Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President, Members of Congress, and my fellow Americans:

Last April, I spoke in this chamber about the immense crises we then faced. The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic emergency since the Great Depression. A violent takeover of this very building aimed at stopping the lawful certification of the electoral count and overturning the will of the voters. 

But I said the opportunities were great, too—and we seized them. We passed the American Rescue Plan, which put money into the hands of families and businesses that were hurting through no fault of their own. It worked. We now have the fastest growth in jobs and income in a generation.

We also went to wartime footing to increase supplies of the COVID-19 vaccine and get shots in arms. When I became president, 1 percent of Americans had been fully vaccinated. Today, nearly 70 percent have been. 

The crises, however, have not disappeared. And new ones have arisen, including mutations of the coronavirus and the highest inflation in decades—inflation that is eating away at the hard-won wage gains of average Americans.

I want to talk tonight about how we can meet these challenges. For they expose how the economy has become rigged against working Americans and the national interest, and what we must do, together, to make things right. 

Let’s begin with the recent surge of inflation. Some speculate that it was caused by the very federal spending that saved the economy. If that were true, long-term interest rates would be soaring—but that isn’t happening. The stronger evidence is that the inflation spike was triggered by the worldwide pandemic, which led to supply chain problems that my administration has been fixing, and labor shortages that are improving as more Americans are going back to work. But the root causes go deeper. 

Consider the price of beef. It’s up more than 20 percent since the fall of 2020. At the same time, the profits of the meat-packing industry are up more than 300 percent. Why? Because the federal government, led by administrations of both parties, allowed the meat industry to consolidate. Four companies now control 55 to 85 percent of the markets for beef, pork, and poultry. They use that monopoly control to jack up prices on consumers. They aren’t passing that revenue along to livestock farmers, who are still hurting. They’re spending it to buy back their own stock. That increases the stock price and, not coincidentally, the compensation of the CEOs who own the stock.

Or consider semiconductors, the mini computers that run so many of the products we use every day. Semiconductor supplies have plummeted because the factories in Asia that produce them have been hammered by the pandemic. That has led to shortages of, and higher prices for, everything from cars to refrigerators. 

But ask yourself: Why are we dependent on Asia for semiconductors? As recently as a decade ago, America was the world’s leader in producing cutting-edge semiconductors, right here at home. But the federal government, led by administrations of both parties, allowed one company—Intel—to buy up or drive out most of its U.S. competitors. Intel then sent offshore or sold off its U.S. manufacturing capacity to reduce costs and boost its stock price. Now, the American people are paying the price in higher inflation.

As you may know, there are not enough trucks and truck drivers to deliver products from our factories and ports to our warehouses and stores. In the recent past, however, many of those goods were delivered by freight rail. Why aren’t those goods now moving on trains? Because the federal government—again, led by administrations of both parties—allowed the railroad industry to monopolize. And the Wall Street hedge funds that control those monopolies demanded that they rip up tracks, mothball rail cars, and lay off seasoned union employees to get costs down and stock prices up. Now our freight rail system doesn’t have the capacity to take up the slack.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

These companies and financiers aren’t doing anything illegal. They’re just playing by the rules of the marketplace Washington has written. Folks, it’s time to tighten the rules. That won’t stop inflation immediately, but we can ensure that it won’t last if we act quickly.

I took the first step in July, when I signed an executive order directing federal agencies to start enforcing our antitrust laws again. Over time, this will not only help reduce inflation, it will also give our entrepreneurs a fairer shot at starting and growing their businesses; our small towns and heartland cities a better chance to build their local economies; and, with more local businesses competing for their talents, a fairer opportunity for American workers to negotiate higher wages—especially if we make it easier for them to join unions. As I said when I signed that order, I’m a proud capitalist. But capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation. 

But I can’t fully address the problem alone. I need Congress’s help. The existing rules didn’t foresee the rise of massive tech monopolies, like Google and Facebook, that buy up or crush their competitors, spy on their customers, and allow foreign disinformation to subvert our elections. Thankfully, lawmakers in both parties have advanced legislation that will allow the government to fight back against these predations. Send me the bill, and I will sign it.

Everyone in this chamber knows that Russia and China pose threats to our democracy, our security, and our economy. While our military must remain vigilant and well funded, the answer is not war. 

The best way to block their incursions is to fortify our alliances in ways that leverage our strengths. Collectively, the economies of the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom account for more than 45 percent of global GDP. Tonight, I am asking Congress to give me fast-track authority to pursue a new U.S.-EU-UK trade alliance based on labor rights, environmental stewardship, anti-monopoly policy, privacy, and other shared values that would raise middle- and working-class wages on both sides of the Atlantic. If China and Russia want access to that market, they will have to change their ways. If not, we will have broadened our sourcing of vital supplies: more from our friends, and less from regimes that might subject us to economic blackmail.

In a troubled world, millions of desperate people flock to our borders. Many seek work but haven’t gone through legal channels. They must be sent back. 

Others have legitimate claims of oppression at home and seek admission as refugees. We cannot admit them all. But how do we decide how many to welcome? 

That authority is vested in the president. But I believe the American people should have a bigger voice. The federal government already thoroughly vets these refugees and consults behind the scenes with state and local officials to determine where they will go. I am issuing an executive order requiring those state and local officials to engage their citizens in that determination. If those communities wish for more refugees—and many do, because refugees have skills, start businesses, and take hard-to-fill jobs—I will send them more.

Violent crime is on the rise in America. But we are not going to defund the police—not on my watch. The people living in the toughest neighborhoods don’t want less policing. They want more, and better, policing. In the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans came together to put 100,000 new officers trained in community policing on the streets, and the crime rate plummeted. My new budget calls for doing the same, but with more emphasis on promising strategies that can de-escalate conflict, like pairing police with social workers trained in handling the problems of mental health, spousal abuse, and drug addiction. 

The American people deserve a government that is on their side. Too often, they see one that fritters away their tax dollars. The single biggest source of waste in government today is the outsourcing of work to so-called service contractors—private companies that do work, often at twice the price and with worse results, that civil servants used to perform. Both parties have allowed this to happen. In the coming days, I will take steps to reverse the practice. 

The new and ongoing crises we face are taking a toll on all of us. It’s hard not knowing when things will get back to normal, or if they’ll get worse. The situation is toughest on our children, who need our reassurance, but sense our fear for their future. 

I understand that fear. It is rooted in justifiable concerns that our institutions are broken; that our leaders put their self-interest above the common good; that they listen more to the rich and powerful than to the people; and that they put partisanship above problem solving.

I share those concerns. I am disappointed that not one Republican in this chamber voted for the American Rescue Plan, which did so much for our economy. I’m saddened that Republicans have not supported our efforts to extend the child tax credit that is easing burdens on working families. Or our work to reverse the structural inequities that disproportionately hurt people of color, such as greater investments in underfunded historically Black and Hispanic colleges and universities, which help their students earn degrees that lead to good-paying jobs. Or our efforts to provide more affordable housing, bring down prescription drug prices, expand national service, combat climate change, and protect a woman’s right to choose. And I’m alarmed that no Republicans—yet—have offered their support for the reasonable legislation cosponsored by Senator Joe Manchin to protect the sanctity of the vote from the Big Lie. 

And yes, there’s blame to go around. We Democrats have spent precious time bickering among ourselves. You may have noticed that.

But when we in Washington truly listen to the American people and work together, we achieve great things. That’s what we did last fall, when Democrats and Republicans passed historic legislation to rebuild this country’s infrastructure. That investment in roads, bridges, and broadband will create not just good jobs for working Americans now, but also a sounder economy and a better life for generations to come.

Flawed as they are, our institutions can work miracles. The same federal government that botched the first year of the pandemic patiently invested, over many years, in medical research that created the breakthroughs that are the basis of the COVID-19 vaccines. And the same pharmaceutical companies that infuriate us by jacking up the price of medications also took that federal research and turned it into billions of vaccine doses that are saving lives here and around the world.

Even with our flaws, we are a great nation. Never bet against the United States of America.

Yes, my fellow Americans, our government is far from perfect. So are its leaders. We are fallen, like all humans, including the Founding Fathers. But the Almighty gave us the power of reason and the capacity for wisdom. If we use those gifts and work together, we can meet our challenges, provide prosperity, and build a more perfect union.

The post What Joe Biden Should Say appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Mary Ann Lynch, of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, is a model Democrat. She began her political career as a staffer for Democratic Governor Joe Brennan and has supported the party with donations and volunteer work for more than 40 years. In the past two elections, she voted a straight Democratic slate—Joe Biden, U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree, Governor Janet Mills—with one exception. Last fall, with control of the Senate on the line and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings a traumatic recent memory, Lynch cast a ballot for Republican Senator Susan Collins. She has no regrets.

“I’m a ticket splitter,” Lynch told me. “I don’t often split, but I do split. I vote for the person who I feel would be the best for Maine and for the country. Instead of saying we need more Democrats or more Republicans, I would say we would need more people like Susan Collins who reach across the aisle to get things done.”

Lynch does not share the ominous feeling, increasingly common among Democrats, that time is running out. A paper-thin majority in Congress is likely to disappear next year, leaving just months to pass paid family leave and protect voters from conservative attempts at disenfranchisement. As the likes of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema pettifog and delay, many Democrats wish for just one more Senate seat. And as Texas and other states pass restrictive abortion laws unchecked by the Supreme Court, frustrated Democrats turn to voters in Maine, who returned Collins to the Senate last fall despite her vote for Kavanaugh and the Republican tax bill, and ask: Why?

Exit polling indicates that 13 percent of Collins’s support in 2020 came from registered Democrats. Women overall broke for Collins over her challenger, Sara Gideon, 49 to 46 percent. How did these constituencies make a decision seemingly so against their own interests? How do they feel about it now? Ask them, and their answers often evoke nostalgia for things lost—paper mills, union jobs, and a bipartisan, collegial Congress. They also share a lack of urgency about the slow-moving constitutional crisis instigated by Donald Trump, a sign, along with the election of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia this fall, that Democrats will have to do more to win than point to Trump’s misdeeds, especially now that he’s off the ballot.

Joe Bean, of Falmouth, Maine, is not related to the famous L. L. Bean family, of comfy sportswear and (formerly) generous return policies, but he does embody another Maine tradition: a certain spin on political independence. Like Maine’s other senator, Angus King, Bean is not formally affiliated with a party, and also like King, he votes mostly with Democrats, which includes supporting the party’s candidates for president, Congress, and the governor’s mansion. With one exception: Collins.

In recent years, Democrats have relied on disgust generated by the antics of Trump—and, in Maine, the proto-Trumpist former Governor Paul LePage—to sway voters like Bean their way. And for the most part, lately, it has worked—Republicans haven’t put forward someone Bean could stomach for years. But Collins, to Bean, embodies a disappearing spirit of compromise, more important than a particular policy decision or appointee. “It hasn’t been pretty down there in D.C.,” he told me, “but I see her continuing to try to be that bridge between the parties.”

Bean, a retired hospital executive who has lived in Maine all his life, wants to see major Democratic initiatives such as Build Back Better succeed. Yet he said he considered Gideon a dedicated partisan who only would have added to the divide; Collins, in bringing along other Republicans, will help to get things done. He questioned why Biden didn’t follow the example of Bill Clinton, who in a bipartisan gesture hired Collins’s mentor, former Senator Bill Cohen, to serve in his cabinet. “Why can’t Biden do some of that outreach?” Bean asked. “Talk to the senators on the other side who might be willing to make a deal?”

This kind of thinking helps explain why the Kavanaugh vote failed to pull away the kinds of moderates who, in the Trump era, have been (mostly) reliable votes for Democrats. Lynch, a supporter of abortion rights, told me she was impressed by Collins’s conduct during the 2018 hearings—meeting with dozens of advocates from both sides, reading reams of documents, and calling for the FBI to investigate Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against the judge. It was the evenhandedness that mattered, even more than the result. “I probably would have respected her vote either way, because of the due diligence she had done,” Lynch said of Collins. “That’s what I want to see from a senator.”

Since joining the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has signaled that he is willing to overturn or limit Roe v. Wade in a decision due in June—seemingly reneging on his assurances to Collins that the precedent is “settled law.” So far, Collins has declined to comment on Kavanaugh’s remarks, during oral arguments on a Mississippi abortion law this December, that “if you think about some of the most important cases, some of the most consequential cases in this Court’s history, there’s a string of them where the cases overruled precedent.” In our conversations, Collins’s supporters told me it was too early to tell what Kavanaugh’s legacy on the Court would be.

Meanwhile, despite the Capitol attacks on January 6 and what has followed, Lynch and others interviewed for this story don’t agree that the Republican Party’s drift toward authoritarianism—denying the 2020 results, passing strict voter-suppression laws, subverting local control of elections—demands exceptional measures from Democrats and independents. “I don’t think it’s a time of crisis,” Lynch told me. “We have had far greater crises in this country. I’m naive; I still think that if we can reach across the aisle and understand each other, we can come to compromise and move forward.”

Bean framed the problem in an inverse way: If there is a danger to democracy, it’s in the presence of extreme partisanship on both sides, which pulls the country ever further apart. “I do think there’s a crisis, and I’m very concerned about it, frankly,” he said. “But I don’t think either side is right.”

That view is shared by another registered Democrat: Bill Green, a legendary Maine newsman who cut a series of campaign ads for Collins. Green places blame on both the right and the left, and is convinced that the country will head back to the middle. “I’m disgusted by January 6,” he told me. “But I’m disgusted by Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon, too”—a reference to looting and rioting that followed Black Lives Matter protests in those cities. “I feel like we’re starting to recognize that some of our systems are worth keeping. We just need to work on them.”

Thoughtful or not, brave or not, Collins’s stance on Kavanaugh—and her relationship with Trump—unquestionably harmed her standing in Maine. The senator won her prior election, in 2014, by 37 points over her Democratic challenger. In 2020, Collins beat Gideon 51 to 42, not factoring the many votes for the progressive independent Lisa Savage that, under Maine’s ranked-choice system, likely would have gone Gideon’s way had Collins failed to break 50 percent. Before the election, nearly every major poll showed Gideon significantly ahead, an error that observers afterward blamed on late-breaking undecideds and undercounting of ticket splitters. But some part of Collins’s reelection—however small—can also be attributed to the influential endorsement she received from Bill Green.

For 30 years, Green, a folksy television reporter known for his sweater vests and down-home sayings, hosted Bill Green’s Maine, a popular program that celebrated the state and its icons, from lobster boats to lighthouses to potato farms. A year into his retirement, the Senate race was at its feverish peak. Green, who spares no affection for Trump, watched with disgust as attack ads called Collins a “Trump stooge” who had “betrayed” her state. (Negative ads also dubiously charged Gideon with protecting a sexual predator in the Maine legislature and abandoning the speakership to campaign.) “It was snippy,” Green told me. “It was undignified. In Maine we ought to be able to have at it, but it shouldn’t be malicious.”

“I’m turned off by all the ads attacking my friend Susan Collins, and I find them offensive,” he said in an ad that aired that October. Green’s sentiments echoed those of many Mainers put off by the nastiness of the campaign, as well as their feeling that Gideon was drawing support from big-money outsiders. (“I’ve lived in Maine since 1975, and I’ve never seen such a negative campaign,” Lynch told me.) And although “my friend Susan” is, to Green, just that—an actual friend of his family—that language also reminded Mainers that they, too, knew Collins. If they hadn’t met her in the grocery store or at the 4-H, they’d seen her on TV and in person, stumping for their votes as she had for the past 24 years. In the ad, Green lent encouragement to ticket splitters. “No matter who you support for president, please remember: Maine needs Susan Collins.”

Collins’s votes in the Senate since her reelection have been just fine with Green, too. This summer, she helped defeat the For the People Act, arguing that its sweeping voting rights provisions—making Election Day a federal holiday, restoring eligibility to felons who’ve served their sentences, keeping names on voting rolls, automatically registering eligible voters—went far beyond preserving the right to vote. Green wasn’t convinced either that such sweeping action was necessary in response to laws such as Georgia’s, which forbids giving water to people waiting to vote. (With many polling places closed in Black areas, lines are often long.) Should people be allowed, Green mused, to give voters even such small gifts as a bottle of water? “What is that law saying? I don’t know,” he said. “Leave it to Susan. I trust her.”

The post Do Democrats Who Supported Susan Collins in 2020 Regret Their Vote? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Ever since he narrowly won his race for the Wisconsin State Senate in 2018, Democrat Jeff Smith has never stopped campaigning—though he does so in unusual ways. For instance, he regularly parks his trademark “big, red truck”—a 1999 Dodge Ram pickup—on the side of a road, plants a six-foot handmade sign that reads “Stop and Talk With Senator Jeff Smith,” and engages with his constituents on whatever topics are on their minds. These “Stop and Talks” help him in his role not only as a candidate but also as a policy maker. “Every conversation sparks a new idea,” he told me. 

Smith represents Wisconsin’s 31st State Senate District in the western part of the state, which Donald Trump won twice. Half of the district’s voters live in heavily Democratic Eau Claire, the rest mostly in six rural, and overwhelmingly Republican, counties. It is emblematic of the kind of geography Democrats have been losing in recent cycles and need to get better at to avoid being wiped out electorally in 2022 and 2024. 

To win reelection in 2022, Smith needs to do what he did in 2018: maximize turnout in Eau Claire, his hometown, while keeping his losses down everywhere else. It’s tough, though, because the Democratic brand has become so toxic in the rural and small-town parts of the district. Voters there, he says, identify the party with unpopular policies, like “defund the police,” that he and most other Democrats never supported. They also increasingly bring up their belief that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. 

His best hope, he told me, is to build enough trust with enough individual voters in rural counties that they will overcome their partisan leanings. That’s why he lets those who stop to chat lead the discussion. “If you listen to voters long enough, you can find something we agree on,” he observed, pointing to negotiating down prescription drug prices as an example. “That starts the process of building trust.” If he can engage with voters before the party label comes up, their response is often “You know, you are the only Democrat I can vote for.”

This slow listening strategy is how he ran his canvassing operation in the run-up to 2018. The campaign consultants the state party sent to help him counseled a traditional method based on efficiency: Use out-of-district volunteers to provide voters a scripted message and move on as quickly as practical to reach as many voters as possible. Instead, Smith and his campaign manager (whom he hired and paid for out of his own campaign funds, the better to maintain control of his message and strategy) personally knocked on 20,000 doors, representing 75 percent of possible doors. They also took their time, letting voters lead the conversation. They used the information gained from this in-depth canvassing to refine their message and language as the campaign progressed instead of exclusively relying on polling. 

Their door knocking paid off: The campaign overperformed in places where Smith and his manager knocked on the most doors compared to areas where volunteers knocked. His campaign also purchased radio ads and produced large hand-painted signs, which the consultants argued was a waste of money. Overall, Smith outperformed the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Tony Evers, who also won that year, by 3 percent in Eau Claire and 1 percent in the surrounding rural counties.

I asked Smith how he thinks he was able to surpass the top of the ticket. “Energy, visibility, out-of-the-box thinking, and control of my own messaging,” he replied. I also asked him how the party or outside funders could help him, and other Democrats like him, in 2022 and beyond. He recommended training for local volunteers in outreach at doors and over the phone, plus funding for year-round radio programming that counters GOP disinformation and builds the brands of individual candidates.

Over the past four years, I’ve spoken to scores of Democratic state legislative incumbents like Smith in 10 midwestern states as part of a research project with Illinois Representative Cheri Bustos, former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. While Democrats representing heavily rural, small-town, and suburban white working-class districts have been getting wiped out in recent cycles, a number have survived and even thrived. These officials are mostly overlooked when party leaders search for ways to win elections. But their collective wisdom holds the key to how Democrats can gain durable majorities in Washington and statehouses around the nation.

What Smith and Democratic politicians like him are practicing in the Midwest, on a localized basis, is a version of the “deep canvassing” approach that Stacey Abrams made famous when she ran, and came close to winning, the Georgia governor’s race in 2018, paving the way for two U.S. Senate victories for Democrats two years later. The method relies on building lasting personal relationships with voters not just at campaign time, but in the off years as well, with old-fashioned, but effective methods—at their doors and through local media. 

If these methods are practiced more widely, Democrats can improve in rural areas and win back some of the white working-class voters who have been deserting them. The improved results—even if it’s just a few percentage points—can help swing close battleground states in presidential campaigns, U.S. Senate races, and congressional contests. As a first step, the national and state parties should start listening to politicians like Smith. Then, they and their funders need to start building institutions—including PACs and nonprofits—that devote resources to rural Democrats and the strategies, both time-tested and novel, they can use to woo skeptical blue-collar voters.

Paul Marquart has represented his rural, northwestern Minnesota state house district for 20 years. He credits his constant door-to-door campaigning for his longevity in a district Trump won by 12 points in 2020. He knocks in the odd-numbered years, too. When the pandemic hit and traditional canvassing was limited, it was the personal relationships he had built with voters over time, in the months and years before he needed their votes, that made the difference. “That election wasn’t won for me in 2020, but from the previous 20 years,” Marquart says.

State Representative Kevin Hertel from Macomb County, Michigan, has similar advice. He reports positive experiences with more extensive conversations at the doors, where he tries to “drill down” with voters. “If they trust you enough, you can push back,” he told me.

In working-class Council Bluffs, Iowa, state Representative Charlie McConkey knocks on doors three times each campaign cycle. He won his district in 2020 by seven points, while Trump won it by five. State Representative Dave Considine, from rural Wisconsin, knocks on 15,000 doors himself each cycle. 

State Representative Darrin Camilleri, from a mostly white working-class district in suburban Detroit, says it was “consistently meeting voters over four years that helped create a shield—they know me.” And once voters know a candidate, they are less likely to believe the worst of them. As state Representative Tip McGuire from Kenosha, Wisconsin, says, “I can beat a Facebook ad if I’m at your door.”

A number of the lawmakers I interviewed don’t bring up the fact that they’re Democrats with constituents. “If voters don’t know your party first, you can get through to them,” says Lance Yednock, the only Democrat left representing a rural district in the Illinois House of Representatives. State Representative Julie Rogers from Kalamazoo, Michigan, agrees: “You have to brand yourself. It’s more important than party ID.”

But these highly localized door-knocking campaigns are difficult when control is turned over to managers and staff sent by caucus campaign organizations, who are often more schooled in urban political methods. And they are parachuted in during election season, when voters’ opinions of Democrats—cemented by a Republican news and talk radio machine that works constantly—may have already hardened past the point of resuscitation.

That’s where local media come in. Many of the successful candidates I spoke with devote significant time, and what limited funding they have, to getting their messages out through local newspapers and radio stations. These efforts, they say, help them build their individual brands separate from the toxic reputation the Democratic Party has with many of the voters they need to win. 

Jeff Smith, for instance, publishes a column on his website that is regularly reprinted in weekly newspapers that cover the rural and small-town parts of his Wisconsin district. Other lawmakers I spoke with do the same. 

When they can afford it, they also place ads in these publications. Representative Hertel buys space in two Macomb County newspapers for his op-eds. State Senator Amanda Ragan from northern Iowa places ads in 10 local newspapers, believing that they have staying power—“Many people will set it down to read later.” 

Newspaper ads have fallen out of favor with some party professionals over the years, following conventional wisdom about newspapers’ decline. But, in rural areas, weekly town or countywide papers serve as the journal of the community and a significant source of news. Several lawmakers told me that ads in such papers take on added value in places that lack adequate broadband.

The same goes for local radio stations. The content on the stations is often arch-conservative, and state party officials often advise candidates to avoid spending money on them. Still, state Senator Judy Schwank, from Berks County, Pennsylvania, frequently goes on a talk radio AM station and advertises there as well. 

Yard signs and billboards are also critical in rural areas. Schwank, in a common refrain I heard, said, “Consultants tell me, ‘Yard signs don’t vote,’ but they are very important in rural areas and send a strong, symbolic message of support to neighbors that it’s okay to support a Democrat.” Minnesota state Representative Julie Sandstede, who was reelected to her Iron Range district also won by Trump, emailed me, “In rural communities, where internet service is spotty and even the mail (postal service) is limited, billboards are the one sure way candidates can ensure visibility and messaging.”

Admirable as these efforts are, Democratic lawmakers are swimming against swift political currents. To help them and other candidates like them, Democrats will need a wholesale revamping of their strategy and an investment in resources to carry it out.

First and foremost, the party and its funders need to assist Democratic officeholders and candidates in conducting the deep canvassing techniques that can mobilize regular supporters and help find new ones. As Sasha Issenberg pointed out in his book The Victory Lab, George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 conducted “search and rescue” operations to find Republican voters in strong Democratic communities like Duluth, Minnesota. Democrats should do the same, and start by investing in training local volunteers in canvassing and phone techniques. Research has shown that local volunteers are more effective than people brought in from the outside, but they need to be properly trained. And as this magazine has documented, even in the reddest districts there are cadres of loyal Democrats eager to help, if only someone would ask. 

Second, Democrats running in rural and white working-class districts need funding to purchase ads and secure other exposure in local media, especially in off years. This is vital to helping them establish or maintain their personal brands. 

Local newspapers are one key outlet. While such papers have certainly been suffering economically because of collapsing ad revenue, their readership is still reasonably high. And the advertising slump means that their ad rates are more affordable than ever. It also means, frankly, that they’re motivated to give friendlier coverage to candidates who buy ads.

Radio advertising is also an important part of the messaging mix in rural areas. Country music stations and those broadcasting weather and farm programming are popular, not very political, and natural places for rural individual Democrats to buy ads with messages tailored to their audiences. On other stations, regional or national talk show hosts, almost all of them conservative or far right, dominate. Democrats lack anything that comes remotely close to competing.

Judy Schwank told me the party needs its own, rival syndicated radio program that talks values and communities. Jeff Smith suggested something similar, perhaps including a recurring, folksy segment like the old Paul Harvey “The Rest of the Story” that adds context to negative Republican ads. A model for this type of programming already exists—George Rattay, chair of the Fayette County, Pennsylvania, Democrats, hosts The Democratic Radio Hour on an AM station that’s partially funded by a local union and focuses on economic “bread-and-butter issues.”

Outdoor advertising is another investment opportunity for a rural PAC. Billboards can be expensive, and space often needs to be reserved early. A third-party group can fund billboards with economic messaging featured in nonelection years to continually build the brand—with wording chosen by the candidates themselves. 

Tabloid-style newsletters, mailed directly to voters’ homes, can be an effective way to advertise the Democratic legacy directly to voters in rural areas as a form of brand rehabilitation. After all, the Democratic Party does have deep working-class and rural bona fides, and much of the economic security that people rely on, from Social Security to Medicare, was created by Democrats. Democrats recently passed programs that built on this legacy, such as the bipartisan infrastructure bill and tax credits for families with children. Research shows that voters aren’t crediting Democrats with policy achievements. A series of newsletters that highlight these policies, stretching back to the FDR era and drawing a sharp contrast with the corporate policies pursued by Republicans, can help with political literacy and education. I’ve found in previous campaigns that voters, especially seniors, keep this style of advertising on their coffee tables longer than traditional mailers, which have a more generic feel. 

Without a strong Democratic media presence, Republicans get to dictate the narrative. But we know from the past that when Democrats do succeed in rural areas, it’s based on people forming personal connections to the party. I was reminded in several conversations that stories about Democratic successes aren’t passed down the way they used to be. Former Pennsylvania state Senator Rich Kasunic said his family would gather for dinner and his dad would share whether the union had been able to secure work for him in the coal mines in the upcoming week. The decline of unions reduced the intermediary role they played in disseminating information about policy and politics. Today, those dinner table conversations need to be kickstarted by Democrats themselves, promoting their own history of advocating for working people. 

One emerging issue ripe for this type of grassroots education and mobilization is the monopolization of key areas of the economy, including agriculture. Democrats are going after big monopolies, and demonstrating their negative impacts on jobs, wages, and Main Street can make inroads in rural communities.

There are plenty of PACs, nonprofits, and third-party organizations devoted to aspects of improved performance in rural areas. But these existing organizations mostly focus on polls or messaging. That can help, but they don’t invest in ways that can help candidates address voters in the media they engage with, like small local newspapers, and where Republicans have established complete control, like radio. 

Such strategies are neither inconceivable nor prohibitively expensive. In most cases, they require consistent investment and a willingness to listen to the locals and trust the candidates. There is no question in my mind that Democrats can improve their performance in rural and working-class areas. The Republicans didn’t so much win these voters in the past 10 years as Democrats lost them. An organization dedicated to investing in the right strategic areas and listening to winning officials on the ground can start the challenging road ahead, one house and one town at a time.

The post How Democrats Can Win in White Working-Class Districts appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The District of Columbia’s June 2020 primary was nothing short of a disaster. To minimize the risk of coronavirus transmission, the city abandoned its plan to hold an election the old-fashioned way. It shuttered most of its polling locations, keeping open just 20 full-service vote centers, open to any voter, rather than the 143 precinct-based centers normally in use, and sent every registered eligible voter an application to request an absentee ballot. 

This left huge jams at vote centers, with long lines snaking around sidewalks, forcing some voters to wait more than four hours to cast ballots. While more than 90,000 voters—out of the city’s roughly 410,000 registered voters—requested absentee ballots, hundreds reported never receiving them. At a conference the day after the election, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called the event “nothing short of failed execution.” 

Something had to change.

Learning from their mistakes, D.C. election officials took a different tack for the November general election. This time, they mailed every registered eligible voter a postage-paid ballot, rather than an application to vote absentee; opened up more vote centers; and peppered ballot drop boxes across the city. The approach proved highly successful: Citywide turnout was 66.9 percent—up from 65.3 percent in 2016 and 60.9 percent in 2012. More than 60 percent of voters cast their ballots by mail or drop box, making D.C.’s experiment with mail voting consistent with western states that all saw increased voter turnout after enacting similar vote-at-home systems.

Now, D.C. policy makers want to make the 2020 reforms permanent. Nudged by recent Republican efforts in state legislatures to restrict voting access, Councilmember Charles Allen introduced the Elections Modernization Amendment Act of 2021 before the city council in November. The bill would codify the 2020 election measures into D.C. law. Most significantly, it would require the Board of Elections to send a postage-paid ballot to every registered eligible voter and provide tracking updates on the status of their ballots, giving voters the peace of mind of knowing their mailed-out ballot has been received and counted. Allen hopes his legislation will allow “more and more and more people to be able to vote.”

If the legislation passes and is signed into law, D.C. would join a growing number of states—Washington, Oregon, Utah, Hawaii, Colorado, Nevada, Vermont, and California—that have transitioned to vote-at-home systems. 

But the measure could also have ripple effects beyond the city borders. Skeptics of vote by mail have long worried that the system would suppress minority votes. That’s one reason it hasn’t spread more rapidly in cities and states east of the Mississippi that have large Black populations. Yet if D.C., a 46 percent Black city with a Black mayor, makes the switch to permanent vote by mail, other jurisdictions might be more likely to follow. What’s more, if the legislation passes and the election that follows goes as swimmingly as 2020, it could influence the national conversation by convincing the many people with power and influence who reside in Washington of the merits of universal vote by mail.

Notably, states on the West Coast have been “far more progressive in terms of expanding options for voters over time than any other part of the country,” says Amber McReynolds, the former CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, who now sits on the U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors.  

Even more significantly, the states that have adopted mail-in voting have been controlled by both Democratic and Republican officials in the governor’s mansion and statehouse. All that changed last year. Ahead of the 2020 vote count, former President Donald Trump went to war with vote by mail, scaring GOP voters away from mail voting with egregiously false claims that the system was rife with voter fraud. After he lost, he propagated lies that the election had been stolen from him. Since then, vote by mail has become much more popular among Democrats. 

“Historically, voting by mail was not really a partisan issue,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of Voting Rights & Elections at the Brennan Center for Justice, says. “In fact, often, the Republican Party saw more mail voting than the Democratic Party,” and it was “a form of voting that Republicans encouraged.” 

Beyond the simple convenience of voters being able to return their ballots in the way that suits them—whether by mailing them in or dropping them off—the system has other big pros: It reminds voters that elections are taking place (which is especially important in a non-presidential election cycle); it saves states and localities significant cash; and it means that voters are likelier to complete the full ballot because they have more time to research candidates and talk through their options with friends and family. “It’s like a take-home exam, open book,” Robert Stein, a political science professor at Rice University, says.

But not all Democrats are completely sold on vote by mail. Some have criticized the method over the possibility that it could suppress low-income and Black votes. With the exception of Hawaii, all of the states that have enacted a vote-at-home system so far are majority white. D.C., by contrast, is a majority-minority city with a large Black plurality.

The logic behind these concerns is rooted in demography and culture. First, Black voters are more transient than white voters, says Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, the national political and organizing director of the Collective, a PAC aimed at increasing representation of the Black community in seats of power. When people move regularly, they might be less likely to update their voter registration record, which would naturally become an obstacle for mail ballots reaching correct addresses. At the same time, there are higher rates of homelessness among Black populations: 86.5 percent of homeless people in D.C. are African American (compared with 46 percent of the general D.C. population). There is also a stronger culture of in-person voting among Black communities, partly due to the historic “souls to the polls” movement involving the transportation of Black churchgoers from places of worship to the ballot box after Sunday services, Olasanoye told me. 

This concern isn’t just a hypothetical. D.C. Council-member Allen says that in the June 2020 D.C. primary, “voters took up vote by mail at a different rate based on which neighborhood they were in. So, we did see, in neighborhoods that are predominantly more affluent and more white, they utilized vote by mail more.”

Yet, Olasanoye, alongside other advocates for expanded voting access, believes that mail voting can boost the political power of Black voters if implemented properly. 

The first stipulation of any good vote-by-mail system is that it provide a sufficient number of physical voting sites so voters have choices. The standard, according to McReynolds, who served as Denver’s director of elections from 2011 to 2018, is one voting center for every 20,000 to 50,000 registered voters—depending on state idiosyncrasies such as population density. 

Educating voters is also key. In 2020, elections administrators across the U.S. spent hundreds of millions of dollars informing the public about how to register to vote, how to vote by mail, and what the rules and deadlines were. “That level of education has to happen in targeted communities, particularly in the Black community, now that we’re not in a COVID regime,” Olasanoye said. “For Black folks, like everybody else, they will exercise this option if they understand the rules of the game.”

One encouraging case study comes out of Baltimore. During a 2020 special election, Maryland’s 7th Congressional District—which has a majority-Black population and takes in about half of Baltimore City and chunks of neighboring Baltimore and Howard Counties—implemented vote by mail for the first time. 

Many advocates expressed grave concerns about the potential of the system to suppress voters without permanent addresses, especially given that the district encompasses some of the poorest sections of West Baltimore. But as the Washington Monthly’s Eric Cortellessa reported last year, the election turned out to be a massive success: Overall voter turnout increased by 10 percentage points between the February primary—held in the traditional, in-person way—and the April vote-by-mail election. The February primary, meanwhile, was actually the more competitive race: a Democratic primary in a Democratic district. Moreover, the district’s voters cast a stunning 157,075 mail-in ballots compared with just 1,009 cast at in-person polls.

To pull this off, the state Board of Elections took three key steps: They mailed a ballot to every registered voter (rather than putting the burden on voters to apply), kept three in-person voting sites open for those who needed them, and invested in high-speed vote counters. The results are clear evidence that, when implemented with care, vote-by-mail elections can empower a majority-Black electorate.

Washington, D.C.’s own 2020 general election provides similar evidence that mail voting can work in minority jurisdictions. For instance, in D.C.’s Ward 7, which is 91.7 percent Black, turnout increased from 59.6 percent to 63.1 percent between the 2016 and 2020 general elections, with 61.1 percent of voters in the ward voting absentee. 

All in all, if the D.C. legislation to make vote by mail permanent passes, it could be an opportunity for the city to prove that the system can boost turnout among all populations in a plurality-Black city. As Christopher Mann, a voting rights expert and professor at Skidmore College, told me, the city’s success could influence the national debate because “there is some reluctance from elected officials about which communities might be helped or hurt by this.”

It could also shape the conversation around vote by mail because of the professional makeup of its electorate. Simply put, people of power and influence—be they administration officials, Capitol Hill staffers, think tank scholars, or journalists—will get to experience, for the second time, the benefits of the system firsthand. That, Mann said, could dispel “the skepticism that comes from unfamiliarity.” 

In turn, those same people might feel more confident promoting vote by mail as a positive reform. “Everybody looks to the District of Columbia as the nation’s capital on many different policy issues,” Councilmember Brianne Nadeau told me. “We are always mindful of that.” In other words, it could lead to a potential domino effect.

While the bill’s passage is not assured, its chances look promising: Seven out of 13 councilmembers—three of whom are Black—co-introduced it with Allen. It also has strong community support. An organization aimed at enhancing the political power of D.C.’s low-income communities, Empower DC, supports vote by mail along with other initiatives to increase access. “If it were to be implemented fully and completely in D.C., it should assist with voter access for Black communities,” executive director Parisa Norouzi says.

To be sure, there are some risks involved. Congress has unique jurisdiction over the city. While the current Democrat-controlled Congress would have no problem with the legislation, Republicans “might see it as provocative … as an opportunity to have this debate on a national stage,” Mann said. If and when Republicans control Congress again, they would have the power to repeal the measure. 

Such repeals have happened, but they are relatively rare. Moreover, Republicans might be wary that overturning D.C.’s election laws could be the pretext Democrats need to get a majority of their caucus behind making D.C. a state, which would likely hand Democrats two more Senate seats. 

In the meantime, Donald Trump and his acolytes continue to cast doubt on the system and spread the lie that the former president actually beat Joe Biden. That means Democrats will have to do everything in their power to protect and enhance voting rights. Expanding vote by mail is one of the surest ways to do that.

The post Will D.C. Lead the Way on Vote by Mail?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Los Angeles’s Griffith Park is instantly recognizable to movie watchers, with its iconic observatory, sprawling views, and, of course, the Hollywood sign. Tourists and Angelenos alike flock to the hills to hike and take selfies, oblivious to a quiet climate revolution taking place below, in a tree nursery at the park’s base. 

For Amaiya Mason, that part of Griffith Park is the office.

Mason is a fellow with the California Climate Action Corps, a state-level program that utilizes funds from AmeriCorps, the federal government’s national service program, to place mostly young people with local organizations that work on climate-oriented projects. Beginning in September, she was deployed to a nonprofit called City Plants, which runs the Griffith Park tree nursery as part of a public-private partnership with the city.

A native and resident of Compton, Mason spearheads campaigns for City Plants’ Tree Ambassador program, which pays community members to lead tree planting efforts in under-resourced neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights, Koreatown, and Watts, which have little tree coverage and are more susceptible to extreme heat. She has helped coordinate campaigns with the program’s 13 ambassadors, each helping plant trees in low-canopy neighborhoods. Along the way, she’s developed skills, and a passion, for community organizing—listening to residents’ mistrust of government and changing her pitch to accommodate it; working with people in lower-income communities to hear about their needs; and hosting events where residents of those neighborhoods take home free trees. 

The California Climate Action Corps has already shaped her career goals and opportunities. Upon completion of her term of service, she’ll earn $10,000 in federal and state education awards—an “awesome perk,” she says, that will allow her to finish her associate’s degree at a community college and eventually pursue a graduate degree. And the work she is doing has fortified her long-term plans—bringing climate solutions back to her hometown.

“I’m always like, how can I bring this back to Compton?” Mason said. “I really want to bring a compost facility. I want to have a sustainability office in Compton. I’m getting to work so closely with city planners and other organizations that they’re affiliated with, so I get to learn the ins and outs of what needs to happen, so that I can bring it to my people.”

Mason’s desire to continue her climate work is exactly what the founders of the California Climate Action Corps were hoping for. When Governor Gavin Newsom’s office set out to create a climate corps, they focused on three pillars: meaningful climate work, equity, and service. And while numerous conservation corps and local-level climate programs exist around the country, Newsom and his team, led by the chief service officer, Josh Fryday, consciously designed the CCAC to be a national model to show President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats not only how to create a climate corps, but how to do it right.

Indeed, a version of what Newsom has started, on a small scale in California, might well happen nationally. As of early December, the Build Back Better plan approved by the House of Representatives included $15.2 billion in new funding for AmeriCorps to launch a nationwide climate corps. If the program survives at that size and the Build Back Better bill passes, it would represent the largest expansion of national service in decades.

AmeriCorps currently has about 75,000 annual participants. The Civilian Climate Corps would add 300,000 new positions—a monumental victory for both national service and the fight against climate change. But its creation would present three major practical challenges. First, can it be scaled up at such a pace without diluting its impact or creating the kinds of unintended scandals political enemies and the press might seize on? Second, can it fulfill the demands of the left, including greater representation of low-income and marginalized participants than AmeriCorps has traditionally provided, and find them good-paying jobs in the emerging green economy? Third, and most importantly, can a service program focused on one issue—climate change—be successful and unifying when one of the two major political parties denies that the problem even exists?

Some answers to these questions can be found by looking into the details of the federal legislation—and into what is effectively its predecessor, the California Climate Action Corps.

When President Bill Clinton signed the National Community and Service Trust Act in 1993, which authorized the creation of AmeriCorps, he and the lawmakers who shepherded its passage had a big vision. His budgets pushed for 50,000 servicemembers to go out into the field each year, with the intention of growing that number to the point that every American who wanted to serve would have the opportunity to do so.

But that goal proved elusive. AmeriCorps has managed to survive, and in some ways thrive, over the years, thanks to the bipartisan support it enjoys at the state and local levels because of its decentralized structure. The bulk of federal AmeriCorps dollars flows to individual states’ “service commissions,” which are in large part controlled by governors. The commissions then vet the nonprofit organizations that receive those dollars and use them to cover the living allowances of AmeriCorps members. Indeed, it was a Republican governor, George W. Bush, who, when he became president, expanded AmeriCorps to 75,000 participants. 

In Congress, however, AmeriCorps quickly developed enemies, especially on the right. House Republicans, when in the majority, have repeatedly tried to zero out the program’s budget. Though those attempts have failed, they have effectively kept a lid on AmeriCorps’s growth. 

The program also has antagonists on the left. Its roots in the moderate Clinton administration make it suspect in the eyes of some progressives. Public-sector unions have long worried that AmeriCorps members might steal government jobs. And some members of the Congressional Black Caucus see it as a program that primarily parachutes affluent white people into their communities rather than hiring disadvantaged members of those communities. (In fact, AmeriCorps’s membership broadly reflects the demographics of the country, with mostly white and middle-class participants and significant numbers of Black and Latino members.)

Because of this political resistance, AmeriCorps remained stuck for years at 75,000 participants, with insufficient administrative funding and penurious stipends for members. Ironically, the low member stipends made it even more difficult to recruit people of color and low-income people to serve.

When Biden won the presidency and Democrats took control of the Senate, champions of AmeriCorps saw the potential for a breakthrough. Democratic Senator Chris Coons, a longtime champion of national service and the president’s best friend in the Senate, had been working with Republican Senator Roger Wicker on legislation to expand AmeriCorps. Coons and other lawmakers succeeded in adding an extra $1 billon, available through 2024, for AmeriCorps (whose 2020 budget was only $979 million) to the American Rescue Plan, the $2 trillion stimulus bill Democrats passed in March. Those funds provided for much-needed administrative upgrades, lower matching grant requirements for partner nonprofits that struggled during the pandemic, and new service positions to help with pandemic-related aid work. Most critically, the bill raised the size of the AmeriCorps annual living allowance to a minimum of $16,000—still meager, but higher than before.

As traditional national service advocates were finally securing a victory in Washington, the idea of corps work was picking up steam, unexpectedly, on the left. In 2018, the Sunrise Movement, an influential progressive environmental group, began calling for a Green New Deal—an homage to Franklin D. Roosevelt that featured national service components similar to those in FDR’s original program. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps supported the “tree army”—3 million (mostly white) unemployed men who received wages, food, clothing, and shelter in exchange for manual labor in conservation. Under the Green New Deal, a Civilian Climate Corps would combat climate change with a particular eye to Black, brown, and low-income communities that bear the brunt of the crisis.

Sunrise promoted the CCC heavily as its members helped the Biden and Bernie Sanders camps to create a unified platform in the 2020 Democratic primaries. By the time Biden became the official nominee, a Civilian Climate Corps was on his climate platform.

Sunrise’s original, somewhat vague plan called for creating a new agency, potentially housed in the U.S. Department of Labor, to manage the new CCC. AmeriCorps was mostly left out of the picture.

This plan, however, posed practical problems. For instance, a new agency would have little of the preexisting infrastructure, such as relationships with reliable state and local nonprofits, needed to roll out such a large program. That could lead to snafus, like a weak grantee misappropriating funds, that might garner media investigations and howls of protest by conservatives that the whole CCC enterprise is a waste of taxpayer dollars. 

Fortunately, as congressional Democrats began working on the bill, it quickly became clear that there was no way to avoid running the proposed program through AmeriCorps—for the simple reason that the budget reconciliation process, through which Build Back Better would have to pass, makes the creation of new agencies and programs impractical. “If we had to say, would you want the CCC to be run out of AmeriCorps, ‘probably not’ is the answer,” Lauren Maunus, the advocacy director at Sunrise, told me. “But is there a vehicle that makes more sense than AmeriCorps for national service in funded and existing programs? No.”

From there, progressives such as Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez negotiated with Coons and national service allies to merge their proposals. To bring members of the Black Caucus on board, they agreed to extend the American Rescue Plan pay raises to lift the allowance to a minimum of $15 per hour. In addition, several Hill staffers told me Biden committed to ensuring that 50 percent of CCC projects are in “environmental justice communities”—that is, localities whose low-income or minority residents are disproportionately affected by climate change—and that 50 percent of recruits come from those communities. The bill also provides about $1.1 billion in extra funds for AmeriCorps to continue expanding its administrative capacity.

Media coverage of the seemingly endless clashes between progressive and moderate Democrats that have characterized Build Back Better has damaged the party’s brand and deflated Biden’s approval rating. But at least in the case of the Civilian Climate Corps, the sausage making led to an admirable result. The zeal of progressive groups like the Sunrise Movement—which staged hunger strikes and protests outside the White House, among other actions—put the CCC on the Democrats’ agenda and helped keep it there during endless rounds of budget cutting. Knowledgeable moderates like Coons helped broker the negotiations in ways that kept both progressive lawmakers and the likes of Joe Manchin on board, all the while grounding the legislation in the familiar and reliable soil of AmeriCorps. “There was a lot of agreement around AmeriCorps serving as the center pole,” says AnnMaura Connolly, the president of Voices for National Service and a key player in the negotiations. “Folks had priority pieces, and that was clear, but in a weird way, they were so complementary that there wasn’t a need for drama.”

While Washington was wrestling in the early months of 2021 with legislation to create a Civilian Climate Corps, California was a step ahead: It was rolling one out.

In September 2020, Newsom announced the creation of the California Climate Action Corps, which began accepting applicants. By January 2021, the inaugural cohort of CCAC members were in the field, working on fire mitigation, food rescue and recovery, and urban greening in five cities. 

One of those members was Maricella Fuentes. A 2020 graduate of the University of California, Davis, Fuentes had been trying unsuccessfully to find environmental work during the height of the pandemic. She applied to the CCAC and was accepted to work at Veggielution, a nonprofit in East San Jose that grows healthy crops on a six-acre community farm. As a CCAC member, she helped distribute the food to local families in need, processed excess food to either donate or sell at Veggielution’s farm stand, and taught local families about minimizing methane emissions through composting and gardening.

As Fuentes’s seven-month stint came to an end, her bosses at Veggielution were impressed enough to offer her an interview and eventually a job. Since September, she has been on staff as a communications coordinator.

Fuentes’s experience is exactly what advocates of a national Civilian Climate Corps are hoping to deliver—a chance for a young person of a modest background to fight climate change through grassroots service, and then translate that service into a good job. Though the CCAC has only been up and running for a year, there are strong signs that its impact is matching its intentions. And importantly, while it’s a state-based initiative, it’s very much an AmeriCorps program, and thus an example of how local governments can put federal funds to their best use.

The CCAC operates through AmeriCorps State and National, which dispenses funds to California’s service commission. Fellows receive a $27,000 living stipend, topping off the average AmeriCorps contribution in California—$18,000, according to Fryday—with money that initially came from the governor’s discretionary funding and now is provided through state legislation. They can receive educational awards up to $10,000—the first $6,345, for a full term, comes from the federal Segal Education Award, and the state will provide up to an additional $3,655. Next year, the program is expanding through a partnership with the University of California and California State University systems to provide up to another $10,000 for college students to do a yearlong term of service while still in school, through funding from the state budget.

“There’s been good programs in the past, but they’re kind of like, okay, we’ll teach you how to plant a tree or clean up a highway or debris from serving time or getting in trouble or whatever,” Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, told me. “[CCAC] is much more comprehensive. It’s really about directing people towards great careers, and skills that they can use for the rest of their lives to address poverty as well as the planet.”

In November, I shadowed a number of fellows as they went about their work. Fellows in Santa Monica collected excess food from a local Whole Foods, a partnering organization, and delivered it to a food distribution site at an elementary school in Venice Beach—thus tackling both food insecurity and methane emissions from food waste. In Los Angeles, Nithya Raman, a city councilmember, told me about sending fellows in her office on a door-knocking and phone banking campaign to connect residents in zip codes with high wildfire risk with a city service that provides rebates for turf replacement, making their homes more fire resilient. And at an outdoor sports park in Redlands, fellows sweated under a relentless late-November sun as they showed me the trees they had planted and discussed the need for greater tree coverage.

AmeriCorps has been more rigorously evaluated than most federal programs. Its education and workforce training efforts, for instance, have proved especially effective in helping recipients of the service. Those who serve in AmeriCorps, meanwhile, are more than three times as likely as their demographic peers to secure jobs in the social service sector, according to a 2018 study from Service Year Alliance and Burning Glass Technologies, a labor market analytics firm. In other words, experiences like that of Fuentes, who landed a permanent job at the nonprofit where she served, are common.

One fear about the Civilian Climate Corps, however, is that the challenge of fielding 300,000 new members could tax AmeriCorps’s management ability. The agency’s process for disbursing grants is already bogged down in red tape, and scaling up so dramatically could mean that there will not be enough time to deeply engage with local partners, thereby placing members in roles that have minimal climate impact and little bearing on their career goals. “It comes back to solidifying those local partnerships,” says Josh Fryday, the California official overseeing CCAC, which started with 300 members in 2021 and will have 1,000 in 2022. “If you don’t have those, and if they aren’t on board with it, and it’s not really in with what the local leaders are trying to accomplish, you’re going to get people doing a bunch of random stuff that’s not having an impact.” 

The good news is that the new federal legislation anticipates some of these problems. In addition to extra money to administer the program, it simplifies regulations with the aim of reducing the time that both grantees and government officials spend navigating AmeriCorps’s complex bureaucracy, which has been a source of consternation in the past. And it gives AmeriCorps considerable time—eight years—to scale up from its current 75,000 members to 300,000.

The far more worrying problem is that a new federal Civilian Climate Corps, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president with no support from GOP lawmakers, could provoke a political backlash. It is not hard to imagine Republicans in Washington, if they reassume power, attempting to defund the program, and GOP states refusing to participate, as happened with Obamacare. “To the extent that national service can be a vehicle for bringing people together across difference, I am concerned that the branding is not an invitation for common venture,” says John Gomperts, the former director of AmeriCorps. “That worries me.”

The solution may be to be flexible with the brand. That is what the California Climate Action Corps has done. For example, CCAC is working with Fresno’s new Republican mayor, former police chief Jerry Dyer, to help him achieve his campaign goal of “beautification.” In reality, the fellows who work in Fresno do the same urban greening work as those in Los Angeles or San Jose. CCAC is also starting a program in rural Butte County, one of California’s more conservative areas, to do fire mitigation work. The county, recently decimated by deadly fires, is grateful for the help. They just avoid using terms like “climate change.”

“These are communities that are being affected by it,” Fryday said. “They may not talk about it as climate, but we’re going to have to make sure Climate Corps works for them.”

A federal Civilian Climate Corps could be similarly flexible in how it markets itself. AmeriCorps has existing partnerships in every red state, including commissions that work with Republican political leaders. In Florida, for example, state leaders are thinking about using their existing AmeriCorps programs to start a “Resilience Corps,” parroting language that ultraconservative Governor Ron DeSantis frequently deploys, that would help develop better flood barriers and other ways to combat the effects of rising sea levels. Across the Southwest, West, and South, Republicans acknowledge that heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding are problems, and things like planting trees or re-landscaping houses to be fire-smart are inoffensive solutions—so long as they are not aggressively marketed as being about climate change. 

The danger, however, of allowing individual states and localities to label what they’re doing as “beautification” and “resilience” is that it will effectively submerge the identity of the new Civilian Climate Corps. In the Peace Corps or the military, members serve in disparate locations engaging in different roles, and yet the experience of having served in a respected national organization becomes a key part of their identity, far beyond their term. But AmeriCorps has never enjoyed that same sense of communal spirit. Many participants in AmeriCorps programs identify as employees of the nonprofits they work for—Habitat for Humanity, say, or Teach for America. It is not unusual for these members to not even know that their salaries are being paid by AmeriCorps. 

California has confronted this dilemma by creating a “shared member experience program” that tries to foster esprit de corps among its far-flung CCAC fellows. The program organizes frequent group Zoom calls for fellows based on regions and focus areas, engages them in regular trainings and service days, and brings them together for presentations and networking events. “What makes this interesting and intriguing to people is that they get to be part of something,” Fryday, a Navy veteran, told me. “They get the call to arms of their generation.” 

For Fuentes, those opportunities to engage with other fellows and feel like a part of something larger than her day-to-day work was one of the best things about the program. During her term, she went on a small group trip to the governor’s mansion to build a garden, participated in food rescue work, and attended workshops with other fellows in San Jose. “It really exposed me to great opportunities career-wise, but also connecting with a lot of people,” Fuentes said. “It was really well rounded with helping people like me with professional development.”

Creating a federal climate corps will be a real challenge for the Biden administration, which must balance the progressive enthusiasm fueling the legislation on a national level with the bipartisan investment needed to make it work in localities. But if national Democrats heed the lessons their California counterparts have learned, the Civilian Climate Corps can be a success story that helps achieve climate and job goals. 

And if done right, the CCC can do something that sometimes feels even more difficult than stopping climate change: bring Americans together.

The post The Promise, and Potential Pitfalls, of a Civilian Climate Corps appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last February, President Joe Biden issued an executive order commanding agencies throughout the government to report on ways to fix America’s supply chain mess. He ordered the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to tell him what to do about the country’s near-total dependence on China for the key ingredients needed to produce vital pharmaceuticals. He tasked the secretaries of the Energy and Defense Departments with finding solutions to our growing dependence on foreign corporations for the materials needed to make everything from electric vehicle batteries to computer-guided munitions.

And he ordered the secretary of the Department of Commerce to come up with solutions to what is perhaps the most urgent supply chain bottleneck of them all: the acute shortage of semiconductors that is driving up the prices and limiting the availability of a broad range of consumer goods, ranging from cars to TVs, laptops, phones, and even household appliances like washing machines and toasters.

When the reports came back 100 days later, the agencies listed a variety of different factors at work, but all agreed on one root cause. As the White House politely summarized it, the big problem was “misaligned incentives and short-termism in private markets.” Noting that America’s major corporations had spent the past decade distributing nearly all of their net income to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks and dividends, the White House concluded that “a focus on maximizing short-term capital returns had led to the private sector’s underinvestment in long-term resilience.” In other words, the ultimate explanation is Wall Street greed.

Yet strangely, when it came to proposing solutions, the White House had nothing to say about reining in the power of financiers over American business. Instead, the administration called for more government spending on science and technology, plus a wide range of new direct and indirect corporate subsidies for computer chip makers. Since then, with White House encouragement, a bipartisan coalition has passed a bill in the Senate, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, that takes the same approach. It offers more than $50 billion in subsidies to domestic semiconductor manufacturers, for example, but without taking any measures to ensure that the companies don’t continue to offshore production or use the funds to increase CEO pay or buy back their own stock. On November 15, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced plans to push the bill through the House by attaching it to a must-pass defense policy bill.

There’s nothing wrong per se with government using corporate subsidies to achieve public purposes. But this legislation doesn’t address the core problem the administration itself identified. Over the past 40 years, financial deregulation combined with lax antitrust enforcement and poorly conceived trade policies have shifted power away from people who know how to invent, manufacture, and deliver products and toward people who know how to make money through financial manipulation. Until we take on that problem, our country’s ability to ensure uninterrupted access to the microprocessors and other vital components and raw materials on which our security and prosperity depend will become only that much more vulnerable to disruption and even collapse.

To see how this dynamic works, consider the fate of a company that not so long ago was a symbol of America’s absolute technological dominance of the digital age, from its inception in the early 1950s well into the first decade of the 21st century. The decline of Intel nicely illustrates what happens when a tech corporation pays more attention to raising its stock price than coming up with better products.

Many of the first chip technologies were pioneered by Intel. They included the 8088 microprocessors released in 1979, which long served as the foundation of personal computers. They also included the first commercially available dynamic random access memory chip, released in 1970, the basis for storing data on computer hard drives.

The personal computer revolution of the 1980s and ’90s created a boom in demand for Intel’s products, and for years the corporation prospered. But as time went by, Intel increasingly used its resources to focus on protecting its monopoly profits in the microprocessor market for PCs and on buying back its own stock to boost the price.

To protect its monopoly, Intel used illegal tactics such as loss leading and subsidizing the advertising costs of PC makers that used Intel chips. Through such maneuvers, Intel so weakened its one remaining U.S. rival, Advanced Micro Devices, that AMD was forced to sell off its own manufacturing facilities to the semiconductor firm Global Foundries, which was controlled by a state-owned investment firm in the United Arab Emirates. With AMD knocked down, Intel could deliver even more of the short-term profits Wall Street demanded.

To further boost its stock price, Intel purchased $48.3 billion of its own stock from other investors between 2001 and 2010 rather than put the money to work making more advanced chips for the mobile revolution, or building new foundries. Intel even spent $10.6 billion on stock buybacks in 2005, the same year it successfully lobbied the government for increased subsidies for its nanotechnology research. In all, 113 percent of Intel’s net income during that decade went to stock buybacks and dividend payouts.

Then the process actually accelerated. Between 2011 and 2015, Intel spent $36 billion in buybacks and $22 billion in dividends to shareholders. From 2016 to 2020, these numbers increased to $45 billion and $27 billion respectively.

Meanwhile, Asian chip makers such as TSMC and Samsung focused mainly on reinvesting their profits in capital expenditures, eclipsing Intel in this spending starting in 2015. TSMC and Samsung also focused on emerging technologies. While Intel was monopolizing the market for PC microprocessors and servers, other new semiconductor companies were breaking into the newly emerging smartphone and tablet market and utilizing TSMC’s and Samsung’s foundry services to make more advanced chips. The manufacturing expertise of these two companies benefited immensely from making the smaller, more efficient chips needed for tablets and phones. TSMC now has a market share of more than 80 percent in these smaller chips, which are also being used to power the highest-end PCs, while Intel is still a year away from developing them.

TSMC and Samsung are not likely to give up their lead. TSMC is moving fast to protect its technological prowess, with plans to spend $28 billion on capacity to keep up with demand for 200mm wafers, the chips used in appliances and automobiles, and to expand production of more advanced process technologies, which so far only TSMC and Samsung have mastered. To compete with TSMC, Samsung has announced plans to spend $151 billion just on logic-based non-memory chips, the main chips used in computers and electronics and the largest segment of the semiconductor market.

The numbers are causing a growing innovation gap. TSMC’s 2021 capital expenditures are expected to be 133 percent greater than Intel’s. With that investment, TSMC is planning to produce highly advanced 3-nanometer chips by next year while also starting construction on a facility to make even smaller, more advanced chips. Even Apple, which long used Intel chips in its computers, is now contracting with TSMC for the production of the super-advanced M1 chips that drive its latest generation of Macs. As Bloomberg recently summarized the situation, “As chip rivals struggle, TSMC moves in for the kill.”

Intel’s decline was foreshadowed by the sad fate of Motorola. For years, the company was a pioneer of technological innovation, and a foundation of U.S. economic strength. Motorola created the first pager and the first handheld mobile phone, and its semiconductors helped power the first Macintosh computers. By the 1990s, Motorola led the market in the sale of cellular products.

Motorola became such an innovative company because for most of its history it was led by engineers who interacted with one another through highly decentralized systems of R&D and manufacturing. Indeed, it was long known as a “loose confederation of warring tribes,” with the engineers in each division having control over major decisions. This approach to corporate governance largely worked, until Wall Street began to ratchet up the pressure in the 1990s. Motorola was still profitable, but investors began to push the company to pump up share prices. The result was a plan to restructure Motorola’s priorities around marketing rather than manufacturing. When Motorola’s automobile chip business then came under fierce price competition from TSMC, which was able to loss-lead its products thanks to heavy subsidies by the Taiwanese government, Wall Street demanded that Motorola executives break their company into parts.

In 1998, Motorola sold off part of its semiconductor division to a consortium of private equity firms. Then, in 2001, Motorola began to shut down additional plants, lay off workers, reduce capital investment, and contract with outside manufacturers. Finally, in 2003, with pressure from Wall Street still mounting, Motorola spun off the remainder of its semiconductor division. The spin-off included the sale of its fabrication plant in Tianjin, China, to a Chinese corporation.

Other American semiconductor makers experienced much the same fate, and for the same reasons. LSI Logic, for example, was once a major player in the microprocessor market for data storage and consumer electronics. Its day of reckoning came in 2005 when its CEO, Abhi Talwalkar, decided to shutter its chip-fabrication plants—called “fabs”—and outsource production. Talwalkar emphasized the importance of cutting costs to please Wall Street, saying, “The adoption of a fabless model … is the right manufacturing strategy … to enhance value for [LSI’s] shareholders.”

Much the same story even played out at IBM, the company that invented modern computing. In 2014, under the leadership of CEO Ginni Rometty, the corporation announced a “strategic realignment” that meant retreating from any lines of business that might require increased funding to compete, like semiconductor fabrication. IBM, which once had the world’s third-largest maker of semiconductors, sold its semiconductor plants to Global Foundries for $1.5 billion, citing the division as unprofitable. That same year, the corporation engaged in billions in stock buybacks.

Justifying her actions later, Rometty said, “When it comes to managing for the long term, we sold our semiconductor manufacturing operations last year. We did it in order to move to higher value.”

Why did America’s most innovative tech companies become primarily focused on pleasing shareholders rather than pursuing innovation and long-term growth? A series of policy mistakes, some familiar and others obscure, provide the answer.

One lesser-known yet consequential policy change came in 1982 when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) quietly issued a new rule that established so-called safe harbor protections for executives against charges of stock price manipulation. This policy change led to a radical shift in how CEOs are compensated—with traditional salaries being largely replaced by stock options. This change meant that CEOs now personally profited when they took measures to jack up short-term stock prices. “If you keep earnings up and pump up stock prices, you’re a success,” says Bill Reinsch, former undersecretary of export administration at the Department of Commerce.

Another key policy change came in 1992, when the SEC issued proxy rules that for the first time made it legal for shareholders to communicate freely with one another and to make public statements. What this meant in practice was that powerful financiers and large institutional investors could form cartels that concentrated both financial and political pressure on executive teams to cut costs and raise stock prices.

Then, in 1996, came the National Securities Markets Improvement Act. The bill allowed hedge funds to pool unlimited funds from institutional investors, ushering in the era of private equity. As financiers became able to take bigger stakes in corporations, stock “raiders” like Carl Icahn and Daniel Loeb found that they could exert even more direct pressure on managers and board members.

Meanwhile, trade agreements made by presidents of both parties weakened the federal government’s ability to pursue a coherent industrial policy by surrendering sovereignty to entities like the World Trade Organization. Because of such agreements, when China, Taiwan, and South Korea began using direct state subsidies to ramp up their own semiconductor industries in the 1990s and target American firms, the U.S. government was largely powerless to respond.

These measures, in combination with a relaxation of antitrust enforcement that began in the early 1980s, led to what is now often called the “financialization” of the U.S. economy. During this period, many “thought leaders” defended these measures to give Wall Street more power over other sectors of the economy as a way to more efficiently allocate capital, labor, and other resources. What we got instead was an industrial system controlled by a few highly predatory Wall Street bosses who demanded short-term profit maximization. In the real world, the result was the destruction of many of our most important industrial capacities and arts, and a fundamental undermining of our economic and national security, as demonstrated over the past two years in the long series of industrial production failures and supply chain collapses.

What’s to be done? It may be too much to ask Congress and the Biden administration to undo 40 years of bad trade and competition policy with a single stroke. But it’s not too much to ask that they at least not throw unconditional subsidies at the same people who engineered this mess. Under the current rules of the game, there is a good chance that many, if not most, of the subsidies we offer to tech firms will just flow to self-dealing CEOs and the Wall Street bosses they serve.

Minimally, the semiconductor bill the Senate is about to send to the House needs to be redrafted to impose firm conditions on the corporations that receive these public monies. For example, the bill could mandate that they not engage in buying back stock, in sending jobs offshore, or in paying executives more than 50 times what their median worker earns. If we are going to pay corporations to build factories in the U.S., we might even, as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has called for, demand in return that the public get some equity in those companies.

More broadly, why shouldn’t we push for legislation that would require any company selling essential finished goods in the United States—whether it’s prescription drugs or personal protection equipment, or cars or components needed for national defense—to document that they have multiple, geographically diverse suppliers? We don’t need all supply chains to be domestically sourced, but we do need to make sure, as a matter of public health, national security, and, ultimately, sustainability, that our supply chains do not become too concentrated in a single nation or region or under the control of a single corporation.

If there’s good news, it’s that key players in Washington finally appear to be waking up to this threat. Earlier this year, the Pentagon’s Office of Industrial Policy published its annual report on industrial policy and critical technologies, which strongly highlighted the dangers of the shareholder-activist philosophy and the threat the financial industry poses to sectors critical to our national security.

“Together, a US business climate that has favored short-term shareholder earnings (versus long- term capital investment), deindustrialization, and an abstract, radical vision of ‘free trade,’ without fair trade enforcement, have severely damaged America’s ability to arm itself today and in the future,” the Pentagon warned. “Our national responses—off-shoring and out-sourcing—have been inadequate and ultimately self-defeating.”

Or, as the industrial expert Bill Lazonick puts it, “Americans ought to know that what [Wall Street] is being allowed to do is the real enemy of America.”

The post To Fix the Supply Chain Mess, Take on Wall Street appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In 1994, the CBS program 48 Hours prepared to air explosive video about unsanitary conditions at a South Dakota meat-packing plant, Federal Beef Processors. A Federal Beef employee had agreed to wear a hidden camera to capture footage of operations at the plant. But the company got a state court injunction forbidding CBS to broadcast the report. Airing the story might result in “national chains refusing to purchase beef processed” by the company, the state court judge reasoned—and CBS had obtained the footage by “calculated misdeeds.” The South Dakota Supreme Court refused an emergency request to lift the injunction.

One day later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, without bothering to refer the matter to the full Supreme Court, dissolved the lower court’s order. Federal Beef was free to sue CBS after the fact for damages, if it could prove any, he said, “rather than [proceed] through suppression of protected speech and news reporting.”

At the time, Blackmun’s order, and the haste with which it was granted, didn’t raise many eyebrows. Very few principles are as firmly entrenched in First Amendment law as the doctrine of “prior restraint.” That term, as the great First Amendment scholar Melville Nimmer explained, describes “administrative and judicial orders forbidding certain communications when issued in advance of the time that such communications are to occur.” In other words, if the government makes you submit your expression in advance for approval, that’s prior restraint. And if a court orders you not to say or print anything on a subject, that, too, is prior restraint—which is all but completely forbidden. “Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity,” the Supreme Court wrote in 1963.

Nonetheless, every now and then, local judges begin to wonder, like the attorney played by Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny, whether the Court is really … serious about that. That brings us to New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood—in New York, every friendly local judge is a “Supreme Court Justice”—who last week issued an extraordinary order in a defamation case brought against The New York Times by Project Veritas, a far-right activist group that produces deceptively edited videos, often filmed in secret, to spur disinformation and conspiracy theories.

On November 2, Veritas had sued the Times for defamation. Its complaint was based on a September 29 investigative story by the reporter Maggie Astor and a September 30 follow-up by the media reporter Tiffany Hsuf.

The stories referred to a Veritas report accusing the campaign of Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, of involvement in a supposed “ballot-harvesting” scheme in Minneapolis’s Somali American community; the Times quoted the conclusion of academics who study the dissemination of false news that the report was “probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort.” Veritas said the Times story was part of a conspiracy by the newspaper and a “left-leaning group of academics and college students” to discredit the Veritas report by falsely labeling it “deceptive.” The complaint demanded damages for Veritas’s legal fees as well as punitive damages for the articles.

On November 18, Veritas filed a motion with the New York state court hearing the defamation suit. This motion concerned a different story, dated November 11. It quoted from a series of memos written for Veritas by its lawyer, Benjamin Barr, outlining ways that its investigators could use deceptive means and false identities to compromise federal employees without running afoul of federal law.

We can pass over, for the moment, the irony of a suit by Veritas, which proudly specializes in reporters who assume false identities, surreptitiously film their targets, and then edit the video to maximize the harm to those targets, against the nation’s top newspaper. It’s a bit like a medical ethics complaint filed by Hannibal Lecter against Anthony Fauci.

Right now, we should focus on the unprecedented breadth of Wood’s order. It temporarily bars the Times from “further disseminating or publishing any of Plaintiff Project Veritas’ privileged materials.” What is stunning is that the order then goes further: Wood orders that the Times take down material it has already posted and, further, that “The New York Timesand its counsel shall cease further efforts to solicit or acquire” other memos. Every prior restraint case I know of has concerned an order forbidding publication of information; the court ordering a news organization to stop reporting on a subject breaches new frontiers of judicial censorship.

Making the order even more radical, the November 11 story was quoting memos prepared long before the Veritas lawsuit against the Times—meaning that the memos could in no way reveal Veritas’s legal strategy in this particular case. Moreover, the memos were not obtained through court-ordered discovery; instead, they were leaked by someone who had gotten them from the lawyers or Veritas itself. Leaks of this sort are common in coverage of controversial organizations like Veritas; there’s no evidence that the Times itself committed any misconduct in obtaining them.

For hundreds of years, English and American lawyers have understood that even harmful speech—speech that a court could lawfully punish after the fact—cannot be thwarted by judicial order in advance. As William Blackstone, the British jurist whose 18th-century Commentaries on the Laws of England was a foundational document for British and American lawyers in 1760 wrote:

The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state: but this consists in laying no prior restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.

Simply put, if a media organization wants to roll the dice by publishing something inflammatory, the First Amendment says they can. After the fact, there may be penalties, such as damages for defamation, or even criminal prosecution if reporters broke the law—but barring extraordinary circumstances, no one can muzzle them beforehand.

The Supreme Court has stuck by that principle for nearly a century. In 1931, in a 5–4 decision, the Court struck down an order banning publication of The Saturday Press of Minneapolis. The Press—later christened by the legendary newsman Fred W. Friendly the “Minnesota Rag”—was devoted to bigoted and false attacks on politicians it disliked, a sort of Project Veritas of its day.

The majority opinion by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes began by noting that the bar on “prior restraint” is not total. “No one would question but that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops,” Hughes wrote. But “the fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct.”

The Warren Court subsequently reaffirmed that the Constitution abhors prior restraints even under much more dramatic circumstances. Famously, in the 1971 case of New York Times v. United States, the Court, by a 6–3 vote, lifted a lower court injunction against publication of reporting based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense Department study of the conduct of the Vietnam War that had been leaked by the former Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg. (Disclosure: I played a very minor after-the-fact role in the leak, probably the best thing I have ever done or will ever do for my country.) The Court’s order was terse, simply reasserting the presumption against prior restraint and finding that, despite the government’s claims that national security would be harmed by publication, the case had not overcome that presumption.

Five years later, the Court unanimously struck down a local judge’s order barring media coverage of a Nebraska mass murder case. Since then, local court orders muzzling the press usually haven’t lasted long. In 1990, a New York state judge banned publication of a book revealing operations of Israel’s intelligence service; an appeals court lifted that ban within two days.

In one exceptional case, the Court let stand an injunction barring CNN from broadcasting audiotapes gathered through government surveillance of the former Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. Noriega, deposed by U.S. troops in 1989, was being held in a federal lockup in Miami pending trial on drug-smuggling charges. The tapes allegedly contained privileged conversations between Noriega and his lawyers; the complication in this case arose because CNN, regarding the injunction as unconstitutional, had refused to obey it; it broadcast some of the tapes in the teeth of the Court’s prohibition, and probably thus forfeited judicial sympathy for its case.

How does this play out in the Project Veritas case? The Times gained access to the memos because someone on the inside leaked them—not through the legal process of discovery. Leaks of this sort are routine, and reporters who receive them are not violating any law. Moreover, the memos do not discuss the organization’s legal strategy in the current lawsuit, but offer more general advice about how Veritas’s “reporters” can assume false identities without violating state or federal law. The memos were also written well before Veritas sued the Times, indeed before the publication of the article that gave rise to the suit. They were not produced in litigation between the Times and Veritas; rather, the article referencing them was part of the Times’s coverage of a separate federal investigation of the group.

All in all, the court enjoining the Times in advance from publishing would be, in amendment terms, a bridge way yonder too far. But the judge is also ordering the Times to take down material it has already published, even to refrain from further reporting on the subject matter, regardless of whether the information gathered isn’t published. Finally, the story on the memos is not an issue in the case before Wood’s court; he arguably has no jurisdiction on the matter at all.

Disconcertingly, a New York appellate judge on Friday refused to intervene in the case.

The next step, as in the South Dakota beef-processing case, would be an emergency petition to the Supreme Court. But the case arises just as the Court’s conservative majority has launched an unprecedented offensive against the media. For the past two years, Justice Clarence Thomas has been campaigning for radical changes to the law of defamation—changes that would make lawsuits against the media much easier to win. And in a secretive September speech at Notre Dame, Justice Samuel Alito accused the media and other critics of “unprecedented efforts to intimidate the Court or damage it as an independent institution.” Even Justice Stephen Breyer, in his 2021 book, The Authority of the Court and the Perils of Politics, took reporters to task for even using the terms liberal and conservative to describe members of the Court. What’s more, the newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, stood next to Senator Mitch McConnell and scored the media because its coverage “leaves the reader to judge whether the court was right or wrong, based on whether she liked the results of the decision.”

Beyond this, conservatives on the high court have also begun to display an odd languor in providing emergency relief to parties they dislike. Will The New York Times join that enemies list? More ominously, will Justice Thomas write in a separate opinion that he and the ghost of James Madison agree it’s time to put these purveyors of fake news in their place?

The post Are the Courts Getting Ready to Crack Down on Reporters? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Most of us remember the atmosphere of pre-2008 America. One of its signature features was the jerry-built McMansion, usually constructed in isolated developments miles outside cities on hitherto perfectly serviceable farmland, heaving up in eczematous patches that scarred the rural landscape.

Loudoun County, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., is one such place, notable for possibly being the McMansion headquarters of America—at least insofar as it has managed to sustain itself over time. When the 2008 crash descended on America, other developments across the country were abandoned like Machu Picchu, their pools filling with algae and mosquito larvae, or turning into crime-ridden hellholes like Victorville, California.

The country is now emerging from another deep recession, albeit with a twist. The Great Depression of 1929, like almost all economic downturns, featured a rise in income equality. Thanks to the dubious economic “innovations” that have structurally changed the economy, income inequality has accelerated, and one sees it in the booming real estate market.

The truly rich, of course, are not a part of the new McMansion phenomenon, except perhaps as investors in real estate investment trusts. Below them are the aspirational rich, whose peculiar bureaucratic and networking talents as coat holders of the genuinely wealthy served them very well during the COVID recession—certainly better than hamburger flippers or production line workers. The aspirational rich seek houses suitable to their station, and thus the new McMansion craze.

Geographical tastes seem to have changed. Perhaps the commute from Loudoun County to K Street was getting too much, or living in a raw, undeveloped place without wine bars and outdoor cafés became unappealing. For whatever reason, we now see the fad of the infill McMansion in long-established neighborhoods in large cities or their inner suburbs.

The modus operandi is always the same: Take a totally usable older house that is the same style and size as neighboring dwellings, though perhaps needing a rehab, and knock it flat, along with every mature tree on the property—there will be no room for them, owing to the enormous footprint of the planned structure. Then construct a particle-board chateau that has at least 75 percent more square footage than the neighbors, complete with a quarter-acre driveway for the obligatory Range Rover.

One needn’t worry about zoning regulations. In Fairfax County, Virginia, where I live, the politicians have apparently been purchased by real estate interests, so setback or height restrictions are not enforced. The resulting McMansions accordingly squat on their properties like an aircraft carrier in a duck pond. 

While the sheer size of the structure guarantees disharmony with the local houses, the eye-lacerating incongruity of its style brings it to a new level. The structures resemble the architecture of the Loire Valley, Elizabethan England, or Renaissance Tuscany—as imagined by Walt Disney, or perhaps Liberace. As with McMansions everywhere, the new owners could have obtained a sounder design for less, but they prefer the turrets, portes-cochères,
and ill-proportioned Palladian windows that they bought.

The basic proportions are unfailingly clumsy. The roofs aren’t symmetrical, so that one more giant walk-in closet could be shoehorned in. From the side, this asymmetry and the too-small windows make the construct look like an old sawmill in the Pacific Northwest, or a three-story wooden barracks hurriedly thrown up during World War II. Some manage to look imposing from the front, mimicking George Mason’s brick mansion. But closer inspection reveals the fraud: The front is a brick veneer; the sides and back consist of vinyl siding. Often enough, the brick is a shocking uremic yellow.

Sometimes where a perfectly good house, a spacious 1950s ranch of 2,500 square feet or so, is perched on an ample lot, a developer will tear it down and erect not one but two aspirational-rich mausoleums. Since they cannot be wide, they resemble New Orleans shotgun shacks—narrow and extremely deep—but on a gargantuan scale. In order to obtain the apparently mandatory 5,000 square feet of interior space each, the builders are obliged to reach upward, which increases the appearance of disproportion. The effect is that of a domino placed on its side.

Why do the aspirational rich seem to adore these ghastly structures, when a perfectly livable, aesthetically more pleasing, and more solidly built house could be purchased for less? I’m no psychologist, but it likely stems from the same reason these people would choose Walter Keane over Rembrandt or Kindergarten Cop over Citizen Kane, and by a crushing margin. It simply appeals to them.

At some level, there is little doubt that part of it is motivated by the Ozymandias Complex: “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” It is certainly the despair of neighbors enduring a barnlike building looming into the sky just over the property line and blotting out the sun. But if one earns one’s daily bread lobbying to increase the allowable amount of rodent hair in breakfast cereal, being detested by the neighbors might not be unduly troubling.

This is not just about cynicism toward people whose bank accounts are as flush as their aesthetic tastes are impoverished. One by one, relatively affordable houses—and I emphasize relatively, in today’s market—are being systematically erased and substituted with houses costing twice as much. The process tends to raise the valuation of neighbors’ properties (and hence their taxes) while lowering their quality of life.

All of this is rationalized by the fact that land prices in cities and inner suburbs are considered too high to economically justify building smaller houses on the same lots. This is correct as far as it goes, but it is a symptom of a larger problem. Land prices are high because FIRE interests (finance, insurance, and real estate) want them that way as they ceaselessly work to pump up demand. And it also circles back to the growing personal income imbalances in the economy. In any case, one sees very few small or normal-sized houses built where land is much cheaper anymore.

And that still does not answer the question of why it is not more economical simply to rehab the existing house, or, if you must bring them down, build multi-family dwellings, like townhouses, on some of those lots. There are millions of people—the young, childless couples, and seniors—who have no need or desire for a huge house, and their options are becoming more limited by the day. But if you are a real estate agent, would you prefer a fixed-percentage commission on a $500,000 house or a $1.2 million house? And the huge residential construction industry can only maintain its present scale by the raw quantity of board feet of lumber they nail together.

If the infill blight is a matter of economics, it is not the mythical economics of perfectly balanced supply, demand, and market signals. Rather, it is a byzantine economics similar to national defense, where perverse incentives, artificial creation of cost, and political contributions to those who make the regulations are the deciding factors.

Spending half a million dollars in a large metropolitan area for a starter house already makes “affordable housing” a macabre joke. But how about spending seven figures? Whether it is conscious collusion, or whether all the elements of the Real Estate Industrial Complex are acting together on a blind, instinctive drive, like worker ants, to eradicate cheaper housing, is moot. Thus considered, the McMansion syndrome is not a silly First World problem of aesthetics, but rather, if not restrained, might become the symptom of a Third World city like Rio de Janeiro, where opulence and squalor are juxtaposed.

Quality of life does not merely encompass being ticked off that your neighbor’s hulking Tower of Babel invades your privacy. Building as close to the lot lines as possible ensures that all the trees will be gone, adding to the heat island effect in the locality. The huge roof and massive driveway not only cause flooding problems for neighbors in heavy rains (this is a problem where I live), they also mean more storm water polluted by fiberglass shingle pellets and driveway oil washing into streams and bays. The new houses are wired accordingly, ensuring disproportionate, inefficient power draw from our already rickety electrical grid. As for the rubble of the old house, most of it will end up in a landfill.

Structural problems at the national level prevent the appropriate taxation of the truly wealthy and their coat holders for the foreseeable future. But at least some localities could crack down on these residential monstrosities by actually enforcing the zoning codes they do have, and limiting infill McMansions in size by instituting ordinances that restrict replacement houses’ square footage. Likewise, they could enact property tax surcharges on houses above a certain size, steeply graduated as their size increases.

The infill McMansion spectacle is a warning and a symptom, like political polarization, of the rising income inequality and concomitant decline of community feeling in the United States. It is not something that fell out of the sky, but a phenomenon that was carefully engineered by financial management.

The post The Growing Blight of “Infill” McMansions appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Earlier this month, on his HBO show, Bill Maher lectured Democrats: “You’re alienating a whole lot of people, particularly whites without a college degree,” he said, because “you come across as the ‘Cares-About-Everybody-But-Me Party.’” He asked, rhetorically, “Why is the party that supports so many issues that benefit the middle class still considered out of touch by 62 percent of Americans?” Then he answered himself: “In plain English, nobody likes a snob … Your micro-aggression culture doesn’t play in the Rust Belt.”

At 65, Maher is in his fourth decade hosting a political comedy show, and he’s probably never been taken more seriously. Chris Cuomo gave Maher the whole hour of his prime-time CNN show, Larry King style, to tee off on wokeism. TheDaily Beast columnist Matt Lewis (and my co-host on the Bloggingheads.tv show The DMZ) dubbed the host of Real Time with Bill Maher “the most powerful voice critiquing the excesses of the progressive left and defending liberal democracy.”

But Maher is not the jester speaking truth to power. He is a hypocrite pushing misinformation. If he wants Democrats to win as badly as he claims, he should either get his facts straight or cancel himself.

First, let’s recognize how ridiculous it is for Maher to condemn snobbery. He has been the epitome of the condescending coastal liberal sneering at Middle America through much of his career. In a famously awkward Real Time interview a few days after George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, Republican Senator Alan Simpson scolded Maher for “making fun of Americans who have some religious bent or faith. Keep doing that, and your people will never win an election.”

Simpson’s advice was not heeded. Maher escalated his fight against the devout with the 2008 documentary Religulous, in which he interviews representatives of several faiths and tries to make them look like idiots. He closes the film with an apocalyptic, histrionic monologue in which he declares, “The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live.” (Like Maher, I am a nonbeliever, but the fact is that mankind has lived with religion for a rather long time.)

Two years ago, Maher’s snobbery went beyond those who worship God to those who worship fried food. In the course of tweaking the Democratic presidential candidates for supporting expanded health care coverage, Maher said on Real Time, “The problem with our health care system is that Americans eat shit” and “citizens don’t lift a finger to help.” He wasn’t worried about alienating a whole lot of people, particularly whites without a college degree, when he said: “Here in America, we look at fried chicken and think, that’s a good start. Now put it on a bun, and add bacon, and cheese, and something no one even thought to put on it … Europe doesn’t look like this because Europe isn’t always eating for two.”

If you’re going to look down on average Americans for what they eat and what they worship, you might not be the best judge of what they want. But Maher could be a hypocrite and still be on the mark. Just because he’s looked down on average Americans in the past doesn’t mean that the Democratic Party today doesn’t do the same.

But let’s look more closely at Maher’s case.

In his diatribe on November 19, to prove his point that Democrats don’t seem to care about noncollege whites, Maher said, “You can find ways to stand up for these folks without being David Duke. This month, when the Democrats finally passed their big trillion-dollar bill to rebuild our roads and bridges, six Democrats voted no because it didn’t go far enough to address climate change … This was free money from the federal government that would actually improve their constituents’ lives.”

But Maher’s example makes the opposite point. Only six Democrats voted no, while 215 House Democrats and 50 Senate Democrats voted yes. Let’s ask the question again: Why is the party that supports so many issues that benefit the middle class still considered out of touch by 62 percent of Americans? Maybe because people with big media platforms act like the votes of six congressional Democrats define the party more than the other 265.

After noting that “Democrats were told” racism was “the reason” for their defeat in Virginia’s gubernatorial election, Maher cracked, “I haven’t worked up an official Democratic campaign slogan for 2024 yet, but I tell you what I have ruled out is ‘Vote Democrat Because White People Suck.’” What was the basis of this critique? A tweet by the former Democratic National Committee chair from two decades ago Howard Dean, a tweet from The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill, and a headline from a blog post by MSNBC.com writer Ja’han Jones. None of these people have anything to do with messaging for the Democratic Party, let alone the messaging for Terry McAuliffe’s losing effort in Virginia. Yet Maher is blaming the Democratic Party for what “Democrats are told” by some online progressive commentators.

More than anyone, Maher should understand that the Democratic Party should not be defined by what a few progressive commentators say. Back in 2012, Maher made a big show of donating $1 million to the main super PAC dedicated to Barack Obama’s reelection. Immediately, conservatives tried to yoke Obama to Maher’s habit of using objectifying, misogynistic, and ableist language to describe Sarah Palin and her family. Then Maher continued to cause controversy by referring to Mitt Romney’s religion as a “cult” and deriding his wife, Ann Romney, as someone who had “never gotten her ass out of the house to work.” But most voters did not see a vote for Obama as a vote for Maher, and Obama won.

Maher is not just unfairly, and hypocritically, defining the Democratic Party with backbencher votes and stray tweets from woke progressives. He is actively pushing false information about what these progressives are actually doing.

During his turn on Cuomo Prime Time, Maher said, “When you’re doing something that sounds like a headline in The Onion, that’s when you’ve gone too far, you know? Land of Lincoln cancels Lincoln. That really happened. They tore down Lincoln’s—Lincoln isn’t good enough for them. Seattle, the city council voted to decriminalize crime. This is an Onion headline. I saw one, very recently, maybe babies should vote. It’s what I mean about the ‘Party of No Common Sense.’”

Every one of these examples is misinformation.

Nothing of Lincoln has been torn down in Illinois, though a statue of Lincoln’s bête noir Stephen Douglas has been removed from the statehouse grounds. Maher is probably referring to last year’s creation by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot of an advisory committee to review 41 monuments and murals, including five Lincoln statues. But the committee has not yet made any recommendations, and inclusion on the list, according to the committee, is “not a condemnation of these monuments, but … an opportunity to learn from them.” Lightfoot has said, in response to criticism of Lincoln’s presence on the review list, “Let’s be clear, we’re in the Land of Lincoln, and that’s not going to change.”

The Seattle City Council has not voted to decriminalize crime. Last year, one city councilor proposed an ordinance allowing dismissal of most misdemeanors if the defendant could prove that the crime was driven by poverty, mental illness, or addiction. But the proposal was met with widespread opposition, including from the mayor. A formal bill was never drafted. The issue never came to a vote.

Who said, “Babies should vote”? Lyman Stone, in a September New York Times op-ed titled “The Minimum Voting Age Should Be Zero.” And who is Lyman Stone? A demographer who is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies. And what are the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies? Conservative think tanks.

New Rule: Just because something is published in The New York Times does not mean that it is automatically part of the Democratic Party platform.

Presumably, Maher isn’t intentionally pushing misinformation to smear Democrats. After all, he has been a Democratic donor. But as a consistent opponent of “political correctness,” apparently any example of it is too good to fact-check.

Maher is also selective about who he attacks for stupid wokeness. I’ve yet to see Maher skewer People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who in January urged people to “stand up for justice by rejecting supremacist language” … such as using the words chicken and rat as pejoratives.

Sounds like great fodder for the anti-woke warrior who recently lamented that “nobody knows what words mean anymore.” Yet three months after PETA’s call, Maher didn’t mock PETA; he starred in a PSA for PETA. Why? Because Maher is a longtime PETA board member.

Being a PETA board member is not a crime. And maybe poultry shouldn’t be synonymous with cowardice. The point is that Maher does not hold himself to the standards he applies to others. When progressives push views that Maher doesn’t like, he not only attacks the views, he also blames them for the ills of the Democratic Party, no matter how far removed they are from the party. But if you criticize Maher for his views, he screams “political correctness,” while donating to Democrats and lecturing them on how to win in the Rust Belt.

So, here’s one more New Rule for Bill Maher: Judge the Democratic Party on what the vast majority of Democratic Party officials actually do and actually believe, not on what commentators say on Twitter, let alone on HBO.

The post New Rule: Bill Maher Should Look in the Mirror appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” It’s a statement full of wisdom, but it also carries a degree of irony. Welles made Citizen Kane—one of the most daring and inventive movies of all time—when RKO Radio Pictures granted him historic levels of artistic freedom. It might be more accurate, then, to say the enemy of art is the absence of limitations for most—but not for an exclusive few. 

In fact, in the history of motion pictures, there might be only one other filmmaker who could make films of such consequence and majesty with complete creative control: Buster Keaton. His life’s greatest tragedy was that, once he gave up that freedom, he could never get it back.

The vaudeville child star turned filmmaker had a run in the 1920s that makes him, as Roger Ebert once declared, arguably the greatest actor-director in the history of movies. During that decade, he churned out 10 silent feature films—including his most famous, The General—and a collection of shorts that created the grammar of cinema. At the dawn of the medium, Keaton figured out visual storytelling like none other. His gags worked not only because of his physical courage and prowess—he did his own stunts, often in one take—but because of his ingenuity with the camera. 

In his short film The Goat (1921), for instance, Keaton tries to escape from the police by hiding in a spare tire attached to the back of a car. Once the car drives away, however, we see that the spare tire is not, in fact, attached; rather, it’s part of a display for a tire store. We are then left with Buster, his body encased helplessly in rubber next to the curb. It’s a joke that requires hardly any technical trickery; it works because he knew where to put the camera. To this day, Keaton’s shots are among the most imitated, like the house collapse in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) when a wall falls down on him, but he’s saved by standing on the perfect spot to pass through the attic window. 

Keaton loved the comedy of action and the ability of the camera to fool the eye. He was a genius at experimentation. With the exception of The General, he never worked with a completed script. He would devise a compelling beginning and a satisfying finish. “The middle will take care of itself,” he would say. 

Unfortunately, though, like all things, Keaton’s incredible run came to an end in 1928, when he joined MGM Studios and lost his creative control. The move, he said, was “the worst mistake of my life.” Around the same time, he was drinking excessively. He went in and out of rehab and nearly lost everything. MGM fired him. 

After an extended bout with chronic depression and alcoholism, he made his way back into pictures. None were as good as the ones he made in the 1920s. Then, after a lost period, he was at the cutting edge of television comedy in the 1950s. In many ways, his experience in vaudeville and silent film equipped him perfectly to reach audiences on a smaller screen, who were harder to capture without the inoculations a theater provides from the outside world.

As Dana Stevens writes in her new book, Camera Man—an impressive confluence of biography, film criticism, and cultural history—Keaton’s trajectory tells, in its own way, the history of modernity and the evolution of film technology.

Keaton’s life essentially coincided with the first 70 years of film. And yet he was stunningly ahead of his time. Indeed, a quick scan today of Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok yields an endless stream of gags that carry influences from Buster—even if their makers don’t realize it. 

Joseph Frank Keaton was born in the small town of Piqua, Kansas, in 1895, the same year the Lumière brothers made their first films. As Stevens, a film critic for Slate, notes, at some point in that year, Louis Lumière is said to have proclaimed, “The cinema is an invention with no future.” It’s no small irony that this is when our hero—the man who proved him wrong—emerged.

Buster’s parents, Joseph and Myra, were comedic performers in a traveling vaudeville show. As legend has it, when he was six months old, he fell down a set of stairs, amazingly without a scratch. Another traveling performer, Harry Houdini, witnessed the tumble and reportedly said to Joseph and Myra, “That’s some buster your kid took.” (“Buster” at the time was a common word for a fall.) From then on, young Joseph went by Buster. 

It wasn’t long before he became one of the nation’s premier vaudeville stars. Joseph, Myra, and Buster were known as “the Three Keatons,” with Buster as the main attraction. As a kid, he loved to make people laugh by taking the fall—a formative time for his physical comedy. His dangerous gags were such a pervasive part of the show that critics accused the elder Joseph of child abuse, including for once throwing a young Buster at a heckler in the audience. But as contemporary critics have noted, the Keatons were skilled performers who knew what they were doing, and Joseph likely wouldn’t have wanted to hurt his son, the star of the act. His parents weren’t avaricious, either. Buster was able to keep his share of the earnings. By the age of 12, he had his own car. 

In 1917, he appeared in his first film, The Butcher Boy, after being discovered by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. He went on to act in 20 of Arbuckle’s films, with an interruption to serve in World War I, where he lost hearing in one ear. 

Keaton got his next big break in 1920, when an impressed studio executive, Joseph Schenck, gave him his own production unit. From 1920 to 1929, Keaton made his masterpieces of silent film: Our Hospitality (1923), a satire of the warring Hatfield and McCoy families; Sherlock Jr. (1924), a surreal comedy about a movie projectionist who becomes the famed detective; Seven Chances (1925), about a man who must fulfill a series of bizarre terms to inherit $7 million; The General (1926), an epic tale of a Civil War train engineer who schemes to be reunited with the two loves of his life; College (1927); and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). 

Keaton’s daring was unquestionable; his famous $42,000 train wreck in The General—almost $650,000 in today’s dollars—is the most expensive shot in silent film history. Two of Keaton’s most famous rules were to never fake a gag and to never use a stuntman. “Stuntmen,” he once said, “aren’t funny.” For Seven Chances, he manufactured an avalanche of rocks falling down a mountain so a camera could capture him running from them. The 1920s were also when he cemented his reputation as “the Great Stone Face.” He was known for maintaining a deadpan expression even as cataclysm was happening all around him. Because he was human, after all, he did eventually get hurt. At one point, he broke his neck—from which stunt, no one knows—but he didn’t even realize it. (Years later, a doctor asked him when he broke his neck. “Never,” Buster said. “Yes, you did,” the doctor replied.) 

In the century’s first three decades, Keaton rose from obscurity to become one of the industry’s biggest stars. 

But when MGM poached Keaton in 1928, both his friend Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd advised him not to give up his independence. Financially, it was a hard offer to turn down; MGM was offering Keaton $3,000 a week (a little under $48,000 today). But the studio, one of the most regimented in all of Hollywood, was a stifling place for him. 

Although his first film with MGM, The Cameraman (1928), was a box office hit, there were endless battles behind the scenes. His entire method of filmmaking was deemed unacceptable. Scripts had to be written; everything had to be planned. From then on, Keaton’s films didn’t have the same energy.

Meanwhile, his personal life was also falling apart. Keaton began drinking heavily. In 1932, his wife Natalie divorced him, and his drinking got worse. He went to rehab, where he met a nurse and married her, but he couldn’t quite kick the booze. By 1933, MGM had fired him, but his drinking continued. He got divorced again, and then suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken to a hospital in a straitjacket. 

Newspapers said he would never appear in movies again, but after a year of sobriety, Buster went back to acting. He was clearly still depressed; on the set, he would take breaks to cry. 

Eventually, he signed a 10-film contract with Columbia Pictures, but again without creative freedom. His salary was also seriously diminished, from a peak of $3,000 a week to just $100. 

In 1940, Keaton got married, for the last time, to Eleanor Norris, a dancer whom he met playing bridge. (He was known as one of the best bridge players in Hollywood.) Keaton had lost most of his money, so they moved into his mother’s home. 

Around this time, he made the last big transition of his career: to television. 

In the 1940s and ’50s, he starred in commercials and made short appearances in a few feature films, including Sunset Boulevard (1950) and, most memorably and movingly, in Chaplin’s late film Limelight (1952), in a routine where the silent-era stars played a pair of inept stage musicians. It was the only time the two giants would ever appear together on film. 

But it was his appearances on television comedy shows, such as The Ed Wynn Show, that got him attention again. Keaton’s background in vaudeville proved highly useful, because so many of those early shows relied on skits. “The overlap between early television and vaudeville was so marked that a new term, ‘vaudeo,’ was coined to describe the phenomenon,” Stevens writes. 

This galvanized a reconsideration of his silent films from the 1920s. In 1960, Buster received an honorary Oscar. He had seemingly risen from obscurity once again. Suddenly, with the dawn of a new medium (television), a newfound appreciation had surfaced for an old medium (silent film), and the innovations from Keaton that had shaped it. 

In 1966, Keaton died while playing bridge. He was 70 years old and suffering from lung cancer. Luckily for the rest of us, Eleanor Keaton outlived her husband by 32 years and became a dedicated promoter of his work, traveling around the world to speak at screenings and festivals that featured Buster’s silents. 

Even as the industry continued to experience “sea changes,” as Stevens calls them—including the collapse of the studio system in the 1970s, shortly after Keaton’s death—his influence became increasingly visible. Jackie Chan re-created his gags—from falling out of windows to hanging on the side of moving buses—and Wes Anderson emulated his shots, with their emphasis on geometry and the way characters move inside of the frame.

Now, with the birth of social media, many of his stunts have become popular memes and gifs. On TikTok, whose short videos featuring physical comedy make it well suited to Keaton homage, there is an entire page with content from Buster’s films. It has received more than 44 million views. 

As Stevens makes clear, Keaton was a singular 20th-century man. He brought film from its inception to the present, and he created a cinematic language that now travels with virtually everyone, all the time, contained in a small device that we carry around in our pockets. “He is out there to be seen,” Stevens writes, “streaming past us on every conceivable platform, still and always ahead of his time.” 

And yet the best way to experience Keaton is in the mode he originally intended: on a big screen, in the company of others. That’s where the magic comes alive. 

I remember my first time seeing a Keaton film on a big screen, in 2017. It was a showing of The General at the AFI Silver Theatre, in Silver Spring, Maryland, with live musical accompaniment. The shots were astonishing, better than anything that computer-generated imagery can produce. The soundtrack was beautiful and elegant. But the most memorable part was laughing with the audience. The film was more than 90 years old at the time, and yet—like Citizen Kane, another movie made by an unconstrained genius and imitated for generations—Keaton’s comedy still held the power to delight and surprise.

The post How Buster Keaton Became a Digital Meme appeared first on Washington Monthly.