I met Frank Nolen at Armstrong’s Restaurant, an unassuming grill in Verona, Virginia, located in the Shenandoah Valley near the state’s western border. It was early September. Nolen, a seventy-eight-year-old man who spoke in a slow, baritone southern accent, had agreed to see me that day after he finished picking up a shipment of hogs for his nearby farm. “I don’t make appointments,” he had told me the week before, when I had tried to schedule a meeting in advance. The whims of farming prevented it.

When I arrived, Nolen was sitting in a booth in the back of the restaurant. The waitress, who addressed him as “Mr. Nolen,” came over to tell us about the day’s special: country-fried steak served with macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and gravy, and peas and carrots. We both ordered it.

Nolen is the platonic ideal of the person American journalists look to interview during their dispatches from “Trump country.” He is a white Christian man with a memory stretching back decades. He owns a hog and cattle farm. He lives in an aging, not-so-affluent county in Appalachia—the “heartiest” of the heartland.

Except Nolen isn’t a Republican.

“I did vote for Clinton,” he said with astonishment when I asked, just to be sure, that I was getting his politics correct. To emphasize the point, he told me what would happen if he voted for Trump. “I’d have to go to the courthouse,” he said. “I’d go to them and ask somebody to give me fifteen lashes.”

To be clear, Nolen—the chairman of the county Democratic committee—is an exception. In Augusta County, where Nolen has lived since 1960, more than 70 percent of voters chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, making it one of the most pro-Trump parts of the state. In Virginia’s 2017 gubernatorial primary, 58 percent of Augusta GOP primary participants voted for far-right ideologue Corey Stewart over the more mainstream eventual nominee, Ed Gillespie. Most of the neighboring counties also voted for both Trump and Stewart, if not by quite such dramatic margins.

Reporters have descended on conservative bastions like Augusta, as well as counties that recently flipped from blue to red, in a bid to understand how a reality television star became president. They have spoken to longtime, working-class conservatives and ex-Democrats who, through Trump, finally found a vehicle through which to express their political frustrations. In doing so, they’ve routinely painted a picture of Trump-voting America so predictable that it has become a trope. Yet very few journalists have chosen to focus on the Democrats in Trump country who stayed Democrats.

Why should they? It was, after all, white working-class Obama-Trump voters who helped sway the 2016 election. Depending on whom you ask, it’s the ballots of these onetime Democrats that will determine who wins the next set of elections. Other commentators emphasize the possible influence of minorities who traditionally do not vote in high numbers, or suburban and exurban women. Each of these groups seems more coverage worthy than the residents of a region where the electoral outcome is all but guaranteed.

But even in places like Augusta County, thousands of people voted for Hillary Clinton. No depiction of Trump country is complete without them. Most of their neighbors may be standing by the president, but if Augusta is any indication, Democrats in rural red counties are just as fired up and enthused as their counterparts in liberal cities. In Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District, which includes Augusta, no Democrat has mounted a midterm congressional campaign in twenty years. This year, four people ran.

“I was working the farmers’ market yesterday, and I got an email from a lady,” Nolen told me at Armstrong’s. “She wanted to know how she could volunteer to help the Democrats this year. Just out of the blue. It’s encouraging.”

Increasing Democratic activism is essential in districts like the Sixth, where many of the liberals I spoke with shared stories of being pressured to stay out of politics. Nolen is public and indomitable, but he said that many of his anti-Trump friends would disclose their political leanings only in confidence. “They would tell me and wouldn’t tell their preacher,” he said, citing the stigma of supporting pro-choice candidates in a heavily religious area. “Some of them think that their preacher can sentence them to hell. But I can’t.” As more activists come out of the woodwork, the Democratic Party gains more people like Frank Nolen: human faces who can make the party more accessible to residents with hidden liberal inclinations. This is critical for the party’s fortunes. Building a viable electoral infrastructure depends on making it socially acceptable to be a Democrat.

None of this is to say that Democrats will win Augusta County—or similar counties—anytime soon. Overwhelmingly white and dominated by evangelicals, Virginia’s rural conservatives are fiercely committed to Trump and the GOP. But Trump country Democrats don’t need to win. They didn’t win in 2008, when Barack Obama flipped Virginia blue for the first time in forty-four years, outperforming Clinton’s 2016 Augusta County vote share by nine points in the process. Better turnout by Democrats in unexpected places can add up and contribute to statewide, and national, victories.

But to do better, Democrats need to establish a larger presence in places where liberals seem few and far between. If Virginia’s Sixth District is any indication, that appears to be happening.

I traveled to western Virginia in an effort to understand the situation of Democrats in the reddest parts of America. This meant avoiding the roughly fifty House seats that political forecasting sites suggest are competitive in 2018, which have been thrust into the limelight by prognosticating journalists. Instead, I needed to go somewhere where the November outcome was effectively a foregone conclusion—somewhere that would test the resolve of even the steeliest Democrat.

Virginia’s Sixth District fits this mold. Although the seat is open—incumbent Bob Goodlatte is retiring after thirteen terms—FiveThirtyEight gives Ben Cline, the Republican nominee, a greater than 99 percent chance of victory. The Cook Political Report rates it as “Solid Republican,” and Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball describes the GOP-held seat as “Safe.” The contest has received scant attention from pollsters or national media outlets. The Washington Post article announcing the results of the district’s Democratic primary was eight sentences long and written by automated software.

I met Jennifer Lewis, the winner of that primary, after a fundraiser in the town of Staunton. I mentioned that FiveThirtyEight had pegged her odds of winning the race at below 1 percent. Lewis smiled. “So we have a chance,” she replied.

Lewis, a thirty-seven-year-old mental health worker from Waynesboro, Virginia, began excitedly talking about her commitment to a host of economic and environmental issues, highlighting that her campaign was accepting no corporate PAC donations (a decision that helped explain why her competitor had dramatically outraised her). She repeatedly emphasized her opposition to the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a controversial energy project that would funnel natural gas from West Virginia into Virginia and North Carolina. The project has generated strong opposition in the Sixth District from across the political spectrum, ranging from conservatives angry about the use of eminent domain to liberals concerned about greenhouse gases.

Signs of growing enthusiasm extend beyond just Lewis. Almost every Democrat I spoke to had evidence that the current political climate is bringing new voters and activists into the fold. In Shenandoah County, where a Democrat has not won a presidential campaign since 1932, Katherine Morrison told me that only five or six people used to show up to the county’s Democratic committee meetings. “Now, it’s fifty,” she said, adding that more than 700 people typically both receive and open the group’s emails. Democrats in nearby counties also told me that their committees were growing in size.

Who are these newly activated Democrats? For starters, they are not people who voted for Trump in 2016. None of the Democrats I met during my time in the Sixth District were able to relay anything more than whispers about Trump voters who had regrets. The Republicans who they did introduce me to—the region’s relative moderates—stood by the president.

“I’ve never had an experience where there was a strong Trump supporter who said, ‘I’ve seen the error of my ways,’ ” said Thea Litchfield Campbell, the co-chair of the Rockingham County Democratic Committee. “There was no confessional moment.”

Studies suggest that there may be few confessions anywhere. In March, a FiveThirtyEight-commissioned survey found that even 58 percent of “reluctant” Trump voters, a fifth of his 2016 coalition, have no regrets, and that this group’s impression of the president had gradually improved over the past ten months. An August 2018 study by Pew indicates that Trump voters feel almost exactly the same way about the president as they did in November 2016—that is, generally positive. This is especially true in areas such as Virginia’s Sixth. Unlike the many Rust Belt converts who opted for Trump out of a sense of economic malaise, Shenandoah Valley’s evangelicals appear to have voted for the president in hopes of advancing a socially conservative agenda—particularly with regards to abortion. By appointing conservative judges, Trump has delivered.

Indeed, it was telling that most of the rural Democrats I interviewed seemed just as baffled by Trump supporters as urban progressives are. “I don’t understand them, and I’m mad at them,” said Derek Goebel, a fifty-three-year-old native of Page County, where more than 70 percent of people voted for Trump. “They’re not pro-life, because people are dying every day. We’re destroying people’s lives, ripping children from their parents’ arms, and we’re destroying the environment.”

So then who are these newly active liberals? Some, including Goebel, are people who typically vote Democratic but were motivated by Trump to become more outwardly involved. Samuel Halpern, 68, of Page County Indivisible, is a good example. Halpern first heard about Indivisible—a national progressive network set up in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election to “defeat the Trump agenda”—in January 2017 while attending an open-door session held by the staff of Goodlatte, the retiring incumbent. Halpern was expecting a handful of other attendees. Instead, there were thirty-five. Virtually all of them, Halpern said, were “irate and concerned” about the direction of the country. Many of the other attendees were talking about Indivisible, still a relatively new organization. Halpern started helping Page Indivisible, a local group inspired by the national entity, organize. The Page group now has roughly 100 members, a surprisingly large number in a deeply conservative county with 24,000 residents.

Other Democrats were new to politics altogether. Campbell, for example, grew up in a very conservative Mennonite community where voting was taboo. “The idea was that you prayed for your leaders, and whoever God wanted got put in place,” she explained. “It wasn’t your position to make that decision.” But for Campbell, that changed in 2016. “After Donald Trump’s election, it was really clear to me that this was going to be a time that my grandchildren read about in history books. What am I going to say that I did? And for me, it was just clearly becoming politically involved. Simply praying didn’t yield results that I could abide by.”

Campbell said that she hopes to mobilize other people like her: Democratic by ideology, but historically unlikely to vote. “What we’ve found is that there are lots of people who are supportive of the Democratic platform, or would lean Democrat, but just don’t vote,” she said. “I feel like rather than changing a lot of votes, what we’re doing is energizing people who haven’t been involved before.”

There are reasons to believe that changing the behavior of some of the roughly 26,000 Rockingham County adults who stayed home in 2016—compared to the approximately 36,000 who cast ballots—could pay dividends for Democrats. A bevy of research suggests that Democrats generally do better in high-turnout environments, in large part because nonvoters are on average younger, poorer, and more likely to be nonwhite than people who regularly cast ballots. But mobilizing nonvoters is easier said than done. “They’re not likely to vote because they’re not particularly interested in politics,” said Robert Roberts, a professor of political science at James Madison University, located in the middle of the Sixth District. In other words, it’s unclear if there are enough voters like Campbell to really make a difference.

Still, I had trouble thinking that Sixth District Democrats couldn’t perform better. Barack Obama won 41.2 percent of the district’s vote in 2008 and 39.5 percent in 2012, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 34.9. Meanwhile, the nation’s economic boom has not really touched this part of Virginia, and Democrats told me that they often had the most success connecting with residents when it came to discussing social welfare. “You start talking about wanting to expand Medicare, and they relate to that,” Campbell said.

But it wasn’t enough. “At the end of the conversation, they still won’t agree to vote for the candidate who wants to expand that,” she said. “There’s still an extra hump.”

The “hump” is partially the product of conservative Christianity and Fox News. But in Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District, there’s another element that I hadn’t considered until I visited: intense social pressure. In places where Trumpism is so widespread, identifying as a liberal carries risks—social, financial, and perhaps even physical. For Democrats, this means that half the battle is simply normalizing their party.

“I wear these shirts to the gym that say ‘Pro-America, Anti-Trump,’ ” said Morrison. “Women, particularly, would come up to me and whisper, ‘I’m a Democrat.’ But they really were embarrassed to say it. That’s how strong it is.”

Morrison is the chair of her county’s Democratic committee. She told me that in her experience, most liberal residents keep quiet about their political affiliations. The pressure to stay silent and vote Republican is especially strong for people who work for conservative employers, are part of Shenandoah’s prominent, multigeneration (and generally conservative) families, or run small businesses that depend on a local clientele.

Morrison mentioned her hairdresser as an example. When Morrison gets her hair cut, the two will often quietly discuss politics and their shared outrage at Trump. “But she won’t do anything public, because her business depends on Republicans,” Morrison said. I asked Morrison if she could introduce me to her hairdresser or other closeted Democrats. She said she would check, but cautioned that interviews were unlikely. I never heard back about it.

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This prompted me to reflect on the economic background of my own sources. Many commute to jobs in Harrisonburg, home to James Madison University, and one of the Sixth District’s few left-leaning spaces. A few are transplant retirees. Nolen is semiretired and operates his own farm. Goebel owns a vacation business located in Page County, but it relies mostly on tourists. Indeed, out of all the “open” Democrats I interviewed on record, not one person’s income is largely dependent on other locals. The single, elusive swing voter I found spoke on the condition that I wouldn’t list his workplace. 

Donna Bible, an eleventh-generation Rockingham County resident, said that conservative pressure was particularly intense for women. “I know that a lot of women, if they didn’t feel oppressed by their husbands, if they didn’t feel like they needed to tow the family line, they would speak out,” she said. The product of a Republican family, she speaks from experience. “I think I became a Democrat because of that issue more than any other. It is infuriating to be a woman in a patriarchal society.”

Initially, the idea that people might be browbeaten into suppressing their progressive beliefs struck me as overwrought. But the more people I spoke with, the clearer it became that intimidation—while usually muted—was real. “The back of my truck has two Obama stickers, an ‘I vote Democrat’ sticker, a Hillary Clinton sticker, and now a Jennifer Lewis sticker,” Goebel told me. “I had a note left that said, ‘You’re a traitor.’ ” Other anecdotes seemed more serious. Morrison said that during a small anti-Trump rally she helped organize, her group encountered a number of counterprotestors, one of whom was brandishing a large rifle.

The climate of hostility in Shenandoah was also evident in a photo Morrison showed me from the Shenandoah County Fair. The Republican Party’s booth, located directly across from the Democratic Party’s booth, featured a sign telling voters to “#WalkAway from Hate, Socialism and Violence, especially from Killing Babies and Raping Children.” (The county sheriff and a member of the county board of supervisors, who showed up to add their own posters to the GOP station, had the sign taken down after the Democrats complained.)

Almost everywhere I went, I heard similar stories. Donna Bible told me about a “belligerent, angry man” who yelled at her for knocking on his door while canvassing. “He was a little intoxicated at 10 a.m. Saturday morning, and he’s pounding on the ground, and saying, ‘This here’s hallowed ground, and I’m telling you that you’re walking on my hallowed ground,’” she told me. Bible said that she eventually got the man to calm down and listen to her, something in which she took pride. “But I’m still shy knocking on doors,” she added.

Her husband, Colum Leckey, has run into even more trouble. “I do a lot of canvassing. I get yelled at a lot. I had a guy flash a gun at me once,” he said. I met Leckey alongside Bible, Campbell, and two other Democrats. A gregarious man in his mid-fifties, Leckey seemed almost indifferent to the hostility. He told me that the only time he felt intimidated was when a group of people chased after him. “I got rattled,” he said. “They wanted to beat me up.”

Then he chuckled. “There are a lot of rough people around here who want to kick my ass.”

Campbell quickly cautioned that Leckey’s nonchalance was not representative of their group, which generally preferred postcard writing to knocking on doors. “We are not all Colums,” she said. “He is fearless.”

The tension has not impacted Luther Santiful, a Democrat in Shenandoah County. “I know most of the Republicans, and they know me,” he said. “I talk to a lot of people, and we don’t hate each other, we talk.”

Santiful, the former director of equal opportunity and civil rights for the U.S. Army and the onetime chairman of his county’s Democratic committee, was probably the most easygoing Democrat I spoke with during my tour. He was also the only black person I met, and quite possibly the only one I saw. Other Democrats had relayed racist comments disclosed to them by conservative friends or in-laws. I asked Santiful if he felt discrimination was a prevalent feature of his region’s politics. “I think there’s a little bit of racism here, but I don’t think I run into it on a regular basis,” he said. Santiful hypothesized that there simply weren’t enough people of color in Shenandoah to threaten the overwhelming white majority, or to make any kind of separate political impact. “I can count them on one hand,” he said with a laugh.

As one of his county’s few publicly outspoken Democrats, Santiful has become a de facto local representative for the party. It’s a role he seems to embrace. “They’re coming to us, asking about our candidate, and so it’s up to us to give them the information they need,” he said. Santiful said he had become especially involved in Virginia’s upcoming Senate election between Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine and Republican nominee Corey Stewart—the same far-right candidate who lost the GOP gubernatorial primary to Ed Gillespie. “It’s up to me to talk about Kaine,” he said. “People tell me, ‘I’m a solid Republican, but I can’t vote for Corey Stewart.’”

Santiful’s story gets at a larger point: restoring the Democratic brand in rural America isn’t only, or even primarily, about defeating Donald Trump. The president attained an Electoral College victory despite losing the popular vote because of razor-thin margins in traditionally Democratic parts of the Midwest. But Democrats’ struggles in rural America predate the president and will persist after he is gone. Given the Senate’s disproportionate representation of increasingly conservative rural states, making inroads in these regions is critical for the Democratic Party’s long-term success.

The unique loyalty Trump has inspired among Republican voters does not always extend to other candidates—especially when they carry their own controversial baggage, as Alabama Republicans discovered when Doug Jones defeated alleged sex offender Roy Moore. Jones lost in the heavily conservative parts of the state that Trump most thoroughly dominated. But outperforming Clinton’s vote share in these rural counties helped him became the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the Senate since 1997. Stewart—now the GOP’s Virginia Senate nominee—is not quite as notorious as Moore. But the chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, who routinely uses the white nationalist term “cuckservative” to refer to more moderate Republicans, comes close.

In an era in which the Trump base dominates many Republican primaries, candidates like Moore and Stewart are not that uncommon. In deep-red Kansas, hard-right, anti-immigrant Republican gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach is running essentially even against his Democratic opponent. For Democrats in these situations, simply performing less poorly in rural, conservative areas can make all the difference.

Santiful introduced me to Roy Nilsen, a former Lutheran pastor who resides in Shenandoah County. Nilsen supports Trump, but he finds Stewart’s “bluster” repulsive. After Stewart was nominated, he approached Santiful to ask about Kaine. “I trust his advice, he’s honest,” Nilsen said of Santiful. “He said [Kaine’s] a fine man and a fine person.” Nilsen is planning to vote for Kaine on November 6.

I encountered other Trump voters who local Democrats thought might be in play during the 2018 election. Derek Goebel introduced me to Lois Shaffer, the director of Page County’s food pantry, where Goebel volunteers. Shaffer told me that she was a proud Trump supporter, but, with thirty-two years of experience in regional charitable work, she was deeply concerned about her community’s needs. When I asked her what issue she felt was most important for the government to address, she responded that she wanted to see a system of universal health care.

Goebel, who was previously unaware of Shaffer’s politics, told me that he was surprised to learn she had voted for Trump. But after thinking for a while, he told me he believed that Jennifer Lewis might be able to sell Shaffer on her progressive economic agenda. And Goebel hypothesized that—given his long relationship with the food pantry’s leader—Shaffer would give Lewis a fair hearing so long as he put the two in contact.

“Lois would listen,” he said.

This does not mean that Jennifer Lewis will win. Bolstered by the Democrats’ midterm advantage and the mobilizing power of outrage at Trump, she will likely do better than Kai Degner, the last Democrat to make a run in the Sixth District. But barring a massive scandal, a non-incumbent Democrat has effectively no shot at winning a congressional race in a place where Trump outperformed Clinton by twenty-five points.

“It’s a long-haul effort,” acknowledged Rick Yoder, another Democrat in Rockingham County, when I asked him whether activists could ever turn the county blue. For now, the county Democratic vice chairman said the goal was simply turning the party into a real presence. Doing so has practical benefits beyond just moving closer to winning an election. Multiple Democrats mentioned that one of the Sixth District’s state delegates, Todd Gilbert, usually ran uncontested, allowing him to raise thousands of dollars and distribute it to more embattled Virginia Republicans. Recruiting a challenger for him was an immediate aim, one they said could force Gilbert—the house of delegates majority leader—to spend more of his own funds and thus help Democrats win statewide.

While conservatism may seem unstoppable in most of rural America, that can waver or change. During the height of the Great Recession in 2008, Obama performed well enough in rural areas that he won North Carolina and came close to winning Montana. Similarly, Democratic House candidates defeated incumbent Republicans in deeply conservative places, including western Idaho. Exogenous shocks are a regular, if unpredictable, feature of politics, and it’s up to opposition parties to provide a viable alternative when there is discontent. To succeed, they must knock on doors and establish a visible presence—even in places like Rockingham where it seems most everyone disagrees with them. Their community representatives have to be respected and networked within the region, like Santiful and Goebel. Doing so is the only way for Democrats to make it seem acceptable, and normal, to be a part of their party.

No one better embodies the long fight to normalize being a Democrat than Frank Nolen, whose commitment to the Democratic Party predates its rural problems. When Nolen first moved to Virginia in 1960, he said, Republicans were so scarce that they “could fit in a phone booth.” Nolen joined the county Democrats and rose through the party’s ranks, becoming a member of the county board of supervisors before being elected to the state senate.

Nolen served there for two decades, during which time Republicans made enormous gains. Many of his colleagues switched sides. But Nolen, whose father had blamed the Great Depression on Herbert Hoover and the GOP, stayed behind. “In my third or fourth term, the Republicans were going strong,” he said. “They tried to get me to switch, made me all kinds of offers. But I turned them down.”

I asked him why he was still involved in local party politics. He said he didn’t have much of a choice. When Nolen lost his seat to a Republican in 1995, there were virtually no more active Democrats in Augusta. “I couldn’t get anybody to be chairman, so I took up chairmanship by default,” a position he has held, more or less, ever since. But that’s changing. “I think after this year, I’m going to have plenty of people willing to do it,” he said.

As if to illustrate the point, Nolen’s phone rang. He apologized for the interruption and answered. “Hey, Al,” he said, then listened for a moment. “Okay, I’m meeting with the landlord.”

Nolen hung up, looked back at me, and said he would have to leave soon. “Democratic committee’s going to a larger headquarters, and one’s become available,” he said. “Gotta take care of that.”

The post The Democrats of Trump Country appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If it weren’t for Donald Trump, Salena Zito would likely still be unknown outside of Pittsburgh. Zito, a former political staffer and consultant, was forty-six when she was hired to write about politics for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2005. The paper was then owned by the late conservative billionaire activist Richard Mellon Scaife. It was Zito’s entry to journalism. For eleven years, she served as a hybrid reporter-columnist, filing moderately conservative opinion pieces leavened with folksy, on-the-ground interviews of the everyday people she met driving around small-town Pennsylvania and nearby states.

By the time Trump entered the political scene, Zito was well positioned to document the psychology of his voters—a subject of intense national fascination. A column from August 2016 captures the spirit of her dispatches. Marveling at the number of Trump lawn signs in rural and small-town Pennsylvania, Zito chided “pundits” for underestimating Trump’s popularity and looking down on his base. “While Trump supporters here are overwhelmingly white, their support has little to do with race (yes, you’ll always find one or two who make race the issue) but has a lot to do with a perceived loss of power,” she wrote, clarifying that “these people see a diminishing respect for them and their ways of life, their work ethic, their tendency to not be mobile.” Zito seemed to empathize with this sense of aggrievement. After quoting an unnamed woman who criticized Obama for not commenting enough during tragedies, Zito observed, “Voice such a remark, and you risk being labeled a racist in many parts of America.”

Zito had discovered a promising new beat: the sympathetic Trump voter profile. In September 2016, she made a splash with an Atlantic article in which she observed that, when Trump says something obviously false, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Around the same time, she took a buyout from the Tribune-Review and joined the Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post as a columnist. The election results, which guaranteed at least another four years of interest in the Trump coalition, only raised Zito’s profile further. The Washington Examiner, a conservative tabloid in D.C., hired her as its national political correspondent. Then came a CNN contributor gig, a Harvard fellowship, and a book deal—leading no less a literary tastemaker than Trump himself to tweet, “ ‘The Great Revolt’ by Salena Zito and Brad Todd does much to tell the story of our great Election victory. The Forgotten Men & Women are forgotten no longer!”

But as Zito’s prominence grew, a national audience started catching wind of whispers that had trailed her since her Pittsburgh days. The loudest criticisms, which came mostly from a handful of popular, anonymous Twitter accounts, centered on two main charges. One was an alleged sin of omission: on at least five occasions, Zito had left out the fact that her interview subjects were not merely ordinary citizens who voted for Trump but also current or past Republican Party officials. Several of these cases come from her book, The Great Revolt, which came out this past May and consists mostly of chapter-length profiles of white Rust Belt voters whose support for Trump is supposed to be in some way remarkable. Zito describes Michigan business owner Dawn Martin and her sisters, for example, as “raised to be Democrats.” She doesn’t mention Martin’s position as secretary of the Lake County GOP.

The other alleged sin was one of commission: many of the quotes Zito obtained from unnamed man-on-the-street voters seemed too good to be true, in a way that consistently echoed Zito’s own political views. Sometimes, the premises of the encounters were implausible, as when she claimed, “In the past three weeks, I have traveled to Chicopee, Mass., Raleigh, NC, Harrisburg, Pa., and hundreds of towns in between,” which would require a pace of at least ten towns per day. Or when she recounted overhearing a conversation between two young men in a car at a gas station—a car she was not in, and which was blasting the radio—praising Tom Cotton for criticizing Obama’s deal with Iran. As the guys drove away, she wrote, she spotted an Obama-Biden bumper sticker.

Other times, her subjects speak in language that just doesn’t sound like the way real people talk, as when a thirteen-year-old French tourist named Mathilde says, “I wish more people young and old would understand the gravity of this moment and apply that kind of grace in their daily lives.”

For a while, Zito mostly ignored the criticisms. But over the past summer, the pressure built, especially after an anonymous Twitter account compiled a long list of questionable Zito moments. Eventually the story outgrew the confines of social media, with articles on the controversy appearing online—including a piece by Ashley Feinberg in HuffPost whose headline declared, “Take Salena Zito Neither Seriously Nor Literally On Trump Voters.”

Zito finally had to respond. On September 4, she published a defiant column with the headline “The Twitter Trolls Attacking My Work Are All Wrong.” On the matter of the Republican officials, she argued that since she was up front about them being Republicans, there was no problem. After all, her reporting is about the various surprising elements of the Trump coalition, and many experts, including the Hillary Clinton campaign, had expected Trump to alienate mainstream Republican voters. And the supposedly made-up quotes? Zito provided the transcript of her interview with Mathilde, which, unless it was an expert forgery, showed that the conversation had taken place as written. 

For Zito, it was case closed. “I don’t report what I want to happen, or what I wish had happened,” she concluded. “I report what is happening.” 

There was just one problem: she had inadvertently presented evidence that suggested otherwise.

Central to Zito’s public persona is her unique insight into the Trump coalition—insight derived from “on-the-scene, shoe-leather reporting,” as she and her coauthor, Republican strategist Brad Todd, put it on the first page of The Great Revolt. (Zito provides the in-person reporting, while Todd contributes research and analysis.) A Politico profile shortly after the election called Zito “a reporter who saw Trump’s victory coming from miles away.” 

This narrative contains an element of mythmaking. Zito never quite predicted a Trump victory; she devoted one of her last preelection columns to explaining why a “Trump defeat will be incredibly difficult for his supporters to accept.” Throughout the Republican primary, she was cool toward him. In January 2016, she warned that populism was “radically contaminating conservatism’s values,” and chastised Trump supporters for insisting “that anyone who has been involved in or elected to public office is just plain bad, part of the problem.” In March 2016 she complained of “Trump’s demagoguery, nascent racism, xenophobia and lack of substance on policy issues,” and in April predicted that the Wisconsin primary would be “the moment when Donald Trump fatally faltered.”

Her tone changed after Trump officially locked up the nomination. While she still stopped short of predicting he would win, Zito argued that the media was underestimating his strength and unfairly maligning his supporters. “In interview after interview in all corners of the state, I’ve found that Trump’s support across the ideological spectrum remains strong,” she wrote in August.

This was an argument she had made before. In 2008, she wrote that John McCain had “a brand that resonates [with Pennsylvanians] in the blue-collar areas where their unions are trying to persuade them otherwise.” In 2012, she gushed about the “organic nature” of a Mitt Romney rally in North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, chiding the “TV networks, national press, Washington elite and establishment Republicans” for overlooking Romney’s popularity among both Democrats and Republicans. (Obama easily won the state both times.)

But in 2016, the Republican nominee finally did exceed expectations, making Zito look prophetic. She seemed to relish thumbing her nose at D.C.- and New York–based journalists who missed the story and “have continued to blow it” since the election. “To recognize the potential of the Trump coalition,” she and Todd write, “analysts would have had to visit places they had stopped visiting and listen to people they had stopped listening to.”

People like Ed Harry, a retired union official in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and the very first person profiled in The Great Revolt. A lifelong Democrat, Harry is the archetypal Obama-Trump voter. His shift, Zito reports, began with free trade agreements. “Blue-collar America essentially had the door shut in its face,” he says. Harry is representative, Zito and Todd write, of “the Luzerne County voters who too many journalists, sitting an easy drive away in their New York bureaus, did not come to meet.”

Except they did come to meet Luzerne County voters—including Ed Harry. By the time the book came out, Harry had been interviewed by at least five separate outlets since 2016, including Newsweek, the Associated Press, and even a writer for Third Way whose piece ran in the Washington Monthly. True, most of these interviews took place after the election; but so did Zito’s.

This shouldn’t be all that surprising. Far from being overlooked, the white working-class Trump voter has been one of the most consistent subjects of media profiles since Trump’s rise. Those reports often include themes that don’t make it into Zito’s columns. Newsweek, for instance, noted that Harry’s complaints about NAFTA drifted into conspiracy theories, including about George Soros paying millions to Black Lives Matter protestors. When I spoke with Harry a few weeks ago, he had plenty to say about free trade, but also about illegal immigration. He was convinced that the United States has an open borders policy, and that sanctuary cities are places where undocumented immigrants are allowed to commit crimes.

“How could you have a sanctuary city where you’ve got a rapist who got convicted and gets let go and they can stay there because of the mayor or whoever it is allowing it to happen in violation of our laws?” he said. “If you or I did that, we don’t have a sanctuary city we can go to. I’d go to jail.”

The point is not to pick on Harry; the point is that regular people have complex and unordered political views. But you wouldn’t know that from reading Zito. Like a Hemingway novel or a Miles Davis solo, her reporting is distinctive less for what it includes than for what it leaves out. The motivations of white Rust Belt voters that emerge in her reporting are, without fail, morally unimpeachable: Obama took the country in the wrong direction; trade deals have screwed them over; elites look down on regular Americans; politicians are liars; and Trump, while not perfect, tells it like it is. Any uglier sentiments—racism, sexism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories—are conspicuously absent, as is any interrogation of where those attitudes come from.

Indeed, the most notable gap in Zito’s reporting may be the role of conservative media itself. Why do white voters in Pennsylvania feel such a powerful sense of grievance? Where does Ed Harry get the idea that the U.S. has an open borders policy? By airbrushing her subjects’ more extreme beliefs, Zito avoids having to acknowledge their likely origin: Fox News and the broader right-wing media apparatus of which she is a part.

Still, there’s a difference between leaving things out and making things up. A reporter does not promise to tell the reader everything that happened, but she does promise that everything she does tell the reader really did happen. In Zito’s case, that means quoting her subjects faithfully. Which brings us to Dave Rubbico.

Rubbico is one of the most controversial characters in the Zito universe. A lifelong Democrat from Erie, Pennsylvania, he went from voting twice for Obama to casting a ballot for Trump, decking himself out in MAGA gear, and slapping an Infowars bumper sticker on his pickup truck. He’s also one of the voters in The Great Revolt whom Zito didn’t identify as an elected Republican—which, critics suggested, meant he wasn’t the swing voter she portrayed him as.

In her rebuttal column on September 4, Zito dwelled on Rubbico at length. The fact that he’s a Republican official is irrelevant, she pointed out, since he ran for the local Republican committee only after the 2016 election. Point: Zito.

Then she overplayed her hand. She posted the audio of an interview with Rubbico, plus a partial transcript, in which he explains how he grew disillusioned with Obama after twice voting for him. But the recording also revealed three small yet clear discrepancies between the interview and the way Zito reported it in the book. First, in the audio, Rubbico says he thought Obama “was too much with diplomacy and not enough for action.” But in the book, there’s a word added: Obama “was too much with delicate diplomacy” (emphasis mine).

Later in the recording, Rubbico—a jaded former welfare case worker—says, “Clients were encouraged to defraud the system, management from Harrisburg on down, like trickle down with President Reagan and stuff. But Harrisburg said they’re more interested in making clients happy instead of the accuracy of taxpayer-funded benefits.” Here’s how Zito renders it in the book: “The clients were encouraged to defraud the system. There was corruption. Harrisburg said they’re more interested in making clients happy instead of the accuracy of taxpayer-funded benefits.” 

At this point in the tape, Rubbico goes into a long complaint about how the people gaming the system were specifically immigrants and refugees. Zito responds by asking, “So the corruption bothered you?” Rubbico, who up to that point hasn’t mentioned corruption, replies, “Fraud, corruption, yeah,” before relaying another anecdote about a manipulative Iranian. But the material about immigrants and refugees is totally absent from the book. Instead, Zito quotes Rubbico seemingly spontaneously saying, “There was too much fraud and corruption, yeah.”

All in all, in the one interview tape that Zito shared with the world—to prove the accuracy of her reporting—there were three examples of her adding words that the speaker didn’t actually say.

These changes are small, but they betray an intention to sanitize her subject’s views. Being against diplomacy as such is a bit extreme, but accusing Obama’s foreign policy of being “delicate” is a mainstream Republican position. Complaining about immigrants looks a lot like the xenophobia that Zito insists is barely present in the Trump coalition; better to replace it with generic concerns about corruption. “These are definitely deliberate attempts to massage the quotes to make the point in a way the author wanted the point made, not the way the speaker wanted the point made,” said Kelly McBride, senior vice president at the Poynter Institute and an expert on journalistic ethics, in an email.

At the same time, the changes were subtle enough that it would be extremely unlikely for the speaker to notice them. Which raises the question: How often does Zito use this technique? I was struck, for instance, at how many of the people profiled in The Great Revolt—twelve of twenty-three, by my count, including Ed Harry—are quoted saying that voting for Trump wasn’t about Trump, or politics, but rather about “community” or “being a part of something bigger” than themselves. I called a few of these people up and asked questions that I thought would yield similar answers. They didn’t; no one mentioned anything close. Had Zito fed them her own thoughts, then brushed up the quotes to make it look like their idea, the way she did with Rubbico and “corruption”? There’s no way to know without hearing the tapes.

A few weeks ago, I reached out to Zito for an interview. She declined, but offered to answer questions via email, so I typed up the quote discrepancies and asked her how they came about.

“I would never manipulate what a source or interview subject says,” she wrote back. “That was not the full audio of Rubbico and I interviewed him additional times after that. That portion was used to show he voted for Obama twice and then Trump.”

For reference, here is the full context of the “delicate” quote as it appears in the book: “Instead of being a … How can you say it? Instead of being someone who does a job, he was being someone pussyfooting around, and he was too much with delicate diplomacy and not enough for action.” That entire passage is in the audio, too, word for word—with the sole exception of “delicate.” In her explanation, Zito seemed to be saying that Rubbico had uttered the exact same paragraph twice—down to pausing and asking, “How can you say it?”—in two different conversations, except for one word.

Again, it’s a small change; one could imagine it being the result of an honest, if careless, mistake. But Zito was denying that it was a change at all. I wrote back expressing my skepticism. But I pointed out that if she sent me audio recordings showing that the quotes came from different conversations, it would put the matter to rest.

“I will not be sharing anymore [sic] audio,” she replied. “For clarity the quotes that I used in the book are exactly how he said it in a series of broad interviews and questions, what was released was just a tiny snippet.”

That was on a Friday. The following Monday, I emailed the editors of the New York Post and Washington Examiner. I included the discrepancies and described them as “strong evidence” that Zito had manipulated quotes. I asked whether they had made any effort to audit Zito’s articles for accuracy or had any plans to do so.

I never heard from the Post, but Hugo Gurdon, the editorial director of the Examiner, quickly emailed me back: “These are not ‘strong evidence’ of manipulation, as you suggest. They are pusillanimous quibbles. When the smear campaign against Salena began on social media a few weeks ago we looked into it and we are satisfied that the allegations are worthless.” I called Gurdon to follow up, since his suggestion that the discrepancies weren’t a big deal was at odds with Zito’s argument that there were no discrepancies. But he refused to elaborate on the record and quickly hung up.

A half hour later, I got an email from Zito. It read, in part: “After thinking about this over the weekend, I realize I may have not given you the clearest answer to your question; when I went back with subsequent interviews with Mr. Rubbico I posed some of his answers that he gave to me as questions to get clarity, those answers are the direct quotes in the book. I hope that makes better sense.”

She still declined to send me the recordings of those subsequent interviews.

Zito insists that she records almost all of her interviews. That presumably includes quotes like this one, from August, which Zito attributed to a middle-aged Ohio woman:

For decades I have been inspired by aspiring politicians and elected officials who took to the podium or the camera and delivered poetic speeches to earn my trust and my support. They would sway me with expressive words and artfully delivered promises. . . . It took me a while to realize those words weren’t theirs, but skillfully crafted sentences that had been massaged and focus-group tested by a full staff of speechwriters and strategists.

Of course, it’s possible that someone really said this— just as it’s possible that, as Zito writes, this conservative voter “shudders as she imagines what kind of problems she would encounter if she gave her name, so she declines.” But the combination of a contrived-sounding quote with a thin rationale for anonymity might have prompted a conscientious editor to ask to check the tape.

If any of Zito’s editors have been moved to scrutinize her work, however, they’ve been quiet about it. Frank Craig, until 2016 the editor of the Pittsburgh Review-Tribune, who Zito says in The Great Revolt taught her “to trust her instincts,” didn’t respond to interview requests. Neither did Seth Mandel, until recently the opinion editor of the New York Post, who helped Zito put together her September 4 rebuttal column. (He has since taken a new job—at the Washington Examiner.) Neither did Stephen Lynch, editor of the New York Post, nor Tina Constable, the head of Crown Forum, which published The Great Revolt. The Washington Examiner’s Hugo Gurdon, the one editor who responded to me, refused to specify how exactly the paper had “looked into” the case against Zito.

Accusations of fraud by reporters occur at mainstream and liberal publications too, of course. But compare their reactions. The New Republic exhaustively investigated the serial fabrications of Stephen Glass. The New York Times published a damning report on its own former staffer, Jayson Blair, on the front page of the Sunday paper, and forced two top editors to resign. Lower-profile cases are common. The Houston Chronicle recently parted ways with veteran reporter Mike Ward after someone else on staff raised questions about whether Ward’s man-on-the-street interviews had really taken place. The paper even brought in an outside investigator to determine how deep the fraud had gone.

As I reported this story, I came to think Zito may well be a victim—not of Twitter trolls, but of the culture of the publications she has worked for. She came to journalism late in life, from a nontraditional background. Did anyone ever show her the ropes?

All journalists, liberal or conservative, have convictions and ambitions that can drive them to greatness or lead them astray. Serious publications try to manage these traits by nurturing internal cultures of questioning and dissent, by imposing rigorous editing and fact checking, and by being transparent with the public when these systems fail.

To say that conservative media does not generally hew to the same professional standards is not a novel observation. In a speech at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference, Tucker Carlson, of all people, insisted that conservatives needed to create publications more like the New York Times—“a paper that actually cares about accuracy.”

The irony is that honest, rigorous on-the-ground reporting of the kind Zito claims to practice is exactly what conservative media, and the conservative movement, could use more of. Real life is complicated, and complexity is anathema to ideology. If conservative publications were more committed to accurate reporting, there might be some hope for the movement itself to reverse its decades-long drift away from objective reality.

Such a shift doesn’t seem terribly likely at the moment. At this point, there is so little daylight between conservatism and Trumpism that the amount of cognitive dissonance required to maintain loyalty could never sustain prolonged engagement with honest storytelling.

In that depressing sense, Zito may be the ideal reporter for the Trump era. While she lacks the president’s taste for aggression, she shares his ironclad commitment never to admit fault. So, evidently, do her employers. And they display the same instinct for projecting their own pathologies onto their opponents. “A few journalists, particularly those who rarely if ever leave the Washington Beltway or Midtown Manhattan, want to discredit my work because of what it reports,” she wrote in her September 4 column. “They want to silence the voices I listen to and record.”

If anything, Zito’s steady rise suggests the opposite: a hunger on the part of a national audience, including elite media, to better understand the Trump electorate. The question they should be asking is: Whose voice are they really hearing?

The post Her Dispatches From Trump Country Are Perfect. Maybe Too Perfect. appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Karen Petrou’s office is bare. A desk and chair, a computer, a sofa. There is no art on the wall. In this modest space—in a not-so-modest Dupont Circle building—Petrou runs a consultancy, Federal Financial Analytics, where she has become one of the most influential financial regulation experts in the world. On a given day, she fields dozens of calls from government officials, bankers, investors, and reporters, all of whom want her input on some esoteric regulatory issue that only a tiny number of human beings understand. 

For someone with that level of accomplishment, you would expect her walls to be lined with pictures of her posing with important people. You might also expect an expensive painting or sculpture, something to convey her sophistication and status. But Petrou has no need for these ornaments. She wouldn’t be able to see them. 

Petrou, who is sixty-five, is no expert on medical technology or pharmaceutical research. But after a highly successful career—the American Banker called her “the sharpest mind analyzing banking policy today—maybe ever” in 2012—Petrou has trained her intellect on the task of curing blindness. She has reached a point in her life and career at which she wants to use her professional expertise to make an impact outside her field and eradicate the source of her greatest personal adversity.

Petrou is the architect of a bill introduced in Congress last July that would create so-called Eye Bonds, a package of loans, backed by a limited government guarantee, to support research into blindness cures that would otherwise stall. 

The insight behind the bill, called the Faster Treatments and Cures for Eye Diseases Act, is that the lack of a cure for blindness is not a scientific problem; it’s a financial one. For years, translational research—the point at which science is turned into a product by trying it on human patients in the hope of getting FDA approval—has been referred to as the “valley of death.” In countless cases, promising therapies and other interventions can’t get the funding they need when it’s time to test treatments on people. 

For Petrou, who started going blind as an adolescent, this has been painfully frustrating. But last December, the Federal Drug Administration approved a gene therapy called Luxturna that can substantially improve eyesight in children suffering from a rare form of childhood-onset blindness. It was one of the few drugs that got past the valley of death. Petrou believes that if Luxturna’s fate were not such a rare exception, her fate could be changed too. “I believe that if we could get this promising research past the valley of death, I could see in ten years,” she said. 

Karen Petrou grew up in the well-to-do town of Briarcliff Manor, a Westchester County suburb north of New York City. She was driven and ambitious, a good student who stayed out of trouble. But she wasn’t good at sports. “I knew I didn’t quite see things the way others did.” But, she said, “I just assumed I was a crappy athlete because I couldn’t find a softball.”

It wasn’t until she hit her teens that she noticed something was off. “It never really occurred to me until I took driver’s ed and realized that the double-yellow line wasn’t really in my line of vision,” she said. At eighteen, she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder that causes a breakdown and loss of cells in the retina. The doctor said she would be blind by the age of twenty-five. “It was not a good day around my family,” Petrou recalled. 

In fact, Petrou turned out to have a slower version of the disorder: she didn’t lose her reading vision until she was in her mid-thirties and didn’t need a guide dog until she was fifty. But she lived the rest of her younger years in dread of what was to come. Today, she is almost completely blind. She described her life as one of “constant improvisation”—learning to live with less and less sight and adapting to advances in technology. Her phone’s voiceover capabilities have made things much easier, and with the layout of a computer keyboard fully ingrained in her memory, she probably types faster than you do. 

Petrou recognizes that as a child of privilege, she had more opportunities than most others who lose their sight early. After graduating from Wellesley College, she studied briefly at MIT, and earned a master’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley. Sexism was a constant feature of her academic career, which prepared her for a life in corporate America while going blind. “I was already used to people thinking I wasn’t supposed to be where I was,” she said. “That was good combat training.” 

After earning her degree from Berkeley, Petrou became an officer at Bank of America’s Washington, D.C., office. She rose through the ranks fast, becoming a vice president by age twenty-seven. But her trajectory stalled when her boss said that while he’d like to promote her to senior vice president, he wasn’t comfortable elevating a woman to that role. “After that, I decided to start my own firm,” she said. In 1985, she cofounded Federal Financial Analytics. 

Along with being one of the most coveted financial consultants in town, Petrou has also been a part-time public intellectual, weighing in on crucial regulatory issues before influential audiences like Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the Brookings Institution. Her expert opinion has frequently been quoted in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And she’s currently writing a book, which will be published this spring by Yale University Press, about how regulatory policies after the 2008 financial crisis exacerbated the nation’s wealth divide.

As a blind person, Petrou is a rarity not only in the financial elite but in the workforce, period. “More than 70 percent of blind adults in America are unemployed,” she said, accurately citing the most recent statistics. “Because the stereotype of blindness, in my opinion, is worse than the actual disease. Parents are terrified that their children will be the equivalent of pencil sellers their whole lives.”

Petrou has defied those stereotypes, but she is still not immune to occasional humiliations. At a recent dinner party, she was sitting next to her husband when someone asked him, rather than her, “What would she like to eat?” There are other blows to the spirit. Recently, Petrou was riding the elevator with a colleague and with Zuni, her guide dog. Another man asked her colleague how old his German Shepherd was. “He was clearly talking to him, because a blind person with a dog is clueless,” Petrou said.

Petrou’s connection with Zuni runs deep. Every day they travel together by Metro from her home in Northwest Washington to her office near Dupont Circle. There are some people, however, for whom the dog is a problem. “There are people I know who won’t have us over to their house, because we won’t go anywhere without the guide dog,” said her husband, Basil Petrou, who along with Karen is a managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics. “It’s not a pet. The guide dog is working. We’re not asking to bring our pet to the house, but people don’t understand.” 

Karen added, “We don’t like them anyway.” 

The idea for Eye Bonds began in 2013 at a Foundation Fighting Blindness (FFB) board meeting in Boston. Petrou and her fellow board members talked to venture capitalists, who explained why it was so hard to fund translational research. Clinical trials, they said, were too risky—the chance of the treatments failing and investors losing money was high. Even if they are successful, translational research can take from eight to seventeen years, whereas most venture capitalists want a five-year payout on their investments. 

Because of that reality, attempts to fix visual impairments have gained little momentum. While thousands of ideas get through basic research, they tend to come to an abrupt standstill. Most of the funding comes from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and private foundations, like the FFB. By themselves, these organizations cannot provide enough support for the range of promising research options. The FFB, Petrou said, gets roughly 100 grant applications every year, about ten of which its scientists consider highly promising. It can only fund one or two.

Ben Yerxa, the foundation’s CEO, said his organization put $2 million into groundbreaking research at the University of South Carolina, where scientists are working on developing a new class of compounds as neuro-protective agents for retinitis pigmentosa, which affects roughly one in 4,000 Americans, including Petrou. But USC needs more money to test those compounds out on patients. “Those situations cause us to scratch our heads and wonder what’s wrong with the system,” Yerxa said. 

To make sure more promising blindness treatments made it through the valley of death, Petrou realized, she needed to make the research more attractive to investors. That’s where Eye Bonds come in. The bonds are simply a way of packaging federally backed loans to researchers who currently struggle to get funding. The bonds would bundle together several promising blindness treatments, so that instead of having to make a risky bet on one small researcher—like the lab at USC—an investor’s risk would be diversified. The federal government would also mitigate the risk by guaranteeing up to half the loan principal. (The bill introduced in July would establish a pilot program allowing the government to guarantee up to $1 billion in loans. It would also allow the government to take equity in the research.)

Each year, four or five bonds would be issued, each for no more than $250 million. The National Eye Institute, a division of the NIH, would select the research projects to be funded by the bonds. Even if only one of these projects got approved by the FDA and became a commercial success, Petrou argued, the profit would pay off all the other loans. The investments would be further protected, she explained, by using intellectual property rights—namely, drug patents—as collateral.

“It’s the same concept as a mortgage,” she said. “You take out a loan and get a house. If you don’t pay back the loan, [the bank] can take your house. If nothing pans out, all the loans have to be paid back.” The only way Eye Bonds would end up costing the taxpayers money is if none of the projects panned out and the collateral became worthless over time. 

After Petrou shared her idea with the FFB leadership, they began crafting a legislative proposal and recruiting members of Congress. One lawmaker they made an impression on was Congressman Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who sponsored the 21st Century Cures Act, legislation that speeds the process by which drugs and other medical products receive FDA approval. It was one of the last pieces of legislation Barack Obama signed into law. “The other day, I was at a major senior expo in Kalamazoo and there was a table set up for the visually disabled,” Upton told me. “We’d like to find a cure for this.”

Petrou hopes her proposal will have applications far beyond helping to cure blindness. “There are millions of Americans and their families suffering from disease and disability that scientists believe they can cure, treat, and prevent,” she said. “If the only thing that’s keeping disease and disability from being reversed is money, this bill is an experimental way to match the missing money at the valley of death.”

Some detractors of the bill argue that it does not address the real reason translational research has so much trouble finding funding. “There’s tons of capital chasing good interventions,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also chairs the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. “The problem is that the money is looking for high returns in diseases that will pay a lot of money.” 

Blindness cures don’t have the same lucrative upside as treatments that not only have broad application but also require continual usage. Unlike erectile dysfunction, which requires a man to take a pill every time he wants to have sex, or an anxiety disorder, which requires a pill every day, a blindness cure will likely only require a brief, one-time treatment. That puts a limit on its profitability. (Or, as the comedian Chris Rock put it nearly twenty years ago, “There ain’t no money in the cure—the money’s in the medicine!”) The long-term horizon for any potential breakthrough is also unappealing to venture capitalists, who hunger for quick returns. 

But Petrou understands all that. It’s why the Eye Bond is designed to target an entirely different pool of funding. “Who has long-term money?” said Basil, her husband, who helped her develop the idea. “The answer is insurance companies and pension funds.” 

In other words, if Eye Bonds work, it will be by creating a new, low-risk investment product where one didn’t exist before—one that appeals to institutional investors looking for longer-term places to park their money, and drawn to the promise of a partial federal loan guarantee.

Petrou also said that the upside may be higher than people think, because visual disability is more widespread than many realize. That’s especially true after two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; roughly 10 to 13 percent of combat injuries are now vision related. Meanwhile, with an aging population, macular degeneration is becoming more common. 

It all adds up. According to the National Eye Institute, blindness and vision disorders cost the government $145 billion a year. By 2050, when the NIH expects blindness cases in the U.S. to have doubled from its current levels, that figure could reach $700 billion. 

Petrou is playing a long game. It’s nearly impossible to pass such an ambitious plan through a divided Congress, where bold proposals generally die. And the bill’s champions on Capitol Hill recognize that its chances, at least this year, are slim at best. “Let’s face it,” Upton said. “We’re late in the year and there aren’t a lot of legislative days left.” But even if there is no movement soon, he said, that doesn’t mean it will fail. “We’ve certainly laid the foundation for it to be reintroduced next year.” 

Petrou is aiming to lobby lawmakers more aggressively once the new Congress convenes in January. “If it succeeds, all the scientists in the field tell us that with a billion dollars they will cure blindness, in virtually all of its various forms, because the science is so far advanced,” she said. That’s only the beginning of her boundless optimism. She sees Eye Bonds as a first step toward building “a bio-bond market that expands to cancer or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or any number of other diseases and disabilities.” 

Until then, she will not be resting. Earlier this month, she was on the Metro when a mother approached her. “Can I ask you something?” Petrou recalled the mother saying. “My son is five. He’s going blind. Can he get a dog? I want him to be able to go to school.” I asked Petrou how often this happened. “All. The. Time,” she said. After another pause, she added, “With a guide dog, I can’t fake it anymore.”

One way she has dealt with her blindness is by pouring herself into her work. Too much rumination, when you’re trapped in a visionless body, can be dangerous. You have to keep moving. “There’s a big debate: Is it better to lose your sight all at once or over time?” she said. “Well, once you’ve seen the beauty of the world, you kind of miss it.”

She tries, as best she can, not to think about it too much. “There’s no choice,” she said. “I wish there were. The goal of Eye Bonds is for there to be one.”

After our conversation, Petrou had to leave for an appointment. She knows the office well, and needs little help getting to the conference room or the elevator or her assistant’s desk. All she needs is Zuni. Once beckoned, the dog would be by her side. After attaching a leash to Zuni’s harness, Petrou would give an instruction. Within minutes, they would be down the elevator and out the door, onto 19th Street. 

It was a beautiful October afternoon. Washingtonians were out en masse for what might have been one of the last gorgeous fall days. Petrou would see none of it. Reflexively, she would just ask Zuni to lead her to the Metro. She still had work to do.

The post Has This Woman Figured Out How to Cure Blindness? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The First Amendment wasn’t supposed to be the first amendment. 

It’s mostly forgotten today, but Congress originally sent twelve of James Madison’s proposed constitutional amendments to the states for ratification; the ten that were ratified are what we now call the Bill of Rights. If all twelve had gotten through, the U.S. House of Representatives today might be at about 6,000 members, instead of 435.

That’s because Madison’s original first amendment specified a precise formula for representation. Initially, each House member would represent 30,000 people. For the first Congress, this meant just sixty-five members. Then, when the House got to 100 members, the ratio would go to 40,000 to one. When it got to 200 members, the ratio would go to 50,000 to one. That was as far as it got.

“It is a sound and important principle that the representative ought to be acquainted with the interests and circumstances of his constituents,” Madison wrote in Federalist 56. As the new nation’s population grew, then, the “People’s House” should stay close to the people. But Madison’s forward-looking amendment was always at least one state short of the three-quarters needed for ratification.

Still, for the next 120 years, Congress generally acted in accordance with the spirit of the lost first amendment. While the number of senators remained constitutionally fixed at two per state, Congress passed decennial legislation to increase the size of the House following each census. By 1832, it had grown to 240 members. After some stasis in the mid-nineteenth century (Congress was preoccupied with other things then), the House grew consistently in the post–Civil War era, rising to 433 after the 1910 census. The 1912 admission to the union of Arizona and New Mexico, which as states were constitutionally entitled to at least one representative, brought the number to 435, with one representative for every 211,000 constituents. 

But even as Congress passed the Apportionment Act of 1911, rumblings about a too-big House were growing. And so was the nation: between the 1910 and 1920 censuses, the population swelled by 15 percent, from 92 million to 106 million. Much of that growth came in the form of immigration to cities like New York and Chicago. To keep the ratio at 211,000 to one would have meant adding another seventy representatives. The House couldn’t agree on a plan, with representatives from less populous, rural states fearing a dilution of their power. So, for the first time following a census, it didn’t reapportion at all. 

The debate continued through the 1920s. “Why is this number 435 sacred?” asked Ralph Lozier, a third-term Missouri Democratic congressman, in 1928. “There is absolutely no reason, philosophy, or common sense in arbitrarily fixing the membership of the House at 435 or at any other number.” 

But in 1929, Congress did just that, voting to cap the number of representatives at 435, and reapportion among states based on their fluctuating share of the national population. The case for keeping districts small lost out to the need for consensus on reapportionment—and to the argument that a larger House would descend into chaos. As Wallace White, a Maine Republican, put it, “If the efficiency of the House as a parliamentary body is of first importance, then we must concede that the House may be of such size that it will become less orderly and that its effectiveness as a deliberative, legislative body will be impaired.” 

But if keeping the House at 435 members was supposed to make it more effective, deliberative, and orderly, the cap has been a dismal failure. Eight decades later, it’s hard to imagine a more dysfunctional institution. Real debate is a thing of the past. All authority runs through party leadership. Members spend half their time fundraising, and too often put the interests of donors and lobbyists ahead of those of their constituents, whom many now refuse to meet face-to-face. Not coincidentally, economic inequality continues to rise, and faith in government continues to decline.

In short, history seems to have proved James Madison right. 

The good news is that the 435 number is not set in stone; Congress could expand the House through simple legislation, as it used to every decade. Doing so might be the most effective way to make the House function as a real representative body again. Radically expanding the House could, in one stroke, address some of the biggest problems facing Congress and, by extension, the country. Smaller districts would give voters more access to members and ease the pressure to fundraise. They would provide more representation for the poor and lead to a more diverse and representative body. And adding members would fracture party leadership to the point where the House would have to work in a decentralized way, leading to more deliberation in committees and more fluid coalitions—just as the institution was designed to work.

After the 2020 census, the official U.S. population will likely be around 333 million people. That means that the average U.S. House member will represent about 765,000 constituents. That’s a lot of people—comparable to the population of major cities like Seattle and Denver.

Look across the globe, and you’ll see that the United States is an outlier. In the United Kingdom (population 66 million), the House of Commons has 650 members, one for every 101,000 Brits. Germany’s Bundestag has 709 members, one for every 116,000 Germans. Only India (population 1.3 billion) has more constituents per representative in its lower house, the Lok Sabha. But in India, individual state governments have more autonomy than in the U.S., making the national legislature less important.

Political scientists have documented two serious consequences to overly large districts: lower trust and higher inequality. The first is intuitive: the more constituents, the less likely it is that citizens will have direct contact with their representatives. If representatives feel distant and unhelpful, so will government. Across democracies, there is a correlation: the larger a nation’s districts, the less overall confidence its citizens have in government.

The political scientist Brian Frederick has shed light on the phenomenon by exploiting some natural variation in the size of U.S. congressional districts. (Since states vary in population, it’s impossible to get equal-sized districts across all states. For example, Montana has one representative for 1.05 million people; Rhode Island has two representatives for 1.06 million people.) Frederick found that as districts get bigger in population, constituents are less likely to report having contact with their member of Congress, less likely to think their member would help solve their problems, and more likely to see their member as out of touch with the district. In short, having so few representatives for so many constituents contributes to widespread dissatisfaction with Congress. 

That dissatisfaction may be at a crisis point. In a recent poll, only 11 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress, putting it at the bottom of a list of fifteen public and private national institutions. 

The second major consequence of overly large districts is less obvious, but even more significant: there is an extremely strong correlation between constituent-to-representative ratios and inequality. 

Why would this be? One consequence of House districts being so big is that they are more heterogeneous. This means that there are few districts where poor voters add up as a pivotal voting bloc. The political scientist Karen Long Jusko estimates that even if the poorest 33 percent of Americans voted as a unified bloc, they could still only elect their preferred representative in 5 percent of districts. In France, by contrast, a third of the districts have a low-income majority. “[T]he size of a U.S. congressional district is much larger—by a factor of almost seven—than the average French district,” Jusko notes. “This undoubtedly contributes to the heterogeneity of American congressional districts, and dilutes the electoral power of low-income voters.” Meanwhile, she finds a consistent pattern: the more electoral power poor voters have across countries (and across U.S. states), the higher the level of government social spending. 

There’s no magic formula for the exact perfect size of a legislature. But bringing the House back to the ratio that stood in 1911—211,000 constituents to one representative—would be a good start. It would still put the U.S. toward the upper end of the thirty-six countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-ordination and Development, but we would no longer be a major outlier. To get there, in a nation of 333 million people, the 2021 House would need about 1,600 members. Bringing the House up to that level would likely go a long way toward reducing inequality and could restore much-needed trust in government. It would also have several other major benefits.

For one, expanding the House would strike a more powerful blow against the influence of money in politics than any past campaign finance regulation, simply by cutting down on the costs of campaigning—reducing the candidate demand instead of trying to cut off the supply. With one representative for 200,000 people, it’s much more feasible to run a grassroots, door-to-door campaign than when you’re trying to represent 765,000 people. It’s true that more campaigns could mean more money spent on House races overall, but the average cost would drop dramatically, giving less-deep-pocketed candidates a better chance. And it would mean that individual members, once in office, could spend more time with their constituents and less time hanging out with lobbyists and rich donors. 

Another benefit would be added diversity. Today’s House is 80 percent male, and 80 percent white, with an average age of fifty-seven. Adding 1,165 new members would be a quick way to make the legislature look a lot more like the country it represents. 

Finally, perhaps the best reason to increase the size of the House is that it would open the door to another potentially transformational electoral reform: putting in place a form of semi-proportional representation that would allow for a multiparty system.

This idea—which House Democrat Don Beyer, of Virginia, has introduced in a bill called the Fair Representation Act—would implement multimember districts and ranked-choice voting, a system already used successfully in Ireland and Australia. The new districts would still be large, but with three to five candidates emerging, each would only need to win over a subset of voters. If the Irish example is a guide, individual candidates would run stronger in different parts of the district, serving different but overlapping constituencies, keeping representatives closer to voters. 

The big advantage of Beyer’s proposed reform is that it would defuse the zero-sum partisanship that is currently paralyzing Congress. Moving away from winner-take-all elections would allow new parties to emerge, which would in turn force coalition building and compromise. The result would be a more committee-based Congress, where more bills come to the floor—not just those that party leaders think improve their ability to win partisan control—and more business actually gets done.

So why not do it? The simplest case against increasing the size of the House is the same one Wallace White made in the 1920s: a bigger House would just be too big. It would be too hard for members to deliberate, discuss, and debate. They couldn’t get to know each other as people. It would be a mere voting assembly, in which leaders dictate how members vote, and everybody else is a backbencher.

The thing about this critique is that it perfectly describes the current House. In today’s House of 435, there is no deliberation. Members give speeches to an empty chamber. They are talking to the cameras, beaming out their message on C-SPAN and perhaps later in YouTube clips. Whatever idealized deliberation and bonhomie might be lost with a larger House is already long gone, and it isn’t coming back. Even the Senate, with a more manageable 100 members, is hardly a model of reasoned debate and thoughtful persuasion, though it comes closer.

Yes, perhaps a House so large and so close to the people would get more unruly or more populist. But that was the original plan, and it’s why there’s also a Senate. Sure, we’d have to build new office buildings, and create a separate space where all 1,600 members could sit together if need be. But that’s a small price to play for a more representative and responsive legislature.

Even if you’re convinced on the merits of this proposal, you might still dismiss it as pie in the sky. Why would any current members—the ones who would have to vote on it—support such a proposal? Being one of 435 sounds better than being one of 1,600. Why would members vote to dilute what little influence they have?

The status quo may be the devil Congress knows, but it’s one hell of a devil. That a near-record number of House members are retiring this year, most in perfectly safe districts, is the surest sign that even the prestige is no longer worth it. 

Making the House larger could, paradoxically, make the job a lot more appealing. That’s because members would almost surely have to spend less time fundraising, which is widely acknowledged to be the most miserable part of being in Congress. Expanding the House would pair especially well with a proposal to create a public matching system for small donors, in which candidates get six public dollars in campaign money for every one dollar they raise privately. Maryland Representative John Sarbanes has developed legislation to put this system in place, and it’s now a part of the Democrats’ Better Deal for Democracy platform.

In a more decentralized, committee-based House, members would have more opportunities to work in smaller groups to develop real legislative solutions, rather than just serve as partisan foot soldiers. And if the House were more productive and more responsive to the concerns of constituents, being a member might feel more important and even more prestigious—like being part of a great institution, not just the butt of jokes about being as popular as head lice.

Still, if Congress doesn’t act, the states could. Madison’s original second amendment provided that if representatives and senators voted to increase their pay, the raise wouldn’t kick in until the next Congress. That idea lay fallow for almost 200 years, until a college sophomore in Texas rediscovered it and started a campaign to ratify it. In 1992, Michigan became the thirty-eighth state to ratify, making the “salary grab” rule the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the Constitution. Of course, restricting pay raises for members of Congress is an easier sell to voters than creating more members. But at the same time, creating more than a thousand job openings in Washington might appeal to quite a few ambitious state legislators.

There may be more direct solutions to each of the problems—inequality, campaign finance, the lack of real deliberation, and so on—that flow from having a too-small House. But there are structural reasons why direct solutions have failed. Individual politicians operate inside of institutions, and those institutions create incentives and pressures. Expecting a different outcome with the same incentives in the same organization is a recipe for failure. Change the organization and the incentives, however, and you might actually get a different result. Make it harder for members of Congress to avoid their constituents, make them less reliant on large donors, and weaken the grip of party leaders, and a more responsive, equitable government that can win back the trust of the people becomes much more likely.

In the bizarro universe in which the states had ratified all twelve of Madison’s proposed amendments, freedom of speech would be enshrined by the Third Amendment and congressional district size would have been capped at a maximum of 50,000 constituents per representative. Would the House now be at 6,000 members? Maybe. Would Congress have amended the amendment to slow the growth? Quite possibly. But at the very least, we probably would have seen a multiparty system develop in the late nineteenth century, as two parties would have been inadequate to organize the diversity of representation in a chamber with well over 1,000 members. And we very likely would have had a more populist House, in a good sense—one more attuned to the economic concerns of the people and with more incentive to cater to the demands of less privileged minority voting blocs. Instead, we’re left with the accident of history that survived, and the arbitrary number of 435 that stuck when the House started to seem too big and too skewed toward immigrant-heavy cities. 

Any increase to the House—to 700, to 1,600, to 6,000—would be a major change. But it would make our lower chamber far more representative and more responsive. And it might be just the disruption we need to fix our unsustainably polarized national politics and restore the original vision of the lower chamber: an unruly, chaotic place, close to the people, and capable of acts of unexpected creativity.

The post To Fix Congress, Make It Bigger. Much Bigger. appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The debate about gun violence in America has fallen into a depressingly familiar routine. After every horrendous mass shooting, like the recent one at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, or weekend spree of violence in Chicago, the media commences a few days of wall-to-wall coverage. Large numbers of Americans demand changes in gun laws. Experts debate various reforms on TV. When no changes are forthcoming, attention lags until the next mass shooting. Rinse and repeat. 

There are two principal reasons why we are stuck in this painful rut. The first is that the National Rifle Association, via its influence primarily within the Republican Party, has effective veto power over any gun legislation at the national level and in many states. The second is that the solutions that are typically discussed fail to match the scale of the problem. Banning military-style semiautomatic weapons, regulating magazine clips, closing the gun show loophole, and preventing people with domestic violence restraining orders from acquiring weapons might well reduce levels of gun violence—to some extent. But it is hard to argue that these reforms, even if they all went into effect, would do much more than put a modest dent in the problem, and for a simple reason: there are just too many guns floating around. 

In total, Americans possess as many as 393 million guns—almost half of all civilian-owned guns around the world—despite making up only 4.4 percent of the world’s population. In such an environment, it’s simply too easy for someone determined to do harm to get a gun. States with more guns experience more gun-related deaths, including homicides. According to the American Journal of Public Health, a 1 percent increase in a state’s gun ownership rate equates to a roughly 1 percent increase in firearm homicides. States with the most guns also report the most completed suicides, which account for the majority of gun-related deaths. This is partly because guns make it much easier for people to kill themselves. Over 85 percent of suicides attempted with a firearm prove fatal. By contrast, the fatality rate of poison-related suicide attempts is 7.4 percent. For cutting, it’s 5.1 percent. Gun violence did drop substantially in the 1990s before stabilizing—at a rate vastly higher than in any other developed country—during the first decade and a half of this century. But since 2014, gun violence rates have again spiked. 

The stalemate on gun legislation will not last forever. A point will come, as it has several times in America’s past, when Washington will be politically ready to act—most likely the next time Democrats control both the White House and Congress. When that moment arrives, wouldn’t it be better if, instead of debating marginal fixes, there were new ideas on the table to actually address the root of the problem by substantially reducing the number of guns in circulation?

In that spirit, I would like to float such an idea. It is not one that comes from deep expertise in gun policy, which I cannot claim. Rather, it emerges from my experience in the private equity business. 

After our small company buyout firm purchased an importer of night vision monoculars, a product popular with hunters, we began to get approached by business brokers about small arms manufacturers that were for sale. One such company—which we later visited—was a well-run, highly profitable, and rather intimidating manufacturer of sniper rifles. At first the notion of competing in a market as large as the firearms industry didn’t seem to make sense. We soon learned, however, that the U.S. firearm manufacturing industry is relatively small. The market capitalizations of the two largest U.S. firearm manufacturers—Sturm, Ruger & Co. and Smith & Wesson, public companies that together produce approximately 50 percent of all handguns manufactured in the United States—total less than $3 billion. To put that in perspective, the market cap of General Motors is roughly $50 billion. In fact, the vast majority of U.S.-made handguns are produced by fewer than fifty, mostly small, private companies. 

In the end, we chose not to invest in the firearms industry. But the exercise drove a thought. To shift the supply and demand dynamics of firearms in America, and thereby reduce gun violence, what if somebody acquired every handgun manufacturer in America? And what if that somebody were the federal government?

Sniper rifles are fearsome weapons, made specifically to kill unsuspecting humans. But they are not seriously contributing to the gun violence problem in the U.S. Nor are hunting rifles, shotguns, or truly automatic weapons (the latter are heavily regulated and seldom in civilian hands). Rather, most gun violence is perpetrated with handguns. In the ten states with the most gun homicides, handguns are responsible for roughly 80 percent. 

Semiautomatic assault rifles, like the AR-15 and its competitors, are at the center of the gun debate, primarily because of their role in recent mass shootings. But mass shootings make up a small fraction of gun injuries and deaths in America. Moreover, according to a 2013 government report, a handgun was involved in roughly two-thirds of mass shootings in the U.S. since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. 

The number of handguns in circulation is astonishing. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), since 1986 over 100 million handguns have been manufactured and imported into the U.S.—approximately one for every household in America during that period. 

To bring down the level of gun violence, we need to have fewer handguns in circulation. To that end, I propose that Congress pass legislation directing the federal government to take three major steps: purchase the entire domestic handgun manufacturing industry; ban the import of all handguns; and offer cash buybacks for all handguns in circulation. Over time, this would allow the government to significantly lower the supply—and thereby raise the price—of handguns, all without infringing on Americans’ right to bear arms.

Let’s take these steps in turn, beginning with the first: empowering the federal government to buy out the domestic handgun industry. Constitutionally, there’s no reason why this could not happen. Washington nationalized the railroads temporarily during World War I, bailed Chrysler out of bankruptcy in the late 1970s, and bought out the insurance company AIG in 2008 before selling its shares in 2012. 

Under law, the government would have to offer “just compensation” to shareholders of the handgun businesses, but the cost would be quite modest. In many instances, it would not even be necessary to purchase the entire companies—only the handgun assets. These manufacturers could continue to make and sell hunting rifles, shotguns, ammunition, and accessories. Indeed, even at a price of two to three times current market valuation (which may be necessary because prices will certainly rise in anticipation of the sale), the entirety of U.S. handgun manufacturing capacity—literally every producer, large and small—could be acquired for around $5 billion. That’s big money, for sure, but within the context of the federal government it’s not so much. 

Then bring in a smart, highly experienced team of managers from the industry to pull the new federal handgun manufacturing holding company together. Maintain brands and models, run some of the divisions independently, but create efficiencies at the same time—just as is done in private industry. Build a board of directors with relevant experience. Continue to manufacture and sell handguns under existing laws to all of the usual customers, including national retail chains, independent gun stores and dealers, individuals who pass background checks, and federal, state, and local government agencies. Reaffirm every American’s Second Amendment rights to own a gun (or as many guns as you want) along with the enforcement of existing laws.

The second step in this long-term solution to gun violence is to ban the importation of handguns, which accounts for a growing proportion of the American market. Of the more than nine million handguns introduced to the U.S. market in 2016, about 40 percent were imported, predominantly from allies like Austria, Germany, Italy, Croatia, and Brazil.

Again, there is no constitutional reason why this could not happen. In 1989, George H. W. Bush declared a permanent ban on almost all foreign-made semiautomatic weapons. In 1998, Bill Clinton affirmed Bush’s ban, adjusting it to include weapons that could be easily converted to and from military-grade capacity. Banning handgun importation would require considerable political capital, possibly including new legislation and changes to existing trade agreements. But the fact remains that these countries and, in most cases, these foreign private companies, are supplying the United States with roughly four out of ten handguns being sold in our country every year and are a major contributor to the gun violence epidemic we are seeking to solve. 

At this point, we would control our own destiny with regard to the supply of handguns in the country. With the elimination of imported handguns, the federally owned factories would experience significantly higher demand and the ability to raise prices. And when the price of something goes up, the public buys less of it. 

Higher prices for handguns would dramatically increase the profitability of the new federal handgun manufacturing holding company. And who would be the owners of these American factories? That’s right—you and I. The increased profitability of the U.S. handgun industry would inure directly to the benefit of the American taxpayer and likely lead to a boost in jobs in the domestic handgun manufacturing industry. Significantly, existing gun owners would also benefit from this shift in supply and demand, since the value of all existing handguns, both foreign made and domestic, would rise.

Of course, if new domestic companies were allowed to jump back into the handgun manufacturing business, they would flood the market, undercutting the government’s prices and spoiling the entire effort. So the legislation would also have to grant the government a monopoly on the manufacturing of handguns. Constitutionally, this would be controversial. Liberal jurists would point out that Congress has this power under the interstate commerce clause and argue that the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms—not to manufacture and sell them. Conservative judges might argue the opposite: that restricting supply more than what “the market” dictates unduly impinges on the right to obtain a gun. With conservatives dominating the Supreme Court, the legislation would face rough sledding. But that would be true of almost any ambitious progressive policy one can think of. Eventually, the more conservative reading of the Second Amendment will have to be overcome.

The third step is legislation that authorizes a long-term, nationwide federal buyback of handguns. Gun buybacks are nothing new; local governments have been running them for years, offering citizens cash for any guns they bring to the police department, no questions asked. There is scant evidence that local buybacks achieve their stated aim of reducing the number of guns on the streets, however, for the simple reason that the gun industry just fills the void by selling fresh weapons. But with the overall supply now restricted by the import ban and federal ownership of the domestic handgun business, every gun purchased through the federal buyback could mean one fewer in circulation. 

This program would only be effective if the prices paid—with no questions asked, no IDs required, and for cash—were attractive. And they would be, thanks to steps one and two. With the supply of new guns restricted, the buyback program would pay the now much higher market price for pre-owned handguns. A run-of-the-mill used handgun that was purchased legally for around $200 might fetch a buyback price of around $500. More expensive handguns could bring $1,000 or more. 

According to a 2015 analysis by the Washington Post, the average gun-owning American household owns about eight guns. Most gun owners bought all their guns lawfully and are highly responsible. If you are one of the millions of people who own a number of guns, the opportunity to sell down your collection at a significant profit and still remain well armed could be very attractive. On the other end of the spectrum, the communities where violence involving illegal guns is most severe are disproportionately poor and heavily African American and Hispanic. Changing the market dynamics to get handguns off the street and out of households—and dramatically raising the cost of obtaining one—would benefit these communities most of all. 

Weapons purchased by the government would be imaged, their serial numbers entered into a centralized system, and in most cases transferred to secure regional processing centers, like existing armories. Usable pre-owned weapons would be re-marketed to federal agencies, the military, state and local police departments, and private security agencies. Others might be sold to foreign governments at export market prices, never to be imported back to the U.S. Those that had been stolen would be held at the local buyback location—in most cases a police station—and returned to their rightful owners. Excess or unusable inventory would be systematically destroyed. 

Once in place, the system would necessarily be managed, through trial and error, with an eye toward its market effects. The aim would be to slowly, over many years, diminish the number of handguns in circulation, but not so much that rising prices caused a spike in gun theft or made a black market in smuggled or illegally fabricated weapons highly lucrative. (It almost goes without saying that manufacturing 3-D printable handguns, which the courts have already begun to crack down on, should remain illegal.)

The total long-term cost of this solution is difficult to measure with much intellectual honesty, but some aspects can be estimated. The federal purchase of the handgun manufacturers, as we’ve seen, would cost from about $5 billion to perhaps as much as $8 billion. But the ban on imports would effectively reduce that cost by increasing the value and profitability of the new taxpayer-owned federal handgun holding company. In other words, the federal government would overpay for the private manufacturing assets and then improve the profitability of those assets by limiting foreign supply. American taxpayers would subsequently own a very valuable and profitable business. 

The cost of the third part of the legislation, the nationwide handgun buyback, is the most difficult to estimate. Setting up and staffing 500 to 1,000 buyback locations around the country—even if they are in existing police departments or similar protected buildings—would be expensive. So would establishing regional secure processing locations. Purchasing pre-owned handguns at now higher market prices would be the most costly, especially since we can expect that many individuals would stock up on handguns in anticipation of the legislation going into effect. 

But, again, keep in mind that all these costs would be offset in three fundamental ways. First, a government-controlled monopoly handgun industry would be highly profitable, providing substantial recurring revenue. Second, most of the bought-back handguns would be resold at market prices, including as exports. 

Third, and most importantly, there would be enormous savings gained by a reduction in gun violence. The Giffords Law Center estimates that such violence costs the American economy at least $229 billion every year. This figure takes into account many factors, including the costs of taxpayer-paid emergency and other medical care, lost productivity, and courts and incarceration. It does not attempt to measure the pain of a life-altering injury, or the horror of losing a loved one to murder, accident, or suicide. The benefits of reducing gun violence are greater than what can be put in absolute dollar terms. What’s clear is that in the end, the long-term value to the American people of slowly but surely reducing the number of handguns in circulation and the resulting reduction in gun violence would be a tremendous bargain. 

The politics of a federal purchase of all handgun manufacturers, an import ban, and a federal buyback will obviously play badly with the gun rights movement and its standard-bearing organization, the NRA—which would face losing a major source of funding and thus a loss of political power. These politics could well stop the idea in its tracks. At the same time, this approach has something going for it that no other gun violence solution can claim: it provides direct, immediate, and substantial economic benefits to the owners of handgun manufacturers and every American handgun owner. The more handguns you own, the more money you stand to make. It would be instructive to observe how Second Amendment–focused gun enthusiasts weigh their ideological principles against the prospect of having existing gun collections rise substantially in value. We may never know until we put forth the proposal. It may be that American voters will recoil at the idea. But what about younger voters, who polls show are less skeptical about government and more sympathetic to gun violence legislation? And what happens when, a couple decades from now, these voters make up the majority?

Gun violence has woven its way into the fabric of American culture. It’s not simply a familiar breed of tragedy; it’s one we’ve come to expect. The possibilities I’ve described are not modest, but neither are the ramifications of gun violence. In the face of such thoroughly normalized violence, Americans deserve broad, sweeping reforms. As a country, we’ve experienced far too many years of painstaking incrementalism, of NRA stalemates masquerading as compromises. The scope of our imagination ought to match the scope of the epidemic. That way, when the moment for change comes—likely, when Democrats once again control Washington—we all can say we left no stone unturned.

Sara Hodgkins, a writer based in Chicago, contributed to this story. 

The post A Real Long-Term Solution to Gun Violence appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Making ends meet as a church organist isn’t easy. Perusing the positions advertised on the website of the American Guild of Organists (AGO) reveals that most require a bachelor’s degree in music, and often a master’s. Yet only a few congregations take in enough from their collection plate to pay their organists a living wage. Most either rely on volunteers or offer a salary of about $20,000 a year, even for an organist who doubles as a choir director, as many do. 

So the AGO came up with some ideas it thought would help its nearly 15,000 members earn a living. First, it distributed a recommended uniform salary scale for organists, adjusted by local cost of living. Second, a few years ago, it revised its code of ethics to discourage organists from trying to undercut each other on cost. The new rules urged guild members against applying to a position already held by another member, and provided that an outside organist playing a church gig would have to get the incumbent’s permission, and pay them their usual fee. 

The moves ultimately had little effect on the guild members’ income, but there was another consequence. When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) got wind of how the organists had become organized, it leapt to action, charging last year that they were conspiring to restrict competition. The agency ordered the AGO to destroy all copies of its salary guide and “to eliminate rules that restrict its members from competing for opportunities to perform.” 

The organists protested. One, from Illinois, wrote to the FTC that all they were trying to do was “protect the extremely tenuous professional existence of organists in the U.S., most of whom don’t earn a living wage.” Another, from Pennsylvania, argued that the FTC’s order “impinges on the Constitutional right to freedom of association and impairs the ability of a class of musicians to raise mutual standards and support themselves in a risky career choice.” Organists also objected to being ordered to share their workspaces and instruments with strangers. 

Moreover, their “collusion,” the organists pointed out, didn’t exactly corner the market. If a couple wanted to get hitched at, say, St. Luke’s, they might have to use that church’s organist for the ceremony or pay a higher fee to have someone else play the gig. And of course the couple remained free to get married at, say, St. Matthew’s or St. Paul’s, using a different organist. In the annals of corporate price fixing and market manipulation, the organist cartel didn’t rank. “A voluntary mutual agreement between Guild members to not poach on other members’ places of employment without financial recompense is not the sort of thing that should come under government scrutiny or regulation,” wrote the organist from Pennsylvania.  

Yet the AGO felt forced to capitulate and signed a consent decree. “Our legal counsel advises us that if we attempt to litigate this matter in Federal Court, we will most surely lose after spending tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees,” wrote executive director James Thomashower in a letter to his members. “The AGO’s position simply cannot be sustained in a court of law in light of other cases and legal precedents. Moreover, losing in court could entail fines and further penalties for the organization and possibly for its elected leaders as well.”

The FTC’s crackdown on church organists is not an isolated case. In recent years the agency has gone after members of many other occupations, either by threatening them with lawsuits or by prevailing on state and local government officials to deny them collective bargaining rights. Recent targets have included ice skating instructors, animal breeders, and music teachers. Others over the years have included public defenders, doctors and dentists in private practice, home health aides, and truck and Uber drivers who tried to organize. In each instance, the FTC has declared that if such workers cooperate with each other to improve their negotiating position in the marketplace, they are guilty of a conspiracy to restrain trade. 

The FTC has taken a particularly hard line on workers who press for occupational licensing laws. An estimated 25 to 30 percent of the U.S. workforce is employed in occupations that require some kind of license, ranging from doctors and lawyers to barbers, electricians, public school teachers, and taxi and truck drivers. Occupational licensing laws can obviously help protect the public from incompetents and shady operators, but they also have long served another important purpose. By limiting market entry, licensing strengthens the bargaining position of producers who otherwise would have little market power. For workers who lack a college or advanced degree, licensing also provides a way to earn a credential that adds to their ability to negotiate for a decent income and better working conditions. As unions fade away and labor markets in more and more sectors are dominated by just a few large employers, occupational licensing has become the main means by which many blue- and pink-collar workers gain or hold on to a marginally middle-class living.

Yet the FTC has repeatedly challenged members of trades who have sought to use licensing to secure their market position, arguing that this form of collective action is simply “rent seeking” by special interest groups. Of course, by the same reasoning, laws that guarantee workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively are equally illegitimate, since they too allow workers to increase their income through policies that increase their negotiating power in labor markets. And indeed, attacking occupational licensing has become a staple of passionately anti-union Republicans like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Meanwhile, even as the FTC trains its fire on the organist cartel and occupational licensing requirements, it is ignoring a form of rent seeking that really does wreak havoc in the economy: corporate mergers. Decades of lax enforcement by the FTC and other federal antitrust regulators have led to levels of corporate monopoly not seen since the Gilded Age. Vertically integrated super-firms—from agribusinesses to airlines to giant tech platforms like Facebook and Google—have little need to conspire with their competitors, because they have so few competitors left. And where there is still any need to collude, well, it’s a lot easier to fix prices and wage scales when you only have to conspire with two or three rivals.

American competition policy is, in short, upside down and inside out. Regulators and courts perversely foster ever-lower levels of competition among ever-larger corporations, allowing them to reap greater profits and share less of them with workers. At the same time, they outlaw forms of cooperation among workers, small business owners, and professionals that have historically served vital economic and social purposes. The effects of this imbalance will only get worse as more and more of us struggle in an increasingly deregulated, de-unionized, monopolized economy that forces contingent workers into tournaments of ruinous competition with one another. 

But that doesn’t have to be our future. Americans have faced similar challenges in the past, and used a shrewd mix of competition policies to fix them. 

When populists and progressive reformers pushed the Sherman Antitrust Act through Congress in 1890, their purpose wasn’t to go after colluding church organists—nor workers, independent proprietors, contractors, or farmers. Their purpose was to take down colluding plutocrats. 

Senator John Sherman stated that the “single object” of the bill was to deal with “combinations that affect injuriously the industrial liberty of citizens,” meaning combinations of capital, not of labor. Another of the bill’s architects, Senator George Hoar, stated that “as legislators we may constitutionally, properly, and wisely allow laborers to make associations, combinations, contracts, agreements for the sake of maintaining and advancing their wages.” This was necessary, said Hoar, to maintain a proper balance of power in negotiations with “large corporations who are themselves but an association or combination or aggregation of capital on the other side.”  

Yet the final bill passed without an explicit antitrust exemption for labor, and before long a conservative Supreme Court was able to turn the Sherman Act into a powerful weapon that capitalists used to attack workers. Almost before the ink was dry, the Sherman Act became the legal justification for shutting down a general strike in New Orleans. By 1897, the majority of Sherman cases had targeted labor “monopolies” (that is, unions) rather than capital.

Meanwhile, conservative judges interpreted the Sherman Act in a way that weakened its power to combat concentrations of corporate power. Even in the landmark 1911 case that broke up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the Court didn’t find that the corporation was too big, but rather that it was engaging in specific abusive practices. “The Trusts Have Won,” lamented the populist crusader William Jennings Bryan. The narrow ruling, said Bryan, was as outrageous as if a judge had interpreted a statute against murder “on the theory that the legislature meant undue murder.” 

Populists pointed out that corporations are themselves legally sanctioned forms of market collusion. By investing in a single entity, the capitalists who control a corporation’s stock avoid competing with one another and engage in collective actions, such as pooling information and coordinating prices and wages. Why, then, should it be categorically illegal for individual citizens engaged in selling their labor, or their small-scale productions, or their crops, to achieve the same ends? Why is one form of coordination called a corporation and the other a criminal cartel? 

Reformers finally made a big step toward fixing these flaws with the passage of the Clayton Act, which Woodrow Wilson signed into law in 1914. The act stated in plain English that labor unions and farmer co-ops should not “be construed to be illegal combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade, under the antitrust laws.” In the case of wage workers, Congress went a whole step further by stating that for the purposes of U.S. competition law, “[t]he labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.” Just to make sure that reactionary judges wouldn’t undo their handiwork, reformers persuaded Congress the same year to create the Federal Trade Commission and to give it explicit statutory power to bust up corporate monopolies. 

Over the next several decades, courts and legislators still struggled with the question of how the law should treat corporations, individual workers, farmers, and independent businesses. But by fits and starts a coherent and highly successful strategy emerged for balancing regulation of market concentration and collusion. 

To understand how this strategy worked, think of a control panel with three dials. 

The first dial regulated the amount of corporate concentration. After the mid-1930s, policymakers turned this dial up high, causing the federal regulators to become more aggressive in prosecuting actual or incipient corporate monopolies. By the 1960s, antitrust regulators struck down one merger on the grounds that it would have led to a single company controlling a mere 5 percent of American retail shoe sales. In cases where economies of scale or network effects made bigness inherently more efficient, such as in railroads, telecommunications, or electrical utilities, policymakers tolerated corporate monopolies but made them subject to strict regulation by agencies like the Interstate Commerce Commission or various state public utility commissions. 

The second dial regulated collective action by employees. After the Clayton Act, wage and salary workers became subject to their own separate labor laws, apart from freelancers, independent contractors, and other kinds of self-employed workers. A prime example of how labor law enforced that distinction is the Wagner Act of 1935, which gave private-sector employees, and not self-employed workers, the explicit right not only to organize into labor unions but also to engage in collective bargaining without fear of antitrust prosecution. Over the next two generations, this second dial would sometimes get turned down a bit, but overall it remained at a setting that strongly favored collective action by employees into the 1980s. 

The third dial regulated collective action among independent enterprises, including self-employed workers, family farmers, and sole proprietors. The fights that farmers waged to form cooperatives, and that small proprietors and professionals fought to form trade associations, are only poorly remembered today. But securing the right to associate played a major role in structuring the U.S. economy throughout much of the twentieth century. 

An early formalization of this right was the Capper-Volstead Act of 1922, which granted farmers, who then still made up a significant share of the U.S. population, the explicit right to organize into cooperatives. Co-ops allowed dairy farmers, for instance, to coordinate the production of milk and vertically integrate into other dairy products in order to gain greater bargaining power with giant corporate food processors and distributors. Capper-Volstead made clear to the courts that when farmers cooperated, it wasn’t an illegal cartel; it was an economically and socially beneficial form of enterprise. Though most of these farmer co-ops have today been effectively captured by large financial interests, the Capper-Volstead Act is still on the books and could be reformed to serve its original purpose. (See also “How Rural America Got Milked,” in our January/February 2018 issue.)

The third dial also regulated cooperative behavior among self-employed professionals, like doctors, and among independent proprietors, like store owners and artisans. In her new book, American Fair Trade, Harvard Business School professor Laura Phillips Sawyer chronicles the populists and progressive leaders who fought for these rights of association under the banner of what were once known as “fair trade” laws. These leaders included Edna Gleason, who in the 1920s became the sole owner of three drug stores in Stockton, California, after her husband died. Gleason would go on to become known as the “mother of fair trade” after she organized independent pharmacists throughout California into a trade association and then secured a California law that allowed retailers and manufacturers to cooperate in enforcing minimum prices for brand-name drugs and other consumer products. The effect of this cooperation was to prevent the emergence of mega chain stores selling at below cost to drive out smaller rivals, as Walmart would later do. Fair trade laws also helped keep retail locally owned and competition focused on factors such as customer service and selection. 

Among the prime theoreticians of the fair trade movement was Louis Brandeis, “the People’s Lawyer” and longtime Supreme Court justice. In his legal briefs and court decisions, Brandeis famously attacked the “curse of bigness” and advocated for aggressive prosecution of corporate monopolies. But he also, as Brandeis biographer Gerald Berk chronicles, consistently championed the social and economic value of having a broad field of smaller competitors engaging in cooperative forms of capitalism. 

One of the benefits of cooperation among competitors, Brandeis noted, was the ability to set standards. The experience of buying shoes is improved, for example, when shoemakers cooperate in using a common measure of shoe sizes. Similarly, it’s all for the better when electrical device makers cooperate so that their products don’t each require a different-sized socket. Brandeis also pointed to how cooperation among competitors could lead to progressive improvements in quality. Humans live longer, healthier lives when knowledge of “best practices” in medicine is widely shared among competing doctors and dentists rather than regarded as a trade secret. 

Brandeis’s case for cooperative capitalism also included the observation that producers are more likely to avoid wasteful over- or underproduction when they share market data. Producers can’t make informed decisions about what to produce and how much to charge unless they can know what is selling and at what price. Moreover, if only the biggest players have enough market information to make smart decisions, it will tend to lead to monopoly. Thus the pooling of market information by trade associations can be essential to making competitive markets efficient and sustainable. 

Even outright price fixing can sometimes provide broad benefits, Brandeis observed. When producers and retailers agree to enforce minimum prices, competition no longer centers on who can drive out rivals by selling below cost for the longest. Nor does competition focus on who can cut wages, benefits, product standards, and customer service the most (think of ever-shrinking airline seats and “basic economy”). Instead, competition shifts to metrics other than cheapness: who can provide customers with the most innovation, highest quality, and best service. 

Under the influence of Brandeis’s thinking, the Federal Trade Commission in the 1920s actively encouraged trade associations to participate in government-sponsored conferences in which they shared market data, set common standards, and compared notes on best practices. Though it is largely forgotten today, most Democrats and Republicans agreed in this era that government should work closely with trade associations and labor unions to manage the terms of market competition. Indeed, one of the great proponents of such practices was Herbert Hoover. He even coined a word for it: “associationalism.”

During his early presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt took Hoover’s cooperative model to an entirely new level by signing the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. In a fireside chat, FDR explained that NIRA was “partnership in planning” in which “organized private industry” and organized labor would develop codes of fair competition on an industry-by-industry basis. Under NIRA, businesses that followed the codes could exhibit official signs reading “We do our part.” Corporations that “did their part” were exempt from antitrust prosecutions. 

Unfortunately, this experiment in cooperative capitalism quickly foundered as the business councils it relied on became dominated by the largest and best organized corporations and adopted codes that hurt the competitive position of smaller businesses. Moreover, in 1935, the Supreme Court declared NIRA unconstitutional, finding that Congress had ceded too much authority to the executive branch. But the Court let stand what by then had become an extensive body of fair trade laws at the state level, so that the high degree of cooperation among independent businesses continued right into the 1970s. 

Meanwhile, FDR responded to the Court’s invalidation of NIRA by turning up the dial on antitrust enforcement. Starting in Roosevelt’s second term and lasting into the early 1980s, the federal government took a new hard line on preventing and breaking up corporate monopolies. Examples include actions that disrupted the vertical integration of Hollywood studios and movie theater chains, deconcentrated central industries like aluminum and petrochemicals, and forced major technology companies like AT&T to share their patents with start-ups that became the pioneers of Silicon Valley. 

The result was a huge economic, social, and political success. Through a set of policies that shrewdly checked corporate concentration while also encouraging beneficial forms of cooperation among smaller-sized competitors, the U.S. created a balanced political economy that brought with it record levels of technological and organizational innovation, a rapid expansion of the middle class, and a narrowing of income inequality to levels not seen before or since. Yet by the end of the 1970s this distinctly American system of managed competition was under sustained ideological attack that would lead to its near demise. 

The attack came on two main fronts. 

The first was led by a coterie of highly influential libertarian economists, many of them associated with the University of Chicago, who waged a coordinated campaign against the government’s use of antitrust law to prevent or break up corporate monopolies. These economists presented themselves as social scientists, but they typically made little use of empirical data. Rather, they built their reputations by arguing that government policy should be based on simple mathematical models of how perfectly rational actors would behave in perfectly competitive markets. And these models revealed, the economists said, that there was little reason to worry about corporations gaining too much market power. Monopolies that tried to abuse their position by raising prices or cutting services would inevitably be disrupted by new competitors. 

Of course, in the real world, markets are not perfectly competitive. Without government playing referee, they tend to get cornered and monopolized, and market players who don’t know that tend to get slaughtered. Nonetheless, the Chicago school of antitrust would have enormous influence in persuading policymakers to turn the first dial—the one regulating corporate concentration—back down almost to zero. 

The other main line of attack came from the “public choice” school of economics associated with the University of Virginia and, later, George Mason University. These economists, led by Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan, developed the concept of “rent seeking” and initially applied it in defensible ways. They noted, for example, that when a government grants a monopoly to a private firm it creates a windfall of monopoly profits, or “rents.” Similarly, they were surely right to say that when a corporation hires more lobbyists than, say, engineers, it may well be making society worse off. 

Yet the public choice school soon used the concept of rent seeking to attack virtually any form of cooperation among market players, especially smaller ones. Thus, unions became cast as rent-seeking institutions equivalent to corporate cartels. Members of any trade—taxi drivers, health care workers, nursery school teachers—who benefited from a government policy that might allow them to negotiate for a larger piece of the pie became cast as colluding, anticompetitive rent seekers who made the rest of us poorer. 

Tullock, Buchanan, and their acolytes were conservatives. But before long, some liberals took up their approach. Initially, liberals used the rent-seeking frame to attack government regulation that favored entrenched corporate incumbents. Longtime readers of this magazine may recall how many of its authors—including this one—once celebrated the work of the late Mancur Olson, particularly his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. (See, for instance, my “From Calhoun to Sister Boom Boom: The Dubious Legacy of Interest Group Politics,” in our June 1983 issue.) Olson’s work showed how the logic of collective action often made it more rational for special interests to seek a bigger slice of an existing pie through lobbying than to cooperate in creating a larger pie. 

That reasoning resonated among the then-rising generation of “New Democrats” for two main reasons. One was that giant regulatory agencies like the now-defunct Civil Aeronautics Board still had real power over much of the economy and often seemed to be using it on behalf of the industries they were supposed to be regulating. Thus it was the likes of Jimmy Carter, Ralph Nader, and Ted Kennedy who led the charge for deregulating the airline industry in the late 1970s. They had become convinced that because CAB limited the entry of new carriers, it was creating “rents” that enriched established airlines at the cost of consumers. 

Another reason the rent-seeking frame resonated with many liberals in this era was their growing alarm over the behavior of certain professions. By the 1980s, the incomes of lawyers and doctors were rising particularly sharply. At the same time, the basic social contract that had long required lawyers and doctors to put the interests of their clients or patients above their own seemed to be breaking down. In response, many on the left, including not only New Democrat liberals but also radical social critics like Ivan Illich, began to question why these professions should be allowed to continue operating what increasingly looked like self-regulating, self-dealing guilds.

Some of these critiques remain valid today. Self-dealing by medical specialists, for example, remains a large reason why American health care costs so much. Yet over the last forty years, far larger trends have completely reordered our political economy in ways that place such concerns in an entirely new context. 

These trends include massive privatization, deregulation, de-unionization, and rising monopolization—all contributing to the extreme concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent and diminishing prospects for just about everyone else, including many professionals. Even many doctors now face an uncertain future as large corporate hospital chains buy out more and more of their practices and monopolistic health insurers cut their reimbursement rates. Given these epochal changes, it would seem hard to argue today that preventing “rent seeking” by working-class Americans, or even by professionals, should be the focus of America’s competition policies. And yet in recent years this analysis has actually been gaining strength in many liberal quarters. 

For example, Jason Furman, formerly chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has offered the formulation that “[l]obbying for preferential regulation (such as licensing requirements) is one classic example of rent-seeking.” This theme is echoed by the Brookings Institution, which stated flatly in a recent white paper that “rents for licensed workers come at the expense of both consumers—who pay higher prices—and unlicensed workers.” In their new book, The Captured Economy, the libertarian/liberal duo of Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles (both of whom are dear friends of this magazine) take a similar line, condemning occupational licensing as rent seeking that hurts the poor by raising prices. “Even if it works as well as it can,” they conclude, “occupational licensing is thus regressive in its distributional consequences.”

Many liberals now join libertarians in using the concept of rent seeking to explain America’s growing regional inequality. Why is it that so few working- and middle-class Americans can afford to move to or remain in cities like San Francisco or New York? The answer, says a chorus of liberal writers, is zoning. “The mechanism by which zoning creates rents is straightforward,” observed Furman and fellow Obama administration economist Peter Orszag in a 2015 white paper. “By constricting the supply of housing,” they argued, “zoning and land use restrictions can potentially discourage low-income families from moving to high-mobility areas—effectively relegating them to lower-mobility areas, reinforcing inequality.”

It’s no doubt true that some communities engage in exclusionary zoning. But what this analysis leaves out is the far greater role of corporate monopoly rents in driving up the cost of housing in elite cities beyond the reach of ordinary folks. Corporate concentration fuels an ever-growing concentration of ever-richer elites in cities where monopoly firms are headquartered. Not only do these elites bid up the price of real estate, but the very same trend toward monopoly leaves most workers with flat or falling income as fewer and fewer employers compete for their services. Given these and other structural causes of inequality, why does the conversation in liberal circles so often focus on blaming middle-class homeowners for resisting changes in zoning laws that threaten their home equity, which for most is their largest, and often only, real asset?

Lurking beneath these mental frames is an assumption that cooperative behavior among weaker market players necessarily “distorts” some idealized “free market” result. Yet liberals, especially, should be wary of borrowing such a dubious concept as “free markets” from libertarians. Markets cannot exist without rules that regulate their terms of competition any more than sports can exist without specific rules of play. (Try enjoying a game of football in which everyone decides for themselves how many people are on a team, whether it’s tackle or touch, and how you keep score.) Accordingly, it makes no more sense to say that some markets reflect natural or perfect competition, and others degenerative rent seeking, than it does to say that footfall offers perfect competition while baseball is a market distortion. What matters about markets is whether their rules lead to fair, open, and sustainable competition, as opposed to unsporting rule by oligarchs. 

Here is another problem with the rent-seeking frame. It assumes that when middle- or working-class people manage to actually collect a rent, it must come at the expense of poorer people. But is that really true? 

Take occupational licensing for hair braiders, often cited by well-meaning liberal/libertarian types as the epitome of Robinhood-in-reverse rent seeking. Assume, for argument’s sake, that there is no public health reason why hair braiders need to be licensed. If braiders nonetheless increase their income by persuading their fellow citizens to go along with a licensing requirement, does this make the poor worse off? 

If you’re tempted to answer yes, first pause to note that by the same logic, if the hair braiders became employees of a corporation, formed a union, and managed to raise their income through collective bargaining, this, too, would make the poor worse off. People who think this way—who apply a positive mental framework to labor unions, and another, negative one to organizing by independent producers and workers—need to scrutinize how their minds have been captured by a libertarian ruse. In the real word, neither the poor nor society as a whole is worse off just because workers and small producers may cooperate. In many sectors the only real alternative to unions, occupational licensing, and other forms of managed competition is ruinous competition that drives down income to the point that no one can make a decent living. Who wants lower prices if it means even lower wages? 

Examples of this phenomenon can be seen in trades like truck driving. Because of the repeal of regulations that once created far higher barriers to entry in trucking, ruinous competition today leaves drivers working far longer hours, for far less money, than they did in 1980, when the market rules changed. So severe is this race to the bottom that despite an extreme shortage of truck drivers, “market forces” do not respond by raising compensation for truckers. It’s hard to argue that this has benefited the poor. In today’s economy, with its soaring returns to capital and flat and falling returns to labor, more and more of us are truckers now. 

So what does all this mean practically? We need to get the three main dials of competition policy back in balance. That means turning the dial controlling corporate concentration back up to where it was during the 1950s and ’60s, paying particular attention to the new and dangerous big tech platform monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. It also means turning back the dial controlling the ability of employees to organize to where it was set in mid-century America, rather than further abridging the negotiating power of labor unions, as the Supreme Court did recently in its Janus v. AFSCME decision. And it means setting the third dial so we are no longer harassing church organists with threats of antitrust suits, but are instead restoring the lost rights of all independent producers to cooperate in counterbalance against concentrated corporate power. These are the settings in competition policy that once created broad avenues of upward mobility, economic liberty, and mass prosperity. It’s time to set them back where they belong.  

The post The Case For Small-Business Cooperation appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Barack Obama had a vision—expressed in a literal, color-coded map he carried with him in 2009—for how high-speed rail would transform America. There would be 150,000 jobs, environmental benefits, less highway and airport congestion, and, most importantly, “a smart transportation system equal to the needs of the twenty-first century.” As part of that vision, in his 2010 State of the Union address he announced that the state of Florida would receive a federal grant, later set at $2.4 billion, to build a high-speed rail project that had been shovel ready since the 1990s: an eighty-five-mile line connecting Tampa and Orlando, offering a super-fast alternative to traffic jams along Interstate 4. The young president showed up a day later in a sweaty gymnasium at the University of Tampa to promote the plan. “There’s no reason why other countries can build high-speed rail and we can’t,” he said to applause. “And that’s what’s about to happen right here in Tampa.”

Except it wasn’t. That November, Republican Rick Scott, a Tea Party darling, was elected Florida’s new governor. It took him one month in office to extinguish Obama’s vision. “Put simply,” Scott wrote in a February 2011 letter to Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, “the proposed high-speed rail line is far too uncertain and offers far too little long-term benefit for me to consider moving forward.”

Ideology was at the core of his decision. For years, mainstream Republicans have rebuked high-speed rail as socialist folly. (They are hardly kinder to Amtrak, a quasi-public, nominally for-profit entity.) Scott was the latest in a long line of Republican governors—including John Kasich in Ohio and Scott Walker in Wisconsin—to reject Obama’s money on the grounds that high-speed rail was too much of a burden on taxpayers.

But a few years ago, a more palatable solution was presented to Florida’s Republicans. The proposed train, called Brightline, wouldn’t quite be “high speed,” which by international standards generally means running on dedicated tracks at speeds over 150 miles per hour, often approaching 200. Brightline trains would run on upgraded tracks laid in the nineteenth century, passing through the centers of many small towns and traversing hundreds of grade crossings, where track and roadway (or track and track) meet. As a result, they would top out at 125 miles per hour. But what really animated Republicans was Brightline’s solution to funding: it would be a for-profit operation funded through private investment. This train wasn’t socialism; it was American free enterprise at work. 

Yet Brightline, which started running between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach this past January and extended services to Miami in May, has been controversial. While Scott has praised the project for being “100 percent private,” the project is under siege from a broad coalition of Floridians—including many Republicans—who complain that a high-speed passenger train will disrupt their tranquil communities, and who object to the generous subsidies handed out to private investors in the form of what are known as private activity bonds, or PABs—tax-exempt bonds created by Congress and authorized by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Florida’s state Democrats, for the most part, have been quietly supportive of Brightline. 

So many other countries have unveiled state-of-the-art high-speed rail systems in recent years (Uzbekistan, anyone?) that it’s become almost a cliché to wonder why America hasn’t been able to build tracks of its own. Yet the question of what to do about the impasse—along with America’s degenerating infrastructure more broadly—remains perilously unanswered. Brightline, with its supposed combination of public benefit and private enterprise, offers itself as a panacea to the partisan gridlock. But can a for-profit transportation project adequately provide what has traditionally been a publicly subsidized service? Or will the sleek new trains become an advertisement for the limitations of bipartisan compromise?

President Obama wasn’t the first Democrat to make sweeping promises about how high-speed rail would transform Florida. In 1982, the wildly popular Democratic Governor Bob Graham returned from a vacation in Japan convinced that bullet trains were the future. He created the Florida High Speed Rail Commission, a nonpartisan group tasked with determining whether the technology was feasible for Florida. They concluded that it was, and by 1996, it looked as though the project would actually happen. The Florida Department of Transportation agreed to commit $70 million per year for thirty years to build a line between Orlando and Tampa. Companies like Amtrak and the makers of France’s TGV started meeting with the committee to bid for the commission. One consortium even proposed a magnetic levitation train that would travel at 300 miles an hour.

“They spent an hour convincing me how they were the best engineers,” said C. C. Dockery, a wealthy, civic-minded businessman who served on the committee, recalling one such meeting. “Finally, I had a chance to cut in and say, ‘If you think this is an engineering job, you’re definitely wrong. This is a political job.’”

By that time, debates over high-speed rail were percolating nationwide. Conservatives objected that it would be an expensive boondoggle leading to bigger government. If countries like Japan and France were surpassing the U.S. in train technology, it was just a sign of their socialist inefficiency. Besides, they argued, we have cars.

Democrats, by contrast, were drawn to the broad social benefits of high-speed rail: the millions of construction jobs they believed it could create, the broader economic development it could stimulate, and, perhaps idealistically, the connections it might encourage between disparate communities. In 1992, then candidate Bill Clinton proposed creating “a high-speed rail network between our nation’s major cities.” Once in office, he wound up prioritizing deficit reduction over his campaign promises for infrastructure investment, but he still managed to put in place a plan to create federal-state partnerships devoted to alternative means of transportation. Florida was first in line to receive the benefits. 

But, in 1999, newly elected Governor Jeb Bush killed a $6.3 billion project to build a bullet train linking Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. Billions of public dollars were at stake, he said; who knew whether tourists and auto-loving Floridians would even use it. (Florida would have put up $2 billion, with the rest coming from federal loans and private investment.)

A group of private citizens fought back, led by Dockery. In 2000, following a campaign to which Dockery contributed $3 million of his own money, Florida voted in favor of making high-speed rail a state constitutional mandate. It seemed like Dockery had finally won: construction for a train from Tampa to Orlando was to begin in 2003. But Bush—who later boasted that his nickname was “Veto” Corleone—swooped in to lead an effort to repeal the amendment in 2004. “This little choo-choo could cost us a lot of money,” Bush argued on his way to winning the repeal vote. It seemed clear by that point that Florida’s Republicans
would not budge: high-speed rail was all but out of commission. 

And then Brightline came along. 

When I flew into Fort Lauderdale in July, I had to rent a car. Florida’s southeast corridor is designed for the automobile, with disjointed trenches of soggy swampland and gated communities joined by an epic sprawl of asphalt and traffic. With the exception of Miami, the cities that run along the southeast coast feel more like a disparate string of small neighborhoods, linked by roads with names like Green River Parkway and South Military Trail that ultimately feed into larger highways like Interstate 95.

The Brightline station, built on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale’s sleepy downtown, stood in stark contrast to its surroundings—a fiercely lit, modern white-winged building spitting out a pair of railway tracks that divide the city. To the east was a mix of fast-rising real estate developments and gentrifying older neighborhoods; to the west, low-income housing. Surrounding the station, on all sides, were streets and highways. Every day, sixteen trains run in each direction between West Palm Beach and Miami, offering a high-end, hospitable alternative to I-95, which runs parallel to the train. 

“Nifty,” a man disembarking Brightline said as I stepped past him onto a fluorescently painted train that had slid into the station exactly on time. “Very nifty.”

It was a Wednesday night in the middle of summer, and nearly every other row of seats was empty. The interior glowed in an opalescent sheen, smelling of a fresh grapefruit musk (a scent that Brightline is turning into candles to sell). The plush leather seats reclined to face screens displaying color-coded maps and declaring, “We’re proud to be American-made.” Inscribed on every headrest, in elegant cursive, was the word “Brightline.”

We all but glided up the coast, passing backyard barbecues, empty lots, and low-income communities where, as one man later put it to me by way of explaining the poverty, “People bike.” It was a sharp contrast to the scene inside the train, which seemed built to serve mostly businesspeople and tourists. Smiling stewardesses in matching violet uniforms offered riders in the “Select” class unlimited free beverages. One stewardess, whose hospitality recalled the long-lost days of Pan Am, explained to a middle-aged blond woman who was sipping a vodka with lime that she could even blow-dry her hair on Brightline on her way to work. “It pays to relax!” she said with a laugh, continuing down the aisle.

“I’ll take a Stella Artois,” said a young man playing Sim-City on his computer. He paused, looking up. “Wait—is it cold?”

The stewardess nodded.

“I mean, is it Florida cold?”

It was indeed. This, Brightline seemed to be saying, was no Amtrak ride. 

To its boosters, Brightline is a testament to what free enterprise can accomplish—running on privately owned tracks that simultaneously run fleets of money-making freight trains. But the reality is that hauling people has been a money loser since the 1960s, and Brightline wouldn’t exist without some form of government backing.  

The project was the brainchild of Wes Edens, the cofounder of Fortress, one of Wall Street’s most powerful private equity firms, which bought Florida East Coast Industries for $3.5 billion in 2007. Eight years later, the company came up with a plan to make passenger trains profitable again. The trick was to get approval from the Florida government and the U.S. Department of Transportation to allow Brightline to float more than $1.7 billion in private activity bonds. 

PABs, originally designed to attract investment to private projects with public benefits (like, say, a new hospital), are appealing to investors because the interest they pay is exempt from federal income taxes. For Brightline, they provided a way to finance private infrastructure using public tax subsidies. Although Brightline’s holding company is responsible for paying back the debt created by these bonds, the tax exemption is a pure public expenditure.

To survive on PAB funding, Brightline needs to find a way to churn a profit. As Brightline’s president Patrick Goddard explained to me, “Our goal is to provide mobility. And yes, we want to make money while doing so.” In turn, it is pricey. Current rates, which are expected to rise significantly, range from $15 to $30 to ride from Miami to Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach. Like airline flights or ride shares, prices fluctuate based on demand. (I paid $20 to ride for thirty minutes between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach in the off-season.)

If all goes right, Brightline will create so much economic development in the communities it serves that it will more than make up for the cost of its tax subsidies. The taxpayers will in effect get a free passenger rail service. But if that sounds too good to be true, maybe it is. 

A private, for-profit train seemed to be just the banner Florida’s corporate Republicans needed to pass high-speed rail, even if it was only made possible through the back-end subsidy of tax exemptions. “We changed the conversation,” Dennis Grady, the president of the Chamber of Commerce of the Palm Beaches, told me when I met him at his office, a flat building on the edge of the water just ten minutes from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Grady, who has been running the Chamber for thirty-three years and likes to refer to the business community as “my people,” has been a leading advocate of Brightline, which is a Chamber member. “We removed the criticism of public dollars, and put in private dollars.”

The business community’s enthusiasm has been key to Brightline’s success. More surprising, though, has been the support of libertarians—erstwhile high-speed rail skeptics who became cheerleaders for Brightline. One of these supporters is Bob Poole, founder of the libertarian Reason Foundation and a member of Scott’s transition team in 2010. The Reason Foundation was instrumental in persuading the governor to reject Obama’s proposed project in 2011. When Scott announced that he was killing the project, he cited a Reason Foundation report as the basis for his decision. 

I met Poole at his house, a late-1960s tract house fifteen minutes outside of Fort Lauderdale. The walls were lined with an eclectic book collection, with public policy tomes resting next to Ayn Rand fiction and Hippie Food. Poole told me that Obama’s high-speed rail plan was “just loony tunes.” High-speed rail made sense in Europe, or Japan, where cities were closer together and extensive rail systems already existed, he explained. But in America, preexisting freight tracks have been severely downsized, and trying to revive them doesn’t make sense. Brightline, however, was a different story. “The fact that this is privately funded, and no taxpayer money is at risk, makes this a no-brainer to support.”

Yet even if Brightline wins the praise of self-described market conservatives and Chamber of Commerce types, it’s having a harder time in some other Republican quarters. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, for example, has become an outspoken critic. A few months after Brightline began operations, Rubio wrote a letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao questioning the legitimacy of its funding. He argued that the project doesn’t meet the standards outlined by the Department of Transportation, which provide that “high-speed rail” must run at a base speed of 150 miles per hour to qualify for funding. Other state Republicans chimed in with letters to Chao.

An unlikely team of allies—nine Democratic and Republican representatives—fired back, assuring Chao that they shared her “vision of identifying innovative approaches to meet our nation’s transportation challenges.” The group argued that Brightline was the “perfect example” of how private activity bonds should be spent, and that it would decongest Florida’s growing population by providing a new transportation alternative. They accused their opponents of “resisting change.”

Meanwhile, opposition is strong at the local level, including among the many Republican retirees who live along Brightline’s right-of-way. A month after the train began operating, a group calling itself Citizens Against Rail Expansion (CARE) filed a lawsuit complaining of crony capitalism. CARE’s suit challenges the legality of Brightline’s PABs while also raising environmental and safety concerns (in six months, for instance, Brightline trains ran over and killed nine people, though more than half may have been cases of suicide). The lawsuit is currently awaiting a court date. 

Governor Scott—who is running for Senate this fall—has not responded directly to any of the complaints, beyond repeatedly stressing that Brightline poses no risk to taxpayers. He may be forced to speak more on the topic soon. In August, the Miami Herald reported that Scott and his wife had invested at least $3 million in Fortress, the investment group that owns Brightline, and have earned more than $150,000 in profits from their investment. When I contacted Scott’s office, his spokesperson, Lauren Schenone, said that Scott’s investment was part of a fund “managed by an independent financial professional who decides what assets are bought, sold or changed,” and that Scott, a multimillionaire, has no control over it. “The Governor does not discuss the First Lady’s investments with her or with her financial advisors,” Schenone added.

In August, Brightline got the green light from the Florida Development Finance Corporation to act as the conduit issuer for almost $1.8 billion in PABs, enabling the company to go forward with what they are calling “Phase II”: trains from Miami to the Orlando airport. Construction has begun, with the upgraded track cutting through one of Florida’s most densely populated arteries—a predominantly Republican corridor where many residents are adamantly opposed to seeing fast trains running through their backyard. Ironically, it’s a “backyard” that likely wouldn’t exist if the railway hadn’t been built through it 124 years ago.

“We don’t want this train coming through our town—bottom line,” Brent Hanlon, one of four founding members of CARE, explained to me in his office in an exclusive country club in Hobe Sound. Hanlon, who has sandy blond hair, sun-spotted skin, and speaks with a boyish eagerness, had never been politically active until 2014, when he heard about Brightline. He immediately reached out to the surrounding forty towns to raise awareness about the train, and formed CARE. “We’re a very small town with a small-town feel, and we just think that having a train blow through our community would take away the charm of our downtown. When you see Confusion Corner, you’ll understand why.”

Hobe Sound, in Martin County, is part of a cluster of small communities that make up the “Treasure Coast,” a sprawling beach with silvery blue water where sea turtles nest and “downtown” is a single street with a theater, a café, a barber shop, and a restaurant. Inland, wild swampland wraps tightly around spruced-up golf courses, a parody of the eternal combat between chaos and order. 

I followed Hanlon by car to Confusion Corner, which turned out to be the local nickname for a congested roundabout in the middle of the small town of Stuart. Bisecting one edge of the clogged circle are the railway tracks Brightline proposes to use. As we stood there, a freight train passed by, and Hanlon pointed to every “confused” car that had to sit a little longer in traffic. I didn’t completely understand the hype. Trains had been running up and down the tracks for as long as Martin County had existed. While Brightline would add to that traffic, it didn’t seem like something Floridians—who appear to be culturally habituated to congestion—hadn’t seen before. 

“Is there anything Brightline could do to change your mind?” I asked Hanlon as we watched the freight chug past. 

“Yeah,” he said quickly. “They could, uh, not run.”

CARE has been repeatedly accused of being a classic case of NIMBYism. At a congressional hearing last April, Brightline’s president, Patrick Goddard, accused the group of being “a minority of narrow-minded residents . . . who are willing to support passenger rail everywhere, it seems, except in their own backyard.” When I spoke with Goddard on the phone more recently, he said he wished he’d handled the situation differently. “We’re married now,” he said, referring to the fact that Brightline is beginning to build through the Treasure Coast en route to Orlando. “We’re going to have to find a way to get along.” 

Naturally, Brightline opponents see the NIMBY label as a way of trivializing their objections. “We have really legitimate reasons for being concerned about safety, and to say that we’re just anti-progress is very shortsighted,” said Erin Grall, the state representative for Vero Beach, and a Republican. “The reality of these coastal communities is that they have been built up by a railway, but not one running at 110 miles per hour through our communities.” She argued that Brightline hadn’t put the proper safety features in place: the train would pass through 100 grade crossings, and the burden of maintaining them, according to Grall, would fall on local taxpayers. “This state’s been talking about high-speed rail for a really long time,” she said. “The conversation does change a little if it’s privately funded, but safety is still an issue and there isn’t really an entity on the state level that has stepped up to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to make sure our citizens will be safe.’”

CARE casts itself as the voice of the community—a bipartisan advocate for what it claims are the roughly ten million people who live in areas that could be affected by rail expansion. At the same time, CARE has powerful supporting players of its own. In the group’s short life-span, it has raised $2 million from private “crowdsourcing” (the community is mostly wealthy retirees). It is backed by the former CEO of American Airlines and employs a global PR firm and a legal team consisting of two county attorneys and two outside counsels.

Brightline is continuing to expand. In September, the company announced that it would be starting a high-speed passenger service connecting Southern California with Las Vegas. But it’s not clear how successful the Florida operation has been. When I spoke with Goddard, he said Brightline’s first-quarter numbers were “higher than expected.” The company generated $663,000 in ticket revenue, and carried close to 75,000 passengers, from January to March. But according to Brightline’s unaudited quarterly report, the company lost roughly $28 million in the same period. A Brightline spokeswoman, however, said those numbers only reflected ridership for Brightline’s introductory service, and added that ridership and revenue increased 35 percent from January to March. The project’s fate may depend on whether it can sell the more than $1.1 billion in remaining PABs by the end of January (an extension granted by the Department of Transportation in May). If Brightline fails, private investors will lose their money, with no responsibility on the government itself. But what may be lost, in that case, is the opportunity to have applied the PABs to a project that could have succeeded.

The larger question raised by Brightline is whether its mixture of private ownership and public subsidies, which the Trump administration proposed in its infrastructure bill in February, makes either political or economic sense. “Almost invariably, the issue is that when private capital is at risk, the arrangement is structured so that private returns are prioritized,” said Elliott Sclar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University. “Either way, the public sector always bears the lion’s share of risk for the entire project.” 

In a way, the combination of private financing for public railways is nothing new. From the beginning, rail infrastructure in the U.S. was privately owned, but largely financed through considerable grants of public land. Railroads, in turn, used a small part of the land for their rights-of-way, selling the rest at an enormous profit. The very track on which Brightline runs exists because back in the 1880s Florida gave Henry Flagler, one of John D. Rockefeller’s close friends, a grant of more than two million acres of land in return for his building the Florida East Coast Railway. 

This model has led to problems and contradictions over the years. Even before the coming of autos and planes, most passenger trains historically lost money, especially ones serving small towns on lightly traveled branch lines. The government had to force railroads to run those unprofitable trains, often pointing to the generous land grants and other subsidies the railroads received. But in the mid-twentieth century, a variety of forces made this harder to sustain. (Depending who you ask, it was Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate system, a cultural shift toward driving, the railroad unions, or all of the above.) The decline of passenger rail was slow, until suddenly, it happened all at once: October, 30, 1970, the day the government passed the Rail Passenger Service Act “to revitalize rail transportation service in the expectation that the rendering of such service along certain corridors can be made a profitable commercial undertaking.” Today, we know that act as “Amtrak.”

That system hasn’t worked out so well either. Outside of the corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C., and a few other routes, Amtrak trains run on tracks owned by private railroads. These railroads charge Amtrak rent for using their rails and often for the cost of maintaining their infrastructure, then routinely delay Amtrak trains for hours by making them cede priority to freight trains. Republicans in Congress keep insisting that Amtrak must nonetheless make a profit on each train, even if it means cutting service standards to the bone. Recently, under pressure to show a profit, Amtrak has cut dining car service on two of its long-distance trains and is rapidly cutting back the number of manned stations across the country. 

Those who have supported and advocated for Brightline—from Rick Scott to the Chamber of Commerce to the company itself—embrace an ethos of efficiency, but it is an efficiency that, as so often happens when the state looks for private solutions to public problems, tends to achieve its effect by separating the few from the many. As the Chamber’s Dennis Grady told me, “My people want to get from A to B, and they aren’t anxious to stop a lot. That’s why Brightline is successful.”

Maybe, if it is necessary to get conservative buy-in for improved passenger rail service, a model like Brightline’s is the best America can do. But it doesn’t solve the basic contradiction between expecting trains, or any other form of transportation, to turn a profit on every run while also expecting the system to serve the public’s broad needs for service. “The paradox of public transport, quite simply, is that the better it does its job, the less ‘efficient’ it may be,” wrote the historian Tony Judt, a social democrat and a lifelong devotee of railways. “[W]hat of rail links to and from places where people take the train only occasionally? No single person is going to set aside sufficient funds to pay the economic cost of supporting such a service for the infrequent occasions when she uses it. Only the collectivity—the state, the government, the local authorities—can do this.” 

When I left Florida to return home to New York, I decided to take Amtrak. The ride from Tampa took twenty-five hours, traveling along tracks, congested with freight trains, that are owned by the CSX corporation—or, more exactly, by the hedge funds and other financial institutions that own CSX. The station in Tampa was true to Amtrak’s reputation—a decrepit and tired-looking gray. Water dripped on our heads as we waited for a man with a whistle to allow us to board. But every seat was full. Next to me, an elderly woman was traveling to visit her son, somewhere in Virginia. She couldn’t drive and depended on Amtrak to see her family. She asked what had brought me to Florida, and I explained that I was writing about Brightline, the new high-speed rail. “What is high-speed rail?” she asked, yawning.

For all its built-in handicaps and acute underfunding, Amtrak remains an essential public service—and a social good. As an eerie midnight blue set in, and everyone fell asleep, the train rocked forward, stopping deep into the night in the tiny hamlets of the south—the Villages, Waldo, Ocala, Wildwood—to carry passengers who look very different from those riding Brightline to the cities of the Mid-Atlantic. I woke up when the sky turned white and we were passing through someone’s backyard in rural South Carolina, a thick fog settling in over tangles of overgrown mossy fields. Only twelve hours had passed; thirteen, give or take a few, to go.  

The post The Train That Only Libertarians Can Love appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A memorial service for Jeffrey Leonard will be held this Sunday,October 21st, at 2 p.m.,
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church,9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, Maryland. The visitation and reception ison Saturday, October 20th, from 3 to 6 p.m. at the Robert A. Pumphrey Funeral Home,7557 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland.

The Washington Monthly is heartbroken to report the sudden death of our friend and colleague, Jeffrey Leonard—writer, board member, and benefactor—on Thursday.

It is hard to exaggerate what a wonderful, impressive, and generous man Jeff was, or the central role he played in sustaining and strengthening the Washington Monthly. A decade ago, when we were on the ropes financially, Jeff gave us a substantial personal donation, became chairman of our board, and brought with him the estimable Diane Straus as our publisher. For a year we ran the magazine rent-free out of extra offices at Jeff’s Global Environment Fund (GEF), a private equity firm that invests in the clean energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable resource sectors. There we got to know his terrific wife (and high school sweetheart) Cal and meet (or at least hear proud stories about) their three kids, Michael, Anna, and Peter. Under Jeff’s fatherly guidance, and with Diane in the lead, we rebuilt the magazine’s business model, expanded its funding base, and ultimately “moved out of the house.” But Jeff became a regular in our new offices and a continuing source of wise advice on the business front.

Jeff was not only a brilliant businessman, but also a visionary policy intellectual. A D.C. native with a doctorate from Princeton, a master’s from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s from Harvard (where he roomed with our own Nick Lemann), he wrote five books, served as vice president of the World Wildlife Fund and the Conservation Foundation, and advised a host of government agencies, from the World Bank to the EPA, before cofounding GEF in 1990. More than anyone I’ve ever known, he had deep knowledge of the workings of both government and markets, of how the two intersect, and of their respective strengths and weaknesses. He also had a reporter’s sensibility, constantly picking up intel as he traveled the world—and the D.C. think tank circuit—and formulating the information into pragmatic, ahead-of-the-curve policy ideas. He turned many of those into visionary stories for the Washington Monthly—like this great one, in which he predicted (pre-Tesla) the electrification of American transportation. See also here, here, and here. His most famous piece, about how large corporations were increasingly and systematically delaying payments to their smaller business contractors and damaging the economy in the process, landed him a guest appearance on The Colbert Report and spurred action by the Obama administration.

The Washington Monthly is hardly the only organization that has benefited from Jeff’s many gifts. He chaired the board at City Year Washington DC, co-chaired the Clean Technology Venture Network in San Francisco, and was most recently treasurer at New America and a senior fellow there in global studies. In business, his policy work, and in every part of his life, Jeff made the world better. He left us too soon, and he will be keenly missed.

The post Remembering Jeffrey Leonard appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s a good time to be a former White House ethics lawyer. Norman Eisen, President Barack Obama’s ethics counsel, has, as of this writing, published 74 op-eds since January, including 16 for the New York Times and ten for the Washington Post. He’s been cited in more than 28,000 news reports since President Trump’s inauguration, according to the Brookings Institution’s tally. And he appears on CNN almost every time Trump is embroiled in a legal scandal, which is to say, all the time.

In another era, a former White House ethics lawyer wouldn’t enjoy such prominence. But Trump’s Washington has created an insatiable appetite for someone who can distill complex government ethics law. Eisen has become a go-to explainer. “He’s like the unemployed referee calling fouls and penalties every single day as he sees all of the rules and norms being trampled,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law professor who’s known Eisen for decades.

When I showed up to his office last month to meet with Eisen, he was running late. Eventually, he swooped in to his office and apologized profusely: He’d just come from giving a radio interview. Within seconds, he bounced right out to use the restroom. By the time he returned, he was already on the phone with another journalist.

Other than being very busy, Eisen isn’t necessarily what you picture as the D.C. lawyer-type. He’ll occasionally opt for a boldly-patterned suit, and before my meeting with him, he offers me chocolate instead of the customary glass of water or coffee.

His exuberance makes him seem more fitted for the stage than the confines of a think-tank headquarters. “He could be doing something mundane, and if he engages you in a conversation, you’re in for a ride,” said Aaron Keyak, a Democratic operative and close personal friend.

Eisen is one of those D.C. figures with many titles: senior fellow at Brookings, chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, and CNN political commentator. Now, he’s added a new title: author. Eisen has just begun promoting his new book The Last Palace, tracing the history of the ambassadorial residence in Prague.

Eisen has spent his career building a narrow expertise that now, all of a sudden, is in remarkably high demand. But expertise alone does not get you on cable television every night and a book deal with Penguin Random House. There’s a unique mix of ingredients that reporters constantly seek out in an expert. Eisen’s got the whole stew.

Eisen’s mother is a Czech Holocaust survivor, and his parents ran a hamburger stand when he was growing up. After graduating from Brown, he went to Harvard Law School, where he became friends with Barack Obama. Years later, Obama tapped him to be his chief ethics lawyer. After spending two years in the White House, the president appointed him to a cushy ambassadorial gig. As U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic, Eisen lived in a palace. While he was there, he became Wes Anderson’s overqualified tour guide as the director was doing research for his 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel. (Anderson later based the film’s crusading lawyer, played by Jeff Goldblum, on Eisen.)

Eisen isn’t a politically neutral expert, and his strong opinions make him all the better for journalists seeking comment, or for op-ed editors in need of an expert take.

“It takes about 12 seconds to figure out he’s not a particular fan of Trump” said Paul Farhi, a media reporter for the Washington Post. “He’s coming at it from a point of view, but that’s actually an advantage if you want opinions—you want people with strong points of view.” For editors, it also helps that Eisen can write an informed column almost immediately after news breaks. “If Trump does something crazy, I’ll get a text from Norm and we’ve got to swing into gear with an op-ed,” said Richard Painter, a former vice-chair of CREW and frequent co-author with Eisen.

There aren’t many people with Eisen’s expertise, and that’s one reason why he’s become such a ubiquitous media presence during Trump’s presidency. Most of the people who know government ethics thoroughly and systematically work for the government, which makes them less able to comment freely. People like Eisen, former Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub, and George W. Bush’s ethics counsel Painter, have all recently exited government, and are among the few experts in the field who often comment publicly.

But that’s only part of the reason reporters and producers find themselves coming back to Eisen. “He knows how to make a soundbite happen” said Darren Samuelsohn, a White House reporter for Politico. “He’ll try and say something five or six or seven different ways until he says it in the way that ends up getting into the copy of your story.”

Eisen doesn’t shy away from superlatives. He was quick to call the successive guilty verdicts for the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen and his former campaign chair Paul Manafort “the worst hour of Trump’s entire presidency—no, make that entire life,” phrasing that made headlines in both The Guardian and The New Yorker.

Trump’s election was an inflection point for Eisen’s career. During the campaign he sounded alarms about the candidate’s conflicts of interest, but after November 8, the media and public were all the more eager to understand the legal implications of Trump’s global business ties: The Atlantic published a Q&A with Eisen to explain blind trusts and presidential powers; Politico profiled him; he and Painter were interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition. Eisen garnered even more press attention when CREW filed a lawsuit against the president over the emoluments clause three days after he was inaugurated.

Eisen’s watchdog group argued that, when Trump Tower rents office space to a state-controlled bank, or a Trump-owned hotel rents a conference room to embassy staff, the president is violating a constitutional provision that forbids public office holders from accepting gifts or emoluments from foreign states. “Before Norm ever started talking about it, who ever heard of the emoluments clause?” Keyak said. “I bet most people didn’t even know how to spell the word.”

Practically overnight, the press had to understand the arcane law on deadline. Eisen was one of the few people ready to take their calls—and actually know what he was talking about.

The public also wanted Eisen’s explanation: A MoveOn.com video of Eisen and Painter breaking down the issue got more than 2.5 million views in one week. While CREW’s suit was unsuccessful on technical grounds, two similar lawsuits against the president are proceeding.

Eisen’s rising star is part of a common Washington story. As the tides of power change, pundits, experts, and specialists get pulled along in the current. Eisen’s specific—and relatively narrow—area of expertise is in high demand right now with the president running into unprecedented ethics law issues. It’s an unusual moment in history, and one that will pass. When it does, a new set of media-darling experts will emerge.

Until then, Eisen will be ready to hop on the phone with journalists. “Reporters love when their sources call them back, and Norm calls everybody back,” Samuelsohn said.

It’s not just journalists who can reach Eisen easily. Painter says that Eisen works around the clock. He can usually get ahold of him early in the morning or late at night. The exception is between Friday evening and Saturday night, when Eisen, an Orthodox Jew, observes Shabbat.

But Eisen and Painter have a mutual understanding. “We’re afraid that instead of a Saturday night massacre, there will be a Friday night massacre,” Painter told me, referring to Richard Nixon firing Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal. There are certain circumstances, he said, under which Eisen’s rabbi would let him go on CNN on the Sabbath: “If Bob Mueller gets fired, there’s an arrangement.”

The post The Former White House Ethics Lawyer Umpiring Trump’s Washington appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The NeverTrumpers may have failed to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, but he has been a godsend for their public reputations. Instead of remaining in the wilderness, the neoconservatives who make up the bulk of the NeverTrump movement have fitfully begun to move back toward, or at least flirt with, the Democratic Party, which is where the original neocon journey began. Among some of their longtime detractors, it’s creating a vertiginous sensation. James Wolcott, for example, recently observed in Vanity Fair, “One of the chewier ironies of the Trump interregnum is finding that I’m following former foes on Twitter and elsewhere that I once mocked, reviled, and cast into outer darkness during the Bush presidency, especially after the invasion of Iraq.”

Now that the neocons have, in a manner of speaking, been born again, they are once more crusading for regime change against an authoritarian foe, only this time on the home front. Trump, not Saddam Hussein, is the main object of their ire, and they are earning quite a hearing in mainstream liberal outlets. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum regularly appear in the Atlantic. Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss have decamped from the Wall Street Journalto the New York Times. William Kristol and Jennifer Rubin are regulars on MSNBC.

And then there is Max Boot, a columnist for the Washington Post and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Unlike Kristol or Stephens, Boot’s breach with the Republican Party is complete. He does not believe that the party can be redeemed, and he isn’t sure that he should call himself a conservative anymore. The day after the 2016 election, after a lifetime of backing the GOP, he re-registered as an independent. In August, he posted on Twitter a screenshot of a fundraising pitch that read, “Hey, this is Newt Gingrich. President Trump needs your help to elect more Republicans in 2018. Will you make a 4X matched donation today?,” with this accompanying text: “Hey, this is Max Boot. Hell no.” His sallies have earned him brickbats from the right; the pro-Trump website American Greatness has branded him a “soulless, craven opportunist.”

Boot’s defection from conservative orthodoxy carries a particular sting because he was once the most explicit exponent of American greatness. After 9/11, he endorsed American imperialism in a Weekly Standardcover story. The benighted countries of the Middle East, he announced, “cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” His name became a synonym for neocon warmonger, and he went on to advise the George W. Bush administration and presidential aspirants such as Senator Marco Rubio.

In the past two years, however, Boot has not merely parted with the conservative stances that he previously espoused, but has been actively assailing them, whether the issue is race, gun control, or the Iraq War. Indeed, as a columnist for the Washington Post, Boot has relentlessly attacked Trump and his enablers. “If there has been an outcry against Trump’s virulent racism from the right, I must have missed it,” he wrote in August. “The only conservatives who are willing to regularly call out Trump’s bigotry are those of us who are #NeverTrumpers—and, as I constantly hear online, we aren’t ‘real’ conservatives because we do not worship at the orange altar.”

Now, in The Corrosion of Conservatism, Boot charts his ideological odyssey. He deftly recounts his early attraction to the conservative cause and his revulsion at its embrace of Trump. For Boot, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as a child, the 2016 election felt like back to the future. As Trump sailed toward the Republican nomination, Boot’s Twitter account and email began to fill up with anti-Semitic, pro-Trump messages. He became increasingly alienated from the conservatives who ended up trying to curry favor with Trump, ranging from Rubio to Paul Ryan. He had naively expected them to repudiate Trump’s authoritarianism. When they didn’t, he felt betrayed.

For Boot, it was personal. Joining the conservative movement had been part of coming to America. It gave a young immigrant from Moscow a sense of identity and mission. In contrast to Kristol, who has already begun plotting to stymie Trump in the 2020 primaries, or Frum, who has sought to chart the ideological course of the GOP in books like Dead Right, Boot was never a Republican operative. He isn’t trying to rescue the GOP to restore the old order. Instead, he is a historian who has always relished being an intellectual dissident. His basic temperament hasn’t changed at all, which is why he may be the ultimate neocon.

Now it’s the Republican Party, not the left, that is in his sights. He understands that he missed the real danger to freedom that was right in front of his nose: a party that flirted with white nationalism, cozied up to Russian autocracy, and toppled into obsessive conspiracy mongering. And he is haunted by a question: “Did I somehow contribute to the rise of this dark force in American life with my advocacy for conservatism?”

Unlike previous accounts of breaking with the right, such as Garry Wills’s Confessions of a Conservative, the value of Boot’s book does not rest in any original political analysis. Instead, he explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative madrassa. In describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide of the right, offering fascinating insights into the psychology of a true believer. His fervor for explaining why the right is wrong brings to mind Arthur Koestler’s remark in The God That Failed: “When all is said, we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about.”

Boot, who was born in 1969 in Moscow, had firsthand experience with communism and was deeply shaped by the persecution of Soviet Jews. His parents divorced when he was two, but both later immigrated to America. Boot’s father, Alexander, was a dissident who distributed samizdat and managed to get out in 1973. His mother emigrated with Max in 1976 and then taught Russian in California.

Boot makes it clear that his enthusiasm for his father—a self-described monarchist who now lives in England and devotes his time to denouncing atheism and the welfare state—is quite constrained. But Alexander’s gift of a National Review subscription to Max when he was thirteen left a lasting imprint. The younger Boot absorbed the worldview of its writers, ranging from the reactionary Austrian aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn to William F. Buckley Jr. himself. Boot also read up on the standard conservative texts: Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Ronald Reagan, who inveighed against the “evil empire” that Max and his parents had fled, was Boot’s contemporary hero. The liberals who preached détente with the Soviet Union, or even accommodation, were the new appeasers.

Boot’s dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony, he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks “displayed my precocity, my attachment to Israel, a country I had not yet visited—and my questionable judgment, since the invasion would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire.”

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As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Boot played the part of adversary, battling against the campus left. Upon graduation, he went to work at the Christian Science Monitor. But his true aspiration was to become an editor for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side economics and a hawkish foreign policy.

Boot says that in 1994 he received a call that Bartley wanted to meet with him. He reckoned that Bartley would want to talk about his political philosophy. Instead, Bartley mentioned that he had two positions open, one for an editorial writer on economic issues, another as an assistant op-ed writer. Boot explained that he knew nothing about economics. This pleased Bartley. “I later learned,” Boot writes, “that he liked to take writers who did not know much about the subject and train them in his way of thinking.”

In the end, Boot took the latter position, and quickly plunged into the social whirl of the cloistered New York conservative world. He attended dinners at the Manhattan Institute and went to the monthly “Monday Meeting,” where conservative activists promoted everything from the gold standard to Central Park’s horse-drawn carriages. He says he became a “made man” in 2007 when he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, which was established by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and is bestowed annually on a writer who exhibits a “love of country and its democratic institutions” and “bears witness to the evils of totalitarianism.”

But Boot had contrarian instincts from the outset at the Journal. He once invited a Princeton professor named Paul Krugman to write an op-ed critical of supply-side economics, which almost prompted Bartley to fire him. Needless to say, it never ran. “This was an early indication,” Boot writes, “that groupthink could be just as tenacious on the right as on the left.” Boot also confesses that he found it difficult to decipher the baroque conspiracy theories that Bartley and his acolytes concocted about Bill and Hillary Clinton involving Whitewater, the airport in Mena, Arkansas, and the death of Vince Foster. “I thought he was a deeply flawed man,” Boot says of Clinton, “but I appreciated the achievements of his presidency.” But Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy.

One of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot’s acknowledgment that Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. “There is no doubt that there has always been a dark underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to ignore,” he writes. For all the political right’s hosannas for Buckley, he established the revanchist conservatism that views compromise, either at home or abroad, as tantamount to treason. It’s important to remember that Buckley began his career by supporting the iniquitous Joseph McCarthy—a sentiment he never repudiated—and that he viewed Dwight Eisenhower as a dangerous establishment Republican who refused to liberate eastern Europe militarily and failed to roll back the New Deal. Nor was this all. Buckley also opposed the civil rights movement and for decades supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. Even as they decried the Soviet Union and China for human rights violations, Buckley and other conservatives were remorseless apologists for one of the most odious regimes in the world.

After McCarthy’s demise, the GOP remained addicted to conspiracy mongering. Boot usefully reminds us that Phyllis Schlafly’s 1964 best-selling tract A Choice Not an Echo suggested that hidden kingmakers were preventing Republican presidential candidates from winning. “It wasn’t any accident,” she claimed. “It was planned that way” by New York financiers who supported “a continuation of the Roosevelt–Harry Dexter White–Averell Harriman–Dean Acheson–Dean Rusk policy of aiding and abetting Red Russia and her satellites.” The failure to distinguish between White, who was a Soviet agent, and Acheson, who was not, wasn’t any accident, either. The message was that egghead liberals, whatever they might say about battling communism, were, at bottom, traitors.

The populist style often played a key role in helping Republican candidates win elections. But Boot distinguishes between a populist pose and actual populism. For him, the breaking point began with Sarah Palin and ended with Trump. In his view, “[t]he rise of Palin and now Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.” Boot himself warned against the rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal column in which he maintained that the GOP should not “ ‘Rush’ to embrace talk show democracy.” He now denounces Fox News and figures like Dinesh D’Souza and Ann Coulter for peddling conspiracy theories on Trump’s behalf.

Perhaps the most notable part of Boot’s book is his willingness to face up to the fiasco that was the Iraq War. He notes that for years he felt defensive about his support for it and was too stubborn to cede any ground to his critics. “It is not nearly as easy to remake a foreign land by force as I had naively imagined in 2003,” he writes. And he recognizes that the catastrophic policies he espoused helped create the terrain for Trump to rumble to victory. In listening to Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton, Boot says that he recognizes “my callow, earlier self. Bolton, a conservative firebrand since his days as a student at Yale University in the early 1970s, is whom I used to be.”

Boot thus differs from the many other NeverTrumpers who often fail to recognize that belligerent policies have led to disaster at home as well as abroad. He issues a scorching indictment of the GOP: “I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and devastating defeats. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be any chance to build a reasonable center-right political party out of the ashes.” Indeed, he concludes, “having escaped the corrosion of conservatism, I am a political Ronin, and will swear allegiance to no master in the future. I will fight for my principles wherever they may lead me.”

There’s a whiff of grandiosity in this declaration. Like Whittaker Chambers, who pioneered the breaking-ranks genre in Witness, Boot takes an apocalyptic view of politics. But his readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable. If it ends up prompting him to sign up as a Democrat, then his neocon journey will have come full circle.

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