving what they inherited and adding their own compositions—and for much of my life, I have been afraid of losing it.

When I was a child, I sat in the choir loft in the grand German synagogue in Baltimore, Maryland, where my grandfather was the cantor, and my father, a composer, conducted the choir. I squeezed onto the ledge of the balcony, behind the first tenor. The music contains my family’s history. It is central to my Jewish self.

I have attributed the disappearance of the music to three factors: first, to the Holocaust, which wiped out the communities and the synagogues that were home to the music; secondly, to a post-Holocaust aversion to anything polluted with the German culture that had fostered the Jewish enlightenment; and, finally, to America, the land of the future and of assimilation, which offered freedom and opportunity at the price of destroying Jewish identity and tradition.

THIS WINTER, I READ My Promised

Land by Ari Shavit as I imagine many Jews read it—with a profound sense of recognition. In his aching, passionate account of the transformation of an idea—Zionism—into a nation, Shavit confronts the paradoxes of forgetting and remembering, of blindness and vision, that the making of the state of Israel required. He looks clearly at how early Zionists, fired by desire for a homeland, overlooked and later displaced the Arabs who already lived in Palestine; he recounts his military duty in a Gaza prison camp and pieces together the story of the destruction of the Arab town of Lydda in 1948.

Shavit also looks at how Jews transformed themselves into Israelis. He devotes a chapter, “Housing Estate, 1957,” to one of the prefabricated blocks erected in the new state— apartments for European Holocaust survivors whose children practiced the violin for hours a day, and also for sophisticated émigré Jewish Iraqis: Jews of the diaspora. Many could not

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wait to shed their old names and the old image of Jews as weak and cowardly Talmudic scholars. But many others abandoned precious parts of their identity—their culture, their history, their religious practices—in order to conform to the Israeli ideal and erase traces of the diaspora.

While he accepts that the project of homogeneity was once central to the success of the new state, Shavit argues that it is critical to remember what was obliterated and ignored, who was devalued—Jews from Muslim countries. He tallies the breadth and the implications of forgetting; his book recounts the tragic cost of building the Jewish state, as well as its great achievements. He fears for the future and understands that to survive, Israel must remember and confront both the bitter and the sweet.

Shavit and his family spend every summer in England, where his greatgrandfather, Herbert Bentwich, was a successful lawyer and ardent Zionist who first visited Palestine in 1897.

Just half a century later, Palestine became Israel, and for the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jews had a physical homeland. Jerusalem is no longer located only in memory or in prayer.

Israel was always a state of mind where the diaspora lived; now it is also a political state. Diaspora has become a choice, and for 66 years, the Jewish nation and the Jewish diaspora have flourished, symbiotic, interdependent, drawing strength from each other. But that is changing. Settlements in the West Bank, oppression of Palestinians, a government increasingly ruled by extremists: Many Jews in the diaspora—as well as many Israeli Jews—no longer support these politics, and they are voicing their opposition.

IN HIS DENSE, DRY, and valuable

study, At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora is Good for the Jews, Alan Wolfe argues that the diaspora (his ideal liberal diaspora), with its diversity, universalist values, and openness to the secular world, is now more

Traditionally, Israel was a state of mind where the diaspora lived.

Now it is a political state, and diaspora has become a choice.

Moses Mendelssohn, father of the Jewish enlightenment movement in 18th-century Berlin

necessary than ever. In his book, both history and polemic, Wolfe unravels arguments for and against the diaspora, from the 19th century to the present day, from the early Zionist dream of Palestine as a home for the oppressed masses of eastern European Jews—bankrolled by prosperous, Western Jews (a view supported

by Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis)—to contemporary writers like A.B. Yehoshua who believe, like Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, that only in Israel can a Jew live a fully Jewish life.

Wolfe reminds us that negation of the diaspora is as old as Zionism. If a Jewish homeland exists, the argument goes, why should Jews want to live outside that homeland?

The debate about the relationship between Israel and the diaspora—and about the legitimacy of the diaspora— has not diminished, he believes. Wolfe links the question to another deep rift in Jewish thought: between universalism—the idea that the humane values of Judaism can and should benefit secular society—and particularism, which holds that Jews are responsible only to themselves (the fundamental question of “Is it good for the Jews?”), and that they must defend themselves against the inimical outside world.

Wolfe’s definition of universalism invokes the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment movement founded

by Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin in the late 18th century. A charismatic philosopher, Mendelssohn fought for legal emancipation; he encouraged Jews to study German, Hebrew (not Yiddish), and Jewish history, to venture into the gentile world of ideas and culture, to embrace the Europe where they had lived for a thousand years. The Haskalah inspired a flowering of Jewish talent—Heinrich Heine and Felix Mendelssohn (Moses’s grandson)—an influx of Jews into liberal politics, and, with the Reform Judaism movement, a loosening of the strictures of religious life. It came at a price—assimilation and even conversion; both Heine and Felix Mendelssohn became Christians. In eastern

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Europe, with its strong rabbinic and Hasidic traditions and its unrelenting anti-Semitism, the influence of the Haskalah emerged in Jewish schools, in democratic and socialist political movements—and in Zionism.

While Zionism was of a piece with European nationalist movements and their need to legitimize the present with a return to the ancient past (the first modern Olympics were held in Greece in 1896, a year before the first Zionist Congress), Jews were, consistently, the victims of those movements. The Zionist project gained momentum and urgency with the realization that life for Jews in eastern Europe was becoming untenable.

Some Jewish thinkers argued that Zionism required a new kind of Jew, not the craven creature of the diaspora, but tough and secular, prepared to make the desert bloom and, if necessary, to vanquish enemies.

Only a small number of Jews moved to Israel at the turn of the century, however: 75,000 between 1882 and 1914, compared to the millions who immigrated to America, and, along with their politics and their Zionism, flourished there. Wolfe dissects the changing attitudes of American Jews toward the Zionist project. Many leaders, including several prominent Reform rabbis, were outspoken in their opposition to a Jewish state, both from their pulpits and through their involvement with Jewish organizations. America was where Jews had found peace and fulfillment: Palestine seemed to them like another shtetl.

But when the horror of the Holocaust became known and Israel became a state, opposition dissolved.

After the 1967 war, American Jews united in their financial and political support, adopting Israeli culture as their own and defending Israel against all criticism. Wolfe’s book draws an intellectual map—a map whose roundabouts, intersections, one-way streets, and dead ends he tries valiantly to chart—of the diaspora in America (specifically the diaspora of Ashkenazi Jews): the trek from the shtetls to the suburbs, religious practices that shifted focus away from God and toward self-­f ulfillment, from Judaism to Jewishness, from

solidarity with Israel to dissent.

Defending the diaspora, Wolfe, like Shavit, returns several times to the centrality of memory. How to remember the diaspora? Was the diaspora a tragedy on repeat? A history of suffering and oppression, a disease of the spirit? Or a diverse and often exotic flowering?

Did a people whose home existed only in memory learn to imagine in the real world a lifting of that oppression, the potential for a just and righteous future?

MY FAMILY’S BEAUTIFUL, vanishing

music, which flourished for just over a century, is a small story that traces the complex and fluid boundaries of Jewish identity and belief, in Europe, America, and Israel. It is a story of interconnection, like others that have occurred and been forgotten many times over the millennia in Spain, in Persia, in Italy. Ironically, the disappearance of our music is also a casualty of the project of Zionism.

My grandfather, Abba Joseph Weisgal, was born in Kikl, a shtetl halfway between Warsaw and Gdansk in Poland. He was the oldest of 11 children. His brother Meyer, ten years younger, became a pivotal American Zionist journalist, impresario, and the founder of one of the foremost scientific research centers in the world, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. In Kikl, their father served as the chazzan, or cantor, and

Cantors Louis Lewandowski and Salomon Sulzer

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as the shochet, the ritual slaughterer.

Though Kikl’s streets were muddy and unpaved, it was surrounded by a meadow and close to a lake where the children swam.

By the time Meyer was born, Abba had already left home to apprentice with a cantor in Nieszawa, a town close to the ever-shifting German border. In 1905, the rest of his family sailed steerage to America, despite its terrible reputation as the breeding ground of the dreaded germs of assimilation. Abba, 19 and under the spell of Western music, went to Vienna to study with one of the students of the great cantor Salomon Sulzer. Meyer never completely forgave Abba for abandoning Yiddish and Hasidism in favor of what Meyer called in his autobiography a “Teutonic mode of worship.”

Sulzer, who became cantor in Vienna around 1826, revolutionized synagogue music. He harmonized them and structured traditional chants in the way his contemporaries, who in Vienna included Beethoven and Schubert, transformed folk tunes into high art.

Famous for his interpretations of lieder, Sulzer became a part of Schubert’s musical circle. Schubert set several psalms in Hebrew for Sulzer’s choir.

Gentiles as well as Jews attended Sabbath services to hear the music; in 1904, the celebration of the centennial of Sulzer’s birth had to be moved from the synagogue to a theater to accommodate the large audience. At that time, the Vienna Court Opera was directed by Gustav Mahler, a converted Jew, and cantors also pursued careers in opera.

Sulzer was one of a generation of great cantors nurtured by the Haskalah. The cantor Louis Lewandowski was born in Poland and arrived in Berlin in 1834. Felix Mendelssohn arranged for the boy to attend the Berlin Academy, where he became the first Jewish graduate. Like Sulzer, Lewandowski preserved the ancient melodies within the forms of 19thcentury music.

Samuel Naumbourg had a similar influence on French synagogue music. Born in Bavaria, he became

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chief cantor of Paris in 1845. A prolific composer, his melodies share the ravishing lushness of French opera, two of whose most successful composers were Jewish: Fromental Halévy and Giacomo Meyerbeer (an early and ardent supporter of Wagner, but never mind). Naumbourg also edited a newly discovered book of Hebrew music by the Italian early Baroque composer Salamone Rossi. Rossi, a colleague of Claudio Monteverdi, became court composer to the dukes of Mantua in the early 17th century.

He composed madrigals and sinfonias for the court and set Hebrew psalms and prayers in the same polyphonic style, with almost no reference to traditional chants. “The Lord has put new songs in my mouth,” he wrote, quoting Psalm 40. Naumbourg recognized that in Italy two centuries earlier, Jews found a moment of freedom similar to his own, when cultures interlaced and it was possible for a Jew to enter the secular world without abandoning his religious identity. A century after Naumbourg, in a postHolocaust flowering of Jewish culture in New York, my father put together a new edition of Rossi.

The music of 19th-century composers like Sulzer, Lewandowski, Naumbourg, and others, including the Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna who also wrote extensively for the synagogue, formed the foundation of what my grandfather and my father sang all their lives. In 1908, Abba became the assistant cantor in the Moravian town of Ivancice, about halfway between Prague and Vienna; graves in the Jewish cemetery there date to the 15th century.

The cantor, another of Sulzer’s pupils, encouraged him to compose. Abba married the cantor’s niece; my father, Hugo Weisgall (he added a second “l” to his name), was born in 1912.

Three years after World War I, in which he served in the Austro-­ Hungarian army, my grandparents, my father, and his baby brother, Freddie, sailed for America. Abba auditioned for the job of cantor at Chizuk Amuno in Baltimore, and the congregation hired him on the spot. His sparkling baritone lifted into tenor; he was handsome, with thick hair and

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Abba Joseph Weisgal

a lush mustache. He dressed elegantly, he carried a cane, he enjoyed a glass of schnapps. His nusach, or chanting, despite his brother’s fears, was tinged with irresistible Hasidic ecstasy.

When he sang, he talked to God, and he knew that God heard. He had a gift for melody; he was egotistical, stubborn, deeply kind, and utterly lovable.

He sang in that synagogue for the rest of his life.

The 1920s and 1930s were the golden age of cantors in America, but Abba’s nusach did not feature the same hermetic eastern European wailing of his youth and of the millions of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in America. The last of the great cantors in the line that descended from Salomon Sulzer, Abba sang in a more austere, less showy way; it was a dialogue with the choir. Abba’s solos were virtuosic cadenzas, melodic riffs, jazzlike in their inventiveness. Abba and the choir sang the entire service.

Every once in a while the rabbi interrupted to read a paragraph in English or to deliver his sermon (which the members of the choir—and the grandchildren of the cantor—considered intermission; we retired to the choir loft’s anteroom to tell jokes and play checkers).

But Jewish life in America was changing, becoming more homogeneous, leaving parts of the past

MY PROMISED LAND: THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF ISRAEL

BY ARI SHAVIT

Spiegel & Grau

AT HOME IN EXILE: WHY DIASPORA IS GOOD FOR THE JEWS

BY ALAN WOLFE

Beacon Press

behind. My father, a founder of the Cantors Institute at the Jewish Theological Seminary, said to me once that he found students had little interest in learning the 19thcentury central European musical canon. When in 1968 Chizuk Amuno moved to a soaring, Le Corbusier– style complex in the suburbs, Abba refused to go; he would not drive on the Sabbath. The new building was not a shul, a place for study and worship, it was a Sanctuary, with a capital S (Wolfe is fascinating on these synagogues). Out of gratitude—and guilt—the congregation kept the old building in town for Abba. A stubborn old man who refused to change with the times, he was put out to pasture. Grime stained the limestone walls and clogged the blue and gold stained-glass windows. My father had finally moved us to New York, but we drove back to Baltimore for every holiday. Then, in 1974, a group established a new congregation in the old shul. Abba was its chazzan, and the rabbi was a distinguished scholar.

In the choir loft, we broke with tradition and listened to his sermons.

When Abba could no longer sing, my father acted as chazzan.

After Abba died, my father went to the leaders of the little congregation in Rockland, Maine, and offered to be their cantor. For a few years, my brother and I were the inadequate choir, keeping the music on life support, struggling to sound like ten men.

Despite us, attendance increased.

People came to hear my father. It turned out that there were a lot of Jews living in midcoast Maine. A generous and eloquent rabbi from Portland began to lead services with my father. A member of the congregation, a pediatrician with musical training and perfect pitch, started a choir.

Membership grew, and in 2005 the leaders of the congregation decided to hire a rabbi. Our music offended her; it did not sound Israeli. That is true; it was dripping with diaspora. We sang less. Eventually the rabbi departed.

We are still singing. But I worry. We sing only a fraction of what there is. I hear only in my mind many of Abba’s great set pieces, or Ne’ilah, the aching Yom Kippur closing service. At

photos courtesy of the author

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Passover, we struggle to remember the dozens of family tunes we sang and wonder how much our children will be able to keep.

The Passover Hagaddah ends the same way Ne’ilah ends, with a declaration: L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim.

“Next year in Jerusalem.” It was the last prayer my grandfather sang in a synagogue, the last prayer my father sang. Abba was a Zionist, and he wrote Zionist melodies for Hebrew prayers. With all the trees in Israel he bought in the names of his grandchildren, I’m sure that he subsidized an entire forest. But Abba was a child of the diaspora.

HIS MUSIC, HIS FRAGILE hybrid, holds

the diaspora’s sweetness, its contradictions. Abba’s music was too Jewish, and it was not Jewish enough. In America, Jewish composers of Abba’s generation—Irving Berlin, George Gershwin—were transforming American secular music. In 1926, Jascha Heifetz played Schubert, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn in the Valley of Harod, sanctifying the miracle the pioneers had wrought. My friend, the violinist Miriam Fried, was one of those children of the Holocaust practicing in a prefabricated apartment.

On the Sabbath, her father listened to a radio program that featured Lewandowski and other cantors—a memory,

Hugo Weisgall

cut off from its origins as prayer.

Though Zionism was a secular movement, Jewish religious music that echoed the secular world was suspect; it echoed the diaspora, too.

The diaspora was a condition of disputation, of possibility, of conscience.

It was dangerous; it could lead to assimilation, or death. Salamone Rossi was probably murdered in 1633 when Austrian troops conquered Mantua and destroyed the ghetto.

Some Venetian Jews had opposed Rossi’s secular-sounding settings; they saw in his death God’s punishment. Nobody dared anything like it until Salomon Sulzer came along two hundred years later. In Ivancice, the Germans rounded up Sulzer’s family and they died in Terezin. The facade of the synagogue there still bears bronze Hebrew letters spelling out the verse from the psalm: “Sing unto the Lord a new song.” The singers met a terrible end: Should that once again negate the beauty of the music?

This could be another story of loss.

On the other hand, the music is still sung, and some has been recorded.

Wolfe argues that we must reconstruct the memory of the diaspora and not live as if disaster lurks around the corner. Just now it may not be lurking in the American diaspora, but there are rumblings in Hungary and France.

This is a story of contradiction; among

My family’s beautiful, vanishing music, which flourished for just over a century, traces the fluid boundaries of Jewish identity and belief, in Europe, America, and Israel.

Deborah Weisgall has written about music, visual arts, and architecture for many publications, including The New York Times, The���� At� ��� lantic, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal.

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the most recent diaspora Jews to make aliyah are ultra-Orthodox Americans occupying the West Bank.

In Baltimore, Abba lived as if the whole world were Jewish; he inhabited a dream diaspora. He walked to shul every day. He could have been in Moravia, strolling along Ivancice’s lovely, slow river, instead of around the Druid Hill Park reservoir. When Jews moved out and black families moved in, people warned him that he wasn’t safe there. But his new neighbors addressed him as “Reverend” and looked out for him, just as his old neighbors had.

The diaspora’s sweetness: Wolfe believes in it; Shavit is drawn to it.

Shavit describes Devon the way the prophets described the Promised Land. The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, Isaiah preached. He writes, “With its deep calm … England has all that we never had and all that we may never have: peace.” But he mistrusts that serenity; he suspects that in England’s green fields and beside its meandering streams, his Jewish identity, his restlessness and energy, will erode. It might, but it might not; the old and dire predictions that assimilation will wipe out the Jews have not come true.

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, Jeremiah lamented in Babylon, may my right hand lose its cunning. The Talmud was codified in exile in Babylon. Maimonides wrote, in Arabic, in exile. But David, the sweet singer of Israel and a working king, composed on the job. He sang of green pastures and still waters, and he sang: The Lord trained my hands for war … I have pursued my enemies and overtaken them. David’s psalm is no longer a metaphor. A Jewish home, prospering in an ancient, contested sliver of land—that is the dangerous reality of Zionism. Israel is again one among the nations.

On Yom Kippur, I recite, “Next year in Jerusalem,” but I really hope: Next year in Maine. At our seders, we always said it out loud: Next year in Baltimore. Next year in New York, in Massachusetts, in Maryland. Next year in Jerusalem, the state of mind, a place of peace. Next year we will sing, wherever we are.

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Defending Choice, Yet Again

respondents in the same poll agreed that abortion should be legal to save the life of the woman. A Gallup average of various polls starting from 1996 to 2002 found that 79 percent of respondents thought abortion should be legal in cases of rape and incest. The popularity of rape exemptions suggests that people are not really reasoning from the premise that an embryo has full human rights, but rather from the premise that women have responsibilities to bear children conceived by consensual sex, but not coerced sex.

Pollitt offers this acerbic judgment on the mushy middle of the American abortion debate:

An unapologetic defense of abortion rights— and about time BY LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN B

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n August, a swarm of police officers was dispatched to the scene of a miscarriage at a Dallas high school, after a dead fetus was found in the girls’ lavatory. Police officers combed the school in search of a female “suspect.” The investigation concluded only when the authorities satisfied themselves that the miscarriage had been spontaneous.

We might have known it would come to this.

Abortion access has decreased dramatically in Texas since the state’s restrictive anti-choice law went into effect in 2013. About half of the state’s abortion clinics closed in the law’s first year on the books. On August 29, a federal judge struck down key parts of the law that were scheduled to take effect in September and would have forced about 12 of the state’s remaining 19 clinics to close. But the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard the case in September, could easily reverse the lower court when it announces its ruling.

One result of the law is that Texas women are increasingly turning to black-market abortion drugs from online pharmacies, flea markets, or Mexico to induce their own miscarriages—a fact that might have been on the police officers’ minds when they decided to descend on Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas to investigate a miscarriage.

When it comes to dwindling access to abortion, Texas is not unique. Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land, but anti-choicers have been chipping away at abortion access through state legislatures. Between 2011 and 2013, 205 new abortion restrictions became law. These laws make abortion more difficult and expensive to obtain by imposing waiting periods, ultrasound viewings, medically unnecessary restrictions on clinic operations, and other hurdles.

This all makes Katha Pollitt’s Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights a timely

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book indeed. A full-throated defense of abortion as a social good, Pro is a thorough debunking of anti-abortion pieties. But it’s not just anti-abortion activists on whom Pollitt, columnist for The Nation and a noted poet, sets her sights: She also takes pro-choicers to task for paying lip service to the idea that abortion is always an agonizing decision that all women feel somewhat bad about, what she calls “the awfulization” of abortion.

Pollitt makes a compelling point: Why would that be universally true, unless all women inherently want babies all the time, or unless everyone believes there’s something at least a bit wrong with abortion? As Pollitt’s own reporting makes clear, regret and uncertainty are hardly universal experiences for those who have abortions.

Women’s reasons for abortion are dismissed as frivolous and selfish, Pollitt argues, because society doesn’t take seriously women’s aspirations for a better life. Furthermore, she writes, women are depicted as shallow—or worse—for wanting to have sex while avoiding pregnancy. This attitude rests on the conservative assumption that pregnancy is a natural “consequence” of sex, and that women who try to avoid it are shirkers.

As Pollitt points out in her book, large swaths of the public have muddled ideas about the morality of abortion. She found that polls that ask people to label their stance on abortion (pro-choice or pro-life) don’t square with other polls that ask more probing questions about whether abortions should be allowed for specific reasons. Whether the people deem an abortion to be permissible or not has more to do with our judgments about a woman’s sexual morality than about the moral status of zygotes.

Citing a 1996 University of Virginia poll in which 38 percent of respondents said that abortion was “murder, as bad as killing a person already born,” Pollitt notes that 84 percent of

If you really mean what you tell pollsters, your respect for “life” is entirely conditional. It depends not on any quality of the embryo or fetus—you’re willing to dispose of it if the reason meets your approval—but on your judgment of the pregnant woman.

PRO: RECLAIMING ABORTION RIGHTS

BY KATHA POLLITT

Picador

Pollitt exposes some muddled thinking in pro-choice public opinion as well: 31 percent of respondents in a poll conducted by the National Opinion Research Center proclaimed themselves to be totally pro-choice, but only 25 percent of respondents in Gallup’s poll average agreed that women should be allowed to have an abortion if having a baby would interfere with their career. This is further evidence that people decide the rightness of an abortion based on their judgments about the woman and her choices, rather than about any inherent property of the embryo or fetus.

The term “pro-choice” has fallen on hard times. In 2013, even the venerable Planned Parenthood announced it was moving away from it. Pollitt faults the pro-choice establishment for playing defense and spending too much time defending those rare kinds of abortion that evoke strong sympathies for the pregnant woman: termination to save the woman’s life or health, catastrophic fetal anomaly, and unwanted pregnancies due to rape or incest—even though the vast majority of abortions take place for more mundane reasons.

In a typical abortion, the woman

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simply doesn’t want a baby. Pollitt persuasively argues that this option is a good thing for women and for society—and that supporters of abortion rights should be explaining the benefits of ready access to these less dramatic abortions. If a woman’s body is truly her own, and not the property of her male partner or the state, simply not wanting to be pregnant should be enough. A woman shouldn’t need extraordinary extenuating circumstances to end a pregnancy.

We don’t expect people to choose a spouse or a career based on happenstance. Why should a woman bear a child just because she happens to get pregnant? Not only can abortion be just as ethical as childbearing, Pollitt maintains, it can be the morally superior choice in some circumstances.

What’s praiseworthy about bearing more children than you can—or want to—take care of?

Among the book’s strengths, Pro articulates a clear vision of how abortion rights contribute to a flourishing society. For starters, how are women to be socially equal to men if they can’t

control their own fertility? A woman has a much better chance at success if she can pursue education or employment without fear of being interrupted by unplanned pregnancy. What’s more, abortion and birth control are central to the modern companionate ideal of marriage, where people get married because they love each other, not because a condom broke. And, of course, the power to have sex without having babies gives both women and men the option to postpone marriage and child-rearing while they pursue other goals, like higher education, that benefit individuals and society.

Anti-choicers like to say that abortion and birth control destroyed the “traditional family.” What they really mean is reproductive freedom deprived them of their greatest recruiting tool: the shotgun marriage.

Pollitt argues that the anti-choice movement’s focus on the putative rights of the unborn from the moment of conception is just a fig leaf for its real agenda: controlling women’s sexuality and reproduction. If antichoicers were as interested in saving

Abortion rights supporters take a stand outside the Texas governor’s mansion on August 29, 2014, after a federal judge in Austin struck down two provisions of the 2013 Texas law that restricts abortions.

Lindsay Beyerstein is a reporter in Brooklyn, New York.

Her reporting has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Slate, Al Jazeera America, Reuters, and other publications.

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unborn babies as they claim, they would be enthusiastic proponents of birth control and medically accurate sex education—which can prevent unplanned pregnancies, and thereby reduce the need for abortions. Yet we see some anti-choicers opposing both abortion and birth control—and even trying to redefine some forms of birth control as abortion, in opposition to scientific consensus.

Before the 1800s, when women were totally entrenched in the family, Pollitt writes, abortion wasn’t even a topic of public controversy in the United States.

In those days, abortion was just one of those icky female concerns, like periods and childbirth, that men didn’t need to think about. But abortion became a symbolic issue when women started agitating for rights to education, property, and the vote in the 19th century.

Pollitt stresses that 19th-century doctors like Horatio Robinson Storer, who led the physician’s movement to criminalize abortion, condemned the practice as a woman’s rejection of her role as a wife and mother. Storer famously claimed that most abortions in his day were performed on married women. In his view, the women who should have been breeding were deliberately flouting their duty. As Pollitt points out, there was widespread fear that Protestant women weren’t having enough babies to populate the West and the newly liberated South with free, white people. He also took a personal interest in keeping women out of the medical profession.

The controversy over abortion flared up again after Roe v. Wade, which took place during an era of massive upheavals in women’s social status. “In the nineteenth century, abortion came under attack at a moment when women were claiming political power; in the twentieth century, it came under attack when they claimed sexual freedom,” wrote historian Leslie Reagan in her classic book, When Abortion Was a Crime.

Where Pollitt errs is when she draws a sharp distinction between the old arguments for abortion (pronatalism, eugenics, racism, chastity) and the new zygote-as-person anti-abortionism, and overrates the novelty of the “zygote-as-person” talk

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that dominates today’s anti-choice discourse. This isn’t exactly true. The old sexist arguments have become much less socially acceptable, but theories about ensoulment or personhood beginning at conception have been around since at least the days of Hippocrates, when they seesawed back and forth in popularity with rival views like Aristotle’s that alleged the soul formed more gradually as the fetus developed. In fact, arguments about the moral status of the unborn often coexisted with sexist and pronatalist arguments. In his infamous 1868 anti-abortion treatise “Why Not? A Book for Every Woman,” Storer argues that abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide from the moment of conception.

Certainly, the kitsch of “the unborn baby” took off after the popularization of ultrasounds in the 1960s, when the anti-choice movement glommed on to imagery of adorable fetuses in utero, and their opposite numbers, bloody fetuses in basins. But ancient is the basic, sexist idea that as soon as a man contributes his vital essence to effect a pregnancy, the fetus enjoys moral status independent from the pregnant woman.

“Abortion equals murder” has almost always been a bad-faith argument. There are a handful of true believers who assassinate abortion providers and justify it as violence necessary to save unborn babies, but even these terrorists usually draw the line at killing women who’ve had abortions. If the people who say abortion is murder truly believed it, would they do so with no follow-through on disagreeable prospects like jailing or executing women who procure abortions for such premeditated “murder”?

Yet Pollitt is correct to point out that increased emphasis on embryoAmericans as human beings tends to push the abortion debate in a more radical direction. There is less room for compromise when one side has proclaimed that abortion is homicide.

When murder rhetoric combines with old-fashioned sexism, the two strains of anti-abortion thought can recombine in strange ways. It’s surely difficult and disconcerting to believe that abortion is murder and that one

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in three—the number of American women who have abortions—of your female family members, friends, and neighbors is a stone-cold killer. One way to resolve this conflict is to posit that women are stupid: They don’t realize that they’re killing babies, because they are dupes of “the abortion industry.” That’s why, antichoicers say, women need the state to confront them with ultrasound images and stall them with waiting periods and bombard them with false propaganda that claim a correlation between abortion and breast cancer.

There’s an even more sinister implication to this paternalism. If embryos are people, and women are stupid people, pregnant women need to be monitored and controlled to ensure the well-being of the innocent people inside them. “Fetal endangerment” laws are based on this premise. A proposed law in Kansas would have made every miscarriage subject to criminal investigation. Spontaneous miscarriages are even more common than abortions. A pregnant woman in Tennessee recently received a more severe sentence for making meth than could be given a man under the law, based on the judge’s interpretation of federal sentencing guidelines, because she is deemed to have endangered her “unborn child.”

Pollitt calls upon supporters of abortion rights to go back to the more radical era of “abortion without apology.” By conceding the “awfulization” of abortion, they have empowered anti-choicers to chip away at abortion access with paternalistic restrictions that make it harder to get an abortion, even making it impossible for women who lack the means to travel. Only by reclaiming abortion as a fundamental right and normal part of health care can the pro-choice movement hope to win in the long run.

Pro is one of the most comprehensive arguments for abortion rights to be published in recent memory.

Anyone who wants to understand why pro-choicers believe what they believe would do well to start with this book. But even more than a valuable resource, Pro is a great read. Fans of Pollitt’s clear and dryly funny prose will not be disappointed.

What Women Need Can women translate symbolic victories into durable progress on multiple fronts, from financial status to physical safety? BY IRIN CARMON B

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n 2012, the young singer Taylor Swift was asked if she was a feminist. “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls,” she responded. “I never have. I was raised by parents who brought me up to think if you work as hard as guys, you can go far in life.” Two years later, in an interview with The Guardian, Swift recanted: “As a teenager, I didn’t understand that saying you’re a feminist is just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities. What it seemed to me, the way it was phrased in culture, society, was that you hate men.”

Swift wasn’t wrong that feminism is stigmatized, but by pop-culture standards, her turnaround came late.

Another superstar, Beyoncé, had long since gone from hedging on feminism to embracing it. At roughly the same time, Democrats began to run on women’s issues—even using the A-word, abortion, in television advertisements. Grotesquely, Republicans were positioning themselves as the true champions of women, including on contraception.

Something on the surface, if not in the structures of things, has shifted in recent years. Until a few years ago, even sympathetic celebrities and politicians cringed at anything feminist or even tangentially insistent on women’s rights.

Perhaps things needed to get worse—with right-wingers

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talking about “legitimate rape” and everything suggested by it—before they could get better, particularly for the female voters courted by the parties. The Internet also allowed a critical mass of feminists to come out of hiding and speak on their own terms, among them Girls creator Lena Dunham, whom Swift credited as her feminist mentor.

These are mostly symbolic victories, though they matter, too, and feminists have been starved for them. Whether the groundswell can be channeled into something more sustainable and profound is another question. Not only is the opposition fierce, there are also deep fractures among those who call themselves feminists. “Divisions across age, race, class and ideology have complicated efforts to establish common priorities,” writes Deborah L. Rhode in What Women Want.

Nonetheless, common priorities are exactly what Rhode hopes to establish with her book.

A professor of law at Stanford University and former director of its Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Rhode begins with a customary acknowledgment of the problem.

“On virtually every major dimension of social status, financial well-being, and physical safety, women still fare worse than men,” she writes. “Sexual violence remains common, and reproductive rights are by no means secure.

Women assume disproportionate burdens in the home and pay a price in the world outside of it.”

This is a slim book, but a broad one. An undertaking of this scope demands both comprehensiveness and analytical verve, and unfortunately, What Women Want has the former but almost none of the latter.

Rhode’s book will have little for feminists to disagree with, but that is likely only because it is so cautious. In the perennial conversation about feminist unity, there are both political and practical reasons why feminisms, plural, win out. The bar for speaking for everyone, or trying to, is deservedly high—and this book doesn’t meet it.

Rhode’s chosen format is a chapter per issue—“Employment,” “Appearance,” “Sexual Abuse” among them—each one surveyed with a dry

aggregation of studies and statistics.

The occasional personal aside is a reminder that the book wasn’t generated by an enterprising robot, the kind that Rhode’s colleagues in engineering at Stanford must be developing. Rhode mentions that an undergraduate paper at an all-male college described a talk she gave on campus as a “hissy fit.” One only wishes for something resembling a hissy fit to go along with the sobering facts she amasses.

The other sign of humanity here is a brief accounting of interviews that Rhode conducted, seeking to answer the questions “Is the movement stalled?” and “What are the major obstacles it confronts?” Her only sources, however, are “the heads of leading women’s organizations.” They do important work. But as mostly white, middle-class professionals of a certain generational slice, typically living in the Northeast, they hardly speak for the whole of feminism.

Is it too much to ask that a university professor canvass some young people? Or that someone whose home base is in California—home to some of the most vibrant and effective feminist grassroots activism, especially by women of color and in reproductive justice—ask around a little?

Those women might have a different view from one of Rhode’s interviewees, Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. On whether there is a “women’s movement,” Northup says, “I don’t know that we have one. We have an organized policy sector. But movement suggests a broader cultural consciousness like what we had in the 1970s, and I don’t see that happening.”

Northup may be right that whatever we have now doesn’t look like the movement of the ’70s. But it is cramped and incomplete to have this be a final word on “broader cultural consciousness,” especially when Rhode refers to the Internet only in passing, mostly as a forum for women to be further harassed.

On the same narrowed front, Terry O’Neill of the National Organization for Women tells Rhode that only 6 percent of funding by nongovernmental organizations goes to women’s issues and “you’re

WHAT WOMEN WANT: AN AGENDA FOR THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

BY DEBORAH L. RHODE

Oxford University Press

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not going to fund a revolution on 6 percent.” O’Neill may or may not be referring to The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, a 2006 critique of relying on nonprofits like hers for social change. But Rhode never questions the premise that social transformation requires foundation funding.

If Rhode’s point is that the movement needs to be jumpstarted, cataloging ideas it has already long since come up with is unlikely to do it. I could not find any policy prescription in Rhode’s book that mainstream progressive organizations haven’t adopted; many are already on the Democratic Party platform. Rhode intones that “anti-poverty, contraceptive access, and universal preschool programs should be a priority.” Well, yes; the first is still not enough of a priority for either Democrats or some feminists. On the second, while Rhode mentions Hobby Lobby, she gives little airing to the policy that spurred the suit—requiring comprehensive contraceptive coverage on insurance plans—which, however contested, represents one of the few gains for reproductive health access in our time. The third policy just helped a Democrat win a long-shot mayoral race in New York City.

Rhode is never clear about whom she is writing for. There is plenty of need for a Feminism 101, but no novice would get through this book. At times, it has all of the dynamism of a human resources manual, all dutiful groundcovering without affect or insight. It is full of unobjectionable, anodyne statements like “Whatever oversight structures an employer chooses, one central priority should be the design of effective evaluation and rewards.”

No politician writing an electionpositioning book could outdo the rote descriptors Rhode generates in a single page: “The stakes in Social Security reform are substantial,” she says, then declares in the next paragraph: “The political challenges of all of these issues are substantial.” And the sentence after the next: “But the stakes in these debates are too substantial to ignore.” Mentioning substance cannot substitute for it. And simply declaring a book an agenda is not enough to animate it.

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The End of the Lavender Ghetto As gays and lesbians gain acceptance, they are moving away from the old neighborhoods that long epitomized gay culture. BY DAVID L. KIRP B

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or nearly half a century, San Francisco’s Castro district has been the gay Mecca, and from every corner of the globe LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) tourists have made the pilgrimage.

They came to party, and many wound up staying. The rainbow flag was first flown there. The annual Gay Pride parade and Halloween party were red-letter days on the LGBT calendar.

Gay tourists still throng the Castro, and tour buses continue to bring gawking tourists, but the neighborhood isn’t what it used to be. Lesbians and gays are moving out, the census data show, and straights are moving in—that means more strollers and fewer sex shops. The Gay Pride parade, once a cultural celebration, has morphed into a corporate-­ sponsored event, and like Halloween, it draws thousands of titillationseeking suburbanites. The rainbow flag has become as ubiquitous, and as stripped of meaning, as the “I Heart [fill in the blank].”

This transformation story is much the same in other gay enclaves such as Chelsea and Greenwich Village in Manhattan, Dupont Circle in D.C., and Boystown in Chicago. As a Chicago journalist observed, “With more [straight] families moving in and longtime [gay and lesbian] residents moving out, some say Boystown is losing its gay flavor.”

Some observers cheer the demise of these neighborhoods, among them veteran gay activist Urvashi Vaid, who has urged gays and lesbians to “leave the ghetto.” Others lament the loss of a distinct gay sensibility and the homogenization that accompanies these demographic shifts. Like it or not, though, the change seems to be inevitable and permanent. “We tend to assume that once created, queer neighborhoods will be self-sustaining,” Don Romesburg, a historian,

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points out. “That’s not true. Our neighborhoods get built within particular economic, political, and cultural circumstances. When those change, so do our neighborhoods.”

In There Goes the Gayborhood?, University of British Columbia sociologist Amin Ghaziani vivisects the transformation of these communities, which he labels “gayborhoods,” as well as the emergence of gay enclaves in other urban precincts, suburbs, and small towns across America.

The census data—the only information available to Ghaziani for broadbrush arguments—have only limited value. The Census Bureau only counts gay households, not LGBT individuals, which excludes the estimated 75 percent of gay men and 60 percent of lesbians who are single, as well as gay couples who live apart and transgender and bisexual men and women.

For finer-grained analysis, Ghaziani draws on 40 years of newspaper coverage and 125 interviews to explore how gay life has evolved during the past generation—what has been termed the “post-gay” era. While some LGBT residents are moving out of the gayborhoods, Ghaziani argues that a distinct, place-based gay identity continues to evolve. It’s a nuanced and complex tale—a tale of neighborhood changes and cultural shifts, an identity in flux—and Ghaziani does a nice job of telling it.

THERE GOES THE GAYBORHOOD?

BY AMIN GHAZIANI

Princeton University Press

IN A BREATHTAKINGLY short time

span, we’ve seen a tectonic shift in popular attitudes toward gays and lesbians, away from bigotry and toward acceptance. At the same time, gays have grown less inclined to regard their sexuality as defining who they are. They’re more apt to see themselves as multifaceted individuals who happen to be gay—think Emmy-­w inning comedy Modern Family, with its multiple story lines

David L. Kirp is James D. Marver Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and author of Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools.

that showcase how the meaning of “family” keeps evolving. As Nate Silver, editor of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight, put it, “I’m kind of sexually gay, but ethnically straight.”

Marriage equality provides the most dramatic example of this change. A decade ago, Massachusetts was the lone state to legalize LGBT marriage. The idea was widely dismissed as a liberal pipe dream—even civil unions, gay marriage lite, seemed a stretch—but now the movement seems unstoppable.

Gays and lesbians can wed in 19 states and the District of Columbia, with more to come. In recent months, courts have overturned state bans on gay marriage in a dozen states. During oral argument in a case challenging Wisconsin’s anti-marriage law, Federal Appeals Judge Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee and one of the sharpest minds on the bench, went so far as to compare these bans to laws that criminalized interracial marriage. The Supreme Court will have the final say, most likely in this term, and it’s hard to imagine the justices as Canute, commanding the tides to halt.

The sea change in popular opinion has been equally striking. While a 2009 USA Today/Gallup poll found that only 40 percent of voters endorsed gay marriage, a 2014 Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that nearly 60 percent favored marriage equality. In every region of the country, and even in the states that forbid same-sex couples to wed, a majority now favors gay marriage, and so do 77 percent of voters under age 30. Republican strategists can read the tea leaves. In 2004, the GOP made the gay marriage menace its wedge issue, but now, with 40 percent of Republicans embracing marriage equality, the party has been notably silent.

While discrimination and hate crimes remain all too common—the United States is no more LGBT-blind than it is color-blind—poll data show an unmistakable trend toward acceptance. As a live-and-let-live attitude toward gays and lesbians has increasingly become the norm, they have come to identify their neighborhoods not as lavender ghettos, but as entire

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cities—San Francisco, New York, or Chicago. In a 2013 Pew survey, 92 percent of the LGBT community agreed that society had become more accepting over the past decade and expected this trend to continue.

That’s one reason why organizations like San Francisco’s LGBT Community Center, with its focus on gay identity, are struggling; why iconic gay bookstores like A Different Light in San Francisco and the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York have closed; why readership of gay newspapers has dropped; and why the number of gay bars, the traditional gathering places of gayborhoods, is shrinking. In Boston and Cambridge, for example, there were 16 gay bars in 1993, but fewer than half of them were still in business 14 years later. In Chicago, the Manhole—the name speaks volumes—reinvented itself as Hydrate, a martini bar pitched to straights as well as gays.

The pace of change is picking up as this generation of LGBT teenagers comes of age. Psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams’s research finds that these youth “have much less interest in naming [their] feelings and desires as gay. The notion of ‘gay’ as a noteworthy or identifying characteristic is being abandoned.” In years past, coming out was often a traumatic experience, but now many teens are candid about their sexual desires, and their straight friends take it in stride.

Nationwide, in high schools and on college campuses, Gay-Straight Alliances are flourishing. Last June, a gay high school couple in politically conservative Putnam County, New York, was overwhelmingly elected prom king and queen. Their parents were supportive, and so was the school administration. “We’re proud of all our students,” said the principal. “They know they have the right to pick whoever they want.” The couple reported that their biggest concern was deciding who would be king and who would be queen. If LGBT young adults head for New York City, they’re more likely to live in hipster Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bushwick and Red Hook than in Chelsea.

Meanwhile, many gay couples in their thirties and forties, weary of the

frenetic pace of the Castro or Chelsea, are relocating to less party-hearty urban neighborhoods or to the suburbs. There has been a substantial migration from San Francisco, the nation’s priciest rental market, to Oakland, the West Coast’s answer to Brooklyn, where housing is more affordable. A considerable number of gays and lesbians have made the move, and they’re not looking to re-create the Castro. The same pattern can be seen in New York, with LGBT migration from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens, as well as in Chicago and Washington, D.C., as gays and lesbians move to cheaper, less gay-identified neighborhoods.

The Internet has hastened this diaspora. An international study of 17 cities found that, without exception, the virtual world outstripped the brick-and-mortar landscape.

It’s a familiar pattern, and not just among gays. Why shop in a gay bookstore when Amazon is cheaper? Why go to a gay bar when apps like Grindr facilitate instant hookups, and websites like Match.com make it easy to shop for a relationship?

This new technology has enabled gays and lesbians to focus on their individual lifestyles—they no longer see a pressing need to promote the well-being of the LGBT community.

That attitude is consistent with a zeitgeist that, as New York University Professor Lisa Duggan argues, promotes “a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption,” a move “away from identity politics to a privatized pride.”

If you take a close look at what’s happening in LGBT America, however, the picture becomes murkier.

Ghaziani describes the “post-gay era” as “uneven and incomplete.” Many gays and lesbians still live in the gay enclaves, which remain a lure for others, including teens for whom coming out is no picnic. What’s more, while places like Chicago’s Boystown have lost some of their luster, “cultural archipelagos … multiple clusters of gay and lesbian populations,” scattered nationwide, have emerged.

The boys of Boystown, a Chicago “gayborhood”

The “Ozzie and Ozzie” families moving to the suburbs bring to mind the migration of immigrants from their old neighborhoods.

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Although these observations ring true, it overstates the case to describe Albuquerque or Orlando, two of the cities with the largest proportion of gay couples, as “new hotbeds of queer lives, cultures, and communities.”

Those cities have become attractive to gays because they’re seen as gayfriendly, but they haven’t become centers of gay culture. Ghaziani detects “a perceptible sexual charge” in these cities but, having been to both, I have no idea what he observed in his travels.

Similarly, it’s a stretch to think of the suburbs to which gay families are moving as part of a cultural archipelago. That other LGBT families live in “once-sleepy blue-collar suburbs” may well ease the adjustment of these former urbanites, but that’s not what motivates them to move. Like millions of Americans, they want the whitepicket-fence life, replete with “affordable roomy houses with a yard, along with safe streets and a good school for their children.” They describe themselves as “‘regular Joes’ and ‘suburban’ … ‘true mainstream Americans.’”

The aspirations of these “Ozzie and Ozzie” families bring to mind the attitudes and behavior of immigrants.

With few if any exceptions, they have initially settled in tight-knit communities, which offer familiarity, social cohesion, preservation of cultural identity, and insulation from bigotry. These enclaves, the Chinatowns and barrios, continue to attract new arrivals. But as immigrants assimilate, their options expand, and many of them move to ethnically mixed neighborhoods. They may participate in cultural events put on in their old communities, but that’s not where they choose to live.

Much the same holds true for gays and lesbians. To state the obvious, the LGBT community isn’t an ethnic group, and most gays and lesbians are not foreign-born. Yet as There Goes the Gayborhood? demonstrates, the forces that shape the lives of immigrants—the pull and tug of identity and assimilation, cultural and market forces, discrimination and acceptance—are at work. Why should gays and lesbians who opt not to define themselves by their sexual identity behave any differently?

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A Talent for Story-Telling Rick Perlstein tells how Reagan imagined his way into the American psyche. BY HEATHER COX RICHARDSON B

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n 1959, as the Cold War heated up and the economy cooled down, President Dwight Eisenhower received a letter from World War II veteran Robert J. Biggs. Tired of hearing the president explain the complexities of the modern world, Biggs begged Eisenhower to lead the nation with firm assertions rather than “hedging” and “uncertainty.” The former general responded that such guidance by authority was imperative in a military operation but fatal in a democracy. Self-government demanded that men reject easy answers and instead carefully weigh the often contradictory facts about great issues facing the nation.

Just as Eisenhower did, Rick Perlstein’s new book, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, illuminates the deadly attraction of certainty in an era of insecurity. Taking more than 800 pages to cover only three years, Perlstein produces an exhaustive and kaleidoscopic picture of what it felt like to be an American from early 1973 when the prisoners of war began coming home from Vietnam to Ronald Reagan’s failed effort to capture the Republican presidential nomination in August 1976.

What emerges from these pages is a society convulsed. The book begins as POWs who have dreamed of their traditional families return to wives who believe in free love. One development after another undermined the sense of stability: inflation that busted budgets so badly the government recommended eating cow brains; the kidnapping of beloved heiress Patty Hearst and her resurrection as a terrorist named Tania; and the oil embargo that drove gas prices high enough to sour Americans’ love affair with big cars.

Spellbound moviegoers watched The Exorcist and Jaws, films that inspired terror through the swift and deadly strike of the unknown. And, of course, there was Watergate, destroying

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faith in the government and dividing the country as Nixon tried to defend himself by pushing Americans apart, building support by creating common enemies, emphasizing differences rather than similarities.

With Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford assumed the leadership of Americans primed to distrust the government and each other. Perlstein recounts the strife of that era, from Boston, where the crisis over busing children to integrated schools pitted working-class whites against African Americans and Boston’s elite, to West Virginia, where rural Christians fought against the textbooks that brought secular values and multiculturalism into their traditional culture. Inflation and interest rates were at record highs; unemployment rose, while the housing and stock markets stagnated. As Americans watched traditional certainties dissolve, Perlstein argues, “conservative-minded citizens everywhere felt ignored, patronized, dispossessed of the authority that was rightfully theirs.” The middle-of-the-road competence and matter-of-fact secularism of President Ford, Perlstein claims, alienated them further.

Into this chaos stepped Ronald Reagan, a man whose childhood had taught him to overwrite disorder with fantasy. His father Jack was a heavydrinking shoe salesman; his mother Nelle a religious paragon who was so dedicated to rescuing needy souls that she ignored her own children. The family moved constantly, its boundaries shifting as Nelle tried to make ends meet by taking in boarders. Ronald, the shy younger brother in a dysfunctional family, coped with neglect, hunger, and violence by avoiding attention and immersing himself in the boys’ adventure books of his era.

These formulaic books centered on a fatherless boy reared in humble circumstances, a youngster marked for a greatness revealed at the book’s end

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE: THE FALL OF NIXON AND THE RISE OF REAGAN

BY RICK PERLSTEIN

Simon & Schuster

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College and the author of To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party.

when all the trials of the boy’s childhood became steps to a triumphant destiny. Inspired to reshape his own world into one like that of an adventure story, young “Dutch,” as he was nicknamed, created his own version of reality. In his world, melodramatic traumas turned into glorious triumphs just in the nick of time; everything always worked out in the end so long as the hero kept faith. Dutch, Perlstein explains, told stories.

Reagan used his sunny optimism first to invent himself as a heroic lifeguard who saved an astonishing number of lives (although no one seemed to have trouble in the water when the other lifeguards were on duty), then to save the day on the football field. He went on to an acting career in 1937, then to the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, and finally to become a spokesman for General Electric.

In each of his incarnations, he performed as if he were acting out a simple melodrama with a happy ending.

Always there were heroes and villains; always the story line was simple and the proper outcome clear.

Reagan turned his talent for storytelling to politics during his years working for GE. Backed by a corporation obsessed with its public image, he sold the idea that business leaders advanced civilization. In Reagan’s telling, bolstered with statistics and anecdotes he made up on the spot, the heroes were corporate leaders standing firm against grasping workers who were trying to impose communism on America. In the 1950s, business regulation and spending on public social programs—housing, education, rural electrification—were popular. But Reagan saw them as wealth redistribution, and if that redistribution didn’t stop, people would wake up one day to find they had destroyed the capitalism that was the genius of America. Reagan had begun his adult life as a Democrat, but by 1960 he was firmly on the far right.

In 1964, Reagan cast his lot with archconservative Barry Goldwater, launching his own political career with a televised speech urging voters to choose the reactionary candidate who offered a clear view of a world divided between good guys

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and communists.

Presidential candidate Reagan Although Americampaigning in 1976 cans resoundingly rejected Goldwater, Reagan’s message resonated in California, and to the astonishment of pundits who had dismissed him, voters there elected Reagan governor in 1966.

Reagan’s governance was practical—he raised taxes and spending repeatedly and compromised as necessary—but he continued to tell voters a clear-cut story of villains to be thwarted and heroes who would win in the end. He harped on the idea that grasping government bureaucrats wanted to raise taxes to steal the money of hardworking Americans and redistribute it to welfare moochers. When his own administration presidential nomination, and his star increased the budget or approved the was on the rise. nation’s most liberal abortion law, he That Reagan made up his own spun the facts to serve his story line: reality is well established; Perlstein’s Entrenched interests had forced him contribution is to tie Reagan’s faninto positions he opposed. tastic tales to the larger story of the Perlstein explains how Reagan’s modern American conservative power grew as he took his talent for movement. He began this exploration fantasy into the Watergate era, blithe- in his 2001 Before the Storm: Barry ly refusing to acknowledge that Nixon Goldwater and the Unmaking of the might have done anything wrong.

American Consensus, which traced Repeatedly, he dismissed the mountthe rise of a divisive conservatism to ing evidence as an unfounded rumor the 1964 Goldwater campaign. While about a minor affair “blown out of an electoral debacle, that campaign proportion.” Pundits and members gave political voice and organizationof his own entourage thought Reaal tools to an activist minority that gan was out of touch, only to watch hated the post–World War II consenin astonishment as crowds cheered sus. Americans in that era generally wildly for his storybook plotlines in believed that government activism which American leaders were good, promoted widespread economic sucand good always triumphed over cess, but conservatives, backed by evil. In 1976, the man who simply businessmen who loathed governrefused to acknowledge the reality of ment regulation and taxes, underWatergate, the gravest constitutional took to destroy that accord. Perlstein crisis of the 20th century, was a serirecounted the growing power of this ous contender for the Republican minority in his 2008 Nixonland: The

Perlstein’s contribution is to tie Reagan’s fantastic tales to the larger story of the modern American conservative movement.

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Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Nixon, he argued, won power by dividing a previously united American society into Us and Them, turning the inchoate anger of conservatives into a political platform. The Invisible Bridge carries the story of American conservatism forward to the rise of Reagan in the years from Watergate to the 1976 Republican convention.

This is a rip-roaring chronicle, but it engages more than informs.

It promises to show how Americans redefined patriotism in the 1970s as those willing to reflect critically on American power and use it responsibly lost control of the nation to those who refused to question authority and backed American leaders in a tautological belief that they must be right because they were American leaders. But Perlstein’s argument fails to provide an adequate explanation; why this change occurred is unclear.

Equally unclear is why Americans chose Reagan’s fallacies over facts; Perlstein simply chronicles that they did. His painstaking portrait of the troubles of the era suggests that it was chaos that spurred voters to choose Reagan’s simplistic fantasy. But the 1970s were not the only tumultuous period in American history. The 1890s and the 1930s were at least as troubled, and each produced a population that recoiled from political storytelling and instead demanded fact-based politics.

Why did Americans gravitate toward a politician who made his own reality? Perlstein took the title of The Invisible Bridge from advice that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave to Richard Nixon. “If the people believe there is an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river out there,” Khrushchev told Nixon. “You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.”

Eisenhower resisted replacing a complicated reality with easy certainties.

The Invisible Bridge tells how less honorable men, nursing their own psychological wounds and eager for power, turned Eisenhower’s warning, that easy answers were dangerously attractive, into a prescription for political triumph.

FALL 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 99

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Democracy’s New Moment

by Miles Rapoport

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or a very long time, those of us committed to strengthening American democracy felt we were— if not voices crying in the wilderness—standing on the sidelines, stamping our feet for attention. Fights over the right to vote and other civil rights are as old as the Republic, as are efforts to restrain the influence of money in politics. But until lately, the health of democracy itself was not quite a first-tier public issue.

When the 2000 election showed just how important a few votes could be, we hoped this debacle would galvanize a broader movement for democracy. In March 2001, I wrote an article for this magazine entitled “Democracy’s Moment,” calling for a movement with the broad agenda of expanding voting and reining in runaway campaign spending. The closing sentence was “If the democracy movement is successful, America’s real and diverse majority will emerge and change our country for the better.” It was slightly wishful thinking, at the time.

Now, 14 years later, we are in even more danger, and yet there is a far greater possibility that such a movement can emerge.

For one thing, the electorate that was coming of age in 2000 is now a major force. My colleague, Dēmos President Heather McGhee, notes that “46 million young adults under 30 are eligible to vote, actually surpassing the 39 million eligible seniors who are.” Although young people are

less likely than seniors to exercise their voting rights, polls show that the millennial generation is more averse than any other age group to the right-wing agenda, and more committed to inclusive democracy. McGhee sees mobilization of the youth vote as the democracy movement’s next great challenge.

On the voting rights front, we are holding our own in a pitched battle. While the right wing is determined to hold or acquire power by blocking access to the polls for millions of Americans and the Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder decision, the movement to expand voter registration and strengthen voting rights has had its share of victories. Two examples: Since 2010, 22 states have passed restrictions on voting.

Through ballot initiatives and vigorous advocacy in the courts, five of these burdensome state laws are being challenged. More importantly, since 2012, 16 states have expanded access to the polls.

In 2001, only six states had Election Day voter registration; today, 11 states and the District of Columbia have adopted this reform. (A 12th state, North Carolina, recently moved to end Election Day registration; a court refused to intervene to restore it for the 2014 election, and a trial to settle the issue permanently is scheduled for next year.)

The issues surrounding money and politics are tougher terrain.

The horrifying increase in economic inequality in America and the wealth amassed by a tiny sliver of American society are poisoning our political system. Some analysts have dubbed 2014 the “Year of Dark Money.” And the Supreme Court’s equation of unlimited money and free speech (What were

By attacking the right to vote, democracy’s enemies have inspired a movement. they thinking?) makes it harder to enact commonsense reforms. Still, there have been some victories at the state level: Several states, including Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, have passed laws strengthening disclosure of political spending.

Some states have adopted and protected voluntary small-donor public financing systems. Earlier this year in New York, advocates came within a whisker on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s chin of winning passage of a statewide public financing system. This effort will continue.

In Washington, D.C., real momentum has developed for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision and restore the ability of Congress and the states to regulate campaign spending. A week-long debate in the Senate in early September produced a

54–42 majority for the amendment—impressive, but short of the 67 votes needed for passage. This effort will also continue.

A petition urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to write new rules for disclosure to shareholders of corporate political spending has received more than one million comments, the most for any rulemaking in the commission’s history. The coalition backing the proposal includes major institutional investors, public advocates, and academics.

The key to winning these issues is a truly broad and grassroots movement for democracy. We’re building one. Two years ago, leaders of the NAACP, the Sierra Club, the Communications Workers of America, and Greenpeace created the Democracy Initiative. They concluded that they could not win on their issues—civil rights, saving our health and our planet, and protecting workers’ rights—unless a strengthened democracy began to work on everyone’s behalf. At Common Cause, we have an organization with a 44-year history of fighting for democracy and a membership base of 400,000 in 35 local chapters. We intend to give this effort our best work.

By attacking the right to vote and unleashing big money, democracy’s enemies have turned a series of fragmented projects into a movement. It’s time, finally, for democracy’s moment.

Miles Rapoport is president of Common Cause.

volume 25, number 5. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published quarterly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1333 H Street NW, Suite 300 East Tower, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2014 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. printed in the u.s.a.

100 WWW.Prospect.org Fall 2014

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The True Story of Public Education in America

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS ou’ve heard their mantra: Our public schools are failing because teachers don’t care and policymakers are spending too much money to prop up a broken system.

Campbell Brown and company, who could be called Michelle Rhee 2.0, have carried on this refrain. They say it’s the teachers who are holding back our nation’s neediest kids.

While this narrative is infuriating, what’s more important are the legions of classrooms that debunk it. I’ve recently visited some of these classrooms in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas and Washington, D.C.—they hum with life as teachers engage students from all demographics and geographies.

At Middle College High School in Houston, Texas, students who had been on the verge of dropping out tell me how they had little hope but now have dreams for the future. Thanks to dedicated teachers and school support staff, a great principal, and community partnerships, these students are met where they are and have access to the individual support they need to move forward—things like a later start time, food that’s always available and smaller class sizes. And the students have each other’s backs. One student told me that if he doesn’t see his classmates at the bus stop in the morning, he calls to check in on them.

At Fair Haven Elementary School in New Haven, Connecticut, teachers describe an atmosphere of trust and collaboration. Martina Ramos, a kindergarten teacher who was struggling, tells me how, instead of being thrown out, she got the support she needed to improve. “I definitely feel more confident when I walk into the classroom,” she shared. “I’m strong, I’m competent, I know what I’m going to teach and I know I’m going to see results in my students. I honestly think that if I did not have those supports in place, I don’t think I would be teaching at this point.”

At Oliver School in Lawrence, Mass., in a district that many wanted to charterize following the New Orleans model, Superintendent Jeff Riley instead worked with our union to create a labormanagement partnership that has led to increased planning and professional-development time for teachers and vital wraparound services for students and their families. And all the signs show real success for kids. “I’m proud that we are an

AFT-unionized district,” Riley said. “We are all working for one thing and that’s the kids.”

This same story is playing out in public schools across America.

But don’t take my word for it. While we will never be satisfied until all our kids reach their potential, there’s evidence we are moving forward.

The latest PDK/Gallup poll shows that 67 percent of public school parents give their child’s school a grade of A or B. And 6 in 10 public school parents say their child’s school supports high levels of wellbeing, while more than half believe it encourages their child to build strong relationships. What’s more, a resounding majority of Americans disagree with the naysayers’ belief that student test scores should determine whether a teacher is a success or failure.

Instead of starving our schools of critical funding and pushing market-based, test-driven policies that ultimately fail our kids, we should be relying on evidence and input from those closest to the classroom to find solutions that work to reclaim the promise of public education.

Public education should help students build positive relationships with their peers and with adults. It should help them not only to acquire knowledge but to think critically and apply what they’ve learned. It should help students develop persistence and grit. And it should foster joy as they learn.

Take what happened in New Haven. A few years back, teachers and their union were at loggerheads with the district. Both sides decided that the continued acrimony wasn’t helping New Haven’s children. We set aside our differences, began to build trust, and, now, collaboration is embedded in the school culture. And we are seeing results: Graduation rates are up, drop out rates are down, and test scores are steadily improving.

When we work together—to fix, not close, neighborhood schools, to give kids the criticalthinking and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in our 21st-century economy and the support they need to address their economic and social challenges, when we trust and support teachers—we can succeed.

There is no silver bullet. We still have a lot of work to do to ensure that every child in America has access to a high-quality public education.

But, despite what our detractors would have you believe, great, welcoming public schools are within our grasp.

How do I know? Because I’ve seen it.

I challenge others, who have not spent any real time in these classrooms, to see this too, before they try to substitute their judgment for the judgment of those closest to our kids—their parents and their teachers.

Collaboration is embedded in the school culture, and we are seeing results.

Photo by Thomas Girgoir

Weingarten visits a classroom at Fair Haven K-8 School in New Haven, Conn., on Sept. 5, 2014.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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