This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

Perhaps the largest group of Americans who have no home in the political status quo are the self-employed. According to the U.S. Census, this demographic includes 16.5 million workers, or about 10.4 percent of the total working population. But this is likely a significant undercount, because it fails to capture the full range of self-employment types, which includes gig work, side hustles that supplement traditional employment, contract work, and sole proprietorships (small businesses with no employees). A more comprehensive survey conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that 15 percent of workers are best classified as independent; another from MBO Partners that includes in its count those who work independently only some of the time puts the share of self-employed workers as high as 44 percent. 

And this cohort is swelling: Millions of Americans who were laid off or furloughed during the pandemic found new opportunities in independent work and never went back. Historically, self-employed workers were disproportionately educated, white male professionals who earned high incomes. But especially since the pandemic, this group has gotten younger, more diverse, more female, and lower earning. A 2024 study found that 18 percent of independent workers are Black—a higher share than in the workforce as a whole (13 percent). Today, the self-employed population looks remarkably like the traditional base of the Democratic Party.

As such, you might think that this growing army of freelancers, gig workers, and micro-business owners would be a key target of the Democrats’ messaging and policy making. In fact, almost the opposite is the true. The 2024 Democratic Party platform mentions “workers” 78 times and “union” 23 times, but “self-employed” workers and “independent contractors” just once each. As they try to understand why they’re losing the support of the multiracial working class—and formulate a plan to win such voters back—Democrats might start by focusing on what they can do to connect with and help the self-employed. 

Democrats would have a good story to tell about what they’ve done for this group if they chose to tell it. In 2010, they passed the Affordable Care Act, which gave self-employed workers and small business owners access to affordable, comprehensive health insurance, enabling more workers to strike out on their own without fear of losing coverage. Joe Biden’s administration made investments in the economy under the American Rescue Plan, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act that led to an explosion of small business creation in recent years and a doubling of the Black business ownership rate between 2019 and 2022. On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris proposed to help small businesses by increasing the start-up expense deduction tenfold, to $50,000, and offering partially forgivable loans to entrepreneurs.

Democrats at the federal and state levels have also taken the lead in cracking down on corporate exploitation of the self-employed. A 2020 study from the National Employment Law Project estimates that between 10 and 30 percent of companies misclassify employees as independent contractors to dodge paying employee benefits. In early 2024, the Biden administration finalized a rule that imposes a stricter rubric to determine whether a worker is an employee of a company. In California, Democrats in the state assembly passed a bill in 2019 designed to reclassify many gig workers as employees, granting them benefits and labor protections. 

Yet, confoundingly, Democrats almost never talk about how their agenda has helped the self-employed. In fact, they almost never talk about independent workers as a discrete group at all. Part of the reason is that no one is pushing them. Unlike labor unions, which represent a smaller (10 percent) share of the American workforce, the self-employed lack organized representation with which to pressure elected officials to see them as a defined group and pay attention to their needs. Democratic campaign professionals slice and dice the electorate in all sorts of ways to better understand important demographics, but seldom do their polls contain cross-tabs for “self-employed.” “It just hasn’t occurred to most of them,” says the liberal political analyst Michael Podhorzer. “When I ask progressives, ‘What percentage of the self-employed do you think are in economically precarious positions?’ they lowball it by at least half.”

Republicans seldom talk about self-employed workers either. Donald Trump made no promises specifically to them on the campaign trail in 2024. The closest he came was his promise to exempt tips from federal taxes. (Many gig workers who use digital platforms like Uber rely on tips.)

Republicans are masters, however, at promoting policies in ways that seem appealing to self-employed workers but, in reality, screw them. For instance, in 2017, Trump promised that his signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would help middle-class entrepreneurs. (“The rich will not be gaining at all with this plan,” he said of the bill, presumably with a straight face.) Indeed, the bill included a provision that allowed sole proprietorships and other so-called pass-through entities to deduct 20 percent of their revenue from their taxable income. But this ultimately was just another giveaway to the wealthy. As a 2024 study found, the wealthiest 1.5 percent of filers received more than half of all pass-through deductions. Filers with an income below $160,000—the large majority of sole proprietorships—received just 13 percent of the total pool of deduction dollars. 

The real purpose of the provision was to push traditionally employed workers to quit and become contractors, relieving the payroll burden on big businesses, which would no longer have to pay employee benefits. Similarly, in the waning days of Trump’s presidency, his administration issued a rule that aimed to make it easier for companies to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. (The Biden administration later stopped it from taking effect—a measure they did little to advertise.)

In 2017, Trump also issued an executive order allowing collectives of small businesses and self-employed individuals to purchase group health insurance plans. This, too, sounded beneficial to self-employed workers but in fact was the opposite. These association health plans (AHPs) were not required to follow ACA rules, which meant they could omit basic benefits like mental health care and prescription drugs and deny coverage for preexisting conditions. AHPs were also notoriously susceptible to fraud and financial instability, often leaving members with unpaid medical bills when plans collapsed. In 2019, a federal judge struck down the rule, and last spring, the Biden administration formally repealed it, having previously made ACA insurance policies less expensive for the self-employed by getting Congress to put more money into the program. 

Over the next four years, the Trump administration will undoubtedly try to pass off still more policies that hurt the self-employed as favorable to them instead. Democrats can use these occasions to expose his duplicity. But to win the support of self-employed voters, they need something more: a robust plan to help them. 

Such a plan begins by understanding the two fundamental ways the current system mistreats the self-employed. The first is that the American social safety net is largely tied to traditional W-2 employment. Self-employed workers lack access to benefits like unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and overtime pay that federal law requires employers to provide their workers, as well as 401(k) retirement plans and paid medical leave, which most companies offer. As a result, workers outside the traditional employment system are left to buy costlier individual insurance and save for retirement without employer contributions. When they’re sick or can’t find work, they’re left in the lurch.

The second way self-employed workers are taken to the cleaners is through the array of federal rules and regulations that, over recent decades, has led to corporate monopolization of markets. For example, small online sellers have little choice but to ply their wares on Amazon’s online marketplace. By 2023, the tech giant was taking a whopping 45 percent of sellers’ revenue in the U.S through various fees—up from 35 percent in 2020 and 19 percent in 2014. It’s the same story for self-employed workers trapped on other exploitative digital platforms: Uber’s dominant market position allows it to impose high commissions, offer unpredictable pay, and shift costs onto drivers, leaving many earning less than minimum wage after expenses.

Monopolists squeezing independent workers is a problem in legacy industries, too. Big poultry producers exploit the independent farmers who supply them with chickens by enforcing one-sided contracts, controlling key inputs, and manipulating pay systems to maximize their own profits while shifting risks and costs onto the farmers. This system traps farmers in debt and dependency, leaving them with little autonomy or recourse against abusive practices.

Another prime example: Visa and Mastercard control more than 80 percent of credit card transitions and use this duopoly power to charge businesses exorbitant swipe fees. Small businesses, with their smaller sales volume, are disproportionately harmed by this abusive practice.

In November, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s proposed Credit Card Competition Act, which would guarantee that merchants have access to networks other than Visa and Mastercard. The bill, first introduced in 2022, is cosponsored by a small, bipartisan group of senators but faces precipitous odds of becoming law: Industry lobbyists funded by Visa and Mastercard have spent some $80 million fighting it. The bill is an object lesson in the challenges sole proprietors and small-scale entrepreneurs face in shaping federal policy without well-funded pressure groups or the strong support of party leaders. (The closest thing they have to a presence in Washington, the National Federation of Independent Business, is really a right-wing, Big Business–led astroturf group.) 

It’s time Democrats offered self-employed workers more. Fighting misclassification is only part of the answer. Most independent workers don’t see themselves as mis-
classified full-time workers—in fact, according to one survey, more than half of freelancers say that no amount of guaranteed money could persuade them to return to a conventional job. “Not only do most freelancers not have an obvious would-be employer who is misclassifying them, but for many of them, the freedom, flexibility, and ownership they get from freelancing is of the essence,” the organizer Sara Horowitz writes in her 2021 book, Mutualism: Building the Next Economy From the Ground Up.

One of the more sensible ways to help them is to finally sever the outdated tie between basic social safety net protections and traditional W-2 employment. As Steven Hill first proposed in the Washington Monthly in 2016, Democrats should advocate for a “portable benefits” model for independent workers. Under this approach, benefits like health insurance, retirement savings, paid leave, and other employment-related protections would not be tied to a single employer but would instead move with workers across multiple jobs. Each employer would pay an allocation for benefits (prorated based on the number of hours an independent worker was contracted) into that worker’s “individual security account,” which would be managed by the federal government or a private agency specializing in benefit administration.

Such “multi-employer plans” are common in industries like construction and mining. If employers were required to give identical benefits to both employees and independent contractors, the incentive for them to turn employees into contractors would be gone, making the question of worker misclassification mostly irrelevant. There’s been some progress on making portable benefits a reality: In May 2023, a bipartisan group of legislators, led by Senators Mark Warner and Todd Young, reintroduced the Portable Benefits for Independent Workers Pilot Program Act. This bill proposes a $20 million grant program through the Department of Labor to encourage states, localities, and nonprofits to test various models for portable benefits.

The other important step Democrats can take to help the self-employed is to continue promoting the fight against market consolidation. The Biden administration brought major antitrust lawsuits against Amazon for its exploitation of small-scale sellers and its monopoly over online retail; against Cargill and other top poultry producers over their treatment of independent chicken farmers; and against many other monopolists that abuse their power over contractors and small businesses. But the administration rarely presented its pro-competition agenda as a means to help the self-employed as a defined class of workers.

With Trump already promising to limit benefits for gig workers, there is a clear opportunity for the Democratic Party to position itself as the champion of the modern American workforce. Campaigning on portable benefits, antitrust enforcement, and other measures that help self-employed workers and micro-business owners could prove important in future elections.  

The post Champion the Self-Employed appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Imagine the media as a grand, lumbering ship from a Patrick O’Brian novel. The Washington Monthly is the lookout perched high in the crow’s nest, peering over the horizon.

Time and again, for 55 years, the Monthly has spotted issues years before they become mainstream stories, such as how the overweening power of monopolistic corporations threatened global supply chains, how prestigious colleges were undermining social mobility, and how reckless financiers were creating a housing bubble. 

This unmatched prescience is a joy for the Monthly’s dedicated readership—a readership that keeps us afloat. 

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After I came aboard the SS Monthly two years ago, my editors encouraged me to look for over-the-horizon stories. I dug into how Republican leaders were borrowing talking points from chauvinistic “manosphere” influencers to reach lonely young men. In 2016, “Trump proved the potential of disillusioned young men as a growth demographic,” I wrote, and his imitators were learning to “leverage online male grievance in electoral politics.” 

Matthew Cooper, our executive editor—digital, encouraged me to compare this tactic to what Democrats were doing: nothing. “By failing to articulate a commitment to helping young men, the left has let Republicans fill the vacuum,” I wrote. “They’re failing to expose the fraudulence of the right and leaving votes on the table.” What might the political consequences be? 

My story landed me an appearance on Morning Joe. Claire McCaskill, the former Senate Democrat defeated for her seat in 2018 by Josh Hawley, the Ivy League-educated MAGA enthusiast who had just penned a book on manhood, was another on-air guest that day. McCaskill voiced her worry after reading my story that her party wasn’t “accounting for the Joe Rogans of the world.” 

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Unfortunately, the 2024 election proved her warnings, and mine, disastrously accurate. Young men shifted nearly 30 points towards Trump compared to just four years ago. On social media, liberals searched desperately for a liberal Rogan-like figure to close the testosterone gap.

Sometimes, you don’t want to be able to say, I told you so. That feeling happens often at the Washington Monthly. We need your donations to keep up our important work at this dangerous time.

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A liberalism that can defeat the MAGA movement needs the Monthly. As we enter a perilous new era, the Monthly will continue covering the political currents that other outlets miss. We’ll continue imploring the media to listen and the Democratic Party to adapt. We’ll keep generating new ideas on issues like college reform, K-12 education, and health care for our veterans, and we’ll keep promoting a more just approach to international security and fair trade. We’ll keep scanning the horizon.

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The post How to Sink the MAGA Armada appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump cast himself as a populist taking on the political and corporate establishment. His criticism of corporate mergers and his promises to protect consumers from monopolies were central to his anti-establishment message. Amazon, he said, had “a huge antitrust problem.” Pharmaceutical companies charging inflated prices for prescription drugs were “getting away with murder.” AT&T’s plans to acquire Time Warner, Inc. would put “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” he told a rapturous crowd in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and vowed a Trump administration would block the deal.

Once Trump took office, the Department of Justice sued to block the Time Warner-AT&T merger, as he had pledged. Though it lost that case, the DOJ’s Antitrust Division launched major suits against Facebook, demanding the divestiture of its WhatsApp private messaging service and Instagram photo-sharing application, and against Google over its monopoly of the search engine market. (Facebook is now traded as Meta and has a $1.44 trillion market capitalization as of October 2024.) The DOJ, under Joe Biden’s administration, which continued the suit, prevailed against Google in federal district court in August.

However, the antimonopoly Trump of 2016 is nowhere to be found in 2024. Instead, this year, the former president has been courting plutocrats by offering political favors for support more brazenly than any presidential candidate in U.S. history.

For example, in February, after his supporters began boycotting Budweiser, a product line from AB InBev, the American-Belgian-Brazilian beverage and brewing giant, because it hired a transgender influencer for a branded content partnership, Trump urged them on Truth Social to give the brand a “second chance.” His post came days before a lobbyist for the beermaker’s parent company, which has a market cap of over $100 billion, was scheduled to host a campaign fundraiser.

Then, in March, despite having tried to ban the social media service TikTok via executive order in 2020, Trump reversed his position on the ubiquitous app after meeting with billionaire GOP mega-donor and former “Never Trumper” Jeff Yass, a significant shareholder in the company. Yass subsequently poured tens of millions of dollars into pro-Trump super PACs.

In a filmed meeting at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in April, Trump offered a group of 20 oil and gas executives and lobbyists a blunt quid pro quo: If they raised $1 billion for his campaign, he would, if returned to office, slash regulations and taxes. And in another display of newfound largesse toward special interests, the septuagenarian Republican, who had once said that the cryptocurrency Bitcoin “seemed like a scam,” addressed crypto’s largest convention and promised to make America “the crypto capital of the planet.” The switch precipitated a vast influx of campaign donations to pro-Trump campaign vehicles.

Trump has softened his touch with the tech giants he once vowed to make heel. During a televised interview with Bloomberg earlier this month, he dodged a question about breaking up Google (Market Cap: $2.1 trillion). A few days later, the Republican nominee bragged on a podcast that if he recaptured the presidency, he would help Apple’s Chief Executive Officer, Tim Cook, battle a fine from the European Union. For the record, Apple’s market capitalization is the largest in the world, $3.46 trillion as of October 2024, larger than the gross national product of India or the United Kingdom.

Then there’s Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk, the mogul and South African native, who has become the politician’s wingman in the 2024 race, often appearing by the candidate’s side. In the election’s final weeks, the world’s wealthiest man has devoted unequaled resources and attention to electing Trump. Musk has effectively taken over a significant portion of Trump’s ground operations, spending $118 million on a new super PAC that’s running get-out-the-vote campaigns in several swing states—an effort Musk is personally leading from his temporary perch in pivotal Pennsylvania. Musk has become a headliner at Trump rallies, including last week’s perfervid gathering at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The CEO of Tesla and Space X has transformed the social media company X (formerly known as Twitter) into a promotional platform for Trump’s campaign, flooding the site and the accounts of its 600 million active users with right-wing content and, at the behest of campaign officials, deactivating a journalist’s account after he published leaks about Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance.

Musk’s reasons for supporting Trump would seem straightforward: His companies, both publicly traded and privately held by him, have nearly 100 federal contracts worth billions of dollars. Many are the subject of federal investigations and inquiries. Donations to Trump are an investment that could buy Musk a friendly legal environment—and maybe even direct influence over the federal government’s intimate relationship with his business empire.

The once-populist Trump has promised Musk a role in his administration as the head of a “government efficiency” department that would audit the federal government for waste. (The move would invite “conflicts of interest on a scale unseen in recent memory,” as the Times put it.) Musk has said the federal budget could be cut by a third, enough to eliminate non-defense discretionary spending from the FBI to NASA. He has not been shy about how he would use such a position. “There should be a federal approval process for autonomous vehicles,” Musk said on a Tesla earnings call in October. “If there’s a Department of Government Efficiency, I’ll try to help make that happen.” Trump, for his part, has been similarly candid about the transactional nature of their alliance. As president, he opposed electric vehicles; no longer. “I’m for electric cars—I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” Trump confessed in August.

These overtures to corporate elites are working: In recent months, a wave of endorsements and donations from billionaires and executives—many of whom had vocally opposed Trump in the past—has helped him narrow Harris’s lead.

Along the way, Trump has stopped talking about antitrust and criticizing corporations. This shameless reversal on monopoly seems less abrupt, however, if you understand how he governed as president. Despite a few high-profile cases, Trump used antitrust enforcement as a tool to help his friends and punish his enemies throughout his presidency.

This pattern emerged in 2017, Trump’s first year in office. As an investigation in The New Yorker found, Trump ordered the lawsuit against AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner in November 2017 as retaliation against CNN, then owned by the media giant, for its critical coverage of him. (When the Justice Department later lost in court, it declined to appeal.) Less than a month later, when Disney announced it had reached a deal to buy 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets, Trump’s DOJ conspicuously declined to intervene. Not incidentally, the deal was wildly lucrative for Fox News CEO and Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who had dedicated the full force of his media empire to getting Trump elected. Trump offered Murdoch his congratulations.

Similarly, in the summer of 2019, Trump’s antitrust enforcers not only chose not to take action against a proposed merger between Sprint and T-Mobile but worked to ensure the deal went through—a favor to Masayoshi Son, a Trump ally and the chairman of SoftBank, the majority owner of Sprint. By contrast, that fall, Trump’s DOJ opened a baseless antitrust investigation into four carmakers over a perceived slight. The New York Times editorial board called it a “cruel parody of antitrust enforcement.”

The Trump administration’s handful of well-publicized lawsuits belied a largely passive period of antitrust enforcement. Trump’s antimonopoly enforcers at the DOJ and regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission, let massive mergers in health care, defense, agricultural chemicals, and industrial gasses sail through unchallenged. The number of major antitrust cases regulators brought to trial was lower than the four years before Trump took office. The administration eliminated the independent office tasked with protecting farmers and ranchers from meat-packing monopolies and let Facebook off with a paltry settlement for illegally allowing the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest user data. Consolidation across the economy worsened.

In truth, the antitrust revolution came to Washington after Trump left office. When Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021, he put antitrust at the center of federal economic policy for the first time in 40 years.

Biden’s enforcers brought ambitious lawsuits against monopolists, including Amazon, Nvidia, Ticketmaster, Apple, Google, and Facebook. In addition to the ruling against Google in August, a landmark antitrust victory, regulators have notched major wins against airline, book publishing, food production, and ad tech industry monopolies. Under the specter of robust enforcement, merger activity fell to record lows in 2022 and 2023. The administration has also empowered over a dozen other government agencies to step up regulatory enforcement, resulting in a crackdown on price gouging, noncompete contracts, and banking-related junk fees.

Unlike Trump’s administration, Biden’s has prosecuted monopolists without fear or favor, even at risk to Democratic campaign coffers. Big Tech long maintained a cozy relationship with the party; Google’s close ties with Barack Obama’s administration did not go unnoticed in 2012 when the Justice Department declined his FTC’s recommendation to file antitrust charges against the company. A decade later, Biden chose to allow antitrust charges against Google and showed none of the regulatory favoritism endemic to the Trump administration.

In a second term, Trump’s selectivity would be manifest in more dangerous forms. Trump has trumpeted that he will seek to govern like Vladimir Putin in Russia or Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who dispense favors and threaten enemies to keep them in line. That would only change if Trump died or became incapacitated or if Vance, who’s shown a more serious commitment to antimonopoly policy in the Senate, takes office and breaks with Trump’s approach.

Meanwhile, some progressives have questioned whether Kamala Harris will follow Biden’s path. Harris’s brother-in-law and adviser, Tony West, is on leave from his role as Uber’s chief legal officer, and her debate prep adviser, Karen Dunn, is representing Google in the more recent of the FTC’s two antitrust cases against the tech giant. But the evidence suggests that Harris will advance Biden’s competition agenda, not hinder it. She’s received support from some billionaire tech moguls but, unlike Trump, hasn’t publicly promised them any policy changes, such as firing Lina Khan, Biden’s dogged FTC chair, something Democratic donors like IAC Chair Barry Diller and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman have demanded. She inherited Biden’s campaign operation, and several key veterans of Biden’s National Economic Council, which helped shape his antitrust agenda, are now top advisors to the Harris campaign, suggesting continuity in policymaking.

Harris’s written economic platform is essentially the same as her predecessor’s, and her record as California’s attorney general suggests that she’s willing to take corporate interests to court. On the campaign trail, Harris has touted protecting consumers and making markets more competitive. “On day one, I will take on price-gouging and bring down costs,” Harris said at a rally in Atlanta. “We will ban more of those hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks and other companies use to pad their profits. We will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases. And we will take on Big Pharma to cap prescription drug costs for all Americans.” The proposed crackdown on corporate price gouging—the single most popular economic proposal from either candidate, according to a Guardian poll—is the subject of a new ad campaign.

While we can’t know what Harris will do in office if she wins, her closing pitch is clear: she will persist in restoring the federal government’s role as a check on corporate power. Her opponent has long since stopped pretending he’d do the same.

The post Trump Isn’t Even Pretending He Would Fight Corporate Power appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump vows to root out the uncooperative public servants who constrained his first term and replace them with loyalists. “Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state,” he told rallygoers in March last year. Bringing the sprawling federal bureaucracy to heel is necessary if he’s to realize his agenda: shutting down the southern border, building “vast holding facilities” for migrants facing deportation, and prosecuting his political enemies.

Under current law, the vast majority of the 2.1 million-member federal workforce are “career” civil servants. The president can only fill about 4,000 political appointment positions across the federal bureaucracy. The rest serve in their role regardless of who occupies the White House and cannot be fired for political reasons. To “restore government that is controlled by the people,” as Trump put it, he plans to bring back “Schedule F,” an executive order he issued in the waning days of his first term that Joe Biden rescinded before it could go into effect. Trump officials planned to use Schedule F to convert as many as two-thirds of protected civil servants into political appointees who could be fired and replaced by executive fiat. Out with the nonpartisan experts loyal to the law; in with the cronies loyal to Trump.

Under the early spoils system of the American government, jobs were awarded based on loyalty to a party or president rather than qualifications. The system was eradicated after aspiring diplomat Charles Guiteau shot and killed newly-elected President James Garfield in July 1881 for the slight of refusing Guiteau a consulship in Europe. (Guiteau had played a small role in getting him elected and felt entitled to a prominent position in government.) In response, Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, enacted the Pendleton Act of 1883, which mandated that federal positions be granted based on merit instead of patronage, and the federal civil service was born. By 1909, merit-based appointments constituted two-thirds of the federal workforce.

Schedule F could functionally restore the old spoils system. A federal bureaucracy loyal to Trump would give him unprecedented power over the government, including the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and other departments and agencies historically run with minimal political interference. And unlike four years ago, Trump now benefits from a reserve corps of loyalists ready to fill the tens of thousands of would-be government vacancies. Right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation are pouring millions of dollars into building databases of recruits and training programs to prepare them for loyal service.

These plans may sound like the fevered scheming of a singularly authoritarian leader and his cultish supporters. But such plans have a long history in the conservative movement. If Trump succeeds, it will be the realization of the Republican Party’s decades-long crusade to seize control of the civil service.

Richard Nixon intensely distrusted the permanent government when he entered the Oval Office in 1969. The former representative, senator, and vice president fretted to his staff about liberal bias among civil servants and fumed about the supposed “Jewish cabal” of “liberals” and “academics” in government undermining his authority.

So began a secretive political purge. Civil servants deemed untrustworthy were reassigned to obscure roles and replaced by loyalists. The purge was led by the late Nixon aide Fred Malek, who suggested in a memo later obtained by investigative journalist Jack Anderson that they “stop calling it ‘politicizing the executive branch’ and, instead, call it something like strengthening the government’s responsiveness.” That gave the program its euphemistic title: the Responsiveness Program. (For his many revelations about the administration’s misdeeds, Anderson was the target of a failed assassination plot ordered by Nixon in 1972.)

The Responsiveness Program was, for a time, successful. Under pressure from White House Counsel John Dean, the IRS began hounding Nixon’s political enemies with tax audits. The Small Business Administration awarded grants to Nixon’s friends. The Central Intelligence Agency kept at least one of the president’s enemies under illegal surveillance.

But other attempts to strong-arm federal agencies went nowhere—a telling sign of the resilience of civil service norms. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was an unlikely “bulwark against the president’s attempts to politicize and undermine the federal bureaucracy,” as his biographer Beverly Gage wrote. Not exactly a grand champion of civil liberties, Hoover nevertheless rejected Nixon’s insistence that the FBI further expand surveillance of civil rights and anti-war protesters beyond its already substantial forays into that area.

Watergate ended Nixon’s political career and his efforts to politicize federal agencies. “If he had been able to pull it off, it would have amounted to almost a coup against our existing form of government,” Anderson wrote. Evidence of the lawbreaking Responsiveness Program came to light in 1977, when Democrats took control of the Civil Service Commission, the agency responsible for protecting civil service workers (later replaced by today’s Office of Personnel Management), and uncovered evidence of this “Little Watergate.”

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the fledgling Heritage Foundation issued its first “Mandate for Leadership”—a precursor to the organization’s “Project 2025” plan for the Trump administration. The paper did not go so far as to recommend the mass elimination of civil service protections the way “Project 2025” would. Still, it laid out a novel vision for downsizing government and aligning the federal bureaucracy with conservative goals.

With “Mandate for Leadership” as his governing blueprint, Reagan took unprecedented steps to ensure ideological conformity across his administration. “I will not accept the supposed ‘wisdom’ which has it that the federal bureaucracy has become so powerful that it can no longer be changed or controlled by any administration,” he declared.

The Reagan administration empowered political appointees to use all means to overrule and subvert the government’s career civil servants. “With personnel actions sometimes subtle and sometimes overt, it has put out a message that it expects ideological loyalty at the high levels of career service,” the Washington Post reported in 1983. “The political appointees, moreover, have brought a missionary zeal to their task, figuring that they have 50 years of history to reverse.”

Some examples: At the Department of the Interior, Secretary James G. Watt fired 28 career lawyers who opposed the development of natural resources under the flimsy pretense of budgetary cutbacks. When openings in the legal office soon opened up and one of the lawyers, Derb Carter, reapplied for his job, he was questioned about his political beliefs, which violated Civil Service rules.

At OSHA, Dr. Peter F. Infante, the head of its Office of Carcinogen Classification, was almost fired by OSHA’s administrator, Thorne G. Auchter, after the industry-backed Formaldehyde Institute complained to Auchter that Infante had publicly disputed a government finding that there was insufficient evidence to call formaldehyde a carcinogen. (When Congress caught wind of the plan to fire Infante, Auchter backed off.)

At the EPA, Dr. Adrian Gross, the chief of the toxicology branch in the Hazard Evaluation Division, was transferred to an obscure post after Gross accused his superiors of improperly helping two chemical companies register an insecticide called permethrin that Gross said was a carcinogen.

Similar episodes played out at the Department of Energy, the Merit System Protection Board, and elsewhere.

In 2001, the Heritage Foundation issued a policy paper, “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel,” that warned George W. Bush’s incoming administration of the “immense power and political sophistication of the federal employee network and its allies and the intensity of its resistance to serious change” and implored Bush to take “managerial control of government” even further.

 Bush did just that. The Texan led “a crusade to replace expert judgment in federal agencies with political calculation, to marginalize or eliminate longtime civil servants, to change laws without going through Congress, to silence dissenting views within the government, and to centralize decision-making in the White House,” a report from the magazine Government Executive found.

Bush empowered partisan appointees to stack the civil service with loyalists. At the State Department, one high-ranked appointee listed loyalty to Bush as a job requirement for a weapons of mass destruction program. A Pentagon appointee selected candidates for Iraq reconstruction assignments based on whether they’d voted for the president, effectively putting a team of young, underqualified partisans in charge of essential elements of Iraqi reconstruction. A Justice Department appointee screened applicants by running their names and keywords such as “guns,” “abortion,” and “Florida recount” through search engines to assess their feelings about those issues and identify “good Americans.”

Career experts at the CDC, EPA, NASA, and other agencies were cowed into silence by their partisan superiors. For example, when the chief Medicare actuary, Richard Foster, was preparing to issue a warning to Congress that proposed prescription drug reforms could cost more than the White House acknowledged, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Thomas A. Scully, a political appointee, threatened to fire him.

Others quit. The Washington Post reported that a “brain drain” of career experts at FEMA meant private sector contractors took over much of the disaster response and even policymaking. As a result, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the agency was caught unprepared and mounted a gravely inadequate response.

In 2016, Trump ran a similar playbook. The Heritage Foundation staffed his administration with thousands of recruits, and his deputies in the federal agencies routinely marginalized dissident officials with reassignments and demotions.

But veteran officials often publicly rebuked his agenda. Trump was infuriated by civil servants like scientist Anthony Fauci, who issued sober, unflattering reports on the spread of Covid; Sally Yates, a DOJ attorney who refused to enforce Trump’s “Muslim ban” order; and Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council official who testified in Trump’s impeachment inquiry. “Somebody said, President, what’s the toughest country to deal with? Is it Russia? Is it China? Is it North Korea?” Trump told attendees of a fundraiser in the final weeks of his first term, the day after he issued his last-gasp Schedule F order. “No, the toughest country by far is dealing with the United States.”

 A half-century of Republican—and sometimes Democratic—ridicule of “big government” has chipped away at the efficacy of the federal bureaucracy. For decades, the size of the federal workforce has not kept pace with the growth of the U.S. population. As Paul Glastris and Don Kettl reported in the Monthly, overstretched agencies like the IRS and the CMS have increasingly come to rely on private contractors, who are less accountable and less effective than civil servants. Contractors working for the federal government today outnumber civil servants at a rate of more than two to one.

But despite Republican efforts to overpower the federal bureaucracy, it remains largely nonpartisan and professional. Will that finally change if Trump retakes office?

Maybe. More than ever, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups are “laser-focused on the staffing challenge,” as former Trump official Troup Hemenway, the President of Personnel Policy and a founder of the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, put it. Heritage alone has poured $22 million into the effort. Plus, a second-term Trump could enjoy advantages in legal disputes that other Republican presidents did not. Members of the conservative Supreme Court supermajority have often expressed doubt about federal agencies, suggesting they might be inclined to sympathize with Trump’s argument that the federal bureaucracy needs to be constrained.

Another advantage is that Trump may not need to replace nonpartisan civil servants at all because private contractors now do so much of their work. Paving a lane for his agenda may be as much a matter of shifting certain contracts to loyalists. During his first term, he showed no scruples about doing so on a smaller scale: Companies or individuals with ties to Trump were awarded contracts to provide “strategic services” at the CMS and build portions of the southern border wall.

But a dramatic takeover of government is an uphill battle, and one Democrats are taking seriously. The Biden administration just finalized rules to guard against Schedule F. The rules guarantee that career employees who are reclassified as political appointees can retain their civil service protections. And Trump is capricious and distractible. It’s just as likely he’ll throw out Heritage’s carefully plotted plan as he’ll adopt it.

What’s more, past presidents’ progress toward taking control of the federal bureaucracy was often kneecapped by scandal and incompetence. If he wins a second term, the most scandal-prone and incompetent president in living memory could prove the exception. But the civil service has survived more disciplined political attacks than he’s likely capable of. Jack Anderson wrote that Nixon “found out that a seething enterprise like the federal government could not be compartmentalized, cordoned off and led from a glass bubble.” That’s as true today as it was in 1974.

The post Trump Vows to Crush the Civil Service, but He’s Not the First President to Try appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Click here for the Monthly‘s Presidential Accomplishment Index and more essays comparing Trump and Biden’s achievements in office.

In the months before the 2016 election, corporate concentration broke through as a salient issue in Washington for the first time in decades. Building on years of work published in the Washington Monthly by Barry Lynn, Lina Khan, Phillip Longman, and others, mainstream Democrats began speaking of America’s monopoly problem, linking it to rising inequality and falling rates of entrepreneurship. That April, Barack Obama’s administration, after years of lax antitrust enforcement, published a white paper documenting the growing dominance of large firms over the economy and its baleful effects on economic opportunity. On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton became the first major presidential candidate in decades to advocate tougher antitrust enforcement. 

Donald Trump, Clinton’s rival for the presidency, also spoke out on the issue that year. After AT&T announced plans to acquire Time Warner, Trump declared in October 2016 that the proposed merger would be “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” and promised to block it. Trump spoke against the monopoly power of companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Shortly after being elected, Trump’s Department of Justice moved as promised to block the AT&T/Time Warner deal, one of the government’s most ambitious merger cases in 40 years. 

Observers across the political spectrum applauded, warning that the merger would lead to fewer outlets for independent programming and too much concentrated power over the information environment. But many became critics after the judge criticized the prosecutors for resting their case on a highly technical, unprovable claim that the merger would harm consumers, and ruled in favor of the merger. 

Still more disillusioning to antitrust reformers was the question of Trump’s motives. 

Trump had a long history of criticizing CNN, which was owned by Time Warner. He had even once publicized a doctored video that depicted him body-slamming the CNN logo. After the DOJ brought its suit, a New Yorker investigation confirmed that Trump had personally told deputies to have the merger blocked as punishment for CNN’s unfavorable coverage. 

Adding to doubts about the sincerity of Trump’s opposition to monopoly, the DOJ soon afterward waved through Disney’s acquisition of the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox, a deal that drastically consolidated media markets. Though Trump’s preferred network, Fox News, was left out of the deal, the sale inflated Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch’s personal fortune by billions of dollars, for which Trump offered his personal congratulations.

The favoritism bore an obvious resemblance to an infamous episode from a half century earlier: Richard Nixon’s interference in International Telephone & Telegraph’s purchase of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, at the time the biggest merger in American history. In June 1969, when the DOJ was preparing a suit to block the sale, Nixon ordered his deputy attorney general to back off. As reporters soon uncovered, ITT’s CEO was a close friend and ally of Nixon’s, and the company had secretly contributed $400,000 to his reelection campaign.

If such a scandalous quid pro quo is historically rare in antitrust enforcement, Democrats, too, sometimes exercise prosecutorial discretion. Lyndon Johnson held up the antitrust review of a bank merger until the owner of one of the banks, who also ran a newspaper, agreed to give him more flattering coverage. Despite the urging of Federal Trade Commission officials, Obama declined to take antitrust action against Google, which had forged a close partnership with his administration. Google’s employees had contributed more to his reelection campaign than almost any other company.

But the selective application of the law was endemic to Trump’s antitrust operation. Makan Delrahim, the head of the DOJ antitrust division under Trump, gestured toward populist criticisms of the long-standing antitrust status quo. But in summer 2019, when Sprint and T-Mobile were working toward a merger that would reduce the number of major cell service providers from four to three, Delrahim not only declined to intervene but actively worked to ensure that the deal went through, lobbying other regulators and members of Congress and fighting an antitrust suit brought by a group of states. His motives were apparent: Sprint is majority owned by SoftBank, and SoftBank’s chairman, Masayoshi Son, is a known ally of Trump’s. 

By contrast, shortly after Trump posted several furious tweets about an agreement Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, and Honda had made with California to set stricter emissions standards than those proposed by the White House, Delrahim opened a plainly baseless antitrust investigation into the four companies. The New York Times editorial board called it a “cruel parody of antitrust enforcement,” and the policy writer David Dayen observed that “the notion that the automakers conspired with each other to raise fuel standards in a bid to limit competition is a joke.”

As Matthew Buck and Sandeep Vaheesan of the Open Markets Institute documented, Delrahim also made a habit of helping out large corporations by involving the DOJ in antitrust lawsuits where it wasn’t a party. On several occasions in office, he issued amicus briefs defending tech giants like Apple and Comcast facing antitrust lawsuits from states and consumers. 

In June 2020, the career DOJ official John Elias revealed during congressional testimony that the department had devoted major resources to other dubious investigations. Attorney General Bill Barr, for example, ordered a series of unfounded antitrust investigations of cannabis companies. Probes into “Big Pot” accounted for 29 percent of the antitrust division’s merger investigations.

Trump’s relationship with the FTC, which has major antitrust powers, reveals a similar pattern. After Trump finally appointed someone to chair the FTC in 2018, his choice, the attorney Joseph Simons, announced that he would become far more aggressive on antitrust. But he essentially did the opposite, presiding over a largely passive period for the agency. Trump’s FTC filed about 21 total merger enforcement actions per year, only slightly more than under the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. 

Trump’s FTC won only one major decision against a monopolist in its first three years: the chipmaker Qualcomm for its dominance of critical components in cell phones. Yet after a district court ruled in favor of the FTC, this lone success was torpedoed by internecine squabbling. When Qualcomm appealed, the DOJ took the unheard-of move of intervening against the FTC, filing a motion defending Qualcomm. Delrahim, as it happens, was outside counsel for Qualcomm for many years prior to his federal service, though he officially recused himself from the case. Qualcomm won on appeal in 2020.

To their credit, during Trump’s final months in office, regulators filed two historic lawsuits against tech monopolists: one against Google for its dominance of the search engine market, and another against Facebook calling for it to divest WhatsApp and Instagram. (The Google search case went to trial in fall 2023.) Though advocates worry that those cases, like the case against Time Warner and AT&T, were imperfectly designed by a chaotic administration, they nevertheless helped reestablish a more confrontational enforcement paradigm on antitrust. 

Democrats became increasingly focused on combating monopoly during Trump’s time in office. U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar, Al Franken, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren delivered soaring speeches about confronting monopolies and introduced new legislation to strengthen antitrust law. In 2019, the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee opened a sprawling investigation led by Democrat David Cicilline that documented how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google use their monopoly power to threaten free enterprise and democracy. On the campaign trail in 2020, the field of candidates competed on who had the best anti-monopoly plan. 

Biden was not at the vanguard of this movement in his party, but his campaign’s policy papers included promises to confront monopolies. Then, after he won the election, Biden committed to the cause like no other president had in modern times. He appointed one of the movement’s brightest and most aggressive reformers, Lina Khan, to run the FTC, as well as other fierce critics of corporate concentration in key posts, including Jonathan Kanter, who took over the antitrust division of the DOJ, and Tim Wu, who became a key economic adviser inside the White House. Six months after taking office, Biden issued a whole-of-government executive order that called on 17 different government agencies to take 72 actions to foster competition and protect consumers against monopolies. As a result, agencies like the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Food and Drug Administration have cracked down on public scourges like price gouging, noncompete contracts, and banking-related junk fees, and created new rules to make consolidated industries like the hearing aid market more competitive. 

Under Kanter and Khan, the DOJ and FTC have also filed far more ambitious antitrust investigations than any administration in decades. Last summer, an investigation into several food production conglomerates over wage suppression and collusion resulted in an $85 million settlement, one of several successful DOJ investigations into no-poach and wage-fixing schemes across the economy. In December, the FTC successfully blocked the medical data firm IQVIA’s attempt to monopolize the business of advertising to doctors through the purchase of an ad tech company called DeepIntent. And in January, a judge sided with the DOJ in its suit against a JetBlue-Spirit merger, the first successful prosecution of an airline merger in 40 years. 

The effect of a more aggressive posture from regulators goes beyond favorable court rulings: Under the threat of litigation, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Berkshire Hathaway, and the chipmaker Nvidia were some of the companies to back off multibillion-dollar acquisitions of smaller firms. Biden’s regulators filed a record 50 antitrust enforcement actions last year, and mergers dropped to a 10-year low.

Trump’s regulators, like all administrations of the past 40 years before Biden, argued cases mainly on the narrow basis of harms to consumers. But Khan and other reformers argue for reestablishing an interpretation of antitrust law that’s more expansive than this “consumer welfare standard.” Under Biden, regulators have rewritten the government’s lax merger guidelines and have often focused their legal strategy on the harms done to producers as well as consumers. For example, in October 2022, regulators secured one of the most important victories of the Biden era with a successful challenge to a merger between Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, which would have cut the number of major publishers in the U.S. from five to four. Prosecutors focused their arguments on how the industry’s consolidation hurts authors, not consumers; by winning with that argument, they established the precedent that antitrust cases can be won by proving harm to both workers and independent contractors. 

The federal judiciary is largely accustomed to ruling leniently on antitrust cases, and Biden’s regulators have also lost several important cases, including lawsuits against Meta’s acquisition of the virtual reality firm Within and Microsoft’s acquisition of the video game company Activision Blizzard. But even in losses, arguments advanced by prosecutors have helped establish useful precedent. For example, in the Within case, the FTC argued that a monopolist’s acquisition of a budding company in the industry, rather than a well-established competitor, can breach antitrust law, and that a large corporation’s investments in a market it’s not already in—virtual reality, in this case—can harm competition. In his decision, the judge acknowledged both arguments as valid in principle, marking the first instance since the 1980s that a court has endorsed such arguments.

Moving away from the consumer welfare standard will be especially important for regulating tech platforms like Google and Amazon that offer free or cheap services to consumers while gouging the businesses that have no choice but to market on their platforms. Last year, regulators announced two more long-awaited, major tech lawsuits. The first, another against Google, charges the company with maintaining a monopoly over online advertising by controlling the tools and digital auction systems companies use to place ads. Google siphons ad revenue from publishers, making the business of journalism unsustainable. The second investigates Amazon’s coercive behavior toward online merchants, including its practice of punishing businesses that sell on its Marketplace for offering lower prices elsewhere. These and other important antitrust cases—for example, the FTC’s investigations into the cartel behind hospital drug shortages, a private equity firm’s roll-up of anesthesiology providers, and Big Tech’s investments in artificial intelligence companies—will become the responsibility of whichever administration wins in November. 

Much of the business world is betting it will be Trump. After a long dip in merger activity, the monopoly researcher Matt Stoller noted the announcement of several high-value mergers this winter: Exxon made an offer to buy the shale producer Pioneer; Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines proposed combining; Chevron is buying Hess; and more. “I don’t mean to say that Trump will win,” Stoller wrote, “only that Exxon, Humana, Chevron, et al. are betting that they might find a far more favorable climate when their deal goes to trial.”

In other words, monopolists know that the self-proclaimed first businessman president was a lot more bark than bite on enforcement. Maybe that would change a second time around: Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society that are hoping to staff a Trump administration are starting to eschew the party’s market fundamentalism orthodoxy and embrace anti-monopolism. But Trump has made clear he’d use another term to punish his enemies and protect his cronies by whatever legal tools available, and there’s little to suggest that he’d staff his administration with fair-minded regulators instead of willing sycophants. 

A second term for Biden, on the other hand, would ensure the meticulous prosecution of ongoing antitrust lawsuits against Google, Amazon, Apple, Live Nation, Visa, UnitedHealth Group, Exxon Mobil, Subway, Kroger and Albertsons, and others. It would also mean the furthering of Biden’s whole-of-government effort to crack down on all forms of anticompetitive behavior. In February, the CFPB announced that it’s taking on credit card comparison websites that take kickbacks from banks to move their cards up the rankings, stifling competition, and is building its own public comparison-shopping site. In March, the FTC launched an investigation into price-fixing and collusion among landlords and property managers in the highly consolidated rental market. Proposed rules that would ban auto dealers from using bait-and-switch tactics, protect small poultry farmers from deceptive corporate distributors, break up the organ donor network monopoly, and restore net neutrality are popping up across the government. 

Ahead of the election, with satisfaction with the economy still low, Biden is doubling down in his war on shady pricing practices. In his State of the Union address, Biden railed against “deceptive pricing from food to health care to housing” and promised to crack down further on junk fees. “Snack companies think you won’t notice when they charge you just as much for the same size bag but with fewer chips in it,” he scoffed, and called on Congress to pass Senator Bob Casey’s recent anti-shrinkflation bill. In March, he issued a new executive order creating an FTC- and DOJ-led “Strike Force” to target anticompetitive practices across the economy, instituting new rules that slash credit card late fees from the current average of $32 down to $8, banning deceptive contracts in farming and ranching, and more. Whether all this momentum translates into real wins against corporate power will depend on who occupies the White House. 

The post Trump vs. Biden: Who Got More Done on Antitrust? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In the early summer of 2023, a consensus about President Joe Biden’s revival of antitrust enforcement took hold in the media: It had flopped. After the Federal Trade Commission, led by Lina Khan, failed in its attempts to stop two high-profile mergers—Meta’s acquisition of the virtual reality firm Within and Microsoft’s acquisition of the video game company Activision Blizzard—the obituaries poured in. “Joe Biden’s trustbusters have fallen short of their ambitions,” The Economist declared. “The defeats raise questions about Ms. Khan’s ability to carry out her ambitious goal of reversing decades of weak antitrust enforcement, as political pressure mounts and patience wanes,” The New York Times wrote. The Wall Street Journal has published an attack on Khan approximately once every 11 days. 

But if the boos from the peanut gallery fazed the Biden administration’s trustbusters, they haven’t shown it. In September, the Department of Justice went to trial against Google over its deals with smartphone companies to crowd out search engine competitors; another suit against Google, over its dominance of online advertising, is set to begin next spring. Later in September, Khan announced a major lawsuit against Amazon, charging the behemoth with engaging in “unfair methods of competition” such as forbidding merchants on its sites from offering lower prices on other sites. 

The audacity of the suit, and Khan’s abiding criticism of the company’s behavior—she wrote a now-famous treatise on Amazon’s stranglehold on the American economy as a law student in 2017—won her praise from some knowledgeable observers. “By sheer force of intellect,” wrote the New York Times tech reporter David Streitfeld, who has covered Amazon for decades, “she is opening up a conversation about how companies are allowed to behave.” But other media outlets covered the cases in the style of political campaign reporting, in which momentary wins and losses are treated as immensely important. “The spate of high-profile losses has amped up pressure on the FTC to bring a successful case against Amazon,” Politico speculated, as if recent “pressure” is what’s driving a case that Khan has been plotting for years. 

Hot takes like these reflect a spoon-fed PR narrative from the tech platforms in the government’s cross hairs. But a quick perusal of history books, or even a glance at Wikipedia, should dispel the notion that a few adverse rulings mean curtains for the revival of antitrust enforcement. The first efforts to check corporate “trusts” in the 1890s also faced major reversals in court, but in little more than a decade the federal government had broken up some of that era’s biggest monopolies, including Standard Oil. And over the subsequent decades, Washington would put together a robust regulatory regime that maintained a competitive economy that would last until the 1980s, when it was dismantled by the Reagan administration. 

Yet even on the myopic terms of debate set by the media, the story that Biden’s revival of anti-monopoly policy is failing is not supported by the facts. “That’s a complete bullshit narrative,” Matt Stoller, the author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, told me. “They’ve actually been really successful at deterring mergers, winning cases, and changing some aspects of the law.” Biden’s team has had a slew of important victories in court. They include a landmark win against the merger of Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House and a series of proposed mergers in health care, energy, and tech that were abandoned under the threat of litigation. This has had a demonstrable deterrence effect: So far in 2023, the total value of successful mergers is down 40 percent compared to the averages over the past five years.

But more than just litigating antitrust cases, Biden’s administration has reoriented the entire government toward making the economy fairer and more competitive. Biden’s policy program is designed to check monopoly and restructure competition in labor and other markets to public purposes. His administration has made stamping out anti-
worker and anti-consumer practices in the business world a government-wide imperative, directing agencies to use their full regulatory powers and issue new rules. Results include a crackdown on junk fees, a breakup of the private hearing aid cartel, and new regulations on broadband and rail companies, to name a few early victories. 

While the media and many political commentators remain largely obtuse to the larger vision behind these changes, Biden has been explicit about how competition policy unites his administration’s directives across areas that have long been treated as distinct policy silos, including trade, national security, antitrust, labor law, industrial policy, and public investment in infrastructure, as Rana Foroohar explains elsewhere in this issue (see “The Great Reordering”). And while Biden’s revival of antitrust enforcement and competition policy is a sharp break with the past few decades, there’s reason to think it will endure for years to come, regardless of what happens next November.

Biden’s vision is deeply informed by the largely forgotten history of how America once used a broad range of public policies and institutions to contain corporate monopolies and channel competition to productive, equitable ends. This history includes the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act and subsequent amendments, which tamed the power of railroad barons and ensured that different shippers, towns, cities, and regions enjoyed equal access to the dominant networked industry of the era. It includes the Sherman Act of 1890 and subsequent amendments that would eventually come to contain the monopoly power of trusts controlled by colluding Wall Street banks and financiers like Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan. It included Progressive Era institutions like the Federal Trade Commission, armed with the statutory power to police unfair business practices and combinations wherever they occur. And it included state and federal laws like the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 that restricted giant retailers like Woolworth’s and the A&P grocery chain from abusing their market power over suppliers and customers.

By the 1950s and ’60s, this broad competition policy regime had led to market structures that were well balanced compared to today and consistent with both innovation and the growth of a broad middle class. In sectors of the economy like chemicals or auto manufacturing, where there were large economies of scale and deep capital needs, giant corporations like DuPont or General Motors were allowed, but they were bound by labor laws that effectively forced them to share their profits with their workers, and by codes of corporate governance that made them responsible to stakeholders beyond just their stockholders. In other realms, corporate concentration was allowed only to the point that it was necessary to accommodate progress. Farms got bigger and more mechanized, and so did food processors, but they were not allowed to become concentrated agribusinesses like today’s industrial-scale confined animal feeding operations, monopolized meat-packers, or international fertilizer and “biotech” cartels. Modern supermarkets replaced many local butchers or bakers, but chain stores were prohibited from approaching anything like the market dominance of today’s Walmart, let alone Amazon, and in most American towns and cities, Main Street merchants still had a chance. 

All this changed during and after the 1980s. Ronald Reagan effectively ended antitrust enforcement, except in cases of proven collusion and egregious monopoly pricing. Restraint on price discrimination by retailers also went by the wayside. This set off a merger and acquisition boom that, when combined with broad deregulation of financial institutions, gave Wall Street financiers increasing dominance over the whole economy and led to the loss of millions of middle-class jobs. Meanwhile, free trade policies and lax antitrust enforcement embraced by both Republican and Democratic administrations eroded much of the country’s industrial production and led to dangerous dependencies on foreign-made computer chips, pharmaceuticals, and key minerals. 

Most of this sea change in policy occurred not by repealing the laws that had long channeled and balanced market competition in America, but by policy makers in both parties just failing to enforce them. The result was the growth of corporations of unprecedented size and power in every sector—from media and communications to retail, banking, health care, energy, and food production—that hollowed out local communities and vastly increased racial, regional, generational, and other forms of inequality. 

For years, the connection between these baleful economic trends and growing market concentration went largely unrecognized by leading policy makers and economists. But beginning in the mid-2000s and increasingly in the early 2010s, writers and thinkers such as Barry Lynn, Phillip Longman, and Lina Khan (who worked together at the think tank New America) began making these causal links in a series of major exposés, mostly in the Washington Monthly and Harper’s. The national press and established politicians in both parties were slow to take note. Even those who faulted the American economy on other grounds typically still believed that it was marked by entrepreneurial dynamism and robust competition. 

After the Great Recession, the rise of the Tea Party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left revealed the country’s disillusionment with the deeply unequal and precarious economy that consolidation had created. Further evidence came in 2015, with the ascendant presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who channeled the country’s fury at big banks and billionaires. None of this populist activity focused much on monopoly power, but its effect was to finally make some leaders in Washington start listening to antitrust reformers. In early 2016, Senator Elizabeth Warren met with Lynn, Khan, Jonathan Kanter, another strong anti-monopoly advocate, and Ted Downey, the executive editor of The Capitol Forum, which reports on antitrust issues. A few months later, Warren delivered a speech in which she warned that “concentration threatens our markets, threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy.” That fall, Hillary Clinton gave a speech on the need for greater antitrust enforcement, the first major presidential candidate to do so in decades.

It was a breakthrough moment for the Democrats. During Trump’s term in office, lawmakers like Warren, Sanders, and Amy Klobuchar began talking regularly about the dangers of monopolies. In June 2019, the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee opened an investigation led by Democrat David Cicilline into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, and Cicilline recruited Khan as counsel for the committee. Summoning the CEOs of those companies for testimony, Cicilline framed them as modern-day robber barons. The investigation, he said, “goes to the heart of whether we as a people govern ourselves, or whether we let ourselves be governed by private monopolies.” Ahead of the 2020 elections, regulating Big Tech became a major issue in the Democratic primary. 

For decades, Biden went along with his party’s general retreat from antitrust enforcement and tolerance of growing corporate concentration. But by 2020, his party’s neoliberal consensus was cracking under the country’s obvious disaffection with the economic status quo. When he won the nomination, he spoke of the need for deep structural change—“an FDR-sized presidency,” as he put it. 

Under the guidance of senior advisers Ron Klain and Bruce Reed, he appointed Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and the author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, to a newly created White House economic advisory position. Wu helped impress on him the importance of antitrust enforcement. “The president really liked the idea of basically doing what FDR had done,” Wu told me. “What did FDR do? What FDR did was reinvigorate antitrust.” 

Biden chose Khan to lead the FTC, at 32 the youngest chair in its history, and Kanter to head the antitrust division of the DOJ. Both are members of the “New Brandeis” school of antitrust theory, which, in the tradition of the Progressive Era jurist and reformer Louis Brandeis, holds that consolidation threatens the economic and social conditions of democracy and which advocates for the full use of the antitrust regulatory powers of the government. 

Wu, Klain, and Reed, together with other senior staffers like the economic adviser Brian Deese, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai—some veterans of the Clinton and Obama administrations, others newcomers—devised a policy agenda that exchanged the free market austerity of Reaganomics for new regulations and investments in climate and infrastructure. The group shared an expansive view of competition policy that went beyond antitrust enforcement to include “every law and policy that promotes the distribution of power, of opportunity, of risk,” as Lynn told me. The Biden staff’s conceptual embrace of competition policy, he said, “is far better than anything we could have ever imagined.” 

After years of fruitless advocacy, Wu told me, “all of a sudden, things start to move very quickly” with Biden’s senior staff in place. While Congress began to move fitfully on new antitrust legislation, Biden used his own authority to reorient the federal agencies toward protecting workers and promoting competition as it did in the New Deal era, with a “whole-of-government” executive order, issued on July 9, 2021, that was principally authored by Wu. The order called on 17 different government agencies to take a laundry list of actions to address “some of the most pressing competition problems” in the economy. “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation,” Biden declared in his announcement. “Over time, we’ve lost the fundamental American idea that true capitalism depends on fair and open competition.” 

More than two years later, here’s what Biden’s anti-monopoly push has accomplished. 

The most important dimension of Biden’s whole-of-government antitrust agenda is an aggressive approach to litigating cases. Last October, the DOJ secured the most important antitrust victory of the Biden era when it successfully blocked the merger of Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, which would have cut the number of major publishers in the U.S. from five to four. The “theory of harm” prosecutors presented was novel for the modern era. The DOJ did not allege harm to consumers—i.e., rely on the “consumer welfare” standard—and instead focused their arguments on how authors suffer from consolidation in publishing. By winning the case on this basis, the government set an important new precedent for future litigation: Antitrust cases can be argued on and won by proving harms to independent contractors and businesses, like Uber drivers and merchants selling on Amazon. Another key victory came in May 2023, when the DOJ successfully sued to stop an anticompetitive regional partnership between JetBlue and American Airlines. “I think we can call airline consolidation dead for the moment,” Matt Stoller wrote in his Substack, BIG. Kanter also has pending investigations into Visa, Ticketmaster, and Apple. 

And it’s not just merger cases. The agency announced its intention to more aggressively enforce the Clayton Act’s prohibition on directors serving simultaneously on the boards of competitors, leading to the resignation of board directors in several industries. “The DOJ making this a priority is a big step and consistent with the broader theme of reviving dormant legal powers,” Sandeep Vaheesan of the Open Markets Institute (OMI) said. During Obama’s first term, the USDA unsuccessfully tried to challenge the poultry industry’s abusive “tournament system,” which pits chicken farmers against each other to compete for bids and undercuts their bargaining power. But last summer, a DOJ lawsuit against the food production conglomerate Cargill, several competitors, and a data consulting firm alleging years of collusion and wage suppression ended in an $85 million settlement, effectively ending the practice across much of the industry.

Kanter has also initiated a half-dozen criminal investigations against no-poach and wage-fixing agreements, which illegally block workers from changing jobs in their industry. In October 2022, the DOJ won the first-ever conviction under antitrust law for employer collusion when the staffing firm VDA pleaded guilty to a conspiracy with another firm to refrain from recruiting or hiring each other’s nurses. Several other cases have ended in acquittals, but as with lawsuits against mergers, the message is being heard in the business world: Antitrust enforcers are taking labor violations seriously again. 

The FTC likewise has filed far more ambitious antitrust lawsuits than it did under previous administrations. Khan has said that to win, the government must be willing to lose, eschewing the extreme caution of her predecessors. But there’s been less losing than media coverage would lead you to believe. Khan’s two oft-referenced defeats in court—the failed lawsuits against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision and Meta’s acquisition of Within—are in fact the FTC’s only clear losses. The agency has secured important wins in court, including a recent ruling against Intuit for falsely advertising its signature product, TurboTax, as free. The FTC has also extracted settlements that prevent abusive business practices, such as one with the health information technology company Surescripts that prohibits the firm from excluding competitors from e-prescribing markets. And many cases have concluded in companies dropping a merger after being sued by the FTC. Under the threat of litigation, the computer chip maker Nvidia called off its $40 billion acquisition of the chip design firm Arm; Lockheed Martin dropped its $4.4 billion purchase of the engine maker Aerojet Rocketdyne; and Berkshire Hathaway called off its $1.7 billion purchase of a pipeline in Utah, to name a few. 

The credible threat of prosecution has proven to have a deterrence effect on mergers and acquisitions across the economy. Though other factors may be at work as well in driving down mergers, merger filings fell by roughly 40 percent in the year after Biden put his new competition policy team in place. In 2023, the total value of successful mergers is also down 40 percent. The business world is feeling the heat: In recent months, the supermarkets Kroger and Albertsons have sold more than 400 stores to try to avoid a merger challenge.

What’s more, antitrust advocates hailed the unsuccessful challenge to Meta’s purchase of Within as a sneaky victory for changing case law. The FTC argued that a monopolist’s acquisition of a nascent company in the market, rather than a mature competitor, can violate antitrust law. The FTC also maintained that a company like Meta can even hurt competition in an industry, like VR fitness apps, in which it’s not yet operating. In his decision, the judge affirmed both of the FTC’s arguments as valid in principle—the first time a court has accepted such arguments since the 1980s. This, like the Penguin Random House case, sets a precedent for future litigation.

Reestablishing a broader interpretation of antitrust this way is an essential part of Khan and Kanter’s strategy. “One of the challenges that we face is that antitrust law has, in certain areas, calcified because cases haven’t been brought in new contexts,” Khan told me. Pursuing only classic “rivals buying rivals” cases would do little to expand what’s possible through litigation in an increasingly complex economy, where anticompetitive behavior can take many forms. 

Breaking the judiciary’s narrow reliance on the consumer welfare standard will be especially important for tech regulation. Effects on consumer prices alone are a poor measure of the monopoly power of companies like Google and Facebook, which offer free products to consumers even as they charge monopolistic prices to the businesses that rely on their platforms. Case in point: In its lawsuit against Google’s dominance over online advertising—the heart of Google’s business—the DOJ alleges that the company’s anti-competitive behavior lowers ad revenues for websites and publishers and hikes ad costs for marketers. And in its lawsuit against Amazon, the FTC points specifically to the goliath’s monopolistic abuse of online stores doing business on its platform. 

This past July, the DOJ and the FTC published draft guidelines that laid out the more expansive standards by which they’re prosecuting anticompetitive behavior. The merger guidelines are a sort of open letter to judges, and while they have no power to compel judges to rule a certain way, courts have given guidelines significant deference across every presidency they’ve been issued. As major cases loom, it may help prosecutors turn the tide. 

Lawsuits by the FTC and the DOJ are only the most high-profile weapon in the Biden administration’s war against concentrated economic power. Less prominent but equally potent are the writing and enforcement of regulations based on statutory powers previous administrations have neglected. For instance, when Trump took office, enforcement actions by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fell by 75 percent, but it has been revitalized by the Biden appointee Rohit Chopra. The CFPB has gone after companies for price gouging in captive markets like prison financial services, is working on rules that would make it easier for consumers to change banks, and is cracking down on “junk fees”—deceptive charges for service—in banking, part of an administration-wide fight against such fees. 

New pro-competition, pro-consumer rules are popping up across the government. The Food and Drug Administration passed a rule to foster greater competition within the hearing aid industry, which is dominated by four companies that together control 85 percent of U.S. sales. With a new Democratic majority, the Federal Communications Commission is preparing to reinstate net neutrality rules to stop broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon from speeding up connection rates to favored websites and slowing service to others. And the Surface Transportation Board is developing rules that will inject more competition into railroading, one of the most consolidated industries in America, by giving shippers currently served by only one railroad greater options for routing their freight on other lines. 

The most important rule changes have been at the FTC. Under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, the agency has broad authority to make new rules to stop “unfair methods of competition,” but previous administrations failed to use that power. That’s changed under Biden. In January, the FTC proposed a ban on noncompete agreements, which rob more than a quarter of private-sector workers of the basic right to freely switch jobs within the same industry. Under this same authority, the agency is developing rules to crack down on personal data collection and has voted to boost “right to repair” enforcement, prompting Microsoft and Apple to change their rules to allow consumers to repair their own electronic equipment. 

Is an earth-shattering win against a tech giant possible in the near term? It’s hard to say. But if major breakups like that of Standard Oil in 1911 are what antitrust is best known for, enforcement in the New Deal era was built on the humbler work of reaching favorable settlements and deterring mergers through the threat of litigation. Bringing corporate power to heel has always been achieved through “1,000 nibbles,” as Barry Lynn told The American Prospect. The Google search case the FTC is currently litigating, for example, is simply “one of those nibbles,” he said.

In 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter famously observed that “the antitrust enterprise, as an institutional reality, now runs its quiet course without much public attention.” In other words, as enforcement became routinized, the specter of litigation was enough to keep corporations in line. In the 1960s and ’70s, about 70 percent of antitrust lawsuits concluded in a court-ordered settlement.

Such agreements were the backbone of midcentury antitrust enforcement. As Lynn wrote in the Monthly, Thurman Arnold, the architect of America’s 20th-century antitrust regime, established the “government’s general approach” to enforcement, which “was to start by bringing an antitrust suit against a firm that had captured undue control of some sector of the economy. It would then accept a settlement (in the form of a consent decree)” and extract meaningful concessions, such as requiring the company to share patents with competitors for free. 

The history of antitrust is only in small part the history of winning big cases. “People think antitrust is very effective when the government is bringing and winning big cases, and my view of that is it’s wrong,” OMI’s Vaheesan said. “When agencies are bringing cases, they’re also deterring a lot of bad conduct from being pursued in the first place, certain mergers aren’t proposed, and certain competitive practices aren’t being used. I think those are the defining features of the successful postwar antitrust system.” 

This deterrence effect has important implications for the cases against Google, Amazon, and others that Biden has brought, even if his administration isn’t around to see them through. In 1998, the Clinton administration sued Microsoft over its attempts to monopolize the web browser market, the last major antitrust action against a tech giant before the Biden era. A court ordered the company to be split in two, but the George W. Bush administration reversed the order when he assumed office. Still, the company was chastened enough to allow competitors—including Google—to emerge and thrive in Silicon Valley. Even if a future administration lets Biden’s major cases fizzle, this wave of lawsuits will likely induce lingering caution.

But there’s reason to hope that the revival of anti-monopoly policy will not end after Biden leaves office, even if he’s replaced by a Republican. After all, the Trump administration also made some halting moves toward restoring antitrust enforcement, most notably bringing the Google search suit in the waning months of his presidency before Biden’s team took the case over. Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who voted for Lina Khan’s confirmation in 2021, recently introduced legislation to break up meat-packing and poultry monopolies. In the September Republican debate, Ron DeSantis called Meta and Google “monopolies.” The writing is on the wall: Slamming corporate power is good politics. “There are such things as ideological and intellectual trends,” Wu told me. “A return to antitrust is one of them.” 

That’s not to say that this new antitrust trend is fated to triumph. The sway of corporate power in both parties remains formidable. The federal bench is rife with judges who’ve spent their careers waving through mergers and who can be counted on to be skeptical of cases brought by federal trustbusters. It’s foolish to discount the difficulty of bringing to heel the most powerful corporations the world has ever known. 

But it’s even more foolish to write off the antitrust efforts of the Biden administration after a couple of court losses, as the press has been doing. The truth is that the fight for a fair economy isn’t failing. It’s just getting started.

The post Winning the Anti-monopoly Game appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and presidential aspirant, is owning the libs the way he knows best: by screwing over his constituents.  

Under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the most significant climate investment in American history, Florida is eligible for $346 million in residential energy rebates. These subsidies would help consumers buy energy-efficient appliances and retrofit their homes, cutting fossil fuel consumption and shrinking their energy bills—a welcome benefit for all but especially for low-income families, who are slated to receive half the funding. 

Despite this, Politico reported that DeSantis recently vetoed the state’s application for the rebate funds. His office provided no explanation, but his reasons seemed obvious: In a crowded presidential primary, thwarting the Democratic incumbent is its own reward. “It’s very frustrating to see how presidential politics is hurting Floridians,” Wayne Messam, the Democratic mayor of Miramar, Florida, told me. That the state is reeling from the summer’s heat and storms and is more vulnerable to climate change than perhaps any other might make another governor reconsider turning down free climate funds. But not DeSantis.  

Scuttling funds requested by a Florida legislature with a Republican supermajority exemplifies how the 44-year-old uses gubernatorial authority to roll over the popular will—and even other GOP elected officials. DeSantis has vetoed an almost unanimously popular bipartisan law that would have saved $277 million by electrifying the state’s vehicles, blocked Florida cities from requiring gas stations to add electric charging, and stood in the way of federal funding for popular and urgent climate programs. Earlier this year, he turned down $24 million in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to upgrade rural wastewater systems, $3 million in IRA funds to fight pollution, and funds for the Solar for All program, which would have paid to help low-income households install solar panels.  

While DeSantis has engaged in gubernatorial bigfooting, Messam observes that his antics are “just the same old, tired, just crazy acts” of Republican governors nationwide. During the Obama administration, GOP governors declined funds for expanded Medicaid coverage and rail lines with a zeal they usually save for cutting taxes for the wealthy. Ten GOP-controlled states still haven’t expanded Medicaid, including Florida under DeSantis. The governor’s energy rebate veto is just the latest.  

But what’s new this time is the determination of Democrats not to be caught flat-footed. For local leaders like Messam, who represents over 135,000 constituents, the fight for the energy rebates isn’t over. U.S. Representative Darren Soto, a Democrat from Kissimmee, Florida, near Orlando, told the Washington Monthly that he met with Biden’s team last week about restructuring the application guidelines for the rebate program to bypass state governments.  

The third-term representative is confident that this is doable. “IRA is a budget [reconciliation] bill that doesn’t delineate every aspect of how to implement the program—the Biden administration already has wide discretion to be able to go around the states,” he said. On Wednesday, Soto issued a letter signed by each of Florida’s Democratic members of Congress requesting that the federal government implement the rebate program directly or through municipal governments. “The idea was met positively in my meeting with White House officials,” Soto said. 

When Biden took office in 2021, the Monthly implored him to sidestep hostile Republican governors and route federal spending directly to local governments this way. As I reported last spring, the administration took the advice. The COVID relief package Biden signed in March 2021, the American Rescue Plan (ARPA), provided $130 billion directly to cities and towns versus the $220 billion states received—a huge departure from stimulus bills under previous administrations, which directed nearly all funds to Tallahassee, Columbus, and other state capitals. “We made sure the American Rescue Plan empowered you directly—directly,” Biden told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in January. The same was true of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which made a third of all surface transportation money available to municipalities, and the IRA, which is designed to allow municipalities, which are tax-exempt entities, to take advantage of the billions in tax incentives for renewable energy by making the credits available as direct payments. “It’s a direct response to governors playing politics with increasing frequency with federal funds,” Soto said. 

Despite this remarkable progress, much of the funding in Biden’s spending bills is still at the mercy of governors like DeSantis. Just months into his presidency, in May 2021, some 20 GOP-led state governments flexed their power by ending unemployment benefits under ARPA several months early. Several governors have recently joined DeSantis in rebuffing climate pollution reduction grants and the Solar for All program. As Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act spending pours into states, the specter of Republican obstructionism looms. The coming months will show whether governors have the appetite to make spurning infrastructure and climate funds the sort of conservative litmus test that rejection of Medicaid expansion was a decade ago. 

But so far, Republican-led states have largely availed themselves of BIL and IRA funds instead of immiserating their constituents. Republicans have shown no hesitancy in sending press releases to cheer funding under the CHIPS and Science Act that put dollars in their districts to build semiconductor plants—even when they voted against the landmark measure.  

The performative rejection of monies might be becoming passé. Biden now jokes about this. “My Republican friends who voted against [the IRA]—I still get asked to fund the projects in those districts as well,” he teased in February. “But don’t worry, I promised I’d be a president for all Americans. We’ll fund these projects, and I’ll see you at the groundbreaking.” And should DeSantis-style obstinance spread, Democrats are readying an end run. Soto said a new era of local empowerment is upon us: “There’s no question.” 

The post DeSantis Loves Stepping on Florida Municipalities, Thwarting the Popular Will appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In high school, Brieon Fonoti knew what attending a high-quality four-year college could mean for his life. “School was always the goal,” he says. But growing up in a poor neighborhood in Long Beach, California, where he attended “a lot of inner-city schools,” even the state’s well-funded public colleges felt unattainable. His mother, who raised him and his three siblings by herself, cycled between jobs—call centers, the post office—and struggled to make ends meet. Looking for a better life, Fonoti heard that the military often pays for higher education after a period of service. “I was trying to do something to make it easier on myself financially,” he told me. “And so, I joined the Army.”

After graduating from high school in 2017, Fonoti, whose mother is Black and father is Samoan, left Long Beach for a paralegal position with the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAG Corps, at Fort Riley in Kansas. “I was looking for a job that would transfer over to the civilian side,” he explained, and paralegal work held such promise. There, a senior officer recognized his talent. “You work hard,” he recalled the officer saying. “You’re really smart. Why don’t you go to school and become an officer?” The way to become an officer was through the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, so he applied.

Because of Fonoti’s middling high school grades, West Point didn’t accept him outright, but instead offered him a spot at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School (USMAPS), located at a nearby satellite campus. USMAPS allows promising applicants who need to catch up to their peers academically to spend a full school year taking small-group academic courses and preparing to reapply for West Point. The JAG Corps officer who recognized Fonoti’s talent had also gone through USMAPS, and encouraged him to accept the invitation. About 40 percent of the 240 or so would-be cadets who attend USMAPS every year are Black, and many, like Fonoti, come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Though he was at first hesitant to say yes because it meant investing a year of his time, once Fonoti started at USMAPS in the fall of 2020, he felt supported academically in a way he never had before. “I was touching subjects I had never taken in high school,” he said. “Like, I never took calculus, I never took physics.” He served as battalion commander, a leadership role similar to class president, for one semester, and finished 30th in his class out of more than 200. When he reapplied to West Point in the spring, he was accepted.

Fonoti completed his sophomore year at West Point this past spring. He’s majoring in law and is ranked about 800th out of 1,200 in his class—an impressive feat for a student of his background at West Point, a college that’s as selective as Georgetown. To have finally realized his dream can feel surreal, he told me. “Even now sometimes I’m walking around, like, damn, I kind of—kind of go here,” he said, incredulous, on a sunlit day this spring. We sat outside the campus’s formidable gray-brick dining hall, the Hudson River rushing below. A statue of Douglas MacArthur loomed nearby.

Fonoti’s remarkable story is far from unique at West Point: In recent decades, the school has used its long-running preparatory program, which about 42 percent of Black cadets go through, to build a more racially and economically diverse student body than most other selective schools. Black cadets make up about 15 percent of the West Point student body, double the percentage of most Ivy League colleges, and graduate at a similar rate as white cadets. Black West Point graduates also achieve the rank of major early in their career nearly as often as white graduates.

Like other race-conscious admissions programs, USMAPS is designed to help promising recruits who may be lagging academically because of their socioeconomic background. But it does so in a way that civilian colleges seldom do—by building up those students’ academic abilities to match those of their more privileged peers. In other words, students who excel at USMAPS prove through their performance that they are worthy of admission.

For colleges looking to find ways to achieve racial diversity after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating affirmative action in college admissions, USMAPS may provide an answer. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a sister case involving the University of North Carolina, the Court ruled it illegal for colleges to give minority students an advantage based on their race. USMAPS shows that a rigorous preparatory education can help students reach the regular admissions threshold on grades, test scores, and other entry criteria, potentially making such an advantage unnecessary.

In the ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, noted that the decision “does not address” the use of race-conscious admissions policies by service academies like West Point. He justified the exemption by referencing “the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.” But the move was widely seen as a political expedient—a way to outlaw affirmative action in civilian settings without antagonizing the military, an institution voters revere. In an amicus brief to the Court last fall, 35 former leaders of the armed services warned that prohibiting the use of “modest, race-conscious admissions policies” would “impair the military’s ability to maintain diverse leadership, and thereby seriously undermine its institutional legitimacy and operational effectiveness.”

The service academy loophole also allowed Roberts to sidestep an inconvenient fact: USMAPS proves that it is possible to craft race-conscious college admissions policies with rigorous and fair standards. For the most committed opponents of affirmative action to acknowledge that would undermine their whole strategy.

But by the same reasoning, the success of USMAPS poses a challenge to liberal supporters of affirmative action as well. If military academies can use the preparatory school model to achieve diversity while upholding admissions standards, why can’t elite civilian colleges and universities do the same? In USMAPS, West Point is making the investment necessary to help highly capable but underprepared Black and Hispanic students succeed. Ivy League schools, by contrast, have taken the easier path. Rather than tap their immense endowments and powerful fund-raising capacities to train up large numbers of talented lower-income students of color, they hit their race targets by lowering the bar for admissions or enrolling better-prepared minority students from affluent families. Just 3 percent of all students at Harvard come from the bottom 20 percent by income, as Richard Kahlenberg noted in the Washington Monthly, and almost three-quarters of Black students are from the top socioeconomic fifth of the Black population.

The prep school model of race-based admissions is not the easy target for conservative activists that Harvard’s more conventional version proved to be. If affirmative action has a future after SFFA v. Harvard, introducing programs like USMAPS at civilian colleges could be what saves it.

The origins of military prep school can be traced to 1916, when an act of Congress authorized enlisted men to apply to West Point, spawning informal academic programs for soldiers stationed at home and abroad to prepare for the academy. USMAPS was born when West Point consolidated these programs into a formal preparatory school for enlisted soldiers in 1946.

After 1948, when President Harry Truman banned segregation in the military and integration began, Black service members received few opportunities for promotion to the officer corps. By the late 1960s, frustration over this pattern of discrimination, made worse by large numbers of Black draftees serving under white officers in the brutal combat of Vietnam, led to racial tension and violence. Recruiting more Black officers became imperative for maintaining order, and in the 1970s and ’80s, military leaders responded with aggressive affirmative action plans. That included establishing Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs at historically Black colleges and universities and requiring minority representation on officer promotion boards. The military also leaned heavily on USMAPS and similar prep schools in the Navy and Air Force to bring more Black candidates up to the academic level of the service academies. As a result, the Black student populations grew substantially. By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, a Black four-star general, Colin Powell, was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the military was widely lauded as the most successfully integrated institution in the country.

That success presented a major problem for conservatives in their long war to outlaw affirmative action. In 2003, the Supreme Court took up a case, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan Law School, that most experts predicted would spell the end to race-conscious admissions policies. Instead, a group of retired senior military leaders delivered an amicus brief testifying to the vital role affirmative action had played in the rebuilding of the nation’s armed forces after Vietnam and warning of dire consequences to military readiness should those tools be taken away. Legal experts called the brief a “showstopper,” and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, drew heavily from it in an opinion that would protect affirmative action for another two decades.

Meanwhile, in 2011, USMAPS relocated from Eatontown, New Jersey, to a single enormous glass building just a few miles up the road from the academy’s main campus on the Hudson River. There, promising West Point applicants whose grades and test scores fall short of the academy live and study for 10 months without distractions. “USMAPS is a very close facsimile of what they’ll experience at West Point,” Colonel Carl Wojtaszek, the chair of the West Point economics department and coauthor of a major recent study of USMAPS, told me. In addition to underrepresented racial groups, USMAPS serves prior-enlisted service members, who make up 20 to 30 percent of the USMAPS student body, and student athletes recruited to West Point, who make up about 40 percent. “Prepsters” are put through a gauntlet of military drills and physical training, but the school’s main emphasis is academics. The curriculum focuses on three core subjects—math, science, and English—and features a full-year study skills course that emphasizes time management and information literacy. “Learning how to just prioritize and time-manage—that was the biggest key at Prep that they would stress to us,” says Jemel Jones, who attended USMAPS in 2018 and graduated from West Point this spring after playing quarterback all four seasons at the academy. Jones says those study skills helped him keep pace with students who were admitted directly to West Point when he arrived at the academy.

Civilian colleges across the country have also long struggled with the fact that first-year students from disadvantaged backgrounds often lack the academic preparation they need to succeed. Their efforts to correct the problem, however, have been much less effective. Most colleges funnel underprepared new students into remedial education courses that rehash material the students failed to learn in high school. Students who are put in remedial classes at four-year colleges are often overburdened by the extra class time and schoolwork, and are more likely to drop out, according to the organization Education Reform Now. More than half of Black students at four-year colleges are in such programs.

Many colleges, including highly selective ones, have taken a more promising approach: placing incoming freshmen with lower grades and test scores in two- to six-week summer preparatory programs. The few studies of these programs’ effect on student attainment suggest that they are modestly more successful than regular remedial classes. For instance, a 2010 study of 2,222 incoming freshmen at a selective technical college found that students who attended the college’s summer bridge program were 3 percent more likely to graduate than a control group of students with similar high school GPAs and household income.

But for students who grew up in the most adverse circumstances and attended low-performing high schools, only so much can be accomplished in just a few weeks. No civilian colleges have expanded on the success of the summer school preparatory model and developed a full-year program like USMAPS.

That’s because ordinary colleges don’t have the same incentives as the military to invest in their students’ success. “A normal college, when they bring somebody in, they’re thinking at best it’s a graduate that leaves and they don’t have to worry about again, but we are obligated to have our graduates go into the Army and lead,” Wojtaszek said. “We can’t have failure on the human capital side, because that person is going into our ranks and will lead 39 sons and daughters. Just getting him across the stage isn’t enough.”

Another crucial difference is that, unlike summer school students at civilian colleges, USMAPS students haven’t already gotten into West Point. At the end of the year, they reapply for the academy. About 83 percent get in. This gives would-be cadets a clear goal: gaining entry. “This aligns the incentives,” Wojtaszek and his collaborators pointed out in their study, which was published this spring.

That incentive structure helped Marisa Reyes, a 2018 West Point graduate and former prepster, find motivation to succeed. Growing up in Brownsville, Texas, Reyes lacked a sense of purpose and struggled to keep up with her high-achieving sisters in high school. “There was an honors breakfast where both my sisters were getting recognized for being A-plus students,” she says. Her dad turned to her. “He asked me, ‘Don’t you want to be up there someday?’” After her older sister was accepted to the Naval Academy, Reyes applied to all three service academies and was rejected. But West Point offered her a spot in the preparatory program. There, for the first time, she found purpose: getting in. “The saying was, ‘Getting you ready to go down the hill,’” Reyes told me. “That was constantly referenced.” Now that she was surrounding herself “with people that were always motivated,” she said, she thrived.

It’s a winning formula. USMAPS students who are admitted to West Point increase their SAT scores, on average, from 1099 to 1164 over the course of the preparatory year. That figure is within the normal range for directly admitted West Point first-year students and only 122 points shy of the 1286 mean score for direct-admits. West Point assesses applicants with its College Entrance Examination Rank (CEER), an academic ability metric based on a student’s high school class rank (adjusted for school quality) and SAT scores. According to Wojtaszek’s study, Black prepsters who were accepted to West Point after completing USMAPS saw a 29-point gain on CEER’s 800-point scale, and Hispanic prepsters saw a 36-point gain. These improvements mean that Black and Hispanic prepsters accepted to West Point upon reapplying have academic credentials equivalent to those of lower-performing applicants who are admitted directly to the academy.

But academics are only one measure used at West Point. Admission is determined by the Whole Candidate Score (WCS), a comprehensive measure of abilities, 60 percent of which is based on CEER. A candidate’s leadership potential, which is calculated based on high school faculty recommendations and extracurricular achievements, is another 30 percent, and the final 10 percent is a physical fitness test. Over the course of USMAPS, Black prepsters who were accepted to West Point improved their leadership score by 24 points and physical score by 6 points on an 800-point scale.

Just as impressively, since 1951, USMAPS graduates have made up 11 percent of the student body, yet they have held a quarter of the student leadership positions at West Point. Since West Point’s goal is to prepare future leaders, not future academics, this figure is an especially encouraging indicator of USMAPS’s effectiveness and of the wisdom of allowing its graduates into West Point ahead of some other students with higher SAT scores.

USMAPS also helps students with the cultural acclimation necessary to succeed at a rigorous college. Reyes, the 2018 West Point graduate, described the proactive academic mind-set she learned at the prep school. “USMAPS did a good job of teaching you [to] always ask for help,” she said. That confidence and sense of belonging is critical at a prestigious college like West Point. Despite the academy’s strides on diversity, the school is still culturally dominated by white legacy students. “This place is way outside the norm of what I’m used to in California,” Fonoti told me this spring while we walked across the vast central quad, a group of mostly white cadets playing volleyball nearby. “There are a lot of kids here with, like, really oddly important parents,” he added. “They all went to private schools.” That’s not true for many former prepsters. As Fonoti put it, he can’t call his parents and say, “‘Super-important mom and dad, shit hit the fan. I need help.’ They’re the ones asking me!”

In civilian higher education, this cultural dislocation can be insurmountable. Often, low-income students of color struggle with the adjustment to their new surroundings, failing to find a support network and toiling at their schoolwork in isolation. They drop out at higher rates than their peers. It’s a different story at West Point. Former prepsters I spoke with described a culture of mutual support rooted in their prep year together. “We do have a really deep sense of camaraderie,” Fonoti said. “A lot of us are first-generation college students.” Jones, the quarterback who graduated this spring, said this affinity among former prepsters was a source of strength at West Point. “We take pride throwing up the ‘U’ for ‘USMAPS,’” he said, beaming, and made a “U” with his thumbs and index fingers. Jones, who will fulfill his five-year active-duty service as a tank platoon leader at Fort Bliss in Texas, said that as an upperclassman he made a habit of mentoring younger former prepsters.

Prepsters have a lower-than-average academic class rank at the academy, but 58 percent of students who entered USMAPS between 2005 and 2008, the last time the figure was made publicly available, eventually graduated from West Point. The rate was even slightly higher for Black students than white—60 percent compared to 58 percent—and is especially impressive considering that West Point is tougher to get through than most elite colleges. The overall West Point graduation rate is 84 percent; Harvard’s is 98 percent.

Almost 25 years ago, the journalist and Air Force veteran Debra Dickerson made the case in U.S. News & World Report that elite civilian colleges should follow the military’s example and create their own preparatory feeder schools. This spring, Wojtaszek came to the same conclusion. “Selective colleges and universities can potentially benefit from the experiences of West Point since they face similar challenges in attracting low-income and minority students who are often not sufficiently well prepared for the academic rigors of advanced undergraduate education,” he and his collaborators argued in their study of USMAPS.

One lesson elite institutions of higher education can take from the military’s experience is that viable prep schools can’t be run on the cheap. The Army doesn’t disclose the cost per student at USMAPS, which is free for attendees. But it is a fair bet that it’s close to the cost of West Point itself, which is about $62,500 per cadet per year. The government picks up 100 percent of that, too. Every Ivy League college has an endowment north of $6 billion; Harvard’s is $53 billion. Prestigious colleges and universities certainly can come up with the money to run high-quality preparatory academies. They haven’t because they haven’t needed to: Until now, they could meet their diversity goals simply by lowering admission standards and recruiting better-prepared minority students from affluent families.

That’s not going to be so easy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June decision banning race-conscious admissions policies. Elite schools will still have some inexpensive workarounds, like making standardized tests optional, an already-spreading practice that has been shown to advantage Black and Hispanic students, and giving credit to students who write in their admissions essays about how race has affected their lives (another carve-out Roberts wrote into his opinion). Still, racial diversity on elite college campuses is expected to go down unless those colleges are willing to try new strategies.

USMAPS-style prep schools should be high on the list, especially because they have a strong chance of passing muster with the Court. Or, at least, they will for a while. In SFFA v. Harvard, Roberts, a patient longtime foe of affirmative action, left open the possibility that the Court might someday revisit the military academies exemption. Conservatives elsewhere are already gunning for it. In July, soon after the ruling, House Republicans added a provision in the annual defense authorization bill that would do away with all affirmative action programs in the military. That language is likely to be stripped out of the legislation during negotiations, with Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House. But that situation won’t last forever, either.

Even if the civilian prep school strategy might someday be vulnerable to challenge by politicians or the courts, liberals should still encourage elite colleges to pursue it. Not only would it benefit lower-income minority students, more of whom would be admitted into prestigious schools; it could also prove to be the innovation that saves the very concept of race-based admissions.

The hard truth is that traditional affirmative action has long been unpopular with most voters. But those voters might be more sympathetic to a prep school version if they came to understand that minority participants invest a year’s worth of sweat equity to earn their place by rising to the academic standards of elite colleges. And if the American public comes to support this model of affirmative action, conservatives will attack it at their peril.

The post How the Military Can Save Affirmative Action appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On April 13, federal authorities arrested 21-year-old Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira for leaking classified intelligence documents. If his alleged crimes are extraordinary, his story seems painfully familiar.  

A young man with a lot of anger, Teixeira lived at home and seemed to have no real social life beyond obsessing over weapons with his gamer friends on the social media platform Discord. He had a veritable garrison at his Dighton, Massachusetts, home. To persuade the presiding judge not to release him on bond, prosecutors unearthed the unsettling fact that Teixeira, who was permitted to see classified intelligence in his role as an IT specialist at Joint Base Cape Cod, had once been denied a weapons permit by the state of Massachusetts for making violent threats at his high school. His online activity suggested an alarming preoccupation with mass shooters and an apparent sympathy for terrorist attacks by the Islamic State.  

Teixeira was rewarded for his violent fantasies in his “Thug Shaker Central” Discord group, where users casually shared racist, antisemitic, and anti-Ukraine posts. The group typifies a deeply misanthropic culture that’s taken hold online in an age of widespread male discontent. “There’s no point hiding it,” one group member told The New York Times. “I’m not a good person.”  

Unlike past intelligence leakers—those purporting a just cause like Edward Snowden or aggrieved sorts looking for money like Aldrich Ames—Teixeira’s ambitions in disclosing sensitive documents were small. His sole purpose was to impress his online pals with his access to secrets. He seems not to have wanted the intelligence widely shared, and the only reward he sought was the group’s admiration.  

Teixeira has no antecedent as an intelligence leaker. Still, as a young man with limited ambitions, a pitch-black worldview, and an inability to make his way constructively in today’s America, he’s symbolic of a generation of lost men.  

Over the last decade, scholars like Richard Reeves and Nicholas Eberstadt and journalists like Hannah Rosin have sounded the alarm about the social dislocation of American boys and young men, who are falling behind women in school and the workplace by multiple measures. Some are falling out of society altogether. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the decline in college enrollment for male students was seven times the rate for female students. Some 63 percent of young men now are single—for young women, it’s half that—and more young men live with their parents than with a partner. Men now account for almost three out of every four “deaths of despair”—suicide and drug overdoses.  

About 15 percent of men say they have no close friends (the rate was 3 percent in 1990) and are twice as likely to report having little emotional support than women. They spend an increasing share of their time playing video games and watching porn. And they’re turning to places like Teixeira’s message board to stew over their sense of abandonment.  

Attention to this crisis of male malaise has been apparent across the political spectrum in recent years. Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican, pointed to the symptoms in a speech in November 2021 at the National Conservatism Conference. “Many men in this country are in crisis, and their ranks are swelling,” he said. “They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse.” His assessment was similar to the one offered by Reeves, of the left-leaning Brookings Institute, in his 2022 book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.  

But unlike the left, the right is working to reach disillusioned young men directly, offering a captivating and self-pitying narrative: America’s liberal elites are out to punish them. “The deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men,” Hawley railed in his speech. “This is an effort the left has been at for years now.” Hawley’s new book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, is a 256-page treatise on this idea. “No menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood,” he writes. “To be frank, some welcome that collapse: namely, those on the American left. In fact, they have helped drive it. In the power centers they control, places like the press, the academy, and politics, they blame masculinity for America’s woes.”  

Republicans like Hawley are confronting a genuine social problem. But they’re using it—to promote their careers, to bring disillusioned young men into the party’s fold—in fundamentally harmful ways. They’re misdiagnosing what is causing the ills of men and boys. (Spoiler alert: It’s not feminism.) And they’re wooing those hurting through a message of resentment.  

“This attempt to restore traditional manhood was always linked to restoring some sense of traditional America,” Kristin Du Mez, a gender studies scholar at Calvin University, told me. But if Hawley’s is an old message, with echoes of Phyllis Schlafly-Jerry Falwell antifeminism, it’s in a new package. “What we have today is much less restrained,” she says. “There’s less talk of virtue. And, in fact, it seems much more aggressive.” When MAGA lawmakers talk about masculinity, they don’t sound like the culture warriors of the 1970s and ‘80s. They sound like Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, and other exponents of the so-called “manosphere” movement that permeates the adolescent male online experience.

Social media algorithms and private message board platforms like Discord have exposed millions of young men to the manosphere’s revanchist understanding of gender, one premised on the idea that feminism and LGBTQ rights are to blame for their struggles with work and school and relationships and are the reason they’re still living at home. The liberal regime that controls Western politics, culture, and media, they hear, forbids them from expressing their natural manhood. This ideology comes with an arcane language—to be “red-pilled,” for instance, is to wake up to this sinister anti-man agenda.  

In recent years, right-wing leaders have borrowed from this online parlance. This tactic has received little attention, but to the initiated, manosphere concepts are everywhere. Hawley’s examination in Manhood of the supposed feminizing cultural forces keeping men stuck in a cycle of “screens, leisure, porn” bears a solid resemblance to Peterson’s credo and the Proud Boys’ weird anti-masturbation dogma, as Du Mez has noted. In October 2021, when then-Congressman Madison Cawthorn called on mothers to raise young men as “monsters,” to much confusion, he was lifting language from a popular Peterson video and winking allyship to the online right. Cawthorn later used his departing speech from Congress to deliver a screed on the threat to traditional masculinity in America. “Our young men are taught that weakness is strength, that delicacy is desirable, and that being a soft metrosexual is more valuable than training the mind, body, and soul,” he said.  

An obsession with the online conspiracy theory that declining testosterone levels threaten Western civilization is now a familiar topic on Fox News and a recurring theme for Republicans like Representative Matt Gaetz. That theory inspired former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s infamous viral segment, “The End of Men,” which was more or less a screen adaptation of the manosphere bible “Bronze Age Mindset.” The film even featured as an expert the pseudonymous influencer “Raw Egg Nationalist,” a leader in the far right’s bizarre bodybuilding-and-raw-food movement. (In its latter years especially, Carlson’s show scraped many ideas from the online far right, including the “great replacement theory.”)  

Few figures on the far right have learned to leverage online male grievance in electoral politics as has tech financier and Republican patron Peter Thiel. Two of the Senate candidates he backed last year—Ohio’s J.D. Vance and Arizona’s Blake Masters—aimed at this demographic. Vance’s fiery Twitter thread from November 2021 defending Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse (“he defended his community when no one else would”) echoed ideas from the Proud Boys’ “Western chauvinist” ideology. And on the campaign trail last year, Vance’s fulminations against professional women and his suggestion that women should stay in violent marriages for their children seemed calculated to court the online right.  

Unlike Vance, who went through a Thiel rebrand, Masters was a creature of this world before he ran for office. As Politico put it, “Masters, a millennial message-board addict with an awkward personal affect that sharply contrasts with his macho posturing, is those voters.” His platform fused a regressive vision of gender—he even called for allowing states to make contraception illegal—with a tech-bro pro-Bitcoin plank. Though he lost to incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly, his win over more traditional Republican candidates in the primaries suggested an appetite for his brand of politics. 

The male-dominated “edgelord” culture that Republicans are co-opting—the culture that seems to have fostered Teixeira—was not always especially political.  

Lonely young men have gathered on message boards since the early days of the internet. But in 2014, tensions over gender representation in the video game industry boiled over into harassment against several female journalists and game designers. “Gamergate,” as the incident was dubbed, is credited with helping unify the diffuse online manosphere. Two years later, Peterson became an international phenomenon for declaring that male dominance is a pillar of Western civilization. His YouTube videos lent a tweedy authority to manosphere ideas until then the province of trolls and 4Chan users. Through this 60-year-old professor, those ideas found purchase with a growing number of young men. Another gateway was McInnes and his online comedy show, where a Barstool Sports-style misogyny attracted flocks of men who would become the Proud Boys, which he announced in 2016. (McInnes officially left the Proud Boys in 2018, but according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “remains intimately involved in their internal matters.”) The alt-right was taking shape, with zero-sum masculine aggression at its core.  

The electoral potential of male grievance became apparent around the same time. Donald Trump was all id and ego on the campaign trail. He may have bragged about his daughter Ivanka’s business acumen, but his smears of women energized the online misogynist right, as the researcher Alex DiBranco documented. (Trump got his testosterone levels measured on a Dr. Oz episode during the campaign.) His campaign manager Steve Bannon, who liked to call the opposition “cucks,” recognized the possibilities this offered.  

As Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie would testify in 2019, Bannon employed the consulting firm to drum up votes from “incels” (involuntarily celibate men who blame feminism for their non-existent dating lives) in 2016 because they were “easy to manipulate.” “You can activate that army,” Bannon later told USA Today. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.” For instance, as scholars Pierce Alexander Dignam and Deana A. Rohlinger have documented, the Reddit community r/TheRedPill, a popular manosphere community that had long resisted engagement with traditional politics, embraced Trump as an avatar of their cause. (The founder of r/TheRedPill was later revealed to be Republican New Hampshire Representative Robert Fisher, who promptly resigned.) That November, 53 percent of men voted for Trump compared to 42 percent of women, a historic gap. 

To a new generation of Republican leaders, Trump proved the potential of disillusioned young men as a growth demographic. In 2019, former George W. Bush speechwriter and Trump national security official Michael Anton used his review of “Bronze Age Mindset,” the pseudonymous manosphere polemic, in the Claremont Review of Books to call on his party to adapt in an evolving political climate. “Tax cuts, deregulation, trade giveaways, Russophobia, democracy wars, and open borders are not, to say the least, getting the kids riled up,” he wrote. “What is? The youthful enthusiasm for BAM suggested a place to start looking.” Within a few years, the once-stodgy Claremont Institute was publishing manosphere influencers.  

The violent assertion of male authority has always been a step toward fascism. January 6 bore an unsettling resemblance to the hypermasculine paramilitarism that heralded fascist takeovers in Germany and Italy. Men, McInnes has said, must be prepared to use violence: “You’re not a man unless you’ve beat the shit out of someone.”  

Simon Copland, a manosphere researcher at Australian National University, told me that he’s recently noticed greater symbiosis in the relationship between Republicans and the manosphere. “It’s not just that the manosphere influences politicians. It’s that the things they’re saying start to influence the manosphere as well,” he told me. The GOP’s newfound obsession with the idea that drag performers and transgender educators are sexually “grooming” children is one example. “That is filtering back down into the manosphere, where people are picking up those narratives,” he explained. This MAGA-manosphere alliance was publicly burnished when Trump dined with self-identified incel and white nationalist Nick Fuentes in November.  

Hawley has fashioned himself the right’s principal interlocutor with angry young men—his less-than-manly waltz out of the Capitol on January 6 notwithstanding. After his National Conservatism Conference speech in 2021, the freshman senator told Axios he planned to make masculinity his signature political issue, a declaration he appears to be making good on with his new book. 

The book’s topic is a more inspired choice than the more typical look-at-me screeds from Republicans like Tom Cotton’s Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power or Ted Cruz’s Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System, two recent additions to the genre of conservative victimhood. Hawley is staking his career on manhood, and his instincts aren’t terrible: young men are hurting and looking for answers. Republicans like Hawley may be guiding them to the wrong answers, blaming corporate sensitivity training (which can be self-parodies), university curricula, and inclusive gender categories on passports for their struggles. But if the causes are misplaced, the effects are all too real. 

Reeves and Hanna Rosin, author of 2012’s The End of Men—no relation to Carlson’s segment cited above—have documented how macroeconomic changes over the last half-century have disproportionately harmed men. “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength,” Rosin writes. In an economy that increasingly requires a college degree, men struggle to adapt: In the 1980s, the gender ratio among undergraduates was about even, but there are now almost two women enrolled for every man. After each recession, fewer men have rejoined the workforce; most recently, in 2008, three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. One in three men with only a high school diploma are now out of the workforce—10 million in all—with the biggest drop in employment among men between ages 25 and 34.  

Eberstadt, the conservative author of the landmark Men Without Work, writes that “something like infantilization besets some un-working men,” who, unable to find work in the growing service and professional sectors, succumb to prescription drugs and television. The literature shows that Hawley is right to suggest that many of this unemployed cohort are filling their time with video games instead of participating in domestic and community life.  

Our education system, too, is less sensitive to boys’ needs. Boys are now twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and twice as likely to be suspended as girls, and their attainment in elementary, middle, and high school lags. Schools devote less time to physical education and provide fewer breaks in lessons than boys need. They have few role models: In 2018, only 24 percent of all K-12 teachers were men.  

The reception on the left to Hawley’s masculinity crusade has been predictable—jeers, sneers, but little appreciation for a real social problem. Jezebel found the idea of men’s issues as politically relevant laughable, calling Manhood a “book literally no one asked for.” Rolling Stone puzzled at “the lack of substance behind Hawley’s newfound obsession with men.” The same flippant response followed Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion on a podcast last August that “discrimination” against young white men “has created hopelessness in many of these guys,” which “turns them to all kinds of bad things: porn on the internet, reading crazy stuff in chat rooms.” HuffPost mocked Greene’s “bizarre new explanation for porn.” Media analyst Jason Kint tweeted that the male suffering Greene described was “a preposterous concern.”  

It’s a tempting impulse: Hawley and Greene’s depiction of an omnipotent left discriminating against white men is ridiculous. Hawley’s unctuous demeanor gives Cruz a run for the most annoying senator. (John Danforth, the former Republican Senator from Missouri who was a political mentor to Hawley, says he regrets helping the Stanford-and-Yale grad win the seat he once held.) His Capitol jaunt, juxtaposed against his raising his fist in solidarity with the January 6 crowd, makes him a worthy target. He and Greene are both malign actors disparaging feminism in bad faith.  

But their bombastic indictments of the left contain a kernel of truth. “Discrimination” under liberalism, as Greene suggested, is not the cause of men’s struggles, but left-leaning institutions like the media and universities have also not been promoting an especially constructive message for men recently. Progressives have struggled to express what a non-“toxic” masculinity entails or provide examples of positive male role models. “I think the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ is toxic,” Reeves told me, a view shared by many other gender scholars. Boys struggling with school and their mental health shouldn’t be told there’s something wrong with their nature, as though manhood is a sort of original sin. A cultural shift in how we talk about men is essential to creating an appealing alternative to manosphere influencers. A wise and compassionate liberalism can embrace multitudes. Many young men are hurting; women too often face misogyny, discrimination, and violence. Acknowledging the woes of one group doesn’t diminish the sufferings of another.  

Liberals must acknowledge, as Hawley and Greene do, the plight of men struggling with their place in the modern world, unsavory as they might find it. “I think there’s a fear that talking about these issues will distract from or undermine the work that still needs to be done on behalf of women and girls,” Reeves told me. “Zero-sum thinking is destroying a lot of our political discourse.” By failing to articulate a commitment to helping young men, the left has let Republicans fill the vacuum.  

But the left has a compelling story to tell if they choose to tell it. The reasons for the sorry condition of young men are well-documented, and some have policy solutions that Democrats are uniquely positioned to pursue.  

Changing the material conditions of work and school through public policy can help address the crisis of despair among young men. Investing in a thousand more vocational schools, as Reeves suggests, expanding mental health services and paid paternity leave, and implementing school policies better suited to boys could help narrow the achievement gap and improve male life outcomes. The sort of spending programs that help men are more likely to come from the left. The concern with monopolies and the concentration of economic power is something this magazine explores regularly. To Hawley’s credit, he’s broken from the Republican establishment/Business Roundtable consensus on these issues. Expanding the role of community colleges, which play a singularly important role at this moment in our economic history, offering an avenue to the middle class for the majority of Americans who will not get a four-year college degree, is an issue where the Biden administration is strong, and the likes of Vance and Hawley have nothing.  

Democrats have been afraid to highlight what they can offer men as men, in contrast to how they promote (as they should) female-owned small businesses. “One of my annoyances with the [Biden] administration is the fact that the [2021] infrastructure bill was a huge job creator for working-class men, but no one in the administration would say that,” Reeves says. Nearly three-quarters of the bill’s 800,000 jobs created yearly will go to men. Expanding Medicaid coverage under 2021’s American Rescue Plan disproportionately helped men, too, who have higher rates of suicide and shorter life expectancy than women and benefit from extended mental health coverage under the program.  

Hawley may lament the plight of working-class men, but he voted against both bills. Aside from his interest in antitrust—which seems more aimed at the conservative bugaboo of Big Tech than Big Oil—he has little to offer men. Yet he and his party continue to enjoy a reputation for being on their side. By refusing to show how they’re delivering for men the way they boast of delivering for women or minorities, Democrats are blowing it. They’re failing to expose the fraudulence of the right and leaving votes on the table. If the left is going to win back men, it’s time to start talking to them before they fall prey to the demagoguery of Josh Hawley, to self-destruction like Airman Teixeira, or to the quiet despair of millions of others. 

The post What Josh Hawley and the Right Get Wrong About Manhood appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Local sovereignty is integral to Texas’s frontier, “Remember the Alamo” self-image. But Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a spirited critic of federal overreach, has gone to war against the self-governance of Texas localities. This is not “the United States of Municipalities,” Abbott proclaimed in 2017. Over his two-plus terms, he and his GOP-controlled legislature have overridden the ability of local governments in Texas to, among other things, mandate paid sick leave, require COVID-19 vaccines for workers, expand voting options, and regulate oil and gas drilling within their own borders. 

Other Republican governors have been doing the same. Georgia’s Brian Kemp signed legislation in 2021 criminalizing the provision of food and water to voters waiting in line at local polling places. Florida’s Ron DeSantis has not only dictated what books local school libraries can and cannot stock but also signed a 2021 law making it illegal for municipalities to mandate electric charging stations at local gas stations.

The penchant of state-level Republicans for squashing municipal policies they don’t like has been made easier by the way the federal government has traditionally funded programs to help localities: by routing the money through the states. When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in 2017, city lawmakers expected the state to pass along the more than $1 billion Congress had appropriated for emergency aid. Instead, they received nothing: The entire package was doled out to largely white, inland communities less affected by the storm. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner accused Abbott of a “money grab.” The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development later found that the stunt put Texas in violation of the Civil Rights Act. “Let me just tell you, that remains a sore spot,” Turner recently told me. His ire was further piqued when the Texas Department of Transportation announced in February 2021 that it would expand a highway that cuts through the city without changes requested by the mayor and other Houston lawmakers. The planned expansion would displace nearly 1,100 homes, 340 businesses, five churches, and two schools.

In the 21st century, the arrival of an educated, multiracial workforce in places like Houston has collided with the disproportionate power Republicans have accrued at the state level to create a novel political phenomenon: Increasingly blue metro areas are finding themselves up against increasingly red state governments—and losing. If demographics are destiny, governors facing an in-migration pattern that worryingly resembles the long-term marginalization of their conservative politics are exploiting the legal and fiscal preeminence states have over localities in new and extreme ways. “Don’t California My Texas” has become Abbott’s trademarked mantra. In February, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene captured the mood when she suggested that red states should block new arrivals from blue states from voting for a period of five years. Governors like Abbott and DeSantis, with the backing of a conservative Supreme Court supermajority determined to buttress the power of states, are steamrolling the will of cities to govern in ways their voters think best.

But that dynamic is not going unchallenged at the national level. One of the least noticed but most profound changes in Washington over the past two years has been a concerted effort by Joe Biden’s administration and Democrats in Congress to liberate localities from the overweening power of state governments—a change the Washington Monthly called for in January 2021. (See “How Biden Can Use Federal Power to Liberate Localities,” by Daniel Block.) 

This has happened in innumerable ways, large and small. For instance, in March 2021, Biden’s Department of Transportation told Texas to halt the Houston highway project until a federal investigation of civil rights and environmental justice concerns could be completed. (The project resumed after two years and will now reflect many of the changes Turner requested.) More significantly, the administration has worked to restructure spending bills in ways that shift the balance of power from state to local governments. For example, the COVID relief package Donald Trump signed in 2020, the CARES Act, sent almost four times as many federal dollars to state governments ($110 billion) as to cities ($29 billion), and none to municipalities with fewer than 500,000 residents. Those smaller communities had to apply to their state governments for the funds, and nearly 30 percent got nothing. By contrast, under the COVID relief bill Biden signed in March 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act, Washington sent $130 billion directly to municipalities of all sizes, more than half as much as the $220 billion states received. In an even greater break from past practice, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Biden signed in November 2021, appropriated $196 billion—a third of all surface transportation spending in the bill—for competitive grants that municipalities can apply for directly, without having to seek permission from their state governments. Competitive spending in previous infrastructure bills was negligible. 

Spending priorities in Washington seldom change so dramatically and quickly. Yet the mainstream press has almost completely missed this shift. In part, that’s because the administration itself doesn’t talk much about it, and when it does, it is in resolutely nonpartisan terms. “Having been a mayor, I noticed [that] however well intentioned folks in the state capital were, they didn’t always see things quite the way they looked on the ground,” Pete Buttigieg, the ever-careful transportation secretary, told the Washington Monthly.

Giving localities more freedom to deploy federal dollars as they see fit isn’t, in fact, inherently partisan. It only seems so in the context of GOP-controlled states trying to do the opposite. Moreover, the anger liberal cities feel toward their repressive Republican state governments is more than matched by the fury conservative towns in blue states feel toward the policies and spending priorities of their Democratically controlled state governments—to the point where, in red regions of states like Colorado and Oregon, there is open talk of secession. That’s why reasonable leaders in both parties who worry about American democracy going off the rails should want the pro-locality shift in federal policy Biden has started not only to continue, but to expand. 

In January of this year, Joe Biden spoke before a group of mayors in the East Room of the White House and did a little compare-and-contrast bragging. “With the CARES Act we passed under the previous administration,” he said, “you had to go to your legislatures for permission to get the money.” That, he said, ran counter to his longtime belief in how federal aid should be structured. “When I wrote the COPS bill years ago, you didn’t have to go to the legislature or your governor to determine—you could apply directly. 

“Well, that’s what we’re talking about,” he went on. “We made sure the American Rescue Plan empowered you directly—directly.” 

In truth, as a U.S. senator for 36 years, Biden voted for bills that funneled federal funds primarily through the states, with little directed to municipalities. And as president, he refused to veto a bill in Congress to overturn a Washington, D.C., city council measure to reduce mandatory minimum sentences in the District—a decision that might have been politically expedient but is hardly consistent with respect for local decision-making.

Still, Biden’s sympathy for local government leaders is long-standing and rooted in a little-known fact about his political career. The first public office Biden was elected to, in 1970 at the age of 27, was commissioner for New Castle County in northern Delaware. “I learned early on, if you’re in the county, you got to go through someone else to get help—you gotta go to your governor, you gotta go to your state legislator, you gotta go to the state senators,” he recalled at a conference for county officials in February. “We always did better when there was direct funding for the things that related to the county.” 

Then, as now, tensions existed between urban and rural interests over spending and other decisions. For instance, politicians representing cities wanted funding for projects like mass transit, whereas those from more rural areas wanted money spent on roads. But back in the 1970s—indeed, for most of U.S. history—disagreements between rural and urban interests weren’t necessarily partisan in nature. Rural lawmakers (depending on the state) were as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, and spending battles typically involved bipartisan dealmaking—for instance, urban Democrats aligning with suburban lawmakers, who were largely Republicans, to get money for metro-wide bus service. 

Only in the past 20 years, as the parties sorted more starkly geographically—with metro areas becoming overwhelmingly blue, and rural and exurban areas becoming overwhelmingly Republican—have the battles over the funding of local communities become reliably partisan and ideological. In 2011, for example, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the Ron DeSantis of that era, signed legislation preempting the ability of local governments to mandate that private businesses in their jurisdictions offer paid sick leave, as Milwaukee had done. Soon after that, 15 more states passed similar statutes. In 2012, Barack Obama took 69 percent of the vote in cities with more than 500,000 residents while winning just 22 percent of total counties, the lowest share in history. Meanwhile, the Republican Party was methodically consolidating power over state governments: Between 2010 and 2013, the number of states with a Republican ruling trifecta jumped from nine to 25, their largest state lawmaking majority since the 1920s. Governors and attorneys general launched an endless barrage of lawsuits against Obama’s government. 

Defying federal rules and turning down funds became fashionable, and governors in Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and Louisiana rejected aid for building high-speed rail, despite the protestations of city dwellers. The Supreme Court faithfully served the interests of states in disputes with the federal government, striking down the Obamacare mandate to expand Medicaid in 2012. (More than a decade later, 11 states, Texas and Florida among them, have still not expanded Medicaid. In those two states and other holdouts, polls suggest that support for expansion has a strong majority.) 

With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, this revenge tale against cosmopolitan progressives reached a crescendo. The new president followed alarming threats against immigrants with an executive order to withhold federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities that declined to hold in jail inmates who would otherwise go free, pending checks on their immigration status by federal authorities. Courts ultimately blocked Trump’s order on the grounds that he didn’t have the statutory authority. Nevertheless, some Republican governors, including DeSantis, Abbott, and Arkansas’s Asa Hutchinson, signed legislation banning sanctuary city policies. 

When Biden took office, he signaled a new era with the appointment of three former mayors to his cabinet: Pete Buttigieg at the Department of Transportation, Marcia Fudge at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Marty Walsh at the Department of Labor.

His first major piece of legislation, the American Rescue Plan, was a life raft for cities and towns in financial free fall during the pandemic. States had not lost as much revenue as predicted, but localities were struggling. Of the 1.3 million jobs lost among state and local governments between February 2020 and March 2021, three-quarters were at the local level. The huge influx of cash helped localities avoid planned layoffs, backfill lost revenue, and fund vaccine outreach and distribution. The money helped Washington, D.C., offer free testing and vaccines across the city seven days a week, and Boston to set up a grocery delivery program for food stamp recipients. Houston received $607,769,139, most of which went to budget deficits; extra funds were put toward programs like an initiative to house 7,000 homeless Houstonians, which got a $35 million earmark. “Those dollars are getting out the door,” Mayor Turner told me. “That is an example of a successful design of how to distribute federal dollars.” 

Biden’s second major legislative achievement, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is helping localities finance long-awaited projects starved for funds by the recalcitrance of their state governments. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the 70-year-old Wilcox Bridge has deteriorated to the point that it can’t support heavy vehicles anymore, forcing fire trucks to take long detours to reach certain neighborhoods; city officials say a $25 million grant funding a renovation will drastically improve emergency response times. In Clearwater, Florida, the regional transit CEO Brad Miller told the Tampa Bay Times that he is “the fourth transit authority director over the past two decades to try to secure funding” for a new public transit center in the city’s downtown. With a $20 million BIL grant, the project can finally proceed. 

And in Houston, Biden’s infrastructure bill is funding a long-sought revamp of Telephone Road, one of the most heavily trafficked arteries of southeast Houston. Despite cutting through densely populated city neighborhoods, the six-lane thoroughfare is notoriously ill-accommodating of pedestrians and bikers. With BIL funds, Telephone Road will get a facelift: safer bike lanes, wider sidewalks that connect to transit hubs, and CCTV cameras. “It’s really exciting to see the Department of Transportation investing federal funds in projects that are going to advance pedestrian infrastructure, not just vehicular infrastructure,” Gabe Cazares, the director of LINK Houston, an organization that advocates for a more equitable transportation system in the city, told me. 

Biden’s other major legislative achievements also redound to the benefit of localities. Last August’s CHIPS Act gives local governments a seat at the table when it comes to permitting federally funded microchip manufacturing. The billions of dollars in tax incentives the Inflation Reduction Act, signed a week later, provides for renewable energy would not normally be available to tax-exempt entities like cities, but the bill includes a novel mechanism that allows municipalities to take advantage of these credits in the form of direct payments. 

For many local officials, Biden’s disposition toward localities stands in stark contrast with that of Republican governors. The difference is “night and day,” Wayne Messam, the Democratic mayor of Miramar, Florida, and the president of the state’s League of Mayors, told me. “DeSantis claims that Florida is the free state, but every time you turn around, he’s telling us what we cannot do,” said Messam, who is planning to apply for federal infrastructure grants to build EV charging stations in his city. “Yet you have a Biden administration that has worked hand in hand with mayors across this country … I just think that it’s just a difference between the two parties.”

The Biden administration, and Democrats generally, have been relatively quiet about how their biggest legislative wins of the past two years do so much to liberate localities from state GOP oppression. Why? A major reason is that, traditionally, Democrats have been deeply wary of local control. Indeed, for decades, the liberal agenda often involved passing regulations that constrained local decision-making in order to advance national goals—typically for good reason. In the 1960s, Democrats passed civil rights laws that overturned racist state and local voting and segregation laws. In the 1970s, they passed environmental laws that mandated restrictions on local zoning and land use. 

But this activist period of Democratic policy making inspired a backlash that Republicans exploited. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan spun the narrative that the progressive reform agenda and centralized spending programs of the decades prior had encroached on local autonomy. He swept into office 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 us it has to be spent.” He soon replaced the federal bureaucracy’s multitude of narrow categorical grants with consolidated block grants that states could use as they wanted. His appeals to states’ rights helped enshrine Republicans as the party of local autonomy in the public imagination thereafter through the subtle conflation of these two distinct levels of government. Thanks to Reagan, it’s Democrats who are thought to imperiously prescribe policy from on high. 

But the Republican Party proved to be no friend of municipalities. Under Reagan, federal aid flowing directly to local governments without first passing through states declined from 12 percent to 4 percent of total municipal revenue, and it has never recovered. For a generation now, GOP governors and state legislators have been gleefully overriding local government initiatives, typically in the service of conservative culture war issues or corporate interests looking to minimize economic regulations. 

As a consequence, local governments, which have no independent powers under the U.S. Constitution, have for many years had no real champions in either party. This is true not just in terms of direct government programs, like infrastructure funding, but also in the way the federal government has chosen to structure markets. Over the past four decades, both parties have supported the deregulation of key industries, like finance and transportation, and refrained from enforcing anti-monopoly statutes. As a result, in cities and towns all over America, locally owned businesses—be they banks, retail stores, news outlets, or manufacturing firms—have been put out of business or gobbled up by large oligopolistic corporations. Meanwhile, smaller cities and towns have found themselves without reliable and affordable—or even any—airline and rail connectivity. In these and other ways, the federal government has contributed to the evisceration of local communities that sociologists like Robert Putnam have documented. 

The Biden administration, with its stepped-up antitrust enforcement and pro-localities spending legislation, has taken a welcome first step in changing that. But the administration has not articulated a vision of local empowerment that unifies these policies, perhaps assuming that it wouldn’t compute with liberals who associate the concept with “Don’t Tread on Me” libertarianism. Yet explaining and defending his empowerment of local communities could be both good politics for Biden and his party and good policy for the country. Contrasting his support for localities with state-level GOP hostility to them would be especially useful if the opponent Biden winds up facing in 2024 is Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor who most conspicuously flaunts his despotism over local communities. 

A pro-localities agenda, taken further, could allow Democrats to advance their goals in an era of GOP dominance at the state level. To get around the 11 states that are stonewalling expansion of Medicaid, Democrats could pursue legislation that allows local jurisdictions to opt into the federal program independent of their states. Municipalities have proved more willing partners for Democrats’ policy agenda than states, and routing the largest possible shares of future infrastructure, water, housing, and disaster relief funds directly to localities would help ensure that federal money is spent more judiciously.

Democrats may also be able to protect localities from state preemption laws through legislative means. As the Lehman College sociologist Nathan Newman has suggested, Democrats could push legislation that makes preemption a civil rights violation when it disproportionately impacts people of color. 

A pro-localities agenda could also be a way to lower the temperature on some of the country’s most divisive issues. While Democrats should fight hard to pass legislation enshrining Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, if that proves politically impossible they should consider offering a compromise bill that would allow individual municipalities to decide if abortion should be legal in their jurisdiction. In the unlikely event Republicans supported such a measure, the practical effect would be that women in red states that ban abortion and even abortion pills could more easily get to towns and cities in their states rather than having to travel hundreds of miles to seek reproductive health care in other states. 

Crucially, Democrats may find a receptive audience for a local-empowerment agenda outside their base. Polls show that local governments are the most trusted by conservatives and liberals alike. Republican governors’ attacks on big cities infuriate progressives, but their neglect of basics like clean drinking water, broadband access, and crumbling infrastructure also frustrates some voters and officials in red areas of those states. That’s why bipartisan groups of mayors in Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and elsewhere across the country celebrated the infrastructure bill’s new investments in localities. “Mayors have been consistent over 10 years,” David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, told PBS. “Mayors have come to that same White House in the Obama administration, in the Trump administration, and now in the Biden administration, seeking virtually the same thing.” Finally, he said, they got it.  

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