In early February 2020, a group of women in northeastern Delhi launched a sit-in against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act. The law, passed at the end of the previous year, allowed undocumented immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to become Indian citizens—provided they are not Muslims. This restriction, critics claimed, meant that the CAA ran afoul of India’s constitution, which prohibits religious discrimination. 

The women in Delhi’s northeast were hardly the first people to protest the CAA. In the weeks after its passage in December, thousands of people across India demonstrated against the bill. But this group attracted the ire of a particularly provocative politician. Speaking not far from the sit-in, Kapil Mishra—a former legislator from India’s governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—declared that protesters had “created a riot-like situation.” He gave the Delhi police three days to evict the demonstrators. If the police failed, Mishra said, his followers would take matters into their own hands. “We will have to hit the streets,” he threatened.

Mishra’s followers did not wait. Within 24 hours of his speech, Hindu mobs arrived at the sit-in and other Delhi protests. It is unclear who struck first, but soon, Hindus and Muslims were brawling. The former mobs, enabled by the police, quickly gained the advantage. They then spent three days rampaging through Muslim neighborhoods. They vandalized mosques and burned down houses. Chanting “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail, Lord Ram), a religious-phrase-turned-attack-cry, they assaulted and injured hundreds of people. When all was said and done, at least 36 Muslims were killed, as were 15 Hindus. To this day, only a very small percentage of the more than 2,000 people arrested for the violence have been convicted. 

Although it has received relatively little American attention, few global stories are more significant than the rapid rise of Hindu nationalism. Ever since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014, the world’s most populous country has set about passing laws that strip rights from its 200 million Muslims. The government, for example, divided Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, into two and then stripped it of statehood. It has promised to implement a law that could revoke the citizenship of many Muslims. The BJP’s tenure has been accompanied by a spectacular rise in hate crimes against minorities. The result is a country where a politician could openly incite a religious riot and face zero repercussions.

Since the BJP took charge, many reporters and commentators have written about how the country has changed. The New India, by the journalist Rahul Bhatia, is the latest entry into this field. Over the course of more than 400 pages, Bhatia tells readers about a state where “the old norms of secularism and equality—however flawed their execution—were being cast off.” He examines how India’s various institutions were “hijacked by religious and commercial interests.” He looks at why people adopted an ideology many previously ignored.

For Americans, The New India will resonate. India and the United States are very different countries with unique political dynamics; India, for example, does not have the same amount of polarization. But many of the forces that Bhatia describes are also found here. The New India, then, is both a chronicle and a cautionary tale: an illustration of how easily societies can be poisoned.

The New India is different from many works of political journalism. It does not proceed chronologically, and it does not primarily focus on how laws were passed or how they work. Bhatia does discuss the history of Hindu nationalism, going back to 1824, when the Hindu philosopher Dayanand Saraswati was born. As he does so, he examines the many connections between the Hindu nationalist movement and European fascists. But ultimately, Bhatia is less interested in blow-by-blows or policy minutiae. (An exception is his chapter on the history of Aadhaar—the controversial, biometric national identification numbers that Indians have been largely made to obtain.) Instead, Bhatia is mostly focused on what India’s transformation has meant for people’s lived experiences. 

His chapters on the Citizenship Amendment Act, for example, speak less about the history of the law itself and more about the violence it helped provoke, describing what it meant for many Muslims to lose their belongings and to see friends and family maimed or killed. He chronicles the story of one young man, Imran, who was shot while fleeing the riots in his neighborhood. Imran’s family managed to get him into a local, half-built hospital, where a Muslim doctor patched him up while trying to help a mass of other victims. The doctor then sent Imran to a government hospital for more treatment. But Imran was turned away by an admissions staffer who accused him of “firing bullets and throwing stones.” He still struggles to walk, Bhatia writes, and his father is going bankrupt paying for his medications.

Bhatia also spends time with Hindus who supported and defend the killings. He visits a lawyer who is representing, pro bono, a group of young men charged with destroying the house and belongings of a Muslim man, rendering him destitute. Bhatia asks the lawyer, Rakshpal Singh, why he opted to take on the case for free. The answer is revealing. “It is my belief that when Hindu society was under attack … these boys stood like soldiers and stopped them,” Singh explains. “If they hadn’t stopped the violence, there would have been greater damage.” Defending them in court, he continued, was his “moral duty.”

This notion—that Hindus are under attack by Muslims—is present throughout Indian politics. It is propagated by many of the country’s leaders, who seek to whip up the population into an anti-minority frenzy that they can use to maintain power. Truth, Bhatia notes, is a weak obstacle to these aims. Ethnic entrepreneurs can almost always find anecdotes that inspire enough fear to overcome the broader factual picture. Muslims, for example, are not any more violent than Hindus. They do not aspire to displace India’s overwhelmingly large Hindu population. But revanchists are skilled at finding anecdotes in which a Muslim did attack a Hindu, and then amplifying these stories across the entire nation.

Such actors, of course, also succeed by spreading outright disinformation. Hindu nationalists, Bhatia writes, are adroit at “creating an atmosphere of suspicion through the publication and repetition of rumours and suggestions”: that Muslims engage in ritualistic animal slaughter, that they are intolerant of other religions, that they are marrying and forcibly converting thousands of Hindu women. By constricting the free press, the BJP has made it hard to dispel these rumors. In India, most major media outlets are dependent, at least to an extent, on advertising by the government or companies close to it. The BJP is thus able to bring journalists in line simply by threatening their finances.

Bhatia’s book is understandably focused exclusively on India. But his insights have comparative applications, including to America. The U.S. does not face the same degree of political violence as does India (although rates are rising). Its demographic divisions have not yielded pogroms since the end of Jim Crow. But over the past 10 years, the United States has been swarmed by exclusionary rhetoric and misinformation. The targets are primarily minorities—in particular nonwhite immigrants who, according to many politicians, are stealing jobs, murdering citizens, and committing other atrocities. In the aggregate, these claims are incorrect: Research shows that immigrants create jobs and commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens. But no matter. Anti-immigrant politicians and activists can find enough anecdotes to tar newcomers as violent. They can then bolster this narrative through, as Bhatia put it, the publication and repetition of rumors and suggestions.

Consider, for example, one of the most recent and outlandish claims: that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are hunting and eating their neighbors’ pets. It is baseless. But it gained substantial currency among a segment of the population by being posted, again and again, on social media. It was then elevated by J. D. Vance and Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s vice presidential and presidential nominees, respectively, including at the September 10 presidential debate. 

Bhatia’s exploration of the personal effects of such hate will also likely resonate. The book opens with stories of how the author’s friends and family, as he describes it, “began to go mad.” When Modi rose to power, a relative he adored for his humor began speaking “passionately about Muslims, arguing that they were less than human.” Another close relative, who had previously avoided politics, told him India needed a dictator. “Reasonable people said worrying things about democracy and minorities,” Bhatia writes. Millions of Americans would relate.

The New India does not delve into how one can deprogram these individuals—let alone a whole nation. (“Trying to change their mind was pointless,” Bhatia writes of his close relations.) The book does not have a happy ending. But India may not be consigned to a future of illiberalism. In June, not long after The New India went to press, the country released the results of its monthslong 2024 national elections. To everyone’s shock, the BJP lost its majority. After a decade of untrammeled rule, it has now been forced to govern in coalition with parties not committed to Hindu nationalism. As a result, it has had to shelve many policies that would have further remade the state.

This shift may ultimately mean little. It is unclear why, exactly, the BJP underperformed, but it is more likely that the party lost seats over widespread joblessness than over its treatment of minorities. The media remains largely friendly to the government, although there is now a little more space for critics. And the country’s opposition is deeply divided on almost everything except for the need to evict Modi. They have yet, as one journalist told me, to create a compelling and coherent alternative vision.

Still, the result is a reminder that few victories are permanent. Politics can shift. But it can take time and thus require great patience. “There are battles history cannot win in the arc of a single human life,” Bhatia writes. “A reckoning with our beginning comes only towards the end.”

The post Modi Operandi appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In 2011, as the House of Representatives held the debt ceiling hostage, international observers unloaded on the United States. “The value of [our] investments, the value of our oil earnings, and the value of our currency are all under threat as politicians in Washington grandstand for their constituents,” wrote Saudi Arabia’s Arab News. The Globe and Mail, a major Canadian newspaper, declared that an American default “would be catastrophic, not just for Americans, but for all those who depend on U.S. stability and leadership.” The Age, a prominent Australian daily, wrote that “economic barbarians have taken Congress hostage, and U.S. and global markets with it.” 

America’s adversaries were even harsher. China Daily, an English-language newspaper controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, published a cartoon that showed a snowball named “U.S. debt” about to run over the planet. China’s state-run Xinhua news agency wrote that the world had been “kidnapped” by U.S. politics. Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked that Americans were “living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar.” No one (aside from some Republicans) appeared to be having fun. 

The U.S., of course, avoided default. Just hours before the Treasury was due to hit its borrowing limit, President Barack Obama agreed to massive spending cuts in exchange for a debt ceiling hike. Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating for the first time in history and rattled financial markets recovered. Other countries, though shaken, could breathe. 

But now, the threat has returned with Republicans regaining control of the House of Representatives. A dangerous showdown isn’t guaranteed: Speaker Kevin McCarthy has said he is unwilling to allow a default, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has echoed the sentiment. Yet McCarthy won the speakership, in part, by promising to hold the debt ceiling for ransom. And other members of the House Republican Conference are obviously ready to get aggressive. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith says the debt limit is “clearly one of those tools that Republicans” will use to force major spending cuts. “I’m a no, no matter what,” insisted Representative Tim Burchett when asked if he would vote to raise the cap.  

For Republicans, a game of debt-limit chicken has political benefits. GOP proposals to cut government spending are unpopular, but the debt ceiling is an opportunity to make a Democratic president sign on to them. If the brinksmanship results in market chaos, that, too, might help the GOP since voters tend to blame the incumbent president’s party when the economy suffers.  

But internationally, a default would be disastrous, particularly if it results in a financial crisis. It could make it harder for Europe to continue working with the U.S. to support Ukraine and undermine Washington’s capacity to sanction Iran and Russia. It could not only cause economic havoc in the short run but also eventually lead to a new world financial order, one no longer reliant on the dollar as its reserve currency—a change that would make it harder for Washington to exert global influence.  

A default would mean “Washington’s domestic politics are in such a mess that its legislators hardly give weight to their country’s international reputation,” said Paul Tucker, the deputy governor of the United Kingdom’s central bank from 2009 to 2013 and a former member of the G20’s Financial Stability Board. Tucker described defaulting as a gift to U.S. adversaries. “‘Vote default, vote Beijing,’ might be the motto,” he said. 

Experts say that even if the U.S. does not default, a protracted standoff over the debt ceiling could damage Washington’s influence. So could a solution that involves massive spending cuts. Both scenarios would chip away at America’s capacity to lead during great power conflict. Default or austerity would make allies wonder whether Washington is reliable, just as America needs partners as a bulwark against Russia, China, and the world’s other ambitious autocracies.  

In 246 years, the United States has never defaulted, so it is difficult to precisely predict the consequences if it did. But it would almost assuredly be disastrous. “The U.S. in disarray, default, and possibly with a financial crisis on its hands is likely to get less of what it wants on the world stage,” said Jonathan Kirshner, a professor of political science at Boston College who researches international economics. Helen Thompson, a professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge, agrees: “You’d have to say some really bad things could happen.” 

The curtailment of U.S. power would depend on how long the default lasts and on whom the federal government chooses to keep paying when it can no longer borrow. A short-lived default, in which Congress and the President agree to a solution within hours or a few days, may not send the market stumbling or trigger a recession.  

In a Hobson’s choice, Washington could keep the markets happy by servicing its debt instead of paying civil servants and senior citizens. But the American public would go ballistic, and the Biden administration has balked at stiffing Americans to protect bondholders. So, it is possible that international markets could reel from default. “You could expect that financial market panic would spread through the world economy,” said Thompson. 

If a default triggers a global financial crisis, as it easily could, it will become much harder for Washington to keep its allies arrayed against Moscow. The Ukraine war and the resulting sanctions on Moscow have already put European states under tremendous economic pressure.  

In the long term, a default-driven financial crisis could undermine the dollar, a key instrument of American power. As the global reserve currency, the dollar allows Washington to spend freely because many nations, institutional investors, and individuals park their cash in U.S. Treasury instruments such as bonds, notes, and T-bills. If a shaken world watched Washington default on the “full faith and credit” of the United States, they would likely be reluctant to buy our debt and might even unload much of what they have, sending U.S. borrowing costs skyrocketing.  

Moreover, the dollar is the key to the global financial system and to international transactions, and its dominance allows the United States to issue impactful sanctions unilaterally. This is a power used by all recent presidents, including Republicans. It is unlikely, for instance, that Trump’s economic campaign against Iran would have dealt so much damage if Tehran could efficiently deal in pesos, rubles, or drachmas.  

A default would create “the question, among others, of whether the dollar is truly safe,” Tucker said. U.S. rivals, he told me, would “roam the world arguing to sovereign asset managers and others that they should trim the proportion of their portfolios allocated to dollar-denominated assets.” Brad Setser, a former senior advisor to the United States Trade Representative, added: “Efforts to move away from the dollar would accelerate. No question.” 

Even an extended showdown that does not end in default will have negative consequences. “It reinforces a narrative in Europe and probably China and some other Asian countries as well that American policy is just dysfunctional,” said Thompson. Such a moment would come just as Washington had succeeded in digging itself out of the post-Trump international malaise. Biden’s message—“America is back”—is a harder sell when Washington teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.  

The wrong kind of debt ceiling settlement could also compromise U.S. authority—especially if the White House and Congress return to the strict discretionary budget caps adopted in 2011 when the Obama-Biden administration presided over a $1 trillion cut in defense. There’s no reason to think a 2023 repeat would be less severe. “There is likely less money for a range of U.S. policy priorities that impact the world,” Setser said, sketching out the consequences of a renewed sequester. “Less money for defense spending, less money, conceivably, for Ukraine, less money to back global investments in green technologies. Take your pick.” 

Indeed, a 2023 Budget Control Act could be even worse in its effects than the 2011 model. Many Republicans are calling for defense cuts, which almost none wanted in 2011. Much of the House GOP conference is clamoring for reductions in aid to Ukraine, too—all at a moment of heightened international competition. “There was not so obviously a rival superpower in 2011,” said Tucker. “Now there is.”  

It is unclear what Democrats can do to break this Republican logjam. So far, they’re waiting out the GOP in hopes that Republicans will receive such intense pressure from businesses, voters, and donors that they come to their senses.  

If the White House and Treasury resort to unprecedented actions to keep borrowing—minting a trillion-dollar coin or following the analysis of legal scholar Garrett Epps and declaring that the 14th Amendment means the debt ceiling is unconstitutional—most of the analysts I spoke with believe the wider world would be fine with that. “I can’t imagine there being a particularly bad reaction to a particularly gimmicky or technical fix,” said Thompson. “If you look at it from within European politics and European countries, the whole idea of a debt ceiling looks odd.”  

America’s allies, in other words, recognize the debt ceiling for what it is: a ridiculous problem. They might not mind an absurd fix. 

The post How Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship Jeopardizes U.S. Power appeared first on Washington Monthly.

To hear some journalists tell it, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s reelection last week was actually a defeat. “Justin Trudeau’s Early Election Gamble Backfires,” declared CNN in a headline. “Trudeau’s Election Bet Fails,” said the Associated Press. The prime minister, they noted, had called an election early in hopes that his Liberal Party would gain an outright majority in the Parliament. In the end, Trudeau only won a few more seats and must continue to rely on the (also left-leaning) New Democratic Party to govern. This underperformance, the AP hypothesized, “may well spell his demise in the future.” Politico’s “Ottawa Playbook” agreed: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will now have to wear the election call, and its C$600-million price tag, and face a new series of questions about his leadership.”

Among the media, prognosticating about Trudeau’s defeat and discussing his weakening appeal is a proud tradition. In August 2019, for example, The Guardian’s Canada correspondent authored a feature entitled “Justin Trudeau: The Rise and Fall of a Political Brand.” It concluded that Trudeau faced “an extraordinary challenge” in the coming October contest because, among other things, he had pressured his attorney general to not prosecute a large Canadian engineering company charged with corruption. His reputation took an even bigger hit the next month when photos emerged of him at age 29 in brownface. His party lost its outright majority in the subsequent election.

But reports of Trudeau’s demise are greatly exaggerated. A win is a win, and as far as winning goes, Trudeau has done quite a bit of it. His third electoral victory almost assures that he’ll be the longest-tenured progressive leader in the wealthy world. Out of all the OECD countries with left-leaning heads of state, only Sweden’s Stefan Löfven has been in office longer, and, barring a sudden massive scandal, Trudeau will soon overtake him (Löfven is retiring in November). The Canadian prime minister has stayed in power during an era in which much of the world has moved to the right—in many cases, such as the United States under Donald Trump, far to the right. That fact alone makes him one of the most successful progressive leaders on the planet.

Power, of course, is only as good as what you do with it. Trudeau’s time in office has resulted in a long list of policy accomplishments. The prime minister expanded Canada’s version of Social Security—called the Canada Pension Plan—by boosting the amount of income the system replaces from one-quarter to one-third, a shift that delighted unions. He increased by 10 percent the Guaranteed Income Supplement, which the government provides to seniors who are especially poor. His parliament created the tax-free Child Care Benefit for impoverished kids. He launched and then hiked the country’s first-ever carbon tax. He passed a large infrastructure package, one that’s bigger as a percentage of GDP than the bipartisan infrastructure bill the U.S. Congress is now considering. (It is also greener.) He legalized weed. After a mass shooting in 2020, he banned 1,500 different kinds of guns. He is planning to increase Canada’s intake of immigrants to levels not seen since 1911. Last May, his government began budgeting tens of billions of federal dollars to reduce child care costs to under $10 a day.

“This might be the most left wing government in Canada’s history,” wrote the Canadian journalist Stephen Maher last week, commenting on both the Liberal Party’s progressive accomplishments and its third electoral victory. The prime minister’s track record is what you might expect the Democratic Party to accomplish had it won a landslide victory in 2020, with Elizabeth Warren atop the ticket.

Trudeau’s policies appear to have had strong results. Poverty—which was increasing before he took office in 2015—has fallen during his administration, from 14.5 percent to 10.1 percent in 2019 (the most recent year for which data is available). That’s at least partially attributable to the Child Care Benefit, which experts believe decreased childhood poverty by 20 percent in the two years after its enactment. Deep poverty, meanwhile, fell from 7.4 percent to 5.0 percent. The share of Canadians making less than half the median income was rising before Trudeau won. Since his first victory, it has decreased by 15 percent. The share of after-tax income going to the bottom 40 percent of earners, largely stagnant under his predecessor, went up. It remains to be seen how COVID-19 will shape his economic legacy, but Trudeau’s government has mounted an aggressive fiscal response. The pandemic has complicated the government’s efforts to bring in immigrants, but Canada has remained one of the friendliest nations for foreigners. Of all the refugees who resettled around the world in 2020, nearly half went to Canada. It is the third consecutive year that the country has led the world in resettlements.

The prime minister has nonetheless come under heavy fire from the left. “Trudeau’s Blackface Is Appalling, and So Are His Policies,” wrote The Nation in 2019, shortly after the scandal broke. “The mainstream media,” the piece said, “is finally waking up to just how thin the Liberal leader’s progressive veneer has always been.” At around the same time, a Guardian columnist criticized the prime minister for “basking in a progressive image he doesn’t deserve.” Last week, a Jacobin story described Trudeau as a “phony” and a “champion of the status quo.” We have come a long way from 2015, when the prime minister’s charismatic, avowedly woke campaign made him an international celebrity. There are no more Trudeau stans.

The critics are not all wrong. Trudeau has not done nearly enough to make up for the generations of oppression experienced by Canada’s Indigenous communities, and he has done far too little to tackle discrimination in the country’s criminal justice system. He abandoned an important pledge to reform his country’s electoral system. He has supported the fossil fuel industry’s pipeline building, seriously undercutting the country’s ability to fight climate change. These are clear failures, and it is important for progressives to call him out.

But Trudeau has, by and large, followed through on his liberal promises. Indeed, an independent 2019 assessment of the prime minister’s record by 24 academics found that Trudeau had wholly kept more than 50 percent of his campaign pledges and partially kept another 38.5 percent, the most of any Canadian government since 1984. He is certainly a flawed leader. But he is not, as Jacobin says, “governing to the right of the Conservatives.”

In fact, Trudeau’s accomplishments become especially impressive when one considers the Conservative he first defeated in 2015. Under nine years of Stephen Harper, Canada—never quite the progressive paradise that many American liberals imagine—was in decisively right-wing territory. Harper cut social services for the poor, including by making it more difficult to receive unemployment insurance. He pulled Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol and systematically weakened elements of the country’s environmental protection regime. He shuttered 12 of the 16 regional offices operated by Status of Women Canada, a federal government organization dedicated to promoting gender equality, and eliminated its independent research fund. He axed a database that tracked assault rifle ownership. Harper’s control was so total that he successfully passed a law to increase Canada’s retirement age to 67 starting in 2023, something the Republican Party has never been able to accomplish in the U.S. (Upon taking office, Trudeau promptly repealed the age increase.)

Canada, with a more progressive populace and a parliamentary electoral system that does not systematically drown out liberals, is different from the United States. There are clear limits to what the country can teach us.

Nevertheless, elements of Trudeauism are making their way into the Democratic Party. They are most clearly evident in the Biden administration’s multi-trillion-dollar Build Back Better bill, an extremely ambitious piece of progressive legislation that could bring the U.S. much closer to its northern neighbor. A few parts of the plan, including the billions of dollars that would go to lowering the cost of child care, resemble some of Trudeau’s own achievements.

Other parts of the prime minister’s political formula are evident in the behavior of the Democratic Party’s progressives. The Canadian left clearly does not love the prime minister, but for the past six years, they’ve swallowed their disagreements enough to keep him in power. America’s progressives may not adore Biden, and there is a lot more they wish he would do to advance their agenda. But they have uniformly lined up behind Build Back Better because they recognize it for what it is, not for what it isn’t.

Whether that will be enough is another story. The Democratic Party’s most conservative representatives have not been nearly as supportive of the president’s policies, and several are in open revolt over multiple facets of the reconciliation bill.

It would be too simplistic to tell moderates that, based on what’s happening in Canada, they would be assured of reelection if they vote for a boldly liberal agenda. But if these politicians really do care about helping the marginalized and building a better political climate, Trudeau should at least inspire them. Not only has he passed popular, progressive legislation, he’s shifted the center of political gravity in a more liberal direction. In an attempt to defeat him, Erin O’Toole, Trudeau’s most recent Conservative Party challenger, embraced a host of progressive policies. He pledged to keep the carbon tax. He loudly declared himself “an ally to the LGBTQ community” and told voters that he’d work to keep abortion available nationwide. In his post-election speech, he criticized Trudeau for not doing enough to help Indigenous Canadians.

“Ours is a conservatism that dwells not in the past, but learns from it, to secure the future,” he told voters. “It is a conservatism that reveres strong communities and compassion for one another, for our environment, and for those in need, at home and abroad.” Hearing the speech, I was reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s famous (and perhaps apocryphal) declaration that Tony Blair was her greatest triumph. It is rare that a premier can list the ideology of her opponents as an accomplishment. Justin Trudeau, like Thatcher, can now make that claim.

The post Justin Trudeau May Be the World’s Most Successful Progressive Leader appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The 2020 presidential election happened amid extraordinary levels of voter turnout. According to the Census Bureau, 66.8 percent of eligible adults cast ballots in the race, the highest rate since 1992. Other estimates suggest that last year’s turnout rate bested the 1992 level, and may be the highest since 1900.

As usual, rates correlated heavily with age. But for the first time since the U.S. let 18-year-olds vote, more than half of all 18- to 24-year-olds cast ballots. The 51.4 percent of young people who voted blows the 2016 mark—39.4 percent—out of the water. In fact, the increase in youth voting is one of the most striking shifts among any demographic. Turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds grew by more than double the overall increase from 2016: 12 percentage points versus 5.4 points.

The surge in youth voting stemmed, in part, from how charged the election was. Donald Trump is a mobilization machine, and his polarizing presence atop the ticket turned out millions of progressives and conservatives who might have otherwise stayed home. But part of why youth turnout shot up is thanks to the deliberate work of student voting organizers, who mobilized young Americans to register and cast ballots despite the pandemic and restrictive voting laws. This includes national groups like the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, which helps schools develop registration and turnout plans. It also includes smaller, local organizations. Special credit goes to the many on-campus, student-led groups that worked to get their peers to the polls.

But student organizers have the best chance of success when they are actively supported by their administrations. That’s why each year at the Monthly, we release an honor roll listing the colleges doing the most to turn their students into citizens. To make the honor roll, schools must meet multiple criteria. For this year’s iteration, they had to submit action plans to ALL IN for 2018 and 2020. Schools needed to have signed up to receive data from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE), which calculates college-specific registration and voting rates. (Information for 2020 is not yet available.) And they must have made both their 2016 and 2018 NSLVE data available to the public. In short, schools need to have shown a repeated commitment to increasing student voting—and have been transparent about the results.

Like youth voting rates overall, our honor roll grew. This year, a total of 205 schools made the list, 47 more institutions than in 2020. What didn’t change is the eclectic nature of the honored campuses. There are plenty of elite schools on the list, such as Northwestern University. But, as was true last year, plenty of famous colleges missed out. The majority of honorees are public institutions, including many community colleges.

The list relies on participation in programs such as ALL IN and NSLVE because raw turnout data isn’t available for all institutions. But to reward truly standout colleges, we ordered the honor roll by voter registration rate. The top-performing school—the Maryland Institute College of Art, or MICA—receives its own distinction for having a registration rate above 95 percent. The next 15 schools are also specially demarcated for topping 85 percent.

It is wonderful to see that both our honor roll and youth voting grew. But that doesn’t mean colleges or activists can rest on their laurels. There are more than 1,000 schools that don’t make the cut. Youth turnout rates continue to sit far below the rate for older Americans. It is unclear if Generation Z will turn out in force in 2022 or 2024, especially if Trump doesn’t challenge Biden. And GOP-controlled states are already at work passing new, even more burdensome restrictions to the franchise. Maintaining last year’s youth voting rates will be a battle. Increasing turnout further will be a war.

But it’s one that we’re prepared to wage at the Monthly. We have faith that activists will continue to fight as well. Many of today’s leading political issues—especially the devastation wrought by climate change—are of particular importance to younger generations. It is imperative that colleges do everything they can to get their students to vote.

The post America’s Best Colleges for Student Voting appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On December 17, 2020, a group of mostly Indian American protestors gathered outside Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. A pair of turban-clad men held up a banner telling the company to “STOP the suppression of freedom of speech.” Another protestor carried a poster exhorting passers to “honk for human rights.” Yet another waved a sign declaring, “We stand with farmers.” Three days later, demonstrators rallied outside Facebook’s Vancouver office with similar posters. “No Farmers No Food,” read several of the signs.

Protests against Facebook, one of the most controversial companies in the world, have become commonplace. But this was not your typical anti–Big Tech demonstration. The Indian Americans and Canadians gathered at the company’s gates weren’t there because of Facebook’s usual controversies—its surveillance of users or its role in spreading political mis-information. Instead, the immediate cause of their anger was that Facebook had taken down pages protesting India’s new agricultural acts.

Historically, Indian farmers have sold their crops through specialized markets where the government sets minimum prices. The new laws, hastily passed in September 2020, allow farmers to instead sell directly to corporate buyers. In theory, this change could help farmers by generating more competition for their products. But in practice, farmers and liberal economists believe that the laws, once fully implemented, will kill the price-supported marketplaces altogether. Farmers will then have to sell directly to corporations. This, they warn, will not look like a utopia of competitive bidding. India’s biggest food companies have tremendous market power, which they could use to force farmers to accept ever-lower prices. This could push many independent farmers out of business. It’s a possibility that has driven more than 250 million people around the world to strike, march, or otherwise demonstrate—making the movement, according to many observers, the largest protest in world history.

Facebook restored the pro-farmer pages and said that the suspensions were a mistake. But many of the protestors smell a deeper connection between the social media giant and India’s new laws. In April 2020, Facebook purchased a 10 percent stake in a company called Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecommunications provider. Jio is, in turn, controlled by Reliance Industries, India’s biggest overall corporation. In addition to dominating telecom, Reliance is the largest player in petrochemicals and in retail. When its latest acquisition is complete, the company will control 40 percent—a large plurality—of the country’s organized (formally incorporated) groceries sector. That could make it the biggest buyer of farmers’ products and, therefore, the biggest beneficiary of the right to negotiate directly. 

Protestors have been burning Jio SIM cards to express their anger. But they’ve also directed their ire at Reliance’s partners, including Facebook. In interviews with reporters, several demonstrators in California and Vancouver speculated that Facebook took down the protest pages as a favor to Mukesh Ambani, Reliance’s chairman and chief executive. At the Vancouver protest, one person held up a sign that declared: “Modi + Zuckerberg = Ambani’s puppets.”

Facebook, one of the world’s most powerful companies, is no one’s puppet. But through its partnership with Reliance, the social media giant could substantially gain from the agricultural laws. Facebook owns WhatsApp, which has more than 500 million users in India. It is currently rolling out WhatsApp Pay, a Venmo-like feature that will allow WhatsApp users to complete digital transactions without leaving the application. And it is integrating Reliance’s JioMart—an expanding, groceries-focused online marketplace—into its messaging service. It would be as if Americans could buy or sell products over Amazon while on Facebook Messenger, using Facebook Pay. It means that if Indian farmers begin selling more food directly to Reliance, as the laws would allow, there is a good chance they will do so via WhatsApp.

For Facebook, that presents enormous financial opportunities. For every sale or purchase made over WhatsApp, the company will receive valuable data on people’s needs, retail preferences, and finances. On May 15, Facebook updated WhatsApp’s privacy policy in a way that makes clear the broader Facebook empire can use this data as it sells microtargeted advertisements. 

The opportunities for Facebook extend beyond just ads. To make money in India, WhatsApp is trying to break down one of the most critical barriers found in healthy and equitable economies—the line between regular businesses and banks. In a filing with Indian regulators for WhatsApp Pay, the company said that selling loans and offering credit would be one of the “main objects to be pursued by it in the country.” It’s a troubling prospect. Banks already offer deeply extractive loans calculated to match what they know about an individual’s finances. When big communications companies enter banking, they can use their tremendous stores of other personal data to peddle even more exploitative arrangements. If banks double as retailers, they can use their lending power to help keep competitors, suppliers, and buyers weak or servile. In the case of WhatsApp, this could mean ensuring that any small business or farmer using its payment services remains financially subservient to its retail partner: Reliance.

For Reliance, piggybacking on WhatsApp comes with additional benefits. Given the app’s popularity, it could help make the company even more dominant in India’s food supply chain. It would also help Reliance acquire its own data set on farmer finances. Both would help the company procure goods from agricultural workers at the lowest possible cost. Reliance could likewise use this data to make sure that the agricultural inputs it helps manufacture, like tractors, sell at the highest possible price. WhatsApp Pay could meanwhile hand out high-interest loans to help farmers cover the gaps.

“It’s 360-degree control,” Parminder Jeet Singh, the executive director of IT for Change, a human rights–focused nonprofit in India, told me. He compared the possible arrangement to driving for Uber. Farmers, like drivers, would sell as much product (in the former case, food; in the latter, rides) as the corporations allow. They would be paid what the corporations dictate. And, much as Uber lends drivers money to purchase vehicles, these corporations could lend farmers money to buy raw inputs at highly unfavorable terms. 

This system is still a hypothetical. Reliance does not yet wholly control India’s food and retail economy, and WhatsApp Pay is still in its nascent stages. But India’s other largest retailers, Amazon and Walmart, loom in the wings. Each could establish similarly totalizing ecosystems. Walmart already owns PhonePe, one of India’s two biggest e-payment companies. And Reliance is willing to partner with these U.S. giants when convenient. The company, for example, works with PhonePe. And PhonePe is already operating as a financial services company. (It does not offer loans.) 

Whether the farmers can prevent a corporate takeover by integrated tech-banking-retail platforms has consequences that extend beyond just agriculture. Activists in India are worried that as these companies grow in size, they could also turn the country’s millions of neighborhood stores and small merchants into gig workers, wholly dependent on the whims of commerce giants. In fact, the conflict has global implications. The kinds of consolidation happening in India are already under way in many other parts of the world, including the United States. America has businesses, like Comcast, that control multiple parts of a supply chain, from television studios to stations to the cable lines that send programming to homes. It has retail companies, like Amazon, that both make products and own the marketplaces in which competitors must sell their own goods. It has businesses that double as banks. And it has plenty of tech companies that harvest data from individuals and sell it for ads, manipulating users in the process. 

This combination has pushed thousands of small businesses out of existence. It has left many localities without affordable access to capital. And the dominance of Facebook and Google over the ad market, in particular, has helped misinformation spread just as it has accelerated the decline of local journalism. 

Governments have been slow to act. It’s only within the last half decade that American policymakers have begun to really grasp the consequences of concentrated corporate power. Even in countries more progressive than the U.S., campaigns against monopolies have remained mostly an elite phenomenon. Unlike many other causes, antitrust has inspired limited grassroots activism. 

Until consolidation came for Indian farmers. A largely dispersed and already struggling lot, these workers—most of whom are effectively small business owners—understand far better than Westerners the risks posed by monopolies. Their protests are among the first modern efforts by everyday people to stop corporations from taking over an industry on unfair terms. They are the only grassroots campaign in memory to challenge corporate power across multiple continents, all at once.

It’s too early to say if Indian farmers and their allies will succeed. But if they do, it will send a powerful message. It will show that it’s possible for potential victims of consolidation, powerless as they may seem, to fend off economic giants. It will prove that it’s possible to make states safeguard even very small players. 

In late 2014, Mark Zuckerberg visited India to plot the rollout of Free Basics, his company’s plan to provide free, limited internet access to anyone with a cell phone. Zuckerberg was greeted by leading politicians, but his product quickly drew controversy. Free Basics restricted users to just 36 preselected websites, and the only available social media platform was Facebook. To many activists, this looked less like an act of charity and more like an attempt at dominance. “They wanted the whole internet to be Facebook,” says Osama Manzar, the founder of the Digital Empowerment Foundation, a Delhi-based nonprofit focused on providing information access to India’s poor.

Advocates launched an extensive public relations campaign against Free Basics, one that ignited a fierce debate about net neutrality. Facebook pushed back with its own PR crusade, reportedly spending $40 million on advertising. In billboards, the company pictured a farmer named Ganesh. Free Basics, they claimed, helped Ganesh learn “new farming techniques that doubled his crop yield.” In an op-ed for India’s largest newspaper, Zuckerberg declared that “everything we’re doing is about serving people like Ganesh.”

In the end, the critics won out. On February 8, 2016, Indian regulators prohibited telecommunications providers from restricting access to certain websites, rendering Free Basics illegal. Digital rights activists celebrated. In a toe-to-toe fight with one of the planet’s strongest companies, they were victorious.

Facebook, however, was hardly vanquished. At the time Free Basics was banned, WhatsApp had more than 150 million users across India. Over the next year, that number grew rapidly, to 200 million. Especially among the elite and middle class, it was the most popular messaging system in the country.

But WhatsApp, with its end-to-end encryption, offered very few opportunities for Facebook to make a profit. To change that, in April 2017, Facebook announced that it would roll out WhatsApp Pay. It was a ripe time for such an endeavor. Five months before, the Indian government abruptly declared that the existing 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes were no longer legal tender, pushing many Indians to use digital transactions as a substitute for cash. If successful, WhatsApp Pay could become a major player in India’s entire retail economy. But just like Free Basics, the e-payment enterprise ran into headwinds. In 2018, regulators froze the project over concerns that it would give a foreign company too much information about Indians.

Then, in April 2020, Facebook purchased its stake in Reliance Jio. In doing so, it made a powerful friend. Jio, which launched cellular services at the end of 2015, had already come to lead the Indian telecom market. That was thanks to both its parent company’s deep existing pockets and a series of fortuitous—or suspicious—regulatory changes that hurt Jio’s main competitors. It was not the first time that Reliance Industries, India’s biggest private company for decades, had benefited from the government’s decisions. In the world of Indian business, Reliance’s power with politicians is the stuff of legend. 

Seven months after Facebook announced its investment, the Indian government signed off on WhatsApp Pay. One month later, Zuckerberg and Ambani held a virtual, videotaped conversation to celebrate their partnership and explain how WhatsApp Pay would transform Indian retail. “WhatsApp, now with WhatsApp Pay, brings digital interactivity and the ability to move to close transactions and create value,” Ambani declared. JioMart, he said, would give small shops “a chance to digitize and be at par with anybody else in the world.”

The partnership represents a concentration of resources and power that has concerned even some advocates who are ambivalent about the agricultural reforms. Ajay Jakhar, the chairman of Farmers’ Forum India, and a farmer himself, told me he believed that the government meant well with the laws, and he was clear that he supports private markets. But he worried that the consolidation could breed economic disaster. “Without regulation,” Jakhar said, “I think millions of jobs could be lost in every street corner.”

Farming is the most common profession in India. Estimates vary widely, but research suggests that at least 100 million people work in agriculture. Some studies put the number closer to 150 million—more than 10 percent of the entire population.

For many, it is a brutal economic existence. Even with minimum guaranteed prices for crops, the country’s small farmers generally earn barely enough money to survive. Over the past several decades, thousands of financially distressed farmers have committed suicide by drinking pesticides. In 2019 alone, 10,000 agricultural workers killed themselves. In the northern Indian state of Punjab, considered the country’s breadbasket, farmer suicides have increased tenfold over the past five years.

There are many forces behind the suicide crisis, and they can vary widely by place and time. But a common theme is debt. Research suggests that roughly 90 percent of India’s farmers cannot cover the costs of fertilizer, seeds, pesticides, and other equipment. To cope, many turn to moneylenders, who can front the cash needed to plant and harvest. But it comes at a steep price.

“The lenders impose conditions, or they create an environment, where farmers are forced to buy pesticides and seeds and other stuff from dealers which are associated with the moneylender,” Jakhar explained. “They lock them into a closed loop where they buy pesticides from the same circle of people, and they pay interest to the same circle of people.”

Virtually no one in India thinks the status quo is working, including the millions of farmers now outraged about the reforms. But the protesters fear that opening the sector to corporate giants will lead to something even more exploitative. Existing lenders operate with imperfect knowledge about their clients’ earnings. This creates room for farmers to haggle and hunt for better deals. Grocery giants like Reliance and Walmart, working with tech outfits like WhatsApp and PhonePe, would possess far more financial information. As a result, they could dominate farmworkers in ways that today’s moneylenders can only dream of doing.

“Control over loans would completely be in the hands of these companies who would have microdata about all their transactions, about their livelihoods, and the harvests,” Jeet Singh, of IT for Change, said. Because of the information at their disposal, he continued, they could calculate the most extractive loan that individuals will still take.

And that’s before the monopoly power kicks in. Should one or a handful of India’s grocery giants succeed in conquering the food supply chain, they could milk farmers from both ends, dictating how much they pay for inputs and how much they make off sales. They could also tell farmers what kinds of crops they should grow, precisely when they should plant, and exactly when to harvest. Reliance has already created an app, JioKrishi, that uses data analytics to instruct farmers on when they should sow, irrigate, and fertilize their fields. 

Farming may not seem glamorous, but for India’s many small landowners, it provides a sense of professional identity and at least a degree of autonomy. Becoming corporate cogs would threaten both. “Work is what gives dignity,” says Arun Kumar, the Malcolm Adiseshiah Chair Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, a Delhi think tank, and a critic of the agricultural laws. “If people don’t have dignity, it creates social and political issues.”

Facebook did not respond to multiple interview requests. Reliance declined to speak. In a public statement, the latter company has denied that it will create any kind of gig-worker farming system. “Reliance Retail Limited (RRL), Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL), or any other affiliate of our parent company, i.e., Reliance Industries Limited have not done any ‘corporate’ or ‘contract’ farming in the past, and have absolutely no plans to enter this business,” the company said on January 4. “Reliance has nothing whatsoever to do with the three farm laws currently debated in the country, and in no way benefits from them.”

But six days later, and right after the laws took effect in the southern state of Karnataka, Reliance purchased more than 220,000 pounds of rice from a group of local farmers. In other public statements, the company has been clear that agriculture plays a major role in its overarching commerce plans. “Our focus will be India’s 60 million micro, small and medium businesses, 120 million farmers, 30 million small merchants and millions of small and medium enterprises in the informal sector,” Reliance said in April 2020, as it announced its partnership with Facebook.

What Reliance aims to do with these other merchants is also of critical importance. That’s particularly true for India’s millions of grocery corner stores, known as kiranas, which serve as the backbone of the country’s retail economy. They account for 75 to 78 percent of India’s consumer goods market. They are usually locally owned. Reliance, however, wants to bring them not just into its own orbit, but into Facebook’s as well. “India has more than 60 million small businesses, and millions of people around the country rely on them for jobs, and that’s a big part of what I hope that our partnership can serve here,” Zuckerberg said in his videotaped conversation with Ambani. “I couldn’t agree more,” Ambani replied.

Reliance and Facebook are not the only corporations who see potential in the corner store economy. “Kiranas is where the real challenge is and where the real opportunity is,” Priya Patankar, the head of communications for Walmart’s PhonePe, said. “Payments is going to be the underlying drug which gets the user through the app.” The company would then find multiple ways of monetizing its base. Google Pay, another popular e-payment platform, is also trying to reach these small businesses. It’s partnering with financial institutions to offer them loans.

In the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with digitizing the operations of kiranas and farmers. If Reliance, Walmart, or Amazon were operating truly neutral platforms, making no use of small merchants’ data, and not offering their own competing products, the systems they are developing would not be especially threatening. But that’s not what’s happening. These companies do make their own products; indeed, many kiranas already sell their goods. They will monetize data small businesses provide. As a result, rising digital commerce in India could lead to a repeat of what Amazon is doing to small retailers across the United States. As Amazon has grown into America’s dominant online marketplace, the company has pushed onerous, tax-like financial agreements on the many merchants who became dependent on its platform, forcing them to hand over large shares of their revenues. Amazon has also used its privileged look at these merchants’ sales data to manufacture copycats of their most popular products, which it then sells for lower prices. The result of this process has been small business closures and the steady draining of wealth from communities across America.

As some of imperialism’s foremost victims, Indians are quite attuned to the dangers of what academics and activists call “digital colonialism”: when foreign tech companies flood a market with their services, extract people’s data, and then profit off the information to the detriment of the local population. Concern about digital colonization was critical in killing Facebook’s Free Basics. The concept helped hold up approval of WhatsApp Pay. And many of India’s business leaders have, at various times, invoked it to advocate for restrictions on foreign companies. That includes Mukesh Ambani. In a December 2018 speech, Reliance’s CEO demanded that the Indian government prevent “corporates, especially global corporations,” from owning Indian data. “Data colonization is as bad as the previous forms of colonization,” he said. “Data freedom is as precious as the freedom we won in 1947.”

What Facebook is planning to do, with the help of Reliance, neatly fits the definition of digital colonization. It is a foreign company that controls India’s most popular messaging service. It is leveraging this service to shape and monitor Indian commerce. Selling microtargeted loans could easily become highly extractive. And its junior status in the relationship with Reliance could eventually change. When the British East India Company first began its missions to India, the subcontinent’s Mughal rulers were far wealthier and more formidable than any European state. Over time, the company became dominant anyway. 

But thinking of Facebook purely as a foreign conqueror, akin to past colonial regimes, obscures the grander dynamics at play. The East India Company’s scope was geographically limited. If you lived in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, you had relatively little to fear from the company. Indeed, its actions likely redounded to your benefit by bringing (ill-gotten) wealth into your state. That is not true for Facebook. It may be headquartered in Silicon Valley, but it is not extracting raw materials from India for the benefit of Americans. On the contrary, both Indians and Americans—specifically their data and their attention—are the company’s raw materials. 

To a certain extent, the onus for stopping this exploitation rests with U.S. regulators. It was, after all, America’s weak competition policies that allowed many tech and retail behemoths to emerge in the first place. But the cat is already out of the bag. The Biden administration could force Facebook to sell off WhatsApp, make Amazon stop manufacturing products for its U.S. marketplace, and shut down the domestic fintech company that Walmart just created. An independent WhatsApp could still enter banking and e-commerce in India. Amazon could still make goods for Indians. Walmart could still own PhonePe. As policymakers in a bigger market, Indian regulators may actually have more power to stop these businesses than do their American counterparts. (Although so far, Indian politicians seem mostly interested in using these powers to make tech companies silence government critics.) But ultimately, the problem is now larger than any one state. It will take international action to stop the endless consolidation. 

That’s part of why the agricultural protests are so significant. It’s the first transnational, grassroots movement against monopolization, and the tens of millions of people demonstrating around the world grasp the global stakes. There’s a reason protesters are outside Facebook offices thousands of miles from India, carrying posters that link Zuckerberg to Ambani. There’s a reason why they have slowed traffic in and out of major global cities, like London and San Francisco. And there’s a reason why—rather than sticking to tractor parades in Delhi—farmers are burning Jio SIM cards, destroying Jio telecommunications towers, and shuttering Walmart stores in Punjab. They can see that the exploitation extends beyond just their workplace. 

“What has shocked the nation is they normally believe farmers are illiterate, and that farmers are people who don’t understand all these things,” says Devinder Sharma, a leading agricultural analyst and a columnist. “But they know the nitty-gritty now. They understand the implications.”

The post The World’s Most Important War on Big Tech Comes from India appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The tweet went out at 9:46 p.m. on April 21, Indian Standard Time. “This is an #SOS call,” wrote Fortis Healthcare, a medical company headquartered in northern India. One of their hospitals, they said, had only 45 minutes of oxygen left. Roughly fourteen hours later, Max Healthcare, a hospital chain based in Delhi, sent out a similar message: “SOS – Less than an hour’s Oxygen supplies at Max Smart Hospital & Max Hospital Saket.” They tagged Delhi’s chief minister, India’s health minister, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Sixty-one minutes after that, news broke that Sir Ganga Ram hospital, also in Delhi, had actually run out of high-pressure oxygen. Likely as a result, 25 patients had died.

Over the past two weeks, India has posted more than 4.5 million Covid-19 cases, shattering global pandemic records. Hospitals have run out of beds and supplies, stranding many of the country’s sickest patients. The government has recorded more than 200,000 pandemic deaths. That is by itself an enormous number, but given the country’s uneven, substandard health care infrastructure—and the deliberate efforts by some of India’s 36 states and territories to avoid tallying fatalities—it is almost certainly an undercount.

India’s Covid-19 crisis is a singular catastrophe. It’s also not the nation’s first respiratory disaster. Most years, much of the country is blanketed in thick smog. According to the World Air Quality Report, six of the planet’s ten most polluted cities are in India. Delhi clocks in at number five, making it earth’s smoggiest capital. On average, particulate matter in the country’s urban air is more than five times what the World Health Organization (WHO) considers acceptable.

These two tragedies may be epidemiologically related. A study by researchers at Harvard University found that even a mild increase particulate matter is connected to an 8 percent increase in Covid-19 deaths. Scientists at the University of Cambridge discovered a link between the severity of Covid-19 infections and long-term exposure to pollution. As a result, since the beginning of the pandemic, experts have worried that India’s perennial smog could make its citizens exceptionally vulnerable to the illness.

But there’s a connection between the pandemic and smog disasters that extends beyond lungs and into politics: massive governmental failures, especially at the national level. Despite advance warnings, public officials did not transport enough oxygen out of plants in the east before the second wave began to rise in March, and they failed to sufficiently increase production elsewhere. India could at least mitigate its air quality crises, as many other countries have, but policymakers have not properly enforced antipollution laws that would decrease smog. Instead, officials have downplayed the severity of the pandemic and the pollution, blamed both disasters on opponents, or been silent altogether. In the case of Covid-19, leading politicians actively encouraged mass gatherings even as caseloads reached new heights.

It is impossible to measure the exact toll of each malpractice. There are not yet (and may never be) statistics on how many coronavirus patients would have survived if the government had properly managed a second wave. But given all the desperate pleas for supplies, the skyrocketing prices for cylinders, and the fact that states have literally sent armed guards to try and guarantee that their oxygen shipments aren’t hijacked, it’s safe to assume the number is high. Estimating pollution-related deaths is also tricky, but in a study published inThe Lancet, researchers concluded that smog caused 1.24 million premature deaths in India during 2017 alone. Experts at the University of Chicago calculated that Delhi residents lose close to a decade of life owing to the pollution. In India, politicians’ bad planning and policies are depriving citizens, sick with Covid-19 and not, of the air they need to survive.

In 1981, the Indian government passed the Air Act—its first systematic attempt to control high levels of smog. The law gave existing water pollution control boards at the state and central level the power to curb emissions. It forbade, for example, individuals from starting or running particularly polluting businesses, such as those that produce fertilizer and petroleum, without first receiving permission.

Well intentioned as it was, the act was poorly enforced and largely ineffective. State and federal governments then took additional steps to fight smog: vehicle emissions standards, bans on burning crop stubble, new metro systems. Once more, the results were uneven at best. The stubble-burning ban, like the original Air Act, goes mostly unheeded. Smokestacks are commonplace across polluted Indian cities. Delhi’s metro is clean and widely ridden, yet the rate of car ownership in the city has gone up.

Shortly after winning office in 2014, Prime Minister Modi pledged to clean the air, but he’s taken few tangible measures to do so. Smog levels remain astronomical. In 2018, the WHO declared that air pollution was “the most important single risk factor for premature disability and death in India,” and it is unclear how much the prime minister cares. As pollution levels soared during the fall of 2019, prompting Delhi’s chief minister to call his city a “gas chamber,” Modi said almost nothing.

Compared to some of his colleagues in the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), Modi’s quiet was an excellent response. The country’s environment minister addressed the smog crisis by blaming the Delhi government for “politicising” air pollution. It later turned out that the minister had canceled three meetings with his state-level environmental counterparts. A BJP minister in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, defended stubble burning and recommended that governments hold religious festivals to please Lord Indra, the God of rain. “He will set things right,” the official said.

The national health minister, Harsh Vardhan, was just as cavalier. In 2019, he addressed the smog crisis by advising that Indians eat carrots. The vegetable, he tweeted, helped fight “pollution-related harm to health.”

Vardhan is still India’s health minister. In this role, he’s helped preside over a Covid-19 response that often looks disquietingly like the government’s response to the surge in pollution, and that often looks worse. In early April, as caseloads climbed, the health minister blamed opposition-controlled states for rising infection rates—a shirking of national duties not entirely unlike Donald Trump’s admonition, early in the Covid-19 crisis, that America’s 50 states were to blame for whatever went wrong. At the same time that Vardhan was attacking opposing politicians, Modi held massive election rallies, defying the dictum of no mass events during the pandemic. The chief minister of Uttarakhand, a member of Modi’s party, encouraged people to travel to his state for a multi-month mass religious event. “Nobody will be stopped in the name of Covid-19,” he said. “The faith in God will overcome the fear of the virus.” Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims apparently listened, helping further fuel infections. On April 29, as India posted a world-record 379,257 Covid-19 cases, Vardhan claimed that India’s pandemic fatality rate was “the lowest in the world.” (It isn’t.)

Meanwhile, India’s oxygen supply chain collapsed. The country manufactures enough of the gas to meet even pandemic demand, but the major production facilities are located in the east, whereas needs are currently highest in the north and west. The government had time to move oxygen into place; scientists warned at the end of February that a second wave could hit India. But the country’s leaders didn’t act until it was far too late.

Even without expert warnings, the national, state, and local governments should have reformed their oxygen systems after the first wave, when they also faced shortages. They could have also learned from oxygen crises that predate the pandemic. In August 2017, for example, more than 20 children died at a state-run hospital in Uttar Pradesh after distributors cut off its oxygen supply. The hospital’s leaders had written multiple letters to their superiors in the government, telling officials that the state was dramatically behind on payments. But the entreaties went unanswered.

After the children suffocated, the state government responded by claiming they died of natural causes. It simultaneously arrested some of the facility’s staff, including, most famously, the pediatrician who was on duty when supplies ran out. The Indian Medical Association declared that the doctor had been framed. He was eventually acquitted.

Perhaps the most damning evidence against the Indian government’s oxygen failure—as well as the failures of some regional governments—comes from the southern state of Kerala. It currently has India’s fourth-highest infection rate, but unlike Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, or Maharashtra, it isn’t suffering from shortages. That’s because after Covid-19 first came to India, the state helped build new oxygen plants, some publicly owned, some privately owned, and ultimately upped local production by 60 percent. Now, it has excess supplies that it’s sending to the rest of the nation.

Cleaning India’s air is trickier than increasing the supply of medical oxygen. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. After the United States passed the Clean Air Act, national emissions of a variety of pollutants, including particulate matter, dropped by an average of 73 percent. London has long suffered from smog, but recent policy changes that cut back on driving and improved emissions standards have been quite successful. From 2015 to 2019, Londoners living in areas with high levels of nitrogen dioxide fell by 94 percent. Even Beijing, once the global face of pollution, has been getting better air after the government reformed parts of the city’s energy and industrial infrastructure.

Many Indians know cleaner air is attainable. In spring of 2020, as the coronavirus first rolled across the country, the government implemented a lockdown. Enforcement could be shoddy and social distancing in this densely packed nation, soon to be the world’s largest by population, is often impossible. But the order did cut back on automobile traffic. With fewer people on the roads, the skies across northern cities cleared so much that photos of distant mountain ranges, typically made invisible by pollution, went viral. In a FaceTime call, a friend of mine in Delhi gushed about the lack of smog. He took his phone outside so I could experience it myself. Pointing his camera up, I saw something that—in my time living in the city—I never witnessed: pure, blue skies.

But as the first wave subsided, the Modi government declared victory and reopened much of India. Traffic and smog returned. With more Indians congregating in mass numbers and with newly infectious variants, the virus came back, too. A few weeks ago, my friend and I made plans to catch up again. But a couple days before we were due to talk, he canceled. He had caught Covid-19 and needed to rest.

The post India’s Long Struggle to Breathe appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It is not often that soccer makes the front page of the New York Times. But on April 18, the sport’s most famous teams kicked off an economic drama so seismic that it received A1 attention the next day. In an arrangement that would have upended the world’s most popular form of entertainment, twelve of the wealthiest soccer clubs in Europe—such as Manchester United and Real Madrid—announced they would begin playing in a breakaway international Super League “as soon as practicable.”

The clubs presented their decision as a way to improve the sport’s quality. But the only thing super about the league was the condemnation, which was immediate and widespread. Sports writers were outraged. Coaches denounced the proposal. Former star players castigated the project, as did current ones. Fans were furious. The proposed league was “driven exclusively by greed,” declared Football Supporters Europe, an umbrella fan organization. “The only ones who stand to gain are hedge funds, oligarchs, and a handful of already wealthy clubs.”

The critics are right. The Super League project would have transferred money away from dozens of European teams to the select, conspiring clubs. It would have done so by greatly diminishing the top domestic soccer associations, like the English Premier League or Spain’s La Liga, in which these dozens of teams compete. Right now, the associations are the backbone of soccer, watched by well over one billion people worldwide, and they shower money on soccer clubs from almost every major city in their countries. But the Super League would have stolen away many of these eyeballs and, with them, the high-price advertisements and expensive broadcasting contracts that help sustain all the teams. It would be as if American baseball’s richest and most storied franchises—like the Dodgers, the Yankees, the Cubs, the Giants, and the Red Sox—formed their own association, garnering an increased share of baseball’s profits while turning the MLB into a new minor league.

The result would have been something distressingly familiar to anyone following the global economy: rising geographic and overall inequality. In addition to being already rich themselves, 10 of the Super League’s 12 participants came from big, already wealthy cities. The three Spanish clubs that signed up to join hail from Madrid and Barcelona. Two of Italy’s three teams are in Milan, the metro area with the country’s highest per capita GDP. Of the six English participants, half are based in London. Another two are from Manchester, a middle-class metro by average income, but still the U.K.’s second-largest economy. (The league’s organizers invited three other teams to join as well, one based in Paris and another based in Munich.)

Equally disconcerting: A lot of the money that would flow to the “super” clubs would go to a small group of people from not just outside their team’s city, but from outside their team’s country. Of the 12 teams, four are owned American moguls. One is controlled by a Chinese investor. The owner of Manchester City F.C., Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is a billionaire sheikh from the United Arab Emirates. The owner of Chelsea F.C., Roman Abramovich, is a Russian oligarch and an associate of Vladimir Putin.

In an era of inequality, that these titans and tycoons drew mass backlash is unsurprising. What is surprising is what happened next: the protests succeeded.

When elites conspire to extract money from local communities, they tend to triumph. Over the last two decades, regulators have signed off on a wide range of corporate mergers that have concentrated wealth in the hands of an ever-smaller number of people and places—like when Belgium’s InBev bought St. Louis’s Anheuser-Busch, or when Seattle’s T-Mobile bought the Kansas-headquartered Sprint. Politicians have stood by as unscrupulous investors acquired socially critical assets, such as local newspapers, and stripped them down to make fast cash. Rather than redistribute this ill-gotten wealth in the form of higher personal and corporate taxes, elected officials across the world have steadily lowered both and cut welfare instead.

It’s therefore understandable that many commentators reacted to news of the Super League’s formation with grim resignation. “European soccer has been drifting, inexorably, to this point for years,” wrote The New York Times’s Rory Smith. In explaining why the project was inevitable, he cited factors that could just as easily describe the behavior of some governments: the willingness of leagues to wave in money “from anyone and everyone,” the fact that they decided “the rules did not really apply” to their richest clubs, the way soccer’s governing bodies “gave more and more power away” to these big, wealthy teams. “It’s the reality of modern football,” wrote Vince Rugari in the Sydney Morning Herald. Fans may burn their jerseys, threaten boycotts, and petition for change. The Super League, he wrote, would still come to be.

But then, something strange took place. In near unison, and across the ideological spectrum, heads of state throughout Europe loudly denounced the project. On Monday, Italy’s prime minister came out against the league. So did French President Emmanuel Macron. Spain’s socialist government criticized it, as did British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. These weren’t merely statements of disapproval. In remarks on Tuesday morning, Johnson said his government would drop a “legislative bomb” to stop the project from happening.

Within hours, the league began to crumble. On Tuesday afternoon, Chelsea F.C. and Manchester City F.C., both English participants, announced plans to withdraw. By the end of the day, every club from Britain was out, and most had apologized to fans. Juventus, AC Milan, Inter Milan, and Atlético Madrid withdrew on Wednesday. With only two teams left, the super league was dead.

To be clear, it wasn’t killed simply by government opposition. The project faced remarkable blowback from soccer authorities (the president of European soccer’s governing body called the organization’s architects “liars” and “snakes”) as well as from some of the super clubs’ own coaches and players. The planners failed to secure participation from three of Europe’s most famous teams—Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, and Borussia Dortmund—leaving their monopoly vulnerable and incomplete. And there would have been no broad political opposition were it not for the fierce, mounting objections of fans. The people, in other words, moved the leaders.

But the league’s would-be founders must have known there would be an outcry from fans, and actors on both sides of the battle have credited the opposition of politicians with the project’s spectacularly swift demise. That opposition, after all, wasn’t delivered in mere abstractions. To try and stop the league from forming, Oliver Dowden, Britain’s sports minister, got specific. The government, he said, was “examining every option from governance reform to competition law, and mechanisms that allow football to take place.”

Dowden and his party are not exactly known for their interest in equality. But that doesn’t mean his threats were off target. As it happens, corporate governance reform and trust busting are some of the exact policies that would help restore fairness to Britain’s highly consolidated, overall economy. His statement should give progressives, whose interest in equality extends beyond soccer, some inspiration.

The collapse of the Super League should give them hope. The project isn’t quite buried; the richest clubs could try again later, but better prepared. They might use the threat of a second attempt to wring more favorable deals from soccer’s existing associations. But it is still unusual for major mergers to fail, and to witness the league’s collapse is inspiring and refreshing in equal measure. It means the pressure and organizing worked. It means that when enough people protest, political systems can still stop wealth from flowing up.

The post The Collapse of Europe’s Super League Is a Serious Progressive Victory appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Bleeding Kansas began with an eviction attempt. In late 1854, Jacob Branson, an abolitionist from Ohio, started trying to kick Franklin Coleman, a slavery proponent, off his property. Roughly a year later, Coleman ran into a friend of Branson’s at a local blacksmith’s shop. The friend berated Coleman for continuing to squat on the land and demanded that he desist. It’s not clear what, if anything, Coleman said in response. But it is clear what he did. As the friend walked away, Coleman took out a gun and killed him.

Fearing reprisal in what was a largely antislavery community, Coleman fled to a nearby town and turned himself in to a proslavery sheriff. That sheriff promptly freed him and then arrested Branson. Local abolitionists, many of whom were already furious about the murder, grew incensed. They intercepted the sheriff at gunpoint and liberated his prisoner.

News of the murder, arrest, and jailbreak spread rapidly across Kansas. Both proslavery and antislavery activists formed militias, and it wasn’t long before violence began to erupt. On May 21, 1856, 800 slavery supporters sacked the city of Lawrence—home to the state’s antislavery leaders—looting houses and murdering one resident. In response, a group of abolitionists led by John Brown killed five proslavery settlers in Franklin County. Hundreds of slavery supporters retaliated by attacking an antislavery settlement in the town of Osawatomie, murdering several locals and burning most of the village to the ground. Abolitionists then drove proslavery forces out of Linn County. Slavery proponents next pulled 11 antislavery settlers from their homes and shot them down.

Bleeding Kansas is, per its name, most famous for the bloodshed. But the clash went further than raids. The two camps established rival territorial administrations, each claiming to represent the entirety of the state. They drafted their own constitutions, passed their own laws, and egged on their side’s combatants. Both petitioned Washington for official recognition. But the U.S. capital, itself polarized by disputes over America’s original sin, was unable to decide which group ought to be in command. It was not until the South seceded that Kansas was finally admitted to the Union.

There are many critical differences between the 1850s and today. The government is now far more expansive and powerful than it was in the antebellum era. There is no modern problem as singular and overriding as slavery was; we are instead polarized over many issues. And while there are geographic dimensions to our divisions, they are not nearly as clean as those that once split the U.S. Much like territorial Kansas, almost every American state has its own union and its own confederacy.

But there are also clear parallels. The present United States may be more polarized than it has been at any time since the 1850s. Large swaths of the population simply refuse to accept the election of political opponents as legitimate. Many of the social issues that divide us, in particular questions of systemic discrimination, stem from slavery. 

Most frighteningly, research suggests that a growing number of Americans believe that political violence is acceptable. In a 2017 survey by the political scientists Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe, 18 percent of Democrats and 12 percent of Republicans said that violence would be at least a little justified if the opposing party won the presidency. In February 2021, those numbers increased to 20 percent and 28 percent, respectively. Other researchers have found an even bigger appetite for extreme activity. In a January poll conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, researchers asked respondents whether “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Thirty-six percent of Americans, and an astounding 56 percent of Republicans, said yes.

All of this raises a serious question: Could the United States experience prolonged, acute civil violence? 

According to dozens of interviews with former and current government officials, counterterrorism researchers, and political scientists who study both the U.S. and other countries, the answer is yes. “I think that the conditions are pretty clearly headed in that direction,” says Katrina Mulligan, the managing director for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress and the former director for preparedness and response in the national security division at the Department of Justice (DOJ). The insurrection on “January 6 was a canary in the coal mine in a way, precisely because it wasn’t a surprise to those of us who have been following this.”

“Unfortunately, I think it’s a heightened risk,” Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of homeland security, told me. As evidence, she cited the Capitol attack, as well as “the rhetoric that’s being exchanged on social media, and just the number of groups out there that are organized and don’t seem reticent about using violence.”

Scholars of conflict differed in their estimates of how much violence might erupt, from sporadic terrorist attacks to a sustained insurgency. Individual assaults could be successfully handled by local and state police, but they could also easily escalate into a broader conflagration requiring federal involvement and inspiring copycat attacks. Experts also listed a wide range of potential targets, from Democratic politicians and institutions affiliated with minority groups to city halls and state government buildings.

But officials and researchers overwhelmingly agreed on the main source of the threat: the radical right. Despite overwrought warnings of “antifa,” it has been extreme conservatives who have driven into crowds of protestors, killing liberal activists. No leftists have murdered police officers or security guards, as right-wing fanatics did last summer in California. Progressives have not called for a race war or the bloody overthrow of the federal government. “Primarily, this is a far-right problem,” Napolitano said. “We saw it pretty clearly expressed on January 6.”

That, however, could shift. The modern American left does have a violent tradition. During the 1960s and ’70s, groups including the Weather Underground bombed banks, statues, and major government buildings. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 were overwhelmingly peaceful, but some demonstrators looted stores and destroyed police vehicles. And when Donald Trump’s supporters protested in Portland wielding paintball guns, the far-left activist Michael Reinoehl shot and killed one of them. His justification—self-defense—is both inexcusable and telling. If right-wing agitators continue down an increasingly extreme trajectory, and if the state does not stop them, it is easy to imagine liberals becoming increasingly less pacifistic.

Unfortunately, none of the officials I spoke with thought that any agency—from local and state law enforcement to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the armed forces—is fully prepared for the challenges posed by domestic terrorism. At least for federal employees, this should be expected. After four years of working under an administration that courted extremism rather than combated it, many bureaucrats and officers are just getting up to speed.

“In my entire 40 years in the military, from Annapolis to supreme allied commander of NATO, I never gave a thought to these challenges,” says James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral and the former dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “I suspect my successors in the Pentagon at the four-star level have spent a huge amount of time thinking them through over the past 12 months.”

These officials—and their peers in the DOJ and DHS—should be able to scale up fast. Because the federal government has such strong surveillance measures, it is very effective at penetrating and eliminating terrorist cells. It has powerful law enforcement agencies and the world’s most well-funded military, meaning that it retains an overwhelming force advantage. As a result, full-scale civil warfare is highly unlikely.

But as a tool of counterinsurgency, force has serious drawbacks. It is tricky to devise operations that target violent extremists without also targeting nonviolent ones. Sometimes, counterinsurgency measures sweep up random civilians. As a result, they can quickly generate backlash, further radicalizing both militant groups and the broader public. And even if every operation is perfectly precise, violence does not have a good track record of changing hearts and minds. 

To truly end an insurgency, the government must address the underlying social conditions that allow terrorism to thrive. It must build trust with alienated communities, which means finding partners that are welcomed by hostile populations even if the government itself is not. Part of why America failed in Iraq and Afghanistan is that in both places, wide swaths of the country simply rejected the authority of the U.S.-backed Iraqi and Afghan governments.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration might not have much more luck fighting insurgents on the home front. The economic dislocation and racism (and other misplaced cultural grievances) that are driving discontent are not easy to fix, especially with our knotty political system. And even if the president can tackle these challenges, the institutions that are trusted by the right—incendiary conservative politicians, Fox News, talk radio grifters, Facebook commentators obsessed with “owning the libs,” and, above all else, Donald Trump—have no incentive to stop peddling lies or to cool their tone. Hate works to their political and financial benefit.

“We can run around and do targeting operations. The FBI can sweep up dudes nonstop,” says Jason Dempsey, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But political violence is, ultimately, a political problem. So long as the GOP remains in thrall to the far right, attackers will have enough support to regenerate. “If you don’t address that,” Dempsey says, “then no amount of tactical action will ever get you ahead of the game.”

Does America have enough extremists to sustain an insurgency? Mason and Kalmoe’s research suggests that tens of millions of Americans view political violence as acceptable. This doesn’t mean that tens of millions of people are willing to commit violence themselves. But they don’t need to be. According to The New York Times, between 15,000 and 20,000 Americans belong to militias. If there’s at least tacit outside backing, that’s more than enough potential actors. “These groups are in the hundreds, and membership is in the five digits,” says Linda Robinson, a longtime foreign correspondent covering the Middle East and the director of the center for Middle East public policy at the RAND Corporation. “This puts it up at a parallel with some of the more significant armed insurgencies in other countries that many of us have spent years studying.”

The raw numbers, of course, do not tell us much about the precise nature of the threat. America’s militia scene may be large, but it is also diverse and chaotic. Some groups, like the Proud Boys, are avowed misogynists. Others, like the Three Percenters, welcome women members. The Oath Keepers recruit heavily from the police. The Boogaloo Boys, meanwhile, encourage violence against them. Without a clear hierarchy and leadership, America’s militias would find it impossible to wage organized warfare against the federal government. That is part of why a redux of the 1860s is currently unlikely.

But international experience suggests that disorganization among insurgents is no impediment to sustained violent activity. Indeed, for many states struggling with serious civil conflict, diffuse terrorist networks are the norm. Both Robinson and Mason, for example, told me that America’s budding domestic terrorism scene in some ways resembles the structure of al-Qaeda. While al-Qaeda may have slipped off many Americans’ radar screens since Osama bin Laden’s death, the movement has survived two decades of sustained assault from international militaries because its dispersed setup—multiple branches with minimal overlapping infrastructure—makes it very difficult to completely dismantle. It is alive and well in the Middle East and, especially, in Africa. Over the past two years, it carried out grisly attacks in Mali, Somalia, and Kenya. 

For counterinsurgency forces, fighting a dispersed network poses special challenges. A clearly defined enemy can certainly surprise, but if it has a stated agenda and staked territory, there are known battle lines. When the opponent is a collection of groups with differing aims, there is an especially wide range of targets. In the United States, those targets include some obvious marks—Democratic politicians, Republicans who won’t help steal elections, Black churches, synagogues, shopping centers popular with immigrants. But antigovernment extremists could also select targets that are more idiosyncratic. Investigators have speculated that the Nashville man who blew up his van near an AT&T facility in December 2020 may have been inspired by conspiracies about 5G technology. In February 2021, a group of anti-vaccine protestors temporarily shut down a mass vaccination facility. The next such demonstration might not be conducted peacefully.

Successful attacks against any of these people or places would have clear negative consequences for national security. But when it comes to our political stability, experts say, the most frightening targets are government properties. “I think what we should be most concerned about here are attempts to take over state institutions by force,” says Yuri Zhukov, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan who studies domestic and international political violence. Doing so, he told me, is usually a prerequisite for seizing and controlling territory: in other words, for starting a more serious civil conflict.

Violent militias are unlikely to successfully occupy the Capitol again, given the complex’s heightened security. They will also struggle to overtake state capitols, which have likewise grown more fortified after armed protests in Lansing and Richmond. But Zhukov and others are concerned about local government buildings, which are much easier for extremists to attack. Indeed, for some of the world’s most successful insurgent groups, municipal facilities were the first sites of violence. 

In Ukraine, for example, residents who opposed the 2014 Euromaidan revolution—in which pro-Western protestors forced the pro-Russian president out of office—began destabilizing the country’s more Russia-aligned eastern provinces by seizing city property. “Protestors come to the square, they get whipped up into a frenzy, then they’re told to march on the local administrative building, like the town council or police station,” Zhukov said, describing what happened. Fueled by regional grievances, opportunistic politicians, and Russian propaganda, they broke down doors, smashed through windows, and streamed into the facilities. Local police, either overwhelmed or sympathetic to the insurgents’ aims, failed to hold them off. The uprising was contagious, and town after town across the country’s eastern flank fell to insurgents. Eventually, it was impossible for the government to dislodge them without turning to its military. Later, once Russian troops got directly involved, it became impossible to dislodge them altogether.

It is hard to envision America’s messy militia scene destabilizing the United States in a similar manner. But it is possible that U.S. militias could quickly grow more organized, or at least more orderly, if even one group took control of a local government building. “Once that happens in one city, people are going to try and replicate it somewhere else,” Zhukov said. “That’s kind of the nightmare scenario here.”

The United States is not Ukraine. It is a far more powerful country with better-equipped and better-trained security forces. And we do not share a border with a hostile adversary that likes to intervene in our politics.

But there are enough parallels to cause concern. Like Ukraine, we are highly polarized. Russia is not as forceful a presence here, but it has been injecting disinformation into our political discourse and trying to destabilize our government. There are emerging linkages between America’s far right and Vladimir Putin’s regime. Certain American political elites are fueling extremism to gain more power. And there are those within our local police departments, federal security services, and the armed forces who sympathize with far-right groups.

“The two most common features of some of the worst civil conflicts are political elites instrumentally looking to use violence and mobilize people in pursuit of their own power ambitions, and divisions within the military,” says Michael Kofman, the director of the Russia studies program at CNA, a nonprofit research and analysis organization, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. To varying degrees, the U.S. has both.

There is a good chance that any sustained right-wing insurgency in America would follow the pattern Ukraine experienced. Militia groups, responding to some perceived tyranny by federal authorities—or perhaps to another liberal political victory—would attempt to seize city government buildings in a safely conservative state. If it worked, extremists elsewhere would attempt to replicate the attack.

But in some countries wracked by civil conflict, violence largely takes place in politically mixed communities. In Iraq, for example, attacks are generally concentrated in the same handful of provinces. According to Robinson, of RAND, these are places “where people have been in conflict for a very long time over basic issues, and where the government is either not addressing the violence or, in some cases, a shadow government is of like mind with the actors.” In 1855, Kansas bled for a similar reason: It was a seam territory, home to people with irreconcilable political differences who followed competing governments of uncertain legitimacy. A modern American insurgency could break out in a similarly split state. 

One candidate for that kind of violence might be Michigan. The swing state has a long history of militia activity, and it has a fiercely divided government. The governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is a Democrat, as are the attorney general and the secretary of state. But Republicans control the state legislature, and they have worked hard to undercut and delegitimize the executive branch. In response to the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state’s 2018 election victories, the legislature spent a lame-duck session passing laws to limit the executive branch’s powers. The legislature has sued the governor repeatedly over COVID-19 regulations. They have threatened to sue her if she allocates federal pandemic relief money without their approval. And they have openly cultivated ties to antigovernment militias. 

This came to a head on October 6, 2020, when the FBI arrested six men for plotting to kidnap Whitmer. These men were radicals, but they were not isolated. At a May 2020 protest over COVID-19 rules, the state senate leader appeared on the same stage as one of the arrested men. It is not difficult to imagine a militia furious at Whitmer in particular, or at Democrats in general, trying to seize a state building with the tacit support of Republican legislators.

Whether the violence began in a safely red state or a contested purple one, the response to any insurrection would follow a similar chain of escalation. Under the U.S. law enforcement system, responsibility for fending off insurgents attacking a local or state government building would first fall to local and state police. In an ideal world, that is where it would end. 

Yet police officers are, on the whole, more conservative than the general population, and militia groups curry favor among law enforcement. Research suggests that well over 1,000 cops might actually belong to right-wing extremist organizations, a figure that does not capture the number that simply sympathize with radicals. Were a right-wing group to seize power, it is possible that the police would not work aggressively to arrest insurgents.

But even if the police fought the mob, they might struggle. Due to lax American gun laws, most militia groups are exceptionally well armed. The connections between law enforcement, the military, and extremist outfits mean that some militia members are also quite well trained. Dozens of the people involved in the January 6 riot were active or former members of the police and the military, and many employed technologies that are frequently used by those in uniform. Others used common military combat techniques. 

If local and state police were unable to stop extremists, or if insurgents targeted a federal building, the national government could take charge. There are a number of armed federal agencies that could potentially claim jurisdiction. In 1992, for example, the FBI commanded federal and local officers as they stood off against a white nationalist in Idaho accused of illegally selling weapons. The next year, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives raided a compound in Waco, Texas, following reports that residents were stockpiling banned arms. When the raid devolved into a gunfight that killed five ATF agents, the FBI came in. The Department of Defense (DOD) even played a role, providing the FBI with specialized equipment.

In isolated instances, this is almost always enough. Sometimes, it can be too much. In its attempt to flush residents out of the Waco compound, the FBI accidentally set off a horrifying fire that killed almost everyone inside. The dead quickly became martyrs for antigovernment extremists. Timothy McVeigh said the disaster was one of the reasons he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.

But in cases where disorder becomes widespread, federal agencies might not be the best fit. If a militia took control of more than one government building or started multiple violent riots, the governor might call on the National Guard. There is very recent precedent for this step, albeit not against the far right. In the rioting after George Floyd’s murder, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz deployed the National Guard in Minneapolis to try to stop the unrest. This is not a positive memory. It involved a justified protest being co-opted by violent actors, resulting in a forceful government response. But the Guard did eventually restore order. 

Yet if, as in Ukraine, a successful insurrection led to either copycats or a loss of territorial control, a state’s National Guard might not be enough. The governor might ask the president to invoke the Insurrection Act, federalizing the Guard and bringing in additional military forces. This, too, would have precedent. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act at the request of California Governor Pete Wilson to try to stop the L.A. riots.

It’s also possible that the president would invoke the Insurrection Act without first receiving a governor’s request. If widespread violence broke out in a GOP-controlled state, the governor could refuse to fight it or, worse, could order state law enforcement to side with insurgents. With the state abdicating its responsibility, the White House could feel compelled to step in.

That might seem unlikely, but it has happened within the living memory of many Americans. In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the state National Guard to prevent Black students from enrolling in Little Rock’s Central High School. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne Division to protect the teenagers. On September 30, 1962, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett ordered the state highway patrol to withdraw from the University of Mississippi so an angry mob of segregationists could stop James Meredith from enrolling in classes. The rioters shot at federal marshals sent to protect Meredith, attacked journalists, and beat up bystanders. Later that day, President John F. Kennedy federalized Mississippi’s National Guard and sent in U.S. Army units to quell the unrest. The military succeeded, but only after two people were killed and hundreds injured.

Ugly as these incidents were, they were discrete. There were no cross-state riots, no cascading acts of violence. But in the worst-case, Ukraine-style scenario—in which thousands of insurgents seized buildings, destroyed infrastructure, and simultaneously carried out other attacks across multiple parts of the country—the military would have to get more involved. In this situation, the president might direct the Joint Special Operations Command, the agency that chases terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, to look for domestic insurgents and put down attacks.

These troops would make fast work of any insurrectionist brushfire they were sent to contain. Tactically, special operations units are extraordinarily proficient. But like in the Middle East, that work would result in mass casualties and horrifying violations of human rights. In attempting to preserve the territorial integrity of the United States, the military might rip it apart. If it succeeded in maintaining the authority of the federal government, it could come at the expense of the rule of law.

Leaders of the U.S. Northern Command, the military branch that controls the DOD’s homeland defense efforts, did not respond to questions about planning for domestic conflict. Neither did the current assistant defense secretary for homeland defense—the DOD official who oversees domestic operations. In response to written questions about their concerns, plans, and capabilities, DHS and FBI spokespeople simply emphasized that they were paying close attention to domestic terrorism and would work collaboratively to combat it. In an interview, Mike Dugas, the provost marshal for the National Guard Bureau, told me the Guard has not done national-level planning for a counterinsurgency mission.

But Dugas said there was “heightened awareness” among the Guard about the threat of violent domestic extremists, and that it’s possible individual governors have taken steps with their own Guard to plan for an insurgency. Former DOD officials told me they considered ways in which to assist civilian law enforcement if domestic agencies needed specialized technology or expertise. And though these officials did not map out broad domestic tactical operations during their tenures, they suggested that the department’s thinking might be shifting.

“We did not, so far as I know, have a plan for an outbreak of a civil war,” said Tom Atkin, who served as acting assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense from September 2015 to January 2017. “And I guess that part of it is, prior to Trump’s presidency, who ever thought that would happen?”

The good news is that most of the people I interviewed thought that, while we must prepare for the worst, a nationwide insurgency remains unlikely. For starters, America’s robust intelligence capabilities make it difficult for would-be terrorists to carry out plans. The men who plotted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer were caught before they could act. So were the Boogaloo Boys who sought to set off explosives at a Black Lives Matter protest. The January 6 insurrection was a high-profile national security failure. But even then, the government received warnings. With a newly attentive administration, it is less likely that future plotters will be able to act.

More importantly, the country has in recent memory faced domestic extremism and brought it to heel without spiraling violence. During the 1990s, militia groups and radicalized individuals in the Pacific Northwest, the Ozarks, and other locations emphatically rejected the authority of the federal government. They stockpiled weapons. They declared themselves “sovereign citizens” and refused to pay taxes. They set up kangaroo courts where they issued decrees and placed liens on the property of local authorities. None of these had the force of law, but they were intimidating. And some extremists were able to co-opt—at least to a limited degree—local police forces. 

But after the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI began a sweeping crackdown. They infiltrated, broke up, and shrank many of the country’s militias by arresting members who had engaged in criminal activity. Other members were merely taken in for questioning, but the experience was frightening enough to discourage further militia involvement. Many veterans of this fight are still in the government. The man who led the successful prosecution of McVeigh, Merrick Garland, is now the attorney general. He has made it clear that he will hold domestic terrorists to account.

Perhaps the most hopeful historical precedent, however, comes from the 1960s, the last time a presidential administration made fighting discrimination and expanding democracy central to its agenda. Much like today, these plans encountered fierce opposition. White people marched and rioted to stop integration. Right-wing politicians denounced the federal government as tyrannical and promised to fight to stop its plans. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” Alabama Governor George Wallace declared in 1963. Later that year, he stood in front of a school to stop Black students from entering, even after Kennedy sent in federal troops. 

But eventually, and without the use of force, Wallace stepped out of the way. So did most other white southerners. Black people enrolled in previously all-white schools. They began sitting at the front of buses. Between 1960 and 1970, Black southerners went from being mostly disenfranchised to more than 65 percent registered to vote.

That’s not to say the end of Jim Crow was a peaceful affair. Black people and their allies were spat on and beaten up. Forty-one activists were killed. But given the rhetoric of the time, experts say it is remarkable that more people didn’t die. “If you took these yahoos at their word, and not just individuals but politicians, you’d say, ‘Oh God, I don’t know, 10,000 [killed] or something,’ ” said Robert Mickey, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan who studies the democratization of the American South. “But no, they were full of it.”

Yet in some ways, the present moment feels more frightening than the 1960s. Part of that is geographic. Today’s conflict is national, rather than concentrated in the South. Part of it is polarization. The Democratic Party of the 1960s included both Wallace, southern apartheid’s most voracious defender, and Lyndon B. Johnson, its most powerful elected opponent. There were clearer lines of communication and a joint political tent. Now, the conflict over minority rights, the rule of law, and basic principles of democracy is mapped neatly onto parties. Unlike in the 1990s, when right-wing extremism was overwhelmingly disavowed by national Republicans, the modern GOP actively courts the far right.

And the 1960s and 1990s are not the only historical analogs. In 1876, an armed militia of Democrats successfully pressured Mississippi’s Republican governor to resign. In 1898, an angry mob of white supremacists in North Carolina seized Wilmington’s city hall and forced the Republican mayor out of office. These were not isolated incidents. The entire collapse of Reconstruction was an extraordinary victory for right-wing insurgents over fatigued federal forces and their regional allies.

We should learn from this failure. Coercion can be an essential tool in fighting insurrections, but Reconstruction’s demise shows that insurgencies cannot be permanently defeated by simply applying force. This is a lesson that the U.S. military has recently rediscovered while mired in the Middle East. American soldiers could quickly topple the Baathist and Taliban regimes, yet without continuous, widespread occupation, they could not stop Iraq from devolving into chaos and the Taliban from slowly regaining power. To defeat an insurgency, government actors must ultimately change the political beliefs of a hostile population. 

That means today’s democrats—lower- and upper-case d alike—must enact policies that win over voters, restore their trust in the government, and ultimately reduce discrimination. This will require legislation to mitigate economic inequality and improve living standards for everyone. The American Rescue Act—which is expected to cut poverty by a third, fight the pandemic, and stimulate the economy—is a positive first step. Raising the minimum wage and fixing our infrastructure would be a wonderful second and third. Actions that give local communities more power, like the freedom to set up municipal broadband networks (something prohibited in many states by laws passed at the behest of cable companies), would also prove valuable. The Biden administration could more fully unrig the economy by using competition policy to break up giant corporate conglomerates. And in the long run, regulations that further integration would help to lessen racial animus and the violence it inspires.

But to truly stop the spread of extremism, economic and social reform will not be enough. So long as the Republican Party continues to peddle lies and hate, extremist groups will find political cover. Unfortunately, the average Republican member of Congress has more to fear from primary challengers than from Democrats, and denouncing the far right opens officials up to accusations that they are not sufficiently supportive of the Trumpist cause. Embracing it, by contrast, helps them stay in office. The result is escalating rhetoric that further inflames the base.

Democrats are not powerless to stop the GOP’s vicious cycle of radicalization. If the Senate can pass many of the critical, pro-democracy reforms contained in H.R. 1—the House’s For the People Act—they might be able to change the Republican Party’s underlying electoral calculus. The gerrymandering ban would force more GOP politicians to compete in genuine swing districts. Provisions that expand access to the franchise could make them reach out to traditionally liberal demographics. Combined, these changes might just cause Republican politicians to moderate.

But without them, the odds of a shift are long. Republicans will have the upper hand in redistricting, leading to a new, disproportionately conservative congressional map. The party’s ongoing efforts to keep minorities from voting will move full steam ahead. Maybe a robust pandemic recovery and strong economy will be enough to lock the GOP out of federal power for years, forcing some kind of independent reckoning. But an unreconstructed Republican Party could capture the White House, again while losing the popular vote, and then use its national power to more thoroughly rig elections. 

If that happens, hell could really break lose. A few blue states might try to secede. Leftist militias, now a relative rarity, might expand. Indeed, even moderate liberals could embrace violence. It isn’t hard to see why. If voting can no longer bring about political change, people tend to reach for alternatives.

Some progressive groups are already arming themselves. At least one of them, based in Washington State, has named itself after John Brown. The homage is instructive; Brown took to weapons after concluding that abolition would be impossible without them. He was tired, he explained, of the antislavery movement’s commitment to rhetoric in the face of slaveholder violence. “These men are all talk,” Brown said of his compatriots, shortly before moving to Kansas. “What we need is action—action!” 

The echoes of the 1850s are loud, and grim.

“There are not a lot of cases of highly socially and politically polarized countries that depolarize without something horrific happening,” said Mickey, of the University of Michigan. “We don’t have a playbook.”

The post America’s Next Insurgency appeared first on Washington Monthly.

About two and a half years ago, as media speculation about where Amazon would locate its second headquarters reached a fever pitch, The Onion, a satirical website, decided to make its own projection. “‘You Are All Inside Amazon’s Second Headquarters,’ Jeff Bezos Announces to Horrified Americans as Massive Dome Envelops Nation,” the site declared. The story described a world in which Amazon divided the United States into segments of its supply chain. “The entire state of Texas will be replaced with a 269,000-square-mile facility used exclusively to house cardboard boxes, tape, and inflatable packaging materials,” the authors wrote. “A large swath of the Midwest will soon be razed to make way for a single enormous Amazon Fulfillment Center.”

It was, of course, a joke. But based on reporting from the veteran ProPublica journalist Alec MacGillis, it’s a joke with more than just a ring of truth. In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One–Click America, MacGillis argues that Amazon’s dramatic expansion is Exhibit A for America’s economic unraveling. Armed with stark statistics and moving anecdotes, MacGillis illustrates how the retail giant pushes regional stores out of business. He shows how the company extracts tax incentives from desperate local governments in exchange for poor-paying warehouse jobs. Amazon has “segmented the country into different sorts of places, each with their assigned rank, income, and purpose,” he writes. It has altered “the landscape of opportunity in America—the options that lay before people, what they could aspire to do with their lives.” 

It is a damning and powerful assessment. But Amazon isn’t MacGillis’s only, or even most fundamental, subject. Instead, he treats the company as both a cause and a symptom of a bigger problem: skyrocketing regional inequality in the United States. 

Over the past 40 years, certain parts of America—mostly along the coasts—have become far more prosperous than others. This trend has not received as much attention as rising income disparities, but its political consequences have been similarly grave. Regional inequality has fueled authoritarian nationalism in the U.S. It has concentrated well-educated liberals in economically vibrant, overwhelmingly Democratic states. It has left white working-class voters elsewhere embittered and detached from mainstream politics. After decades of job losses and wage stagnation, it’s not surprising that some people in struggling counties embraced a candidate who promised to restore a halcyon era (“Make America great again”) and blamed their challenges on groups many were already prejudiced against (minorities). Donald Trump’s path to the presidency was paved in part by declining economic opportunity in the Midwest.

MacGillis provides readers with a useful primer on how this happened. Beginning in the late 1970s, politicians gradually stopped enforcing fair competition policies: the many laws designed to create an even economic playing field for different businesses and different parts of the country. Regulators started neglecting antitrust statutes, allowing a few companies in each sector to expand rapidly by purchasing or crushing their competitors. They loosened restrictions that had prevented chain stores, like CVS and Walmart, from dramatically underselling smaller rivals. And they eliminated regulations that made it equally easy to transport goods to and from all parts of America. “Profits and growth opportunities once spread across the country,” MacGillis writes. Now, they cluster in places where the dominant companies are based.

These trends are all bigger than any one business. But it’s easy to see why MacGillis chose to focus on Amazon specifically. The company owns a third of the country’s data storage market. It controls somewhere between roughly 40 and 50 percent of America’s e-commerce market, more than five times the share of its nearest rival. That makes Amazon both singularly powerful among U.S. businesses and representative of winner-takes-all corporate America at large. Together, Facebook and Google control more than 50 percent of the online advertising market. Like Amazon and its neighboring company Microsoft, they are headquartered only a few towns apart. Comcast and Charter, both located along the Acela corridor, collectively own a majority of the U.S. cable market.

These companies haven’t just survived the current recession. They’ve thrived. While the employment rate has gone down since COVID-19 arrived in America, the S&P 500 has gone up by more than 15 percent. All but one of the five richest companies have seen their value grow, including Amazon. Indeed, Amazon’s stock has increased by an astonishing 80 percent over the past 12 months. MacGillis writes that the company is reporting record profits.

The distribution of Amazon’s newfound wealth, however, has been deeply uneven. The company is hiring warehouse workers across America, but these low-paying jobs require famously long shifts, involve strenuous and monotonous work, and offer little autonomy. Meanwhile, Amazon is also expanding its Seattle and Washington, D.C., offices—adding well-paid, white-collar jobs in elaborately sculpted buildings with rooftop dog parks, onsite botanical gardens, and discounted child care.

Geographically, the United States was once an equitable place. Between the 1930s and the late 1970s, per capita earnings in almost every part of the country gradually converged. In 1933, the average income in the southwestern United States was roughly 60 percent of the national average. By 1979, it was approximately the same. During the same period, New England fell from being 1.4 times richer than the rest of the country to just above average. In 1978, the average income in the Detroit metro area was on par with that of New York City and its suburbs. Drawing on findings from this magazine, MacGillis notes that the 25 richest metropolitan areas in 1980 included Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Cleveland.

This equality was hard won. Starting at the turn of the twentieth century and accelerating during the New Deal, the federal government enacted antimonopoly laws to prevent extreme regional inequality. Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, it blocked mergers that today wouldn’t draw any attention—including one between two shoe companies that, together, controlled just over 2 percent of the nation’s footwear market—in order to keep chain stores from colonizing the country. It prohibited wholesalers and manufacturers from giving bulk discounts to these chains, which would put community retailers at a serious disadvantage. When national politicians spoke about the need to help small businesses, they meant it.

But like anything achieved through vigilant enforcement, this parity was easily erased. Beginning under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and continuing under Ronald Reagan, the federal government started ignoring or outright repealing fair competition regulations. As a result, the fortunes of America’s regions diverged. The St. Louis metro area, for example, had 23 Fortune 500 companies in 1980, but in recent decades most have been acquired by larger corporations or otherwise pushed off the list. Today, it has only eight. By contrast, New York’s per capita income in 1980 was 80 percent higher than the national average. By 2013, after years of mergers in banking and finance, that figure was 172 percent. In 2018, 20 of the top 25 wealthiest cities were on the coasts.

As businesses departed from large swaths of the interior, many Americans were left without good economic options. Fewer businesses meant less competition among employers to drive up pay. The main employers that have moved in as most companies moved out—retailers like Walmart, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, and Dollar General—are notorious for their low-wage business models. The bulk of the money each store makes flows out of the local community and into the company’s headquarters, almost always located far away.

But perhaps no growing employer is as notorious as Amazon. According to MacGillis, the company has hired hundreds of thousands of new warehouse workers in the past five years. It has added more than 175,000 during the pandemic alone, even as thousands of small retailers have shut down. The indignity of life in the company’s warehouses is well documented, but MacGillis makes space to describe the dangers. He recounts how one worker was killed after being crushed by a forklift, and how another was killed by a tractor. He covers various attempts by warehouse workers, some with past union experience, to organize for safer conditions. None of those attempts go well. (Hopefully, the ongoing union drive in Alabama will end with more success.)

Massive retailers with low prices, like Amazon, are not just a poor replacement for local employers. They are part of why local employers shut down. Inexpensive products are nice for customers, but they drive community stores straight out of business. And Amazon has tools beyond low pricing that it uses to squeeze competitors. The company is the main, and for many small businesses the only, way to sell products online. It capitalizes on this by forcing vendors on its platform to hand over a hefty percentage of their profits—usually 15 percent—for every sale, a transaction fee that MacGillis compares to a tax. Amazon also manufactures goods itself, often copying its vendors’ most popular products based on its privileged look at their sales data. Free of the same fee (the company doesn’t tax itself), Amazon sells these knockoffs at a lower price than the originals, driving the real creators into insolvency. As a result, money that would have gone to small businesses instead winds up with Amazon.

While consolidation has devastated most of America, it has been a boon for Amazon’s hometown. Once a manufacturing city as distressed as present-day Detroit, Seattle has become a rich tech mecca. The metro area has a median household income of $94,000, making it the ninth wealthiest in the country. Its population has roughly doubled since 1970. Not all of this can be attributed to Amazon; Boeing drew engineers to the area, and the city’s growth began in earnest when Bill Gates and Paul Allen set up shop to build Microsoft. But there’s no doubt that Amazon is now the city’s crowning jewel. It has accounted for 30 percent of all new jobs in Seattle over the past decade, most of which are well paid.

For Seattle’s boosters, this growth is a testament to the city’s inherent virtues. “From its beginning, Seattle showed a do-whatever-it-takes resilience,” the Seattle Times columnist Ron Judd wrote in 2016. He acknowledged that there was “a little bit of dumb luck” involved in the city’s success, but ultimately praised its location, lifestyle, and innovative spirit for attracting people like Jeff Bezos. The success of Seattle, Judd wrote, is heavily tied to “history, geography, education and, yes, some creative capitalizing on all the gifts the place was given.” 

MacGillis implicitly rebuts such arguments. Baltimore’s Atlantic waterfront, he points out, could not save it from postindustrial economic erosion, nor could St. Louis’s central location. The author outlines the careers of retailer entrepreneurs from overlooked metros—like El Paso, Texas—who clearly possess the enterprising talents that libertarians believe made Bezos a billionaire. They were eventually brought to heel, in no small part because of Amazon. 

The truth is that Seattle has prospered because Gates and Allen, both Seattle natives, set up their company in the area during the late 1970s, when it was still possible to build a successful corporation in most American cities. And once Seattle had Microsoft, it became easier to attract other tech companies. But now, without fair competition rules, other cities don’t have the same opportunities Seattle once had. It’s hard for new retailers to grow when they have to contend with Amazon.

Yet even Seattle is suffering. Its housing and living costs have skyrocketed, pushing many middle-class and working-class residents out. Soaring rents have pushed some of them onto the street. By the end of 2017, Seattle had the third-largest homeless population in the country, after Los Angeles and New York City. The changes have disproportionately harmed Black residents, whose median income has fallen since 2000 even without accounting for inflation. Seattle, MacGillis writes, is “proof that extreme regional inequality was unhealthy not only for places that were losing out in the winner-take-all economy, but also for those who were the runaway victors.”

The author chronicles the city’s hapless attempts to fix the nasty side effects of its hyper-prosperity. It passed a tiny income tax followed by a tiny tax on large businesses in order to address housing shortages and improve public transportation. The first was successfully challenged in court by coalitions representing the city’s rich. The latter was attacked by a collection of big companies, including Amazon, which threatened to cancel a planned Seattle building expansion if the law wasn’t repealed. Amazon also helped bankroll an expensive ballot initiative to eliminate the tax. Ultimately, the city council repealed it first.

The tax exemptions that less prosperous cities offer Amazon in exchange for becoming the site of a new fulfillment center are even more degrading. While local authorities view the subsidies as the price of keeping their economies alive, MacGillis suggests that the tax cuts may ultimately cost cities more than the new jobs are worth. Emergency service departments in two Ohio counties, for example, have had to contend with a steady stream of 911 calls for warehouse injuries, an expense that Amazon creates but does not pay for, because it is exempt from each county’s property taxes. The company’s distribution centers build up truck traffic on nearby highways, but Amazon is excused from paying the taxes that fund roadway maintenance.

That so many local governments kowtow to Amazon is a depressing statement about political power in America. But even if these places—be they Seattle or Dayton—could muster the political will to take on the company, they simply don’t have the tools to win. The affordability crisis threatening rich metros and the hollowing out of poor ones are both by-products of concentrating economic power in a handful of cities. And that’s something that only the federal government can fix.

The good news is that there are national policies that could rebalance our economy. By reviving underused competition policies, the Biden administration has the power to distribute wealth much more fairly. There’s no shortage of consolidation in the American economy, from gigantic agribusinesses to hospital chains. But for any would-be trustbuster, Amazon must be at the top of the list. At a minimum, the administration should fight to prohibit the company from both owning America’s dominant online marketplace and selling its own products in it. Better yet, it could spin off Amazon’s data storage business, its smart home business, and its many other non-search components into independent companies. Better still, it could break up Amazon’s marketplace outright.

The government has many other tools it can use to better distribute opportunity. It could bring back regulations that made it impossible for big businesses to get better deals from suppliers than small ones could. It could reconstruct the dismantled Civil Aeronautics Board, an institution that kept airfare prices roughly the same on a per-mile basis wherever one went and made sure small and midsize cities received adequate service. It can re-create the Interstate Commerce Commission, which did the same thing for passenger trains and freight transportation. Those transit regulations enabled new small businesses to thrive in midsize heartland cities rather than just existing economic hubs. 

Some of these steps require new legislation. But many are possible through executive action under existing, if currently unenforced, competition statutes. Either way, there’s hope. Democrats have unified control of the government, and progressives are increasingly concerned about concentrated economic power. The U.S. House of Representatives, multiple state attorneys general, and the Department of Justice are all investigating anticompetitive practices by Amazon. The latter two are already suing Facebook and Google.

But the Democratic Party does not have the best recent track record when it comes to curbing corporate power. Democrats dominate Seattle’s government, and they ultimately killed a law that mildly inconvenienced Amazon. The Obama administration did virtually nothing to stop the mergers, acquisitions, and other actions that fueled retail consolidation and helped give rise to Big Tech. As MacGillis points out, many of Obama’s officials went on to prominent, powerful roles in major tech companies. Jay Carney, one of the former president’s press secretaries, now heads public policy for Amazon.

It is still too soon to say whether Joe Biden will take the aggressive antitrust positions favored by progressive activists or the lenient approach of the president he served beside. His first Federal Trade Commission nominee, Lina Khan, is an antitrust expert who advocates for curbing the power of large corporations. Her selection was a promising sign. So was choosing the Big Tech critic Tim Wu to work on technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council.

But the most important positions are yet to be filled, and progressives are worried that his early choices will soon be counterbalanced by monopoly-friendly personnel. Should Biden ultimately opt to follow Obama’s path, it might be because he simply does not recognize the economic damage oligopolistic companies have caused. If so, he would do well to read MacGillis’s book. But it is also possible that Biden and his team are aware, but their interest in fighting back will be tempered by fund-raising concerns, a belief that challenging monopolists would be too risky for the economy, or simply a desire to tackle other priorities.

If that is the case, the administration should consider the political consequences of continuing on our current path. The steady draining of wealth and opportunity from large parts of America is part of why many onetime Democratic strongholds, like Michigan, are now swing states, and why many onetime swing states, like Missouri, are now Republican strongholds. Well-educated liberals will not move to these places unless there are economic opportunities. The remaining white, non-college-educated residents will continue to feel economically embittered.

With thin congressional majorities, competition policy may be one of the few tools Biden can really wield to restructure America’s political economy. He must use it.

The post Can Amazon Be Stopped? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The agents arrived in the middle of July. Dressed in camouflage and sporting body armor, they drove around Portland, Oregon, in unmarked vans and apprehended people who were protesting police brutality. They came seemingly at random, late at night, and patrolled far from the federal property that, ostensibly, they had been sent to protect. One protestor said that the agents pulled his beanie over his eyes after shoving him into the back of their van, making it impossible to see where he was being taken. 

Conducted at the behest of Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, the arrests of the protestors prompted widespread condemnation from Oregon activists and politicians. “This is the stuff of fascist regimes,” Senator Ron Wyden said. The Portland City Council voted to ban local police forces from cooperating with DHS agents. The mayor, Ted Wheeler, told the DHS secretary that he was very concerned about the “violence federal officers brought to our streets”—and that he wanted them out of the city. At first, the Trump administration refused. But after mounting objections, it eventually gave in. Liberals breathed a sigh of relief. They had made it through what had perhaps been, to date, the scariest attack by Donald Trump against American democracy. 

To date. On November 17, after cries of fraud from Trump and state GOP leaders, two Republican officials in Wayne County, Michigan, voted to not certify Detroit’s election results. The maneuver, if successful, would have disenfranchised an overwhelmingly Black city and stolen the state’s Electoral College votes from Biden. Trump and Michigan GOP officials cheered. But, once again, the party’s actions spurred outcry, both from national and local activists. After three hours, the officials gave in.

Though these efforts failed, they reveal something intrinsic about the GOP’s authoritarianism that, relative to its xenophobia, gerrymandering, and attacks on voting rights, hasn’t drawn much scrutiny: During their most autocratic moments, Republicans often target municipalities. During the Black Lives Matter protests, Trump sent the military into Washington, D.C. In addition to Portland, the president sent armed DHS officers to at least a dozen other municipalities. That included larger cities such as Buffalo, New York, and Kansas City, Missouri. It also included smaller ones like Port Huron, Michigan, and GOP-governed Pearland, Texas. The president called for swing states to toss out ballots not just from Detroit but from Philadelphia and Milwaukee as well.

In the public imagination, Republicans have traditionally been the party that promotes local choice and liberty, and the Democratic Party has been the one that regulates from on high. The latter earned this reputation in the 1960s, when it passed landmark legislation overturning state and local laws that mandated racial segregation and suppressed Black people’s voting rights. The party bolstered it in the 1970s, when Democrats in Congress drove the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, both of which imposed restrictions on local zoning and land use in service of protecting the natural world. 

Though these and other proud liberal achievements were essential and validated as constitutional, they caused a massive political backlash that enabled the rise of movement conservatism. Ronald Reagan swept into power promising “to put an end to the merry-go-round where our money becomes Washington’s money, to be spent by the states and cities exactly the way the federal bureaucrats tell them to.” Ever since, the GOP has centered part of its brand on reverence for local decision-making. In his campaign platform, George W. Bush emphasized the need to provide “flexibility and control to states and local communities,” especially on education. While rolling back fair housing regulations, the Trump administration proclaimed that it was “protecting American communities from excessive Federal overreach and preserving local decision-making.” Republicans even smear as tyranny policies they had a hand in creating, including key parts of the environmental statutes of the 1970s (signed by then President Richard Nixon).

But, in truth, Republicans have never really cared about “local decision-making” as a principle. Reagan threatened to revoke highway funding from any state that didn’t raise its drinking age to 21. Under Bush, Republicans forced many municipalities to weaken regulations on consumer safety. Trump tried to withhold millions of dollars from localities that wouldn’t cooperate with federal immigration officers. Republicans, like Democrats, are quite happy to restrict communities when it suits their purposes. Yet rather than doing so to protect individual rights like voting, or defend against market externalities like pollution, Republicans tend to do so in service of social conservatism or what they see as economic rights—which in practice means the rights of large corporations. 

This has become especially pronounced in the past decade, as Republicans have used their dominance of state governments to take away powers from communities at breakneck pace. Under the auspices of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a consortium of corporate lobbyists and right-wing state legislators, Republicans have made life easy for big businesses by making it difficult for localities. The vast majority of states with a Republican legislature and governor now have laws prohibiting, or “preempting,” municipalities from raising their minimum wage. Many, like Louisiana, bar towns from restricting oil drilling and gas fracking. At the behest of telecommunications monopolists, some GOP-run states, such as Mississippi, have started banning localities from setting up their own broadband internet networks. With the encouragement of religious conservatives, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina have killed local ordinances prohibiting LGBTQ discrimination. And last July, with the support of the state’s restaurant association, Republican Governor Brian Kemp blocked multiple cities in Georgia from implementing mask requirements.

Democrats are still happy to impose on cities and towns. In a 2017 study, the political scientists Mallory SoRelle and Alexis Walker found that Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to pass preemption statutes at the federal level (though more recent research shows that state preemption statutes are much more likely to pass when Republicans have unified control of government than when Democrats do). But when Democrats preempt, they generally do so in a very different way. According to SoRelle and Walker, Democrats tend to restrict local authority by setting regulatory floors. Republicans do so by creating regulatory ceilings. The former is inherently less restrictive than the latter. For example, the Card Act of 2009, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by President Barack Obama, created baseline federal consumer protections for credit cards but left state and local governments free to go further. When the GOP caps minimum wages, it gives localities an extremely narrow band—or sometimes no band—in which to operate.

Indeed, if you look back far enough, it becomes clear that liberals have a long history of actively empowering municipalities. In the Progressive Era, Democrats used federal power to make upgrades for local governments, changes that are now largely forgotten but at the time were much appreciated. They established, for example, a federal Office of Markets in 1913 that offered direct assistance to struggling municipally run food bazaars, where most people shopped at the time. That tradition carried over into the New Deal era. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the ur-Democrat, may be best remembered for the Social Security Act, but his reforms consciously helped communities as distinct entities. To bring electricity to rural America, he created the Rural Electrification Administration, which offered loans to small towns that were cut off or price gouged by large electrical utilities. He and his successor, Harry Truman, also signed multiple antitrust laws, like the Celler-Kefauver Act, that protected local economies from being dominated by retailers in distant cities. 

But it’s been decades since progressives have tapped this strategy of supporting localities. While they have reliably championed federal aid to local governments in times of emergency, Democrats have mostly focused their energies on nationwide projects directed and run from Washington, such as expanding health insurance. That’s true of Joe Biden’s policy vision, too, such as his plan for massive investments in green energy. These are important endeavors, worth working hard for—even if they will be extremely difficult to achieve without solid Democratic control of Congress. 

Yet at a time when Republicans are openly trying to suppress the freedom of local communities to govern themselves, Biden and his party have an obligation to fight back. That won’t be easy without strong majorities in Congress. But by rediscovering the older progressive tradition of using the federal government to help cities and towns, Biden will find that there is quite a bit he can do by executive action. 

Democrats will also discover that this strategy is not only good policy but also good politics. Poll after poll shows that local governments are far more trusted than the federal government. In 2020, for example, Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans—including 69 percent of Republicans—have at least a “fair amount” of trust in local governments, compared to 43 percent in the federal executive branch and 33 percent in Congress. A 2018 Pew Research Center study found that 69 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats have favorable opinions of their local governments, far above the 44 percent and 28 percent, respectively, who view the federal government positively. That dim view of Washington has long been a liability for Democrats, who must find ways to improve the public’s trust in our national government. Using federal power to help local communities could achieve that—and it might turn a liability into an advantage. 

Public opinion might not stop GOP senators from voting down a Democratic-sponsored bill that, for example, gives towns the freedom to set up their own broadband networks rather than rely on the poor service of telecom monopolies. But when Republicans do so they will pay a reputational price, while burnishing the image of Democrats as the party of local freedom. Democrats will make even greater gains when, through Biden’s executive power, they fund public broadband providers anyway.

Blue cities in red states likely stand to gain the most from such policies, given that they have been the most aggressively manhandled by conservative legislators. But there are plenty of small towns in red America that would benefit as well, and their citizens would be surprised to see Democrats fighting on their side. The great debate in electoral politics on the left has long been whether to prioritize policies that energize the base or ones that have a chance of pulling in swing voters. Championing local empowerment allows Democrats to do both. 

Infrastructure

Perhaps the one area in which even hardened Washington insiders say there is room for the two parties to collaborate is infrastructure. Despite his talk about the need for new infrastructure spending, Trump had neither the desire nor the skills to pull off any kind of legislative compromise. But we can be sure that Biden will try. 

His first address to a joint session of Congress would be the perfect time for Biden to announce that, as president, he is going to defend the interests of local communities. Transportation policy is a great opening foray. Under present law, roughly 70 percent of all federal transportation dollars are automatically routed through states. Biden should propose letting municipalities and regional government bodies, like those that build and manage mass transit systems, apply directly for almost all federal transportation funding. This would place local and regional entities on an equal footing with state transportation departments. That’s essential, because in many states, departments of transportation are effectively run by rural lawmakers who are exclusively interested in funding highways.

One small but telling example is how dollars from the federal government’s Transportation Alternatives Program get spent. Each year, the program sends $850 million to states for bike lanes, sidewalks, and other pedestrian improvement projects. It’s exactly the kind of funding that many municipalities, including downtowns in otherwise rural places, desperately want and need. But loopholes inserted by congressional Republicans allow governors to easily divert the money elsewhere. Between 2012 and 2017, roughly $635 million in TAP funding was moved out of the program, away from biking and pedestrian projects, and toward roadway upgrades. Tens of millions more was simply not spent, either returned to the federal government or disappearing from existence. (The GOP leads the vast majority of states where both the diversion and the wasting have taken place.) Letting localities apply to the federal government directly, rather than relying on states to do the right thing, would cut back on the leakage.

The obvious vehicle for putting localities and states on an equal footing is the next federal transportation bill, which Congress must craft and pass early in Biden’s term. Republicans will almost certainly refuse. Altering the funding rules could take years of negotiations, even with a heavily Democratic Congress. But in trying to fix this system, Biden would have at least signaled to cities and towns across the country whose side he is on. 

He also has ways to act alone. Shortly before he left office, Obama signed legislation that expanded two investment programs in the federal Department of Transportation: TIFIA (named for its enabling legislation, the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act); and the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing program, or RRIF. Together, the programs have billions of dollars to finance everything from bike lanes and sidewalks to light rail and train stations using long-term, low-interest loans. Localities can apply for funding without asking their states. 

Trump ignored both programs entirely. Biden shouldn’t. Instead, he should direct his Department of Transportation to use them liberally, to loudly invite localities from across the country to apply, and to personally hand over the resources to local officials in Rose Garden ceremonies.

Biden could also make direct spending more local friendly. Right now, the Department of Transportation’s roadway advice—followed by many state transportation departments—is largely tailored to making traffic flow as quickly as possible, irrespective of where the traffic is. Federal guidance should instead explicitly tell state departments to ask communities what kinds of roads they want. Even very rural places prefer slower roads in their downtowns. The reasoning experts offer makes sense: In addition to being safer for pedestrians, slower traffic is more likely to lead people to stop, walk around, and patronize businesses.

These changes would help more American towns—and, by extension, the people who live in them—develop the kind of infrastructure they want and need. And if the tweaks came over strong Republican opposition, it would signal to towns both large and small that it is liberals who care about helping communities.

Environment and Energy

Biden made climate change a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. His $2 trillion plan, the most ambitious climate initiative ever released by a major-party presidential nominee, managed to win praise from both establishment environmentalists and younger, more progressive activists. Unfortunately, it could run into a brick wall—the Senate. But that shouldn’t deter him. If Democrats in Congress cannot break a filibuster or pass major climate legislation through reconciliation, the president-elect should tell Mitch McConnell (and maybe Joe Manchin) that he will do what his predecessor did when Congress wouldn’t fund the border wall: declare a national emergency.

The GOP won’t be moved for a variety of reasons. But if one is that they believe Biden is bluffing, the president-elect should prove them wrong. As Biden noted in his campaign platform, climate change is “an existential threat” where “the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale.” He therefore shouldn’t hesitate to act in a sweeping and dramatic fashion. Declaring an emergency under the National Emergencies Act would free Biden to redirect some military spending to renewable energy projects, like new solar power installations. That might seem like a gross misuse of Department of Defense spending, but the Pentagon and its senior officials have repeatedly referred to climate change as a serious national security threat. In 2018, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote that climate change causes “great devastation requiring humanitarian assistance/disaster relief, which the U.S. military certainly conducts routinely.” It’s entirely reasonable for Biden to use military money to address this unfolding crisis. The Pentagon already does.

But, critically, Biden could use the emergency powers to help local communities. Since 1991, more than 600 municipal governments have developed plans to control greenhouse gas emissions. In 2010 and 2011, more than 70 regional commissions created sustainability plans. Many of these initiatives were spurred by funding in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package. Unfortunately, after taking control of Congress in 2011, the GOP refused to fund these local plans any further, rendering many of them nothing more than blueprints. But by using national emergency powers, Biden could provide loan guarantees to communities so they can complete, or at least further, their green initiatives. He could even use some of the military spending to fund these projects outright. That would be in stark contrast to Trump’s emergency declaration, which used military spending to build new fencing in border communities that vocally opposed it.

If Biden doesn’t want to declare a national emergency on his own, he could still use executive actions in ways that would help fight against climate change and liberate municipalities. This isn’t just for liberals. Even some conservative cities, like Denton, Texas, have tried to limit or ban fossil fuel extraction within their boundaries. Unfortunately, in the case of Denton, the GOP-controlled Texas legislature responded by prohibiting towns from regulating oil or fracking. Republicans in Oklahoma and North Carolina followed suit. The Biden administration might be able to stop these states, even without Congress’s help. Under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency has not just the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, but also a legal obligation to do so. The Obama administration mandated that each state reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to a certain target. Biden should consider bringing back state reduction targets. At a minimum, he should mandate that states let localities cut emissions on their own by invoking the federal government’s power to regulate carbon levels. (He should also allow California to again set its own air quality and gas mileage standards, a freedom Trump revoked.) Conservative judges might stop him. Yet the very act would signal that if you want your town to be more eco-friendly, it isn’t Democrats who object.

Local climate empowerment goes beyond just fighting against states. Biden could use the Rural Utilities Service to help rural electric cooperatives, which supply power to just over 10 percent of America’s population, switch away from coal. Right now, these cooperatives are highly dependent on aging fossil fuel power plants, many of which are far more expensive and less effective than greener sources of energy. Through executive action alone, Biden could instruct the Rural Utilities Service to purchase the defunct or unprofitable dirty power plants of any co-op that agreed to switch to solar or wind. Given how cheap the latter two energy sources are becoming, it would be an extremely generous offer, one that cleans the environment simply by giving communities a choice. 

Finally, the president-elect should make good on one of his campaign promises: helping regions develop climate resilience plans “in partnership with local universities and national labs, for local access to the most relevant science, data, information, tools, and training.” This assistance will be especially valuable for the many cities and towns that don’t have climate plans not because they don’t want them, but because preparing for a warming world requires technical, environmental expertise that most cities simply cannot afford. The EPA can offer such expertise, alone and in partnership with other institutions. Biden should make sure they do.

Broadband

High-speed internet is an essential service. Especially at a time when many jobs are, by epidemiological necessity, done online, it’s impossible for communities without broadband to attract various types of employers or workers. When school is virtual, kids in places without high-speed internet are seriously disadvantaged. Even before the pandemic, median household incomes, employment rates, and the number of firms all grew significantly faster in counties with broadband than in counties without it.

Unfortunately, there are many such counties. According to a recent report by the broadband consumer company Broadband Now, as many as 42 million Americans lack broadband access. The lack of access is particularly pervasive in rural areas, but it’s common in poorer urban neighborhoods as well. There are also tens of millions of people who could theoretically purchase broadband internet but cannot afford it. 

This patchwork system is the product of major telecom companies, such as Comcast or Cox. These corporations have decided that providing broadband access to certain parts of America is not sufficiently profitable. To compensate, some communities have formed broadband cooperatives or companies of their own. The benefits have been enormous. When Chattanooga, Tennessee, set up its own broadband provider in 2007, it kickstarted a surge of entrepreneurism that ultimately created more than 500 businesses. A study from the University of Tennessee found that between 2011 and 2015, Chattanooga’s city-owned broadband provider generated $1 billion for the local economy.

But at least 22 states, a full half of which are under unified GOP control, have passed laws pushed by wealthy telecom companies that ban or severely limit municipal broadband. That includes Tennessee, where telecom monopolists were so spooked by Chattanooga’s success that they got the state legislature to make it impossible for other places to replicate what the city did.

As it happens, the Federal Communications Commission is empowered by statute to facilitate communications by “removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.” If Biden obtains a majority on the FCC—it currently has a 2–2 split—the agency should go to court to challenge states’ preemption power in this area. Conservative judges might overrule the agency’s effort, as they did the one time FCC lawyers attempted this during the Obama administration. But there’s no reason the agency can’t try again if it has the opportunity. Just like with the EPA order, the very act, if cheered on by Biden, would signal to communities across America—and especially in rural areas—that his administration is on their side. (Legislation clarifying the FCC’s power might nonetheless be the ultimate answer.)

Meanwhile, if Democrats do get a majority on the FCC, there’s an easy, clear step the agency should take to support local broadband projects. Right now, the commission spends tens of billions of dollars annually to prop up major telecom companies, some of it for the express purpose of expanding broadband. It has not worked, and it’s time to try a different approach. Without any action from Congress, the commission could redirect most, if not all, of these billions to municipal and co-op projects. Doing so would allow these entities to bring high-speed internet to millions more Americans.

Immigration

Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 by loudly railing against immigration. He gave the issue far less emphasis during his 2020 race. Exactly why is anyone’s guess, but it may be because his nativist rhetoric and policies caused a huge backlash, including among GOP voters. According to Gallup, more than 70 percent of Americans now believe that immigration is “a good thing,” the highest level in at least 20 years. The shift is especially dramatic when it comes to refugees, thanks in large part to Republicans changing their minds. According to Pew, support for letting in refugees climbed among GOP voters from 40 percent in 2016 to an astonishing 58 percent in 2019. 

The United States is still very much struggling with xenophobia. The public’s general attitude toward immigration may be highly positive, and support for letting in refugees may be quite high. But polling shows that support for increasing immigration writ large is at best a plurality—neck and neck with support for decreasing immigration and keeping levels the same. So as Biden overturns Trump’s policies and makes America more welcoming, as he’s promised to do, he will have to work hard to avoid having public opinion shift back. 

There’s evidence that the president-elect understands this. His 2020 campaign platform called for an entirely new visa category allowing cities and counties “to petition for higher levels of immigrants to support their growth.” It’s a shrewd idea. In a 2016 quantitative study published in Political Psychology, several academics found that Americans’ “hostility toward immigration decreases” when citizens “feel that they, and/or their country, are more in control” of the process. Adding a strong local element to our immigration system could significantly bolster Americans’ sense of control over migration into the country and, with it, their desire to take in more people.

Biden will need the support of Congress to create the new visa program. It’s a good bet that Republicans won’t provide it and will filibuster attempts to create it. But he should still push for the category because the politics are great. In fact, he should double down on the idea and apply it to an area in which presidents have near unilateral authority: determining how many refugees the U.S. accepts each year. Biden has already pledged to raise the refugee cap to 125,000—the highest level since 1993. But he should publicly commit to increasing refugee numbers even higher during his term if local governments want a greater influx. This would not be a radical change; traditionally, the federal government consults with state officials, local officials, and nonprofit resettlement agencies to determine each year’s refugee ceiling. But Biden should make sure local citizens are aware of and engaged in the decision by adding clearer public notifications to the process.

This would be in the proud liberal tradition of establishing floors, not ceilings. Local communities wouldn’t be able to say no to all refugees, but they could decide for themselves whether to welcome additional numbers. The more places that do, the higher the overall number of refugees the federal government would let in. In all likelihood, it would be a lot, because local officials and business leaders are well aware that refugees start businesses, take hard-to-fill jobs (such as in meat-packing plants), and revitalize depopulated towns and neighborhoods. “There are thousands of communities around the United States that are ready to say, ‘Please, send us refugees,’ ” says Mark Storella, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration from 2016 to 2018. 

If you doubt him, consider what happened after Trump issued an executive order in 2019 giving governors the ability to block refugees from coming into their states. Only one governor, Greg Abbott of Texas, chose to exercise that power. And when he did, mayors across the Lone Star State, including conservatives such as Fort Worth’s Betsy Price, fought back. (A federal judge eventually issued an injunction against Trump’s executive order because of the administration’s typically sloppy legal craftsmanship.) 

The policies above are just a few examples of how bolstering local power could help Biden politically. But there are plenty of other opportunities. The president-elect, for instance, should propose a federal jobs program for the millions of Americans who are unemployed because of the pandemic. But rather than have Washington heavily involved in managing the program, Biden should call for a radically decentralized approach in which the federal government issues qualified applicants vouchers they could use to get jobs at nonprofits chosen by state and local governments. 

Vigorously enforcing anti-monopoly statutes, as Barry Lynn argues in “How Biden Can Transform America” (page 20), would also help distribute power in ways that revive communities. By breaking up Google and Facebook’s near-total control of digital advertising, for instance, Biden could give local newspapers back the revenue that once sustained them—and that they desperately need.

In advocating for local empowerment, Biden would be pushing on an open political door. There is growing grassroots energy and anger, particularly in blue cities within red states, about the ways conservatives have blocked off progressive policies. The Partnership for Working Families, for instance, was founded as a network of local activist groups fighting to advance progressive causes in their communities—from climate change to housing rights. The group’s chapters have become increasingly focused on the challenges preemption laws present. Protests by a variety of organizations over North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill,” which originated as a way to preempt Charlotte’s nondiscrimination ordinance, eventually forced the state to repeal part of its law. 

There is also some support for devolving power to local governments among center-right intellectuals. The New York Times columnist David Brooks and the National Affairs editor Yuval Levin, for example, have expressed deep concern for the civic health of local communities. These worries are well founded. Declining social capital has been relentlessly documented for years by social scientists revered by liberals, such as Robert Putnam. Brooks and Levin have both argued that giving more power to cities and towns might be a cure. “By putting more meaningful authority and power nearer to [the] level of the community,” Levin recently wrote, the U.S. stands “a better chance of drawing more citizens into the public arena, and so helping to mitigate the isolation that afflicts so many Americans.” His words suggest that in advancing an agenda of local empowerment, Democrats might find conservative allies.

As an institution, the Republican Party will not be one of them. Its authoritarian impulses lead it to attack municipalities whenever they deviate from its ideology or undermine its power. The GOP’s desire to constrain more urban areas of the country may even be explicitly designed to hurt political opponents. “Trump knows, like most Republicans, that the people who live in walkable, urban, dense places don’t vote for people like them,” says Chris Leinberger, a professor at George Washington University and the head of the school’s Center for Real Estate and Urban Development. “They would love to keep financing roads and keep moving people further and further out, because exurban households and rural households tend to vote Republican.”

It will be difficult for Democrats to entirely stop the GOP from restricting cities and towns without firm control of Congress. It will help if they win power in more states. But now that Joe Biden is president, the party is not powerless. By championing community governance, they can fight back.

The post How Biden Can Use Federal Power to Liberate Localities  appeared first on Washington Monthly.