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The profit-driven economy is being tested by new visions of wealth-building models outside of mainstream capitalism. These cooperative structures form part of a new system that envisions a service to the public good instead of the shareholders' balance sheets. As global demands for economic justice grow, can this new economy reshape the way we think about ownership and pension strategies? What are the setbacks in implementing these programs, and who is doing the work on the ground? Helping to unpack these ideas are Marjorie Kelly and Ted Howard of the Democracy Collaborative and co-authors of the book, The Making of a Democratic Economy.
Laura Flanders: Congratulations first on the book. Let's start with the breakdown part: You see this as a period of breakdown, but also deep redesign. How do you see it?
Marjorie Kelly: Well, you know, we're told the economy's doing well. GDP is growing, the stock market's up. Unemployment is low, but in fact, there's really two economies. Forty-five percent of jobs today are insecure. They're part-time, contract, Uber'ized-type jobs. And that's the number we're not talking about. Wages have been stagnant for decades and there are reasons for that. That's what we talk about in the book, is that the economy is designed for the outcomes that we have where three billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of Americans combined. But a different kind of economy is growing. And that's what we travel around and visit.
Is it an economy, Ted, or is it just like a smattering of lots of different types of things?
Ted Howard: Well, within the overall hyper-casino that we live in, our thesis and our belief is there is literally a new economy being born. It's showing up in different models and innovations in different places. It reminds us of the period as the Great Depression was gearing up. The government at the time under Herbert Hoover was not coming to save anybody, said the free market's going to handle the Depression. So, people in communities started innovating and creating really exciting new models to really take care of themselves.

And when the politics changed under Franklin Roosevelt in the New Deal, his government looked around the country at these little models and scaled them up into things like the Social Security system, our most important social safety net. So, our view is that every community has many, many innovative models - public banking, cooperatives, land trusts, employee ownership, social enterprise. And they just need to be developed so that when the time's right, they can take center stage in the economy - not be the alternative - be the defining characteristic of America's economy.
I mean, that's very interesting. The New Deal wasn't brought to us by government. Really, government got it from us. That makes us feel kind of-
Howard: You know, we often think, Well it's the wise men sitting around the table in Washington, D.C., with Franklin Roosevelt. But it wasn't. It was people in their communities creating the ideas ... in the United Kingdom, the National Health Service came from a very small model in Wales that was then lifted up decades later by Aneurin Bevan and became one of the great health systems in the world. And that's how these things happened.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have plans around the Federal Reserve and "quantitative easing for the planet." How do you explain quantitative easing for the planet?
Howard: Well, very simply what we looked at was defined. If we don't get on top of the climate crisis, this country and countries around the world are going to be swamped with the crisis ... The problem is we have these large energy companies that are in the way of any meaningful change. They will block it consistently. So, we asked ourselves: How do we get them out of the way? And then we recalled 10 years ago at the height of the Great Recession when the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve basically implemented something called quantitative easing. They literally created money out of nowhere in order to bail out banks, insurance companies [and] auto companies to stabilize the economy. They created over $3 trillion.

It happened in Europe as well.... So we said, Well, if they could do that, we have a much greater crisis now, the climate crisis. What would it take to buy out all the oil companies and just strand the oil in the ground? Just take them over, get them out of the way, and leave the fossil fuel in the ground. So, we created a [phrase] called "quantitative easing for the planet." How many hundreds of billions or trillion dollars, perhaps, need to be created in order to take over America's oil infrastructure and just leave the oil in the ground?

It was a completely outside-the-box idea, but we realized that even if every country in the world did everything it's committed through the Paris accords (and of course the U.S. pulled out them) ... we still don't make it to 2°C or less. We need some radical interventions. So, the democratic economy is just being built in communities through models and innovations. But we need a new order of thinking. You know, Albert Einstein said, 'We can't solve the problems we are facing with the same thinking that created the problems in the first place.' So [quantitative easing] for the planet is a very new approach to handling the biggest crisis of our time.
Are there practical applications to your making of a democratic economy that people are fighting for today, Marjorie?
Kelly: Oh, all over. Lots of people are working for more employee ownership. For example, right here in New York City, the mayor has put millions of dollars behind growing worker co-ops and there have been over 100 started. There are other cities [in which] people are talking about publicly owned banks. In North Dakota, they have the Bank of North Dakota - [this] helped that state survive the recession in great shape. And the [current] governor of California is talking about state-owned banks. Cities are talking about city-owned banks. And that would help bring lending back to small- and medium-size businesses, which are not getting loans from the big banks. They've essentially become hedge funds. So, yes, we're talking about really practical things.
We've covered Cooperative Home Care Associates here in New York, one of the largest worker-owned cooperatives in the country. Why is it still so alone in scale in the U.S., do you think?
Kelly: Well, that's starting to change, Laura. I mean Cooperative Home Care Associates employs 1,200 people, mostly Latinos and African American women. It's been around 33 years and there is now a movement to replicate it. So, there are 15 of these companies that are either in formation or have already been formed. But you're right. Why isn't worker ownership more of a phenomenon? I think it's because a lot of it is the mindset that Ted talked about. We're so focused on Wall Street. We're so focused on what capital is doing and where can you invest in these capital-owned companies that this idea that workers can own their companies and that can be a successful profitable model that it doesn't kind of penetrate the mind. So, I think that mind shift is critical.
You talk about corporations; I mentioned that you had been instrumental in sort of sparking this B-Corporate movement. That's kind of a middle stage. Do you want to tell people what B-Corps are?
Kelly: Yeah, well, if you step back for a moment and you say, What do we think the purpose of companies is today? Maximize returns to shareholders. This is kind of taught in the business schools, enforced in the courts. Well, what if there were a different purpose inside companies to serve the public good? To create public benefits? So that's what B Corps are. They're saying these are for-benefit companies. They are companies that take into their bylaws, their articles of incorporation, this legal commitment to serving the public good as well as serving employees and shareholders. And there are thousands of these companies out there all over the world, and they're succeeding. They are some of the most exciting companies, particularly when they're combined with broad-based ownership.
Do they require a particular kind of shareholder - somebody who doesn't really want that much money back?
Kelly: It requires, I think, leaders and investors who think that there's a broader and more important purpose of business. But yes, you can still make money, you can still make plenty of money for investors.
We last talked, Ted, on camera when we were reporting on the Preston Model, which has also been about leveraging investment capital - some of it public money - to invest locally and create local employment and better living conditions. How's that going as far as you know?
Howard: The Preston Model is really an extraordinary representation of what can occur in a place when a full range of community wealth and democratic economy tools are deployed. Preston is an older industrial city of 150,000 people in Lancashire [in the U.K.]. Five, six years ago, they began this journey that they're on to create a new model for the local economy. At the time the high street was shuttered, unemployment was high. There was really no future for the city. They've leveraged a hundred million pounds of public employee pension funds. They're creating cooperatives in the city through the university. They're creating a public bank that will be capitalized by the reserves of the city council. They've changed purchasing so that 70 million pounds of purchasing is brought back to the city that used to go internationally or to the city in London.

The end result is when this all began just five, six years ago, Preston was listed in the bottom 20 percent of the most deprived cities and communities in all of the United Kingdom. Earlier [in 2019] ... PricewaterhouseCoopers did an assessment of the most improved communities in the United Kingdom, and the number one listed was Preston, which is extraordinary in such a short period of time. Now, there's a long way to go, but it shows what's possible when people put their shoulder to the wheel and institutions start to work for local benefit.
Were there qualms about putting pension funds into programs like that?
Howard: Yeah. Well, Marjorie may have something to say about this, too, but you know, in the United States, there is a movement to use public pensions. In California, multibillion-dollar investments [are] being made [via the California Public Employees' Retirement System], and they're not taking all of their money out of Wall Street, but they're taking some for local impact. The history is showing that these are returning very good value to the pension funds. So, it's not that the laborers whose pension funds are invested are now taking dramatically lower returns. It can be done well, and it's being done around the country.

It's very interesting, this whole field that we're talking about here, if we'd sat here 40 years ago ... we wouldn't be talking about employee stock ownership plans. They didn't exist. People were not talking about public banking. Community land trusts had not started. So all of these innovations - impact investing, B Corp, all of these - were to be invented. And now we have decades of history proving the efficacy of these models.

The question of service, who are you serving, takes me back to Mondragon and to your book. You mentioned at the beginning this question of mindset. Talk a bit about your takeaways from that trip. We should say Mondragon is the world's biggest federation of cooperatives, a thousand cooperatives in the Basque Country of Northwest Spain. It's been around for over 50 years. [It] grew up under fascism and is still there today, bringing on new types of industries as well as maintaining some old ones.

Kelly: And $11 billion of income coming in to those companies. So they're quite substantial. I was struck by how ordinary these companies are. They're making things like elevators, like packaging, packaging machines - and they're doing it well. They're selling all over the world and they're just 100 percent owned by their workers. And that's just an ordinary business there. That was very striking to me.

Howard: And for me, that was my sixth trip to Basque Country, and every time I learned something. But for me the fundamental lesson was on one trip I asked a Basque leader: What's the difference between your system and our system in the United States? And he said it so eloquently, he said: In your system, capital is in first place over labor, so if you get in trouble during a recession or downtime, the drive is preserve capital for the investors, and a way to do that is shed as much labor as you can. It's a rational decision in your system.

In our system, we know capital's essential, but we place labor above capital. So, when we get into trouble, we find ways to keep everybody working. We absorb them into different companies. We have a different kind of social safety net because their purpose is not to generate a maximum shareholder value, their purpose is to provide decent, ongoing, secure work for the Basque people. And that's just a very fundamental difference.
It goes back to the "divine right of capital" that you've talked about. We have to topple it. You say sexism is still bad, racism is still bad, every other kind of -ism is still bad, but seen as bad. Pro-capital bias somehow is still okay.
Kelly: Yeah. Right. Capitalism is that form of capital bias where we just think capital comes first. Maximizing returns to shareholders is the purpose of the company. Only shareholders are represented on corporate boards and even in the income statement. You define profit as income to shareholders; that's good. You're supposed to have as much of it as possible. Income to workers is an expense. You're supposed to have as little of that as possible, so it's all designed in. Capital matters. Workers don't matter. The environment is invisible. Communities are powerless.

That's designed into the basic structures of the economy. One of the things we're trying to do with this book is to help us all wake up and just see that all this that we take for granted, in fact, is not legitimate.
Not legitimate and not the only option.
Kelly: Right.
You tell a lot of stories in this book as well as giving us a lot to think about. Thank you so much, both of you. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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A Growing Movement Shows There Is an Alternative to Capitalism

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The profit-driven economy is being tested by new visions of wealth-building models outside of mainstream capitalism. These cooperative structures form part of a new system that envisions a service to the public good instead of the shareholders' balance sheets. As global demands for economic justice grow, can this new economy reshape the way we think about ownership and pension strategies?

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George Washington's farewell address is often remembered for its warning against hyper-partisanship: "The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism." John Adams, Washington's successor, similarly worried that "a division of the republic into two great parties ... is to be dreaded as the great political evil."

America has now become that dreaded divided republic. The existential menace is as foretold, and it is breaking the system of government the Founders put in place with the Constitution.

Though America's two-party system goes back centuries, the threat today is new and different because the two parties are now truly distinct, a development that I date to the 2010 midterms. Until then, the two parties contained enough overlapping multitudes within them that the sort of bargaining and coalition-building natural to multiparty democracy could work inside the two-party system. No more. America now has just two parties, and that's it.

The theory that guided Washington and Adams was simple, and widespread at the time. If a consistent partisan majority ever united to take control of the government, it would use its power to oppress the minority. The fragile consent of the governed would break down, and violence and authoritarianism would follow. This was how previous republics had fallen into civil wars, and the Framers were intent on learning from history, not repeating its mistakes.

James Madison, the preeminent theorist of the bunch and rightly called the father of the Constitution, supported the idea of an "extended republic" (a strong national government, as opposed to 13 loosely confederated states) for precisely this reason. In a small republic, he reasoned, factions could more easily unite into consistent governing majorities. But in a large republic, with more factions and more distance, a permanent majority with a permanent minority was less likely.

The Framers thought they were using the most advanced political theory of the time to prevent parties from forming. By separating powers across competing institutions, they thought a majority party would never form. Combine the two insights-a large, diverse republic with a separation of powers-and the hyper-partisanship that felled earlier republics would be averted. Or so they believed.

However, political parties formed almost immediately because modern mass democracy requires them, and partisanship became a strong identity, jumping across institutions and eventually collapsing the republic's diversity into just two camps.

Yet separation of powers and federalism did work sort of as intended for a long while. Presidents, senators, and House members all had different electoral incentives, complicating partisan unity, and state and local parties were stronger than national parties, also complicating unity.

For much of American political history, thus, the critique of the two-party system was not that the parties were too far apart. It was that they were too similar, and that they stood for too little. The parties operated as loose, big-tent coalitions of state and local parties, which made it hard to agree on much at a national level.

From the mid-1960s through the mid-'90s, American politics had something more like a four-party system, with liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alongside liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Conservative Mississippi Democrats and liberal New York Democrats might have disagreed more than they agreed in Congress, but they could still get elected on local brands. You could have once said the same thing about liberal Vermont Republicans and conservative Kansas Republicans. Depending on the issue, different coalitions were possible, which allowed for the kind of fluid bargaining the constitutional system requires.

But that was before American politics became fully nationalized, a phenomenon that happened over several decades, powered in large part by a slow-moving post-civil-rights realignment of the two parties. National politics transformed from a compromise-oriented squabble over government spending into a zero-sum moral conflict over national culture and identity. As the conflict sharpened, the parties changed what they stood for. And as the parties changed, the conflict sharpened further. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats went extinct. The four-party system collapsed into just two parties.

The Democrats, the party of diversity and cosmopolitan values, came to dominate in cities but disappeared from the exurbs. And the Republicans, the party of traditional values and white, Christian identity, fled the cities and flourished in the exurbs. Partisan social bubbles began to grow, and congressional districts became more distinctly one party or the other. As a result, primaries, not general elections, determine the victor in many districts.

Over the past three decades, both parties have had roughly equal electoral strength nationally, making control of Washington constantly up for grabs. Since 1992, the country has cycled through two swings of the pendulum, from united Democratic government to divided government to united Republican government and back again, with both sides seeking that elusive permanent majority, and attempting to sharpen the distinctions between the parties in order to win it. This also intensified partisanship.

These triple developments-the nationalization of politics, the geographical-cultural partisan split, and consistently close elections-have reinforced one another, pushing both parties into top-down leadership, enforcing party discipline, and destroying cross-partisan deal making. Voters now vote the party, not the candidate. Candidates depend on the party brand. Everything is team loyalty. The stakes are too high for it to be otherwise.

The consequence is that today, America has a genuine two-party system with no overlap, the development the Framers feared most. And it shows no signs of resolving. The two parties are fully sorted by geography and cultural values, and absent a major realignment, neither side has a chance of becoming the dominant party in the near future. But the elusive permanent majority promises so much power, neither side is willing to give up on it.
Read: How American politics went insane
This fundamentally breaks the system of separation of powers and checks and balances that the Framers created. Under unified government, congressional co-partisans have no incentive to check the president; their electoral success is tied to his success and popularity. Under divided government, congressional opposition partisans have no incentive to work with the president; their electoral success is tied to his failure and un popularity. This is not a system of bargaining and compromise, but one of capitulation and stonewalling.

Congressional stonewalling, in turn, leads presidents to do more by executive authority, further strengthening the power of the presidency. A stronger presidency creates higher-stakes presidential elections, which exacerbates hyper-partisanship, which drives even more gridlock.

Meanwhile, as hyper-partisanship has intensified legislative gridlock, more and more important decisions are left to the judiciary to resolve. This makes the stakes of Supreme Court appointments even higher (especially with lifetime tenure), leading to nastier confirmation battles, and thus higher-stakes elections.

See how this all reinforces itself? That's what makes it so tricky to resolve, at least in a two-party system with winner-take-all elections.

Political science has come a long way since 1787. Had the Framers been able to draw on the accumulated wisdom of today, they would have accepted that it is impossible to have a modern mass democracy without political parties, much as they might have wanted it. Parties make democracy work by structuring politics, limiting policy and voting choices to a manageable number. They represent and engage diffuse citizens, bringing them together for a common purpose. Without political parties, politics turns chaotic and despotic.

The Founders also would have known that plurality elections (whoever gets the most votes wins) tend to generate just two parties, while proportional elections (vote shares in multi-winner districts translate into seat shares) tend to generate multiple parties, with the district size and threshold percentages shaping the number.

But at the time, the Framers believed they could have a democracy without parties, and the only electoral system in operation was the 1430 innovation of plurality voting, which they imported from Britain without debate. It wouldn't be until the 19th century that reformers came up with new voting rules, and until the 20th century that most advanced democracies moved to proportional representation, supporting multiparty democracies.

Had the Framers accepted the inevitability of political parties, and understood the relationship between electoral rules and the number of parties, I believe they would have attempted to institutionalize multiparty democracy. Certainly, Madison would have. "Federalist No. 10," with its praise of fluid and flexible coalitions, is a vision of multiparty democracy.
Read: America is not a democracy
The good news is that nothing in the Constitution requires a two-party system, and nothing requires the country to hold simple plurality elections. The elections clause of the Constitution leaves states to decide their own rules, and reserves to Congress the power to intervene, a power that Congress has used over the years to enforce the very plurality-winner single-member districts that keep the two-party system in place and ensure that most elections are uncompetitive.

If the country wanted to, it could move to a system of proportional representation for the very next congressional election. All it would take is an act of Congress. States could also act on their own.

Multiparty democracy is not perfect. But it is far superior in supporting the diversity, bargaining, and compromise that the Framers, and especially Madison, designed America's institutions around, and which they saw as essential to the fragile experiment of self-government.

America has gone through several waves of political reform throughout its history. Today's high levels of discontent and frustration suggest it may be on the verge of another. But the course of reform is always uncertain, and the key is understanding the problem that needs to be solved. In this case, the future of American democracy depends on heeding the warning of the past. The country must break the binary hyper-partisanship so at odds with its governing institutions, and so dangerous for self-governance. It must become a multiparty democracy.

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America Is Now the Divided Republic the Framers Feared

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George Washington's farewell address is often remembered for its warning against hyper-partisanship: "The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism."

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The 1960s hold a special place in collective memory and imagination, as much because of what has happened since as because of what happened then. As Sheila Rowbotham notes at the beginning of her recently reissued memoir, "the radical dream of the sixties was to be stillborn, for we were not to move towards the cooperative egalitarian society we had imagined. Instead, the sixties ushered in an order which was more competitive and less equal than the one we had protested against."

As the dream died, the sixties entered its depoliticized, two-dimensional afterlife, "glossily repackaged as the snap, crackle and pop fun time, to be opened up periodically for selective nostalgic peeps on cue: the pill, the miniskirt, the Beatles, Swinging London, Revolution in the Streets." Or in the immortal words of Danny, the drug dealer of Withnail and I: "They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black." As the subsequent decades have buried the dream ever deeper, the attempt to unearth it has seemed ever more urgent and more impossible. As Rowbotham puts it: "Retrieval has become an act of rebellion."

Rowbotham's account of the sixties is, as befits a feminist historian, both personal and political. We follow her through the decade, year by year, as she moves from her Methodist boarding school in North Yorkshire to Paris, Oxford, and London, exhibiting the same understated yet principled promiscuity in her explorations of sex, love, and politics.

Rowbotham recounts her early experiences of political activism in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the hope and disillusionment of the Harold Wilson government, the flowering and rapid fracturing of the New Left. She documents the flourishing, in the wake of political disappointment, of the radical history movement - and her own close friendship with two of its central figures, Dorothy and Edward Thompson.

Throughout, we witness Rowbotham's struggles to develop and articulate an incipient feminist consciousness for which her immediate context as yet provides no adequate conceptual resources or vocabulary. All the while, she confronts the deep-seated sexism both of the organized left and of a superficially androgynous and sexually libertarian hippie counter-culture.

In what remains a familiar syndrome of left masculinity today, egalitarian pretensions often served both to mask and to intensify an underlying reality of domination. "The divested trappings of masculinity could, as if to compensate, produce a more exaggerated desire to control women," Rowbotham writes. "It was to be this peculiar combination of a new spaciousness in gender identity and a tighter grip in unexpected places which laid the basis for women's rebellion."

Yet in the Britain of the sixties, as Rowbotham relates, "feminism" was still something for "professional" women: a narrow demand for equal access to perks particular to a social and economic elite. The "second wave" of the 1970s would change all that; the course of development of mainstream feminism in the decades since has arguably changed it back again.

As the book closes on the eve of the first UK Women's Liberation Conference, held in 1970, Rowbotham reflects:

The movement I envisaged was to be an entirely new kind of politics - no leaders, no ego trips, no more sectarian disputes. It would assert the claims of working-class women, not only those of the more privileged, and it was going to be about bread and about roses . . . What actually happened was to be in some ways much more than we initially imagined and in some ways very much less.

To retrieve the sixties in memory is simultaneously to realize how much has been forgotten. The point is not to say that things were better then than they came to be later on - or than they are now. In certain ways, the struggles of and on behalf of women, sexual, and ethnic minorities had barely begun. The thin, individualistic version of "equality" that would later become official doctrine - albeit one now newly imperiled - was yet to be established. Explicit bigotry and bias - resurgent again today - were widespread in the sixties.

But as Rowbotham's account also makes clear, there was a developing understanding of the structural nature of oppression, something which today's activists are having hastily to relearn and reassert in the face of the overwhelming dominance of a liberal model preoccupied with "implicit bias" and oriented toward a narrow equality of representation within existing social institutions.

Reflecting on the visit by Malcolm X to the Oxford Union one year before his murder, Rowbotham recalls:

Sociological studies of race current in Britain in the first half of the sixties tended to focus on attitudes, but Malcolm X's approach, along with an influential 1962 book by a white American socialist, Michael Harrington's The Other America, connected the sources of material injustice with cultural domination. I seized on these insights from across the Atlantic because they illuminated the daily evidence of race and class inequality surrounding me in Hackney much better than concepts of a 'prejudice'.

What happened to the promise of the sixties? One part of the answer is that its demise was brought about by the internal weaknesses and divisions of the Left, then the hammer blow of Thatcherism, and perhaps finally secured by the softer, smothering effect of the Tony Blair years, which ushered in a depoliticized dystopia that is only now beginning to crack.

But to ask what happened to the "dream" of a freer and more human form of society is not only to ask how it died, or who killed it. It is also to ask the slightly different question of what became of that kind of conviction or aspiration, and of the people who embodied it. Of the parade of young radicals who appear in Rowbotham's story, some - and this, unsurprisingly, seems to be truer of those figures who went on to achieve conventional forms of recognition and success - would later take up their places among the prize bores of the establishment. Not everyone is willing or able to conform to this model of maturity. But those who still hold out - the old Trots, old hippies, and trade unionists - have been relegated more and more to the margins, eventually fading into an invisibility beyond curiosity or even ridicule.

The classic joke has it that if you remember the sixties, you weren't there. In a way, Rowbotham proves that adage wrong. She describes dabbling in weed and acid - but only in moderation. And anyway, she kept a diary. As a result, she is able to document the day-to-day happenings of the (mainly London-based) left in which she was active throughout the decade in more detail than normal human memory could furnish unaided. But there are different kinds of memory.

There is the ability to reconstruct with relative precision what happened when, and in what order. This is quite different from what might be called the "analytic" dimension of memory: the abstraction or drawing out, from an inevitable morass of events, the contours of a trajectory; the crystallization of an insight from particular experience. Rowbotham does far more than merely record events: she recalls her thoughts at the time, supplementing these with reflections in retrospect; she weaves together her insights as a social historian with those of an active participant in a sequence of social movements.

Yet to my mind, the first dimension of memory as chronicle is more developed in Promise of a Dream than the second, analytic one. A consequence of this is that Rowbotham's memoir can produce at times the paradoxical sense of a rather distant kind of intimacy. The reader has her nose right up against the day-to-day goings on of Rowbotham's own life, the lives of people she knew and the various organizations to which they belonged, yet without much sense of really being there or truly knowing any of the characters - even Rowbotham herself. As a result, the action tends to roll by without the sense of proportion or perspective needed to make it truly memorable, so that one is left with a lingering sense of remembering simultaneously too much and too little.

Promise of a Dream was first published in 2000 - almost twenty years ago. The difference of perspective afforded by the passage of the intervening years is profound. Viewed retrospectively, the year 2000 appears as roughly the halfway mark of the era of the " End of History ": the high point of the idea that the major political questions had been conclusively resolved in favor of liberal capitalism, leaving only the technical challenges of implementation (the latter best left to the experts). But history did not end, and events since the most recent economic crash of 2008 have left capitalism and liberal democracy - according to opponents and ardent defenders alike - in a state of existential crisis.

Things in 2019 feel almost as different from the way they felt in 2000, I suspect, as from the way they must have felt in the sixties. The combination of anger and hope evident in Rowbotham's account of that decade - affirmed by virtually everyone who both remembers and was there - is in stark, alien contrast to the 2000 I remember: a time of latency, of nothingness, of a shiny superficiality and deeper sickness. To someone of my generation, the idea of growing up with the sense that things were steadily, albeit slowly and imperfectly, developing in a positive and socially progressive direction is almost impossible properly to imagine. Until very recently, perhaps, so was the experience of the disappointment of real hope.

If the sixties were a time of optimism, the late nineties and early 2000s a time of ominous blandness, the dominant mood of 2019 is one of screeching desperation. If it is to be possible to hope again, we will have to help one another to remember.

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We Should Recapture the Optimism of the 1960s

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The 1960s hold a special place in collective memory and imagination, as much because of what has happened since as because of what happened then. As Sheila Rowbotham notes at the beginning of her recently reissued memoir, "the radical dream of the sixties was to be stillborn, for we were not to move towards the cooperative egalitarian society we had imagined.

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"Every billionaire is a policy failure." So says a key adviser to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez herself says that it's wrong to have a "system that allows billionaires to exist" alongside poverty. And the New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo recently called for us to "abolish billionaires".

For most of the last four decades, the gains from economic growth have flowed overwhelmingly to the rich. Much of those gains to the rich weren't "earned" in any traditional sense, but rather extracted, excess profits squeezed out of a system designed to favor those who already have power, position and wealth. Today, the top 1% of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. It's no wonder "abolishing billionaires" has become a rallying cry.

But what does it really mean? Is it setting a cap on the amount of wealth one household can own? Or does it entail something a little more structural: unrigging the system that gave us billionaires and instead creating an economy in which everyday people get the benefits from the growth that they have created.

Tax

Perhaps the most direct way to begin "abolishing billionaires" is by taxing them much more heavily.

America's overall tax system is only barely progressive - meaning that the richest Americans pay only a bit more in taxes as a share of their income than everyone else. And at the very top, among those taking home hundreds of millions each year, the tax code is actually regressive, meaning the more they make the less they pay. The richest 1% own nearly 40% of all the wealth, but pay only 20% of all the taxes.

Boosting rich people's taxes is sound policy. Extreme inequality is like economic pollution. It creates widespread harm that the polluters don't pay for. Inequality makes bubbles more likely, it undermines the foundations for innovation and productivity, and it weakens and destabilizes consumer demand. Taxing it like pollution helps make the costs clearer and reduces the harm.

And of course, taxing the super-rich would generate revenue that could be put to better uses than letting that money sit in a Bahamian bank account of a billionaire.

Over the next 10 years, the richest 1% of American households will take home about another $22 tn, after federal taxes. Their average annual post-tax income will be about $1.7m.

Right now they pay about 30% of their income in taxes. Increasing their overall average tax rate by about 10 percentage points would generate roughly $3tn in revenue over the next 10 years, while still leaving the 1% with an average post-tax annual income of more than $1.4m. (That new tax rate, by the way, would be about the same as the overall rate the richest 1% paid back in the 1940 s and 1950 s.)

Three trillion dollars in new revenue is enough to make college free at all public universities, make a massive new investment in infrastructure along the lines of what Senate Democrats have proposed, and triple the budget for the National Institutes of Health. Needless to say, all of these investments would pay enormous economic dividends.

Of course, we could raise even more from the rich. We could raise the top 1%'s effective tax rate by as much as 25 percentage points and still leave them with an average annual after-tax income of over $1m. Doing that would generate about $8tn in revenue, which is enough to send every household in the bottom 75% a check for nearly $8,500 every year for 10 years.

Wealth tax

We could also tax wealth. Whereas income is new money that comes in each year, wealth is the accumulated money that has built up over time. As of 2016, the wealthiest 1% of American households owned about $27tn in total, an average of about $23m per household.

A tax that took about 1% of that wealth each year would yield about $4tn over the next decade. To put that amount in perspective, $4tn is more than the federal government will spend over the next decade on foster care, school lunch, school breakfast, the Children's Health Insurance Program, food stamps, unemployment compensation, supplemental security income for the elderly, blind people and those with disabilities, and all the tax credits for working families combined.

Income and wealth taxes at those levels would, of course, be a lot higher than we have now, but they wouldn't be so high as to actually, directly, "abolish billionaires". The rich would still be richer than everyone else, just slightly less so.

Ignore the critics

There will be those who claim the sky will fall if we tried to tax the rich like this. They'll predict widespread economic damage, maybe even collapse. These warnings of doom and gloom rely on the theory that growth and prosperity come from rich people's ingenuity and knowhow. If we tax them, they might take their ball and go home. That's preposterous, of course. Rich people are neither the source of economic prosperity, nor will they decide to go off and form their own society in Antarctica or 10 miles off the coast of San Diego.

In fact, taxing rich people will make our economy work more like it should. If we disincentivize hoarding at the top, money will more easily flow to the workers and families who really drive economic growth. And the tax revenue we generate can be put to good use, investing in working people, in communities across the country, and in our collective future. And before long, instead of a few hundred billionaires taking ever more, we could instead have a thriving middle class, widespread economic security, and real opportunities to give the next generation a better life.

Michael Linden is the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative and a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute
Topics

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What could the US afford if it raised billionaires' taxes? We do the math

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"Every billionaire is a policy failure." So says a key adviser to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez herself says that it's wrong to have a "system that allows billionaires to exist" alongside poverty. And the New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo recently called for us to "abolish billionaires".

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The Democratic Party is the longest-existing political party in the US, and arguably the world. But in its over 180 year existence, it's completed a remarkable ideological and geographic transformation. Originally a staunch defender of Southern slavery, the party now wins the support of most nonwhite voters. Once an advocate of rural interests against coastal elites, the party now draws much of its strength from cities and coastal areas. These maps tell the tale of the Democratic Party's origins, its various metamorphoses, and the sources of its strength - and weaknesses - today.

Origins

1) Democrats: The party of Andrew Jackson

For 28 years after Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800, his party, deemed Democratic-Republicans by today's political scientists but commonly referred to as Republicans then, controlled the presidency and dominated US politics. But by the mid-1820s, that party had begun to fracture. Factions formed around politicians from different regions with competing ambitions - one of whom was Andrew Jackson, who had gained national fame as a general during the War of 1812. In his 1824 presidential bid, Jackson won pluralities of both the popular vote and electoral college. But since no candidate won an outright majority, the election went to the House of Representatives, which chose John Quincy Adams as president. Jackson quickly became the leading opposition figure to Adams' presidency, and in their 1828 rematch, the results of which are shown here, he won broad support everywhere outside the Northeast, and swept into office. At the time, his supporters didn't have an official name, and were usually called "Jackson men." But because they argued that they had the popular will, they distinguished themselves from their rivals by calling themselves "Democratic" Republicans - and eventually, just "Democrats."

2) Democrats: The party of Indian removal

One major issue animated Jackson's presidency from his very first year: the forced removal of Indians living east of the Mississippi River, to clear the way for more white settlement. This map shows the removal of the "Five Civilized Tribes" - Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole - that ensued after Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830. Indians were rounded up from their homes, and sent to concentration camps and on forced marches. About 46,000 people were expelled during Jackson's presidency. The issue was one of the most important in defining the new Democratic Party - according to historian Daniel Walker Howe, an analysis of Congressional votes at the time found that "voting on Indian affairs proved to be the most consistent predictor of partisan affiliation."

3) Democrats: The party of Manifest Destiny

With the Indians moved out, the Democratic Party turned its sights westward. By the 1840s, the party had embraced the idea of "manifest destiny" - that (white) Americans were divinely entitled to domination of the whole North American continent. In his book The Battle Cry of Freedom, historian James McPherson calls Manifest Destiny "mainly a Democratic doctrine," and writes that the party "pressed for the expansion of American institutions across the whole of North America, whether the residents - Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Canadians - wanted them or not." This map shows all 19th century westward expansion in the contiguous US, but pay close attention to the westernmost regions. Three massive expansions - the annexation of Texas, the Oregon acquisition, and the postwar Mexican Cession - occurred during the presidency of Democrat James K. Polk. The Mexican-American War in particular, pushed by Polk and criticized by the opposition Whigs, expanded US holdings all the way to California - and set the stage for controversy over whether slavery should be expanded to these newly-acquired territories.

The Civil War and its aftermath

4) Democrats were the party of slavery

As the 1850s began, the question over whether slavery should be allowed in new territories and states became the major dividing line in American politics - and the Democratic Party more and more clearly became the most important institutional supporter of slavery. Their main rivals, the Whigs, were split on the issue regionally, but even most Democrats outside the South were expected to refrain from criticizing the so-called "peculiar institution." Furthermore, Democratic conventions had a rule requiring two-thirds approval for any presidential nominee, which effectively gave the South veto power over the choice. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act - passed under Democratic President Franklin Pierce, by a Democrat-controlled Congress - set the stage for even stronger sectionalism in US politics, over slavery. Most notably, the new law outright repealed the decades-old ban on slavery north of the 36°30′ line, instead allowing residents of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to vote on whether to permit slavery by popular sovereignty. The law and ensuing bloody conflict in Kansas provoked a tremendous backlash in the North, and was the death knell for the regionally divided Whig Party. An irrevocable split between Northern and Southern Whigs allowed for the rise of a new Northern party organized around opposition to expanding slavery - the Republicans.

5) The Democratic Party fractured during the Civil War

Crisis finally arrived with the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln as president, the subsequent secession of 11 Southern states, and the breakout of the Civil War. The new Confederacy was suspicious of party organizations, so though former Democrats like Jefferson Davis played major roles in the new government, the Democratic Party no longer operated in the South during the war. In the Union, however, the party remained Lincoln's main opposition. There was a range of opinion, including moderate Peace Democrats who preferred a negotiated settlement, Copperheads who wanted to cease the war immediately and blamed abolitionists for provoking it, and War Democrats who wanted peace through victory. In 1864, Republicans pushed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, which went down to defeat in the House in June because 57 of the chamber's 72 Democrats opposed it, as shown on this map. As Lincoln ran for reelection that year with the support of some War Democrats, the Peace Democrats fought back with what historian William Lee Miller called "the most explicitly and virulently racist campaign by a major party in American history." Democrats constantly stoked fears that Lincoln's policies would lead to miscegenation and racial equality. The party had performed well in the 1862 midterms, and as late as August 1864 Lincoln expected to lose. But the fall of Atlanta in early September restored public confidence in Lincoln's handling of the war. He swept to a landslide victory that November, and passage and ratification of the 13th Amendment soon followed.

6) The Democratic domination of the South

After the Civil War, it was clear that the Republican Party was the nation's governing party. In the next 11 presidential elections, spanning 1868 to 1908, Democrats only managed to win twice (Grover Cleveland's two nonconsecutive terms). They held the Senate for just four years in that 40-year timespan, and the House of Representatives for 16. In the South, however, the Democrats became effectively the only party - a situation that would last for decades, since the Republican Party was so closely associated with Lincoln, the war, and the end of slavery. This map shows how the South overwhelmingly voted for Democrats in presidential elections. But the dominance existed at state and local government levels as well, leading to constant abuses of the rights of freed blacks. "Long into the twentieth century, the South remained a one-party region under the control of a reactionary ruling elite who used the same violence and fraud that had helped defeat Reconstruction to stifle internal dissent," wrote historian Eric Foner in his book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution.

7) The party of farmers and silver

After Reconstruction, racial issues receded from the national debate - and instead, monetary policy became the hot-button issue of the late 19th century. The 1873 adoption of the gold standard and ending of silver coinage was incredibly controversial among farmers, who blamed the policy change and the business interests who supported it for various economic hardships. As a result, farmers across the South and West began to gravitate toward the Democrats. Matters came to a head in the election of 1896, when Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan attempted to mobilize a national populist coalition against gold-supporting capitalists, saying his opponents "shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." But he failed - the rural states that backed him weren't enough for a majority, because more populous states in the Northeast and Great Lakes voted Republican. "McKinley's triumph indicated that the Republicans had secured control of America's industrial base," wrote historian HW Brands in his book American Colossus. "Urban workers crossed class lines to vote with their employers rather than with the farmers of the South and West." They would keep doing so - letting the Republican Party dominate national politics - for decades.

Embracing government activism

8) Woodrow Wilson and Progressivism

The Progressive political tradition arose in the US as the 19th century slipped into the 20th. It focused on fighting corruption, countering the power of monopolistic trusts, social reform, and the active use of government to try to improve people's lives. Originally, there were progressive elements in both parties (and outside them), with Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson as leading figures. This map shows the electoral college results of the 1912 presidential election, which pitted Wilson and Roosevelt (now heading a new Progressive Party) against each other and the incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft. Wilson won, and Democrats enacted various economic and governmental reforms during his presidency, such as an antitrust law and an income tax. Eventually, the Democratic Party became known as the main home for progressives.

9) The party elected to fight the Great Depression

This is the map that finally restored the Democratic Party to dominance of national politics. After the 1920s decade of Republican rule, generally pro-business policies, and a booming economy, the bottom finally fell out when the Great Depression crushed the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The discrediting of laissez-faire ideas and the inability of Republicans to deal with the crisis led to landslide Democratic victories in 1932, when, as this map shows, the average unemployment rate among gainful workers was 34.5 percent. Franklin D. Roosevelt swept into office and enacted the New Deal, perhaps the most sweeping domestic legislative program in American history. His administration also dramatically expanded the size of government and created the modern executive state.

10) The party of government spending

The New Deal - which became the emblematic liberal program for decades to come - included various attempts to boost the economy, jobs programs, laws expanding union powers, and the creation of Social Security. It also led to a lot of individual projects, ranging from infrastructure development to arts, that put people back to work and made clear the role government could play in American life. This map shows the sweep of New Deal projects across the country, from the Chickamauga Dam in Chattanooga, Tennessee to a post office in Riverton, Wyoming. Head over to the Living New Deal website for the interactive version of the map, which shows the specifics of every single project.

11) The party of unions

In the decade after the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935, US union membership more than quadrupled, to 14.3 million workers, writes Rich Yeselson. This expansion provided a new and durable organizational base that became increasingly associated with just the Democratic Party. But unions didn't flourish everywhere - they had particular trouble breaking into rural areas and the South. The expansion of union influence and power produced a backlash - both among the Republican Party and business interests, and in the still-Democratic South, which was suspicious of union organizing. In 1947, these two elements joined together to enact the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman's veto. The law "stopped labor dead in its tracks at a point when unions were large, growing, and confident of their economic and political power," Yeselson writes. States were now permitted to pass "right to work" laws that prevented mandatory union membership among employees - and many soon did.

12) The split over civil rights

The Democrats' coalition of the mid-20th century was divided between Southerners who supported segregation, liberal activists trying to end it, and others outside the South who were happy to look the other way. Eventually, though, the supporters of civil rights gained the upper hand, pushing through important civil rights and voting rights laws in the mid-1960s. This map shows states where Democratic senators voted for cloture for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where they voted against it (which meant continuing the filibuster), or where the party had two senators whose votes were split. Nearly all Republicans voted in favor of cloture, which was invoked 71-29, but it was Democratic president Lyndon Johnson who signed it and the subsequent Voting Rights Act into law - which helped drive more and more black voters to embrace the party that had so long been associated with racial discrimination.

13) The (gradual) loss of the South

"I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come," President Johnson said shortly after signing the Civil Rights Act, according to his aide Bill Moyers. Yet party loyalties take a long time to shake off, and while the South certainly appears lost to Democrats today, the break-up was very gradual. Democrats maintained control of the House of Representatives for an amazing 40 straight years between 1955 and 1994, in large part because of continued support from conservative Southerners, as shown in this map by Jonathan Davis at Arizona State University. The Senate, too, remained in Democratic hands for all but six of those years. Majority control didn't necessarily mean the party could pass progressive bills, though, as many of the Southern conservatives frequently partnered with Republicans to block liberal initiatives. The South also provided the Democrats' only two successful presidential candidates between 1968 and 2008 - Jimmy Carter, who won nearly every Southern state in 1976, and Bill Clinton, who won a few.

14) The antiwar movement

Democratic presidents began American involvement in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. But Vietnam created a tremendous political backlash in America, as hundreds of thousands were drafted and tens of thousands died for a war with no end in sight. This map shows five major examples of anti-Vietnam War protests between 1967 and 1968 - the fifth of which infamously occurred at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and spiraled into violence. Since the sixties, there's been a dovish tradition in the Democratic Party - even if it isn't always heeded. When George HW Bush took the Gulf War resolution to a vote in 1991, the chamber was controlled by Democrats - but just 18 percent of Democratic senators, and 32 percent of Democratic House members, voted in favor of war. After 9/11, more Democrats voted for George W. Bush's war in Iraq, though many on the left remained suspicious. When that effort foundered, anger over it helped energize the Democrats and restore them to Congress in 2006. Senator Hillary Clinton's vote to authorize force in Iraq similarly helped propel Barack Obama to the nomination, and the presidency, in 2008.

Today's Democratic coalition

15) Democrats are strong in big cities

This map of New York's political donors is from a series by Crowdpac that plots out the address of every disclosed political donor in America, and uses blue dots to mark Democratic donors and red ones to mark Republicans. We see here that NYC is overwhelmingly blue, which makes sense - according to an analysis by Richard Florida, 11 of the 15 largest US cities voted for Obama over Romney in 2012, and Obama performed particularly well in denser cities. "Affluent, high-tech, creative class metros" like New York and Los Angeles are "mostly blue," while "less advantaged, less skilled metros in the Sun Belt and even in the Midwest are increasingly red," Florida writes.

16) Richer Americans vote Republican, poorer ones vote Democratic

In recent years, the richest states - many of which are in the Northeast or on the West Coast - have tended to vote Democratic. But that doesn't mean that the Democrats are the party of the rich. These maps, from Andrew Gelman's book " Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State," separate how the richest third and poorest third of the population in each state voted in the 2004 presidential election (which was won by George W. Bush). Gelman's analysis shows that the richest third of nearly every state's electorate voted for Bush, while the poorest third of voters in most states opted for Democrat John Kerry.

17) Democrats perform badly among evangelical Protestants

Here's another map of where Democrats are strongest today - in places where there aren't many evangelical Protestants. American politics weren't always incredibly polarized by religion, but restrictions on school prayer and the expansion of abortion rights helped trigger the mobilization of the Christian right. These issues weren't purely partisan when they first came up, but gradually, Democrats and the liberal establishment became known for protecting abortion rights, defending the separation of church and state, and (more slowly) expanding gay rights.

18) Few Blue Dog Democrats remain

After the dramatic defeat of many House Democrats in 1994, the more conservative members of the party felt they needed a group to better coordinate them - or at least a label they could use to distinguish themselves from the party's liberals. So the "Blue Dog Democrats" were formed. Its members tended to be more pro-business and more socially conservative. By 2009, with the Democrats back in control of Congress for Obama's first year, the coalition had swelled to include 54 members of the House, and great pressure was placed on Blue Dogs to support Obama's agenda on health reform and cap-and-trade - which many of them did. The backlash broke the Blue Dogs, and the vast majority of the coalition either retired or was defeated in subsequent elections. These maps show the decline in House districts represented by Blue Dogs from 2009 to 2013. The Blue Dogs' ranks will shrink further after the Democrats' 2014 drubbing, to either 14 or 15 (depending on a recount).

19) The party of unions

Labor remains a key pillar in the Democratic coalition in states where it still has a presence. But union membership has dropped so much, and unions have been so weakened, that the party now has to look elsewhere for much of its financial support and organizational muscle - to rich donors and social issue interest groups. Private-sector union membership has particularly plummeted, from 35 percent or so in the 1950s to just 6.9 percent in 2011. This map shows the percentage of each state's 2011 labor force that was in a union - and makes it clear that Democrats perform better in more unionized states. Measures that would weaken unions further, like right to work laws or restrictions on collective bargaining for public employees, are key pillars of the Republican agenda in many states today.

The future of the party

20) The growth of the nonwhite electorate

Since LBJ's 1964 landslide, Republicans have won more of the white vote than Democrats in every single presidential election. Initially, this led to the Democrats losing the presidency quite frequently. But as the share of the nonwhite population has grown, Democratic prospects in presidential elections have improved - and the party has won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. "Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point-meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country," Jonathan Chait has written. By 2020, he added, "nonwhite voters should rise from a quarter of the 2008 electorate to one third." This map, from PolicyLink, shows one projection of how much US population growth in the next 30 years will be due to people of color.

21) Democrats and the white vote

Though Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election, he only picked up about 40 percent of the white vote - the lowest for a Democrat in decades. But this decline wasn't evenly distributed. The New Republic posted an excellent map that makes this clear with a county-level comparison of Al Gore's performance in 2000 to Barack Obama's performance in 2012. In the red counties, Obama did better than Gore, and in the blue counties, he did worse. "Democrats have a problem with Southern whites, not all whites," Nate Cohn wrote, pointing out that Obama won heavily-white New Hampshire, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The party performed less well among whites in the 2014 midterms, though, so we'll see how things turn out in 2016.

22) Weakness in the states

The Obama presidency has brought some major setbacks for Democrats in the states, as you can see in this map, which shows the partisan balance of state legislatures after the 2014 midterms. Democrats ended up with full control in a mere 11 state legislatures, while the GOP got full control of 30. The number of states where Democrats control both the governorship and the state legislature has been cut to 7 - the fewest since the Civil War. If the states are the "laboratories of democracy," as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, it's the Republican Party, not the Democrats, who will be the ones conducting experiments in the next few years.

23) Growth of Hispanics in key states

The growth of the Hispanic population has been particularly important to presidential-year Democratic math. These maps, from Pew, show the growth of that population from 1980 to 2011. This growth already helped California and New Mexico become solidly Democratic states on the presidential level, and helped tip swing states Florida and Colorado toward Barack Obama too. It also gives political context to President Obama's deportation relief executive action of November 2014: Democrats believe that the future of their party relies on the strength of their bond with the Hispanic electorate.

Learn more

Credits

Developer Yuri Victor

Editor Ezra Klein

Lead Photo: Lucian / Washington Post / Getty

Update: Clarified that the term "Democratic-Republicans" is the technical term used for Jefferson's party by political scientists today, not at the time.

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23 maps that explain how Democrats went from the party of racism to the party of Obama

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The Democratic Party is the longest-existing political party in the US, and arguably the world. But in its over 180 year existence, it's completed a remarkable ideological and geographic transformation. Originally a staunch defender of Southern slavery, the party now wins the support of most nonwhite voters.

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What should we do about Google, Facebook, and Amazon? So far, however, relatively few answers have come from the socialist left. At least in the United States, the cutting edge of the platform regulation conversation is dominated by liberal antitrust advocates, perhaps best represented by the Open Markets Institute.

They have some good ideas, and they're serious about confronting corporate power. But they come from the Brandeisian reform tradition. Their horizon is a less consolidated capitalism: more competitive markets, smaller firms, and widely dispersed property ownership.

For those of us with our eye on a different horizon, one beyond capitalism, this approach isn't particularly satisfying. There are elements of the antitrust toolkit that can be very constructively applied to the task of reducing the power of Big Tech and restoring a degree of democratic control over our digital infrastructures. But the antitrusters want to make markets work better. By contrast, a left tech policy should aim to make markets control less of our lives - to make them less central to our survival and flourishing.

This is typically referred to as decommodification, and it's closely related to another core principle, democratization. Capitalism is driven by continuous accumulation, and continuous accumulation requires the commodification of as many things and activities as possible. Decommodification tries to roll this process back, by taking certain things and activities off the market.

This lets us do two things: the first is to give everybody the resources (material and otherwise) that they need to survive and to flourish - as a matter of right, not as a commodity. People get what they need, not just what they can afford. The second is to give everybody the power to participate in the decisions that impact them. When we remove certain spheres of life from the market, we can come up with different ways to determine how the resources associated with them are allocated.

These principles offer a useful starting point for thinking about a left tech policy. Still, they're pretty abstract. What might they look like in practice?

First, the easy part.

A portion of the internet is devoted to shuttling packets of data from one place to another. It consists of a lot of physical stuff: fiber optic cables, switches, routers, internet exchange points, and so on. It also consists of firms large and small (mostly large) who manage all this stuff, from the broadband providers that sell you your home internet service to the "backbone" providers who handle the internet's deeper plumbing.

This entire system is a good candidate for public ownership. Depending on the circumstance, it might make sense to have a different kind of public entity own different pieces of the system: municipally owned broadband in coordination with a nationally owned backbone, for instance.

But the "pipes" of the internet should be fairly straightforward to run as a publicly owned utility, since the basic mechanics aren't all that different from gas or water. This was one of the points I made in a recent piece for Tribune about the Labour Party's newly announced plan to roll out a publicly owned network and offer free broadband to everybody in the UK. It's good politics and, even better, it works.

Publicly owned networks can provide better service at a lower cost. They can also prioritize social imperatives, like improving service for underconnected poor and rural communities. For a deep dive into one of the more successful experiments in municipal broadband in the United States, I highly recommend Evan Malmgren's piece "The New Sewer Socialists" from Logic.

Further up the stack are the so-called platforms. This is where most of the power is, and where most of the public discussion is centered. It's also where we run into the most difficulty when thinking about how to decommodify and democratize.

Part of the problem is the name: "platform." None of our metaphors are perfect, but I think it might be time to give this one up. It's not only self-serving - it enables a service like Facebook to project a misleading impression of openness and neutrality, as Tarleton Gillespie argues - it's imprecise. There is no meaningful single thing called a platform. We can't figure out what to do about the platforms because "platforms" don't exist.

Before we can begin to put together a left tech policy, then, we need to come up with a better taxonomy for the things we're trying to decommodify and democratize. We might start by analyzing some of the services that are currently called platforms and trying to discern the principal features that distinguish them from one another:

1. The first is size. How many users does the service have? Sometimes this is an easy question to answer. Sometimes it's not, because the way we define "user" will vary, and these differences may be substantial:

Sometimes what it means to be a user isn't all that complicated. The number of monthly active users of Facebook, the Google product suite, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are easy to calculate.

But what about a service like Uber or Instacart, where you have both workers ("drivers," "shoppers") and customers? Both are users, but they're using different parts of the service. So it probably makes sense to include both in the overall user count.

What about a service that has "targets" who aren't exactly users? In last week's newsletter, I talked about the Axon policing platform that enables law enforcement agencies to connect various devices and services - bodycams, tasers, in-car cameras, a digital evidence management system, smartphone apps, etc. - into a single integrated portal. The users of this platform are police officers. The targets are the individuals whose information is being recorded and processed by the platform. Should they be included in the overall user account, even though they aren't really users? If our goal is to measure the overall impact of the service, then the answer is yes.

2. The second dividing line is function. What does the service do? Nick Srnicek, in his invaluable book Platform Capitalism, uses this approach to define five different kinds of "platforms," though I'm inclined to use the word "services":

Advertising services like Google and Facebook that hoover up personal data and monetize it by selling targeted ads.

Cloud services like AWS and Salesforce that sell various cloud-based "as-a-service" products to enterprise clients, from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to customer relationship management (CRM).

Industrial services like Predix designed to support "industrial internet" applications like wiring up a factory with Internet of Things (IoT) devices and using the data that flows from them to optimize efficiency.

Product services like Rolls Royce and Spotify that "transform a traditional good into a service." Rolls Royce is now renting jet engines to airlines, so that they pay by the hour instead of buying the whole thing up front, and using sensors and analytics to optimize maintenance. Spotify is turning albums into streams. The business model is subscription fees.

Lean services like Uber and Airbnb that match buyers and sellers while minimizing their own asset ownership. Matching isn't all they do, however: gig-work services like Uber are also very much in the business of algorithmically managing and disciplining their drivers.

One could think of more types of platforms. And I might quibble with some of Srnicek's category choices - do Uber and Airbnb really belong in the same bucket? But if we're looking to differentiate services by function, this list is a good place to start.

The third way to split up services is by the kind of power they exercise. K. Sabeel Rahman wrote an interesting piece for Logic called "The New Octopus" that identifies three kinds of technological power:

Transmission power, which is "the ability of a firm to control the flow of data or goods." He gives the example of Amazon's massive shipping and logistics infrastructure controlling the "conduits for commerce," as well as internet service providers controlling the "channels of data transmission." We might also add AWS and other major cloud providers. A service like AWS S3 is essential to the flow of data across the modern internet.

Gatekeeping power, where the firm "controls the gateway to an otherwise decentralized and diffuse landscape." He gives the example of Facebook's News Feed or Google Search, which mediate access to online content. Here the power is held at the "point of entry" rather than across the entire infrastructure of transmission.

Scoring power, which is "exercised by ratings systems, indices, and ranking databases." This includes automated systems for screening job applicants, for instance, or for informing sentencing and bail decisions.

We could spend a lot more time tweaking our taxonomy. But let's leave it there, and return to the question of how we might decommodify and democratize our digital infrastructures. Given the wide range of services we're talking about, it follows that the methods we use to decommodify and democratize them will also vary. The purpose of developing a reasonably accurate taxonomy is to help inform which methods we might use for each kind of service.

This is the logic behind Jason Prado's argument in the latest edition of his Venture Commune newsletter, "Taxonomizing Platforms to Scale Regulation." Prado argues that we should be differentiating services by the number of users they have, and then implementing different regulations at different sizes. At 0-5 million users, for instance, a service should "only be subject to basic privacy regulations." At 20-50 million, they should be required to publish "transparency reports about what data is collected and exactly how it is used." At 100+ million, a service becomes "indistinguishable from the state" and therefore needs to be democratically governed, perhaps by a "governing board made up of owners, elected officials, platform developers/workers, and users."

I like this basic approach, but I would expand it. Size is an important consideration, but not the only one. The service's function and the kind of power it exercises are also significant factors. We could map each feature (size, function, and kind of power) to an axis - x, y, and z - and then plot each service as a point somewhere along those three axes. Then, depending on where the service sits in our three-dimensional space (or n-dimensional, if we refine our taxonomy by increasing our number of features), we could select a method of decommodification and democratization that is particularly well suited to the service.

What are some of those possible methods? Here are four:

Public Ownership

In this case, a state entity takes responsibility for operating a service. These entities can be structured in all sorts of ways, and exist at different levels, from the municipal to the national. Services that exercise transmission power (Rahman) or those that involve the cloud (Srnicek) are especially good candidates for such an approach. Along these lines, Jimi Cullen wrote an interesting proposal for a publicly owned cloud provider last year called "We Need a State-Owned Platform for the Modern Internet." Public ownership is also probably best suited for services of a certain scale. At the largest size, however, governance can no longer be achieved at the level of the nation-state - at which point we need to think about transnational forms of public ownership.

Public entities can also be in the business of managing assets rather than operating a service. For example, they might take the form of "data trusts" or "data commons," holding a particular pool of data and enforcing certain terms of access when other entities want to process that data: mandating privacy rules, say, or charging a fee. Rosie Collington has written an interesting report about how such an arrangement might work for data already held by the public sector called "Digital Public Assets: Rethinking Value, Access, and Control of Public Sector Data in the Platform Age."

Cooperative Ownership

This involves running services on a cooperative basis, owned and operated by some combination of workers and users. The platform cooperativism community has been conducting experiments in this vein for years, with some interesting results.

What Srnicek calls "lean" services would lend themselves to cooperativization. A worker-owned Uber would be very feasible, for example. And there are all sorts of policy instruments that governments could use to encourage the formation of such cooperatives: grants, loans, public contracts, preferential tax treatment, municipal regulatory codes that only permit ride-sharing by worker-owned firms. It's possible that cooperatives work best at a smaller scale, however - you might want a bunch of city-specific Ubers rather than a national Uber - in which case the antitrust toolkit might come in handy, since we would need to break up a big firm before cooperativizing its constituent parts.

We could also think of data trusts or data commons as being cooperatively owned rather than publicly owned. This is what Evan Malmgren recommends in his piece "Socialized Media": a cooperatively owned data trust that issues voting shares to its members, who in turn elect a leadership that is empowered to negotiate over the terms of data use with other entities.

Non-Ownership

In some cases, services don't have to be owned at all. Rather, their functions can be performed by free and open-source software.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of open source as an ideology - Wendy Liu's "Freedom Isn't Free" is essential reading on this front - but free software does have decommodifying potential, even if that potential is suppressed at present by its near-complete capture by corporate interests.

This is another realm in which the antitrust toolkit could be helpful. In 1949, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against AT&T. As part of the settlement seven years later, the firm was forced to open up its patent vault and license its patents to "all interested parties." We could imagine doing something similar with tech giants, making them open-source their code so people can develop free alternatives to their services. Prado suggests that a service's code repositories should be forced open within six months of hitting 50-100 million users.

In addition to bigger services, I'd also argue that services whose business model is advertising (Srnicek) and those that exercise gatekeeping power (Rahman) would make good candidates for open-sourcing. One could imagine free and open-source alternatives to Google Search, for instance, or existing social media services.

Another useful idea drawn from the antitrust toolkit that could help promote open-sourcing is enforced interoperability. Matt Stoller and Barry Lynn from the Open Markets Institute have called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to make Facebook adopt "open and transparent standards." This would make it possible for open-source alternatives to work interoperably with Facebook. It doesn't get our data off of Facebook's servers, but it starts to erode the company's power by giving people various (ad-free) clients that can access that data and present it differently. If these interfaces caught on, Facebook would no longer be able to sell ads and its business would eventually collapse. At which point it could be refashioned into a publicly owned or cooperatively owned data trust that furnishes data to a variety of open-source social media services, themselves perhaps federated on the model of Mastodon.

Abolition

Certain services shouldn't be decommodified and democratized, but abolished altogether.

Governments deploy a range of automated systems for the purposes of social control. These include carceral technologies like predictive policing algorithms that intensify policing of working-class communities of color. (This is also an example of what Rahman calls scoring power.) Scholars like Ruha Benjamin and community organizations like the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition are applying the abolitionist framework to these kinds of technologies, calling for their outright elimination: in her new book Race After Technology, Benjamin talks about the need to develop "abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code."

Another set of systems worthy of elimination are the forms of algorithmic austerity documented by Virginia Eubanks in her book Automating Inequality. In the United States and around the world, public officials are using software to shrink the welfare state. This deprives people of dignity and self-determination in a way that's fundamentally incompatible with democratic values.

There's also facial recognition, which can be deployed by public or private entities. The growing movement to ban facial recognition, a demand advanced by a range of organizations and now embraced by Bernie Sanders, is a good example of abolition in action.

One final note worth mentioning: while the goal of a left tech policy should be to strike at the root of private power by transforming how our digital infrastructures are owned, we will also need legislative and administrative rulemaking to govern how those infrastructures are allowed to operate. This might take the form of General Data Protection Regulation-style restrictions on data collection and processing, measures aimed at reducing right-wing radicalization, or various algorithmic accountability mandates. These rules should apply across the board, no matter how the entity is owned and organized.

The above is a provisional sketch. It has lots of holes and rough edges. Plotting all the major services along three axes according to their features may ultimately be impossible - and even if it can be done, it runs the risk of locking us into an excessively rigid model for making policy. More broadly, there are severe limits to this sort of programmatic thinking, which can too easily tilt in a technocratic direction.

Still, I hope these thoughts can help develop a left tech policy that takes the basic principles of decommodification and democratization and tries to apply them to our actually existing digital sphere. At the moment, there is relatively little political space for such an agenda in the United States, but there may come a time when more space is available. It would be good to be ready.

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What should we do about Google, Facebook, and Amazon? So far, however, relatively few answers have come from the socialist left. At least in the United States, the cutting edge of the platform regulation conversation is dominated by liberal antitrust advocates, perhaps best represented by the Open Markets Institute.

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The current bond yield stagnation mirrors late-1800s 'long depression,' economist suggests

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The current "secular stagnation" for bond yields offers close parallels to the long depression of the late 1800s, according to TS Lombard Managing Director of Global Macro Dario Perkins.

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The engine that powers the world's most potent economy is dying at a worrisome pace, a "distinctly American phenomenon'' with no easily discernible cause or simple solution.

Those are some of the conclusions from a comprehensive new study by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University showing that mortality rates for U.S. adults ages 25-64 continue to increase, driving down the general population's life expectancy for at least three consecutive years.

"This looks like an excellent paper - just what we needed to help unravel the overall decline in life expectancy in the U.S.,'' said Eileen Crimmins, an associate dean at the University of Southern California who's an expert on the link between health and socioeconomic factors.

In a trend that cuts across racial and ethnic boundaries, the U.S. has the worst midlife mortality rate among 17 high-income countries despite leading the world in per-capita spending on health care.

And while life expectancy in those other industrialized nations continues to inch up, it has been going in the opposite direction in America, decreasing from a peak of 78.9 years in 2014 to 78.6 in 2017, the last year covered by the report.

By comparison, according to the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker, the average longevity in similar countries is 82.2 years. Japan's is 84.1, France's 82.4 and Canada's 81.9. They left the U.S. behind in the 1980s and increased the distance as the rate of progress in this country diminished and eventually halted in 2011.

Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the VCU Center on Society and Health and the study's lead author, said the reasons for the decline go well beyond the lack of universal health care in the U.S. - in contrast with those other nations - although that's a factor.

"It would be easier if we could blame this whole trend on one problem, like guns or obesity or the opioid epidemic, all of which distinguish the U.S. from the other countries,'' Woolf told USA TODAY. "But we found increases in death rates across 35 causes of death.''

They were most pronounced in the industrial Midwest, the 13 Appalachian states and upper New England, which Woolf attributed partly to the decline in manufacturing jobs and the opioid epidemic.

Of the top 10 states with the highest number of excess deaths in the 25-64 age range - meaning deaths above projections based on U.S. mortality rates - eight were in the Rust Belt or Appalachia. Half of the excess deaths were concentrated in the latter region.

The Ohio Valley - comprising Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania - accounted for one-third.

Some of the other numbers mined by the study, based on data compiled by the U.S. Mortality Database and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are staggering:

Between 1999 and 2017, midlife mortality from drug overdoses spiked by 386.5%.

In that same age group and time period, deaths from hypertensive diseases increased by 78.9%, and those linked to obesity by 114%.

Suicides rose by 38% and climbed 55.9% among those ages 55-64.

"Not only are employers more likely to see premature deaths in their workers, but also greater illness rates and greater disability, and that puts U.S. businesses at a disadvantage against businesses in other countries that have a healthier and more productive workforce,'' Woolf said, adding that employers here are already saddled with high health care costs.

US mortality rate 'root causes' include lack of education and living wages

The report showed mortality rates among those younger than 25 and older than 64 have decreased. That might point a finger at the country's dysfunctional health care system for working adults, because many in those other age groups can be covered by either the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) or Medicare.

Woolf disputes that notion, saying only 10% to 20% of health outcomes can be attributed to medical care. He said the bigger culprit is a lack of social programs and support systems more common in other wealthy countries for when working families run into difficult times.

Those rough spells, often associated with a job loss, can lead to the kind of unhealthy behaviors - drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, overeating, suicide attempts - that result in what have become known as "deaths of despair.''

Woolf said a noticeable increase in those is yet another indication of the seriousness of the problem the U.S. faces, one he said will require investment from the public and private sectors to address.

Even if Americans were to reverse their recent backward trend, one estimate says that at its rate of longevity growth from the past several years it would take the U.S. more than 100 years to catch up to the average life expectancy other wealthy countries reached by 2016.

"We're making a huge mistake if we don't step back and look at the root causes,'' Woolf said, including a lack of educational opportunities and living wages among the likely causes. "The prescription for the country is we've got to help these people. And if we don't, we're literally going to pay with our lives.''

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'A distinctly American phenomenon': Our workforce is dying faster than any other wealthy country, study shows

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The engine that powers the world's most potent economy is dying at a worrisome pace, a "distinctly American phenomenon'' with no easily discernible cause or simple solution. Those are some of the conclusions from a comprehensive new study by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University showing that mortality rates for U.S.

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Older voters warp their countries' policies because of their political power. One British politician has a plan to end that dominance.

Dylan Martinez / Reuters

For more than two decades, the Conservative politician David Willetts was the member of Parliament representing Havant, a cozy middle-class town in southern England. He dealt with the usual problems: traffic in the town center, littering along the seafront.

After the 2007 financial crash, though, he noticed something alarming. He was regularly visited by young couples-the man might be a nurse, his partner might be a cashier at the local supermarket-who worked hard and lived frugally, yet found themselves "camping in the spare room of his parents' house, with a baby in a box at the bottom of the bed, and they couldn't see how they would ever get anywhere to live." Often, Willetts would give them whatever help he could-very little-and then head over to a local residents' association meeting, where he would talk to "completely decent people" in their 50s and 60s who owned their own home but wanted no further houses to be built in their neighborhood.

Willetts had stumbled onto one of the great divides of modern politics: young versus old. In Britain, age is now a better predictor of voting intention than social class. Overall, the Boomers voted for Brexit in 2016 and the Conservatives in 2017; their Millennial children voted Remain and Labour. The single biggest error that Theresa May, the prime minister in the lead-up to the 2017 election, made during that process was to float the idea that older people might have to contribute more to the spiraling costs of their own retirement care. The "dementia tax" prompted an immediate, ferocious response, and May backed down.

That is not an isolated example. A guiding principle of politics in Britain, and elsewhere in the West, is: What Boomers want, Boomers get. Working-age benefits, for example, have been frozen since the 2015 budget, but the state pension has consistently risen. (At this election, Britain's two main parties have both promised to keep increasing pensions; Jeremy Corbyn's Labour has also pledged £58 billion ($74.7 billion) to Boomer women affected by the rise in the female state pension age from 60 to 66.

The debate is also about so much more than abstract disagreements over policy and government funding. Caring for the elderly, for example, becomes wrapped up in assertions of "just deserts"- I've worked hard all my life and paid my taxes -and fears about money-grubbing children selling off their parents' houses. It is also, like taxes on inheritance, a subject that prods at many people's deep desire to pass something on to their offspring. Perhaps some are jealous of what appear to be greater opportunities afforded to younger people, bemused by younger generations' lifestyles, and fearful that their own values are seen as outdated. Generational arguments are essentially family dramas, with all the friction that implies.

Both sides claim that the other is being condescending. Some Boomers argue that the word itself has become a cover for ageism; Millennials roll their eyes and reply with the phrase that has come to encapsulate their weariness: " Okay, Boomer."

Still, it would be a shame if the age divide in politics merely became another front in the internet's never-ending, constantly mutating, 24/7 culture war. Because as Willetts's experience in Havant showed, the battle between the generations presents modern politicians with an inescapable challenge. Boomers have bent the gravity of politics toward themselves and their needs. They buy newspapers. They vote. They wield their spending power effectively. Their voice is loud. To build a fair and just society, the question then must be: On everything from elderly care to housing, how do you persuade them to vote against their own interests?

Willetts started by exposing the scale of the problem. In 2010, he wrote a book called The Pinch, which argued that British "baby boomers"-the generation born in the 20 years after the Second World War- "took their children's futures." They bought cheap houses, which have since rocketed in value. Their standard of living rose throughout their working lives. They retired with solid state-funded pensions, and sometimes generous private ones, too. Their Millennial children, by contrast, were having a tougher time-struggling to buy a house, watching their salaries stagnate, and looking ahead to a much less comfortable retirement. It was, Willetts wrote, selfish of the Boomers not to recognize, and mitigate, this situation.

The trouble was the sheer number of Boomers. As a big generation, the Boomers had achieved political and cultural dominance. They were no more self-interested than any other group, but they warped government priorities. And that was unfair to everyone else. Boomers, Willetts argued, were not okay.

Still, in terms of government policy in Britain, little in a tangible sense has changed over the past decade, and Willetts-now a member of the House of Lords and the president of the Intergenerational Centre at the Resolution Foundation, a London think tank-has returned to the subject with an updated edition of The Pinch. "The frustration for me is that the core argument remains absolutely the same," he told me. "The problem is as acute now as it was 10 years ago."

The 63-year-old-yes, Willetts is a Boomer himself-is well aware of the subject's emotional resonance. Mostly, though, he is surprised that the rage tends to come not from Millennials, who feel disadvantaged, but from the Boomers, who feel attacked. (After The Pinch first came out, he began to receive furious letters in neat copperplate handwriting on expensive notepaper.) "When we have all this power, we shouldn't be surprised when younger people are rather resentful," he said. "I'm surprised they aren't angrier."

He does not think Boomers hate young people, "but I don't think they're yet aware of the impact of the policies they vote for on the younger generation." In Britain, for example, Boomers have opposed housebuilding, leaving the country with a chronic shortage that protects the value of their homes but traps younger people in the expensive private-rental sector. (In 1980, the average private tenant spent 10 percent of their income on rent. That figure is now 30 percent.) Boomers have successfully deterred politicians from devaluing the state pension, even as salaries and working-age benefits have stagnated. The result is that pensioner poverty has halved since 2000, whereas poverty among people of working age has risen. Pensioners are less likely to be surviving on a low income than are those of working age.

The challenge for politicians is that, like other relatively privileged groups-think men or white people-Boomers can be defensive about their unearned luck. After all, any individual pensioner might be poor; might have been driven out of a much-loved job by an ageist employer; might have been recently divorced or widowed; might be worried about future retirement bills. Very few of us feel that we have lived unfairly blessed lives.

That defensiveness can sometimes manifest as retaliatory accusations that younger generations have it easy. The intergenerational debate has spawned its own weird jargon: "Avocado toast," for example, has become shorthand for the argument that Millennials splurge their salaries on good living, rather than saving for a home like their parents did. The only problem: even the priciest avocado toast at a London restaurant costs in the range of £10 ($13), while the average home in the city costs more than £450,000 (about $575,000) and a buyer would be expected to have a 20 percent down payment to get a mortgage. That is an awful lot of toast.

Arguments about Boomers versus Millennials crop up in other countries-hence the popularity of the "Okay, Boomer" meme in the U.S.-but the problem is particularly acute in Britain, because of the country's steep fall in home ownership in recent decades. The British rental sector is much more "mom and pop"-literally. " Something like 20 percent of Boomers have a second property that they rent out," Willetts said. That means there is a direct transfer of wealth from younger renters to older asset-owners.

How, though, do you explain to otherwise reasonable retirement-age voters how much damage their demands are causing to their children's generation-without completely alienating them? "In politics, you're not a kamikaze pilot, you're not on a suicide mission," Willetts said. He told the Boomers that the houses they owned had been largely built in the 1960s and '70s so their parents had somewhere to live; they now had a similar obligation to allow more building for their own kids. "That was the only argument that gave them pause," he said.

The most consistent criticism of the "generation war" thesis is that enormous inequality exists within generations-there are poor Boomers and rich Millennials. But we would not argue that the existence of Oprah Winfrey-a black, female billionaire-means that racism and sexism do not exist. So why overlook the advantages and disadvantages of being born in a particular year? Those differences within generations do matter, though, because rich Boomers, the luckiest part of a lucky generation, will leave their money to their children, further entrenching inequality. If the value of assets is rising faster than incomes, we are heading for a society where wealth matters more, and earnings matter less. The problem will not resolve itself without intervention.

What form might that intervention take? One obvious answer is to build more houses (bad news for the residents' associations who want to preserve their unblocked views or quiet roads) and ease lending criteria for younger people, to make it easier for them to get mortgages. Willetts has a more radical idea: Offer younger people £10,000 when they turn 30, money that they could put into a pension, use to start a business, combine into a down payment, or spend on education or training.

Free money for Millennials? That might cause a few Boomers to choke on their (non-avocado) toast. Willetts is intent on persuading them that it's only fair. He reminds me of the famous bumper sticker: "Be nice to your kids: They choose your nursing home."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Helen Lewis is a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights.

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spiraling costs of their own retirement care

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president of the intergenerational centre

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Older voters warp their countries' policies because of their political power. One British politician has a plan to end that dominance. For more than two decades, the Conservative politician David Willetts was the member of Parliament representing Havant, a cozy middle-class town in southern England.

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This story is part of a group of stories called

This post is part of Polyarchy, an independent blog produced by the political reform program at New America, a Washington think tank devoted to developing new ideas and new voices.

Over the past generation, party systems in Europe have changed radically as new parties on the left and especially the populist right have increased their vote share at the expense of traditional parties of the center-right and center-left. The decline of the latter has been particularly dramatic. In some European countries, social democratic parties have practically disappeared from the political scene, and even in former strongholds like Germany and Scandinavia their vote shares are at historic lows. The fate of social democracy should worry not only those on the left, but anyone concerned with democracy in Europe.

European socialist parties were the first "modern" parties, progenitors of a type of political organization that would play a critical role in making democracy work. In addition, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, social democratic parties were the most forceful advocates of democratization, and after the Second World War the stabilization of liberal, capitalist democracy in Europe depended critically on them.

It is simply impossible, in short, to understand the development of democracy in Europe during the late 19th and first two-thirds of the 20th century without paying careful attention to social democratic parties. It is also impossible to understand the challenges facing democracy in Europe today without understanding how these parties have changed over the past decades. In particular, the organizational decay and watering down of social democratic parties' traditional economic profiles contributed to growing political disenchantment and disengagement, the increasing salience of social and cultural issues in political life, and the rise of populism in many European countries.

Organizational innovators and champions of democracy

Up through the late 19th century, most European parties had little in the way of formal or permanent organization, internal discipline, or strong ties to voters. This was because few democracies existed at this time - with very few men (women were not enfranchised until the 20th century) eligible to vote in most European countries, extensive internal organization, ties to civil society associations, cultivating members, and retaining their loyalty was unnecessary.

During the second half of the 19th century, however, a large working class emerged in Europe, but was for the most part excluded from political power. Lacking direct political influence and subject to harassment by the authorities, power and protection could only come through organization and discipline. And so in contrast to most liberal and conservative parties, as socialist parties anchored in the working class developed during the late 19th century, they developed strong internal organizations, extensive grassroots networks, disciplined activists, ties to civil society associations (primarily but not exclusively unions), and educational and cultural programs that created encompassing "subcultures" that in turn generated what we would today call deeply partisan loyalties or identities.

These parties provided workers - the disenfranchised and disadvantaged of the day - with a political "voice" or champion, as well as the solidarity, loyalty, and commitment necessary for a long-term struggle against a deeply unjust political and economic status-quo. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) epitomized this model. The SPD's hold over its members would make an extreme Republican partisan green with envy. As one famous study put it, so extensive and encompassing was the SPD's organization that its supporters could live in it "from cradle to grave":

An SPD member could read the party's newspapers, borrow from its book clubs, drink in its pubs, keep fit in its gyms, sing in its choral societies, play in its orchestra, take part in its ... theater organizations, compete in its chess clubs and join, if a woman, the SPD women's movement and if young, the youth organization. When members were ill, they would receive help from the Working Men's Samaritan Federation. When they died, they would be cremated by a social democratic burial club. (Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture. Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany).

The astonishing breadth and ambition of this new type of political organization was directly related to its sweeping aspirations: preparing the working class for the struggle to change the world. The SPD's first program called for a slew of practical reforms including freedom of association, speech, and thought; an end to child labor and other laws protecting workers; free and universal education; and democratization.

Indeed, in the decades before the First World War, socialist parties were the most forceful and consistent advocates of democratization. Conservatives, of course, rejected democratization, but liberals were wary of it as well. They favored giving the vote to the educated middle class but generally opposed universal suffrage because they feared empowering workers would lead to "tyranny of the majority" and threats to their property and prerogatives.

The social democratic foundations of successful democracy in Europe

The end of the First World War unleashed a wave of democratization across Europe but few of these new democracies survived the interwar period. It was only after the Second World War that stable liberal democracy became the norm in Western Europe. A significant reason for this was that a social democratic understanding of the relationship between capitalism and democracy came to dominate not only the left, but other mainstream parties as well.

This shift was based on a recognition that for democracy to finally succeed in Western Europe, the social conflicts and divisions that had fed left- and right-wing extremism and helped scuttle democracy in the past would have to be confronted head-on. In addition, the experience of the Great Depression - where capitalism's failures produced social chaos, conflict, and growing support for Communism and fascism - led many to accept that political stability required avoiding economic catastrophes and ensuring that the benefits of growth were shared equitably.

After 1945, accordingly, Western European nations constructed a new political-economic order that differed greatly from what liberals preferred, namely as free a rein for markets and as small a role for states as possible, as well as what communists and democratic socialists advocated, namely an end to capitalism. Instead, after 1945 capitalism remained, but it was capitalism of a very different type than had existed before the war, one tempered and limited by a democratic state that openly committed to protecting citizens from markets' most destructive and destabilizing consequences.

This social democratic order worked remarkably well: The 30 years after 1945 were Europe's fastest period of growth ever while economic inequality declined and social mobility increased. This, in turn, undermined support for radicalism. In another remarkable shift from the interwar period when European party systems had been pulled to the extremes by communists on the left and fascists on the right, after 1945 European party systems became dominated by parties of the center-left and center-right that accepted the legitimacy of liberal capitalist democracy.

Social democratic decline and challenges to democracy

During the last decades of the 20th century, however, social democratic parties changed in dramatic ways, weakening them and the democracies they were embedded in.

By the late 1970s and '80s the organizational features pioneered by social democratic parties and adopted by other traditional political parties - extensive grassroots networks, ties to civil society associations, committed activists, immense memberships, and so on - began to decline, hindering their ability to link citizens to governments, mobilize them for elections and other types of political activity, facilitate information flows from the grassroots to leaderships, and determine what issues dominated the political agenda. The result was growing electoral volatility and political disengagement, which probably contributed to growing disillusionment with political institutions overall, as well as accelerating the role played by the media in providing information to citizens and setting the political agenda.

During the late 20th century, social democracy's programmatic profile also shifted, as the party watered down or even abandoned its commitment to the postwar social democratic consensus, instead embracing much of the emerging new neoliberal one. This shift had profound political consequences.

First and most obviously, it is an essential part of the backstory of the rise of the populist right.

Most European right-wing populist parties have their roots in the 1970s and '80s, during the period when social democratic and other traditional parties began losing hold of their voters. But initially most new-right parties, including the French National Front, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Italian League, and the Danish Progress Party, had conservative economic profiles: They favored lower taxes, a smaller state, and cutbacks to welfare programs. In the late 1980s, for example, Jean-Marie Le Pen boasted that he had adopted the principles of Reaganomics and Thatcherism before they became fashionable. But social democracy's economic shift created a golden opportunity for these parties.

Voters from low socioeconomic backgrounds like workers and those with low levels of education have always been fairly conservative on social and cultural issues; they also, however, generally have left-wing economic preferences. As long as right-wing populists advocated conservative economic policies (and flirted openly with fascism, which was universally rejected by European voters), voters with left-wing economic preferences would have trouble voting for them. But social democracy's economic shift during the late twentieth century, along with growing discontent generated by the fallout from neoliberalism and then the financial/euro crisis, created incentives for these parties to shift course.

And indeed, by the early 21st century, all populist right parties had altered their profiles, breaking ties with fascist movements and anti-democratic individuals and moving left economically. Almost all these parties now advocate strong states, protectionism, social safety nets, and so on. Once the populist right underwent this reorientation, voters with conservative social views and left-wing economic preferences no longer had to choose between them when deciding how to vote. Given this, it is not surprising that many voters who in an earlier era would have voted for the left, most notably workers, shifted to the populist right. So dramatic has this shift been that in many European countries, including France and Austria, right-populist parties rather than social democratic ones are now the largest "working-class" parties in their systems.

But social democracy's watering down or even abandonment of its previous economic profile also helped the populist right in another way: by increasing the salience of social issues in political competition.

As social democracy's economic profile grew less distinct, party leaders had an incentive to stress non-economic issues to distinguish themselves from competitors. By the late 20th century, accordingly, social democratic parties became increasingly associated with support for immigration, multiculturalism, etc. This coincided with and was probably partially caused by a shift in the nature of center-left party leadership toward a highly educated elite whose preferences, particularly on issues like immigration, cultural change, and the EU, diverged greatly from those of their traditional voters and who presented their parties and their goals in technocratic, managerial terms.

Voters also, of course, had reason to focus increasing attention on social issues as the economic profiles of center-left and center-right converged. (This tendency was further aggravated when center-left and center-right parties formed grand coalitions, making it harder for voters to distinguish their positions and enabling the populist right to present itself as the real "political alternative.") As one study put it, as the salience of economic issues as well as traditional parties' differences on them

"declined in most Western European countries, the opposite trend can be identified for non-economic issues, including immigration, law-and-order, identity, and so on. These changes on the supply side of party competition cause working-class voters to base their vote decisions on their authoritarian, non-economic preferences and not - as in the past - on their left-wing economic demands."

But shifting the focus of political competition to social issues from economic ones hurts the center-left and benefits the populist right as well as new-left parties like the Greens since the latter are unified by these issues while traditional left voters are divided by them. The more political competition focuses on social issues, in other words, the harder it is for social democratic parties to build and maintain broad, cohesive electoral coalitions.

But beyond electorally disadvantaging social democratic parties, when political competition focuses on social issues, democracy can run into problems. Such issues touch on questions of morality and identity, often making them difficult to bargain and compromise over and leading some citizens to view debate and competition over them as a zero-sum game.

Social democracy and the future of democracy

It is difficult, in short, to detangle the decline of social democracy from the challenges facing European democracies. In particular, social democracy's decline raises some key questions.

The successful consolidation of democracy in Western Europe after 1945 was built on a foundation of organizationally strong, moderate parties of the center-left and right. Social Democratic parties in particular had high membership levels, strong ties to civil society groups, especially unions, and committed activists. This enabled them to organize and mobilize voters, communicate effectively with the grassroots, and provide an institutionalized link between citizens and governments. But these features of social democratic and other traditional parties have declined over the past decades, raising the question of whether other parties or organizations can take over the representational, social, informational, and governance functions they provided. If not, how well can democracy function without them?

Successful democratic consolidation in Europe was also built on a social democratic consensus that committed the democratic state to tempering capitalism and protecting citizens from its most destabilizing and destructive consequences. This differed from what Marxists, communists, and democratic socialists hoped for - namely, an end to capitalism- as well as what liberals preferred - namely, as free a rein for markets as possible. But during the late 20th century this consensus frayed, raising the question of how well democracy can function if the major players in it do not recognize the potential tensions between it and capitalism and are committed to overcoming them.

The contemporary neoliberal right believes firmly in markets but has worked to roll back the "social democratic" limits placed on them during the postwar era: favoring a less interventionist state, deregulation, paring back welfare protections, and so on. But this offers little to citizens suffering from stagnating incomes, inequality, and declining social mobility and is therefore ill-equipped to address their frustration, anger, and disillusionment with democracy.

The populist right, on the other hand, forthrightly address the fears of the economically "left behind" and supports an activist state and welfare policies - but only for those it views as legitimate members of the national community. The populist right's welfare chauvinism is thus paired with illiberal and anti-pluralist positions, raising the question of how well democracy can function if such parties continue to gain support.

On the left, meanwhile, new-left parties like La France Insoumise and Podemos as well as major European intellectuals like Wolfgang Streeck and Thomas Piketty have brought democratic socialist and even Marxist critiques of capitalism back to the fore, questioning whether democracy and capitalism are compatible. Streeck, for example, forthrightly asserts that "there is an inherent conflict between democracy and capitalism" and that it is a "utopian" fantasy to believe they can be reconciled.

For those who believe that capitalism is necessary to ensure the economic growth and separation of economic and political power that healthy democracy requires, the growth of voices that lack a commitment to one or the other or do not believe they can be reconciled should be worrying. In the past, social democracy stood for the view that the democratic state could and should use its power to maximize capitalism's upsides when minimizing its downsides. And it believed in organizing workers and other voters for the long-term struggle to create a better world.

The 21st century is, of course, different from the 20th. But during the last century, successful democracy in Europe depended upon the organizational model and political-economic vision associated with social democracy. Whether well-functioning democracy can survive in the 21st century should these things disappear is a question we may now be facing.

Sheri Berman is professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her latest book is Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day (2019).

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This post is part of Polyarchy , an independent blog produced by the political reform program at New America , a Washington think tank devoted to developing new ideas and new voices.

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Different regions of the U.S. have measurably different psychological profiles. Understanding them could influence American politics and more.

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

A few years ago, Jason Rentfrow, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, dug into a question that has captivated him for decades: Do different places have different personalities? Do people in Los Angeles, for instance, have measurably different temperaments than the residents of Augusta, Georgia? If so, what does that mean for both places? Rentfrow decided to test these questions on a phenomenon that has captivated all of America lately: The rise of Donald Trump.

Together with his co-authors, Rentfrow analyzed a set of surveys that had been conducted between 2003 and 2015 in 2,082 U.S. counties-about two-thirds of all the counties in the country. The surveys asked three million people 44 questions about their habits and dispositions. Rentfrow and his co-authors focused on neuroticism, one of the "big five" traits that psychologists often use to measure personality, which is a tendency to feel depressed or anxious, and to respond more severely to stress. The study authors compared each county's level of neuroticism to whether those counties later voted for President Trump in the 2016 election, and whether they had historically voted for Republicans.

It turned out that neuroticism was, indeed, correlated with support for Trump. This was true even when controlling for each population's racial makeup, education level, income, and political attitudes. In fact, neuroticism was strongly linked to more people voting Trump than they did for Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 election. The trait alone appeared to have a link to Trump support. The same pattern held with Brexit votes, the study also found: The more neuroticism in a given area of the U.K., the more likely people were to support the country leaving the European Union.

Based on this correlation, Rentfrow and his co-authors speculate that neuroticism was a force that attracted people to populist candidates and ideas. The more people in a certain region tend to worry, the authors posit, the more politicians can tap into those worries and drum up support for their populist messages. Trump, for instance, stoked voters' fears about immigrants, terrorists, and other interlopers. Neuroticism particularly seemed to drive a shift toward Trump support in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio, the authors write-states that were thought to be crucial to Trump's 2016 victory.

This study and the other work by Rentfrow and many of his colleagues have added some scientific basis to the common inkling that people in different parts of the U.S. act differently. There are already many stereotypes: New Yorkers are always in a hurry; Californians are extremely chill; Minnesotans are unusually nice. While these sorts of characteristics don't apply to every person in an area, Rentfrow and his cohort quantified some of the personality differences that do exist between states. The effort could, ultimately, help Americans understand themselves a little better.

Rentfrow acknowledges that his approach can be controversial. People rarely like to hear generalizations about their hometowns, especially if the generalization is that it's an unusually neurotic place. And of course, many factors influence voting behaviors aside from personality. "Psychology is about trying to understand the inner workings of people's minds," he told me. "Here I was trying to make these broad generalizations, not just about individuals, but about people based on where they lived."

Rentfrow had a breakthrough in 2013, when he and others published a study that suggests the U.S. has three "psychological regions." The first, in the Midwest and parts of the Southeast, is "friendly and conventional." It has high levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness-three more of the "big five" personality traits. "The characteristics of this psychological region suggest a place where traditional values, family, and the status quo are important," the authors write. (The southern United States also tend to be more courageous, according to his research.)

REntfrow et al, Personality Processes and Individual Differences

In a second region that consists of the West Coast, the Rocky Mountains, and the Southwest, meanwhile, Americans tend to be "relaxed and creative," the authors write. People in these areas are very open-another big personality measure, marked by a tendency toward curiosity, variety, and imagination-but rank comparatively low on most all other traits. "In general, the qualities of this region depict a place where open-mindedness, tolerance, individualism, and happiness are valued," the authors note.

REntfrow et al, Personality Processes and Individual Differences

Finally, there's the "temperamental and uninhibited" region, which consists of the Northeast and, to some extent, Texas. These states have higher neuroticism than the others, and are moderately high on openness. "This particular configuration of traits depicts the type of person who is reserved, aloof, impulsive, irritable, and inquisitive," he writes. To which we on the East Coast say, You talkin' to me?

REntfrow et al, Personality Processes and Individual Differences

There are a few reasons why personality might clump up in this way. The neuroticism belt, for example, might have come about because many East Coast cities tend to be older and crowded, and living in such environments can contribute to anxiety-as anyone who has ridden a packed subway car at rush hour can attest. Neuroticism also happens to be higher in areas that have been dominated-and since abandoned-by coal-based industries, suggesting that economic woes can eviscerate mood. And compared to the sunny West Coast, in the chilly, swampy east, "the weather, in general, may not be quite as nice," Rentfrow told me.

Of course, in Rentfrow's study about the 2016 election, neuroticism was associated with Trump support, whereas the supposedly neurotic Northeast was one of the few regions where Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won states. But at a county level, Trump still dominated many places in the Northeast, and neuroticism might explain why he was more popular than fellow Republican Mitt Romney in those areas.

Openness, meanwhile, is highest in large, cosmopolitan cities. The states that are higher in openness, therefore, tend to be those that have large cities. There's also some evidence that agreeableness-kindness and warmth-clusters toward the southern United States and the northern Great Plains. Perhaps that's because people there don't tend to move as much, Rentfrow says, and thus forge more lasting relationships with their neighbors.

Some of this process is a feedback loop from the environment: People in high-crime neighborhoods might grow to be cautious and skeptical, because if they are too trusting, they risk becoming victims. Another mechanism is selective migration, or the tendency of people to move to areas that might satisfy their needs or interests. Live-music junkies, for example, might flock to Austin or Nashville.

Finally, there's the so-called "ecological influence," or the qualities of the natural world that surrounds us. Living near the beach might influence how much time you spend outside, how much you value physical appearance, and what your hobbies are-all factors that can then shape your personality. In one of Rentfrow's studies, people in both China and the U.S. who grew up in areas that were closer to 72 degrees Fahrenheit were found to be more agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable.

Living in a certain state won't completely rearrange someone's personality, or even necessarily have much of an effect. Individual personalities are, in part, genetically determined: If you have two very gregarious parents, you'll probably have at least a little extrovert in you. But your environment can nudge your personality in a certain direction.

"Your genetics determines your range," says Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas who has worked with Rentfrow on many studies. On a 10-point scale, your biology might set you between a two and a five on openness, but your environment and other circumstances will determine whether you're closer to the two or the five. "Even if you're genetically low on openness, but you live in New York city, you're going to exposed to a huge variety of ideas, different types of people, food, art, and culture," Gosling says. "You'll be toward the top of your biological range."

Despite how many studies Rentfrow and others have now produced, there are still some reasons to be cautious about this research. For one, the impulse to psychoanalyze large groups of people has a dark history. After World War II, some psychologists speculated that fascists have a specific personality that enabled them to commit the atrocities of the Holocaust. Some even proposed now-debunked ideas about how harsh parenting or latent homosexuality could lead to Nazism. Today, studies like Rentfrow's are conducted with more empirical care-and with the knowledge that even if there are a lot of neurotic people living in a place, it won't mean that every single resident has a Lexapro prescription. Averages are averages, but individuals are all distinct.

Plus, people both shape and are shaped by their environments. It's impossible to know whether California causes people to be relaxed, for example, or if relaxed people move to California-and in fact, it's probably a little of both. "We can't randomly assign people to Alabama versus Minnesota," Shigehiro Oishi, a psychologist at Columbia University, told me.

Still, if these findings hold up, they hold important ramifications for politics and policy. They could, for instance, help policymakers better tailor resources and programs to spur economic growth or promote healthier eating. In one of the studies from Rentfrow and researchers at the University of California Davis, low conscientiousness-a tendency to be less responsible and less self-controlled-predicted worse health and more substance use. Rentfrow and others have also found that areas low in neuroticism and high in openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness tend to have more robust economies.

On a more fundamental level, understanding the psychology of places helps us understand what we talk about when we talk about regional differences. Why do some areas have such high rates of obesity or heart disease? Why do some states seem to weather recessions better than others? Why do some cities become lively hubs of beer and bachelorettes while others wither and die out? "All of those things are essentially the consequence of people doing something rather than something else," Gosling says. And what people do, in turn, depends in part on their personalities.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Olga Khazan is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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Different regions of the U.S. have measurably different psychological profiles. Understanding them could influence American politics and more. A few years ago, Jason Rentfrow, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, dug into a question that has captivated him for decades: Do different places have different personalities?

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Comparative politics didn't used to be a best-selling topic that got people booked on cable news. That was before Trump.

"Many citizens are not fully aware of what's happening until it's too late," said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University professor. Credit... Jesika Theos for The New York Times

ITHACA, N.Y. - Each prognosis was bleaker than the next.

One academic told of a future where the Senate refused to consider Supreme Court justices from the opposing party, leaving the bench size to fluctuate with partisan whims for years to come.

Another imagined violence breaking out between white supremacists and Antifa groups in the capital, if President Trump lost the popular vote for a second time but was returned to the presidency by the Electoral College. Armed militias might emerge in the suburbs, as they once did in Ireland.

Valerie Bunce, a scholar on post-Soviet politics at Cornell University, told her fellow social scientists, gathered in Ithaca to discuss the future of American democracy, that she saw something that smelled like the fall of Communism in the last century.

"We were looking at this in the 1980s - and if you said then the Soviet Union would break up, people didn't believe you," she told two colleagues, who responded with an uneasy laugh. "I'm just trying to give you an idea of the kind of things that can happen here."

Four years ago, when the political establishment remained convinced that Donald J. Trump would not triumph, the researchers at the conference could see the reasons he would. And after Mr. Trump became president, they predicted that he might break democratic norms and spur an impeachment. That seemed extreme to some.

"Joe Scarborough once came on MSNBC with a copy of a piece we'd written and said that we were 'laughable,'" said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University professor who has spent the last several years arguing that American democracy is facing challenges similar to those that brought down Latin American democracies in coups during the last century.

The consensus among the scholars is that modern America has never produced a president like Mr. Trump, but that other countries have. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela pioneered using Twitter to attack his enemies and hosted a TV show called "Alo, Presidente." Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's current strongman, used the term "deep state" decades before Mr. Trump did.

The field of comparative politics - a discipline that contrasts the formation and fall of political systems around the globe - has long been an obscure realm of the ivory tower. But now it is selling books and has become fodder on cable news, and scholars say they've found themselves explaining American political upheaval to bemused diplomats of foreign embassies.

Though these scholars do paint a grim picture for the future of democracy, no one sees an American dictatorship in the offing. Many point to the 2018 midterm elections as signs that the Democrats - known in academic lingo as "the opposition" in these scenarios - remain a potent force. In this view, impeachment itself shows American checks and balances are still intact.

"Today democracies don't die at the hands of generals, but at the hands of elected leaders - presidents, prime ministers," began Mr. Levitsky in front of a packed lecture hall at Cornell last week. "Many citizens are not fully aware of what's happening until it's too late."

For democracy to work, in Mr. Levitsky's view, it's best to see the system as a kind of a game in which both sides' ultimate goal is to keep playing for indefinite rounds. While everyone wishes to win, it's more important that neither side is ever completely defeated or has demoralized its opponents to the point that they no longer want to play.

In Venezuela, Mr. Levitsky recalls, polarization between the leftist Mr. Chávez and the opposition boiled over into a coup and a general strike against him, both of which failed. Mr. Chávez responded by packing the courts, closing media outlets and jailing his opponents. The country's democratic fabric has been in tatters ever since.

A key turning point for many democracies was the moment when political rivals began to see themselves as enemies rather than competitors, losing a key norm Mr. Levitsky calls "mutual toleration." In his opinion, American politics lost that early in the Trump era when the president referred to his rivals as "traitors" and "scum."

The story, or some variation of it, is Mr. Levitsky's bread and butter, with similar patterns of democratic breakdown seen in Chile, Hungary, Turkey, Spain before the Spanish Civil War, and Germany and Italy before World War II.

"I never thought I would be seeing it in the U.S.," Mr. Levitsky said.

Not all scholars agree with that the United States is seeing this kind of breakdown. Hadas Aron, a faculty fellow at New York University, said she admired Mr. Levitsky's work and even teaches it to students, but said there were large differences between the democratic crises in countries like Hungary or Poland and what is going on in the United States. Those countries were far more polarized to begin with, she said.

"Democracy dies when there is no support for democracy, when people don't believe in it," she said. "Here, Trump is meeting with resistance by institutions at every step."

No matter how one analyzes it, the troubled times have brought a boom for these scholars. "How Democracies Die," written by Mr. Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, also a professor at Harvard, became one of the rare books to make it both to best-seller lists and the undergraduate political science syllabus circuit. And many of his colleagues saw their careers buoyed by current events, too.

At the recent conference in Cornell on the topic of democratic resilience in America, Robert Lieberman, the former provost of Johns Hopkins University, couldn't resist the urge to pull up a mock-up of his new book cover with the title "Four Threats." It featured a minimalist landscape of dark, foreboding waves.

"The book wouldn't exist if Trump weren't president," he said of his manuscript, an analysis of breakdowns of American democratic norms after the republic's founding including the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression and Watergate.

The Trump presidency, in some ways, was the reason for the conference itself, giving a kind of urgency to those gathered around the table rarely seen at academic gatherings.

Jennifer McCoy, a professor at Georgia Sate who spent years monitoring Mr. Chávez's elections in Venezuela, presented charts of discontent with democracy in Zimbabwe, comparing them with downward trends among Americans. Kenneth M. Roberts, who teaches comparative Latin American politics at Cornell, showed research that the Republican Party had swung further to the right than most right-wing parties in Europe.

A sense of disbelief seemed to take hold of the room when Lilliana Mason, a government and politics professor at the University of Maryland, began to show the results of a survey she had conducted among voters on the issue of political violence around the 2018 midterms. While 77 percent had said they were against violence of any sort, around 20 percent appeared willing to tolerate some kind of violence in politics.

She flipped to another survey. Twenty-five percent of respondents had said they favored the country being broken up along party lines into separate nations.

"What are they ... " she paused, but no question followed. "This just looks so bad."

Another thing these scholars think looks bad: the Supreme Court. Specifically, these scholars of democratic dysfunction could not get over the fact that Judge Merrick B. Garland never got a confirmation hearing in the Senate, something that hadn't happened since 1866.

Over dinner at an upscale restaurant near campus, Thomas M. Keck, a professor at Syracuse who studies the history of the Supreme Court in previously divisive times - it changed size seven times during 19th century partisan warfare - said he thought drastic measures might be needed. He floated some options, like term limits for new justices and keeping open the possibility of expanding the court's size.

Many of his colleagues seemed convinced by the time the entrees were served. "It may be our least-bad option in restoring the court's role as a democratic guardrail," Mr. Keck said.

Last year, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, invited Mr. Levitsky and Mr. Ziblatt to Washington to discuss their book with a group of senators. During the conversation, Mr. Levitsky said one of the lawmakers told him that Mr. Garland's blocked appointment was likely to become the norm.

He described the meeting with the senators as a "discombobulated discussion," the lawmakers struggling to understand the political polarization Mr. Levitsky understood through his studies of democratic breakdown in Latin America.

"They kept asking, 'Why are Republicans behaving this way?'" he said, noting how unfamiliar the American lawmakers were with the polarization taking root around them. "These were smart people who knew a lot about politics, but they didn't have an explanation."

These kinds of questions have left Mr. Levitsky feeling somewhat vindicated since the days some saw him as too alarmist.

Earlier this year, Mr. Levitsky and Mr. Ziblatt appeared on Mr. Scarborough's show, "Morning Joe," to discuss the paperback version of their book.

"How have the institutions held up? How is the democracy doing?" Mr. Scarborough asked, this time in seeming agreement that there was a threat to both.

Yet Mr. Levitsky can be shy in offering solutions to the crisis he sees.

During Mr. Levitsky's public lecture at Cornell this month, Tracy Mitrano, who is running as a Democrat for the congressional seat that includes Ithaca, asked him for any wisdom ahead of her campaign.

"What advice would you give to a congressional seat candidate from this district?" Ms. Mitrano asked, as the audience, which included some would-be constituents who recognized her, began to chuckle.

Mr. Levitsky thought for a moment.

"Political science is very good at uncovering problems," he said, saying that it was up to the politicians to figure out how to solve them. "I'm going to shut up now, because I don't know."

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Comparative politics didn't used to be a best-selling topic that got people booked on cable news. That was before Trump. ITHACA, N.Y. - Each prognosis was bleaker than the next. One academic told of a future where the Senate refused to consider Supreme Court justices from the opposing party, leaving the bench size to fluctuate with partisan whims for years to come.

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Back in 2017, I wrote a piece speculating that the Mueller hearings might bring America's epistemic crisis to a head. That crisis involves Americans' growing inability, not just to cooperate, but even to learn and know the same things, to have a shared understanding of reality. We have sorted ourselves into polarized factions living in different worlds, not just of values, but of facts. Communication between them is increasingly difficult.

I wondered what might happen if Mueller offered clear, incontrovertible evidence of Trump's guilt. Would the right wing be able to prevent its members from ever finding out? What if the truth was revealed but it had no power, no effect at all, because half the country had been walled off from it? What if there is no longer any evidentiary standard that can overcome our polarization?

As it happened, the hearings didn't play out that way. Mueller's report and testimony were oddly oblique and muted, with notable omissions. It proved relatively easy for the president and his supplicant media to dismiss the whole thing as a dud.

Now we may experience the stress test that Mueller never produced: whether the right can shield itself from plain facts in plain sight.

Unlike Mueller's report, the story behind the impeachment case is relatively simple: Congress approved military aid for Ukraine, but Trump withheld it as part of a sustained campaign to pressure Ukraine into launching an investigation of his political rival Joe Biden's family. There's a record of him doing it. There are multiple credible witnesses to the phone call and larger campaign. Several Trump allies and administration officials have admitted to it on camera. Trump himself admitted to it on the White House lawn.

REPORTER: What exactly did you hope the Ukrainian president would do about the Bidens?

TRUMP: "I would think that if they were honest about it, they'd start a major investigation" https://t.co/oMb1cjsx4T
- Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) November 13, 2019

It's just very, very obvious that he did it. It's very obvious he and his associates don't think there's anything wrong with it. And it's very obvious there is something wrong with it. Holding US foreign policy hostage to personal political favors is straightforward abuse of power, precisely the sort of thing the Founders had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution.

It's a clearly impeachable pattern of action, documented and attested to by multiple witnesses, confessed to multiple times, in violation of longstanding political precedent and a moral consensus that was, until 2016, universal. Compared to Mueller, that is a much more difficult test of the right's ability to obscure, distract, and polarize.

Right now, the right's messaging machine is sputtering a bit, cycling through defenses - it didn't happen, Trump's not competent enough to do it, it was a failed quid pro quo so it doesn't count, he did it but it's not impeachable - that contradict one another from day to day.

Can the machine successfully hold the right-wing base in an alternate reality and throw up enough fog to keep the general public at bay for long enough to get through the next election? It seems challenging, given the facts on record, but this is just the sort of challenge the machine was built for.

Let's quickly review how we got here.

The rise of tribal epistemology

Earlier in 2017, I told the story of Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that has to do with knowing and coming to know things - what counts as true, what counts as evidence, how we accumulate knowledge, and the like. It's where you find schools of thought like skepticism (we can't truly know anything) and realism (the universe contains observer-independent facts we can come to know).

Tribal epistemology, as I see it, is when tribalism comes to systematically subordinate epistemological principles.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain is by way of analogy with tribal morality, which people are more familiar with. Tribal morality is what happens when tribal interests come to subordinate moral principles.

Moral principles are generally, by their nature, cosmopolitan. They are meant to apply across tribal lines, to be "transpartisan." Take, for instance, the principle "it is wrong to torture." Interpreted as a principle, it is meant to apply to everyone. Anyone, from any group or nation, who tortures anyone else, from any group or nation, is doing something wrong.

But under tribal morality, principles are subsumed under tribal membership. It becomes, "it is wrong for them to torture us." It is okay for us to torture them, because our tribe is Good and thus whatever actions we take to prosecute the interests of the tribe are Good. They, however, are Bad, so they are subject to the rules. (Readers of a certain age may recall the US having just this debate in the mid-2000s.)

Tribal epistemology happens when tribal interests subsume transpartisan epistemological principles, like standards of evidence, internal coherence, and defeasibility. "Good for our tribe" becomes the primary determinant of what is true; "part of our tribe" becomes the primary determinant of who to trust.

A circular logic, which has become quite familiar in the impeachment affair, emerges: Anyone who says anything contrary to the tribe marks themselves as an enemy of the tribe (cough *deep state* cough); enemies of the tribe cannot but trusted, so their testimony or evidence can be ignored. Thus, by definition, nothing that questions the tribal narrative can be trusted.

A decades-long effort on the right has resulted in a parallel set of institutions meant to encourage tribal epistemology. They mimic mainstream media, think tanks, and the academy, but without the restraint of transpartisan principles. They are designed to advance the interests of the right, to tell stories and produce facts that support the tribe. That is the ur-goal; the rhetoric and formalisms of critical thinking are retrofit around it.

Talk radio and the birth of Fox News in the 1990s were turning points. They eventually expanded to create an entire, complete-unto-itself conservative information universe. It was capable of cranking out stories and facts (or "facts") in support of the conservative cause 24 hours a day, steadily shaping the worldview of their white suburban audience around a forever war with The Libs, who are always just on the verge of destroying America.

As I covered in more detail in this post (and this one), over time this led to a steady deterioration in fealty to norms, epistemological and otherwise, to the point that something like 30 percent of the country is now awash in a fantasia of conspiracy theories and just-so stories.

As journalist Alex Pareene wrote in a scathing 2017 piece, the propaganda machine that the right built to keep its base outraged grew out of control and swallowed the GOP. "They're screwed," Pareene wrote of conservatives, "because they and their predecessors engineered a perpetual misinformation machine, and then a bunch of people addicted to their product took over the government."

Sen. John Kennedy is speaking. He says he is a "proud deplorable" and unlike the "cultured, cosmopolitan, goat's milk latte-drinkin', avocado toast-eating, insiders elite."
- Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 15, 2019

Now everyone with any power on the right is deep in the bubble, right up to the president himself, who spends a considerable portion of his time watching and tweeting about Fox News. There are no more moderates or responsible Republicans behind the curtain, keeping an eye on the difference between tribal tall tales and reality. Fox natives are running the show, including the federal government.

And Trump, the ultimate tribalist, has made it clear that he doesn't want to hear any of these half-ass stories about how he did something wrong but it's not that bad. He demands ultimate loyalty, and to him loyalty means insisting that he did nothing wrong at all.

The call to the Ukrainian President was PERFECT. Read the Transcript! There was NOTHING said that was in any way wrong. Republicans, don't be led into the fools trap of saying it was not perfect, but is not impeachable. No, it is much stronger than that. NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2019

Following Trump down that path requires ignoring or wishing away mountains of evidence and decades of precedent, opting instead to believe him when he says, "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." This is tribal epistemology in its rawest form: It's us or them, our story or theirs. If you are one of us, you believe our story.

Republicans need to maintain doubt and prevent consensus

As a recent Crooked Media/Change Research poll showed, voter opinions on impeachment are as inflamed and polarized as they are on everything else. Some 91 percent of those polled have strong feelings on impeachment: 94 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents oppose it; 94 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents support it. Meanwhile, "50% of independents and 57% of swing voters support removing Trump from office."

This is the story of American politics: a narrowly divided nation, with raw numbers on the side of the rising demographics in the left coalition but intensity and outsized political power on the side of the right coalition. Put in more practical terms, the right still has the votes and the cohesion to prevent a Senate impeachment conviction.

On the downslope of a fading, unpopular coalition is not a great place for Republicans to be. It doesn't augur well for their post-2020 health as a party. But it is enough to get them through the next election, which is about as far ahead as they look these days.

All they need to do is to keep that close partisan split frozen in place. Above all, they need to ensure that nothing breaks through to the masses in the mushy middle, who are mostly disengaged from politics. They need to make sure no clear consensus forms, nothing that might find its way into pop culture, the way the entire nation eventually focused its attention on Nixon's impeachment.

It's a kind of magic trick they're going to try to pull off in full view.

Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he won't read any of the transcripts, and dismissed Sondland's reversal.

"I've written the whole process off ... I think this is a bunch of B.S."

Per @alanhe
- Kathryn Watson (@kathrynw5) November 5, 2019

The right has hacked the cognitive biases of voters and reporters

They are working with a few key tools and advantages. The first is a strong tendency, especially among low-information, relatively disengaged voters (and political reporters), to view consensus as a signal of legitimacy. It's an easy and appealing heuristic: If something is a good idea, it would have at least a few people from both sides supporting it. That's why "bipartisan" has been such a magic word in US politics this century, even as the reality of bipartisanship has faded.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was very canny in recognizing this tendency and working it it ruthlessly to his advantage. He realized before Obama ever set foot in office that if he could keep Republicans unified in opposition, refusing any cooperation on anything, he could make Obama appear "polarizing." His great insight, as ruthlessly effective as it was morally bankrupt, was that he could unilaterally deny Obama the ability to be a uniter, a leader, or a deal maker. Through nothing but sheer obstinance, he could make politics into an endless, frustrating, fruitless shitshow, diminishing both parties in voters' eyes.

This is what Republicans need more than anything on impeachment: for the general public to see it as just another round of partisan squabbling, another illustration of how "Washington" is broken. They need to prevent any hint of bipartisan consensus from emerging.

Tribal epistemology is key to this. Republicans must render partisan not only judgments of right and wrong but judgments of what is and isn't true or real. They must render facts themselves a matter of controversy that the media reports as a food fight and the public tunes out.

That's the main reason they are focusing their attacks so intently on process complaints. The investigation itself, the hearings, the whole process must come to be seen as partisan, which will serve as permission for the engaged on the right to attack it, the engaged on the left to embrace it, and the broader public to dismiss it.

Aiding in the effort is the propaganda machine. One of the more notable findings from the aforementioned poll: "89% of Republicans who get most of their impeachment news from Fox oppose the inquiry because they think the allegations aren't true; 59% of other Republicans say the same." As I have written before about AOC and the Green New Deal, the right has an ability to convey a partisan message to its base that the left utterly lacks.

As a massive post-election study of online media from Harvard showed, media is not symmetrical any more than broader polarization is. "Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left," the researchers found. "On the right, prominent media are highly partisan."

Democrats are still dependent on the mainstream press to convey their messages to the broad public. Many of their consultants and press officers still view their role as managing relationships with mainstream reporters. But the mainstream media, catering to low-information voters and reinforcing their worst prejudices in the process, persists in covering politics precisely through the most cynical lens, as a team sport, competing performances to be narrated like an announcer calling a game.

Analysis: The first two witnesses called Wednesday testified to President Trump's scheme, but lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention. https://t.co/1UfkaeZ3I4
- NBC News (@NBCNews) November 14, 2019

Meanwhile, the right not only commands the highest rated cable news network and an army of supportive online media outlets, it is out-spending by millions on Facebook, Tik-Tok, 4chan, and 8chan, targeting messages where their audiences are.

Impeachment is make or break time for America's epistemic health

As Putin and other modern autocrats have realized, in the modern media environment - a chaotic Wild West where traditional gatekeepers are in decline - it is not necessary for a repressive regime to construct its own coherent account of events. There are no broadly respected, nonpartisan referees left to hold it to account for consistency or accuracy. All it needs, to get away with whatever it wants, is for the information environment to be so polluted that no one can figure out what's true and what isn't, or what's really going on.

The recipe is always the same: attack independent media outlets as partisan enemies of the regime and, by proxy, enemies of the people. At the same time, use the media under state control, along with an army of bots, trolls, and shitposters, to inject accusations, lies, and conspiracy theories into the public dialogue.

In an information fog filled with vexed uncertainty, people will either tune out, revert to their tribal affiliations, or both. They will seek a strong leader who offers simple certainties and a clear account of who is to blame for the chaos. Confusion and fear, not deception, are the ultimate goal.

That is precisely the kind of machine the US conservative movement has built: one designed to produce confusion and fear. Trump is its natural leader, the first Republican president to reflect the party's contemporary core and character, and his impeachment is its ultimate test.

Meanwhile, Democrats are attempting to do something that arguably nothing since the 9/11 attacks has done: unite Americans in a clear understanding of a threat and a clear will to action, in a way that reaches across conventional partisan lines, at least to some extent.

On their side, they have the products of America's tattered remaining institutional processes and norms: clear evidence, painstakingly laid out in a Constitutionally prescribed process, communicated through mainstream news outlets. The facts are clearer than ever, but those institutions are weaker and social trust, which the right has been concertedly attacking for decades, is at a low ebb.

In opposition is large but stable minority united by unquestioned loyalty to a tribal leader, dedicated to guerrilla information warfare unconstrained by conventional norms of accuracy or consistency, and motivated by an almost eschatological will to power.

If the latter triumphs, if it is able to muddy and distract enough to make impeachment just another Mueller, just more partisan white noise, we will cross a kind of rubicon. It will demonstrate that, to a first approximation, lol nothing matters.

Moral consensus will have become impossible. Epistemological consensus will have become impossible. It will show that no amount of evidence is capable of bridging the partisan gap. The epistemic crisis, and its attendant political crisis, will be fully upon us.

Ultimately, communication, and with it survival as a polity, depends on a shared body of facts and assumptions about the world. For decades, the right has been sawing away at the threads that still connect it to mainstream institutions, procedures, and norms of conduct, to the point that it has created a hermetically sealed and impenetrable world of its own.

As congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned in 2012, the GOP as become "a resurgent outlier: ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; un-persuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

The machine was primed and waiting for someone like Trump. Now, with his erratic and indefensible conduct, he is accelerating the breach, pushing the right into ever-more cult-like behavior, principles laid aside one after another in service of power.

That is what a tribalist like Trump wants: for communication and compromise across tribal lines to become impossible, so that loyalty becomes the only measure and everything is reduced to pure struggle for dominance. If he makes it through impeachment unscathed, he and the right will have learned once and for all that facts and evidence have no hold on them. Both "sides" have free rein to choose the facts and evidence that suit them. Only power matters.

If the right's epistemic break becomes final and irreparable, as impeachment threatens, then no matter what happens in the next election, American democracy is in for a long spell of trouble.

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With impeachment, America's epistemic crisis has arrived

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Back in 2017, I wrote a piece speculating that the Mueller hearings might bring America's epistemic crisis to a head. That crisis involves Americans' growing inability, not just to cooperate, but even to learn and know the same things, to have a shared understanding of reality.

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Former president Barack Obama speaks with actress, model, and activist Yara Shahidi during the Obama Foundation summit in Chicago, on 29 October. Photograph: Ashlee Rezin Garcia/AP

On Tuesday, in Chicago, former president Barack Obama joined actress Yara Shahidi in a conversation with activists from his Obama Foundation program. Over the nearly 1.5-hour Obama Foundation summit event, the beloved political figure deployed his trademark charm and humor while discussing the challenges of movement politics.

Media attention has focused on a particular part of the conversation - Obama's criticism of call-out culture and what he perceived as an excessively strident activist left. "We can't completely remake society in a minute," Obama said, "so we have to make some accommodations to the existing structures."

He added, "This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you."

He then made a separate point about social media activism:

"If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb, I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. 'Man you see how woke I was, I called you out.'" But "that's not activism. That's not bringing about change."
Opinion
On its face, these are fair remarks. During the session, both Obama and Shahidi drew from examples of the nonviolent civil rights movement of the early 1960s, which required enormous faith, patience and compromise from its activists in the face of threats to their lives and livelihood. Today, as social justice activists' material conditions have relatively improved, they will encounter people in positions of power with wealth and access, and they have to learn to work with them on some level, Obama implied. And no, tweeting about a verb probably won't bring about change.

However, we can't look at Obama's remarks in a vacuum. From 2016 - as he prepared to exert his influence over who would be the next Democratic nominee - to the present, Obama has often aimed his political critiques at youth-led, black and progressive movements. While upholding the necessity of nuance, Obama himself seems to force these movements into a box, cherry-picking anecdotes for a strawman: that these movements expect purity and demand perfection.

Barack Obama takes on 'woke' call-out culture: 'That's not activism' - video
This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke ... you should get over that. The world is messy. There are ambiguities
In an early instance of this ideological pattern, at a 2016 youth town hall in London, Obama spoke generally of Black Lives Matter while referring to the handful of activists who confronted the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for her role in criminalizing black youth:

"Once you've highlighted an issue and brought it to people's attention ... then you can't just keep on yelling at them. And you can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position. The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room."

A few months later in a Howard commencement address, with Chicago protests of the police killing of Laquan McDonald not far in the distance, he told the audience of mostly black students about his criminal justice reform as a state senator:

"I can say this unequivocally: without at least the acceptance of the police organizations in Illinois, I could never have gotten those [criminal justice reform] bills passed ... If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you're not going to get what you want."

And earlier this year, Obama again raised the amorphous specter of purity politics as people have embraced a leftward policy shift:

"One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States ... is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, 'Uh, I'm sorry, this is how it's going to be' and then we start ... a 'circular firing squad', where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues."

Obama has offered these platitudes without much evidence that progressives, Black Lives Matter activists or young voters expect purity. Impatience with the status quo is not purity. A consistent political project is not purity. And being patient has its limits.
For many Americans, the normalization of genuinely leftwing policies is providing the hope and change Obama campaigned on
You can gather from the general direction of Obama's career, from turning down a route in corporate law to his community organizing, that he has some commitment to social justice. However, his remarks indicate discomfort with more radical tactics in achieving it, reducing them to petulant zeal and not a legitimate strategy among the broad scope of tools needed to dismantle oppressive systems.

While discussing Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King as examples of patient progress, he freezes them in time. He failed to note either King's or Parks's evolutions. Over time King became more radicalized and questioned integration. When Parks was forced to Detroit to retreat from the backlash against her bus boycott activism, she became a proponent of the Panthers' self-defense demands and identified Malcolm X as her personal hero.

Obama also failed to discuss how, despite King's strategies negotiating with Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress waffled in passing further civil rights measures until the 1968 riots after King's assassination, when Congress was forced to swiftly pass the Fair Housing Act.

Or go back further: despite the negotiations and patience of abolitionists in the 1800s, it was a steady stream of black uprisings, and an entire civil war, that gave abolition laws and the Emancipation Proclamation any teeth.

Obama's fundamental problem is in confusing a strategy of pragmatism with the strategy. Pragmatic approaches can coexist with more radical politics. But Obama's pattern of dismissing radical demands altogether shows a serious unwillingness to appreciate the times. Obama is committed to a notion of reaching across the aisle that may have seemed necessary in 2012, but not so much in 2019.

Americans in the throes of economic struggle and social oppression have been advised to hold their nose for so long that they're suffocating. The labor movement is experiencing more worker strikes now than in the past 40 years. We're in a 1968 moment, not 1963. But Obama has not accepted this evolution.

As people demand universal policies for basic needs of shelter, food, freedom from police terror, and economic security, and when wealth inequality is the worst in a century, Obama has to reckon with his own questions. How is his form of calling out - scolding black, young and progressive movements - bringing about change? Is he part of the solution or part of the problem?

For many Americans, the normalization of genuinely leftwing policies is providing the hope and change Obama campaigned on. This is the time for him to finally help achieve it.

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Barack Obama thinks 'woke' kids want purity. They don't: they want progress

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On Tuesday, in Chicago, former president Barack Obama joined actress Yara Shahidi in a conversation with activists from his Obama Foundation program. Over the nearly 1.5-hour Obama Foundation summit event, the beloved political figure deployed his trademark charm and humor while discussing the challenges of movement politics.

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As the big day dawned last weekend, Berliners held a huge street party, with more than 100,000 revellers gathering in the cold to ooh and aah over an epic display of fireworks. Elsewhere, celebrants of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall followed their own time-honoured traditions. TV producers ran that grainy archive of burly Germans smashing sledgehammers into brickwork, while posh newspapers rolled out their grandest pen-suckers to pronounce on The Future of the Continent. Thus, a historic event that changed the world is stripped of some of its most troubling questions and tidied away into a neat little period piece, a Now That's What I Call Perestroika! compilation album.

Let us try to change that today, for I come not to bury communism but to praise it - or rather, one aspect of it that gets next to no recognition. On its own terms, "really existing socialism" was a miserable failure: brutally repressive to its own peoples and ultimately unable to compete with capitalist economies. Yet it achieved something else that its own politburos and planners never intended - an achievement that represents one of our era's greatest paradoxes. Communism didn't topple capitalism, but kept it honest - and so saved it from itself.
Berlin marks 30 years since fall of the wall in reflective mood
The very presence of a powerful rival ideology frightened capitalists into sharing their returns with workers and the rest of the society, in higher wages, more welfare spending and greater public investment. By sending tanks into Prague in 1968, Leonid Brezhnev may have crushed the dream of "socialism with a human face"; but he and other Soviet general secretaries forced capitalism to become less inhumane. Conversely, the collapse of communism between 1989 and 1991 has left capitalism unchallenged and untempered - and increasingly unviable. The challenge of our time, whether in the UK's general election or next year's US presidential contest, is to build a political movement that can restrain a system spinning madly out of control.

You're not meant to think of it this way. From the very outset, November 1989 was framed as the moment when capitalism could stop battling for survival and finally renew itself. The Guardian's own leading article, published even as the Trabants queued by the mile to get into the west, summed up liberal hopes: "The wealth is at last available not only to tackle long-neglected evils at home, but to pay for a genuine fight against poverty, injustices and ecological disaster in the rest of the world."

I trust I'm not giving away too much of the plot by observing it hasn't panned out like that. Indeed, for most of the past three decades, the political classes - whether Tony Blair or David Cameron, George W Bush or Barack Obama - have accepted vast gulfs between rich and poor as just one of those sad facts of life. With tiny shrugs, they put it down to globalisation or the shifting job market - and deploy the work of top economists such as Harvard's Lawrence Katz and David Autor who argue that income inequality has been a natural byproduct of technological innovation.

Yet history supplies very different testimony. It shows how the existential threat to capitalism posed by socialist movements, whether revolutionary communist or reformist social democrat, rebalanced power towards workers. The starkest example is the eight-hour working day. Demanded for more than a century by socialists such as Robert Owen, it had been the rallying cry of the annual May Day demonstrations organised since 1890 - yet it took the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 and the concurrent unrest of workers across Europe to make it law within months in France, Germany and Portugal.

The manner in which socialism reformed capitalism is made explicit in a paper from the International Labour Organisation that notes how the surge in inequality across the west in the 19th century was reversed "as the threat of the spread of communism inspired welfarist redistributive reforms, giving capitalism a more human face". In 1929 the richest 0.1% of Americans owned almost 25% of all the nation's household wealth; by the 70s, that had dropped below 10%.

For perhaps a couple of decades after the second world war, the future looked distinctly red-tinted. In 1951, the Canadian news magazine Maclean's asked: "What hideous magic is possessed by the discredited conspiracy called communism that it continues to control more than a quarter of the voting power in France and Italy?" A few years later, Harold Macmillan's Conservative ministers were fretting about how the Soviets were outstripping both Americans and the British on education spending, and churning out many more scientists and technologists.
In 1989, capitalism won. Today its greatest ideological challenge is the planet | Larry Elliott
Whether it was the space race or huge European trade unions with links to Moscow, a spectre was haunting the west: the spectre of egalitarianism. In a new study of 16 industrial countries during the cold war, Brazilian economists André Albuquerque Sant'Anna and Leonardo Weller argue that the "more national elites were under the threat of communist revolution, the more the state introduced policies that reduced top income shares" - whether that be taxing and spending more, or allowing uncomfortably powerful trade unions. Those reds under the bed helped ensure you would have social democracy at home.

Communism was not the sole shackle on capitalism - but it is one that typically gets painted out of history. Yet as the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm observed in his memoir Interesting Times, even in the 80s when the Soviet bloc was ailing and feeble, it could still "frighten the rich and the rulers of the world into taking some notice of the needs of the poor".

Almost all such counterweights to extreme capitalism have disappeared today, from strong trade unions to alternative national models. The resulting debauchery is all around us, from the companies that shovel money towards their shareholders while sending their workers to food banks, to the billionaires now preparing to run for US president, to the major capitals (such as London) that ask barely any questions of passing kleptocrats but instead sell them anything they want.

Countervailing forces made capitalism not only more bearable for those living under it but also more likely to survive. Without them, the system loses both consent and even the will to carry on. The banking crash, Brexit, the impending climate catastrophe - all should serve as distress signals for keen-eared capitalists, yet the answer to each is to serve up more of the same: more finance, more slash-and-burn, more tokenism around carrier bags.

A system so manifestly unwilling to change course will hit the rocks. One paradox of the 20th century was that communism failed, yet helped capitalism to success. The challenge for this century will be whether we can build a new political movement to scare the capitalists silly, so as to force them to come to their senses.

* Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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The task of politics today is to scare the capitalists as much as communism did | Aditya Chakrabortty

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As the big day dawned last weekend, Berliners held a huge street party, with more than 100,000 revellers gathering in the cold to ooh and aah over an epic display of fireworks. Elsewhere, celebrants of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall followed their own time-honoured traditions.

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wo of the "freest economies" in the world are on fire. According to indexes of "economic freedom" published annually separately by two conservative thinktanks - the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute - Hong Kong has been number one in the rankings for more than 20 years. Chile is ranked first in Latin America by both indexes, which also place it above Germany and Sweden in the global league table.

Violent protest in Hong Kong has entered its eighth month. The target is Beijing, but the lack of universal suffrage that is catalysing popular anger has long been part of Hong Kong's economic model. In Chile, where student-led protests against a rise in subway fares turned into a nationwide anti-government movement, the death toll is at least 18.

The rage may be better explained by other rankings: Chile places in the top 25 for economic freedom - and also for income inequality. If Hong Kong were a country, it would be in the world's top 10 most unequal. Observers often use the word neoliberalism to describe the policies behind this inequality. The term can seem vague, but the ideas behind the economic freedom index help to bring it into focus.

All rankings hold visions of utopia within them. The ideal world described by these indexes is one where property rights and security of contract are the highest values, inflation is the chief enemy of liberty, capital flight is a human right and democratic elections may work actively against the maintenance of economic freedom.

These rankings are not merely academic. Heritage rankings are used to allocate US foreign aid through the Millennium Challenge Corporation. They set goals for policy-makers: in 2011, the Institute of Economic Affairs lamented that a rise in social spending was leading to a fall in Britain's ranking. Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith even cited the Heritage index in support of a hard Brexit. Launching the 2018 index at the Heritage Foundation, Trump's commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, expressed hope that environmental deregulation and corporate tax cuts would reverse America's decline in the ranking. Where did this way of framing the world come from?

The idea for the economic freedom index was born in 1984, after a discussion of Orwell's 1984 at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society - an exclusive debating club of academics, policymakers, thinktankers and business leaders formed by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 to oppose the rise of communism in the east and social democracy in the west. The historian Paul Johnson argued that Orwell's predictions had not come true; Michael Walker of the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute countered that perhaps they had. High taxes, obligatory social security numbers and public transparency about political contributions suggested we might be closer to Orwellian dystopia than we thought.

Walker saw this debate as the unfinished business of Milton Friedman's 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, which had suggested that political liberty relied on market freedom but had not proved it scientifically. Friedman was at the meeting, and, with his wife and co-author, Rose, agreed to help host a series of workshops on the challenge of measuring economic freedom.

The Friedmans gathered a crowd of luminaries, including Nobel prize winner Douglass North and The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray, to figure out whether something as nebulous as freedom could be quantified and ranked. They ended up with a series of indicators, measuring the stability of currency; the right of citizens to own bank accounts in foreign countries and foreign currencies; the level of government spending and government-owned enterprise; and, crucially, the rate of individual and corporate taxation.

When Walker's Fraser Institute published its first index in 1996 with a foreword from Friedman, there were some surprises. According to its historical overview, the second freest economy in the world in 1975 was Honduras, a military dictatorship. For the next year, another dictatorship, Guatemala, was in the top five. These were no anomalies. They expressed a basic truth about the indexes. The definition of freedom they used meant that democracy was a moot point, monetary stability was paramount and any expansion of social services would lead to a fall in the rankings. Taxation was theft, pure and simple, and austerity was the only path to the top.

"The 'right' to food, clothing, medical services, housing or a minimal income level," the authors wrote, was nothing less than "'forced labor' requirements [imposed] on others." The director of the index translated the vision into policy advice a few years later, writing in a public memo to the Canadian prime minister that poverty could be eliminated through a simple solution: "End welfare. Reinstitute poorhouses and homes for unwed mothers."

Not content with mere economics, the Fraser Institute joined up with the Cato Institute in 2015 to publish the first global index of "human freedom". They included all of the earlier economic indicators and supplemented them with measurements of civil liberty, rights to association and free expression, alongside dozens of others - but left out multiparty elections and universal suffrage. The authors noted specifically that they excluded political freedom and democracy from the index - and Hong Kong topped the list again.

What was going on? One answer is that the project of measuring economic freedom had made some of its authors question their prior assumptions about the natural relationship between capitalism and democracy. By the 1990s, Friedman, who had previously seen the two as mutually reinforcing, was singing a different tune. As he said in an interview in 1988: "I believe a relatively free economy is a necessary condition for freedom. But there is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy." An enfranchised people tended to use their votes to pressure politicians into more social spending, clogging the arteries of free exchange.

In the workshops devoted to creating the indexes, Friedman cited the example of Hong Kong as evidence for the truth of this proposition, saying: "There is almost no doubt that if you had political freedom in Hong Kong you would have much less economic and civil freedom than you do as a result of an authoritarian government."

Hong Kong's former chief executive, CY Leung, agreed. During the "umbrella revolution" protests of 2014 he was asked why suffrage could not be expanded. His matter-of-fact response was that this would increase the power of the poor and lead to "the kind of politics" that favour the expansion of the welfare state instead of business-friendly policies. For him, the tradeoff between economic and political freedom was not buried in an index. It was as clear as day.

Economic freedom rankings exist inside nations, too. Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer, two of Trump's economic advisers, created comparable league tables for American states - which have proved drastically unhelpful in predicting economic success. The system has been rolled out by the Cato Institute in India, too, encouraging a deregulatory race to the bottom within national borders as well as across them. One of the authors of the report, Bibek Debroy, now chairs the Economic Advisory Council to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.

Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan may be dead. But economic freedom indexes carry the neoliberal banner by deeming the goals of social justice forever illegitimate and pushing states to regard themselves solely as guardians of economic power. Stephen Moore, who was a favourite earlier this year for Trump's appointment to the Federal Reserve Board, put the matter simply. "Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy," he said in an interview. "I'm not even a big believer in democracy." Hong Kong's financial secretary made much the same argument two weeks ago in London, when he cited the city's top economic freedom ranking and reassured his audience that "alongside the protests, the business of business rolls on, unabated".

By colour-coding nations, celebrating victors on glossy paper stock and giving high-ranking countries a reason to celebrate at banquets and balls, the indexes help perpetuate the idea that economics must be protected from the excesses of politics - to the point that an authoritarian government that protects free markets is preferable to a democratic one that redesigns them. At a time when the casting of ballots may lead to changes that threaten the freedom that capital has long enjoyed, the disposability of democracy in the vision of the index is what haunts us, from Santiago to the South China Sea to Washington DC.

Quinn Slobodian is a historian and author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

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Democracy doesn't matter to the defenders of 'economic freedom' | Quinn Slobodian

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wo of the "freest economies" in the world are on fire. According to indexes of "economic freedom" published annually separately by two conservative thinktanks - the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute - Hong Kong has been number one in the rankings for more than 20 years.

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Getty Images

Juleanna Glover has worked as an adviser for several Republican politicians, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Rudy Giuliani, and advised the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Jeb Bush.

By most everyone's judgment, the Senate will not vote to remove President Donald Trump from office if the House impeaches him. But what if senators could vote on impeachment by secret ballot? If they didn't have to face backlash from constituents or the media or the president himself, who knows how many Republican senators would vote to remove?

A secret impeachment ballot might sound crazy, but it's actually quite possible. In fact, it would take only three senators to allow for that possibility.

Story Continued Below

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he will immediately move to hold a trial to adjudicate the articles of impeachment if and when the Senate receives them from the House of Representatives. Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution does not set many parameters for the trial, except to say that "the Chief Justice shall preside," and "no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present." That means the Senate has sole authority to draft its own rules for the impeachment trial, without judicial or executive branch oversight.

During the last impeachment of a president, Bill Clinton, the rules were hammered out by Democrats and Republicans in a collaborative process,as then Senate leaders Trent Lott and Tom Daschle recently pointed out in a Washington Post op-ed. The rules passed unanimously. That's unlikely this time, given the polarization that now defines our politics. McConnell and his fellow Republicans are much more likely to dictate the rules with little input from Democrats.

But, according to current Senate procedure, McConnell will still need a simple majority-51 of the 53 Senate Republicans-to support any resolution outlining rules governing the trial. That means that if only three Republican senators were to break from the caucus, they could block any rule they didn't like. (Vice President Mike Pence can't break ties in impeachment matters.) Those three senators, in turn, could demand a secret ballot and condition their approval of the rest of the rules on getting one.

Some might say transparency in congressional deliberations and votes is inviolable, and it's true that none of the previous Senate impeachments have been conducted via secret ballot. But the Senate's role in an impeachment is analogous to a U.S. jury, where secret ballots are often used. When Electoral College gridlock has resulted in the House picking the president-the House elected Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and John Quincy Adams in 1824-that vote has been secret. And, of course, when citizens vote for president, they do so in private.

Trump and those around him seem confident that he won't lose the 20 Republican senators needed to block a guilty verdict. But it's not hard to imagine three senators supporting a secret ballot. Five sitting Republicansenators have already announced their retirements; four of those are in their mid-70s or older and will never run for office again. They might well be willing to demand secrecy in order to give cover to their colleagues who would like to convict Trump but are afraid to do so because of politics in their home districts. There are also 10 Republicansenators who aren't up for reelection until 2024 and who might figure Trumpism will be irrelevant by then. Senators Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski have been the most vocal Republicans in expressing concerns about Trump's behavior toward Ukraine. Other GOPsenators have recently softened in their defense of him, as well-all before the House has held any public hearings.

There's already been some public speculation that, should the Senate choose to proceed with a secret ballot, Trump would be found guilty. GOP strategist Mike Murphy said recently that a sitting Republican senator had told him 30 of his colleagues would vote to convict Trump if the ballot were secret. Former Senator Jeff Flake topped that, saying he thought 35 Republican senators would vote that way.

While it's unlikely Trump would support a secret ballot, it's possible he might actually benefit from one in the long run. If a secret ballot is agreed on and Trump knows the prospect of impeachment is near, he could then focus his energies on his post-presidency. Once he leaves office, Trump faces multiple possible criminal investigations, at the federal, state and local level. He almost certainly knows that a President Pence could pardon him only for federal crimes. To avoid the prospect of serving time, Trump could negotiate a collective settlement-just as the Sackler family has done in the OxyContin matter-with all the jurisdictions now running independent investigations into his activities. Trump's impeachment, followed by a quick resignation, might appease Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's and New York Attorney General Letitia James's thirst for justice, making them more likely to agree to a deal.

Even McConnell might privately welcome the prospect of a secret ballot.He has always been intently focused on maintaining his Republican majority in the Senate. Trump's approval numbers continue to languish, and support for impeachment has been rising. McConnell himself, facing reelection next year, has an approval rating of just 18 percent in Kentucky, not to mention that the Republican governor there just suffered a stunning upset in last week's election. All of which suggests McConnell might warm to the possibility that he and his caucus could avoid a public up-or-down vote in defense of behavior by the president that's looking increasingly indefensible.

A secret ballot might get Trump out of office sooner than everyone expects: The sooner any three Republican senators make clear that they will support nothing short of a secret ballot, the sooner Trump realizes his best course could be to cut a deal, trading his office for a get-out-of-jail-free card-a clean slate from prosecutors-just as Vice President Spiro Agnew did. And if Trump were to leave office before the end of the year, there might even be enough time for Republicans to have a vibrant primary fight, resulting in a principled Republican as the nominee.

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There's a Surprisingly Plausible Path to Removing Trump From Office

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Juleanna Glover has worked as an adviser for several Republican politicians, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Rudy Giuliani, and advised the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Jeb Bush. By most everyone's judgment, the Senate will not vote to remove President Donald Trump from office if the House impeaches him.

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1. Virginia Democrats Won Because Courts Killed a Racial Gerrymander

2. Podcast Episode
Partisan Gerrymandering Is Over in North Carolina

3. Georgia Is Purging Voter Rolls Again

4. North Carolina's Congressional Gerrymander Is Dead

Slate's Who Counts? series is made possible by the support of Slate Plus members and readers like you.

College Avenue in Fredericksburg, Virginia, isn't just the dividing line that splits a Democratic city into two red-leaning state House districts. The yellow line in the middle of the street is the actual border, so if you drive out of the University of Mary Washington campus and take a left into McDonald's, you cross from one district to another, midturn.

On the last Saturday before Election Day, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder-now leading the Democratic Party's anti-gerrymandering fight-and Joshua Cole, a preacher-turned-Democratic candidate seeking the 28 th District seat, dodged weekend traffic for the ultimate photo op. Holder straddles the yellow line, arms spread across two districts, flanked by Cole on one side and another candidate on the other, smack in the middle of the road.

"Holder told me it's the craziest thing he's ever done," a still-jubilant Cole told me on Thursday, celebrating his own narrow victory (after an 82-vote defeat in 2017) and the first Democratic trifecta in Richmond in more than 25 years. The Democrats took control of both chambers of the statehouse on Tuesday, boosted by the invalidation of a racial gerrymander drawn by Republican lawmakers in 2011.

Cole's campaign, understandably, made gerrymandering a focal point of his race. That won him not only a get-out-the-vote visit from Holder but also one of just 11 Virginia state House endorsements made by Barack Obama. "We ran on this issue," he said, pointing out that Democratic candidates statewide promised voters fair maps and independent redistricting. "Now we all need to be accountable to the people."

Cole might quickly find the middle of Fredericksburg traffic a safer and more comfortable place to be.

Will it be the high ground orhardball?

This past February, both houses of the Virginia legislature-then under GOP control-overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment that would create a bipartisan commission to draw the state's next set of maps in 2021. No one loved the compromise. But amending Virginia's constitution requires passage of the same bill with identical language in two consecutive years, followed by approval by all voters. The laborious process needed to start this year in order to meet the 2021 deadline; this solid compromise-a 16-person commission, half citizens and half politicians, with real transparency provisions and protections against either side jamming through a map the other party hated-was the best attainable deal.

Now the legislature's new Democratic majority needs to make a decision. They can embrace an imperfect deal, pass the amendment a second time, and model the good government practices Holder, Obama, and others have demanded this decade through litigation-even with no assurance or expectation that Republicans will offer similar politesse in the states that they control. Or they could scuttle or slow-walk the constitutional amendment and do a gerrymander of their own, entrench their majority, and punt this blue-leaning state solidly into the Democratic column throughout the 2020s, picking up a handful of crucial congressional seats in the process.

Will it be the high ground or hardball? Here's what makes the Democrats' decision more fraught: Like so much else involving both Virginia and redistricting, it's complicated by race, politics, and mistrust.

While the constitutional amendment cleared the house 83-15 and with a unanimous 40-0 vote in the Senate, most of the opposition to this compromise inside the house of delegates came from the Democratic black caucus, concerned that the amendment itself offers no guarantees of minority representation on the new commission.

"The constitutional amendment is insufficient. Period," Delegate Marcia Price, a prominent member of the legislative black caucus, told me on Wednesday. Price has been an outspoken opponent of gerrymandering but says that in this political climate-pointing to GOP voter suppression efforts in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina-she'd be naïve to back any plan with this much Republican support without clear protections for minority voters.

"If the commission is really for the purpose of protecting residents and their voices, how can we make such a big compromise?" asked Price. "We want to do something. I don't believe that compromise is the only thing we can do. We can find solutions that don't exclude black and brown voices."

Delegate Sam Rasoul, a fellow member of the legislative black caucus, told me that he both supports the amendment and believes that an accompanying bill can be passed that addresses concerns about minority representation and puts additional teeth into the process. "We can't change the amendment," he said, "but how we participate in the process, with equity, can be outlined in enabling legislation."

State Sen. Jennifer McClellan said that the legislature, even as control switches hands, remains "in the process of passing a constitutional amendment and we plan to pass it again." McClellan, who co-sponsored a bill with Price last session that would have added specific criteria for the commission, including a prohibition on the use of political performance data, agreed that additional safeguards for minority representation needed to be added. "We have to work on a criteria bill and on implementing legislation so we can assure the fairest and most compact districts that we can have," she said. But she insisted that fair, competitive districts were good for both Democrats and democracy, and force officials to knock doors and make their case to voters every cycle.

A Democratic gerrymander could go after additional seats in Congress, entrench Democratic elected officials, maximize seats in the legislature, or strategically seek to oust specific Republicans. People involved in the redistricting debate said that former Gov. Terry McAuliffe - who has aggressively spoken out against GOP gerrymanders and may run for governor again in 2021-was encouraging efforts to craft a Democrat-friendly map. McAuliffe declined an interview request from Slate, but sounded non-committal and unwilling to endorse the constitutional amendment on Virginia public radio station on Wednesday. "I am concerned about what we have set up in Virginia," he said, specifically mentioning his discomfort with the state Supreme Court holding the power to draw the lines if the commission deadlocks. "This is something we have to sit and look at."

The president of the Asian American and Pacific Islanders Victory Fund-whose board includes former Washington Gov. Gary Locke, former congressman and Cabinet secretary Norman Mineta, a founder of the liberal State Innovation Exchange, and several former Obama administration officials-tried to pump the brakes on redistricting reform on Twitter. "While the tide is rising high for Democrats since 2017, we cannot unilaterally disarm and fix gerrymandering," wrote Varun Nikore, who was appointed to multiple Virginia boards by McAuliffe and whose organization endorsed several Virginia candidates.

New Jersey Democrats tried a similar move after winning trifecta power in 2017, quickly attempting to alter a bipartisan commission to their advantage. Holder, who intervened in New Jersey, appeared to take a more wait-and-see approach in a statement to Slate. "We share the concern voiced by some members of Virginia's legislative black caucus that the reform passed earlier this year does not have enough protections for minority voters," said Patrick Rodenbush, Holder's spokesman at the National Democratic Redistricting Foundation. "However, that was just the first step in the process. The legislature now has the opportunity to draft the actual criteria and details for reform in a way that protects communities of interest, minority voters, and gives Virginia a truly non-partisan redistricting process."

Democrats could, if they choose, let this amendment die in 2020, remap the state legislature and congressional districts themselves in 2021, and then bring forth a reform effort after that, having etched themselves a decade of likely control.

That plan could have its own political repercussions. Voters understand and hate gerrymandering. Redistricting reformers won statewide ballot initiatives in red and purple states like Utah, Missouri, Colorado, Ohio, and Michigan in 2018. Democrats made an ambitious package of democracy and voting reforms the very first legislation introduced in the U.S. House after reclaiming the majority in 2019. Even while constrained by an unfavorable map, Virginia's turning blue anyway. Democrats hold every statewide office and both U.S. Senate seats. It has gone blue at the presidential level since 2008. Democrats would likely win six or seven of the state's 11 congressional seats under a fair map.

It's also a natural contrast with Republican politicians, who have built barriers to the ballot box after capturing trifectas in swing states such as North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Why abandon a popular reform and further politicize gerrymandering, that rare issue that Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree is horrible for democracy? Why kneecap reformers running on pro-democracy platforms in Virginia and elsewhere, or state litigation that has undone partisan gerrymanders in North Carolina and Pennsylvania?

I had to be missing something, and knew who to call: David Faris, the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty, an aggressive manifesto that recommends fighting right-wing norm-busting with hardball tactics of our own. But even this court-packing advocate of busting California up into seven states with 14 senators wasn't having it. "I hate to disappoint you," he said, "but I think they should go forward with the reform."

Faris says that he conceptualizes fighting dirty in a more high-minded way. "It's about using your constitutional power to level the playing field, not to create an unfair one," he said. "Public opinion has turned against gerrymandering in a significant way. The public relations hit, the cost to their legitimacy, from playing hardball in Virginia is a steep price to pay for the limited advantage they'd get by doing that. One more seat? With a hardcore gerrymander? You can't make an argument in a serious way that you are doing the right thing."

Cole, the youngest black American of either party to be nominated for the state House, guaranteed that he was going to Richmond to do the right thing, and support a reform that mattered deeply to his district. "I know I'm a freshman member and my voice may not hold very much sway, but I will do what I told people I would do," the newly elected delegate said. He said that his fellow Democratic newcomers from 2017 and his class would stay the course. "We still have to deal with some of the old-school Democrats," he said, referring to those in the state Senate. Rasoul and McClellan, meanwhile, vowed that the black caucus' concerns about equity would be addressed comprehensively.

"I think there was a bipartisan spirit before and have no reason to believe that will change," Rasoul said with conviction. "We're hoping cooler heads prevail and we can fix this thing for the next generation."

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Lula is finally out of jail - although, as both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn made clear yesterday, he should have never been there in the first place. It has become increasingly evident that Lula never had a fair trial. He was, in fact, a political prisoner - a victim of lawfare: the manipulation of judicial institutions for politically motivated persecution.

Since Lula's imprisonment, documents released by Glenn Greenwald and the Intercept have shown that the judge and prosecutors were colluding, constructing the case together, and calculating their actions for maximum mediatic and political impact. The messages show the then-judge Sérgio Moro - now minister of justice in the extreme right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro - instructing and advising the prosecution, at the same that he was publicly pretending to be a neutral and technical arbiter.

It is now clear, as former president of Ecuador Rafael Correa has recently stated in an interview to Jacobin: "if [Lula] hadn't been jailed, he would be president of Brazil, but instead we have the fascist Jair Bolsonaro as president, and the judge who jailed Lula is a minister." Armed with this new information, Lula is now waging a judicial battle to annul the whole trial, as Sérgio Moro could not be regarded as an impartial judge.

But that is not why Lula was released this Friday. On Thursday night, the Brazilian Supreme Court finished its much-anticipated deliberation on whether defendants could be imprisoned before appeals to higher courts had been exhausted. On a six to five vote, the court ruled that such incarceration was unlawful until final appeals were exhausted - which is, in fact, what the constitution states quite clearly. Less than twenty-four hours later, Lula was speaking to a euphoric, red crowd outside the federal police headquarters, after 580 days of imprisonment.

This is not the first time that Lula was imprisoned. He was first sent to jail almost forty years ago, while Brazil was still under military dictatorship. Then, Lula was leading the largest industrial workers' strike in the country's history.

Born into one of the poorest areas of Brazil, Lula had migrated with his family to São Paulo as a young boy, and eventually became a metalworker in one of the most densely industrialized regions of the world: São Paulo's ABC district. Under the military dictatorship, strike action was illegal, but since 1976 the Brazilian working class had been creating new forms of industrial action and militancy inside the factories, which forged a new generation of confrontational trade unionists. Lula was a product of this wave of class insurgency that eventually entered in articulation with a network of social movements and catalyzed the return to democracy in Brazil.

In 1980, Lula was imprisoned by the organ of political repression of the military regime under the infamous National Security Law after seventeen days of strike action. His conviction was for "disturbing public order," and he spent thirty-one days in jail without a trial. This show of force from the regime, however, backfired badly, prompting marches and others mobilizations of solidarity, strengthening and further politicizing the workers' movement, which gained support from broad sectors of Brazilian society. When leaving jail, Lula declared proudly: "if I had to go to jail again for the same motives, for representing the demands of my class, they can arrest me another five hundred times."

That very same year, 1980, Lula was pivotal in the creation of the Brazilian Workers' Party, the Partido dos Trabalhadoresor PT. The Workers' Party was created as the result of the confluence of social and popular movements, composing a diverse and heterogeneous coalition including progressive sectors of the Catholic Church (inspired by Christian social teaching), democratic forces resisting the dictatorship, militant trade unions, community associations, revolutionary socialist organizations, and a diverse array of civil society actors from the feminist, environmental, black liberation, and gay rights movements to human rights defenders.

Around the core of an industrial workers' leadership, a complex web of social demands for rights and recognition coalesced into a mass party of the working class, with Lula, from the beginning, playing the role of a catalyst and unifier. Its founding manifesto, launched a few months prior to Lula's imprisonment, opened with the line: "The Workers' Party arises from the need felt by millions of Brazilians to intervene in the social and political life of the country in order to transform it. The most important lesson the Brazilian working class has learned in its struggles is that democracy is an achievement that we either build with our own hands or it will never come." Freedom, the manifesto continues, is never a gift, given from above, but always the doing of our own collective action.

A lot of things have happened during those almost four decades separating these two episodes of Lula's imprisonment. The Workers' Party has grown to become the hegemonic force in Brazilian life, finally gaining the presidency, with Lula himself, in 2001. In this process, it morphed into a much more ambiguous political force. It retained strong links with trade unions and social movements, and still today has a mass membership. Crucially, it contributed massively to alleviating poverty while in office, nearly eradicating hunger and pursuing a policy of full employment which pushed wages upward.

But the overall politics of the PT governments were conciliatory and never represented a clear rupture with neoliberalism. Lula's approach in power was incremental and careful, and the promise of mass democratization and structural transformation of Brazilian society, that inspired the formation of the Workers' Party, was never realized.

In the end, it was the political right that abandoned the democratic pact of the post-dictatorship era, first with the parliamentary coup against President Dilma (the first woman president of Brazil, also from the Workers' Party) and then with the politically charged judicial process against Lula, culminating with his imprisonment in 2018. It was this latter transgression against democracy that ultimately prevented Lula from running in a presidential election in which he was leading in every poll. The Brazilian elite is no longer willing to compromise.

But why do elites still fear Lula? It's common to hear in Brazil that Lula arouses a kind of instinctual class hatred on a subrational level: the wealthy few don't really have anything to fear from Lula (after all, he governed with them!), but they cannot but despise him for his humble origins and manual worker background.

Maybe there is something to that. But the street party that spontaneously erupted after his release, the enthusiasm that many in the working poor still feel toward him, points to another explanation. Lula symbolizes the menace of working-class politics. It is no coincidence that he chose the building of his trade union (the metalworkers' trade union) as a bunker to rally his supporters during the days just before his imprisonment, and no coincidence that it's to that trade union he returned after leaving prison. It is there, surrounded by workers and activists, that Lula feels most at home. It was in that trade union, Lula sometimes says, that his life acquired meaning.

In a recent letter, addressed to the UK Labour Party's annual conference and published in Tribune, Lula wrote: "I was a union leader, I helped create the Workers' Party (PT), and had the honour of being elected and reelected president of my country. Never before had a factory worker reached the highest office in Brazil. For that reason, I needed to prove that the working class is capable of governing." He means that, and he is proud of that. It is his nature, to his bones.

In his last speech, before going to prison, Lula comforted the crowd in front of the metalworkers' trade union by saying: "The powerful few may kill one, two, or three roses, but they can never stop the spring from coming. And our struggle is for the spring."

Yesterday, we saw roses of solidarity coming from committed left leaders around the globe, such as Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Barcelona's mayor Ada Colau. But in Brazil, we are still searching for the spring. Under an authoritarian government that becomes ever more repressive as it doubles down on austerity policies, privatization, and precarization, we will need as much international solidarity as possible. The Brazilian working class and the Left are under attack of a vicious political project that is globally articulated with the most reactionary currents in the world. We can only beat the populist right with an internationalist working-class movement. Our weapon is solidarity, our struggle is international.

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Lula is finally out of jail - although, as both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn made clear yesterday, he should have never been there in the first place. It has become increasingly evident that Lula never had a fair trial.

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"We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world ... In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number."
- Frederick Douglass, 1869

In the late 1860s, Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave turned prose poet of American democracy, toured the country spreading his most sanguine vision of a pluralist future of human equality in the recently re-United States. It is a vision worth revisiting at a time when the country seems once again to be a house divided over ethnicity and race, and over how to interpret our foundational creeds.

The Thirteenth Amendment (ending slavery) had been ratified, Congress had approved the Fourteenth Amendment (introducing birthright citizenship and the equal-protection clause), and Douglass was anticipating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (granting black men the right to vote) when he began delivering a speech titled " Our Composite Nationality " in 1869. He kept it in his oratorical repertoire at least through 1870. What the war-weary nation needed, he felt, was a powerful tribute to a cosmopolitan America-not just a repudiation of a divided and oppressive past but a commitment to a future union forged in emancipation and the Civil War. This nation would hold true to universal values and to the recognition that "a smile or a tear has no nationality. Joy and sorrow speak alike in all nations, and they above all the confusion of tongues proclaim the brotherhood of man."

From December 1866: Frederick Douglass's 'Reconstruction'

Douglass, like many other former abolitionists, watched with high hopes as Radical Reconstruction gained traction in Washington, D.C., placing the ex-Confederate states under military rule and establishing civil and political rights for the formerly enslaved. The United States, he believed, had launched a new founding in the aftermath of the Civil War, and had begun to shape a new Constitution rooted in the three great amendments spawned by the war's results. Practically overnight, Douglass even became a proponent of U.S. expansion to the Caribbean and elsewhere: Americans could now invent a nation whose egalitarian values were worth exporting to societies that were still either officially pro-slavery or riddled with inequality.

The aspiration that a postwar United States might slough off its own past identity as a pro-slavery nation and become the dream of millions who had been enslaved, as well as many of those who had freed them, was hardly a modest one. Underlying it was a hope that history itself had fundamentally shifted, aligning with a multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious country born of the war's massive blood sacrifice. Somehow the tremendous resistance of the white South and former Confederates, which Douglass himself predicted would take ever more virulent forms, would be blunted. A vision of "composite" nationhood would prevail, separating Church and state, giving allegiance to a single new Constitution, federalizing the Bill of Rights, and spreading liberty more broadly than any civilization had ever attempted.

Was this a utopian vision, or was it grounded in a fledgling reality? That question, a version of which has never gone away, takes on an added dimension in the case of Douglass. One might well wonder how a man who, before and during the war, had delivered some of the most embittered attacks on American racism and hypocrisy ever heard could dare nurse the optimism evident from the very start of the speech. How could Douglass now believe that his reinvented country was, as he declared, "the most fortunate of nations" and "at the beginning of our ascent"?
From December 2018: Randall Kennedy on the confounding truth about Frederick Douglass
few americans denounced the tyranny and tragedy at the heart of America's institutions more fiercely than Douglass did in the first quarter century of his public life. In 1845, seven years after his escape to freedom, Douglass's first autobiography was published to great acclaim, and he set off on an extraordinary 19-month trip to the British Isles, where he experienced a degree of equality unimaginable in America. Upon his return, in 1847, he let his profound ambivalence about the concepts of home and country be known. "I have no love for America, as such," he announced in a speech he delivered that year. "I have no patriotism. I have no country." Douglass let his righteous anger flow in metaphors of degradation, chains, and blood. "The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man," he declared, "except as a piece of property." All that attached him to his native land were his family and his deeply felt ties to the "three millions of my fellow-creatures, groaning beneath the iron rod ... with ... stripes upon their backs." Such a country, Douglass said, he could not love. "I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible, and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments."

Six years later, as the crisis over slavery's future began to tear apart the nation's political system, Douglass intensified his attacks on American hypocrisy and wanted to know just who could be an American. "The Hungarian, the Italian, the Irishman, the Jew and the Gentile," he said about the huge waves of European immigration, "all find in this goodly land a home." But "my white fellow-countrymen ... have no other use for us [blacks] whatever, than to coin dollars out of our blood." Demanding his birthright as an American, he felt like only the "veriest stranger and sojourner."

The fact that emancipation, extracted through blood and agony, could so quickly transform Douglass into the author of a hopeful new vision of his country is stunning, a testament to the revolutionary sense of history embraced by this former slave and abolitionist. Yet he had always believed that America had a "mission"-that the United States was a set of ideas despite its "tangled network of contradictions." Now the time had come to reconceive the mission. Douglass's immediate post-Civil War definition of a nation came quite close to the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson's modern conception of an "imagined community." In his "Composite Nationality" speech, Douglass explained that nationhood "implies a willing surrender and subjection of individual aims and ends, often narrow and selfish, to the broader and better ones that arise out of society as a whole. It is both a sign and a result of civilization." And a nation requires a story that draws its constituent parts into a whole. The postwar United States served as a beacon-"the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family."

Americans needed a new articulation of how their country was an idea, Douglass recognized, and he gave it to them. Imagine the audacity, in the late 1860s, to affirm the following for the reinvented United States:

A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for its existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family.

Few better expressions exist of America's founding principles of popular sovereignty, natural rights, and the separation of Church and state. From his enslaved youth onward, Douglass had loved the principles and hated their flouting in practice. And he had always believed in an Old Testament version of divine vengeance and justice, sure that the country would face a rending and a renewal. Proudly, he now declared such a nation a "standing offense" to "narrow and bigoted people."

In the middle section of his speech, Douglass delivered a striking argument on behalf of Chinese immigration to America, then emerging as an important political issue. In the Burlingame Treaty, negotiated between the U.S. and the empire of China in 1868, the American government acknowledged the "inalienable right" of migration and accepted Chinese immigrants, but it denied them any right to be naturalized as citizens. Douglass predicted a great influx of Chinese fleeing overcrowding and hunger in their native country, and finding work in the mines and expanding railroads in the West. They would surely face violence and prejudice, Douglass warned. In language that seems timely today, he projected himself into the anti-immigrant mind. "Are not the white people the owners of this continent?" he asked. "Is there not such a thing as being more generous than wise? In the effort to promote civilization may we not corrupt and destroy what we have?"

But this rhetorical gesture of empathy for the racists gave way to a full-blown attack. He urged Americans not to fear the alien character of Asian languages or cultures. The Chinese, like all other immigrants, would assimilate to American laws and folkways. They "will cross the mountains, cross the plains, descend our rivers, penetrate to the heart of the country and fix their home with us forever." The Chinese, the "new element in our national composition," would bring talent, skill, and laboring ethics honed over millennia. Douglass invoked the morality of the natural-rights tradition. "There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible." Migratory rights, he asserted, are "human rights," and he reminded Americans that "only one-fifth of the population of the globe is white and the other four-fifths are colored."

Just as important, he placed the issue in the context of America's mission. The United States ought to be a home for people "gathered here from all quarters of the globe." All come as "strangers," bringing distinct cultures with them, but American creeds can offer a common ground. Though conflict may ensue, a nation of "strength and elasticity" would emerge through contact and learning. What might sound like a manifesto for multicultural education in the 1990s or a diversity mission statement at any university today actually has a long history.

Douglass made sure to embed his bold vision in first principles. To the argument that it is "natural" for people to collide over their cultural differences and to see one another only through mutual "reproachful epithets," he countered with the notion that "nature has many sides," and is not static. "It is natural to walk," Douglass wrote, "but shall men therefore refuse to ride? It is natural to ride on horseback, shall men therefore refuse steam and rail? Civilization is itself a constant war upon some forces in nature, shall we therefore abandon civilization and go back to savage life?" Douglass called on his fellow citizens to recognize that "man is man the world over ... The sentiments we exhibit, whether love or hate, confidence or fear, respect or contempt, will always imply a like humanity." But he did not merely ask Americans to all get along. He asked his fellow countrymen to make real freedom out of slavery, out of their sordid history-to see that they had been offered a new beginning for their national project, and to have the courage to execute it.

swept up in hope, Douglass did not anticipate the rising tide of nativism that lay ahead in the Gilded Age. The U.S. passed a first Chinese-exclusion law, directed at women who were deemed "immoral" or destined for forced labor, in 1875. By 1882, Sinophobia and violence against the Chinese led to the federal Chinese Exclusion Act, banning virtually any immigration by the group-the first such restrictive order against all members of a particular ethnicity in American history. Those who remained in the country lived constrained and dangerous lives; in the late 1880s, Chinese miners were gruesomely massacred in mines across the West. The Chinese also faced the hostility of white workers who now fashioned the ideology of "free labor" into a doctrine that sought to eliminate any foreign competition for jobs, especially in economic hard times. For Douglass, these bleak realities were just the outcomes he had warned against as Reconstruction gathered momentum.

Immigrants from Europe continued to stream into the United States, even as a resurgent white South gained control of its society in the latter days of Reconstruction. As nativism, racism, and nationalism converged in the closing decades of the 19th century, the idea of America as a cosmopolitan nation of immigrants fought for survival. Eugenics acquired intellectual legitimacy; and violence, and eventually Jim Crow laws, consolidated a system of white supremacy.
Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia to rival the great universities in the North and transform a slave-owning generation. As the university celebrates its 200th anniversary, Annette Gordon-Reed reviews Alan Taylor's new book about how Jefferson's plan was launched.
By the 1890s Douglass, aging and in ill health but still out on the lecture circuit, felt hard-pressed to sustain hope for the transformations at the heart of the "Composite Nationality" speech. He never renounced his faith in natural rights or in the power of the vote. But in the last great speech of his life, "Lessons of the Hour" -an excoriating analysis of the "excuses" and "lie" at the root of lynching-Douglass betrayed a faith "shaken" and nearly gone. Disenfranchisement and murderous violence left him observing a nation mired in lawless horror. Lynchings were "lauded and applauded by honorable men ... guardians of Southern women" who enabled other men to behave "as buzzards, vultures, and hyenas." A country once endowed with "nobility" was crushed by mob rule. His dream in tatters, Douglass begged his audiences to remember that the Civil War and Reconstruction had "announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages."

Many civil wars leave legacies of continuing conflict, renewed bloodshed, unstable political systems. Ours did just that, even as it forged a new history and a new Constitution. In 2019, our composite nationality needs yet another rebirth. We could do no better than to immerse ourselves in Douglass's vision from 1869. Nearly 20 years earlier, he had embraced the exercise of human rights as "the deepest and strongest of all the powers of the human soul," proclaiming that "no argument, no researches into mouldy records, no learned disquisitions, are necessary to establish it." But the self-evidence of natural rights, as Douglass the orator knew, does not guarantee their protection and practice. "To assert it, is to call forth a sympathetic response from every human heart, and to send a thrill of joy and gladness round the world." And to keep asserting those rights, he reminds us, will never cease to be necessary.

Practicing them is crucial too. In an 1871 editorial he took a position worth heeding today. The failure to exercise one's right to vote, he wrote, "is as great a crime as an open violation of the law itself." Only a demonstration of rebirth in our composite nation and of vibrancy in our democracy will again send thrills of joy and emulation around the world about America. Such a rebirth ought not to be the object of our waiting but of our making, as it was for the Americans, black and white, who died to end slavery and make the second republic.
This article appears in the December 2019 print edition with the headline "The Possibility of America."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

David W. Blight is a professor of American history and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author, most recently, of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

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tremendous resistance of the white south

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conspicuous example of composite nationality

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first quarter century of his public life

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great influx of chinese fleeing overcrowding

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author of a hopeful new vision of his country

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Frederick Douglass's Vision for a Reborn America

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"We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world ... In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number."

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Martin Luther King Jr marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 in protest of attempts by white legislators across the south to prevent African Americans from voting. At the time, black people outnumbered white people in Selma but comprised only 2% of the voting rolls.

Over 50 years later, King's cousin, Christine Jordan, then 92 years old, showed up at her polling station in Atlanta, Georgia, to vote in the 2018 midterm election, just as she had in elections for the previous 50 years. But she was told there was no record of her voter registration.

"It's horrible, she held civil rights meetings in her home and they had no record of her," Jessica Lawrence, her granddaughter, said at the time.

Jordan's troubles were not unusual. Although America prides itself on holding free and fair elections, and the right to vote is enshrined as the foundational principle of its democracy, there is mounting evidence of systemic attempts to prevent growing numbers of Americans from being able to exercise it.

Until recently, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured that the federal government had oversight of changes to voting systems in those US states that had a history of voting discrimination. But that changed six years ago with a supreme court ruling that gutted the law. It meant that those very same states no longer had to get "pre-clearance" from the federal government for legislation affecting elections and voting processes. In other words, the states with the worst history of voting discrimination were free to revert to something like their previous behavior.

The Brennan Center at New York University - the foremost non-partisan organization devoted to voting rights and voting reform - reports that "over the last 20 years, states have put barriers in front of the ballot box - imposing strict voter ID laws, cutting voting times, restricting registration, and purging voter rolls. These efforts, which received a boost when the supreme court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013, have kept significant numbers of eligible voters from the polls, hitting all Americans, but placing special burdens on racial minorities, poor people, and young and old voters."

The measures these states have introduced, affecting millions of Americans, are designed to suppress the vote, hence the term "voter suppression".

Such policies not only endanger the gains of the civil rights era, which ushered in the Voting Rights Act, but they also threaten the notion that the United States is at the forefront of western liberal democracies.

In an interview last year Barack Obama said, "We're the only advanced democracy that deliberately discourages people from voting."

And Carol Anderson, author of One Person No Vote and an adviser on the Guardian's new voting rights series, wrote in a piece titled Voting While Black that "the recent spate of whites calling 911 on African Americans for barbecuing while black, waiting in Starbucks while black, sleeping at Yale while black ad nauseam has led to a much-needed discussion about the policing of public spaces. Yet, there's another important public space where blackness has been policed and we have been far too silent about it: the voting booth.

In 2016, pummeled by voter suppression in more than 30 states, the black voter turnout plummeted seven percentage points

"In 2016, pummeled by voter suppression in more than 30 states, the black voter turnout plummeted by seven percentage points. For the GOP, that was an effective kill rate. For America, it was a lethal assault on democracy."

This is why today the Guardian is launching The Fight to Vote, a yearlong investigation of the American democratic process and its failures. It will scrutinize compromised electoral systems, give a platform to voices silenced at the polls and reveal how voting suppression is already shaping the 2020 election.

Struggle for the franchise

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Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta Scott King lead a black voting rights march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery. Photograph: William Lovelace/Getty Images

The struggle for the right to vote in the US has existed as long as the country itself. In 1789, after the ratification of the constitution, suffrage was extended only to white, property-owning men. Following the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, black people were permitted to vote, but after a brief period when black politicians began to win elections, the white majority began to institute restrictions like those that motivated King's march from Selma.

International comparisons show how voting restrictions are a stain on US democracy. In Australia, voting is compulsory. In Sweden, all voters are automatically registered. Both nations rank high on an " electoral integrity index " produced by academics at Harvard University and the University of Sydney.

Yet rather than being ranked with other major western democracies, the US falls lower down the list alongside countries like Kosovo and Romania.

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Guardian graphic | Source: The Perceptions of Electoral Integrity expert survey, country-level (PEI 7.0)

Of particular concern in the US, said Sarah Repucci, senior director at Freedom House, a thinktank in Washington DC, "are the techniques that target minority (mostly black) voters, instituted by Republican-controlled state governments. Countries that have targeted minority voters include Cameroon, Kosovo - hardly regimes that Americans would consider to be our peers."

It's no surprise that the US trails behind other democracies in voter turnout - about 55% of eligible Americans voted in the 2016 elections, compared with around 87% in Belgium and 78% in South Korea.

Partisan officials

At every stage of the voting process, Americans face hurdles determined by where they live. Election law is set by partisan state lawmakers and administered, in most places, by secretaries of state, who are partisan officials.

In several Republican-leaning states, the difficulties voters face start with the documents they are required to produce in order to exercise their democratic right. Legislators across the country have tightened the requirements for acceptable forms of identification - this in a country where 7% of Americans do not have photo IDs, and the number is higher among black and Hispanic populations.

It's no surprise that the US trails behind other democracies in voter turnout-about 55% of eligible Americans voted in the 2016 election

In 2016, Wisconsin reinstated strict voter ID laws, ostensibly to fight voter fraud, which experts have repeatedly found to be almost non-existent.

For this reason, in the run-up to the presidential election, a woman named Anita Johnson traversed three counties in the south-east of the state. She was part of an entire industry of activists trying to get people to the polls.

When Johnson, who is an attorney and works with the not-for-profit VoteRiders, made her way through the majority black communities in towns such as Racine and Kenosha, she battled rumors and confusion about what forms of ID people needed to vote. She accompanied them to various government offices to get a driver's license or helped them find the old address records that they needed to register. It became clear to her that Wisconsin's policies were discouraging would-be voters.

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Anita Johnson, at her home in Milwaukee. Photograph: Lauren Justice/The Guardian

"I've done this all year since the 2018 election - the thing is to not stop," she said. "There is going to be a lot of confusion during the 2020 election because not everyone pays attention to democracy like I do."

And not everyone in the state had an activist like Johnson to help them. When Donald Trump eventually won Wisconsin with a 22,000-vote lead, political analysts found that in the city of Milwaukee alone there was a 3% lower turnout, or 41,000 fewer votes cast, than four years before.

"The most serious curtailment to voting rights and turnout in Wisconsin is due to the extreme and restrictive photo voter ID law," said Jay Heck, director of Common Cause, a non-partisan government accountability group in the state.

The same year, 600,000 people in Texas were estimated to lack the IDs needed to vote under the state's strict guidelines. Virginia put new restrictions on organizations and not-for-profits that were registering people to vote through drives and campaigns. This year, Tennessee sought to make such groups subject to criminal penalties if they make mistakes.

'Phony pretexts'

For many Americans, even finding a voting booth presents a formidable challenge. A report released a few months ago by the the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a civil rights organization, revealed that 1,688 polling places have been shut since 2012. These closures have taken place in states with histories of racial discrimination in elections, including 214 precinct closures in Georgia.

As Sean Young, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, "our elections officials are supposed to defend and protect our democracy. Instead, many have been aggressively pushing poll closures in communities of color with phony pretexts."

Ten per cent of Georgia's counties were left with a single precinct for all voters, with some having to travel miles to cast their votes. Outranking Georgia, Texas had 760 poll closures and Arizona had 320.

These poll closures are a direct result of the changes to the Voting Rights Act in 2013 - previously Georgia was one of nine states that had to get pre-clearance before they shuttered polling stations or made changes to electoral law. That is no longer the case.

Voter purge

And if stricter voter ID laws and the closure of polling booths aren't sufficient deterrents, there are yet more ways to discourage and suppress the vote. Another method is called a "voter purge"- and it is precisely what happened to Christine Jordan, King's cousin.

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Christine Jordan, Martin Luther King's cousin. Photograph: Greg Palast

Jordan thought she was registered to vote when she went to the polls. She hadn't changed her residence or her name. Yet she had still been wiped from the rolls, like 17 million other people in the US between 2016 and 2018, according to the Brennan Center.

"Voter purging" is when officials scrub names from the voter rolls ostensibly to ensure people don't vote twice and that people who have died or moved get removed from the rolls. These are perfectly legitimate justifications.

Yet it tends to be more common, the Brennan Center reported, in areas and states that previously would have been prevented from making such changes by the Voting Rights Act. Places, that is, with a history of voting discrimination.

And as the Brennan Center reports, "Problems arise when states remove voters who are still eligible to vote. States rely on faulty data that purport to show that a voter has moved to another state.

"Oftentimes, these data get people mixed up. In big states like California and Texas, multiple individuals can have the same name and date of birth, making it hard to be sure that the right voter is being purged when perfect data are unavailable.

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Boxes containing mail-in-ballots sit waiting to be sorted at the San Francisco City Hall polling location in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016. Photograph: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

One infamous system, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck System, has been used by dozens of states since it was introduced in 2005 to search for people who are registered in more than one jurisdiction. A 2017 study found that Crosscheck is 99% more likely to purge legitimate rather than inadmissible voters.

The authors of the study stated, " We find that one of Crosscheck's proposed purging strategies would eliminate about 300 registrations used to cast a seemingly legitimate vote for every one registration used to cast a double vote."

Felon disenfranchisment

Weigh up the combined impacts of strict ID laws, poll closures and voter purges and you are still nowhere close to estimating the number of people who are actively deterred from voting in the US. Another approximately 4.7 million Americans are prevented from voting at all. This is the number of convicted felons who have no right to vote, including those incarcerated for grave crimes such as homicide and rape but also encompassing charges including burglary and repeated driving under the influence.

Forty-eight states have some form of felon disenfranchisement, but three states - Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia - disenfranchise people for life. The impacts are disproportionate: one in 13 African Americans have lost their right to vote as a result, compared with one in 56 non-black voters, according to the Sentencing Project.

Jevon Gerrard Stevens, a 42-year-old water treatment plant operator for Miami-Dade county water and sewer department in Florida, was convicted of third-degree grand theft auto in 1998, which resulted in his jailing for three months. He hasn't been able to vote for 21 years.

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"It's a way for those that are in power to control the less fortunate, and once you become a convicted felon you fall right into that category," he said.

There are signs, however, of a nationwide change in sentiment. Until recently, Florida had one of the strictest felon disenfranchisement rules in the country. Then, in late 2018, a majority of Floridians voted to return the franchise to felons after they leave prison - to Stevens' delight.

The move, which has been contested by Republicans, has the potential to restore the vote to 1.4 million people in the state, a not insignificant number considering that the margin between Trump and Hillary Clinton in the last presidential election in Florida was just 1.2 points.

Gerrymandering

There are numerous other ways politicians and operatives have worked to dilute the power of Americans' votes.

Many states allow gerrymandering, or the drawing of electoral district lines to favor one party by packing voters from another party into as few districts as possible, leaving them with fewer seats after election day. In a remarkable move in July, the supreme court decided not to offer a ruling, in a 5-4 majority decision, on partisan gerrymandering. It was saying, in effect, that it would not find partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional.

In an excoriating dissent, Elena Kagan and the court's liberal justices accused the court's majority of shirking its duty.

"The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives."

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Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote?

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Martin Luther King Jr marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 in protest of attempts by white legislators across the south to prevent African Americans from voting. At the time, black people outnumbered white people in Selma but comprised only 2% of the voting rolls.

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The biggest under-the-radar political story is the Republican Party's tenuous hold on 10 legislative chambers in eight blue or purple states: Arizona (House/Senate), Florida (Senate), Iowa (House), Michigan (House/Senate), Minnesota (Senate), North Carolina (Senate), Pennsylvania (Senate) and Wisconsin (Senate).

And if you agree with Sen. John Cornyn John Cornyn DNC chief: 'Texas is a battleground' Senate Republicans struggle to coalesce behind an impeachment strategy Overnight Health Care: Studies show teen e-cig users favor Juul products, mint flavors | Warren offers plan to reduce veteran suicide rate | WH official calls Pelosi drug plan 'unworkable' MORE (R-Texas) assessment that his home state of Texas is "on the precipice of turning purple," add the Texas Senate to the list.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party holds similarly tight leads in seven legislative chambers - all Senate - in seven states: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Oregon. The difference is that most of these states are solidly blue, while the others are Bluish-Purple, meaning Republicans are unlikely to seize control anytime soon.

And so the 2020 elections could transform our nation's political power structure beyond the presidency, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House. Republicans control 59 state legislative chambers, compared to 39 for Democrats. Since the 2010 elections, Republicans have controlled no fewer than 56. Yet Democrats now have a legitimate shot at ending the GOP's nearly decade-long state legislature dominance.

Tuesday night's results in Virginia could be a bellwether. Heading into the 2017 elections, Republicans held a 66-34 majority in the House of Delegates. Their loss of 21 seats these past two cycles shouldn't be viewed in a vacuum, as the Democratic takeover of both the House and Senate marked the seventh and eighth state legislative chambers that have swung from Republican- to Democratic-controlled since the start of Donald Trump Donald John Trump Biden allies see boost in Tuesday's election results Sanders vows to end Trump's policies as he unveils immigration proposal Republicans warn election results are 'wake-up call' for Trump MORE 's presidency. During that time, Democrats have lost only one legislative body - a shift to a power-share arrangement in the Alaska State House.

Trump's approval rating in Virginia heading into Tuesday was -6 percent. His approval is also negative in each of the eight blue/purple states where Republicans are clinging to state power: -4 percent in Arizona, -2 percent in Florida, -14 percent in Iowa, -10 percent in Michigan, -11 percent in Minnesota, -3 percent in North Carolina, -8 percent in Pennsylvania, and -11 percent in Wisconsin. Trump carried seven of these eight states in 2016, highlighting just how much the political landscape has changed in places where the GOP recently felt secure.

Why does all this matter? In most cases, state government's re-draw legislative district lines immediately following the completion of the United States' decennial census. The November 2020 results will impact state and national politics and policies for the next decade.

If Democrats succeed in claiming the 10 narrowly divided legislative chambers in eight winnable states, they would slice into the GOP's trifectas (control of the state house, state senate, and governorship) in Arizona, Florida, and Iowa. As a result, newly created maps could not be easily gerrymandered.

Additionally, such Democratic gains would hand the party trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota, while creating more leverage in the states with Republican Houses and Senates and Democratic governors: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

North Carolina is a particularly interesting case, as Republicans hold a 10-3 seat advantage in the U.S. House despite winning only 50.4 percent of the House vote in 2018. While the state's courts continue to demand newly drawn district lines for next year's elections, both sides know these maps will require another overhaul in 2021. A Democratic-controlled Senate paired with Democratic Governor Roy Cooper assuredly would result in maps all-but-guaranteeing at least three more U.S. House seats for Democrats (or a 7-6 Republican-Democratic split).

In light of what is bound to be an exceptionally heated and monumental presidential election, a high-stakes battle for the U.S. Senate, and a fascinating series of U.S. House contests in the potential wake of a Trump impeachment, Tuesday's elections reinforce how much local politics influence national politics and policy.

For the better part of a decade, Republicans have governed blue/purple electorates that are not ideologically aligned with them. Democrats were in the same boat decades ago, ruling over increasingly red populations. When the dam broke in 1994 and then in 2010, the Democratic Party was never the same.

If the dam breaks for Republicans in these blue/purple states in 2020, it will be felt for many years.
B.J. Rudell is associate director of POLIS: Duke University's Center for Political Leadership, Innovation and Service, part of the Sanford School of Public Policy. In a career encompassing stints on Capitol Hill, on a presidential campaign, in a newsroom, in classrooms, and for a consulting firm, he has authored three books and has shared political insights across all media platforms, including for CNN and Fox News.

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The GOP's tenuous grip on blue and purple state legislatures

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The biggest under-the-radar political story is the Republican Party's tenuous hold on 10 legislative chambers in eight blue or purple states: Arizona (House/Senate), Florida (Senate), Iowa (House), Michigan (House/Senate), Minnesota (Senate), North Carolina (Senate), Pennsylvania (Senate) and Wisconsin (Senate). And if you agree with Sen.

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Michigan Rep. Justin Amash caught Washington's attention over the July 4 holiday with his personal declaration of independence from the Republican Party. "The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions," Amash wrote in a Washington Post op-ed announcing his parting with not only the GOP but also the very concept of party affiliation.

Amash is right: The two-party system is indeed in a "partisan death spiral" (or, as I prefer to call it, a "Two-Party Doom Loop "). But Amash's solution of simply rejecting any party identification and bashing partisanship is as impractical as his limited-government libertarianism.

Without parties to put forward programs, limit political choices to a manageable number and engage voters, modern democracy fractures into incoherence.

Parties - and therefore partisanship - are essential to modern mass democracy. Without parties to put forward programs, limit political choices to a manageable number and engage voters, modern democracy fractures into incoherence. The alternative to partisanship is not nonpartisan deliberation, as Amash argues. It's chaos.

Thus, the answer to the two-party doom loop is not to get rid of partisanship. What we need instead is more partisanship. That is, we need more parties. The binary nature of partisanship in our system echoes every other social conflict we have and rolls them into one sweeping, deafening, zero-sum contest for the soul of the nation, making our political system unworkable.

A multiparty system, in contrast, makes space for flexible coalitions and for parties to change in a responsive and resilient manner. It doesn't require voters to choose between one of just two opposing teams - a divisive choice that works poorly with the tribal parts of our brain that see the world in black and white.

Amash in his op-ed made reference to his experience in Congress as a frustrated dissident within a top-down Republican Party. He complained, "With little genuine debate on policy happening in Congress, party leaders distract and divide the public by exploiting wedge issues and waging pointless messaging wars."

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This is a fair and resonant critique. Both parties have centralized power in a leadership always focused on winning the next election, and winning the next election means drawing sharp contrasts, not making deals to solve pressing public issues.

Amash also wrote: "These strategies fuel mistrust and anger, leading millions of people to take to social media to express contempt for their political opponents, with the media magnifying the most extreme voices."

But it's not entirely fair to blame social media. Social media is certainly an amplifier, but the causes of polarization go far deeper and further back. They are more structural.

Indeed, the partisan polarization has deep roots in the electorate. Largely, it's the result of the way the two party coalitions have sorted along ethnic, religious, cultural and, most of all, geographical lines. Today, the Democrats and the Republicans represent two very different visions for American identity: Democrats for urban cosmopolitan diversity, Republicans for rural traditionalism.

These divisions, combined with the way our winner-take-all system of elections leads both parties to ignore sizeable parts of the country they see as unwinnable, amplify and reinforce the us-against-them politics that is so maddeningly destructive. Because the two parties represent such different values, the stakes of each election seem so much higher.

The winner-take-all contests, both in the House and the highly disproportionate Senate, also overrepresent rural America and underrepresent urban America. As a result, Republicans now have a built-in six-point advantage in both chambers.

Because the GOP is up against unfriendly demographic trends ( more people are moving to cities; America is growing more secular and diverse), they've pushed harder on gerrymandering and voting restrictions to maintain what appear to more Americans as unfair advantages (well, unfair only if you think the party that gets the most votes should win the most seats). But they've justified these acts by arguing that Democrats are engaging in voter fraud, and would gerrymander even worse if they were drawing district lines.

These perceived unfairnesses make political conflict feel even more high-stakes. Democracy depends on some basic shared sense of electoral fairness. Without it, electoral results start to feel illegitimate. Might threatens to make right. A death spiral indeed.

While Amash's criticisms resonate, his solution rings hollow. He predictably cites George Washington's valedictory inveighing against the evils of partisanship; but despite the framers' clever constitutional design, political parties formed almost immediately after the first president left office. Parties, it turned out, were incredibly useful for organizing voting coalitions and building public brands. No modern mass democracy has thrived without parties, and for good reason. Parties are necessary to organize politics.

But for most of American political history, these parties were loose and baggy coalitions without coherent ideological programs. (The obvious exception to this was the 1850s and the 1860s.) This flexible incoherence meant that while America had a two-party system in name, it had something more akin to a multiparty system in practice. For most of the second half of the 20th century, American politics operated more like a four-party system, with liberal Republicans often voting with liberal Democrats, and conservative Democrats often voting with conservative Republicans.

That made governing possible, with support for the president neither anathema nor knee-jerk, and Congress organized in a decentralized, committee-oriented fashion, which is how it has been most effective.

But as the party coalitions re-sorted along regional and identity lines starting in the 1980s in response to the tumultuous politics following the rights revolutions of the '60s and the '70s, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats began to vanish. In 2010, America became a truly two-party system, with two distinct and mostly nonoverlapping coalitions, each with a very separate geography. Since then, it has become ungovernable.

I choose 2010 because that was when the conservative Blue Dog Democrats dwindled to irrelevance in the midterm election, essentially eliminating the last vestiges of the old four-party system. It was also the year when Amash won his first election to Congress as a young Tea Party Republican.

Binary political conflict oversimplifies by limiting us to just two choices. The simplicity makes us more certain we are right. It makes compromise difficult. Multiparty political conflict, on the other hand, complicates by expanding the choices. It adds new dimensions. Complexity confuses us. This is good, because it opens us to new approaches and new ideas. When we are uncertain, we seek out new information, and this makes political compromise possible because we are more open to new perspectives.

What Americans need - and want - is more political parties.

When no party expects to win an outright majority in an election, campaigning doesn't rely on a negative, lesser-of-two evils logic. And voters tend to be happier.

If the United States moved to a system of modest proportional representation, in which legislative seats were allocated to match the share of the vote each party received (ideally in five-member districts, with ranked-choice voting, like Ireland), we'd probably wind up with five or six parties.

No party would have a majority in Congress, and so parties would need to build governing coalitions as happens in other multiparty systems. No president would have an automatic majority either. In multiparty democracies, parties must join together to govern. More perspectives are represented. And policymaking winds up closer to the middle. When no party expects to win an outright majority in an election, campaigning doesn't rely on a negative, lesser-of-two evils logic. And voters tend to be happier.

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Opinion | To fix American democracy, we need more partisanship, not less

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Michigan Rep. Justin Amash caught Washington's attention over the July 4 holiday with his personal declaration of independence from the Republican Party. "The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions," Amash wrote in a Washington Post op-ed announcing his parting with not only the GOP but also the very concept of party affiliation.

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How do you know when you've seen a gerrymandered district? Maybe it looks like a duck or a snake, or a pair of earmuffs. Or maybe there's no obvious sign that the mapmakers played games with the contours in order to ensure a particular electoral outcome inside those boundaries.

The last contests using the current set of congressional maps are a year away. After that, the results of the 2020 census will be used for the redistricting of the entire country - assuring a fresh burst of gerrymandering by politicians with the power to draw maps designed for keeping themselves in power. (The North Carolina districts mentioned below are very likely to get altered before the next election, however, to settle a lawsuit alleging the current map favors Republicans so much as to violate the state Constitution's "fair elections" clause.)

We asked half a dozen people who have studied the way American political maps are drawn to reveal their best examples of the most flagrant current gerrymandering. Of course there are plenty of ways to approach that task. In some cases, the really odd shapes make it easier. In others, experts need to dive deep into demographic data to discover the most egregious examples of packing and cracking.

The experts we asked, in alphabetical order:

Their choices are listed here, starting with the districts mentioned most often. Their rationales have been slightly edited to improve clarity and reduce repetition. Disagree with their list? Let us know which congressional districts you believe are wrongly excluded.

1. Beside Lake Erie
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Fierman: Ohio's so-called "snake by the lake" 9th District, which stretches from Toledo to Cleveland, is so thin and strangely shaped that they actually drove to Lake Erie to monitor sea levels with respect to the contiguity of the district. They are concerned that climate change could make the district non-contiguous and consequently altered in the next round of redistricting.

Hill: Democrat Marcy Kaptur is never far from the shore when traveling her district. Comprising portions of Cuyahoga, Erie, Lorain, Lucas and Ottawa counties and bordering Michigan and Canada via Lake Erie, the narrow district is almost laughable - though it is probably the best place to visit in Ohio because of the beaches and Cedar Point amusement park.

Lamar: In May a panel of federal judges in Cincinnati described the district as "a bizarre, elongated sliver of a district that sever[s] numerous counties." The purpose for that nonsensical grouping is to pack as many Democratic voters as possible into a single district. The court held that the 9th is a blatant partisan gerrymander, but there will be no federal judicial remedy since the Supreme Court's ruling in June that the courts have no role in ending partisan gerrymandering.

Miller: The 9th was designed by the Republican who controlled state mapmaking in 2001 to get rid of a Democratic House member, by making two incumbents living more than 100 miles apart compete for one seat. The economic differences across the district are significant. The scientific industry is the largest employer in Cleveland, then represented by Dennis Kucinich, but science jobs are far less common in Kaptur's Toledo and fairly rare in the rural counties where either agriculture or tourism reign. The cultural differences couldn't be starker: Residents of Toledo are seven times more likely to root for the University of Michigan (Ohio State's rival since 1918) than those in Cleveland. And even tiny communities like Florence, with 2,400 residents, are represented by two different members of Congress. When large cities are packed together and small communities cracked apart, it becomes pretty obvious that constituents are being robbed of real representation.

2. North Carolina campuses
https://mapchart.net/
Fierman: North Carolina A&T State University is the largest historically black college in America. In 2011, Republicans won a majority in the General Assembly and packed black voters and A&T students into the 12th District. In 2016, the court ruled that district was a racial gerrymander and ordered the drawing of new maps. The result was an example of cracking: A&T is divided between two districts that are reliably Republican, the 6th held by Mark Walker and the 13th represented by Ted Budd.

Lamar: Federal courts held that the long, snake-like 12 th District was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because it packed too many black voters and A&T students into one district. Rather than preserving A&T as an obviously distinct unit in the redistricting process, the new map split the university down the middle, which effectively dilutes the significant voting power of the university's 10,000 students. The 6th and 13th are both represented by white, male Republicans.

Hill: The 4th was so bad it had to be redrawn. The result still isn't exactly a beauty - two separate shapes held together by a thin connection. While the district still includes Raleigh and Chapel Hill, it formerly included Durham - placing the Duke and North Carolina campuses in one district. The seat is held comfortably by Democrat David Price, who won with 72 percent in 2018.

3. Spreading from Baltimore
https://mapchart.net/
Oleson: Maryland is the shamefaced owner of the single worst gerrymander in the nation. The 3rd District mangles the central part of the state as it snakes its way northeast from Annapolis, then west, again eastward, and one more time northwest(ish) until it's close to the top of the state - passing in and out (and sometimes back in again) of four counties and Baltimore City. The district has been characterized by a federal judge as a "broken-winged pterodactyl lying prostrate across the state" and also likened to "blood spatter at a crime scene." With such a sprawl, it can be difficult for some communities to access their House member. At the League of Women Voters, we saw this when we sought to arrange an election forum in a district with a border 225 miles long; no one place was easily accessible to all the voters in the district.

Hill: Talk about a picture that belongs next to "gerrymandering" in the dictionary. Visually, Maryland's 3rd is atrocious. And the narrow nature of most of the district - constructed to favor Democrats - makes it difficult for residents to know whether they are physically in the district or not. Interestingly, the seat is held by Democrat John Sarbanes, the author of HR 1, the House-passed electoral reform package that includes a provision turning House redistricting over to independent commissions in every state.

4. Alabama's capital
https://mapchart.net/
Wang: The 7th District is living proof that racial gerrymandering is partisan gerrymandering, and vice versa. It is heavily Democratic and gives off several narrow tendrils that encompass major black population centers, including far-off Birmingham. In the special Senate election of 2017, Democrat Doug Jones won the statewide popular vote by 1.5 percentage points - yet the only district he carried was the 7th, which is 63 percent African-American. Without these contortions, Alabama's seven-member House delegation could quite possibly have a second Democratic - and potentially black - member in addition to Terri Sewell. For a state with 25 percent black population and 34 percent Democratic vote in 2016, that wouldn't be a crazy outcome at all.

Hill: It's not so much the entirety of the districts themselves but the way they divide up Montgomery County, home to the capital city. The 2nd District takes the center of the county with the eastern portions in the 3rd and the western portions in the 7th, the state's lone reliably Democrat seat. Race and ideology factor into this carveout as Montgomery heavily votes Democrat, and the portion of the county in the 2nd went "blue" by a 22-point margin in the midterm - but was still offset by the overwhelmingly "red" tone of the rest of the district, which re-elected Republican Martha Roby.

5. Baton Rouge
https://mapchart.net/
Fierman: Louisiana's 6th District owes its strange shape to the 2nd District, which looks like it's been inserted inside the 6th and was drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The black voting age population of the 6th is 21.5 percent. The reason that percentage is not higher is because in 2011 Republicans moved a large number of African-Americans who live on the north side of Baton Rouge into the heavily Democratic 2nd. The result was an extremely packed majority-minority district that reaches New Orleans and looks almost surrounded by a very oddly shaped and disfigured district. (Cedric Richmond has held the 2nd since it was drawn.)

Lamar: The 6th, held by Republican Garrett Graves, is highly gerrymandered to ensure it has remained consistently red. It selectively fractures the city of Baton Rouge into two. It combines the predominantly white neighborhoods of south Baton Rouge with its suburbs and some coastal parishes. Meanwhile, it excludes the predominantly black neighborhoods of northern Baton Rouge, which are instead incorporated into the 2nd, which takes in New Orleans and is the only safely blue district in the state.

6. Western Maryland
https://mapchart.net/
Fierman: The 6th District shared center stage in the Supreme Court decision that federal courts have no role in settling claims of partisan gerrymandering. Democrats conceded their explicit goal was to move enough voters around to dilute GOP voting power and defeat the incumbent Republican congressman. As the definition of gerrymandering is to draw lines to give the people in power strategic advantage, and the Democrats admitted doing so, this is clearly one of the country's most gerrymandered districts.

Wang: Now held by Democrat David Trone, the 6th was drawn by Democrats to pack as many Republican voters as possible into a single meandering district. In the Supreme Court' oral arguments, the two justices living in Maryland, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, showed great familiarity with the details of their state's political geography in excoriating the gerrymander. Still, they declined to act to rein in this offense - or a statewide offense in North Carolina. Instead, they left the work to individual states.

9. Metro Atlanta
https://mapchart.net/
Hill: From a visual perspective, Georgia's map is among the stronger ones you will currently see. The districts are largely fair and contiguous, and they represent a strong upgrade over the gerrymandered mess created when the Democrats were in charge of drawing the map the early 2000s. That said, there's an issue with the three counties that are the most populous in the state and form the core of Atlanta's metropolitan area. They are subdivided to a troubling extent. Three House districts (the 4th, 7th and 10th ) come into Gwinnett County; three (the 6th, 11th and 13th) have parts of Cobb County and four different members represent Fulton County: Democrats John Lewis (the 5th), Lucy McBath (the 6th) and Austin Scott (the 13th) as well as Republican Barry Loudermilk (the 11th). Having a county split three or more ways is less than ideal for its residents.

11. Metro Detroit
https://mapchart.net/
Wang: Michigan's 14th District jams together the African-American-dominated cities of Pontiac and Detroit, 31 miles apart. Its convoluted shape has packed in as many Democratic voters as possible, and they're currently represented by Brenda Lawrence. Email correspondence among GOP operatives in 2011, obtained by Michigan news outlets, included one summarizing the party's control over the House mapmaking: "In a glorious way that makes it easier to cram ALL of the Dem garbage in Wayne, Washtenaw, Oakland and Macomb counties into only four districts," the 14th among them.

Related Articles Around the Web

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A gerrymandering dirty dozen: The House's worst districts

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Where is gerrymandering the worst? We asked six people who have studied the way U.S. political maps are drawn to show the most flagrant examples of current gerrymandering. They represent The Redistrict Network, Take Back Our Republic, the Campaign Legal Center, the League of Women Voters and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

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Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Articles about "canceled" or "provocative" writers rarely focus on the people they've harmed.

Last weekend, The New York Times published a rogue's gallery of the allegedly "canceled": that is, a group largely composed of writers who have faced profound public criticism, mostly online. In one another, they have found common cause, says the Times- even something like a community. They share the same critics (those they deem "social justice warriors") and sometimes the same allies, the piece claims-a circle of contrarian podcasters, or an editor at Quillette, the online magazine devoted to rebranding conservative ideas as courageous defenses of free speech.

But one commonality remains unobserved: Of the 13 public figures featured in the story, ten have been "canceled" in part for work which has antagonized trans people.

Jesse Singal has made transgender children part of his beat, in stories at New York magazine and The Atlantic, the common theme being that social acceptance of trans people-and trans activists' " adult agendas"-is at odds with medical best practices and could harm children. Katie Herzog wrote a 2017 piece for The Stranger on detransitioners-a small minority of adults who transitioned and then later identified with their assigned birth sex-part of a wave of stories, like Singal's, which raise concerns about trans children and teens being over-medicalized, even though the far more common experience of trans people of any age is facing down financial and geographic obstacles, as well as medical gatekeepers, in accessing transition-related care. Meghan Murphy, a blogger from Canada, has lately brought her trans antagonism to the U.S. website of The Spectator. She is mostly known to American audiences for having been one of the few people with a considerable platform to be banned from Twitter for violating its terms of service in a series of trans-antagonistic tweets.

The canceled may have faced consternation online, but they have safe spaces, too, the Times reports: parties hosted by Quillette, one website still happy to publish their works, alongside its usual content against #MeToo and in defense of phrenology. Conspicuously absent from the Times piece are quotes and stories from the people who have been deemed-both by the canceled and their chroniclers-supporting players in the culture war debate: the trans individuals the canceled have concerned themselves with, and whose lives and health are at stake.

It was just one year ago that the Times reported that " 'Transgender' Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration" by narrowing the definition of "sex" to that which can be determined "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable." It is a definition at least some of the canceled, such as Murphy, defend-even as it would effectively eliminate federal recognition under the law for 1.4 million transgender people in the United States, including at least 150,000 trans children for whom the canceled profess concern.

Since that Trump administration proposal last October, the Department of Justice has argued before the Supreme Court that trans people should be denied protection from discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The trans military ban was reinstated. The Bureau of Prisons eliminated protections for trans people who are incarcerated. The Department of Education rolled back guidance on respecting trans students and has become far less likely to investigate anti-LGBTQ discrimination in schools. Just this week, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed changing their rules so that the programs they fund can discriminate against trans people, from child-welfare, to HIV/AIDS prevention, to anti-trafficking service providers.

In response to all this, there have been waves of resistance from trans, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people across the country. After the Trump administration proposal redefining sex was reported last year, they organized under the banner #WontBeErased, with protests from San Diego, California, to Portland, Maine, to the White House. On October 8, as the Supreme Court met to hear arguments on whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ workers in its Title VII, 133 people were arrested for blocking the street in front of the building. As violence against trans women has been recognized as an epidemic by the American Medical Association, this year Columbia, South Carolina saw its first Trans Pride rally, part of the city's Black Pride celebrations. In the course of two weeks there this summer, two black trans women were killed in the state: Denali Berries Stuckey and Pebbles LaDime Doe.

It would be beyond flip to describe the last two years of institutionalized anti-trans bias in the United States as trans people being somehow "canceled," particularly given how meaningless the term has been made. But the violence and attempts at erasure they have faced already exceeds the mere public criticism of the "canceled" cis writers profiled by the Times.

Murphy, for example, who opposes civil rights legislation for trans people in the United States and has travelled to Scotland to campaign against similar protections, claims the term " TERF," meaning trans-exclusionary radical feminist and an accurate description of Murphy's politics, is "hate speech." After one of Murphy's speaking engagements was protested earlier this month, she earned media hits from the BBC and the CBC, where her judgment that trans women are not real women was treated merely as an " opposing view."

Whether she could even truly be called "canceled," under these conditions, is up for fruitless debate. But regardless, to dwell on the effect "cancellation" has had on her, rather than the effect her work has had on others, suggests the trans-antagonistic content of her work is itself secondary.

"The canceled," as the Times terms them, still work, which they acknowledge themselves to varying degrees. Murphy has moved from feminist blogging to the culture war circuit, elevated alongside other Twitter-banned internet personalities like far right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. Herzog remains a staff writer at The Stranger, long after her "controversial" feature, "The Detransitioners: They Were Transgender, Until They Weren't," which she is still discussing on her fellow cancelees' own media platforms more than two years later. Singal is still published at New York magazine, and a book in which he will tell "stories of half-baked psychology-from the implicit association test to recent work on gender identity and many others" was sold to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for a reported mid-six figures.

These writers, intended or not, have been able to use trans antagonism to build their careers. We are still only five years on from the Grantland story which outed a subject as trans during the pre-publication reporting process, leading to her death by suicide. One of the takeaways was supposed to be increasing the number of trans journalists and editors. This year, Lewis Raven Wallace interviewed trans editors and journalists for NiemanReports about the state of the field. "Trans people's personal stories are often 'balanced' with the opinions of those who question our fundamental rights to health care, safety, and employment, or depict us as dishonest or untrustworthy," wrote Wallace. "And while trans people are often expected to disclose and probe our own 'bias' as trans journalists, cisgender journalists covering trans people are rarely asked to do the same probing of their own gender experience and how it might shape their work."

Vice staff writer and Jezebel contributor Harron Walker has argued, specifically of Singal in the case of his Atlantic cover story, "When Children Say They're Trans," that "[h]is perplexing success as an authority on trans issues can be attributed to a combination of personal and structural transphobia."

It's the structural element that those reading-or editing-the individual works of these authors and who fail to perceive any problem so often overlook: In the only cover story the Atlantic has devoted to trans people this century, the thesis could best be summarized, "...but what if they aren't trans?" This was not even a new question for the Atlantic. The cover tease for a non-cover feature ten years before Singal asked, too, "Should children have sex changes?"

These writers may be both hailed and lambasted for being "canceled," but at the close of business, they can set their writing down and shut the door on their debates about trans identity. Trans people do not have that luxury, and in fact, when they resist being drawn into debates with such writers, they are-again-cast as the problem. The canceled can elevate themselves to stakeholder status in the fight for trans rights. The struggles trans people face disappear behind the cancel drama; they are identified merely as the canceled writers' "critics."

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.

@melissagira

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Fixating on "Cancel Culture" in an Age of Transphobia

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Spencer Platt/Getty Images Articles about "canceled" or "provocative" writers rarely focus on the people they've harmed. Last weekend, The New York Times published a rogue's gallery of the allegedly "canceled": that is, a group largely composed of writers who have faced profound public criticism, mostly online.

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If you, dear reader, have more insights on the above (or any of the rest), hit me up on Twitter. I'd love to update this as smart people give feedback.

Each Era is about 40 years. Not a perfect pattern, but roughly consistent:

Individualist, Realignment and Founding are 40 years each.

Collectivist is 48 years, but FDR did win two extra terms.

Progressive is 32 years, and is missing a two term Precursor.

Populist is 32 years, but there were several one termers who would normally get two terms in later Eras.

It would be strange for this to happen like clockwork for no underlying reason. Major events explain some (Revolutionary War → Founding, Civil War → Realignment, Great Depression → Collectivist), but not others (Populist, Progressive, Individualist). Or maybe it's related to generational turnover. There may be overlaps with Strauss-Howe that I should look at further.

I wondered how this structure would align with the presidential rankings that historians do. So I graphed the average rank for each president from a list of major studies since 1982. Looks randomly distributed:

But when we separate Eras, and give a trendline for each, we see something interesting. Each Era starts with a higher ranked president, then trends down. The pattern's consistency may indicate that there's something here.

One note on the Realignment Era. The reason it looks different is Johnson and McKinley. Johnson was bottom-tier, immediately following top-tier Lincoln, early in the Era. This happened because of assassination, not election. McKinley, as mentioned earlier, kind of straddled Eras, got assassinated, and was a mid-tier president who doesn't really fit the bottom-tier Ender Role. If you remove those outliers, the trend line looks like the others.

This post is not about Trump specifically. But he's part of this overall story, and he's the news story right now. As I shared my ideas with people, I often heard (sometimes in fear and sometimes in awe), "well maybe Trump is the start of his own Era."

I don't believe that is the case. His place in the cycle of history has all the makings of the Ender of the Individualist Era. And if you were to make a movie about the end of that Era, you'd includes lots of scenes of the news saying the stuff the news is saying today.

If patterns hold, the next president will be a transformational progressive.

It could happen in 2020, or in 2024 if Trump wins re-election. That would be new for an Ender, but could happen.

Also, caveat that a model built with only 45 presidents and 58 elections can be all kinds of wrong. Let's meet up again in 2060 and see how it held.

Until then, here's what the next 40 years might look like:

This suggests that we're entering the Seventh Party System. That feels about right. Both parties have deep internal tensions, from realigning coalitions. The next Era/Party System will still probably feature the Dems and GOP as the major parties. But what each represents may change soonish.

I chose Humanist to label the next Era, because I think the conversation may be about what to do with people as tech progresses at an exponential rate and the impact of climate change grows.

I'm making big claims here. To be better substantiated, future analysis may include looking at U.S. governors, U.K. Prime Ministers, etc. Each have different electoral structures. But if all of this stems from fundamental human nature, then some generational cyclical patterns may exist as well.

My thesis today is that a President's impact is in large part a function of their Era and Role. If longtime patterns hold, and politics is not too broken, we may be starting a new Era. If so, a transformational progressive will win.

Thank you to Ashley vonClausburg, Clay Garrett, Mike Davis, Lisa Conn, Patrick Hammon, Georges Sassine, Andrew Fader, Kouichi Shirayanagi, and Stefan Long for reading the draft and giving me feedback. And thank you to Mr. Sewell at Irvine High for getting me stoked about U.S. History in the first place.

2019090401: Published.

2019090501: Added reference to McKinley assassination.

2019090901: Added Stefan Long to Credits.

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How history predicts the 2020 election (and the next 40 years)

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If you, dear reader, have more insights on the above (or any of the rest), hit me up on Twitter. I'd love to update this as smart people give feedback. Each Era is about 40 years. Not a perfect pattern, but roughly consistent: Individualist, Realignment and Founding are 40 years each.

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Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope.

They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms.

Story Continued Below

SEIU - which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to - dialed Clinton's top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.

Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat's models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.

Michigan organizers were shocked. It was the latest case of Brooklyn ignoring on-the-ground intel and pleas for help in a race that they felt slipping away at the end.

"They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren't," said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. "They believed they had better information, which they didn't."

Flip Michigan and leave the rest of the map, and Trump is still president-elect. But to people who worked in that state and others, how Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes and lost by 100,000 in states that could have made her president has everything to do with what happened in Michigan. Trump won the state despite getting 30,000 fewer votes than George W. Bush did when he lost it in 2004.

Politico spoke to a dozen officials working on or with Clinton's Michigan campaign, and more than a dozen scattered among other battleground states, her Brooklyn headquarters and in Washington who describe an ongoing fight about campaign tactics, an inability to get top leadership to change course.

Then again, according to senior people in Brooklyn, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook never heard any of those complaints directly from anyone on his state teams before Election Day.

In results that narrow, Clinton's loss could be attributed to any number of factors - FBI Director Jim Comey's letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.

The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data - operatives spit out "the model, the model," as they complain about it - guiding Mook's decisions on field, television, everything else. That's the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she'd beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).

"I've never seen a campaign like this," said Virgie Rollins, a Democratic National Committee member and longtime political hand in Michigan who described months of failed attempts to get attention to the collapse she was watching unfold in slow-motion among women and African-American millennials.

Rollins, the chair emeritus of the Michigan Democratic Women's Caucus, said requests into Brooklyn for surrogates to come talk to her group were never answered. When they held their events anyway, she said, they also got no response to requests for a little money to help cover costs.

Rollins doesn't need a recount to understand why Clinton lost the state.

"When you don't reach out to community folk and reach out to precinct campaigns and district organizations that know where the votes are, then you're going to have problems," she said.
The enthusiasm gap
From the day Clinton released her launch video, the campaign knew she'd struggle with enthusiasm. Yet they didn't do many of the things voters are used to seeing to give a sense of momentum, insisting that votes didn't come from campaign literature, door knocking, commitment to vote cards or the standard program of sending absentee ballot applications to likely voters rather than just appealing to the people once they'd already ordered the ballots.

"It was very surgical and corporate. They had their model, this is how they're going to do it. Their thing was, 'We don't have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is,'" said one person involved in the Michigan campaign. "But in terms of activists, it seems different, it's maybe they don't care about us."

Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not "scientifically" significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.

"There's this illusion that the Clinton campaign had a ground game. The deal is that the Clinton campaign could have had a ground game," said a former Obama operative in Michigan. "They had people in the states who were willing to do stuff. But they didn't provide people anything to do until GOTV."

The only metric that people involved in the operations say they ever heard headquarters interested in was how many volunteer shifts had been signed up - though the volunteers were never given the now-standard handheld devices to input the responses they got in the field, and Brooklyn mandated that they not worry about data entry. Operatives watched packets of real-time voter information piled up in bins at the coordinated campaign headquarters. The sheets were updated only when they got ripped, or soaked with coffee. Existing packets with notes from the volunteers, including highlighting how much Trump inclination there was among some of the white male union members the Clinton campaign was sure would be with her, were tossed in the garbage.

The Brooklyn command believed that television and limited direct mail and digital efforts were the only way to win over voters, people familiar with the thinking at headquarters said. Guided by polls that showed the Midwestern states safer, the campaign spent, according to one internal estimate, about 3 percent as much in Michigan and Wisconsin as it spent in Florida, Ohio and North Carolina. Most voters in Michigan didn't see a television ad until the final week.

Most importantly, multiple operatives said, the Clinton campaign dismissed what's known as in-person "persuasion" - no one was knocking on doors trying to drum up support for the Democratic nominee, which also meant no one was hearing directly from voters aside from voters they'd already assumed were likely Clinton voters, no one tracking how feelings about the race and the candidates were evolving. This left no information to check the polling models against - which might have, for example, showed the campaign that some of the white male union members they had expected to be likely Clinton voters actually veering toward Trump - and no early warning system that the race was turning against them in ways that their daily tracking polls weren't picking up.

People involved in the Michigan campaign still can't understand why Brooklyn stayed so sure of the numbers in a state that it also had projected Clinton would win in the primary.

"Especially given what happened in the primary," said Michigan Democratic Party chairman Brandon Dillon. "We knew that there was going to have to be more attention."

With Clinton's team ignoring or rejecting requests, Democratic operatives in Michigan and other battleground states might have turned to the DNC. But they couldn't; they weren't allowed to ask for help.

State officials were banned from speaking directly to anyone at the DNC in Washington. ("Welcome to DNC HQ," read a blue and white sign behind the reception desk in Brooklyn that appeared after the ouster of Debbie Wasserman Schultz just before the July convention).

A presidential campaign taking over the party committee post-convention is standard, but what happened in 2016 was more intense than veterans remember. People at the DNC and in battleground states speak of angry, bitter calls that came in from Brooklyn whenever they caught wind of contact between them, adamant that only the campaign's top brass could approve spending or tactical decisions.

"Don't touch them. Stay away," one person on the other end of the call remembered Clinton campaign states director Marlon Marshall saying after hearing about a rogue conversation between a battleground operative and an official at the DNC. "You can't be calling those people and making them think something is coming when nothing is.

Mook himself made a number of those calls.

To Brooklyn, this was the only way to shut down what they perceived early as an effort to undermine the campaign's planning, DNC officials playing good cop as they made promises they couldn't keep to friends in the states, took credit for moves Clinton's staff already were making, or looked to dig up trouble to use against them later
Shunning help from outside
Brooklyn's theory from the start was that 2016 was going to be a purely base turnout election. Efforts were focused on voter registration and then, in the final weeks, turning out voters identified as Clinton's, without confirmation that they were.

Marshall, at Mook's direction, had designed a plan that until the final weeks was built around holding Pennsylvania and winning just one more state - electoral math that would have denied Trump the presidency on the reasonable assumption Michigan and Wisconsin were Clinton's.

There was a logic guided by data, they say.

"We have built an operation and we run an operation as if this is going to be a close race," Marshall said in an interview with Politico in early October. "We have not seen an organization in many states on the Trump side that reflects that."

In Michigan, Brooklyn tracked 211 staff compared with 58 for Barack Obama in 2012. A source there said the field plan called for an additional 70 staffers, but deferred to the local team instead on using the $1.4 million allotment for a limited paid canvass.

But enough tremors were reaching Brooklyn by late October that veterans of previous campaigns were brought on to help oversee a stabilization - despite tension that dated back to many at the firm never wanting Mook to be campaign manager in the first place.

A battle against Mook's direction took hold, with multiple people plotting ricochets, complaining to people like Chief Administrative Officer Charlie Baker and longtime Clinton confidante Minyon Moore in the hopes of getting the campaign manager overruled.

Michigan was the only presidential battleground that didn't have an active Senate race, and that cost the state money from Brooklyn. Waving off complaints during a visit to Michigan a few weeks out, Marshall explained to the room that Clinton was going to clobber Trump in the final debate and they were talking about moving money into Senate seats. And by the time they arrived in Las Vegas for that third debate, Clinton's top aides were boasting about how they were about to expand the lead and pull marginal Senate candidates over the line to give her a governing majority.

In Michigan, they raised more than $700,000 to cover costs, mostly from in-state donors. Though the campaign said every check was signed off on in Brooklyn, Fowler said the DNC approved a $50,000 rogue transfer - let the Clinton campaign complain to him after Election Day, he told them.

"You're in a state, your job is to win the battleground state, not to have complete fealty to the national campaign headquarters, especially if the national campaign headquarters is not listening," Fowler explained.

Among the other workarounds claimed was one from interim DNC chair Donna Brazile, who was persuading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to hold the $5 million transferred to them from the Clinton campaign and to wait to spend it buying airtime for minority voter turnout in the final week they otherwise wouldn't have been able to fund.

But there also were millions approved for transfer from Clinton's campaign for use by the DNC - which, under a plan devised by Brazile to drum up urban turnout out of fear that Trump would win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote, got dumped into Chicago and New Orleans, far from anywhere that would have made a difference in the election.

Nor did Brooklyn ask for help from some people who'd been expecting the call. Sanders threw himself into campaign appearances for Clinton throughout the fall, but familiar sources say the campaign never asked the Vermont senator's campaign aides for help thinking through Michigan, Wisconsin or anywhere else where he had run strong. It was already November when the campaign finally reached out to the White House to get President Barack Obama into Michigan, a state that he'd worked hard and won by large margins in 2008 and 2012. On the Monday before Election Day, Obama added a stop in Ann Arbor, but that final weekend, the president had played golf on Saturday and made one stop in Orlando on Sunday, not having been asked to do anything else. Michigan senior adviser Steve Neuman had been asking for months to get Obama and the first lady on the ground there. People who asked for Vice President Joe Biden to come in were told that top Clinton aides weren't clearing those trips.

"We worked collaboratively with Brooklyn throughout and made a robust investment in Michigan, and we were obviously disappointed that we came up short. Everybody was," Neuman said.
'Not the right plan'
Top aides in Brooklyn write off complaints from battleground state operatives as Monday morning quarterbacking by people who wouldn't have had much of a case if Clinton had won. They continue to blame the loss on FBI Director James Comey, saying he shifted late deciders, not any tactical failures.

"Now of course, in hindsight, there are any number of steps that we could have taken that may have made the difference in a state as closely decided as Michigan, but the consistent theme across all the battleground states was that we saw our numbers drop in the final week after Jim Comey sent his shocking letter to Congress," said former Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon.

When top aides to the Trump campaign mapped out the best-case scenarios for election night, they always fell short of 270, and Michigan was always the state that they couldn't see a way through.

Trump's last stop of the election was a massive rally in Michigan that went on past midnight, his campaign homing in on Trump's chances there largely from nervousness it sensed coming out of Brooklyn.

Walking out at the end, Trump turned to his running mate, Mike Pence, almost confused: "This doesn't feel like second place," he said, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

Democrats felt it too. Rep. Debbie Dingell, who complained throughout the campaign about the lack of urgency and support, has told people since the election that Hillary and Bill Clinton both said in their final appearances in the state that they felt something was off.

On the morning of Election Day, internal Clinton campaign numbers had her winning Michigan by 5 points. By 1 p.m., an aide on the ground called headquarters; the voter turnout tracking system they'd built themselves in defiance of orders - Brooklyn had told operatives in the state they didn't care about those numbers, and specifically told them not to use any resources to get them - showed urban precincts down 25 percent. Maybe they should get worried, the Michigan operatives said.

Nope, they were told. She was going to win by 5. All Brooklyn's data said so.

In at least one of the war rooms in New York, they'd already started celebratory drinking by the afternoon, according to a person there. Elsewhere, calls quietly went out that day to tell key people to get ready to be asked about joining transition teams.

But an hour-and-a-half after polls closed, Clinton aides began making rushed calls, redrawing paths to 270 through the single electoral vote in Maine and Nebraska. Still assuming wins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Michigan suddenly looked like the state that was going to decide the presidency.

They scrambled a call with campaign attorney Marc Elias, prepping for a recount in a vote that oddly looked like it would be a narrower win than they had ever prepared for. An hour later, after they hung up, they realized it was over. They could tell by the numbers they were seeing - not the numbers being spewed from their own internal analytics team, but the numbers sitting at the bottom of the TV tuned to CNN. With the recount frozen, Clinton lost Michigan by 10,704 votes.

"I think it's true, they executed well. I think it's true that the plan was accomplished," said a former labor leader in the state. "But the plan was not the right plan."

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How Clinton lost Michigan - and blew the election

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Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope.

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1. Why I Haven't Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh

2. Nationals Manager Ejected From Game 6 After Going Bananas During "Take Me Out to the Ball Game"

3. Trump's Oil Obsession Is a War Crime

4. Don't Gaze Directly at the Impeachment Bill

The Trump administration is trying to take away health care from millions of Americans. Yet nobody is campaigning on, fundraising off, or publicizing this imminent threat. That's astounding. But any day now, aided and abetted by the 5 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Trump administration is poised to stick a knife in the heart of what remains of the Affordable Care Act. At minimum, this president will be throwing 20 million people who obtained insurance under the ACA off of their plans. That should be something we are reminded of daily.

The notoriously conservative appellate court will decide a challenge to a state-led effort to end the ACA once and for all, on the dubious legal theory that, when Congress chose not to kill Obamacare in 2017, it actually intended to kill the law. If the court embraces this theory, it could send the American health care system into a tailspin and affect nearly all Americans' coverage to varying degrees. A three-judge panel of that court heard arguments in July. A decision is imminent.

Elections rise and fall on guarantees of affordable, efficient health care. But this looming catastrophe hasn't come up at a single Democratic debate. It has been absent from the daily news cycle for months. Donald Trump's fiercest critics on the hill rarely mention it. Yes, it's easy to be distracted. After all, the Trump administration is simultaneously kidnapping children from migrant parents and bilking students to repay loans and facing an impeachment effort. But if the court he packed succeeds in destroying the ACA, it could be the single most consequential event of Trump's presidency, and can sit right up there with the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the travel ban, and the family separation policy as humanitarian catastrophes. And yet almost nobody is talking about it, because it's happening in the courts, in the dark, and yet also right out in the open.

The case is Texas v. United States, and it began as yet another Hail Mary lawsuit, brought by 20 state attorneys general to kill Obamacare. The states' argument goes like this: In 2012's NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court ruled that the ACA's individual mandate to buy insurance was constitutional because it functioned as a tax. If you didn't get coverage, you had to pay a "penalty" to the IRS. But Congress zeroed out the mandate in 2017's tax cut bill. Now, if you don't get coverage, you pay zero dollars; there is no more penalty. The states assert that the mandate no longer functions as a tax because it collects no money. So, the mandate must be struck down.

But the courts can't stop there. They also have to decide if the rest of the act can function without the mandate. And when Congress passed the ACA in 2010, it found the mandate to be an integral component of the broader law. Thus, the states now argue, courts cannot "sever" the mandate from the ACA: If it is struck down, the rest of the law must fall too. Medicaid expansion, insurance exchanges, subsidies, protections for preexisting conditions-all of it must be abolished root and branch by judicial fiat. The whole thing is toast.

This argument fails on several levels. The plaintiff states argue that Congress secretly obliterated the ACA by zeroing out the mandate in the tax cut bill. By that point, though, Congress had spent many months attempting to repeal the law and failed. The best Republicans could do was kill the mandate and boast that at least they had cut Obamacare's most controversial tax. There is absolutely no evidence that any lawmaker who voted for the tax cut bill believed they had rendered the entire law invalid. Perhaps some hoped the ACA would collapse on its own without a functioning penalty. But no one thought that removing the penalty would compel the courts to tear down every inch of Obamacare.

Even if Congress harbored this covert intent, the plaintiff states' argument would still make no sense. The Supreme Court has ruled that an unconstitutional provision may be severed if the law remains "fully operative" without it, and Congress would've wanted the remainder of the law to stand. Here, we know Congress believed the ACA could operate without the mandate, because Congress already neutralized the penalty and left the rest of the law intact. Sure, some lawmakers wanted to repeal the whole act. But that is not what they did, and it is not the judiciary's job to do it for them, in the rearview mirror. Courts are supposed to follow the text of the law, not a conjecture as to what Congress might have done if Republicans had enough votes.

Despite these logical defects, Trump's Justice Department sided largely with the states at first. The DOJ agreed that the mandate is unconstitutional and argued that it could not be severed from key components of the law-including the requirement that insurance companies cover those with preexisting conditions and refrain from charging higher premiums because of age, gender, or health status. U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor shocked court watchers by going further than that and ruling that the entire law must be struck down. The Trump administration then abandoned any semblance of moderation, midlitigation, and agreed with O'Connor, declaring that the whole ACA is now illegal. This about-face prompted several career attorneys to stage a walkout, refusing to sign onto the DOJ's outrageous briefs.

While critics of O'Connor's opinion across the political spectrum found his reasoning silly, the 5 th Circuit may well affirm his decision any day now. In July, the case came before a three-judge panel that included Judge Kurt Engelhardt, a Donald Trump appointee, and Judge Jennifer Elrod, a George W. Bush appointee. Both conservatives appeared open to the conspiracy theory that O'Connor, the DOJ, and the state plaintiffs cooked up: that Congress secretly destroyed the entire ACA by zeroing out the penalty.

Elrod speculated that perhaps lawmakers thought, "Aha, this is the silver bullet that's going to undo Obamacare." She also noted that Congress zeroed out the mandate "in a reconciliation process," when they were "limited in what they could do in regard to the tax bill in 2017." Wouldn't it make sense, she suggested, that Republicans would use their limited power to kill the "linchpin" of the law and expect the courts to finish the job?

Engelhardt asked Douglas Letter-attorney for the House of Representatives, which stepped in to defend the ACA when the DOJ refused-why the court should bother preserving any part of the law. Why, he said, should he "become the taxidermist" for the ACA when "Congress can fix this"? He also asked why the Senate "isn't here to talk about the will of Congress." If lawmakers really didn't intend to wipe out the whole act, shouldn't the Senate "also be here to say, 'Oh, this is what we meant when we wrote this'?" (He did not appear to understand that the Senate's Republican leaders will not lift a finger to help Obamacare.) Engelhardt then demanded to know why the House can't "put together a cafeteria-style package" of the ACA's most "attractive and popular" features and pass it "tomorrow." (This is not how lawmaking works.)

It is worrisome that the 5 th Circuit is actually taking the DOJ's claims seriously. The first judge to hear this case, O'Connor, is a reactionary partisan with no respect for the rule of law. Texas routinely tosses cases onto his docket requesting a nationwide injunction against progressive policies. O'Connor barred the Obama administration from protecting transgender schoolchildren, blocked a regulation outlawing discrimination against transgender patients, and struck down a law that curbs the government's ability to remove Native American children from their families. So it's no shock that he wants to blow up the entire ACA on a reed-thin argument that is not supported by fact, history, or law. The judges of the 5 th Circuit, by contrast, were supposed to be the adults in the room.

Yet Elrod and Engelhardt seem ready to do through judicial means what congressional Republicans could not manage to do legislatively and kill off the ACA while the public looks elsewhere. In so doing, they'll offload this embarrassment of a case right onto the Supreme Court's docket-just as the justices juggle an overload of partisan hot-button appeals, and Chief Justice John Roberts prepares to preside over an impeachment trial in the Senate.

But the most astonishing part of this sad episode isn't the fact that irresponsible partisans in the judicial branch are acting lawlessly, aided and abetted by the Department of Justice. It's that the same Americans who stopped Congress from eviscerating the ACA in 2017 by maniacally organizing, petitioning, and protesting have apparently not quite recognized that the courts are about to achieve the same outcome without their signoff. This is because the judicial branch works quietly, and without fanfare, and also because Americans don't make phone calls to federal jurists to lobby for outcomes in lawsuits. Even if they did, such efforts do not often change judicial minds. This is, by design, how anti-majoritarian courts operate. It's also how federal courts have managed to do, in the gun context, the abortion context, and the religious liberty context, what legislatures cannot do openly: thwart the will of the people. By design that is what courts should be doing, if the will of the people butts up against the Constitution.

Hypertechnical severability arguments cloaked in half-truths and ahistorical revisions of actual events, however, are not fundamental constitutional principles. And killing the ACA in the 5 th Circuit after multiple failed efforts to kill it in Congress is not lofty judicial intercession. It is an effort to undo a law that has been wildly successful and, yes, lifesaving for millions, in a backroom, on a pretext, in defiance of both the law and the will of Congress. If the 5 th Circuit guts the ACA, the Supreme Court is going to have to add it to the mounting pile of explosive election year cases it's already got on its plate. And Americans are going to have to relearn a lesson we keep forgetting, which is that the courts are the most important legacy of any presidential election contest and that we always remember that fact, after the fact, when it is far too late.

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A Federal Court May Soon Do What Congress Could Not: Obliterate Obamacare

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Why I Haven't Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh Nationals Manager Ejected From Game 6 After Going Bananas During "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" Trump's Oil Obsession Is a War Crime Don't Gaze Directly at the Impeachment Bill The Trump administration is trying to take away health care from millions of Americans.

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We asked young, ordinary Europeans to take a look at U.S. policies on everything from food to guns. As they discover facts about America, they're not impressed. Credit Credit... The New York Times

Sometimes it's useful to get an outside perspective. In the Video Op-Ed above, Europeans are shocked to learn that the American government does not guarantee social protections that citizens in other advanced economies take for granted.

Their reactions reflect how European governments prioritize citizen welfare, offering national assurances like universal health care and affordable education. Americans have grown accustomed to the exorbitant costs of basic human services, the absence of parental leave protection and the unregulated presence of chemicals in food - things that would "cause riots" in Europe.

It's true that the United States grapples with a larger and more diverse population than that of any European country. But with the resources of the world's largest economy and as keepers of the American dream, can't policymakers find solutions?

Brendan Miller (@brenkjm) is a filmmaker based in London.

Rubina Pabanai (@RubinaPabani) is a filmmaker and podcaster based in London.

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Sometimes it's useful to get an outside perspective. In the Video Op-Ed above, Europeans are shocked to learn that the American government does not guarantee social protections that citizens in other advanced economies take for granted. Their reactions reflect how European governments prioritize citizen welfare, offering national assurances like universal health care and affordable education.

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1. Trump Will Nominate Amy Coney Barrett Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Buried

2. Mourning the Way RBG Calmly Approached Opposition

3. Trump Wants One Thing From His SCOTUS Nominee

4. Republican Senator Proposes Bill That Would Make It Illegal to Count Votes

Slate's Who Counts? series is made possible by the support of Slate Plus members and readers like you.

"For the first time ever," Justice Elena Kagan declared on June 27, "this court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities."

Kagan was reading a summary of her dissent in Rucho v. Common Cause, a 5-4 decision that barred federal courts from hearing partisan gerrymandering claims. Chief Justice John Roberts had just wrapped up his majority opinion, delivered during the dramatic last session of the term. Justices rarely read dissents from the bench, and typically reserve the practice for decisions that they view to be catastrophically misguided. Now, for the first time, you can hear her deliver her historic dissent. Slate obtained the recording from the National Archives. It is deeply compelling and, for the stoic justice, remarkably impassioned. At first, her voice is filled with righteous fury, but it soon shifts into profound sorrow as she nears the end.

For 13 minutes, Kagan decried her conservative colleagues' decision to withdraw the federal judiciary from political redistricting. "These gerrymanders dishonored our democracy," she proclaimed. "Left unchecked, as the court does today, gerrymanders like these may irreparably damage our system of government."

Her voice wavers as she delivers the final line: "With respect, but deep sadness, Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and I dissent."

It was only the third dissent that Kagan had read from the bench since her confirmation in 2010. All three involve threats to the democratic process, a danger that the justice takes quite seriously. The first dissent she delivered from the bench, in 2011's Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom PAC v. Bennett, also involved corruption of the electoral process. Arizona voters passed an initiative that provided publicly financed candidates roughly the same amount of money donated to privately financed candidates. The Supreme Court ruled that the law unconstitutionally "penalizes speech" by punishing private donors. Reading from the bench, Kagan demolished the majority's reasoning.

"All the law does is fund more speech," she said. "It is our law and our tradition that more speech, not less, is the governing rule." She ended with a sharp retort to the majority: "Arizonans deserve better. Like citizens across this country, Arizonans deserve a government that represents and serves them all. And Arizonans deserve the chance to reform their electoral system to achieve this most American of goals."

Kagan's second dissent from the bench came in 2018's Janus v. AFSCME, which invalidated mandatory "fair share" fees. In 22 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, public sector employees had to pay these fees to cover the cost of collective bargaining, whether or not they joined the union. The conservative justices ruled that compulsory fees violated the First Amendment. In her dissent, Kagan criticized her colleagues for deciding to "pick the winning side in what should be and until now has been an energetic policy debate."

"Yesterday, 22 states were on one side, 28 the other," she said. "Today, that healthy, that democratic debate ends." The First Amendment, she added, "was meant not to undermine, but to protect democratic governance."

Kagan's Rucho dissent picks up on this earlier theme: The court betrays the Constitution when it limits the people's ability to govern themselves. And by ignoring the injury that partisan gerrymandering inflicts on self-governance, the court betrayed its duty to protect democracy. "If there's a single idea that made our nation," Kagan said, "it's this one: The people are sovereign. ... The people get to choose their representatives. And then they get to decide whether to keep them. Election Day is what links to the people to their representatives and gives the people their sovereign power. That day is the foundation of democratic governance. And partisan gerrymandering can make it meaningless." She concluded:

Of all times to abandon the court's duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the court's role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.

This dissent is classic Kagan: forceful but accessible, eloquent but unflashy, expressing not just outrage but acute disappointment over the majority's grave error. At an event in July, Kagan explained why she delivered such a razor-sharp dissent. "You're not writing the dissent because you saw the thing differently and you think everybody should know there were two sides to this issue," she said. "You're writing a dissent because you want to convince the future-and I guess you want to convince the present too."

She has already persuaded one court that she had the better argument. Less than three months later, a North Carolina court struck down the state's legislative gerrymander-drawing upon Kagan's reasoning in Rucho. (State courts remain free to blockpartisan gerrymanders under state constitutions.) Maybe a future Supreme Court will revisit this issue and decide that Kagan had the better argument, reviving challenges to partisan gerrymandering under the U.S. Constitution. Until that day comes, her Rucho dissent will stand as one of the most eloquent defense of representative democracy ever delivered by a Supreme Court justice.

Support This Work

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You Can Now Hear Elena Kagan Read Her Searing Dissent in the Partisan Gerrymandering Case

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Trump Will Nominate Amy Coney Barrett Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Buried Mourning the Way RBG Calmly Approached Opposition Trump Wants One Thing From His SCOTUS Nominee Republican Senator Proposes Bill That Would Make It Illegal to Count Votes Slate's Who Counts? series is made possible by the support of Slate Plus members and readers like you.

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We haven't yet perfected our system of government.

Credit... Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

Dr. Older is a sociologist and science fiction author.

Between impeachment inquiries, questions about the security of our elections and the proliferation of books and articles announcing that democracy is dead, it's clear that many people in the United States are disillusioned with democracy.

But it's hard to claim that the United States, at any point in its history, has been a democracy in the rigorous sense of the word. This is partly by design. The foundations of the United States were defined by a struggle over how much democracy should be mitigated. It was terrifyingly radical to suggest that the people - even a very restricted group of people - might have a say in government, and the founders cautiously padded the rails to limit the power of the masses. This was still a huge step forward from dynastic monarchy, but it was not a place to stop.

And we didn't stop.

Over the two and a half centuries since, we've grown more democratic, expanding the franchise to women and people of color and instituting the direct election of senators by popular vote (the 17th amendment, ratified in 1913). But we've also taken steps away from pure democracy; initiatives making it more difficult for people to vote and gerrymandering are good examples of this. We've watched the role of money in politics grow and seen the proportion of our representation drop because of the cap on the number of members in the House of Representatives.

In the past 20 years, we've had two presidential elections in which the candidate with the most votes did not take office. But presidential elections are only the tip of the undemocratic iceberg. In 2014, a Princeton study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page found that the United States is an oligarchy, not a democracy, with policy driven by the economic elite and business interests. Furthermore, studies and polls showthat majority public opinion on many of the key issues of the day - abortion, gun control, universal health care - is nowhere near reflected in public policy decisions.

It's hardly surprising that we haven't yet perfected our system of government. Societies have been practicing democracy for a very short time relative to human history, and we're still working out the bugs and persuading ourselves to commit to the difficulties. And democracy is still a terrifyingly radical idea - as much as we rhapsodize about government by the people, we are afraid to trust ourselves and much more afraid to trust anyone else.

Moreover, democracy was never supposed to be a perfect clockwork mechanism, functioning on its own while citizens went about their lives, mitigating with preternatural precision every failure of human nature. Democracy is about people actively engaging with the decisions of their government at every level. It requires creating the space and processes for that to happen, providing education to enable an informed citizenry and putting in place safeguards to prevent oppression by the majority - and then continuously improving and adjusting those components as society changes.

In our technology-rich world, with a surplus of wealth and leisure time, we should have more opportunities to facilitate and extend democracy than ever before. And we do. Municipalities across the United States and countries around the world are experimenting with different types of democracy, leveraging digital and nondigital innovations to better involve citizens. Some countries have mandatory voting; some have instituted e-voting. Some localities within the United States are experimenting with ranked-choice voting or quadratic voting. Some countries are expanding the potential of direct democracy, in which people vote on policies or laws rather than on representatives; some are looking for ways to engage people beyond voting, into broader engagement in governance and community. There are myriad ways that we can make our system more representative, more accountable, more reflective of what people want.

And yet most of the discourse in the United States treats democracy as a done deal, an achievement to trumpet and spread around the world, an enviable and unchangeable status quo. There's an immense kind of hubris in the suggestion that the way we do democracy is the end-all and be-all of governance, and that if it doesn't work it must be democracy's fault rather than our own.

It's telling that many of the arguments about the end of democracy suggest it's because we've given too much power to the masses, that we've become too democratic. A paper by Shawn Rosenberg, professor of political science and psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, claims that the problem is social media and that other technologies have disrupted the role of elites in guiding the masses through the intricacies of policy and economics. Other commenters suggest that the abysmal state of political literacy in the United States means the people can't be trusted to make decisions about their government.

But how many of the recent "failures of democracy" have come about not because "institutions eroded" but because those institutions either were never intended to be democratic or have recently been adjusted to be exclusionary?

That the Electoral College system should result in a president who did not win the popular vote is not a failure of democracy; rather, it's the expected effect of a system that was always supposed to be undemocratic, and it's functioning as intended (if not quite as designed). If the checks and balances of our tripartite system have failed, it's not only because of bad people acting in venal and unethical ways; it's because those people were elected through undemocratic means of gerrymandering, party politics, voter suppression and intense injections of money, and they know where their incentives lie. If voter turnout is low, maybe it's not because people don't believe in democracy any more, but because the system they live in has shown them time and again that their vote doesn't count the way it's supposed to count and their representatives don't need to care about representing them.

Our recent stumbles are reminders that we still have work to do on our system of government. Democracy is not a unitary state that can be achieved, but a continuous process. We need to keep reinventing and refining government, to keep up with changes in society and technology and to keep it from being too easy for elites with resources to exploit. And it is worth fighting for. Not because of the founders, or because it sounds good, but because while democracy may be far from perfect, it is still the best system we've got.

At least so far.

Malka Older is an affiliated research fellow with the Center for the Sociology of Organizations at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and the author of "The Centenal Cycle" trilogy. Her new collection of short stories, " ... And Other Disasters," will be published on Nov. 16.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | The United States Has Never Truly Been a Democracy (Published 2019)

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We haven't yet perfected our system of government. Dr. Older is a sociologist and science fiction author. Between impeachment inquiries, questions about the security of our elections and the proliferation of books and articles announcing that democracy is dead, it's clear that many people in the United States are disillusioned with democracy.

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Thanks to the information revolution, a stunning 90% of the data created by humanity has been generated in just the past two years.

Yet the math taught in U.S. schools hasn't materially changed since Sputnik was sent into orbit in the late 1950s. Our high school students are taught algebra, geometry, a second year of algebra, and calculus (for the most advanced students) because Eisenhower-era policymakers believed this curriculum would produce the best rocket scientists to work on projects during the Cold War.

It has been 50 years since the U.S. reached the moon, almost 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell. Technology has advanced to the point that tiny powerful computers are routinely carried around in pockets and purses. Times have changed, and so has the math people use in everyday life.

We surveyed 900 "Freakonomics" podcast listeners - a pretty nerdy group, we must admit - and discovered that less than 12% used any algebra, trigonometry or calculus in their daily lives. Only 2% use integrals or derivatives, the foundational building blocks of calculus. In contrast, a whopping 66% work with basic analytical software like Microsoft Excel on a daily basis.

When was the last time you divided a polynomial? If you were asked to do so today, would you remember how? For the most part, students are no longer taught to write cursive, how to use a slide rule, or any number of things that were once useful in everyday life. Let's put working out polynomial division using pencil and paper on the same ash heap as sock darning and shorthand.

What we propose is as obvious as it is radical: to put data and its analysis at the center of high school mathematics. Every high school student should graduate with an understanding of data, spreadsheets, and the difference between correlation and causality. Moreover, teaching students to make data-based arguments will endow them with many of the same critical-thinking skills they are learning today through algebraic proofs, but also give them more practical skills for navigating our newly data-rich world.

Data-based math courses allow students to grapple with real-life problems. They might analyze issues about the environment, space travel or nutrition. Students can examine the threat of wildfires or the ways social media is tracking their data, learning how to apply math to real-world issues.

Other countries are moving much faster than the U.S. in instituting such a curriculum. Over the last 50 years, statistics and data science have become an integral part of the United Kingdom curriculum. Canada's educational system, which is ranked highly internationally, also incorporates statistics and data.

In addition, the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, measures how effectively countries are preparing students for the mathematical demands of the 21st century. Last week, PISA released a mathematics framework that guides the assessments. Data literacy is central to the framework. In contrast, U.S. high school students learn algebra and geometry - and are woefully underprepared for the modern world.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is leading the way in updating the way math is taught. In 2013, the LAUSD secured approval from the University ofCalifornia to recognize data science as a statistics course that students can substitute for Algebra 2 in the college pathway. Over 2,000 students are taking advantage of this option. The classroom we observed was full of critical thinkers who see data everywhere and appear comfortable interpreting, analyzing and questioning it.

Modernizing math at a national level will require an intensive effort from educators, policymakers and high school counselors - as well as from students and parents who will need to advocate for it. Some states are already exploring changes to their mathematics frameworks, while a fair number of innovative teachers across the country are independently developing their own data-focused lesson plans.

For this revolution to be carried out across the country, decision makers will need to hear from parents and other interested parties who recognize that our children deserve math instruction that is relevant to their lives.
Jo Boaler is a professor of mathematics education at Stanford University and author of "Limitless Mind." Steven D. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and co-author of "Freakonomics."

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Opinion: Modern high school math should be about data science - not Algebra 2

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Thanks to the information revolution, a stunning 90% of the data created by humanity has been generated in just the past two years. Yet the math taught in U.S. schools hasn't materially changed since Sputnik was sent into orbit in the late 1950s.

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For most of his life, few people knew Thomas Hofeller's name.

But for decades, Hofeller was the Republican Party's most influential mapmaker. When it came time to redraw districts, Hofeller not only knew how to churn the data and work with the software - but he also knew exactly how this power could be used.

In 1991, Hofeller said, "I define redistricting as the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States today."

Then a decade later, he said, "Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It's a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters."

Perhaps his greatest work was in his late years. In 2010, after Republicans took over several statehouses, Hofeller helped redraw several statehouse maps, including the maps in North Carolina.

Gerrymandering has been around for centuries, but in that redistricting cycle, Hofeller tested the limits of exactly how much power one party can accrue - without actually having a majority of the electorate support them. When the Supreme Court struck down his maps for diluting the voting power of black people, Hofeller drew another round of maps that diluted the political power of Democrats.

But in 2018, Hofeller died. Shortly thereafter, his daughter found thousands of his documents. And it turns out those documents are key to fixing the structural "vote stealing" Hofeller spent his life perfecting.
More reading:

My colleague Ella Nilsen wrote an excellent story during the 2018 midterm elections about the gerrymandered North Carolina districts. A few months later, the Supreme Court ruled that gerrymandering was outside their authority - something Vox's Zack Beauchamp wrote was a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump. Shortly thereafter, the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered maps. Vox's Ian Millhiser writes that this case, and other state cases, show the "cracks" in the Republican Party "gerrymandering firewall."

This Powerpoint presentation Hofeller gave to state leaders is revealing. Hofeller told people to keep files secure. Turns out he wasn't heeding his own advice.

One of the best books on modern gerrymandering is by David Daley. He's looked through some of Hofeller's files and found an email where - shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer and a kidney tumor - Hofeller wrote, "I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit."

To watch more Vox videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel, where I will continue to cover some of the key policy and politics stories leading up to the 2020 election.
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The man who rigged America's election maps

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How Tom Hofeller shifted the balance of power by taking gerrymandering to the extreme.

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I make a living teaching students how to construct arguments and analyze arguments made by others. I wrote a book about logic. I love this stuff. So when I see a New York Times opinion piece titled " This Is the Strongest Argument Against Medicare for All," my ears perk up.

The author, Reason magazine features editor Peter Suderman, tells the story of Vermont's brief flirtation with the possibility of passing a state-level program similar in certain respects to Bernie Sanders's federal Medicare for All proposal. According to Suderman, the effort failed, and this "failure" shows "why any similar project undertaken at a national scale is unlikely to succeed as well."

There are two central problems with the claim that Vermont "tried" and "failed" to implement a "single-payer" health insurance plan. The first is that the proposal being considered in Vermont wasn't a single-payer plan. The second is that it was never tried.

A single-payer system is one in which, even if private plans exist to provide supplemental health care, only one entity is paying for basic care. A system in which private plans compete with a public one to pay for such care is by definition multi-payer - and any version of the health reform being considered in Vermont would have fallen into the latter category.

Vermont probably couldn't legally get away with trying to interfere with interstate commerce by banning private health insurance companies from doing business in the state, and in any case, their state legislature was never going to try. The bill they did pass to "investigate" the possibility of single payer also established (as required by the Affordable Care Act) an exchange for Vermonters to buy into private plans.

This isn't semantic hairsplitting. Some crucial advantages of single-payer systems rely on the state having a monopoly on basic health insurance.

Take cost control. Many doctors currently refuse to take Medicaid because it pays out at a lower rate than private plans. If Vermont's proposed public plan, Green Mountain Care, had come into existence, either it would have faced the same problem, or lawmakers would have had to continue to jack up the payout rates in a budget-busting attempt to compete with private plans.

If Bernie's plan to abolish private plans (at least for basic insurance) were implemented, on the other hand, doctors and hospitals would have to either close their doors or make do with the rate that Medicare was willing to pay. The last several decades of Canadian history strongly suggest that most of them would learn to make do.

One of the logical fallacies I teach students in my critical thinking classes is the "fallacy of equivocation," which is committed by arguments like this one:

Premise One: Only men are rational.

Premise Two: Women are not men.

Conclusion: Women are not rational.

On a syntactic level, this looks like a valid argument. The problem, of course, is that "men" is being used to mean "humans" in the first premise and "male humans" in the second premise. Similarly, Suderman's argument seems to be something like this:

Premise One: Former governor Peter Shumlin tried and failed to implement single payer in Vermont.

Premise Two: ???

Conclusion: A President Bernie Sanders would fail if he tried to implement single payer on a national scale.

As we've seen, "single payer" means something different in the first premise and in the conclusion. In the premise, it means "a multi-payer system with a public option" - i.e. the sort of thing that candidates like Joe Biden, Julian Castro, and Pete Buttigieg have proposed.

More importantly, though, Suderman's argument relies on a second equivocation. Governor Shumlin didn't try and fail to get the legislature to sign off on the creation of Green Mountain Care. Nor was there some initial implementation of the program that ended in disaster. What happened was, quite simply, that Governor Shumlin got cold feet.

Suderman tells us that Shumlin decided not to go ahead with the plan for Green Mountain Care because it would have involved unacceptably high tax rates. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has always been comfortable telling voters and journalists that his Medicare for All plan would involve a tax increase for middle-income taxpayers. He's emphasized, however, that the combination of this modest increase with the abolition of premiums, co-pays, and deductibles would mean considerable overall savings for those same taxpayers.

It's hard to imagine Bernie Sanders simply deciding not to push for Medicare for All legislation after being elected president. If this isn't what Suderman means to suggest, however, his central premise is irrelevant to his conclusion.

On the other hand, if he wants to suggest that single payer would "fail" in any other sense, all his work is still ahead of him. No one denies that a hypothetical President Sanders who used every available bit of political capital to push for single payer, instead of Shumlin-ing out, would face a steep uphill climb to make it happen. (No one is more aware of this problem than Sanders himself, who has been talking for years about the need for a grassroots "political revolution" to make his political agenda a reality.) Once such a program were in place, though, an abundance of evidence from several countries around the world strongly suggests that it would succeed in every sense.

Suderman describes the inference he tries to draw from Shumlin's cold feet as "the strongest argument against Mr. Sanders's single-player plan." As a defender of Sanders's plan, I hope he's right. If this is the best argument the other side has to offer, they've lost the debate.

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The "Strongest Argument Against Medicare for All" Is Very, Very Weak

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I make a living teaching students how to construct arguments and analyze arguments made by others. I wrote a book about logic. I love this stuff. So when I see a New York Times opinion piece titled " This Is the Strongest Argument Against Medicare for All," my ears perk up.

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Aside from having proposals for programs they would like to implement, Democratic presidential candidates have proposals for how they would like government to function.

The primary campaign has brought forth proposals to change all three branches of government, potentially impacting how laws are passed, the size and function of the Supreme Court, and how presidents are elected.

Below, we summarize how the 2020 Democratic contenders want to change U.S. governance in these three areas.
Don't see the graphic above? Click here. Graphics designed and produced by NPR's Alyson Hurt and Thomas Wilburn. Elena Burnett is an intern on the Washington Desk.

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Bigger Supreme Court? No More Electoral College? See What 2020 Democrats Would Do

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Aside from having proposals for programs they would like to implement, Democratic presidential candidates have proposals for how they would like government to function. The primary campaign has brought forth proposals to change all three branches of government, potentially impacting how laws are passed, the size and function of the Supreme Court, and how presidents are elected.

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The case will review a 2016 law known as PROMESA, in which Congress created an unelected oversight board to restructure Puerto Rico's multibillion-dollar debt. Describing the board as an agency of the Puerto Rican government, Congress even gave it power to revise the territory's laws. This return to colonial supervision angered not only many Puerto Ricans, but also some creditors. The creditors went to court, asserting that the board's members were appointed in violation of the appointments clause.

A Federal District Court judge rejected the creditors' argument on the ground that the appointments clause doesn't apply in the territories. But in February, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed that ruling, holding that Congress is bound by the appointments clause everywhere.

The First Circuit considered the unwelcome possibility that if the appointments clause applies to Puerto Rico, it might also require the appointment, not election, of Puerto Rico's governor or the District of Columbia's mayor. But it distinguished these officers on the ground that the appointments clause applies only to "officers of the United States." The court maintained that the governor of Puerto Rico, by contrast, is an officer "of the territory," suggesting that her authority comes from the Puerto Rican constitution and not federal law.

But only three years ago, in another case involving Puerto Rico, the Supreme Court emphasized that the Puerto Rican Constitution is United States law: Congress approved that Constitution and can amend it, which Congress effectively did with PROMESA. Territorial officers thus are officers of the United States in the same way that William Barr, as attorney general, is both an officer of the Department of Justiceand of the United States.

Moreover, the First Circuit's distinction between territorial law and United States law wouldn't save the Washington mayor, whose authority undoubtedly comes from federal law. So if the Supreme Court upholds the First Circuit's application of the appointments clause to Puerto Rico without offering a new explanation why the clause shouldn't also apply to its governor, it could doom territorial - and district - home rule.

The court could, of course, overturn its noxious territorial precedent, giving district and territorial residents the same constitutional rights as other Americans to representation in Congress and everything else. Failing this wholesale revision, the court should explicitly preserve Congress's power to create the conditions for local self-government in the territories and the District of Columbia. Otherwise, in the name of freeing Puerto Rico from unconstitutional oversight by an unelected board, the court might make Washington and the territories even more constitutionally anomalous and less democratic than they are now.

The promise of 1947 would, decades later, be broken.

Nikolas Bowie is an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, where he teaches constitutional and local government law.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Will Puerto Rico Still Be Allowed to Govern Itself?

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The case will review a 2016 law known as PROMESA, in which Congress created an unelected oversight board to restructure Puerto Rico's multibillion-dollar debt. Describing the board as an agency of the Puerto Rican government, Congress even gave it power to revise the territory's laws.

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The country's upcoming elections are crucial. And the United States is on the wrong side of the fight.

Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

A few minutes' walk from the center of Gdańsk, with its redbrick churches and cobblestone alleyways, a giant sans serif sign welcomes visitors to the city's historic shipyard: the STOCZNIA GDAŃSKA.

Passing through the gate underneath the modernist white lettering, you reach a maroon museum hall in the form of a ship. Erected a few years ago with financial support from the European Union, it tells the story of Solidarność, or Solidarity, the trade union that originated in these shipyards, and in the 1980s became a formidable opponent of Poland's Communist dictatorship. The exhibition traces the story of Solidarity from its list of initial demands to the roundtable at which Lech Wałęsa, the union's leader, negotiated Poland's transition to democracy.

The exhibition is designed as a joyous celebration of the brave activists who hastened the demise of the Soviet Union, and paved the way for the happiest period in Polish history: the first time in living memory that the country is free, affluent, and at peace with its neighbors. It's supposed to provide the country with a unifying narrative. But a short stroll in the direction of the harbor is enough to reveal the divisions tugging the country apart.

A few hundred yards from the European Solidarity Center is a small, military-style barrack that formerly served as Solidarity's headquarters. Wałęsa keeps an office in the former, but has not set foot in the latter in many years. He and the union he once led are now on opposite sides of the country's political rift: Like many of its blue-collar members, the new leadership of Solidarity is largely supportive of a populist government that, according to Wałęsa, is threatening the country's hard-won democracy.
Read: A warning from Europe: The worst is yet to come
In Poland's first democratic elections after the fall of Communism, Wałęsa endorsed a slate of candidates for the Sejm, the country's Parliament. Among them were the twins Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński. When Wałęsa was elected Poland's first president, at the end of 1990, Jarosław became his chief of staff.

The honeymoon did not last long. Although he'd lionized Wałęsa as a heroic opposition leader, Kaczyński soon accused him of secret complicity with the Communist regime, and organized raucous protests against the president; one featured a burning effigy of his longtime ally.

Like much of the rest of the world, Kaczyński had once thought of Polish democracy as having its origins in a broad popular movement against Communist dictatorship; now he argued that it was built on an unacceptable compromise with Communist apparatchiks who secretly remained in control of Poland's political and cultural institutions.

With his brother, Lech, Jarosław founded a far-right movement built on a series of conspiracy theories. The new Law and Justice Party argued that liberals, homosexuals, and Communists were aiming to undermine the true character of the nation from within. From outside, Germany and Russia were plotting to take revenge for their recent defeats. Only uncompromising defenders of traditional Polish values, like the Kaczyński twins, stood a chance of saving the nation.

To the surprise of political analysts, this paranoid stew of fearmongering has proved politically potent. The Kaczyńskis won power in 2005, with Jarosław serving as prime minister and Lech as president. Their hold on power slipped away when another party on which Law and Justice relied for its parliamentary majority defected, and Lech died in a tragic plane crash. But in the fall of 2015, Kaczyński staged a successful comeback: The party he leads won the presidency as well as, for the first time, an absolute majority in the Sejm.

Over the past four years, Kaczyński has used his power to stage a massive attack on Poland's democratic institutions. In an astoundingly short span of time, he has turned state television networks into reliable purveyors of government propaganda; gained effective control of the country's court system; weakened the independence of the electoral commission; restricted free speech; and initiated a number of high-profile trials against political opponents, including the director of the European Solidarity Center. As Wałęsa put it in a public letter co-signed by 14 other senior statesmen from across the political spectrum, the government has repeatedly attacked the country's "division of power" in ways that seriously imperil "the foundations of the democratic state."

Read: Poland's long fall from grace

Kaczyński's conspiracist mind-set and his attacks on independent institutions have exacerbated the deep tensions-between town and country, east and west, secular and devout-that have long characterized Poland. Even more deeply than in the United States, it now feels as though the country has been sawed in half. There's the mostly metropolitan Poland of well-educated and affluent optimists who are grateful for the opportunities they have been able to seize since the country emerged from Communism. And then there's the mostly rural and exurban Poland of those who fear that their traditional way of life is about to disappear, and intuit that the winners of the country's economic transition have come to look down on them.

The opposition has mostly avoided infighting. Although the formal political opposition ranges from the center-right Civic Platform, which ruled the country until Kaczyński's victory four years ago, to leftist parties like the Democratic Left Alliance, these disparate interests have managed to coordinate their resistance to the regime. In the election for the European Parliament this past May, they even formed a joint list, the European Coalition.

Despite this show of unity, however, the outcome of that election was a bitter disappointment: Law and Justice emerged as the largest party, with the European Coalition coming in a distant second place. Polls for the upcoming parliamentary elections, scheduled for this weekend, predict an even more crushing defeat for the opposition. The government is likely to gain about 45 percent of the vote, nearly 20 points more than the closest opposition party. Thanks to the country's electoral system, which gives a sizable bonus to the largest political force, Law and Justice is likely to have virtually free reign to step up its attacks on Polish democracy.

Observing Polish politics from a distance, I was long puzzled by the failure of the opposition. Here is a government that spreads unsupported conspiracy theories, is doubling down on a vicious culture war against sexual minorities, and has been fiercely criticized by international institutions that continue to be highly popular in the country. Why has a relatively united and professional opposition proved so powerless to orchestrate a broader majority against it? After traveling to Poland a few weeks ago, I came away with three overlapping explanations.

Law and Justice has been adept at delivering tangible benefits to its supporters. The key plank of the 2015 campaign was a promise to introduce a monthly payment of at least 500 złoty to every family with two or more children. Once Law and Justice took power, it implemented the system, sending a monthly payment to the bank accounts of many Polish voters. Now Kaczyński has expanded the "500 Plus" scheme to families with one child.

The government's tangible achievements shine all the more brightly because the opposition has failed to coalesce around a charismatic leader who is capable of formulating a positive vision for the country's future. Grzegorz Schetyna, the leader of the Civic Platform, is widely derided as a career politician who is unwilling to formulate a clear stance on key cultural issues, such as gay rights, or key economic issues, such as the 500 Plus. As a result, he has been unable to fire up his base or to make a play for conservative voters who are concerned about the government's divisive tone.

Finally, opposition leaders and newspapers have struggled to conceal their disdain for those who voted for the government in the past. Rather than seeing them as compatriots who might be persuaded to embrace a different vision of politics, they talk about supporters of the government as incorrigible deplorables. Anybody who votes for Law and Justice, a succession of local opposition figures told me with varying degrees of explicitness, is a religious fanatic, an uneducated rube, or a deluded idiot.

Political scientists will likely continue to debate the exact causes of the opposition's weakness for years to come. But one thing is undeniable: It is now deeply demoralized. With elections that may decide the fate of Polish democracy just days away, nobody I met in the country seems to believe that the opposition stands a chance. A country that fought so valiantly to gain its liberty in the 1980s now seems strangely apathetic in the face of a grave threat to its democracy.
Yascha Mounk: What to make of the European elections
It takes time to dismantle a democracy.

From Hungary to Turkey, populists who have won power in deeply divided societies faced serious opposition in their first terms in office. After they managed to gain reelection, that resistance started to crumble. By the time they had been in office for eight or 10 years, they had succeeded in capturing their countries' institutions to such a degree that the opposition could no longer compete on an even playing field.

There can be little doubt that Kaczyński is hoping for the same outcome. A few days after his party won election in 2015, he spent a day with Viktor Orbán, the populist prime minister of Hungary. If the government is reelected, the deputy prime minister has recently vowed, it will step up the "re-Polonization" of the country's media.

These attacks on Poland's democracy directly threaten American values and interests. If Warsaw comes to resemble Budapest, and Poland descends into a populist dictatorship, it would destroy one of the biggest success stories for liberal democracy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The country's transformation would also throw the European Union into an existential crisis; after all, citizens of full democracies in Berlin or Paris may not be especially enthusiastic about sharing their sovereignty with an aspiring dictator in Warsaw.

Any American government in recent memory would, under such circumstances, have expressed serious concern about the developments in Poland, and tried to shore up democratic forces within the country. Donald Trump's White House, by contrast, has consistently signaled its support for Kaczyński. When Trump first traveled to Warsaw, in July 2017, he implicitly endorsed the government's fearmongering about internal and external enemies: "We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time ... to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are."

Evidently determined to boost Kaczyński's chances of reelection, the administration also did him a big favor in the final stage of his reelection campaign: For the past two decades, every Polish government has fought to give Polish citizens the ability to travel to the United States without having to apply for visas at a local consulate. Last Friday, the Trump administration unexpectedly granted Polish citizens that privilege.

A populist government in a major European country can now credibly claim that it would, if reelected, enjoy a closer relationship with the United States than a moderate opposition that is struggling to rescue the country's democratic institutions. Democracy is in mortal danger in Poland-and the president of the United States is on the side of its would-be assassins.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Yascha Mounk is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He is the author of The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It.

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The country's upcoming elections are crucial. And the United States is on the wrong side of the fight. A few minutes' walk from the center of Gdańsk, with its redbrick churches and cobblestone alleyways, a giant sans serif sign welcomes visitors to the city's historic shipyard: the STOCZNIA GDAŃSKA.

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4. IRS Official Alleges Treasury Department Appointee Tried to Interfere With Trump or Pence's Tax Returns

After Brett Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court in October 2018, most of the justices seemed eager to do whatever they could to keep SCOTUS out of the limelight. Less than two weeks earlier, Christine Blasey Ford had declared on live TV that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a teenager; Kavanaugh, in response, accused Democrats of orchestrating a "grotesque character assassination" driven by "pent-up anger about President Trump" and "revenge on behalf of the Clintons."

The Supreme Court's legitimacy rests in large part on the perception it is a nonpartisan institution, but Kavanaugh joined the bench engulfed in a toxic cloud of political rancor. In the year after the ugly confirmation hearing, the justices mostly kept their heads down, ducking many controversial cases for no apparent reason. They decided only two bona fide blockbusters, throwing partisan gerrymandering claims out of federal court and blocking the census citizenship question. Meanwhile, they dodged cases about Dreamers, abortion, religious freedom, and discrimination, effectively deciding not to decide.

But the Supreme Court has amassed far too much power to avoid any contentious issue for long. As Congress remains deadlocked and the White House melts down, SCOTUS has become the only fully functioning branch of the federal government. It has taken on the role of policymaker, obligated to resolve many of the battles that engulf the political branches. Republicans understand this fact, and it is a key reason why they fought so hard for Kavanaugh's confirmation. With lawmakers paralyzed, momentous disputes wind up at the Supreme Court. And now, thanks to Kavanaugh's vote, many of these battles will be decided by a 5-4 conservative majority.

A slew of potentially earthshaking cases has already piled up on the court's docket for the upcoming term. Multiple transformative decisions will come down in June, thrusting the court into the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign. And the full impact of Kavanaugh's appointment will become clear as the court is dragged further to the right. This jurisprudential bloodbath will heighten the stakes of the 2020 race, amplifying the power of the president and the role of the judiciary in the most explosive political fights of the day.

Potentially earthshaking cases have already piled up on the court's docket for the upcomingterm.

The term will begin with a bang, with oral arguments over whether states can abolish the insanity defense. Four states have outlawed this defense-which allows defendants with mental illnesses to acknowledge their crime but argue a lack of culpability-even though it's been a universal feature of criminal law for most of American history. Without Justice Anthony Kennedy's moderating influence on Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, the conservative bloc may bless the abolition of the insanity defense, ensuring that more people with mental illnesses are locked up in prison without access to appropriate treatment.

A day later, the court will hear arguments in three cases that ask whether federal law prohibits employment discrimination against LGBTQ people. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars workplace discrimination "because of ... sex." And it is impossible to discriminate against LGBTQ people without taking sex into account. Consider an employer who fires a man for marrying a man but does not fire a woman for marrying a man. This discrimination is inherently based on sex: change the male employee's sex and he wouldn't be fired. Now consider an employer who fires a trans woman because she is trans. That termination turns on her sex-the fact that she does not identify as a man.

There is another reason why it would be bizarre to subtract LGBTQ employees from federal protections. The Supreme Court has ruled that sex stereotyping-punishing workers for failing to confirm to gender norms-is a form of sex discrimination prohibited under Title VII. Discrimination against gay people rests on the ultimate sex stereotype: the belief that men should only be romantically involved with women, and vice versa. Discrimination against transgender people, too, is rooted in sex stereotyping -a belief that individuals should conform to the sex they're assigned at birth as well as the attendant gender norms.

Dozens of lower court judges, including numerous Republican nominees, have reached these conclusions with ease. But there is little reason to be optimistic that the new conservative majority will agree. Conservative advocacy groups, including some that supported Kavanaugh's and Gorsuch's confirmations, have lobbied against an LGBTQ-inclusive interpretation of Title VII. So, too, have a number of congressional Republicans who endorsed both justices. There is also the possibility that the conservative justices on the bench today hold anti-LGBTQ beliefs that will cloud their analyses of the issue. A 5-4 decision along ideological lines excluding LGBTQ employees from Title VII seems disturbingly probable.

A week later, SCOTUS will hear arguments in a seemingly dry clash over executive power. In theory, the case asks only whether the Constitution's appointments clause applies to Puerto Rico's Financial Oversight and Management Board, which Congress created to restructure the island's debt. If so, the president must nominate each member of the board and obtain Senate confirmation.

But this case could be a Trojan horse that strips U.S. territories and the District of Columbia of home rule. If the appointments clause applies to the Puerto Rico board, it may also apply to territorial governments more broadly. That would give the president of the United States the power to choose the governors of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. He could also select high-ranking executive officials in each territory-as well as the D.C. mayor. Residents of U.S. territories and D.C. could no longer elect their own leaders. If the court hands down a sweeping decision, Trump, facilitated by a GOP-controlled Senate, could seize control over every territorial government.

The next day, the court will hear a dispute over whether states can prosecute immigrants who use false Social Security numbers. Immigrant rights advocates argue that the federal government has sole authority to charge this crime, but red states are trying to seize the power to punish unauthorized immigrants themselves. A few hours later, the justices will take on a case about Lee Boyd Malvo, who was 17 years old when he helped John Allen Muhammad murder 10 people during the "D.C. sniper" shootings. Malvo, who regrets his actions, is serving life in prison, but he has sought resentencing under SCOTUS precedents that sharply limit juvenile life without parole. In Kennedy's absence, the conservative majority may roll back those decisions and give states leeway to keep juvenile offenders behind bars until they die.

In November, the hits will just keep coming. On Nov. 12, Trump's attempt to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, will finally come before the court. (The justices punted this case for months last term to avoid deciding it in 2019.) President Barack Obama created DACA to let certain undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children live and work here legally. The Trump administration tried to wind it down-but DACA's defenders argue that it did so illegally, on the mistaken premise that the program is unlawful. A majority of the court may rule that Trump has discretion to reverse his predecessor's policy however he wants. It could also take a leap forward and declare that DACA itself is unconstitutional. Either decision would trigger a humanitarian crisis, placing 800,000 Dreamers in danger of deportation.

That same day, the court will hear arguments in Hernández v. Mesa, a truly horrific case. The facts are ghastly: In 2010, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed an unarmed 15-year-old Mexican boy across the border. His family argues that the Constitution's prohibitions on such police brutality provide them with a right to damages. If the court rules against them, it could strip everyone-citizens and undocumented immigrants alike-of the ability to sue federal law enforcement for misconduct. And recent precedents suggest that the conservative justices are prepared to slam the door on such claims.

One day later, the justices will consider Comcast v. National Association of African American-Owned Media, a potential atomic bomb for race discrimination law. Section 1981, a federal statute first passed in the wake of the Civil War, guarantees racial minorities the right "to make and enforce contracts."

This rule is expansive: It applies to independent contractors, unlike Title VII, and bars race discrimination in retail, education, and public accommodations. A federal appeals court ruled that, to win under Section 1981, plaintiffs need only prove that race was one factor in their mistreatment. Comcast wants to defang law by requiring plaintiffs to prove "but-for" causation-meaning they would not have faced discrimination but for their race. The conservative justices favor this stringent standard, which would compel plaintiffs to uncover evidence of blatant racism. Since that evidence almost never exists, a decision importing "but-for" causation into Section 1981 could kneecap the law.

In December, the court will hear arguments in a Second Amendment case for the first time since 2010. It will decide whether New York City's strict gun laws-which bar residents from traveling with firearms unless they're going to a city shooting range-is unconstitutional. The court will say it is. In the process, it will bring the right to bear arms out of the home and into the streets, setting the stage for a future decision that creates a constitutional right to public-carry. (New York City has already repealed the law in question and argues that the case should be dismissed; the plaintiffs vigorously disagree.)

When the court returns from the winter holidays, it will hear another landmark case: Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue.This case is, at bottom, an effort to force states to fund religious education. The plaintiffs argue that once states subsidize private schools, they must also subsidize parochial schools. It appears that the conservative justices agree with that proposition, even though it directly violates the constitutional separation of church and state. If the court sides with the plaintiffs, the roughly 30 states that use vouchers or tax credits to support private schools would have to open up their programs to religious schools. Taxpayers, by extension, would be compelled to fund the exercise of religion.

Guns, immigration, executive power, police brutality, criminal justice, race discrimination, church-state separation, LGBTQ rights-what other issue could the Supreme Court possibly take on to make this term more incendiary? Ah, yes: abortion, of course! Sometime in 2020, the court will hear June Medical Services v. Gee, a challenge to Louisiana's targeted regulation of abortion providers (or TRAP law). The state passed a stringent law that compels these providers to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital-a virtually impossible task that provides no health benefit to women. In 2016's Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt,the Supreme Court struck down an identical law. Kennedy provided the fifth vote. After he stepped down, the 5 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Louisiana law, defying Whole Woman's Health. In February, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Louisiana law by a 5-4 vote, sparing the states' clinics, which were prepared to shutter. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberals; Kavanaugh dissented.

Roberts likely voted to freeze the law to remind lower courts that they cannot ignore binding precedent. But he dissented in Whole Woman's Health and is no fan of abortion rights. The Supreme Court will now have to decide whether a constitutional right to abortion access still exists in a post-Kennedy world. Do not expect Roberts to side with the liberals this time around. He may not have wanted the 5 th Circuit to overrule Supreme Court precedent. But he may be happy to overturn Whole Woman's Health himself, giving states the green light to regulate abortion clinics out of existence.

The justices may prefer to avoid the grimy political arena, but over the next eight months, the court will take center stage. As these decisions come down, the court will inevitably become a flashpoint in the presidential campaign. Liberal voters will demand to know what Democratic presidential hopefuls plan to do about the judiciary, and candidates will embrace court packing with more enthusiasm.

As the new majority launches a conservative revolution in constitutional law, ushered in by Kavanaugh's elevation to the bench, Democrats will learn, over and over again, how much damage Trump has inflicted on the progressive project. And they will be forced to contend with a wildly powerful judiciary poised to obstruct progressive reforms while shattering liberal precedent. The Supreme Court is not yet in the forefront of the 2020 race. By the time this term is over, traumatized Democrats may struggle to talk about anything else. Perhaps Democrats will espouse a vision of progressivism that is less reliant upon the judiciary for success. They may conclude that it is not healthy for a democracy to depend so extensively on the rule of five justices in Washington.

Update, Oct. 4, 2019: This article has been updated to note that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear June Medical Services v. Gee.

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This Supreme Court Term Will Launch a Conservative Revolution

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Republicans Now Say It's OK to Enlist Foreign Help in an Election Trump Can't Outrun This One Mike Pence, You Might Actually Be Running for President IRS Official Alleges Treasury Department Appointee Tried to Interfere With Trump or Pence's Tax Returns After Brett Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court in October 2018, most of the justices seemed eager to do whatever they could to keep SCOTUS out of the limelight.

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The justices again appear poised to pursue a purely theoretical liberty at the expense of the lives of people of color.

Alicia Tatone

When the Louisiana State Militia finally arrived at the Colfax courthouse on April 15, 1873, all it could do was bury the bodies. Two days earlier, a large force of white supremacists had taken control of the courthouse from the mostly black faction protecting it. J. R. Beckwith, the U.S. attorney for New Orleans, told Congress that in the aftermath the ground was "strewn with dead negroes," their bodies plundered by whites who had come to watch the bloodshed. The dead remained "unburied and mutilated," Beckwith said, until federal troops arrived days later to shovel them into a mass grave.

"Not a single negro had been killed until all of them had surrendered to the whites who were fighting with them," The New York Times reported at the time, "when over 100 of the unfortunate negroes were shot down in cold blood." Some were killed as they tried to surrender, and others as they attempted to flee the courthouse, which had been set on fire. President Ulysses S. Grant called the Colfax massacre a "butchery" that "in bloodthirstiness and barbarity is hardly surpassed by any acts of savage warfare."

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Many white Southerners saw it differently. Robert Hunter, the editor of The Caucasian, a Louisiana newspaper, told Congress in 1875 that some of his own staffers had participated in the massacre. "I approved it, as most of our people did," Hunter testified. "Had not the Colfax affair ended as it did, not less than a thousand niggers would have been killed later."

Seventy-two men were ultimately indicted for their role in the Colfax massacre, charged under the Enforcement Acts of 1870, which were passed to help the federal government suppress the Ku Klux Klan. But their convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that the federal government lacked the authority to charge the perpetrators. Justice Joseph Bradley, a Grant appointee, wrote that the United States had not clearly stated that the accused, in slaughtering more than 100 black men, had "committed the acts complained of with a design to deprive the injured persons of their rights on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude." And it wouldn't have mattered if they had, argued the Grant-appointed Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, because the Fourteenth Amendment's powers did not cover discrimination by individuals, only by the state. "The only obligation resting upon the United States is to see that the States do not deny the right," Waite wrote. "This the amendment guarantees, but no more. The power of the national government is limited to the enforcement of this guaranty."

This decision, in United States v. Cruikshank, the legal historian Lawrence Goldstone argues, provided a guide for the campaign of racist terrorism that would suppress the black vote and enshrine a white man's government for generations. "The Colfax defendants would have had to announce their plan to violate their victims' rights on account of the color of their skin in order to be culpable," Goldstone wrote. "Justice Bradley had thus communicated to any Redeemer with violent intent that to avoid federal prosecution one need simply to keep one's mouth shut before committing murder."

Grant was enraged that "insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers ... and the so-called conservative papers of the State not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to justice."

The decision in Cruikshank set a pattern that would hold for decades. Despite being dominated by appointees from the party of abolition, the Court gave its constitutional blessing to the destruction of America's short-lived attempt at racial equality piece by piece. By the end, racial segregation would be the law of the land, black Americans would be almost entirely disenfranchised, and black workers would be relegated to a twisted simulacrum of the slave system that existed before the Civil War.

The justices did not resurrect Dred Scott v. Sandford 's antebellum declaration that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. Rather, they carefully framed their arguments in terms of limited government and individual liberty, writing opinion after opinion that allowed the white South to create an oppressive society in which black Americans had almost no rights at all. Their commitment to freedom in the abstract, and only in the abstract, allowed a brutal despotism to take root in Southern soil.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court today is similarly blinded by a commitment to liberty in theory that ignores the reality of how Americans' lives are actually lived. Like the Supreme Court of that era, the conservatives on the Court today are opposed to discrimination in principle, and indifferent to it in practice. Chief Justice John Roberts's June 2018 ruling to uphold President Donald Trump's travel ban targeting a list of majority-Muslim countries, despite the voluminous evidence that it had been conceived in animus, showed that the muddled doctrines of the post-Reconstruction period retain a stubborn appeal.

Roberts wrote that since the declaration itself was "facially neutral toward religion" and did not discriminate against all Muslims, it did not run afoul of the Constitution. In doing so, he embraced the logic of decades of jurisprudence from his predecessors on the high court, whose rulings ensured that the Constitution would not interfere with the emergence of Jim Crow in the American South. The nation's founding document is no match for a dedicated majority of justices committed to circumventing its guarantees.

"You have the president repeatedly saying this is a ban on Muslims, and the courts agreed with that, and he went back and rewrote it, and the courts seemed to say that was all he had to do to cover up his discrimination. After Reconstruction, the Court refused to see how their rulings encouraged the rise of white supremacists and inhibited the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment," says Adam Winkler, a legal historian and professor at the UCLA School of Law. "There is in both instances a preference for legal formalities over how we know the law is being implemented on the ground."

The Roberts Court is poised to shape American society in Trump's image for decades to come. All three branches of the federal government are now committed to the Trump agenda: the restoration of America's traditional racial, religious, and gender hierarchies; the enrichment of party patrons; the unencumbered pursuit of corporate profit; the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of the rival party's constituencies; and the protection of the president and his allies from prosecution by any means available. Not since the end of Reconstruction has the U.S. government been so firmly committed to a single, coherent program uniting a politics of ethnonationalism with unfettered corporate power. As with Redemption, as the end of Reconstruction is known, the consequences could last for generations.

The lesson of the post-Reconstruction Supreme Court is that a determined Court majority can prove stubbornly resistant to short-term swings of political fortune. Even if Democrats win the next election cycle, and the one after that, an enduring conservative majority on the Supreme Court will have the power to shatter any hard-won liberal legislative victory on the anvil of judicial review. It will be able to reverse decades-old precedents that secure fundamental rights. It will further entrench the rules of a society in which justice skews toward the wealthy, and the lives of those without means can be destroyed by a chance encounter with law enforcement. It will do all these things and more in the name of a purely theoretical freedom, which most Americans will never be able to afford to experience.

"For large portions of American life people of color have been treated unjustly, and for most of that period the Supreme Court has found ways to rationalize that, and make us think that is consistent with promises of liberty and equality," says the Harvard Law professor and legal scholar Randall Kennedy. "That's what it's typically done. Is it doing that today? Yup."

The Supreme Court's moments of majesty, such as Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregated schools; and Loving v. Virginia, which struck down antimiscegenation laws; and even Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage, are few and far between. For most of its existence, the high court has been committed less to upholding the rule of law or the Constitution than to preserving its own legitimacy, unwilling to shield the powerless from the mob unless convinced that it has the political cover to do so. Like many things in America, the ideal rarely resembles the execution.

"We constantly romanticize the Supreme Court of the United States," Kennedy says. "People think they have more rights than they actually have. They think something's gonna happen and the Supreme Court's gonna make things right. It's just ridiculous."

During Redemption, Southern white militants regained control of state governments across the South with murder and terror, successfully disenfranchising the newly emancipated slaves. The Republican Party relinquished its commitment to protecting the rights of black voters in the South, even though the party could not be viable there without them. Fearful that a weary nation was tired of expending blood and treasure for the benefit of people whom most whites considered only conditionally American, Republican lawmakers acquiesced to the creation of a separate and unequal society in the South.

To maintain their power in the South, the so-called Redeemers required more than control of state governments and rigged election rules. They also required a compliant executive branch and a sympathetic Supreme Court.

Reconstruction's experiment in equal rights did not end, and could not have ended, simply by force of arms. Rather, as the Republican Party retreated from its commitment to black rights and the Democratic Party reasserted its historical commitment to white supremacy, the branches of the federal government became aligned toward a single ideological purpose: the protection of white rule. Virtually anyone who might have opposed it in principle acquiesced in practice.

That cause succeeded for a century not simply because of the implacable commitment of the Democratic Party, but also because the federal courts, filled with Republican-appointed jurists, chose to be compliant, painting the scaffolding of segregation with the language of constitutionalism. Together they built Jim Crow, which would last for a century, until it was torn down to its still-intact foundations by the civil-rights movement.

The Colfax massacre is most often remembered as the single worst act of violence during Reconstruction, but it also set a template for the high court's approach to the bloody restoration of white rule in the South. The men who carried out the massacre had popular support among Southern whites-according to the historian Ted Tunnell, "nearly half the white males" in New Orleans alone belonged to terrorist groups such as the White League, which was willing to use violence to secure political gains or prevent black Americans from voting. With Cruikshank, the justices sent the message that if white Southerners wished to overthrow their state government at gunpoint, the Supreme Court would bar efforts to prosecute them. In the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases, the justices drew a distinction between state and national citizenship, concluding that, in the words of the historian Eric Foner, "primary authority over citizens' rights rested with the states."

In the 1879 case of Virginia v. Rives, Justice William Strong, a Grant appointee, sanctioned all-white juries by ruling that the simple fact that black people in Virginia had never been called upon to serve on a jury was not, absent a law explicitly barring them, evidence of discrimination. The relevant provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment "have reference to state action exclusively, and not to any action of private individuals," Strong wrote. If blacks were barred from juries by discriminatory custom, not by written law, the Constitution offered no remedy.

In the 1883 case United States v. Harris, Justice William Woods cited Strong when he wrote that the federal government had no authority to try a group of white men for lynching four black men they had seized from a jail in Tennessee, where they were being held by the local sheriff prior to being charged. "The section of the law under consideration is directed exclusively against the action of private persons, without reference to the laws of the states or their administration by the officers of the state, we are clear in the opinion that it is not warranted by any clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution," Woods wrote. In the name of limited government and individual freedom, the Supreme Court could not allow the federal government to stop or punish white men determined to enforce racial caste by murdering black men in public.

The reasoning in those cases-that the Fourteenth Amendment did not allow the federal government to legislate against private discrimination-led the Supreme Court to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had declared, "All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement." The law had rarely been enforced, and similar protections would not become law again until nearly a century later, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The ruling overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1875 came in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, at a time when black Americans were being denied the right to vote, barred from businesses, thrown off train cars, and murdered in the street. Justice Bradley wrote in his majority opinion:

When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men's rights are protected ... There were thousands of free colored people in this country before the abolition of slavery, enjoying all the essential rights of life, liberty and property the same as white citizens, yet no one at that time thought that it was any invasion of his personal status as a freeman because he was not admitted to all the privileges enjoyed by white citizens, or because he was subjected to discriminations in the enjoyment of accommodations in inns, public conveyances and places of amusement.

Bradley's opinion, which gave segregation the explicit approval of the nation's highest court, doubled as an expression of the era's bipartisan exhaustion with black Americans who continued to insist that they were entitled to be treated with the same respect and dignity as white people. Justice John Harlan wrote one of his famous lone dissents, arguing that what the Civil Rights Act sought to accomplish was "what had already been done in every state in the Union for the white race, to secure and protect rights belonging to them as freemen and citizens; nothing more."

Lawrence Goldstone notes that the decision drew praise from the white North as well as the white South. Sectional differences were reconciled in a common frustration over having to share the country with black people. Northern newspapers such as The New York Times and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle praised the ruling. Harper's Weekly described it as "another illustration of the singular wisdom of our constitutional system."

The Supreme Court's growing hostility to federal efforts to protect black rights would come to its logical conclusion in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregation in public transportation. Justice Henry Billings Brown, a Rutherford B. Hayes appointee, wrote that "if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane." Separate was not inherently unequal, he insisted. "A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races-a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color-has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude." As the historian Ibram X. Kendi has written, "Brown relied on racist ideas to support a policy that was clearly discriminatory in intent. It was his job to obscure those intentions."

In 1898, in Williams v. Mississippi, the William McKinley-appointed Justice Joseph McKenna would write for a unanimous Court that literacy tests and grandfather clauses, two cornerstones of Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement, were constitutional because they also affected some whites. That the devices were consciously used to bar black voters from the polls was of no significance-the Court would avert its eyes and plug its ears. "They do not on their face discriminate between the races," McKenna wrote, "and it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil; only that evil was possible under them."

In the name of limited government and individual freedom, the Supreme Court would deny black people both. But it's not as if the Redemption Court was sincerely committed to those principles. "Some commentators have praised the justices' rulings during this period for applying 'restraint,' for voluntarily restricting their own power rather than resorting to 'activism' to artificially rewrite the Constitution. In fact, the justices were engaging in nothing of the sort," Goldstone argues. "The judges were simply finding justification, no matter how flimsy, for declining to enforce constitutional amendments with whose principles they philosophically and politically disagreed."

The Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process, however, did not go to waste. As the Republican Party abandoned its black constituency in the South, it became more dependent on, and shaped by, its corporate benefactors, which profited handsomely from being granted rights and protections denied to black Americans. As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written: "The Court increasingly used the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect corporations from state regulation rather than the civil rights of persons." In case after case, "the U.S. Supreme Court had come to embrace the logic of corporations," Painter wrote in Standing at Armageddon, her history of the Gilded Age. "These decisions outlawed virtually any attempt by states to limit maximum hours of work, of unions to strike, and of the federal government to curb or regulate monopolies or to curb the accumulation of vast fortunes."

As Adam Winkler documents in We the Corporations, from 1868 to 1912 the Supreme Court heard 604 Fourteenth Amendment cases. Fewer than 5 percent involved the civil rights of black Americans, and civil-rights advocates lost nearly all of those. "More than half of all the Fourteenth Amendment cases decided by the Supreme Court-312 in total-involved corporations," Winkler writes, "which succeeded in striking down numerous laws regulating business, including minimum wage laws, zoning laws, and child labor laws." The redistribution of civil rights from American citizens to American corporations helped create the greatest disparities in wealth in the nation's history, until the present day.

"When impoverished Southern workers were not protected as voters, they could not vote to influence policies that would protect them economically or bodily," Painter said.

"The Supreme Court contributed to the inequality of the Gilded Age by reinforcing and encouraging racial segregation. By refusing to read the Fourteenth Amendment broadly for minorities, they allowed a system of racial apartheid to go up in the South," Winkler said. "On the other side, the corporate rulings enhanced inequality by entrenching the power of industrialists, financiers, and wealthy elites at the expense of immigrants and the working class."

One episode in particular stands out. In 1881, the Republican attorney Roscoe Conkling, a former legislator who helped write the amendment, insisted, in a case involving the Southern Pacific Railroad, that the text guaranteeing all "persons" equal protection under the law was meant for corporations rather than black people, raising a journal of congressional deliberations in the courtroom as proof. It was complete hokum; the journal contained nothing of the sort.

The Conkling story illustrates the trajectory of the Republican Party, born in the fires of abolition. Black voters were the conscience of the party, the only constituency for whom the commitment to American pluralism was ironclad. Without them, it was inevitable that the party would sell its soul to the corporate powers that sustained it.

In December 2015, five days after 14 people were killed by Islamic State-inspired shooters in San Bernardino, California, Donald Trump called for a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the United States. Trump read his declaration for a crowd in South Carolina, and it cheered wildly.

Sensing Republican voters' hostility to Muslims, and their anger over being called anti-Muslim, Trump would make generalizations about Muslims as terrorists a regular feature of his campaign rhetoric. He told stories about American soldiers shooting terrorists with bullets smeared in pig's blood, as if Muslims were werewolves or vampires in some horror film and could be stopped with silver or garlic. He invoked Franklin D. Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans as a model policy. He proclaimed, " Islam hates us." Rudy Giuliani would later say that, as president, Trump asked his advisers to show him how to implement his "Muslim ban" in a manner that was legal.

Faced with all this evidence of the president's intent, Chief Justice Roberts upheld the ban, writing that it was "facially neutral" and that "the text says nothing about religion." His decision echoed the logic of the Supreme Court's rulings in Redemption-era cases such as Cruikshank and Williams: that as long as the legal language itself did not explicitly mention the group being discriminated against, intent and effect were irrelevant. The implications are larger than one religion: As with the Redemption Court, which gave the Redeemers a blueprint for creating a segregated society through laws that "do not on their face discriminate between the races," Roberts and the conservative majority have indicated that Trump's bigotries can be made policy as long as they appear "facially neutral."

With Anthony Kennedy's retirement, there is no discriminatory voting restriction the justices will be unable to sanction, no immigration law born in animus they will be unable to approve, no expansion of corporate power they will be unable to accept, no grant of presidential immunity they will be unable to uphold, no financial or environmental regulation they will be unable to strike down, no religious objection to an antidiscrimination law they will be unable to recognize, no worker protection they will be unable to repeal, no limitation on abortion they will be unable to allow, and no abuse of power by law enforcement they will feel compelled to restrict. While the Roberts Court will never explicitly endorse a white man's government in the way the Redemption Court did, in pursuit of other cherished ideological goals it will be asked to pave the road for a white man's government by another name.

The justices of the Redemption Court "had a very limited and restricted view of racial justice. They lacked imagination, and because their view was so limited, they ended up destroying Reconstruction," says Anderson Francois, the director of the Civil Rights Clinic at NYU. "In the travel-ban case, Roberts tries to pull the same stunt, pretending not to know or understand the social context in which Trump ran and which he has used to govern. The Trump administration, without exaggeration, is committed to maintaining some form of white supremacy and white control."

In the short term, that means that in states where Republicans dominate the government, women and religious and ethnic minorities will find their rights further curtailed. Where it is necessary to restrict the electorate in order to maintain political dominance, Republicans will be able to do so without much interference. This will not be a simple matter of reasserting states' rights. If the past is any guide, Republicans will find the lure of using federal power to impose their ideological goals on the blue states that choose to reject them difficult to resist, should they even attempt to resist it.

The Roberts Court need not be any more consistent than the Redemption Court. Where federalism meets its goals, it will employ federalism. Where the supremacy of the federal government must be invoked, it will invoke the supremacy of the federal government. A Court that concludes that anti-Christian animus motivated the decision to uphold an antidiscrimination law protecting gay and lesbian couples but is deaf to the anti-Muslim statements of a president imposing a ban on Muslim travelers is not interested in consistency. A Court that says it is a violation of the First Amendment for California to make crisis pregnancy centers provide patrons with information about the availability of state abortion services but allows South Dakota to force doctors to read from an anti-abortion script is unconcerned with integrity. A Court that preaches fidelity to the Constitution but strikes down part of the Voting Rights Act without so much as naming what part of the founding document it violates regards honesty as a disposable virtue.

The Court will do what is necessary to bring its ideological project to fruition, a vision of the law in which the federal government does not intercede with the strong on behalf of the weak, because that would be unfair.

But there are limits to the comparison. The Redemption Court was arguably constrained by the broad public consensus among white people of all political stripes that black people were inferior and undeserving of full citizenship, a consensus that hobbled enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 even before it was struck down. The new Roberts Court will pursue its ideological agenda even in the face of majoritarian opposition. "In the Reconstruction cases, the Supreme Court is made up of Republicans who are facing the political facts of life and trying to do the best they can under those circumstances," the Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman told me. "Here, that's not the case. What we have is a Court of radical originalists who understand the dominant jurisprudence of the postwar era as a betrayal by big government on behalf of values that the Founders would not recognize."

The Redemption Court was "naive to issues of racial justice, but not necessarily hostile to them ... That Court could not also imagine a world in which blacks were fully equal; it could not imagine a world not subject to white supremacy and white control," Francois says. "To the extent that the Roberts Court succeeds-and I think it will-in keeping down black political power, it will not be because of a lack of imagination. It will be deliberate."

Some legal experts, such as the Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith, have argued that Kennedy's departure may not meaningfully change the shape of the Court. "There is little doubt that Kennedy's replacement will be conservative and little doubt, too, that the Court will have a conservative bent for the next few years," Goldsmith wrote in The Weekly Standard. "Beyond that, it is too early to tell."

This analysis mistakes the Court for a fulcrum of change, rather than the Republican Party itself. The GOP's partisan incentives have realigned around a man who believes black and Latino immigrants are from "shithole countries," whose very name is a battle cry for white nationalists, and whose demonization of Muslims on the campaign trail ended in a grand victory on the Supreme Court. The Justices may not share Trump's vision for America. But they appear unwilling to restrain him. Kennedy's final opinion before retirement upheld Trump's travel ban while pleading with Trump to "adhere to the Constitution and to its meaning and its promise." It showed that, while there may be varying degrees of commitment to Trump's ideological project within the Republican Party, conservative resistance is all but finished. Even those who might disagree with the president's agenda are no longer willing to be significant obstacles to it.

As if to send that very message, Trump's handpicked replacement for Kennedy, Brett Kavanaugh, introduced himself to the country with the preposterous falsehood that "no president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination." Even if Kavanaugh were not a post-Bill Clinton convert to the belief that the president is above the law, his decision to ritually debase himself before the president who selected him is an act that should end any fantasy that Kavanaugh possesses the necessary personal integrity to hold the position, let alone to defend the constitutional rights of Americans from a government determined to strip them away.

The end of the Reconstruction era was not an inevitable outcome. It was a political choice. Republicans might have committed themselves to arming and organizing black citizens to resist the campaign of terrorism that ended Reconstruction. But the Republican Party was not as committed to pluralism as the Democrats were to white supremacy. White Republicans such as Louisiana Governor Henry Clay Warmoth saw their role as not just resisting the violence and despotism of the Democratic Party but also preventing the newly emancipated from attempting to, in Warmoth's words, "Africanize the state."

Or, as Ted Tunnell writes, "Reconstruction failed on the lower Mississippi mainly because Louisiana whites believed more devoutly in white supremacy than the Radicals believed in the rights of man." It is hard to look at the leaders of today's Democratic Party and avoid a similar conclusion: that the intensity of their commitment to fighting the president's agenda is not equal to the passion of those who carry the banner of Trumpism.

After Trump intimidated the NFL into banning protests against police brutality during the national anthem, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi could not even muster a defense of the players' right to protest the murder of their countrymen by agents of the state. "I love the national anthem. I love the flag, and I love the First Amendment, and I'll just leave it at that," Pelosi said at a CNN town hall in May. During a month in which the Trump administration's horrifying policy of shattering undocumented families and placing children in cages was revealed, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the floor to denounce Representative Maxine Waters for calling on Americans to protest Cabinet officials when they see them in public. Steny Hoyer, the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the House, condemned as "inappropriate" his Latino colleagues' protest of the president when he visited Congress. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the leader of the party's left flank, rebuked a restaurateur in Virginia for refusing to serve White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The leadership of the opposition party is moved to shock, embarrassment, and even anger when its lower-ranking members are mildly intemperate in their opposition.

While the leaders of the Democratic Party do not share the Trump-era Republican enthusiasm for a white man's government, their unwillingness to fight fiercely for the constituencies threatened by Trumpism suggests a reluctance to take the necessary measures to win the political battle ahead of them, because unlike those constituencies, the stakes for them are not existential.

There is hope for the Democratic Party in its base. The black and brown workers intimately acquainted with the two-faced nature of American liberty, the rebellious teachers whose surprise strikes brought red-state politicians to heel, the young leftists whose cold-eyed understanding of power mirrors that of their Republican opponents, and the feminists who flooded the streets after Trump's inauguration forced the nation to reckon with the ascension of predatory men to the highest levels of culture, clergy, and state. But they will have to contend with a party establishment that is so divorced from the lives of those the Trump administration has put in peril that it cannot comprehend what will be required to defeat Trumpism. Democracy is a fight, and the Democratic Party's leadership has yet to show that it can even wrap its hands.

"Punishment is not how this place works," Schumer told The Washington Post in late July, explaining his reasons for not pressuring red-state Democrats to oppose Kavanaugh. The Democratic leadership is allowing Trump to solidify his hold on the federal judiciary and offering token opposition to the Supreme Court nominee of a president under at least two federal investigations whom half the country wants impeached, while castigating its own lower-ranking party members for protesting Trump officials.

Americans have an unfortunate tendency to see U.S. history as an epic, sweeping narrative with a Hollywood-style happy ending. That false promise of the final triumph of the forces of good is one reason why America's struggles with racism remain so persistent, and why Americans seem so surprised when what they see as a distant, shameful history emerges in the present.

That false promise has also manifested in an unfortunate tendency to imagine the Trump administration in retrospect from some hypothetical future in which its worst excesses-its corruption, discriminatory agenda, and reckless policies-are held to account. President Barack Obama frequently invoked Martin Luther King Jr., saying that the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice. Focusing on justice, though, one can forget just how long the arc can be. In his first major speech since leaving the presidency, in Johannesburg, South Africa, in July, Obama exchanged his once-favored metaphor for Nelson Mandela's "long walk to freedom," acknowledging that "the previous structures of privilege and power and injustice and exploitation never completely went away."

Millions of enslaved people lost their lives during the long night of American chattel slavery, without so much as a hint of dawn. Those who lived to see emancipation would see the darkness fall again within a generation. The Redemption Court would ensure that in the century between emancipation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, millions were deprived of the right to vote, thousands were lynched, and entire generations were lost to the neo-slavery of convict leasing. Those who fled the South for greater opportunity were herded into ghettos in the North, shut out of good schools and jobs, and systematically deprived of whatever meager wealth they were able to gather.

Perhaps members of Trump's inner circle will face genuine consequences for their acts. But American history suggests that they are more likely to go on to lives of comfort and celebrity, beloved by the political faction that placed them in power. Whatever enlightenment may come, those who suffer most in this era are unlikely to see it. Their children are unlikely to see it.

Whether the Trump project, with its dehumanization of people of color, relentless corporatism, authoritarian vision of justice, and staggering personal corruption, comes to an end is a task for politics, not history. The arc of history does not bend toward justice on its own. It can be bent only by those with the power to do so. As Frederick Douglass once said, power concedes nothing without demand. Those who wish to see justice in their lifetime will have go to the polls and seize it.

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The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century

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The justices again appear poised to pursue a purely theoretical liberty at the expense of the lives of people of color. When the Louisiana State Militia finally arrived at the Colfax courthouse on April 15, 1873, all it could do was bury the bodies.

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Three pages into her new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal($27, Simon & Schuster), Naomi Klein baldly states the urgency of the climate crisis and why we need a massive, expensive infrastructure deal to address it. "Money won't matter when we're dead," she writes.

Klein is an author and activist who writes most broadly about climate and its knotty relationship with capitalism. Author and activist Bill McKibben calls her the intellectual godmother of the Green New Deal, and she's helped legislators like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shape their visions. She told me over the phone-in a narrow window in a schedule packed with events to enact change-that in On Fire, she wanted to lean into that history to outline her vision for the future.

The book starts with a 50-page rationale for a global Green New Deal, then rolls into a decade's worth of Klein's reporting and speeches on the global climate crisis, from the insidious spread of the BP oil spill to the moral dilemma of sacrificing coastal communities to sea-level rise. But she also anchors her stories of catastrophe in particular places: she watches her young son choking on smoke in a British Columbia forest, for instance, as he worries about where animals go in the face of flames. The question is: How many stories like these do we need before we start making changes?

(Photo: Courtesy Simon & Schuster)

The most powerful thrust of Klein's book, however, is not story but action. "The book is very much about connecting the dots between various crises that we face," she told me. "It's about the climate crisis and parts of the world literally on fire, but it's also about political forces raging on the right, xenophobia, and fascism, and the war on women. One of the things that has really held us back in the climate movement is the way of carving it up into these issue-based silos. I want to connect the crises and connect the solutions."

Scientists say we have 12 years to cut emissions before the living systems that support us are altered beyond repair, especially if we want to get our emissions to net zero in accordance with the Paris climate accord by 2050. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere has already locked us in for more warming.

Things are going to get worse, that's for sure. It's just a question of who and where will be most impacted. It's an equity question as much as an environmental one. That's why, Klein said, the Green New Deal model is necessary to shake up the economy that depends on fossil-fuel subsidies and tax breaks and to make investment for the greater good.

"This is a huge economic paradigm shift, in breaking out of straight capitalism and consumerism-people are not going to make as much money," she said. "Our society isn't built for equity, and the people in power don't want to change that."

We can't just let the market make choices, she argues. The solution won't be something relatively simple, like cap and trade or a carbon tax. It's going to take a drastic cut in emissions, along with new frameworks for transportation, energy, and food systems.

"Some [presidential] candidates are paying lip service to the Green New Deal by calling it a climate plan, and it's clear that they don't understand," Klein told me. "It's a plan for a new economy. If you're just treating it as climate policy, you don't understand it. FDR's New Deal was not a narrow framework. Dozens and dozens of policies fit inside it."

That's why the New Deal model is useful. It evokes a historical memory, a starting point for broad-scale social change. In the 1930s, when it was enacted, the Depression had thrown the country into such upheaval that increasing national debt by a third seemed like a pretty good idea. Calling the climate emergency "our third world war," economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote that World War II is another example of when we've effectively thrown money at a threat to the country. We must do so again now.

(Photo: Kourosh Keshiri)

"We have generations that have grown up with no historical memory of their own of a time when big, collective positive change was possible, when they're told something is too big or impossible that has a lot of persuasive power, especially after years of hyperindividualism and deconstruction and war on collective action in society," Klein said.

"Whatever we do now will make the difference between whether we weather those shocks with some kind of decency or truly descend into barbarism," she said, noting that we have a tiny window to make massive changes. When she gets depressed-as she told me she often does about this work-it's helpful to remember how much further along we are than even five years ago.

That's the most positive, urgent point right now. Millions of kids are marching in the streets. Presidential candidates are one-upping each other with climate proposals, pushing some iteration of a Green New Deal to the forefront of the Democratic Party's platform. Young activists are leaning hard against significant structures of power. "I see our moment as this time of three fires," Klein writes. "It's climate change; the angry, raging, reactionary right; and the fire in the belly of this new generation." Now we have stoke that last fire and give it air to grow.

Lead Photo: Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star via Getty

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Three pages into her new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal ($27, Simon & Schuster), Naomi Klein baldly states the urgency of the climate crisis and why we need a massive, expensive infrastructure deal to address it. "Money won't matter when we're dead," she writes.

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The constitutional right to an abortion is almost certainly coming to an end - the only question is how long the Supreme Court's new majority will take to kill it off. It's not likely to be very long. On Monday, the Supreme Court will meet to decide whether to hear a case that could leave little, if any, of this right standing.

For years, Justice Anthony Kennedy held the balance on a Supreme Court divided between four staunch opponents of this right and four supporters.

His replacement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, looks ready to change that. Just months after joining the Court, Kavanaugh wrote an opinion seeking to shrink abortion rights.

Nor is Chief Justice John Roberts, the closest thing this Court has to a swing vote, likely to vote in favor of abortion rights out of respect for precedent. In 2007's Gonzales v. Carhart, decided less than two years after Roberts joined the Supreme Court, Roberts voted to uphold a ban on so-called "partial birth abortions" that was very similar to a law the Supreme Court struck down just seven years earlier. The salient difference between Gonzales and the earlier case, Stenberg v. Carhart, wasn't any difference between the two laws. It was the fact that the Court's personnel had changed, and the new majority with Roberts as chief justicewas far less protective of the right to an abortion.

Litigators on both sides of the abortion debate, in other words, are now experiencing deja vu - except that the Court's current majority is even more hostile to abortion rights than the one that decided Gonzales. The salient question todayis not if the Supreme Court will gut what remains of its pro-abortion decision in . It is almost definitely when.

The decision undercutting abortion rights could come as soon as next week, though it is more likely that the Court will wait until next June, when they typically hand down their highest-profile decisions, to come for Roe. But make no mistake, when the justices meet Monday for their first conference of the next term, the continued vitality of the abortion right is very much on the line.

Why Roe is on the line

Throughout the year, the justices meet periodically to decide if they want to add more cases to the short list of lawsuits that are argued before the Court. Monday is the Court's "long conference," the annual meeting where the justices consider the backlog of petitions that were filed while the Court was on its summer break, each of which ask the Court to hear a particular case.

One of those petitions concerns June Medical Services v. Gee, a case involving a Louisiana abortion restriction that will be very familiar to anyone who's followed the last several years of abortion litigation.

To recap: Three years ago, in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court considered a Texas law that imposed burdensome restrictions on abortion clinics that, at least on the surface, appeared to be ordinary health regulations. One provision required any physician performing an abortion in Texas to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital (a credential that is especially difficult for abortion providers to obtain). Another required abortion clinics to maintain expensive facilities, such as "a full surgical suite with an operating room."

Whole Woman's Healthwas a challenge to what abortion-rights advocates often refer to as "targeted restrictions on abortion providers" or "TRAP" laws - laws that masquerade as efforts to make abortions safer but whose real purpose is to drive up the cost of operating abortion clinics until they shut down.

Many abortion clinics, for example, only offer medication abortions - a non-surgical abortion induced by pills. As Whole Woman's Health explained, "the surgical-center requirement provides no benefit when complications arise in the context of an abortion produced through medication" because "complications would almost always arise only after the patient has left the facility." Simply put, it makes no sense to require facilities that perform no surgeries to have a full surgical suite.

In theory, an admitting-privileges requirement might make abortions safer by allowing women to be admitted to a hospital more quickly if they experience complications. But numerous studies cited in Whole Woman's Health found that such complications are so rare - occurring in "less than one-quarter of 1%" of first-trimester abortions - that it was far from clear why a state should impose such a burdensome requirement on abortion providers when that requirement could only be relevant to a tiny fraction of patients.

Indeed, a major reason why abortion providers struggle to obtain admitting privileges is because complications are so rare. "Hospitals often condition admitting privileges on reaching a certain number of admissions per year," according to a brief filed by an organization representing hospital physicians, but abortion complications are so unusual that the doctors who provide such abortions are unlikely to meet their quota.

As Whole Woman's Health explains, "doctors would be unable to maintain admitting privileges or obtain those privileges for the future, because the fact that abortions are so safe meant that providers were unlikely to have any patients to admit."

Which brings us back to Gee, the case the Court will discuss next week. The Louisiana law at issue in that case is nearly identical to the admitting privileges law struck down in Whole Woman's Health. Nevertheless, a panel of the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld this extraordinarily similar law, largely resting its decision on a contested factual claim that it may be easier for doctors to obtain admitting privileges in Louisiana than it is in Texas.

That prompted a strongly worded dissent from Judge Patrick Higginbotham, a Reagan appointee. The Fifth Circuit majority, Higginbotham wrote, ignored the Supreme Court's command that "'unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion impose an undue burden' on the exercise of that right."

Moreover, the majority's factual claims were not just highly contested, they were at odds with the factual conclusions of the trial judge who heard this case. As a general rule, appellate judges are supposed to defer to trial judge's findings of fact unless they are "clearly erroneous." But the majority, according to Higginbotham, did not do so. "I had not thought that abortion cases were an exception to the coda that appellate judges are not the triers of fact," he wrote, warning that "it is apparent that when abortion comes on stage it shadows the role of settled judicial rules."

Should the Supreme Court allow the Fifth Circuit's decision in Gee to stand, in other words, it would send a clear message to anti-abortion judges throughout the country. It would tell those judges that they are free to ignore the Supreme Court's abortion decisions or to violate the ordinary rules that govern nearly all litigation in order to protect laws restricting abortion.

Indeed, the Fifth Circuit's defiance of the Supreme Court appeared to be too much even for the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Last February, Roberts surprised many court-watchers by crossing over to vote with his liberal colleagues and temporarily stay the Fifth Circuit's decision.

It's unlikely that Roberts, who joined the dissent in Whole Woman's Health, suddenly had a change of heart about abortion rights. Rather, the most likely message Roberts intended to send to the Fifth Circuit was more territorial - " You don't get to overrule Roe v. Wade. Only I get to overrule Roe v. Wade."

Three ways the Supreme Court could resolve this case

The stay expires automatically upon the Supreme Court's final disposition of Gee. That is why so much is at stake at Monday's conference.

In theory, the Court could decide that it is so troubled by the Fifth Circuit's defiance of Whole Woman's Health that it reverses the appeals court without additional briefing or oral argument - a process known as "summary reversal." Anyone who bets on this outcome should expect to walk away empty-handed.

A somewhat more likely outcome is that the Court could decide not to hear the case at all. If it did that andlet the Fifth Circuit's opinion stand, the stay lifts and Louisiana's anti-abortion law will take effect.

Should that happen, other judges will believe that they are free to follow the Fifth Circuit's lead - that is, to uphold anti-abortion laws even if those laws are nearly identical to laws the Supreme Court already struck down. Cases like Roe and Whole Woman's Health will remain on the books in some zombie form, but they will be treated as optional.

Such a decision, moreover, would come at a time when Republican dominance of the federal bench is increasing. The Fifth Circuit, which oversees Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, already showed that it is eager to uphold anti-abortion laws. Republicans have solid majorities on the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Circuits, which combined oversee a vast swath of the country that includes the Midwest and much of the South and the Great Plains states. And once Trump fills two vacancies on the Eleventh Circuit, which oversees Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, Republicans will gain a majority there as well.

Most of the states that are likely to enact anti-abortion laws, in other words, are overseen by conservative appeals courts. So if the Supreme Court gives those courts a permission slip to ignore cases like Whole Woman's Health, the right to an abortion could effectively cease to exist in those states.

All of that said, it is much more likely that the Supreme Court will agree to hear the Gee case. The four most conservative justices may want to take the case so they can cut back on abortion rights in a formal legal opinion. And the four most liberal justices may want to take it just so they can extend Roe 's viability for a few more months before its seemingly inevitable demise. And it only takes four votes in total to place a case on the Court's argument calendar.

So the Court will probably hear the Gee case, and the decision will likely come down next June, the month when the Court ordinarily hands down its most contentious opinions.

Assuming that there are five votes to uphold the Louisiana law - and there almost certainly will be - there is some doubt about what the opinion will say. It may overrule Roe outright, thus ending the era of constitutional abortion rights in one fell swoop.

Alternatively, the Court could leave some shell of Roe in place while also making it clear that at least some so-called TRAP laws are now permissible. Louisiana won't be able to ban abortions outright but they will be able to require abortion providers to obtain pointless credentials. They might also be able to require clinics to build expensive facilities that serve no medical purpose.

If this last scenario plays out, the future of abortion rights is not likely to look very different from what it would if the Court overrules Roe outright. As a practical matter, there isn't much difference between a clinic that shuts down because abortion is illegal and a clinic that shuts down because there are no longer any doctors who can gain the credential they need to perform an abortion.

In states led by anti-abortion lawmakers, in other words, some of the better-funded clinics will likely try to remain open, building more and more expensive facilities and running their doctors through more and more elaborate obstacle courses just to obtain the credential that doctor needs to perform abortions. But once the Supreme Court opens the floodgates to laws whose real purpose is to drive up the cost of operating an abortion clinic, even the wealthiest clinics will be caught in a vice.

Eventually, the costs will be so high that no one can afford to operate a clinic. And that will be the end of the constitutional right to an abortion. When it all sorts out, abortion will likely remain available in blue states. But the rule that every pregnant person has the right to terminate their pregnancy will fade into memory.

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The fight to end Roe v. Wade enters its endgame next week

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The constitutional right to an abortion is almost certainly coming to an end - the only question is how long the Supreme Court's new majority will take to kill it off. It's not likely to be very long. On Monday, the Supreme Court will meet to decide whether to hear a case that could leave little, if any, of this right standing.

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In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In 2000, George W. Bush pulled off a similar trick. According to a new study, these are not flukes. They are the kind of results we should expect from the Electoral College.

The study, by three economics researchers at the University of Texas, quantifies just how often the Electoral College will produce an "inversion" - that is, an election where one candidate wins the popular vote but the other walks away with the presidency. The numbers are simply astonishing.

In modern elections where one party prevails by just 2 points in the two-party popular vote, "inversions are expected in more than 30% of elections." That number rises to 40 percent in elections with a 1 percentage-point margin.

Republicans, moreover, are far more likely to benefit from an inversion than Democrats. "In the modern period," the study suggests, "Republicans should be expected to win 65% of Presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote."

This Republican advantage can shift elections where the Democrat was a fairly clear winner in the popular vote. "A 3.0 point margin favoring the Democrat," the study concludes, "is associated with a 16% inversion probability." In other words,Republicans will win nearly one in six presidential races where they lose the popular vote by 3 points.

Indeed, to understand the magnitude of the GOP's advantage in the Electoral College, consider this chart:

The chart shows the probability of a Republican Electoral College victory across 92 different models. Notice that the chance of a GOP victory reaches 50 percent when Republicans have less than 50 percent of the vote. At the extremes, the chart suggests that there is still a small chance of a Republican victory even in elections where Democrats win the popular vote by about six points.

The study is authored by University of Texas at Austin economics professors Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, and Geruso's research assistant Ishaana Talesara, who is also a student at UT Austin.

To reach their conclusions, the research team ran hundreds of thousands of simulated elections under various election models. The paper as a whole studies three periods in American history: the Antebellum period from 1836 to 1852, the Reconstruction period from 1872 to 1888, and the modern period from 1964 to 2016 (although many of their modern samples only look at the period from 1988 to 2016). These periods were selected to exclude eras when one party typically won in a landslide.

Overall, they conclude that "the high probability of inversion at narrow vote margins is an across-history property of the Electoral College system." The Electoral College has, at various times, given an advantage to Democrats, Republicans, and the now-defunct Whig Party. Now itgives a clear advantage to Republicans.

The Electoral College skews elections by giving a structural advantage to small states. Each state receives a number of electoral votes equal to the number of United States House of Representatives members from that state, plus two. These two additional votes effectively triple the voting power of the smallest states, while having only a negligible impact on the voting power of large states.

Additionally, modern-day Democrats are disadvantaged because they "have tended to win large states by large margins and lose them by small margins." In 2016, for example, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won California by nearly 3.5 million votes. Meanwhile, she lost the crucial swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by fewer than 80,000 votes combined.

It's not hard to imagine 2020 producing an even starker inversion. Historically red states like Texas and Arizona are trending toward Democrats, but most likely not enough to flip those states in the next election. If Democrats narrow Trump's margins in those states, while Trump barely holds onto states like Florida or Wisconsin, the next Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by 5 million votes or more - and still lose the Electoral College.

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The astounding advantage the Electoral College gives to Republicans, in one chart

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In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In 2000, George W. Bush pulled off a similar trick. According to a new study, these are not flukes. They are the kind of results we should expect from the Electoral College.

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There is a "brain gain" afoot that suggests a national homecoming to less bustling spaces.

By

Ms. Smarsh is the host of the podcast "The Homecomers" and the author of the memoir "Heartland."

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Wichita, Kan. Credit Credit Mojoeks/iStock, via Getty Images Plus

WICHITA, Kan. - For more than a century following the Industrial Revolution, rural and small-town people left home to pursue survival in commercial meccas. According to the American story, those who thrived in urban centers "made it" - a capitalist triumph for the individual, a damaging loss for the place he left. We often refer to this as "brain drain" from the hinterlands, implying that those who stay lack the merit or ability to "get out."

But that old notion is getting dusty.

The nation's most populous cities, the bicoastal pillars of aspiration - New York City and Los Angeles - are experiencing population declines, most likely driven by unaffordability. Other metros are experiencing growth, to be sure, especially in the South and West. But there is an exodus afoot that suggests a national homecoming, across generations, to less bustling spaces. Last year, the Census Bureau found that while roughly 80 percent of us live in urban areas, rural life was the most wished for.

If happiness is what they seek, those folks are onto something. A 2018 study by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health reported that in spite of economic and health concerns, most rural Americans are pretty dang happy and hopeful. Forty percent of rural adults said their lives came out better than they expected. A majority said they were better off financially than their parents at the same age and thought their kids would likewise ascend. As for cultural woes, those among them under age 50, as well as people of color, showed notably higher acknowledgment of discrimination and commitment to social progress. All in all, it was a picture not of a dying place but one that is progressing.

The University of Minnesota Extension researcher Ben Winchester has cited a "brain gain " in rural America. Mr. Winchester found that from 2000 to 2010, most rural Minnesota counties gained early-career to midcareer residents with ample socioeconomic assets. A third of them are returning, while the rest are new recruits.

I grew up in and wrote a memoir about a place that by many measures during my Reagan-era childhood and Clinton-era adolescence was indeed "dying." American readers love a tale of escape from such places, populated by characters who exemplify addiction, abuse, bad decision-making. My memoir instead seeks, through historical facts and cultural analysis, to reveal the immense public forces of policy and socioeconomics that shaped my family's behaviors, opportunities and outcomes. I wrote affectionately yet unsparingly from that area, where I still choose to reside.

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Ouray, Colo. Credit Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In the year since it was published, this less-common narrative has prompted thousands of people to find me at speaking events and book signings. They tell me this: Our stories are different but the same. I know the world you wrote about - it's deep in me, and I care about it.

From Seattle to Charlottesville, they come bearing homegrown tomatoes (that's "'maters" to us), fresh loaves of bread, small-town yearbooks, landscape photography, original paintings of big skies. They cry as they relate their own stories of departure, return, longing.

These aren't just white people lamenting the loss of the family wheat farm. They are black women missing their families in the rural South, Muslim women organizing workers in meatpacking towns on the plains, young gay men hoping to return to their small-town roots. This is the rural America I know and love - a place rife with problems, yes, but containing diversity, vibrancy and cross-cultural camaraderie.

I explore this shift in the zeitgeist with a new podcast featuring rural and working-class advocates from the Black Belt of the Deep South, migrant camps of California's Central Valley, the Iowa tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, the desert Southwest, Appalachia and the Midwest. I spoke with people who founded or help guide entities such as the Black Farmers' Network, United Farm Workers Foundation, the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program, the Female Farmer Project, the Southern Documentary Fund and the Kansas Democratic Party.

From where I sit, they are heroes of the American odyssey - seeing value where others see lack, returning with the elixir of hard-won social capital to help solve the troubles of home. In one conversation, the political scientist Veronica Womack described the metaphorical significance of her black students at Georgia College considering work in agriculture.

"It's kind of a circle," Dr. Womack said. "When our ancestors were made free, land was their pursuit." So when she says her students are coming home, she explained, she means that they have realized that farming is a "vehicle that I can use to be free."

Last month, The Christian Science Monitor reported a prairie trend of young people, drawn by family ties and affordable entrepreneurship, returning to rural and small-town homes around college graduation. They're opening restaurants or starting small, unconventional farming operations. One college senior founded a direct-to-consumer beef company in Otoe County, Neb., and sold $52,000 worth of meat in the past nine months.

This return - or refusal to leave - is good news for Americans who will happily remain in cities. The future of rural is intertwined with suburban and urban outcomes by way of food production, natural resources, the economy, political movements and beyond.

We need policymakers who understand this (and care about it). Good news: Progressive Democratic presidential candidates have unveiled a spate of rural policy plans more robust than any in recent political memory. They suggest actions for which rural advocates have argued - investing in rural people and economies to lead a Green New Deal, cutting out oppressive middlemen in moving food from producers to eaters and much more.

Government agencies have made piecemeal efforts to attract professionals to rural America, offering loan forgiveness or other incentives to teachers, doctors, home buyers. To make the burgeoning rural return feasible, we need big structural fixes for a big problem, such as Poland's recent scrapping of income tax for young workers in an effort to keep them in the country.

The concept of home is a subjective one unto the individual. But we have long interpreted it at the mercy of forces such as capitalism and industrialization. The resulting social imbalance is an objective crisis. Mobility is a virtue of freedom. Staying - or returning - is an equal virtue.

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Opinion | Something Special Is Happening in Rural America

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There is a "brain gain" afoot that suggests a national homecoming to less bustling spaces. By Ms. Smarsh is the host of the podcast "The Homecomers" and the author of the memoir "Heartland." WICHITA, Kan. - For more than a century following the Industrial Revolution, rural and small-town people left home to pursue survival in commercial meccas.

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Truthdig: Expert Reporting, Current News, Provocative Columnists

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Editor's note: This article was originally published on Truthout.
We have entered an ominous age of political conformity. Support is growing for a right-wing populism that views liberal democracy as both an anachronism and a curse. Meanwhile, many of those who oppose this growth of the right wing are turning to a left-wing populism that is dangerously susceptible to the same patterns of demagoguery and discourses of unity and exclusion.

The signposts are clear. Across the globe, politicians spew out inordinate incitements of hatred and bigotry, while legitimating and often overtly supporting racism. Liberals cling to notions of freedom and liberty that ignore the power of capital to turn such terms into their opposite. The mainstream media measure the task of pursuing the truth against how their bottom line is affected.

What has emerged out of this abyss of rising authoritarian power and its politics of depoliticization is the depredations of an updated version of fascist politics and the normalization of a rising tide of cruel and habituated ignorance. Habit normalized in a politics that destroys notions of informed agency and self-determination now merges ignorance and hatred. One result is the growing support for right-wing populism, which views individuals and populations displaced by global forces and deprived of the most basic means of existence - including food, shelter and pure water - with disdain and hatred. The late Russian writer and journalist Vasily Grossman issued a warning from another time that seems equally appropriate today. He writes:

How mighty, how terrible, and how kind is the power of habit! People can get used to anything - the sea, the southern stars, love, a bunk in a prison, the barbed wire of the camps.... What creates this abyss is the power of habit. Dull as it seems, it is as powerful as dynamite; it can destroy anything. Passion, hatred, grief, pain - habit can destroy them all.

The Dangers of Right-Wing Populism
Right-wing populism offers a pseudo-democratic notion of politics in which matters of informed judgment, critical agency and collective action disappear into the symbol of the leader. In this discourse, politics becomes personalized in the image of the larger-than-life demagogue, removed from the alleged ignorance of the masses or "herd." The past and present emergence of right-wing populist leaders is exemplified in the rise of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Geert Wilders, among others. Right-wing populism destroys everything that makes a genuine democratic politics possible.

As I have written elsewhere, right-wing populism builds upon and accentuates a long tradition of anti-democratic, neoliberal and racist tendencies that have been smoldering in the United States for decades. It eliminates critical thinking, undermines acts of civic courage, dismantles genuine collective action rooted in mass movements, suppresses democratic forms of opposition and crushes opponents. Its stark Hobbesian division between friends and enemies, unquestioning loyalty and democratic participation contains a propensity for violence rooted in its unforgiving politics of exclusion. The latter is especially troubling at a time in which violence has increasingly emerged and is accepted as a defining feature and organizing principle of politics, if not society itself. In this instance, the friend/enemy binary becomes all the more dangerous in a context where history is being erased and ignorance colludes with power to give rise to widening networks of oppression.

Trump makes this divisive feature central to his mode of governance. Putting forward coded assertions of white supremacy, Trump acts on a regressive notion of unity that relies on exclusion and a politics of disposability. According to Trump, "The only thing that matters is the unification of the people - because the other people don't mean anything." In Trump's discourse, the call for unity has as its foundation the implication that all opposition is not only illegitimate but constitutes the terrain of the enemy. His notion of "the people" is reduced to a category that mimics the will of the leader whose image of the U.S. is as racist as it is anti-democratic in this deeply authoritarian discourse. The right-wing populist claim to exclusive power, representation and governance in the hands of the leader is not without its critical moments. For instance, right-wing populist leaders go out of their way to criticize globalization and the elite, but in doing so, they claim that only they can " represent the people " while putting policies into play that expand the power of the financial elite and their neoliberal imperatives, such as regressive tax cuts and the hollowing out of the welfare state.

The demagogic character of populism can be seen in its use of a language of simplicity, one that avoids complexity, honest dialogue, multifaceted struggles and the hard work of power-sharing modes of governance. This spirit of populism is at odds with a language that is troubling, calls power into question, disturbs machineries of class, gender, sexual and racial oppression, and uses language to sharpen the moral imagination and bear witness to state and corporate violence. Right-wing populism both demonizes and promotes the fear of an internal enemy, distorts information, and suppresses dissent and resistance. In doing so, it attempts to strip democracy of all of its ideals. Populism's language of simplicity and its embrace of an agency-stripping notion of anti-intellectualism is further strengthened by neoliberalism's culture of fear, insecurity and uncertainty that accentuates a sense of frustration, anger and political impotence that traps individuals in their own feelings, unable to translate private troubles into broader social and political considerations.

Right-wing populism speaks in the language of the perpetrator as victim, refigures the language of war as heroic, and merges the rhetoric of command and racial purity with the discourse of commerce and capitalism. Under right-wing populism, the language of violence parades as the language of war, redemption, walls, barriers and security. This is a populism without a social conscience - one that supports authoritarian societies marked by deregulation, the dismantling of the welfare state, the denial of climate change, a soaring inequality and a struggle to define a nation's past.

The friend/enemy binary becomes all the more dangerous in a context where history is being erased.

Populist leaders such as Trump and Bolsonaro rule not for the public interest, but for themselves and their ultra-rich allies, furthering the slide toward lawlessness and barbarism. How else to explain Trump's pressuring Israel to ban two congresswomen of color from visiting Israel after he has stated that they should go back to their own countries after they had criticized his policies? How else to explain his relentlessly cruel policies, such as cutting federal support for food stamps for over 3 million people, asserting that immigrants who use government benefits such as housing vouchers or Medicaid may be denied green cards and visas, and his ongoing immigration raids which separate families and traumatize communities? Trump's grotesque sense of entitlement and limitless self-regard translates into a fixation on dominating and humiliating others.

Right-wing populism thrives on the allure of the spectacle of violence and redirects pent-up anger and aggression into a form of collaborative pleasure and emotional release that becomes complicit with the ugliness of authoritarian modes of governance and morally compromised lives.

Right-wing populism shares many elements of a fascist politics, including an ideology of certainty, unhampered by doubt and complexity in its explanation of history and justification for its policies. Its friend/enemy distinction fuels both a politics of disposability that makes some human beings superfluous, and also promotes a culture of fear and terror in which the unthinkable becomes normalized. It disdains the truth and scientific evidence, and empties words of any meaning while elevating lying to the status of a national ideal that legitimates a dystopian mode of governance. A willful forgetting of history covers over its support for anti-Semitism, its hostility toward elites, and its embrace of nativism and racial hatred.

Right-wing populism also destroys any notion of the social marked by the principles of individual freedom, justice, equity and equality; it also thrives on anti-intellectualism, and as Hannah Arendt once said, brings "to light the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment." Finally, right-wing populism, like fascism, supports authoritarian governments in which power is concentrated in the hands of the alleged leader.
The Limits of Left-Wing Populism
Populism comes in many forms, and some writers such as Chantal Mouffe have argued that the antidote to right-wing populism is left-wing populism. She insists that left-wing populism works to expose and denounce rising social and economic inequality, criticize the deep cruelties of capitalism and rightly reveal corrupt middle-of-the road politicians. Mouffe also argues that left-wing populism opposes centrist politics with its investments in neoliberal ideology, finance capital, austerity, deregulation and corporate power.

Federico Finchelstein, meanwhile, has pointed out that left-wing populism is often marked by its "attention to unequal social and economic conditions ... questioning even the dogmas of neoliberal austerity measures and the supposed neutrality of technocratic business-oriented solutions." Yet, he qualifies the latter by pointing out that left-wing populism undermines its political project "by its claim to exclusively represent the entire people against the elites." Mouffe ignores this criticism and suggests that the combination of popular sovereignty and equality advocated by left-wing populists offers the greatest challenge to the pervading hold of right-wing populism across the globe, which she argues is the background condition for the erosion of the democratic ideals and institutions.

What is particularly strong about Mouffe's argument is the call for a populist movement rooted in a more comprehensive struggle to recover and expand radical democracy as a political force. For Mouffe, the challenge of left-wing populism is to make clear that the struggle for popular sovereignty has to be part of a broader struggle for democracy. She recognizes that people no longer feel in control of their destinies. Her answer to massive forms of alienation is to create a left-wing populism that highlights the contradictions between liberal democratic ideals and the anti-democratic politics of the emerging right-wing populism. Democracy in this view becomes a means to fight an ideological war against right-wing adversaries and diverse modes of authoritarianism.

Right-wing populism speaks in the language of the perpetrator as victim.

As crucial as some of these arguments are as part of a challenge to confront right-wing populism, they are not unproblematic. Mouffe and many other advocates of left-wing populism fail to understand the pathologies inherent in all forms of populism. As theorists such as Finchelstein along with John Keane and Jan-Werner Muller point out, these extend from underestimating how populism is susceptible to being a politically empty category that can be appropriated by almost any political group. Moreover, populism in all of its forms is too indebted to the personalization of leadership, whether such leaders are on the left, such as Bernie Sanders, or on the right, such as Donald Trump.

Moreover, as Finchelstein rightly observes, "In all cases, populism speaks in the name of a single people, and does so in the name of democracy. But democracy is defined in narrow terms as the expression of the desires of the populist leaders." In addition, it runs the risk of being organized around notions of unity that replicate the friend/enemy divide and employ politics as a weapon based on hard and fast notions of exclusion and inclusion. Populism tends to ignore the hard work of education as a crucial tool for addressing the crisis of neoliberalism and its corresponding crisis of subjectivity, identity and agency.
Critical Education Could Change the Political Landscape
Education has a central role to play in addressing and changing the consciousness of people who occupy either side of the populist divide, as well as people who hold contradictory attitudes toward power, equality, identity, citizenship, asylum and other central political issues. Binarisms do not produce a collective political consciousness; instead they feed into either the dead end of a rigid orthodoxy or the banality of celebrity culture. Instead of a revolution in consciousness, we get a mix of intellectual infantilism and a commodified culture that denounces all thoughts of a critical public consciousness.

Populism on both sides can open the door to conspiracy theories, create what historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style" of politics, and "morph into a tool of journalistic [if not simplistic] discourse." In short, populism can represent a range of perspectives and possibilities while still maintaining its illiberal attributes including "understanding its own position as the only true form of political legitimacy" while refusing to recognize the validity of its opponents' views, subjecting them to the process of demonization and accusing them of " being tyrannical, conspiratorial and anti-democratic." In other words, such a perspective becomes sclerotic in its own ideology and political certainty.

Populism is susceptible to being a politically empty category that can be appropriated by almost any political group.

Populism on both the right and left narrows the scope of power to the role of leaders, whether progressive or reactionary. This weakens a politics of resistance and potentially undermines the hard work of building a mass anti-capitalist political movement while potentially sabotaging the rise of self-determining and engaged individual and social agents. However, it does more; in its application to any group that challenges power, it loses a sense of political specificity and historical context and tends to overgeneralize the opposition with a homogenizing view of people that conceives of political opponents as enemies. Populism in general runs the risk of pitting groups against each other, and for the left, this means often pitting class against race or failure to move beyond the fracturing of groups into isolated, single-issue movements. In addition, power in all of its complexity is increasingly defined in simplistic terms as something to resist rather than as a tool of possibility rooted in the struggle over developing democratic institutions.
Beyond Populism
Populism has strong tendencies to criticize elites, but power runs much deeper and is present in both economic and political structures and ideologies that develop over time - all of which need to be challenged. At the same time, what is needed in this instance is a vision and a broad-based movement of informed workers, artists, intellectuals, young people, and others who are challenging not just corporate elites, but capitalism itself. Populism runs the risk of becoming synonymous with momentary, if not misdirected, outbursts of anger, discontent and moral outrage, only to be then appropriated by demagogues. Social movements are built not merely on feelings of isolation, anger and emotional dissatisfaction, but also on the hard work of organizing concerted ideological struggles to connect with the problems that everyday people confront, and to create a politics of identification in which people can recognize themselves and join with others not merely to condemn elites, but to radically change the structures of domination.

What is needed is an anti-capitalist movement that can redirect the pain, anger and rage of the dispossessed toward a radical restructuring of society whose aim is the construction of a democratic socialist society. The problems people face in the United States and other authoritarian capitalist societies are too deep, extend too far and command too much power. Their deep sources of oppression must be challenged by building alliances that bring together workers, intellectuals, young people and diverse anti-capitalist social movements. Such a broad-based social and political formation must learn to speak to and with the dispossessed while addressing how capitalism deprives them of the material conditions of freedom, forcing them to compete over scarce resources, time and dignity.

Capitalism is the antithesis of democracy and must be overthrown because it cannot provide what Jeff Noonan calls "universal life-goods," which translate into "a healthy environment, public healthcare distributed on the basis of need and not ability to pay, and an adequately funded public education system." Noonan describes these all as "universal life-goods without which we cannot live and live fully."

Any challenge to the current rise of right-wing populism must address the need for a politics that contains a language both of critique and hope. This suggests a politics that rouses the passions of people to be energized and more informed, and makes clear that resistance must be a collective enterprise with struggles unified in their aim to refuse the notion that capitalism and democracy are the same. Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he argued that we need a politics that comprehends the totality of the system we are fighting, that there is no struggle without risk, and that struggle is a collective project rooted in a revolution of values and the dream of a world in which justice and equality merge.

The depoliticizing forces at work under neoliberalism cannot be underestimated in terms of their contribution to the rise of right-wing populism. Widening inequality, widespread alienation, a hardening of culture, the collapse of public goods and civic culture, the dismantling of the social contract, the expanding criminalization of social problems and a ballooning civic illiteracy, among other forces, all contribute to diverse forms of depoliticization. Under such circumstances, the declining popularity of liberal democracy produces a populace that lacks a sophisticated understanding of how neoliberal fascism infantilizes them politically and undermines their ability to exercise critical judgment, concerted acts of self-determination and collective resistance. The left needs to make visible the right-wing assault on the basic values and programs that undermine democracy and social justice, and promote widespread misery and suffering. It needs to provide alternative educational programs, use alternative media to educate people in a language they can understand, use demonstrations as pedagogical tools to raise consciousness, and make education central to promoting policies that both undermine capitalism and give meaning to what a socialist society looks like. There will be no change to the power and ideological dynamics of capitalism if matters of popular sovereignty, class struggles and economic equality are not central to the collective fights for economic, political and social justice.

Neither a reactionary nor a progressive populism will provide a strategy capable of challenging the new capitalist formation I term "neoliberal fascism."

Populism tends toward extremes, and a pseudo-democratic style of politics that embraces an imagined people, oversimplifications, and charismatic and demagogic leaders.

Neoliberal fascism must be challenged with a new narrative and vision of what counts as politics at a time in which power has become global and the promises of established liberal elites have become bankrupt politically and ethically. Nancy Fraser rightly argues that we need a political movement in which "a broad spectrum of social actors can find themselves" and address the "challenge of financialization, deindustrialization" and "corporate globalization."

Populism neither explains the rise of fascist movements around the globe nor does it provide the answer to challenging them. What is needed is a powerful new vision of politics, one that takes education, agency and power seriously in its ongoing efforts to develop an alliance among those forces who can imagine and struggle for a world in which neoliberal fascism no longer exists and the promise of a socialist democracy becomes more than a utopian dream. There will be no justice without a struggle, and there will be no future worth living without the collective will to struggle.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and...

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Populism Is Not the Answer to Neoliberal Fascism

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Editor's note: This article was originally published on Truthout. We have entered an ominous age of political conformity. Support is growing for a right-wing populism that views liberal democracy as both an anachronism and a curse.

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Simple polling reveals Americans' views of President Donald Trump are split by variables like race, ethnicity, age, and increasingly by whether or not you earned a college degree.

Some other more unusual questions also reveal strong correlations, and those correlations may do more to reveal what's really going on than basic demographic questions.

Consider, for example, Sam Gilliam's 1980 drawing "Coffee Thyme." Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, partnered with YouGov Blue in a recent poll that showed this image (without any further identifying information) to respondents and asked them whether or not they consider it art.

If it looks like art to you, then odds are you disapprove of Trump's job performance. If it doesn't, then odds are you like him.

The Coffee Thyme Gap is actually larger than the college degree gap, which is one of the biggest and most widely discussed predictors of Trump support. And there's reason to believe the bachelor's degree serves as an imperfect proxy for underlying psychological attributes that are better captured by asking about art.

The numbers

Approval of Trump is, of course, correlated more tightly with partisanship than with any demographic variable. But Republicans who think "Coffee Thyme" is art are somewhat less likely than skeptics to approve of Trump, and among independents there is a very noticeable Coffee Thyme Gap.

That corresponds to a significant gap in overall approval that's bigger than the education divide. Among people who think "Coffee Thyme" is art, Trump approval is at 36 percent, whereas among college graduates he's at 45 percent.

Now, every once in a while a totally meaningless correlation will pop up by coincidence, and without more polling you can't exclude the possibility that that's what's going on here. But the poll was an effort to test a hypothesis about the relationship between art, psychology, and political ideology that's been well developed in academic surveys but not so prominent in basic political polling.

Modern politics is driven by "openness to experience"

This is, of course, just one poll and just one painting. To really draw any strong conclusions about the connection between modern art and partisan politics, you'd want to do repeated surveys with a range of different examples.

But while the "Coffee Thyme" result might seem novel to a lay person, it wasn't unexpected to the people who put the poll together. That's because it's in line with a well-known finding in political psychology that people who score high in a personality attribute known as "openness to experience" tend to have more left-wing political opinions (see Will Wilkinson's overview for the Economist or Chris Mooney's for the Washington Post). And while of course partisan politics differs from country to country, the link between openness and left-wing views pops up in studies of lots of places including Poland and Belgium as well as the UK along with the United States.

Indeed, this link between personality and politics is arguably why almost everyone (including the people directly involved) intuitively sees a kinship between Donald Trump and Brexit enthusiasts, even though the policy issues in play are different.

Another thing that correlates with openness to experience is educational attainment. High-openness people have higher IQs, so they tend to do better in school. And high-openness people are more interested in school, especially the less practical aspects of it, so they're more motivated to earn degrees.

In other words, the political correlation between college degrees and disliking Trump is probably mediated by underlying personality differences. As an intuitive example, take my father. He's an older white man who's economically comfortable and has no college degree, which in broad demographic terms sounds like a hard-core Trump fan. But when I tell you he's a novelist who lives on the Upper West Side with his wife, who is also a novelist, a very different picture emerges. People with artistic temperaments are prototypically "high openness," and it's no surprise at all that my dad hates Trump.

The problem, of course, is that pollsters can't really give people elaborate personality tests on surveys. Questions about educational attainment are much easier to ask. And unlike taste in art, the Census Bureau tracks educational attainment, so it's easy to say that Minnesota has a larger share of college graduates than Wisconsin but difficult to quantify how open to experience Minnesotans are compared to Wisconsinites.

But it really would be in candidates' interest to directly target personality rather than broad demographic correlates of personality. And it would be interesting for everyday pollsters to do more work with personality alongside their various normal questions. What's cool about the "Coffee Thyme" test is - at least through one run - it seems to be pretty powerful despite its simplicity.

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Simple polling reveals Americans' views of President Donald Trump are split by variables like race, ethnicity, age, and increasingly by whether or not you earned a college degree. Some other more unusual questions also reveal strong correlations, and those correlations may do more to reveal what's really going on than basic demographic questions.

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The title of associate US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's recently issued book echoes Benjamin Franklin 's supposed answer to a woman who asked what the Constitutional Convention had adopted: "A Republic, If You Can Keep It." This suggests that Gorsuch thinks that our republican form of government is important. Yet in joining the 5-4 majority that voted in favor of allowing partisan gerrymanders, Gorsuch voted against one of the crucial underpinnings of democracy, allowing citizens to choose their leaders.

Two recent court decisions about gerrymandering in North Carolina dealt with a very similar set of facts, but came to very different conclusions. In each, Common Cause and others challenged redistricting plans written by Republican legislators to guarantee that Republicans would win a majority of seats even while losing the popular vote.

The first case, Rucho v. Common Cause, challenged redistricting of North Carolina's US House seats in federal courts (and a Democratic gerrymander in Maryland). The second, Common Cause v. Lewis, challenged the Legislature's redistricting of itself in the state courts.

Despite their similarities the two cases had very different outcomes. Writing for a 5-4 majority US Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that the federal courts had no business interfering with gerrymandering schemes. In doing so, Roberts and his colleagues killed the challenge to Wisconsin's Republican gerrymander.

In the other case a three-judge state panel gave the North Carolina Legislature two weeks to create districts in which "partisan considerations and election results data shall not be used."

Despite conceding that "these cases involve blatant examples of partisanship driving districting decisions," Roberts concluded that the federal judiciary had no role to play.

... we have no commission to allocate political power and influence in the absence of a constitutional directive or legal standards to guide us in the exercise of such authority.

Roberts goes on to reassure those concerned about democracy that "our conclusion does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering" and does not "condemn complaints about redistricting to echo into a void." But he offers no remedy, instead suggesting that state courts or legislation introduced in Congress repeatedly but unsuccessfully might solve the problem.

Article IV, Section 4 of the US Constitution, the so-called "Guarantee Clause," states that the "United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." Contrary to the apparent belief of Republican legislators in North Carolina (and Wisconsin), this does not require state governments dominated by the Republican Party. According to the (very conservative) Heritage Foundation, this requires three elements-popular rule, no king, and the rule of law. By allowing those in power to entrench themselves, gerrymandering undermines at least the first of these.

In its 357-page decision the North Carolina panel of trial court judges takes a very different route:

The issue before the Court is distilled to simply this: whether the constitutional rights of North Carolina citizens are infringed when the General Assembly, for the purpose of retaining power, draws district maps with a predominant intent to favor voters aligned with one political party at the expense of other voters, and in fact achieves results that manifest this intent and cannot be explained by other non-partisan considerations.

It finds that the General Assembly had a partisan intent to create legislative districts that perpetuated a Republican-controlled General Assembly, that it deployed this intent with "surgical precision" to use packing and cracking to dilute Democratic voters' collective voting strength, that partisan intent predominated over all other redistricting criteria, and that the effect of these maps is that, in all but the most unusual election scenarios, the Republican party will control a majority of both chambers of the General Assembly.

Quoting the US Supreme Court's observation that "state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply," the North Carolina court proceeds to decide the case based on the North Carolina constitution. Noting that Section 10 of the state constitution requires that "all elections shall be free, it goes on:

This Court further concludes that the 2017 Enacted Maps are tainted by an unconstitutional deprivation of all citizens' rights to equal protection of law, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.

In contrast to the indifference that Roberts and company show to measuring partisan intent, the state judges do a deep dive into statistics. Figure 5, reproduced below, is an example. North Carolina law, like many other states including Wisconsin, requires that map makers minimize the splitting of political units. Jowei Chen of the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan used mapping software to generate 1,000 district plans based on non-partisan criteria. As can be seen, the adopted plan splits far more municipalities than would be expected. In other words, in order, to make the plan so favorable to Republicans, the map-makers had to do violence to the principle of keeping together people in the same town.

Compactness is another common requirement, including in North Carolina and Wisconsin. There are a number of formulas of measuring compactness, but they generally operate by comparing the area enclosed to the length of its boundary. Two commonly used measures are the Polsby-Popper and Reock compactness scores. Using either formula, a circle-the most compact possible shape-earns a score of one. The less compact a shape is, the smaller its score.

Figure 4, also by Chen, plots the average compactness using the two measures-the Polsby-Popper on the vertical scale and the Reock on the horizontal. The 2017 House Plan (in red on the lower left) is compared using the two measures to the compactness in the 1,000 computer-generated plans (the cloud on the upper right). Again, the House Plan is an extreme outlier, demonstrating the amount of compactness its designers had to sacrifice to gain the plan's Republican advantage.

As already noted, the North Carolina decision comes from a panel of trial judges, not the state's supreme court. Theoretically, then, the Republican legislators could appeal it, but they have announced that they will not. Why? Speculation is that they fear losing the appeal, and that such a decision could become a precedent for a state challenge to the Republican gerrymander of the state's congressional delegation.

The North Carolina judges note that defenders of the gerrymander lied to them:

The Court is troubled by representations made by Legislative Defendants, or attorneys working on their behalf, in briefs and arguments ... and to General Assembly colleagues at committee meetings that affirmatively stated that no draft maps had been prepared even as late as August 4, 2017.

This pretense was punctured when Republican consultant Thomas Hofeller died, and his files were leaked. Among other disclosures were the records of his extensive work making the North Carolina plan as Republican-favorable as possible.

This pattern of lying to judges seems to be a pattern among gerrymander defenders. The North Carolina judges point to the contradictory testimony of Thomas Brunell, a Republican expert witness. His argument defending the North Carolina plan contradicted his testimony in Nevada attacking a plan passed by Democrats.

Lying was also associated with Wisconsin's gerrymander. Under Gov. Scott Walker and Attorney General Brad Schimel, the state's brief falsely claimed that the bias against Democrats was a byproduct of Democrats' tendency to live in cities. The evidence showed otherwise, especially when a hard drive was recovered that showed a series of draft plans, each more Republican-friendly than the last.

This pattern continues. The National Republican Redistricting Trust quotes its National Finance Chairman Scott Walker as claiming that "Democrats, led by Barack Obama and Eric Holder, will stop at nothing to gerrymander Democrats into permanent majorities. They believe the courts, not the voters, should pick the winners and losers in our elections." Thus, an attempt to get rid of gerrymandering is itself repositioned as a gerrymander.

Chief Justice John Roberts' decision in Rucho is particularly unfortunate coming at a time when federal district courts were becoming increasingly comfortable with protecting democracy by invalidating gerrymanders. Before Roberts' decision, the courts ruled against gerrymanders in Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. No court upheld them.

North Carolina joins Florida and Pennsylvania where state courts ruled against gerrymandering based on provision of their state constitution. Could Wisconsin follow suit? Our constitution lacks the "equal protection" and "free election" clauses similar to North Carolina's. But it does refer to "governments ... deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." And Section 22, Maintenance of free government. notes that "The blessings of a free government can only be maintained by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."

A state supreme court committed to democratic government, could use these to ban gerrymandering. Unfortunately, there is no reason to expect that the present Wisconsin Supreme Court will move beyond partisanship based on its recent decisions.

Another route against Wisconsin gerrymandering could rest on the constitution's requirements for districts:

such districts to be bounded by county, precinct, town or ward lines, to consist of contiguous territory and be in as compact form as practicable.

As in North Carolina, the Wisconsin gerrymander sacrificed compactness and divided communities on the altar of partisan advantage. The following graph, taken from Chen's amicus brief in the challenge to the Wisconsin gerrymander, plots the number of intact counties on the vertical scale against the average compactness on the horizontal. The red circles show the values for 200 computer generated plans. The results of Act 43 are shown at the lower left, again showing the Republican plan is an extreme outlier

Unfortunately, with the US Supreme whiffing on gerrymandering and the Wisconsin Supreme Court dominated by partisan hacks, the 2020 election becomes all the more important.

More about the Gerrymandering of Legislative Districts

Data Wonk: Gerrymandering Is Built on Lies - Bruce Thompson - Sep 12th, 2019

Data Wonk: The Future of Wisconsin Gerrymandering - Bruce Thompson - Aug 14th, 2019

Republicans Deny New Gerrymander Plan - Ruth Conniff - Jul 30th, 2019

GOP Could Bypass Evers, Gerrymander Again - Ruth Conniff - Jul 29th, 2019

Op Ed: The Game is Rigged in Wisconsin - Spencer Black - Jul 21st, 2019

Gerrymandering Foes Push Reform - Erik Gunn - Jul 17th, 2019

Rep. Robyn Vining Continues Fight for Fair Maps - State Rep. Robyn Vining - Jul 16th, 2019

Statement on Nonpartisan Redistricting Reform Bill - State Rep. Lisa Subeck - Jul 16th, 2019

Gerrymandering Bill is Bipartisan - Laurel White - Jul 12th, 2019

Op Ed: Redistricting Now Up to Citizen Action - Jay Heck - Jul 2nd, 2019

Rep. Robyn Vining Says Fight for Fair Maps Is Not Over - State Rep. Robyn Vining - Jun 28th, 2019

U.S. Supreme Court Allows Gerrymandering - Laurel White - Jun 28th, 2019

Statement on U.S. Supreme Court decision on Partisan Gerrymandering - Fair Elections Project - Jun 27th, 2019

Waupaca County Opposes Gerrymandering - Matt Rothschild - Apr 29th, 2019

45 Counties Want to Ban Gerrymandering - Wisconsin Democracy Campaign - Apr 19th, 2019

Data Wonk: Walker Seeks to Gerrymander America - Bruce Thompson - Apr 3rd, 2019

Murphy's Law: The Arrogance of Robin Vos - Bruce Murphy - Mar 21st, 2019

Data Wonk: The Gerrymander Wars March On - Bruce Thompson - Mar 20th, 2019

The State of Politics: How Evers Would End Gerrymandering - Steven Walters - Mar 18th, 2019

Evers' Budget Will Include Nonpartisan Redistricting Process - Shawn Johnson - Feb 27th, 2019

Representative Subeck Applauds Governor Evers' Plan to Ensure Fair Election Maps - State Rep. Lisa Subeck - Feb 26th, 2019

Rep. Hesselbein Supports Governor Evers' Fair Maps Plan - State Rep. Dianne Hesselbein - Feb 26th, 2019

Rep. Spreitzer Supports Gov. Evers's Redistricting Reform - State Rep. Mark Spreitzer - Feb 26th, 2019

Statement on Governor Evers' announcement he will include nonpartisan redistricting reform in his proposed budget - Wisconsin Fair Elections Project - Feb 26th, 2019

Rep. Robyn Vining Embraces Gov. Evers' Inclusion of Redistricting in Budget - State Rep. Robyn Vining - Feb 26th, 2019

Op Ed: Why We Oppose Gerrymandering - Andrea Kaminski - Feb 20th, 2019

Murphy's Law: Republicans Oppose Gerrymandering - Bruce Murphy - Jan 29th, 2019

Op Ed: Gerrymandering Costs Taxpayers Millions - James Rowen - Jan 23rd, 2019

Data Wonk: Gerrymander is Alive and Well - Bruce Thompson - Dec 12th, 2018

Board Adopts Supervisor Moore Omokunde Proposal to Decriminalize Marijuana - Sup. Supreme Moore Omokunde - Nov 6th, 2018

Murphy's Law: The Fight Against Gerrymandering - Bruce Murphy - Oct 30th, 2018

Democrats Refile Redistricting Suit - Shawn Johnson - Sep 16th, 2018

Amended Whitford Complaint Highlights Harm Caused by Wisconsin's Partisan Gerrymander to 40 Plaintiffs Across 34 Districts - Campaign Legal Center - Sep 14th, 2018

The State of Wasted Votes - Malia Jones - Jul 2nd, 2018

Data Wonk: Can Democrats Still Contest Gerrymander? - Bruce Thompson - Jun 27th, 2018

The State of Politics: Democrats Rejected Redistricting Reform - Steven Walters - Jun 25th, 2018

Supreme Court Punts on Gerrymandering - Shawn Johnson - Jun 18th, 2018

Republican State Leadership Committee: The Efficiency Gap is "Sociological Gobbledygook" - Republican State Leadership Committee - Jun 18th, 2018

Response to Gill v Whitford decision to remand back to trial court - Fair Elections Project - Jun 18th, 2018

The Art Of Gerrymandering Milwaukee - Malia Jones - Jun 9th, 2018

The Push for Nonpartisan Redistricting - Cathleen Draper - Jun 5th, 2018

U.S. Supreme Court Nears Decision on Wisconsin Redistricting Case - Cathleen Draper - Jun 2nd, 2018

Data Wonk: Many Republicans Oppose Gerrymandering - Bruce Thompson - Mar 14th, 2018

The State of Politics: Will U.S. Supremes Rule on State Districts? - Steven Walters - Feb 19th, 2018

Back in the News: Majority Now Backs Fair Redistricting - Bruce Murphy - Feb 5th, 2018

Data Wonk: John Roberts' Nightmare - Bruce Thompson - Oct 11th, 2017

The State of Politics: You Be The Judge on Redistricting - Steven Walters - Oct 2nd, 2017

Op Ed: U.S. Supreme Court Should End Partisan Gerrymandering - Andrea Kaminski - Sep 26th, 2017

Data Wonk: Judges Consider a Democratic Gerrymander - Bruce Thompson - Aug 30th, 2017

Op Ed: 24 Counties Have Voted for Fair Maps - Matt Rothschild - Aug 25th, 2017

Data Wonk: Right Wing Seeks to End Democracy? - Bruce Thompson - Aug 23rd, 2017

Data Wonk: US Supreme Court Wrong on Redistricting? - Bruce Thompson - May 31st, 2017

Op Ed: Save Taxes With Nonpartisan Redistricting - Andrea Kaminski and Lindsay Dorff - May 26th, 2017

Data Wonk: Why GOP Backs Gerrymander - Bruce Thompson - May 24th, 2017

Data Wonk: State's Political Map At Issue - Bruce Thompson - May 18th, 2017

Rep. Peter Barca Statement on Attorney General Appeal of Redistricting Decision - State Rep. Peter Barca - Feb 24th, 2017

Fair Elections Project calls upon Legislature to focus on fair map drawing process - Wisconsin Fair Elections Project - Feb 24th, 2017

Campaign Cash: GOP's Redistricting Lawyers Are Big Donors - Matt Rothschild - Feb 6th, 2017

Op Ed: Reject Partisanship, Redraw Voting Maps - Andrea Kaminski - Feb 3rd, 2017

Rep. Peter Barca Statement on Assembly Organization Committee Secret Ballot - State Rep. Peter Barca - Feb 2nd, 2017

Court Watch: Court's Redistricting Order A Problem? - Bruce Thompson - Feb 1st, 2017

Rep. Hesselbein Calls for Open, Transparent, and Public Process for Drawing New Legislative Lines - State Rep. Dianne Hesselbein - Jan 27th, 2017

Wisconsin Federal Court Permanently Blocks State Redistricting Plan - Wisconsin Fair Elections Project - Jan 27th, 2017

Data Wonk: 2016 Election Results Prove Gerrymandering - Bruce Thompson - Dec 28th, 2016

Plaintiffs call for new maps for Wisconsin legislative district - Wisconsin Fair Elections Project - Dec 21st, 2016

Data Wonk: Measuring Wisconsin's Gerrymandering - Bruce Thompson - Dec 7th, 2016

Sen. Taylor statement on federal court ruling against Republican gerrymandering - State Sen. Lena Taylor - Nov 21st, 2016

Statement on Redistricting Ruling - State Sen. Chris Larson - Nov 21st, 2016

Federal Court overturns unconstitutional gerrymandering of Wisconsin legislative districts - Wisconsin Fair Elections Project - Nov 21st, 2016

Rep. Barca Statement on Redistricting Decision - State Rep. Peter Barca - Nov 21st, 2016

HISTORIC DECISION: Wisconsin Federal Court Strikes Down Partisan Gerrymander and Adopts Groundbreaking Legal Standard - Campaign Legal Center - Nov 21st, 2016

Murphy's Law: The Myth of Democratic Gerrymandering - Bruce Murphy - Jan 26th, 2016

Data Wonk: Can New Approach End Gerrymandering? - Bruce Thompson - Jan 6th, 2016

Federal Lawsuit to Overturn Unconstitutional Gerrymandering of Wisconsin Legislative Districts Continues - Wisconsin Fair Elections Project - Dec 17th, 2015

Can Auto Redistricting End Gerrymandering? - Laura Thompson - Dec 10th, 2015

Assembly candidate Brostoff calls for non-partisan redistricting - State Rep. Jonathan Brostoff - Apr 17th, 2014

Redistricting reform the antidote to Republican extremism - Press Release - Nov 13th, 2013

Lazich, August, Fitzgerald and Vos Still Silent on Redistricting Reform Public Hearings As Support & Pressure Builds - Common Cause in Wisconsin - Sep 17th, 2013

Freshmen legislators push new legislation to correct flawed partisan redistricting process - Press Release - Apr 11th, 2013

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Data Wonk: Gerrymandering Is Built on Lies

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The title of associate US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch 's recently issued book echoes Benjamin Franklin 's supposed answer to a woman who asked what the Constitutional Convention had adopted: "A Republic, If You Can Keep It." This suggests that Gorsuch thinks that our republican form of government is important.

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Oliver Munday

For almost 60 years, two generations have held the American presidency. The Greatest Generation-born in the early 20th century-first won the White House in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was 43. Baby Boomers-born after World War II-took over in 1992, when Bill Clinton was 46. By this precedent, Generation X was ripe for a president in 2016. Three of the early Republican front-runners-Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Scott Walker-would have entered the Oval Office in their 40s. But each faltered, and America replaced Barack Obama, a young Boomer, with Donald Trump, an older Boomer. Rather than choose a generational successor, America elected a candidate 15 years older than the president he replaced, the largest such jump in American history.

Now Gen Xers have another shot. Many of the 2020 presidential contenders who sparked early enthusiasm-Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke, Julián Castro, and Kamala Harris-were born between the mid-1960s and 1980, the span that defines Generation X. (Harris, born in 1964, is on its cusp.) But as of midsummer, with the exception of Harris, they were all below 5 percent in national polls. The result is a top tier of candidates that, in addition to Harris, includes three who are roughly Trump's age-Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren-and Pete Buttigieg, a Millennial.

If a Gen Xer doesn't win in 2020, there will be another chance in 2024. But by that time the field may be crowded with Millennials-born from 1981 to 1996-whose ranks include Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and rising Republican stars such as Representatives Dan Crenshaw and Matt Gaetz. Sandwiched between two larger and more politically consequential generations-Boomers and Millennials-Generation X may never produce a president at all.

This electoral weakness isn't coincidental. It reflects an ideological problem. Rubio, Cruz, Walker, Booker, O'Rourke, Castro, and Harris all entered adulthood between the Reagan and Clinton eras, and launched their political careers around the turn of the millennium. That means they likely began forming their political beliefs at a time when the Republican Party had a strong pro-immigration wing and leading Democrats embraced free trade, tough anti-crime policies, and charter schools. Then, as they came closer to running for president, an ideological earthquake hit.

Since 2016, the Democratic Party has lurched left. Nativists have taken over the GOP. Among activists in both parties, views that were once mainstream are now widely reviled. Gen X politicians have responded by either downplaying or repudiating their prior positions. That's unfortunate, because not everything that leading Republicans and Democrats believed before the parties reinvented themselves has been proved wrong. Gen X politicians could help check the hubris of the present-if only they would now defend what they once believed.

According to socialscientists, events that occur while people are entering adulthood have a disproportionate influence on their political views. That doesn't mean everyone who comes of age around the same time interprets those events in the same way. Rather, particular eras create particular intragenerational arguments. Think about the way Baby Boomers have spent their political careers debating the legacy of the Vietnam War.

The fight that has defined Generation X is between conservatives who came of age idolizing Ronald Reagan and liberals who came of age embracing Bill Clinton's response to him. As ideological children of Reagan, who granted legal status to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants, Cruz, Walker, and Rubio expressed sympathy for immigration before the 2016 election season. Cruz argued for doubling the cap on the number of immigrants America could admit every year; Walker supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; and Rubio helped write a 2013 Senate bill to create a path to citizenship.

Then, in 2015, Donald Trump-who, as a political neophyte, was largely unconstrained by traditional Republican views on immigration-jumped to the top of the polls in the Republican presidential race by denigrating Mexican immigrants and demanding a wall to keep undocumented immigrants out. Finding themselves on the wrong side of a tectonic shift in the GOP, his Gen X competitors jettisoned their earlier views. Asked in a 2015 debate why he no longer supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants -a position, the moderator noted, that he had held "from 2002 until as recently as 2013"-Walker responded that he had "listened to the American people." Rubio said that although he had helped draft the 2013 Senate bill that provided a path to citizenship, he hadn't expected it to become law. Cruz claimed that an amendment he'd supported to dramatically increase the number of H-1B visas for foreign workers had been a ploy to sabotage the passage of any immigration bill at all.

Read: How immigration became so controversial

The insincerity was obvious, and it didn't work. In many primaries and caucuses, according to data published by FiveThirtyEight, Trump won the lion's share of voters who called immigration their top concern. During his presidency, Rubio and Cruz have largely supported his immigration agenda in the Senate. That's unfortunate. Comprehensive research suggests that while immigration imposes some fiscal costs, and disadvantages some Americans, it benefits the American economy as a whole. But these Gen X Republicans who once promoted that view have mostly gone silent.

Gen X Democrats have suffered a similar crisis of confidence. Consider Beto O'Rourke's and Julián Castro's shifting stances on trade. By the time each ran for city council in their Texas hometowns of El Paso and San Antonio in the 2000s, they had witnessed the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton had signed into law in 1993. Initially, El Paso saw low-wage manufacturing jobs go south of the border, but over time, as Texas and Mexico grew more economically intertwined, fortunes rebounded. A 2016 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that since NAFTA had gone into effect, average income levels in El Paso and other Texas border cities had come closer to those in the nation as a whole. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in San Antonio, which averaged more than 6 percent in the three years prior to NAFTA taking effect (the Bureau's data starts in 1990), has averaged about 5 percent in the 25 years since.

Given the data, it's not surprising that both O'Rourke and Castro hailed free trade before running for president. "Since the signing of NAFTA," Castro declared in 2012, "San Antonio has blossomed into a major center of trade." O'Rourke in 2015 voted to give Obama the authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which, he said, offered the "chance for El Paso to capitalize on its growing status as a leading trade community."

But as the Democratic Party has moved left, O'Rourke's and Castro's support for free trade has left them ideologically marooned. Castro now calls for renegotiating NAFTA, and has said he sympathizes with people who feel that many trade deals were "entered into with the concern of the big corporations first instead of the American worker." O'Rourke wants to renegotiate it too, though not markedly, despite most studies showing that NAFTA has had a modestly positive overall impact on the American economy.
Read: Trump's exaggeration of NAFTA's lousiness
Kamala Harris's retreat has been on truancy. In 2006, as San Francisco's district attorney, she launched an initiative to reduce the number of students who chronically missed school without a valid excuse, a problem that, in the words of one 2005 study, had "reached epidemic proportions in urban academic settings." The initiative was classically Clintonian, an effort to pair the two principles in which he grounded many of his policies: opportunity and responsibility. To help parents keep their kids in school, Harris created a hotline through which they could get referrals to services. Her office advertised the hotline on city buses that passed through neighborhoods where truancy rates were high. But she also sent a letter to parents warning them that truancy was against the law. Before prosecution, parents of truant children went through a lengthy, noncriminal process with school officials. But when that didn't work, Harris's office could bring them to court.

At the time, Harris's tough-on-truancy policy fit the Democratic mood. Thirteen years later, it's become a political liability. Numerous left-leaning commentators have slammed it as part of the criminalization of poverty that in recent decades has incarcerated vast numbers of young men of color. Progressives are right that the tough-on-crime policies of the Clinton era had devastating effects, and that Harris wrongly defended some of them. But her anti-truancy initiative-which she launched after studying data on the correlation between truancy during childhood and crime later on-was designed to keep people out of jail. And the effort appears to have kept kids in school: Between the 2007-08 and 2010-11 school years, the percentage of students in San Francisco public schools deemed chronically truant fell from 4 to 2.5 percent.
Read: Kamala Harris's political memoir is an uneasy fit for the digital era
Progressive critics might argue that Harris could have achieved those results without threatening parents with fines or jail. But she didn't lock up any parents of truants; very few even paid a fine. In most instances, judges dismissed cases on the condition that the parents took actions to get their kid to school. Why did it take a court summons to get some families the help they needed? It's called the "black-robe effect." For some people, a judge's demand carries more weight than a school administrator's plea, even when they're urging the same thing. In the hardest cases, giving people an opportunity to get help isn't enough-demanding that they exercise responsibility is necessary too.

Nonetheless, Harris has backpedaled. Although she declared in her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, that " fighting truancy might very well be the single most important thing we can do to impact the future of crime," the issue is absent from the criminal-justice section of her campaign website. This spring, she said she regrets the way other California prosecutors implemented a 2011 statewide anti-truancy law that she'd pushed. In the current ideological climate, Democrats won't even defend Clintonian policies that they know have worked.

Something similar has happened to Cory Booker on education. Booker, like Bill Clinton, once advocated for charter schools, which operate without many of the regulations that govern traditional public schools. After becoming mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Booker, according to The New Yorker, set out to make the city "the charter school capital of the nation." Aided by an infusion of money from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others, he made progress toward achieving that goal. From the 2009-10 to 2017-18 school years, the share of Newark students attending charter schools rose from 12 to 33 percent.
Read: The verdict on charter schools?
The data have been impressive. While achievement growth in math ended up flat, English gains in Newark schools have significantly improved since Booker launched his reforms, according to a study by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard. (Although funded by what is now the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the study-conducted by researchers at Harvard and Dartmouth-was peer-reviewed.) The study found that the movement of students from traditional public schools to higher-quality charters helped drive this progress. According to data from the Newark Board of Education, graduation rates have improved too. That finding is consistent with a 2015 study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford showing that students in urban charter schools perform substantially better than students in other urban public schools.

Nonetheless, as Bernie Sanders's socialist message has gained influence, the mood inside the Democratic Party has turned against charter schools. Sanders has proposed a halt to government funding of new charter schools. Even a relative moderate, Pete Buttigieg, has called for slowing their expansion, according to NBC News. And Booker has dramatically muted his support for them; the education section of his campaign website makes no mention of charter schools. When Los Angeles teachers went on strike earlier this year, in part to protest the expansion of charter schools, Booker publicly supported them (though he didn't link his support with their views on charter schools).
Read: When school choice means school's choice
It is laudable when politicians admit they were wrong to champion policies that have failed. And many of the policies that enjoyed widespread support around the time Gen X politicians were first seeking office-from the Iraq War to mass incarceration- have failed. Those failures laid the foundation for the ideological revolts that have transformed both parties since 2016, and those transformations were overdue. It's a good thing that Donald Trump is more reluctant to attack Iran than George W. Bush was to attack Iraq. It's a good thing that Democrats are now contemplating massive infrastructure investments to stave off climate change.

But there's a fundamental difference between admitting you were wrong when the evidence has proved you wrong and pretending you were wrong when the evidence has proved you right, just because the political tides have shifted. It's the difference between humility and cowardice.

By defending policies that have worked but are now ideologically out of favor, Gen X politicians could combat presentism, the recurring tendency-especially among progressives-to condescendingly dismiss the ideas of the past.

Young activists disdainful of the Clinton and Obama presidencies are remaking the Democratic Party. But new generations tend to overcompensate for the failures of their predecessors. In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were so eager to distinguish themselves from the isolationists of the 1930s that they forgot that an earlier generation's skepticism of war-born from the disillusionment of World War I-had lessons to teach despite the necessity of World War II. Heeding those lessons might have kept America from losing 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam.

After the economic woes of the Jimmy Carter years, Clinton-era New Democrats were so determined to prove that the party was not antibusiness that they deregulated Wall Street in ways that contributed to the 2008 financial crash. In the 1990s, many New Democrats also dismissed labor unions because of their belief in the free market. Today the pendulum has swung again, and Democrats eager for labor's embrace are joining with teachers' unions to oppose a charter-school movement that enjoys overwhelming support from African American and Latino Democrats.

As the in-between generation-old enough to have witnessed the Clinton era as adults but young enough to learn from its failures-Gen X Democrats could warn against the hubris of the present, as Ted Kennedy warned against Clinton's endorsement of welfare reform in the 1990s and older foreign-policy thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Lippmann warned against Johnson's escalations in Vietnam.

What matters most isn't whether Gen X produces a president. It's whether it helps America's next president-whatever his or her generation-learn from the past rather than sneer at it.
This article appears in the October 2019 print edition with the headline "The Lost Generation."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Peter Beinart is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York.

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For almost 60 years, two generations have held the American presidency. The Greatest Generation-born in the early 20th century-first won the White House in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was 43. Baby Boomers-born after World War II-took over in 1992, when Bill Clinton was 46.

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Sharpies, auto emissions and the weaponization of policy.

Image

Credit Credit Jim Datz

Democracies used to collapse suddenly, with tanks rolling noisily toward the presidential palace. In the 21st century, however, the process is usually subtler.

Authoritarianism is on the march across much of the world, but its advance tends to be relatively quiet and gradual, so that it's hard to point to a single moment and say, this is the day democracy ended. You just wake up one morning and realize that it's gone.

In their 2018 book " How Democracies Die," the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin's Russia, to Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey, to Viktor Orban's Hungary. Bit by bit the guardrails of democracy were torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of the ruling party, then were weaponized to punish and intimidate that party's opponents. On paper these countries are still democracies; in practice they have become one-party regimes.

And the events of the past week have demonstrated how this can happen right here in America.

At first Sharpiegate, Donald Trump's inability to admit that he misstated a weather projection by claiming that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, was kind of funny, even though it was also scary - it's not reassuring when the president of the United States can't face reality. But it stopped being any kind of joke on Friday, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a statement falsely backing up Trump's claim that it had warned about an Alabama threat.

Why is this frightening? Because it shows that even the leadership of NOAA, which should be the most technical and apolitical of agencies, is now so subservient to Trump that it's willing not just to overrule its own experts but to lie, simply to avoid a bit of presidential embarrassment.

Think about it: If even weather forecasters are expected to be apologists for Dear Leader, the corruption of our institutions is truly complete.

Which brings me to a much more important case, the Justice Department's decision to investigate automakers for the crime of trying to act responsibly.
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The story so far: As part of its jihad against environmental regulation, the Trump administration has declared its intention to roll back Obama-era rules mandating a gradual rise in fuel efficiency.

You might think that the auto industry would welcome this invitation to keep on polluting. In fact, however, automakers have already based their business plans on the assumption that fuel efficiency standards will indeed rise.

They don't like seeing their plans upended - in part, one suspects, because they understand that the reality of climate change will eventually force the reinstatement of those rules. So they have actually opposed Trump's deregulation, which they warn would lead to " an extended period of litigation and instability."

And several companies have gone beyond protesting. In a remarkable rebuke to the administration, they have reached an agreement with the State of California to comply with standards nearly as restrictive as the Obama rules even if the federal government is no longer requiring them.

Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department is considering bringing an antitrust action against those companies, as if agreeing on environmental standards were a crime comparable to, say, price-fixing.

This would be disturbing even if it came from an administration that had previously showed some interest in actual antitrust policy. Coming from people who heretofore haven't indicated any concerns about monopoly power, it's clearly an attempt at weaponizing antitrust actions, turning them into a tool of intimidation.

And it's also clear evidence that the Justice Department has been thoroughly corrupted. In less than three years it has been transformed from an agency that tries to enforce the law to an organization dedicated to punishing Trump's opponents.

Who's next? In at least two cases, Trump appears to have tried to use his power to punish Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, which the president considers (like this newspaper) to be an enemy. First he pushed for an increase in the post office's package shipping rates, which would hurt Amazon's delivery costs; then the Pentagon suddenly announced that it was re-examining the process for awarding a huge cloud-computing project that Amazon was widely expected to win.

In each case it's hard to prove that these were efforts to weaponize government functions against domestic critics. But who are we kidding? Of course they were.

The point is that this is how the slide to autocracy happens. Modern de facto dictatorships don't usually murder their opponents (although Trump has been fulsome in his praise for regimes that do, in fact, rely on brute force). What they do, instead, is use their control over the machinery of government to make life difficult for anyone considered disloyal, until effective opposition withers away.

And it's happening here as we speak. If you aren't worried about the future of American democracy, you aren't paying attention.
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Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Death Of Democracy, American-Style. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | How Democracy Dies, American-Style

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Sharpies, auto emissions and the weaponization of policy. Democracies used to collapse suddenly, with tanks rolling noisily toward the presidential palace. In the 21st century, however, the process is usually subtler. Authoritarianism is on the march across much of the world, but its advance tends to be relatively quiet and gradual, so that it's hard to point to a single moment and say, this is the day democracy ended.

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It's doubtful even Alexander Hamilton believed what he was selling in "Federalist No. 68."

Chip Somodevilla / Getty

Before we get to the Electoral College, can we talk about Alexander Hamilton?

As a political figure, Hamilton was volatile, mercurial, choleric, vindictive, conniving, disloyal, and incontinent; those personal flaws eventually led to his death in a duel with Aaron Burr. We remember him because he was also smart, creative, dashing, and decisive. And if you'd had a case in front of a New York court, he'd have been the lawyer to hire. Brilliant doesn't do justice to his advocacy skills.

But an advocate is what he was. If he were a car salesman today, he could convince you that you really don't want the backup camera in your family minivan, because this baby here knows not to back into walls.

It's in that context that we should read his panegyric, from " Federalist No. 68," to the "mode of appointment of the chief magistrate of the United States" by the electors, a "small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, [who] will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations." The electors, he assured us, will be "men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice."

I love The Federalist. It is like a particularly well-done brochure for a Las Vegas timeshare, written to sell more than to inform. Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay had one job: to ensure that the draft Constitution was ratified. The alternative, to these patriots, was disaster-the division of the new nation into hostile confederacies, and possibly the transformation of some or all of the states into clients of the European powers. There was no chance of a do-over; it was this Constitution or nothing. For this reason, The Federalist insists that every word, every comma, of the Constitution added up to the best of all possible rules in the best of all possible worlds.
Garrett Epps: 'The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it.'
However, the authors knew the document's flaws. When Madison sent a copy to Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson discreetly replied: "In some parts it is discoverable that the author means only to say what may be best said in defense of opinions in which he did not concur."

As long as George Washington was on the ballot, the electoral system worked fine. But when Washington retired in 1796, it hobbled his successor, John Adams. The original Constitution made the electoral-vote runner-up the vice president-Adams's defeated opponent, Thomas Jefferson. Poor, gallant Adams could have used a friend at No. 2 but instead got a cunning foe. In the next election, in 1800, the system turned on Jefferson; because he and his running mate, Aaron Burr, got the same number of electoral votes, the election went to the House of Representatives, leading to 35 ballots over seven days-and very nearly to civil violence by outraged Jefferson supporters.

After that debacle, Congress proposed the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804. It requires electors to vote for one president and one vice president. But it didn't fix the real flaw: the electoral system is grossly undemocratic and devised in large part as a protection for slave states, which feared being outvoted in a popular-vote system. In fact, after Adams, what contemporaries called "the slave seats" ensured the dominance of slave-master presidents for the next quarter century. Then, in 1824, it gave us the first president to lose the popular vote, the unfortunate John Quincy Adams.

In 1876, the system almost restarted the Civil War; a Republican-dominated "electoral commission" awarded a one-vote victory to the popular-vote loser, "His Fraudulency" Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1888, electors gave us another loser president, the forgettable Benjamin Harrison. More recently, in 2000 and 2016, the system produced popular-vote losers who rank among the worst presidents in American history. The misfire in 2016 was especially painful, in part because the beneficiary, Donald Trump, was so plainly unfit for office and in part because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, the largest margin of any electoral-college loser in history.

Turns out the U.S. really needed that backup camera; without it, "we the people" are still backing into walls. But so smooth was that handsome salesman that generations of Americans keep insisting everything is fine.

In fact, between the 2016 election on November 8 and the scheduled electoral vote on December 19, a number of commentators assured Americans that it was for moments like this that the Founders had so wisely decided against a backup camera. The idea, they said, was that electors were to block unfit candidates. They could break their pledges to vote for their state's winner, scatter enough votes that neither candidate would get a majority, and throw the election to the House, where high-minded lawmakers would surely choose someone other than Donald Trump. These mythical electors were called "Hamilton electors," and the language of "Federalist No. 68" was deemed the "true" meaning of Article II of the Constitution.

In Colorado, which Clinton carried, one elector tried to vote for Ohio Governor John Kasich instead of Hillary Clinton; state officials discarded the vote, removed the elector, and referred him for prosecution on state charges. In Washington, three Clinton electors voted for Colin Powell and one for the Native American activist Faith Spotted Eagle. Under state law, their votes were recorded, but the secretary of state fined each elector $1,000 for violating the Washington elector-pledge law.

In May, the Washington State supreme court upheld the fines, reasoning that "the Constitution does not limit a state's authority in adding requirements to presidential electors, indeed, it gives to the states absolute authority in the manner of appointing electors." In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issued a contrary decision, holding that Colorado's actions violated the federal Constitution because

While the Constitution grants the states plenary power to appoint their electors, it does not provide the states the power to interfere once voting begins, to remove an elector, to direct the other electors to disregard the removed elector's vote, or to appoint a new elector to cast a replacement vote. In the absence of such a delegation, the states lack such power.

Read: The electoral college was meant to stop men like Trump from being president
I think the Tenth Circuit got it right. Electors aren't state officials; precisely because they are such odd figures, staying close to the text of the Constitution is best. The text doesn't tell us what an elector is (though we know he or she can't hold any other federal office); it does tell us what states can do (control how electors are selected)-but it does not grant states any power after that. There is no context for any unwritten powers. Beyond the text is only chaos.

And that leads us to my problem with "Hamilton electors." First, as noted above, I don't think Hamilton believed the high popalorum he was selling in "Federalist No. 68," and if he did, he was wrong. The Princeton political scientist Keith E. Whittington recently demonstrated that electors have more or less always functioned as party agents, not independent figures. I cannot imagine that any voter in 2016 went to the polls eager to give some unnamed fellow citizen a free choice among Clinton, Trump, Bernie Sanders, Kasich, Ron Paul, Powell, and Faith Spotted Eagle.

When Trump won the electoral contest, the republic was in danger. Would it have been saved by an Electoral College that sabotaged or reversed the result? Citizens should support such an electoral démarche, I think, only if they would also support a military coup to block Trump. Either alternative would inflict near-mortal damage on our system of elections.

Meanwhile, the residue of the Hamilton idea is a system more, not less, prone to misfiring. In the event of a near-tie next year, I can imagine that a losing candidate, or powerful forces backing him or her, would use bribery, threats, violence, and blackmail to try to flip one or two electors. The Constitution should not be read to empower such corruption, or to open the door to such chaos.

The electoral system is a disaster; those concerned with its dangers would do better to support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which states bind their electors to vote for the popular-vote winner. That has its own risks-a rogue legislature might try to violate its pledge. But they pale beside the Hamilton alternative.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Garrett Epps is a contributing editor for The Atlantic. He teaches constitutional law and creative writing for law students at the University of Baltimore. His latest book is American Justice 2014: Nine Clashing Visions on the Supreme Court.

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largest margin of any electoral-college loser

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The Electoral College Was Terrible From the Start

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It's doubtful even Alexander Hamilton believed what he was selling in "Federalist No. 68." Before we get to the Electoral College, can we talk about Alexander Hamilton? As a political figure, Hamilton was volatile, mercurial, choleric, vindictive, conniving, disloyal, and incontinent; those personal flaws eventually led to his death in a duel with Aaron Burr.

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Shortly after its post-World War I creation, the foundations of Germany's Weimar Republic began to quake. In 1923, Hitler staged an abortive coup attempt in Bavaria, the so-called Beer Hall Putsch - a failure that nonetheless turned Hitler into a reactionary celebrity, a sign of German discontent with the post-war political order.

One contemporary observer, a legal theorist in his mid-30s named Carl Schmitt, found the seeds of the crisis within the idea of liberalism itself. Liberal institutions like representative democracy, and the liberal ideal that all a nation's citizens can be treated as political equals, were in his view a sham. Politics at its core is not about compromise between equal individuals but instead conflict between groups.

"Even if Bolshevism is suppressed and Fascism held at bay, the crisis of contemporary parliamentarism would not be overcome in the least," he wrote in 1926. "It is, in its depths, the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity."

Schmitt's critique of liberalism proved terrifyingly accurate. The struggle between the Nazis and their opponents could not be resolved through parliamentary compromise; the Weimar Republic fell to fascism and took the rest of the continent down with it.

I've been thinking about Schmitt a lot lately. Not about his dark fate - he became an enthusiastic Nazi - but instead about his prescience. Schmitt saw something in German politics, deep flaws in its liberal order, before they became obvious to other political observers and ordinary citizens. His philosophical critique predicted political reality.

Schmitt haunts our political moment because we are seeing a flowering of criticism of American liberalism. In recent years, serious thinkers on both the left and right have launched a sustained assault on the United States' founding intellectual credo.

These criticisms do not arise in a vacuum. They stem from real-world crises, most notably the 2008 Great Recession and the rise of far-right populists like Donald Trump to power. These shocks to the system show, in the eyes of liberalism's contemporary critics, that something is profoundly wrong with the fundamental ideas that define our politics. It is a belief that "the liberal idea has become obsolete," as Russian President Vladimir Putin recently declared.

Unlike Schmitt and Putin, the intellectual critics of liberalism opponents do not typically challenge democracy itself. But they are united in believing that American liberalism as currently constituted is past its expiration date, that it is buckling under the weight of its contradictions. Their arguments tap into a deep sense of discontent among the voting public, a collapse of trust in the political establishment, and a growing sense that institutions like Congress aren't delivering what the public needs.

On the right, the anti-liberals locate the root of the problem in liberalism's social doctrines, its emphasis on secularism and individual rights. In their view, these ideas are solvents breaking down America's communities and, ultimately, dissolving the very social fabric the country needs to prosper.

Liberalism "constantly disrupts deeply cherished traditions among its subject populations, stirring unrest, animosity, and eventually political reaction and backlash," Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, one of the most prominent of the reactionary anti-liberals, said in a May speech.

Left anti-liberals, by contrast, pinpoint liberal economic doctrine as the source of our current woes. Liberalism's vision of the economy as a zone of individual freedom, in their view, has given rise to a deep system of exploitation that makes a mockery of liberal claims to be democratic - an oppressive system referred to as "neoliberalism."

"Neoliberalism in any guise is not the solution but the problem," Nancy Fraser, a professor at the New School, writes. "The sort of change we require can only come from elsewhere, from a project that is at the very least anti-neoliberal, if not anti-capitalist."

The defenses from America's liberal intellectual elite have been weak at best. The most prominent defenses of liberalism today are either laundry lists of its past glories or misplaced attacks on "identity politics" and "political correctness," neither of which are adequate to the challenge presented by liberalism's newly vital critics on the reactionary right or socialist left.

If liberalism is to endure, liberals have to join the fight. And that starts with understanding why liberalism is in trouble - and just what, exactly, it's up against.

A very brief account of liberalism, and why it's in crisis

For a word that's so omnipresent, liberalism is notoriously difficult to define.

In the context of political philosophy, liberalism refers to a school of thought that takes freedom, consent, and autonomy as foundational moral values. Liberals agree that it is generally wrong to coerce people, to seize control of their bodies or force them to act against their will (though they disagree among themselves on many, many whys and hows of the matter).

Given that people will always disagree about politics, liberalism's core aim is to create a generally acceptable mechanism for settling political disputes without undue coercion - to give everyone a say in government through fair procedures, so that citizens consent to the state's authority even when they disagree with its decisions.

This foundational liberal vision is typically associated with a group of European and American thinkers - from John Locke in the 17th century to John Rawls in the 20th - and thus often treated as a Western political inheritance. But seeing liberalism as a product of a particular cultural tradition is a mistake.

As Amartya Sen argued in a brilliant 1997 essay, many of the core principles we identify with liberalism today - religious toleration, popular sovereignty, equal freedom for all citizens - can be found in writings from pre-modern Europe, the ancient Buddhist tradition, and a 16th-century Indian king, among a range of sources. Liberalism has taken root in diverse societies across the globe today, from Japan to Uruguay to Namibia.

Sen's paper suggests that instead of defining liberalism by books written by dead white men, it makes more sense to treat it as a set of parts: a grouping of principles and animating ideas that, when combined, add up to an overarching framework for understanding political life.

Of these components, at least four political principles are common to the various species of liberalism (all of which relate to its core moral premise about freedom). They are familiar to most citizens in liberal regimes: democracy, the rule of law, individual rights, and equality.

These ideas - the minimalistcore of liberalism - are so foundational to political life in advanced democracies that they're simply taken for granted, with debates about public policy taking place inside liberalism's parameters.

Bush-era American conservatism was a right-wing species of liberalism; what Americans call "liberalism" is a relatively modest form of left-liberalism. Germany's Christian Democrats, India's Congress, Cape Verde's PAICV, and Argentina's Republican Proposal are politically diverse parties, some more conservative by their country's standards and others more left-leaning, but they're all broadly liberal.

To challenge liberalism is thus to not merely engage in ordinary political argumentation. It is to call into question the entire operating system that defines the world's democracies. It is, by its nature, a radical claim.

But these are radical times. Several trends and shock events have combined to create a sense of rolling crisis. This certainly traces back to the Great Recession; arguably, it began as far back as the 9/11 attacks. But what's clear is that liberalism's peril became acute in 2016, when the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump proved that illiberal right-wing populism had emerged as a serious challenge to liberal hegemony.

By one count, illiberal right-wing populists controlled the governments of least 11 different countries in 2018; in 1990, they controlled none. Trump is the most famous example, but he has peers in countries as influential as Brazil and India. Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has openly described his political vision as "illiberal," essentially dismantled Hungarian liberal democracy; Poland's ruling Law and Justice party is well on the way to doing the same. Combine these outright victories with the rising popularity of far-right parties in many other European countries, and it looks like liberalism is at risk of being overthrown by the voters that it's supposed to be serving.

The rise of such a challenge to liberalism has highlighted how the liberal status quo has failed to deliver, particularly in the wealthy West. Across the OECD, the top 10 percent makes over nine times per year as much as the bottom 10 percent. Metrics of trust in a range of governmental institutions - legislatures, courts, civil service - are falling across advanced democracies. In the United States specifically, deaths from alcohol abuse, drug overdose, and suicide have reached all-time highs.

These are just a few of the doleful indicators, numbers that paint a gloomy picture of the political status quo in liberalism's strongholds and especially the United States. If life under liberalism is getting worse for a lot of people, is it possible that the idea really has outlasted its usefulness?

The left's challenge to liberalism

Modern anti-liberals, both on the right and the left, take the notion that the status quo is broken as their starting point.

Those on the left argue that liberalism's failures were eminently predictable, the inevitable product of contradictions within liberalism long identified by critics in the Marxist tradition - that between the liberal commitment to egalitarian democracy and a vision of the market as a zone of individual freedom.

The Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra captured this argument particularly well in an interview with the LA Review of Books:

Liberal capitalism was supposed to foster a universal middle class and encourage bourgeois values of sobriety and prudence and democratic virtues of accountability. It achieved the opposite: the creation of a precariat with no clear long-term prospects, dangerously vulnerable to demagogues promising them the moon. Uncontrolled liberalism, in other words, prepares the grounds for its own demise.

The core concepts of the leftist narrative have been worked out for decades by Marx-influenced scholars like the University of Pennsylvania's Adolph Reed Jr., the New School's Nancy Fraser, and the City University of New York's David Harvey. It's become prominent thanks to the emergence of vibrant leftist magazines like Jacobin and its adoption by prominent public intellectuals like Mishra.

The current crisis of liberalism, according to this narrative, dates to (roughly) the 1970s. Around then, governments across the Western world began deregulating their economies, selling off state-owned industries, and privatizing core government services. This turn towards economic "neoliberalism," as leftists termed it, was not just a matter of economic policy, but rather a comprehensive ideological and philosophical project.

Under neoliberalism, the logic of the market becomes "an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs," Harvey writes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism. "It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world."

Neoliberalism, in this line of thinking, became dominant on both sides of the political aisle. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were neoliberals; so too were Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Their agenda of tax cuts, "welfare reform," and deregulation created the rapid increase in inequality since the 1970s, giving rise to a political and economic model rigged in favor of the rich.

The critique of neoliberalism is not new, but it has gained currency in the last decade or so. The Great Recession can be blamed on neoliberal financial deregulation, the Eurozone crisis on neoliberal austerity, and the rise of Trump and right-wing extremists as a backlash to neoliberal free trade agreements and neoliberal indifference to rising inequality.

"Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously," leftist author Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian. "Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe."

Now, it's possible to oppose "neoliberalism" without opposing "liberalism" per se. But liberalism's left-wing critics disagree; they claim that neoliberalism is not a distortion of liberalism, but rather its true face.

Liberalism's core error, in this view, comes from a mistake in its vision of democracy. Liberals support democracy as a matter of principle, believing that individuals have a right to shape decisions that affect their lives in deep and important ways. But liberals curiously excludes parts of economic life from this zone of collective self-determination, seeing the market as a place where people have individual but not collective rights. Liberalism sees nothing wrong with the heads of Amazon and Facebook making decisions that have implications for the entire economy.

So long as capitalists are free from democratic constraint, leftists argue, liberal democracy is on dangerous footing. The super-rich use the power their accumulated wealth provides to influence political life, rearranging policy to protect and expand their fortunes. The rise of neoliberalism is, per the socialist writer Peter Frase, this process in action: proof that capitalism will invariably corrupt liberalism's promise of freedom and equality.

For all their anti-liberal rhetoric, virtually none of today's serious left critics of liberalism are Stalinists or Maoists - that is, opponents of democracy itself. They believe in liberal rights like freedom of expression, and pursue their revolutionary agenda through social organizing and democratic elections.

They champion Sen. Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign, despite the fact that the policies he advocates stop well short of democratizing the workplace or abolishing capitalism. That's because they see the electoral victory of an avowed "democratic socialist" and policies like Medicare for All as the beginning of a long process, necessary steps for replacing eventually capitalism with something better.

Many of the sharpest left-wing critics of liberalism do not frame themselves as opponents of liberal democratic ideals. Rather, they argue that they're the only people who can vindicate liberalism's best promises.

"In describing my own political trajectory, I often talk about my parents' liberal politics, and my own journey of discovery, through which I concluded that their liberal ideals couldn't be achieved by liberal means, but required something more radical, and more Marxist," Frase writes. "That's what I'd call socialism, or even communism, which for me is the ultimate horizon."

The right's challenge to liberalism

The right's attack on liberalism is even more sweeping than the left's.

Conservative anti-liberals question not only freedom in the economic sphere, but the value of pluralistic democracy itself - arguing that core liberal ideals about tolerance and equality actually produce an insidious form of tyranny that destroys communities and deadens the human spirit.

The key proponents of this view are heavily (though not exclusively) Catholic; many draw from their faith's long tradition of anti-liberal thought. They have a small presence in the academy - Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen and Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, for example - but are much less visible in the professoriate than socialists.

The right-leaning anti-liberals are more often found in the punditry, conservative think tanks, and even in the ranks of actual political parties (particularly in Europe). The Christian publication First Things is a particular hub of media activity for these anti-liberals, as is the American Conservativemagazine. Sympathetic writers can be found at outlets ranging from the New York Times to National Review to the New York Post. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is a conservative anti-liberal; on the far right, anti-liberals include Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Polish European Parliament member Ryzard Legutko.

The right's starting point is the same as the left's: our society is in dire straits, and liberalism is to blame. Like the left, they see the untrammeled market as part of the problem, a decisive break with the libertarianism or "classical liberalism" favored by traditional American movement conservatives and European right-wingers in the mold of Margaret Thatcher. The economic split has produced more than a little infighting in conservative ranks.

But conservative anti-liberals are not content with rubbishing libertarianism and other liberal economic doctrines. The real error, in their view, goes even further back - all the way down to liberalism's core ideas about individual freedom and choice.

Liberalism's foundational premise is that the government must defend liberty: that people should be free to choose their paths in life, and that the state's role should first and foremost be protecting and enabling the exercise of this freedom. Conservative critics believe this basic liberal picture is rooted in a false, impoverished view of human life - there is not, and never has been, such a thing as freely choosing, autonomous individuals.

Actual people are embedded inside social relations and identities - most notably, family, faith, and community - without which they lack meaning and purpose. Liberalism elevates the will of the individual at the expense of these pre-political bonds.

"For decades now our politics and culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom," Hawley writes in an essay published by Christianity Today. "It is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community, a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice."

The pursuit of profit erodes social ties, creating incentives for people to pursue their self-interest rather than build families or embed themselves in communities. Young people leave their small towns in search of career and meaning in anonymous big cities, destroying the communal ethos that allowed people to feel happy and secure. Rising inequality chips away at the bonds of social solidarity, hollowing out the middle class and placing deep barriers between citizens.

Liberals use the state to try and address the market's failures, providing services like welfare payments and health care. But such efforts, conservatives argue, usurp functions that used to belong to community and church - further weakening those key sources of meaning and identity.

"The political project of liberalism is shaping us into...increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone," Deneen, probably the sharpest of these conservative anti-liberals, writes in his book Why Liberalism Failed.

This destruction of community, conservative anti-liberals believe, can be seen in the big-picture numbers. Across liberal societies, religious attendance has fallen, social clubs like the Elk Lodge are declining, divorce rates have risen, and birth rates are shrinking. Liberalism's separation of individual from community and security leaves its subjects angry and alone, turning to demagogues because no one else is channeling their rage at a failing status quo.

But what has really set off reactionary anti-liberals has been the state enforcement of liberal social mores.

They believe that liberalism's vaunted neutrality - its claim to respect all citizens' freedom to follow their own paths in life - is a sham. Liberalism can only truly tolerate belief systems that cohere with its vision of freedom, and will actively attempt to stamp out worldviews that it concludes are hostile to that ideal. In the right anti-liberal imaginary, liberal tolerance is fundamentally intolerant.

Hence attempts to force Hobby Lobby's insurance to cover birth control and Christian bakers to make cakes for gay weddings. Hence the rise of "political correctness" and the LGBT movement's attempts to challenge the allegedly foundational concept of the gender binary. Eventually, these conservatives believe, liberalism's quest to make everyone free could culminate in wiping out traditional Christianity and conservative society altogether.

"The need for building a liberal-democratic society ... implies the withdrawal of the guarantee of freedom for those whose actions and interests are said to be hostile to [liberalism]," Legutko, the Polish member of European Parliament, writes in his influential book The Demon in Democracy.

So if liberalism is a mortal threat to the West, what's the right-wing alternative?

There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought: localism and nationalism.

The localist view, advocated by Deneen and the American Conservative's Rod Dreher, suggests that national politics should not be the focus of anti-liberals' energy (at the moment, at least). They advocate instead focusing on engaging in small-scale experiments and community building that can restore what liberalism has destroyed, providing islands of stability for traditional Christians amid the secular storm raging nationwide.

"Such communities of practice will increasingly be seen as lighthouses and field hospitals to those who might have once regarded them as peculiar and suspect," Deneen writes. "From the work and example of alternative forms of community, ultimately a different experience of political life might arise."

The nationalist view, by contrast, argues for recapturing the state and remaking it on avowedly illiberal lines - constructing a state that rebuilds national communities by opposing international capital and secular liberalism alike.

The Orbán government in Hungary is an example of this agenda in action. Hungary's leader has banned the teaching of "gender ideology" in universities, cracked down on non-European immigration, passed financial incentives aimed at getting Hungarian women to have more babies, and redefined Hungary's regime as both as a "Christian democracy" and an "illiberal democracy."

An even more radical version, advocated most prominently by Harvard's Vermeule, is something called "integralism" - an obscure Catholic doctrine that essentially amounts to the abolition of the church/state distinction and the replacement of liberal democracy with an avowedly Catholic regime.

These integralists reject the label of "theocracy" for their ideal government. But they do hope the current system can be transformed from within, the ultimate aim being a state that promotes a religiously defined " Highest Good " rather than liberal autonomy.

Vermeule specifically "hopes for eventual integration effected from within institutions," starting by influencing of "executive-type bureaucracies" rather than through outright winning elections. It's a way of shaping the future, of laying the groundwork for a Catholic world after "liberalism's eventual disappearance."

The inadequacy of the liberal response (so far)

Despite all of its problems, I still believe in liberalism. Its core philosophical doctrines are correct: The aim of politics should be ensuring individuals are free to live according to their "plan of life" (a term taken from John Rawls, the liberal philosophical giant of the 20th century). Core liberal institutions, like an expansive slate of individual rights and a social democratic mixed economy, are vital to human flourishing.

But despite my deep faith in liberalism, I've recently found myself more frustrated by reading fellow liberals than the illiberals attacking us.

Many modern liberals, including some brilliant and well-regarded thinkers, do not seem up to the task of defending liberalism from its newest wave of critics. They lean on old arguments persuasive largely to other liberals, doing little to counteract the narrative of crisis from which the new illiberalism gets its force. It feels like the liberalism we have is musty, grown soft from its Cold War victory and unwilling to grapple with an opposition very different from what came before it.

The first of these unsatisfying arguments, which I associate most closely with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, is that the narrative of a world in crisis is simply wrong. On every conceivable metric, the world is getting better - extreme poverty is declining, life expectancy is going up, deaths from war and violence are on the decline. If things are generally doing well, where's the need for radical change?

I happen to find the data behind this view persuasive, and indeed have argued that it's a compelling case for cautious optimism about humanity's future. It's not, however, a particularly good defense of liberalism at the moment.

Most of the current global improvement is happening in the developing world; the biggest recent jumps in global life expectancy largely come from these countries, including authoritarian states like China. By contrast, conditions in richer liberal democracies are getting worse on a bevy of different metrics. The data on global improvement is hardly making the case for liberalism in its historical bastions.

Even if you buy that liberalism is responsible for improvements for people living in the developing economies, it's not clear if it can keep this progress going. The damage done by our new demagogues and the looming threat of climate change could end up reversing worldwide progress against untimely death and poverty.

But most fundamentally, liberalism's defenders need to meet people where they are. And Pinker's metrics notwithstanding, a lot of people really feel like the political status quo is failing them. The illiberals are explaining why that is; liberals are trying to talk them out of it. This won't work, no matter how many statistics on infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa liberals marshal.

The second unsatisfying liberal argument is that liberalism may not be perfect, but it has a long history of repairing itself. This is one of the central arguments in Adam Gopnik's A Thousand Small Sanities, the New Yorker correspondent's book-length defense of his liberalism.

"The liberation of women, the emancipation of slaves and then of the racially oppressed, the recognition of the rights of sexual minorities - these are all the unique achievements of liberal states, engineered by liberal activists, all things that have never happened before in history," Gopnik writes.

But saying that liberalism can repair itself isn't the same thing as explaining how it can do so right now. The victory of the suffragettes is cold comfort for women fighting for equal pay; claiming that liberalism abolished Jim Crow does nothing to tell us how it will fix the new Jim Crow. Gopnik's argument is more of a testament of faith in liberalism rather than an effort to chart a way through the current crisis.

The third and final unsatisfying liberal response, the one that frustrates me the most, is lashing out at the wrong enemies.

One of the most common genres in modern American punditry is the attack on "identity politics" and "political correctness." Liberalism's defenders on both the center-left and center-right frequently pinpoint today's young people and college kids, with their "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" and gender-neutral pronouns, as being a looming threat to free speech and core liberal values - the tip of a spear aimed at the multicultural left.

Books like The Once and Future Liberal, Columbia professor Mark Lilla's post-Trump opus, argue for a need to move beyond "identity liberalism"; liberal essayists warn that practitioners of "identity politics" are corroding the soul of American liberalism.

"The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones," Jonathan Chait wrote in a 2015 New York magazine feature. "While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed."

But there is scant persuasive evidence that America's young left-wing activists are turning against free speech or other core liberal values. The argument also betrays a misunderstanding of the relationship between identity politics and Marxism, as well as an underestimation of the degree to which right-wing anti-liberalism has become a part of the modern Republican Party.

Most importantly, the liberal war on identity politics is a mistake philosophically. It misunderstands the rising energy surrounding identity issues as a threat to liberalism when it's actually sowing the seeds of liberal renewal.

One of liberalism's historical sources of strength is seeing the world for what it is, adapting its doctrines to fit changing realities rather than trying to make the world fit an older version of liberalism. Modern liberals need to do the same with the problems raised by its current critics. They - we - need to recognize that there are serious flaws in liberalism as it exists. Leftists are correct that neoliberal faith in the market was far too devout; conservatives are right that liberals have been too inattentive to the importance of community.

But liberal adaptation to change is not merely a process of self-flagellation. It also involves identifying what new ideas are bubbling up that can be adapted to strengthen liberalism, pinpointing the raw materials for generating enthusiastic new liberal movements and visions. The obsessive focus on a handful of overeager college organizers and professors is a mistake; it obscures the undeniable fact that organization around group identity has helped create a number of vital political movements that are defending liberalism's central component parts.

Think about the Movement for Black Lives, dedicated to liberal ideals of equal citizenship and non-coercion. Think about the fact that roughly 4 million Americans around the country turned out for the 2017 Women's Marches, using a call for women's equality as means of organizing against Trump's threat to American democracy more broadly.

Think about the #MeToo movement's role in fighting back against a pervasive source of unfreedom and inequality. Think about the backlash to Trump's travel ban and family separations, how young people around the world are using their generational identity to mobilize around climate change, and how laws aimed at repressing minority voters have become a rallying cry for the defense of free and fair elections.

The people doing the work to defend equality, freedom, and democracy today base their activism on the experiences of specific identity groups. They tend to use specific oppressions as a jumping-off point, weaving together different groups' experiences into a tapestry of solidarity. Particularism is not isolating, but rather a means of generating a broad-based critique of social inequalities that can improve democracy for all.

Liberals will not succeed by tut-tutting activists who care about the oppression of their own communities. They succeed by developing a vision of liberalism that harnesses activists' energy and sense of injustice.

The defense of liberalism begins by recognizing that there is a crisis, that anti-liberals are once again asserting themselves intellectually in ways that should worry liberalism's defenders. It will triumph by seeing the world for what it is, and changing liberalism to meet it - not by insisting on arguments well past their expiration date.

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Shortly after its post-World War I creation, the foundations of Germany's Weimar Republic began to quake. In 1923, Hitler staged an abortive coup attempt in Bavaria, the so-called Beer Hall Putsch - a failure that nonetheless turned Hitler into a reactionary celebrity, a sign of German discontent with the post-war political order.

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Everything was unfolding as it usually does. The academics who gathered in Lisbon this summer for the International Society of Political Psychologists' annual meeting had been politely listening for four days, nodding along as their peers took to the podium and delivered papers on everything from the explosion in conspiracy theories to the rise of authoritarianism.

Then, the mood changed. As one of the lions of the profession, 68-year-old Shawn Rosenberg, began delivering his paper, people in the crowd of about a hundred started shifting in their seats. They loudly whispered objections to their friends. Three women seated next to me near the back row grew so loud and heated I had difficulty hearing for a moment what Rosenberg was saying.

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What caused the stir? Rosenberg, a professor at UC Irvine, was challenging a core assumption about America and the West. His theory? Democracy is devouring itself-his phrase - and it won't last.

As much as President Donald Trump's liberal critics might want to lay America's ills at his door, Rosenberg says the president is not the cause of democracy's fall-even if Trump's successful anti-immigrant populist campaignmay havebeen a symptom of democracy's decline.

We're to blame, said Rosenberg.As in "we the people."

Democracy is hard work. And as society's "elites"-experts and publicfigures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule-have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy. As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-wing populists.

His prediction? "In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail."

***

The last half of the 20th century was the golden age of democracy. In 1945, according to one survey, there were just 12 democracies in the entire world. By the end of the century there were 87. But then came the great reversal: In the second decade of the 21st century, the shift to democracy rather suddenly and ominously stopped-and reversed.

Right-wing populist politicians have taken power or threatened to in Poland, Hungary, France, Britain, Italy, Brazil and the United States. As Rosenberg notes, "by some metrics, the right wing populist share of the popular vote in Europe overall has more than tripled from 4% in 1998 to approximately 13% in 2018." In Germany, the right-wing populist vote increased even after the end of the Great Recession and after an influx of immigrants entering the country subsided.

A brief three decades after some had heralded the "end of history" it's possible that it's democracy that's nearing the end. And it's not just populist rabble-rousers who are saying this. So is one of the establishment's pioneer social scientists, who's daring to actually predict the end of democracy as we know it.

Rosenberg, who earned degrees at Yale, Oxford and Harvard, may be the social scientist for our time if events play out as he suggests they will. His theory is that over the next few decades, the number of large Western-style democracies around the globe will continue to shrink, and those that remain will become shells of themselves. Taking democracy's place, Rosenberg says, will be right-wing populist governments that offer voters simple answers to complicated questions.

And therein lies the core of his argument: Democracy is hard work and requires a lot from those who participate in it. It requires people to respect those with different views from theirs and people who don't look like them. It asks citizens to be able to sift through large amounts of information and process the good from the bad, the true from the false. It requires thoughtfulness, discipline and logic.

Unfortunately, evolution did not favor the exercise of these qualities in the context of a modern mass democracy. Citing reams of psychological research, findings that by now have become more or less familiar, Rosenberg makes his case that human beings don't think straight. Biases of various kinds skew our brains at the most fundamental level. For example, racism is easily triggered unconsciously in whites by a picture of a black man wearing a hoodie. We discount evidence when it doesn't square up with our goals while we embrace information that confirms our biases. Sometimes hearing we're wrong makes us double down. And so on and so forth.

Our brains, says Rosenberg, are proving fatal to modern democracy. Humans just aren't built for it.

People have been saying for two millennia that democracy is unworkable, going back to Plato. The Founding Fathers were sufficiently worried that they left only one half of one branch of the federal government in the hands of the people. And yet for two centuries democracy in America more or less proceeded apace without blowing itself up.

So why is Rosenberg, who made his name back in the 1980s with a study that disturbingly showed that many voters select candidates on the basis of their looks, predicting the end of democracy now?

He has concluded that the reason for right-wing populists' recent success is that "elites" are losing control of the institutions that have traditionally saved people from their most undemocratic impulses. When people are left to make political decisions on their own they drift toward the simple solutions right-wing populists worldwide offer: a deadly mix of xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism.

The elites, as Rosenberg defines them, are the people holding power at the top of the economic, political and intellectual pyramid who have "the motivation to support democratic culture and institutions and the power to do so effectively." In their roles as senators, journalists, professors, judges and government administrators, to name a few, the elites have traditionally held sway over public discourse and U.S. institutions-and have in that role helped the populace understand the importance democratic values. But today that is changing. Thanks to social media and new technologies, anyone with access to the Internet can publish a blog and garner attention for their cause-even if it's rooted in conspiracy and is based on a false claim, like the lie that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor, which ended in a shooting.

While the elites formerly might have successfully squashed conspiracy theories and called out populists for their inconsistencies, today fewer and fewer citizens take the elites seriously. Now that people get their news from social media rather than from established newspapers or the old three TV news networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), fake news proliferates. It's surmised that 10 million people saw on Facebook the false claim that Pope Francis came out in favor of Trump's election in 2016. Living in a news bubble of their own making many undoubtedly believed it. (This was the most-shared news story on Facebook in the three months leading up to the 2016 election, researchers report.)

The irony is that more democracy-ushered in by social media and the Internet, where information flows more freely than ever before-is what has unmoored our politics, and is leading us towards authoritarianism. Rosenberg argues that the elites have traditionally prevented society from becoming a totally unfettered democracy; their "oligarchic 'democratic' authority" or "democratic control" has until now kept the authoritarian impulses of the populace in check.

Compared with the harsh demands made by democracy, which requires a tolerance for compromise and diversity, right-wing populism is like cotton candy. Whereas democracy requires us to accept the fact that we have to share our country with people who think and look differently than we do, right-wing populism offers a quick sugar high. Forget political correctness. You can feel exactly the way you really want about people who belong to other tribes.

Right-wing populists don't have to make much sense. They can simultaneously blame immigrants for taking jobs away from Americans while claiming that these same people are lazy layabouts sponging off welfare. All the populist followers care is that they now have an enemy to blame for their feelings of ennui.

And unlike democracy, which makes many demands, the populists make just one. They insist that people be loyal. Loyalty entails surrendering to the populist nationalist vision. But this is less a burden than an advantage. It's easier to pledge allegiance to an authoritarian leader than to do the hard work of thinking for yourself demanded by democracy.

"In sum, the majority of Americans are generally unable to understand or value democratic culture, institutions, practices or citizenship in the manner required," Rosenberg has concluded. "To the degree to which they are required to do so, they will interpret what is demanded of them in distorting and inadequate ways. As a result they will interact and communicate in ways that undermine the functioning of democratic institutions and the meaning of democratic practices and values."

I should clarify that the loud whispers in the crowd in Lisbon weren't a response to Rosenberg's pessimism. This was after all a meeting of political psychologists-a group who focus on flaws in voters' thinking and the violation of democratic norms. At the conference Ariel Malka reported evidence that conservatives are increasingly open to authoritarianism. Brian Shaffer related statistics showing that since Trump's election teachers have noted a rise in bullying. Andreas Zick observed that racist crimes shot up dramatically in Germany after a million immigrants were allowed in.

What stirred the crowd was that Rosenberg has gone beyond pessimism into outright defeatism. What riled the crowd was that he's seemingly embraced a kind of reverence for elitism no longer fashionable in the academy. When challenged on this front, he quickly insisted he didn't mean to exempt himself from the claim that people suffer from cognitive and emotional limitations. He conceded that the psychological research shows everybody's irrational, professors included! But it was unclear that he convinced the members of the audience he really meant it. And they apparently found this discomforting.

There were less discomforting moments in Lisbon. The convention gave an award to George Marcus, one of the founders of the discipline, who has dedicated his career to the optimistic theory that human beings by nature readjust their ideas to match the world as it is and not as they'd like it to be-just as democracy requires.

But this isn't a moment for optimism, is it? What is happening around the world shows that the far-right is on the march. And when it comes to the U.S., the problem might be larger than one man. Liberals have been praying for the end of the Trump presidency, but if Rosenberg is right, democracy will remain under threat no matter who is in po

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The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy

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Everything was unfolding as it usually does. The academics who gathered in Lisbon this summer for the International Society of Political Psychologists' annual meeting had been politely listening for four days, nodding along as their peers took to the podium and delivered papers on everything from the explosion in conspiracy theories to the rise of authoritarianism.

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This story is part of a group of stories called

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What if we just give people money?

This is the question propelling several new books and that's been taken up by more than one presidential candidate - foremost Andrew Yang, who has made universal basic income (UBI) the centerpiece of his campaign. An automated future looms on the horizon, and tech magnates and policy wonks are turning to UBI as a neat solution to the messy problem of technology-induced unemployment.

Yet when one considers the political ramifications of the largest and longest-running UBI experiment in America - Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) - giving out cash appears to create unforeseen problems, and advocates for basic income would do well to incorporate Alaska's latest experience into their conceptions of the policy.

Since 1982, Alaska has been giving every woman, man, and child an annual chunk of its nest egg: the $66.3 billion Permanent Fund. Alaska deposits at least 25 percent of mineral royalties - revenue the state generates from its mines, oil, and gas reserves - into the fund annually. The money is in turn invested by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation in domestic and global stock, bonds, private equity, and more, and interest earnings are then distributed to Alaska residents every September.

Former Gov. Jay Hammond, the mastermind behind the fund, created the dividend system as a way to ensure Alaska's nonrenewable resources could provide an everlasting return to the state. In his words, he "wanted to transform oil wells pumping oil for a finite period into money wells pumping money for infinity." Paying out $1,000 to $2,000 per person per year - every Alaskan gets the same amount- was Hammond's plan to protect the fund. If every Alaskan were a stakeholder in the Permanent Fund's future, surely no politician could dismantle it without paying an electoral price.

For decades, Hammond's system was an unprecedented success. But in 2015, plunging oil prices created major shortfalls in the state's budget. In response, then-Gov. Bill Walker deviated from the traditional PFD formula and reduced the value of the check for 2016. Doing so allowed the government to continue funding state services and ensured the sustainability of the fund. Instead of a check for $2,052, as they would have received with the traditional formula, Alaskans that year got a comparatively paltry $1,022.

In 2018, Republican state Sen. Mike Dunleavy saw an opportunity. Despite traditional Republican aversions to handouts, Dunleavy ran for governor on the campaign platform of increasing the PFD. He promised every resident up to $6,700, to make up for Walker's cuts in 2016 and 2017 - though he was foggy on how the state could pay.

The result? Dunleavy won by a landslide.

The problem is that he now finds himself unable to fulfill his campaign promise without major cuts elsewhere. He's now seeking to jettison other state commitments to health care, education, infrastructure, and other vital areas. After initially vetoing $444 million from the state budget, Dunleavy responded to the threat of a recall vote and walked back some of his more extreme line-item cuts. Still, the state will see no funding for public broadcasting, a 31 percent cut to its critical ferry system, $130 million from Medicaid, and $70 million from the University of Alaska system.

The PFD allowed Dunleavy to turn the governor's race into a single-issue vote: Do you want a bigger check or not? The events in Alaska show that a UBI policy can have a dramatic effect on an economy - but it can also overwhelm all other governmental concerns and dominate politics.

The complicated politics of the Alaska Permanent Fund

To supporters of a UBI, the Alaska PFD offers a tantalizing glimpse of what a universal basic income can do. Thanks to the PFD, crippling poverty is scant in Alaska. A 2016 study by the University of Alaska found it reduced poverty up to 20 percent.

However, Alaskans' finances are insecure in other ways. High unemployment ( the highest in the country) and the astronomical cost of rural living meant that even voters who were concerned about the feasibility of Dunleavy's $6,700 pledge voted for him anyway.

A couple thousand bucks might not sound like basic income, but for many rural Alaskans, a big PFD can mean the difference between a year of hunger and a year of plenty. In the end, Dunleavy's $6,700 was an offer too high to refuse.

But on top of all the cuts he's pushed, Dunleavy agreed on August 20 to the $1,600 PFD that was passed by the legislature - meaning Alaskans still won't get the check they thought they were voting for, because contrary to Dunleavy's campaign messaging, the governor does not actually hold the power to set the value of the dividend. (Only the legislature does.)

The upheavals in Alaska illustratehow the PFD has come to warp the state's politics. It has allowed a feckless politician to capitalize on residents' economic insecurities and reach the state's highest office. Alaska is one of the closest test cases we have for UBI, and interested parties should note the political and social costs that Alaska's PFD is accruing. Once a government adopts such a policy, it may well become the preeminent issue in future campaigns. As Anchorage Daily Newscommentator Charles Wohlforth wrote, "It took only a year or two before the fund became politically sacrosanct."

Alaska is not a perfect analog to the United States as a whole. The state has no income or sales tax and is loath to implement either. Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend plan relies on dedicated tax revenue, which would be subject to fewer vicissitudes than oil markets. It is also improbable the US would find itself in a similar budgetary bind that would pit funding for public services against a UBI. The US can borrow in huge numbers and perform financial wizardry that a lone state cannot.

However, Alaska's political composition means it is a better test case for UBI than any small-scale randomized controlled trial, since it allows observers to study not only the economic and social ramifications of UBI but also its effects in the political arena.Republicans control the government of Alaska - just as they now control the US federal government - and Republicans tend to defund public services and thwart attempts to raise taxes on the wealthy. Any viable American UBI policy would have to grapple with the same temptations on the part of conservative politicians to use UBI to get elected and then as an excuse to strip public funding from programs they don't like.

The situation unfolding in Alaska demonstrates how economic precarity, paired with an entrenched reliance on an annual check, can result in deep political dysfunction. How might the government salvage this vital yet troublesome program? Alaskan lawmakers have proposed codifying the formula for the dividend check amount in the state constitution as a way of settling its perennial political battles.

In theory, this would isolate the PFD from opportunistic politicians, but the reality would be more complicated. How exactly to calculate the amount alone is a vexing and deeply political question. Introducing more rigidity to the process might make the state even less adaptable to oil market fluctuations.

None of this is to say Alaska should do away with the PFD, or that UBI activists should abandon their cause. Aspects of the PFD show tremendous promise for a similar nationwide program - it signals the US would see reduced poverty, a buoyed economy, a greater sense of ownership over the country. But these UBI enthusiasts should pay attention to the curdling effects the PFD has had on Alaska's politics, and how it has left elections vulnerable to candidates willing to make unkeepable promises.

Cash is a uniquely motivating incentive. The Alaska governor's race indicates UBI would be a mobilizer of votes beyond what other proposals might achieve. And because UBI does not have the same tinge of big government as other entitlements, conservative political movements can readily claim UBI for their own and use it as a cudgel to dismantle public programs. Alaska demonstrates that when you start giving people money, the act may very well eclipse every other political concern and blot out all other missions of government.
Robyn Sundlee is a research fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. She was the campaign manager for Alaska State Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (D) in 2018. Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you'll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, humanely handling the scourge of feral hogs, and - to put it simply - getting better at doing good.

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Finding the best ways to do good. Made possible by The Rockefeller Foundation. What if we just give people money? This is the question propelling several new books and that's been taken up by more than one presidential candidate - foremost Andrew Yang, who has made universal basic income (UBI) the centerpiece of his campaign.

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Political nihilism is one of the president's strongest weapons.

By

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

Image

Trump supporters at a rally in Manchester, N.H., in August. Credit Credit Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

Over the four years during which he has dominated American political life, nearly three of them as president, Donald Trump has set a match again and again to chaos-inducing issues like racial hostility, authoritarianism and white identity politics.

Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the winner of the best paper award in the Political Psychology division was " A 'Need for Chaos' and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies."

The paper, which the award panel commended for its "ambitious scope, rigor, and creativity," is the work of Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen, both political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple.

It argues that a segment of the American electorate that was once peripheral is drawn to "chaos incitement" and that this segment has gained decisive influence through the rise of social media.

"The rise of social media provides the public with unprecedented power to craft and share new information with each other," they write. In the political arena, this technological transformation allows the transmission of a type of information that portrays "political candidates or groups negatively" and has "a low evidential basis." The "new information" transmitted on social media includes "conspiracy theories, fake news, discussions of political scandals and negative campaigns."

The circulation of this type of information (which the authors label "hostile political rumors") has been "linked to large-scale political outcomes within recent years such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election."

On a less cataclysmic level, the authors' analysis helps explain the intensity of anti-establishment voting that drove Trump's successful takeover of the Republican Party in the 2016 primaries.

The authors describe "chaos incitement" as a "strategy of last resort by marginalized status-seekers," willing to adopt disruptive tactics. Trump, in turn, has consistently sought to strengthen the perception that America is in chaos, a perception that has enhanced his support while seeming to reinforce his claim that his predecessors, especially President Barack Obama, were failures.

Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux find that those who meet their definition of having a "need for chaos" express that need by willingly spreading disinformation. Their goal is not to advance their own ideology but to undermine political elites, left and right, and to "mobilize others against politicians in general." These disrupters do not "share rumors because they believe them to be true. For the core group, hostile political rumors are simply a tool to create havoc."

In the past, chaos-seekers were on outer edges of politics, unable to exercise influence. Contemporary social media - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and so on - has empowered this constituency, providing a bullhorn to disseminate false news, conspiracy theories and allegations of scandal to a broad audience. Examples include the lunacy of the Comet Pizza story (a.k.a. Pizzagate), the various anti-Obama birther conspiracies and Alex Jones's claim that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that left 20 children dead was a "complete fake" staged by the government to promote gun control.

How do Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux measure this "need for chaos"? They conducted six surveys, four in the United States, in which they interviewed 5157 participants, and two in Denmark, with 1336. They identified those who are "drawn to chaos" through their affirmative responses to the following statements:

I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over.

I think society should be burned to the ground.

When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking "just let them all burn."

We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.

Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.

In an email, Petersen wrote that preliminary examination of the data shows "that the 'need for chaos' correlates positively with sympathy for Trump but also - although less strongly - with sympathy for Sanders. It correlates negatively with sympathy for Hillary Clinton."

In their paper, Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux contend that "the extreme discontent expressed in the 'Need for Chaos' scale is a minority view but it is a minority view with incredible amounts of support."

The responses to three of the statements in particular were "staggering," the paper says: 24 percent agreed that society should be burned to the ground; 40 percent concurred with the thought that "When it comes to our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking 'just let them all burn' "; and 40 percent also agreed that "we cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over."

The authors expressly caution that there "is a limitation of the study," pointedly noting that "we cannot claim" that substantial numbers of "American citizens are ready to go into actual fights with the police or commit other forms of political violence." Instead, they write,

this study provides insights into the kinds of thoughts and behaviors that people are motivated to entertain when they sit alone (and lonely) in front of the computer, answering surveys or surfing social media platforms.

In these circumstances, "a few chaotic thoughts that lead to a few clicks to retweet or share is enough. When the echoes of similar processes across multiple individuals reinforce each other, it can add up to cascades of hostile political rumors," conspiracy theories and fake news.

The intense hostility to political establishments of all kinds among what could be called "chaos voters" helps explain what Pew Research and others have found: a growing distrust among Republican voters of higher education as well as empirically based science, both of which are increasingly seen as allied with the liberal establishment.

In a paper that parallels the work of Petersen and his colleagues, Rose McDermott and Peter K. Hatemi, political scientists as Brown and Penn State, argue that Trump and other right-wing populist leaders have tapped into evolutionarily based "tribal sentiments and drives."

Trump's expertise, in this view, lies in his ability to capitalize on the fear of chaos. "Populist movements," McDermott and Hatemi write, "rely on inflammatory rhetoric to create a tribal 'us versus them' condition - this type of environment instigates neural mechanisms from the evolutionary desire to be part of the group."

The abrupt rise of social media has played a crucial role, they observe:

In many ways, as we have technologically advanced, we have also regressed to more immediate, emotional, and personal forms of political communication. And it is only in understanding the nature of that personal political psychology that we can begin to grapple seriously with the challenges of today, including the consequences of global populism.

In the 2016 campaign, Trump successfully elevated in the national consciousness the perceived threat of undocumented immigrants, a sense of a disordered country and a fear of random criminal assault on the streets of major cities.

In that election, Trump had a great deal to work with: residual anxiety over the 2007-9 recession; battles over the rights of transgender people; rising levels of social and economic inequality; employment losses driven by globalization; rampant automation; the deterioration of traditional family structures; climate change and extreme weather; and the prospect that whites would no longer be the majority.

Peter Drucker, the American management consultant, writing in 1968, 48 years before the 2016 election, anticipated the sense of chaos in the world to come:

We face an Age of Discontinuity in world economy and technology. We might succeed in making it an age of great economic growth as well. But the one thing that is certain so far is that it will be a period of change - in technology and in economic policy, in industrial structures and in economic theory, in the knowledge needed to govern and manage, and in economic issues.

While we have been busy finishing the great nineteenth century economic edifice, the foundations have shifted beneath our feet.

While Trump's focus on disorder and chaos worked to his advantage during the 2016 campaign, there is no guarantee that he will benefit from it when he is an incumbent seeking re-election.

As the 2018 election demonstrated, Trump's personally chaotic approach to governance, his record of undermining relations with allies and strengthening ties to autocrats; his use of trade policy to heighten market insecurity; his aggression, his recklessness, his incessant lying; and his sneering contemptuous, bullying style, together worked against him and the Republican Party.

Bert Bakker, a professor of communication research at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the panel that awarded the A.P.S.A. prize, emailed me to discuss his views of the significance of the work of Petersen and his colleagues:

The authors set out to explore the psychological underpinnings of the tendency to share hostile political rumors online. The sharing of hostile political rumors has often been attributed to partisan motivations. Supporters of one party share this kind of information to mobilize voters against another political party. Yet, in the paper, Petersen et al. introduce a second motivation to share hostile political rumors and that is what they call 'chaotic motivations'.

Bakker continued:

It remains an open question whether those with higher chaotic motivations also turn their "motivations" into action. One could expect that those higher on chaotic motivations are more likely to protest and actually revolt against the political system. Moreover, I could see a role for chaotic motivations in understanding why people support populist politicians. Populist politicians share a message that the elites in, for instance Washington, Paris, Berlin and London, are corrupt, evil and self-centered. Perhaps this rhetoric resonates well with a tendency to like to see the democratic system go down.

The phrase "like to see the democratic system go down" is chilling - and raises the question: How worried should we be about a fundamental threat to democracy from the apparently large numbers of Americans who embrace chaos as a way of expressing their discontent? Might Trump and his loyal supporters seek to bring down the system if he is defeated in 2020? What about later, if the damage he has inflicted on our customs and norms festers, eroding the invisible structures that underpin everything that actually makes America great?

A political leader who thrives on chaos, relishes disorder and governs on the principle of narcissistic self-interest is virtually certain to find defeat intolerable. If voters deny Trump a second term, how many of his most ardent supporters, especially those with a "need for chaos," will find defeat unbearable?

More from Thomas Edsall on Trump's Brand of Politics

Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall

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Opinion | The Trump Voters Whose 'Need for Chaos' Obliterates Everything Else

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Political nihilism is one of the president's strongest weapons. By Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality. Over the four years during which he has dominated American political life, nearly three of them as president, Donald Trump has set a match again and again to chaos-inducing issues like racial hostility, authoritarianism and white identity politics.

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"Even if we can't escape its consequences, it is not too late to escape the mindset that brought us here." -

Alice O'Keeffe, reviewing This Is Not a Drill
The country of Iceland has held a funeral for its first glacier lost to the climate crisis. The once massive Okjökull glacier, now completely gone, has been commemorated with a plaque that reads: "A letter to the future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it."

This reality is reverberating across the globe, far beyond Iceland. Even when no literal funeral is being held, we are, in a sense, witnessing an ongoing funeral for the world we once knew.

July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth since record keeping began in 1880. Nine out of the 10 hottest Julys ever recorded have occurred since 2005, and July was the 43rd consecutive July to register temperatures above the 20th century average.

In Greenland, scientists were stunned by how rapidly the ice sheet is melting, as it was revealed the ice there was not expected to melt like this until 2070. The melt rate has been called " unprecedented," as the all-time single-day melt record was broken in August as the ice sheet lost a mind-bending 12.5 billion tons of water in one day. It is worth remembering that the Greenland ice sheet contains enough ice to increase global sea levels by 20 feet, and it is now predicted that it will lose more ice this year than ever before.

Also for the first time in recorded history, Alaska's sea ice has melted completely away. That means there was no sea ice whatsoever within 150 miles of its shores, according to the National Weather Service, as the northernmost state cooked under record-breaking heat through the summer.

Earth

A recent UN report estimates 2 billion people are already facing moderate to severe food insecurity, due largely to the warming planet. The other contributing factors are conflict and economic stagnation, but extreme weather events and shifting weather patterns are a large and growing contributor to this crisis, which is sure to escalate over time.

Nine out of the 10 hottest Julys ever recorded have occurred since 2005.

Another recent study, titled "Adaptive responses of animals to climate change are most likely insufficient," showed that many animals are no longer able to adjust quickly enough to the climate crisis. While birds are laying their eggs earlier as temperatures and conditions change, and are doing what they can to coax their chicks to hatch sooner, it is still not enough to keep apace with the dramatically shifting climate. Many more extinctions are on the horizon.

Speaking of, Beluga whales in the Arctic are now clearly in a downward spiral toward their demise, due largely to climate crisis impacts, according to another study. Warming waters, lack of food, and pollution are taking their toll on the embattled whales. Over the past 20 years, their growth rates have been declining, which means their ability to forage for food is now also compromised.

It is interesting to see even mainstream outlets like People Magazine now reporting on climate grief, which the medical community has already been doing for quite some time, and expects to see a dramatic ramping up of climate-disruption-related mental health issues in the future.

In Greenland, residents are already traumatized by climate impacts, as they are coping with the reality that their traditional ways of life are clearly on the way out. Courtney Howard, board president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, told The Guardian that she believes the climate crisis is causing worsening states of mental and physical health around the world, and says these issues will become some of the most important of our time. "Temperature change is magnified in circumpolar regions," she told The Guardian. "There is no question Arctic people are now showing symptoms of anxiety, 'ecological grief' and even post-traumatic stress related to the effects of climate change."

In the financial realms, a leading economic historian warned recently that the climate crisis could very well become the trigger for the next global financial crisis by way of causing instability and massive disruptions in markets.

Distressingly, a recently published study warned that a new superbug which erupted at the same time on three continents may well have been brought about from warming temperatures. The study pointed out how a drug-resistant fungal disease has now been made more prevalent by existing on a warming planet.

2 billion people are already facing moderate to severe food insecurity, due largely to the warming planet.

A recent report from Canada warned that British Columbia could see "catastrophic" consequences from climate disruption-related events in the next three decades. These include more severe wildfire seasons, increasingly intense and longer heat waves, water shortages, and storm surges across the province.

Speaking of Canada, that country's Pediatric Society recently warned that children's health is expected to be increasingly negatively affected by climate-disruption impacts, including things like air pollution and heat stress.

Water

Drought-induced blackouts are now besetting the people of Zimbabwe, where some places are seeing 18 hours per day without electricity. Imagine that in the summer heat. Dams providing hydropower lack water. Power blackouts are spreading.

In Harare, Zimbabwe's capital city, the taps have run dry, affecting more than 2 million people, who have been trying to cope with not having access to municipal drinking water.

In India, a stunning 1 million people were displaced and at least 270 killed by severe flooding from heavier than usual monsoon rains.

Back in the U.S., New York City's summer has served as a preview of things to come, as an extreme heat wave coupled with flash flooding beset the iconic city.

On the other end of the water spectrum, a recent study published in Science Advances warned that megadroughts will likely beset the U.S. Southwest within decades. The study stated that the megadroughts are "almost assured," and will be on a scale not seen since medieval times.

At the same time, by 2050, another report warned that "snow droughts" will become far more common across the western U.S. This is critical, in that it compounds the aforementioned impending drought crisis, as mountain snowpack is vital to providing water into the spring and summer.

One quarter of the total global population is already affected by extreme water stress.

A recent and critically important study showed that one quarter of the total global population across 17 countries is already affected by extreme water stress. Lebanon, Qatar and Israel/Palestine top a list of places with the worst water shortages, as the growing climate crisis threatens more "day zeroes" - days where major cities will literally run out of water.

Meanwhile, sea levels continue their inevitable and accelerating rise. In the U.S., a recent report showed how 21 beach towns, including Miami Beach, Galveston, Atlantic City and Key West, will soon be underwater.

Speaking of Galveston, the state of Texas is looking toward Dutch expertise for assistance in how to construct what would be the nation's most expensive and most ambitious coastal barrier for protection against intensifying hurricanes. The Netherlands has been devising ways to protect massive parts of its low-lying country against the ocean for centuries. Now the skills it has cultivated are, soberingly, increasingly relevant worldwide.

Meanwhile, the oceans continue to warm as they absorb the brunt of the heat human activity is adding to the atmosphere, and the warming waters are literally pushing Pacific salmon to the brink of their ability to survive, according to another report.

Distressingly, a recently published study showed that unexpected marine heat waves are now becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Alpine mountaineering routes are disintegrating as glaciers and icefields melt in the Alps. The ice-reliant climbing routes in the mountains are tumbling down and melting away faster than anyone expected.

Greenland experienced a record heat wave in the middle of this summer, which dramatically accelerated the melting of the ice sheet, meaning its contributions to sea level rise are in the process of accelerating as well.

The country of Iceland is now preparing for how it will cope without any more ice.

Meanwhile, scientists have expressed alarm and shock about the fact that the permafrost across the Canadian Arctic is thawing out 70 years sooner than previously predicted.

Things are so dire in the icy realms of Earth that the country of Iceland is now preparing for how it will cope without any more ice ... something that country relies upon for its identity, businesses, government and very existence.

Fire

These stunning satellite photos show an Arctic burning up in front of our eyes. In Alaska alone, at the time of this writing, at least 1.6 million acres have burned from at least 100 wildfires this summer. Wildfires in Siberia could well burn into October when the first snows fall, as at least 6.7 million acres have burned across Russia.

Another report showed that, due to climate disruption, wildfires in California have already become 500 percent larger than they were since the 1970s.

Canadian media are reporting that forests that have been scorched in the Pacific Northwest are not growing back as expected. This brings into question numerous species of trees' ability to regenerate as the fires get increasingly hot, burn longer, and scorch longer areas.

At the same time, another report reaffirmed the fact that even the rainy Northwest is now facing the inevitable increased risk of wildfires due to higher temperatures, increasing drought and lower humidity.

Air

By 2050, Florida will have more days that feel like 100 degrees Fahrenheit (100°F) than any other state in the U.S., according to a recent study. Washington D.C. currently averages one week per year of 100-degree days, while by 2050 that could rise to two months. The same study warned that climate disruption will expose millions of people across the U.S. to " off-the-charts " extreme heat.

The burning of fossil fuels reached an all-time record last year.

Meanwhile, Europe sizzled under a record-breaking heat wave this summer, as heat from the Sahara baked the continent and temperature records toppled en masse. There are far too many records to name from that heatwave, but notable was the fact that Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands recorded their highest temperatures ever during Europe's second major summer heatwave.

In Canada, the far northern community of Nunavut saw warmer temperatures than the city of Victoria, far to its south. According to CBC News, "the source of the Arctic beach weather is a large current of air that somehow found its way north from the U.S. southeast" - a much more common occurrence as warming intensifies.

Denial and Reality

Ever busy denying the crisis, in the last month the Trump administration buried a large climate disruption response plan, as revealed by Politico. The outlet revealed how the Agriculture Department prevented the release of an already completed and sweeping plan about how the government should best respond to the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, in what could have been a slip of the tongue, Trump's Energy Secretary Rick Perry said during a recent nationally televised interview, "The climate is changing. Are we part of the reason? Yeah, it is. I'll let people debate on who's the bigger problem here."

It's not just the Trump administration that's fueling denial. It was also revealed how DNC Chair Tom Perez introduced a resolution in an attempt to kill a climate debate among the Democratic presidential candidates.

Nevertheless, reality has a way of not going away, despite human efforts at denial.

A recent report showed that the climate crisis is already well along in causing childhood deaths and the stunting of growth in Australia and across the Pacific. Other impacts on kids include lowered cognitive capacity and higher susceptibility to the spread of diseases.

And, to keep all of this in perspective, as a final reality check, the burning of fossil fuels reached an all-time record last year, according to oil giant BP.

For perspective on the rate of acceleration now baked into the system, half of all fossil fuels used by humans have been burned since just 1990. Many more consequences are lurking just around the corner: It takes at least 10 years before we begin to see the impacts of the CO2 once the fuels are burned.

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Alaska's Sea Ice Completely Melted for First Time in Recorded History

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"Even if we can't escape its consequences, it is not too late to escape the mindset that brought us here." - Alice O'Keeffe, reviewing This Is Not a Drill The country of Iceland has held a funeral for its first glacier lost to the climate crisis.

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North Carolina's state court delivered Democrats a big win Tuesday, ruling the state's legislative district map unconstitutional, and paving a path to undo years of Republican gerrymandering in a traditionally competitive state.

In a 357-page decision, a three-judge panel ruled the state's legislative districts violated the North Carolina State Constitution through "extreme partisan gerrymandering." The case was brought by Common Cause North Carolina, a nonpartisan group working to end gerrymandering in the state.

"The 2017 Enacted Maps, as drawn, do not permit voters to freely choose their representative, but rather representatives are choosing voters based upon sophisticated partisan sorting," the ruling states.

The court is leaving it up to the Republican state legislature to redraw the maps, but it is setting specific guidelines for them to follow: The new maps must be redrawn by September 18 (within two weeks), lawmakers can't use data to try to draw a partisan advantage, and the redrawing process must be public. The court will also appoint a referee to review the redrawn maps before they are enacted, and if the legislature tries to delay, the referee could redraw the maps itself.

"We're thrilled," Daniel Jacobson, one of the lead attorneys for the plaintiffs, tells Vox. "They can't try to delay, which has been one of their main tactics."

The fact that this is a state court ruling, based on the state constitution, is crucial. In June, the US Supreme Court ruled that federal courts can't strike down maps on grounds of partisan gerrymandering, but state courts still have the ability to do so. The state's Republican state leadership has said they will not appeal the decision, guaranteeing new maps in the state, according to a statement from state Senate leader Phil Berger.

This case could be a blueprint for other states - like Wisconsin, Maryland, and Texas - that have extremely gerrymandered maps. It gives Democrats in North Carolina a bigger chance to win back at least one chamber of the state legislature. North Carolina's governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, is also up for reelection in 2020.

It "suggests even though the federal courts have stepped away from partisan gerrymandering, there may be remedies in state courts, and people should look at their state constitutions," says Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. "They didn't bring it under the US Constitution, they brought it solely under state provisions, that will be what insulates it."

North Carolina's gerrymandered maps, explained

North Carolina has a long history of gerrymandering, and both parties have played a part. But the current maps were drawn by Republican lawmakers in 2016, after a US Supreme Court case deemed older maps drawn in 2011 to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that disadvantaged the state's black voters.

North Carolina's Republican-leaning gerrymandering was apparent in recent election results. In the 2018 elections, state Republican received less than half the vote overall, yet they still control 29 out of 50 state Senate seats and 65 out of 120 state House seats.

That is "just is not something in a 50/50 state that occurs naturally," Li told Vox. "And it didn't."

When it came time to redraw the maps in 2016, Republicans made clear they were doing it to consolidate political power. Republican state Rep. Dave Lewis publicly admitted as much during the 2016 process.

"I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it's possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats," Lewis said at a state House hearing.

Recently discovered files showed that GOP strategist Tom Hofeller, who died in 2018, drew the maps in North Carolina Republican Party's headquarters specifically using prior election results to "construct the district boundaries to advantage Republicans," the court ruling outlines.

Gerrymandering has bolstered Republicans' grip on power

When Democrats managed to elect Roy Cooper to the governor's mansion in 2016 - one of the few bright spots for Democrats in a year that was dominated by Donald Trump and Republican victories - their wins were spoiled by the Republican state legislature.

Within 48 hours of Cooper's victory, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a series of bills that pulled Cooper's ability to make key cabinet appointments without their approval, drastically cut the size of Cooper's administration, and changed the Board of Elections so that Republicans would control it in election years. They ensured lawsuits had to first go through the Republican-controlled appeals court, before the Democratic-majority state Supreme Court.

Cooper, and state Democrats, have been fighting these changes since. They've been successful on some fronts; for instance, the state Board of Elections move was ruled unconstitutional. But Cooper's administration has been reduced to trying to energize the people of North Carolina to fight an explicit Republican power grab, while trying to battle the GOP-controlled legislature in the courts as well.

In 2018, other states, like Michigan and Wisconsin, also elected new Democratic governors - who came in to face Republican legislative majorities that have been entrenched through gerrymandering.

Since those gerrymandered state legislatures draw their own district lines, it can seem enormously challenging to ever dislodge them. But this case shows that the state courts can still step in and provide a way out.

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A North Carolina court just threw out Republicans' gerrymandered state legislature map

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North Carolina's state court delivered Democrats a big win Tuesday, ruling the state's legislative district map unconstitutional, and paving a path to undo years of Republican gerrymandering in a traditionally competitive state. In a 357-page decision, a three-judge panel ruled the state's legislative districts violated the North Carolina State Constitution through "extreme partisan gerrymandering."

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What would be so bad about a Senate that actually did things?

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What would it look like if the U.S. Senate ditched its filibuster rule, allowing legislation to pass with a simple majority?

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What would be so bad about a Senate that actually did things? Choose your preferred player: Copy your ad-free feed link below to load into your player: For questions about subscriptions or your Slate Plus feed, check our FAQ. What would it look like if the U.S.

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Timothy Noah is the employment & immigration editor at POLITICO. He has previously written for the New Republic and Slate, and is author of The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.

Hate crime is rising, the Arctic is burning, and the Dow is bobbing like a cork on an angry sea. If the nation seems intolerant, reckless and more than a little cranky, perhaps that's because the American republic is showing its age. Somewhere along the way, a once-new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (not men and women; that came later) became a wheezy gerontocracy. Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are extremely old.

Let me stipulate at the outset that I harbor no prejudice toward the elderly. As a sexagenarian myself, not to mention as POLITICO's labor policy editor, I'm fully mindful of the scourge of ageism. (I've had the misfortune on occasion to experience it firsthand.) But to affirm that America must work harder to include the elderly within its vibrant multicultural quilt is not to say it must be governed almost entirely by duffers. The cause of greater diversity would be advanced, not thwarted, if a few more younger people penetrated the ranks of American voters and American political leaders.

Story Continued Below

Let's start with the leaders.

Remember the Soviet Politburo? In the waning years of the Cold War, a frequent criticism of the USSR was that its ruling body was preposterously old and out of touch. Every May Day these geezers would show up on a Moscow reviewing stand, looking stuffed and fix their rheumy gaze on a procession of jackbooted Red Army troops, missiles and tanks. For Americans, the sight was always good for a horselaugh. In 1982, when Leonid Brezhnev, the last of that generation to hold power for any significant length of time, went to his reward, the median age of a Politburo member was 71. No wonder the Evil Empire was crumbling!

You see where this is going. The U.S. doesn't have a Politburo, but if you calculate the median age of the president, the speaker of the House, the majority leader of the Senate, and the three Democrats leading in the presidential polls for 2020, the median age is ... uh ... 77.

It doesn't stop there. We heard a lot last November about the fresh new blood entering Congress, but when the current session began in January, the average ages of House and Senate members were 58 and 63, respectively. That's slightly older than the previous Congress (58 and 62), which was already among the oldest in history. The average age in Congress declined through the 1970s but it's mostly increased since the 1980s.

The Deep State is no spring chicken, either. POLITICO's Danny Vinik reported two years ago that nearly 30 percent of the civilian federal workforce was over 55; two decades earlier, it was closer to 15 percent. Of course, the entire U.S. workforce is getting older, thanks to the aging of the Baby Boom-that giant Hula-Hoop-shaking cohort born during the prosperous post-World War II years from 1946 to 1964. But the federal bureaucracy is even older, apparently because civil-servant Boomers, despite their defined-benefit pensions, are less inclined than their private-sector counterparts to retire.

America's ruling class is of course more nimble than the Politburo ever was. And indeed, the two Democratic presidential candidates proposing the most dramatic departure from the status quo are Bernie Sanders, who'll turn 78 on September 8, and Elizabeth Warren, who's 70. Still, there's something to be said for youth and vigor. John F. Kennedy (then 43) tapped into that feeling in his 1960 bid to succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower (then 70) when he campaigned on the slogan, "Let's get America moving again."

Why should we care how old our leaders are? As the journalist Michael Tortorello reported three years ago in POLITICO Magazine, cognitive functioning declines dramatically on average after age 70, and the types of intelligence that decline most sharply on average are "the capacity to absorb large amounts of new information and data in a short time span and apply it to solve problems in unaccustomed fashion." It would seem advisable to have at least a few more people in the higher reaches of government on whom we can rely still to possess this skill in youthful abundance.

The cognitive-function issue is not a theoretical one, if political commentators are to be believed. The past month has brought near-daily speculation about our 73 year-old president's state of mind. "He's getting worse," CNN's Brian Stelter said earlier this month. "We can all see it. It's happening in public." In recent weeks, Trump has canceled a meeting with the Danish prime minister because she wouldn't discuss selling Greenland; suggested that his own Florida resort be the site of the next G-7 conference; and been quoted suggesting that hurricanes be deterred from reaching landfall in the U.S. through the detonation of nuclear weapons. "If Donald Trump were your father, you would run, not walk, to a neurologist for an evaluation of his cognitive health," John Gartner, a psychologist, wrote in an April USA Today op-ed.

Whether Trump's cognition is declining is a question muddied by a wealth of evidence that his speech and behavior were always at least somewhat erratic. (This is a man, recall, who more than 30 years ago confessed to giving his second-grade music teacher a black eye, which may not even be true.) A similar ambiguity surrounds Joe Biden, 76, whose well-documented history of verbal gaffes helped sink two previous presidential candidacies, one of them (similarly) more than 30 years ago. "Biden has always made gaffes by the bushel," Fox News commentator Brit Hume (who's also 76) tweeted earlier this month after Biden appeared to think he was in Vermont when he was really in New Hampshire (a state of no small significance in the primary race). "But some of his recent ones suggest the kind of memory loss associated with senility." (Trump and Biden's physicians, I should note, have vouched emphatically for their mental fitness.)

Even if the speculation that Trump and/or Biden might be a little bit gaga is unfounded and terribly unfair, isn't it strange that we're talking about the 2020 front-runners in the same worried tone we might adopt discussing with our siblings whether Mom and Pop should still be driving? It isn't the first time. The 2016 election occasioned more muted speculation along the same lines about Trump, and even a little bit about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who's only slightly younger.

None of this means a septuagenarian can't function effectively as a political leader. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are 79 and 77, respectively, and by all reports they're operating at peak mental capacity. But to affirm that not all elderly people are impaired cognitively is very different from affirming that none is.

Even the healthy older brain is, well, different from the healthy younger brain, and if you care about politics that's worth making some effort to understand. Certain tasks are just harder as you get older, even if you're very smart. Your mental reflexes are slower. (How do I know? None of your damn business.) It takes you longer to remember someone's name. Multitasking is more challenging. Learning foreign languages is more difficult, and adjusting to unfamiliar cultures is perhaps a bit harder. You can overcome these obstacles if you make some effort, but not everybody-not even all American leaders-makes the effort.

The most important compensating benefit to old age is greater wisdom, which comes from experience. When you're making decisions that affect others, it's much better to have a deep well of experience to draw on than to maintain the mental reflexes of an auctioneer. Wisdom may be more valuable in the digital age than ever before, because the velocity of information and normative judgments on social media, cable news and elsewhere constantly threatens to make glib idiots of us all.

But here's the rub: The aging of America's ruling class does not automatically increase its experience level. In presidential politics, notes Brookings Institution senior fellow Jonathan Rauch, political experience, which "used to be a selling point," has "become a liability. Voters and the public have come to see experience as inauthenticity."

In a November 2015 Atlantic article, Rauch plotted experience level for presidential candidates from 1960 to 2012. His graph showed a clear increase in experience level among the losers and a corresponding decrease among the winners. Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. George H.W. Bush won with more political experience than Michael Dukakis, but four years later lost to Bill Clinton, who had less. John McCain lost to Barack Obama, who'd been in national politics a mere four years.

Donald Trump, who is 73, entered the Oval Office with no political experience at all. The single greatest mental compensation that age provides was therefore unavailable to the oldest president in American history.

***

Why is America governed by old people? Maybe because it has so many elderly voters.

The American electorate is older than it's been for at least half a century. One reason is aging Boomers. The other is the greater tendency (despite a rising mortality rate) of people who make it into old age to go on living. By 2030, every living Boomer will be elderly (that is, age 65 or older), and by 2035, the Census Bureau projects, the elderly will outnumber minors for the first time in U.S. history.

This demographic trend has an exaggerated effect on politics. According to the Pew Research Center, in the 2020 election nearly one-quarter of the electorate (23 percent) will be elderly, "the highest such share since at least 1970." But that understates the size of the elderly vote because the elderly are much likelier than any other age group to show up on Election Day. Old people really like to vote. In 2016, for instance, 71 percent of eligible elderly voters reported to the Census that they voted. For other age cohorts, the turnout percentages were 67 percent (aged 45-64), 59 percent (aged 30-44) and 46 percent (aged 18-29).

The electorate is even older in primaries, and older still in local elections. In 2016 Phil Keisling, chairman of the National Vote at Home Institute, led a Portland State University survey of 50 cities that found the median voter age in municipal elections was 57, "nearly a generation older than the median age of eligible voters."

The broad outlines of this trend are widely understood, which explains why, for instance, Donald Trump said in 2015 that "I'm not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican." (He nonetheless proposed in this year's budget to cut more than $500 billion from Social Security and Medicare, which he'd also pledged to protect, but that's another story.)It helps explain why the federal government spends more on Medicare, which provides medical coverage to elderly people, than it does on Medicaid, which provides medical coverage to poor people. (Another reason for the difference is that the elderly require more health care.)

It also may help explain why racial tolerance seems in some respects to be in decline, as measured, for instance, by the unnerving quasi-respectability afforded white nationalism by some mainstream players in national politics (including Trump). The elderly, polls show, are in the aggregate less concerned about racial prejudice than the young. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found a 21-point spread between the elderly and young adults (18-29) when they were asked whether racial discrimination was the "main reason many blacks can't get ahead," with 54 percent of young adults answering in the affirmative but only 33 percent of the elderly. The age divide on this question was almost as wide as the 24-point divide between black respondents and white.

Similarly, political support for immigration restrictions may reflect an aging electorate. Pew found a majority in all age categories agreed that "immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents," but the spread between the elderly and young adults was 31 points, with 51 percent of the elderly answering in the affirmative but 82 percent of young adults.

It's often claimed that the elderly care less about the future than the young, but that's a canard. The elderly care quite a bit about what will happen to a world they spent a lifetime building and populating with their children and grandchildren. (Their lives wouldn't have much meaning if they didn't.) Recent polls show the elderly care, if anything, slightly more about the budget deficit than other age groups (despite not wanting to give up Medicare and Social Security benefits), and are slightly less inclined to complain they pay too much in taxes.

That said, the young care a lot more than the old about climate change. Polls aggregated by Gallup from 2015 to 2018 show that concern about it drops with age. Fully 70 percent of respondents age 18-34 worried "a great deal" or "a fair amount" about global warming, compared with 63 percent age 35-54 and 56 percent age 55 and up. That's a 14-point generation gap between the young and the elderly and near-elderly.

You often hear older Americans complain that the younger generation, with its fixation on social media, can't distinguish between fact and opinion, making it difficult for them to apply the critical thinking necessary to consume news and be responsible citizens. A 2018 Pew survey found that Americans do indeed experience great difficulty telling these two things apart: Given five factual statements and five statements of opinion, a majority of Americans couldn't identify them properly.

But younger Americans actually scored better on this test than older ones. Thirty-two percent of 18-49 year-olds were able to identify all five factual statements, and 44 percent were able to identify all five statements of opinion. Among the over-50 cohort, only 20 percent identified all five factual statements correctly, and only 26 percent did the same with the statements of opinion.

***

The final leg of America's gerontocratic triad is its system of government. That, too, is old and a bit creaky.

We think of ourselves as a young country, and in many respects we are. But we are also, as Paul Ryan famously noted in 2016, "the oldest democracy," provided you exclude older ones that didn't last (Athens, Rome) and ignore various undemocratic restrictions to the franchise that persisted into the 20th century. No nation in the world has a written Constitution older than ours. And it shows.

The list of the Constitution's anachronisms and ambiguities is long.

Article One says Congress may "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States," phrasing that strictly limited the regulation of private business at the federal level until the New Deal, when the Supreme Court reversed itself and concluded the federal government's power to regulate private business was pretty vast. Had the Founders grasped that the modern economy would all but eliminate purely local commerce-and that it could, unchecked, alter the very climate of planet earth-they might have had more to say on the subject. As things stand, the powers of the regulatory state are the subject of endless legal combat.

Article Two says you must be a "natural born Citizen" to be president, which excludes for no apparent reason Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm, who previously governed two of the nation's most populous states. The racist "birther" movement that challenged the legality of Barack Obama's presidency (and that ushered Donald Trump onto the national political stage) wouldn't have been possible without Article Two.

Article Two also established that presidents be elected through the Electoral College, an antique mechanism borrowed from the Holy Roman Empire that twice during the past two decades delivered the presidency to the popular-vote loser.Some people have a problem with that.

The Second Amendment frames the right to bear arms within the context of "well-regulated" state militias that no longer exist, an ambiguity that the Supreme Court interpreted in 2008 to mean the Constitution protected the right to bear arms, after holding for the preceding seven decades that it did not. Had the Founders known the extent to which the nation would tear itself apart over the regulation of firearms more deadly than they ever imagined, they might have laid down a few broad parameters.

And so on.None of this would matter much if our government were more amenable to reconsidering first principles, but that's getting harder, too. The Constitution can be amended, and it has been, 27 times. But growing political polarization in recent years has made that difficult. Only two constitutional amendments were ratified during the past half-century (one giving 18-year-olds the right to vote and another, more anodyne amendment that makes it a little harder for Congress to give itself a raise).

Congress could perhaps pick up some of the slack, but it's slowed down, too. According to the Pew Research Center, Congress passes fewer substantive laws today than it did 30 years ago.Increased use of the filibuster (which is not mentioned in the Constitution, but has been around almost as long) almost certainly played a role, and a fed-up Senate has during the past decade started phasing out its use. In a provocative June 2018 essay in Commentary, the political scientist Yuval Levin posited that 231 years on, Congress had acquired a problem James Madison never anticipated: a reluctance to compete with the other two branches of government in the exercise of power. Partisanship, he concluded, had displaced ambition to legislate. Senators and representatives, he wrote, now "see themselves as players in a larger political ecosystem the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather engaging in a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience." Levin didn't put it this way, but he seemed to be suggesting that Congress had grown decadent, like fin de siècle Vienna, but without the solace of Sacher tortes.

A more modest theory of governmental decadence was set forward by Rauch in his 1994 book Demosclerosis. The idea was that democracy had developed arteriosclerosis, not because its system of government was creaky, but rather because the accumulating power of interest groups over time was choking it like a weed. Demosclerosis differs from gridlock, Rauch argued, because gridlock implies that nothing gets done. In a demosclerotic government, plenty gets done. Rather, Rauch wrote, the government's ability to solve problems is compromised because it can't easily reassign a finite set of resources. Old allocations must continue, and therefore new allocations can't be experimented with.

Think of it, Rauch says, like leaving a bicycle in the rain. The bicycle may be perfectly fine, but if you leave it outside long enough rust will corrode it. All things considered, Rauch says, the Constitution is in excellent working condition. But its machinery has been left out too long in the rain.

Bringing a bicycle in from the rain should be within the ability of America's somewhat doddering polity. Our gerontocracy is a bit rheumatic, but it isn't hopeless. Still, the task will likely be easier and go much faster if a few more young hands pitch in.

This article tagged under:

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Timothy Noah is the employment & immigration editor at POLITICO. He has previously written for the New Republic and Slate, and is author of The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It. Hate crime is rising, the Arctic is burning, and the Dow is bobbing like a cork on an angry sea.

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Read: Elizabeth Warren has momentum. Can she build a movement?
The speakers in these stories are always enthusiastic about Warren, delighted by her intellect, inspired by her policy agenda, and happy about the prospect of a woman president. But they seem confident that they're alone, or at least in the minority, in liking these things. The speakers are progressive, but think that nobody else is; they want a woman president, but they feel that the rest of the electorate is too sexist to vote for one. They want to vote for Warren in the primary, but feel that they shouldn't, or can't afford to. Instead, they should capitulate to what they imagine are other voters' bad impulses, so that when the general election rolls around, the Democrats will have a candidate who they think is more likely to beat Trump-a centrist, that is, and a man.

The tendency found in these reported stories is at least somewhat backed up by polling. Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank, found that Warren had a significant advantage in its "magic wand" poll, which asks voters which candidate they would choose to make president if they could wave a magic wand to bestow the office, rather than having the contenders go through a general election. She did less well, however, in a more traditional survey.

It seems that Warren is extremely popular-but that voters do not trust one another to share that high opinion of her.

The result is a kind of sexism by proxy, in which voters think that they can't vote for a progressive woman in a primary because they don't believe other, supposedly less enlightened voters will vote for her in a general. They intend to reduce suffering, and to secure the best outcome available-isn't the most important thing to beat Trump? They want to convey worldliness, sophistication. But the effect is to disadvantage worthy candidates like Warren because they are progressive and female, and to unfairly privilege unworthy candidates because they are centrist and male. It is voter masochism disguised as pragmatism, sexism disguised as common sense.
David A. Graham: Elizabeth Warren's big night
Even as these voters seem to acknowledge the seriousness of sexism, they wind up reinforcing it with their actions, reducing the likelihood that a woman could become president by asserting confidently that it is not possible.

The perception that a woman can't win the presidency stems mostly from Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss, a single data point that is given undue importance in voters' minds. After all, the loser of every other presidential election was a man, but no one questions men's viability as candidates because of their gender. There is some empirical evidence to suggest that women have a harder time in races for executive positions than they do in elections to legislatures, and there is a good deal of evidence that women face uphill battles to attain positions that have not been held by women in the past. But Vox reports that while data suggest that sexism was a factor in the 2016 race, it was not decisive. And in 2018, women who were not incumbents were more likely to win their midterm elections than any other kind of candidate.

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Read: Elizabeth Warren has momentum. Can she build a movement? The speakers in these stories are always enthusiastic about Warren, delighted by her intellect, inspired by her policy agenda, and happy about the prospect of a woman president. But they seem confident that they're alone, or at least in the minority, in liking these things.

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Gerrymandering is a leading issue in many state elections for 2020, but you rarely hear anything about Maine. That's because this state solved the problem of excessively partisan gerrymandering a long time ago - yet its solution seems hardly to come to the notice of those working overtime on the problem.

Maine's system was not without peculiarities. Until recently, the state reapportioned its congressional, legislative and county commission districts two years later than most states, even though the relevant U.S. Census numbers are known in plenty of time. Thus, new districts took effect for the 2004 elections, not 2002 - making existing districts unnecessarily outdated.

That changed when the Maine Republican Party took the state to court over congressional redistricting in 2011. Nationally, Republicans had managed a virtual takeover of many state houses a year earlier. Then, they used their majorities to gerrymander with a sweep and precision never before seen; that's the problem many are trying to fix.

Maine Republicans did win a federal court decision requiring the state to move up congressional redistricting to 2012, but the legislative districts were, as usual, revamped for 2014. A subsequent constitutional amendment, ratified by voters, aligned the process so, starting in 2022, all districts will be done together.

Yet partisan attempts to gerrymander in Maine have generally failed, because of the genius of our system. There are two steps: First, redistricting plans proposed for the Senate and House have to pass by a two-thirds majority in each body.

If such a supermajority isn't achieved, the apportionment is ordered by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Since it's exceedingly rare that either party controls a chamber by two-thirds, this is an elegant check on extreme partisanship.

It also works better than the solution commonly advanced elsewhere: a nonpartisan commission, composed of citizens - or, in some case, judges - charged with drawing district lines "fairly." In practice, however, fairness is more complex than just seeing that Democrats or Republicans don't gain undue advantage.

Such commissions generally don't understand politics - in fact, they're chosen primarily because they don't. Although we often assume that allowing lawmakers to draw their own districts is somehow suspect, it's preferable to turning the job over to a bureaucracy.

After all, legislators know their constituents quite well, since in Maine they get an election report card every two years. They know which towns fit well together, politically, and which don't; these are not trivial concerns.

Generally, if the parties don't agree by two-thirds, the state supreme court looks at both plans - there are rarely any plans except from the parties - and makes a reasonable accommodation between them.

An exception came in 1994, when, shortly after the replacement of then-House Speaker John Martin, forced to step down after an unprecedented 19 years at the helm, the court got two plans - and accepted the House Republican plan, intact. Democrats gambled, and lost.

Whether or not resentment about Martin colored the court's judgment, the resulting reapportionment was devastating for Democrats. No fewer than seven Democratic representatives were placed in districts already represented by Democrats, so the party effectively lost seven incumbents before the November campaigns even began.

Republicans nearly won a majority that year, picking up 14 seats. Chastened House Democrats remembered, and in 2004 negotiated a redistricting plan with House Republicans, while the Senate - as it often does - let the court decide.

Because the Maine system works so well, it causes little fuss, and thus gets little notice. But it's clearly superior to attempting to take reapportionment - a vital political function - out of the political process.

Consider Election Day in even the smallest towns. The ballot clerks and poll watchers you say "hello" to are most often supplied by the Republican and Democratic parties; few nonpartisan volunteers want to bother, and so it's the political parties themselves that help keep our elections fair.

Perhaps Maine's system could next be adopted by neighboring New Hampshire. Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, just vetoed the nonpartisan commission bill a Democratic Legislature sent him.

If legislators there had instead proposed the Maine system, Sununu would have been hard-pressed to find a reason to veto it; if he had, his own party might have decided to override him.

It's simply a better method - limiting, but not eliminating, partisan impulses - and represents a common-sense reform any state could adopt.

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Maine Voices: Maine has common-sense remedy for gerrymandering

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Gerrymandering is a leading issue in many state elections for 2020, but you rarely hear anything about Maine. That's because this state solved the problem of excessively partisan gerrymandering a long time ago - yet its solution seems hardly to come to the notice of those working overtime on the problem.

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Is contemporary capitalism compatible with liberal democracy? The glib answer, though not wrong, is that it had better be. There are no known examples of fully socialized economies with a liberal democratic regime. The more considered answer is that it can be, but only with the public policies that make it so.

The relationship between liberal democracy and capitalism changes over time, as do the policies needed to make them mutually supportive. Not for the first time, changes in the structure of capitalism have lately moved faster than the policies required to domesticate them. Liberal democratic governments are scrambling to catch up.

Ever since Aristotle examined the relationship between class structure and regimes of government, political scientists have understood that a strong middle class is the foundation of stable constitutional governance. The reason is straightforward: in societies divided into the rich few and the many poor, class warfare is inevitable. The rich will use the state to defend what they have; the poor, to gain a bigger share. Sometimes this will be through majoritarian democracy, but is often led by a strongman claiming to act in the people's name. By contrast to either of these ambitions, the middle class tends more to prize the rule of law and to seek incremental rather than radical change.

Through much of human history, class structure was a product of chance and force, not policy. Because economic growth as we know it today existed neither in theory nor reality, economies were understood as zero-sum games. Political communities gained through plunder and conquest (or imperial tribute); economic classes gained through redistribution. It is only during the past three centuries that long-term, secular economic growth, from which in principle all can gain, was conceptualized and realized as part of humankind's lived experience.

There was nothing natural or automatic about this process. The vibrant markets on which growth depends are systems of rules backed by public power as well as social norms. Wise policies are needed to ensure that the fruits of growth of growth are widely shared. When these conditions are satisfied, market economies tend to generate not only broad improvements in living standards but also growing middle classes that the poor can hope to enter. Market-driven economic growth tends therefore to support constitutional governance in its modern form, combining elements of majoritarian democracy with protected individual rights and liberties.

The expectation of economic growth from which all can benefit is a centerpiece of modern politics. When hope and reality diverge, the losers are bound to resist, and sympathetic winners often join their cause.

The Industrial Revolution sparked more than a century of reform, with the aim of taming capitalism's excesses and cyclical instability. The failure of these efforts during the Great Depression led to the collapse of liberal democracies throughout much of the West and to the rise of anti-democratic regimes and ideologies on the Left and the Right. Whatever their place on the ideological spectrum, these forces damaged not only democracy, but also markets and individual liberty.

It was not until the end of World War Two that policy makers successfully deployed industrial capitalism in support of liberal democracy. Strong trade unions helped balance the interests of labor and capital. Social programs helped meet basic needs and provide security for sick, unemployed, and elderly citizens. Counter-cyclical policies reduced the severity of economic downturns. International institutions stabilized currencies and trade.

These post-war policies laid the foundations for decades of economic growth and rising standards of living. Confidence in governments and markets grew. The fall of the Berlin War and collapse of the Soviet Union put this confidence on steroids. In much of the West, left-wing parties made their peace with markets and entered an era of "Third Way" politics. The post-war order seemed to represent a permanent, mutually beneficial settlement of the tension between markets and liberal democratic politics.

But beneath the tranquil surface of liberal democracies, disruptive pressures were building. As the industrial era gave way to the information age, post-war policies came under pressure. Manufacturing employment--a leading source of stable, well-paying jobs--lost ground, first relatively, then absolutely. The rise of the knowledge-based economy created sharper disparities-between more and less well-educated workers, and also between regions.

Globalization put additional pressure on the post-war order. With the increased mobility of capital, corporations shifted production from high-wage to low-wage jurisdictions, between regions and also between nations. The collapse of the Soviet Union freed tens of millions of poorly paid workers to enter the global marketplace. As production dispersed, corporations became less rooted in and less responsive to the concerns of local communities. The interests of their shareholders often trumped loyalty to their country of origin. These disruptive forces intensified when China entered the WTO in 2001. Economic inequality increased and social mobility slowed, especially in the United States.

Still, the post-war order seemed viable-until the Great Recession struck. From 2007, output fell, unemployment surged, and the global financial system nearly collapsed. Some liberal democracies deployed counter-cyclical policies. Others resorted to austerity. Fiscal constraints, real or imagined, forced central banks to adopt unprecedented strategies that staved off disaster but failed to stimulate a strong recovery. In economies with strong protections for incumbent workers, many young adults found themselves on the outside of the economy, looking in.

As growth has slowed and fewer citizens share in the gains from growth, support for liberal democracy has weakened. The example of China has convinced some autocrats that the West's model is no longer the only game in town: it seems that they can enjoy the benefits of rapid economic growth without liberalizing their politics or abandoning control over the commanding heights of their economies.

Within the West, rising populist movements are rejecting the liberal elements of liberal democracy in favor of systems that allow popular majorities to get their way, even at the cost of individual and minority rights. The institutions that defend liberalism-independent constitutional courts, a free press, and robust civil society-are under attack.

The political challenge is clear. As the industrial economy has given way to the information economy, the post-war reconciliation of markets and liberal democracy that fostered social mobility and a strong middle class has become obsolete. We need a new strategy for a new era. This is a challenge not only to our political system, but to our political imagination.

The central aim of public policy now is to ensure that contemporary capitalism strengthens rather than undermines liberal democracy. The components of this new program are tolerably clear, even though specific policies remain contested. Among them:

Completing secondary education and receiving at least some post-secondary training is now economically essential. To make this necessity a reality, public policy will have to do more-from pre-school to college--to break the link between family background and educational attainment.

Public policy should do more to resist growing regional disparities. Traditional regional subsidies are the equivalent of blood transfusions, keeping patients alive without restoring them to health. Instead, governments should ensure that all regions have the building blocks of economic growth-education, transportation, finance, information, and infrastructure.

In most advanced societies, economic concentration is increasing, limiting competition, innovation, and entrepreneurial opportunities. Europe has taken the lead in resisting these negative trends, and other market economies should follow suit. Consumer prices are no longer an adequate guide to anti-trust policies, if they ever were.

Wages for lower-skilled occupations in advanced economies will be limited by wages for these jobs in less-developed societies. Higher productivity helps, but not enough. Public policy must step in, with higher minimum wages, increased wage subsidies, and universal opportunities for workers to share in rising business productivity and profits.

The excesses of globalization must also be reined in. Capital mobility should be limited when it imposes intolerable costs on jobs, wages, and social stability in advanced economies. Trade rules should not give advantages to state-controlled economies at the expense of market economies.

It is reasonable to worry that liberal democratic governments lack the capacity to make the kinds of sweeping changes that secured economic growth and political stability in the 1940s and 1950s. In most liberal democracies today, deep divisions may preclude the bold policy initiatives we need.

Political reform is therefore required along two tracks-changing institutional structures to make effective government more possible in divided societies; and taking on directly the social divisions that have polarized democratic politics and sparked the populist surge.

On the first track lie reforms to ensure neutral procedures for creating electoral districts; new measures to reduce the impact of money on political outcomes; and rules to increase incentives for elected officials to cooperate across partisan and ideological divides. On the second, reforms to restrict divisive media practices and rally civil organizations to build bridges among partisans in local communities. For example, laws governing social media platforms could be amended to hold them more responsible for messages promoting hatred, violence, and illegality, and foundations could invest aggressively in organizations promoting civil dialogues among citizens with divergent policy views and ideological commitments.

This menu of economic and political reforms is daunting. If the present offers little consolation, history is more encouraging. Well-established liberal democracies have repeatedly demonstrated their capacity for reinvention. Although at present the gap between the need for effective leaders and the supply of such leaders is at a cyclical peak, we can reasonably hope that clear-sighted politicians with a gift for public explanation will emerge as they have in past crises, and that they will have the ability to inspire their peoples to undertake the tasks their future requires.

William Arthur Galston holds the Ezra K Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

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Yes, contemporary capitalism can be compatible with liberal democracy | William Arthur Galston

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Is contemporary capitalism compatible with liberal democracy? The glib answer, though not wrong, is that it had better be. There are no known examples of fully socialized economies with a liberal democratic regime. The more considered answer is that it can be, but only with the public policies that make it so.

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In July 2018, the most widely respected analysts were decidedly uncertain whether the Democrats could retake the House. On July 6, , for example, listed 180 seats as "solid" for Democrats, with 12 likely/lean and 3 "toss-up or worse." If the Democrats won all of those Cook Political Report and the 22 GOP-held seats described as "toss-ups" - they'd still be one seat short of a majority, at 217.

But on July 1, newcomer Rachel Bitecofer, assistant director of the Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, released her prediction of a 42-seat "blue wave ," while also citing the Arizona and Texas U.S. Senate races as "toss-ups." Her startling prediction was numerically close to perfect; Democrats will end up with a gain of 40 or 41 seats, depending how the re-run in North Carolina's 9th district turns out. (Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won the Arizona Senate race, in a major historical shift, and Beto O'Rourke came close in Texas.) Furthermore, she even strutted a little, writing on Nov. 2 that she hadn't adjusted her seat count, but that " the last few months have been about filling in the blanks on which specific seats will flip." Her resulting list of those was also close to perfect.

With a record like that, you'd think that Bitecofer's explanation of what happened would have drawn universal attention and become common sense - but you'd be sadly mistaken. She's barely beginning to get the recognition she deserves, and more troubling for the country, the outdated assumptions her model dispensed with continue to cloud the thinking of pundits and Democratic Party leadership alike. (Follow her on Twitter here.)

This hampers efforts to counter Donald Trump's destructive impact on a daily basis, and spreads confusion about both Democratic prospects and strategy in the 2020 election prospects. Above all, the mistaken belief that Democrats won in 2018 by gaining Republican support (aka winning back "Trump voters") fuels an illusory search for an ill-defined middle ground that could actually demobilize the Democratic leaners and voters who actually drove last year's blue wave.

Today's polarized hyper-partisan environment is the product of long-term historical processes that can't simply be wished away, Bitecofer argues. Her case is similar to the one described in detail by Alan Abramowitz in his 2018 book, " The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump " (Salon review ), as both scholars confirm.

"I am concerned with the longer-term trends that provide the context for these short-term effects," Abramowitz said of Bitecofer's model. "She's very interested in the impact of demographic change and growing racial and ethnic diversity on the party system, especially in contributing to growing partisan polarization and negative partisanship," which are key themes of his work.

The good news is that so long as Trump is in office, negative partisanship gives Democrats an edge, as electoral realignment continues. Rather than fearing Trump's ability to repeat his 2016 upset, on July 1 of this year Bitecofer released her 2020 projection, which shows Democrats winning 278 electoral votes versus 197 for Trump, with several swing states too close to call. Bitecofer also isn't worried about the Democrats losing their House majority. On Aug. 6, Bitecofer released a preliminary list of 18 House seats the Democrats could flip in 2020, nine of them in Texas. The most significant threats that concern Democrats are actually golden opportunities, according to her model.

That's not to say Democrats don't have anything to worry about - especially in 2022, when the tailwinds of negative partisanship may well be blowing in the other direction. But worrying about the right things, rather than phantoms, is the first step toward deal with them. So I sat down to talk with Bitecofer, in hopes of bringing some sanity and perspective to what is already a bewildering election cycle. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
When I first saw your 2018 midterm projection, I felt two things simultaneously: First, this really makes sense, and then a sense of dread. "Oh my God, is this just motivated reasoning on my part, that makes me think this is so smart?" I no longer have divided feelings, but I understand the doubts.
Well, I can tell you as a person creating the analysis, I have that same problem. Imagine being the person doing the analysis and having that problem: Is this actually what's going on, or is this just wishful thinking?

I had an advantage since I had lived through the Virginia cycle. [That is, the state legislative races of 2017 that resulted in big wins for the Democrats.] In the Virginia cycle, I kept telling everybody else, "This can be a massive landslide. You guys should be investing in delegate races because you guys can probably pick up 15-20 of them." And everyone was saying, "Oh no, that's not how it works in Virginia politics, you're just too new to Virginia." So I already had the advantage of knowing that. But that doesn't mean I wasn't absolutely sick to my stomach on Election Day.
When made your initial prediction of a 42-seat wave, other analysts weren't even sure there would be any blue wave at all, and everybody had toss-ups where you are saying these will flip or are likely to flip. You were proven right, but the common-sense explanation that Democrats won over moderate Republicans by campaigning on health care was very much at odds with your explanation. You had this very prescient insight, and then everyone else catches up, but they sort of drop your insight. So how did you know, and how is that explanation mistaken?
I'm really glad to hear you frame it that way. I haven't heard it framed that way, even in my own brain, but you're exactly right. I am way ahead of everybody, they finally catch up as we move into the final two months before Election Day - certainly that last month - and then the election happens and it happens exactly that way, and then they abandoned my explanation. Now I'm out there trying to fight to get the explanation accepted.

The explanation, of course, is that it was this giant turnout of core constituencies, that either are Democrats or favor Democrats - they're independents who favor Democrats - and they have a huge turnout explosion. So it's not the same pool of voters changing their minds and voting Democrat after voting Republican because of the issue of health care. It's a whole different pool of voters.

They might have many reasons that they cite, and probably this is not the reason they would cite. But what made them enraged and show up is Trump Inc., the negative partisanship. I don't know why Nancy Pelosi, the DCCC or many of these moderate members are convinced that moderate Republicans crossed over and voted for them. I have the data for some of these districts and the data tells a very different, very clear story: If Republicans voted in huge numbers, they voted for Republicans.
In your look back, you actually said that there was a Republican surge, but it wasn't a match for the Democratic surge.
The truth of the matter is Democratic turnout, particularly in midterms, is so bad that with the giant surge the Democrats managed to put together, what they were able to do is come close to matching Republican turnout. Which is good, that's a major victory. But in many districts, especially where the candidates were focusing on being moderate, the Democratic turnout still underperformed its potential, and still underperformed turnout among Republicans, according to this analysis that I'll be releasing after Labor Day.

But the turnout surge among independents - new independents, not ones who voted in 2014 - was so large with that turnout surge of Democrats to flip the district. If Republicans had also voted for Democrats, then these margins by which Democrats won would be much larger.
What factors predicted the turnout that allowed your model to be so accurate?
This model was built in the wake of the 2016 election. It was built as a response, answering why the models were off in 2016, and it was based on this belief that polarization has changed the behavior of voters. It has decreased the efficacy of things like the economy and increased the predictive power of things like partisanship. So the main predictor in my model is partisanship, the party competition of the state or the district, if were talking about my 2018 model, and that really sets the frame of the debate.

It has to be within a realm of possibility. To illustrate that, in 2018 when we look at the Senate map, Arizona was an R+5 state - that meant it had a partisan advantage for Republicans of about five points. Tennessee was an R+15 state, and of course, as I predicted, Arizona flipped to the Democrats but Tennessee didn't even come close, despite multiple millions of dollars spent by Democrats in that effort.

The second thing that's most significant and influential - and this is totally unique and new - is the percentage of college-educated residents residing in the state or in the district. This is what I said would be unique and new in the Trump era. This was why I was able to look at maps, at these races that in 2018 people saw as toss-ups, and say, "No, no, no, no. These are going to flip."

In this new era that we're moving into, we have college-educated voters moving towards the Democrats, and white working-class voters moving away from them. That allowed me to look months and months ahead at polling and say, these are the races where Democrats are going to do really well.
Circling back to something you already touched on, you argue that the "midterm effect" is misunderstood and that the old model - the movement of independents' support from party to party - was a mistaken way of thinking about it. What sort of evidence was there for this prior to 2016, and then afterward?
We have thought of the midterm effect in this way: You have the president, you've got two years of performance. For a long time we've had a chunk of the electorate that's partisan. Those conditions have just gotten worse, especially the last 20 years in what we call hyper-partisanship. But then we have these independents. The independents must be the referees, basically.

In this theory, they are free of partisanship, they're able to look at a person and see them as they are without these blinders of partisanship and judge their actual abilities and make a referendum upon their performance in office. So there's this idea that in the midterms they look at the incumbent party. And if they're not doing great, like, say, Obama overreached with Obamacare, there's this giant backlash of independents and they have this revolution because, God help us all, Obama modestly tweaked health care!

What I'm saying is no, the Democratic base collapsed, basically, from what it looked like in 2006, which was the last midterm when they had been out of power [and won]. It just literally collapsed among Democrats and because of that, it looks like the electorate has this giant recoil effect, driven primarily by these independent voters who are rejecting the party in power. But what we're really looking at in much of these elections are the surge and decline of certain voters entering and leaving the electorate.
Could you going into a little more detail about how recent election results have advanced or refined your model?
The way it helped refine the model is - refer back to what happened in 2010, when Democratic participation just collapsed once the anti-Bush sentiment disappeared. Before that, the 2002 midterm was completely different because of 9/11, so we only had 2006 to look at, and we had this huge wave. Democrats flipped 35 seats in the House, Nancy Pelosi became the speaker, and then they doubled down that with Obama's victory in 2008, and then they had this turnout collapse.

So I expected, even though Trump and Republicans are just better at voting, and especially Trump with his messaging - people sneer at it, but it touches people's base emotions. So I expected it would be pretty good at getting people to vote, though I expected some kind of decline in turnout among Republican voters.

If that happened, then we would've seen participation rates in the 40s, and we probably would have seen a better night in the Senate for Democrats, probably very similar to what we saw in the House. But the reason that didn't happen is that Republican turnout surged just as much as Democratic turnout surged, and that was something I did not expect to happen.

It certainly did not happen in Virginia in 2017, and that taught me that negative partisanship can be artificially created with very good strategy, and the Republicans have that. Some people sneered at it. You'll even hear really smart GOP analysts, political pundits, say "Oh, Trump's caravan strategy was so stupid." Well, the 40-seat loss was locked in, and it didn't matter, but what he probably did was save a couple Senate seats. So my 2020 model has been refined to account for my belief that Republican turnout is going to be extremely high too.
As a corollary to that, would you say concerns that "We shouldn't do X because Trump will exploit it to rile up his supporters" are off-base, because that's going to happen anyway?
Absolutely. In fact, in the district-level analysis of the voter file in California and Virginia that I'll be releasing after Labor Day, I have competitive districts in those states. The data shows the turnout surge and how much different the composition of the electorate was between 2014 and 2018. I'm also able to show that even in these districts where Democrats ran Blue Dog candidates who were as unobtrusive as possible - with, exactly as you stated, the goal of not riling up Trump voters - the turnout for Republican voters in those districts was huge.

In fact, not only did Democrats not get the benefit of not stirring up the Trump base - the Trump base was stirred up and showed up in huge numbers - but by not tapping into anti-Trump sentiment in their own campaign strategy, by not intentionally activating that Trump angst, they paid a price in terms of their own base turnout. It was depressed, compared to other districts.
This year you released your presidential prediction on July 1, showing the Democrats winning a bare majority of 278 electoral votes, just above the 270 needed to win. Trump is at 197, with four toss-up states. But Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are not toss-ups in your model. You write that Trump is in trouble in the Midwest and that there's a profound misunderstanding of how we won those states in 2016. What's at the heart of this misunderstanding, and why does it matter for 2020?
When we hear the punditry talk about what happened in the Midwest, generally speaking they'll say the Midwest swung toward Trump, right? Well, that's only true in two states. In Iowa and Ohio, where Trump cracked 50%, you can genuinely say he won over voters in those states. The others - Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - Trump won those states by carrying only a plurality of the vote, and I would categorize that as a win by default. He won somewhere around 46 or 47% of the vote.

The reason that neither candidate was above 50% was that a huge numbers of voters in those states cast what we call protest ballots, and in the polarized era, the average that goes to a protest ballot is about 1.5%. The famous Ralph Nader election, the spoiler in Florida in 2000, that was about 1.5%. In Wisconsin, 6.2% of voters cast protest ballots in 2016. That's an extraordinary amount.

So when you understand the role that third parties made in Trump's victory there in the Midwest, and his inability to crack 50%, you realize that it's a path to victory which was very complex. It becomes heavily tied to the fact that he was up against not just a Democrat, but that particular Democrat the GOP had managed to cause a public opinion backlash toward. That's certainly not going to be the case in the 2020 cycle.
So what about 2020. What does your model say?
My model for 2020 starts off with Democrats at 278 Electoral College votes, and that's a problem for Trump, because of course you need 270 to win. It does that because of my model's prediction, based on turnout and predicted vote share, that Pennsylvania and Michigan will slip back to the Democrats. I'm uncertain about Ohio, but even if Trump wins Ohio, he can't win the other three Midwestern states. Then as you point out I have four tossup states: Arizona, North Carolina, Florida and Iowa. Even if he wins all four of them, the Democrats have already won the election - and the idea that he would win all four is pretty unlikely.

I will have a much better sense about this once we see the participation rates in the Democratic primary. But I think what we're going to be looking at is Arizona, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia as states where Trump is forced to play defense to hold on. I think by the time we get into September [of 2020] - I don't think we're going to get to the point where Democrats are comfortable in the Midwest. I think we'll see a full-bore campaign and spending press in the Midwest all the way through to Election Day. But I think coming into September and October, they're also going to be spending resources in the Sun Belt and other states like that.
You say that if Joe Biden is the nominee, he needs to consider a running mate who will motivate base voters, and that if a progressive is the nominee, there could be a self-reinforcing dynamic of misguided questioning in the media. While neither of those things should cause Democrats to lose, they are concerning, and they reflect a lack of understanding of what your model and analysis provides.
The Democratic leadership - the way they've chosen to navigate the Trump impeachment stuff, and certainly the way they talk about their House victories and how to maintain their House majority, it tells me that they're still living in a understanding of the data that is outdated. If you don't understand how you won, and what the concurrent political data environment is telling you, that is concerning. So I do see a lot of evidence that Democrats don't get this. I'm not sure why.

I do know there is an increasing voice within Democratic politics that is leaning toward seeing the environment through my lens, and we saw that play out in 2018, in the campaign strategies of Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams. What they were able to do in terms of their contests in both those deep red states was absolutely remarkable, and it speaks to the efficacy of a turnout-based approach, a strategic approach.

In Texas and Georgia, O'Rourke and Abrams both carried the votes of independents, whereas in Missouri and Indiana, where [incumbent senators] Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly positioned themselves much more in the Blue Dog camp in terms of issues positions, both of them lost independents.

So you might think, "Why is that? If one group of candidates took more liberal issue positions, why did they win over independents?" It seems counterfactual, and the reason is what mattered was turnout. O'Rourke and Abrams carried independents because turnout surged, with different independents showing up to vote, motivated by the targeting strategy deployed by those campaigns, which were run under my suggested model rather than the old playbook that used to work back in the '90s and '80s.
Democrats remain very worried about their freshman class, based largely on the notion of a static electorate, rather than one that's still realigning. But you recently released 2020 projections citing 18 Republican-held House seats as top targets, nine of them in Texas. What are you seeing here that others are overlooking, and what will it take to realize that potential?
I see a couple of things. No. 1, I want to point out that these are possible targets. It's not my official 2020 House forecast, because I don't include all house races. It's just 18 targets for pickup opportunities. And you're right, because the realignment is still in progress, conditions are improving for Democrats. My model identified many districts Democrats did not even weaponize as competitive because they are still operating under this assumption that what makes an election competitive is a candidate like Amy McGrath [who is running against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky].

I'm arguing, no, it's conditions like the suburban areas with a lot of college-educated voters. No matter how great a candidate, if you put them in the wrong electoral condition, no matter how much money you throw at them, they're not to be able to overcome those conditions.

So here's the other thing that both parties' leaders should come to understand. In these swing areas, your power time is limited, so you should probably use the power when you have it, because the idea that you're going to hold it indefinitely is totally wrong. Under my research assumptions, under my model, Democrats win the White House in 2020, and then in 2022 they're going to have a very tough electoral cycle, because turnout for Democrats will go back to normal.

And because Democrats have poor electoral strategy, they're going to compound that problem, probably by not appealing to Democrats to get them to the polls. So no matter how moderate you keep your Blue Dogs' legislation, they're all going to get wiped out anyway. So use your power where you have it. No. 2, there are ways to keep them in office, but the ways they're choosing are not the ways to do it.
Turning to the Democratic primary campaign, on Twitter you been repeatedly warning that name recognition is the primary thing the polls are measuring this far out. How can folks be more realistic about thinking about the 20 candidates in the race right now?
People reading your article, people following me on Twitter - we forget how atypical we are, even in terms of those who are going to vote in the Democratic primary. Primary voters are already more active and aware and more typically engaged than average Americans, but still not like us. They're not paying attention at all, not watching the debates, they're not reading news stories, they're not on political Twitter, reading political news sites, but they will vote.

So multiple blue-check reporters on my feed have said, "Oh it's interesting that Bernie Sanders voters choose Biden for their second choice." No, that's not interesting at all. That's the only other person that voters have ever heard of. So the problem is the proliferation of analysis that's happened that's completely analyzing shit that's totally wrong. It's in the data, okay? But it's being driven by this name ID problem.

I've said a million times that we are living in the golden age of data. We just have to understand its limitations. And the sad truth of the matter is that the only way I've been able to figure out for people to do that is by following me and reading my research, because there's no one else talking about it.

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Does anyone understand the 2020 race? This scholar nailed the blue wave - here's her forecast

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In July 2018, the most widely respected analysts were decidedly uncertain whether the Democrats could retake the House. On July 6, , for example, listed 180 seats as "solid" for Democrats, with 12 likely/lean and 3 "toss-up or worse."

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This is true: In my fourth and final year at summer camp, I was mock-kidnapped after lights out, driven to the edge of a forest, and told to kneel. The camp director emerged from the trees gripping a sword. He said some incantatory nonsense and knighted me, marking my induction into the camp's most exclusive club: the Camper's Council.

My camp ran seven weeks, June to August, in Maine. Campers ages 6 to 16 came from "outstanding families" around the world, as the website proudly proclaimed (remarkable how much of the world resided in the tri-state area). During the day, we'd fire .22s at the camp's junior rifle range, and after dark, we'd play campfire games and sing the goodnight song.

On the whole, the place made me miserable. I hated bringing my towel to the communal showers and worrying that someone might see me naked. I hated playing sports badly and then having to pretend I cared about getting better. I hated Dance Fridays, a ritual humiliation so cutting it felt engineered by social scientists to make me upset.

I can't deny that camp had its moments. Getting picked for Camper's Council was one of them. When you're 12, you feel deserving of any honor bestowed on you: I remember bathing in pride when the blade lightly touched my shoulders. I later found out it had been forged from Toledo steel. Not knowing what that meant only impressed me more.

The council, a kind of summertime student government, convened a few times every year. We were supposed to lobby management on behalf of the rest of the campers - when we wanted something, like more fluff for our fluffernutters, we made a motion. When we had complaints about the relative scarcity of foursquare courts, it became a useful back channel.

None of us were elected. Instead, existing members nominated candidates in closed sessions, like a secret society. Only one criterion mattered: Every candidate had to exhibit "high character." Needless to say, our focus group of 10- to 15-year-olds had no idea how to identify this. Cronyism reigned, and, as with most private clubs, the council functioned largely as a status symbol, and occasionally as a lever to enact petty agendas. The summer I served, we handled one issue involving a counselor some of us didn't like. I can't remember the reasoning; it's possible he was too rude. By the end of the session, I think we had managed to get him fired.

Camper's Council hardly made sense, at least from a camper's perspective. We knew we were foolish, too young to legislate. But from an adult's point of view - from the view of the parents who paid for the instillation of a certain brand of character, and the staff who promised to service it - the council was a self-evident success.

Us kids had it backward. Character wasn't what earned you a seat but what the council would ultimately impart: the soft skills needed to advocate for something you wanted; the congeniality to cultivate allies in its pursuit; the self-assurance that attends even the hollowest power. The council's existence signaled the same thing that the camp's mandatory uniforms and Toledo steel swords did: This was a playground for the elite.

The camp was largely attended by the same group of people I went to private school with, the same I competed against for Easter eggs at the country club brunch, the same I would later debate at Phillips Exeter Academy, where my dad went, and his dad, and his dad before him. Plus or minus a small French contingent and a few sons of Venezuelan oil barons, these were my people, luckily and shamefully. Their circumstances were uncommon.

But take away the trappings of wealth and you would find the same cancerous organ that powers all summer camps. I submit that summer camp as an institution fully sucks. Presented as some kind of antediluvian free state for kids, in which play is loosely organized but otherwiseunfettered, its conventions are sneakily conservative.

The very idea of camp grew out of a reactionary movement, as University of British Columbia historian Leslie Paris noted in her book Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. Near the end of the 19th century, educators, church leaders, and child welfare activists started embracing rustic sleepaway camps as a necessary corrective to the "feminizing" influence of urban life. The earliest camps sprouted in New England and catered to middle- and upper-middle-class Protestants. Their founders shared a lofty goal: to turn boys into model citizens.

Elitism wasn't an unfortunate corollary to this project but its animating ethic. Ernest Balch, who founded Camp Chocorua on Squam Lake in New Hampshire - one of the first and most influential summer camps - wrote about raising boys with the character "to hold this Republic safe against the forces of evil and keep the soft hearted and soft headed safe in their homes."

He drew from his studies at Exeter and Dartmouth to devise a holistic curriculum that would train an army of gentleman clones. It tested far more than physical vigor. "In the woods," Paris wrote, "Chocorua campers learned not only about nature but also about capitalism, market values, buying on credit, hiring themselves out, and paying for the labor of others - skills with applications in the environments from which they came and to which they would soon return."

Obviously, camp didn't stay the province of the wealthy. It was too powerful a concept, and the modern school system practically necessitated it. American kids were no longer working thanks to child labor laws, but compulsory education still gave them three months of freedom per year that parents had to figure out how to occupy. Summer vacations became democratized, and summer camps soon attracted new constituencies.

But camp's philosophical framework remained fixed. Its rationale, in the eyes of both parents and proponents, was broadly utilitarian: Camp functioned as a vehicle for moral instruction as much as recreation, because kids' characters needed building.

A hundred and forty years later, a warped copy of that blueprint lingers, tainting the modern camp experience. Strict schedules of activity times, meals, lights out, and morning assembly workify the fun. A hierarchy of privileges, like later bedtimes and more off-campus socializing, accrues to older kids to encourage repeat customers. Sexuality, of course, is stridently policed, even while campers are made to believe that something is always happening behind the boathouse. Throughout, the grown-ups talk about character, how campers are becoming the people they would eventually be. How the victories and defeats and teamwork and even tears would strengthen them in some ineffable but consequential way.

Character suggests different qualities to different groups. My own camp minted members in good standing, as the bankers' and lawyers' kids who went invariably became. I know because I'm one of them, despite my best efforts. I work in advertising, live in a global city, get politely drunk at cocktail parties. I married a lawyer. I have achieved a facility for racquet sports. I can pronounce the names of most foods. I never button a suit's bottom button.

That's what my camp wanted for me, and wherever they ended up, I know my fellow campers share a version of it. Like so many institutions of the upper class, my camp was just another handshake, another network, another vetting process. Whether anyone has dropped the name in an interview, I can't say, but I have full confidence that if I messaged a former camper I didn't know and titled it "Hey, remember me from camp?" they would open that message, read it, and possibly reply.

Ultimately, summer camps exist to validate outmoded social structures among the most vulnerable age bracket. It's not surprising that athletic preteen extroverts with good looks and excess friends shine in a camp setting - nor is it condemnable. But most of the things that make camp camp form a divisive feedback loop, funneling emotional resources to the kids who already enjoy their fill. It can be a hard chain to break. Picking captains for color wars, treating each cabin like a microsociety, commoditizing care packages - these traditions all conspire to allocate attention to the campers who get plenty of it the rest of the year, and alienate the ones who might not fit in.

In a way, tradition is where the most insidious attitudes flower. Parents may find some proto-camp programming unobjectionable, or even positive. A low dose of nationalism, like pledging the flag or saluting stuff or really losing your shit on July Fourth, isn't necessarily toxic. But wade deeper into camp country and you can't mistake the enduring gender norms, the hazing rituals, the elitism that colors the whole enterprise to this day. Why did the girls' cabins at my camp have bathrooms and electricity while the boys' didn't? Why were endless, often painful, occasionally cruel pranks a central feature?

None of it gets interrogated, because camps profit from tradition: The 10-year-old camper at the bottom of the totem pole keeps coming back so he can finally enjoy his time at the top. The wealthy banker believes he must have done everything right, and wants his kids to follow in his footsteps.

It's raw indoctrination, but adolescents don't have the capacity to question dogma. They're rewarded for conforming to the camp's status quo, so they conform to the best of their ability, and however their time goes, they think they've learned a lesson about life. That's the dark irony of character: It is presumed built either way. Had a horrible time? Built character. Made lifelong friends? Built character. Took your first Juul hit while contemplating the enormity of your despair? Built character. This allows camps to package any experience as a success, insofar as every camper has an experience.

There is, of course, another institution kids pass through that's resistant to change, frequently humiliating, economically stratified, and the cause of countless minor traumas: school. But school is so critical to children's development that we regulate it stringently - we review and revise its curricula; we consider how it impacts a life before, during, and after attendance. Camps, on the other hand, are largely lawless. No national regulations exist. There is no standard to be applied. Whether a camp chooses to evolve its programs and provide more progressive spaces for kids is entirely within its discretion.

To be fair, some camps are doing just that. A number of sleepaway camps geared toward LGBTQ youth have appeared in recent years, offering gender-inclusive cabins and sports. Specialist camps and minority-focused programs help foster a sense of community for kids who desperately need it. But that's not camp's legacy - if it were, the existence of those programs wouldn't be noteworthy.

Camp's legacy, for me, is the elation of the moment I was knighted, my camp director smiling down at me, the promise that I had been granted entry into a new, more important group of people. It made everything I hated about camp briefly tolerable.

Years later, I ran into a fellow Camper's Council member at Harvard Law School, where I was visiting a friend for the weekend. He and I got drunk and reminisced. It turns out he had caught the camp bug and returned for many years, eventually getting hired in college and rising to the head of staff or some equivalent. He had overseen Camper's Council as part of his duties.

I used to think those people were closet freaks, but he seemed like a legitimately upstanding dude, the same way I remembered him. And I could see how some people genuinely love camp and cherish their memories from it, the way I cherished memories of Zelda: A Link to the Pastor my black Lab, Norm. At the same time, drinking Buds in an HLS dorm room with a future master of the universe just solidified my suspicions about why camp exists and how it operates.

At some point, I asked him about the sword. He confessed that the camp director had bought it at Disney World. When you're a kid, you're just eager to believe.

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This is true: In my fourth and final year at summer camp, I was mock-kidnapped after lights out, driven to the edge of a forest, and told to kneel. The camp director emerged from the trees gripping a sword. He said some incantatory nonsense and knighted me, marking my induction into the camp's most exclusive club: the Camper's Council.

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The Next Recession Is Going to Be Brutal

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The economy is showing signs of turning, and the people who saw the least benefit from the latest boom are now the most vulnerable ahead of the next bust

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Lands managed by indigenous people possess the greatest levels of biodiversity. This is according to a study led by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and published in the journal Environmental Science & Policy.

The team compared levels of biodiversity in 15,621 areas across three of the largest countries in the world - Australia, Brazil, and Canada.

The size of the area did not appear to have much of an impact on species diversity. Neither did geographical location. Instead, what seemed to have the biggest influence on biodiversity was its management.

The results of the study show that land managed (or co-managed) by indigenous communities contained the highest levels of biodiversity. Protected areas (parks, wildlife reserves etc) came second, while those that were unprotected and selected at random came third.

"We looked at three countries with very different climates and species, to see if the pattern held true across these different regions - and it did," co-author Ryan Germain, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, said in a statement.

"From frogs and songbirds right up to large mammals like grizzly bears, jaguars, and kangaroos, biodiversity was richest in Indigenous-managed lands."

According to the study authors, this is the first time biodiversity levels and land management has been compared on such an extensive scale, geographically speaking.

It comes shortly after a United Nations (UN) report, published in May, warned we are facing a biodiversity crisis, with up to a million species under threat. Many researchers have spoken of a "sixth mass extinction" - which is either imminent or already here depending on who you ask, but will with almost certainty threaten life as we know it regardless.

At the same time, many countries around the world are failing to meet even nominal targets as far as land protection is concerned, and some are actively working to remove protections.

Traditionally, conservation programs have been concerned with nominating certain places for protection and creating parks and reservations. But, the study authors point out, these areas tend to have little overlap with the geographic ranges of the world's more vulnerable species. Instead, areas are often chosen because they have relatively low economic value and biodiversity.

What's more, indigenous communities have often been pushed out of designated areas. Not only can this be damaging to the communities themselves, but it can also be also detrimental to the conservation agenda.

This study highlights how important it is to extend the reach of protected areas to cover more land - and more wildlife.

"Protected areas are a cornerstone of biodiversity conservation globally, but current levels of protection will be insufficient to halt the planetary extinction crisis," said Peter Arcese, the Forest Renewal B.C. Chair in Conservation Biology at UBC.

"We must manage a larger fraction of world's area in ways that protect species and leads to positive outcomes for people and the species they've relied on for millennia."

Today, indigenous communities manage or have tenure around 25 percent of the planet's land area. They have played an important role in environmental activism - and have faced the brunt of reactionary retaliation.

The study authors hope the results of the study will encourage greater collaboration with indigenous governments, organizations, and communities to improve biodiversity levels as well as indigenous rights.

"This suggests that it's the land-management practices of many Indigenous communities that are keeping species numbers high," said lead author Richard Schuster, the Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University, formerly of UBC.

"Going forward, collaborating with Indigenous land stewards will likely be essential in ensuring that species survive and thrive."

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Land Managed By Indigenous Peoples Have The Greatest Levels Of Biodiversity

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Lands managed by indigenous people possess the greatest levels of biodiversity. This is according to a study led by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and published in the journal Environmental Science & Policy. The team compared levels of biodiversity in 15,621 areas across three of the largest countries in the world - Australia, Brazil, and Canada.

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The displacement of meaningful civic engagement by political consumerism and lurid media spectacle is suffocating U.S. democracy. In the record $6.5 billion 2016 election cycle, a total that excludes untraceable dark money, the consumerist conquest of civic life became nearly complete, with empty partisan noise reverberating 24/7 through global media echo chambers in inverse proportion to the shriveling substance of daily civic life.

Before the advent of spectacular politics, former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford accepted public funding during the 1976 presidential campaign and spent $35.5 million and $33.4 million respectively, an inflation adjusted total of $158 million. Today, the multibillion-dollar campaign spectacle is permanent, punctuated only by a single day for elections.

A healthy democracy is predicated not on what philosopher Guy Debord described as "an immense accumulation of spectacles" but on the daily practice and attitude of engaged civil life by citizens working far outside the nexus of corporate-sponsored political parties.

Countering the devolution of democracy into consumerism requires understanding its underlying rationale and organizational mechanics.

The Role of Political Parties and Media in Election Spectacles

The U.S. Democratic and Republican Parties of the 21st century are money-laundering operations in which cash investments are converted into political capital for a small donor class consisting of corporations, banks and the wealthy, who delivered 67.8 percent of all political donations in the 2016 election cycle.

The job of the parties is to stage-manage and relentlessly promote a permanent multibillion-dollar electoral competition among dozens of candidate-contestants vying to represent one of the two major brands in the final November round. In the 2020 election cycle, 24 Democratic presidential candidates declared their candidacies 80 to 100 weeks before the election, while President Trump filed for re-election January 20, 2017, the day of his inauguration.

The process of surviving the spectacle's demeaning vetting process ensures that any candidate who emerges is captive to the financialized global system that spawned them.

Once the officially sponsored candidates are selected, the job of the parties shifts to promoting the coming election blockbuster in the most apocalyptic terms possible in order to rouse a weary electorate and divert attention from the imperial ethos underlying the entire enterprise.

The template was established in the 1964 presidential election by former President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "Daisy ad" warning of nuclear holocaust if his Republican opponent Barry Goldwater were to be elected. In 1968, former President Richard Nixon continued the theme with a campaign tagline admonishing voters, "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it." Every election is touted as "the most important of our lifetime," with nearly certain apocalypse if the wrong candidate is elected.

The parties subcontract lucrative marketing duties for this end-of-days spectacle to media outlets controlled by billionaire news entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos ( The Washington Post), the Sulzberger family and Carlos Slim ( The New York Times) or Rupert Murdoch and family ( Fox News, Wall Street Journal) and a constellation of global corporations (Viacom, Time-Warner, GE, Disney, Clear Channel) that control the majority of other major news outlets - NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, et al. Social media duties are farmed out to Facebook and its subsidiaries (WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus Virtual Reality), Alphabet (Google and YouTube) and Twitter.

In exchange for being given carte blanche to drive ratings and pad their bottom lines, the primary job of this cluster of traditional and new media conglomerates is to normalize the permanent marketization of spectacular politics in ways that ensure outcomes causing minimal disruption to the structure and operations of global capital and the permanent warfare state.

OpenSecrets estimates that from July 2015 through October 2016, Trump received free media worth more than $5.9 billion, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received nearly $2.8 billion. In exchange for this free news coverage, 3.3 million paid TV ads ran in 2016, generating a record $2.3 billion in revenue, while Facebook ad revenue jumped 57 percent over 2015 to an all-time high of $26 billion.

At the lower end of the media spectrum, tens of thousands of small donors ( 32.2 percent of total donations) give enthusiastically to candidates promising radical change while claiming not to accept special interest money.

These donors are like amateur political day-traders investing in alternative political brands and scrappy campaign startups that rarely succeed. The process of surviving the spectacle's demeaning vetting process ensures that any candidate who emerges is captive to the financialized global system that spawned them.

Even campaigns built around themes of change and a politics of hope quickly morph into governance predicated on permanent warfare, capital consolidation and the inexorable growth of economic inequality.

This is not democracy. It is an elaborate form of empty political consumerism that has been drained as nearly as possible of meaningful political agency.

How the Political Consumer Spectacle Works

There is a symbiotic relationship between the methods used in consumer marketing and the strategies and tactics employed in political campaigns.

The management of consumer discontent in the form of incessant brand switching has become a dominant issue of U.S. business culture. Marketing analysts describe a "switching economy" in which regular brand changing has increased nearly 30 percent since 2010.

Voters can be convinced to switch political brands as easily as consumer brands based solely on over-the-top marketing blandishments offering the cheap thrill of taboo-breaking.

The new lingo of the marketing class is therefore laden with political jargon about strategies that promote "meaningful engagement" and "empowerment" by giving consumers "authentic experiences" to earn loyalty and trust.

These tactics and strategies are now used to manage political discontent.

Gallup reports that in June 2019, between 41 and 46 percent of Americans self-identify as Independent, among the highest percentages since Gallup's polling of party affiliation began in 2004. Conditioned to think and act like consumers, and feeling they have no meaningful outlet for their most deeply felt political impulses, a considerable cohort among the electorate has grudgingly shifted their desire for change into political brand switching in a new electoral market centered on the endless distractions of permanent spectacle.

Rolling Stone political correspondent Matt Taibbi observes that Trump's fundamental insight in 2015-16 was that U.S. presidential elections are "basically just a big reality show ... with bad characters" in which show producers have the impossible task of turning "human sedatives" such as former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker or South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham into political stars who might appeal to voters.

Taibbi notes that Trump realized the show needed new production values with a "reality actor in the middle ... to take advantage of the stagecraft" that comes with a multibillion-dollar production budget.

There is ample evidence that many voters reject both party brands and want to send the entire system up in smoke. For example, a post-election analysis by The Washington Post found an electorally significant percentage of Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. They shared comments such as, "We need to change everything," and "I'm excited to see him blow the place up." The New York Times reports that, "The voters who switched from President Obama to Mr. Trump in 2016 were decisive." Further, 7.8 million voters cast ballots for third-party candidates in 2016, leading analyst Stuart Rothenberg to conclude: "Their strong showing was due to the unpopularity of the two major-party nominees."

Given the current weakness of party identification, electorally significant numbers of voters can be convinced to switch political brands as easily as consumer brands based solely on over-the-top marketing blandishments offering the cheap thrill of taboo-breaking. In 2016, Trump's carnivalesque campaign, with its unbridled fascistic exaltation of nation and race above community and civil life, gave them a vehicle for doing so.

With the U.S. confronting nuclear threats and environmental crises across the globe, the multibillion-dollar politics of performance, spectacle and racist carnival are not only inadequate to today's political challenges, they are a clear threat to democracy and peace.

Reimagining Democratic Political Civilization

French diplomat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed that, "Democracy depends on many things besides voting." Rather, he believed the most important and distinguishing characteristic of U.S. democracy was the universality of "free voluntary civil association."

Voting, with its devolution into political consumerism, opens the door to fascistic demagoguery and is clearly insufficient to sustain democracy.

Civil association, in which neither government nor private markets are sovereign, is democracy's training ground. It creates emotionally mature citizens, not partisan voters easily manipulated by divisive party politics. That is its vital function.

The U.S. no longer bothers to train citizens in democracy; that is, teaching people to become effective citizens and members of their community rather than partisan voters. Voting, with its devolution into political consumerism, opens the door to fascistic demagoguery and is clearly insufficient to sustain democracy. This is not a small thing. It is at the center of current U.S. political dysfunction.

Finding ways to bring accountability to today's permanent political spectacle is necessary and vital work. Yet, it cannot become a substitute for the long-term labor of reimagining and rebuilding a modern democratic civil society.

Sharp political disagreements are inevitable, but the core of a healthy civil society is civility and ultimately civilization itself. It is only through civil association that citizens learn how to deal with their differences to advance a common cause.

Parties cannot do the work of building civil society. Only citizens can. Their work has traditionally taken place in the non-monetary social economy, a space outside the consumerist pull of the market where they can come together voluntarily to solve community problems, such as the role of Black churches during the civil rights movement.

Over the past decade, new forms of open-source social mapping have begun to chart the variety of civil associations and to facilitate connections among them based on the belief that collective action depends on the social networks that civil associations embody.

Absent the associative practices and buffering effects of civil association, social problems become national in scope, while political life, defying the maxim that all politics are local, devolves into consumer spectacle.

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Elections Are Treated as Political Consumerism and Democracy Is Suffering

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The displacement of meaningful civic engagement by political consumerism and lurid media spectacle is suffocating U.S. democracy. In the record $6.5 billion 2016 election cycle, a total that excludes untraceable dark money, the consumerist conquest of civic life became nearly complete, with empty partisan noise reverberating 24/7 through global media echo chambers in inverse proportion to the shriveling substance of daily civic life.

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Astra Taylor will change how you think about democracy

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Astra Taylor’s new book has the best title I’ve seen in a long time: Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. I talk a lot about democracy on this show, but not in the way Taylor talks about it. The democracy I discuss is bounded by the assumptions of American politics. This, howev…

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1. It's Never "Too Soon" to Talk About Preventing Mass Shootings. It's Always Too Late.

2. It's John Delaney's World, and the Rest of Us Are Just Living in It, Realistically and Pragmatically

3. We Should No Longer Doubt What the Democratic Party Is Today

4. "Republican Talking Points" Is a Terrible Talking Point

Within last week's story of how Ronald Reagan made a racist phone call to Richard Nixon, there was a second story-a parable, effectively: a small point that contained a much larger point. It had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with Ronald Reagan's own character; it happened after Reagan had finished fuming to Nixon about how African leaders who'd thwarted American foreign policy at the United Nations were "monkeys," and the two men had gotten off the phone.

Nixon then called Secretary of State William Rogers, to relay Reagan's message and to warn Rogers that the White House should not express too much public support for the U.N., given the anger of the conservatives that Reagan represented. "As he said," Nixon said, "he saw these, he said, these, uh, these cannibals on television last night." At the word cannibals, the men shared a chuckle.

But Reagan hadn't said cannibals. Nor was Nixon calling the leaders cannibals himself. He had conjured the word from somewhere, and attributed it to Reagan-in Reagan's role as a voice of the bigoted faction of the public-and passed it along to Rogers, without anyone having directly produced it. It was a racist slur, yet no particular racist person could claim authorship of it. It just happened.

In response to the El Paso massacre, it's been easy enough for people to draw the connection between the vitriol that Donald Trump and Fox News express toward immigrants and the professed motives of the person arrested for the slaughter. Open, seething hate of nonwhite people has become a recurring presence in this country under Trump.

But so, too, is something not quite as open, and much more well established. At the end of June, after the first round of Democratic presidential debates, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens got criticized for writing this passage:

What conclusions should ordinary people draw about what Democrats stand for, other than a thunderous repudiation of Donald Trump, and how they see America, other than as a land of unscrupulous profiteers and hapless victims?

Here's what: a party that makes too many Americans feel like strangers in their own country. A party that puts more of its faith, and invests most of its efforts, in them instead of us.

They speak Spanish. We don't. They are not U.S. citizens or legal residents. We are. They broke the rules to get into this country. We didn't.

This was straightforwardly in the spirit of what the accused El Paso gunman would write, about "defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion." But Stephens, a self-styled Never Trumper who claims to be offended by the president's vulgarity and bigotry, didn't believe he had written any such thing. In a follow-up column, calling his critics "Jacobins" and their complaints "preposterous," and comparing himself to the target of Big Brother's Two Minutes Hate, he explained that people had willfully misunderstood his effort "to channel the negative way 'ordinary people' might have viewed last week's Democratic debates."

Like Nixon, Stephens was simply expressing racist ideas that he supposed belonged to someone else-some figure, or mass of figures, offstage, whose point of view deserved a respectful hearing. He was writing, that is, in the dominant mode by which white nationalist ideas are presented in America: as a second-order concern, or, better yet, a third-order one, a warning that liberals, by denouncing racism, run the risk of offending or provoking the people who hold those racist views (or views that may seem, to a snobbish and uncaring coastal elite, to be racist, when in fact they reflect the reasonable or at least understandable frustrations or fears of the people who hold them).

Polite media outlets have been full of these defenses of racism, or defenses of the feelings of white people with racist opinions, since Trump's victory. Usually, these defenses are presented as critiques of "identity politics," or, more daringly, of "diversity." The Columbia professor Mark Lilla, who presents himself as a "liberal" (though his resume suggests otherwise), demonstrated the form in a showcase piece in the Times Sunday Review in mid-November 2016, dismissing the notion that Trump had benefited from a "whitelash," in which the president-elect was able to "transform economic disadvantage into racial rage":

[T]he whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by "political correctness." Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.

Lilla, who went on to write a book on liberalism's inadequacies, made it very clear that he wasn't personally threatening the people who attributed Trump's victory to racism; he was merely saying that if they kept it up, they could bring a threat down on themselves. Hillary Clinton, he wrote, had alienated the white electorate by "calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters." Identity politics, according to Lilla's formulation, "never wins elections-but can lose them."

What Trump had won with, therefore, must not have been identity politics. The whiteness of the nation was presumed to be a fact, before which "identity politics" and "diversity" would have to yield. Andrew Sullivan, when not using his New York magazine column to denounce Trump as a poison in the body politic, writes unabashedly of the menace of immigration and demographic change. In a long column lamenting the multilingual and multiethnic degradation of the genuine Englishness of London-London, of all places, which has been a fully cosmopolitan city since it was Roman Londinium-he worked himself up into an attack on immigration policy in the United Kingdom and United States alike:

Home is indeed where one starts from. Change it too rapidly and it will disintegrate. We have been fools on mass immigration, we have been fools for preventing an honest debate about the benefits and drawbacks of diversity, and we have been contemptible in our contempt for so many of our fellow citizens.

Sullivan assured his readers that he loves diversity, himself, personally; he was just outraged for his "fellow citizens," who fear cultural variety and feel threatened by it. To embrace diversity-let alone to simply be alive, as one of the human beings whose existence and location constitute "diversity"-is to insult the older, truer nation.

Ostensibly liberal publications are happy to publish these views, as long as they can be expressed on behalf of others, or attributed to the verdicts of history or sociology. In 2010, long before Trump entered electoral politics, Ross Douthat was using his Times column to argue that the xenophobic strain in American culture had a "wisdom" that deserved fair consideration:

During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture-and the threat of discrimination if they didn't-was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.

Even violence-"pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul"-was valuable, as it forced immigrants to conform to the culture of the mainstream, and built a stronger union.

At the time, this was Douthat's defense of Islamophobia, but the general idea would become his template for excusing the broader abuses of Trumpism, when the time came. Last year, Douthat argued that Democrats should be willing to bargain with Stephen Miller, the most aggressive anti-immigrant figure in Trump's policy circle, on immigration. Yes, Miller is a "restrictionist," and "his critics say he just wants to keep America as white as possible." But previous bipartisan negotiations, Douthat wrote, had excluded Miller's point of view, to allow only participants "who favor both amnesty for illegal immigrants and reforms that would probably increase immigration rates":

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't represent the actual divisions in the country. Americans have become more pro-immigration since the 1990s, but there is still a consistent pattern when you ask about immigration rates: About a third of Americans favor the current trend, slightly fewer want higher rates, and about a third, like Miller, want immigration reduced.

The overwhelming majority of the country supports immigration. Yet it is necessary, Douthat said, for that majority to be willing to let anti-immigrant views shape policy. When readers objected, he wrote a follow-up column, explaining that while he personally believed "Trump's race-baiting is disgraceful," he considered the objections to immigration-its "costs as well as benefits"-to be worthy of policy debate. Then he described some of those costs, as he saw them, or as he saw others seeing them:

First, as mass immigration increases diversity, it reduces social cohesion and civic trust. This is not a universal law, as the economics writer Noah Smith has pointed out; there are counter-examples and ways to resist the trend. However, it is a finding that strongly comports with the real-world experience of Europe and America, where as cultural diversity has increased so has social distrust, elite-populist conflict, and the racial, religious and generational polarization of political parties.

Immigrants weaken the nation-not because Ross Douthat feels that way about them, or distrusts them on his own, but because it's just a general principle that people feel that way. This is not a universal law, yet it's worth treating as such, even in a country built on waves of mass migration. Douthat set the terms of discussion: Here is American society, and then, outside that society, there is diversity, threatening and disrupting it.

Moreover, he wrote, immigrants are fracturing the spatial and economic structure of American life, taking jobs in the cities so that "an immigrants-and-professionals ecosystem effectively prices out the middle class." Pro-immigrant people, whether on the right or the left, are pursuing "a fantasy of replacement that's politically corrosive."

Thus the people in the prosperous cities withdraw from their fellow citizens of the heartland, while those forgotten Americans bear the costs of immigration:

And they do so out of sight and mind for the winners in this system, who inhabit a world where they only see their fellow winners and their hard-working multiethnic service class. Which in turn encourages them toward mild contempt for their fellow countrymen who don't want to live under a cosmopolitan-ruled caste system, who feel alienated from the Californian or Parisian future.

This was, and is, the language of white nationalism. Douthat wasn't saying he believed these things himself, just that the people who did believe them-the people who felt victimized by the "contempt" of the "cosmopolitan" caste and the immigrants taking jobs-deserved to be heard, and to be given a chance to exclude more immigrants from the country.

But imputed racism is still racism. No one said cannibal, yet the word crackled to life through the lips of the man who was president of the United States. No one was writing in the New York Times to demand that the future of white children be secured; they were just saying that social cohesion might be stronger if white people felt more secure in their white children's futures.

A few days before the atrocity in El Paso, CNN's Dana Bash had questions for the presidential candidates in the Democratic debates: "Sen. Sanders, you want to provide undocumented immigrants free health care and free college. Why won't this drive even more people to come to the U.S. illegally? ... Gov. Bullock, about two-thirds of Democratic voters and many of your rivals here for the nomination support giving health insurance to undocumented immigrants. You haven't gone that far. Why not? ... Congressman Ryan, are Sen. Sanders' proposals going to incentivize undocumented immigrants to come into this country illegally?"

Bash was challenging the candidates to justify policies that, viewed from a certain angle, might be offensive to certain voters. It was necessary to ask, because some Americans hold these opinions.

The El Paso killer wrote, of the Democrats, "They intend to use open borders, free healthcare for illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters."

Here was the person CNN wanted the Democrats to reassure. It was important that Americans know that the party's policies wouldn't go too far. There's no room in our politics for extremism.

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Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us

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It's Never "Too Soon" to Talk About Preventing Mass Shootings. It's Always Too Late. It's John Delaney's World, and the Rest of Us Are Just Living in It, Realistically and Pragmatically We Should No Longer Doubt What the Democratic Party Is Today "Republican Talking Points" Is a Terrible Talking Point Within last week's story of how Ronald Reagan made a racist phone call to Richard Nixon, there was a second story-a parable, effectively: a small point that contained a much larger point.

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But this desire to unionize faces some daunting challenges.In many corporations, the mentality is that any supervisor, whether a factory manager or retail manager, who fails to keep out a union is an utter failure.That means managers fight hard to quash unions. One study found that 57 percent of employers threatened to close operations when workers sought to unionize, while 47 percent threatened to cut wages or benefits and 34 percent fired union supporters during unionization drives.

Corporate executives' frequent failure to listen to workers' concerns - along with the intimidation of employees - can have deadly results. On April 5, 2010, a coal dust explosion killed 29 miners at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. A federal investigation found that the mine's ventilation system was inadequate and that explosive gases were allowed to build up. Workers at the nonunion mine knew about these dangers. "No one felt they could go to management and express their fears," Stanley Stewart, an Upper Big Branch miner, told a congressional committee. "We knew we'd be marked men and the management would look for ways to fire us."

The diminished power of unions and workers has skewed American politics, helping give billionaires and corporations inordinate sway over America's politics and policymaking. In the 2015-16 election cycle, business outspent labor $3.4 billion to $213 million, a ratio of 16 to 1, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. All of the nation's unions, taken together, spend about $48 million a year for lobbying in Washington, while corporate America spends $3 billion. Little wonder that many lawmakers seem vastly more interested in cutting taxes on corporations than in raising the minimum wage.

There were undoubtedly many reasons for Donald Trump's 2016 victory, but a key one was that many Americans seemed to view him as a protest candidate, promising to shake up "the system" and "drain the swamp." Many voters embraced Mr. Trump because they believed his statements that the system is rigged - and in many ways it is.When it comes to workers' power in the workplace and in politics, the pendulum has swung far toward corporations.

Reversing that won't be easy, but it is vital we do so. There are myriad proposals to restore some balance, from having workers elect representatives to corporate boards to making it easier for workers to unionize to expanding public financing of political campaigns to prevent wealthy and corporate donors from often dominating.

America's workers won't stop thinking the system is rigged until they feel they have an effective voice in the workplace and in policymaking so that they can share in more of the economy's prosperity to help improve their - and their loved ones' - lives.

Steven Greenhouse, who was the labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times for 19 years, is the author of the forthcoming " Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor," from which this essay is adapted.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Yes, America Is Rigged Against Workers

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But this desire to unionize faces some daunting challenges.In many corporations, the mentality is that any supervisor, whether a factory manager or retail manager, who fails to keep out a union is an utter failure.That means managers fight hard to quash unions.

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Buraydah train station in Saudi Arabia on Friday. Saudi women will be allowed to obtain passports, travel and work without a male relative's permission. Credit Credit Tasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Some Saudi women joked about rushing to the airport - alone. Others breathed a sigh of relief that the men in their lives - whether fathers, brothers or husbands - could no longer dictate their movements. Social media crackled with ecstatic posts: memes of women praising the crown prince and ululating in celebration.

The jubilation came Friday as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman extended a passel of new rights to women: the right to travel without a male relative's permission, to receive equal treatment in the workplace and to obtain family documents from the government. Together, they were a significant blow against a system that has long treated women as second-class citizens.

"This change means women are in a way in full control of their legal destiny," Muna AbuSulayman, a well-known Saudi media personality, wrote on Twitter. She said she was so elated that she could not sleep.

The new regulations were the most significant weakening yet of Saudi Arabia's so-called guardianship system, a longstanding tangle of laws, regulations and social customs that subjected many women's rights to the whims of their male relatives. Coming after new regulations allowing women to drive and attend entertainment and sporting events, the changes have the potential to be a game changer, not only for women but for Saudi society.

"It is a great breakthrough," Hoda al-Helaissi, a member of the kingdom's advisory Shura Council, said on Friday. "It was bound to happen, but these changes are always done at a time when the people are more apt to accept the changes, otherwise they will fail."

The advances for women are a key piece of Prince Mohammed's vision for reforming the kingdom by diversifying the economy and loosening social restrictions. Since his father ascended the throne in 2015, Prince Mohammed, the kingdom's day-to-day ruler, has won plaudits for taming the kingdom's religious police, allowing movie theaters and music concerts, and lifting the ban on women driving.

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Since his father, King Salman, right, ascended to the throne in 2015, Prince Mohammed has begun initiatives aimed at diversifying the economy, confronting Iran and loosening the kingdom's social restrictions. Credit Tasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

But along with that social opening have come riskier moves that have raised questions about his brash leadership style, including his catastrophic war in Yemen, the jailing of dissidents at home, and the effort to silence them abroad, including the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Even as Prince Mohammed opened new doors for Saudi women, critics pointed out, some women who had campaigned for those rights remained in jail or on trial for their activism.

At least some of the changes to the guardianship laws are to take effect by the end of the month, the government said in a statement. But they will likely take longer to flow through the Saudi bureaucracy to individual households, and some women said they would only be truly equal once they received other rights they still lack, such as the ability to marry or live on their own without a male relative's permission.

Even so, the changes were pivotal.

"These new regulations are history in the making," Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, the kingdom's ambassador to the United States and Saudi Arabia's first female ambassador, wrote on Twitter. "They call for the equal engagement of women and men in our society."

She added: "Our leadership has proved its unequivocal commitment to gender equality."

In recent years, Prince Mohammed has loosened restrictions on women's dress and pushed for more women to enter the work force, billing the social opening as essential to build the insular Islamic kingdom's economy.

It was not clear why the new regulations were announced now, but the news was likely to draw some attention from the mounting foreign criticism of Saudi Arabia's human rights record.

The murder of Mr. Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year drew global condemnation. Saudi forces are bogged down and accused of war crimes in Yemen, leading to growing calls by American lawmakers to cut support for the Saudi war effort. And waves of arrests have scooped up clerics, intellectuals, royals, businessmen and activists who had campaigned for an end to the guardianship system.

Saudi women driving in Dammam in 2018. The year before, Saudi Arabia announced that it would allow women behind the wheel. Credit Tasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

A number of young Saudi women have fled abroad in recent years, seeking refuge from abusive family members and a legal system they do not trust to protect them, drawing unwanted attention to the guardianship system.

The arrests, and the wider intolerance of dissent under Prince Mohammed, made it hard to fully gauge public reaction to the changes, but many Saudi women cheered them as liberating.

Ms. al-Helaissi, the Shura Council member, said she did not expect the changes to have a great immediate effect on most families, but said the biggest beneficiaries would be divorced or widowed women who could now run their family affairs more easily.

The regulations allowing women to register births, marriages and divorces will make an enormous difference for women who are separated from their husbands and those who need to navigate the bureaucracy on behalf of their children, said Adam Coogle, a Saudi expert at Human Rights Watch.

In the past, he said, separated women have reported being punished or extorted by husbands who would not help obtain birth certificates or other bureaucratic records for children.

The ban on employment discrimination will also prevent private employers from telling women that they need a guardian's permission to be hired, a common practice even though current law does not require women to obtain consent to work.

The new regulations are unlikely to produce instant changes across Saudi society, especially in conservative homes, where men may retain power over female relatives regardless of what the laws say.

Saudi women were not allowed to work in public spaces until 2015. Credit Tasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

Absent some kind of government intervention to enforce the regulations, Mr. Coogle said, employers and officials may continue to require guardians' involvement.

"That's the trick," he said. "We have to see what kind of infrastructure they put in place to implement these changes."

But about two thirds of the kingdom's 22 million citizens are under age 30, and many lack their elders' attachment to the kingdom's traditional social strictures. They are already used to seeing women working as supermarket cashiers and driving themselves to and from work.

Ms. AbuSulayman said on Twitter that while her father never put obstacles in her path, she had gone so far as to consider moving abroad to avoid being subject to the guardianship of her brothers.

Now, she said, her eldest daughter - who, under the current system, would have had to obtain her father's permission to renew her passport this year - will grow up without restrictions on her right to travel.

"She will never know about this episode in our nation's life," Ms. AbuSulayman wrote. "A generation growing up completely free and equal to their brothers."

But Saudi women's experiences of guardianship can vary drastically according to their class and education, as well as their male guardians' attitudes.

A Saudi official filling in a marriage contract in April. The changes will be particularly important for separated women. Credit Tasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

If "some women's dreams were aborted" by the travel barriers, Ms. AbuSulayman wrote, they were "a minor nuisance for most." Still, she said, they were "a symbolic indignity for a wider concept of adulthood, accountability and meaning of personhood."

Saudi social codes have long been driven by an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam and by traditional Arabian practices that kept women not only out of public life but also out of sight in many cases.

Girls' education was introduced only in the 1960s, and even then it caused trouble in conservative cities. For decades, top state clerics have promoted strict segregation between women and men and have preached that it would be better if women stayed at home.

Most of those clerics have now been silenced and some of their old teachings expunged from government websites. While many likely oppose Prince Mohammed's social reforms, they have kept quiet, either out of deference to the monarchy or because they fear arrest for speaking out.

Critics of the guardianship laws hailed the changes but they called on the kingdom to push further by allowing women to marry, live on their own and exit state facilities like domestic violence shelters without consent from their guardians.

And they noted a distinct discrepancy in the announcement. Even as the kingdom loosens the cuffs of guardianship, about a dozen female Saudi activists who spoke out about reforming the system remain imprisoned on charges related to their activism on women's issues.

Some have been detained for more than a year, undergoing court proceedings wrapped in secrecy, and rights groups have said that they have reported being tortured and sexually harassed while in prison.

"As long as the women activists are still being tried and charged for calling for these same reforms, well, we're still within the same social contract," said Lynn Maalouf, the director of Middle East research for Amnesty International.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Excitement Builds Over Rights for Saudi Women. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Saudi Arabia Extends New Rights to Women in Blow to Oppressive System

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BEIRUT, Lebanon - Some Saudi women joked about rushing to the airport - alone. Others breathed a sigh of relief that the men in their lives - whether fathers, brothers or husbands - could no longer dictate their movements. Social media crackled with ecstatic posts: memes of women praising the crown prince and ululating in celebration.

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They can no longer afford the luxury of a smaller, less expensive welfare state.

By

Professor Castañeda is a specialist in Latin American affairs.

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A early-20th-century Social Democracy postcard calling for old-age insurance. Credit Credit Imagno/Getty Images

MEXICO CITY - There is a debate underway within the Democratic Party over what kind of candidate can beat Donald Trump in 2020. A centrist candidate will attract moderate Republican voters, but perhaps demobilize young, minority, college-educated Democrats. A more exciting, perhaps more radical candidate, will mobilize Democrats but scare away moderate Republicans.

From the perspective of a citizen of the country that has probably suffered most under the Trump administration's policies, the debate signals a historic shift. The rooting of a more Social Democratic identity for the Democratic Party may mean more, in the long run, than defeating Donald Trump in 2020. This is the most interesting and seductive aspect of this presidential campaign. The last two Democratic debates revealed how the party's center of gravity has shifted to the left: the more liberal members seem increasingly Social Democratic and the more moderate ones, increasingly liberal.

The Social Democratic movement first emerged in Germany in the late 1800s under Otto von Bismarck, the country's first chancellor. It proliferated and flourished in Western Europe as an antidote to the violence of the Russian Revolution, the emergence of totalitarian Communism and the destruction wrought by two world wars.

In Europe, and later in Latin America, governments placed a greater emphasis on the role of the state in regulating market economies, protecting the weakest sectors of society, seeking to reduce poverty and inequality as much as possible under a capitalist model, defending the environment and strengthening labor unions, workers' parties and progressive institutions.

The United States missed that train, largely because it didn't face the same challenges. The American, more deregulated, everyone-for-himself, free-market model delivered the goods for years, without labor parties or strong unions, with a distant and reduced role for the state in the market and society, and with the exclusion of important sectors of its inhabitants from that society.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal was a semi-Social Democratic response to the Great Depression, but it didn't stick. Until Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the economy's steady growth kept inequality down, and the middle class thrived. Americans could afford the luxury of a smaller, less expensive welfare state because of its rich middle class. After the 80s, that began to change.

Europe has been much better at keeping inequality in check. Tax systems redistribute income across countries and include generous transfers like social security, health insurance and unemployment benefits. Now after four decades of growing wealth and income polarization, rising racial tensions and greater domestic challenges, one sector of the American electorate is seeking to finally put in place what the Europeans built over the half-century following World War II. The conditions that made it possible for the United States to manage without a large, generous, expensive but highly popular welfare state have slowly vanished.

Paradoxically, the rise of social democracy in the United States may save it from dying in Europe. With the exception of Spain, Social Democratic parties are losing their grip in the Old Continent. Moderate socialist experiments in Brazil and Chile have lost ground south of the Rio Grande, while the Mexican version is not faring well.

The hope that social democracy has finally come to America stems from positions that the contenders jockeying for the Democratic Party's nomination are adopting. For the first time since Roosevelt and the New Deal, policies devoted to reducing inequality, helping the poor, supporting the young, protecting the elderly and considering the issues of race in a different context are being proposed by Democratic candidates. Ideas that in 2016 were considered radical or fringe have now become part of the mainstream conversation.

Medicare for All or universal health care, whether with a single public payer or through a private option for those who prefer it, costs a great deal of money. So does true universal and free child care, as well as parental leave for all, crucial benefits today when more parents than ever find themselves in the workplace. Nearly all the Democratic challengers support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and tuition-free higher public education. Financing for these proposals is in typical Social Democratic fashion: raising existing taxes, or creating new ones.

Even if a candidate who is committed to many of these ideas is actually elected, they may not be able to put these promises into practice. They certainly will not be if the Senate remains in control of the Republicans. But altogether, these proposals represent a sea change in American politics.

Already, in the midterm elections, voters sent two new members who identify as socialists to Congress. A recent Fox News survey found that raising taxes on those who earn more than $10 million a year enjoyed broad, bipartisan support. The Green New Deal may not be as mainstream as other proposals, but polls show that a majority of likely Democratic voters would support it.

Since the Russian Revolution, the Social Democratic experiment has been the most effective antidote to authoritarian socialism: It proved that a prosperous working class was feasible. Today that same experiment's possible arrival in the United States may well be the best response to the authoritarian, populist challenge emerging on the right, from Hungary to Brazil, from Britain to South Africa. The best response to the undeniable downsides of globalization - growing inequality, and the fear of the "other" - is more democracy, more social benefits, more equality.

Jorge G. Castañeda, Mexico's foreign minister from 2000 to 2003, is a professor at New York University and a contributing opinion writer.
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Opinion | Of Course Americans Are Turning to Social Democracy

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They can no longer afford the luxury of a smaller, less expensive welfare state. By Professor Castañeda is a specialist in Latin American affairs. MEXICO CITY - There is a debate underway within the Democratic Party over what kind of candidate can beat Donald Trump in 2020.

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The Democratic presidential candidates on stage Tuesday and Wednesday night are trying hard to woo primary voters so that, if they prevail, they can then make their case to the general population as the party's nominee. But the ultimate deciders come 2020 might not be the ones who cast ballots in neighborhood polling stations.

There is a very good chance that the Electoral College will split evenly on Election Day, throwing the race into the House of Representatives. And just as with the popular vote, the majority does not choose the winner. Though Democrats control the House and are likely to hold onto it in 2020, the system currently favors Republicans and all but guarantees Trump will be re-elected.

A Trump win via the House would represent the third presidential contest out of the last six where a Republican triumphs despite losing the popular vote.

An obscure constitutional provision spells out how an Electoral College tie is to be broken, with constitutional law professors and a small band of diehard political junkies just about the only ones versed in its details. An evenly split Electoral College between two major party nominees would be unprecedented in American history; the only times the House decided elections were in the case of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, when multiple parties competed and neither candidate got an Electoral College majority.

If the Electoral College splits 269-269 in 2020, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution dictates that the House pick a president and the Senate a vice president. But unlike a vote on a piece of legislation in the House, winning the presidency requires the support of a majority of state delegations - whereby each state votes as a unit to decide a winner, with New York's 27 House members and New Mexico's three getting equal say. Though Democrats have more members in the House right now by a 235 to 197 margin, Republicans form the majority of 26 state delegations to the Democrats' 22, and the GOP is likely to continue to hold most of those state delegations in 2020.

With the Electoral College split, the 117th Congress - House and Senate members elected in 2020 - would undertake the task of choosing the next president and vice president on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, according to federal statute.

Assuming Trump is the Republican presidential nominee, he would all but certainly emerge as the winner. And assuming the 2020 Democratic nominee wins the popular vote, a likely outcome since 2016 standard-bearer Hillary Clinton did by nearly 3 million ballots, a Trump win via the House would represent the third presidential contest out of the last six where a Republican triumphs despite losing the popular vote. ( Al Gore received some half-million more votes than George W. Bush in 2000.)

The procedure in this case - a few hundred politicians in the House choosing the president not even by a straight majority - would seem even more undemocratic and unfair than the two races determined by the Electoral College.

"It's among the most egregious violations of democratic principles imaginable," is how George Edwards III, a retired professor and author of " Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America," put it. "There's simply no principle that can justify it."

With half of the presidential elections in the 21st century resulting in the popular vote loser becoming president, concerns about the nature of American electoral democracy would only intensify. And one of the main critiques of the Electoral College - that it favors small states - would only be more stinging: A state like Rhode Island, with two House members, would have the same say in the decision as Texas, with 36.

Such an outcome would likely lead to drama and political strife beyond what we've already seen in the Trump years. To the point that it could be called a constitutional crisis - a conflict with no apparent solution that all sides could agree is legitimate - even though rules on how to proceed are laid out in the Constitution.

So, how would we get here?

Well, winning the Electoral College requires nabbing at least 270 electoral votes, a majority of the total 538. In 2016, Trump effectively won 306 electoral votes, to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's 232. The race was decided by three states that had voted Democratic since 1992 and moved into the Republican column in 2016: Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), Michigan (16) and Wisconsin (10). The trio is a sore point for many Democrats, as less than 80,000 votes combined for Clinton in the industrial behemoths would have made her the next president.

The three states are receiving considerable attention in the run-up to the Democratic primaries, with a pair of ace political analysts suggesting Pennsylvania and Michigan could both go Democratic with Wisconsin staying Republican. Under this scenario, advanced by David Wasserman for NBC News and Nate Cohn of The New York Times, Trump in 2020 could lose the popular vote by as many as 5 million, but still win a second term by a 270-268 margin in the Electoral College.

Indeed, heading into the 2020 race, Pennsylvania and Michigan look increasingly likely to return to their recent Democratic voting patterns. Trump's approval ratings hover in the low 40s, tough territory for an incumbent president. In Pennsylvania, House Democrats in 2018 picked up four seats over the course of the year - Conor Lamb in a March special election for a seat long held by a Republican, and three in the November midterms. Democrats also scored well in local races. In Michigan in the midterms, Democrats won two Republican House seats, took the governorship and made striking gains in the state legislature.

Wisconsin, though, is a different story. It's the focus of both parties' attention ahead of 2020, with Trump having beat Clinton there by about 10,000 votes out of nearly 3 million cast - the smallest margin in the three decisive states. Both parties are already on the ground, having learned the lesson of Clinton's decision to all but skip the state until the closing days of the 2016 race.

In fact, there's reason to think Trump has an edge in Wisconsin. His approval rating there is decent, and a late June Firehouse Strategies-Optimus poll showed him making significant inroads on the Democratic front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, closing a 12-point gap in March to trail just 40-46. Additionally, Trump's approval rating in the state had ticked up during that time, from 41 percent to 44 percent, with only 51 percent disapproving. (Similar polls in Pennsylvania and Michigan show Trump with worse numbers in both dimensions.)

So, Electoral College wins in Pennsylvania and Michigan but a loss in Wisconsin would provide the Democratic nominee 268 votes. In which case, Trump would win with 270 votes, the slimmest margin possible.

But there's one additional piece of the political-mathematical puzzle that will likely affect the result and wasn't addressed by Wasserman and Cohn - a single electoral vote in Maine. Nebraska and Maine are the only states to split its electoral votes according to who wins the race in each congressional district, rather than awarding all of them based on the entire state's popular vote.

Political trend lines are moving against Trump in Maine's 2nd District, the largest district west of the Mississippi and the second-most rural district in the United States. Maine as a whole is going Democrats' way: In 2018 the party won the governorship and state Senate, and GOP Sen. Susan Collins has seen her approval ratings drop precipitously.

If the Democratic nominee can claw back Maine's 2nd District while winning Pennsylvania and Michigan but losing Wisconsin, Trump's Electoral College total would drop by one, to 269. And that would be a tie, throwing the race into the House.

Fifteen months out from Election Day, the electoral math is pointing to the very real possibility of a tie, and then election by the House by the minority party. A second Trump term under these circumstances is hardly far-fetched. We would then find out if that makes for a constitutional crisis or just a political one.

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Opinion | The Electoral College could be tied in 2020. That helps Trump and hurts democracy.

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The Democratic presidential candidates on stage Tuesday and Wednesday night are trying hard to woo primary voters so that, if they prevail, they can then make their case to the general population as the party's nominee. But the ultimate deciders come 2020 might not be the ones who cast ballots in neighborhood polling stations.

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There's a lot of complaining about gerrymandering, but what should districts look like? We went back to the drawing board and drew a set of alternative congressional maps for the entire country. Each map has a different goal: One is designed to encourage competitive elections, for example, and another to maximize the number of majority-minority districts. See how changes to district boundaries could radically alter the partisan and racial makeup of the U.S. House - without a single voter moving or switching parties. How we did this "

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Aaron Bycoffe, Ella Koeze, David Wasserman and Juila Wolfe

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There's a lot of complaining about gerrymandering, but what should districts look like? We went back to the drawing board and drew a set of alternative congressional maps for the entire country. Each map has a different goal: One is designed to encourage competitive elections, for example, and another to maximize the number of majority-minority districts.

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For decades, liberals have called for government action to correct the excesses of the free market: progressive taxation; public health insurance; unemployment insurance; Social Security; and health, safety, and environmental regulations. The 2020 campaign - featuring proposals for higher taxes on the wealthy, Medicare-for-all, and the Green New Deal - is no exception.

But some of the candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren in particular, are taking a fundamentally different approach. Rather than compensating citizens for the unfortunate side effects of markets, they seek to reshape the markets themselves.

Warren's latest idea, the "Stop Wall Street Looting Act," is a perfect case in point. She seeks to rewrite the rules to constrain private equity firms from simply selling off assets and laying off workers in companies they invest in, and to press them to deliver more value to middle-class consumers and the economy as a whole.

This concept, which I call "marketcraft," makes market governance a core function of government comparable to statecraft, the art of diplomacy. Governments are the architect of markets: They not only lay the foundation for markets with the rule of law and property rights, but also establish corporations, the institutions at the heart of the capitalist economy. They foster stock markets via limited liability, disclosure requirements, and trading rules. They promote competition via antitrust policy and pro-competitive regulation. And they define the core commodity of the digital age - information - via intellectual property rights.

Thinking of government in this way opens us up to a profound rethinking of policymaking, one that is both less radical than democratic socialism - because it embraces capitalism - and more radical, because it seeks to transform capitalism from its roots.

This perspective abandons the pretense that markets are free or natural in favor of a more realistic view: The alternative to government action is not free markets, but real-world markets riddled with imbalances of power, collusion, and fraud. Rather than trying to correct the results of these imbalances after the fact, the government should not be shy about reshaping these markets to make them work better, through measures like corporate governance, financial regulation, labor practices, and antitrust enforcement.

The New Deal was marketcraft in action

Both left and right misunderstand how governments craft markets.

Those on the right tend to argue that the government should "leave" things to the market. Yet such laissez-faire is not only undesirable - it is impossible. Modern economies rest on the foundation of government regulation. The real choices are not about whether the government should intervene in the economy but about how the government should structure markets from the outset.

Many on the left are equally confused, but in a different way. They are suspicious of market solutions because they view these solutions as undemocratic and threatening to their values. But governments can craft markets to promote whatever policy goals they choose, including progressive goals such as economic equality or environmental protection.

The recent proposals to reform marketcraft have historical precedent, beginning with the ideas of the early-20th-century Progressive movement. Proactive marketcraft became national policy under the New Deal in the 1930s. The Banking Act of 1933 separated commercial from investment banking and created the federal deposit insurance system. The Securities Act of 1933 mandated financial information disclosure, and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 created the Securities and Exchange Commission. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 guaranteed collective bargaining rights and prohibited employer practices that would undermine them.

These reforms enabled financial markets to deliver more value to the economy at less risk, and gave workers more bargaining power vis-à-vis their employers.

After World War II, though, liberals focused less on marketcraft and more on Keynesian macroeconomic policies, welfare services, social regulation, and equal rights amid strong economic growth. Economic thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman claimed government intervention undermines free markets. Their arguments gained popular appeal after the stagflation of the 1970s provided the opening for President Ronald Reagan and others to put these ideas into practice by loosening financial regulation, attacking union power, and easing antitrust enforcement.

Reagan's overhauls were not really about "deregulation" in the literal sense of reducing regulation, but rather a reorientation of market rules to benefit the wealthy and powerful. The neoliberal ideology that views government as an obstacle to the free market rather than as the architect of markets became so pervasive that progressives internalized some of its core precepts even as they battled the resulting policies - proposing remedies for specific "market failures" rather than a more fundamental transformation of markets.

The Democratic Party even took a partial neoliberal turn under the administration of President Bill Clinton, which enacted NAFTA and decided not to regulate financial derivatives.

Market governance and inequality

To illustrate how the marketcraft approach differs from the more traditional liberal policy agenda, consider economic inequality, a defining challenge of our time.

As Thomas Piketty demonstrated in his magisterial work Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the United States since 1980 has experienced a historically unprecedented boom in the incomes of the top 1 percent of wage earners, mostly corporate executives, and especially the top 0.1 percent. Meanwhile, most Americans have gained little or nothing from the substantial productivity gains over this period. Piketty focuses particularly on tax policy in explaining this surge in inequality and in proposing remedies.

But failed marketcraft is at the heart of both the boom for the 1 percent and the stagnation for the rest, and better marketcraft will be essential to reversing these trends.

US executive compensation has soared as corporate governance shifted toward the shareholder model, under which managers are supposed to maximize financial returns for shareholders and not to reward stakeholders such as workers or customers. Legal and regulatory adjustments encouraged the business practices at the heart of this trend, such as stock options and share buybacks, which have not only boosted shareholder returns but also propelled skyrocketing executive pay at the cost of wages and investment.

Meanwhile, financial liberalization and lax enforcement have contributed to outsize profits and pay packages in the financial sector, which has taken up a growing share of the economy in recent decades without delivering greater value to household investors.

Changes in labor regulation and employer practices help explain the lack of gains for lower and middle-class workers. President Ronald Reagan cracked down on public sector unions and appointed more business-friendly representatives to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). State governments passed "right to work" laws that undermined union power by prohibiting mandatory union dues. Employers grew more combative in fighting unions, hiring specialized consultants to help them decertify the organizations. And Democrats failed in attempts to pass legislation to preserve union strength throughout this period.

The increase in market concentration across many sectors of the economy has boosted inequality by raising the gap in corporate returns and executive compensation between the superstar firms and all others, and undercut wages because dominant firms do not have to compete as much for workers. Laws governing intellectual property rights have contributed to economic inequality, as firms in sectors that rely heavily on intellectual property, such as high tech and pharmaceuticals, have garnered especially high profits and executive pay.

The more standard liberal approach would compensate for inequalities that emerge from market competition with redistribution via the tax system and social services.

The marketcraft approach would shift the focus to "predistribution" - the market rules that generate the inequality in the first place. The government could recalibrate rules in these areas to give workers a more powerful voice in corporations; to press financial institutions to deliver more value for the economy and fewer rents to themselves; to shift the balance of power between employers and workers; and to constrain market power to the benefit of workers and consumers. That would not undermine American capitalism but revitalize it.

Among the Democratic candidates for president, Warren has gone the furthest with this agenda. She proposes corporate governance reform to give labor representatives a voice on corporate boards and to constrain executives from manipulating financial returns to maximize their income from stock options. She supports labor reforms to shift bargaining power from employers to workers. She advocates more aggressive antitrust enforcement to constrain the market and political power of dominant firms. And she backs regulation to impede finance executives from seizing outsize rents for themselves and their firms, and to protect consumers from fraud.

To be clear, this isn't a case against any of the other essential elements of a progressive agenda, such as a more equitable tax system, universal health insurance, and public investment in education and infrastructure. We need all of those things.

But progressives should embrace the reordering of capitalism as their priority. Instead of tolerating a rigged market system and then compensating workers or consumers for injustices through tax and welfare policies, a turn to marketcraft would empower them to earn fair wages and to pay fair prices from the outset.

Steven K. Vogel is a professor of political science at the University of California Berkeley and the author of Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work.

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For decades, liberals have called for government action to correct the excesses of the free market: progressive taxation; public health insurance; unemployment insurance; Social Security; and health, safety, and environmental regulations. The 2020 campaign - featuring proposals for higher taxes on the wealthy, Medicare-for-all, and the Green New Deal - is no exception.

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Greg Knight has lived in Alaska his entire life.

It's where he went to school, raised his family, and planned to retire. But after Gov. Mike Dunleavy's recent veto of the state budget, which cut $130 million of state funding for the University of Alaska system, Knight said he might have to leave his beloved state.

When he heard the news, he started packing up the home he's owned in Anchorage for 20 years.

"It's heartbreaking," he said, but equivalent jobs just don't exist in the state. "If this goes through, I could find myself unemployed in a matter of 60 days."

Knight, 53, is a fiscal manager at the University of Alaska Anchorage, a job he doesn't think will be around if the veto stays. "I'll have to leave Alaska," he said.

If Dunleavy has his way, the university says it will have to eliminate 1,300 jobs, close entire campuses, lay off tenured faculty, and shutter academic programs. "We may not even be able to mow the lawns," university Chancellor Cathy Sandeen told NBC News.

Lawmakers and university administrators knew the state would cut $5 million from the budget, which seemed manageable and foreseeable considering Alaska has reduced its financial support of its university system four out of the past five years. But the extra $130 million added on by the Republican governor's veto, totaling a 41 percent cut in the state funding, blindsided the university.

The state Legislature has until July 12 to overturn the veto, but it needs support from three-fourths of the legislators. State political experts say it will be an uphill battle, and they will need to whip votes fast - right now it hinges on about six undecided Republicans.

If the cuts happen, "the university will drastically change overnight," Sandeen said. She and others say Knight isn't the only one who will leave the state, and fear an impending "brain drain."

"It would take decades to reverse this damage," Sandeen said. "We would see a reduction in student enrollment.

Sandeen, who has worked in public higher education for the past 30 years around the country, said, "I have never seen cuts of this magnitude."

Alaska is not alone in its struggle to secure state funding for its university system. Research from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that 45 states received state funding in 2018 far below pre-recession levels - driving up tuition, reducing academic opportunities and student services, and deterring low-income students from enrolling, all while student debt soars. But the northernmost state's situation is unique both because of its geography and the sheer size of the cuts.

The University of Alaska System has three universities, and 16 campuses, some of which aren't accessible by land. A large portion of students, whose median age is 25, work while they study, commuting to their nearest regional campus, and the three main campuses only have an on-campus student housing of five to 10 percent. Around 16 percent of students attending the system during the fall of 2018 were Alaska Natives, many of whom want to remain on their tribal lands as they study. If the cuts go through, regional campuses will close, and students won't have anywhere else to go.

The cuts worry Sandeen for many reasons, but she is focused on their "human costs." She says her college faces a loss of 700 jobs. "There will not be 700 replacement jobs for those people," she said. "Meanwhile, in the Lower 48, the economy and job market is hot."

Jim Johnsen, the president of the University of Alaska System, has the same concerns. Alaska's population is declining, and the state has a 6.4 percent unemployment rate, the highest in the country. Johnsen says the state's isolation exacerbates this issue.

"If we lay people off, they aren't going to walk across the street and get another job at another company, because we're it." Alaska has almost no private four-year institutions, and what it does have are minuscule and religiously-affiliated schools.

Dunleavy's office did not respond to a request for comment but he's said recently, "Over the past several years we have used $14 billion from our savings to subsidize the government. This situation, everyone agrees, is not sustainable."

If the cuts go through, Johnsen will have to scrap entire programs, and highly-skilled professionals and university researchers will leave. Even more, students will look to other states for their higher education, especially because Alaska has tuition reciprocity with other Western states. This worries Johnsen, who feels certain the cuts will worsen the "brain drain" - only 20 percent of students who leave Alaska for higher education return after graduation.

With the state's education system in such disarray, he worries it's more than just a brain drain.

"It's a brain gusher," he said.

Programs unique to Alaska will go away too. Many of the regional campuses are in predominantly Alaska Native communities, and have programs in Alaska Native languages and culture that - like all programs - will face cuts. This is one of the many reasons the cuts worry Sara Eliza Johnson, an English professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She says the cuts will force some indigenous students to "choose between leaving tribal lands to receive a quality education outside the state and staying at home to participate in their cultural communities."

"The ripple effect will be devastating," she said.

Knight said he isn't hopeful about the veto override, and is getting ready to put his Anchorage home on the market. He and his wife are thinking of moving to Oklahoma, where they have family, or Oregon, where he sees job opportunities.

"I'm an accountant, I've spent my life working with numbers," he said. "But it's about the people of the state, too."

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After a proposed 41 percent cut to the state university system, Alaska fears a "brain drain"

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Greg Knight has lived in Alaska his entire life. It's where he went to school, raised his family, and planned to retire. But after Gov. Mike Dunleavy's recent veto of the state budget, which cut $130 million of state funding for the University of Alaska system, Knight said he might have to leave his beloved state.

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Gavin Newsom (Wikimedia Commons)

California continues to terrify and confound conservatives. If liberal politics are supposed to be harbingers of economic and social disaster, California's successes certainly seem to be an inconvenient reality. The Golden State is running a $30 billion surplus while functionally locking Republicans out of power in the legislature and statewide office. California's economy is the 5th largest in the world, with job growth in the state far outpacing its relative share of the population. And the state is home to a diverse range of growing industries, including Silicon Valley's technology, Hollywood's cultural output, the Central Valley's agriculture, and coast's tourism among others. Notably, unlike some other states, California's boom depends very little on declining or soon-to-be-automated legacy industries like fossil fuels or industrial manufacturing. Higher tax rates, increasing diversity, better social services and effective environmental protections have not only failed to stunt California's economic powerhouse, they have served to make it a robust and vibrant place for life, work and entrepreneurship.

But California does have a few massive problems. The biggest of these is housing. A combination of geography, restrictive zoning laws, a pleasant climate, lack of rent control and artificially low property taxes created by shortsighted voter initiatives have created a housing catastrophe in the state. Gentrification is pushing longtime residents out of their communities, homelessness is a serious problem and young people are unable to live in the communities where they work. Millennials are particularly impacted: nationally, half of Millennial renters who want to purchase a home have no money saved for a downpayment. The problem is much worse in the state, where rents and mortgage costs are far higher than the national average but most jobs outside of tech and finance don't pay all that much more to compensate for the higher standard of living. The housing shortage in California is so massive it has its own lengthy Wikipedia page.

Conservatives love to claim that Californians emigrate to other states to get away from high taxes and liberal culture. The tax claim is utter nonsense; some Fox News acolytes may indeed leave to go where the weather suits their clothes. But the vast majority of those choosing to leave California do so to escape the exorbitant mortgages and rents-provided, of course, that they can find good work in a lower cost-of-living area, which isn't always a guarantee for those not on fixed incomes.

But unlike many other chronic problems in American society, California's problems can be fixed-mostly by building a lot of new housing. Newly elected governor Gavin Newsom has a plan to do exactly that:

Newsom has said California's housing crisis - driving up rent and home prices - is essentially a problem of supply and demand. He wants to spend state money to create more supply.

He proposes a $1.75 billion increase in funding for housing initiatives. Of that, he'd like to devote $1.25 billion in one-time spending for building new housing, which includes $750 million in grants to help local governments plan for increased housing production and $500 million to expand the mixed income loan program.

An additional $500 million would be devoted to tax credits, with $300 million going to the state's program for low-income housing developers, and $200 million going to a new tax credit program to help develop housing for higher income households.

Newsom says he wants the Department of Housing and Community Development to "establish statewide goals that break down by region so that they're more realistic and more nuanced." They plan to initially allocate $250 million of the $750 million to local governments to help them start reaching those goals, and then dole out the extra $500 million as the local governments hit certain benchmarks.

The biggest challenge to Newsom's plan is cities themselves. While Californians tend to be progressive overall on national issues, many older homeowners are reluctant to allow construction of new housing locally for a variety of mostly selfish reasons under the umbrella of NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard): they don't want views impacted by taller construction, they don't want poorer or younger residents nearby for fear of "crime" or reduced home values, they don't want any extra traffic on their way to the suburban shopping mall, etc. And city councils tend to be responsive to the priorities of the mostly older homeowners who vote in every municipal election and don't mind slow-walking their communities into becoming retirement centers where their grown children can only visit but never live, so long as they don't lose a dime of the parabolic property value increases they didn't actually earn or endure the horror of waiting an extra traffic light cycle to get to Trader Joe's.

Newsom's plan is to essentially compel cities and counties into building the housing they have so far refused to, through a combination of incentives and threats, including withholding funds from cities that refuse to comply. There are also bills proposed in the legislature such as Assemblymember Scott Weiner's AB50 that could force cities to allow for the construction of larger, denser, transit-friendly apartment buildings that would significantly increase the supply of affordable housing.

The bounded political parameters for housing in California aren't just generational or homeowner-versus-renter. There are also basic geographic, environmental and political constraints. No one YIMBY or NIMBY wants to see city councils and boards of supervisors give away the store to developers at the expense of community standards. Few want to increase sprawl, and most want insofar as possible to limit impacts to the local environment, water usage, and climate emissions in any new housing construction. In many coastal cities expanding outward isn't even possible because they're bounded by the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other. This ultimately means upzoning to allow housing in areas where it was previously banned; the construction of denser housing in urban zones that have lower environmental and water impacts; and building up rather than out, even though some residents may complain about the impact on their views.

These are challenges, but they certainly aren't insuperable. They're simply a matter of political will. Fortunately, it's an issue that is receiving greater attention from both legislators and activists, especially those most profoundly affected.

Having an ally in the governor's mansion is certainly a big help. If he can succeed, it could help spur similar reforms in other high cost of living areas around the country as well.

If you enjoyed this article, consider making a donation to help us produce more like it. The Washington Monthly was founded in 1969 to tell the stories of how government really works-and how to make it work better. Fifty years later, the need for incisive analysis and new, progressive policy ideas is clearer than ever. As a nonprofit, we rely on support from readers like you.
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Can California Governor Gavin Newsom help solve the housing crisis?

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Gavin Newsom (Wikimedia Commons) California continues to terrify and confound conservatives. If liberal politics are supposed to be harbingers of economic and social disaster, California's successes certainly seem to be an inconvenient reality. The Golden State is running a $30 billion surplus while functionally locking Republicans out of power in the legislature and statewide office.

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When trying to appeal to the progressive base of the Democratic party, it is frightening to take on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. After RBG said that the Supreme Court should not be expanded, however, there's an opportunity - and even an imperative - to do just that.

As reported by Politico last week, NPR 's Nina Totenberg asked Ginsburg about proposals to expand the court beyond its current membership. The justice responded: "Nine seems to be a good number. It's been that way for a long time. If anything, [court expansion] would make the court look partisan."

The very fact that a sitting Supreme Court justice is being asked about court expansion underscores the growing understanding among voters and opinion leaders that the court has been co-opted by the Republican Party, and has broken democracy for partisan ends by allowing voter suppression, gerrymandering and unlimited dark money.

RBG is an essential voice on the court and a vote for justice for all Americans. We suspect that she would agree, however, that it is not her role to acknowledge what everyone knows, that the Supreme Court has become a partisan institution. No sitting justice can break the taboo of the dispassionate judiciary by publicly questioning colleagues' commitment to the rule of law, let alone calling for reforms that would restore it.

Even though Ginsburg has to continue to maintain the pretense of the Supreme Court as a nonpartisan institution, the 2020 presidential candidates are under no such obligation. To the contrary, it is imperative upon them to recognize and reckon with the fact that the high court is a political institution that has been hijacked by the GOP to advance a partisan agenda on behalf of corporations and billionaires.

It is also an imperative that Democrats make the case to voters that democracy cannot be restored unless the court is reformed. Even if a Democrat wins the White House and persuades Congress to enact his or her signature legislation, the Court will strike down or sharply curtail any important statutes the new president manages to pass. It is frankly naïve to believe that the Roberts court would allow Congress to expand health care access, reduce economic inequality, mitigate climate emissions, eliminate gun violence or fix immigration.

The Supreme Court will block all of that, and if you think that Chief Justice John Roberts will ride to your rescue and rule in an even-handed way, we urge you to follow our forthcoming John Roberts-Is-Not-a-Moderate campaign. We will release extensive data showing that Roberts votes just as conservatively as his most extremist current and former colleagues - Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh - and that his reputation for centrism is wholly at odds with his record.

In fact, Roberts has leveraged the very conventions of neutrality and collegiality that prevent RBG from calling out her colleagues or from calling for judicial reform to bolster his unearned reputation as a moderate. When Roberts stated at his confirmation hearings that his job is to call "balls and strikes" and that he would respect precedent, he played to the myth of the nonpolitical Supreme Court, as when he recently asserted that there was no such thing as an Obama judge or a Trump judge.

Last week, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper became the 11th 2020 candidate to say that he is open to expanding the Supreme Court. Hickenlooper had been opposed to the idea, but came around after realizing that Justice Roberts and his conservative colleagues now pose a grave threat to Roe v. Wade, marriage equality and other core rights.

Without diminishing RBG's iconic status as a national hero, it is incumbent upon the 2020 candidates to make the case to voters that our democracy is broken and that the current makeup of the Supreme Court is a big part of the reason for that. As long as the high court will not allow Congress to restore democracy, judicial reform must remain on the table.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg is wrong - at least about the future of the Supreme Court

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When trying to appeal to the progressive base of the Democratic party, it is frightening to take on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. After RBG said that the Supreme Court should not be expanded, however, there's an opportunity - and even an imperative - to do just that.

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Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, is working to build a generational movement.

Gabriella Agnotti-Jones / Reuters

The key political partnership of the Millennial left was born over noodles. Saikat Chakrabarti met Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Potjanee, a Thai restaurant near his apartment in the West Village, in March 2017. She was looking to get into politics; he was helping fund people getting into politics through the Justice Democrats, the progressive political action committee he'd co-founded that year.

The result has been a viral sensation: a House freshman with more than 4.9 million Twitter followers; a call for a "Green New Deal," which has become a rallying point for young activists; and-from the cages on the border to the committees on the Hill-a serious powering-up of congressional oversight. This has made Ocasio-Cortez the leader of a movement, not just a congresswoman. Chakrabarti, for his part, has been much more than Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff-he's become the chief strategist of a generational insurgency.

But the political establishment has now trained its fire on their collaboration. It began in June as a clash between the speaker and her best-known freshman, when Nancy Pelosi caved to Republicans and moderate Democrats and agreed to pass an emergency-aid package, skewed heavily right, for the southern border.

But the move horrified members of the progressive left-it was bad politics, they thought, typical of their elders' timidity, and worse still, little in it would help the child migrants in what Ocasio-Cortez had called "concentration camps" on the border. Their pushback against it, which included tweets by Chakrabarti, outraged the party leadership.
John McWhorter: AOC's critics are pretending not to know how language works
This has made Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, until now little known, a political target. Maureen Dowd branded Chakrabarti " the real instigator" in The New York Times, and Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor, labeled him " a snot-nosed punk." But the backlash is about much more than either of them. What is happening is a containment operation against the Millennial left.

In some ways, my politics overlap with Chakrabarti's-the Harvard-educated tech millionaire who was a founding engineer at the online-payment company Stripe before volunteering to work for Bernie Sanders-but we have no shortage of disagreements. What we unquestionably share, though, is a Millennial perspective.

We've both seen successive promises made by the Boomer elites gone horrifically wrong. If you are our age-he's 33 and I'm 31-the great events that shape your worldview are not a series of Western triumphs, but a succession of spectacular failures. Our formative experiences were the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and the election of Donald Trump. That makes it hard to defer to a veteran like Pelosi on strategy, when her generation has racked up so many failures.

The Democrats are experiencing a clash of generations. As in all such clashes, each side sees the other as delusional. When the Millennial left looks at the establishment, it sees leaders senescent with decades in the House, blindly clinging to bipartisan civility that no longer exists, unable to see men like Mitch McConnell as their opponents and not their colleagues, and seeing white voters as the only path to victory in 2020. The Millennials see themselves as the realists here.
Read: House Democrats don't know what to make of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
The Boomer establishment thinks the opposite, rubbishing the frustrations of the Millennials as naive follies. They see the squad-the name the four freshman congresswomen endorsed by the Justice Democrats, all progressive women of color, have chosen for themselves-on a trajectory that loses the party the white voters it needs to win in 2020. Dismissing talk that minority turnout can make the difference, they want these young representatives to know their place and quiet down.

Both sides insist the party's midterm victories validate their approach. And with projections that back up both strategies, the approach to 2020 is up for grabs. But, as if Pelosi were determined to prove she was past her prime, she chose to have this fight over the migration crisis-where the new left sees compromise as not only morally abhorrent, but also politically pointless.

The Millennial left sees Republicans pursuing a scorched-earth policy on the border: deploying the Army in electoral theatrics, invoking conspiracy theories centered on George Soros, and painting all Democrats as open-borders fanatics. They took that approach in 2018, and are trying it again in 2020. Why compromise-here?

Pelosi's attacks backfired, harming both moderates and leftists. What began as an intra-party fight over a bill has morphed into anti-Ilhan Omar chants of "Send her back" at a Trump rally, a development as alarming as it was predictable-forcing the party moderates to stand by Omar's side.
Adam Serwer: What Americans do now will define us forever
And yet it was obvious that Trump would hijack any division. Or at least, it was obvious to anyone who fully recognizes how far American politics has changed since Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel first came to Washington.

In this fight, Saikat Chakrabarti's wunderkind biography has been turned against him, especially by moderates who have typically favored a softly-softly approach to Silicon Valley. Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, and spent his youth participating calculator competitions before working at a hedge fund and then a series of start-ups in San Francisco. Perhaps that made him a tempting target for Pelosi, as Big Tech replaces Big Oil as the left's most-hated industry. But after making his fortune, Chakrabarti rejected Silicon Valley's ideology in favor of backing antitrust reform and tax increases-volunteering for Sanders in 2015. This is when his generational insurgency began.

Nor is this the first attempt of this "snot-nosed punk" to remake Democratic politics. Chakrabarti's initial project, Brand New Congress, was launched in 2016 with other veterans of the Sanders campaign. It didn't lack for ambition. The group wanted to "recruit over 400 extraordinary ordinary Americans to challenge both Democrats and Republicans in congressional primary races across the country in order to replace almost all of Congress in one fell swoop." In the end, Brand New Congress recruited just 12-and only Ocasio-Cortez prevailed.

The frustrations of that experience-the country was just too polarized-spurred Chakrabarti to help create the Justice Democrats in January 2017. In place of Brand New Congress's failed model of bipartisan change, the Justice Democrats declared that they were "working to change the Democratic Party from the inside out." And that meant an aggressive approach. "Challenging incumbents in primaries is the best way to make them start to listen to people over corporate donors," the group declared. And, like the successful insurgent groups that transformed the Republican Party, it branded itself as openly radical.

Which brings us to the bigger accusation: that they should not be doing this. Sitting Democrats should be respectfully left alone. "They should stop attacking us," as one House Democrat told CNN. But from the party's point of view-not the politicians'-I'm not convinced.

David A. Graham: The overhyped feud between Nancy Pelosi and AOC

Progressive America is overdue for a generational replacement. The unexpected boomlets behind Beto O'Rourke and Pete Buttigieg and the Twitter sensation who is now Chakrabarti's boss reflect an unsated hunger for Millennial politicians. When Pelosi sniped that a " glass of water " could have won Ocasio-Cortez's district, her dismissive tone revealed how little she understood the dynamics of the Queens representative's appeal.

Partially, this is because the United States of politicians like Trump, 73; Biden, 76; Bernie, 77; and Pelosi, 79, is starting to feel like a gerontocracy. And this is striking compared with Europe, where Emmanuel Macron is only 41, Boris Johnson is 55, and Matteo Salvini and Pedro Sánchez are 46 and 47, respectively.

This Congress is among the oldest in history. The average member is 58 in the House and 62 in the Senate, with party leaders nearly a decade older. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 80. This aging cohort, on too many occasions, has shown itself not fit for purpose on 21st-century issues.

The cringeworthy performance of 44 senators last April trying to hold Mark Zuckerberg, 34, to account was what convinced me we need more Chakrabartis on the Hill-regardless of party-not fewer of them. Senator Orrin Hatch, then 84, used his time to ask the Facebook CEO how he sustained a "free" business model. ("Senator, we run ads," Zuckerberg replied.)

The party establishment should not be offering jobs for life and a career-protection service. Primary challenges are not new. Nor are the numbers here an unprecedented takeover: The Justice Democrats are currently endorsing just five challengers, and only seven of them are incumbents in the House.

In fact, it was a young challenger who's responsible for the Democratic Party's greatest recent electoral success. Barack Obama's failed challenge to Bobby Rush in the 2000 congressional primary shouldn't have seen him blackballed. He was 47 when elected president, and his youth played a major role in his candidacy, which saw a Democrat elected between John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who were both in their 60s when they were the party's nominees.

But if the strategy isn't novel, what about the policies the Justice Democrats are advancing?

This is less red than meets the eye. In Europe and across the rest of the Anglophone world, virtually no one would see Medicare for All as radicalism. Not only do British Conservatives and German Christian Democrats support public health care, but the Green New Deal-vision of state-led investment reminds me of the politics of my mid-century conservative heroes, including Harold Macmillan or Charles de Gaulle. And, further back, even Alexander Hamilton.
Read: A centuries-old idea could revolutionize climate policy

In fact, I find it very hard to pin the caricature of Chakrabarti the radical leftist-a " revolutionary" according to Henry Olsen in The Washington Post-to the actual Chakrabarti. Labeling the new left as "radical socialists" is lazy. But several moderate Democrats are doing just that, including Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas, who is facing a Justice Democrats primary challenge. "I think they're not Democrats quite honestly," he said on Fox News. "They're socialists."

But what Ocasio-Cortez's office likes to call "the Green New Deal ideology" is something more contemporary. Instead of reaching for 20th-century crutches, moderates should take the time to study-or at least read-the titles of the core texts posted to the website of New Consensus, the policy shop spun off by the Justice Democrats, to understand how Chakrabarti and his cohort actually think.

Books by Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England; the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf; and the historian (and my Hudson Institute colleague) Arthur Herman rub shoulders with the work of contemporary left-wing economists Mariana Mazzucato, Ha-Joon Chang, Ann Pettifor, and Stephanie Kelton. This is not Jeremy Corbyn's bookshelf.

The caricature gets even worse when it comes to migration. Too many people who should know better have bought into the Tucker Carlson charge that the members of the Millennial left want "open borders," including Bret Stephens at The New York Times, who characterized them as advocating " nearly unlimited immigration." But this isn't the case.

Wanting to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not the same as wanting to abolish the border. What they want is to make it less violent. That thinking is shaped by what groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, United We Dream, the Immigrant Defense Project, and Make the Road are advocating. Their long-term goal-if you listen-is an America that is actively increasing immigration, pulling in the workers needed for a booming, reindustrializing, techifying America.
Peter Beinart: AOC's generation doesn't presume America's innocence
What I see here is a more historically minded politics than moderates are giving the new left credit for. The books do not reflect a quest for "the emotional satisfaction of their own purity," to quote Maureen Dowd, but a keen interest in studying the right. What the Justice Democrats think they are doing is not creating the Freedom Caucus of the left, but rather, the Reagan Revolution in reverse.

Like the conservative movement, which launched the Heritage Foundation in 1973, failed to oust Ford in 1976 in favor of Reagan, only finally to win in 1980, the new left is set on a more distant prize. Sanders, the 77-year-old who sparked the Millennial left in 2016, is really their Barry Goldwater, the failed Republican nominee who, in 1964, brought movement conservatism to life.

Chakrabarti's cohort is trying to spur their generation to produce not just congressional wins, but broad cultural change backed up by a movement, outriders, and cultural icons. This, they think is even more important than winning the next election. Because without a movement, moderate presidents will be in office but not in power. For them it is better to plan to eventually win completely-than fall silent-hoping only for a shaky president, with little vision, to scrape in with 2020.

These guys are here for the long haul. The Millennial left in Congress is not a faction that needs to be slapped down, but a generation that should be engaged with, brought into the fold, and better understood. This is what a more-deft House speaker would be doing. But instead, the Millennial left is being turned into a straw man for Trump to bash.

I only wish Chakrabarti and his allies were being criticized for their actual ideas, and being challenged with competing plans, by competing Millennials, in the House. Where's the moderates' movement? Because too often, the fight between the Democratic establishment and the insurgents on Capitol Hill is really a battle between a plan-admittedly full of holes, errors, and blanks-against no plan, just a sense of entitlement.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Ben Judah is a contributing writer at Politico and the author of This Is London and Fragile Empire.

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key political partnership of the millennial

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chief strategist of a generational insurgency.but

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Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, is working to build a generational movement. The key political partnership of the Millennial left was born over noodles. Saikat Chakrabarti met Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Potjanee, a Thai restaurant near his apartment in the West Village, in March 2017.

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The Republican party has come out swinging against socialism - a strategy sure to be a mainstay of its 2020 campaigns. "Our opposition to our socialist colleagues," the Wyoming senator Liz Cheney claimed, referring to the congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, "has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion, or with their race. It has to do with the content of their policies. They are wrong when they attempt to impose the fraud of socialism on the American people. They are wrong when they pursue policies that would steal power from the American people and give that power to the government."

It's a bold line coming from the daughter of a man, the former vice-president Dick Cheney, who did more to centralize power in the executive branch than perhaps any other public official in living memory. It's also a bald-faced lie. Cheney's diatribe against socialism - like Trump's racist railing against the same group of progressive freshman congresswomen to "go back" to where they "originally came from" - has a long legacy in American history: it's called red baiting.

And this round is no less xenophobic than those before it. When New York legislators voted to suspend five socialist state assembly members in 1920, they did so on the grounds that they were "enemy aliens" who had been "elected on a platform that is absolutely inimical to the best interests of the state of New York and the United States".

The first red scare - well before the more well-known McCarthyism of the 1950s and 1960s - saw hundreds of real and suspected leftists deported under the Immigration Act of 1918. It also fueled the revived popularity of the antisemitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,with one well-circulated version replacing "Jews" with "bolsheviki". Unsurprisingly, many of the most prolific anti-communists were also committed segregationists who violently fought black-led labor and civil rights organizing in the south, accusing members of groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of being dupes for the Comintern. Nearly two decades before brutally suppressing Martin Luther King's campaign to integrate Birmingham's business district, the commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, cut his teeth by waging war on communists in the same city.
How Trump distorts facts to make Ilhan Omar seem like an enemy to the US
Throughout American history, attacks on so-called radicals have fit hand-in-glove with racist and anti-immigrant politics. The message - whether to Jewish anarchists, CIO unionists or (hardly socialist) Barack Obama - has never been subtle: you don't belong here.

The idea behind red-baiting has always been that there's something inherently foreign to the US about the left - that despite the longtime presence of socialism in America it's some toxic import, whether from the Soviet Union or elsewhere. And the CIA and FBI have spared no expense in violently suppressing socialists at home and abroad, from the killing of the Black Panther party's Fred Hampton in Chicago to the overthrow of the democratically elected leftwing government of Chile's Salvador Allende.

Given all their appeals to patriotism, what ironically seems so dangerous to red-baiting elites about socialism here is the threat that too many Americans will come together - across race, religion, immigration status, gender and more - and recognize their shared interest in taking power back from the 1%. For similar reasons - as the historian Robin DG Kelly has noted - steel executives stoked racism among white workers, to keep them from joining together with black co-workers to fight for higher wages and better working conditions. Consciously or not, Trump and the Republicans' fear of socialism and " the Squad " is also their fear of a multiracial democracy that would end theirs and their rich friends' stranglehold over politics.

"In our diverse society," as Ian Haney López and Heather McGhee have written, "racism has been the plutocrats' scythe, cutting down social solidarity to harvest obscene wealth and power." Whether in busting unions or gutting welfare programs, elites in both parties have maintained and expanded their control through a strategy of divide-and-conquer - of pitting the 99% against itself. The Squad are now a few of the many Americans calling bullshit, and the 1% is terrified.

Whatever lies the GOP throws out to try to cloud that fact, the kind of democratic socialism being voiced by politicians like Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib isn't any closer to the Soviet Union than our republic is to ancient Rome's. The goal is straightforward: orient society around protecting human and planetary wellbeing, not the endless accumulation of corporate profits.

Tens of millions of people remain uninsured while insurance and pharmaceutical executives rake in record profits, all as fossil fuel CEOs continue to get trillions of dollars' worth of state subsidies to extract and sell resources that could soon make the earth uninhabitable. You don't need to have read all three volumes of Marx's Capital to understand that this economy's priorities are out of whack. You don't need to be a registered Democrat, either: 52% of Republicans support Medicare for All, and 64% support a Green New Deal, compared with 81% of voters overall. From there, recognizing that an undocumented immigrant has more in common with an out-of-work coalminer than either of them do with Donald Trump isn't too far a jump.

If the GOP wants to stake its electoral chances on red-baiting politicians' seedy plots to give people free healthcare and a livable planet, so be it: there are more of us than there are of them.
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America's red scare is back. And it's racially tinged | Kate Aronoff

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The Republican party has come out swinging against socialism - a strategy sure to be a mainstay of its 2020 campaigns. "Our opposition to our socialist colleagues," the Wyoming senator Liz Cheney claimed, referring to the congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, "has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion, or with their race.

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Young people care a lot about climate change-but most of them can't vote. Here's how governments can adapt to accommodate them.

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The 2020 elections are fast approaching, and Donald Trump is already perfecting his campaign strategy: disgust his opponents, embolden his base and distract the general public.

As most people have heard by now, the president said that four congresswomen - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar - should "go back" and try to fix the "crime infested places" they "originally came from". He's continued rallying against them, accusing them somehow of being both godless communists and radical Islamists.
Donald Trump is the archetypal far-right charismatic leader. But his magic won't last | Paul Jackson
Outrage ensued across much of the political spectrum. Three of the four congresswomen attacked were born in the United States - the same unequal country they're trying to fix. Trump's rhetoric wasn't the dogwhistling acceptable in US politics (think Ronald Reagan's racially-charged attacks on "welfare queens"), it was a bullhorn. Even some Republicans joined Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats in passing a resolution denouncing Trump's "racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color".

Liberals who only weeks ago were calling Omar antisemitic for her criticisms of the Israel lobby were now rushing to her defense.

It's a familiar pattern: Trump does a very racist or sexist thing, Trump opponents call out his racism and sexism and declare victory. Democratic party elites jockey for the most "anti-Trump" position. Trump supporters rally around the president, his detractors remind each other he's not their president and things hit a stalemate until the next media event.

This is the exactly what Trump wants politics to become - not about issues, not a contest about the distribution of power and wealth, but a culture war hosted by the media and fueled by competing Twitter teams.

Hillary Clinton couldn't run on substance. Sure, there were progressive economic promises in her platform, but with her background, no one expected her to carry them out. She was a friend of Wall Street, she was a supporter of the Iraq war and the country's bloody foreign policy establishment, so instead of decrying inequality, she tried to win a landslide victory by way of the culture war. It was the corporate wing of the Democratic party against a "basket of deplorables" - it's no wonder that so many working people decided to sit the election out.

But Omar, Trump's most frequent target, is different than Clinton and those in the Democratic establishment. Most Democrats want to keep marrying failed neoliberal economic policies with the progressive rhetoric of inclusion, while Omar rejects neoliberalism and the party's corporate diversity-style politics. She tweeted yesterday, quoting Toni Morrison, that "the function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work" and she has refused any such distraction. Omar voted that day to raise the minimum wage to $15, she then flew back home to a cheering crowd and chaired a forum advocating Medicare for All. She has supported union drives and been on picket lines - she is, in other words, not peddling in the same progressive banalities as her corporate Democrat peers.

Omar sees that Trump wants to divide us on the basis of our race, creed or color to "prevent the solidarity of working people". Trump might want to fight a culture war, but we need to join her in fighting a class war.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

Topics

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Class politics is rising in America. Trump hopes a culture war might stop it | Bhaskar Sunkara

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The 2020 elections are fast approaching, and Donald Trump is already perfecting his campaign strategy: disgust his opponents, embolden his base and distract the general public. As most people have heard by now, the president said that four congresswomen - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar - should "go back" and try to fix the "crime infested places" they "originally came from".

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To listen to this episode of Amicus, use the player below:

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In a week marked by rising rancor, when racist rhetoric ricocheted out of the president's Twitter feed and into a chanting crowd at his reelection rally, the end of an era almost slid under the radar. Dahlia Lithwick reflects on the passing of Justice John Paul Stevens, and the more-than-symbolic shift from his jurisprudence, his character, to our current state of affairs at the high court and beyond. You can read more here. And Dahlia is joined by professor Mary Anne Franks of the University of Miami Law School to talk about her book, The Cult of the Constitution, how growing up among Christian fundamentalists helped her write a book about constitutional extremists, and why there's still hope for America's faulty founding document.

Produced by Sara Burningham.

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To listen to this episode of Amicus, use the player below: Join Slate Plus In a week marked by rising rancor, when racist rhetoric ricocheted out of the president's Twitter feed and into a chanting crowd at his reelection rally, the end of an era almost slid under the radar.

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Our world is getting warmer. This we know.

Just look at Alaska, which experienced all-time record heat in July, topping out at 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Dozens of other cities are in the throes of a heat wave this week, which forecasters have warned will be "prolonged, dangerous, and potentially deadly."

But how much will temperatures in US cities change by 2050? By then, scientists say average global warming since preindustrial levels could be about twice what it is in 2018 - and much more obvious and disruptive. It's a world you'll (probably) be living in. And it's the one we're definitely handing off to the next generation.
Here's how much the winters and summers in the city closest to you are predicted to change about 30 years from now. (More on our methodology here.)

Winters and summers will be warmer in every city by 2050. Type in other cities to see for yourself:

Our analysis, first published in October 2018, shows that in almost every case, the places we live are going to be strikingly warmer in a few decades.

Every season in every city and town in America will shift, subtly or drastically, as average temperatures creep up, along with highs and lows. Some of those changes - like summers in the Southwest warming by 4°F on average - will mean stretches of days where it's so hot, it'll be dangerous to go outside. Heat waves around the country could last up to a month.

Winters will lose days in the 20s and 30s. Rain and snowstorms will be more intense and frequent in some places and less predictable and lighter in others.

How winter and summer temperatures will shift nationwide by 2050

So much of a city's culture and economy depends on the particulars of the local climate. How high will summer electricity bills be in Frederick, Maryland, when it gets as hot as Tulsa, Oklahoma, is today? What happens to New Hampshire's tourism if there's little snow for skiing? Where will Phoenix, Arizona, get its water when the Colorado River slows to a trickle? When will the threat of devastating hurricanes make it too risky to live on the Gulf Coast?

For those who can't afford to move to cool off from the heat, or find work when local agriculture dries up and fisheries die, these changes will be devastating.
In the map below, see how the weather (and precipitation) in several Northern cities will look and feel a lot like how Southern cities do today. In some cities, it'll be like moving two states south.

By 2050, the weather in many cities will be similar to southern cities today

You may be thinking an average increase of a few degrees to your summer and winter weather doesn't seem that bad.

But buried in these averages are extreme weather events - heat waves, severe rainstorms, and droughts - that will be much more damaging and dangerous than the smaller shifts in averages.

In California, for instance, the average temperature shifts will be more subtle. But new climate models show there will be more frequent swings from periods of intense rain to extreme drought, a phenomenon known as weather whiplash. That will put extra stresses on dams and farmers and is likely to lead to more severe mudslides.

Indeed, not every part of the country will experience the same degree or same kind of change.
So we've highlighted the 10 cities whose winters and summers will warm the most and the least by 2050 - compared with your own. (You can sort by change in temperature.)

How your city's average temperature shifts compare to others

Sort cities by:

Shift in winter lows

Shift in summer highs

Population

Cities where winters will warm the most by 2050 How your city compares Cities where winters will warm the least by 2050 Cities where summers will warm the most by 2050 How your city compares Cities where summers will warm the least by 2050 Most populated US cities How your city compares Least populated of top 1,000 US cities

These projections tell us that Midwestern cities like Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit will see some of the most dramatic shifts in winter lows - from the low 20s up about 5.5°F to the high 20s.

Bozeman, Montana; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Chicago will all see their average summer high shift up by nearly 6°F - a much hotter overall summer.

And America's biggest cities, with the exception of San Diego, will all see both their summer and winter temperatures shift by more than 3°F on average.

The big takeaway: The farther north you go in the US, the faster it's warming. (The same is true for the northern latitudes around the world.)
So far, we've just focused on shifts in winter lows and summer highs. But there's more. You can see how temperatures are projected to change throughout the entire year near you:

And here are the projections for precipitation. If you compare cities, you'll see a lot of variation. And know that scientists are much more uncertain about how rain and snow will change than they are about temperatures:

Can we stop this from happening?

The scenario for future emissions we used to predict the weather in 2050 assumes that we will continue to burn fossil fuels at the same rate, and that the world will have warmed on average by 2°C, or 3.6°F, since preindustrial levels.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in early October reported that it is still possible to limit average global warming to 1.5°C, or 2.7°F - the more ambitious target under the Paris climate agreement - this century. But to do so, we would need to drastically cut emissions in the next 12 years, halving current levels by 2030.

That would take an unprecedented international effort. And many scientists believe we've already made irreversible changes, that we are already on course for at least 2°C, or 3.6°F, of warming by midcentury. It will take years, probably decades, for the climate system to fully register the greenhouse gases we've already emitted, are still emitting, and will emit in the coming years.

But as the IPCC argues, it's essential that we take every possible step now to reduce emissions to avoid the worst outcomes in the coming decades and centuries. Continued high emissions portend even more alarming changes to the planet by 2100 - with warming upward of 4°C, or 7.2°F. But we still have a real shot at limiting it to 2°C or 3°C.

This means immediately accelerating all the tools we already are using to decarbonize the energy system, and developing many new ones, like better technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Read our story about a new climate voter's guide and consider the political changes we'll need too.

As individuals, we can buy less, fly less, drive less, and eat less meat and dairy. We can start planning and preparing now for the warmer future. A problem like climate change was wrought by humanity, and its solutions must come from us too.

Where our data came from

To answer the question of how much temperatures in US cities will change by 2050, we looked at the average summer high and winter low temperatures in 1,000 cities in the continental US, comparing recorded and modeled temperatures from 1986 to 2015 to projections for 2036 to 2065. This offers us the best possible estimate on how much winters and summers will shift from 2000 to 2050.

With help from researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, we built our analysis on the Localized Constructed Analogs data set, which draws on 32 different global climate models. The scenario we examined is known as Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5, one standardized set of assumptions of humanity's trajectory in the coming years.

RCP 8.5 presumes that the world will continue increasing energy use at the same rate and in the same forms. It predicts the world will have warmed on average by 2°C, or 3.6°F, by roughly 2040.

There are very legitimate criticisms of RCP 8.5 - that it's too pessimistic, ignores progress we've already made on decarbonization, and majorly overestimates how much coal we'll burn. But two climate scientists we spoke to, Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick at the University of New South Wales, and Kate Marvel at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, argued it was a realistic scenario for now.

Scientists have also examined the future of the global climate presuming the world takes moderate to aggressive action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But emissions over the past 10 years track reasonably well with RCP 8.5, so it's a useful marker, establishing the boundaries of the worst-case scenario for the climate.

We averaged annual temperature and rainfall patterns for 30 years (1986-2015) to establish a climate baseline for cities. This average helps eliminate year-to-year variations in the climate like El Niño cycles, isolating the changes wrought by human activity. We then examined how these cities would warm by 2050, again averaging over 30 years (2036-2065). We limited our focus to the contiguous United States, where we had the best data and the most relevant cities for comparison. (Sorry, Alaska and Hawaii.)

There are some other caveats to this analysis. Temperature and precipitation are just two variables out of dozens that define a climate, so there will be many other shifts, including frequency and severity of extreme weather, that matter to people's day-to-day lives. "The timing and total rainfall of the rainy season really matter for agriculture," said Marvel. "What matters for city dwellers is the increase in precipitation extremes."

The climate data used here is also a global projection that's been downscaled, so some precision is lost when looking at smaller sections of the planet, like cities.

Credits

Fact-checker

Tim Williams

Special Thanks

David Pierce, Climate Research Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Peter Gibson, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Tushar Khot, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

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America is warming fast. See how your city's weather will be different by 2050.

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Our world is getting warmer. This we know. Just look at Alaska, which experienced all-time record heat in July, topping out at 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Dozens of other cities are in the throes of a heat wave this week, which forecasters have warned will be "prolonged, dangerous, and potentially deadly."

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It's a good time to be a Republican. But it's a bad time, George Will argues, to be a conservative. Hence his new, 700-page manifesto, The Conservative Sensibility, which tries to rescue conservatism from the perversions of the Trumpist GOP.

Will's conservatism is rooted in a deep mistrust of majority rule, and an almost religious veneration of the Founding Fathers, or at least a certain understanding of them. Remember, he writes, "the Constitution of the first consciously modern nation, the United States, protects the sovereignty of private individuals, not the sovereignty of a public collective, 'the majority.'"

Will is articulating a tendency that's always been present on the right, but is becoming more central today: the belief that majority rule will be the death of the American experiment, and that the conservative project is at odds with democracy. Will is more forthright than most on this point: He chides conservatives for blasting activist judges, for instance, arguing that the right needs a judiciary willing to make sweeping rulings to curb the power of the state and the whims of the crowd.

There's a lot to discuss here. And discuss we do. You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts, or streaming it below. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Ezra Klein

You write about a "braided relationship" between a person's political philosophy and his or her sensibility. Can you tell me a bit about that?

George Will

By sensibility, I mean something more than an attitude but less than an agenda. I didn't want to write another book telling people 10 things to fix America, or what to think, I'm more interested in how to think. How we think is a result somewhat of our sensibility of how we respond to the flux and flow of things in a complex society. That's as close as I can come to defining it.

Ezra Klein

In political psychology, there's this concept that Jon Jost, at New York University, calls elective affinities. That depending on where you start with your psychological makeup - whether you like change, or you prefer tradition - that some ideologies will be of more appeal to you. And it feels like you're getting at that concept here.

George Will

Right. I can put it in a less recondite way by quoting Virginia Postrel, who said that the story of the Bible reduced to one sentence is "God created man and woman and promptly lost control of events."

The conservative sensibility, as I understand it, says, "That's terrific." The conservative sensibility finds the lack of design and lack of control of a spontaneous-order, free-market society to be exhilarating. Some people find it frightening, others find it offensive that things are going on without people organizing it and bossing people around. The conservative sensibility says lack of control is a good thing.

Is conservatism about accepting change or preventing it?

Ezra Klein

That's surprising, because when I think of conservatives and the conservative movement, I think of a preference for order. That's often assumed to be within both the conservative agenda and the psychological makeup. And yet you're defining it as a group of people who are actually quite comfortable with a sort of disorder.

George Will

Yes, the people who say conservatism wants to defend order have a good point, but the wrong country. European conservatism evolved in defense of established institutions, orders and hierarchies, often nobility, often monarchy, often established churches. And it became self-conscious and articulate under Edmund Burke, who was of course in strong recoil against the French Revolution, and its turmoils, and wound up celebrating the British public as the stolid cud-chewing cow in the meadow, with grasshoppers making lots of noise but having no consequence.

American conservatism is something the reverse, which is to say it celebrates and wants to reconcile people to the hazards and frictions granted, and the creative destruction, the exhilaration of a free society.

Ezra Klein

There's a tension here between the conservatism that is comfortable with the creative destruction of the market and conservatism's defense of the preexisting social hierarchies, which has given the conservative movement much of its power in the US.

Your book is dedicated to Barry Goldwater, but in 1964, the only region he won was the South, and that was based not on a preference for a free-market approach to affairs, but a frustration about the way civil rights was changing their states. So how do those two things reconcile?

George Will

They don't always reconcile. There are tensions within conservatism: There's the localism that took a particularly unseemly and nasty turn with Jim Crow laws, which reflected local majorities. But there is a social conservatism that says if you're going to have the free-market, lightly governed society, then you're presupposing a moral capital that institutions, religious and otherwise, have to nurture. Therefore the civil society becomes a principal concern of those who are less concerned about a strong regulatory administrative state.

Ezra Klein

Your book is built on the idea that there's a fundamental conflict between conservatives and progressives on the idea of human nature. What do you see as the conservative view of human nature, and where does it differ from that of progressives?

George Will

Human nature is not plastic. People are not as malleable as some people thought they were. John Dewey, for example, and some of the early political scientists at the turn of the 20th century, said that people were reflections of an ever-evolving culture, and it's a political project to take charge of the evolution of the culture to make sure that it progresses. Hence, the label "progressives."

Ezra Klein

It seems to me there are two ideas built into that, and I agree with one and probably disagree with the other. It does seem to me that human beings are remarkably plastic - what they're not is predictable. We were hunter-gatherers living in big kinship communities. We have adapted to extraordinarily different circumstances over time. On the other hand, the idea that we can organize that plasticity and direct it in a clear rationalistic way is, I think, proven wrong again and again throughout history. It seems to me that you can take half of that without taking the other half.

George Will

You probably can. I think the conservative sensibility wants both halves. I'll tell you what John Locke and James Madison had in mind. Locke said that individuals are self-conscious creatures who define themselves through action. They are largely self-interested, and will behave in more or less predictable ways. Which is to say, politics can take its bearings from the steady constant in human behavior. Conservatives say 'what's the worst in life, and let's try to avoid it.' And the worst result in politics is tyranny. And you work from there. How to limit government and make tyranny, including tyrannical majorities, less likely.

Ezra Klein

That's a very broad definition of human nature, but the way that you apply it in the book is more narrow. The argument you're making, as I understand it, is that this idea of human nature flows into the idea of limited government, and this idea of limited government flows into certain political structures. And as I understand the structures, they would take things like a big national health care system, among other policies, off the table. It's a big jump to go from a Lockean idea of human nature to a narrow vision of what government can do.

George Will

It is a big jump, but the question of the proper scope and actual competence of government are not severable questions, and they are largely informed by human experience. Short term experience in the United States from the New Deal on, in the larger context, the last 600 years of North Atlantic community history, again informs us about the proper scope and actual competence. And as I say, those are not quite severable questions.

On "the empirical case for limited government"

Ezra Klein

In the book, you write, "The empirical case for limited government is that although human beings have something in common-human nature-they are different in capacities and aspirations. From this it follows, not logically but practically, that government cannot hope to provide happiness to all. The most it can reasonably expect to provide are the conditions under which happiness, as each defines it, can be pursued."

If this is to be defined as an empirical question, then it seems we could look at places that have done different things, like Canada and Western Europe, and see if people are happier and go from there. I take it that that probably would not be amenable to you.

George Will

To come back to the subject to raise, national health insurance. That's largely a utilitarian call. There are people who say that the human experience in what we call more advanced societies has shown that ... certain protections and rights, alongside restrictions on or duties for government, make people have a worthy happiness. In that sense, as I say, we're all rule utilitarians learning as we go along.

Ezra Klein

You frame that reasonably positively. It seems to me you're saying that you can hold those opinions and even potentially be a conservative?

George Will

Sure.

Ezra Klein

That's interesting, because you argue for a version of judicial review in the book, that I think would take a lot of this off the table. And as I understand it, it flows from these fundamental assumptions of human nature and limited government. But does it not? Am I misunderstanding that chain?

George Will

Well, I'm not ... I do have a very expansive role for the judiciary, to produce what Madison called "mitigated democracy." I'm not saying that Social Security or Medicare or what have you should be considered unconstitutional. I am saying that there are certain rights necessary to human flourishing that enumerated or not, and the ninth amendment of course provides for unenumerated rights, that cause me to think, for example, the Lochner decision was quite right, because the freedom to contract is fundamental to the flourishing of autonomous individuals either as individuals or cooperating voluntarily in groups.

Ezra Klein

Help me draw out the distinctions here. The book seems to me to be constructing an argument from philosophic first principles for a very different world than the one that someone like me would prefer. I'm having a lot of trouble in this conversation drawing out the distinctions. In the book, you're clear you want something quite different than what we see. That you think we've gone quite far off the rails. Tell me about how America should look differently?

George Will

The book is dedicated to the memory of Barry Goldwater, for whom I cast my first presidential vote in 1964, when 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time, or almost all the time. Today, it's 17 percent. Now I would think my progressive friends would be interested in the fact that the 60 point collapse has occurred, because everything progressives want to do depends on strong government, and that strong government depends at the end of the day on public confidence in the government.

You ask how would America be different? We'd be much more lightly regulated. The states would be less administrative appendages of the federal government. We would have congressional supremacy reestablished. We would not have a presidency untethered from any restraints imposed by the separation of powers. We would have a president not empowered to declare emergencies and wield powers given to him by Congress. The complaints that modern presidents usurp powers is unfortunately not true. They're wielding powers that were all too willingly given them.

The one thing my hero James Madison got wrong was he said that under popular government all power is sucked into the impetuous vortex of the legislature. In fact, legislature has been spinning off the powers. Congresses under both parties have been spinning off powers to presidents of both parties.

Ezra Klein

It is hard for me to believe that the government were doing less to solve the problems people felt they had, that they would like it better.

George Will

Well, it's curious though, that as governments pretensions and solicitousness have grown, its prestige has plummeted. This began in the 1960s, when the landslide against Goldwater produced the first liberal legislative majority in Congress since 1938. What government does that it knows how to do is something like Social Security. You identify an eligible cohort and mail the cohort checks. It's good at that.

What it's not good at is creating, for example, model cities, or nation building abroad. That's far more ambitious than what the New Deal had in mind, and far more subject to disappointment. And disappointment produces the curdled American attitude toward the national government that exists today.

Ezra Klein

Let me go back to the story about trust, because I think it's interesting. One problem with all this of course, is the lack of survey data going back much further than the '50s, '60s, '70s. But let's grant that the New Deal era, which follows a large expansion of governmental power, is a high watermark for trust in government, and then in the Nixon era and what follows it, you begin to see a large and consistent fall. It seems to me there's a consistent story here that says something like, you had ideologically mixed political parties with low polarization and a not-very nationalized media and this led to reasonably high trust in government.

Then as the parties polarized, and a conservative movement with its own oppositional media developed that was about attacking government and bringing attention to its failures, trust in government falls. Put another way, trust in government is less about what government is doing and more about what is being said about it and reported on about it.

George Will

I think that's right. I am frankly bewildered by the intensity of our political argument today because I don't know what we're arguing about. I'm much more alarmed not by the discord in America, but by the consensus, which extends from Elizabeth Warren on the left to Ted Cruz on the right, and it is this: We should have a large and generous welfare state and not pay for it. Everyone's agreed on that, as far as I can tell, and the public loves it - they get a dollar's worth of government and are charged 80 cents for it. And the differences fobbed off on the unconsenting, unborn future generations.

We used to borrow money for the future - we fought wars for the future, built roads, harbors, airports for the future - now we're borrowing from the future to finance our own consumption of government goods and services, and everyone's agreed on this. It seems to me the political class is more united by self-class interest than it is divided by ideology in this regard.

Political scientists have been saying for years that Americans are ideologically or rhetorically conservative, but operationally liberals. Absolutely true. They talk like Jeffersonians and insist on being governed by Hamiltonians.

What did the founders believe?

Ezra Klein

I think this is a nice bridge to the chapter on judicial review and the Constitution more broadly, which seems to me to be the heart of the book. You argue that the conservative experiment is fundamentally about the founding experiment, that it's about the views of the founders as embedded in the Constitution, which you argue operationalizes the Declaration of Independence. Can you talk a bit about that view?

George Will

Yes. I should say that among those who sternly rejected that view of mine that you just accurately describe was for example, Justice Scalia. Scalia said the Constitution contains no philosophizing. The Declaration was a revolutionary document useful in its time in place, but has nothing to do with the Constitution.

My view of the Constitution is that it should be read in the light cast by the Declaration of Independence. The most important verb in the Declaration is in the second paragraph, which says, "All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights and governments are instituted to secure those rights." And when you start from that, you were put on the path to limited government, and therefore the respect for the, what Hayek called the spontaneous order of a market society,

Ezra Klein

In your book, you write about the importance of what the founders intended, but you also write about the fact that the founders split into the political parties in part over their differing views of what the Constitution permits, and was intended to create. Given the diversity of views among the founders, how can we talk clearly about what "the founders" as a group intended?

George Will

By understanding that while we had these robust, wonderfully interesting arguments they were arguing about what kind of people we were going to be. [To Jefferson] we needed a vast extensive republic, in which there would be lots of land for steady, rural, self-reliant yeomen, rather like Thomas Jefferson. And Hamilton said, No, actually, we want public credit system of finance, and a debt to help with economic growth to allow for a restless, entrepreneurial striving, urban manufacturing commercial class of people rather like Alexander Hamilton.

They were really arguing about the soul of the country, what kind of people we were going to be. I once wrote a book, read by dozens, called Statecraft As Soulcraft, in which I argued that when you organize a society, and particularly when you pick an economic system, you are, of necessity, picking the kind of people you're going to deal with. Your statecraft becomes soulcraft.

And I think America made a wise choice to have a robust, constantly turning market society with the consequent individualism celebrated. What worries me more than anything about the American future is that will now have a great flinch. People will say, "this kind of freedom is stressful, and there are casualties and frictions and uncertainties, and it's just not worth it anymore."

Ezra Klein

I want to hold here on the question of founder interpretation, because as you go through the book, you're arguing for the judiciary at this point to take on a much more active role than even most conservatives support. But given what you're allowing here about disagreements between the founders, there are obviously fundamentally different ways to interpret the Constitution.

George Will

Let me be slightly autobiographical here if I may. I wrote my doctoral dissertation at Princeton and the title was "Beyond the Reach of Majorities." It's a phrase from the second of the flag salute cases. The one in which they overturned a decision just three years earlier, when they had held that it is okay as an exercise of the police power of the state to require Jehovah's Witnesses children to salute the flag, even though it violated their fundamental beliefs, because the government was saying national unity is a public good.

In his opinion overturning that in West Virginia v. Barnett, Justice Jackson said, "The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to play certain things beyond the reach of majority's and above the vicissitudes of politics." Oliver Wendell Holmes, a great progressive pin-up, said, "If the American people want to go to hell, I will help them, it's my job." That is to get out of the way of majorities, of the dominant forces in the community, as he kept saying. Well, I do not believe that, and I think the conservative sensibility rejects the idea that America is about majority rule.

[America is] not about a process majority rule; it's about liberty. Obviously, majorities should rule where government is going to rule, but the fact is that majorities can be tyrannical, and they can be self-interested. Furthermore, as I argue at length most of what governments do have nothing to do with majorities - they have to do with government responding to compact, articulate, confident, and well lawyered minorities who understand the levers and pulleys of the modern state and manipulate them for their advantage.

This is why I think Elizabeth Warren has a firm grip on half a point. She says, "Look, there is a reason why five of the 10 richest counties in America by per capita income are in the Washington area, Washington doesn't make anything save laws and regulations and trouble, and has no natural resources. But there are trillions of dollars sloshing through the system here and deflected and controlled by this. And the government often is the captive of these factions." Then she inexplicably says, "Well, the answer is to make the government very much bigger and very much more involved in allocating wealth and opportunity." It seems to me that this is just going to make matters very much worse.

Ezra Klein

Let me put a pin in Warren's answer, because I want to come back to it. But one question your point raises is this: the president of the United States was the runner-up in the popular vote, the Senate is controlled by the party that got fewer votes than the minority party, the Supreme Court is controlled by Republicans, which it wouldn't be if these things had gone the other way. In a country where the majority controls so little, are we really in danger of tyrannical majority rule?

George Will

You are in danger of tyrannical minority rule inflicted by supposedly majoritarian institutions. It's particularly evident that at the state level, where you have all kinds of rent seeking, domestic protectionism of various interests, passed by majoritarian institutions, but in no conceivable way responsive to majorities.

The good and bad of gridlock

Ezra Klein

This seems to be then where you do have a deep divergence. One view is to say that in a country where you have this much government and this poor level of responsiveness, you just can't have this much government without endless corruption. The other view, which tends to be the view of progressives like Elizabeth Warren, is that the government needs to do these things, so we should work really hard on things like anti-corruption and campaign finance reform, which other countries, like the Nordics and Canadians, have done.

The true dividing line is: Do you want to try to manage the problems of capture as you go along, or simply not create all that much to capture? But then in a system built for gridlock, we end up doing neither.

George Will

My view is a gridlock often is not an American problem, it's an American achievement. That a great many people in the world live under governments they wish were capable of being gridlocked. When the founders went to Philadelphia in 1787, they did not go out to devise an efficient government, the idea would have appalled them. What they wanted was a safe government, to which end they produced three branches of government, two branches of legislative branch, each with its own electoral rhythm and constituencies, judicial review, veto, veto override, supermajority - all kinds of ways to slow the creature down. And yet, I can think of nothing that the American people have wanted intensely and protractedly they did not eventually get.

The idea that we are really hopelessly gridlocked is absurd. People say, "Well, nothing gets done under the Obama administration." Well, nothing except the largest, most sweeping financial regulation since the 1930s, and the Affordable Care Act, the largest domestic welfare legislation since 1965.

Ezra Klein

We were talking when we started the podcast about how I live in California now. And as a Californian, I have a lot of experience of gridlock. And I always think it's actually a better metaphor for government than people give it credit for. Because when you have gridlock, what happens is not that nothing moves, it's that people begin taking weird city streets, and they get places slowly, and they're angry when they get there. But gridlock does not, as Californians will attest, stop people from going places; it changes how they end up getting there, and makes the experience miserable.

And that seems to me to be true for how American gridlock functions. So, it is true that things do ultimately get done, they're just worse than they would otherwise be. That said, I disagree that there's nothing the American people have wanted in an intense and protracted way that they have not gotten. I think truly universal health care is something they've wanted and have not gotten.

George Will

Why haven't they gotten it?

Ezra Klein

Because in America, the institutions through which you would have to push something like that are extremely difficult, whereas in other countries under parliamentary systems, when a political majority is elected based on a promise to create universal health care, they more or less have the power to pass that law. And so in every country, in Western Europe, and Canada, and Japan, where people gave the majority that power, the majority used it. Here, we've many, many, many times elected the majority, that promise universal health care, and it is never polled poorly to create universal health care. And it has failed over and over and over again.

Another example of this is immigration reform. George W. Bush tried it, Barack Obama tried it. A majority of the country polled in a million different ways has said they would like a comprehensive immigration reform compromise in which you get more border security and some kind of path to legalization. Yet, under Bush it died in the Senate, and under Obama, it passed out of the Senate and was never brought to a vote in the House because of the fear that it would pass. Now we have Donald Trump, who has only increased the popularity of that idea.

George Will

I think your example of immigration is much stronger than your example of health care. Immigration is such an interesting issue, because a majority of Republicans favor a path to citizenship, not just legalization, but a path to citizenship for the 11 million who are here illegally. The fact that we can't move on this, does indicate the veto-ocracy we live in. I think that may be [Francis] Fukuyama's description of us: that we have these extraordinarily efficient blocking mechanisms and institutions.

Should judges have even more power?

Ezra Klein

I want to return to the topic of judicial supervision before we run out of time. You argue for much more expansive version of judicial review. If judges were indeed these supra-political figures, who existed with no allegiance to anything but the Constitution, it would be one thing. But as it is, judges are increasingly highly politicized figures, who come up through a long association with whatever political party ends up appointing them. The fundamental problem of the constitutional structure stems from having two parties competing across branches, as opposed to branches competing with each other. Giving judges much more power seems to only magnify the problem.

George Will

You're quite right to worry about judges. I worry about everyone who exercises political power and judicial power, all of this. But I'm less afraid of judges than I am of what the administrative state does and what Congress does to enable the administrative state to do what it does. There's no safety in politics. I just think that at this point in our history, that the court really is for reasons not the ones Hamilton was referring to when he coined the phrase, it is the least dangerous branch.

Ezra Klein

But why? I'd say it's safer to at least rely on Congress and legislators and others as representing some kind of will. If it's just the judges making their own arguments, then you end up in this place where the judiciary begins to lose credibility quite quickly, because people disagree with the arguments. And so if you have this kind of judicial review, how do you prevent that from happening?

George Will

What makes the judicial review so much fun, is that uniquely in judicial review, the court has to say why it is doing what it's doing. It has to reason from precedent and it has to reason from political philosophy. People will often say, "Well isn't it interesting that Americans don't do political philosophy? They have the Federalist Papers and nothing much after that." So absolutely wrong. The Supreme Court reports are where we do political philosophy. Where we reason about the meaning of equality and freedom and justice and all the rest.

So, you have to take the risk, you have to bear the heat, because you are defending a super permanent majority. That is the majority that launched the country, wrote the Constitution and made it possible but difficult to amend.

Ezra Klein

Let me ask you about that. You have a very interesting paragraph on constitutional interpretation. You write that "the threshold question when evaluating any particular mode of construing the Constitution is whether the mode would dictate declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. No acceptable theory for construing the Constitution can invalidate the court's conclusion in Brown; the conclusion invalidates any theory that rejects it."

But you also believe we should go back to the founders' intent, and the founders clearly thought segregation and much worse was constitutional. And the Brown decision itself held that segregation violated the 14th Amendment, which was not added by the founders. It's hard for me to reconcile the faith you place in arguing from founders' intent with a threshold test like that one.

George Will

Well, here's where you and I would differ only on what I'm referring to when I refer to the founders' intent. What were they trying to produce? They were trying to produce a society, a free society respectful of a vast scope of individual autonomy, exercising natural rights. My doctrine is sort of Living Originalism, in that it's the original intent, which is broadly libertarian for our society, applied to today's circumstances.

I love all the recondite hairsplitting on this kind of originalist and that kind of originalist, but I keep coming back to one of the reasons why Scalia described himself as a "faint-hearted originalist." The Eighth Amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishments. Now we know what was being done to punish people at the time the founders wrote that.

If you simply take the original public meaning of the word cruelty, we would not be able to strike down a law today that allowed branding, cropping ears, flogging, pillorying, etc. But instead we say, "Look what the founders intended, their original intent was to get rid of cruelty." And we've changed our minds about cruelty, and that's perfectly permissible. But the original intent was still there, that cruelty shall not be practiced in the United States.

Ezra Klein

This is why I find myself so skeptical of your approach. One thing we very much do know about human nature is we all find arguments that appeal to our ends more convincing than those that don't. There are wrong interpretations of the Constitution that clearly violate the document's text. But there isn't a right answer to a lot of hard constitutional problems, there are a range of them. And you end up in a space where what you have is answers that are generated by power and ideology that people are calling constitutional truth.

I think one reason people like me prefer more majority rule is that at least it's clear what the form of accountability is and how people can change it as opposed to running this dance where the two sides are fighting to death over the Supreme Court, so they can appoint people who agree with them politically, but are good at dressing that agreement up in constitutional language.

George Will

Well, I think you're a Holmesian, much more presentable than the original, but a Holmesian nonetheless.

Ezra Klein

I often think of myself as a presentable Holmesian.

George Will

Well, good. No, I understand your point, and it comes down often to what do you fear most? And you and I fear different things.

You fear the atrophying of democratic muscles. I fear much more the inevitable capture of sprawling administrative state by determined muscular, skillful, articulate compliment, well-lawyered factions.

My view is very much informed by public choice theory, which reduced to its essence is that people in the private sector try to maximize their interest, often profit, people in the public sector do exactly the same thing. They try to maximize their power. And that if you de-sentimentalize your view of government, you will come to a conclusion that there is more to fear than an attenuation of majority rule.

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George Will makes the conservative case against democracy

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It's a good time to be a Republican. But it's a bad time, George Will argues, to be a conservative. Hence his new, 700-page manifesto, The Conservative Sensibility, which tries to rescue conservatism from the perversions of the Trumpist GOP.

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Pete Buttigieg and I were teaching assistants for the same professor, Sacvan Bercovitch, probably America's leading interpreter of American Puritan literature, me at Columbia, Buttigieg nearly a quarter-century later at Harvard. This being our common ground, the differences between our experiences and how we would describe them are telling. I recall Professor Bercovitch as being singularly disinterested in his TAs. He would task you with a bit of research while conveying that he had no particular expectations of you, almost as if to say, "You might do this, you might not, doesn't matter much to me either way." He was immersed in whatever he was immersed in, and I imagined he assumed that you had your obsessive immersions too, if you were lucky, and they weren't likely to be the same as his, and you should follow yours, not his, because-well, for obvious reasons.

Buttigieg's Bercovitch is different. In Shortest Way Home, the South Bend mayor's 2019 memoir, he shares that Professor Bercovitch's first name, Sacvan, was a gesture of imaginative radical solidarity on the part of his parents, an amalgam of the names of the wrongfully executed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. More importantly, Buttigieg (unlike me) closely read Bercovitch's books and was greatly influenced by them. In his senior thesis at Harvard, Buttigieg returned to Bercovitch's ideas about Puritan literature and applied them to the Vietnam War, and considered how in Americans' still-Puritan frame of mind, we see ourselves as fundamentally different from other nations, chosen by God in a way other nations aren't. Buttigieg's senior thesis contrasts that sense of identity with the skepticism toward American values expressed in books like Graham Greene's The Quiet American. I'm going from Mayor Pete's own description of his senior thesis here, as he describes it in his book.

I don't know who the typical reader is of presidential-candidate books. Seriously conscientious voters mostly would be my guess, God bless them. Biography readers are already a unique breed. Any good biography always has another main subject besides the person it's about, and biography readers grow adept at reading stereoptically: like you're looking straight at someone, but you're really focused on what's to their left or right, or behind them, at a milieu, a sense of time and place. Political autobiographies of presidential candidates, on the other hand, are something else-part of the campaign, something every candidate has in his or her travel bag, the little black dress you can always throw on when the occasion demands it.

I'd like to think, though, that these readers of political autobiographies take them more seriously than that. We have a personal relationship with our presidents unlike what we have with other elected officials. We think of them as part of our immediate circle of family and friends. We expect to see one or another of them at breakfast or after dinner. And this election, well, it's arguably the single most important election in our nation's history, right? So we read their books to sustain that illusion of an intimate relation, because we feel we have to know who they really are.

And right now Buttigieg seems to be the presidential candidate we most want to know. So I'm studying the self-portrait he gives in his autobiography, and trying my best to ignore the commentary about him that's all over the map, from a New York Times paean to a salacious Dale Peck essay calling Buttigieg "the gay equivalent of Uncle Tom" that the The New Republic posted and then took down. Related Article

As I read Buttigieg, the audacity of this 37-year-old's writing his autobiography rubs me two ways. Even JFK, with Profiles of Courage, didn't think he was ready to find meaning in his own story yet, and instead wrote profiles of the people he most admired. If Buttigieg were any younger he might have taken on the project of his autobiography as a practical joke. And I begin to realize that in every chapter of Shortest Way Home -indeed, almost on every page-there is an expression of the same underlying idea, which is that you can substitute experience with problem-solving skills, and approximate perspective, ideology, even morality with sheer intelligence and boldness.

This closely resembles the arrogance of tech billionaires who believe that although they have neither the knowledge nor the experience nor the wisdom, they can solve the world's problems anyway, because, well, because look how successful they've been at everything else. You almost want to cheer them on. Until you realize that they are dead wrong, that if they want to help solve the world's problems they had better stop sucking all the oxygen and money out of the room and start paying taxes and letting there be a return to a balance of power that lets us hear from the scientists, philosophers and, yes, the politicians, who are deeply versed in how worlds are lost or saved.

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At a similar point in his campaign for president of France, Emmanuel Macron also wrote a book. It's called Revolution, and in it he portrays himself as a kind of techno-socialist, thumbing his nose at the two encrusted main parties, and positioning himself as a hedge against Marine Le Pen, the charismatic daughter of Jean-Marie and earthy far-right threat to French democracy whom everyone saw as the greatest danger. I am not ashamed to admit that Macron's book impressed me-for its French vision of tolerance-of Islam, in particular-and cooperation among nation states, and especially for his insistence that better-off nations must guarantee the welfare of those less well-off, and help refugees by welcoming them, encouraging them to embrace residency and citizenship.

Almost certainly Macron, like Trump, never expected to win when he wrote Revolution. In any case, reading his book, I thought he sounded credible and likable, despite the fact that people at The Nation and elsewhere were already telling me that the guy was bad news. And Macron as president turned out to be quite different from the author of Revolution, pretty much as my friends at this publication had predicted.

Interestingly, Macron's book wasn't called La Revolution. He had dropped the omnipresent French article before the noun-and I wondered as I read it what that signified. Not sudden radical change then, but rather exhortation, the shout at the barricades but without the barricades themselves and all that they stand for? Or something even more unsettling: not the Beatles, but the Beatles in an Apple ad? Trust, community, democracy. Ask anyone in advertising. Great words, great concepts.

Buttigieg, as we know, is even younger than the very young Macron. He is the youngest candidate in the US presidential race, at 37, and would be our youngest-ever president if elected. (Teddy Roosevelt was 42, JFK 43, and Barack Obama a seasoned 47 and a half; Buttigieg would be 39!)

And in Buttigieg's title, that damned missing article again! Not The Shortest Way Home but Shortest Way Home, tout court. And, yes, I think these two youthful leaders hurry on to the noun in their books' titles for similar reasons, something to do with their youth and how everything is speeding up and heating up in the present historical moment, and they're telling us not to worry, they can handle this, in part by traveling light and throwing overboard anything that isn't absolutely necessary-like articles before nouns. But what else? How about a reasonable strategy to offset the outsize dominance of the corporate class's influence if ever they happen to come to power? Will they throw that possibility overboard as well, along with the article?

Buttigieg writes well, even brilliantly at times, describing how much the country changed between the time he entered Harvard and the time he graduated, 9/11 and the second Iraq War intervening to change-as he sees it-everything. He writes beautifully about various experiences he has already had, despite his youth-as a McKinsey consultant, helping businesses around the world, until he finally had to say to himself one day that he didn't care. Then as a Navy reserve officer serving in Afghanistan, and finally as the upstart Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

And then, reading Shortest Way Home, I'm suddenly feeling just so grateful for old people. Reading the autobiography of a 37-year-old has given me that insight, that emotion, as its singular gift.

There is a reason why some of the leading Democratic candidates in the presidential race now are elderly-another reason besides the obvious ones. It is this: At a moment when our collective memory is being rapidly erased, an act of collective violence, by the daily onslaught of new information coming through our cell phones and our computer screens, and maybe also from so much dazzlingly awful news coming at us almost daily about our natural environment and our political institutions, we can no longer assume that our younger politicians are informed, as they once would have been, by the lessons of history.

Some of our oldest politicians, however, lived through the history, searingly, and having done so informs their motivations and actions each and every day. Bernie Sanders lived through the Great Society of the Voting Rights Act; the Vietnam War; and the civil rights, gay liberation, veterans, women's, and anti-war movements. Elizabeth Warren, like Sanders, was formed in the crucible of the post-'60s years that saw the rise of the women's health movement, the post-Watergate years, the rise also of the environmental movement. Related Article

That era of sweeping social transformation-with all its lessons, good and bad-formed them both and emboldens their actions and aspirations today. They've seen our democracy actually function as a democracy, seen a corrupt president deposed, a US attorney general put in jail. They know the people really do have the power, if only we decide to use it. Bankers and corporate heads all know this too; they just hope the people themselves have forgotten. (And as we are seeing, most tellingly, Biden was there too-mostly on the wrong side of the defining issues of the day.)

Buttigieg's story is moving. As to the sheer audacity of writing your autobiography at the age of 37, we can dismiss him for his hubris, or maybe admire him for his self-regard and competence. As an ultra-proficient, hyper-educated young man of his generation, he understands big data, the sheer power of it, and understands, too, how to harness it. At the same time, as the mayor of a good-sized Midwestern city, he's learned its limitations. And there are many evocations in the book, almost parable-like, that tell the story of common sense and experience providing greater efficiency than big data on its own ever could-whether it be the foreman who knows better than the data does what the best approach is to fixing potholes; or why a test of drug remnants in sewage water that can delineate exposure to opioids in specific neighborhoods won't help you solve the opioid crisis; or why software that can tell you the exact location of every shot fired in the city of South Bend won't tell you why residents fear cops and don't report crimes, or how to improve policing of troubled neighborhoods.

But the news of recent weeks has highlighted how challenged he remains when he faces tests of character that don't have tech or even practical solutions. For all his overdetermined virtuosity-an accomplished pianist! a Rhodes scholar! a polyglot-he has demonstrated no political artistry: He did nothing to address the South Bend police department's longstanding and deep-seated troubles, and ultimately did nothing to prevent the death of Eric Logan.

Just before seeking a second term as South Bend mayor in 2016, Buttiegieg decided it was high time to come out as a gay man. The reader on the East or West coasts might be amazed that he waited so long. How could he have? Closeted throughout college and graduate school (at Oxford, no less!), through three years as a McKinsey consultant, then as a Navy officer, and finally as a politician and mayor of South Bend for four years? There is a fairy-tale quality to much of his narrative, but none more so than that sexuality and love seems to have played no part in it until it became the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place.

His description of telling his parents, his colleagues, and, in a public statement, the people of South Bend, is genuinely moving, a testament to his apparent belief that his connection to his constituents is a truly personal one, that he owes them complete candor.

Vice President Mike Pence plays a cameo in Buttigieg's story. Pence was governor of Indiana through most of Buttigieg's first term of office as South Bend mayor. Buttigieg needed Pence's backing for state support for many of the initiatives he was undertaking to bring vitality back to his city, and got it partly by looking away rather than confronting many of Pence's fundamentalist oaths and actions. But he did also confront, if not Pence himself, then the substance at least of his discriminatory March 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The episode shows Mayor Pete kicking the tin can down the road for as long as he can-not exactly presidential of him-but then, when he finally does decide to act, doing it unstintingly and to good effect.

There is an undercurrent in Buttigieg's book, what Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall might have called its "radical assertion." It is this: We can chart our way forward, find our footing as a nation again, without any political ideology whatsoever, and in this way bring together Republicans and Democrats, old and young, LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ. It sounds naive, because to do so is to toss away nearly all the lessons of history. It is, on the other hand, awfully tempting to a nation as tired and dismissive of all political parties as we have grown to be. Can America be run effectively like a giant version of a small Midwestern city, or managed back to health, McKinsey-style, using good analytics and a president with a winning personality?

We're in a moment of acute crisis. There are now 24 candidates in the race not only for reasons of personal vanity and ambition, but also because they might genuinely believe they can help. But we need to at least acknowledge-in a way we haven't been doing-the outsize contributions of some of the older candidates in the race, people with little to prove, and who have been fighting the good fight for decades and decades, who bring an enormous wealth of experience and wisdom, who have learned firsthand the great lessons of history in America all through the last half-century.

The right candidate really could be someone of any age: Certainly, many insurgent millennial politicians understand aspects of our political economy with a depth that eludes our ostensibly more seasoned politicians. But to make a dent in the status quo, the next American president can't rely exclusively on data, procedure, or any of the other totems of managerialism. To bring about change on the big issues that really matter to people, they will need something that eludes Mayor Pete: an ideology.

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Reading Buttigieg Told Me Everything I Need to Know About the 2020 Presidential Race

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Pete Buttigieg and I were teaching assistants for the same professor, Sacvan Bercovitch, probably America's leading interpreter of American Puritan literature, me at Columbia, Buttigieg nearly a quarter-century later at Harvard. This being our common ground, the differences between our experiences and how we would describe them are telling.

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CLOSE

If you think it's hot now, just wait awhile.

As the globe warms in the years ahead, days with extreme heat are forecast to skyrocket across hundreds of U.S. cities, a new study suggests, perhaps even breaking the "heat index."

"Our analysis shows a hotter future that's hard to imagine today," study co-author Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. "Nearly everywhere, people will experience more days of dangerous heat in the next few decades."

By 2050, hundreds of U.S. cities could see an entire month each year with heat index temperatures above 100 degrees if nothing is done to rein in global warming.

The heat index, also known as the apparent temperature, is what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature. This is the first study to take the heat index - instead of just temperature - into account when determining the impacts of global warming, Dahl said.

The number of days per year when the heat index exceeds 100 degrees will more than double nationally, according to the study, which was published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Communications.

While the heat waves rise up from the ground, a woman crosses the railroad tracks as temperatures climb past 112 degrees on July 5, 2018, in Phoenix. (Photo: Ross D. Franklin, AP)

On some days, conditions would be so extreme that they'd exceed the upper limit of the heat index, rendering it "incalculable," the study predicts.

"We have little to no experience with 'off-the-charts' heat in the U.S.," said Erika Spanger-Siegfried, lead climate analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists and report co-author. "These conditions occur at or above a heat index of 127 degrees, depending on temperature and humidity. Exposure to conditions in that range makes it difficult for human bodies to cool themselves and could be deadly."

Man-made global warming, aka climate change, is caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as gas, coal and oil, which emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane into the atmosphere. This extra CO2 causes temperatures of the atmosphere and oceans to rise to levels that cannot be explained by natural factors, scientists say.

Extreme heat is one of the clearest signs of global warming, according to the National Academy of Sciences.

Adam Kalkstein, an climatology professor and expert on heat at the U.S. Military Academy who was not involved in the research, told USA TODAY, "The report highlights the very real threat of (human-caused) climate change increasing the number of dangerously hot days across the United States.

"Heat is already a leading cause of weather-related mortality across the country and is frequently called a 'silent killer' since its impacts on human health are often underestimated," Kalkstein said. "If the models used here are correct, this research leaves little doubt that the number of potentially dangerous days across the country will increase dramatically."

Rachel Licker, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and report co-author, said, "The rise in days with extreme heat will change life as we know it nationwide, but with significant regional differences.

"For example, in some regions currently unaccustomed to extreme heat - those such as the upper Midwest, Northeast and Northwest - the ability of people and infrastructure to cope with it is woefully inadequate. At the same time, people in states already experiencing extreme heat - including in the Southeast, Southern Great Plains and Southwest - have not seen heat like this," Licker said.

As an example, if nothing is done to curb carbon emissions, Boston could have as many extremely hot days as Columbia, South Carolina, does now. Chicago could have as many as Lafayette, Louisiana, the report says.

Licker said, "Such heat could certainly drive large-scale relocation of residents toward cooler regions."

What can we do about this? "Rapidly reduce global warming emissions and help communities prepare for the extreme heat that is already inevitable," report co-author Astrid Caldas said. "Extreme heat is one of the climate change impacts most responsive to emissions reductions, making it possible to limit how extreme our hotter future becomes for today's children."

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/16/heat-waves-worsen-because-global-warming-study-says/1734127001/

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'Breaking' the heat index: US heat waves to skyrocket as globe warms, study suggests

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CLOSE If you think it's hot now, just wait awhile. As the globe warms in the years ahead, days with extreme heat are forecast to skyrocket across hundreds of U.S. cities, a new study suggests, perhaps even breaking the "heat index."

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As we now know, that grand vision for a postcampaign movement never came to fruition. Instead of mobilizing his unprecedented grassroots machine to pressure obstructionist lawmakers, support state and local candidates who shared his vision, and counter the Tea Party, Obama mothballed his campaign operation, bottling it up inside the Democratic National Committee. It was the seminal mistake of his presidency-one that set the tone for the next eight years of dashed hopes, and helped pave the way for Donald Trump to harness the pent-up demand for change Obama had unleashed.

"We lost this election eight years ago," concludes Michael Slaby, the campaign's chief technology officer. "Our party became a national movement focused on general elections, and we lost touch with nonurban, noncoastal communities. There is a straight line between our failure to address the culture and systemic failures of Washington and this election result."

The question of why-why the president and his team failed to activate the most powerful political weapon in their arsenal- has long been one of the great mysteries of the Obama era. Now, thanks to previously unpublished emails and memos obtained by the New Republic -some from the John Podesta archive released by WikiLeaks, and others made available by Obama insiders-it's possible for the first time to see the full contours of why Movement 2.0 failed, and what could have been.

Photograph by Scout Tufankjian/Polaris

In the midst of the 2008 campaign, the idea for Movement 2.0 seemed both obvious and inevitable. Obama himself recognized that he was sitting atop an organizing juggernaut. Speaking to hundreds of his core staffers in June, Obama praised them for building a campaign machine that had just taken down Hillary Clinton. "Collectively, all of you-most of whom are I'm not even sure of drinking age-you've created the best political organization in America, and probably the best political organization that we've seen in the last 30 to 40 years," Obama told them. "That's a pretty big deal."

Movement 2.0 gathered steam quickly. In the wake of the initial brainstorming call, Edley connected Mitch Kapor with law professor Mark Alexander, a senior Obama adviser, and gave them the job of chairing the project. Kapor was excited. "Mark and I are exchanging email brain dump to try to surface big question and big priorities overall, speaking by phone, and meeting all day next Tuesday in New Jersey to do Vulcan mind meld," he emailed two colleagues. "Already Mark and I have shared vision it's huge, and will go far beyond normal January end of transition."

SAUL LOEB /AFP/GETTY; CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY; WASHINGTON POST/GETTY

Kapor and Alexander dived into the task. They spoke with Bob Bauer, the campaign's legal counsel, about how to structure a new organization after November. They had several meetings with the architects of Obama's online operation, including Slaby, the chief technology officer; his boss, Joe Rospars, the new media director; and Chris Hughes, the online organizing director. They dug into the details of how the campaign had built and managed its online network, and sketched out a way to transition it forward.

With barely three months left until Election Day, Kapor-a veteran of many tech startups-knew that time was short for such an ambitious effort. "Coordination is going to be vital," he emailed Edley on July 23, "and I know campaign time and attention is going to be very limited, so the sooner we can figure out what the 'bridge' is between campaign and transition with respect to online community, and whether it's a footpath or a highway, the better. I am worried that as each day goes by without knowing anything about what we on the transition side might be building and how it does or does not connect, the deadline pressure to actually deliver on time gets worse and worse."

A few weeks later, on August 18, Edley sent a progress report to John Podesta and the other two co-chairs of Obama's transition board, Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse. "Campaign folks are joined at the hip with this effort (Rospars, Slaby, others)," Edley assured them. "The technical discussions about the software platform, etc., are moving quite well." While he acknowledged that "the Senator" would ultimately have to sign off on the plan, Edley-confident that he was still channeling his old friend's wishes-said he didn't "see any particular hurry about it." The candidate, he understood, had a few other things on his mind.

Edley attached the initial concept document for Movement 2.0. It outlined an audacious vision: to create "a new 'home place' for Obama supporters" that would be ready to go, the day after the election. The new entity would be closely aligned with Obama but independent of the party and his re-election campaign. "Think of it for now as AFO (Americans for Obama)," the memo declared, envisioning it as the "principal means for continuing the active participation of people in the Movement." AFO would not simply whip up support for Obama's legislative agenda-it would "gather the input to help shape it." It would "be a place where Obama supporters can come together, affiliate and organize for change using cutting-edge online tools that will create and support a new and deeper form of civic engagement."

The idea was audacious: What if Obama could become not only the first black president, but the first president to organize an enduring grassroots movement?

Critically, the Movement 2.0 team envisioned AFO as a tax-exempt organization that would operate free of the Democratic National Committee. "Mitch and I argued that to make the movement 'authentic' and entrepreneurial," Edley says, "it would have to be built outside of the DNC-which has institutional commitments and incumbent allegiances that will always be a fact of party life." The team concluded by asking for permission to raise $250,000 to set up a staff infrastructure and develop the web site. The founding board would include Edley, Kapor, Alexander, and Podesta.

Podesta decided to circulate the concept document to higher-ups in the campaign. He asked Pete Rouse, Obama's Senate chief of staff and key political consigliere, to forward the memo to Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, partners in a political consulting firm who had risen to positions at the top of Obama's organization. Hildebrand was the deputy national campaign manager, and Tewes, after directing Obama's Iowa campaign, was now running the DNC on the candidate's behalf. Podesta had a simple question for them about Edley's plan: He wanted to "see if they care whether this goes forward to a planning stage."

That was the moment when Movement 2.0 began to stall.

The proposal had started with the campaign's technology team and true believers, but now it had landed in front of two consummate Washington insiders. Hildebrand came to like the idea; creating a movement free from the DNC, he believed, would put more pressure on Congress to implement Obama's agenda. But where others had seen great possibility, Tewes saw potential disaster. Four days later, he wrote to Rouse and his colleague Hildebrand:

As both of you know, I have many concerns about this..... as a lover of "Party" I really don't like this.

I think the decision needs to be made and discussed on "this vs. party" or "this and party." The discussion should focus on-What is best for Barack Obama, his politics, his agenda and his future.

If the first step is to move outside the party with your organization, the political ramifications and "future" ramifications need to be thought through. Further, a discussion should be had of party over this-why and why not?

Marching into this seems premature and secondly creating something before hand (before e-day) has appearance problems in my opinion.

I would ask that we postpone any of this till after the convention and do a little gathering where we can discuss. Please.

Rouse forwarded Tewes's response back to Podesta. Podesta, in turn, sent it along to Edley with a pithy comment: "Let's discuss Monday. Obviously some heartburn with the political crowd."

JAMES NORD/AP IMAGES; COURTESY OF CQ ROLL CALL/THE ECONOMIST; MICHAEL KOVAC/WIREIMAGE/GETTY

There was plenty in Movement 2.0 to inspire heartburn in that crowd. In Silicon Valley terms, Obama 2008 had "disrupted" presidential campaigns, demonstrating how an underdog candidate could defeat a more experienced opponent by changing the terms of the game and empowering millions of people in the process. Now, it seemed, the Obamaites and their tech wizards wanted to disrupt the Democratic Party, diverting money and control from the DNC into an untried platform, while inviting "input," and possibly even organized dissent, from Obama's base. Earlier that summer, activists unhappy with Obama's flip-flop on warrantless surveillance had used MyBO to build a group of more than 20,000 vocal supporters, earning national press and compelling a response from the candidate. What if Obama's base didn't like the health care reform he came up with, and rallied independently around a single-payer plan? Besides, grassroots movements, no matter how successful, don't reliably yield what political consultants want most: money and victories for their candidates, with plenty of spoils for themselves. For insiders like Tewes, Movement 2.0 was a step too far.

Edley knew that Tewes's blowback spelled trouble. On August 24, the day before Obama's triumphal convention began in Denver, he emailed Podesta to express hope that it was just a "misunderstanding." He asked Podesta to keep the issue off the agenda of the transition board's next meeting until they figured out what to do. Podesta agreed. "I think we should [n]ot raise at all tomorrow," he told Edley, "and come up with seperate [sic] plan on how to proceed."

Looking back, Edley says now, Podesta made a tactical error by sharing the plan with party regulars like Tewes and Hildebrand before it had garnered more high-level support in the campaign. "John should've realized that of course the DNC would have competitive objections," he says. "Our proposal would've created, at least in our dreams, yet another set of political forces and policy energy. At the time, I just didn't realize the powerful pull that the architects of the Obama 'movement' would feel away from movement building and toward paranoid possession of the conventional trappings of political power. If you're not really that committed, as a matter of principle, to a bottom-up theory of change, then you will find it nonsensical to cede some control in order to gain more power."

It would be five long weeks later, on October 2-just a month before Election Day-before any reference to Movement 2.0 would surface again in Podesta's emails. By that time, radical revisions had been made to appease the "political crowd." Chris Lu, the transition team's executive director, circulated a revised concept memo to Podesta and its board, in preparation for an all-day meeting. It was a far cry from Edley's original call for a "citizen movement." Instead, the memo explained, "we recommend a new, integrated approach to the Movement 2.0 work, in complete coordination with the ongoing efforts of the DNC, to plan for the continued growth and development of the online-offline community in support of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, our candidates and issues."

Gone was the idea of a new organization, independent of the DNC. "A key working assumption," the memo stated, "is that we should affirmatively empower Barack Obama as the head of the Party, and in the process strengthen both him and the Party. All Obama politics should be filtered through the DNC, and all Party politics"-including existing organizations that support candidates for Congress and statehouses-"should be filtered through the DNC. This all serves the agenda of one person, Barack Obama."

The original backers of Movement 2.0 had been sidelined. "I had nothing to do" with the new memo, Edley says. "I guess they liked our name for it, but chose to pervert the idea to something quite conventional and, forgive me, trivial. To me, real movement building had to be about defining and advancing progressivism, not a communication strategy from the West Wing basement costumed as faux movement. The kind of movement we wanted would have helped Obama a great deal, without making it all about him. After all, even Obama's campaign wasn't only about him or his policy platform."

Edley and his cohorts weren't finished yet. The idea of keeping Obama's online loyalists involved and active had not entirely died; the new memo called for moving quickly to enable the campaign to keep engaging its grassroots supporters after the election. "Steps should be taken now to ensure this possibility does not evaporate, leaving no vehicle for community in the short-term," the memo read. But there was no proposed budget for that to happen-just a call for the formation of a new working group for Movement 2.0, to pull all the stakeholders together. That group never materialized.

The revised memo was not the only postelection plan being considered. Julius Genachowski, co-chief of the transition team's "Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform" group, wanted to launch a White House web site aimed at engaging the public in policy discussions. The TIGR group was a powerhouse of wonks, many of whom were headed into top positions in government, and its planning memo ran to 12,500 words, compared to just 1,500 for the revised Movement 2.0 proposal. The result-in the middle of a heated campaign and a global economic meltdown-was widespread confusion about what would happen to Obama's campaign machine after Election Day.

On October 10, Edley told Kapor and Alexander by email that Pete Rouse had "agreed to try to arbitrate all of this." But five days later, Edley reported that he was getting nowhere. "I am frustrated beyond words on this. Will work it hard today. I think since the campaign team has rigged something for the transition period they just keep back-burnering the longer run issue." A day later, Kapor reported back that Rouse was "too busy (w/ debate prep and all) to deal with M2.0.... I think fundamentally it's not going to be a priority until after the election."

Ultimately, the transition team agreed on only one project: build a simple postelection site, to be called Change.gov, as a place where people could learn more about the transition's plans and job-seekers could submit their résumés. In the end, there would be no "footpath" or "highway," as Mitch Kapor had envisioned, for transitioning Obama's two million supporters on MyBO into a new platform. There wasn't even a rope bridge.

But Kapor didn't give up. In late October, he spoke to Jim Messina, chief of staff to campaign manager David Plouffe, and came away convinced that both Plouffe and Rouse now backed the original vision for the movement. "Importantly, Messina said Plouffe is not only on board but wants his sole responsibility after the election to be getting M2.0 going," Kapor emailed Edley and Alexander on October 23. Even if it was too late to build on the momentum from Election Day, there was still a chance that Movement 2.0 would take wing.

Photograph by Charles Ommanney/Getty Images

On November 5, the day after Obama's victory, his headquarters in Chicago was deluged with phone calls and emails from supporters asking for guidance on how to keep going. Exactly as Edley had feared, no answers were forthcoming-not even about whether the tens of thousands of volunteers who had built personal fund-raising groups on MyBO would be able to continue them. "We're all fired up now, and twiddling our thumbs!" wrote one frustrated volunteer from Pennsylvania. "ALL the leader volunteers are getting bombarded by calls from volunteers essentially asking: Nowwhatnowwhatnowwhat?"

It wasn't until three days after the election that Chris Hughes, the campaign's director of online organizing, put up a post on his personal MyBO page. "The site isn't going anywhere," he promised supporters. "The online tools in My.BarackObama will live on. Barack Obama supporters will continue to use the tools to collaborate and interact." As a stopgap, that was reassuring to grassroots organizers who had used the site to build strong local networks. But it wasn't a plan. There was no plan.

One person, however, seemed to understand that such half-measures wouldn't be enough: the president-elect. The same day Hughes posted his message, Obama reached out to David Plouffe. Unlike other top operatives from the campaign, the campaign manager had decided not to follow Obama into the White House, but to take time off to be with his family before returning to political consulting. His daughter was born in the early hours of November 7, and Obama called him that morning.

"I know you're disappearing for a while to change diapers and play Mr. Dad," Obama told Plouffe, "but just make sure you find time to help figure out how to keep our supporters involved. I don't think we can succeed without them. We need to make sure they're pushing from the grassroots on Washington and helping to spread what we're trying to do in their local communities. And at the very least, we have to give them the opportunity to stay involved and in touch. They gave their heart and soul to us. This shouldn't feel like a transactional relationship, because that's not what it was. I want them along for the ride the next eight years, helping us deliver on all we talked about in the campaign."

Three days later, Kapor emailed Edley and Alexander, frustrated that no progress was being made. "What is needed now," he wrote, "is for the President-elect and his designees to decide how to move forward with Movement 2.0." Would the group be independent or part of the DNC? Who would run it? How would it interact with the White House? "I don't see how anything can happen until the project is given a green light and the basic issue of structure and leadership is settled by those with the power to do so," Kapor concluded. "In other words, someone please just make a decision."

Plouffe led Obama's supporters to believe that the decision was in their hands. On November 19, he emailed a survey to everyone on the campaign's list. "You've built an organization in your community and across the country that will continue to work for change," Plouffe told them, "whether it's by building grassroots support for legislation, backing state and local candidates, or sharing organizing techniques to effect change in your neighborhood. Your hard work built this movement. Now it's up to you to decide how we move forward."

Obama's army was eager to be put to work. Of the 550,000 people who responded to the survey, 86 percent said they wanted to help Obama pass legislation through grassroots support; 68 percent wanted to help elect state and local candidates who shared his vision. Most impressive of all, more than 50,000 said they personally wanted to run for elected office.

But they never got that chance. In late December, Plouffe and a small group of senior staffers finally made the call, which was endorsed by Obama. The entire campaign machine, renamed Organizing for America, would be folded into the DNC, where it would operate as a fully controlled subsidiary of the Democratic Party. Plouffe stayed on as senior adviser, and put trusted field organizers Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird in charge of the new group. Bird says the OFA team was never even told about the idea for Movement 2.0. "None of these documents were even shared with us," he says. "I'm not sure the senior staff on the campaign even knew they existed."

Obama unveiled OFA a week before his inauguration. "Volunteers, grassroots leaders, and ordinary citizens will continue to drive the organization," he promised. But that's not what happened. Shunted into the DNC, MyBO's tools for self-organizing were dismantled within a year. Instead of calling on supporters to launch a voter registration drive or build a network of small donors or back state and local candidates, OFA deployed the campaign's vast email list to hawk coffee mugs and generate thank-you notes to Democratic members of Congress who backed Obama's initiatives. As a result, when the political going got rough, much of Obama's once-mighty army was AWOL. When the fight over Obama's health care plan was at its peak, OFA was able to drum up only 300,000 phone calls to Congress. After the midterm debacle in 2010, when Democrats suffered their biggest losses since the Great Depression, Obama essentially had to build a new campaign machine from scratch in time for his reelection effort in 2012. (Plouffe and Messina declined requests to speak about Movement 2.0; Axelrod, Podesta, and Rouse said they had no comment.)

The grassroots discontent that Obama had harnessed so skillfully in 2008 would soon belong to the right.

Republicans, on the other hand, wasted no time in building a grassroots machine of their own-one that proved capable of blocking Obama at almost every turn. Within weeks of his inauguration, conservative activists began calling for local "tea parties" to oppose the president's plan to help foreclosed homeowners. FreedomWorks, an antitax group led by former Representative Dick Armey, and Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch brothers, quietly coordinated hundreds of nationwide demonstrations designed to look like a spontaneous populist uprising. When members of Congress went home for the summer to hold town hall meetings with their constituents, they were confronted by well-organized and disruptive protests over health care reform. The grassroots discontent that Obama had harnessed so skillfully in 2008 now belonged to the right.

"Killing OFA reduced the possibility of competing for the hearts, minds, and votes of the Tea Party disaffected," says Lester Spence, associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. It also "killed the one entity possible for institutionalizing the raw energy created by the Obama campaign in 2008."

Edley, for his part, still can't get over the opportunity that was lost. He admits that he probably alienated Obama's top campaign brass with his earlier intervention, but he doesn't think that's why his idea for Movement 2.0 died. Mostly, he believes, it was an issue of control. "Our proposal would have required that members of the political team who had just won the nomination be willing to cede control of the grassroots movement and turn it more in the direction of policy advocacy and progressive advocacy," he says.

Even today, Edley doesn't know if Obama was ever told of the idea, and he regrets not bypassing the campaign operatives and reaching out to him personally. "I was loath to go around them and try to reach Barack directly," Edley says. "That is probably one of the biggest mistakes of my professional life, given the dismal disappointment that OFA became."

Ultimately, of course, the failure to keep the grassroots movement going rests with Obama. It was his original, and most costly, political mistake-not only a sin of omission, but a sin of imagination, one that helped decimate the Democratic Party at the state and local level and turn over every branch of the federal government to the far right. In December, in an exit interview with NPR's Morning Edition, Obama himself sounded haunted by it. "You know, when I came into office, we were just putting out fires," he said. "We were in a huge crisis situation. And so a lot of the organizing work that we did during the campaign, we started to see right away wasn't immediately transferable to congressional candidates. More work would have needed to be done to just build up that structure. And, you know, one of the big suggestions that I have for Democrats as I leave, and something that, you know, I have some ideas about is: How do we do more of that ground-up building?"

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Inside the Fall of Obama's Grassroots Army

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As we now know, that grand vision for a postcampaign movement never came to fruition. Instead of mobilizing his unprecedented grassroots machine to pressure obstructionist lawmakers, support state and local candidates who shared his vision, and counter the Tea Party, Obama mothballed his campaign operation, bottling it up inside the Democratic National Committee.

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A progressive take on states' rights can come to the rescue.

By Sam Wang

Mr. Wang is a neuroscientist and the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

Image

Credit Credit Tyler Comrie

Progressives have long looked to federal courts to guard the rights of racial minorities and dissenters. But that protection is weakening. Faced with the enormous injustice of partisan gerrymandering, the Supreme Court last month permitted politicians drawing election district maps to discriminate by party and even potentially mask their racial "packing" and "cracking" as mere partisanship. To fill this growing gap, reformers should take an unexpected route: states' rights.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion that allowed two gerrymanders, one committed by Republicans in North Carolina and one by Democrats in Maryland, to stand. His reason? He could not find a standard to judge when an offense had occurred. He rejected a considerable body of empirical research, including suggestions by my colleagues and me in an amicus brief.

Federalism, in which regional governments retain considerable power, has been invoked in the past to take away representational rights. But a local approach, properly applied, can also restore them. In a stinging dissent, Justice Elena Kagan pointed out that where the Supreme Court had failed to define and regulate partisan gerrymandering, four lower federal courts had succeeded.

State courts can do so, too - without federal approval. The elections clause of the Constitution gives states broad authority over redistricting as long as the actions do not run afoul of federal law. Chief Justice Roberts conceded that states can act on their own by "actively addressing the issue through state constitutional amendments and legislation." Now that Republicans and their designates control the Supreme Court, the Senate and the presidency, reformers should embrace what Heather K. Gerken, the dean of Yale Law School, calls " progressive federalism."

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which I founded, has investigated federalist approaches to redistricting reform. We found 27 instances in which a district map was overturned on the basis of state law. Recently, Pennsylvania's Supreme Court overturned an unfair congressional map, citing the state Constitution's free and equal elections clause, a phrase that is also found in 27 other state Constitutions.

And 47 Constitutions prohibit government discrimination based on political viewpoint, a principle also found in the First Amendment, which Justice Kagan has argued should protect partisan voters. Drawing a district's boundaries to dilute a voter's influence violates the principle of equal protection under the law as found in the 14th Amendment - and in 24 state Constitutions.

The use of federalism to protect voter rights will be tested in a trial this month in North Carolina, where General Assembly districts are being challenged as a partisan gerrymander. Since North Carolina law does not require the governor's approval for maps, state court may be voters' best and last chance at fair districts there.

Proving the case should be straightforward. Computer simulations can quickly explore thousands of alternatives to determine whether a map is an extreme partisan outlier. For example, in the Supreme Court case, which concerned a congressional map, Jonathan Mattingly, an expert witness, demonstrated that one congressional districting plan was more extreme than more than 99 percent of over 24,000 possible alternatives that honor city and county boundaries. Simpler mathematical formulas, which detect inequities of opportunity and outcome, can also help diagnose a state legislative map as extreme.

These technologies will soon be within reach of nearly everyone. Thomas Hofeller, a redistricting expert who died recently, drew North Carolina's gerrymander. He was a Picasso of partisan maps. But thanks to data-sharing projects like OpenPrecincts and the Public Mapping Project, as well as free software like Dave's Redistricting and PlanScore, citizens in every state will be able to draw their own maps - and expose partisan malfeasance the moment it emerges.

Federalism can also be imposed by voters directly. In 2018, redistricting reform initiatives passed in Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Utah. These reforms earned 8 to 19 percentage points more support than the Democratic vote share in statewide races, showing that reform has bipartisan support.

The Colorado and Michigan initiatives establish independent redistricting commissions, in which passing a plan requires votes from independents or members of both parties. The political scientist Alex Keena and collaborators have shown that independently drawn maps are more balanced than maps drawn by either party alone. These commissions can also ensure representation for racial minorities and other communities. Citizens can change the law in the 24 states that allow voter-initiated ballot measures, and local reformers are now working to qualify such a measure for the ballot in Arkansas.

The spoils from gerrymandering are enormous. After a wave election in 2010 favoring Republicans, Republican-drawn gerrymanders in 10 states tilted the balance of power in Congress by nearly 20 seats, a modern high, and took hundreds of legislative seats out of contention.

With increased local power in the redistricting cycle of 2021, Democrats may be tempted to play tit-for-tat, imposing their own gerrymanders. But a proposed constitutional amendment that would have insulated Democrats from voters failed in New Jersey, in part because of popular anger. Rather than reducing electoral competition further, Democrats should seek representational balance by taking the high road of reform. They would be in step with over 70 percent of Americans who agree that gerrymandering should be curbed.

In states without the initiative process, legislators themselves will occasionally agree to give up power. The New Hampshire legislature has sent a reform bill to Gov. Chris Sununu. The Virginia legislature is considering a constitutional amendment for the 2020 ballot, though perhaps not entirely out of altruism: The current Republican majority may lose seats and fall victim to a future Democratic gerrymander.

A final route to reform uses the governor's veto to check legislatures. Maryland has a Republican governor, counterbalancing the Democratic legislature. Wisconsin, site of one of the most extreme Republican gerrymanders in the nation, now has a Democratic governor. Depending on three competitive governors' races this November, bipartisan control may spread to Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Putting all federalist routes together - courts, voter initiatives, laws and elections - I estimate that reform is actually possible in the vast majority of states, even without the Supreme Court's help.

In biological systems, my other area of expertise, self-correction prevents living systems from going off-kilter. If we don't sweat, we overheat. When cells disregard the boundaries of the organ where they belong, the result is cancer. So too in democracy: Without a mechanism to ensure fair districts, a political party can ensconce itself in power indefinitely. By introducing self-correction mechanisms, we can reverse the erosion of faith in democracy that comes from gerrymandering.

Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) is a professor of neuroscience at Princeton and the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section SR, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: How We Can Still Prevent Gerrymandering. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | If the Supreme Court Won't Prevent Gerrymandering, Who Will?

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A progressive take on states' rights can come to the rescue. By Sam Wang Mr. Wang is a neuroscientist and the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. Progressives have long looked to federal courts to guard the rights of racial minorities and dissenters. But that protection is weakening.

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Party democracy is the enemy of representative democracy. Party democracy stops MPs speaking out against racism and warning of the perils facing their country. Party democracy makes politicians put their members ahead of their constituents. Party democracy makes them flatter coteries of arrogant obsessives. Party democracy is the enemy of conscience and judgment. To borrow a phrase, the party has become the enemy of the people.

Who does your MP represent? Who are they frightened of? You and your neighbours? What creaking haycart brought you and the rest of your yokel friends into town? "Control of politics has passed to unelected and irresponsible members," says the historian Robert Saunders, one of the best analysts of British democracy's decay. "Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt needs the support of about 70,000-80,000 Tory members to become prime minister. That's roughly the size of one parliamentary constituency."

Saunders is shocked that hardly anyone seems to grasp that the next prime minister will be the first to take power without any kind of democratic mandate, however tenuous. Many prime ministers have gone to Downing Street without holding a general election. But they were chosen by MPs, who were elected by, and accountable to, their constituents. Labour party members might have chosen the successor to Tony Blair and Tory members the successor to David Cameron. As it was, Gordon Brown and Theresa May were returned unopposed.

We have had to wait until 2019 for our anti-democratic counter-revolution. Only now will we have a PM chosen by members who are overwhelmingly white, southern, old and wealthy, as everyone says, but also extraordinarily conceited, a point I could do with hearing more often. They don't want to know that May's withdrawal agreement can be prettified but not fundamentally altered. Nor will they tolerate warnings about the dangers of no deal. No one who has followed Boris Johnson's career will be surprised by his willingness to please his audience: cowardice defines him. But Jeremy Hunt does not dare tell hard truths either, because he knows they will lead him to certain defeat. To make the point better than I can, 36,000 people have joined the Conservatives recently to claim the right to choose "your" new prime minister, a right that you will be denied. Why are we not enraged by this rigging of the system?

Because the next PM will have no electoral mandate and no workable majority, prime minister Johnson, and I fear we must get used to those words, is considering closing parliament to force through a no-deal Brexit. The Brexit referendum did not include no deal on the ballot paper. The Commons is against it and he does not have the authority of a successful election campaign to justify it. Johnson's sole mandate for shuttering national democracy is the vote of Tory members. This is the "democracy" of a members-only golf club, not of a free country.

The far left showed the way for the Brexit right. In 2016, Labour MPs, who represented millions of Labour voters, told Jeremy Corbyn to go by 172 votes to 40. Labour members overruled them. I thought at the time how absurd it was for far-left propagandists to talk of a "coup" - as if Labour MPs were Pinochet's troops storming the leader of the opposition's office. In retrospect, it appears sinister: the more so as Corbyn and his aide Seumas Milne are now inciting party members to frighten MPs into silence.

If had aired whistleblowers from a corporation, describing how they had been undermined, bullied and forced out of their jobs, had breakdowns and contemplated suicide, for the "crime" of investigating institutional racism, the chief executive would have been forced for the sake of appearances to promise to mend his ways. Corbyn unleashed his "outriders" instead: supposed journalists who owe their loyalty to the Labour party press office rather than their readers and editors.

Jews took the viciousness as Labour's licence to racists to carry on as before. If you are an antisemite, you can now dismiss your accusers in Labour's words for their "personal and political hostility to Jeremy Corbyn's politics". MPs saw something else, and it scared them. They saw the Twitter mobs and Momentum urging members to deselect them, and learned that the safest course was to shut up. Neil Coyle, one of the Labour MPs who will speak out, and you will notice it is always the same Labour MPs who speak out, said the outriders were Corbyn's equivalent of Mao's Red Guard.

Party democracy in Labour allows the leader to keep his MPs in line by denouncing and humiliating Labour's "capitalist roaders". Threats to deselect Conservative " traitors " who oppose a hard Brexit are a means of forcing Faragism on the Tories. Before you write to complain, I accept that not every Labour and Conservative member is a thug, fool, antisemite or Islamophobe, but their ugliness or lack of it is irrelevant.

We are a democracy and power should flow from the people, not from a privileged caste in a private club. Saunders says that either we return to MPs choosing leaders, accept that no one can become prime minister without first holding an election, or move to a presidential system. Democrats and Republican supporters, after all, have the right to choose presidential and vice-presidential candidates before a US election. They have no right to impose a party favourite on the country midterm.

I would say the change we need is as much cultural as political. We still live with the assumption that giving power to party members is "a good thing". If you want to see the consequences, look around you: a Tory party in the control of a clique of narcissistic fantasists, and an institutionally racist Labour party which, like Caliban, cannot bear to see its reflection in the mirror. With ingratiating smiles, politicians thank the members who knock on doors and pound the streets. They talk as if activists were the bedrock on which democracy is based when they surely know it is the quicksand into which it is sinking.

* Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist
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Narcissists and cliques control the main parties and threaten democracy | Nick Cohen

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Party democracy is the enemy of representative democracy. Party democracy stops MPs speaking out against racism and warning of the perils facing their country. Party democracy makes politicians put their members ahead of their constituents. Party democracy makes them flatter coteries of arrogant obsessives. Party democracy is the enemy of conscience and judgment.

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Big data has created new opportunities for a postcapitalist future. But to realise its potential, our democracy must catch up.

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Every time I do an episode on polarization, I get a few emails asking: What about deliberative democracy? Couldn't that be an answer? Deliberative democracy, if you're not familiar, refers to a broad set of approaches in which citizens get together, with or without their representatives, to deliberate on political questions. Not just vote, or donate money, but actually work through hard questions, in a structured process, together. Jane Mansbridge is the Charles F. Adams professor of political leadership and democratic values at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a past president of the American Political Science Association, and co-editor of the book, Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale. So she's not just a pioneering theorist on deliberative democracy, she's specifically studied the question where I'm most skeptical: Can it scale? Book recommendations: Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy by Michael A. Neblo Democracy When the People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation by James S. Fishkin Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign by Frances E. Lee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What deliberative democracy can, and can't, do (with Jane Mansbridge)

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Listen to this episode from Vox Conversations on Spotify. Every time I do an episode on polarization, I get a few emails asking: What about deliberative democracy? Couldn't that be an answer? Deliberative democracy, if you're not familiar, refers to a broad set of approaches in which citizens get together, with or without their representatives, to deliberate on political questions.

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A half hour west of downtown Providence, Rhode Island, past potholed highways lined with maple, ash, and pine trees, is the town of Foster, population forty-seven hundred. Its residents live on small farms and in aging, widely spaced homes; the closest grocery store is in Johnston, twenty miles away. Down Route 6, not far from the Shady Acres Restaurant and Dairy, is Captain Isaac Paine Elementary School. Kristen Danusis, a former school psychologist who became the principal in 2013, tells me that many of her students live "off the grid," in households that earn little regular income.

Yet, inside Isaac Paine, tech abounds. Teachers project lesson plans onto interactive screens, and little hands reach for black Chromebook laptops, which are stacked like cafeteria trays in a large box called a Chromecart. In one class, Danusis introduces me to a lanky child in rain boots, who clicks through an online math program while chatting about a baby goat that's being weaned in her back yard. In another room, children rotate through learning stations, sometimes at screens, sometimes putting pencils to paper. Kids work alone and in small groups; they sit at tiny desks and on beanbags and sofas scattered around the classroom. It looks unlike any school I ever attended. The ratio of children to Chromebooks, in grades three through five, is one to one.

Danusis and her teaching staff practice personalized learning, an individual-comes-first approach, usually aided by laptops, that has become a reformist calling card in education. Two years ago, Isaac Paine Elementary won a competitive grant from the Rhode Island Office of Innovation to become a showcase "lighthouse school," part of a statewide push to bring tech into education. That push officially began in 2014, when Deborah Gist, who was then the state's commissioner of education, announced a public-private "innovation partnership" to merge traditional and computerized pedagogy. It was the latest big-fix trend in K-12 education, and Gist, a favored daughter of Silicon Valley philanthropists, offered up the nation's smallest state as a laboratory mouse.

Personalized learning argues that the entrepreneurial nature of the knowledge economy and the gaping need, diversity, and unmanageable size of a typical public-school classroom are ill-served by the usual arrangement of a teacher lecturing at a blackboard. Some kids are English learners, and others have disabilities; some read well above grade level, and others lag behind in math. If every child had a computer or iPad, she could log into a customized cyber classroom and learn at her own pace.

Anxiety over the influence of technology in schools, as in our lives, is an old story-but one made painfully acute by the glowing smartphone on which you're likely reading this article. Advocates of personalized learning say that the approach has been unfairly conflated with teacherless, online-only education. They invoke Dewey and Freire and Montessori as guiding lights and take pains to emphasize, in almost liturgical unison, that personalized learning is not about tech-and that "tech is just a tool." But skeptics warn that underneath the language of "student-centered" pedagogy is a tech-intensive model that undermines communal values, accelerates privatization, and turns public schools into big-data siphons. Rhode Island's experiment with personalized learning reveals a still more complicated picture: of overworked, undervalued public-school teachers who embrace reforms in order to get what they need.

Nearly two decades ago, the reporter Todd Oppenheimer documented the aggressive rise of emerging Silicon Valley technologies-personal computers and the Internet-in the nation's public schools. In a dense, polemical book called " The Flickering Mind," he warned of the industry's tentacular reach into schools, steered by futurists such as Seymour Papert, the co-creator of the Logo programming language, who had a habit of proclaiming, every twenty years or so, that schools had twenty years left to either adapt or die. Some parts of Oppenheimer's book (see: nightmare visions of Apple iMacs and CD- ROM s) have not aged well. His larger argument, though-that the alliance between education policymakers and billionaire technologists could undermine the role of teachers and the public sphere-has only become more relevant.
This story was published in partnership with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit independent news organization focussed on inequality and innovation in education.
For decades, nonprofit advocacy groups and corporate donors have targeted K-12 education for intervention. The allure of helping disadvantaged children has combined with an openness, on the part of government actors, to private partnerships and technocratic fixes, especially those aimed at disciplining teachers. The George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, with initiatives such as No Child Left Behind (2001) and Race to the Top (2009), spurred what's been called a " nationalization of education politics " and, many teachers say, a relentless cycle of shiny fads promising to revolutionize the field. States and districts grew accustomed to applying for federal funds and foundation grants that eased the impact of budget cuts and promoted experimentation.

Charter schools are the bluntest incarnation of education reform and have long enjoyed bipartisan support. Last year's wave of teachers' strikes, though, popularized the critique that charters divert funding from traditional public schools and undercut union standards. Personalized learning, meanwhile, is as ascendant a reform as ever, boosted by many of the same philanthropic entities that have promoted charters: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (The Gates and Hewlett Foundations and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) Intermediary funders and education-policy groups that depend on their grant dollars-including iNACOL, Excel in Ed, the Learning Accelerator, Big Picture Learning, and Jobs for the Future-have, in turn, made personalized learning a priority. Karla Phillips, a policy director at Excel in Ed, told me that both personalized learning and charter schools have "flexibility" as their aim.

In 2010, Rhode Island won a four-year, seventy-five-million-dollar grant from Race to the Top. State education officials promised to spend these funds on new curricula, teacher coaching, and building improvements, but they initially made no explicit mention of personalized learning. This would soon change. They began to highlight "virtual learning," and approved the creation of a virtual charter high school; they tapped private organizations to help implement tech-heavy personalized learning. Rhode Island couldn't afford to equip every student with a Chromebook or iPad, but successive education commissioners and Governor Gina Raimondo, a Democrat and a former hedge-fund manager, encouraged superintendents and principals to find money in local coffers and apply to local and national charities for ed-tech grants. Angélica Infante-Green, who became the education commissioner in May, told me that she intends to expand personalized learning to more schools. The state's largest district, in Providence, has dramatically increased its spending on Web-based instructional programs, from a hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars in the 2011-12 school year to nine hundred and twenty-eight thousand in 2015-16, the latest data available. Four years ago, only one school out of thirty-nine in Providence used personalized learning; the model has since spread to twenty-five schools. A similar dynamic continues to play out across the country.

When I started to interview Rhode Islanders, I wondered how well personalized learning could serve younger students, given its close association with technology. But, at elementary schools like Isaac Paine and Orlo Avenue, in the East Providence School District, the basics of the method seemed well adapted to short attention spans: kids could bounce from desk to cushy floor, or from a small-group tutorial with a teacher to a Chromebook game. I kept thinking how much the physical setup of the classrooms resembled a Silicon Valley workspace-or is it that Amazon, Google, and Facebook have tried to replicate grammar-school life?

I found that, in Rhode Island, personalized learning seemed to exist only at schools with a one-to-one student-to-Chromebook ratio. This ratio, though, translated into a surprisingly wide range of pedagogical approaches. Providence's DelSesto Middle School, which has about a thousand mostly black, brown, and immigrant students, uses Summit Learning, a no-cost curricular platform developed, in part, by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Arzinia Gill has been the principal of DelSesto for the past several years. When she came to the school, she split the student body into three groups, and decided that all of them would adopt personalized learning. Summit flew Gill and her team to San Francisco, for school visits and training, and won them over. Today, nearly every DelSesto lesson plan unspools from a Summit-brand "playlist," a menu of personalized activities.

At 360 High School, also in Providence and serving a smaller but demographically similar student body, I observed teachers use what the school's principal, Kerry Tuttlebee, calls a patchwork of D.I.Y. apps and software, with some classes much more tech-reliant than others. The same was true at the affluent, predominantly white Barrington Middle School, which will soon move into a sixty-eight-million-dollar building fitted with a robotics lab. Meanwhile, at Cumberland High School, in a mostly white town along the Blackstone River, individual teachers get to decide how and when to use Chromebooks and personalized learning. Students at Cumberland recently asked the administration to institute "screen-free" days.

Rhode Island's education department and the Governor's office told me that personalized learning isn't being forced on anyone, and repeatedly deëmphasized the method's relationship to tech. But, in practice, the approach is often imposed from the top-and, in turn, by local leaders eager to stay current. Teachers at Orlo Avenue Elementary said that, while they supported their principal's decision to adopt Chromebook-based personalized learning, it had undoubtedly created a lot more work, with no accompanying pay raise. At Providence Career and Technical Academy, a high school that combines classroom learning with on-the-job apprenticeships, the district adopted Summit without first consulting the staff. "I was just getting really good at standard classroom-based instruction, and then they pushed this-which is the story of public education in America," Chris Bull, a physics teacher, said. "My ability to motivate students depends on relationships with them, but that's hobbled by each of them being in front of their own screens." (The principal did not respond to requests for comment; a district spokeswoman told me that personalized learning at the school "began with a small cohort of teachers who opted into a first-year pilot.")

Bull also worries that these screens infringe on student privacy, especially in light of Summit's proximity to Facebook. (Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg's wife and his partner in the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is the chair of Summit Learning's board.) As a matter of course, Summit, like most schools, collects such data as students' names, identification numbers, e-mail addresses, income status, race, gender, date of birth, language preference, standardized test scores, and grades; unlike most schools, it is a private nonprofit that operates in thirty-eight states. Students and parents in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Kansas have protested Summit for collecting vast amounts of data and subjecting students to excess screen time. They argue that Summit is not your average private vender and, because of its ties to Silicon Valley, is different even from educational heavyweights like Macmillan and Pearson. "What does it mean to have your educational system uploaded for commodification and surveillance?" Alison McDowell, a parent and activist blogger in Pennsylvania, said. How do we insure that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple won't sell these enormous stores of information to advertisers, employers, law enforcement, or the military? Jessica Geremia, a technology trainer for the Chariho Regional School District, in southwestern Rhode Island, told me, "We use Google all the time. You have that concern: What are you trading for the free use of this tool?" (A spokeswoman for Summit said in an e-mail, "We only use information for educational purposes. There are no exceptions to this." She added, "Facebook plays no role in the Summit Learning Program and has no access to any student data.")

Neither the Rhode Island Parent and Teachers Association nor the state's two teachers' unions oppose the implementation of personalized learning. Yet the academic and policy research behind it is thin. A few local pilot programs have been shown to slightly improve test scores and teacher satisfaction, but a 2017 study by RAND, commissioned by the Gates Foundation to study forty Gates-funded schools, reads like a shrug. "Although advocates and reformers have developed PL models," the RAND authors observed, "many of the component practices are relatively common nationally, making it difficult to clearly identify what makes a school a PL school." In April, researchers at the University of Colorado warned that proponents of personalized learning invite corporate interference in public schools and force students "to learn the same way via digital means," sidelining human instruction. And, in late June, in a scalding review of the Providence district, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy found that, in several Summit schools, "off-task student behavior was the same as, or worse than, in the more traditional classrooms, with some students observably working on assignments from other classes, viewing YouTube videos (or similar), queuing songs on playlists, toggling between Summit and entertainment websites, or pausing on work screens while chatting with neighbors." Summit said in response that these experiences "are not reflective" of its approach, and that Providence doesn't have the "conditions in place to fully implement our model." Other personalized-learning advocates told me that execution is everything.

The prospect of children surfing the Web and clicking through their lessons while teachers, or non-teacher chaperones, pace the room is an emerging reality, especially in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, where personalized "ed tech" is offered as a balm for budget austerity. "There's been hyperbolic claims about the ability of these new technologies to radically transform schools," Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education at Brown University, told me.

So much has changed so quickly in Rhode Island that it's difficult to measure whether, and for whom, personalized learning works. Since 2013, the state, dissatisfied with its scores, has shifted through three standardized-testing modules for elementary- and middle-school students. (On the latest exam, just thirty-four per cent of third-to-eighth-grade students were proficient in English language arts, and just twenty-seven per cent were proficient in math, compared to fifty-one and forty-eight per cent, respectively, in neighboring Massachusetts.) Alex Lucini, a music teacher at West Broadway Middle School, in Providence, told me that the persistence of high-stakes testing acts as a brake on even the most well-intentioned pedagogy: "You're only going to get personalization as far as the accountability measures will allow." Every year, personalized learning comes to a halt in the stressful lead-up to the weeks-long standardized exam, now called RICAS. In April, when I visited Barrington Middle School, which, like Isaac Paine, is a showcase "lighthouse" school for personalized learning, certain doors in the building were closed and marked with bright orange signs: " RICAS TESTING, DO NOT DISTURB."

Various sources told me that personalized learning, when aided by screens, is a bad fit for vulnerable students-those from low-income families, ethnic and racial minorities, kids with special needs, and English-language learners. In some areas of the country, including Providence, these groups account for almost the entire population of public schools. But the experience of personalized learning is, indeed, personal, and exceptions abound. A former special-education teacher in a rural, mostly indigenous region of Alaska told me that some students responded better to negative feedback when it was provided by a machine; they perceived the computer as correcting rather than castigating them. Jessica Jennings, a Providence resident whose daughter is one of a handful of white students at her public elementary school, sees personalized learning "as a tool to support diverse learning environments," a potential path to racial and class integration.

I later met with another local parent, Maggie Mian, and her two sons at a pizza shop on the west side of Providence. Naiem and Aziz, who were finishing up the fifth and sixth grade, respectively, at West Broadway Middle School, wore identical red hoodies and aloof expressions that were quickly unwound by soda pop. With their mother's permission, they took out their smartphones to show me the Summit interface: assignments organized by subject area, with color-coded progress notes attached. Aziz, Maggie told me, "was in trouble every day" at his previous school. Now, thanks in part to personalized learning, he was staying on top of his work-and she was staying on top of him. "Summit is very informative with parents. You can log on and see what your kids are learning, how they're doing," she explained. When I asked what she thought about the criticisms of laptop-based learning, she demurred. "There's always big business. If you don't get Chromebooks from Google, where are you gonna get it?" Naiem and Aziz replied instantly, in unison: "Apple!"

In nearly every conversation I had about personalized learning and ed tech in Rhode Island, the names Donna Stone and Shawn Rubin came up. Stone, of New England Basecamp, and Rubin, of the Highlander Institute, are educators turned nonprofit entrepreneurs in the field of professional development. They specialize in helping teachers design flexible, "student-centered" lesson plans that incorporate Chromebooks and online curricula. Collectively, New England Basecamp and Highlander have trained hundreds of educators at dozens of schools in the state since 2014.

Teachers and principals across the ideological spectrum-which, in education land, generally boils down to one's opinion of charter schools and unions-praised Rubin in particular. While New England Basecamp focusses on Summit schools, Highlander contracts with any school that's interested in personalized learning. In 2014, Highlander launched the Fuse Fellowship, a mentorship program for "natural change agents" that has trained more than a hundred fellows in Rhode Island and recently spread to Massachusetts and Syracuse, New York. Christopher Maher, the outgoing superintendent of Providence schools, credited Highlander with turning him on to personalized learning. At first, Maher said, "What it looked like to me, from the outside, was a lot of corporations that were taking advantage of school districts' inability to navigate what are complex problems." But, when he asked veteran teachers what tools they had recently found most helpful, "a lot of them talked about the personalized-learning training they received from Highlander," he recalled. (Maher amended his comments in late June, after Johns Hopkins published its review: the district should "conduct an internal assessment" to see which personalized-learning platforms "may need to be reconsidered," he said, through a spokeswoman.)

Rubin, who has a skateboarder's gait and nonchalant air, was raised in Michigan by unionized educators, and he aspired, early on, to follow their lead. But, during a brief apprenticeship at a public elementary school in Boston, he said, "I couldn't do anything I wanted to do," and thus he looked for a teaching job that would give him "control over my domain"-a common story among education reformers. He taught for ten years at the Highlander Charter School, in Providence, then joined the Highlander Institute.

Highlander's offices now sit in a sprawling former wool mill in western Providence. The organization receives support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and New Profit, which is funded by the Gates Foundation, so I asked Rubin what he thinks about the creep of tech brands into public schools. He responded, "I have concerns, but compared to what? Pearson? Sodexo?"-referring to the testing and cafeteria behemoths. "Our education system is completely racist. I have a hard time glomming onto Facebook as the biggest problem in an inner-city middle school." Stone, of New England Basecamp, said she was not concerned about Mark Zuckerberg's ties to Summit. "The fact that so many schools and teachers are benefitting from this platform should be celebrated," she told me. "He could be spending his money on so many other things."

New England Basecamp and Highlander typically charge a given school between several thousand and tens of thousands of dollars per year for training and consulting. Each school is responsible for acquiring the requisite hardware, usually in Chromebook form, at a cost of hundreds of dollars per student. It's not uncommon for schools to outsource professional development, but the decision to transform a traditional classroom into a fully personalized, tech-heavy setting demands more than the odd skills workshop. While reporting, I wondered whether the intensity of this training-one-on-one coaching, peer roundtables, site visits to other schools, and time to read, think, and reflect-was what had turned so many Rhode Island teachers onto personalized learning. At its core was the commonsensical, ancient practice of getting to know each child as an individual and catering to her needs. A passage from Oppenheimer's book kept coming to mind: "For decades, we have taken people whom we hold responsible for the intellectual and moral development of our children, put them in chaotic, overcrowded institutions, robbed them of creative freedom and new opportunities for their own learning, imposed an ever-changing stream of rules and performance requirements that leave them exhausted and hopeless, and paid them about $40,000 a year."

In southern Rhode Island, I met with a special-education teacher who had recently been trained in Google Classroom. (Google offers its own network of certified instructors and "transformation partners.") Her school was pushing Chromebook-based personalized learning, she told me, but offered little coaching beyond the nuts and bolts of the platform. "Most districts invest in professional development that's the least expensive," she said. "They have a huge tech push, but we don't need that. There are so many structural issues we need to work on: implicit bias, trauma-informed classrooms, historically accurate teaching." Kristen Rhodes Beland, a fourth-grade teacher in the North Kingstown District, told me that the philosophy of personalized learning has helped her respond to these social and emotional challenges-"because it means not being stuck in this industrialized box."

Teachers in Rhode Island did not participate in the wave of strikes that began last spring. But, like other public-school educators around the country, they have since enjoyed a heightened recognition. Kraft, the Brown professor, told me that this "broader public solidarity" has caused a shift, a move "away from differentiation and individualization to this macro sense of 'What do we have to do to invest in the teaching profession more broadly?' " Personalized learning, though premised on differentiating one student from another, has seemed to work best when it attends, first and foremost, to the needs of teachers as a group. If tech is, indeed, merely a tool of personalized learning, then what does that make the teacher?

E. Tammy Kim is a reporter and essayist.
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The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning

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A half hour west of downtown Providence, Rhode Island, past potholed highways lined with maple, ash, and pine trees, is the town of Foster, population forty-seven hundred. Its residents live on small farms and in aging, widely spaced homes; the closest grocery store is in Johnston, twenty miles away.

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What comes next under any of these scenarios? The certification of electoral votes has to be done by both the House and the Senate on January 6, after the new Congress is sworn in. If they disagree on one or more states, it's possible that no candidate would have the 270 votes required to be president before the inauguration on January 20. So the Constitution gives the House of Representatives the authority to choose a president-but not by a simple majority vote. Rather, each state's delegation casts a single vote. Support from a majority of the states-that is, 26-is needed to select the winner. Of course, each state's delegation would have to calculate how to cast its vote, but it is a near-sure thing that the partisan identity of the legislators would be key.

There's the rub, and the key to the importance of a set of House races. Right now, despite the Democrats having a comfortable majority of seats in the House, the Republicans have a majority of states -26, to be exact. The delegations from two states are deadlocked. (One of those two deserves an asterisk: Michigan went from a 7-7 tie to 7-6-1 for Democrats with the move of Representative Justin Amash, who's called for impeachment proceedings against President Trump, to independent status.)

In several of the states, the majority is slim, and if a single congressional seat changes hands, it could change the majority or create a deadlock. That's true of Republican states such as Florida, whose delegation splits 14-13, and Wisconsin, 5-3; it's also true of Democratic ones such as Colorado, now 4-3; Arizona, 5-4; Minnesota, 5-3; and Iowa, 3-1. * Then there are states with a single member, such as Montana and Alaska, with one Republican apiece, and states with just two representatives, such as Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Maine, where one switch could create a deadlock.

Not surprisingly, Democrats will have many vulnerable House seats in 2020, after winning a slew of seats in red and purple districts in 2018. But some of those seats may prove more consequential than others. For Democrats, the challenge first is to maintain their majority in states such as Iowa, where three Democratic seats are toss-ups, and Virginia, where two fit that category, as well as single seats in Maine, New Hampshire, and Michigan.

Because Democrats won most of the toss-ups last time, their targets are fewer-but there is at least one seat in Florida, in the 15th Congressional District, and a couple in now-deadlocked Pennsylvania that might allow them to take control of a state delegation; and in Montana and Alaska, the controversial Republican incumbents Greg Gianforte (who body-slammed a reporter and then lied about it) and 86-year-old Don Young are targets of opportunity.

While the Wisconsin GOP, with a 5-3 advantage, has gerrymandered its congressional seats to keep the party's edge, good candidates and an infusion of money could conceivably swing one seat to deadlock the state. (And it is manifestly in Democrats' interest to have Amash run for reelection.) A failure to adequately fund all of these contests would amount to political malpractice.

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What Happens If the 2020 Election Is a Tie?

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What comes next under any of these scenarios? The certification of electoral votes has to be done by both the House and the Senate on January 6, after the new Congress is sworn in. If they disagree on one or more states, it's possible that no candidate would have the 270 votes required to be president before the inauguration on January 20.

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The global struggle to stop violence against women and the struggle for human equality are linked.

Judith Butler at home in Berkeley, Calif. Credit... Brian L. Frank for The New York Times

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Mr. Yancy is a philosopher and author.

I reached out to the philosopher Judith Butler last year, not long after I wrote an article titled "I Am A Sexist," as the #MeToo movement was in full swing. I hoped to get an unvarnished critique of the essay. I got much more: A bracing and profound exchange that led to this interview and the reminder that violence against women, in its many forms, is a global tragedy.

Judith Butler is known for her decades of work in philosophy, feminism and activism worldwide. A professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley, she is the author of numerous influential books, including "Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly" and the forthcoming book, "The Force of Non-Violence." The interview was conducted by email.

George Yancy: I know you are familiar with the multinational activist movement Ni Una Menos. The movement, which spans several countries in Latin America, is fighting many forms of violence, in particular femicide, which is the intentional killing of women and girls because of their gender. (One example: In Argentina, one woman is said to be murdered every 30 hours.) In the United States, of course, we have the #MeToo movement. What do you make of these different but similar mobilizations?

Judith Butler: It is important to underscore that there are many feminisms right now (as there have always been) and they differ in regard to their focus and framework. Ni Una Menos is a movement that has brought millions of women into the street across Latin America to fight violence against women, trans people and the indigenous. The slogan "not one less" means that not one more woman will be lost to violence.

Importantly, this is a call that is uttered by a collective: "Not another one will be lost from the class of women, this expanding collective that resists the violence directed against them." But also: "As women, we will not lose another life." The movement is not based on a narrow idea of identity, but is a strong and intensifying coalition that draws support from women and trans people who are workers, who belong to unions and churches, who may or may not have any relation to universities.

Demonstrators marched against gender violence in Argentina in June. Credit... Emiliano Lasalvia/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

The fierce collective opposition to the killing of women is paramount, but this is also violence against trans people, especially trans women, and "las travestis"(who do not always identify as trans). That is why it is sometimes referred to as a movement against "feminicidio" - all those who are feminized or regarded as feminine. This is important because it is not just that murder is committed on the basis of gender; violence against women is one way of establishing the femininity of the victim. The violence seeks to secure the class of women as killable, dispensable; it is an attempt to define the very existence of women's lives as something decided by men, as a masculine prerogative.

The movement is equally a struggle for freedom and equality, and it struggles for the right to abortion, the right to equal pay and the struggle against neoliberal economics that is intensifying precarity, especially for women, the indigenous and the poor. The right to abortion is based on the right of every individual woman to assert freedom over her own body, but follows from the collective demands of women to be able to live their desires freely without state intervention and without the fear of violence, retribution and imprisonment.

The movement has distinguished itself from individualist modes of feminism that are based on personal liberty and the rights of the individual subject. That does not mean that individual histories and stories do not matter. They do, but forms of feminism that do not engage a critique of capitalism tend to reproduce individualism as a matter of course. Collectives are formed through a realization of a common social condition and a social bond, one that recognizes that what is happening to one life, whether it is violence, debt or subjection to patriarchal authority, is also happening for others. And though they may happen in different ways, the patterns are there, and so also are the grounds for solidarity.

In the United States, "#MeToo" has been very powerful in exposing the pervasive character of sexual harassment and assault across every kind of workplace. There is no way to shut our eyes to how long women have suffered with harassment, retaliation, and the loss of their careers - the loss of trust in those upon whom they often depend for work. But the "me" in #metoo is not the same as the collective we, and a collective is not just a sequence of the stories of individuals. The basis for solidarity, for collective action, requires that we depart from the presumption of individualism; in the United States, the tendency is to reaffirm that tenet of political liberalism at the expense of strong and enduring collective bonds. In Argentina, Ni Una Menos is in some ways taking up the ethical and political obligation of "Nunca Mas!" or "Never Again!" forged in the aftermath of the dictatorship. The destruction and disappearance of the lives of thousands of students and activists on the left has led to a sharp opposition to state censorship, repression and violence. The killing of women is equally horrific, very often aided and abetted by police and courts who fail to acknowledge the crime and by a government that refuses to assert the equal rights of women to live their lives in freedom and without the fear of death.

Yancy: The reasons for these two movements are linked to political and economic structures that marginalize and oppress women. Political and economic structures are inextricably linked to machismo, the toxic sense of male identity that translates into male entitlement to women's bodies; indeed, tied into whether or not women live or die. Talk about the performative dimensions of machismo.

Butler: I am no longer sure what counts as performative, but my view is that one reason that men feel free to dispose of women's life as they see fit is because they are bound to one another through a silent (or not-so-silent) pact of brotherhood. They look the other way; they give each other permission and grant each other impunity. In so many places, the violence done to women, including murder, are not even conceptualized as crimes. They are "the way of the world" or "acts of passion" and these phrases disclose deep-seated attitudes that have naturalized violence against women, that is, made it seem as if this violence is a natural or normal part of ordinary life. When feminist men break that pact of solidarity, they risk exclusion by some communities, and yet that kind of defection from the ranks is exactly what is needed.

In Barcelona, a well-meaning man told me he was not entitled to join in a feminist demonstration against violence. But I disagreed with him. Well, maybe I agree with him: participation is not an entitlement; it is an obligation. But men who join that important fight against violence against women and trans people need to follow the leadership of women. If they stand together against the lethal pact of brotherhood that permits, deflects and exonerates, they do it first and foremost by confronting other men, and by forming groups that reject violence and affirm radical equality. After all, when the lives of women and minorities of all kinds are taken, that is a sign that those lives are not treated as equally valuable. The struggle against violence and the struggle for equality are linked.

Yancy: In what ways does your new book on nonviolence speak to questions regarding the vulnerability of women?

Butler: The new book, "The Force of Non-Violence," is concerned with women, for sure, but with all people who are considered to be more or less ungrievable. I work with the feminist idea of "relationality" in order to show not only how lives are interdependent, but also how our ethical obligations to sustain each other's lives follow from that interdependency. The interdiction against violence is a way of asserting and honoring that bond based on the equal value of lives, but this is not an abstract or formal principle. We require each other to live and that is as true of familial or kinship ties as it is of transnational and global bonds. The critique of individualism has been an important component of both feminist and Marxist thought, and it now becomes urgent as we seek to understand ourselves as living creatures bound to human and nonhuman creatures, to entire systems and networks of life. The various threats of destruction can take the form of state violence, feminicidio, abandonment of migrants, global warming. We have to rethink the ties of life to know why we are obligated to oppose violence even when, or precisely when, hostilities escalate.

Yancy: In what ways does your discussion of nonviolence address our pervasive cultural practice of specifically male violence?

Butler: That is a good question. For me, violence is not male or masculine. I don't think that it comes from the recesses of men or is built into a necessary definition of masculinity. We can talk about structures of masculine domination, or patriarchy, and in those cases it is the social structures and their histories that call to be dismantled. It is difficult to know how to understand individual acts of violence within social structures that encourage, permit and exonerate such acts. It may be that we are social creatures whose lives are lived out in social structures that we have some power to change. So I don't think individual men can point to "social structures" as an excuse, i.e. "the social structure of masculine domination made me commit this act of violence."

At the same time, it is all of our responsibility to ask ourselves how we are living out, reproducing or resisting these structures. So though change can happen at an individual level, restorative justice models tell us that individuals change in the context of communities and relationships, and that is how new structures of relating are built and older ones are dismantled. In turn, this means that ethics has to become more than an individual project of self-renewal, since lives are renewed in the company of others. Those relations are what sustain us and, as such, deserve our collective attention and commitment.

George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Emory University. His latest book is " Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America."
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Opinion | Judith Butler: When Killing Women Isn't a Crime (Published 2019)

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The global struggle to stop violence against women and the struggle for human equality are linked. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Read in app Mr. Yancy is a philosopher and author.